Abijah Adams at Lead or Get Out of the Way absolutely destroys Dianne Feinstein and her “good faith” FISA amendment:

All it takes is “good faith” and Bush can granted sweeping spy powers. The FISA court merely needs to grant that the Bush Administration acted in “good faith,” for them and their telecom companies to be granted retroactive immunity.

What? Why?
What. In. The. World… What the fuck makes Dianne think that she can trust the Bush Administration AT ALL?

Good faith? Jesus God, are you serious, lady? Oh, I didn’t notice that you were born just minutes ago and have yet to open your eyes, let alone meet the Bush Administration. So you have no idea what’s been happening the last 8 years, obviously, yes?

Read the whole thing, it’s devastating.

Senator Russ Feingold, long an ally, is stepping up in the FISA fight with a raft of amendments that aim to protect Americans’ civil liberties, stop warrantless wiretaps, ensure that the government is minimizing the number of people accidentally spied on, and gives Congress adequate tools to oversee surveillance activities. Here are the details, from Senator Feingold’s website.

Dodd-Feingold Amendment Stripping Retroactive Immunity

Along with Senator Chris Dodd, Senator Feingold will offer an amendment to strike Title II of the Intelligence Committee bill, which provides immunity to telecommunications companies that allegedly cooperated with the President’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

Feingold-Webb-Tester Amendment to Provide Protections for Americans

Senator Feingold intends to offer an amendment along with Senators Jim Webb and Jon Tester to allow the government to get the information it needs about terrorists and purely foreign communications, while providing additional checks and balances for communications involving Americans. Under the Intelligence Committee bill, many law-abiding Americans who communicate with completely innocent people overseas will have their communications swept up, with virtually no judicial involvement or oversight.

Use Limits Amendment

This amendment, which was part of the Senate Judiciary Committee version of the FISA bill, gives the FISA Court discretion to impose restrictions on the use of information about Americans that is acquired through procedures later determined to be illegal by the FISA court. This enforcement mechanism is needed because the government can implement its procedures before it has to submit them to the FISA Court for review to determine whether they are reasonably designed to target people overseas rather in the United States.

Prohibiting “Reverse Targeting”

Senator Feingold successfully offered this amendment in the Judiciary Committee to add a meaningful prohibition on “reverse targeting,” a practice by which the government gets around FISA’s court order requirement by wiretapping an individual overseas when it is really interested in a person in the U.S. with whom that supposed foreign target is communicating. The Director of National Intelligence has agreed that “reverse targeting” is unconstitutional. Senator Feingold’s amendment requires the government to obtain a court order whenever a significant purpose of the surveillance is to acquire the communications of an American.

Prohibiting “Bulk Collection”

Senator Feingold successfully offered this amendment in the Senate Judiciary Committee to prohibit “bulk collection” — the collection of all international communications into and out of the U.S to a whole continent, or even the entire world. Such collection without a foreign intelligence purpose would be constitutionally suspect and would go well beyond what the government has says it needs to protect the American people. Yet, the Director of National Intelligence testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the Protect America Act – which was enacted last year — permits “bulk collection.” The amendment makes clear that bulk collection is not authorized by requiring the government to certify that it is collecting the communications of foreign targets from whom it expects to obtain foreign intelligence information.

Giving Congress Access to FISA Court Materials

This amendment assists Congress in its legislative and oversight functions by requiring that Congress be provided timely access to FISA court pleadings related to significant interpretations of law, which may be necessary to understand the court’s rulings, as well as past FISA court orders containing such interpretations. The amendment was part of the bill reported by the Judiciary Committee and is based on language approved on a bipartisan basis by the Intelligence Committee when Senator Feingold offered it as an amendment to the intelligence authorization bill.

We should expect these amendments to be brought to the floor this afternoon, or depending on how long the debate goes, tomorrow.

Also you can watch Senator Feingold’s speech from this morning on the Leahy Amendment here and read the transcript of it here.

Cross posted at the CREDO blog.

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.

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.