With the president’s approval ratings at an all time low, the US Senate passed new FISA legislation which legalizes spying on American citizens and legitimizes Bush’s secret wiretapping program. The bill passed 69-28 and the president is expected to sign it into law shortly. An important area of contention is that it grants retroactive immunity to all the telecom companies that participated in the program. As Senator Russ Feingold noted in his opposition remarks during the Senate debate:

The bill the Senate is considering would grant retroactive immunity to any companies that cooperated with a blatantly illegal program that went on for more than five years – and that the administration repeatedly misled Congress about.

If Congress short-circuits these lawsuits, we will have lost a prime opportunity to finally achieve accountability for these years of law-breaking. That’s why the administration has been fighting so hard for this immunity. It knows that the cases that have been brought directly against the government face much more difficult procedural barriers, and are unlikely to result in rulings on the merits.

These lawsuits may be the last chance to obtain a judicial ruling on the lawfulness of the warrantless wiretapping program. It’s bad enough that Congress abdicated its responsibility to hold the President accountable for breaking the law. Now it is trying to absolve those who allegedly participated in his lawlessness. Mr. President, this body should be condemning this administration for its law-breaking – not letting the companies that allegedly cooperated off the hook.

Such lawsuits were our best chance at finding out the true extent and scope of this program. And furthermore, while administration officials say it was instituted in response to the terrorist attacks of 9-11, other information suggests it predates those events by as much as six months and possibly longer. A tool like this was ripe for abuse, with the focus easily shifting from security matters to political ones. But now we may never know.

So one has to ask the question, Why did so many Democrats – including Barack Obama who originally pledged to filibuster any bill that included retro-active immunity – vote for the legislation? Well one part of the answer might lie in that well-known but too-often unexamined phrase “Follow the money.” But the good people over at American New Project have done just that: