Dodd, Feingold To Try and Filibuster Immunity Bill 368
shma writes "This morning the senate has a scheduled cloture vote to cut off debate on the FISA bill which grants retroactive immunity to telecoms who engaged in warrantless wiretapping. Senators Russ Feingold and Christopher Dodd have pledged to try and filibuster the bill, but require the vote of 40 senators to keep the filibuster alive. The article states that a similar 'threatened filibuster failed in February, when the Senate passed a measure that granted amnesty and largely legalized the President's secret warrantless wiretapping programs.' Should they lose the cloture vote, the bill is all but assured of passing. A proposed amendment stripping the immunity provision from the bill is also expected to fail."
So will Obama be there? (Score:2, Informative)
After claiming to be against immunity and against this bill, will Obama actually show up and participate in the voting? Or is he "too busy campaigning?"
Oh, wait. He supports the bill now. [wired.com] Can't you just fell the change we can believe in?
And on that first question, apparently Obama is currently campaigning in Las Vegas [usatoday.com], although given the second point, maybe that's just as well.
Call (Score:5, Informative)
Call and remind your representative that he or she has an oath of office and a public image to sustain, and voting for this bill cannot possibly be a supportive action for either.
Seriously, if this thing passes and becomes law, it should be the job of every /.er to write to their local newspaper and lambaste their representative for voting in support of a bill which violates every citizen's constitutional rights, and aids, abets, and forgives those who broke the law in ante facto.
Conversely, if a /.er's rep votes against it, that /.er should write in support of their representative's action.
Re:So will Obama be there? (Score:3, Informative)
You can't think of any? That's your argument? Ugh. (Score:5, Informative)
* Global Poverty Act (S.2433)
* Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act (S. 230)
* Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation
There's three, related to three very different topics, and all were an improvement in my opinion.
As for McCain-Feingold... he violates the spirit of it every time he catches a ride in his multi-millionaire wife's company plane. With respect to McCain-Lieberman, he both spoke against it to the press as the vote came up a few weeks ago, and then didn't bother to show up and vote one way or the other on the bill itself. Unlike Obama and Clinton, he wasn't in a contested race for POTUS nomination at the time.
Re:Retroactive warrants (Score:3, Informative)
In the FISA courts the government still has to show that they had a good faith belief that the correspondence was relevant to an investigation. The fact that they put a splitter [wired.com] on the backbone means that they are tapping the calls of millions of people. There's no way that they have a good faith belief that every one of those millions of calls is relevant to anything.
Re:Retroactive warrants (Score:5, Informative)
Dick Cheney was part of Nixon's administration during Watergate. He's said before that it taught him to never write anything down if he could avoid it. Hence his famous quote "I learned early on that if you donâ(TM)t want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just donâ(TM)t write any."
Re:You can't think of any? That's your argument? U (Score:4, Informative)
Don't dismiss something as rhetoric if you know nothing about it. Obama actually has a very impressive legislative record. In less than four years the US Senate he's gotten three major pieces of legislation passed:
Google For Government (earmark and government spending transparency)
Counter Weapons Proliferation (loose nukes, etc.)
Ethics and Lobbying Reform (banned a lot of the lobbyist perks)
If you go back to the Illinois Senate the list gets much longer, so it's easier to point to his death penalty legislation as his biggest achievement. The outgoing Governor put a moratorium on the death penalty because of too many questionable convictions. So, the issue spent about a decade treated as a political hot potato on both sides. Working groups were formed and dissolved, but nothing got resolved.
Obama took on the issue and got a compromise bill passed by an overwhelming majority. The only way he could do that was to get the police unions and civil rights groups to agree on a fair set of procedures for things like interrogations in death penalty cases. Just imagine what kind of skill it takes to get agreement between cops and the ACLU.
Anyway, those are just a few highlights. I really have neither the time nor inclination to list all of the major legislation he's sponsored or cosponsored. But that should give you a sense of some things he's devoted his time to.
Coincidence? (Score:5, Informative)
Why am I not surprised?
Re:Call - it was easy and quick to call! (Score:3, Informative)
I called my senators; I've never called a senator's office before and I found it to be incredibly easy. Took less than a minute each.
