Blasphemy

First thing’s first: The Republicans are wrong about off-shore drilling. It’s just another kowtow to the oil companies that control them, and it will produce little to no oil for years to come, not to mention that fact that it just furthers our addiction. There, now that’s out of the way.

I also recognize that yesterday’s Republican protest on the House floor was nothing but a political stunt designed to win points and get people like me buzzing about it.

Well, it worked.

If you haven’t heard, yesterday Nancy Pelosi successfully adjourned the House for a five-week vacation without allowing a vote on offshore drilling. In response, the Republicans refused to leave the floor, staying instead to give rousing speeches in the dark, without microphones, and only to the 30 or so members of the public in the gallery, since CSPAN turns its cameras off when the House is adjourned. Kudos to Rep. John Culberson of Texas, who used Twitter and Qik to post instant updates.

Go ahead, click the link and read the whole Politico post. I promise you won’t be able to get through the whole thing without smiling at least a little. And that’s my point.

The Republicans managed to inspire me on an issue I completely disagree with them about. Can you imagine Congressional Democrats doing that? Of course you can’t. If you could, we would have seen evidence of it in the past two years.

But instead all we’ve gotten is a half-hearted attempt to seem like they’ve accomplished everything (or at least anything) they’ve said they’re going to accomplish.

Speaker Pelosi gets to hide behind the fact that the Senate is holding everything up due to the 60-vote cloture rule. But where is the attempt to rally the American people behind these bills? Where was the response to the talk radio condemnation of immigration reform last summer, which got so many people to call their Senators that it jammed the Senate switchboard and scared Members into voting against it?

We haven’t had that kind of movement surrounding any issue, and Nancy Pelosi is as much to blame for that as Harry Reid, who, well, I’ve dealt with his lack of energy on this blog before. And when he dared Senate Republicans to give up their break to debate the energy crisis, they may not have taken him up on it, but the House Republicans sure did; several of them turned around from their trips home to give speeches during the protest.

In contrast, the only thing we’ve had to be excited about in the last two years is a guy who is currently tied with John McCain when he should be ten points ahead (more on that in a future post).

So congratulations to the House Republicans, who managed to stand up for something they believe in, rather than sitting around hoping an election will fix everything.

How we ended up with the Republicans' FISA bill

Everybody pretty much guessed that the White House put out a bunch of really scary, frightening 'intelligence' to try and manipulate the Democrats who are still (ridiculously) afraid that if they don't give the White House unlimited power, they'll be blamed for a future terrorist attack.

Today's NY Times article confirms that that's what happened:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.

The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.

...

“There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan.

The White House, Mr. Feingold said Friday in an interview, “has identified the one major remaining weakness in the Democratic Party, and that’s its unwillingness to stand up to the administration when it’s making a power grab regarding terrorism and national security.”

...

Democratic leaders did not demand that the security agency seek individual court warrants for eavesdropping. But they did want the court to review and approve the agency procedures soon after surveillance began.

The administration, however, wanted the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to approve the surveillance, with the court weighing in just to certify that no abuses occurred, and only long after the surveillance had been conducted.

The talks intensified in the days before the recess last weekend, highlighted by proposals and counterproposals in calls between Mr. McConnell and the Democratic leadership.

By Aug. 2, the two sides seemed relatively close to a deal. Mr. McConnell had agreed to some increased role for the secret court, a step that the administration considered a major concession, the White House and Congressional leaders said.

But that night, the talks broke down. With time running out, the Senate approved a Republican bill that omitted the stronger court oversight. The next day, the House passed the bill.

If the White House was really so concerned about this gap in the FISA law, they should've been sharing this intelligence consistently instead of doling it out in driblets, and only the bits likely to get the Democrats to do what they want. Any Democrat in Congress who honestly thinks that this was an emergency that just happened to come up right before the August recess doesn't deserve to be in the Congress.

It isn't the Democrats that were endangering national security, it was Republicans who were willing to risk the non-passage of changes to the FISA bill that both sides agreed were necessary, for the sake of grabbing more power for the President.

And tell me, how in the hell did these Democrats decide that it was a good idea to give oversight privileges to Alberto Gonzales, instead of a court?

The Democrats that voted to continue Bush's reign of fear were played for fools. And Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid showed a distinct lack of leadership. If they'd wanted to, they could've stopped this; but obviously the continuing erosion of our Constitutional rights wasn't a big enough deal to inconvenience anyone with.

Gyah.