No Wonder They’ve Been Trying To Shut Us Down…

We should have known with all the Internet connectivity problems and spam and bandwidth filtering that the negotiations over telecom immunity and the surveillance bill are underway behind closed doors in Washington between the United States House of Representatives, the White House, the telecommunications companies and the intelligence community.

According to the TPMMuckraker:

Bush has been beating the drum for weeks (danger! terrorists! attack!). And finally the Dems seem to be marching in time.

…there are clear signs that whatever surveillance bill emerges from the House-Senate negotiations, it will more than likely contain immunity for the telecoms for their participation in the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. But Bush is not a man to settle. He wants more. Here he is speaking yesterday before a gathering of the state’s attorneys general:

“Now the question is, should these lawsuits be allowed to proceed, or should any company that may have helped save American lives be thanked for performing a patriotic service; should those who stepped forward to say we’re going to help defend America have to go to the courthouse to defend themselves, or should the Congress and the President say thank you for doing your patriotic duty? I believe we ought to say thank you.”

Now, as The Washington Post reports this morning, the bill negotiations are ongoing. So it’s not entirely clear what will emerge.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the Post reports, has been polling the Dem caucus on the immunity issue, with “the liberal camp” content with doing nothing (keeping the old FISA law) and “the moderate wing” pushing for retroactive immunity.

But it’s not clear if Hoyer has yet gauged support for this new telecom thanking provision. Perhaps it would come as a completely separate bill (the Thanks for Protecting America Act?), or perhaps all the lawmakers could just go down onto the steps of the Capitol and blow kisses. You never know what novel arrangement could emerge from the bill negotiations.

If they pass this bill, y’all, we can kiss our FREE free Internet goodbye. If you have any regard for your individual liberty, hammer your Congressman TODAY!

King wannabe George W. Bush went live on cable news this morning to take one more swipe at pushing retroactive immunity for the telecom giants, oddly also pushing his “faith-based initiative” to the governors visiting the White House.

He looked like he was back on the blow and Jim Beam last night while watching the CBS News’ “60 Mintues” show, seeing his disgraced former political adviser go down in flames in the heat of national reporting. His eyes were runny and he looked dehydrated and hung over and he was babbling worse than usual.

Since it appears no other news organization or blogger is rushing to get a story online about this, here’s the White House transcript.

Ad 1: Finally, the Washington Post gets something up…

Bush Pushes House to Renew Surveillance Law

For once, the Congress of the United States has taken a stand against king wannabe George W. Bush. Only this time, it was the House, not the Senate, that did the right thing.

Members of the House smartly departed Washington on a 12-day recess today - without passing a new surveillance law giving the telephone and Internet providers a free pass for taking part in the Bush administration’s illegal scheme of intercepting the private telephone conversations, e-mail messages and Web surfing patterns of innocent American citizens, including peace groups, environmentalists, journalists and bloggers.

Of course the lame-duck president woke up this morning in a tiff and started lying to the American people again, this time saying without an extension of the so-called Protect America Act, the intelligence community will not have the tools it needs to protect the homeland against a potential terrorist attack. But that’s not true, of course, and Democrats rightly accused the president of “fear-mongering” and say he has the authority he needs to intercept communications of suspected terrorists, even if the law expires.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the congressional majority is simply trying to balance civil liberties concerns against the executive branch’s concern for security.

The new law updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires a special court’s permission to monitor the communications of suspects inside the United States. Changes in technology since then mean much of the world’s computer and phone traffic passes through the United States, much of it over fiber-optic cable lines.

Precedent dictates that court orders are needed to listen in on any of them, but the new law, passed last August, would allow the federal government to initiate wiretaps for up to one year against a wide range of targets. The version updated and passed this week by the Senate explicitly compels telecommunications companies to comply with the orders and protects them from civil lawsuits for doing so.

Unable to muster the votes to extend the current law, House leaders say they’d rather let it lapse and operate under the old FISA rules than be pressured by the White House into accepting the flawed Senate bill. And good for them.

Any member of Congress who voted for this law in the first place should be replaced by the voters.

