The Politico, via Greenwald:
In an interview with Politico on Monday, Hoyer called the FISA legislation a "significant victory" for the Democratic Party -- one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens.
Call me old fashioned, but I'm suspicious about anything "protects" the civil liberties of American citizens by acknowledging that those civil liberties were being violated -- then declaring amnesty for those acts. Or by protecting those civil liberties by granting that they can be taken from you using secret evidence, presented secretly, banning review, explicitly banning judicial leeway to determine whether laws were violated, or civil liberties infringed upon, or to determine anything at all but whether the administration said it was OK to do the thing in question. Oh -- and that evidence is to be presented by the same people who broke the law in the first place, of course.
Yeah, that sounds pretty robust, all right. I feel better already.
It's not even that Steny Hoyer is merely bullshitting on this one, it appears that he and many other Democrats -- Rockefeller, the Blue Dog administration apologists, and others -- just really, really don't give a damn. It's been clear from the outset of this latest push that Hoyer, Rockefeller and others were going to ram corporate immunity through regardless of the consequences, and find a way to make the rest of the Bush administration's ongoing actions legal as well. It's also been clear that Speaker Pelosi wasn't going to do squat about it, and new party leader Obama wasn't going to do squat about it, and if history is any guide the next step is going to be the world's shortest filibuster as the few sensible voices on this we have left, Dodd and Feingold, receive absolutely no substantive support from the wide phalanx of Democrats who are terribly, terribly concerned about the notion of making the illegal legal and sweeping everything under the "Bush can do whatever he wants" magic toupee, but not concerned enough to do anything but issuing a concerned statement and voting for the damn thing anyway.
You know, so the issue of whether or not the President of the United States told a bunch of companies to break the law on his say-so can be "neutralized" before the November elections. God forbid the Democrats have to be saddled with that.
This is precisely the problem with Democratic "strategy" over the last ten years -- it relies on capitulation as defining theme. Democrats are called weak, and to a large extent that is absolutely true: the Democrats may have an agenda, but whatever it is is subsumed under the banner of "well, sure, but I suppose doing the exact opposite couldn't hurt. We wouldn't want to be seen as obstructionist."
And so even when laws are broken, the response is to issue a do-over and pretend the whole thing is now fine. Congress can subpoena people 'til the cows come home -- they won't actually enforce any of them. The Democrats can rail against the illegal activities of the administration on a daily basis -- but in the end, they'll apparently offer blanket fracking immunity as the "compromise" for maybe-please-if-you-could-please-follow-the-law-this-time-please "new" legislation. In fact, we can't even be that bold -- we have to rewrite the law to make the illegal thing legal going forward, too.
And still, people like Hoyer, and Pelosi, and Emanuel, and yes, even Obama (I don't care if he's the presidential nominee or not, if he issues statements that presume his constituents are fools) paint this complete, multi-tiered collapse as something noble, and necessary, and (for the love of pete) hard-won. That is perhaps the greatest insult: the Democrats have adopted the very Republican position of presuming that if they just pretend that something is true, people will believe them.
The result? In addition to effectively nullifying all possibility of we poor fools in the public ever being allowed to know whether we were among those that were illegally surveilled, we are now poised to legalize the longtime Holy Grail of Bush administration domestic espionage -- secret warrantless data collection on a massive scale. The premise is that data gathered electronically, as opposed to other means, is immune from Fourth Amendment protections merely by virtue of it being electronic. I am not sure what laws of physics mandate this difference, but there it is -- paper, protected; the same information in an electronic stream, not protected. Ironically, if the internet really was a series of tubes, our representatives would be able to suss out the issues of prying open every single message in a certain pipe just to see if one or two might be interesting. Once you get electricity involved, though -- forget it. You'll never get the Steny Hoyers of the world to grasp that.
Here is the simplest possible way to put it, however crude it may be: one notable difference between a democracy and a police state is that in a democracy, your government cannot spy on you unless they suspect you are committing a crime. In a police state, they simply monitor you "preemptively", then decide whether you've committed a crime.
I'm not sure why I ever expected United States Congressmen to be able to grasp the difference; naiveté on my part, I suppose. And I do not think we are devolving into a police state, but if we place political advantage (the November elections!) over accountability, we are perhaps something less than a democracy.
Killing the whole bill and starting over, yet again, would be a fine thing. Personally, I would settle for the rather obvious notion of removing the asinine immunity for past crimes from the bill. I am well used to the Bush administration, the Republican Congress, and now the Democratic Congress being completely incapable of policing itself or respecting protected American rights (after all, we've entertained the notion that the President of the United States can actually strip the citizenship of an American from them, merely on his own say-so), but without the immunity protections, we poor saps in the public would still have some mechanism, however meager, for finding out how extensive past illegal activity has been and forcing, if necessary, the Constitutional implications to be addressed.
I don't expect even that to happen. If there is one thing the Democratic House and Senate has done expertly, the last few years, it is the expert abandonment of principles whenever they are faced with threats by the administration or the Republicans. Such is the scene for the "reform" of FISA. It was instituted as response to the abusive acts of Watergate; now that another President has been found violating those protections, the response by our current Democrats is to immunize the involved parties, and to make the violations legal going forward. And we're supposed to applaud it all as a tough compromise with the lawbreakers.
Clearly, a true profile in courage.