I told them I was from their state and was calling to urge the senator not to support the cloture vote for H.R. 6304 regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and that I urge the senator not to support the bill because it takes away rights from every citizen.
You can find your senators' phone numbers at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm [senate.gov]
McCain has missed more. (Score:5, Informative)
Obama has missed 42.7% of votes, McCain has missed 61%.
Source [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Obama (Score:1, Informative)
A vote present counts as a no vote for the purposes of passing a bill in the Illinois senate.
Re:You can't think of any? That's your argument? U (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Obama claimed three pieces of legislation in one of his ads, and FactCheck.org debunked [factcheck.org] all three claims to varying degrees.
But a more careful review via thomas.loc.gov reveals the following:
110th Congress: 19 amendments to other bills sponsored and passed. All of these amendments (including parent poster's "ethics and lobbying reform" were passed by voice vote or unanimous consent.
109th Congress:
S. 2125, Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006. Passed both Senate and House without recorded vote.
S. 3757, Named a post office after someone. House version passed both House and Senate without recorded vote.
A variety of other amendments to other bills were passed as well.
I didn't see any major pieces of legislation at all, and I must have missed the other ones the parent mentioned above (though I was only looking at legislation that became law).
As for compromise, Obama pales in comparison to his opponent.
Re:Obama (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Obama (Score:3, Informative)
I used the word "most," not "every," because it's the accurate term. To be clear, there are 48 blue dogs in the House (http://www.house.gov/ross/BlueDogs/Member%20Page.html) not counting the unofficial blue dogs. They all voted overwhelmingly in favor of the amendment. You also have about 31 House Democrats up for competitive elections in swing districts, and they voted 3 to 1 for the amendment (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/large-majority-of-swing-district.html). Given that there's about 25% overlap between those two groups, that leaves you with at least 60 House Democrats meeting the criteria I listed, which is the majority of the 105 votes.
Back to the main point, the telecom immunity is certainly an important issue, along with a few other provisions in the amendment. However, just because they don't have the votes to fix the bill does not mean the issue is dead. The whole point of withholding immunity is to keep a leverage for later investigations. However, the immunity provision is civil, not criminal. So, later investigations can still use the threat of criminal prosecution as a leverage. Further, the existing FISA bill can always be amended later when it's not being used as a political football. It may not be the best compromise, but the fact is that it's not capitulation--certainly not if the majority of Democrats voting yea are genuinely in favor of the legislation.
I admit that I'm not happy with the FISA bill but I don't see what Obama can do right now if he can't get nearly every Democratic Senator on board with his position. The Republicans have 50 guaranteed votes (including Leibermann). As I've already stated, they can break a filibuster by getting just 10 of the 50 remaining Democrats and Independents to side with them. A version of the bill with immunity already made it through the Senate once, so we can reasonably expect that the Republicans have the vote.
To sum up, Obama has a path to fix the this legislation after the fact if needed. He's also trying to win an election and maintain strong majorities in the House and Senate. Finally, he needs to maintain a good working relationship with Congress, the majority of whom appear to support this bill. So, I really don't see where exactly he's deficient in leadership here. It sounds more like you're going off half cocked on something you know very little about.
-1, Flamebait? Try +1, True. (Score:5, Informative)
Most Democrats did vote against the bill, 128-105 [house.gov], with only one Republican [wikipedia.org] voting against and ten not voting. It's fair to point out that nearly half the Democrats in Congress, including many of their leaders, are also involved in this attempt to subvert the rule of law and the Bill of Rights, but to try and pretend that the Republicans aren't the greater offenders here is just wrong.
Attention moderators: if reading facts that contradict your opinion makes you want to flame someone, that doesn't mean he's writing flamebait, it just means you should be less flammable.
Re:3 choices (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting. Googlesearch for obama+telecom+immunity [google.com] reveals a Guardian article that shows that he voted (with only 30 other Democratic Senators) against the immunity [guardian.co.uk].
This may have been a hedge, though; because the bill started in the Senate, he knew there would be another chance to vote after it came back from the House.
Hmmm, hit #4 in the search is a CBS News piece dated 6/21/2008 [cbsnews.com] that has him issuing a statement in support of the House's update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but said he would try to strip a provision granting immunity to telecommunication companies when the bill comes to a vote in the Senate next week.
