House Passes Surveillance Bill With No Telecom Immunity
March 14th, 2008The United States House of Representatives, led by the Democratic majority, defied President George W. Bush on Friday and passed a surveillance bill that permits civil lawsuits against the telecom giants to go forward.
The 213-197 vote was short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a threatened veto by the president, however, so the bill now goes back to the Senate. Bush has demanded that any telecommunication company that participated in his warrantless domestic spying program, that secretly began after the September 11 attacks, receive retroactive immunity.
The battle over whether to shield companies has been a key reason why the House and Senate have been unable to agree on a bill to replace a law that expired last month that expanded U.S. authority to track alleged enemy targets without a court order.
It has also prompted Republicans to accuse Democrats of undermining national security while Democrats have accused Bush and his fellow Republicans of election-year fear mongering.
“It is time to reject the scare tactics of the Bush administration and enact this carefully crafted legislation,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said.
About 40 lawsuits have accused AT and T, Verizon Communications and Sprint Nextel of violating the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans, including lawyers, peace activists, environmentalists, journalists and liberal bloggers, all who have been illegally swept up in the electronic surveillance and data mining of phone calls, e-mails and Web surfing patterns.
Eyewitnesses to the illegal nature of the program have testified before Congress, yet the Bush administration and the Republicans in the House and Senate continue to lie to the American people and try to use the fear of terrorism to obliterate the nation’s Sixth Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures in a crass attempt to win elections in 2008.
You can read the Reuters version of the breaking news story here. It is incomplete and balanced, but that is the mainstream news media for you.
House Passes Spy Bill, Rejects Phone Immunity
Meanwhile, if you’ve never watched a big, important debate on C-SPAN, you will be able to watch the replay tonight and over the weekend as Congress leaves on a two week recess. Rarely have more lies been told by Republicans in the name of taking away your Constitutional rights. Some Democrats stood up for you, but now the bill returns to the Senate for a final compromise. In the last Senate version of the bill, retroactive immunity was granted to the telecom companies.
If you have an interest in protecting your rights, get in touch with your Senators over the next two weeks and urge them to fight the Bush administration on this important issue. The issue is not the millions of dollars the phone companies may have to pay out in claims to those who were illegally spied on, including yours truly.
The issue is that the only way we are ever going to find out what the Bush administration and the phone companies did to violate all of our rights is the discovery phase in the civil lawsuits. That is what Bush is trying to avoid.
He broke the law and he knows it. The phone companies broke the law and they know it. They don’t even deny it! They just want Congress to pass a law making their law braking legal.
If that happens, the United States of America is no longer a democracy ruled by the laws of man. It becomes a monarchy and a dictatorship where the president becomes a king who derives his power from God, not the law.
Meanwhile, on the issue of the secret session by the House last night, read the Washington Post’s account. Hint! Hint!
March 14th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Unfortunately, the size of the margin indicates that if Bush vetoes a bill with his exclusion, which he undoubtedly will if it reaches his desk in this form, indicates that the veto would be sustained.
The bill’s sponsors don’t have the two-thirds majority needed to overturn the veto, since the Republicans are all likely to vote to sustain the veto.
The continued failure of Congress to reign in an out-of-control executive poses huge problems not just now, but in the future as well.
As a republic, governed by laws, we cannot rely on the election of “good people” to a presidency whose powers have been extended to something like those of god-kings in ancient empires.
Two facts of human nature come into play here.
First, no matter how theoretically good someone is when elected president, history shows the office tends to corrupt its occupant. “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” noted liberal British statesman Lord Acton in the 19th century.
Second, our failure as voters and concerned citizens to awaken ourselves from the delusion that the president is some sort of national savior, responsible for finding a solution to every human problem. That expectation fuels the ever-expanding power of the presidency.
It’s useful to note here that god-kings, such as those of ancient Egpyt, Mesopotamia, Persia and China, were in fact absolute rulers with total power over their subjects’ lives, property and activities. It’s no accident that Western autocrats, from the Caesars on, have cloaked their autocracy in some religious or quasi-religious mantle.
The U.S. presidency today, originally conconceived as a chief magistrate responsible for executing laws, commanding the military in time of declared war, and conducting otherwise peaceful foreign relations, has devolved into a god-kingship, albeit an elected one.
The top three contenders for the presidency today all embrace this concept, not naming it for what it is.
Most educated people today would agree that the god-kingship model is archaic and childish. At the same moment, they not only fail to see that this is precisely what the presidency has become, and propose nothing other than a change of person as a way to solve the problem.
The problem, of course, is not who holds the presidency, but the institution itself. Whether Obama, Clinton or McCain sits in the Oval Office beginning the afternoon of January 20, 2009, we will still have a culture, and a president, who accepts the god-kingship model for that postion.
There will have been no real change.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Point taken, again, but that’s not the whole story. Working on an essay now on how to save democracy with an independent Web Press…
See the Telescope on the news page, Jay Rosen’s blog, and under Editorials, more from Harpers.org on Alabama.