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

Wannabe king George woke up Wednesday morning and decided he was no lame duck president after all, empowered by the cowardly vote yesterday in the United States Senate granting his administration unlimited powers to spy on innocent American citizens and let the telephone companies off the hook for their illegal scheme.

So he started out his day browbeating the House to pass the same law and even got the Associated Press to run his press release saying, “…terrorists are planning new attacks on our country … that will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison.”

Bush said he would not agree to giving the House more time to debate a measure the Senate passed Tuesday governing the government’s ability to work with telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails between “suspected terrorists,” according to the AP. Do they not realize he is a lame duck who has broken the law and lied time and time again and that under the Constitution, it is the job of Congress to write the laws, not the president?

The bill gives phone companies retroactive protection from lawsuits filed on the basis of cooperation they gave the government without court permission, the AP reports, ignoring the fact that this government has not even paid the bills the phone companies charged to do the illegal sweeping and storage and data mining on millions of phone calls, e-mail messages and Web browsing trails of virtually everyone in this country.

“We need the cooperation of telecommunications companies,” Bush said. “If these companies are subjected to lawsuits costing billions of dollars, they won’t participate, they won’t help us.”

Well, good. They should voluntarily stop helping this administration break the law and stand up to his kingdom as well.

About 40 lawsuits have been filed against telecom companies by people alleging violations of wiretapping and privacy laws, but to its credit, the House did not include the immunity provision in a similar bill it passed last year.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers says he still opposes retroactive immunity. We will be watching today to see how firm he stands.

“There is no basis for the broad telecommunications company amnesty provisions advocated by the administration,” Conyers wrote in a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding asking for documents about the wiretapping program. The documents have been withheld from Congress.

It would be nice to see the House stand up to Bush and strip him of his spying power if he does not back down on the telecom immunity issue. The only way we are ever going to figure out just how bad our Constitution and our laws have been violated by White House officials is to get to the bottom of what the telephone companies and Internet service providers did when they complied with the illegal order to go along with the National Security Agency and spy on us all.

This administration cannot point to a single, solid case of domestic terrorism it stopped by this blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment’s provisions against illegal searches and seizures.

Watch the action on C-SPAN today and urge your Representatives in Congress to oppose telecom immunity.

Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wis., had some hard words for his colleagues after today’s vote.

“The Senate passage of this FISA bill, while not surprising, is extremely disappointing. The Senate missed a golden opportunity to pass a bill that would give our intelligence officials the tools they need to go after suspected terrorists while also safeguarding the privacy of law-abiding Americans. Instead the Senate, with the help of too many Democrats, is yet again giving the administration sweeping new powers – and letting it off the hook for its illegal wiretapping program. I hope that our House colleagues will hold a stronger line, and refuse to accept the deeply flawed Senate bill. The calls from Americans tired of having their rights and their Constitution trampled on by this administration are only growing louder. Congress should stand up for the American people, and the Constitution, by opposing such a badly flawed bill.”

The debate now moves to the House and C-SPAN I.

Senator Majority Harry Reid, D-Nevada, spoke out against the FISA bill with telecom immunity, but it was no use. The vote passed 68-29.

According to Daily Kos, this is the list of those who did not support the bill and did support the rule of law, although two of them were absent from the vote. Can you guess who else was absent?

Akaka (D-HI), Baucus (D-MT), Biden (D-DE), Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-CA), Brown (D-OH), Byrd (D-WV), Cantwell (D-WA), Cardin (D-MD), Casey (D-PA), Dodd (D-CT), Dorgan (D-ND), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Harkin (D-IA), Kennedy (D-MA), Kerry (D-MA), Klobuchar (D-MN), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Menendez (D-NJ), Murray (D-WA), Obama (D-IL), Reed (D-RI), Reid (D-NV), Sanders (I-VT), Schumer (D-NY), Tester (D-MT), Whitehouse (D-RI), Wyden (D-OR)…

You guess it: Where was Democratic Party standard bearer Hillary Clinton?

Meanwhile on the other side of the Capitol, with Senate passage assured, the House is getting ready to take up the reconsideration of the bill in conference. And it looks like House Judiciary Chair John Conyers, D-Mich, will have some tough questions.

