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Today's Must Read
Call it a deal with the devil, but the House Democrats are set to offer compromise legislation that would allow the administration to conduct warrantless surveillance. The trade-off seems clear.
The bill would allow so-called "umbrella" warrants from the FISA Court for what The New York Times calls "bundles of overseas communications." That umbrella would last for up to one year and is meant to extend to communications into and out of the United States. If the "target" was in the U.S., however, the administration would have to seek an individualized warrant from the court. The bill would also make clear that foreign to foreign communications do not require a warrant. The Times helpfully explains that the Dems "remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence."
In return, the Democrats would get some transparency goodies. Four times a year, the Justice Department's inspector general would perform an audit of the program. And the Department would be required to maintain "a database of all Americans subjected to government eavesdropping without a court order, including whether their names have been revealed to other government agencies."
What the bill doesn't include, much to the administration's chagrin, is retroactive immunity for all the telecoms that (allegedly) helped the administration conduct warrantless surveillance during all the years the program remained secret. Perhaps that's because the administration has still, despite a Congressional subpoena, not handed over documents showing the legal basis for the program. And it remains unclear if they will. The Washington Post reported this weekend that the White House told Congress Friday evening that "it would put together that information by Oct. 22 but would not say when or whether it would make the information available to lawmakers."
Dems in the Senate, however, might give the administration its precious immunity anyway. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is working away on his own version of the bill, and apparently retroactive immunity might be part of the package.
Civil libertarians, of course, are unhappy with the Dems' bill -- though not as distraught as they were over the Protect America Act. And even the Dems are subdued, with liberals like Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) saying that “It is not perfect, but it is a good bill."
But the hope appears to be that Dems can confidently tout the "Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed and Effective Act of 2007" -- or RESTORE Act -- as the Not as Bad as The Protect America Act (I guess that would be NaBaPAA). And hope that the bill is strong enough that Republicans and the administration aren't able to pull a repeat of August's debacle.
Update: Here's a summary of the bill provided by Conyers.
Comments (24)
brendancalling wrote on October 9, 2007 10:05 AM:this is just unacceptable, and one of the many reasons I'm re-registering as an Independent.
I am angry and ashamed that i supported the Democrats in 2006. I will never give them a single dime again.
If I wanted to live in East Germany, I'd hop in my goddamn time machine.
merkin wrote on October 9, 2007 10:10 AM:"It's is so painfully obvious when the Democrats are playing someone else's game, right down to the propagandistic title.
--David Kurtz"
Yet to my recollection, TPM was going to bat for Steny Hoyer first as speaker and then as malority leader, and Davd was smearing and sneering at Nancy Pelosi at every opportunity.
Hoyer is the man responsible for this shameless cave in, and many of the others.
Anything but dirty hippies and thier ridiculous constitution.
Thucydides JR. wrote on October 9, 2007 10:21 AM:This is still a bad bill. The bottom line for 9/11 was not that the system in place was bad, but that it was not attended to. Not enough attention was paid to information gathered by existing agencies and procedures.
So what do we do now?
Add layers and layers of Homeland security and war czar bureaucracy, expand domestic spying operations, and legalize invasive surveillance of other nations based not on a warrant but on whims.
All this for some "transparency" from a government and administration that has shown itself fully willing and able to refuse legitimate calls for information and oversight from authorized agencies.
How does that go...? "Fool me once shame on you. Fool me 27 times...."
Summary? All this does is make things worse, not better. It'll take time to see, but it does.
linda wrote on October 9, 2007 10:37 AM:frankly, the democrats who support this legislation are even worse than the republicans. i expect the anti-american and profoundly undemocratic measure from the republicans; that the democrats have signed on in support is the final straw for me.
they are gutless, craven, disgusting fucking cowards who cannot even be counted on to defend the constitution of the united states.
tbhull wrote on October 9, 2007 10:50 AM:This blog needs to quit pretending, in Ken and Barbie like fashion, that any real and meaningful difference exists between dems and repubs. One party two faces. One cock screwing America and shredding the Constitution two sheaths. To continue to deny this makes one part of the problem. DC needs to tumble hard.
sdhays wrote on October 9, 2007 11:02 AM:What are the odds that retroactive immunity will make it into the final bill? Will the House Leadership at least draw the line there? I mean, corporations should never have an expectation that if the government asks them to break the law, the government will let them off the hook later. Do our laws mean ANYTHING???
jolly ranchero wrote on October 9, 2007 11:05 AM:If you think, law be dammed, that the Justice Department will hand over any docs short of an order by the Supreme Court and armed guards, I've got a very extensive signing statement to show you shortly.
