Category: Democrats

Blue Dogs & Telecom Money

The Blue Dog Democrats in the House are threatening to vote with Republicans if they don’t get legislation that grants the big telecom companies retroactive immunity. These twenty-one Dems have the power to derail the good, immunity-free House RESTORE Act.
We were wondering what sort of money these Dems have received from the telecom industry. I went through to identify the donors, though when there are multiple contributions from PACs, I’m just attributing it to the industry. I’m also not counting contributions from QWest, as they’re the one telecom that we know refused Bush administration requests to provide records or wiretaps without court order.

In total, the telecom industry as sent $134,502 to these twenty-one congressmen in the 2008 cycle alone. And keep in mind – it’s early in the cycle and these numbers are likely to grow and the congressmen who’ve been in the House more than one term have received even more money than this.

The question is – will these Democrats take their telecom money and work with Republicans to give the big telecoms retroactive immunity? Or will they stand up for the rule of law and vote with their Democratic colleagues for legislation that doesn’t include immunity?

Please take action and call the Blue Dogs today and ask them to oppose retroactive immunity.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

Stating the Obvious

Harry Reid, speaking on his incompetence as Majority Leader, following FISA votes yesterday:

There was a measure of frustration in the voice of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, as he told reporters during a break in the daylong debate, “Holding all the Democrats together on this, we’ve learned a long time ago, is not something that’s doable.”

While I appreciate the value in someone knowing that they are incapable of doing their job, when the Constitution is at stake, isn’t that a good time to step aside and let someone more willing to get the job done handle things?

The larger strategic question is if Harry Reid wants to pass a bill that includes congressional oversight and does not contain retroactive immunity, and he knows he has a good chunk of his caucus that doesn’t share those goals, why in the world would he chart a legislative course that requires caucus unity to win? That is, why did he set process in terms that require he unify Dems and march uphill to stop the SSCI bill? Why not, instead, use his powers as Majority Leader in favor of his policy agenda and force the anti-Constitution senators to work uphill themselves?

Simply by setting the Senate Judiciary Committee’s bill as the underlying bill would have given Reid better chances of seeing legislation he favors passing. But he didn’t do that. And he couldn’t hold the caucus together.

It’s time for Harry Reid to step down as Majority Leader.

Oh and it’s worth noting that the other members of the Dem Leadership – Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer – were absolutely silent in this fight. Neither, in my view, demonstrated any qualities that suggest they would be an improvement on Reid.

A Progressive Win

Above: Epic Fail 

Last night progressive challenger Donna Edwards defeated corrupt Dem Al Wynn in Maryland’s 4th Congressional district. This is a huge win for the netroots and a great sign of the willingness of new voters who are coming to take part in the presidential primary to embrace progressive candidates.

The good news is that it looks like Al Wynn has more class and principle than Joe Lieberman:

“The deed is done,” Wynn told reporters at a Lanham union hall where his supporters had gathered after the polls closed. “I think the only thing that remains is to support the winner.”

Markos makes a great point about the value of this victory for the netroots.

…we don’t have the money to buy off our politicians, and the bad Democrats know we’re not about to start voting for Republicans. So the only way we can hold our caucus accountable is to send notice that we will primary them. And sure, they may survive such primaries. But sometimes they won’t.

We’ll be working this fall for “more” Democrats, but today we struck a blow on behalf of better Democrats.

Congrats to the folks at Open Left, FireDogLake, Daily Kos and elsewhere who have long championed Edwards’ campaign.

It’s Over. People Are Pissed.

With the colossal collapse of the Senate Democratic caucus today over FISA and retroactive immunity, people are seriously pissed off at the caucus.

Glenn Greenwald notes ironically the frequency with which Senate Dems hand the Bush administration victories:

To conserve resources, newspapers should just create a macro of that phrase — “the Senate handed the White House a major victory today” — and then just program it to be automatically inserted into every article reporting on anything done by the Senate. That system would be foolproof.

Thomas Paine at Lead or Get Out of the Way writes about the system-crippling failure:

I’m too enraged to write anything thought provoking or witty. The leadership of the Democratic party is a bunch of spineless, cowardly, weak, feckless, cowardly asshats, who all need to be primaried until they die. When they retire from the Senate, we need to primary their retirements. When they die and go to Purgatory (they are too milquetoast, feckless, traitorous and weak to justify their special place in hell, and they sure as shit aren’t getting into heaven), I want to primary them there too. Make their lives miserable for all eternity. Seriously, this is beyond pathetic.

How many people failed? The little field where I select who is in the way on my blog form ran out of room before I could add everyone. That’s how spectacularly our leadership has failed.

Paine’s co-blogger Joshua Wyeth targets his ire more specifically towards Harry Reid and his press release announcing he’d vote against the SSCI bill:

[Reid] probably think that is a statement of leadership, that he is calling his caucus to stand with him. Via press release. This is some profoundly weak tea. To borrow the word’s of Jesse Lacey, I’ve seen more spine on jelly fish and I’ve seen more guts in eleven year old kids.

