Bullet Dodged

Lisa Murkowski's effort to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions at power plants failed yesterday, which is a boon for the public. The EPA is complying with a Supreme Court ruling to regulate carbon, and if Republicans don't like it, they can write their own legislative guidance for how to do so. Even my Senator got this one right:

Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) smacks down Murkowski at great length, saying “we can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand on climate change” and if you don’t want the EPA to take action, then the only alternative is cap-and-trade. “Global warming is real…. it’s happening all over the world.” Attacks the “Flat Earth Society” who opposes action.

Murkowski has vowed to bring this back up, but she could also work to pass a real climate bill. The EPA's jurisdiction on setting their own rules is the proverbial gun to the head to force something to get done, and Murkowski may not like it, but her only recourse is to take action.

I don't know what that action will be. Jeff Bingaman is talking about splitting cap and trade from the renewable energy standard. But hopefully we can get something, and failing that, the EPA will be able to carry out its mission.

Gang Of Six Member Recognizes That Bipartisanship Is Dead

Jeff Bingaman, the least vocal member of the Gang of Six, is resigning himself to the reality that his bipartisan funfest is nothing more than a charade, and anyone who actually wants to pass health care reform is on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Sen. Jeff Binagaman (D-NM)--one of the six members of the Senate Finance Committee who have been hashing out a health care reform bill for months--says that if bipartisan negotiations go nowhere, he'd support an effort to circumvent a filibuster and pass legislation without any Republicans.

"If we are unable to do it any other way, that is an option. It is a very difficult option," Bingaman told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall event in Albuquerque yesterday. He was referring to the possibility that Democrats will pass health care reform through the so-called budget reconciliation process.

The acknowledgment signals that even those members of Congress most invested in passing bipartisan health care reform are well aware that those efforts might not bear fruit.

"I don't think that that effort [at bipartisanship] is what is stymying progress," Bingaman said.

"It may well not succeed, but it has been worth the effort, and we are continuing with it."

I obviously don't agree that it's been worth the effort, but if you're a Democrat who really doesn't want to pass health care reform without bipartisan cover, it has. But the moderates made a tactical error. They now risk passing no bill at all because Republicans won't budget one inch to help them. They've allowed the town hall meeting craziness narrative to take hold, to the extent that even liberals like Russ Feingold are proclaiming that there will be no bill until Christmas. The legislative fight has become a test of mettle, and if Democrats lose their most vulnerable members will simply be wiped out next year. So now they really have to do this on their own. You wouldn't see Democrats openly talk about waiving the Byrd rule if that wasn't the case.

Should Democrats use the procedure known as reconciliation, the assumption has been that certain elements would have to be stripped out of the bill and passed separately, because a Senate rule known as the Byrd Rule only allows reconciliation for legislation that costs or raises substantial amounts of money. That would include the expansion of Medicare or Medicaid, revenue-raising tax provisions, and even the creation of a public health insurance option, depending on how it's written. But non-budget-related items -- most of the new insurance industry regulations, for instance -- would presumably be put in a separate bill that would go through regular order -- and would therefore need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

Passing two separate bills, however, is seen by some Democrats as too much of a lift for the slow-moving Senate.

But there's another alternative, according to Martin Paone. Paone, who served as a Democratic Senate floor staffer for 29 years, has been advising Democrats as they craft their legislative strategy. He proposes that Democrats try to get 60 votes to waive the Byrd Rule -- which would then allow the inclusion of those non-budget-related provision in one bill that would require only 51 votes for final passage [...]

Conservative senators such as Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) or Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) could, in voting for a Byrd Rule waiver, put themselves on the record as being in support of popular insurance industry reforms, while still opposing final passage of the bill -- a political strategy that may be appealing to them.

This happened in both 1990 and 1997, under Democrats and Republicans. The world didn't end.

Mike Lux has a primer on the best practices to get a good bill through the sausage-making process. Let's check off where we're at on them:

• Hold the progressives in the House to only vote for a public option. So far, so good. They've signed multiple letters, taken multiple pledges, sent a very clear message about their determination. They need to stay strong.

• Get the Democrats in the Senate to accept that this will have to be a Democrats-only bill. This seems to be moving in the right direction. Schumer sent exactly the right message over the weekend, and it's clear things are beginning to head that way.

