On Monday, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California voted to advance the FISA Amendments Act of 2007, which would cement into place a system of spying on Americans without a warrant while prohibiting evaluation of that system of warrantless spying by the U.S. courts. After immediate passage of the Act was delayed, Senator Feinstein has now proposed what she calls a “compromise”: any challenges to warrantless wiretapping would be heard by judges in the already existing FISA court. But FISA judges have been specially selected for their bias toward national security concerns and away from civil liberties concerns, stacking the deck. And the whole proceedings would be classified, so the American people would never know what sort of spying on them without warrants has been going on. The American people deserve to know what abuses of their liberty have been carried out. The process for determining the constitutionality of warrantless wiretapping needs to be transparent to be trusted, especially since trust has been broken already. And we need fair arbiters of this issue, not judges specially picked for their sympathy toward the authoritarian impulse.
In her proposal, Senator Dianne Feinstein shows a preference for the prerogatives of government authorities over the rights of American citizens. She may be a member of the Democratic Party, but she’s no liberal. Let’s avoid her example and follow the liberal path set out by the Constitution itself instead.
