The United States Senate is back in session debating and voting on amendments to the new surveillance bill and telecom immunity, live on C-SPAN II.

Legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act remained stalled in the Senate yesterday, held hostage by a partisan clash over procedures for consideration of an unrelated economic stimulus package, according to Congressional Quarterly.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., complained that Republicans were blocking his efforts to schedule votes on proposed amendments and questioned Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s commitment to the legislation, saying Republicans have declined to allow FISA to move forward.

“The Orwellian Bush administration has now slopped over into the Senate, and now the Republican leader is now becoming Orwellian himself,” Reid said. “They want to stall the FISA legislation as long as they can, and they’ve done a pretty good job, because they want this legislation to be completed at the last minute, to give the House and the Senate conferees little time to work on this.”

Ad 1: Now it appears Senate votes on the amendments may come up Thursday.

“Hopefully, Senators Clinton and Obama will stay in DC for these critical votes,” opines the the liberal Democrat blog Daily Kos. “Obama was there to vote ‘yes’ on Cardin’s sunset amendment, and Clinton missed that vote, but did vote on the economic stimulus package.”

Another day; another blog vigil to save the world as we know it…

Tags: Domestic Surveillance, Liberty vs. Security

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.