• Split the bill into two parts in the Senate, with the public option and the financing going through the reconciliation process. Democats are sending signals that they are moving in that direction as well.

• Get enough Senators on board for the public option. The whip count DFA and we at OpenLeft have been running shows us at 45. We need five more, and there are several Democrats I think are prime possibilities to come along if this is the path we go down.

• Above all, don't panic. There will be some rough days ahead. Certain Senators will keep saying we can't get this done, and pundits will continue to shed the worst possible light on each day's events. But we just need to hang tough, hold strong, and keep working.

Everything's moving in the right direction, actually, and on #3 we're seeing the Senate take a look at an even bolder line. But panic is always in the air when you're dealing with Democrats.

...Shep Smith is going to get fired.



The last thing I'm worried about is that Republicans will be able to stop the budget reconciliation process. Nobody really cares about Senate procedure and you can't build a movement out of it. They're trying to scare Democrats into not using it, and that may work, but everybody knows that the GOP is full of crap on this one. Even Shep Smith.

Baucus Caucus: Less Health Care For America NOW

The six-headed Presidential hydra, also known as the sub-group in the Senate Finance Committee, has decided to ignore everybody and keep working diligently to do absolutely nothing on the health care bill.

Senate health-care negotiators agreed late Thursday to ignore the increasingly strident rhetoric from Republican and Democratic leaders and to keep working toward a bill that can win broad support from the rank-and-file in both parties, according to sources familiar with the talks.

In a conference call, the three Democratic and three Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee agreed to redouble their efforts to craft a less costly alternative to the trillion-dollar initiatives so far put forward in Congress. They discussed the possibility of also reining in the scope of their package, the sources said.

The senators rejected the idea of imposing a deadline on their negotiations, and they agreed to talk again Sept. 4 -- four days before lawmakers are scheduled to return to Washington from their August break. The consensus, one participant said, was "to take your time to get it right." [...]

Before leaving for the month-long recess, Baucus had pegged the cost of the negotiators' ideas at less than $900 billion over the next decade. Thursday's discussions focused on driving that cost lower, the sources said.

Their draft bill was already woefully short in terms of subsidies for those who can't afford insurance. The Gang of Six wants to drive them even lower.

I'm sure the people most enamored of themselves did reject having a timeline on their circle jerk. But look who is making these decisions. Chuck Grassley has basically said he'd vote against his own bill, even if he gets everything he wants, if he cannot get more than 80 Senators total on board. The #2 ranking Republican in the Senate has already said that votes for reform aren't coming. So Grassley, one of the key negotiators here, has admitted that he won't support anything the Gang of Six does. Mike Enzi is probably stronger in that direction. Olympia Snowe admitted today that the public option was never on the table in this Gang of Six, and that co-ops are worth exploring, even though two months ago she called them worthless. Kent Conrad has been ideologically opposed to the public option for as long as anyone can remember, and came up with co-ops, in all likelihood, as a way to steal seed money for the "non-profit" Blue Cross of North Dakota, which has captured 90% of the market in his home state. Max Baucus admitted as far back as March that the public option was nothing but a bargaining chip. Jeff Bingaman hasn't been getting nearly enough heat for being part of this charade, but he has talked the talk on co-ops as well.

These six Senators, who come from states representing 2-3% of the population, have proposed ideas out of step with 77% of the public, and think they're entitled to hijack the entire process in Congress to serve those ends.

The question is what to do about this. 270,000 people listened to the President's strategy session yesterday, and over 5,600 supporters have contributed almost $350,000 to lawmakers standing up for the public option. These six lawmakers, most of whom probably want no bill at all, know that the longer they hold up the process the harder it becomes to pass anything. Harry Reid needs to use whatever means necessary to force a bill out of the Senate - discharge petitions, going around the committee of jurisdiction, whatever. At that point, we're talking about a conference committee. Which is what Obama has asked for all along. The problem is a matter of trust, as Paul Krugman put it today.

...Chris Bowers is right that this is the worst part about it - the Senate Finance Committee has decided to take two additional weeks off before meeting again. They are so bound and determined to get health care right that they'll do nothing for weeks, presumably in the hopes that health care reform will die on the vine and they won't have to do anything at all.

