Democrats prepared to cave on FISA to avoid looking weak. Huh?

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

Time's Massimo Calabresi predicts the likely outcome of the imminent FISA and telecom immunity fight, to begin this week or next:

Congress will soon take up the far more contentious question of domestic eavesdropping. Last summer, it passed the Protect America Act (PAA), which was designed to modernize the 1978 law controlling electronic surveillance of Americans. After initially trying to block the bill, which expanded the government's ability to track suspect individuals, Democrats caved. But in a last-ditch effort to placate civil libertarians, the Democrats attached a six-month sunset on the old law. That six-month extension ends Feb. 1 and the pressure is on for a permanent fix for the 1978 law.

Democrats find themselves in the same corner they were in last summer: on the one hand their base demands they block expanded domestic spying powers for the Bush Administration; on the other, they can't risk looking soft on terrorism, especially nine months before national elections. Senate majority leader Harry Reid is angling for another month's extension of the PAA, but that would only give the Republicans a third bite at the apple in late February.

The bitterest point of contention for Democrats will be the same question that divided them last summer: immunity for telecom companies that complied with Bush Administration requests for access to American phone and e-mail traffic without warrants after 9/11. After news of the Bush program broke, civil liberties groups brought cases against the companies, and since then the telecoms have in some cases refused to help the U.S. intelligence community further. Bush has said he will veto any bill that doesn't grant the telecoms immunity. The Democrats are split on the issue. Smart money bets the Democrats will cave again -- the only question is how much they fight before doing so.

Here we have a perfect expression of the most self-destructive Democratic disease which they seem unable to cure. More than anything, they fear looking "weak." To avoid this, they "cave" and surrender and capitulate and stand for nothing. As a result, they are, as here, endlessly described in the media as "caving" and surrendering. As a result, they look (and are) weak. [Italics ours.] It's a self-destructive cycle that has no end.

(Continued here.)