Dem Op-Ed on FISA

House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, Intel Chair Silvestre Reyes, Senate Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy, and Intel Chair Jay Rockefeller wrote a joint op-ed in the Washington Post today on FISA. They push back on the Bush administration’s fear-mongering and offer a clear explanation of how current law in the absence of the Protect America Act still provides our intelligence community with the tools they need to do their jobs. Conyers, Reyes, Leahy and Rockefeller write:

The president may try to change the topic by talking about surveillance laws, but we aren’t buying it.

We are motivated to pass legislation governing surveillance because we believe this activity must be carefully regulated to protect Americans’ constitutional rights. Companies that provide lawful assistance to the government in surveillance activities should be legally protected for doing so.

We are already working to reconcile the House and Senate bills and hope that our Republican colleagues will join us in the coming weeks to craft final, bipartisan legislation. A key objective of our effort is to build support for a law that gives our intelligence professionals not only the tools they need but also confidence that the legislation they will be implementing has the broad support of Congress and the American public.

If the president thinks he can use this as a wedge issue to divide Democrats, he is wrong. We are united in our determination to produce responsible legislation that will protect America and protect our Constitution.

The general arc of the op-ed is more political than philosophical. It rebuts arguments about how this legislative process is having an impact on national security. It also runs basic traps on rejecting violations of the 4th Amendment – but never goes into detail as to how violations of our Constitutional rights are taking place. The four committee heads also make no effort to explain why three of them passed legislation out of their committees that did not include retroactive immunity for telecom giants like Verizon and AT&T who helped the Bush administration spy on Americans without warrant, yet a fourth (Jay Rockefeller) authored a bill to the Bush-Cheney administration’s specifications for immunity.

No doubt the reason the Washington Post op-ed was so soft of the issues of civil liberties and retroactive immunity was because the three pro-Constitution Democrats penned it alongside the anti-Constitution Jay Rockefeller. In this instance, a unified Democratic front against Republican political attacks was more important than a unified front defending the Constitution. While I’m glad Conyers, Reyes, and Leahy are keeping this issue front and center, it’s deeply disappointing that they failed to use this opportunity to fight against the Rockefeller-Bush-Cheney legislation including retroactive immunity that the Senate passed two weeks ago.

Shorter Karl Rove

Shorter Karl Rove: OH NOES! Barack Obama is really a liberal Democrat! Aaaaaiiiieeeeeeee!!!1!!

…Seriously, the whole op-ed consists of Rove telling the Wall Street Journal readership about how suddenly and not-suddenly Barack Obama revealed that he isn’t actually Joe Lieberman.

Also, don’t be shocked if you see a lot of pro-Clinton bloggers passing this Rove op-ed around today as some sort of evidence that Karl Rove won’t endorse Barack Obama in the general election or something.

Casey Affleck Should Win

I can probably count the number of my friends who saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford on one hand, while pretty much everyone I know has seen No Country for Old Men. While I loved No Country for Old Men and thought Javier Bardem gave a phenomenal performance, Casey Affleck’s portrayal of Robert Ford was a far more powerful and haunting depiction of a killer than Bardem’s. I wasn’t familiar with Bardem’s work before this film and so I can’t frame his performance in the context of other work. But Affleck is more of a known commodity, a bit actor who is only starting to come into his own. And in The Assassination of Jesse James, Affleck goes so far beyond what we’ve previously seen from him that the quality of his performance in this film stands out even further.

I don’t expect Affleck to win Best Supporting Actor, nor do I expect many people to be disappointed when he doesn’t. But he should.

…And since this is going to be my only Oscar-related post, it’s worth mentioning that I have no clue why Phillip Seymour Hoffman was nominated for his role in Charlie Wilson’s War and not Before the Devil Knows Your Dead – which was as good a performance as I have ever seen Hoffman give – or The Savages. In a year where smaller, artsier films have received great attention from the Academy, it’s ironic that Hoffman’s big budget role is the one that he receives a nomination for over two better, more artistic films.

How McCain Got on the Ohio Ballot

One of the key aspects of McCain’s use of the public campaign finance regime to help his campaign is using it as leverage to get on the ballot in certain states. Ballot access is often a hard proposition, requiring a great deal of time, infrastructure and money to succeed. I’m trying to get a full list of states that McCain used his qualification for matching funds as a means of getting on the ballot, but here is the story in Ohio. This is the former Republican commissioner to the FEC:

McCain used his FEC certification for at least one other purpose.Qualifying for the presidential primary ballot in Ohio is a complex process, requiring a candidate to gather over 100 signatures in each of the state’s 18 districts, using separate petitions for each county within the district, which must be filed with local election boards around the state. Additionally, the candidate must gather still more signatures statewide, all under some very complicated rules and local interpretations. Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and most of the presidential campaigns went through this process, at considerable time and expense. With a filing date of January 3, this was done by these campaigns at precisely the moment McCain was desperately borrowing to keep his campaign afloat, lacking money and resources to organize and gather signatures to be placed on the Ohio ballot.