Health Care: Progressive Movement Must Push Back On This Week's Lapses

It's early, and given the clear attention the President is paying to health care reform I ultimately believe something will get done. But without question, this has been a bad week for those who want to see a legitimate reform of the system. This article in The Hill captures some of the movement:

Despite having a popular president in the White House and comfortable majorities in Congress, the Democratic rollout on healthcare reform has encountered significant bumps in the road.

A cost estimate hanging a $1 trillion price tag on an incomplete bill, salvos from powerful interest groups and great uncertainty among key Democrats on what will actually be in the legislation that moves through Congress have emboldened Republican critics.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee postponed the markup of its healthcare reform bill by one day, to Wednesday. On the eve of that markup, the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce publicly ripped the bill.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) initially planned to release his bill Wednesday, but he has pushed back his timetable because of cost estimate concerns.

“Will we have something out tomorrow? Not sure,” Baucus said Tuesday. “Thursday or probably Friday,” he added.

Perhaps more importantly, the unity that Democrats touted earlier this year has cracked. As conservatives lambaste Democrats, liberal healthcare groups are not rushing to their defense because so many questions about the legislation have not been answered.

Since then, the Senate Finance Committee postponed their markup until after the July 4 recess. And all kinds of compromise plans and half-measures are swimming around Washington. Apparently, centrists in the House from both sides of the aisle are meeting in secret to hash out one of them. Kay Hagan and Jeff Bingaman are refusing to sign on to the public plan in the Senate HELP Committee, delaying its inclusion in the bill, which is worrying advocacy groups. I'm assuming they prefer a compromise like Kent Conrad's out-of-left-field "health co-ops" plan introduced into the debate and sending a thrill up the leg of centrists last week. And today, old warhorses Tom Daschle and Bob Dole unveiled yet ANOTHER compromise plan:

Daschle, Dole and Republican Howard Baker released a bipartisan plan today that would tax some employer-provided health-insurance premiums, require individuals and large employers to buy health insurance, and create public insurance pools run by states instead of the federal government.

The proposals were put together over 15 months by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center, which was started by Daschle, Dole, Baker and former Democratic Senate leader George Mitchell. Congress is drafting a bill to revamp health care, which President Barack Obama calls “the single most important thing we can do for America’s long-term fiscal health.”

Dole said the U.S. has a rare opportunity this year to enact a comprehensive health-care bill. “Let’s do it now,” he urged, saying it may be five years before lawmakers have a similar political opening.

The state-run insurance pools may run into some trouble due to economies of scale. A state simply cannot bargain the way a single payer federal government can.

There are basically two issues that have bedeviled reformers this week. One is the CBO scoring, based on an incomplete document that should have never been given to them, but causing moderate Dems to simply run for cover. This failure came about largely by the HELP committee offering an incomplete bill to try and get some bipartisan cover.

You might ask what the HELP Committee was thinking, sending Swiss cheese legislation to CBO. Well, the HELP Committee's expectation was that the CBO, in crafting its preliminary score, would assume something similar to the outline it had seen months before. The CBO didn't. In fact, it did the opposite. CBO ran its estimates with no employer mandate and an individual mandate with a laughably small penalty.

Members of HELP were thus shocked by yesterday's score. The specific provisions of the bill that the CBO examined did not look like the bill HELP intends to write. Which means that the numbers aren't correct. If HELP is writing a bill with a strong employer and individual mandate, and CBO scores a bill with no employer mandate and a weak individual mandate, that's not a useful estimate.

By Monday night, members of the HELP Committee were scrambling to give the CBO something closer to the final legislation to examine -- this time including rough details of the employer mandate and the individual mandate. They're hoping to have a new set of estimates by Friday, though that's probably ambitious. Either way, I wouldn't put too much stock in these numbers.

Doesn't matter. The numbers are out there, and the Democrats are running away from them as fast as they can. OF COURSE the Republicans would use the CBO score as a permanent talking point no matter what was changed on the bill. Forevermore, it will be seen as costing a trillion dollars a year and not covering anyone - just check out this piece. Max Baucus essentially pulled his bill so he can cover costs and cut government subsidies.

