Thanks to a rush-job from Congress, and some help from a couple of dozen craven Dem lawmakers, the president signed into law yesterday a new bill that offers him broad to surveillance powers, including the ability to eavesdrop on American citizens’ international communications without a warrant.

How bad is the new law? Details are a little sketchy — not surprising, given the classified subject matter — but it appears all the illegal activities the administration was engaged in have now been made legal.

Now that Congress has handed over the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the standard of probable cause as if they were mere wisps of nothingness that weren’t hard won from Runnymede through to the American Revolution and beyond, I have to wonder what has become of the fourth amendment in all of this mess? And, worse, whether Congressional leadership on either side of the aisle cares beyond getting the legislation out of the way so they can head out for vacation?

Marty Lederman has put together an exceptional series of expository links on the FISA legislation — bless him for it, because it is all I can do to get past furious this morning. The question I keep asking staffers and strategists: what in the hell were you thinking? And the “this is a difficult situation” response that I keep getting? Not. Good. Enough.

The good news is that we have six months to slap some sense into Congress. And, perhaps more to the point, at the end of those six months the NSA will have had six years to point us to one good thing that has come out of the program (besides the amusing spectacle of FBI agents calling Pizza Hut). Very little information on the NSA Program's successes, failures, and abuses has come out thusfar; and indeed it may be less likely that more comes out in the future: Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports tonight that the administration has raided the home of a former DOJ lawyer, Thomas Tamm, seizing his and his kids' computers, on suspicion that he was involved in leaking the program's existence to the media. Now that Congress is out of the oversight picture, I suppose it's time to kill the messengers and thereby get the media out of it too.

Congress has failed. This is no easy thing for me to say as I fully admit being at least a little bit shill-like for my party, but to express the indignation that I have in the past over the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program while Republicans were in charge, and then turn a blind eye when the Democrats gain power; that would be hypocrisy.

So that's that. The government is now legally allowed to monitor all your calls overseas with only the most minimal oversight. But don't worry. I'm sure they'll never misuse this power. They never have before, have they?

After months of being flogged for accomplishing little, Democrats who control Congress headed into a summer recess having passed several high-profile bills from raising the minimum wage to bolstering U.S. security and expanding children's health care.