I think it would have been much easier for Harry Reid to use his powers as Majority Leader to stop bad FISA legislation from having a shot at passing than asking Democratic supporters to petition the caucus on to do the right thing on our own.
Joshua Wyeth at Lead or Get Out of the Way has much more righteous indignation than I’m going to muster now on the eve of a FISA vote where a degree of unity is needed. But I absolutely feel his outrage on this.
Matt Stoller at Open Left reports on a conversation he had with Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton yesterday in South Carolina on FISA. Stoller writes:
I talked to Bill first, and asked him for help on the FISA fight. He very lawyerly asked me if they need 60 votes for cloture, and I said ‘yes’. He knows that this means Clinton’s vote isn’t necessary, since it doesn’t matter if the vote total is 59-41 or 59-0.
Then I spoke with Hillary, and she said she has assured her colleagues she will go back to the Senate if they need her vote. She though that we have already lost, alluding to the Judiciary version of the bill which was voted down on Friday. I urged her to speak out publicly and she said she intends to say something on Sunday. [Emphasis added]
Bill Clinton is right to point out that blocking cloture on the Intelligence bill Monday doesn’t take Democrats finding 41 “nay” votes, but the Republicans finding 60 “yea” votes. And Hillary Clinton’s statement that she’ll speak out on this issue and vote if needed is a marginally positive note.
But let me say this: If Hillary Clinton does not show up to vote against cloture on the Intel bill, a vote that will take place while she is in Washington on Monday, it will tell us a great deal about Hillary Clinton’s priorities as a Senator and presidential candidate and an equally great deal about how Harry Reid is running the Democratic caucus. If Clinton doesn’t show up for this vote, according to this statement, it will be in large part because she was given a pass by Reid to miss it. Reid will have told her that her vote was not needed and Clinton will have taken that opportunity to continue campaigning.
I know that presidential candidates miss a great deal of votes while they’re campaigning. I lived with that reality while I was working on the Dodd campaign; as the campaign went on, his missed vote totals rose and it was an issue that we were always well aware of. A lot of the time it is hard both from a cost and a time standpoint to move a candidate from one side of the country to DC in time for a vote. Some campaigns have more money than others, but even when cost is no expense, nothing is a guarantee. I get that.
But Senator Clinton (and Senator Obama) will be in Washington on Monday. And DC isn’t that big of a city, yet neither have committed to be in attendance for the cloture vote. Taking the handful of minutes or even hours that will be needed to vote against cloture on a horrible piece of legislation which strikes against the rule of law should be requisite for every single Democratic Senator and whole lot of Republicans, too. It will be very hard for me to look at this cloture vote as anything other than a statement about how much these senators care about the US Constitution; missing it will tell me that they just don’t care about the Constitution.
The same goes for Majority Leader Reid. If he can’t crack the whip over his caucus and make sure that Senators Clinton and Obama aren’t there to make crystal clear that they stand with the American people in support of the US Constitution, I’ll read that as a statement about how much Reid cares for fully shutting down the Republican Party’s attack on the rule of law.
Our chances of winning the cloture vote on the Intel bill Monday may be good, but it takes more than one vote to stop the Republican Party’s assault on the Constitution. That makes the actions of the people that want to be our leaders in regard to this vote even more important. To jam Kia Franklin’s line yesterday about the best way for telecoms to avoid being liable for breaking the law, the best way for our presidential candidates to avoid criticism for failing up to stand up for the Constitution would be to stand up for the Constitution.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
Harry Reid responds to President Bush’s threat to veto a 30 day extension to the Protect America Act. Here’s Reid’s statement via email:
The White House threat to veto a short extension of the Protect America Act is shamefully irresponsible. The President is simply posturing in advance of Monday’s State of the Union address.
When it comes to providing a strong long-term Foreign Intelligence Surveillance bill, Democrats in Congress are focused on solutions, while Republicans are obviously playing politics.
The House has already passed a FISA bill, and the Senate was ready to pass its own bill until Republicans blocked all amendments. At the same time, Democrats are ready to extend current law for as long as necessary, but Republicans are blocking that extension and the White House is threatening a veto.
It is shenanigans like this that make Americans so eager for change. We hope the American public will remember these Republican stunts when they go to the polling booth this November.
In any event, current law ensures that no ongoing collection activity will be cut off on February 1. There will be no terrorism intelligence collection gap. But if there is any problem, the blame will clearly and unequivocally fall where it belongs: on President Bush and his allies in Congress.
I can’t recall the last time a Senator used the word shenanigans in a press release. I’m quite comfortable with its use here.
