Thus far, FISA has gone down for two reasons:
- The beltway Demopublicans can plead national security
- The beltway Demopublicans believe that no one gives a shit about FISA inside the voting booth
We must convince them that 2 is not true.
There is only one way to do that
We need a scalp. To convince the beltway Demopublicans that people give a crap, we need to do the following:
- Select a target
- Announce that the person is a target for FISA
- Beat the target hopefully in a primary (especially if the target is a Bush Dog)
If we cannot show a scalp, no beltway Demopublican will pay any attention to all the crap that we write in our little blogs. As far as the beltway Demopublicans are concerned, all the blog activity is masturbation anyway.
Unfortunately, most states have completed their primaries at this time, and we are into the general. This kind of thing is best done in a primary because we don’t want to confuse principled fights over FISA with normal partisan fighting.
This is going to take some time. Who should we select? I’d say Hoyer, but he’s pretty strong in his district. We need a target that is weak, and a replacement that is both strong and more progressive.
Indeed! A little of our system’s vaunted self-correction, eh? ‘Soft on terror’ is a hard sell, even still.
We need a Republican scalp. It is too late to mobilize for a primary, most of them are over.
We should select a race where the Dem challenger is opposed to FISA abuse and have the Republican seen to have been defeated on the FISA issue.
We need to lay the stakes upon the table. “The defeat of X is a consequence of his voting for FISA”
It only counts if you call the shot before you line up your ball.
This is only worth doing if we are pretty sure we can take someone out. If we call the shot and miss, the beltway Demopublicans are strengthened in their anti-constitutional stance.