The American Prospect’s Art Levine asks a question.
Why wasn’t there greater mobilization against the warrantless surveillance bill passed earlier this month?
And then he provides “A look at what Congressional Democrats, advocacy groups, and the netroots were doing in the run-up to the bill’s passage.”
There’s a simple answer to this question. The Netroots and the advocacy groups were not told that the Democrats were considering anything more than a tweak of the FISA bill. We were not aware that they were going to gut FISA. In fact, we were assured they would not do a major rewrite.
Caroline Fredrickson, the legislative director of the ACLU, is still fuming over the way Democrats reneged on reassurances she says they offered in late July to liberal groups — particularly at a key meeting on July 20 — that they wouldn’t move any major revisions to the current FISA law before getting the answers they sought about the current warrantless wiretapping program.
“They turned around and screwed us over — and the Constitution — all at once,” she says of the fast-moving FISA legislation that left the ACLU and other groups scrambling to stop it.
Greenwald characterized the situation accurately:
Glenn Greenwald, perhaps the most influential civil-liberties writer on the Web, recalls that despite many leading bloggers being at the YearlyKos convention, he and most others didn’t even start focusing on the menace the bill posed until newspapers reported that the House would consider a FISA bill on that Friday, Aug. 3. It later became clear that this controversial measure was being considered under a no-amendment “suspension” rule that required a two-thirds vote to pass, essentially dooming the Democrats’ more moderate version…
Looking back, Greenwald admits now, “I thought there was nothing to worry about. There was no way the Democrats will do anything beyond fixing this one gap [foreign-to-foreign communications]. It was unthinkable.”
There’s a story to tell here, but it isn’t about a failure on the part of the ACLU or the Netroots. More than anything else, I’m astonished the Netroots has gained so much clout that we could actually be blamed for the loss of our civil liberties. We don’t have that much clout. And we never saw this coming.