“We Can’t Go Back”

OK, I’ll be honest. I got myself a serious Dodd/FISA jones going right now, so I just re-read his full speech from Friday for the umpteenth time in anticipation of him speaking again from the floor shortly. Here’s another passage that I haven’t yet pulled out, but think is a phenomenally sharp assessment of where we are and why we need clear leadership today.

No, Mr. President—we can’t go back. We can’t un-pass the Military Commissions Act. We can’t un-destroy the CIA’s interrogation tapes. We can’t un-speak Alberto Gonzales’s disgraceful testimony. We can’t un-torture Maher Arar. We can’t un-do all that this administration has done in the last six years for the cause of lawlessness and fear.

But we can do this. We can vote down this immunity. We can grab hold of the one thread left to us, and pull until the whole garment unravels. We can start here.

Why not here?

Why not today?

I urge—I strongly urge—my colleagues to oppose retroactive immunity.

I’ll be honest again: re-reading this speech and watching everything Senator Dodd has done since dropping out of the presidential campaign and returning to the Senate makes me deeply sorry that his campaign never gained traction. If this isn’t the perfect example of the clarity and leadership we need today, I don’t know what is.

Lack of Collegiality Having An Impact in FISA Debate

Last week I argued that the Senate Republicans had gone too far in their obstructionism on FISA, to the point that they were alienating their Democratic allies who have joined them on the wrong side of retroactive immunity and warrantless wiretapping. In effect, the GOP went beyond the pale and offended senators who want to work on contentious issues while maintaining a high level of collegiality.

That dynamic is playing out right now on the floor of the Senate. Jay Rockefeller, author of the retroactive immunity-granting Intel bill, is arguing against the GOP obstructionism and against cloture on his own bill because the Republicans have taken it hostage as part of a political ploy.

Rockefeller has said he will vote against cloture on the Intel bill, a very good sign that we will be able to defeat this afternoon’s cloture vote on it. He has also said he will vote for a 30 day extension to the PAA to continue fruitful discussion of renewal legislation.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

Dodd on the Bush Presidency

This is from last Friday’s speech and Senator Dodd is expected to speak shortly, but I still think this line is worth highlighting:

The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.

And that ought to be the epitaph for this presidency: “sacrificing liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.” Worse than selling our soul—giving it away for free! [Emphasis added]

Amen, Senator.

Last Year’s SOTU Response: Jim Webb

Speaking of Kathleen Sebelius giving this year’s State of the Union response, it’s worth highlighting Jim Webb’s response last year. Webb’s speech was infinitely better than Bush’s that night, a rare feat even in the mediocrity of the Bush administration. It was arguably the best speech I’ve seen a Democrat give on the national stage since Barack Obama’s keynote at the DNC in 2004. Webb was especially strong when he was hitting on populist economic themes and offering a devastating critique of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq.

The text of Webb’s speech can be read here.

PS — Webb/Tester or Tester/Webb 2012 (or 2016)!

Kathleen Sebelius

Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas, is giving the Democratic response to Bush’s State of the Union address. As most people probably don’t know who she is or the fact that a lot of smart people are putting her as a likely person for Barack Obama’s short list of vice presidential choices, I thought I’d post some of her ads to give you a bit of flavor for her campaign. I saw her speak last year at the DNC Winter meeting and I was very impressed. She’s dynamic and emotive, while conveying the sort of confidence that you see in a lot of successful governors.

The first ad is far and away one of the most powerful positive ads I can recall from the 2006 cycle. The second, third and fifth ads highlight a similar leadership/forward/progress theme that would certainly be a major part of her upside as a vice presidential nominee on anyone’s ticket.

Not Funny

Imagine what the press would have done if Bill Clinton did stand up comedy routines in 1998 about Monica Lewinsky or Whitewater. Think Progress reports:

At the Alfalfa Club dinner on Saturday night, President Bush made light of Vice President Cheney’s penchant for secrecy while joking about Jenna Bush’s bridal shower earlier that day. “My sister Doro had a wedding shower for Jenna, who got lots of great stuff,” joked Bush. “Mom gave her a toaster. Karen Hughes gave her a Cuisinart. Dick [Cheney] here sent over a gift I could tell he’d picked out personally…a paper shredder.”

The message is clear: It’s OK for a Republican to joke about his vice president’s secrecy in contravention to the Constitution and health of these United States, just so long as it’s done in the comfortable surroundings of Washington’s wealth political elites, with the media elites pressing their ears against the door, hoping to hang out with the cool kids at the after party.