And to prove it, here’s a gut check for all those so-called conservatives and libertarians out there who might still be supporting the president on this issue. How would you feel if this invasive law were in effect and Hillary Clinton were president? Would you still want the federal government to have this power to spy on you?

Of course, Ms. Clinton was absent in the debate in the Senate this week and did not stand up against this assault on our civil liberties. She was out on the campaign trail trying to make up lost ground against Senator Barack Obama, who was there and voted against the version of the law granting unlimited amnesty to the telecom giants.

For that, he just got my vote - and the endorsement of this news organization for president. It is time to take sides.

We’ll have more to say about this later, but first we have a little trip to take down to the state capital city. Look for more updates late this afternoon…

Republicans, liberal and Blue Dog Democrats stopped an effort by the United States House of Representative’s Democratic leadership Wednesday to extend the surveillance bill for 21 days. So unless the House comes up with a compromise in the next day and a half, it will expire on Friday.

According to the TPMMucraker, Congressional Quarterly and other sources, the Republicans wanted to help the administration put the squeeze on the Democrats to pass the Senate’s version of the FISA bill. The liberal Democrats, such as Rush Holt, D-N.J., and Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, because they opposed the Protect America Act in the first place. And the few Blue Dogs such as Leonard Boswell, D-Ind., and Collin Peterson, D-Fla., don’t want any more delay on the issue, apparently.

On Thursday, either the House Democrats will fold and the administration will get its prized retroactive immunity for the telecoms, or the bill will expire and leave the executive branch without legal authorization to continue the spying program.

But legal experts say the implications of any expiration are not as dramatic as portrayed by the president Wednesday morning.. Any spying orders already in place would stay in place long after a temporary law dies on Feb. 16. At the same time, most experts agree that the administration would have to go back to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for new warrants in cases where foreign-to-foreign communications are routed through the United States’ telecommunications infrastructure. That poses little immediate threat, they say, but if a backlog of warrant applications were to build, as happened last summer, it could begin to cause problems.

It will not be a crisis, according to House Speaker Nanci Pelosi, D-Calif. She issued the following statement later Wednesday afternoon.

All Members of Congress fully understand and support our responsibility to protect the American people and the need for the President, the Congress, and policymakers to have the best possible intelligence to fight terrorism.

On Friday, a surveillance law insisted upon by the President last August will expire. Today, an overwhelming majority of House Democrats voted to extend that law for three weeks so that agreement could be reached with the Senate on a better version of that law. The President and House Republicans refused to support the extension and therefore will bear the responsibility should any adverse national consequences result.

However, even if the Protect America Act expires later this week, the American people can be confident that our country remains safe and strong. Every order entered under the law can remain in effect for 12 months from the date it was issued.

Furthermore, the underlying Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which provides for the surveillance of terrorists and provides that in emergencies surveillance can begin without warrant, remains intact and available to our intelligence agencies. Unlike last August, the FISA court has no backlog of cases, and thus can issue necessary court orders for surveillance immediately.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr., D-Mich, made the following remarks on the House floor earlier in support of a bill to extend the Protect America Act for an additional 21 days.

The temporary FISA law we enacted in haste as a stop-gap last August expires Saturday. We want to replace that law with a well-considered one, which appropriately addresses both our security needs and our constitutional values.

The House passed a version of that well-considered law in November – the RESTORE Act. We have been waiting for the Senate to pass its version, so that we could compare it with our version and decide together on the best course of action.

We have also been waiting on access to classified documents regarding what telecom companies may have done in recent years to assist the government with surveillance on U.S. citizens outside the bounds of the law at the time.

The 15-day extension we passed two weeks ago was intended to give us time to consider the Senate bill, thought to be on the verge of passing, and to review the classified documents. Unfortunately, it has turned out not to be enough time.

Judiciary Committee members – only some, not all – just began getting effective access to the classified documents on January 29, after we had been asking for over one year. And the review process is unavoidably somewhat cumbersome and inefficient. Even today, as I stated in my letter to the White House, we still do not have access to numerous critical legal documents.