But Ohio has an alternative means of getting on the ballot – you can simply present your FEC matching funds authorization to the Secretary of State, and go straight to the ballot, without petitioning.And this is what Senator McCain did.

DNC to File FEC Complaint Against McCain

Jonathan Singer of MyDD reports:

First, McCain was able to get around ballot access rules for the primaries in states around the country — at a value of $2-$3 million (what Dean’s own campaign had to spend on ballot access, having not participated in the public financing system in 2004) — by participating in the program. Pulling out now would enable him to reap the material benefit of ballot access offered by the program — again, valued at millions of dollars — without having to abide by the program’s overall spending limit (somewhere in the neighborhood of $54 million).

Second, McCain used the promise of public funds as collateral to help secure a private loan. Once a candidate uses actual public funds in this manner, they have used those dollars, thus locking them into the program. This is key, not only in that it seems to bind him to the program but also in that McCain showed a clear willingness to capitalize on voluntary taxpayer money in order to help him raise more funds from special interest lobbyists (some of whom are at the upper echelons of his campaign staff).

Finally, now that McCain is in the program and hasn’t been certified to pull out — an act that requires a vote of the FEC — it seems that he may have already gone over the spending limit in violation of the law. As of the last campaign finance filing deadline, McCain was already coming dangerously close to the $54 million threshold, and in the weeks since he might have already passed it.

In short, this is an issue of integrity — and John McCain’s lack of it. What the DNC is asking the FEC to do is fairly simple: Require McCain’s campaign to abide by the legally binding contract it created with the federal government to enjoy the benefits of the public financing system — benefits his campaign has already used — in return for abiding by the program’s spending limits. Soon the ball will be in the FEC’s court. Let’s see where they go from here.

I’d like to see how this complaint is adjudicated in the absence of a quorum on the FEC. Right now there are four slots open on the Commission and they cannot form to act on any issue. It will be interesting to see how Dean seeks to change that – will he push for the Senate to quickly confirm the pending nominees, including the arch-conservative vote suppressor Hans von Spakovsky? Or will Democrats seek a new batch of nominees before they confirm them?

Separate from the desire to get McCain to, you know, not break the law, the political value of the DNC’s complaint would be to get the FEC to agree with them and force McCain to freeze spending between now and when he officially receives the GOP nomination. That would provide a massive structural advantage to the Democratic nominee and force McCain to be a punching bag in the ad war between now and late August.

The key in my mind is how can the FEC act on this complaint now? What can Democrats do to ensure that action is taken on this complaint? A negative news cycle on McCain from this complaint is not going to damage his chances of winning in November, whereas an FEC decision tying him to public financing for the duration of the primary season could help ensure Democratic victory.

Lee Camp Rips Fox News

This is great. Comedian Lee Camp, a mainstay with Laughing Liberally and a good friend of the progressive blogging community, does a great Cliff Schecter impersonation on Fox News and makes everyone uncomfortable in the process. Really, this is how Democratic guests need to behave on Fox News.

Who Wrote the Letters?

In today’s Times, Stephen Labaton has a follow-up to the McCain lobbyist sex/corruption story by delving further into the letters McCain sent on behalf of Paxson Communications, a client of lobbyist Vicki Iseman.

The Washington Post reported Friday on its Web site that Mr. Paxson acknowledged in an interview that he had met with Mr. McCain to discuss the letters before they were sent and that Ms. Iseman was probably at the meeting.

In three interviews with The Times since December, Mr. Paxson has provided varying accounts about the letters. In the first, he said Ms. Iseman was involved in the drafting of them and had lobbied Mr. McCain. He later said he could not recall who had been involved.

Paxson told the Times different things, but there’s a big difference between not remembering who was involved and recounting a scenario where Iseman lobbied McCain and wrote the letters he sent to the FCC. That is, it’s easy for someone to say they don’t remember what happened, but when that comes after telling the Times that Iseman had authored the letters McCain sent to the FCC, it doesn’t really pass the smell test.

What’s particularly telling about this aspect of Iseman’s relationship with McCain is that it is the archetypal example of how lobbyists corrupt the process of governance. Paxson, a McCain campaign donor, hired a lobbyist to lobby McCain on issues concerning his business interests that were germane to a committee McCain chaired. That lobbyist had a close relationship with McCain and ended up authoring a letter McCain sent on behalf of Paxson and another telecommunications company to the agency that regulates Paxson’s business. That McCain put his name on the bottom of a letter written by a lobbyist on behalf of her employer tells you everything you need to know about McCain’s ethical compass.