Thanx to a friend and
this post, I thought I'd cherry pick the comments on this fight from the bright minds over at dkos, so this is about strategies, facts, and views from a lot of people. These are not my words, but the words of many. There is some excellent strategic thinking. Please email or call your Representatives and Senators to let them know the true issues at stake. For those in California,
here is Senator Feinstein's webpage with phone numbers to contact her and let her know protecting the Constitution is more important than being nice, and that until the FISA issue is raised and answered satisfactorily, Alito MUST be filibustered. Click on the title to read what's at stake, and how to contact your Senators and House members.
This article is very long, and the comments have been edited, but it's worth the read. I've tried to set off whole comments, but may have lumped some with others. If yours is jumbled with another's, my apologies, but this was pulled together fairly quickly. All comments with very few exceptions were left as I found them, whether they are set off or not. I pulled all these together because our Constitution is at stake.
Our... constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds. - Thurgood Marshall
The 9th Amendment:The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In plain English, what the 9th Amendment says, and every red-blooded true American knows in his bones, the Constitution, our system of government, is founded the citizen's right to be free from unwarranted intrusion by the government. Government out of my and your private life. It's freedom. What could be more American than that?
It's about the Constitution itself, it's about stopping the unbridled usurpation of power by the executive. It's about free speech and free assembly, it's about government by the people. Don't let the MSM frame this as simply an abortion duel, this goes way deeper and further than that. I think the public will realize this too, if we just have a chance to tell them. FILIBUSTER!
Yes, it will be a political drama. But it's a great opportunity to pound home the "the president is NOT above the law" and the point that it is the Congress' job to make the law, the court's job to interpret the law, and the executive's job to execute the law. The "unitary executive" is a buzzword that doesn't mean much to the American people yet. A well-done filibuster, making the same point over and over, can get it across: Unitary executive means ONE branch of government gets to make the law (by executive order), interpret the law (whatever I want it to mean), and execute the law without ANY check on his power. In other words, dictator.
ScAlito invented the doctrine. This is his own patented activist non-originalist idea of how to f*** with the Constitution, to put all power into the president, as have it upheld by his lifetime appointments to the highest court. If that ain't extraordinary, nothing is. If that ain't activist, nothing is. You want to talk original intent? Founding Fathers were guys who rebelled against their own government. Our Constitution is designed, not to protect us, first and foremost, from our own government. Terrorists we can handle. But only the Constitution can protect us from tyranny.
If they take away the tools that were designed to help the minority party in crisis situations, then the people have to rise up, and show up, on the steps of the Capitol building, promptly, and in great numbers. The Republican bullies, as tough as they might sometimes seem, are afraid of the power of the people. It keeps them up at night. The things that should keep them up at night, don't, but they do fear a rebellion of the so-called underclass, in reaction to the misdeeds that they know they have committed against it. If they didn't, they wouldn't spend so much effort trying to keep us like mushrooms - in the dark and fed a load of shit.
The filibuster would be premised ON THE NSA SCANDAL. The press will be forced to educate the public in order to explain what is going. Also, in addition to GOP pro-choice opponents, we expand the pie to include anyone who won't stand with Bush when the chips are down on this question. It's a big group of people. A lot of them are already on the fence (e.g. Specter). It also helps by taking the focus off of abortion and putting it on the constitutional limits of the executive. It's a VERY interesting idea.
What we need is to draw new blood over to our side, in both the Senate and the public at large. The issues of NSA wiretaps, torture, unchecked executive power, etc have an excellent chance of doing just that.
I say we take the label of obstructionist and make it our own - turn it into a positive thing. Equate "obstructionist" with "checks and balances," and with stopping an executive who is out of control, and a danger to our nation. If we look at the polls we see many Americans have doubts about the Bush admin.right now. If we communicate this correctly, they might just begin to think: "Hmm, maybe obstructionists are just what we need right now." At least enough of them might think this way that the term can no longer be used as a weapon. Personally I don't have any problem with being obstructionist right now. It's the appropriate response to an executive who is abusing his power. Me, obstructionist? Yeah, baby.
