Not long ago, a source in Congressman Dennis Moore's office told me that employees from two major telecoms in his suburban Kansas City district -- Sprint Nextel and Embarq -- were battering him with demands for amnesty for spying on Americans' communications without warrants at the demand of President Bush.
And that actually makes me feel slightly better about the Democrats' capitulation on FISA. Maybe they did it because more people called asking FOR it than called to campaign against it.
Maybe it's not about the telecoms' money that swayed Moore and Barack Obama, maybe it's just that opponents of FISA were out-hustled by employees of telecoms. And how hard can that be, really, since the opponents of telecom amnesty organize all their opposition right out here in public, on DailyKos and other Web sites.
To test this theory, I looked for Sprint and Embarq on Moore's campaign finance disclosures. What I found was $10,000 from AT&T.
Moore and Rep. Nancy Boyda voted last Friday to allow the Bush Administration to walk into court and shut down the numerous lawsuits brought by ordinary Americans who were spied on by Sprint, Embarq and AT&T.
Although Moore has not taken a public role in the amnesty proposal, he aligned himself with the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, who apparently worked with right-wing Republicans to keep the amnesty proposal alive month after waning month here at the bitter end of George Bush's presidency.
But based on what his staffer told me, I wonder whether the driving force behind telecom immunity might be astroturf: "grassroots" support ginned up by the telecom companies' pressure on their own employees.
Perhaps some telecom employees know the answer to that.
And for anyone wishing to post a "oh no, not another FISA diary comment," I'd like to point at that the new FISA:
-- permanently hides the illegal spying done by the telecoms for Bush (especially if Bush pardons the companies for criminal acts and thwarts the Olbermann Rationalization).
-- redefines weapons of mass destruction so that Bush can claim he found them in Iraq.
-- makes ALL Democrats who support the bill look like punks because according to a judge overseeing one of the civil cases against Bush and the telecoms, the surveillance amounted to a "dragnet" of all communications, I have to believe that Obama was wiretapped too.
-- makes spying on Americans legal.