A FISA Twist

Interesting. The Republicans are so invested in obstructionism and loath to give any amendment to FISA an upperdown vote that they are trying to block everything decent Democrats want to accomplish on this FISA bill. So Harry Reid has now set down 4:30 on Monday for a cloture vote on the bill, and has said that if the Republicans keep obstructing the amendments he'll recommend against that vote. I think that Reid may be able to get 41 Senators to go along with him on that (especially if Obama and Clinton come back for those votes, and they probably will). Essentially he's saying "allow amendments or you get no bill." Remember that there's a February 1 deadline or the "Protect America Act" expires. So Reid is trying to put Mitch McConnell back in a vice. We'll see if it works.

UPDATE: Given the numbers, it looks like we need three of the twelve Democrats who voted to table the Judiciary Committee version of the bill in order to stop cloture. You get this from the 60 that voted to table that, plus John McCain and Lindsay Graham, who didn't vote today. Here are the twelve:

Rockefeller, Bayh, Mikulski, Pryor, Salazar, McCaskill, Nelson (FL), Carper, Nelson (NE), Landrieu, Inouye, and Johnson

Obviously Jay Rockefeller isn't going to defy his telecom buddies on this one. So you need three out of eleven. That's going to be very tight. You have McCaskill and Bayh on this list, big backers of their respective Presidential candidates. And Bill Nelson has a compromise amendment with Feinstein that would be shut out completely.

The Republicans are trying to ram through a clean bill without any of the amendments that would be poison pills for the President. You'd think that they were running the Senate; that's because, for all intents and purposes, they are. Reid should either pull the bill from the floor because of the obstruction on amendments, or he should threaten committee assignments of those wayward Dems. Either way, those 11 Democrats need hundreds of thousands of constituent calls between now and Monday, telling them they will never get their vote again if they allow this travesty to pass.

UPDATE II: Just to be clear, this cloture vote wouldn't be on the whole bill, but would be a vote on how to vote. If the Republicans win, they're fairly assured of getting the Intelligence Committee bill passed amendment-free. If the Democrats win, they would need only a simple majority for amendments. Some of these amendments have Republican support, like Ron Wyden's amendment to stop wiretapping of persons abroad without a warrant. So they would pass. But they're all deal-killers for Bush, who would veto. Bush wants to make essentially every illegal thing he did legal. And the Repubs in Congress are doing his bidding, in a sneaky way, to try and hide just how lawless this is.