By Madison Powers, CQ Guest Columnist

Lots of people in Washington this week are falling all over themselves in an attempt to get behind what is being billed as a compromise measure that revises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). At stake is the way the U.S. government gathers intelligence and its impact on the expectation of privacy American citizens have in electronic communications such as telephone and e-mail.

Lawmakers have failed for over a year at attempts to reach consensus on a permanent measure and a temporary version, put in place after Sen. Christopher J. Dodd suspended campaigning to return to Washington to filibuster a similar bill, expires in August.

Vice President Dick Cheney , working with Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers, reached an agreement that resulted in House passage by a margin of 293-129. The Senate is poised to pass the measure this week.

A few senators are speaking out against the bill. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick J. Leahy and ranking panel Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania are among the vocal few, but Russ Feingold summed it up best when he said that the “deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation.”

The near-universal refrain is that protection against terrorism depends on its passage. The obvious truth, however, is that while the bill has been bottled up for an extended presidential primary season, the sense of urgency now is based more on the political needs of individual members of Congress than on national security needs.

Democrats want to remove the issue from the fall campaign, and Republicans rarely miss an opportunity to hyperventilate over scary things, for which fewer civil liberties seems to be the prescription. Democrats, including ones who should know better, capitulated in fear of being blamed for not doing enough to stop a terrorist attack because of an overly developed concern for civil libertarian niceties.

The legislation is bad enough. The reasons people offer for supporting it would be embarrassing, but for the fact that few people are paying much attention, and for the fact that the attentive few will have short memories. However, the legislation is too important to be regarded as a mere political bargaining chip. It is the most ambitious legislation of its kind in nearly 30 years, and the political calculus that it won’t matter that much in the end underestimates the extent of its flaws.

A recent Washington Post editorial offers one of the least distinguished contributions to the public discourse. The editorial acknowledges that “the new FISA bill is not perfect,” but it congratulates the congressional leaders for being “capable of achieving delicate compromise in the national interest.” What is breathtaking is how few reasons the Post editorial recites for support beyond the clichéd plea for more bipartisanship during the day before everyone of importance in Washington goes for cocktails in the evening.

One oft-cited source of concern about the present (and future) system of intelligence collection arises out of a 2005 New York Times article that described a program of warrantless domestic wiretapping ordered by the Bush administration’s National Security Agency (NSA) since at least 2002. In addition to the criticism that the intelligence program violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and FISA, outraged members of Congress cited it as further evidence of an imperial presidency indifferent to will of the legislative branch.

In that vein, Speaker Nancy Pelosi summarizes her satisfaction with the compromise by saying, “This bill strengthens congressional oversight.”

Important as oversight is, it is not the heart of the problem. What matters most fundamentally is the protection of individual American citizens who might be spied upon illegally and then left without legal remedy. It is a matter of derivative importance that Congress be put in a better position to keep an eye on the president.

Moreover, given the fact that we have learned numerous key members of Congress were privy to many of the sordid details of the administration’s abuses, getting right the basic legal protections for individuals becomes even more important in an acceptable compromise.

The debate over the central issue of what protections are appropriate for American citizens has been obscured in other arguments as well. Some proponents of the compromise focus on the dispute over the provision that grants immunity from civil litigation to telecom companies that in the past — and in the future — violate the law in cooperating with illegal wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance.