Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and a handful of prominent Democrats said yesterday they would introduce legislation to strip telecom giants of immunity for possibly violating customer privacy by providing information to the government without a warrant.
But Hoyer seems uninterested in pushing the legislation through the House.
"I don't think revisiting that issue is going to get us anyplace," Hoyer told The Hill today.
Nope, sure won't! If you don't count a place of... justice and accountability.
Dan at Pruning Shears wonders if Hoyer is "the worst Democrat alive, or ever?" It's a very difficult question. Actually, he's just a front for corporate hegemony, in this case the telecoms.
I pretty much knew that Dodd's bill was going nowhere, but Hoyer's rationale is what got me.
Former Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe is demanding his party take a stand on health care legislation that the president and many others aren't willing to take: Pass a bill with a public option for insurance coverage or don't pass anything at all.
The long-time adviser to the Clintons, striking an atypically progressive tone, urged the White House to get more assertive in its handling of health care reform and described a bill without a public plan as a "failure."
"If we don't have the public option, we are wasting our time," McAuliffe told the Huffington Post. "To chalk something up and get something that is not the right thing to do is morally wrong... To pass something just so you can go home and go into election saying we passed something is not why lawmakers are sent to Washington."
After a bit of silence following his loss in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, the former DNC chair has come out swinging on the year's most important legislative issue. On Thursday, McAuliffe agreed to host a fundraiser with the first Virginia pol who insisted that a public option be in the bill. The offer, he said, extends to Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner -- both of whom have been sour on the idea of a government-administered option for insurance coverage. He's also involved in whipping support in Congress for the public option.
McAuliffe is the first business-friendly Democrat making the business case for competition in health care, saying that the status quo is bankrupting individuals and companies. But more important, he's a figure with ties to the donor class and the Third Way wing of the party. That he's arguing so strongly for a public option suggests that he's placed a bet that the party would benefit from going that route, and more important, would suffer from failing to do so.
Now it's basically up to the leadership to decide which way to go. Nancy Pelosi has said that her chamber cannot pass a bill without a public option. Steny Hoyer cut her off at the knees yesterday, saying "I'm for a public option but I'm also for passing a bill." Of course, in the House, those two statements are not mutually exclusive, but Hoyer clearly counts on progressives caving. $361,614 says they won't.
As for the Senate, Harry Reid has a choice to make. He can include the public option in the elements of the bill to pass through the reconciliation process, or turn the screws on ConservaDems to invoke cloture on the bill, or he can continue to allow the Baucus caucus to hijack the process. Reid has the ability to bypass the Finance Committee completely, if he chooses, and bring a bill to the floor. And he can use reconciliation for the elements about which Baucus and his cronies feel squishy.
Reid can't do it alone, of course. The President would have to get involved behind the scenes. But Democrats who are losing their base had better think of something to get this through.
Ezra gives the 10,000-foot view of today's health care crackup in the House, and Henry Waxman's dicey choice on how to resolve it:
The central issue here is simple enough: The Blue Dogs want Waxman to make concessions he doesn't want to make. The sticking points, according to sources close to the process, are the public plan -- Blue Dogs still want a trigger option -- and the administration's proposal, which the Blue Dogs support, to create an independent commission able to set Medicare payment rates and make reforms. Waxman and others worry that a Republican administration and Congress could use this panel to undermine the Medicare program.
You can take Waxman's statements one of a couple ways. His willingness to bring the bill directly to the floor undermines the bargaining power of the Blue Dogs: It means they don't have veto power over the bill. This could, in other words, be a negotiating tactic on Waxman's part to soften the Blue Dogs' position. But if that doesn't work, it could also mean exactly what it says: That he's going to push the bill straight to the floor.
That would ensure some bad headlines, and an angry Blue Dog caucus. But versions of this bill have passed two other committees. Energy and Commerce isn't strictly necessary. Waxman's threat to bring the bill to the floor means that Pelosi and Waxman think they have the votes whether or not Energy and Commerce approves the legislation. And that may not be such a bad outcome, either for the Democrats or the Blue Dogs.
But Blue Dogs might balk, because they don't want to walk the plank on a bill if the Senate Finance Committee won't walk it either. We're basically seeing a game of chicken, between Waxman and the Blue Dogs as well as between the House and the Senate. Nobody wants to take the tough vote first. But somebody has to, in order to get the ball rolling.
Brian Beutler discerns tension and chaos on the Hill, but I've heard different. I heard Waxman and Mike Ross have stated that talks are ongoing and that a markup could be held as early as Tuesday. And that Steny Hoyer said publicly at a press conference that votes could happen next week. So we don't really know what's going on quite yet. It's hard not to despair just as a reflex, but I wouldn't just yet.
Not that Steny Hoyer and Eric Cantor had to remove doubt that, with respect to Middle East issues, they are shills for the hard-right Israel lobby. But this is a helpful reminder:
Speaking of Iran and that region, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent out a “Dear Colleague” e-mail Tuesday asking for signatures “to the attached letter to President Obama regarding the Middle East peace process.”
The letter says the usual stuff, emphasizing that Washington “must be both a trusted mediator and a devoted friend to Israel” and noting: “Israel will be taking the greatest risks in any peace agreement.”
Curiously, when we opened the attachment, we noticed it was named “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”
Seems as though someone forgot to change the name or something.
The letter's substance is no better than the title, by the way. On a bipartisan basis, this Congress remains in hock to a far-right ideology that rejects peace and prefers expanding settlements and ruthless occupation exhibited by the Netanyahu government. Simply put, the letter is designed to undercut the Obama Administration's efforts at peace.
Waiting for the "J Street Dear Colleague Letter May 2009.pdf." It may be a long wait.
This has been a very interesting week in the fight for health care reform. Let's take a look at some of the major developments.
• Single-payer: Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced S.703, a single-payer health care bill (called the American Health Security Act of 2009), in the Senate. While this would be a companion bill to HR676 on the House side, it's the first time I can remember, and apparently the first time since the death of Paul Wellstone, that anyone in the Senate has carried a single-payer bill. Sanders in the release calls the bill "the most fiscally conservative option for reform" because private insurance overhead would be eliminated, saving over $400 billion dollars annually. Now that such a bill has been introduced in both Houses, there should be a demand from single-payer advocates to get the CBO to score the bill. Without numbers that Washington trusts, and sadly the CBO is the only number-crunching body with that authority, single payer will not be taken seriously. But a true accounting of the cost savings could spur reform. You can find the bill here.
• The Public Option: Howard Dean has jumped squarely into the health care debate from his perch at DFA, advocating strongly for a public insurance option to compete with the private market. Dean has gone so far as to say that without a public option, health care reform essentially doesn't exist.
Obviously, the insurance industry wants no part of a public option, that would force them to compete on price and quality of coverage, instead of the current system of competing to deny care to their customers to maximize profits. They say such a system would put them out of business. To which I say, YAY! What's important to understand is that there are public options and there are public options. Ezra Klein explains the structure of the three most common proposals:
• Single-Payer Lite. This was the rationale you heard during the primary campaign. A public insurance plan able to use Medicare's bargaining power to secure deep discounts for its customers and ensure the maximum possible network would be cheaper and more efficient than private insurers. Over time, this increased efficiency would make the plan more attractive because it could offer more coverage for less money. As consumers recognized this fact, they would increasingly migrate towards the plan, and the public insurer would become, if not a de facto single payer system, something close to it. The public insurer, in this scenario, is a game changer. But it's a game-changer because it's a form of single payer using a mild version of monopsony buying power.
• The Level Playing Field Plan. Insurers, predictably, howled that a public insurer with access to Medicare's market power would put them out of business. (Generally speaking, liberals agreed with that.) The messaging they settled on was conceptually odd but has proven pretty effective. A public insurer, they argued, would not be competing on a "level playing field." This might have caused someone to wonder when, exactly, the market had ever cared about "fair." But instead, this frame has been widely adopted, with Obama telling Chuck Grassley, "I recognize that there's that concern. I think it's a serious one and a real one. And we'll make sure that it gets addressed." In answer to this, Len Nichols proposed a public insurance plan that doesn't have access to Medicare's bargaining power, and this is the policy that CAP's paper advocates. This is not single-payer lite. It's just an insurer without shareholders or highly-paid executives. (I should note that some, like Harold Pollack, believe you could begin with this plan and end with the single-payer lite plan. I'm not convinced, but its possible.)
• The Catch-All. I've heard that the insurance industry and some advocates are interested in a compromise that looks a lot like Medicaid choice. Here, you'd have a public insurance option, but only for people making under a certain income level. It's a way of folding Medicaid into the new system.
If the single-payer lite plan is jettisoned, with the "level playing field" plan offered, such a public option would not achieve the kind of bargaining power to make it cost-effective. You reduce a bit of overhead and eliminate the profit motive to a certain extent, but you will not have done much to force private industry to heel. So if Dr. Dean wants to advocate for a public option, it had better be the right kind. For his part, Max Baucus, who has as much power over health care reform as anyone in Congress, characterized the public option as more of a bargaining chip than an actual policy point:
"Essentially, it's to keep it on the table to encourage the private health insurance industry to move in the direction it knows it should move toward—namely, health insurance reform, which means eliminating pre-existing conditions, guaranteed issue, modified community ratings. [TRANSLATION: Measures that would force the insurers to cover the sick as well as the healthy, at a cost that everyone could afford.] It's all those actions that insurance companies must take in order to provide affordable coverage. And the public option helps encourage the private companies to move in that direction, because they're worried. We might have to modify the public option to get enough votes. I hear some concerns among Republicans about the public option. The main purpose is to keep the health insurance feet to the fire."
Which leads us to...
• Industry Concessions: The insurance industry has offered what I imagine they consider their grand bargain: they will agree to both guaranteed issue (no more denial for pre-existing conditions) AND community rating (charging a flat rate for a community regardless of medical history) in exchange for an individual mandate that forces everyone to buy health care. This would be significant, but the devil is in the details:
The companies left themselves several outs, however. The letter said they would still charge different premiums based on such factors as age, place of residence, family size and benefits package.
"If the goal is to make health care affordable, this concession does not go far enough," said Richard Kirsch, campaign manager for Health Care for America Now. "It still allows insurers to charge much more if you are old." His group, backed by unions and liberals, is trying to build support for sweeping health care changes.
Importantly, insurers did not extend to small businesses their offer to stop charging the sick higher premiums. Small employers who offer coverage can see their premiums zoom up from one year to the next, even if just one worker or family member gets seriously ill.
Ignagni said the industry is working on separate proposals for that problem.
"We are in the process of talking with small-business folks across the country," she said. "We are well on the way to proposing a series of strategies that could be implemented for them."
Lots of outs for themselves, particularly age, which is intimately tied to increased need for care. It's good in the abstract because the industry clearly feels the need to move in the direction of reform. But they sang a lot of this tune in 1993 as well. Kevin Drum has more.
• Massachusetts Debate. One of the more interesting arguments among health care reformers concerns Massachusetts' "universal health care" policy adopted in 2006. It included an individual mandate and shared responsibility for stakeholders to provide subsidies to ensure everyone signed up for insurance. Monica Sanchez took a look at the MassCare plan relative to Barack Obama's principles for health care reform and found it lacking. A sample:
1. Does it protect families' financial health?
NO - Of those surveyed in a fall 2008 survey of Massachusetts residents on healthcare conducted by the Boston Globe and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation: in a recent survey 13% of insured said they were unable to pay for a health service; 13% said they were unable to afford to fill a prescription; and 33% ranked the cost of care their biggest health concern.
2. Does it make health coverage affordable?
NO - not for the middle class and not even for some people with low incomes. According to the report released last month, "Massachusetts' Plan: A Failed Model for Health Care Reform," by Drs. Nardin, Himmelstein, and Woolhandler, in fiscal year 2009, to bring cost increases down from more than 15.4% to 9.4% for CommCare, the state cut benefits and increased copays.
Read the whole thing. Jon Gruber argues that cost control was not entirely a part of the Massachusetts reform, as it focused more on universality. Thus it created what amounts to an entitlement in the hopes that the political dynamic could be changed to focus on bringing down costs once the plan was in place. In other words, there is, as Ezra Klein put it, an embedded political logic to doing coverage first.
States don't really have the bargaining power to bring down costs, nor can they deficit spend, so I don't know how building the political advantage for cost control really helps them, actually. And while this would possibly make sense on the national level, the Obama plan seeks to do everything at once, so it's not really germane.
• Budget Reconciliation. Harry Reid says he is completely open to using the budget process for health care reform, meaning that such legislation would only need 50 votes. Others violently disagree, not just Republicans but people like Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson. In steps Steny Hoyer, of all people, as a mediator.
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did earlier Thursday, Hoyer defended the House’s decision to include budget reconciliation in its budget.
“Reconciliation on healthcare is a fallback position. It is not the preferred option. The preferred option is creating a bipartisan consensus,” Hoyer said [...]
Republicans argue that Democrats, by having reconciliation in their hip pocket, can pull out of any negotiations, whenever they want, making those talks potentially pointless for the GOP.
Hoyer said that if Democrats acted in that way, the Republicans would have a right to complain.
“If they are negotiating in good faith and then we pull the rug out from under them, I think that would be harmful to our objective of passage with a degree of bipartisan support and therefore credibility in the public,” he said.
Without reconciliation as a fallback, Republicans wouldn't even come to the table. So I do think it's a vital tool and shouldn't be set aside just yet. Hoyer had some interesting things to say about single payer and the public option, as well.
It's pretty obvious that the Employee Free Choice Act will be among the most contentious of the new session, and therefore the one where I would have expected Democrats to be the most reticent. Maybe it's the reliance on labor in electoral politics, but they're actually being pretty open about it, at the highest levels. Over the weekend, Steny Hoyer corrected the record on Fox News Sunday about the intent of the bill, which is not to "eliminate the secret ballot election" in the workplace but to improve a broken workplace election process.
Hoyer specifically said that the House would pass Employee Free Choice "early" in the next session. Then the Senate released their first ten bills of the year, and the second one certainly sounds like Employee Free Choice would be folded into it.
S.2 -- Middle Class Opportunity Act of 2009. Sound familiar? This is a retread of a bill sponsored by Senator Chuck Schumer in the last Congress that has a variety of tax reform goals; the additional descriptions in this bill include hints at union support ("ensuring workers can exercise their rights to freely choose to form a union without employer interference") and perhaps another go at the Ledbetter law ("removing barriers to fair pay for all workers").
Considering that the House will vote as early as tomorrow on the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, this collection of bills may get an early passage as well. And Harry Reid is at least being vocal about the bill.
Reid declined to speculate as to when the controversial, union-backed “card-check” legislation will pass the upper chamber. Yet he said the bill is important to him and Obama.
“The union movement was hurt very, very badly in the Bush administration, and we are going to reverse that.”
Reid said he is interested in working with Republicans on card-check.
“But remember,” Reid said with a smile, “we think we only need two Republican votes.”
I like the commitment to cherry-picking. You're not going to get a bipartisan bill on Employee Free Choice, so you might as well go in knowing the numbers.
This is pretty good news and I hope labor keeps pressuring the Democratic leadership to get this passed. The backlash has kind of fizzled and a swift passage is totally realistic.
• Ted Stevens won his primary. That's excellent news. Mark Begich is going to slaughter him in November. Meanwhile Don Young and Sean Parnell are separated by 150 votes with 98% cast. We won't know the outcome of that for a while.
• John McCain has a private lake that he stocks with fish. And he has a tax plan that would save hundreds of thousands of dollars for the kind of people who stock their own private lakes. This isn't rocket science, people. Republicans have been a party of, by, and for the rich for many many years.
• Steny Hoyer shows some rare fire in the drilling debate. Using George Bush to shut down arguments should be as elementary as McCain using his POW status.
Demonstrators in background:Drill now, Drill now... Hoyer: You know, some people don't listen as you noticed. Some people are so convinced of the righteousness of their position, they don't think that they need to listen to others. That's been the history of this administration for the last eight years, why it's been an abysmal administration.
It is a hear no evil, see no evil, but speak a lot of evil administration that is reflected here.
Demonstrators in background: Complete silence
• Bush apparently is kicking himself that he didn't get to lock in 12 years of war and will have to settle for just 8.
