BREAKING: Patrick Leahy Is, Well, SOMETHING Of A Gangster

I'm blown away at how it went down in the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Greg Sargent picks it up.

Sources say Senator Russ Feingold offered an amendment that would have stripped telecom immunity from the bill, but it was defeated. Then Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking GOPer on the committee, offered a "compromise" amendment saying that in these lawsuits the Federal government, and not the telecoms, would be the defendants.

But because of a procedural difficulty Specter's amendment wasn't voted on -- and Senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the committee, essentially went around Specter's amendment and moved to have a vote to report the bill out of committee without any telecom immunity in it. That passed along strictly party lines. And that's where we are.

I think there was a back-channel deal between Leahy and Reid. There is likely to be a floor fight over this, so telecom immunity is not dead. But Reid is apparently committed to filing a motion to proceed on the bill without telecom amnesty. This is not a slam dunk, as Glenn Greenwald notes.

Even under the best-case scenario -- namely, Reid introduces a bill which does not contain amnesty -- anyone can (and certainly will) offer an amendment to include amnesty in the bill, and no matter what happens, it will be necessary to find 41 Senators willing to support Dodd's filibuster to keep amnesty out of the bill. As indicated, today is a good result in that it's preferable for the bill to have left the Committee today without amnesty in it (especially given the 3 Democratic members' support for amnesty) -- and that's not nothing -- but there is no grand "victory" in the sense that there is now some huge hurdle to having the Senate's bill include amnesty.

It's easier to whip people over stopping an amendment than filibustering the whole bill, that's the improvement. Reid has every ability to limit amendments, by the way, he could also do that. I was inclined to give Leahy a lot of credit for procedural ju-jitsu (by putting through a Title I version of the bill, keeping telecom amnesty in Title II, and then only allowing Title I out of the committee), but I guess there's always an out. This is still anybody's ballgame, but civil liberties forces are in a better position today than yesterday.

UPDATE: The House passed their version of the bill, without immunity. And it's actually a half-decent bill. In addition, the House passed needed mortgage industry reform legislation with a veto-proof majority, and EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT voted for it.

Today, I like our Congress. It changes from day to day.