Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner apparently feels that the telephone companies should be granted immunity for illegal wiretapping surveillance, but when it comes to Republicans getting trapped by an illegal wiretap it's an entirely different matter. In December of 1996 a Florida couple playing with their scanner picked up a conversation on their portable scanner involving then Speaker Newt Gingrich, John Boehner (who was in Florida at the time), Gingrich's lawyer, and other Republicans. The couple decided to record the conversation they claim they inadvertently stumbled across.
The New York Times article describes the subject of the conversation below:
In the conversation, Mr. Gingrich, other Republican Congressmen and Mr. Gingrich's lawyer discussed how the Speaker's Congressional allies should deal with the political consequences of his admission that he had violated House ethics rules by failing to get adequate legal advice on the use of tax-exempt funds and then giving inaccurate information to the House ethics committee for its inquiry into the matter.
Democrats have described the conversation as evidence that Mr. Gingrich broke an agreement with the ethics committee that he would not orchestrate a response to those committee findings.
After submitting the tape to Florida Democratic Congressman Karen Thurman, the Florida couple gave the tape to the House Ethics Committee member Jim McDermott at her suggestion. When the tape was leaked to the newspapers, John Boehner sued Jim McDermott.
Today, the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia ordered McDermott to pay over $1 million in legal fees to Boehner. The case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court ruling that McDermott had acted improperly in releasing the tape to the papers. McDermott was never charged with a crime, but Boehner feels otherwise. According to an article in The Examiner:
Boehner said in a statement that members of Congress have a responsibility not only to obey the law and congressional rules, but also to defend the integrity of those laws and rules when they are violated. Although McDermott was never charged with a crime and maintained that his actions were justified, Boehner took a different view.
So here we have Republicans engaged in questionable, if not illegal, activity. They get caught and Boehner invokes the rule of law argument. More than eleven years later, Boehner feels that wiretapping American citizens is perfectly fine and ignoring the law is patriotic. So instead of allowing the lawbreaking telephone companies to be sued, Boehner feels they should be given immunity because they have decided, with encouragement from the criminal Bush administration, that their actions were justified, just as McDermott felt his actions were justified. I doubt Boehner sees the irony in having the courts decide the merits of his law suit against McDermott while attempting to block similar civil action against the telcos.