Category: Rule of Law

No You Can’t

Via Jesse Wendel at Group News Blog, Billionaires for Bush jam on the Obama celebrity video. Here’s the text:

…It was a creed, snuck into the founding documents that denied the destiny of a nation.

No, you can’t.

It was decreed by bankers and landowners as they marched our monopolies westward.

No, you can’t.

No you can’t stop our power and privilege.

No you can’t repeal our tax cuts for the wealthy few.

No you can’t heal this nation.

No you can’t end the war.

No you can’t.

No matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of our power keeping us in power.

Status quo.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a private school in Newport are the same as the dreams of the boy who parties in the clubs of LA.

We are not as divided as our portfolios suggest. We run this nation, and together we will stop this nonsense about writing the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea —

No. You. Can’t.

VOTE GOP?

Genius.

That Answers That Question

Legislation often gets odd names and acronyms. Sometimes (usually when authored by Republicans) they don’t really mean anything and are just branding. Sometimes they have meaning. I’ve been writing a fair bit about the House RESTORE Act, but never explaining what the full name is. Reading John Deeth’s post on the FISA fight in the House and Blue Dog Leonard Boswell, he actually spells it out: Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective.

I think the job of making acronyms that work for legislation is probably a step above the job of naming military missions (Operation Iraqi Liberation, anyone?).

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.

Another WSJ Editorial Farce

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an editorial attacking Senate Democrats like Barack Obama and Chris Dodd for their work to stop retroactive immunity and pass legislation that includes congressional and judicial oversight of domestic surveillance. Not surprisingly, a paper that has cheered every rollback of rights under the Bush administration doesn’t miss this opportunity to proudly display their urine-soaked bedsheets of fearful anti-constitutionality.

“We lost every single battle we had on this bill,” conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing.

Really? How, exactly, does the lack of political will to defend the rule of law challenge the logic of standing up for the rule of law? I suppose the WSJ thinks something is only worth doing if you know you’ll win in the end, an attitude reflecting a complete lack of guiding principle. I don’t doubt that the WSJ would be happier if Dodd and others let the Bush administration shred the Constitution and give the big telecom companies special treatment behind closed doors, with no prying eyes, questioning journalists, or engaged citizens. Business was certainly better for the telecoms when customers weren’t running away in response to their behavior. To the extent that Dodd et alia were able to bring attention to what the Bush administration and companies like Verizon and AT&T have perpetrated, the WSJ has had to watch their pals get smeared with the truth.

It says something about his national security world view, or his callowness, that Mr. Obama would vote to punish private companies that even the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee said had “acted in good faith.”

But what does it say about the WSJ’s national security world view or their editorial board’s callowness that the other three congressional committees that considered retroactive immunity – the Senate Judiciary, House Intelligence, and House Judiciary Committees – all said that the telecoms did not act in good faith, but rather should be held accountable through normal judicial processes for their behavior? The WSJ and the Republican Party on whole have tried to spread the myth that because the SSCI thinks retroactive immunity is a good idea, all relevant committees think they do. It simply isn’t true, though it’s been used effectively and helped secure retroactive immunity in the Senate (praise be to Jay Rockefeller).

Had Senator Obama prevailed, a President Obama might well have been told “no way” when he asked private Americans to help his Administration fight terrorists. Mr. Obama also voted against the overall bill, putting him in MoveOn.org territory.

Really? Because according to the US Senate and, um, history Obama did not vote against the overall bill. He voted for a number of good amendments earlier day and he voted against cloture, but the WSJ is not only playing fast and loose with the facts, but actually making things up. I’d have to guess Obama did not do what MoveOn.org wanted on final passage.

Getting to the actual hypothetical levied in this bumbling attack by the WSJ, I’d hope telecoms say no if President Obama asks for their help. If he makes the simple step of getting a warrant, I’d certainly expect the telecoms to comply. I haven’t heard of a single documented case where the telecoms refused to help the US Government spy on suspected terrorists when a warrant is forthcoming; to do so would surely land them in far greater legal hot water than their current plight.

The defeat of these antiwar amendments means the legislation now moves to the House in a strong position.

Read that sentence again. One word should stand out. Antiwar? This legislation had nothing to do with the war. It didn’t have anything to do with Iraq – it didn’t even have anything to do with Afghanistan. It’s a broad package of laws governing how the US government can monitor Americans. Pretending otherwise goes beyond the realm of Republican framing and circles right back to, well, where they were in the previous paragraph, making things up about Obama’s votes. It’s lunacy, derived from their need to lie about what is going on in order to present a favorable case for their positions.

