Senate hates warrantless wiretapping so much that they just voted to expand Bush’s powers in this area. Of course they voted late on a Friday night hoping you might not notice.
“By the final vote, Senate Democrats had whittled down that demand and approved a bill that largely mirrored what the Bush administration wanted.”
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/03/fisa.upgrade.ap/index.html
The vote was held under rules that required 60 votes for passage, and they got exactly 60 votes. Had 80 votes been required, they would have gotten exactly 80 votes.
When are the posters here going to wake up and realize that this intelligence gathering is absolutely critical, and that the politicians who scream how awful it is during the day turn around and vote for it at night? How long are going to keep swallowing the BS the politicians and the media dish out to you?
Wait a second,…so you’re crapping on the integrity of the Senate on the one hand, and then using the Senate’s vote to try to prove that warrantless wiretapping is essential on the other hand? That’s a good trick.
That is an interesting spin, but essentially correct. The Senate is full of geriatric hypocrites who say one thing for the cameras and do something very different in the dead of night when adult conduct is seriously critical.
If this issue were merely important, like, say, the long term financial integrity of the US as threatened by entitlements, they would just let the game play for the cameras forever.
It is a good trick, and Art can actually make that case.
The argument goes like this: Warrantless wiretapping is essential to our security, and the Senate knows it. When push comes to shove, they’re going to do the responsible thing and authorize warrantless wiretapping. Their integrity is damaged, however, when they grandstand endlessly about how awful the warrantless wiretapping is, and how Bush’s use of it threatens our liberty.
My take on it is very different than Art’s, of course, but I am in complete agreement with him that the vote demonstrates a total lack of integrity. Unfortunately, it’s that very lack of integrity that allows him to make a convincing show of the above argument.
The Senate is full of geriatric hypocrites who say one thing for the cameras and do something very different in the dead of night when adult conduct is seriously critical.
Right. Because you and I have always been in agreement that the Senate always legislates responsibly. At least when it’s important.
Ah ha ha ha ha ha !!! Good one.
You’re right that it’s full of geriatric hypocrites, though.
Didn’t Bush turn down the compromise the McConnell negotiated? There was also some decent oversight involved from what I understand, coupled with a pretty short time limit–120 days.
Never mind. Read elsewhere that this is a new vote and basically a complete cave-in by weak kneed Democrats. Yet another sad day for the Republic…
One last thing: What I find truly sad is the reasonable implication that the Senate and, soon, the House simply did this so as not interfere with their vacation. Great leadership all around…
It isn’t a cave-in except for the cameras, mclamb. The Democrats want to be publicly against it because their rantings will appease the mclamb’s and MattinSF’s of the world. The reality is that they are very much for the program.
I have been telling you guys this since the day the program was exposed by the NY Times. This program has strong bipartisian support which is why it has continued with congressional approval and funding for six years now. Reid, Pelosi, Harmon and Rockefeller all signed off on the program from inception.
In politics, as in life, stop paying attention to what people say and start paying attention to what they do.
16 Dems voted for the bill, of those, I am surprised by Webb and Feinstein. You can keep up the schtick that this about appeasing me or Matt or other “liberals” like vitus. However, there is significant concern about these capabilities amongst wide swathes of people. In the end, this bill happened because the Dems absolute pu$$ies. They don’t believe in the program or that it is necessary. They are scared of the potential political fall out if something happened that had a tennuous, at best, connection to the presence of the surveillance program. That’s absolute cowardice. And we suffer for it.
Mclamb, if they needed 25 Democrats, they would have gotten 25 Democrats. The leaders no doubt met and decided who would have to vote for it. Webb and Feinstein don’t face the voters for over five years. So they were told how to vote, and they did.
I have been telling you for years that you couldn’t stop this program if you laid down on the tracks. I have predicted such votes for years. No surprise here.
By the way, I should clarify: it’s not the warrantless wiretapping per se that is the problem. My problem is that the program as implemented by the Admin was illegal. Now, if the Admin felt they needed such a program, they could have approached Congress. Which of course they did. They approached Congress with a sledgehammer and a complete refusal to compromise or accept even a minimal restriction. My disgust centers more on the fact that rather than standing up to the Admin and forcing Bush, et. al., to accept reasonable oversight and restrictions, Congress simply caved. That is political cowardice at its finest.