To which I offer:

Kevin at Life has taught us writes:

Not only has the Senate legalized Ol’ GW’s “end run” around the Constitution, but, the telecommunications lobby has shown that our government works for the highest bidder. It doesn’t matter to which party you belong in Washington, D.C. It is the “Party of the Dollar” that will always come out victorious.

As Senator Dodd said earlier today, the telecom lobbying is “having an impact.” I don’t think telecom contributions are a sufficient reason for Democratic cowardice, but they certainly make it easier for some of our weak-kneed Senators to remain wobbly.

Oh and one more thing. Today’s FISA disaster was an awful birthday present for D-Day.

Truly this is the perfect crime: the President decides to break the law, he employs industry to help him do so, then when he’s called on it, he enacts the state secrets privilege to evade oversight from the Congress and the courts, and then demands immunity to let industry evade responsibility because they can’t defend themselves, restricting any peek into the scope of the lawbreaking.

Thanks for making me sick on my birthday!

I guess Harry Reid doesn’t know that it’s not collegial to add insult to injury.

Whoop-De-Doo

Via McJoan at Daily Kos, Senator Harry Reid shows what must pass for spine in his office:

If, as appears likely, none of the amendments to strike or modify the provisions of the bill concerning retroactive immunity are adopted, we expect Sen. Reid to oppose cloture and oppose final passage of the bill.

Reid did vote against cloture – almost twenty members of his caucus voted for cloture. Apparently Mr. Reid’s stated position on this issue has no bearing on the people that he ostensibly leads. Let’s see if this thundering commandment holds enough Dems together to stop the bill on final passage. I’m not about to bet my savings on it…

Tom Lantos Has Died

Very sad.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A spokeswoman for Rep. Tom Lantos of California says the congressman has died.

Spokeswoman Lynne Weill said Monday morning that the 80-year-old Lantos, the only survivor of the Holocaust to serve in Congress, died at Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.

Lantos may not have been the most progressive Dem out there, but he was one of the strongest supporters of human rights in Tibet and Tibetan efforts for freedom. My background is in the Tibetan independence movement and so I’ve always looked very fondly on Lantos, even while not agreeing with him on other foreign policy issues. He was a huge ally in the fight against Google.cn, a search engine designed to censor information people in China and Tibet could access. Lantos spoke out forcefully against Google’s weaselly self-defense.
These words are likely what I will most remember Lantos for, as they speak to his moral clarity when it comes to human rights and freedom:

Companies that have blossomed in this country and make billions, a country that reveres freedom of speech, have chosen to ignore that core value in expanding their reach overseas and to erect a “Great Firewall” to suit Beijing’s purposes.

These massively successful high-tech companies which couldn’t bring themselves to send their representatives to our Human Rights Caucus briefing Wednesday on China and the Internet should be ashamed. With all their power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day. They caved in to Beijing’s demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it.

[…]

It has also been argued Internet companies are entitled to apply the same rules of engagement in China that they apply elsewhere. In Germany, for example, where denying the Holocaust is against the law, access to Neo-Nazi Web pages is impossible via Google. The company notifies its users that not all Web pages may be available. And in its new China services, Google issues a similar warning.

But as the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, I cannot begin to describe how disgusted I am by this particular argument. Because, in essence, it equates the vile language and evil purposes of Neo-Nazi groups and hate speech with content provided by the human rights activists of Falun Gong, by journalists and by democracy activists in China. There simply is no comparison between efforts of the democratically-elected government of the Federal Republic of Germany to move against hate-mongerers, and the Chinese regime cracking down on religious freedom, human rights and democracy.

China’s appalling human rights record never was a secret. U.S. Internet companies simply cannot claim they had no idea of what doing business there could entail. The Internet has always been a vital tool for human rights and democracy advocates in China, and a vital link with the outside world of its oppressed people.

Our Internet companies should have known, because for years their most loyal customers in China have gone to extraordinary technical lengths to bypass government’s controls of the Internet.

If these companies had stood up to Beijing from the beginning, demanding that they retain physical control of their own servers by having them located outside of China, the picture would be very different today.

This is a sad day.

Liberal Impulses

Tad Devine, in a New York Times op-ed, gives us this oh-so encouraging piece of super delegate history:

Many party leaders felt that the delegates would actually be more representative of all Democratic voters if we had more elected officials on the convention floor to offset the more liberal impulses of party activists.

I don’t know much about how super delegates originally came about, so Devine’s piece is informative. But what should be clear – and is clear looking at the nature of the super delegate system – is that it is a mechanism that ensures some level of check outside the democratic process by the party elites. Whether it bears out this way or not, in the 1980s this was something that reduced the strength of liberal activists.

Again, I’m sure I’ll get to read more about super delegates in the coming weeks and months, but I hope those defending the autonomy of these delegates to do whatever they want with no clear directive, recall this passage from Devine and recognize that the mechanism exists to prevent the Democratic Party from becoming more liberal than its elite members want it to be.