The Protect America Act – the FISA reform bill that was passed with little debate last August – is set to expire on February 1st, which is this Friday. The fight we’ve seen in the Senate over the last week has been part of an effort to pass a new law before the PAA expires. But what happens if the PAA sunsets without a replacement law already signed by the President? In short, not much.
Michelle Richardson of the ACLU has a good explanation in this top-rated diary at Daily Kos.
If that means the so-called Protect America Act sunsets, so be it. As House Leader Hoyer and Senate Intel Chairman Rockefeller have noted, all current surveillance orders can be extended into 2009 even if the current law expires. The intel community won’t be forced to end its current warrantless wiretapping and Congress will have the time to do, well, anything else besides pass this horrible Senate bill which is really the worst option out there to date. If no legislation is enacted before the sunset, the law simply reverts to the surveillance statutes in place as of last July – with the significant addition that plans authorized over the last six months may continue even if they have been authorized without appropriate judicial oversight.
This is important because we know what the Republican obstructionists will say the moment the PAA sunsets. Despite their protestations, we will not immediately be made less safe nor will the tools the intelligence community needs be ripped from their hands come 12:01 AM Friday morning. This is very important to know because you’re going to hear a lot of hot air and intimidation coming from the GOP this week.
Now you know the law and the plain fact is that we can continue with a sober, diligent effort to pass a good FISA law that protects Americans’ civil liberties while giving our intelligence professionals all the tools we need and simultaneously ensure that this law doesn’t include retroactive amnesty for big telecoms who face litigation over the role they played in helping the Bush administration spy on Americans.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
This is from yesterday. Senator Chris Dodd lays into the Republican leadership for their obstructionist tactics and makes clear how unprecedented a situation the Republicans have brought us to in the Senate.
Crooks & Liars has the full video of Dodd’s speech on FISA. The text of Dodd’s prepared remarks can be read here.
Update:
Dodd’s speech is around 5,000 words long and finding one part to quote was hard, so I didn’t do it. I’ll just pull Athenae’s favored section and call it a day.
We’ve let outrage upon outrage upon outrage slide with nothing more than a promise to stop the next one.
There is only one issue here. Only one. The law issue. Attack the president’s contempt for the law at any point, and it will be wounded at all points.That’s why I’m here today. I am speaking for the American people’s right to know what the president and the telecoms did to them. But more than that, I am speaking against the president’s conviction that he is the law. Strike it at any point, with courage, and it will wither.
That’s the big deal. That is why immunity matters—dangerous in itself, but even worse in all it represents. No more. No more. This far, Mr. President—but no further.
More and more, Americans are rejecting the false choice that has come to define this administration: security or liberty, but never, ever both.
It speaks volumes about the president’s estimation of the American people that he expects them to accept that choice.
The truth, though, is that shielding corporations from lawsuits does absolutely nothing for our security. I challenge the president to prove otherwise. I challenge him to show us how putting these companies above the law makes us safer by an iota.
That, I am convinced, he can’t do.
A-freaking-men, Senator.
I was a guest on Bill Scher’s LiberalOasis Radio Show, which broadcasts on WHMP-AM in Western Massachusetts. Mostly we talked about the FISA fight in the Senate and what has happened during the Bush presidency to bring us to this point. We also briefly touched on today’s South Carolina Democratic primary.
I’ve never been one to see a lot of virtue in the Senate’s traditions of collegiality across party lines. But now that the Republicans have so strongly cast their lot with obstructionist tactics for explicit partisan gain on the eve of the State of the Union, there may be a real value in the fact that this body doesn’t like it when one side of the aisle proverbially flips the Risk board off the table and prevents the game from continuing.
When the GOP moved to block every single amendment to the Intel bill yesterday, they likely set a lot of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats against their tactics, at least in large enough numbers to ensure that Monday’s cloture vote on the Intel bill will be won by the Democrats.
Senators Specter, Whitehouse, Feinstein, and Bill Nelson all had their compromise amendments shut out. Those are amendments that, though bad, are borne out of a desire not to have the pure Intel bill be made into law. Now they may well be amenable to voting against cloture on the Intel bill so their amendments can be given a chance to be considered by the full Senate.
Even Jay Rockefeller, Dick Cheney’s partner in writing the bad Intel bill, isn’t going to go along with it. D-Day says, “Jay Rockefeller today announced on the Senate floor that he would not support cloture on the FISA bill without more amendments voted on.”
We all know the Republicans in the Senate have brought a vicious strategy of obstructionism to the FISA fight. We will soon find out if they’ve gone too far and assured their own defeat.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
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.
Hold Fast 