Constitutional Rights

Glenn Greenwald has the roll call.

With less than 24 hours to read — let alone understand — what they were voting on, the Democratic-controlled House just passed the "compromise" FISA/telecom amnesty bill by a vote of 293-129. [...] As always, Republicans supported the bill virtually in lockstep, while Democrats split (105-128). Barack Obama managed not to express a view one way or the other prior to the vote (and still hasn't). Nancy Pelosi spoke in favor of the bill, so the whole top layer of House Democratic leadership supported the bill.

Immensely disappointing. That whole "top layer" of the House leadership can expect well-funded primary challengers. Now we have to depend on the Senate Dems to hold the line, and they're the ones who caved first last time.

Taking the party back might take a little longer than expected.

House Democrats are poised to capitulate to the Bush administration and give the telecom companies retroactive immunity for warrantless eavesdropping. Glenn Greenwald has much more. The question is, why are certain Dems so eager to help these companies avoid the consequences of their lawbreaking? BonzoDogBand at Daily Kos has found a likely answer:

I just saw Jonathan Turley on [MSNBC's] Countdown, who concluded to Keith Olbermann that the FISA immunity compromise is happening most likely as a result of top Dems who themselves fear retribution for their complicity in Bush's illegal spying activities. [...]

So, this is all starting to make sense now; Jay Rockefeller is likely one of those Dems who could be found complicit in Bush's illegal spying activities.

Think about it; what else would make Rockefeller fight so hard for the FISA immunity provision? Money can do a lot of things, but not buy oneself out of prison.

Glenn and a wide variety of grassroots groups (including Ron Paul's libertarian supporters) are working to put pressure on House Dems such as Steny Hoyer who are pushing this bill. Contributions for this effort can be made through ActBlue.

Via Making Light:

The Associated Press, having already announced its intention to harass bloggers who publish snippets as short as 39 words from AP stories, has now published a web form through which intimidated parties can give the AP money in return for "permission" to publish as few as five words. [...]

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an "attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt." I suggest it's better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word "privilege") in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. [...]

Welcome to a world in which you won't be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

The reaction from blogs such as Daily Kos and AMERICAblog has been nothing but scorn, since the courts get to decide what constitutes "fair use," not media companies.

The Gavel:

The House has just passed the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 3773, to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to establish a procedure for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence, and for other purposes, by a vote of 213-197-1. The revised House legislation to amend FISA grants new authorities for conducting electronic surveillance against foreign targets while preserving the requirement that the government obtain an individualized FISA court order, based on probable cause, when targeting Americans at home or abroad. The House bill also strongly enhances oversight of the Administration's surveillance activities. Finally, the House bill does not provide retroactive immunity for telecom companies but allows the courts to determine whether lawsuits should proceed.

Rep. Jim Matheson voted for the House bill; Cannon and Bishop (and every other Republican) voted against it (roll call). If you'd like to give Rep. Matheson some positive reinforcement, you can contact his office at (202) 225-3011 or via his e-mail contact form.

Stephen Hayes in the Wall Street Journal, quoting a response from Obama at a Q&A session:

At Cornell College on Dec. 5, for example, a student asked Mr. Obama how his administration would view the Second Amendment. He replied: "There's a Supreme Court case that's going to be decided fairly soon about what the Second Amendment means. I taught Constitutional Law for 10 years, so I've got my opinion. And my opinion is that the Second Amendment is probably — it is an individual right and not just a right of the militia. That's what I expect the Supreme Court to rule. I think that's a fair reading of the text of the Constitution. And so I respect the right of lawful gun owners to hunt, fish, protect their families." [...]

"Like all rights, though, they are constrained and bound by the needs of the community. ... So when I look at Chicago and 34 Chicago public school students gunned down in a single school year, then I don't think the Second Amendment prohibits us from taking action and making sure that, for example, ATF can share tracing information about illegal handguns that are used on the streets and track them to the gun dealers to find out — what are you doing?" [...]

"There is a tradition of gun ownership in this country that can be respected that is not mutually exclusive with making sure that we are shutting down gun traffic that is killing kids on our streets. The argument I have with the NRA is not whether people have the right to bear arms. The problem is they believe any constraint or regulation whatsoever is something that they have to beat back. And I don't think that's how most lawful firearms owners think."

What a fabulous answer. Note how Obama gives an emotional, values-based reason for his support for certain gun regulations — "34 Chicago public school students gunned down in a single school year" — and then allies himself with "lawful firearms owners" against those responsible for "illegal handguns that are used on the streets." Someone's been reading Drew Westen.

Now that Democrats in the Senate have caved and given the telcos retroactive immunity from breaking the law, a reader at Talking Points Memo suggests that Bush's justification — the "unitary executive" — might have some other benefits:

I actually like the idea of a unitary executive, because it implies that there could be a unitary citizen. I have begun to consider myself a unitary citizen. I am allowed (by virtue of the definition of a unitary executive) to pick and choose the laws I would like to follow, kind of Thoreau like.

I also like the idea of retroactive immunity paired with the unitary citizen. I could decide not to follow a stupid law and then forgive myself afterwards.

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, writing in the Washington Post in 2005:

Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

[...] Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. [...]

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders?

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog riffs on a comment by Susan Sontag, who suggested that American-style religion is "more the idea of religion than religion itself."

You may remember the Georgia congressman who sponsored a bill providing that the Ten Commandments would be displayed in Congress and in federal courthouses. Then when he was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, he could name only four of the Commandments, barely. I assume this wasn't just an act.

Obviously, the Ten Commandments have significance to this congressman apart from what they actually say. That significance may be pandering for votes. But in recent years I've seen several polls saying that about three out of four Americans think the Ten Commandments ought to be displayed in public buildings. However, according to Bill McKibben (quote above) only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of them. [...]

I think many Americans regard the Ten Commandments as something like a tribal totem. They want it placed in institutions of power, like schools and courthouses, as a symbol of their tribal dominance. Think of it as territorial marking. And this is just as true of the hard-core fundamentalist as it is for the "cultural" Christian who has read most of the Left Behind books but doesn't know the Beatitudes from spinach. [...]

Sontag said that, when George Bush said Jesus was his favorite philosopher, "Bush didn't mean, and was not understood to mean, that, if elected, his administration would actually feel bound by any of the precepts or social programs expounded by Jesus." She's right. We all understood that, even before we knew Bush very well, and isn't that remarkable?

We've discussed the framing aspect of the so-called "partial birth" abortion procedure previously here, and how this term was deliberately created to be misleading on several levels. Now, according to the Washington Post, right-wingers like Brian Rohrbough, president of Colorado Right to Life, are finally realizing that "partial birth abortion" doesn't mean at all what they thought it meant:

"All you have to do is read the [Carhart] ruling, and you will find that this will never save a single child, because even though the justices say this one technique is mostly banned — not completely banned — there are lots of other techniques, and they even encourage abortionists to find less shocking means to kill late-term babies," he said. [...]

In Rohrbough's view, partisan politics is also involved.

"What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they're really a wing of the Republican Party, and they're not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child — they're geared to getting Republicans elected," he said. "So we're seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we're deceived about what they really do."

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog has more on this topic. The overall point here is that the GOP seems to be incapable of being honest about its own positions, even with its own base. In reality, the so-called "partial birth" abortion bill banned only one specific abortion technique, but it was more useful for the GOP to suggest that the bill would prevent all late-term abortions — because that's what would bring in more donations and votes for Republicans. It never seems to occur to them that their lies will be found out. I sincerely wonder at this point if the national GOP is even capable of purging this tendency of expedient lying.