Category: Democrats

Feingold: “I really do disagree with [Reid’s] way of proceeding”

Sam Stein of the Huffington Post scored a very interesting interview with Senator Russ Feingold today. In it, Feingold takes issue with Senator Reid’s leadership and tactics on the FISA fight, going back to last year.

In an interview with the Huffington Post on Thursday morning, Sen. Russ Feingold, who opposes granting immunity to those companies, expressed disappointment that his party’s leader, Sen. Harry Reid, was not doing more to help strike the provision from a newly considered version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“Of course I have great respect for the Majority Leader,” said Feingold. “He is a good friend of mine. But I really do disagree with his way of proceeding.”

…

“We should have a normal process were this is debated based on a majority vote in the senate,” said the Wisconsin Democrat. “That’s the way it should have been done and I regret that it’s not being done that way. Of course, I support Senator Dodd. He and I were principally involved in making sure this didn’t get jammed through before the holidays and I will be supporting him again. But this decision does make it harder.”

On a tactical level, there is a three sided fight going on between Dodd/Feingold, Harry Reid, and Jay Rockefeller. Reid keeps saying he’s personally opposed to retroactive immunity and I have little doubt that he will vote for the Leahy, Dodd/Feingold, and potentially other good Democratic amendment. But his tactics emphasizing collegiality and the wishes of Jay Rockefeller and Dick Cheney over the good of the nation helps assure that good Democrats will lose this fight.

Feingold went on to discuss the importance of the FISA issue in presidential politics, thanking Dodd for drawing the national spotlight to an issue that he has long worked on.

“I started this fight two years ago when they first announced the illegal program and I’ve been working on it every day,” he said. “And it has been a great help that Chris Dodd made it a part of his presidential campaign and now that he is back to work with me and others… It’s a big help. It’s very hard to do it alone.”

He was also happy to have the support of both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton. The two Democratic frontrunners have said they oppose retroactive immunity. But, with the primary season heating up, it is unlikely they will offer anything more than rhetorical assurances.

“I’d love to have them back,” said Feingold. “But it is not my job to tell them what to do on their campaigns. My understanding is that both of them have indicated support for what Senator Dodd and I are doing. So that’s good. If we see real opportunity for a vote we can win, then yes. I would love to have them back.”

Feingold is giving Clinton and Obama a bit of a pass in that he only really expects them back if there votes can assure a win. I personally think there presence is far more important than that. They want to be our leaders, they should be expected to lead now. Leadership is not a campaign speech with soaring rhetoric – it’s doing the job the people of Illinois and New York elected you to do on the most critical issue facing America today: the health of our Constitution.

Sadly, it looks like Hillary Clinton will not be in Washington today to participate in the FISA debate or a filibuster. No final word yet on Senator Obama.

ACLU Slaps Harry Reid in Nevada Press

Senator Harry Reid is up for reelection this year and press like this in the Las Vegas Sun can’t help his prospects.

Sen. Harry Reid angered liberals in his party last month as he sought to shield telecom companies from liability for their role in the Bush administration’s domestic spying program.

As the Senate debates the surveillance issue this week, the criticism of Reid shows that his role is putting him at odds with his party’s base.

Reid says he personally opposes immunity for the phone companies that cooperated with the government and prefers stronger civil rights protections for citizens, as provided by one of the bills now before the Senate. But as leader of the Senate, Reid embodies the Democrats’ apparent inability to stop a competing bill that essentially gives the Bush administration authority to continue eavesdropping on Americans and lets the telecoms off the hook.

The article goes on to talk about how Congress watchers are responding and Caroline Fredickson of the ACLU doesn’t pull any punches.

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office, said the organization is targeting Reid by name in its materials advocating a tougher bill. “Actions speak louder than words,” she said. “If he really opposes telecom immunity, he needs to show it. And we haven’t seen it.”

Fredrickson said she believes Reid is leading the Democrats in a way that is not only out of step with the party’s base, but with most Americans. The ACLU released a poll this week conducted, incidentally, by Reid’s pollster, Mark Mellman, showing that more than 50 percent of Americans surveyed oppose the immunity provision.

