When we had the first cloture vote on FISA on June 25th, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton voted. It didn’t really matter much. Obama was in Chicago and the vote was 80-15 to proceed to debate on the bill, so Clinton’s vote would have been nothing more than symbolic. Clinton had nothing to gain from voting. If she voted ‘yes’ she would have angered progressives and civil libertarians, and if she had voted ‘no’ she would have driven a bigger wedge between Obama and those constituent groups. And there is no reason to believe that even a unified Obama-Clinton front against the bill could have moved the numbers from 17 to the needed forty-one. Here are the Democratic senators that voted against opening debate on the FISA Bill:
Biden (D-DE)- Chairman of Foreign Relations
Boxer (D-CA)- Chairwoman of Environment & Public Works
Brown (D-OH)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Dodd (D-CT)- Chairman of Banking, Member of the Judiciary Committee
Durbin (D-IL)- Majority Whip, Member of the Judiciary Committee
Feingold (D-WI)- Member of the Intelligence Committee, Member of the Judiciary Committee
Harkin (D-IA)- Chairman of Agriculture
Kerry (D-MA)- Chairman of Small Business
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)- Chairman of Judiciary
Menendez (D-NJ)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schumer (D-NY)- Dem. Conference Vice Chair, DSCC Chair, Member of the Judiciary Committee
Wyden (D-OR)- Member of the Intelligence Committee
As you can see, there are some heavyweights here, and we can include Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, Teddy Kennedy, to the list. He only missed the vote for health reasons. But in spite of the support of five chairpersons and a few members of the leadership, the larger contingent was in favor of debating the FISA Bill. Most damaging to our cause, the following Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee voted in favor of cloture.
Chairman John D. Rockefeller (DEM-WV)
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (DEM-CA)
Sen. Evan Bayh (DEM-IN)
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (DEM-MD)
Sen. Bill Nelson (DEM-FL)
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
This is the signal that we will not be prevailing on the FISA Bill. It’s also a lesson on how important it is that the Intelligence Committee not be staffed with reactionaries. I ordinarily think of Mikulski and Whitehouse as good senators, but the rest of this list is strictly garbage in/garbage out. Of course, the National Security Agency, which has over 35,000 employees, is located in Mikulski’s state, and that may explain a lot of her motivation.
The bill is too divisive and controversial to be debated with clear heads in the midst of a presidential election. It should not have been brought up. But here we are. And the majority of the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee are in favor of the bill which makes it doubly or triply painful for rank and file members to oppose it. We can debate why the leadership made this decision to inflict maximum pressure on their own caucus and drive a wedge between the base of the party and itself, but they made the decision and we are all, on all sides, going to have to live with it.
There will be amendments to the bill. They will be debated tomorrow, but none of them will pass. All eyes will be on Obama (and to a lesser extent, Clinton) but that’s not really fair. The outcome of this vote was decided when the House of Representatives pulled a complete capitulation. Obama will vote for all the good amendments but they will all fail…some miserably. And then there will a second cloture vote to close debate and proceed to a vote on final passage of the bill. Obama has promised to filibuster any version of FISA that includes retroactive immunity. This will be the point at which he can either keep or renege on that promise. But it won’t matter in the slightest how he actually votes. The opening cloture vote had 80 votes. We’ll be lucky to lower that number to 75 for the closing cloture vote.
Once cloture is achieved, the bill will move to final passage. This will occur on Wednesday to accommodate senators that want to attend the racist Jesse Helms’ funeral tomorrow. Obama has promised to vote for this bill on final passage regardless of whether it has amendments attached or not. Do not expect him to reverse course on that promise. And, by all means, hold him accountable for his vote. But don’t think that he could have changed the outcome. We never had enough votes to stop this bill in the Senate, but we had them in the House and they vanished.
Examining the real culprits in this wholesale surrender involves discovering how the House capitulation actually occurred. And, remember, all is not lost with this crippling and demoralizing defeat. Tremendous pain has been and will be doled out to some of the responsible parties by an increasingly organized and sophisticated progressive movement. Lessons have been learned and more lessons will be learned shortly.
