On Spying on American Citizens

I find this issue just dumbfounding. I heard a snip of President Bush's speech on the radio recently. He was encouraging House Democrats to set aside partisanship and to vote pass the Senate version of the FISA bill that gives immunity to telecommunication companies for their part in electronic monitoring of Americans. The President as much as admits this act of spying is illegal for which the telecommunications companies could be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars. All this is, of course, necessary to "protect" America.

Partisanship is no excuse to give the President authority to direct any organization, public or private to violate the law? This is not a "partisan" issue that only the Democrats see has being a problem. Republicans should also know when the President is trying to violate fundamental civil liberties. This is spying on scale previously unheard of in the United States, and a gross violation of the Fifth Amendment. Is this really the precedent we want to have set (or even can set) in direct violation of the constitution? If the President asks you to do something, no matter how illegal, that you can do it and you will be protected against all consequences? What citizen can not see how the President and Congress are trying to over-ride the Constitution? Once this prescient is established, private corporations would have no grounds to object to governmental use of their resources in any way - as long as it was for so-called "national security".

The government, the American government, or any other government of free people should not have the power to secretly listen to anyone's conversation. The intelligence agencies have an easy way to get a warrant. Why should they be allowed uncontrolled spying on the American people - it is against everything our country was founded upon. Congress is the peoples’ representatives in Washington. They must not forsake the fundamental freedoms upon which the US was founded.