Leadership matters. It’s not just liberal bloggers or professional activists that are watching our representatives in Congress, but people back home – their constituents. Any senator who continues to obstruct a Democratic agenda from adequately moving forward can expect to be met with disapproval from the Democratic base both back home and around the country. With all eyes on the Senate this week, I hope that our leaders start acting like leaders and govern the way the country expects them to govern.

Courage Campaign Looks at Bad FISA Amendments

Robert Cruickshank has a great, in-depth post at the Courage Campaign looking at the expected amendment to be offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and why progressives should reject it. Feinstein’s amendment would have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court determine if companies like AT&T and Verizon should be granted immunity; the FISA Court would make this decision behind closed doors. Cruickshank also addresses the Specter amendment which would substitute the federal government in the pending cases against the big telecom companies, finding adequate reason to reject it as well. Cruickshank’s post is definitely worth a read.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

Disclosure: I have joined the CREDO Mobile team to stop the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program and hold the telecom companies accountable for their lawbreaking.

Here Comes the FISA Debate

Well, it now the word out of Washington is that the FISA debate will begin in the Senate tonight, though currently it doesn’t look like votes will take place until tomorrow. My former coworker from the Dodd campaign, Tim Tagaris, has a post up at Open Left explaining the likely legislative process on FISA.

First order of business will be the Judiciary Bill as a substitute to the horrific Intelligence version. That will probably get tabled by Republicans (per Harry Reid’s helpful suggestion) and go away with an overwhelming vote.

Then we’ll go to amendments, including Dodd/Feingold that would strip Title II (Retroactive Immunity) from the bill. There are other amendments, including ones that will substitute liability from the telecoms to the Administration. Dodd is opposed to this, to the best of my knowledge.

There is also a Feinstein amendment that is the big wild card. That would let the FISA court determine whether lawsuits can go forward. That could conceivably pass.

And when we know what a final bill looks like, we’ll know if a filibuster is going to have to happen.

I wouldn’t bet on Dodd backing down if a bill contains retroactive immunity.

I’m sad to say it, but this is outlook means that we can’t give up now, we have to redouble our efforts to make sure that our voices in opposition to retroactive immunity and in opposition to warrantless wiretapping are heard in the halls of the Senate.

Contact your Senator now and ask them to stand against warrantless wiretapping and against retroactive immunity.

And if it comes to it, they need to know that YOU want them to stand alongside Senator Dodd during a filibuster.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

Disclosure: I have joined the CREDO Mobile team to stop the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program and hold the telecom companies accountable for their lawbreaking.

FISA Developments…

There’s a lot going on related to FISA today. For starters, while it remains a possibility that the Senate will begin to address FISA tonight, tomorrow is looking more likely.

We’re also starting to get a clear picture of what we can expect from the Senate debate on retroactive immunity and it isn’t looking good. Senate Majority Leader is set on making it as hard as possible…to stop retroactive immunity.

CREDO members sent Senator Reid over 30,000 faxes this past December, calling on him to do everything in his power to bring legislation to the floor that did not include retroactive immunity. Sadly, he hasn’t listened.

Via Glenn Greenwald, here’s Senator Reid, laying down the law on how he will proceed with the FISA legislation:

We have to finish FISA this week. Everyone should be aware of that point. We have to finish it this week. I know there are important trips people want to take. We have the very important economic conference in Davos that Democrats and Republicans alike would like to go to.

…

Now, it is possible we could finish it fairly quickly. We are going to work from the Intelligence bill, and if amendments are offered that people don’t like, I would suggest they move to table those amendments. Because if people think they are going to talk this to death, we are going to be in here all night. This is not something we are going to have a silent filibuster on. If someone wants to filibuster this bill, they are going to do it in the openness of the Senate. [Emphasis added]

There you have it – the priorities are getting to have a weekend in Switzerland and making Chris Dodd stand on his feet all night to block retroactive immunity, unlike the unprecedented number of painless Republican filibusters of good Democratic legislation.
Also, Reid is sticking with the Intelligence Committee bill, which includes retroactive immunity and is weak on privacy issues. It allows basket warrants, making it legal for the government to get warrants not for individuals on a case by case basis, but whole groups at a time. The Intel bill also fails to include adequate provisions for minimizing the number of people getting accidentally swept up in surveillance. This is the same legislation that Dodd and others successfully delayed last December and unless it is substantially amended, it remains a bad bill.