If/when this gets signed into law, you'd better beleive that Bush either exempts Justice via signing statement, or as "the enforecement branch" of the gov't, simply refuses to enforce it.
Unmitigated Audacity wrote on October 9, 2007 11:32 AM:The Dems really love that corporate money, don't they? They are selling off the US constitutional system piecemeal for a few pieces of silver. There must be a clause of the Merger Agreement they signed with the financial oligarchy that requires them to hand over their testicles for campaign contributions. They have become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the War Party. They can start a new marketing campaign with an old slogan updated for the new realties - Fascism With A Democratic Face.
oleeb wrote on October 9, 2007 11:37 AM:Has there ever, in the history of this republic, been a bigger, more pathetic group of namby pamby pussies and cowards as the Democrats we now have in Congress? They make me sick.
It's difficult for us out here in the hinterlands to blame Bush for trampling the Constitution, eliminating habeus corpus, instituting torture as a policy of the United States, conducing an illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation and so on when he gets full and willing cooperation from these yellow bastards. They not only don't oppose this unAmerican bullshit, they enable it!
I imagine our forefathers are spinning in their graves while these Democrats undermine our representative democracy with each and every capitulation to the tyrant.
Voting Present wrote on October 9, 2007 12:07 PM:Voting for bad Dems is contemptible behavior if the voter actually wants the kind of of right-wing corporate enrichment that bad Dems deliver.
It is more than contemptible if the voter DISAGREES with the right-wing agenda of the bad Dems, but votes for bad Dems anyway because they think it will somehow delay an even-worse Republican agenda. "They deserve neither freedom nor security."
Yup, this is a struggle all right. It's the Big One. Time to draw some lines in the sand. Time to figure out which side you're on.
megisi wrote on October 9, 2007 12:24 PM:It says quite a bit about today's Democratic politician cum bureaucrat that he or she would rather be known as "soft on Constitutional rights" than be known as "soft on terrorism" (whatever that means).
Was it too much to ask, Madame Speaker, for you and your minions to sit down and devise a comprehensive security plan that you could present to the American people as a way to keep them safe, one that actually has a chance at efficacy?
Although I don't think you and Hoyer are particularly bright and I realize you are hamstrung by the criminal tendencies you inherited from your pol machine father, you can't be so stupid that you can't see where we are truly vulnerable.
Are you so cynical that you believe the American people can't see through this phony wiretap stuff and that we don't know there are many ways to make us more secure and that phone eavesdropping is hardly one of the most effective?
How much did the Bushes put in your off-shore bank account to get you to play along with this charade? Harsh, sure, but that can be the only rational explanation for this failure of leadership on your part.
Long Memory wrote on October 9, 2007 12:26 PM:Yes, it's a bad bill. But maybe the Republicans will vote against it when they consider that come 1/20/2009 someone like, oh, Hillary (Buuuuwwwaaaahhhaaaahhhaaaaa) will move into the White House. Because onces this sucker passes everything is fair game. (I'm old enough to remember when America as the Land of the Free. You can forget that stuff now.)
OneCrankyDom wrote on October 9, 2007 12:27 PM:Listen up, I'm only going to say this once. If this goes thru even your local county beer-bellied sheriff will have access via the new "Fusion Centers" to calls made by you. Maybe not in the first yr since they are slow setting them up, but soon after.
tbhull wrote on October 9, 2007 12:29 PM:oleeb wrote on October 9, 2007 11:37 AM:
Q: Has there ever, in the history of this republic, been a bigger, more pathetic group of namby pamby pussies and cowards as the Democrats we now have in Congress?
A: No.
I cannot stand the repubs and BushCo but they do not pretend to give a shit about the Constitution or stopping this bullshit war.
The dems stating that they oppose the War and that they are intent on bringing more order/alance to our Constitutional republic form of government makes ones stomach churn with disdain much in the same way as having to listening to Senator Larry Craig tearfully hugging his porcine beard of wife while proclaiming he is not gay.
jawbone wrote on October 9, 2007 12:29 PM:While this FISA fiasco is making me sick to my stomach, I cannot accept that the Repubs and Dems are "the same."
What I can say is that they are two major subsets of the political set, with some areas of overlap, and some of those areas more overlapped than others.
Plus, our Dems need to get spines....
