It started simply enough. Democrats in the U.S. House wanted to reinstate some restrictions on the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping powers. Those powers had been broadened with a temporary bill in August that would allow the agency to wiretap terrorist suspects without any oversight from courts.

The Democratic proposal made sense: a secret foreign intelligence court would have had more oversight over the NSA program, particularly the interception of communications coming into the United States from abroad. When Americans were involved in those communications, there would have had to be more accountability. In other words, the NSA would have had to justify what it was doing in some cases.

The Bush administration, however, prefers carte blanche when it comes to tapping foreigners and Americans. President Bush (invoking national security) not only said he would veto the legislation, but also wanted the previous easing of rules made permanent.

Republicans thus introduced a measure that said nothing should be done to curtail surveillance aimed at stopping Osama bin Laden or others "from attacking the United States." Obviously no Democrat or Republican in his or her right mind would want to vote against something like that. So the Democrats had to pull away from their bill on the NSA. This is exactly the kind of shallow, cheap maneuver used by those who want to oversimplify debates over domestic surveillance by making them all about being patriotic or unpatriotic.

Well, it's not that simple. The NSA has broad intelligence-gathering capabilities, and of course it should. The war on terror is ongoing. But just because Democrats believe there ought to be more accountability when it comes to domestic spying, they're labeled as hindering the anti-terror effort. What they're trying to do is ensure that constitutional rights to privacy which are a cornerstone of this democracy are protected from overzealous surveillance that would infringe upon those rights.

That doesn't make Democrats soft on terrorism, but some Republican lawmakers know full well that if they use that claim, along with invoking bin Laden, they can convince at least some Americans that the Democrats are up to no good. One Republican said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had "underestimated the intelligence of the American people and the bipartisan majority in the Congress to understand what matters most -- preventing another terrorist attack." That is a preposterous statement -- as if Pelosi didn't understand the gravity of the battle against terrorism.

It is not the speaker who underestimates the intelligence of the people. It's the Republicans who try to play on the fears of the people while they seek to give the Bush administration broad powers to do whatever it wishes with regard to domestic surveillance.