I’d say that this editorial farce is an embarrassment to their paper, but it’s the Wall Street Journal, so this is pretty standard for them.

In Case You Missed It!

Scarecrow at FireDogLake gives us the rundown of what the Senate approved yesterday, just in case you missed it.

— The President can direct US spy agencies to intercept every e-mail, telephone or internet communication of every American and anyone legally in the US with only the most minimal safeguards. Although the bill was supposed to deal with exclusively “foreign” communications, the techniques it sanctions will in fact sweep up domestic and foreign combined.

— Acting without individual or particularized warrants from any court, spy agencies can sweep up millions of communications without differentiating between those warranting surveillance and those not. Procedures for separating out totally innocent persons or communications that have nothing to do with foreign intelligence or any security threat to the US are minimal to non-existent. Procedures allowing a secret court to review such procedures have been weakened, along with measures to correct violations of even these limited procedures.

— Persons spied upon have no ability to determine what information the government has collected, or to affect what the government does with the information. Americans will never know which persons or government agencies were shown private information about them, and if restrictions are placed on their activities or travel because of this secret information, it will be impossible for victims to determine why or to challenge the information.

— Telecommunication companies who participated in government’s illegal spying activities, and those who ordered this, would be forever immune from any consequences for their actions and cannot be required to disclose what they did.

— As bad as the Senate Bill is, the Senate rejected an effort to make the bill the exclusive means by which surveillance can be authorized. So the President arguably can conduct further spying on Americans even without the minimal protections left in the Bill.

Shorter US Senate: In the beginning the Senate was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

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.

Final Passage

The Senate just passed S.2248, the Intelligence Committee’s FISA reform legislation, including approval to massive new surveillance powers for the executive branch and retroactive immunity for telecom companies who helped the Bush administration spy on Americans without warrant.

The vote was 68-29.

The nineteen Democrats voting for the bill were:

Conrad, Rockefeller, Baucus, Webb, Kohl, Whitehouse, Bayh, Johnson, Bill Nelson, Mikulski, McCaskill, Lincoln, Casey, Salazar, Inouye, Ben Nelson, Pryor, Carper, and Landrieu.

Joe Lieberman also voted with 49 Republicans in favor of final passage.

Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did not vote on final passage.

The only other change from the earlier cloture vote on the SSCI bill is that Senator Diane Feinstein voted against final passage, after voting for cloture.

As commenter Halle Burton put it, “The terrorists won.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is a very sad day for our nation.

Dodd: We Just Sanctioned the Single Largest Invasion of Privacy in the History of the Country

I was on a blogger and reporter conference call with Senator Chris Dodd this afternoon. David Isenberg, McJoan at Daily Kos and Jason Rosenbaum of The Seminal have already posted on it.

Dodd announced that because the will of the Senate is so clearly in favor of retroactive immunity and the House legislation is so much better, he won’t be speaking for the full four hours available to him this afternoon. Instead, he thinks the best bet is to get the bill to the House as soon as possible and stop harboring any hope that the Senate will produce a good bill. He will use less of his time so as to allow the Senate vote to take place and the conference committee between the House and Senate FISA bills could proceed.

Dodd started by recognizing that his opponents had the upper hand in this fight.

“Unfortunately those that are advocating this notion that you have to give up liberties to be more secure are apparently prevailing. They seem to be convincing people that you’re at risk politically or we’re at risk as a nation if we don’t give up rights…. We lost every single battle we had on this bill. The question now is can we do better with the House.” [Emphasis added]

Dodd went on and noted that if the conference report doesn’t produce a good bill, “I will use all the tools available to me as a single senator to delay this issue.” Asked if that would include a filibuster, Dodd said, “I will use whatever vehicles I can.”

Dodd was asked if he thought lobbying by the telecom industry was having an impact on the outcome of events in the Senate. Dodd said, “Well, I haven’t heard from them. But it’s having an impact.”

What stood out more than anything else, for me, was Dodd’s assessment of what happened today on the floor of the Senate:

This warrentless wiretapping program was the single largest invasion of privacy in the history of the country and we just sanctioned it by granting retroactive immunity.

Could one Senator utter a more damning assessment of his colleagues work than this? It appears that Dodd shares similar opinions to Kagro X, who earlier described the Senate’s actions today as suicide.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

Dodd’s Speech Last Night

Last night Senator Dodd took to the Senate floor to speak for nearly three hours into the night. At this point, Dodd has spent over twenty hours speaking on the floor of the Senate against retroactive immunity. Sadly, it has not succeeded in convincing his colleagues to stand up with the same degree of spine as he posses.

Below the fold is the full text of Dodd’s remarks last night.

Continue reading “Dodd’s Speech Last Night” →

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…