How I Wish Dianne Feinstein Were a Floridian

I wish Sen. Dianne Feinstein were a Floridian. I'd like to rip her right now. Figuratively speaking, of course.

The California senator is putting politics ahead of the United States Constitution, and thank goodness, it's getting noticed.

Feinstein emerges as a key defender of the administration in collecting everyone's call data.

The Obama administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing -- none at all -- the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

And this is OK with the Democratic senior senator from the Golden State.

As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching. But she argued on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Then she went on to say she actually didn't know how the data being collected was used.

As the New York Times said in its powerful Obama administration condemnation editorial, "This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance --with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power --fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy."

That's what I mean: Too much politics from Feinstein, too little respect for the Constitution.