Senate Succumbs and Sucks Up Again
It's hard to know where to begin on the latest news that the Republican controlled
Congress is going to drop the NSA illegal spying issue. Of course you know who's
involved with pressuring Republicans to back off, right? It's none other than
Dick
Cheney, with a little help from Karl.
The Republican Party left its legacy of Lincoln a long time ago. It's all about covering for the boss, no matter what is said or the truthfulness of those statements. Evidently, it's the same for the party mouth pieces, as we saw yesterday with Brit Hume. Then there is Republican Party, via the web, with the Redstate Racists leading the charge.
But covering for Bush's illegal wiretapping is putting party above country. Franklin is freaking.
The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote
tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently
revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed
number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining
warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel — made
up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats — was clearly leaning in favor
of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against
it.They attributed the shift to last week's closed briefings
given by top administration officials to the full House and Senate intelligence
committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials,
including Vice President Cheney. “It's been a full-court press,”
said a top Senate Republican aide who asked to speak only on background —
as did several others for this story — because of the classified nature of
the intelligence committees' work.
Congressional
Probe of NSA Spying Is in Doubt
But to be convinced by Attorney
General Alberto R. Gonzales and former NSA director Michael V. Hayden strains
all belief. Gonzales on “Charlie Rose” recently was only capable
of offering slogans that sounded like they came straight from the horse's mouth. Laughing with
Rose that Cheney was really the expert on all things NSA spying and having to
do with warrantless wiretapping. As for Michael Hayden, all you have to do is
read Glenn Greenwald to know
he's just not sharing all the facts. But as Greenwald says yesterday, the NSA issue
is really at a tipping point. Now that Republicans are going reptile on us,
that's for sure.
Senator Specter's original idea still seems important, that is
to take the whole program to the FISA court and let them judge what's legal.
As I've said before, I'm skeptical that the court will take any of the program
out of the president's hands.
Now I wonder if Specter will even take the program to the FISA court. If not,
that's very alarming to me.
The real issue is that everyone on both sides in the Senate committee
seem to agree that the NSA spying program is necessary, only that it needs to
be brought into the legal world. It looks like right now, at least to me, that
Democrats just don't want to make this fight because of appearances. All you
had to do was listen to “Meet
the Press” on Sunday.
Rep. Jane Harman: …
I think the Gang of Eight process violates the National Security Act of 1947,
which requires that, unless it’s a covert action program—Congress,
that means the two Intelligence Committees—have to be fully and completely
briefed.
Rep. Jane Harman: …
Jay Rockefeller’s letter is a, you know, is a private cry. If he had
shared that letter publicly, I think he would have been in violation of the
Espionage Act, the disclosure of classified information regarding cryptology
and the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents. So he
could not talk about it. And again, this Gang of Eight process is only under
law for the revelation of covert action programs. This is not a covert action
program, this is a very valuable foreign collection program, and I’m—I
think it is tragic that a lot of our capability is now across the pages of
the newspapers. …
Rep. Harman is as smart as they come and she made it clear, speaking
for the Democratic Party, that we believe in this program, but have a problem
with its implementation because it breaks the law. That's exactly the point, does Bush get to break the law, then simply walk away? The full
court White House press seems to have convinced everyone that's exactly what they get to do.
Rep. Harman: Well, I
wish I’d been a lot smarter in those briefings about the legal underpinnings
of the program. That was not discussed in the briefings. The briefings were
about the operational details of the program and only in the last briefing
because I requested it ahead—this was after the president had disclosed
the existence of the program—did we spend an hour on the process, which
was a very valuable discussion. The vice president and others were there.
But remember, we go into those briefings alone, we have no ability to consult
staff, we have no ability to consult constitutional experts or legal experts
on the history of FISA. Since the program has been disclosed, I—and
I think all of us, at least I have become a lot smarter about all that, and
now that I have read the legislative history of FISA, which was enacted in
1978 on a bipartisan basis to cure the abuses of the Nixon era that had preceded
it, I understand that it is the exclusive way that we can eavesdrop on Americans
in America.Let’s—let’s understand that our Constitution
really is the issue here. The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause to
listen and seize property of Americans. Every one of us wants to catch al-Qaeda
and its affiliates. All of us want the president to have the tools. I just
voted again for the Patriot Act. I believe we need modern tools. And, oh,
by the way, FISA was modernized eight times in the Patriot Act after 2001.
It is not a quaint little old thing that doesn’t work here, it can work
here, and I think the entire program should fit under FISA as currently drafted.
We don’t even need to amend FISA.
With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress there is no
way to press forward on the illegality of Bush's domestic spying program without them. However,
the White House also knows the danger of Democrats getting any traction at all on this
because they just don't stand on firm legal footing. Too many constitutional
lawyers have spoken out, even written against, Bush's warrantless wiretapping.
The canard that the Senate gave Bush the authority to wiretap is false, which
was re-emphasized this past Sunday.
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the
White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to
“deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against
the United States.” Believing the scope of this language was too broad
and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize “all
necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons
[the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided” the
attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president
the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be
used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution,
the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the
Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words “in
the United States and” after “appropriate force” in the agreed-upon
text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority
to exercise expansive powers not just overseas — where we all understood
he wanted authority to act — but right here in the United States, potentially
against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede
to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.
So, here's the upshot, we need the wiretapping program, but it
needs to be legal, as well as have oversight, which must include a wider group
of people than just the gang of 8. If Bush follows the law, there is no reason
FISA can't handle what is needed. The Patriot Act was modified 8 times to broaden
the ability to do what it takes to get terrorists, but the one thing that has
to stop is Bush's runaway regal notion that Congress doesn't matter to the king.
Nobody wants Bush's head on a platter over the NSA wiretapping
issue more than I do, believe me. But without Republicans in this fight, it's
not going to happen because Democrats don't seem to be sufficiently steamed. They don't seem to want to make the president pay for breaking the law.
But undercutting all of that momentum
is the increasingly obvious fact that a substantial number of Democrats are
flirting heavily with — if they have not already outright embraced — the
notion that they ought to back away from this scandal, focus on legislative
“revisions” to FISA in order to render retroactively legal the Administration’s
patently (and proudly) lawless behavior, plead with the Administration to
accept some oversight going forward, and then forget about the whole sordid
affair. Put another way, many Democrats are slowly slouching towards the path
they almost always end up taking – that is, not challenge the Administration
due to three things: fear, fear and fear. Specifically, they are afraid that
standing firm will backfire politically, even though all available facts suggest
that this fear is wholly unfounded. Glenn
Greenwald
This is the type of fight worth waging, but it doesn't look like
our Democratic lawmakers agree. So we're just going to let the lawbreakers get off free now?
Comments are closed.