The Senate voted 60-36 yesterday to table (kill) the Judiciary Committee’s (SJC) version of the FISA bill. Then things got interesting. The Republicans repeatedly refused to grant unanimous consent to consider amendments to the underlying Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s (SSCI) version of the FISA bill. Then Minority Leader Mitch McConnell filed a cloture motion to cut off debate and force a vote on the SSCI version. The vote on cloture is scheduled for 4:30 on Monday, only a few hours before the president’s State of the Union speech. As I understand it (via Tagaris), there would be one pending amendment if cloture is successfully invoked (by prior agreement) and that would be a Dodd-Feinstein amendment related to blanket warrants.
A couple of points here. First, the Republicans got 60 votes to table the SJC bill, so they can presumably get 60 votes to override Senator Dodd’s filibuster of the SSCI bill. In fact, as both John McCain and Lindsay Graham did not vote yesterday, the Republicans can presumably get 62 votes to override Senator Dodd’s filibuster. But things are not so simple.
Yes, it is true that twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to kill the SJC bill, but they didn’t agree to cut off all debate (and amendments) on the SSCI bill. I don’t think the Democrats anticipated that the Republicans would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Had the Republicans allowed up or down votes on the various amendments, they had the votes to kill any amendment that stripped telco immunity from the bill and to override any filibuster. In other words, they could have won. But, apparently, they do not have faith that they can defeat other amendments that are unacceptable to the administration. Therefore, they objected to letting those amendments come to the floor.
When McConnell filed for cloture he went far beyond getting some Democrats to agree to telco immunity. Even Arlen Specter has an amendment that he wants introduced. It should not be too difficult for Harry Reid to keep his caucus from invoking cloture under these particular circumstances. Of course, nothing is certain and we will have to exert pressure on Sens. Inouye, Rockefeller, Salazar, Carper, Bayh, Pryor, McCaskill, Johnson, Landrieu, Lieberman, Mikulski, and the two Nelsons.
Reid seems to have a strategy. He’ll allow a vote on cloture on Monday afternoon. As soon as that vote (hopefully) fails, Reid will pull the SSCI bill and introduce a bill to extend the old FISA law for another month. Reid will then call for a cloture vote on the extension. If the Republicans refuse to agree to the extension, then the bill will lapse on February 1st.
All of this will unfold in the shadow of the State of the Union speech, where Bush can be expected to distort the facts and make it sound like Congress is endangering the country.
So, we will see what actually happens, but we haven’t lost our rights yet. We need to spend the next few days trying to make sure the Dems will not invoke cloture on the SSCI bill on Monday afternoon.
It’s pretty clear at this point that the president is desperately trying to cover up his crimes. We need to make sure he doesn’t succeed.
