Nancy Pelosi refused to allow the House to vote on the reauthorization of the Protect America Act, which had already passed the Senate. Her decision resulted in expiration, on February 16, of surveillance provisions it afforded our intelligence community to keep Americans safe from a terrorist attack.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell sent a very pointed six page letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Sylvestre Reyes last Friday, in which they destroyed Reyes’s contention that passage of the Protect America Act was unnecessary.  The AG and DNI said in part, “Our experience in the past few days since the expiration of the Act demonstrates that these concerns are neither speculative nor theoretical: allowing the Act to expire without passing the bipartisan Senate bill has had real and negative consequences for our national security.  Indeed, this has led directly to a degraded intelligence capability.”

Pelosi handpicked Reyes to chair the critically important Intelligence Committee during a time of war even though, as USA Today pointed out, he had to admit he didn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. Yet, somehow he knows better than the DNI, the Attorney General, the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the leadership of the FBI and CIA, and 2/3 of the Senate….what it takes to fight the jihadists and keep America safe.

Knowing that the PPA would pass the House by a comfortable margin, as it did in the Senate, Pelosi has simply denied bringing it to the floor for a vote. 

Matthew Continetti writing for the Weekly Standard chronicles the evolution of this Hill fight over wiretapping authority, and shames Pelosi and her hacks in an excellent feature appropriately titled “Hear No Evil.” Referring to the Pelosi and Company’s antics, Continetti says, “This demonstrates a fundamental lack of seriousness about national security on the part of congressional Democrats. Newsflash: The United States faces a persistent threat of attack from a terrorist organization with global reach and the desire to massacre as many innocent people as possible. Do House Democrats really want to make the terrorists’ jobs any easier? “

That’s a fair question.  Whose side are they on, anyway?