Who am I kidding… Bush would be given a pass by the media even if he dropped this joke into tonight’s State of the Union address.

FISA Voting Today

The Senate resumes its consideration of intelligence legislation today, though thanks to Republican obstructionism, there will be a cloture vote on the very bad Intelligence Committee legislation to modify and extend the poorly named Protect America Act. Democrats are seeking to keep debate going so they can consider amendments that would end warrantless wiretapping and deny big telecoms like AT&T and Verizon retroactive immunity for their role in assisting the Bush administration spy on Americans.

Debate in the Senate will start after 2 PM. The cloture vote on the Intel bill will be at 4:30 PM. That vote will be followed by a cloture vote on a 30 day extension to the PAA. Senator Reid has put this forward to ensure that the Senate doesn’t have to resolve the legislative fight around the PAA under the gun of its sunset. Hopefully Democrats can muster enough votes to pass cloture on the extension, though President Bush has already threatened to veto a PAA extension of any length.

Glenn Greenwald has a great post this morning looking back at how the PAA was passed last August and how the country should hold President Bush and his Republican cohorts accountable for their irresponsible politicization of this legislative debate, at the expense of national security. Glenn writes:

This veto threat is one of the President’s most brazen acts ever, so nakedly exposing the fun and games he routinely plays with National Security Threats. After sending Mike McConnell out last August to warn that we will all die without the PAA, Bush now says that he would rather let it expire than give Congress another 30 days. He just comes right out and announces, then, that he will leave us all vulnerable to a Terrorist Attack unless he not only gets everything he wants from Congress — all his new warrantless eavesdropping powers made permanent plus full immunity for his lawbreaking telecom partners — but also gets it exactly when he wants it (i.e., now — not 30 days from now).

If the Democrats had even the slightest strategic sense and/or courage — just the slightest amount — this is a political confrontation they would be uncontrollably eager to have. Just imagine if they sustain the filibuster today and instead pass a 30-day extension of the PAA, and then Bush vetoes it, knowingly choosing to leave the intelligence community without the ability to Listen In When Osama Is Calling. It would be the height of political stupidity for Democrats to be afraid of that outcome….

The veto threat from the President is so unbelievably corrupt and manipulative that if our national press had even the smallest amount of critical faculties and understanding of the issues, that veto threat would be a major story. After all, how can the President possibly threaten the country that he will veto a law that he himself has claimed for months is indispensable for Protecting Us All?

Read Greenwald’s whole piece to get a good background going into today’s fights.
We haven’t won anything yet and we need to keep pressure on the Senate today. Send an email to your senators through CREDO’s action alert. You can also get the fax numbers for key senators to lobby at FireDogLake.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

The Civility Delusion

I’ve recently had a number of conversations with Obama supporters – not fanboys, but smart, high-information voters – who think that one net positive for an Obama administration over a Clinton administration is that Obama can enter office without the yoke of 1992-2000’s animus towards Bill and Hillary Clinton. The argument goes that we can expect Hillary Clinton to be crippled by the constant replay of narratives and attacks written during Bill Clinton’s administration, brought back out by the Republicans to shut down what could otherwise be a productive Democratic administration. By contrast, Obama doesn’t carry this baggage and he will enter office on a platform of unity that will prime the pump for a better atmosphere conducive to work.

This tells me that these people are engaging in wishful thinking that goes right past optimism into Delusion Land.

At some level, those engaging in the Obama civility delusion are premising their analysis on the notion that the Republican efforts to shut down the first Clinton administration say more about Bill Clinton than who the Republicans are. In this logic, you can imagine the case being made that had Bob Kerrey or Tom Harkin or Jerry Brown been President instead of Bill Clinton, the GOP wouldn’t have aimed to destroy the Democrat in the White House. This is flat wrong.

The modern Republican Party defined their strategy and tactics during the Clinton administration. They recognized the value in throwing everything, no matter how absurd or unsupported, at the Democrat in the Oval Office. Though they never succeeded in making Bill Clinton an unpopular president, they did make him operate in a hostile media environment, which in turn made accomplishing his domestic agenda more challenging. This strategy worked on Bill Clinton and it has been replicated against the Democratic Party on whole since then, from rampant obstructionism in Congress to Rovian ad campaigns.

Most importantly, we should expect the GOP to continue their destructive attacks on whoever the next Democratic president is. No one gets a pass.

Paul Krugman’s column today makes a similar argument.

Has everyone forgotten what happened after the 1992 election?

Let’s review the sad tale, starting with the politics.

