I don't know if I've mentioned it — probably have — but I'm very much against the idea of granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that may have violated laws in cooperating with the Bush surveillance programs. The only argument I've seen for granting that immunity is along the lines of "If we don't grant them immunity, they won't participate in the program and we need that," which is kind of an admission that what they've been doing is probably illegal. So if we need what they're doing and it was illegal, someone ought to be candid enough to just admit that and we can move on from there. Not that there's much chance of that happening.
Over on his weblog, Kevin Drum offers the interesting speculation — which sure sounds logical — that the reason the telecommunications companies aren't lobbying hard for this protection is that they've already been indemnified by the government; that our beloved treasury is on the hook to pay any fines which are levied against them. That makes sense considering that it's George W. Bush who's getting hysterical about retroactive immunity, not Ma Bell. Apparently, immunity for government officials who ordered the (probably illegal) surveillance is also being snuck in, and that obviously matters a lot to the Bush administration.
Perhaps the thing that depressed me most about the Supreme Court decision in Bush vs. Gore (and its subsequent defense) was that it kind of killed off the idea that that august deliberative body stood above the partisan fray; that the bulk of nine justices put principle over seeing their "team" prevail. Even if you think they came to the proper conclusion, the way they did it — saying it was non-precedential, stopping the vote count as rapidly as possible, plus some of the statements made in justifying it — really made it look like five out of nine justices had worked backwards from the idea that they wanted Bush to win, and had figured out how to support that conclusion.
Before that, you always had the idea — and perhaps it wasn't true even then but it wasn't as hollow as it is now — that the Supreme Court would keep the Executive Branch in check. Even justices who were hailed as right-wingers and who had been appointed by Richard Nixon ruled against Nixon in his big "I'm above the law" case before them. Does anyone think Bush would lose any major case now with the Scalia mob on the bench? That it isn't his ace-in-the-hole on this whole matter of illegal surveillance?
And believe me…I'd be just as horrified at a High Court that wouldn't slap down a Democratic president who decided he had absolute power. I don't trust any politician enough to give them that latitude and I never will.