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I’ve begun taking a look at a lot of the material from the quite short Senate debate on the FISA Amendments Act that took place last week, before the bill was passed and signed into law by George W. Bush. Among those who argued in favor of the FISA Amendments Act, there’s some downright sloppy thinking.

Consider what Kentucky’s Senator Mitch McConnell claimed about the relationship between the FISA Amendments Act and Americans’ legal rights: “Americans have a right to expect Congress to give our intelligence officials what they need to do their jobs!”

Do Americans have a right to expect that Congress will give intelligence officials what they need to do their jobs? Well, no they don’t.

Americans have a right to expect that Congress will obey the supreme law of the land - the Constitution. The Constitution’s fourth amendment clearly creates strong limits on what powers so-called “intelligence officials” can be given by Congress. They can’t search or seize anyone or any property or any information without a warrant based on solid evidence.

What we Americans have a right to expect, Senator McConnell, is that the government will not spy on us, search our homes, or grab information about us from private documents without going to a judge and proving that there’s a good reason for the government action to take place. This is one of the founding principles of the United States of America.

McConnell’s statement, however, treats this fundamental legal right like trash. McConnell is essentially saying that the convenience of government spies is more important than the freedom of the American people.

To anyone familiar with the Constitution of the United States of America, Mitch McConnell’s statement is outrageous.

So, you would think that freedom-loving Americans would have been up in arms about this. You would think that journalists, and activists, and bloggers would be expressing their opposition to the way that Senator McConnell disregards our basic freedoms.

Yet, that didn’t happen. In the week and half since Senator McConnell made that statement, only somewhere between 5 and 10 newspapers reported on the comment. In none of these newspapers was there an editorial or a letter to the editor criticizing what McConnell said.

So the mainstream news media let us down. What about the blogosphere?

Zip. Zero. Zilch… until today, there was not even one blog article even mentioning McConnell’s statement. That blog article, written over at That’s My Congress, was, to be honest, written by me.

This statement was part of the congressional record - and it’s not the only controversial statement in the congressional record on this very important issue that has been completely ignored by mainstream journalism and bloggers alike. Why are bloggers ignoring this material? Why are they ignoring what’s going on in Congress?

One answer is that it’s become mighty inconvenient for many Democratic partisans to complain about the FISA Amendments Act, even though they have been complaining about warrantless wiretapping for years. The trouble is that hundreds of Democratic members of Congress, including Barack Obama, are now actually supporting George W. Bush’s warrantless spying against Americans in the form of the FISA Amendments Act.

It seems that these bloggers aren’t genuine progressives, so much as they are loyal parrots of the Democratic Party’s talking points. If the Democrats support something, they support it too, no matter how abusive the policy may be.

It isn’t just Congress, the Constitution, and American freedom that’s in crisis. The idea of independent media produced online, participating meaningfully in American democratic culture, is in crisis as well.

Independents, Greens, and libertarians, I don’t want to see any triumphant comments coming from you, either - none of your blogs or newsletters mentions this material either. Indymedia has been outtolunchymedia.

This isn’t just a Democratic crisis in media. It’s culture-wide. Small voices aren’t speaking up on important issues in the way that they were a few years ago. Independent voices are going silent all across America - at the worst time possible.