A Lawsuit Challenges The Two-Thirds Rule

It seems thirty years or so too late, but a former UCLA chancellor and director of the MOCA in Los Angeles named Charles Young filed suit against the provision in Proposition 13, passed in 1978, that requires a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to raise taxes. The legal theory behind the case mirrors the theory behind the attempted repeal of Prop. 8 this year, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

The legal theory of the suit, which names the Legislature's chief clerks as the technical defendants, is that when voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978, cutting property taxes and requiring a two-thirds vote for tax increases, it was a "revision" of the state constitution rather than an "amendment."

The constitution allows amendments to be made by initiative petition but allows revisions - generally a more fundamental change - to be made only through a constitutional revision commission or a constitutional convention.

It's essentially the same argument that opponents of Proposition 8, the 2008 measure that outlawed same-sex marriages, made in attempting to persuade the state Supreme Court to void that measure. But the court, which had earlier sanctioned same-sex marriages, ruled that Proposition 8 was valid.

I'm a bit surprised that Young didn't include the single-subject rule in his charges, as the property tax rules and the two-thirds requirement for taxes don't seem to bear much relationship to one another. Of course, that has already been argued before the state Supreme Court, along with the revision argument, equal protection concerns and about a half-dozen other charges, four months after passage, in Amador Valley, and the Supreme Court upheld the initiative. Here's the way the revision argument played out back then.

The California Supreme Court held that although Proposition 13 would result in various substantial changes to the constitution, it was only an amendment because the changes were narrowly tailored to the objective of changing the taxation system. Id. at 228. According to the Court, a change in the voting requirement did not amount to a revision of the constitution. The Court further stated it was not uncommon to have similar voting requirements for financial matters, and that the Proposition would not effect home rule. Id. The Court cited Article XIII, Section 20 of the State Constitution that authorizes the legislature to set maximum property tax rates. Id. at 228. The Court concluded this new article, implemented by Proposition 13, would be no more threatening to home rule than Article XIII, § 20. Id. The Court, while not endorsing the Proposition, did state the initiative process was a direct form of government from the people. Id. Finally, the court held that it would not limit the ability of people, through the initiative process, to achieve such a limited purpose of a new system of taxation. Id.

The Court upheld every aspect of Prop. 13 at that time, and the law has withstood multiple legal challenges over the years. Like with Proposition 8, the Court seems loath to overturn a vote of the people, and now we're 31 years down the road. Of course, this forms the core of Charles Young's argument, that the effects of Prop. 13 are powerful evidence that it is not merely an amendment, but a major revision affecting the lives of all California's citizens.

I'm skeptical that this can get off the ground, but I see little harm in it. And maybe putting Prop. 13 on trial, and laying out the effects in sharp detail, could lead to closing the loophole and building a sustainable revenue base.

Pushback: SEIU Potential Walk-Out, Corporate Tax Cut Repeal, Court Overturns Medi-Cal Cuts

Rumors ran rampant yesterday that state employees, pushed too far by yet another salary cut (totaling 20% over the course of the year), would potentially strike.

Doug Crooks, Director of Communications with the Service Employees International Union’s local 1000, which represents more than 95,000 state employees, declined to confirm the rumor but said any decision would be made by the employees through an authorization vote.

“In the first place, that decision hasn’t been made yet,” said Crooks about the plan to strike. “That decision hasn’t been made yet. We are definitely going to strongly oppose and do everything we can to prevent the governor from imposing a fourth furlough day. But check back with me Monday.”

“The bottom line is we negotiated with this governor in good faith and we agreed on a contract that would save $340 million dollars immediately, and if applied to all state employees it would save the state a billion dollars. That’s billion with a ‘B.’ And for the governor to undermine that contract now is beyond irresponsible. He’s made the state employee a pawn” in the state budget negotiations.

“Well actually, it’s a five percent cut on top of those three furlough days,” explained Alicia Trost, a spokesperson for Senate leader Darrell Steinberg. “It’s simply a scare tactic by the governor, yet another, and we feel the state workforce has already paid their fair share. What’s worse is that it would have a horrible effect on the economy if state workers were to lose up to 20 percent of their buying power.”

By the way, Mr. Stogie just lost a furlough case, with a judge tentatively ruling that he cannot furlough the legal staff of the State Compensation Insurance Fund, which has emboldened the larger pool of workers in SEIU. But more to the point, in the world of Arnold Antionette and the Yacht Party, workers making a median income getting 20% salary cuts while the largest corporations doing business in the state get a massive corporate tax break is considered "everyone paying their fair share."

Speaking of which, Lenny Goldberg offers the text of an initiative to repeal the negotiated-in-secret corporate tax cuts and save the state $2.5 billion dollars a year. Opponents typically respond with race-to-the-bottom rhetoric about businesses leaving the state, which isn't true, by the way.