The other problem has been this continued wrangling over the public plan, which I think a healthy bit of Democrats are simply desperate to torpedo. Hagan and Bingaman won't sign on to it in the HELP Committee, and now Kathleen Sebelius has, perhaps unwittingly, given a bad compromise oxygen:

"I think there is a lot of understanding that the private market has really failed to provide affordable coverage to Americans," Sebelius said. The industry has had "a lot of opportunities" to get rid of coverage restrictions and other unpopular policies, Sebelius said, and really "hasn't served Americans very well."

However, Sebelius stressed that Obama is open to compromise on the shape of the public plan, which doesn't have to be run by the government. She spoke positively of a compromise idea that envisions consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives, like rural electricity or agriculture co-ops. They would get started with seed money from taxpayers but then compete without government control. The plan by Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., may end up in a health overhaul bill to be unveiled by the Senate Finance Committee this week.

Obama did offer a pretty forceful defense of the public option to the AMA this week. And if he wants to throw his weight around, he could probably muscle something through. But will the desire to create a bipartisan solution, which is supposedly more "durable" than a successful solution, trump the public plan? Bill Clinton hopes not:

If he can’t get a good bill, I wouldn’t give away the store on that. If he can’t get a bill that’s genuine universal coverage, that genuinely is going to cut costs and make health insurers give up some of these unbelievable administrative burdens that they’ve put on people, and that really gets to the guts of the delivery system and does more primary preventive care and actually measures things that work, then I would go for the 51. But I would spend a little time trying to get to 60.

Nyceve has more on this meeting.

So we've had a bad couple weeks, with Democrats scurrying in fear from the cost and the public option clearly being used as a bargaining chip. Enough. Chris Bowers has a proposal:

For years, candidates for, and members of, Congress told us that we needed to elect and re-elect them in order to lower health care costs and provide universal coverage. And so, for years, we dutifully worked our collective asses off, delivering wide majorities for Democrats--who said they would lower health care costs and provide universal coverage--in both branches of Congress.
Now, when it comes time for them to deliver on health care by providing a public option--the care minimum required to reduce costs and provide universal coverage--what we are getting instead are backroom deals, flip-flops, and cop-outs.
Enough.

Today, along with Health Care for America Now, Democracy for America and numerous blogs, a campaign is being launched to put an end to the backroom deals on health care. We made and delivered on a commitment to bring about wide Democratic majorities in Congress. Now, instead of negotiating in secret, this Congress needs to make a public commitment to us on where it stands on health care.
No more dodges. No more vague, open-ended responses. We need every member of the Senate--main obstacle to reform--to answer four questions on the public option:

Do you support a public healthcare option as part of healthcare reform?
If so, do you support a public healthcare option that is available on day one?
Do you support a public healthcare option that is national, available everywhere, and accountable to Congress?
Do you support a public healthcare option that can bargain for rates from providers and big drug companies?

As activists and as constituents, answering these questions are the minimum they owe us. We are entitled to specific, clear, written responses to all of these questions.

Email--don't call, but email--these four questions to your Senators now. Make it clear that you want a written response to all four questions. There needs to be as little room for interpretation as possible. The Senate is going to be the biggest hurdle on health care, as it has proven to the biggest hurdle on all legislation in 2009. That is where we must focus our pressure.

Here's the form to post where your Senator stands. We need a citizen whip count on the public option so we know where everyone stands. Only with this kind of clarity can we embolden, for example, the Progressive Caucus to demand a public option in any reform bill.

This is clearly the biggest domestic policy that will be tackled this year. We MUST not fail.

No Giveaways To Polluters

This is really bad news:

Bingaman said any Congressionally developed system capping and trading emissions probably will include carbon allowances given to polluters like cement factories and coal-burning power plants, along with permits that are sold.

Auctioning 100 percent of the permits would essentially make polluters pay quickly for emissions. In the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme, emissions permits were given away to polluters at first. This led to a glut of permits and windfall profits for some emitters.

...."I think it's unlikely we will pass a cap-and-trade bill with 100 percent auction," Bingaman told reporters at the Platts Energy Podium. He said such a system has the risk of substantially increasing the burden on some utilities and major emitters.

