fisa
So something kind of amazing happened tonight, Chris Dodd actually managed to stand up to the Democratic Senate Leadership and convince them, with the help of a few of his fellow Senators and about a half-million civilians manning the phones, to pull the critically flawed FISA bill from the Senate’s docket.
Now, I’ll admit to barely understanding the underpinnings of the bill. I read with great interest while Joe Klein and Glenn Greenwald traded salvos over the bill (and Klein’s apparent mischaracterizations of the bill in his Time column) and what it actually means for terrorist surveillance. Klein insisted (and then retracted) that it’s principal flaw was giving terrorists the same rights as ordinary Americans, a provision he was sure would be used to paint Democrats as soft on terrorism, or bad on national security, or whatever. I’m less interested in that than I am in the issue of telecom immunity, which is also the sticking point for Dodd and his internet legions, and for George Bush.
Bush wants to retroactively pardon any phone company that helped the NSA monitor domestic phone and email traffic without a court order between 9/11 and the present day. This would also effectively end any civil litigation brought by customers against those phone companies. Bush says an updated FISA bill is necessary to save American lives, but refuses to sign any bill that does not include immunity for the telcos. Yes, telephone companies > American lives. Crazy.
Anyhow, Dodd stood up when no one else would and put a hold on the bill, a move that would have frozen it in its tracks had Harry Reid actually honored the hold. There was a lot of scuffling over the course of a week or so, and now Reid has pulled the bill until January.
Now, in the race for the Democratic nomination for President, Chris Dodd is currently polling just above a handful of Cheerios, but he’s getting some good press on this, and I’m pretty impressed with how he’s handled the situation. The guy will probably never be President, but watching him actually take a principled stand on an important issue, and contrasting that directly with the behavior of Clinton and Obama, two people who said they supported him but couldn’t fly out of Iowa for a day to actually do their jobs as Senators, makes me realize that we could do a lot worse.
I’ll put some links in later… for the time being, though, here’s one you can have some fun with.