Super Delegates

LGS at The Seminal gets to the nub of the potential super delegate fiasco:

After such a tremendous turnout in the primaries, it’d be a shame to see an undemocratic process decide the nominee. The voters deserve to have their voices heard — that’s the point of democracy– and the actions of super delegates across the country will reveal whether or not they agree with that statement.

Nothing in the rules says that super delegates must vote for the winner of the plurality of pledged delegates nationally, nor the majority of pledged delegates from their state. But the rules also don’t specify that they must keep their votes with the person they said they’d vote for before their state’s election or any other point in time between now and the convention. They have complete authority to do what they want. The right thing would be to support the winner of a plurality of pledged delegates in recognition of what the Democratic voters have asked for.

When this is all over, Democrats need to change the rules for the nominating process. I have a longer version of this in the works, but for now let me just say:

  1. No more super delegates;
  2. No more caucuses;
  3. A set calendar that is decided well in advance of the primary season.

I don’t think any of those things are particularly complicated and the key underlying principle should be one person, one vote, in secret and in an accountable and observable fashion.

Allegedly Anti-War Democrats Haven’t Ended the War

Matt Taibbi, aka the poor man’s Leonard Pierce, has a powerful article in Rolling Stone attacking the anti-war movement’s embrace of Democratic political interests while Congressional Democrats for fail to move to end the war in Iraq. The article includes some undoubtedly controversial descriptions of how one of the leading anti-war coalitions, Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq, has ties to centrist parts of the Democratic Party, I’m more concerned with how Taibbi pins blame on the failures of those elected to end the war.

The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq is that it’s now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the table during the presidential campaign. Once again — it happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — the Democrats have essentially decided to rely on the voters to give them credit for being anti-war, despite the fact that, for all the noise they’ve made to the contrary, in the end they’ve done nothing but vote for war and cough up every dime they’ve been asked to give, every step of the way….

But the war is where they showed their real mettle. Before the 2006 elections, Democrats told us we could expect more specifics on their war plans after Election Day. Nearly two years have passed since then, and now they are once again telling us to wait until after an election to see real action to stop the war. In the meantime, of course, we’re to remember that they’re the good guys, the Republicans are the real enemy, and, well, go Hillary! Semper fi! Yay, team!

How much of this bullshit are we going to take? How long are we supposed to give the Reids and Pelosis and Hillarys of the world credit for wanting, deep down in their moldy hearts, to do the right thing?

Look, fuck your hearts, OK? Just get it done. Because if you don’t, sooner or later this con is going to run dry. It may not be in ’08, but it’ll be soon. Even Americans can’t be fooled forever.

Taibbi’s ending brings me back to this infamous quote from Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate this past May.

Watching this video, it’s clear that Harry Reid simply doesn’t know the meaning of the word “never.” His use of anti-war rhetoric is about as discomforting to watch as Mitt Romney singing the Baha Men, with the notable difference that while Romney was unable to talk to black youths, Reid has ensured the continuation of a war that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Democrats have utterly failed to legislate with the political will handed to them by the 2006 elections. The majority came through politicians wage anti-war campaigns around the country. The leadership in the Senate is, naturally, comprised of incumbents who were elevated by anti-war sentiment, but bore no electoral connection to it. Perhaps this is an explanation for their failure to legislate the end of the war through the congressional power of the purse. Or perhaps these people – Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, and Hoyer – just don’t believe the same things we believe.

Taibbi’s article cites Reid as saying that they haven’t had enough time to end the war because of the presidential campaign.

Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S. political history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his party’s energies on topics other than ending the war by saying he just couldn’t fit Iraq into his busy schedule. “We have the presidential election,” Reid said recently. “Our time is really squeezed.”

If presidential politics are any limiting factor in Congress’ efforts to stop the war, it’s that Reid doesn’t want to let the legislative process force Obama and Clinton to follow it along to the left. He doesn’t want to require them to make any controversial votes – preferring to let people like Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold be alone in efforts to cut off funding for the war. Ending the war by cutting its funds remains a fringe idea in the Senate precisely because people like Reid, Schumer, Clinton, and Obama have refused to legitimize it and make it the primary course of action for the Senate on the war.

Congress has punted the war in Iraq. I wish I had a better understanding of why they’ve refused to stand up to the President on the continuation of the war. Democrats have funded hundreds of billions of dollars for the war in Iraq. For better or worse, this Congress is responsible for the continuation of the war and nothing they have done, nor even the promises of the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, give me hope that we can expect a quick end to the war following the election of a Democrat to the White House.

Update:

T.Party suggests that our hopes to end the war were effectively ended in December 2006 (before we even seated the Democratic majority in the 110th Congress) when Nancy Pelosi said, “We will not cut off funding for the troops…Absolutely not.”

It’s hard to end the war when you, you know, rule out using the only means to ending the war.

Also note that Pelosi describes the congressional power of the purse along a right wing frame. Double whammy.