• McCain has a new ad up about Obama minimizing the threat of Iran. But wait, he's being completely dishonest about it in addition to the fearmongering! It's truly amazing to see these big tough guy neocons wet their pants over a country like Iran when we have an incalculable military superiority. What a bunch of wimps. Meanwhile, Steve Benen explains the McCain campaign's "video press release" strategy, making a new ad every day that they never air anywhere to troll for media coverage.
In other words, if not for more robust public insurance, it's likely far more people would be without medical coverage. And that's true of the long-term, as well. Employer-sponsored insurance has declined over the last 30 years or so, as rising costs have made it harder for employers and employees to pay for it. If not for the expansions of eligibility for Medicaid and establishment of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, many more people would be without insurance and, as a result, struggling to pay their medical bills.
So the case for expanding public insurance -- ideally, to help cover everybody -- isn't weaker because of the new numbers. If anything, it's stronger.
And of course, the list of uninsured does not count the underinsured.
Days like these kind of make me wish I hadn't written those 7,000 or so posts for the last four years. I mean, I had fun, but it amounted to an authoritarian takeover of government and nothing resembling hope on the horizon. We have a breakdown of the democratic system of government when a political party - the one in the majority - can be bullied into leaving the Constitution in a heap and giving up responsibility to stop the outrages of the Bush years, even when given a mandate to do so. In not wanting the trouble, they are setting a dangerous precedent - that an action is legal as long as the President SAYS it's legal.
And now the standard-bearer of the party, the man many hope will lead the nation and the world in the next eight years, fails to heed the call to reject this capitulation. It could be that he wants the power as President; most Presidents don't want Congress or the courts meddling into their business. It could be he just wants to get elected and doesn't want the trouble that us dirty hippies, who think the Fourth Amendment means as it reads, will provide. Obama is tightening up his access, anyway, at the same time as he calls for bottom-up movements for change, so walling himself off from liberals would fit. I like Obama on some levels and understand perfectly that the only candidate whose views align perfectly with mine is me. But this is a damn stupid move.
More than anything, this betrayal from a rotten-to-the-core Washington establishment just brings things into focus. Republicans as a name brand are screwed for a long time. The House Democratic leadership stinks on ice. But as Howie Klein notes, the leadership beneath them - the second tier - supported the Constitution today.
The movement that was formed in response to this betrayal, the coalition calling itself "Strange Bedfellows," has raised nearly $300,000, and is running full-page ads in the Washington Post calling out Steny Hoyer. You can give here.
There are Bush Dogs on everyone's list and that number will grow in 2008, and more in 2010. We all now know where we stand. There are about 120 Democrats in the House, and maybe 30 in the Senate. It is unacceptable and frankly obnoxious to think that some other Bush Dog like a Mark Udall, who voted for the FISA bill today, being added to the Senate would make any difference. I for one am devoting my energies solely to those who spoke out and who will not betray this movement and their causes. There are two reactions to this: disengagement or refocusing. I can only do the latter.
Here it is. The final indignity. Funding for endless war AND etching out the 4th Amendment will be combined into the same bill to force enough compliance from Bush Dogs to get this bill passed. "By any means necessary" for Hoyer and his corporate lobbying buddies.
The House Rules Committee is meeting at this hour on the "FISA Amedments Act." Later today, they'll be meeting on a technical fix that allows them to waive PAYGO rules and waive consideration of a bill within 24 hours of its rules being set.
The plan is to put the two together.
To be precise, the war supplemental will be attached to the FISA bill. This is being fast-tracked well beyond our ability to stop it. The royalists in the House want war without restrictions and free passes for lawbreakers.
UPDATE: The best information I have is the Rules Committee is acting on the FISA bill right now, and they're waiving the requirements that would conceivably allow them to act on both war funding and FISA as soon as tomorrow. However, war funding may happen tonight, with FISA tomorrow. I apologize for trying to get this information out swiftly. It's still possible but not a done deal.
The handshakes have been made, the contribution checks have been written, and the telecom industry and corporate shill Democrats have joined forces to immunize lawbreaking and undermine the rule of law. This time, for real.
A final deal has been reached on a rewrite of electronic surveillance rules and will be announced Thursday, two congressional aides said.
The aides said the House is likely to take up the legislation Friday....
As of Wednesday, sources said the new bill would allow a federal district court to decide whether to provide retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies being sued for their role in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program....One source said the federal district court deciding on retroactive immunity would review whether there was "substantial evidence" the companies had received assurances from the government that the administration’s program was legal.
Absolutely absurd. Not only does this bill still allow for mass surveillance on American citizens, but according to its provisions, if the Attorney General wrote a "get out of the Constitution free" note to its telecom partners, which we alrady know they did, then they are allowed to violate federal statutes. The telecoms don't have any lawyers who can provide their own analysis, apparently. I guess all the money goes into lobbying. This is total amnesty without any way of discovering who broke the law and when. The entire point of telecom immunity was to shut down any investigations into spying on Americans. Democrats are cupable for having not spoken up to stop this when they had the chance and the Hoyer-Rockefeller axis wants to just bury the bodies.
This will come up for a vote as soon as TOMORROW in the House, despite being just released today. Your representative needs a call. Joe Baca is a Blue Dog who supported the good FISA bill, the one without amnesty. He in particular needs some attention.
When this reaches the Senate, it will be another accountability moment for Dianne Feinstein. She has tried to duck this debate repeatedly, but she can tell us by her vote where she stands - with corporate execs and lobbyists, or with the rule of law and the right to privacy.
The two presumptive presidential nominees have differed over the issue. A senior aide to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., recently indicated the senator would support granting immunity to the phone companies. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was among the most vocal opponents of immunity in the Senate debate last year.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Bankston applauded Obama for his opposition to immunity for the phone companies, and he said he would "call upon him to be as vocal as possible on immunity in the coming days."
