FISA Fight: Mixed Signals from the Republicans
by mcjoan
Tue May 13, 2008 at 10:07:54 AM PDT
Yesterday, Think Progress noted that one of the Republican's pundit mouthpieces was floating the idea that they were going to attempt to get the Cheney/Rockefeller FISA bill past the House by attaching to a media shield bill that has strong bipartisan support. That effort would mean some procedural hurdles for the minority that hopefully leadership would be willing to block. This sounds like a trial balloon, but nonetheless signals the ongoing obsession the Right has with passing the Protect AT&T Act.
Meanwhile, ranking SSCI member Kit Bond told The Hill that the White House is "willing to compromise" on amnesty.
Bond said: "I think we’ve come up with some things that would involve the court, but not get to a position where it would endanger the program or the carriers."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to comment.
Bond said the language, drafted with White House consent, represented a "new provision we’ve come up with" on immunity. He would not give details other than to say that the FISA court would have a role. It is unclear whether the new approach will gain approval from Democratic leaders and negotiators....
Recently, talks have gone on separate tracks. Bond has taken his case directly to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who also has held separate talks with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). Bond said talks with a wider range of lawmakers and staff were unfocused.
Bond and Hoyer have narrowed their talks down to two areas: retroactive immunity and procedures on targeting people outside the United States in eavesdropping and minimizing communications captured incidentally during surveillance operations.
Hoyer has recently suggested revisions, including more court involvement in minimization and targeting procedures.
"There were something like 50 people, and they came up with 25 different ideas, and [Hoyer] sent the list over to me and said, ‘Thank you very much for your ideas, but you and I have talked about the two main ones,’ " Bond said of a recent meeting with all House and Senate negotiators.
Bond’s efforts might not go over well with Rockefeller, who offered his own proposal last week.
"I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but I’m hopeful," Rockefeller said about reaching an agreement.
Bond described Rockefeller’s plan as "bizarre" and said it "totally undid what we passed in the Senate."
The news that Rockefeller is totally undoing what passed in the Seante is the most encouraging news from him in months, but Bond's obnoxious dismissal of it just reiterates the pointlessness of trying to deal with Republicans. At the same time, it's not encouraging that Hoyer apparently has been working more with Bond than with Rockefeller.
One potential, and not completely disastrous, compromise they could be floating would be along the lines of the Specter-Whitehouse substitution bill, which would would allow plaintiffs to substitute the government as the defendant in the pending cases, thus dismissing the teleco defendants. What it's important it that it would ensure that plaintiffs retain full discovery rights – i.e., they can serve discovery requests on the dismissed teleco companies. It's entirely possible, as Kevin Drum and bmaz have argued that the telcos signed indemnification agreements with the government when the warrantless surveillance program began. Any such agreement would be classified, so we don't know they exist, but it seems pretty likely.
Indemnification would be acceptable, provided the cases go forward and the plaintiffs have discovery rights vis-a-vis the telcos. These cases have never been about the potential damage awards against the telcos, despite the Right's efforts to paint this as a greedy trial lawyer issue. What it has always been about is information: about the public's right to know what our government has been doing and why. Given the administration's penchant for secrecy, it doesn't seem likely that this is the kind of compromise that they'd be willing to agree to.
Anything less is unacceptable.
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