But, without Dems we will have a fascistcally* conservative Supreme Court--on that alone I will do what I can to get a Dem Congress, a Dem presdent, hopefully some younger bulwarks against the radicals on the SC, and, then, work to get BETTER Dems.
*The Roberts Court seems to see all power as belonging to the government and corporations, best working in tandem--what else is that?
tbhull wrote on October 9, 2007 12:52 PM:jawbone wrote on October 9, 2007 12:29 PM:
This is not a matter of faith. Objective facts, such as that the Repubs and Dems are essentially the same, do not require your acceptance to be true.
Joe wrote on October 9, 2007 1:14 PM:Come on. I'm perfectly on board with the 'get a spine ****' folks, but it is simply wrong to say there is not a dime worth of difference between the parties.
So sorry, not seeing Democrats as a whole wanting to amend the f-ing Constitution to disallow states from even allowing ON THEIR OWN same sex marriage.
And, supporting some 'partial birth abortion' bill aside, Dems on the whole still agree with the basic idea of choice. The current Republican platform wants to ban it.
How about minimum wage? Or, pay as you go fiscal policies? One can go on.
Josh C. wrote on October 9, 2007 1:21 PM:After reading the review by Conyers, I don't see what the big problem with this bill is.
Most of the dem blogs that I've seen are just saying "dems roll over again" without actually looking at how this bill is different, and if Conyer's description is accurate, then it sounds quite a bit different and improved from the administration's version.
Making statements like "if Bush likes it, then dems shouldn't pass it" is just stupid partisan hating. Sure, most things Bush likes I don't like, but that doesn't mean anything he might accept automatically makes it bad.
If Bush decides to ignore the law, then that's a problem with bush, not the law.
And someone on the other thread complained that the bill does nothing to punish bush for violating the law before. Well, last time I knew, laws don't do that.
So it seems to me this is just a lot of bitching by democrats about democrats because, increasingly, that seems to be all democrats can do anymore (full disclosure: I'm a democrat)
benjoya wrote on October 9, 2007 1:52 PM:Josh C, I agree. The House bill seems ok. (greenwald thinks so, fwiw). The question is whether the House gets rolled by the Senate in conference. Cause it looks like the Senate bill will be the real POS.
Mary wrote on October 9, 2007 2:13 PM:You're wrong jawbone.
Having Dems around did nothing to block Robert or Alito (or Scalia and Thomas before them) from the court. A Republican appointed Stevens and Souter for that matter.
And think back to the Gonzales telling response when "teh program" broke and he was being interviewed by one of the 24 hour channels and said they didn't go to the REPUBLICAN Congress back then because they knew that Congress wouldn't give them what they wanted for teh program.
NOW, with the Dems in charge, they can get anything they want.
How horribly sad is that?
Dems willingly whore out what Gonzales was sure Republicans wouldn't give him. *sigh*
And now we know, with the denial of cert on el-Masri's case, that DOJ sponsored, solicited, directed and covered up torture is A-OK. Nice of Congress to weigh in in favor too - all three damn branches are just the same now.
tbhull wrote on October 9, 2007 3:07 PM:Joe wrote on October 9, 2007 1:14 PM:
Maybe a dime's worth of difference, but certainly not a quarter's worth. Nothing is ever absolute and though some small differences exist on the key issues these folks all goose step to Der Fuhrer's commands, with the Dems feigning opposition and the repubs cooing acceptance. Where are the pay as you go dems wen it comes to the massive debt incurred for this war? Quit fooling yourself with the gay/lesbian and abortion rights side shows.
Reflection wrote on October 9, 2007 4:12 PM:It would be a better bill if the Dems would require the GOV't to ignore and destroy any information picked up about citizens not covered by a warrent. The Citizen should also be informed, and be able to inspect the file before it is destroyed. Congress should require proof of destruction and give itself power to shut the program down within 30 days if such proof is unavailable. Sure this cesspool of Republicans would still ignore it, but it would at least preserve so semblance of the Bill of Rights in law.
Third party anyone?
benjoya wrote on October 9, 2007 8:45 PM:I spoke too soon. Thanks to Steny Hoyer, the House will cave long before there's a conference. anti-constitutional slug.
M. Delphia Block wrote on October 10, 2007 5:08 AM:Rep. Steny Hoyer and Speaker Pelosi are both tools of AIPAC and will take their instructions from AIPAC.
Rep. Hoyer and Speaker Pelosi appearance before the AIPAC Conference was treasonous. These people have Israel's best interest at heart, no AMERICAS!
CHAGRINED