A spokesman for the Obama campaign didn't return phone calls or emails seeking comment for this article.
He's too invested in the power structure to try and change it at this stage. Bottom line. We're going to build our own power channel and leverage from the side of civil liberties. It'll make for Strange Bedfellows but people are genuinely pissed off at this latest effort to merge corporate and political power over that of the people.
UPDATE: This Obama ad for John Barrow is a symphony of lies. This is a very rough day to be a Democrat.
The FISA debacle could happen as early as Friday. Nobody has seen the final bill except the cretins who are moving it forward, including the lobbyists who wrote it. Because the scared bunnies at the DCCC are so worried about keeping power and saving their blessed freshman Dems from criticism (even though it won't), this bill has to be fast-tracked and pushed through under the dead of night.
And if you think that we only have to wait for Obama's election to end this kind of backroom dealing and lobbyist-written legislation, consider that he is trying to protect an incumbent who is one of the worst reactionaries in the Democratic caucus, who supports the FISA bill completely, who defines himself by total resistance to Democratic values, and who will not be an asset to anything resembling a progressive agenda:
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has taped a radio commercial on behalf of U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Savannah, who faces a July 15 primary challenge.
It's the first case of Obama involving himself in a local race in Georgia.
Details of when the ad will start airing and where it will be broadcast - the 12th District covers much of east Georgia, including portions of Augusta and Savannah - were not immediately available Wednesday.
But the Obama campaign made clear to my colleague Aaron Sheinin that it sees Barrow, a two-term Democrat, as an important ally. We've got calls into the Barrow campaign, but haven't heard from them yet.
As Matt Stoller notes, this is part and parcel with Obama consolidating the party. He wants to do a favor for a conservative Democrat who might be in a position to return the favor for him. Regina Thomas, the progressive challenging Barrow, will support progressive values and doesn't need any favors, the logic goes.
This is everything Obama claims so vehemently to oppose, claims he wants to end. And yet the Congress under the control of his party is about to enact a radical bill to legalize vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and immunize telecoms who broke our country's laws for years. And not only is Obama doing nothing about any of that, but far more, he's actively intervening in a Democratic primary to help one of the worst enablers of all of this stay in power, while helping to defeat an insurgent, community-based challenger.
None of that is enjoyable to write or accept, but those are just facts. There is a disturbing tendency on all sides to view Obama through a reductive Manichean lens -- either he's the embodiment of pure transformative Good who is going magically to cleanse our polity the minute he takes office, or he's nothing other than a mindless, passive tool of the establishment whose pretty rhetoric masks a barren ambition for power and who is no better than McCain. Neither of those caricatures is remotely accurate, and a John McCain presidency would be an unmitigated disaster on every level.
But it's critical to keep in mind that Obama is a politician and, like all people, is plagued by significant imperfections. He has largely entrenched himself in, and is dependent upon, the power structure he says he wants to undermine. Uncritical devotion to political leaders, including him, is destructive. Obama needs pressure, criticism, checks, and real scrutiny just like anyone else in power in order to keep him accountable, responsive, and faithful to the principles he claims are the ones driving him.
That's absolutely right. I called on Obama from the moment he clinched the nomination to shut down this FISA bill. It undermined his national security argument, trashed the Constitution, and delivered immunity to lawbreaking. Now he's not only indifferent to such calls, he's actively enabling those "Democrats" who would do the deed.
I guess you could become disillusioned and turn away from politics entirely, smugly tell everyone you know (and some you don't) that you were right all along and Obama's no saint (though I certainly never said he was). Or you can hold him accountable. The Strange Bedfellows coalition is building, having raised nearly $200,000 in a day, with more to come. We will stand up and demand our civil liberties and our Constitutional rights, and attack those politicians, from either political party, who seek to undermine them.
Steny Hoyer's pathetic lie about why he engineered a FISA bill that grants immunity to the telecoms and the Bush Administration is so laughably bad that you wonder how this guy ever got elected Majority Leader in the first place. He certainly wilts in the spotlight.
Asked why Democrats don’t put aside the surveillance legislation until a new president is elected in November, Hoyer said he would prefer to do so, but can’t because so many House Democrats are prepared to vote for the Senate bill that he and other top House Democrats oppose.
“Clearly enough Democrats have indicated in the House they would vote for the Senate bill if it came to the floor. The alternatives are either the Senate bill or a bill significantly better” reached through negotiations with the Senate and the White House, he said.
“Many Democrats have indicated to me they are willing to wait as long as an alternative is in sight. If not, they are prepared to vote for the Senate bill,” Hoyer said.
That's just not factually correct. They all voted with the stronger House bill just a few months ago. They don't have the ability to vote for the Senate bill unless Hoyer and the leadership bring it to the floor. The discharge petition that would force the bill to a vote has been largely dormant for the past two months. It's just completely disingenuous for Hoyer to suggest he's controlled by the rank and file.
Glenn Greenwald reports that his efforts to hold Hoyer accountable for sanctioning lawbreaking are growing.
First, the amount raised in the last 24 hours is now a truly extraordinary $90,000 -- bringing the total for this campaign over $170,000. The more that number goes up, the more potent this campaign will be, the harder it will hit its deserving targets. Contributions can be made here.
The ACLU Press Release announcing this new coalition, which is being called "Strange Bedfellows," is here. We expect to announce numerous other additions to the coalition -- many quite significant -- very shortly [...]
