The Washington Post has an interesting article this morning detailing how the Bush Administration managed to out maneuver the Democrats in Congress and force passage of a broad warrantless wiretapping law:
For three days, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had haggled with congressional leaders over amendments to a federal surveillance law, but now he was putting his foot down. “This is the issue,” said the plain-spoken retired vice admiral and Vietnam veteran, “that makes my blood pressure rise.”
McConnell viscerally objected to a Democratic proposal to limit warrantless surveillance of foreigners’ communications with Americans to instances in which one party was a terrorism suspect. McConnell wanted no such limits. “All foreign intelligence” targets in touch with Americans on any topic of interest should be fair game for U.S. spying, he said, according to two participants in the Aug. 2 conversation.
McConnell won the fight, extracting a key concession despite the misgivings of Democratic negotiators. Shortly after that exchange, the Bush administration leveraged Democratic acquiescence into a broader victory: congressional approval of a Republican bill that would expand surveillance powers far beyond what Democratic leaders had initially been willing to accept.
(….)
Congressional, administration and intelligence officials last week described the events leading up to the approval of this surveillance, including a remarkable series of confrontations that ended with McConnell and the White House outmaneuvering the Democratic-controlled Congress, partly by capitalizing on fresh reports of a growing terrorism threat.
“We had a forcing function,” a senior administration official said, referring to the intelligence community’s public report last month that said al-Qaeda poses a growing threat to the United States and to lawmakers’ desire to leave town in August. “The situation was key to making it work,” the official said, adding that the report’s conclusions were “fortuitous” rather than engineered.
What’s most ironic about the entire affair is the fact that, even though the Democrats have majorities in both houses of Congress, the Administration was able to win passage of a bill that the entire leadership in both the Senate and the House was opposed to.