100% auction is the only way to make cap and trade work. These permits have a value that needs to be set by the market rather than given away for free. Power generators are going to pass on the "cost" of reducing emissions to their customers whether they get permits or have to bargain for them. And Europe's history is instructive. Kevin Drum explains the economics.

The economic theory involved is a little hairy, but those permits have a value on the open market, and that means that in many cases marginal producers can make more money selling their permits than by producing power. They'll only be willing to produce power if they can raise prices enough to make the power-producing business more profitable than the permit-selling business, and eventually everyone will jack up prices to follow suit.

This may sound abstract—even a bit fantastical—but it's absolutely real. In fact, when permits in phase one of Europe's ETS system were handed out for free, electricity prices rose and power companies pocketed a windfall profit (which Britain's Department of Trade and Industry estimated at about $1.1 billion a year in the UK alone). Dale Bryk, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), puts it bluntly: "If you ask them point-blank if they'll charge customers for free permits, they won't tell you. But they know they will."

A better way is for the government to hold an auction to set the price of permits. This has a couple of extremely salutary effects. First, it puts everyone on a level playing field (since Congress has no ability to allocate permits to favored interests). Second, and even better, the money from selling the permits goes to the federal government, not to the carbon emitters. That's a pretty useful revenue stream, one that would probably start out at about $20 to $30 billion per year and go up steadily as the cap came down and the price of carbon permits increased.

Barack Obama has consistently argued for a 100% auction, so special interests and existing power companies cannot game the system. Yet Bingaman is calling it "unlikely" because the lobbying against it would be too intense. Not because it would be the wrong policy, but because the entrenched interests wouldn't like it. This is a horrific way to approach this important point, and one that will fly right by the average person who doesn't know the intricacies of cap and trade. You cannot give away carbon permits and expect the program to be successful.

FISA Update

From what I'm hearing about changes in the legislative schedule, Jesse Helms finally accomplished something significant in his Senate career - his funeral tomorrow will delay the votes on FISA by one day. The votes on amendments and the final bill are now more likely to occur on Wednesday. This means one additional day for grassroots efforts to get the entire Senate on the record over whether or not they will stand with the Constitution. Blue America's tools are still active. I've been pretty pessimistic on the outcome all along, but that's no reason to stop fighting.

Meanwhile, as Marcy Wheeler reports, the Administration wants a clean bill, and would veto any effort to allow the Congress and the American people to know exactly what they would be immunizing:

As we have previously noted, any FISA modernization bill must contain effective legal protections for those companies sued because they are believed to have helped the Government prevent terrorist attacks in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

[snip]

H.R. 6304 contains such protection, but the (Bingaman) amendment would reportedly foreclose an electronic communication service provider from receiving retroactive [immunity] until 90 days after the Inspectors General of various departments, as required by section 301 of H.R. 6304, complete a comprehensive review of, and submit a final report on, communications intelligence activities authorized by the President between September 11, 2001, and January 17, 2007. The final report is not due for a year after the enactment of the bill. Any amendment that would delay implementation of [immunity] in this manner is unacceptable. Providing prompt liability protection is critical to the national security. Accordingly, we, as well as the President's other advisors, will recommend that the President veto any bill that includes such an amendment.

Bingaman's amendment simply states that the IG report, which even Sen. Obama has claimed would allow for accountability, be given the opportunity to actually hold anyone accountable by forestalling immunity until its completion. It's as common sense a proposal as there has been in this year-long debate. Yet there will not be a hearing on it, the debate will consist of a matter of minutes, key witnesses like Mark Klein, the AT&T technician who disclosed the secret room in San Francisco where the NSA was vacuuming up all communications on its network, will never be called to testify, and the entire sordid mess will be pushed across the finish line in a day or two.

Next Steps On FISA - July 8 and Beyond

As we all know, we're in kind of a holding pattern while we wait another week until the Senate is likely to lay down and give Bush more than he expected on warrantless wiretapping and immunity for lawbreaking. I know many of us are calling representatives and talking to them when they come in our communities and even organizing inside Barack Obama's social networking site (9,300-plus strong now). But the reality is that we're likely to come up short. The Beltway elites are determined to bury their sins and make sure nobody finds out about the extent of this illegal and unconstitutional spy program.