Elsewhere, Emptywheel takes a look at the words of Vice President Cheney, out shilling for the big telecom companies before Congress. She rightly identifies the focus of immunity talk as something protects the Bush administration more so than something done to protect the poor multi-billion dollar corporations.

Rather, any immunity is immunity for those who decided it was a swell idea to illegally wiretap Americans. And that list of people begins with Dick Cheney.

It’s quite simple, really. The Bush administration has used executive privilege and state secrets to resist oversight by Congress and the courts. They’ve even gone so far as to flatly ignore congressional subpoenas when it suites them, as Glenn Greenwald reports. Retroactive immunity is just as much a security blanket for the Bush administration as it is a Get Out of Jail Free card for the big telecoms like AT&T and Verizon.

There are many, many other good posts on FISA worth reading today. Here’s a few of my favorites:

When you’re done reading, take a moment – if you haven’t already – to contact Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain and ask them to leave the campaign trail to help stop retroactive immunity and a bad FISA bill. And you can your Senators in an action alert here.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
Disclosure: I have joined the CREDO Mobile team to stop the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program and hold the telecom companies accountable for their lawbreaking.

Change

Via Sadly, No!

Wouldn’t it be great if the 2008 presidential election to determine who will succeed the man likely to be rated as the worst president in American history was about something other than an amorphous concept that has been so diluted as a brand that almost every candidate on both sides of the aisle is running, to some degree or another, on the platform of “change”?

In this particular order, I would be much happier if the 2008 presidential election was primarily about the war in Iraq, restoring the Constitution, and getting health care for every American.

I’m sure defenders of the candidates (and let’s be clear, that is most definitely a plural term) pushing change as their dominant narrative would argue that by “change” they mean their candidate would do stuff on all of those things. And it’d be different. That may be true, but it’s not what the election has been about. It’s been about change and experience. Or, as I’m arguing, nothing.

To be sure, I’m an equal opportunity cranky observer. What’s true about “change” is also true about the experience meme. Like change, it is watered down and fails to capture anything substantive.

Things get really disjointed when you have candidates like Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd (and sometimes Hillary Clinton) trying to shoehorn themselves as people who represent both change and experience. Double whammy! You have thoughtful candidates with diverse plans for the major issues trying to shrink wrap themselves in two conflicting yet vacuous brands that resist discussion of these very issues that make these candidates worthwhile. Of course, Biden, Dodd, and Richardson have all ended their campaigns, unable to find traction on substance amidst narratives lacking in explicit meaning.

Mostly, this is just a point to recognize that our country is worse off when politics is adjudicated by who is putting forth the best marketing and not who is putting forth the best plans for how they will govern.

Feingold’s Take Down of John Edwards

Senator Russ Feingold just demolishes his former colleague John Edwards in an interview in the Appleton Post-Cresent:

On the Democratic presidential candidates
I did notice that as the primaries heated up, all of a sudden, all the presidential candidates — none of whom voted with me on the timeframe to withdraw from Iraq — all voted with me and when we did the Patriot Act stuff.

The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.

When you had the opportunity to vote a certain way in the Senate and you didn’t, and obviously there are times when you make a mistake, the notion that you sort of vote one way when you’re playing the game in Washington and another way when you’re running for president, there’s some of that going on.

On whether he’ll make an endorsement in the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary

Probably not. I’m having a hard time deciding between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as are many people. Those are the two I take the most seriously.

I go back and forth, to be honest with you. I’m torn on this whole issue of who’s more likely to be progressive and really seek change vs. who’s ready to do the job today. It really is a true dilemma in my mind. [Emphasis added]

Feingold’s comments actually mesh fairly closely with what I’ve heard from some Senate staffers in DC about Edwards. He’s thought of as someone who started thinking about his presidential run very early in his career, though he kept voting in a way that kept him safe with his constituents. His last year in the Senate saw a large leftward shift in his voting pattern, but at that point I think the damage was done.

That doesn’t presume, though, that the criticisms of Edwards by people working in Washington are fair or his transformation from a centrist to a hardline progressive is not convincing. No one is talking about the economic crush facing America’s working and middle classes in our presidential field, save John Edwards. No one – not even Russ Feingold – has used their bully pulpit as a political icon to identify and call out the damaging effects of corporatized America to the extent or with the commitment that John Edwards has. I agree with Feingold — it would have been great if Edwards had voted what he talks now. He didn’t and I can understand why his former colleague would be angered by Edwards’ timely transformation.