I just can’t lay it out any more plainly for you, mclamb. Your boys support the program. They always have. They always will. You need to learn this and deal with it. They are just playing you with their words.
You can keep falling for this transparent, predictable, and predicted game just as long as you want, and you can continue to be surprised, or you can raise your game so that you understand their’s. Your choice.
My “boys” are political cowards, unwilling to do their jobs–which is not to rubber-stamp whatever the President puts in their face. I could care less how many times you post otherwise. The program could largely continue with reasonable oversight, but they caved like complete cowards.
And even if I am being “played”, I would much rather vote for someone that makes a pretense of standing up to a renegade Administration with the hopes that they will actually make good versus voting for someone that I absolutely know will rubber stamp everything.
Marty Lederman, a blogger at Balkinization, asks the following with respect to the new bill:
Wholly apart from whether Congress should place any limits on such activities , does the Fourth Amendment have anything to say about such international surveillance? Does a U.S. person here in the States have any reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to phone calls and e-mails with persons overseas? One might think the answer to this would (or should) be yes, but Orin Kerr yesterday pointed to at least one court of appeals decision (McNulty) suggesting that if you enage in a communication with someone else who has no constitutional expectation of privacy, then you don’t, either – in which case perhaps all international communications lack Fourth Amendment protection.
The Fourth Amendment has absolutely nothing to do with the issue. If it did, nothing the Administration or Congress did would be of any consequence, since the Fourth Amendment would govern.
If you want to vote for those who will lie to you in order to tell you what you want to hear and then do the opposite, that is your right. Let me know how that works out for you.
aj, i don’t follow the bs that the politicians and media are dishing out to me, but why is the intelligence gathering critical? how can you know that for certain?
Well I either vote for the guy that tells me what i don’t want to hear and means it, or the guy who tells me what I want to hear and doesn’t.
I’m fucked
=)
Anytime anyone says that one particular political issue is “absolutely critical” to national security, you can ssume they are full of crap. It simply isn’t credible to say that our national security depends on the President being able to listen in on American’s phone conversations without warrants. You can make all the arguments you want to support the policy, or say that it’s important to timely intell collection, or that it is a useful tool, but saying it’s critical is just silly.
There is a lot we don’t know about the program, but apparently an unexpected result of allowing the FISA Court into the process a few months ago was a ruling by some judge that a warrant is required to listen to calls that are strictly international but get switched through the US.
When FISA was enacted, a call from Pakistan to Indonesia took a reasonably direct route. New switches result in such calls being switched through the systems inside the US. The law needs to be fixed to not require a warrant in this case, and probably lots of other situations too.
This is just another chapter in the history of the Harry Reids of the world bragging about killing the Patriot Act one week, and voting to reenact it the next.
I don’t understand why anyone gets surprised or pissed by such behavior. It is completely predictable and predicted.
The House will sign on, probably around midnight tonight. They certainly won’t do it in time for the 11:00 news cycle.
Yawn.
It has not been a good week for democrats, which means it has been a good time for the rest of us. Back in 1951 there was the “House Un-American Activities Committee” hunting for commies. Now, the democrat controlled house is full of Un-American Activities and every demoocrat knows they are being targeted. Witness: This vote you reference, the vote stealing stunt in the house the other day to give welfare benefits to illegal aliens, Reid, Pelosi and Emanual baling out of the ‘Yearlykos’ convention, the lowest approval records for a congress since polls were taken: 3%…
The democrats are working for everything except for the benefit of the average American. Amnesty, healthcare, discounted college tuition, welfare for illegal aliens……constitutional rights for foreign terror suspects, undermining the GWOT by calling it a “Bumpersticker” and a lost cause……comparing our service-members to terrorists and Nazis.
I think the American public is largely ignorant. However, even the ignorant can sense when their public servants have gone astray and are doing the opposite of what is good for the country. Unfortunately, democrats can also sense the shifting tide of public sentiment that will destroy them. Watch for democrats to back away from affiliations with the moveon.org, CAIR, dailykos, La Raza, ACLU (enemy of the state) and other extremist groups, and attempt to come back into the fold of mainstream American common-sense. Savvy Republicans will pounce on the opportunity to expose democrats as the duplicitous, treasonous, pieces of shit that they really are