There's one thing I find kind of confusing about the recent hoopla over telecom immunity and the previous Military Commissions act. That is the fact that these laws retroactively make something legal. Now, it would seem to me that doing that is unconstitutional. "Ex post facto," logically, should cover all retroactive changes in law and not just the ones that make things more harsh.
It seems that judicial precedence, however, means that ex post facto only covers retroactively making the law more harsh.
Can anyone give me a good reason why that should be the case? Otherwise, it seems like a position taken for convenience that is now permitting the kind of behavior that the founders would have most feared - an out of control executive with a compliant Congress making the executive's law breaking legal ex post facto.