This video is from this past fall, but remains a pretty good encapsulation of the arguments being put forth by George W. Bush and his Republican pals in the Senate.
You can expect much of President Bush’s State of the Union address to sound like this.
Kia Franklin at Tort Deform identifies the real effect of the Republicans demanding retroactive immunity for the big telecoms – making America less safe.
Bush, Cheney, and executive administration officials have been saying in the past two days that if we don’t scurry and pass this bill, and in the form and fashion that Bush wants it, it’ll be at our peril. They discuss this in a do-or-die fashion that creates a sense of urgency and drama, and also depicts opponents to retroactive immunity as the bad guys who don’t want to protect America. Yet their framing it this way doesn’t make it so, and this time I think the American public is wise enough to recognize that. The Administration has yet to explain how retroactive immunity will really help protect Americans, yet it threatens to veto any version of the FISA bill that doesn’t provide it.
Which leads the reasonable person to conclude that supporters of retroactive immunity are NOT trying to protect America. They’re trying to protect America’s favorite corporate big dogs, and they’re trying to protect the executive branch’s unfettered power to wave the wand and say magic words like “executive privilege” and “classified information,” etc., in order to get out of any mess they make, regardless of the repercussions for real people. That’s what I call off the hook protection….
The best protection against liability is to not do things that make you liable for violating people’s constitutional rights. Now that’s real meaningful liability protection.
Right on! The big telecom companies knew what the law was. AT&T helped write FISA back in the late 70s. This was not a case of AT&T and Verizon receiving shoddy legal advice or making decisions blindly in an area of law that was unfamiliar to their business practices.
The reality is that giving the telecoms retroactive immunity would be creating a different set of rules for them than everyone else. If you or I were to break the law, we wouldn’t ever be able to expect that the US Congress would then rewrite laws to excuse us for our law breaking before we were ever even found guilty or liable for our actions. Why wouldn’t that happen? Well, because we are a nation of laws and the expectation is that everyone is equal under the law. And why do we see something different now? Because the Bush/Cheney administration and their cohorts in the Senate want to ensure that no one ever finds out the true extent of their abuse of power from the very first days in the White House in January 2001, right up to today.
The discovery phase of court cases against the big telecoms that helped the Bush administration spy on the American public may well be the last, best chance for us to know what has gone on under President Bush. It’s no wonder that the GOP is going to such great lengths to obstruct any decent legislation from being passed governing America’s surveillance laws. This is how they plan to keep everything under wraps for good.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
Senator Russ Feingold put out this blistering statement in response to yesterday’s Republican obstructionism on FISA legislation:
“The conduct of Senate Republicans yesterday was shameless. After weeks of insisting that it is absolutely critical to finish the FISA legislation by February 1, even going so far as to object to a one-month extension of the Protect America Act, they obstructed all efforts to actually work on the bill. Now they want to simply ram the deeply flawed Intelligence Committee bill through the Senate. They refused to allow amendments to be offered or voted on, including my straight-forward amendment to require that the government provide copies of FISA Court orders and pleadings for review in a classified setting, so that Members of Congress can understand how FISA has been interpreted and is being applied. If the Republicans succeed in cutting off debate on Monday, the Senate won’t even get to vote on the amendment Senator Dodd and I want to offer to deny retroactive immunity to telecom companies that allegedly cooperated with the administration’s illegal wiretapping program.
“Democrats should not allow the Republicans to ram this bill through the Senate without amendments. Monday’s cloture vote will be a test of whether the majority is willing to stand up to the administration and stand up for our rights.”
Marcy Wheeler has a phenomenal set of talking points to help clarify what the Republicans are trying to do and how we should respond by stopping cloture on the bad FISA bill.
- The Republicans’ obstruction is preventing their colleagues’ amendments from getting a fair hearing.
- The SSCI bill gives Bush and Cheney immunity for breaking the law.
- The amendments will improve on the SSCI bill, produce a bill that the House will pass, and still ensure the Administration gets what it says it needs: no limitations on wiretapping of foreigners in other countries.
- Jay Rockefeller is putting his donors’ interests over the Constitution and the privacy of American citizens.
- The Republicans are trying to prevent any real oversight over minimization–the process by which the the Administration ensures that it does not collect or keep information on Americans incidentally.
- The Republicans are trying to prevent Congress from specifying that FISA as the exclusive means to conduct electronic surveillance–which is the only way to ensure the President follows this law.
- The Republicans are trying to make it easy for the government to wiretap you while you’re overseas.
- The Republicans are trying to make it easy for the government to use data mining and bulk wiretap techniques that don’t require the government to select real suspects for their wiretapping.
- The Republicans want to give the telecoms immunity for breaking the law in 2004, when they continued to wiretap Americans for a period with only the authorization of the White House Counsel, and not the Attorney General.
- The Republicans’ obstruction risks leaving us with limited surveillance when the Protect America Act expires in February.
Simply put, the GOP is doing everything they can to make any part of the Intelligence Committee’s bill better. They won’t let retroactive immunity be removed. They don’t want there to be the slightest hint of compromise. They just want to protect the Bush administration and their buddies in Big Telecom from any hint of oversight or investigation for warrantless wiretapping and illegal domestic surveillance.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
OK, so here’s my understanding of where we stand in the Senate.
The GOP has been delaying and trying to stop debate on amendments to the underlying bill, the Intelligence Committee bill, since they successfully tabled the SJC amendment.
Republican Minority leader Mitch McConnell filed for cloture on the Intel bill and has objected to having any amendments that would make the bill better. He wants to keep it in a state that he knows will please George Bush and Dick Cheney.
The cloture vote will be on Monday at 4:30PM Eastern.
