There’s a lot going on related to FISA today. For starters, while it remains a possibility that the Senate will begin to address FISA tonight, tomorrow is looking more likely.

We’re also starting to get a clear picture of what we can expect from the Senate debate on retroactive immunity and it isn’t looking good. Senate Majority Leader is set on making it as hard as possible…to stop retroactive immunity.

CREDO members sent Senator Reid over 30,000 faxes this past December, calling on him to do everything in his power to bring legislation to the floor that did not include retroactive immunity. Sadly, he hasn’t listened.

Via Glenn Greenwald, here’s Senator Reid, laying down the law on how he will proceed with the FISA legislation:

We have to finish FISA this week. Everyone should be aware of that point. We have to finish it this week. I know there are important trips people want to take. We have the very important economic conference in Davos that Democrats and Republicans alike would like to go to.

…

Now, it is possible we could finish it fairly quickly. We are going to work from the Intelligence bill, and if amendments are offered that people don’t like, I would suggest they move to table those amendments. Because if people think they are going to talk this to death, we are going to be in here all night. This is not something we are going to have a silent filibuster on. If someone wants to filibuster this bill, they are going to do it in the openness of the Senate. [Emphasis added]

There you have it – the priorities are getting to have a weekend in Switzerland and making Chris Dodd stand on his feet all night to block retroactive immunity, unlike the unprecedented number of painless Republican filibusters of good Democratic legislation.
Also, Reid is sticking with the Intelligence Committee bill, which includes retroactive immunity and is weak on privacy issues. It allows basket warrants, making it legal for the government to get warrants not for individuals on a case by case basis, but whole groups at a time. The Intel bill also fails to include adequate provisions for minimizing the number of people getting accidentally swept up in surveillance. This is the same legislation that Dodd and others successfully delayed last December and unless it is substantially amended, it remains a bad bill.

Elsewhere, Emptywheel takes a look at the words of Vice President Cheney, out shilling for the big telecom companies before Congress. She rightly identifies the focus of immunity talk as something protects the Bush administration more so than something done to protect the poor multi-billion dollar corporations.

Rather, any immunity is immunity for those who decided it was a swell idea to illegally wiretap Americans. And that list of people begins with Dick Cheney.

It’s quite simple, really. The Bush administration has used executive privilege and state secrets to resist oversight by Congress and the courts. They’ve even gone so far as to flatly ignore congressional subpoenas when it suites them, as Glenn Greenwald reports. Retroactive immunity is just as much a security blanket for the Bush administration as it is a Get Out of Jail Free card for the big telecoms like AT&T and Verizon.

There are many, many other good posts on FISA worth reading today. Here’s a few of my favorites:

• Andrew C. White at The Albany Project
• Christy Hardin Smith at FireDogLake
• Digby
• Markos Moulitsas, in his column for The Hill
• Booman Tribune
• mcjoan at Daily Kos
• Lambert at Corrente Wire
• TPM Muckraker

When you’re done reading, take a moment – if you haven’t already – to contact Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain and ask them to leave the campaign trail to help stop retroactive immunity and a bad FISA bill. And you can your Senators in an action alert here.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
Disclosure: I have joined the CREDO Mobile team to stop the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program and hold the telecom companies accountable for their lawbreaking.