So what do we do? There's a lot of outrage and energy around this issue, certainly it needs to be channeled. I think there are a number of things we can do.

• If we keep organizing around the July 8 vote, the best opportunity for us is to encourage passage of the Bingaman amendment, which would put a stay on any immunity until 90 days after the completion of a Justice Department Inspector General report about the President's warrantless wiretapping program. This would be beneficial for a number of reasons. It's "sensible" enough - why give immunity before we know what we're immunizing? - to attract bipartisan support. The IG report would certainly take long past President Bush's exit from the White House, which is extremely beneficial. And the 90 days gives an opportunity to deep-six the immunity after the worst abuses are brought to light. Most important, this would be a change in the bill from the House, which would send it into a conference committee and require another round of votes after reconciliation, AND the President wouldn't be likely to sign anything with the Bingaman amendment in it because he wants his immunity and he wants it now. So for so many reasons, strategically speaking that amendment is the right one to push with your lawmakers.

• Keith Olbermann is right - the right will continue to make up some excuse to attack Obama for this vote on some grounds, so he owes it to his supporters to do the right thing and, if telecom immunity remains in the bill, vote against it. The fantasy of criminal prosecution for the telecoms, well, I'll get to that in a minute. But for those organizing around Obama from now to July 8, it should be around making sure he's at that vote and voting for the Dodd-Feingold amendment, for the Bingaman amendment, and against the bill if they fail.

• What happens AFTER July 8 strikes me as more relevant now - it's highly unlikely that we stop this freight train. Are there any next steps? First of all, we must continue to pressure the next President to investigate the program. The IG report will be made, and there must be a concerted effort to make that public. The bill's expanded wiretapping powers are arguably more pernicious than immunity, and so bringing them into full view could spark an outrage that would roll the whole system back, similar to the Church Committee's findings in the 1970s.

...the bottom line for the ACLU is that no president should have the power to monitor the phones and emails of Americans without a warrant, and telecommunications companies should not be let off the hook. No president should have the power to pardon companies that broke the law.

The ACLU calls on the next president to conduct an immediate investigation of warrantless wiretapping and calls on him to release documents relating to the legality of the NSA’s monitoring of American’s calls and email without warrants.

This issue has awakened a sleeping giant, a broad coalition of Americans worried about the creeping loss of their civil liberties for the last 50 years. Whether it's unwarranted spying or just catalog companies harvesting your emails and selling them off to advertisers, Americans desire their privacy and will fight efforts to take it away. The Strange Bedfellows coalition will live on beyond July 8 and will seek to hold those who limited freedom and curbed civil liberties accountable. But as a specific action, demanding a full, thorough, and public investigation is a good place to start.

• Litigation will not end if our efforts fail on July 8.

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union, two groups that have been leading the charge against dismissing the lawsuits, are working on possible legal challenges for the FISA bill that is expected to pass soon. That being said, no one is ready to throw in the towel on the continuing FISA fight happening in the Senate.

"Assuming that the immunity does pass, which right now we are not assuming, we are certainly preparing for litigation against the application of immunity in our case," Kevin Bankston, a senior attorney for EFF told RAW STORY [...]

While the precise sequence of events in unclear, Bankston said the challenges would take place in the Northern District of California Court, where the telecom lawsuits themselves are being litigated. He said he's pleased that at least the immunity question is not being decided by the secret FISA court, as was proposed in an earlier bill.

The ACLU is keeping its options open but has not decided how or if it will proceed with court challenges to an eventual FISA agreement, a spokesman says.

If the bill granting immunity is a violation of separation of powers, the courts could overturn it. Obviously we have a Supreme Court in hock to corporate interests so the odds would be long, but courts also don't really like their authority usurped so I'm not sure it's such a slam-dunk.

My larger point is that there's a lot of work to be done, both in the next week and beyond, to put us on a path where we have liberty and security, where privacy rights and civil liberties are sacrosanct, and where no man or corporation is above the law. We must continue the fight.

Holding Pattern

Well, it looks like enough people pushed and pushed to get the FISA bill delayed through the recess on the 4th.

The Senate hit impasses over legislation aimed at helping struggling homeowners and a rewrite of spying laws, forcing Democratic leaders to push back consideration of those measures until next month.