In a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding regarding telco amnesty, Conyers “indicated that the secret documents recently provided by the White House do not justify the Senate amnesty provision.” He reiterated previous requests for additional information that the White House has not yet provided and requested declassification “so that more information on this crucial issue may be provided to the American public.”

Here’s an excerpt from Conyer’s letter:

Throughout this past year, the Administration has sounded a drumbeat that Congress enact the Administration’s request for amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, during this same time, the Administration has denied to Congress essential documents and information that would permit Congress, in the exercise of its Article I responsibilities, to consider the proposed amendments to FISA in a prudent and careful manner. This Administration cannot be heard to complain about the unwillingness of Congress to enact legislation that the Administration claims to be so vital for the national security when the Administration at the same time has denied to Congress documents and information that are essential to its legislative responsibilities. Frankly, the Administration’s refusal to provide the requested information belies its position on the importance of the legislation: rather than the Administration giving Congress all the information it needs, the Administration has provided a slow trickle of information to only selected members of Congress, almost assuring that Congress cannot adequately consider its requests.

Once again, I have set forth below our request for documents and information. I further reiterate my request that all these materials, as well as those provided so far, be made available to the entire Judiciary Committee and, to the extent possible, to the American public via immediate and appropriate declassification.

So, there’s a few rounds left to go on this before it’s all over. Even though it won’t do any good, you might let your Senators know how you feel about them selling out. And while we’re at it, I still have no word from Representative Artur Davis of Birmingham on where he stands on this bill. His press secretary is AWOL.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee, spoke for 20 minutes against the FISA bill with the telecom immunity provision that will come up later today after more speeches.

Here’s the link to his statement. This blurb was also posted on his Website.

Senator Leahy criticized the Senate and the Bush Administration for failing work together to make significant improvements to FISA law. He said the original FISA legislation was created in the 1970’s in response to excesses of the time and now similar steps are needed as a check on the abuses of this age. He argued that the Bush Administration supports immunity for telecommunications companies as a way of avoiding responsibility for their own abuses of power. The pending lawsuits were an excellent opportunity to hold the companies and the government accountable for their flagrant disrespect for the law. Senator Leahy concluded by saying that he was not willing to throw away our basic rights because of a group of terrorists.

Meanwhile, speaking to a conference call of reporters this afternoon, Senator Chris Dodd, reflecting on the string of defeats in the Senate today, said he thought the best hope for stripping retroactive immunity from the final surveillance bill lies in the House version, which does not contain the immunity provision.

“We’ve lost every single battle we had on this bill. We’re not getting anywhere at all,” Dodd said. “The question now is can the House do better.”

After the bill passes in the Senate, as is expected late today or tomorrow, the bill would head to a conference committee of the two houses, where they will have to hash out the significant differences.

If the final bill contains retroactive immunity, he said he would “absolutely” filibuster it and use “whatever vehicles we can” to stop it.

The Senate “just sanctioned” the “single largest invasion of privacy in the history of the country,” he said. When asked why he thought so many Dem senators had crossed over, he replied: “Unfortunately, those who are advocating this notion that you have to give up liberties in order to be more secure are apparently prevailing. They seem to be convincing people that you’re at risk politically or we’re at risk as a nation if we don’t give up rights.”

Comments

President Bush has threatened to veto any bill that does not let the corporate giants off the hook, but what the heck. Congress should see if he is willing to let his spying power lapse when it expires in a few days and use it against the Republicans in the 2008 election if he doesn’t sign it.

While the Senate is on a Quorum Call, I’m sitting here thinking … What are these militia rednecks in Alabama – who think Bush is “the man” – going to do when Hillary is elected in a landslide and then has all this spying power to aim at them?

I guess they are just too dumb to wake up and see what’s happening. They are probably happy the GOP is using this power against the likes of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and a few Democrat legislators and school teachers. Dragging them out of their houses doesn’t bother them. Wait until the feds get the power and start using it on them. Then we will hear some screaming from Rush Limbaugh’s “Ditto Heads.”

Senator Chris Dodd, the former Democratic presidential candidate from Connecticut, made an impassioned speech on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon laying out the case for how the law was broken by the Bush administration and the telecommunications companies when they spied on the phone calls, e-mails and Web traffic of innocent American citizens in the wake of 9/11.

A key part of his statement:

“This is our defining question, the question that confronts every generation: The rule of law, or the rule of men? How many times must we get the wrong answer?

