The Democrats may yet give Bush a pass for spying on Americans.
Back in civics class, things like congressional ‘holds’ and the details of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act seemed dry as cold British toast. And, of course, they largely are that dry. But it is in such poorly illuminated corners of congressional procedure that the real drama of lawmaking unfolds. Many Bush foes have become acquainted, like it or not, with such arcana, because they’ve been exploited since 2001 to dismantle the underpinnings of our democracy in favor of an onslaught of GOP power-grabbing.
The battle over FISA legislation that has unfolded in the procedural backwaters since last fall is an important one it almost certainly provides the last opportunity to find out just how far the Bush administration may have strayed (and may still be straying) into illegal surveillance of Americans. That battle has also revealed a great deal about the willingness of the Democratic majority to truly oppose Bush and to withstand fearmongering attacks on their patriotism.
You may recall that last December, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid brought to the Senate floor a version of the FISA update bill that included retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration in mining domestic communications in a massive dragnet tracking potential ‘domestic terrorism.’ The extent of the companies’ cooperation has been impossible to determine so far, though former AT&T technician Mark Klein and former ‘major wireless carrier’ employee Babak Pasdar both say the surveillance they uncovered in their jobs included all all communications traffic, American or foreign.
Remember as well the dramatic meeting revealed by James Comey (former deputy Attorney General) in 2007 Senate testimony which saw the Bush administration trying to get a deathly ill, hospitalized then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign off on surveillance so extreme that Ashcroft wouldn’t sign and he, Comey, FBI Director Robert Mueller and their aides threatened to resign if the Bush administration pressed on. It seems important to discover just what that surveillance involved.
Why congressional Democrats would choose to support the administration’s self-protective notion of telecomm immunity seems mysterious at best. The best answers seemed, back in December, to lie in a combination of fear of Republican ‘soft on terrorism’ attacks and the presence in certain Democratic coffers of telecomm money. When then-presidential candidate Senator Chris Dodd threatened to filibuster the FISA bill, Reid gave in and moved the vote to the new year (though earlier Reid ignored Senate tradition, not honoring the hold Dodd had placed on the legislation). Dodd was promptly accused of presidential grandstanding, though his departure from the primary race not long after, not to mention his impassioned defense of his position, argued that his stand was one of principle.
In subsequent months, the Democratic congress did the unimaginable, standing fast against telecomm immunity in the House and not pursuing ‘compromise’ in marrying the House and Senate bills. The GOP sent out all the usual flares, even targeting vulnerable Democrats in their home districts with fearmongering ads making dubious (at best) claims about how the lack of a FISA update meant we would pretty much certainly be instantly overrun with al Qaeda operatives armed with nukes. The Bushies’ message went over with a surprising clunk, and even that most dire (and usually correct) of political prophets, Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, praised the sudden and surprising appearance of Democratic backbone.
A new era? A new hope? Well, maybe. The famed Democratic propensity for stealing defeat from the jaws of victory has ridden back into town. At the reins? House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller. Never mind the excitement building around newly energized Democratic voters in the season of Obama; never mind that Bush’s disapproval numbers have broken all previous records; Hoyer has been in closed-door talks to work out a ‘compromise’ that will keep the Republicans happy. He’s proclaimed his unnecessary deal brokering ‘promising.’
It seems certain that the companies involved (not to mention the Bush administration) find this ‘compromise’ promising as well. After all, the Politico blog reported, they wrote it: ‘Telecom companies have presented congressional Democrats with a set of proposals on how to provide immunity to the businesses that participated in a controversial government electronic surveillance program, a House Democratic aide said Wednesday.’
The telecomm companies have hired some folks with pretty direct access to the ears of Congress to make their case: former congressmen John Breaux and Trent Lott now head a lobbying firm, the Breaux-Lott Leadership Group. Among their top-paying clients is AT&T.
It should come as little surprise if soon, just when everyone seemed to have given up on the notion of covering up what may well be the largest crimes committed by the Bush administration, Hoyer and Rockefeller show up with a great ‘compromise,’ shutting the door forever on the chance We the People would have had to know what’s been done to us.