I like the idea of an anti-corporate Senator, and I love the idea of an anti-corporate President. It's about time for another TR [wikipedia.org].
Re:You can't think of any? That's your argument? U (Score:4, Informative)
You really need to learn how to use thomas.loc.gov properly. Although, if the best you've got is to knitpick an ad, then it's no wonder you don't understand how to use a simple website. Honestly, the biggest complaint in that FactCheck page is that he's touting his accomplishments in the Illinois Senate. They debunked nothing; they just took issue with him claiming to have "passed" legislation (as is their policy) and not noting the Illinois Senate legislation separately.
Now, I do have to admit that I was mistaken on the Feingold-Obama Ethics Reform Bill (S.230)--it hasn't been passed yet. However, here are three major pieces of Obama's legislation passed into law:
Coburn-Obama Google For Government (S.2590)
Global Poverty Act (S.2433)
Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation (S.1949)
It's funny really, for all McCain's constant bluster on earmarks it turns out that Obama's the one who's actually enacted legislation to help fix the system (S.2590). Of course, McCain was supposed to be involved in the Obama-Feingold Ethics Reform Act too, but he turned the first attempt into a very public, partisan car wreck. The resulting bill ended up being a watered down mess. Fortunately Obama and Feingold had the dedication to revisit the issue and revive the legislation.
As for compromise, it's sounds like you've just bought into the McCain image. The fact is that being senselessly antagonistic doesn't make one a maverick, and flip-flopping for political expediency isn't compromising. You can take almost every issue McCain is campaigning on and make him debate his past positions. He was against the Bush tax cuts and now he's for them. He supported comprehensive immigration reform and now he's against it. He supported campaign finance reform after his Keating Five scandal, and now he's running a primary campaign in violation of finance laws and has established state funds allowing donations of up to $60k per contributor. He claims to be environmentally conscious but has a lifetime score of zero from the LCV and just flip-flopped on offshore drilling. I could continue, but frankly I'm getting bored.
Look, maybe in the future you should be less focused on your candidate's hype and pay a little more attention to the substance.
Where to start? (Score:4, Informative)
"Actually, it's the Bill of Rights and not the Constitution"
The Bill of Rights is nothing more than a name for the first ten amendments to the Constitution. And amendments are part of the Constitution, so you're quite firmly wrong on that.
"The Constitution and Bill of Rights don't grant rights to the people, they provide a list of rights that the government should be unable to take away from the people."
The Supreme Court long ago ruled that the Constitution does apply to all citizens, and does directly enumerate their rights, thank you Mr. Constitutional Scholar. You're using the same old lame argument that segregationists used, and it's no more valid when you write it than they.
" The actual text is, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." "
You should read the actual text yourself. The first part lays out the reasoning for the right, but the second part guarantees the right. Even if the circumstances for giving the right have changed (the left-wing "but we have the National Guard now" argument), the right itself still isn't voided. The only way to strike a Constitutional right is the ammendment process. You can't simply have a judge go "oh well, times are different, this right isn't needed any longer". You simply cannot void a Constitutional right without actually changing the Constitutuion itself.
SCOTUS will likely rule on the individual right issue, and if experts are correct, is likely to put this foolishness about the 2nd being a "collective right" to bed forever. There are no collective rights. Rights are by their very definition for individuals.
Re:Dodd... (Score:3, Informative)
The left flank of the Democratic Party aren't whores. I'm talking about Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee (who voted against going to Afghanistan), Pete Stark, etc.
There are a few libertarian Republicans who aren't whores but tend to vote in such a way that one could construe them to be whores. Ron Paul, Jeff Flake, and others come to mind.
Re:You can't think of any? That's your argument? U (Score:4, Informative)
I need to learn how to use Thomas? Here's what I found out about your citations in less than five minutes:
109th Congress, S.2590: Half the freakin' Senate (47 senators) cosponsored this bill. Tom Coburn was the bill's sponsor. How does that translate into Obama being responsible for passing it into law?
110th Congress, S.2433: Neither it nor its House version (H.R.1302) have passed. The bill had been introduced in the 109th Congress in the House but not the Senate.
109th Congress, S.1949: Also did not pass. Obama is listed as its only cosponsor.