Wow! The House Dems might not cave on warrentless wiretapping?

I've been following the story of Bush's illegal spying program (aided by every major telecom company save Qwest) since it broke in late 2005. If you haven't, there's plenty out there to allow you to read up. Setting aside the details and nuances, though, I can boil it down for you pretty simply:

George Bush assumes he can break the law because he's president, and so he did by enlisting the telecom companies to illegally spy on all of you. Now that he's been caught, he's demanding Congress forever shield this from the courts so
they can't say he's a criminal.

That's really the meat of it.

It's been looking for sometime that Congress would allow him to get away with all this because to do otherwise would allow The Terrorists To Kill Us All In Our Beds.

There's been a lot of back and forth in Congress on the issues of a) whether to legalize the illegal spying and b) whether to grant retroactive immunity for illegal acts to telecom companies (and by extension, to Bush). But it's always seemed as though, at the end of the day, Congress would cave on both.

Maybe not:

[I]t's actually necessary to give some credit where it's due -- to the House Democratic leadership. Nobody expected that they would ever allow the Protect America Act to expire, yet they did. And nobody expected... that they would ignore the barrage of Terrorist-Lover accusations from the President and unveil yet another bill that is actually decent and refuses to bestow lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty, but they now have. ...

With regard to yesterday's FISA bill, more surprising than their defiance is their shrewdness. By including a provision that explicitly authorizes telecoms to submit to the court any exculpatory documents -- notwithstanding the assertion by the administration that those documents are subject to the "state secrets" privilege -- the House bill completely guts, in one fell swoop, the primary argument that, for months, has been made by telecoms and their allies as to why amnesty is necessary.

Bush and the pro-lawbreaking wing of Congress have been pushing the idea for sometime that, well, we've got to kill all these court cases against the administration and telecom companies because we can't allow the phone companies to expose Highly-Classified Super-Duper Secret documents in private to a judge. After all, he'll probably e-mail everything to Osama later that day. This provision would explicitly allow this confidential "in camera" viewing of such documents by the judge. He can then decide whether the documents really are exculpatory and, if so, he can let the telecoms off the hook. This leaves pro-amnesty groups without any coherent argument for granting immunity to Bush and the telecoms. This also would allow these court cases to go forward and (maybe, eventually) to show the country the depth of criminal depravity in the White House these past several years.

Hopefully our political leaders are finally emerging from their post-2002 stupor and realizing that we don't have to destroy our constitution and give George Bush everything he wants in order to save us from Al-Qaeda. It'd be nice to leave behind a frightening era of this nation's history.

UPDATE: It passed the House today (03/14). Bush'll veto it if it ever gets through the Senate. Because, you know, fuck the 4th Amendment.

That's fine. Let's just run out the clock on this nonsense.