The American Spectator

There are many reasons to be happy when Congress goes on vacation — no more taxpayer money is being spent, Harry Reid appearances on TV go way down and traffic eases in the DC area. But, alas, for GOP Presidential communications teams it is a big let down and one of their prime sources of material goes away. Earlier this week all three of the top GOP contenders plus Fred Thompson got into the spirit of things by criticizing the Democrats’ refusal to move along Judge Southwick’s nomination. Today, Rudy Giuliani’s team, despite debate preparations and Iowa travel, found time to bash the Democrats for refusing to approve a needed amendment to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow resumption of terrorist surveillance which was interrupted because of a FISA court ruling in April. (That is right, since April we have failed to address an obvious hole in our terrorism surveillance programs.) Team Rudy whacks Congress as follows:

“It is very dangerous to play politics with national security at a time when our Intelligence Community has just warned us that Al Qaeda is regrouping and continues to plan attacks against our country. Yet that is precisely what the Democrats are doing by preventing a vote on changing the archaic FISA law to bring it up to date with modern technology. The Democrats have been sitting on this since April, and they have refused to even schedule a vote before they go on their summer vacation. Al Qaeda isn’t going on vacation; neither should the Democrats until they agree to fix FISA.”

Let’s see if Congress gets the message.