Rank and File Partisanship
by digby
So the Republicans are finally coming right out and saying that Russ Feingold is helping the terrorists by calling for censure. I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Bill Frist pretty much said it himself on Sunday:
George, what was interesting in listening to my good friend, Russ, is that he mentioned protecting the American people only one time, and although you went to politics a little bit later, I think it’s a crazy political move and I think it in part is a political move because here we are, the Republican Party, the leadership in the Congress, supporting the President of the United States as Commander in Chief, who is out there fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and the people who have sworn, have sworn to destroy Western civilization and all the families listening to us. And they’re out now attacking, at least today, through this proposed censure vote, out attacking our Commander in Chief. Doesn’t make sense.
(Don’t you just love the idea that “our” Commander in Chief is “out there” fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden?” Maybe the Delta Force has rendered them to Crawford where Rambo Bush and Dirty Cheney hunt them like plucked turkeys.)
This stuff is actually a veiled threat. As Robert Parry pointed out the other day:
Bush’s latest success came as part of a supposed “concession” to Congress that would grant two new Republican-controlled seven-member subcommittees narrow oversight of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
While “moderate” Republican senators — Mike DeWine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska — hailed the plan as a retreat by the White House, the deal actually blesses Bush’s authority to bypass the courts in spying on Americans and imposes on him only a toothless congressional review process.
Indeed, the congressional plan may make matters worse, broadening the permissible scope of Bush’s wiretaps to include Americans deemed to be “working in support of a terrorist group or organization.”
Given Bush’s record of stretching words to his advantage — and his claim that anyone who isn’t “with us” is with the terrorists — the vague concept of “working in support” could open almost any political critic of the Bush administration to surveillance.
Now we have Republican senators saying explicitly that Russ Feingold is helping the terrorists. You do the math. Everyone is supposed to simply “trust” a president and his rubber stamp bedwetters to not use such sweeping laws against political opponents.
Very recent history shows that we are very wise to be suspicious of such things. It is not only not unimaginable, it was definitely done, within my adult lifetime, by a former GOP president and many of that president’s staff and acolytes who are now in the Bush administration. Congressional oversight was what nailed them before and they are determined not to be tripped up by that pesky constitutional requirement again.
For a full primer on this issue, read this fascinating article about conservative southern Democrat, Senator Sam Ervin, whose devotion to civil liberties led him to pursue inquiries that led all the way to the White House:
“For the past four years, the U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States.” So charged Christopher H. Pyle, a former intelligence officer, in the January 1970 edition of Washington Monthly. Pyle’s account of military spies snooping on law-abiding citizens and recording their actions in secret government computers sent a shudder through the nation’s press. Images from George Orwell’s novel 1984 of Big Brother and the thought police filled the newspapers. Public alarm prompted the Senate Subcommittee on ConstiÂtutional Rights, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, to investigate. For more than a year, Ervin struggled against a cover-up to get to the bottom of the surveillance system. Frustrated by the Nixon Administration’s misleading statements, claims of inherent executive powers, and refusals to disclose information on the basis of national security, the Senator called for public hearings in 1971 to examine “the dangers the Army’s program presents to the principles of the Constitution.”
[…]
Although he did not know it at the time, Senator Ervin had started down the road to Watergate. It was during the subcommittee’s investigation of Army surveillance in 1970 and 1971 that Ervin stumbled onto the secretive programs and questions of executive power that would lead him to chair the famous Watergate Hearings in 1973. Ironically, it was at the same time that Ervin began his investigation into military spying that Richard Nixon and his men began their own political espionage that put them, too, on the road to Watergate.
[…]
Attorney General John N. Mitchell provided the legal basis for the increased domestic surveillance soon afterward. According to the Attorney General’s spokesman, the Administration had the right to collect and store information on civilian political activity because of “the inherent powers of the federal government to protect the internal security of the nation. We feel that’s our job.” Thus, the Administration claimed a virtually unchecked power — not subject to Congressional oversight — to carry out unlimited domestic surveillance on anyone it wished.
The Church Commission, formed after the Nixon administration, recommended the creation of the FISA court as a direct result of the abuses of the previous few decades on the part of both Democratic and Republican administrations. Republicans were upset by this:
An intense debate erupted during former U.S. president Gerald Ford’s administration over the president’s powers to eavesdrop without warrants to gather foreign intelligence, newly disclosed government documents revealed.
Former president George Bush, current Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney are cited in the documents. The roughly 200 pages of historic records reflect a remarkably similar dispute between the White House and Congress fully three decades before President George W. Bush’s acknowledgment he authorized wiretaps without warrants of some Americans in terrorism investigations.
“Yogi Berra was right: it’s deja vu all over again,” said Tom Blanton, executive director for the U.S. National Security Archives, a private research group that compiles collections of sensitive government documents.
“It’s the same debate.”
You have to give these guys credit for having patience. They lost a debate 30 years ago but the minute they were able to get an airheaded puppet in the white house and a bunch of blind eunuchs in the congress it was as if it never happened. They never liked the law so they just didn’t follow it.
