A bill has been introduced into Congress which would basically let the government eavesdrop on anyone at any time for any reason if the president thought it was necessary for "national security." There presently are no restrictions on who can be spied upon as long as the executive branch can demonstrate to a judicial oversight entity, either before or after the fact, that there's a reason for it. I don't know why this isn't enough for some people, even George W. Bush, but obviously it isn't.
My natural suspicion — which I admit is unsupported by any evidence so far — is that the White House has spied on a lot of Americans who are utterly unconnected to terrorist activity and for whom no judge would ever authorize surveillance. It might be as treacherous as Karl Rove wanting to tap the phones of political opponents or it might be overzealous or inept aides. This administration has certainly had an amazing history of bad aim and hitting the wrong targets. In any case, I suspect there'd be a full-blown, Nixon-like scandal if we ever knew whose phone calls have been monitored…so the Bush people need this kind of blanket "he can do anything he wants" law to avoid that.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans have this attitude that we have to give the president every possible weapon he claims he needs to protect us or we'll all die. They've been led to believe (wrongly, as far as I can tell) that the existing arrangement stops the president's staff from listening in on calls to and from Al Qeada, or might stop it, or might somehow block something that would prevent another 9/11. I don't know why they think this…or even why they think, if the Bush administration did have such information, it would know what to do with it. The National Weather Service told them almost exactly what Hurricane Katrina would do to the Gulf Coast and we all saw how the Department of Homeland Security snapped into action on that one.
These folks are so terrified that they want to gut the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, authorize the president to spy on anyone he wants without accountability, and even make it retroactive to absolve him for what he did before the enactment of the law they're proposing. They aren't the majority but they may be hysterical enough to ram this one through the legislative process, threatening that anyone who opposes it is pro-terrorist or not serious about fighting them. (And by the way, why isn't that charge being hurled at all the Republicans who just defeated a proposal to spend more on port security?) Personally, I don't think any president should have that much unsupervised power and this one certainly hasn't earned that kind of trust.
For more on this new proposal, read this blog post by Glenn Greenwald. And then imagine what the Republicans would be saying if a Democratic president wanted the power that this bill would instill in our Chief Exec. I think we'd already be well past the stage where folks would be worried about losing the argument just because they introduced a Hitler analogy.