It is time to remind our ‘Democratic’ Senator just who, exactly, she works for.

Telecoms may be able to contribute more than we can – but they can’t vote.  That is the exclusive province of us lowly rabble, the American citizenry, and with the blogosphere gaining prominence in the political arena every single day, it is a stupid politician indeed who sells out his or her constituency for thirty pieces of silver – and so far, that is precisely what Claire McCaskill has done.

She has drained my  well of good will, and  if she doesn’t get her act together and start acting like a true-blue Democrat who deserves to occupy Harry Truman’s seat –  right freakin’ now –  she will face the wrath of angry bloggers who will have spent five years calling for her political head when she runs again, and I promise her this:  I will be leading the charge.  She needs to do a gut-check right now – the FISA issue and telecom immunity alone will destroy her chances for reelection – and she can take that to the bank.

The name of this blog is Show Me Progress, not Show Me Perfidy, after all.

Here is her contact information – ring her phones off the hook.  Make her fax machines squeal non-stop and flood her inboxes.  Let her know just how pissed-off you are.

Click the link below to send her an email:

http://mccaskill.senate.gov/contact.cfm

And here are her phone and fax numbers:

Washington, DC

Phone: (202) 224-6154

Fax: (202) 228-6326

Cape Girardeau

Phone 573-651-0964

Fax 573-334-4278

Columbia

Phone:573-442-7130

Fax:573-442-7140

Kansas City

Phone: 816-421-1639

Fax: 816-421-2562

Springfield

Phone: 417-868-8745

Fax: 417-831-1349

St. Louis

Phone: 314-367-1364

Fax: 314-361-8649

Now get busy, Missouri, and get her damned attention.  Our Constitution is in jeopardy and our Senator is doing absolutely nothing to save it.  Let her know you are watching, documenting and pissed off!

Chris Dodd is promising that if the FISA bill makes it out of committee with the telecom immunity language intact, he will filibuster.  You can watch him make his argument for it on this video.

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!

What Kagro X said:

So here’s the key. The domestic spying has always been justified by saying it was a necessary response to 9/11. But clearly there’s damned good reason to believe these programs were conceived and initiated well before the September 11th attacks.

That would mean — gasp! — that your “government” is full of it.

But it’s not just that. If Qwest’s competitors were already abetting this bloodless(?) coup before 9/11, then the “administration’s” domestic spying not only has little if anything to do with response to terrorism, but it also objectively failed to prevent 9/11.

Are you listening, Senator McCaskill?

UPDATE: There’s another option that Kagro X didn’t consider – an allegation that I’m sure right-wing apologists for the administration will be making shortly: Qwest’s refusal to allow warrantless wiretapping caused 9/11.

I am wondering if Senator Bond’s letter to the editor in today’s Post-Dispatch, which attempts to justify preserving the laughably named Protect America Act, has anything to do with the volume of calls and letters he is getting about FISA?  I immediately fired off a necessarily brief response in the form of a letter to the editor which may or may not be printed. I hope those of you who read the letter and have the same negative response will do the same.  I plan to write to Bond himself later today.

Bond pretends that the legislation does not target Americans, but only foreigners.  He ignores the fact that it is quite possible under this legislation for American citizens to be caught up in the spy dragnet it permits, and that there is no oversight mechanism to protect their privacy rights when this occurs–in fact, there is no real oversight mechanism at all. 

We should certainly not let Bond get away with the vague “trust me–we will all be killed unless we permit the government unlimited, unsupervised spying” type of justification that he offers for this pernicious legislation.  Clark’s excellent diary below (FISA back on the table) gives lots of great links to analyses of the FISA legislation as it stands and to proposals currently in play–I particularly recommend the ACLU site. I hope you all will make use of them to gather your facts before you rip into our esteemed Senator Bond.

UPDATE:  This editorial from the New York Times rips into the Bush administration and its Republican supporters in the Congress for giving us just the type of tripe Bond spews in his letter to the Post-Dispatch (which was really probably prompted by their recent editorial dissing the Protect America Act). I guess Bond got his marching orders and has followed them like the good little Republican soldier he usually is (although he deserves thanks for his SCHIP vote).

When Senator Claire McCaskill was asked by constituents why she voted for the FISA overhaul in early August, she said the following in a form letter:

It is important to recognize that this legislation is a temporary fix to provide our intelligence community with the most immediate tools needed to protect our country – it will be in place for only six months, and it cannot be renewed before it is thoroughly reviewed and authorized by Congress. This gives us six months to create a more acceptable permanent intelligence collection process that that allows us to effectively monitor terrorist communications overseas while also protecting the privacy of law-abiding American citizens. I can assure you I will be one of the Senators working hard to re-establish the constitutional protections that have been eroded by this President and this temporary FISA legislation.

The House Democratic leadership has introduced a bill, the RESTORE Act, that supposedly does just that. To review, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was supposed to allow the executive branch some flexibility in surveilling Americans suspected of spying, while at the same time keeping the executive branch in check with a special court to review all warrants. For some reason, the Bush Administration decided that in many cases it was no longer necessary to consult with the FISA court, that no warrant was necessary to spy on American citizens. For reasons even more unfathomable to me, Congress not only avoided  censuring the administration, but in August they actually passed a bill to grant legality to what Bush was doing! Under Democratic leadership!