Democrats will need to muster 41 votes to block cloture. We got 36 votes today on the Judiciary amendment.
We have three and a half days to generate the most pressure possible to make sure the Democrats vote as a block to oppose cloture.
One way forward would be if Senators Clinton and Obama each showed up and voted against cloture, while getting three of the senators who have endorsed them for President but voted to table the Judiciary amendment, we would win. Evan Bayh has endorsed Hillary Clinton while Ben Nelson and Claire McCaskill have endorsed Barack Obama.
Marcy Wheeler makes a convincing case for how the Democrats can win this fight.
We’re getting a bit more time to organize, but we have to use it.
Take action now and ask your senators to vote to against retroactive immunity.
Update: Tim Tagaris has more scheduling notes and what it means at Open Left.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
Barack Obama, in last night’s debate, speaking about President Bush and VP Cheney:
“The one good thing that they have done for us is that they have given their party a very bad name.”
Yes. Maybe Obama gets it after all. Then again, his praising Ronald Reagan and calling the GOP the party of ideas tends to give Republicans a good name.
Let’s just hope the Bush/Cheney line is something we see more of and the awful week of Obama’s GOP praise-fest can be left behind, never to be repeated.
Regardless of any Waterloo-like stands in Florida, Rudy Giuliani is done. Why? Because his “momentum-proof” tri-state area firewall is gone, as best signified by the fact that Giuliani is now significantly behind John McCain in New York, according to the Sienna poll. Trend in parentheses (PDF link).
McCain: 36% (15%)
Giuliani: 24% (48%)
Romney: 10% (7%)
It gets worse: Last month, Giuliani was up 33% on McCain in the Sienna poll. That’s right, there was a 45% swing in New York state against Rudy Giuliani in one month. New York Republicans don’t even like Giuliani any more:
For the first time in a Siena poll, Giuliani had a higher unfavorable rate _ 48 percent _ than favorable just six years after the Sept. 11 attacks. McCain was viewed favorably by 56 percent of New Yorkers.
Another NY poll out today from Marist gives McCain an even bigger lead: 34% to 19%.
Giuliani campaign manager Mike DuHaime had previously called Giuliani’s leads in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut “momentum proof.”
“Some of those leads are momentum-proof at this point,” he said. He stressed Giuliani’s margins in the New York tri-state area of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut versus what he called Romney’s “precarious” lead in New Hampshire where he is known, having been governor of neighboring Massachusetts.
Giuliani now trails in New York (by 12-15%), New Jersey (by 2-4%), Connecticut (by 23%), and Pennsylvania (by 16%), another February 5th neighbor to New York.
If Giuliani is going to lose badly in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and likely lose in New Jersey as well, he has no base of support. His only hope is in Florida.
So, how does Florida look for Rudy? Not good – he trails in every poll that’s come out in the last ten days save one, which shows a statistical tie. The Insider Advantage poll from last Thursday showed Giuliani with a one point lead over McCain and Romney. The Rasmussen poll out today has him down five to Romney.
As I said above, Rudy Giuliani is done.
Adam Nagourney thinks Rudy Giuliani is a “major candidate.”
I’d only be comfortable continuing to call Rudy Giuliani a “major candidate” if Nagourney also designated Ron Paul and Fred Thompson as “major candidates.” But he doesn’t. His list is McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani. Adding Paul and Thompson to that list would mean the entire field consists of “major candidates,” so including Giuliani, from an intellectual consistency standpoint, requires the remainder of the GOP primary to take place in Lake Wobegone.
Nagourney avoids intellectual consistency in favor of the groundless assertion that a candidate with less votes nationwide and less money than Ron Paul is a “major candidate.” I’m willing to grant that Ron Paul’s performance and fundraising capacities do put him in the realm of major candidate, but even to concede that to Paul does not make it necessary to grant the same thing to Giuliani.
In short, Nagourney is making things up.
Giuliani in line to finish sixth, behind Ron Paul and Fred Thompson, again.
Clearly this is good news for Rudy Giuliani.
Update:
John McCain and Ron Paul are in a close race for 2nd place in Nevada. Somehow it is shocking to the crack team at MSNBC that there is a back and forth going on over the 2nd place slot with a whopping 4% of precincts reported.
Update II:
Ron Paul has come in second in Nevada, edging out John McCain by about 1%
Jonah Goldberg’s appearance on The Daily Show is something akin to watching someone try to earnestly unravel a ball of cooked spaghetti that’s been left in a colander to cool. Jon Stewart really wants to see the noodles laid out in an orderly fashion, but Goldberg just resists all efforts to understand him. It seems his most frequent refrain is a Ray Pekurny-esque, “It’s all in that book, ri-right there.”
http://www.thedailyshow.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml
For a more substantive takedown of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, read Dave Neiwert’s comprehensive recap of his efforts with Goldberg at FireDogLake. Neiwert also has a review in The American Prospect and I highly recommend the Gavin McNett’s review for Alternet, as he and the rest of the Sadly, No! team have pwn3d Goldberg pretty much since the book was first rumored back when the smallest computers were housed in large rooms and data was transferred by punch cards in 2003.
Update:
As I found the video via Josh Bolotsky at the CREDO Blog, I didn’t realize it wasn’t from last night, but from the 16th.
Also, Jon Swift’s pre-release offer of help Goldberg meet his publishing deadline by substituting chapters with LOL cats stands out as a piece of advice that Goldberg would have been wise to follow, while still maintaining a comparable level of intellectual seriousness as his final product achieved.
I can’t say that I’ve ever wondered what the Republican presidential field would sound like if they were rappers, but apparently the guys at The Seminal have. Go give them a listen if you’re curious, though I’ll warn that it’s not safe for work.
Hold Fast 