Legality and tolerance

It's amazing to me how Republicans are horrified at the thought of "rewarding someone for breaking the law" when it's a poverty-stricken Mexican father crossing the border to work for $4 an hour at some scut job so he can feed his children, but they're totally in favor of it when it's a billion-dollar telecom corporation that's been illegally spying on US citizens for five years.

What's pathetic is that, if surveillance is needed, there are legal ways to make it happen. The court that approves emergency wiretap orders has approved tens of thousands and only denied a very few in several decades. And the law doesn't even require the order to happen first - only within three days of the beginning of surveillance. And if broader powers were really needed, it could have been a new law passed by Congress. But this administration doesn't even bother with the law, they simply asked AT&T et al. to start the spying even though they knew it was illegal.

And here we are, years later, passing a bill to reward them for the lawbreaking. Frankly, it sickens me.