Luckily, the measure sunsets in February, which leads us to where we are now. I imagine that the RESTORE Act was introduced by House Democrats in order to build up steam to head off a compromise bill currently being negotiated by our very own Senator Kit Bond. And as Glenn Greenwald notes, it’s not without good points, including compelling the Bush Administration to detail all  electronic surveillance conducted without a warrant since Sept. 11, 2001. The bill also does NOT offer immunity to the telecom industry for their acquiescence in the illegal wiretapping. Unfortunately, there is one big problem, and that’s the allowance of “blanket” or “basket” warrants, which doesn’t require the government to narrow the target of the surveillance to a single person. In other words, it practically contradicts the idea of a warrant.

This is important. You need to pick up your phone and call your representatives RIGHT NOW and tell them the following:

1) Only pass a FISA Modernization Bill, such as the one introduced by Representative Rush Holt, that does NOT authorize blanket warrants. Blanket or basket warrants allow the government to suck up telephone calls and e-mails from unrelated individuals.

2) Do NOT give telecommunications companies or Bush Administration officials immunity for possible illegal acts in the last several years. There’s no need to reward them for doing the wrong thing in the past. And if they’ve supposedly done nothing wrong, why do they need immunity?

For more info on those two points, please see the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

To find the contact info for your representatives in Congress, click here. Keep it to the point and polite but firm.

Make some noise, people!

UPDATE: I just got word that the draft of the Senate bill contains a provision for telecom immunity. Make sure McCaskill knows that this is NOT acceptable.

This site has been critical of Claire McCaskill’s vote to expand the president’s temporary powers to spy on Americans. 

Keith Olbermann has a piece citing Rep. Jane Harmon’s accusation that, hours before Congress was to go on vacation, Bush lied to them about an imminent terror attack on the Capitol.  Olbermann interviews Bruce Fein, formerly of the Reagan Justice Department, about the necessity of reining this president in.

At last Tuesday’s blogger meetup (which was fantastic by the way – if you weren’t there, you really missed out), the talk turned to Claire McCaskill’s recent disappointing votes on FISA and on troop withdrawals from Iraq. The feeling all around was disappointment in someone that many of us worked really hard for in 2006. We knocked doors, made phone calls, and raised money to elect someone who would not rubberstamp Bush’s excesses like her predecessor did, but that’s what we’re getting. (Yes, I am happy with her vote on the Webb Amendment to extend rest time for the troops.) And what’s worse, we had no inkling as to why McCaskill voted the way she did, especially on FISA. I mean, why would you vote to expand the powers that Bush was already abusing?

I wrote to Senator McCaskill and received no response, but a friend of mine did get an e-mail response from her office. She argues that the DNI (yeah, that guy) wrote a letter to the Senate requesting a speedy revision of the FISA law because of the increased threat of terrorism, so she gave it to him. McCaskill actually argues against herself, saying in the end, this temporary legislation erodes constitutional protections. So why vote for it at all?

The temporary nature of the legislation does nothing to assuage my fears, either. The Patriot Act, Bush’s tax cuts, and the Iraq War all face or have faced sunset provisions, and even in the case of the unpopular Iraq War, Bush, hardly an endearing president, always gets what he wants. Apparently McCaskill is going to work hard to fix the situation; I’ll believe it when I see it.

I still haven’t seen anything amounting to a logical line of reasoning coming from McCaskill on why Bush (or any president, for that matter) should have the power to sidestep the courts when listening in on the private communications of an American citizen.

Full text of the letter below the jump.

Photo courtesy of PubDef

Dear [redacted]:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the Protect America Act of 2007 (S. 1927). I appreciate hearing from you, and I welcome the chance to respond.

On August 1, 2007, I was faced with a stark reality: the Director of National Intelligence sent a letter warning the Senate of the heightened threat of international terrorism, and urging us to modernize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before the August recess “to ensure that we do not have critical gaps in our ability to provide warnings of threats to the country”. The call to quickly revise FISA in order to reflect developments in telecommunications technology was echoed by four Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I chose to heed these urgent warnings.

I voted for two measures to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I preferred the legislation offered by Senators Rockefeller and Levin; however, it failed to gather the 60 votes needed to pass. I also voted for the Bond-McConnell version, which did receive enough votes to pass. Corresponding legislation was later approved by the House of Representatives, and the President quickly signed the bill into law.

It is important to recognize that this legislation is a temporary fix to provide our intelligence community with the most immediate tools needed to protect our country – it will be in place for only six months, and it cannot be renewed before it is thoroughly reviewed and authorized by Congress. This gives us six months to create a more acceptable permanent intelligence collection process that that allows us to effectively monitor terrorist communications overseas while also protecting the privacy of law-abiding American citizens. I can assure you I will be one of the Senators working hard to re-establish the constitutional protections that have been eroded by this President and this temporary FISA legislation.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns with me. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any further assistance.

All best,
Senator Claire McCaskill