Finally, a federal appeals court ruled that California cannot cut Medi-Cal reimbursements, in an opinion written by a George W. Bush appointee. The familiar pattern of breaking the law to cut the budget often runs up against judicial review, and so the criminals in Sacramento - considering what they're attempting, I don't consider that hyperbole - will have to try something else to achieve their long-sought destruction of the social safety net.

They're Suing

One thing this whole FISA business has taught us is that most of our friends are very likely not in the Congress, they're in the groups doing tireless work year after year to help protect our liberties. The ACLU is one such friend.

Today, in a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy, the Senate passed an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was approved by a vote of 69 to 28 and is expected to be signed into law by President Bush shortly. This bill essentially legalizes the president’s unlawful warrantless wiretapping program revealed in December 2005 by the New York Times.

“Once again, Congress blinked and succumbed to the president’s fear-mongering. With today’s vote, the government has been given a green light to expand its power to spy on Americans and run roughshod over the Constitution,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American.” [...]

In advance of the president’s signature, the ACLU announced its plan to challenge the new law in court.

“This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.”

Another friend, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will sign on to the lawsuit. Raw Story has more.

There are a lot of nodes of power in the political arena, and elected officials are just one of those nodes. The ACLU is so very important in this fight and so many others. You can consider to give them a donation at this link. Rather than throw money down a pit of campaign ads, it may be more beneficial to support the existing structures that do great work in holding government accountable.

UPDATE: In case you're unaware what a group like the ACLU is up against, let me bring you this:

When U.S. law groups announced in April that they were hiring the nation's top criminal defense lawyers to defend alleged al Qaeda terrorists at the war court here, one executive called the lawyers "The A Team.''

Now, they're the No-Pay Team.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged arch-terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury Department over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to this remote U.S. Navy base from as far as Boise, Idaho.

The Treasury division, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, is the same unit that polices American citizens' travel to Cuba. Its authority to license defense costs at the war courts here, called military commissions, comes from anti-terror legislation.

Tuesday, ACLU director Anthony Romero accused the Bush administration of foot-dragging, noting civilian defense lawyers were slow to receive security clearances to meet accused terrorists held for years without access to attorneys.

Because they, like so many nonprofits, aren't blessed with unlimited funding, they have to, in this case, rely on the very group they're fighting in court for their survival. The lawyers working at Gitmo and in the courts to stop unconstitutional power grabs don't deserve this kind of treatment. They need our help.

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.

Here We Go

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.

Rep. Joe Baca, D-Calif. -- Phone: (202) 225-6161, Fax: (202) 225-8671

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.

Oh, and Obama? Ducking this debate as fast as he can.

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.

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

Natch

Joseph Nacchio was the CEO of Qwest Communications, and seven months before 9-11 (let me repeat, BEFORE 9-11), he and his company were asked to assist the US government in providing access to their communications networks without a warrant. Of all the telecoms, Nacchio and Qwest were the only ones to refuse. The government consequently pulled a bunch of their top-secret contracts and generally made it impossible for Qwest to do business. The stock dropped precipitously, and later federal prosecutors arrested Nacchio for insider trading, for having sold a significant amount of his holdings before the stock tanked. He claimed that he was actually trying to raise capital to exercise options and buy more stock, as he expected the government contracts to be renewed. This all went to trial and Nacchio was convicted last year.

But today, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction, and ordered a new trial with a new judge, as the old one excluded evidence from an expert witness that would have validated Nacchio's claims. In a new trial, even more information about the Bush Administration's efforts to immediately conduct massive spying on American citizens upon the moment they entered office will come to light. The goal was total information awareness, an enormous drift net of data that could be used to any of a thousand pernicious ends. Among the evidence that could be provided are those secret contracts and communications on why they were cancelled, and when.

This is why you don't give blanket amnesty to lawsuits where the truth about illegal spying and surveillance could emerge.

Untangling DiFi on FISA

Marcy Wheeler has two excellent stories up today at her new home which I highly recommend to you if you want to understand Dianne Feinstein's evolving position on FISA and retroactive immunity for the telecoms. We know that, several weeks ago, Feinstein was wholly in support of immunity, having happily voted for it in the Intelligence Committee. During yesterday's floor debate, she offered a couple amendments, both with the goal of putting the warrantless wiretapping program and all questions about it, now and forever, under the authority of the FISA court. In Marcy's first piece, she notes the conservative reaction to Feinstein's amendment asking that the question of immunity be decided by the FISA court instead of the Congress.

Now, before Orrin Hatch started accusing "partisan blogs" of fear-mongering on this debate, he had an apoplectic fit about DiFi's amendment, lumping it in with more generalized DFH opposition to immunity. He strongly suggested DiFi's amendment would be a poison pill for him--and presumably the other Republicans following Dick Cheney's orders dutifully.

