The plan by Senate Republicans to step up oversight of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program would also give legislative sanction for the first time to long-term eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant, legal experts said on Wednesday.

Civil liberties advocates called the proposed oversight inadequate and the licensing of eavesdropping without warrants unnecessary and unwise. But the Republican senators who drafted the proposal said it represented a hard-wrung compromise with the White House, which strongly opposed any Congressional interference in the eavesdropping program.

Read the rest of this at the New York Times.

This is really scary. Since when can Congress write legislation that goes against the Constitution without doing it in the form of an amendment? I suspect the first tests of this in the courts will not come out favorably for Congress. Of course now that Bush has stacked the Supreme Court anything is possible there.

Like I have said before. Communism isn’t dead. It is just in the process of being reborn here.