Category: Rule of Law

A Short Timeline for the FISA Fight?

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker has an interesting update on the pending FISA fight.

When [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] tried to get a thirty-day extension to that date last month, Republicans blocked it. So this morning he said on the Senate floor that he’d try again. The time pressures are real, he said, and suggested that even if the Senate were to somehow pass a bill, it would be mighty difficult to get it through the House and to the president’s desk before February 1st. The Senate itself will be a high hurdle, with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) filibustering over a retroactive immunity provision on the one hand and Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) saying that the authority for warrantless wiretapping stems from the Constitution on the other.

Reid is apparently looking for a brief extension of the poorly-named Protect America Act, solely for the purpose of having an easier legislative calendar to work with. The Republicans don’t seem anxious to work with Reid on this, as they are content to try to ram a bad bill through while holding Democrats over the barrel with accusations of being soft on terrorism. Nowhere to be seen in the back and forth of media statements is upholding the rule of law and protecting Americans’ civil liberties.

It looks like the FISA fight will begin later this week or next week, though today’s news makes it look like the debate will be limited by the February 1st expiration of PAA. This is only bad if the Senate continues on its course of trying to pass the bad legislation that came out of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Big telecom companies partnered with the Bush administration to violate untold numbers of Americans’ privacy. Information and wiretaps were handed over without warrant. It strikes me that the best solution would be one that hastily rights the wrongs done by these companies and their allies in the White House, rather than a course of action that rushes through another bad bill with minimal debate in the Senate.

Update:

Here’s a statement from Reid’s office on the GOP rejecting an effort to extend the PAA on month to allow for further negotiations.

“Democrats today offered a one-month extension of the FISA bill so that Congress has the time it needs to debate legislation that improves our nation’s ability to fight terrorism while protecting Americans’ civil liberties.  I am disappointed that Republicans have objected to that extension.

“We are committed to giving our intelligence professionals the tools they need to make America more secure.  The minority’s obstruction is an irresponsible way to approach national security legislation.”

Cross posted at 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.

Taking Action on FISA

Credo Action has launched an action alert to their members, asking them to contact Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain to request that they come off of the campaign trail to stop bad FISA legislation that includes retroactive immunity. (Full disclosure: I am consulting for Credo Action / Working Assets on their FISA campaign.) It’s time to call on these candidates to make defending the Constitution a greater priority than presidential politics.

Take action through Credo’s action page.

The request on Clinton, Obama, and McCain is not an unreasonable one. They claim to be leaders and they seek to hold our highest office. They should be willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that before they take the oath of the presidency, they honor their oaths as senators to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Given that we are in a political season and the request we make is for these presidential candidates to leave the campaign trail has political implications, it is worth noting that Americans are strongly opposed to warrantless surveillance and retroactive immunity. New polling out from the Mellman Group shows that at a rate of two to one Americans want the government to get a warrant before tapping Americans’ international calls. At almost the same rates and with a majority across the political spectrum, Americans are opposed to blanket warrants. And 57% of Americans oppose giving the telecom companies immunity.

Returning to Washington to stop retroactive immunity isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s a politically popular position.

MLK Day

I went to high school in New Hampshire, one of the last states to honor MLK Day as a holiday. As a result of the state’s sad history of not honoring the fallen civil rights leader, my private high school had a tradition of not holding classes in honor of Martin Luther King Day and instead using the day to hold workshops on what I’d broadly describe as diversity issues. Subjects ranged from on campus ethnic tensions to gay rights to how Title IX works and so on.

One of the workshops I attended my senior year was facilitated by a representative from Students for a Free Tibet and was about the modern history of Tibet, the invasion by Mao’s Red Army in 1949-1950, and the subsequent fifty years of China’s military occupation of Tibet. The talk was given by Lhadon Tethong, then SFT’s Programs Director, but now SFT’s Executive Director. She’s a Canadian Tibetan, having been born in exile and grown up in and around Tibetan refugee communities, hearing stories from her family about Tibet, the Chinese occupation, and what it means to be a Tibetan patriot. These are the stories she told us on Martin Luther King Day in January, 2000 and something in me clicked.

Maybe it was that I hadn’t had the opportunity to think about Tibet in a full and authentic way before. Maybe I just was ready to give myself to a worthy cause — despite dabbling in work with environmental protection, the homeless, and anti-death penalty campaigning, I’d never found myself fully invested in a movement. Maybe it was hearing an impassioned, educated, clear call for help for the Tibetan people by a Tibetan (and not, say Richard Gere or Steven Seagal). Whatever the case, I was convinced.

I immediately got involved in my high school’s SFT chapter and before I new it I was participating in a relay hunger fast, helping fundraise for SFT’s international headquarters, interning at SFT’s office in New York, and taking part in protests outside the World Bank. I found it easy to devote myself to a cause that I saw as true and just and right. The Tibetan people in exile and inside Tibet needed help amplifying their voice for independence. I would do what I could to make it possible.

I started working for Students for a Free Tibet in a full time capacity in the spring of 2005. I worked for two full years doing operations and communications work before leaving to join the Dodd campaign. I’ve remained in close contact with my friends and coworkers from the Tibet movement and have no doubt that I will continue to work towards Tibetan independence as long as I have to until Tibet is free.

I say all of this and am reminded that my eight years working in support of Tibetan independence started as part of a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. I believe people have a right not to be treated as second class citizens, not to be silenced, not to have their religious beliefs banned or limited, and not to be imprisoned for voicing their opposition to a harsh military dictatorship. These are not extreme positions to hold, but ones steeped in democracy and respect for the rule of law. I believe this is work closely in line with the example set by Dr. King.

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.