“To those who say that this is just about a few telecoms, I answer: This is about contempt for the law, large and small.

“We are deceiving ourselves when we talk about the U.S. attorneys issue, the habeas issue, the torture issue, the rendition issue, the secrecy issue. As if each one were an isolated case! As if each one were an accident! When we speak of them as isolated, we are keeping our politics cripplingly small; and as long as we keep this small, the rule of men is winning.

“There is only one issue here. Only one: the law issue. Does the president serve the law, or does the law serve the president? Each insult to our Constitution comes from the same source; each springs from the same mindset; and if we attack this contempt for the law at any point, we will wound it at all points.

“That is why I’m here today: Retroactive immunity is on the table today; but also at issue is the entire ideology that justifies it, the same ideology behind torture and executive lawlessness. Immunity is a disgrace in itself, but it is far worse in what it represents. It tells us that some believe in the courts only so long as their verdict goes their way. It puts secrecy above sunshine and fiat above law.”

Read his full statement here.

What do you know, the Washington Post has finally decided to cover the historic debate in the United States Senate on Bush’s surveillance bill and telecom immunity, just in time to see an attempt go down in flames by some Democrats in the Senate to protect our rights. I guess this is good news for the Post since they take all that advertising money from AT and T and Verizon, those big ads that slow down their Website so much.

The Senate voted today to preserve retroactive immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that cooperated with a government eavesdropping program, decisively rejecting an amendment that would have stripped the provision from a bill to modernize an electronic surveillance law, the Post reports.

Senators voted 67 to 31 to shelve the amendment offered by Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.). A filibuster-proof 60 votes had been needed for the amendment to move forward.

The vote represented a victory for the Bush administration and a number of telecommunications companies – including AT and T and Sprint Nextel – that face dozens of lawsuits from customers seeking billions of dollars in damages.

Approval of the amendment would have exposed the companies to privacy lawsuits for helping the administration monitor the calls of suspected terrorists without warrants from a special court following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Senate Rejects Surveillance Amendment, Preserves Telecom Immunity

Yes, and the amendment would have allowed the courts to decide whether the phone giants broke the law, the proper branch of government to decide this issue, when they agreed to spy on us and listen to an administration that obviously doesn’t care about the law.

Why do we even have a Constitution and laws if we are not going to stand up and enforce them? What a bunch of chicken shits…

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately denounced the action today in the Senate.

“When companies break the law, they should be held accountable by our government – not given a multimillion dollar favor,” Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement. “The millions of Americans who are telecom customers deserve to know that their phone conversations are private.”

She charged that telecommunications companies “illegally turned over private customer call information to the government.” But instead of “having faith in the U.S. court system to fairly handle these cases,” she said, the Senate opted to “give the telecom providers a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

There is no sign of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on the United States Senate floor this morning, and it looks like her presence would have been useful. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is in attendance, along with Republican presidential front-runner John McCain.

The Senate started out by voting on a number of amendments to the surveillance bill and the first two went down to defeat.

The first major vote was on California Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein’s amendment to make clear that FISA is the “exclusive means” by which the government could conduct surveillance.

“The President does not have the right to collect the content of Americans’ communications without obeying the governing law – and that law is FISA,” Ms. Feinstein said in her two-minute speech. “Let there be no doubt: FISA has been – and continues to be – the exclusive means for electronic surveillance in this country. This amendment simply reaffirms and strengthens the existing law.”

It’s not clear why Republicans, including Senators Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa and Jeff Sessions of Mobile, would oppose this, except that they march in lock-step with corporate America, but they did. Democrats couldn’t convince enough Republicans there should be no doubt. The amendment failed 57-41. It needed 60 votes to pass.

For up to the minute updates on the debate, watch the TPMMuckraker.

As we post this, the vote is on Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s amendment to strip retroactive immunity for the telecom giants from the FISA bill. It will likely fail, which means we are looking at an afternoon filibuster.

It should be interesting, but don’t hold your breath that the Constitution will come out of this day unscathed. It will most likely take a Democrat president and a higher number of Democrat Senators to get our rights back after the 2008 election.

Long live the Constitution. What happened to the conservative, civil libertarian streak of Republicans? This is the government in your bedroom, especially if you have a phone and a computer in your bedroom. I guess that’s OK with our two senators from Alabama.