A Wall Street Journal editorial discusses Speaker Pelosi's cynical strategy of blocking FISA legislation renewal.  The Journal argues that since liberals are unable to outright block the President from conducting anti-terror surveillance, they are using a back-door strategy of forcing phone companies to not cooperate by exposing them to liability.

We've long held that a President doesn't need a court order under the Constitution to order such wiretaps. But the reality is that, because of these lawsuits, the telephone companies now won't cooperate without the legal protection of a court order. That's how pernicious these lawsuits are.

We asked one phone company executive what he'd do, after Friday's expiration, in response to a government request for cooperation. His answer was blunt: "I'm not doing it. If I don't have compulsion, I can't get out of court [and those lawsuits]. . . . I'm not going to do something voluntarily." Having talked to telecom executives, we can tell you this view is well-nigh universal.

This editorial follows an interesting article by Bob Novak citing donations by trial lawyers involved in FISA-related telecommunications lawsuits donating heavily to Democratic candidates. 

Big money is involved. Amanda Carpenter, a Townhall.com columnist, has prepared a spreadsheet showing that 66 trial lawyers representing plaintiffs in the telecommunications suits have contributed $1.5 million to Democratic senators and causes. Of the 29 Democratic senators who voted against the FISA bill last Tuesday, 24 took money from the trial lawyers (as did two absent senators, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). Eric A. Isaacson of San Diego, one of the telecommunications plaintiffs' lawyers, contributed to the recent unsuccessful presidential campaign of Sen. Chris Dodd, who led the Senate fight against the bill containing immunity.

Liberals in Congress shouldn't be allowed to sell out America's national security in exchange for campaign contributions from their trial lawyer friends.

A USA Today editorial examines the health care plans of Sens. Obama and Clinton, calling their universal coverage proposals "sketchy and incomplete."

Even if the Clinton or Obama plans could be afforded at the outset (they would be financed by repealing President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy), they'd be doomed by a continuation of today's inflation in health care costs. Cost containment is key to making any overhaul work. In fact, even without a big new program, it is crucial to forestall a health care-driven fiscal meltdown of the federal government and to stop employers from dropping health benefits for workers.

Clinton and Obama both would wave the magic wand of modernizing the health care system to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies. They also see savings in preventive medicine. These types of proposals, though worthwhile, are not unlike calls to balance the budget by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. They help at the margins but don't get at the root problems.

Costs are rising largely because health care providers and consumers lack incentives to economize. With third-party insurers paying most of their bills, consumers don't make the kind of tough choices they do when shopping for other goods and services. Similarly, makers of medicines, medical devices, hospital equipment and other products operate in a world with few restrictions or attempts to set priorities. Insuring more people doesn't address those issues.

Any real attempt to control costs would have to increase patients' out-of-pocket expenses, or increase the role of government or insurers in prioritizing new products and services and managing access to care.

None of this would be popular, and neither Clinton nor Obama is saying much about this aspect of the health care crisis. Until they fill in the blanks, the issue of a personal mandate is a somewhat abstract debate, sort of like the one over which is better, experience or change.

With their plans estimated to cost American taxpayers billions of dollars to pay for those who are uninsured and mandates for coverage, we deserve to know all the details of these plans so that voters may make informed decisions at the ballot box.