Dems, clear-thinking Repubs, Fiscal conservatives - anti-fascists of all stripes - should APPLAUD obstructionism. That's POLITICS. You use what you got, and if all we can do is shut down the usurpers, that is exactly what we should do. For starters, congress should refuse to send another law to the executive until he RESCINDS every "statement of signing" he has ever made, and congress should make it plain that they will move to impeach any executive who ever seeks to arrogate their legislative ability with the perversion of "statements of signing". That's THEIR JOB. And that's just for starters, Bubbles.
Dems could score a lot of points by waging the fight not as dems vs republicans, but by casting the issue as a fight to protect legislative prerogatives and power. Any repug that charges obstructionism should in turn be accused, rightly, of abandoning his/her constituents' interests by ceding the power of the peoples' legislature to the executive branch. Bush has brazenly done so, and Alito helped write the playbook.
Such a strategy would play well to a public whose newspapers are filled every day with evidence of the administration's absolute corruption, it would show the dems as interested not just in their own self-interest but in the broader interest of protecting our tradition of representative government and maintaining an effective system of checks and balances as envisioned in the constitution. The alternative is to fight on many single (albeit important) issues like abortion, Vanguard, or CAP, narrow-interest matters that would likely not gain a single republican convert. Broaden the issue to one that ALL Americans can remember from their civics class, some true conservatives could be shamed out of their fear and obeisance to power, and then we stand a fighting chance.
Why the Rush? This is a lifetime apointment, Sandra Day will wait until the issue is settled. So what's the rush? What can't wait until after hearings on FISA scandal? Plamegate still isn't settled yet either.
Hey DNC, somebody put Will the Organizer in charge of a bunch of stuff. He's got this down to a science. "They rushed us to war, now they want to rush this guy on to the court. What's the rush? Are we making mistakes again this time?" Cut. Print. Absolutely brilliant. I want that sound bite on every station for the next two weeks. In ads and in the mouths of Dem surrogates. That's the mantra.
I want to make web ads and run them everywhere next week that all say "what's the rush?" I will say this, though, I think the idea that Bush "could find someone else" is a total red herring here. Assuming it's some one just as bad, that's sort of tough, but comes with a great risk, especially after a few more months of Abramoff/Fitzgerald indicting people, trying people, and killing GOP poll numbers across the board. And now that Luttig has burned his bridge, it's difficult to see who they'd find who wouldn't be either a)less qualified or b)more moderate. They have to go off their short list. If it's someone worse like JRB or Owens, it's a slam dunk. Plus he looks like an idiot for failing three times--"three strikes and you're out. Pick a moderate." That's the disaster scenario. And how easy would it be to paint Bush as the obstructionist, feet-stamping child? Every appointment the guy has ever made has been ideological. Christ, the recess appointments. I could only dream of him taking the bait on that fight.
The Democrats can't lose the nuclear fight because under Senate rules they can block the vote to end the filibuster - which must itself not be filibustered to pass. If the Republican Senators really want to declare that the rules mean nothing, that they, like our apparent President, have no respect for rule, law, or traditions of freedom... well, put that way, if we don't find that at least a half-dozen Republicans stand with us, we may as well go down fighting.
A few of the Republicans might want that. But most of them? Do they want the (almost) true nuclear option? Are they ready to surrender the pretense of legitimacy? If they want to find out how many Americans are true patriots this time around, they may be most unpleasantly surprised.
About the filibuster strategy: It gives us a chance to explain how bad this guy is. If we lose and he is as bad as predicted at least we don't get blamed. The filibuster will only be lost for appointments such as this if they do ram the nuclear option through - but if we don't use it for someone this bad it is effectively gone. If we do lose it, they will have lost it when they want it to oppose the next democratic president's appointments to the court. And the last point is a question - Do the Ds have more problem with their reputation for obstruction or their reputation for spinelessness? I think the latter so that a filibuster aids the Ds perception problem.
Part 2
at this link.Cross-posted at Political Physics and my diary at
My Left Wing.