10.18.07
FISA on Hold
Senator Chris Dodd plans to put a hold on the Senate FISA renewal bill because it reportedly grants retroactive immunity to telephone companies for any role they played in the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program.
For the most part, the new FISA bill – especially the one in the House – is a pretty good bill that democrats should vote for. But as I mentioned earlier, Retroactive immunity to telecom companies for doing things which – well, we don’t know what they did, which is why I have a problem with it.
Then they can take that out of the bill, then I’m fine with it for the most part, but that’s pretty much something which I think needs to be taken out.
Leahy – who chairs a committee which the bill must get through to get to the full Senate – calls the bill “caving” as well, so it’s clear that he isn’t about to give it a free ride either.
The reason why this doesn’t happen more often is that typically holds are only placed by members when they know a bill is going to pass and, presumably, intense public pressure to life a hold on a presumably popular bill will finally get to the Senator holding the bill, and it will move on.
However, I’m not sure how much public outrage you’re going to be able to cook up over giving telecom companies retroactive immunity, and Dodd hasn’t shown himself to be one who would back down from something like this either.
To learn what a hold is exactly, once again I refer you to Kagro X.
I love Conservative Blathering
The problem is that our political and journalistic classes lack sufficient patriotism to promote self-discipline, or perhaps sufficient self-discipline to allow them to act patriotically.
What does that even mean? WTF is “acting patriotically?” Whatever the GOP says it is?
I could probably quote a sentence from a quantum physics book and it’s make more sense than that.
More about the FISA Procedural Move
Kagro X at Daily Kos has a good rundown of exactly what happened in the House yesterday in regards to the FISA bill.
It’s actually tricker than even I had described it, and harder to get around.
Telecom Immunity: Why?
For the most part, I think the liberal wing of the party has been running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off on the new FISA bills for the most part. However, I will agree with them on one point: I don’t see the purpose of Telecom Immunity. If they didn’t break the law, then they shouldn’t have anything to fear form lawsuits. If they do have something to fear, that probably means the violated people’s rights, and then shouldn’t they be punished in some way if that’s true?
I was hoping that the Senate wouldn’t include such a measure in their version of the bill, but given that they only have a 51-49 caucus majority, and have to get past the 60-vote filibuster mark, I guess it’s not surprising that it was included.
Now, the question will be whether more liberal members of the Senate will try to filibuster, and whether they can get 40 people to sustain it. That’s a pretty high bar to meet considering democrats are pretty divided on this issue as it is (which is why it’s been so difficult to find a bill that can pass without just giving Bush what he wants).
The main stumbling block to the bill may very well be getting it through committee, as both the chair and ranking member of the judiciary committee, Senators Leahy and Specter, have basically said they don’t like the idea of telecom immunity, and the judiciary committee does have several liberal members on it such as Feingold, Whitehouse, Kennedy, Schumer, Durbin, Kohl, and Cardin, but it may not quite be enough.
Both Leahy and Specter said that they wanted to see documents on the program before granting immunity, and with the FISA law not expiring until February, they have some time to play with, but Bush will probably just try to wait it out, expecting that the Congress would rather pass a bad bill than no bill at all.
