Yeah, I know. It’s E.J. Dionne and everything, but as my dad likes to say, “Even a broken Grandfather clock is right twice a day.”
Today he talks about the Great FISA Fold, and for once, he’s right on the money (on the basics, anyway.) It’s surely worth trying to understand why the FISA fold happened, and Dionne tries to do just that.
Most Democrats opposed the bill, but 41 (including Shuler) voted yes, allowing it to pass. (Murphy remained passionately opposed.) The one Democratic victory: The legislation expires in six months, meaning the debate will resume this fall. But Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.) warned his colleagues that “when you give up your rights under the Constitution, it is not likely you are going to regain them.”
The episode was the culmination of a shameful era in which serious issues related to national security and civil liberties were debated in a climate of fear and intimidation, saturated by political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.
Dionne, being Dionne, seems to imply that the Democrats alone were responsible for operating solely by the polestar of “political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.” Fact is, both sides are, let’s face it.
Every inch of FISA is political. It was never, ever about protecting America. One side used it as a cudgel, the other side gave in to fear of political loss. That’s the long and short of it.
Politically, Republicans won this round in two ways. They got the president the bill he wanted and, as a result, they created absolute fury in the Democratic base. Pelosi has received more than 200,000 e-mails of protest, according to an aide, for letting the bill go forward.
Democrats concede they made an enormous tactical blunder by not dealing with the issue earlier, forcing the question to the fore in the days before the recess. One anxiety hovered over the debate: If a terrorist attack happened and Congress had not given Bush what he wanted, the Democrats would get blamed for a lack of vigilance.
“Could something happen over August?” Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) asked in an interview. “Sure it could. What bothered me is that too many Democrats allowed that fear to turn into a demand for some atrocious legislation.”
Yeah, see, it wasn’t my fault, it was the other 434 guys. Oh, and after nearly six years of the President using practically every possible issue as a political cudgel guys, you should learn to anticipate. Really. But in the end the fact remains…they folded. They put political gain in front of standing up for the Constitution. They’ve done that…how many times now?
The saga also underscored how constrained congressional Democrats feel because of their tenuous majority in the Senate. Had the Senate sent the House an alternative bill, sponsored by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the two houses could have put a more limited proposal on the president’s desk and challenged him to veto it. But the Levin-Rockefeller proposal failed.
McConnell, in the meantime, played an ambiguous role. Democrats acknowledge that the intelligence director never explicitly agreed to the House leadership’s proposal. But their fears that McConnell was not calling the shots were stoked when Democratic leaders tried at one point to reach him by phone. An assistant to McConnell let slip that the intelligence director could not pick up because he was on the line with the White House. It was another sign, said a top Democratic aide, that “the White House was driving the train on this.”
Why is a guy with a 29% approval rating driving anything? Every time the Democrats give in to “centrist bipartisan comity” the Republicans punch the Dems in the nuts. Every time. There is no comity, there is no negotiating in good faith, there’s nothing but the GOP trying to control America. Period.
Sun Tzu once said “If you meet your foe on the field under rules of honor, and your enemy refuses to follow these rules and instead chooses dishonorable tactics with the intention of victory at any cost, then you will be defeated dishonorably.”
Somebody needs to grab the audiobook version of Art of War and start blasting it while the Dems are sleeping, lord knows Rove and Cheney do it. Hell, Dick probably calls that “Viagra”.
The entire display was disgraceful because an issue of such import should not be debated in a political pressure cooker. It’s not even clear that new legislation was required; Holt, for one, believes many of the problems with handling interceptions involving foreign nationals are administrative in nature and that beefing up and reorganizing the staff around the FISA court might solve the outstanding problems.
But if legislation was needed, there were many ways to grant necessary authority while preserving real oversight. The Democrats got trapped, and they punted. The Republicans have never met a national security issue they’re not willing to politicize. This is no way to run a superpower.
60 Democratic Senators, the White House, and an even larger House majority…that’s the way. Even better, take the fugging gloves off and make impeachment happen.