Whatever hopes people might have had that Mr. Clinton would usher in a new era of national unity were quickly dashed. Within just a few months the country was wracked by the bitter partisanship Mr. Obama has decried.

This bitter partisanship wasn’t the result of anything the Clintons did. Instead, from Day 1 they faced an all-out assault from conservatives determined to use any means at hand to discredit a Democratic president. …

First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).

The point is that while there are valid reasons one might support Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, the desire to avoid unpleasantness isn’t one of them.

I think Krugman is spot on. It wasn’t about Bill Clinton in 1992. It was about the Republican desire to destroy a the first Democratic administration in twelve years. As Krugman notes, Clinton had also run on unity, though with it somewhat less central to his candidacy than Obama.
I can concede that a Hillary Clinton presidency will start off with baggage from her husband’s administration, as far as GOP attack rhetoric goes. But it’s criminally naive to think that Obama would be immune from Republican attacks. And I’m sure the thought of “how will we shut down an Obama administration?” has already crossed the minds of top strategists at the RNC.

It gives me no pleasure in saying this, but the belief that Obama’s post-partisan unity language will insulate him from GOP attacks will likely be proved to be the Maginot Line of political prophylactics. People who think otherwise will be rudely awakened to that fact in early 2009, if Obama is elected President.

So while there are many good reasons to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, immunity or at least a structural advantage when it comes to Republican attacks post-inauguration cannot be one of them.

Stupid Oppo Research

Shorter Clinton campaign: “Ted, we can make a better decision for you than you can for yourself. Since you asked, we wouldn’t have had you endorse Barack Obama.”

Marc Ambinder has posted a video that he says is being circulated as oppo research. I think it’s a safe guess that it is Clinton campaign sending this video to reporters.

Here’s a daring idea. Ted Kennedy, one of the elder statesmen and liberal lions in the Democratic Party, can make up his own mind about who he supports. Questioning his judgment by dumping oppo that would presumably undercut his logic is petty and stupid. I hope the Clinton campaign cuts it out.

What Clinton and Obama Can Do Now

Now that we know both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be in the Senate to vote against cloture on the Intelligence Committee bill, you might be wondering what else they can do, besides show up to cast the right vote. Ari Melber of The Nation has an answer handy:

1. Use their influence and political capital to recruit two more votes for the Leahy bill. That’s all Leahy, Feingold and Dodd need to keep their fight alive under the current rules. Obama and Clinton were endorsed by a total of seven senators who voted the wrong way last week. As DFA explains, “if these presidential hopefuls bring along the support of these senators, they can sustain a planned filibuster [and] defeat any cloture vote.”

2. Use their influence and political capital to press Reid to run the floor for the Leahy bill, instead of the Bush-Rockefeller bill. This is is tough for several reasons, but there’s an opening now that Bush has essentially slapped Reid around and drawn some rhetorical pushback.

3. Rally the Democratic Congress to confront Bush’s veto threat. Send the one-month bill to his desk and let this unpopular president remind the entire country of his irresponsible, cynical approach to governing. Maybe his approval ratings will drop into the teens like his Vice President. (I personally favor this third option the least, since it involves gamesmanship instead of a long-term policy, which Leahy’s bill offers.)

Howie Klein points out who each presidential candidate should be responsible for:

Hillary could prove she’s a leader by bringing in Evan Bayh, Daniel Inouye, Bill Nelson, Barbara Mikulski and Mark Pryor, and Obama could do likewise with Tim Johnson, Claire McCaskill and Ben Nelson.

We will see what, if anything, Clinton and Obama do to turn their two “no” votes into more votes in the Senate. Without question, though, their presence will make victory more likely and show the rest of the caucus that this remains an issue deserving of the highest levels of attention in the national debate. The more we can get this fight to be treated with the gravity that it possesses, the more likely it is that senators will continue to be drawn to the side of the rule law and will be present to fight with us to defend the Constitution.

What is so remarkable about this turn of events is how we can directly tie the actions taken by the top two Democratic presidential candidates to the passionate, consistent advocacy by people online and offline around the country. From emails to faxes to photos and advertisements, Senators Clinton and Obama have been subjected to a monumental amount of pressure. This advocacy helped to show them that there was support for them to do the right thing. Criticism may well be directed at them from the Republican Party or conservative pundits for this vote, but they should rest assured that there are countless Americans who will look at their actions and say, “They’re doing the right thing.”

We can stop a bad bill today and get past Republican obstructionism. Keep up the pressure through the CREDO email action page and make sure the Senate hears from the American people today!