As a result, our campaign will be unveiled in two phases, with Phase I to entail an immediate ad campaign aimed at three key Democratic enablers of this bill -- Hoyer, Chris Carney, and Blue Dog Rep. John Barrow of Georgia. The reasons for targeting Hoyer are self-evident and were set forth yesterday, and the campaign against Carney -- who has long bee one of the Blue Dogs spearheading the effort behind this bill -- is already underway and will continue.
Rep. John Barrow was, like Carney, one of the 21 Blue Dogs who signed the letter to Nancy Pelosi back in March demanding that they be allowed to vote on the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill. In July, Barrow faces a very credible primary challenger -- Georgia State House Rep. Regina Thomas -- who is much more in step with the district's Democratic base.
All good enough. Carney doesn't have a primary opponent, but to be honest, he can have his negatives increased so he's replaced by a Republican. Really doesn't matter a bit to me.
What Hoyer ought to be worried about comes next.
Phase II will involve a massive money bomb, to be planned by the same people who were behind the money bombs that raised millions and millions of dollars for the Ron Paul presidential campaign. The dates and other details for that will be announced shortly.
The plan there is to raise an extraordinary amount of money -- dwarfing the $90,000 raised in the last 24 hours -- by going to all of the various constituents of each member of this coalition in order to fuel a real campaign in defense of civil liberties, constitutional protections and the rule of law. The money raised will be used to oppose and punish those vulnerable members of Congress who continue to support the evisceration of our constitutional framework and core civil liberties, while supporting candidates and office-holders who meaningfully oppose that assault.
Like the ACLU said, it's Strange Bedfellows. But if citizens with different views can come together on supporting civil liberties and the rule of law, I enthusiastically support it. You can become a strange bedfellow here.
A citizen-led to use millions and millions of dollars attacking Steny Hoyer is something I can get behind.
It is now definitively clear that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is the driving force behind a bill -- written by GOP Sen. Kit Bond -- to vest the President with vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to vest lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty [...]
As a result, there is a major new campaign beginning today aimed at Hoyer and a handful of other key members of Congress who enable telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping. In order to raise as much money as possible for this campaign -- far more than the $85,000 raised (and still being spent) in Chris Carney's district as a result of his support for warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty -- we are working to create an alliance with numerous organizations and factions across the ideological spectrum which oppose civil liberties erosions, as well as with as many blogs as possible (modeled vaguely after the ideologically diverse alliance that has arisen in Britain in opposition to the sprawling, lawless surveillance state). We hope to announce details about the participating individuals and groups very shortly. But given the time pressures, it's vital to be able to have as many resources as possible, as quickly as possible, for this campaign. The more money raised, the greater the disruptive impact will be.
You can donate here. Hoyer is part of the working conservative majority that is working to immunize the Bush Administration for lawbreaking and undermine the Democratic Congress. He has nothing but contempt for the rule of law, and he wishes only to accumulate more power and control Congress for decades. He doesn't think the section of the electorate that believes in civil liberties can hurt him or cut into his power. He's wrong. Yesterday progressive Donna Edwards was elected to Congress and she's only the beginning. Hoyer was apparently at the victory celebration and there's no doubt he'll try to assimilate her into the Borg.
I almost have more respect for Hoyer, because you know where you stand with him, than for someone like Harry Reid who tries to oppose the FISA bill while allowing it to go forward at the same time.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he wouldn't support the deal, which would break an impasse over whether U.S. telephone companies alleged to have participated in the government's warrantless wiretapping program should be given immunity from civil lawsuits.
Many Democrats are still anxious about the proposed agreement, which would place lawsuits involving telephone companies in federal courts.
"I will not support that, but a lot of people will," Reid said.
Actually, Harry, if you don't support it, you could go ahead and not bring it up for a vote. It sounds like Reid and Dick Durbin are against it, and Durbin intimates that members of the House leadership don't like it. Hoyer is steamrolling everybody on this.
The leader of the party could shut it down tomorrow. Sen. Obama, our nation turns its lonely eye to you. As for Hoyer, he'll get his comeuppance as well.
Bill Of Rights OK'd For Destruction By Fourth Of July
wThere's not a lot more that can be said about this FISA abomination, but you may want to keep up with developments, so here's the latest.
House and Senate leaders of both parties said negotiators were near a deal on extending the authority to track terror suspects overseas while protecting the civil liberties of Americans as spy agencies sift through cell phone calls and other electronic communications that did not exist when the surveillance law first came into being.
Senior Congressional officials said they hoped to seal an agreement early this week and quickly vote in the House and Senate on legislation that expired back in February, though the administration retained the authority to continue spying on terror suspects it already had in its sights. That power begins slipping later this summer.
Well, actually, no. The "power" would revert back to the FISA court, which has only rejected past warrants for surveillance on the technical grounds that the foreign communications go through a domestic switcher, and all that really would need to be done is a patch treating those calls as foreign communications. Off of that molehill is where we are building this mountain of crap.
The main sticking point between the House and Senate has been President Bush’s demand that phone companies that cooperated in the wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks be given blanket immunity from legal action by customers who claim their rights were violated by warrantless surveillance. The Senate went along with the plan but the House balked.
After weeks of talks, lawmakers have worked out a deal that would allow federal courts to settle the question of whether the telecommunications companies should be protected because they were assured their participation was legal.
No, they're not going to allow federal courts to "settle the question." They're asking courts to rule on whether the Attorney General gave telecom companies a "Violate the 4th Amendment" permission slip. By confining the matter to one of paperwork, district courts will not be ruling on the legality of the spying but merely confirming that the executive branch said it was OK to spy. This is a pretext for a completely outraegous circumstance - the executive branch breaking the law, and then legalizing it by showing that they wrote down that they could break the law.