And there's a reason for that. When the SSCI passed their immunity bill, they did so only by inventing the fiction that it was legal for telecoms to wiretap at the behest of the government if they had the authorization of the Attorney General or "certain other officers." They did so because they know--having read the authorization letters--that one of the letters (presumably the one for March 11, 2004), was signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.

This is important because the FISA court, being authorized to view classified information, would be able to view all the relevant documents, and may make the ruling that people not authorized to sign off on the wiretapping program did so, which would make the telecoms liable for continuing the wiretapping program beyond March 10, 2004, at a point when the AG and the Acting AG determined it to be unlawful.

In other words, DiFi's amendment threatens to scuttle the real intent of the immunity provision, protecting Bush from any legal consequences for wiretapping illegally.

We all know how sloppy and reliant on extreme theories of unchecked executive power the Bush Administration is. This would put them in a tremendous bind. And Feinstein's signal that she would "have a very tough time" voting for the full bill without this compromise, which is co-sponsored by Bill Nelson, means that the more moderate faction of the Democratic caucus is not interested in handing over blanket immunity (I reserve the right to be disappointed in DiFi if and when she turns her back on this).

In a later post, Wheeler takes a closer look at the DiFi amendment and her floor statement. As I noted, Feinstein was initially making all kinds of excuses that the amnesty she voted for in the committee wasn't really amnesty, that the poor telecom companies can't defend themselves because Bush is handcuffing them by invoking state secrets, that they acted after 9/11 to help protect the nation (even though the government was asking for telecom help before 9/11), that "These companies have no financial motives in providing assistance to the Government." That's why it was such a surprising outcome to have her next introduce this amendment. But she goes on to imply that the Bush Administration was relying on inherent authority under Article II to make legal their wiretapping program, and that it's high time we got some judicial review over that from a court able to hear secret testimony (so the government can't hide behind the state secrets privilege). Here's the relevant part of DiFi's statement:

The amendment I am going to submit would put before the FISA Court the question of whether the telecommunications companies should, in fact, receive immunity based on the law.

The FISA Court would be required to act, en banc, and how this is, is 15 judges, Federal judges, appointed by the Chief Justice, they sit 24/7, and this is all they do, they would act en banc. They would look at the following: Did the letters sent to the carriers which were repeated virtually every 35 to 45 days over the last 4 to 5 years, did the letters sent to the carriers meet the conditions of law.

Section 2511 of title 18 clearly states that a certification from the Government is required in cases where there is no court order. That is the only two ways that FISA allows this to proceed, by written certification or by court order.

The Government has to certify in writing that all statutory requirements for the company's assistance have been met. So the FISA Court would first look at whether the letter sent to the companies met the terms of this law. The court would then look at, if the companies provided assistance, was it done in good faith and pursuant to a belief that the compliance was legal.

Finally, the FISA Court would ask: Did the defendants actually provide assistance? If the FISA Court finds that defendant did not provide any assistance to the Government or that the assistance either met the legal requirements of the law or was reasonably and in good faith, the immunity provision would apply.

If the FISA Court finds that none of these requirements were met, immunity would not apply to the defendant companies. I think the merit of this approach is it preserves judicial review, the method we look at in order to decide questions of legality.

Now, the bulk of the Members of this body, probably 90 percent of them, have not been able to see the written certification, so you do not know what was there. What we ask in this amendment is: FISA Court, you take a look at these letters, and you make a ruling as to whether they essentially meet the certification requirements of the FISA law.

Therefore, there is judicial review to determine whether, under existing law, this immunity should be forthcoming. It is a narrowing of the immunity provisions of the Intelligence bill. I think it makes sense. I read the letters. I am a layperson, I am not a lawyer. I cannot say whether they met the immunity provisions. Others can say that.

But it should be up to a court to make that decision. It seems to me that if the FISA Court finds that none of these requirements were met, immunity would not apply to the defendant companies.

The key point to make here is that Feinstein HAS seen these letters. She knows what they say and who authorized them. She's claiming that she doesn't know whether or not the telecoms are eligible for immunity (then why did she vote for it?), but clearly she has a little more knowledge than the average citizen or even the average Senator. And this gets to the heart of all of the crazy unitary executive theories that the Administration has been making from practically the moment they got into office.

So, there has obviously been a subtle but important shift in Feinstein's thinking. And without the concerted effort of the progressive grassroots in California, I think it's fair to say that wouldn't have happened. The Feinstein bloc is now another hurdle for those who want to immunize phone companies for lawbreaking, maybe one that's insurmountable and can derail the whole bill. It's up to the grassroots to hold Feinstein to her word. Her amendment deserves a full and honest hearing. If it passes, we can trust the judicial review process to go forward. But if it fails, the real question is whether Feinstein will be as good as her word, and block the bill for failing to have proper oversight. This is why we must continue the pressure over the holidays and let her know that we're still watching.