Update to the preceding

Literally within hours of Shrub's signing of the FISA bill, the ACLU filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charging that

the new spying law violates Americans' rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution

and is an abuse of government power. The Nation magazine joined the suit on behalf of itself, its staff, and two of its contributing writers.

As Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica points out, the hard part of this is proving you have "standing" to sue, that is, you have been affected by whatever it is you're suing about. One of the approaches is the chilling effect the very existence of the law has on people, particularly the suing journalists who are losing sources.

The ACLU has tried this approach before, however, and has been rebuffed by the court. The group won an initial victory in a 2006 suit over warrantless NSA surveillance, but that ruling was overturned by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the purported chiling effect was too inchoate to ground a claim of standing.

But, he says, the ACLU thinks this time will be different because it involves a law rather than secret spying, making it harder for the administration to wriggle loose by claiming the "state secrets privilege."

In a separate filing with the FISA Court, the ACLU asked the court

to ensure that any proceedings relating to the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the new law be open to the public to the extent possible. The ACLU also asked the secret court to allow it to file a brief and participate in oral arguments, to order the government to file a public version of its briefs addressing the law's constitutionality, and to publish any judicial decision that is ultimately issued.

That strikes me as a clever move as the government would be hard-put to make a coherent argument that discussions of the constitutionality of the law need to be kept secret or involve national security secrets - not that such will keep the Shrub gang from making any lame-ass argument that pops into their undersized brain pans to say that they do nor will it keep the lap dogs on the FISC from agreeing. Still even that raises an opening to say the administration won't have an open discussion - or perhaps even better, to say the White House regards the Constitution's protections as state secrets.

For more background on the suit, Glenn Greenwald has an interview with ACLU National Security Project Director Jameel Jaffer about it. More information about the ACLU's efforts against the bill can be found here and links to the filings can be found here.

On the impact of all this, Greenwald writes that

[b]y all rights ... this bill should have passed quietly and seamlessly back last December. That's normally how the Washington Establishment functions.

It really was a true spontaneous outburst of citizen activism that prevented that from happening. As a result, new coalitions formed. There will now be lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of this travesty of a law. The activism that arose over this bill ... force[d] these issues into the public discourse, and will serve as a foundation, a launching pad, for far more potent and effective efforts against future assaults of this type from the political class on the rule of law and core Constitutional protections.

"[I]t is," he said, "hardly the end of anything, but the beginning." I'm not nearly so hopeful; in fact I feel like throwing a party, remembering Cesar Chavez's comment about the United Farm Workers union that "We have so few victories we need to celebrate our losses."

Still, while I'm not willing to "suck it up" to justify or excuse Barack Obama and the rest of the scummy Democraps who voted for oppression either out of thumb-sucking political cowardice or a genuine disdain for Constitutional rights (I'm still not sure which is worse), I certainly think I should suck it up on continued opposition. So I will do my best.