Over at Slate, I wonder what ever happened to the Republican devotion to the rule of law:

Press reports suggest that the Bush administration has created at least two warrantless surveillance programs with the cooperation of major telecom companies. The first, reported by the New York Times in 2005, involved the warrantless interception of several hundred Americans’ international phone calls and e‑mails. Under the second, first reported by USA Today in 2006, Verizon and AT&T (then called SBC) reportedly provided the government with access to the domestic calling records of its customers. Qwest CEO Joseph P. Nacchio declined to participate in the latter program, believing that doing so would be against the law. Nacchio now alleges that the NSA retaliated for his refusal by canceling an unrelated, lucrative government contract. (He faces unrelated charges of insider trading.) Last summer, the Heritage Foundation’s Matthew Spalding insisted that giving amnesty to illegal immigrants would be “deeply unfair to the millions who obey the law and abide by the rules.” By the same token, letting AT&T and Verizon off the hook would not only be unfair to the customers whose privacy they violated, it would also be unfair to Qwest, which was put at a competitive disadvantage for obeying the law.

Last year, when the Senate was debating immigration reform, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson was arguing that “America is based on the rule of law, and that law must be enforced.” Many other Republican Senators expressed similar sentiments, opposing any leniency for illegal immigrants. But yesterday she voted with every one of her Republican colleagues to forgive telecom companies for their illegal activities. If migrant workers are obligated to obey our laws, surely our largest corporations have the same obligation.