According to the text of the Senate FISA bill, the limitations on civil cases against the telecoms does not come into effect until the day the Act is enacted, i.e., the date that Bush signs it into law. The limitation applies to case pending on or filed after the effective date.

If telecom immunity passes, one potential course of action for the suits currently pending would be to voluntarily dismiss those cases the day before the Act is to be signed. Typically, a plaintiff then has one year to refile the complaint, even if the statute of limitations on the claim has already run. So, e.g., if Bush were to sign the Act on March 2, 2008, all suits against the telecoms would be dismissed on March 1, 2008. The plaintiffs in those suits would have until March 1, 2009, to refile the suit. Were a Democrat to be elected president, and Democratic control of Congress to increase, there could be a bill stripping the retroactive immunity from FISA. I see nothing in the Act that would prohibit that. If this were to be done almost immediately after the new President were sworn in, immunity could be stripped and the suits refiled before the expiration of the one-year refiling period.

Of course, the problem with this course of action is that it requires a lot of variables out of our control, and as Glenn has discussed ad nausem (in a good way), we cannot be confident that the Democrats would be able to keep their party together to pass such legislation.

My larger point is that even if telecom immunity passes, there are still ways to continue maintaining the suits. It helps to view a lawsuit as a game of chess (as an aside, any lawyer who refers to litigation in sports or war analogies is an idiot, or works at the Justice Deparment, which I guess is the same thing). In order to be a successful chess player, you need to think many moves ahead. What has become clear from argument over telecom immunity is that the Bush Administration is not very good at thinking ahead. No doubt the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress think that once retroactive immunity passes, the game will be over.

What we are doing here is important because we are attempting to stop the passage of retroactive immunity in the first place, but also think ahead to the next few steps in the event that it passes. There will still be ways to attack the statute itself on constitutional grounds or to frame pleadings in order to get around the defense.

Of course, if McCain becomes President, then we continue the way we have been and nothing comes to light. In that case, it may be necessary to research the feasibility of conducting a citizen's arrest on the uppper management of the various telecoms and subjecting them to enhanced interrogation techniques, now extra legal!

I do not normally get to read Glenn's posts on the weekends, meaning that by the time I read them there are typically several hundred comments. Thus, I typically do not comment on weekend posts, and am unable to review the majority of very insightful and amusing comments.

After reading this post, however, I feel compelled to comment on this Republican derangement with a thought that has been bouncing around in my head for a few days now: STOP THE MADNESS!!! Literally, the Republican Party is infected with a mental defect that, if left untreated (by removal from power), poses a far greater threat to our daily lives than the "Jihadis" do.

The Declaration of Independence identifies three of our inalienable rights as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Whenever I hear someone from the right (e.g., Mitt Romney) say that our most important right is to be kept alive, I cringe. In order to keep a citizen alive, all a country has to do is put him in a cage and give him three meals a day (at most). However, is life really worth living if we do not have the companion rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Ask the citizens of the former Soviet Union (or the current Russia) how just being kept alive is working out for them.

So once again I say: Stop the madness - vote a Republican out of office!