This, along with blank check funding for war into the next President's term, is being given a deadline date by the House leadership, which always works out perfectly.
Lawmakers also have to get more serious this week about finishing up an overdue bill to fund combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The measure has been slowed by fights over an extension of unemployment pay, new veterans education benefits and general Democratic opposition to Bush administration war policy.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wants the matter settled before Congress breaks for Independence Day at the end of next week, suggesting she is ready to bring the issue to a head.
“We want to pass a bill that will be signed by the president,” she said. “And that will happen before we leave for the Fourth of July. So the timing is sometime between now and then. I feel confident that that will happen.”
There's even talk that the FISA bill and the war funding bill will be COMBINED. Which would certainly wrap up the craven nature of the action into a nice, neat bow, so there's at least something to be said for it. The fact that the deadline is the date marking the birth of the nation gives it a little layer of irony.
CQ has a little more, noting that the compromise, which involves allowing district courts to decide the fate of immunity, was worked out WITHOUT the heads of the Judiciary Committees, or any of the party leadership on either side. This is Steny Hoyer and Jello Jay Rockefeller's ballgame. CQ seems to think that this deal is not yet hardened in stone, but I'm not as sanguine. We need to fight this nonsense, of course, but more than anything this legislation is a slap in the face to those who have prolonged this debate until they are satisfied with the civil liberties and privacy protections. You get the feeling that Hoyer wants to say to the caucus "Can't you let me finish off the Fourth Amendment and go away so we can move on to important items like naming more post offices? I made it LOOK like both sides will get their day in court, what more would you have me do?"
I've previously called for Sen. Obama to step in and put a stop to this nonsense, telling the Hoyer-Rockefeller axis that this undermines his own security goals and debases our ideals as a nation. If he doesn't there really isn't much hope of getting this halted. You can contact him at his Senate website, or at his campaign site.ar
A bipartisan group of congressional negotiators neared a deal yesterday on controversial wiretapping legislation that could be unveiled as early as next week, according to Capitol Hill sources and civil liberties advocates monitoring the talks.
Lawmakers have been wrangling for months over how to extend warrantless surveillance that Bush administration officials consider central to national security. Agreement has proved elusive because of privacy concerns as well as questions about telecommunications companies seeking immunity from lawsuits over their role in helping the government monitor phone calls and e-mail after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks [...]
A key element of the new plan would give U.S. district courts the chance to evaluate whether telecommunications companies deserve retroactive protection from lawsuits. A previous proposal floated by Republicans would have put the question to the secret FISA court that approves warrants.
CQ Politics has more. It looks to me like district courts won't be evaluating whether the telecoms broke the law, but whether they got a permission slip to do so. If the courts are only ruling on the proper filing of documents, then it's not a ruling at all. The ACLU writes:
“This FISA deal looks like the unconstitutional Senate bill in sheep’s clothing. Whatever silk purse Hoyer tries to make of Bond's sow's ear and no matter how they try to sell it, the end result of all this negotiating will be exactly what the administration has wanted from the beginning — FISA rewritten to delete court oversight of surveillance and immunity for its pals at the telephone companies.”
“From the language we’ve seen, we’re back at square one, looking at a bill just like the old Senate bill that lacks meaningful judicial involvement. The Fourth Amendment requires prior and individual court review before the government digs into our private conversations. It is clear the next vote will be on a bill that fails this test — by permitting the government to conduct mass untargeted surveillance, sometimes without prior court review, and sometimes with prior court review — and then only when the government unilaterally decides that it is willing and able to answer to the judicial branch.”
“It is also clear that the deal is intentionally designed to grant immunity to companies that facilitated illegal wiretapping. If the only role for the court — be it District or a FISA court — is to determine whether the companies received a request from the Administration, and not to determine whether those requests were legal, it’s a sham review. The president has publicly acknowledged that the companies were repeatedly sent authorizations to turn over Americans phone calls and emails. It is absolutely guaranteed that current and future cases will never determine whether this administration and its friends in the telecom industry broke the law.”
A travesty. A lot of people are wondering what Steny Hoyer's game is - is it the telecom money, is he trying to hide the conduct of his colleagues who failed to raise objections after being informed about illegal spying, is he afraid of Republicans beating him up as in league with the terrorists. Actually, I just think it's who he is. He has an arrogant belief that Americans don't deserve the kind of privacy protections they've historically been afforded, and that their Washington minders know best. The money is helpful, the GOP bashing makes him fearful, but ultimately, that's what it comes down to.
House Democrats are likely to drop a 13-week extension of unemployment insurance benefits from a major spending package that includes continued funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that would create a new education benefit for military veterans returning from the battlefields.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said yesterday that the unemployment insurance provision would "probably not" be part of the final package of war and domestic spending, which has become the most important legislative battle this spring between congressional Democrats and President Bush [...]
The version of the bill approved by the Senate on May 22 would cost more than $250 billion over 10 years, a price tag that the fiscally conservative caucus of "Blue Dog" House Democrats opposes. The bill would provide $165 billion to fund the two wars into the next presidency, along with billions of dollars more for domestic programs.
The total absurdity about Blue Dogs balking at the price tag of domestic spending in a bill that puts $165 BILLION dollars for war funding OFF THE BOOKS is about to send my fist through this computer screen. I mean good Lord.
If Obama wins, Democrats will own this war. And all of these Blue Dogs will have a choice to make, and they'll either understand the meaning of responsibility or we'll have to hold them to account. There's so much rot in the Democratic Party to clear away, it's going to be a rough road.