Last winter I started a blog with Kombiz Lavasany and Matt Ortega (both now at the DNC) called The Right’s Field, to exclusively cover the GOP primary. One of the things that I was initially puzzled by was the willingness of the Republican base to accept Mitt Romney’s transition from pro-choice, pro-gun control moderate to a conservative of Reagan’s ilk over a few short years. While attending CPAC I spoke with a Republican blogger who explained this phenomena to me on the grounds of Christianity and redemption. The redemption narrative is powerful and common in religious conservative culture. People do wrong, but if they change their ways, they can be forgiven; the change is a good thing. Romney wouldn’t be universally savaged because most conservatives will see him as transitioning from being wrong to being right — and they want their presidential candidates to be right far more than they want them to be without flaw (one could see this evidently when you realize Giuliani, Romney, and McCain have been frontrunners while Brownback and Tancredo are dropouts).

I agree with Feingold that Edwards voted the wrong way on key issues while he was in the Senate. Frankly, he could have been a better Democratic Senator. But he has undergone a transformation, one which when I hear him talk I believe is genuine. Edwards admits he was wrong about Iraq, about bankruptcy, about the Patriot Act, and now he takes good positions on them, some of the strongest in the Democratic Party. This transformation has brought him to not just a better place as a Democrat, but a better place than most Democrats, particularly Senators and presidential candidates, currently occupy.

Attacking Edwards for inconsistency strikes me as something that we don’t need to do, though I’m sure the Clinton and Obama campaigns oppo research shops will continue to do it. I think progressives should welcome the fact that John Edwards has become a leading voice for change, for workers rights, and against corporate power. We don’t have too many people speaking about these issues who can command attention and I’m not ready to write off John Edwards.

FISA and Attack Ads

In a post on Open Left, my colleague from the Dodd campaign, Tim Tagaris, writes about the coming FISA fight in the Senate. Tim points out the structural opposition Senator Dodd will face from Democrats within the caucus that do not agree with his opposition to FISA and do not want to see him standing up on this critically important issue. Tim wrote:

Harry Reid did a fine job in round one of the FISA fight. Maybe even a perfect job, if you consider that his job as Majority Leader is to make his “constituents” happy — in this case, those constituents are a weak-kneed caucus afraid to protect the Constitution for fear they will see their vote in a 30 second advertisement.

Via Glenn Greenwald, we learn that The Politico thinks that Dems should be scared of what Karl Rove will think of their actions on FISA. It syncs well with the quote from Wellstone I’ve included below. You can be sure that Clinton and Obama’s top strategists are having this conversation, as are Harry Reid’s, Chuck Schumer’s, Dick Durbin’s, and every other Election Before Principle Democrat. It is why we lose legislative fights. It is why we lose elections. And it is why Dan Froomkin can make a convincing case that the US Congress has not existed during the Bush years.

Both Tim’s comments and The Politico story made me think of a passage from Paul Wellstone’s The Conscience of a Liberal:

In the Senate, we come to “the well” to call out our votes, “yea” or “nay.” I could write another book about the conversations that take place in the well. One frequent topic is television attack ads. Senators are acutely aware that communications technology has become the main weapon in electoral conflict. A typical refrain is “Can you imagine what the attack ad would look like on this vote?” Quite often, this is another way of saying, “I hate voting this way, but I have no choice if I don’t want to lose my next election.” [pg. 132]

One of the things that I hope the Dodd campaign, particularly our efforts on FISA and using the Congressional power of the purse to end the war in Iraq, impressed upon people is that leadership means not worrying what the other side will say about how our Senators vote. The Republicans will always attack Democrats. They will always call us weak on defense and allies to terrorists. They will always question our patriotism. And they will always be wrong. There is no way around it.

For Democrats to worry about the next election’s attack ads is to surrender their principles now. It is to fail to do their job.

We may not have succeeded in getting Chris Dodd elected President, Tim, but I think he helped show our Party what leadership looks like – doing your job and standing up for one’s progressive principles. That should continue during next week’s expected FISA fight

Disclosure: While I was proud to work for Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign, I currently have no ties to Senator Dodd.