Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an editorial attacking Senate Democrats like Barack Obama and Chris Dodd for their work to stop retroactive immunity and pass legislation that includes congressional and judicial oversight of domestic surveillance. Not surprisingly, a paper that has cheered every rollback of rights under the Bush administration doesn’t miss this opportunity to proudly display their urine-soaked bedsheets of fearful anti-constitutionality.

“We lost every single battle we had on this bill,” conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing.

Really? How, exactly, does the lack of political will to defend the rule of law challenge the logic of standing up for the rule of law? I suppose the WSJ thinks something is only worth doing if you know you’ll win in the end, an attitude reflecting a complete lack of guiding principle. I don’t doubt that the WSJ would be happier if Dodd and others let the Bush administration shred the Constitution and give the big telecom companies special treatment behind closed doors, with no prying eyes, questioning journalists, or engaged citizens. Business was certainly better for the telecoms when customers weren’t running away in response to their behavior. To the extent that Dodd et alia were able to bring attention to what the Bush administration and companies like Verizon and AT&T have perpetrated, the WSJ has had to watch their pals get smeared with the truth.

It says something about his national security world view, or his callowness, that Mr. Obama would vote to punish private companies that even the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee said had “acted in good faith.”

But what does it say about the WSJ’s national security world view or their editorial board’s callowness that the other three congressional committees that considered retroactive immunity – the Senate Judiciary, House Intelligence, and House Judiciary Committees – all said that the telecoms did not act in good faith, but rather should be held accountable through normal judicial processes for their behavior? The WSJ and the Republican Party on whole have tried to spread the myth that because the SSCI thinks retroactive immunity is a good idea, all relevant committees think they do. It simply isn’t true, though it’s been used effectively and helped secure retroactive immunity in the Senate (praise be to Jay Rockefeller).

Had Senator Obama prevailed, a President Obama might well have been told “no way” when he asked private Americans to help his Administration fight terrorists. Mr. Obama also voted against the overall bill, putting him in MoveOn.org territory.

Really? Because according to the US Senate and, um, history Obama did not vote against the overall bill. He voted for a number of good amendments earlier day and he voted against cloture, but the WSJ is not only playing fast and loose with the facts, but actually making things up. I’d have to guess Obama did not do what MoveOn.org wanted on final passage.

Getting to the actual hypothetical levied in this bumbling attack by the WSJ, I’d hope telecoms say no if President Obama asks for their help. If he makes the simple step of getting a warrant, I’d certainly expect the telecoms to comply. I haven’t heard of a single documented case where the telecoms refused to help the US Government spy on suspected terrorists when a warrant is forthcoming; to do so would surely land them in far greater legal hot water than their current plight.

The defeat of these antiwar amendments means the legislation now moves to the House in a strong position.

Read that sentence again. One word should stand out. Antiwar? This legislation had nothing to do with the war. It didn’t have anything to do with Iraq – it didn’t even have anything to do with Afghanistan. It’s a broad package of laws governing how the US government can monitor Americans. Pretending otherwise goes beyond the realm of Republican framing and circles right back to, well, where they were in the previous paragraph, making things up about Obama’s votes. It’s lunacy, derived from their need to lie about what is going on in order to present a favorable case for their positions.

I’d say that this editorial farce is an embarrassment to their paper, but it’s the Wall Street Journal, so this is pretty standard for them.

Carl Hulse of the New York Times has an update on this week’s FISA debate in the Senate. Not surprisingly, the piece appears on the NYT Blog and not the actual print edition of the paper.

The article is solely a rehashing of what political narratives each party will try to use to shape the debate. From the get-go we see Hulse has adopted Republican framing of the debate, describing it as one of “national security.” Actually, as someone who has been deeply involved in this and in regular contact with Democratic Senate offices on their work on this legislation, this is a debate about American civil liberties, the status of the rule of law, and ensuring that the Congress doesn’t pass unconstitutional legislation.

In a paragraph that could have been better used to describe the substantive policy differences of Democrats and Republicans on FISA, Hulse lays out the he said-she said of competing political narratives.

With Republicans making it clear in the last few days that they again will make the terror fight a main element of their campaign message, the exchanges could get more heated. But Democrats plan to fire back and are planning a series of Congressional hearings to show how Bush administration policy has weakened the military, reducing its ability to respond to threats while impairing the National Guard’s ability to react to domestic catastrophes.

I really wish the media would recognize that important things are happening in the Senate. Legislation is being debated that may be turned into political ads this cycle, but will also be determining how the US government conducts surveillance of Americans for the next six years. Likewise, I wish the Senate Democrats were more willing to use their power to conduct hearings to correct problems, not merely document them for the press.

The reality, though, is that the FISA debate has largely been intertwined with political narratives about national security and terrorist threats. The Democrats remain petrified of the thought that the Republicans will say mean things about them to the press and in campaign ads. They worry that if they don’t give the President everything he wants – as Jay Rockefeller and Harry Reid seem intent on doing – that the RNC will put attack ads on the air, telling America that Democrats are giving terrorists the same rights as American citizens. Never mind that Democrats are pushing legislation that does nothing of the sort. Never mind that even if the Dems march lockstep with the GOP on this issue, the Republicans will still run attack ads accusing them of siding with the terrorists, or in Mitt Romney’s case, accuse them of being terrorists.

The inability of Senate Democrats to work from a fundamental understanding of how Republican attacks works is no small part of the story of why they are caving so profoundly on FISA legislation. The fear-driven Democratic caucus under the milquetoast leadership of Harry Reid is on the verge of passing the SSCI bill, despite the strong possibility that they will not pass a single amendment to improve the underlying bill.

By this time Wednesday morning, it’s likely that the voting will be done in the Senate and the only obstacle to retroactive immunity will be progressive Democrats in the House. At this point, I can’t speculate optimistically about the chances for the House holding strong. We can expect Republicans in the House will support en masse the SSCI bill; if the Blue Dog Democrats decide they want retroactive immunity for the telecoms, it will almost certainly guarantee that the Senate version will pass largely intact, just as President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the CEOs of Verizon and AT&T wanted.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.