The reactions from pundits and lawmakers have been varied. Moderate Republican Senator Lindsey Graham admitted in an interview on Thursday morning, after the White House confirmed that the Guardian’s article was accurate, that he was “glad” that the NSA was monitoring citizens’ phone calls.

“We are very much under threat,” Graham said. “Radical Islam is on the rise throughout the region. Homegrown terrorism is one of my biggest concerns. It is happening in our own backyard, and I am glad that NSA is trying to find out what terrorists are up to overseas and inside the country.”
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Tea Party Senator Rand Paul, however, had a different response to the White House’s activities. In a statement, Paul said,

“The National Security Agency’s seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon’s phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution. After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters’ phone records, it would appear that this Administration has now sunk to a new low.

When Sen. Mike Lee and I offered an amendment that would attach Fourth Amendment protections to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year, it was defeated, and FISA was passed by an overwhelming majority of the Senate. At the time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remarked that FISA was ‘necessary to protect us from the evil in this world.’

The Bill of Rights was designed to protect us from evil, too, particularly that which always correlates with concentrated government power, and particularly Executive power. If the President and Congress would obey the Fourth Amendment we all swore to uphold, this new shocking revelation that the government is now spying on citizens’ phone data en masse would never have happened.”

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Graham keeps kissing the wrong butts