August 12, 2007 (LPAC)--Sunday's Washington Post -- in its postmortem on how the old FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) law was effectively abolished by the Democratic-controlled Congress last weekend -- makes it explicit that the struggle between the White House and Congress was not over monitoring terrorist threats, as the White House and Congressional Republicans have publically proclaimed. Rather, Cheney and others were demanding much broader surveillance authority which went far beyond just listening in on suspected terrorists.

During the negotiations between Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, and Congressional leaders, the Democrats offered the Administration full authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of calls in which one party was a foreign suspect tied to terrorist groups, which is what Bush and others were publicly saying was urgently needed. This was not acceptable to the people telling McConnell what to do, which were, undoubtedly, led by Dick Cheney and David Addington. The Post article, based almost entirely on a "senior administration official" who may well be in Cheney's office, notes that McConnell was receiving a stream of emails from the Vice President's office and the Department of Justice, telling him what to demand in the negotiations with Congress.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi then offered a compromise which would provide authority to monitor calls involving "threats to national security," and, reports the Post, this was still not acceptable to officials at in the Office of the Vice President and the Justice Department, who insisted on the broadest possible authority to monitor calls and e-mails, which was not limited in any manner -- except that a call be "concerning" someone "reasonably believed" to be outside the country. Democratic leaders knew that this gave the Administration much more -- almost unlimited -- leeway to monitor electronic communications, but they still allowed it to come to a vote, in which most Republicans were joined by 16 Democrats in the Senate, and, 41 in the House, to pass the unconstitutional bill.