If I really wanted Bush’s third term I’d vote for John McCain, not Barack Obama.
[T]he Obama campaign sent a lukewarm endorsement of the measure [FISA compromise bill]: As to the key reforms of FISA, the bill is an acceptable compromise, not perfect but the best one can do under the situation. As to the retroactive immunity for telecom companies, Obama says he will work to change that in the Senate.
What gives? Why did Obama stay silent for so long, and why did he finally offer such a muted response to the bill?
The answer is simple:
Barrack Obama plans to be the next President of the United States. Once he becomes President, he will be in the same position as George W. Bush: he wants all the power he needs to protect the country. . .
Given these facts, why in the world would Obama oppose the current FISA compromise bill? If it’s done on Bush’s watch, he doesn’t have to worry about wasting political capital on it in the next year. Perhaps it gives a bit too much power to the executive. But he plans to be the executive, and he can institute internal checks within the Executive Branch that can keep it from violating civil liberties as he understands them. And not to put too fine a point on it, once he becomes president, he will likely see civil liberties issues from a different perspective anyway.
So, in short, from Obama’s perspective, what’s not to like?
Most Americans don’t realize that the FISA compromise comes in two parts. The first part greatly alters FISA by expanding the executive’s ability to wiretap and engage in much broader searches of communications than were permissible under the law before. It essentially gives congressional blessing to some but not all of what the executive was doing under President Bush. President Obama will like having Congress authorize these new powers. He’ll like it just fine. People aren’t paying as much attention to this part of the bill. But they should, because it will define the law of surveillance going forward. It is where your civil liberties will be defined for the next decade.
It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this “compromise” bill is the telecom amnesty part. It’s true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill’s expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.
The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President’s power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it “fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home” because “the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power.” Rep. Rush Holt — who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers — condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the “bad guys” in the very people who do the spying.
This bill doesn’t legalize every part of Bush’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism — “you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe” — and it is Obama’s willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.
Where’s that change we can believe in, Senator Obama? When I supported you in the primaries I wasn’t supporting a smarter, slicker politician who could perfect George Bush’s lawbreaking. I was supporting someone who I believed would uphold the law and the civil liberties guaranteed me in the Constitution.
What you have going for you is millions and millions of people who believe you’ll curb the abuses of the Bush years and put the country back on track. A good part of that involves returning to the rule of law, accountability, and safeguards against the abuse of power by the executive branch. You’re relying on us as much as we’re relying on you. So I’d suggest it’s not a good time for you to go pissing us off – “the people who built this movement from the bottom up.”