This is such a useless action. The President has a single-issue agenda for the rest of his second term, and that's getting himself immunity from any repercussions to his illegal actions. For some reason the Democrats are aiding and abetting in that scheme, and they're using lobbyist-written legislation to do 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.
Congress has been wrestling for months with an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with the immunity issue the primary sticking point.
Many Democrats want the companies held accountable for participating in the program, which was initiated in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The White House, however, has insisted that the participation of the telecoms is crucial to monitoring conversations between potential terrorists. President Bush has vowed to veto any bill that does not contain immunity.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Wednesday a FISA deal is “still in flux” but he described the latest developments as “promising” and said he hoped to have a solution soon.
Stunning. There is no reason to pass anything at all. FISA is perfectly robust to handle any needed wiretaps. You can add a patch to finish off the technical fix allowing for international calls that go through a domestic circuit to be surveilled, but nothing else is necessary.
Hoyer is absolutely planning to sell us out on this, because he's interested in protecting the status quo and that includes George Bush. What a terrible House Majority Leader - you literally couldn't pick anyone worse.
We are such a long way away from having the government we need to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The leadership includes a lot of dead wood, the establishment opinion is respected above all else, the job of legislation is outsourced to lobbyists, and the people get screwed. And Obama's special awesomeness isn't going to wipe this rot away, either. We've got so much work to do.
UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler has an interesting post that tries to read Hoyer's mind on this and suggests that he's actually trying to create a kind of Church Committee that would investigate all of the Bush Administration's dirty laundry. I have absolutely no faith that this leadership would pull off such a committee in any kind of satisfying way, but considering that the lawsuits aren't likely to be satisfying either and the real goal is discovery and information, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. In addition, since the Administration wouldn't agree to such a committee unless they controlled it, and so it would derail the whole bill, perhaps it'll keep the process stalled until there's a new President, which in the final analysis is the best we can hope for.
So the House is actually moving forward on the contempt votes for Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten in the US Attorneys case. Kagro X has all the details. But what's interesting to me is that the initial attempt by the Republicans to dirty up this vote came with a motion to adjourn before they had to face it. Only thing is, the motion to adjourn took place in the middle of the late Tom Lantos' memorial service on the floor of the House.
They're nice people.
UPDATE: Adding to the Fighting Dem attitude of the last 24 hours, we have this story suggesting that the House would be fine with letting the Protect America Act expire and never taking up the Senate version of the FISA bill. This would be a tremendous smack in the face to Bush, and while I don't believe it for the moment, they're saying all the right things.
Democrats insisted that a lapse would have no real effect.
The expiration of the powers “doesn’t mean we are somehow vulnerable again,” said Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
The lapsing of the deadline would have little practical effect on intelligence gathering. Intelligence officials would be able to intercept communications from Qaeda members or other identified terrorist groups for a year after the initial eavesdropping authorization for that particular group.
If a new terrorist group is identified after Saturday, intelligence officials would not be able to use the broadened eavesdropping authority. They would be able to seek a warrant under the more restrictive standards in place for three decades through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [...]
“The president’s presentation this morning was, I think, basically dishonest,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader.
Intelligence officials could continue intercepting suspect communications even if the deadline passes, Mr. Hoyer said. In pushing so hard for immunity for the utilities, he added, the Bush administration is “very nervous about what might be disclosed” if the lawsuits against the companies are allowed to continue.
“To some degree, therefore, I think it is a cover-up,” Mr. Hoyer said.
This would be an unprecedented show of backbone on the part of people like Steny Hoyer to ignore the pathetic pleadings of the President. That's why I don't quite believe it yet.
UPDATE: More on the Repubs disrupting the Lantos memorial here.
Hoyer had signs up outside, and he loves the Maryland flag, though it made him look a bit like the Congressman from Medieval Times.
Get that man a writing job!
The context of this is the Donna Edwards-Al Wynn race in MD-04, which we can win. I know Mark Pera got trounced last night, and it turns out that John Laesch narrowly lost to Bill Foster, although provisional and overseas ballots could change that. But Donna Edwards, who came close last time, is the best opportunity for a progressive to beat an incumbent Bush Dog Democrat.
The Congress is too busy giving away money to people they hope to have vote for them (not that it's wrong, but some long-term regulatory and policy shifts instead of handouts would be nice) to bother themselves with the rule of law.
House Democrats will postpone votes on criminal contempt citations against White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, while congressional leaders work with President Bush on a bipartisan stimulus package to fend off an economic downturn, according to party leaders and leadership aides.
Senior Democrats have decided that holding a controversial vote on the contempt citations, which have already been approved by the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, would “step on their message” of bipartisan unity in the midst of the stimulus package talks.
It's enough of a struggle to get Congress to walk, you don't expect them to chew gum at the same time, do you?
“Right now, we’re focused on working in a bipartisan fashion on [the] stimulus,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), indicating that the contempt vote is not expected for weeks, depending on how quickly the stimulus package moves.
Brendan Daly, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said “no decision has been made” as to when a criminal contempt vote would be held by the House.
These citations were originally approved in the Judiciary Committee LAST JULY, by the way.
They will NEVER be voted upon, I think that much is clear. There will always be an excuse. And there will always be Blue Dogs unwilling to "look weak" by doing something strong. Democratic aides admit they don't even have the votes in the House to protect their own oversight responsibilities. And so a President will have set the precedent of extending executive privilege even further, and Congress will become even more irrelevant.
I liked it better when they were out of session, it was much easier on my stomach.
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