UPDATE: From comments, Maryb2004 points out that there is still time to call – the House is in a lunch recess. So what are you waiting for???
UPDATE II: Victory! Well, sort of. Enough votes were peeled off from both the left and the right that the leadership had to pull the bill. More on this later.
A couple of important votes are coming up this week, the SCHIP veto override on Thursday and the FISA-revising RESTORE Act today. More on the SCHIP vote soon.
Following up on this post, I got in touch with the office of my reliably progressive congressman, the Honorable William Lacy Clay, Jr. I received no clear answer on telecom immunity or basket warrants from the staffers I talked to, but today I received an e-mail from Congressman Clay’s office that concerned me. From the e-mail:
[The RESTORE Act] would create Programmatic Authorizations that would resolve the confusion over whether the intelligence community needs individualized warrants for foreign targets if there is a risk that they might be communicating with American citizens; this would be achieved through a program of collection against the foreign target, that, upon proper application and review, would facilitate intelligence gathering for an “organization” and effectively eliminate the need for individual warrants against a “particular” terrorist suspect.[emphasis mine]
In other words, the bill would legalize warrants that did not require the government to specify at whom it is targeted, as long as the government could claim a link to a suspicious “organization”. I don’t know about you, but the thought of my government being able to spy on me, my friends, and family without being forced to name a reason terrifies me. I don’t trust a Supreme Court with Roberts, Alito, and Thomas on it to confirm its unconstitutionality, either.
If a congressman as liberal as Clay is defending this provision, we are in trouble indeed. Get on the phone NOW and let your representative know that blanket warrants are not OK. And pass this message along to your friends!
They think they can legislate around the 4th Amendment. All of them avoid the issue by focusing on Foreign Persons and don’t address the problem of US citizens being caught up in the basket.
imo the Roberts court won’t rule on the constitutionality. They will never REACH the constitutional issue. They will find that whoever is bringing the case has no standing to bring the case because they can’t PROVE that their calls were intercepted. And of course because of “national security” no one will ever have the means to prove that their conversations were intercepted. That is the modus operandi of the Roberts court. To throw things out on “a technicality” that no one can get too upset with. They did it a number of times last term. The end result will be that the statute stays in place.
I’m calling my rep, Carnahan.
The thing is, they’ve managed to muddy the waters so much with the retroactive immunity issue that NO ONE is paying attention to the constitutional issue.
that only one national blog (Firedoglake) is focusing on action on this. As far as the front page of DailyKos is concerned – this doesn’t exist. MyDD? Same. OpenLeft? Not a peep about action on FISA. I would think that each one of them would have had something up from early morning asking their Users to start calling.
This gels with my observation at YKos that when it was announced that the House was staying in session (so it could pass that awful August FISA bill) the only thing that happened was that the panel discussion with House Leaders was cancelled. There was no thought of taking the crowd of people who would otherwise fill that ballroom, most of whom had cellphones, and get some action on FISA going.
Ironically, all of the national blogs have taken to referring to their Users as “activists”. But I’m becoming more and more convinced that national blogs are becoming at best irrelevant when it comes to activism and at worst an impediment — giving all of the would-be activists a false sense that they are actually doing something.
End of rant. Sorry. I care about the constitution.
job in the comments live blogging the vote on the Rule. Here it is (90 minutes of debate – there’s STILL Time to call!)
to scuttle the bill … to give it more time to get retroactive immunity in there? Or something else?
According to TPM the reason they gave doesn’t hold water because the bill had an emergency provision in it that did exactly what the republicans said it didn’t. (A provision the ACLU warned against if I recall).
So let’s keep up the pressure in the meantime so they don’t bring the same bill back – let’s make them bring a better one.
had no idea what I was talking about and couldn’t even spell FISA.
It’s amazing how our representatives try to legislate away our constitutional rights in such an offhand way.
Here’s the message – blanket warrants that cover US citizens are unconstitutional. He shouldn’t be voting for a bill that’s unconstitutional.
nobody else does. It was a bad bill and it’s been stopped. I don’t care what the reason was.
But it’s going to be a short victory because all it showed us was that Democrats are willing to cave on our constitutional rights. And once the Senate Bill gets passed the whole fight is going to be over retroactive immunity – NOT warrants. Which is a terrible shame.
It also showed us that the national blogs (except for Firedoglake) don’t care about the 4th Amendment either. The only front page story yesterday at dKos was Kagro’s analysis of how the Republicans gamed the system. Well written from a procedural point of view but totally missing the point that this was a BAD bill and it’s relief that it didn’t pass AND it’s time to put pressure on for a better bill. That clearly was not his viewpoint, which was that it was a defeat for the Democrats that the bill was not passed.
All these people get the same e-mails for the ACLU that I get. So it’s not that they are uninformed. It must be that they don’t care.