Moreover, the Senate has just passed its version of a long-term surveillance law. It differs from the House version, in ways that may have major ramifications for the freedoms we cherish.

So we need a bit more time. This bill will give us three weeks – not much time, in the view of some. But enough, I hope, to permit us to reach an appropriate resolution on this matter of utmost importance.

A group of Blue Dog Democrats in the United States House of Representatives are now helping House Republicans by endorsing the Senate-passed bill that grants retroactive immunity to the telecom giants for their participation in the Bush administration’s illegal spying on millions of innocent American citizens.

Congressional Quarterly and the Daily Kos are now reporting that the House Republicans will try to derail the effort to pass a 21 day extension of the existing surveillance law and force a vote on the Senate bill that grants retroactive immunity to the telecom giants for their participation in the Bush administration’s illegal spying on millions of innocent American citizens.

House Republicans engineered a series of procedural votes Wednesday in a bid to derail the Democrats’ prooposed extension, which President Bush said Wednesday he would veto. They argued that the House should simply take up and send to the White House a surveillance overhaul bill (HR 3773) that the Senate passed by 68-29 Tuesday.

Because 21 conservative Blue Dog Democrats have endorsed the Senate-passed bill, Republicans might be able to win approval of the Senate bill through a motion to recommit the extension with instructions to amend it with the text of the Senate bill.

The Blue Dogs that have endorsed the Senate passed bill wrote to Pelosi last week, according to CQ, and some House Democrats were prepared to support immunity, regardless, according to DK.

In a letter dated Jan. 28, 21 Democrats in the conservative Blue Dog Coalition sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., supporting immunity and listing other provisions that they believed were needed in a FISA bill.

They wrote that the Senate bill “contains satisfactory language addressing all these issues, and we would fully support that measure should it reach the House floor without substantial change.”

“If this bad bill is jammed through the House of Representatives, it will be their fault,” says DK. “Call them and tell them to support the RESTORE Act without modification, and to support the 21 day extension of the current law. Tell them to stop enabling the Republicans and Bush in taking away our civil liberties.”

Here are those Blue Dogs:

* Rep. Leonard L. Boswell, D-Iowa — Phone: (202) 225-3806, Fax: (202) 225-5608

* Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark. — Phone: (202) 225-4076, Fax: (202) 225-5602

* Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark. — Phone: (202) 225-3772, Fax: (202) 225-1314

* Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D. — Phone: (202) 225-2611, Fax: (202) 226-0893

* Rep. Robert E. “Bud” Cramer, D-Ala. — Phone: (202) 225-4801, Fax: (202) 225-4392

* Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill. — Phone: (202) 225-3711, Fax: (202) 225-7830

* Rep. Heath Shuler, D-N.C. — Phone: (202) 225-6401, Fax: (202) 226-6422

* Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga. — Phone: (202) 225-2823, Fax: (202) 225-3377

* Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Fla. — Phone: (202) 225-5235, Fax: (202) 225-5615

* Rep. Joe Baca, D-Calif. — Phone: (202) 225-6161, Fax: (202) 225-8671

* Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla. — Phone: (202) 225-2701, Fax: (202) 225-3038

* Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn. — Phone: (202) 225-4714, Fax: (202) 225-1765

* Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah — Phone: (202) 225-3011, Fax: (202) 225-5638

* Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn. — Phone: (202) 225-4311, Fax: (202) 226-1035

* Rep. Lincoln Davis, D-Tenn. — Phone: (202) 225-6831, Fax: (202) 226-5172

* Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Ind. — Phone: (202) 225-4636, Fax: (202) 225-3284

* Rep. Tim Holden, D-Pa. — Phone: (202) 225-5546, Fax: (202) 226-0996

* Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La. — Phone: (202) 225-4031, Fax: (202) 226-3944

* Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kan. — Phone: (202) 225-2865, Fax: (202) 225-2807

* Rep. Christopher Carney, D-Pa. — Phone: (202) 225-3731, Fax: (202) 225-9594

* Rep. Zack Space, D-Ohio — Phone: (202) 225-6265, Fax: (202) 225-3394