Donna Brazile broke from the establishment today and wrote this in Roll Call:
Don’t Ignore the Feingold Resolution. Embrace It
The progressive blogosphere is on fire right now. Web loggers are pumped up about the effort by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to censure President Bush for breaking the law on domestic surveillance and taking matters into his own hands. Feingold, a potential 2008 presidential contender, announced the controversial resolution Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” (Full disclosure: I was a participant in the show’s roundtable conversation.) Since then, this topic has activated the party’s base online and generated an onslaught of babble on talk radio stations across America. Feingold hadn’t even left the studio when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) condemned the proposal as “a crazy political move.” I disagree. It’s a desperate political move to save our democracy.
[…]
Many bloggers say they want Democrats to be bold and decisive when it comes to protecting the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law. For those who worry that this issue will create more tension between the progressive “net-roots” types and the party’s base, I say fear not. Let’s use this resolution to talk about what’s really troubling so many Democrats and other astute Americans: the lack of Congressional oversight and accountability. No sooner had Feingold made his announcement than Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) was on CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” urging caution. In other words, hold your powder — wait until the investigation, if any occurs, is completed before urging action.
As a Beltway insider, I am convinced that we cannot continue to tell those who have loyally supported our Democratic leaders to wait. Wait for what? Wait until our pollsters give us the green light to speak up? Should we continue to wait, hoping that the Republicans will finally invite Democrats into the room when important decisions affecting our national security are made? All I know is that people outside the Beltway have grown deeply impatient with our focus-group style of politics. They want to see some bold changes and some new leadership.
It’s time to break with the same-old, same-old and use the Feingold resolution to force the Republican-controlled Congress to commit to serious oversight of the controversial, but increasingly popular, surveillance program. The message from the left-leaning blogosphere is clear: Democrats should understand the real issue. The point is not censure or impeachment; it is Congress’ lack of oversight and its failure to hold anyone accountable for major mistakes or missteps. And especially, it’s about clearly misleading the American public…While the Feingold resolution is not going anywhere given the full Republican control of Washington, D.C., a change in leadership in the fall would make this a ripe item for conversation and action in 2007 and beyond.
Yes, it looks as though we have to clean up the same messes we cleaned up the first time these miscreants were in power and we’d better start preparing the public for it. Saying “trust us” isn’t going to cut it:
Civil liberties watchdogs worry that, in the reaction to 9/11, security agencies are going overboard, much as they did during the 1960s and early ’70s, when huge programs of illegal spying and dirty tricks led to reforms (box).”These agencies haven’t remembered what happened to them in the ’70s,” says University of Georgia scholar Loch Johnson, who as a staff member on the House and Senate intelligence committees helped draft those reforms. “You heard the same arguments back in the Johnson and Nixon administrations: ‘Why do you want to shackle our hands?'”
Why indeed. Given their history, we’d be fools to accept their assurances that they are not using their extraordinary police, military and intelligence power to spy on their political opponents. That’s what they always do. There are many, many examples of this administration’s “grown-ups” lying in wait for a quarter century to roll the clock back to a time of Richard Nixon and the Imperial presidency.
Call your Senators. Get Feingold’s back. Brazile is right on this. The establishment Dems and the weak-kneed courtiers in the pundit and strategist class who whisper in their ears are on the wrong side of history and they’d better get right with it. Here’s an email I got today from a reader:
At times like this I feel that the U.S.A. has been lost and will never again be found. Here we have a president who failed to protect us from foreseeable threats, lied us into an imprudent and unnecessary war (with tremendous loss of national treasure), presided over the destruction of one of the great American cities, spies on the American people and lies about it, and is currently seen as unfavorable by 2/3 of the American people. Yet our Democratic leaders are too timid to even criticize him for fear of being considered against the war on terrorism or being partisan.
With all due respect, Democrats should be kicking Bush in the teeth every chance they get. Every word from their mouths should remind people of what Bush has brought to this country.
I am embarrassed to be a Democrat after seeing the reaction to Feingold censure resolution. I am mortified for our country. I don’t think there is any hope. Our party is the party of Neville Chamberlain. The way we are acting as a party we don’t even deserve to be compared to Americans.
These are your people, Democrats. You’d better listen to this or they are going to be hard pressed to leave the house this November and vote for you. As Rove says, “politics is TV with the sound turned off” to millions of people in this country. All they see is another Democratic retreat. They may not like the Republicans but they also don’t see how a party like ours can beat them.
Democrats’ biggest enemy right now is rank and file Democratic defeatism. They ignore it at their peril. The Republicans aren’t and they will spend every minute of every day working to make Democratic voters feel powerless and weak, no matter how low the GOP falls in the polls. This kind of thing helps them make their case.
Update: Brazile was on Blitzer this afternoon and said this:
BLITZER: Because you know a lot of Democrats are nervous about this resolution.
BRAZILE: Well, they’re nervous — when Jack Murtha spoke out about a timetable, they were nervous. Now the president is almost embracing it.
So just hold your horses, get behind Russ Feingold. Things will be OK in the morning.
Torie Clarke went on to say “bring it on” to try to intimidate the Dems into continuing to believe that they cannot criticize the president on national security. They really need to stop saying that. It hasn’t been working out for them.
Update II: Here’s an interesting analysis of the polling on the issue by Mystery Pollster.
I would suggest that the more Democrats say they approve of the program, the more people will believe there isn’t anything wrong with it. Funny how that happens.
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