Leaders had hoped to finish both measures this week, in addition to an emergency war-spending bill and a Medicare bill, before lawmakers return home by week's end. Both bills have wide support, but in each case, individual senators have refused to let the measures speed through the chamber. As a result, they were forced to lower the bar for this week's action.

Democrats also threatened to keep the Senate in session through the weekend if Republicans didn’t agree to move quickly with the Medicare bill.

Objections by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) will push back an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) until after lawmakers return in July, Democratic leaders said Thursday. Feingold is strongly opposed to language that would likely give telephone companies that participated in warrantless surveillance retroactive immunity from lawsuits.

"It doesn't look like it," Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said of taking up the FISA bill this week. "Sen. Feingold wants additional time and would like to postpone it until after the Fourth of July."

Durbin said: "We can't leave until we finish Medicare and the supplemental."

Looks to me like Jon Ensign and Jim DeMint called Harry Reid's bluff on the housing bill, so he pushed both of them back till after the break. Incidentally, the housing bill would give $15 billion in tax breaks to lenders like Countrywide, and parts of the bill may have actually been written by Bank of America, so I'm not exactly weeping for that delay either.

As I've been saying, it's completely unclear to me whether this is anything but a delay, and if the opportunity is given to pass the FISA bill before the recess, I'm sure the Senate will take it. When you have 80 votes in favor, it's going to be pretty hard to stop it. I would hope that Sen. Feingold and Sen. Dodd could be as annoying as Tom Coburn in holding up a bill, but that seems to only work for conservatives (100 freakin' bills with bipartisan support are being held up by Coburn, but Feingold and Dodd aren't able to stop one).

However, the delay does provide an opportunity to rally support for accountability. The Wall Street Journal today reports on the money-bomb for the Constitution being planned:

Liberal activists and supporters of the Texas Republican and former presidential candidate plan to join forces Thursday and begin a "money bomb" protest of lawmakers who support telecom immunity in the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act. During a "money bomb," grassroots activists donate money during a short period of time -- usually a day -- to create buzz and raise money for their candidate.

The effort is timed to coincide with a planned Senate vote on the bill. Libertarians and liberal activists have blasted Democratic lawmakers, including presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, for supporting the legislation [...]

"There's entrenched power in Washington that protects itself and there are people on both sides who don't feel like they're having their rights protected," says Jane Hamsher, one of the organizers behind the effort and founder of the popular Democratic blog Firedoglake. "It's really about right and left coming together to fight the entrenched power and take their power away."

Damn straight. And I expect a host of angry constituents when the entrenched Senators come back to their states.

UPDATE: Feingold's statement:

"I'm pleased we were able to delay a vote on FISA until after the July 4th holiday instead of having it jammed through. I hope that over the July 4th holiday, Senators will take a closer look at this deeply flawed legislation and understand how it threatens the civil liberties of the American people. It is possible to defend this country from terrorists while also protecting the rights and freedoms that define our nation."

And Dodd:

“I’m pleased that consideration of the FISA Amendments Act has been delayed until after the 4th of July recess. I urge my colleagues to take this time to listen to their constituents and consider the dangerous precedent that would be set by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that may have engaged in President Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.

“When and if FISA does come back to the Senate floor, I will offer my amendment to strip the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill. I implore my colleagues to support the rule of law and join me in voting against retroactive immunity.”

UPDATE II: The contours of this are coming into shape. As emptywheel notes, there's been a unanimous consent agreement to hold votes on all amendments and the final bill on July 8. A UC agreement means no filibuster (UPDATE: Sen. Reid's office is saying that there will be another cloture vote, so there's a slim opportunity to filibuster), so we’d need 51 no votes on the bill to stop it, or 51 yes votes on the amendment to strip immunity.

I'm trying to figure out if any of those other amendments have the likelihood of passing, because that would at least send the bill to a conference committee. And maybe one of the amendments is a poison pill. Apparently Jeff Bingaman has an amendment for a stay on immunity until the Inspector General review about the wiretapping activities is completed. Here he is talking about it:

MP3

Getting from 15 to 51 in 12 days is, in a word, unlikely. But getting to 51 on staying the immunity provision is somewhat more likely; it's at least closer to a compromise. However, the bar has been set to 60 on that amendment.