With Labor Day behind us, Congress is facing a tough month. On the one hand, lawmakers in both parties are anxious to get out of DC, return to their home districts, and campaign as hard as possible in advance of November 7. On the other, many lawmakers, particularly Republicans, aren’t exactly looking forward to hitting the campaign trail with no real accomplishments to show for their efforts.
With this in mind, September will be unusually busy. Some GOP leaders are aiming for a Sept. 29 adjournment date, giving lawmakers only four weeks — about 12 legislative days — before wrapping up for the year. How will Congress spend their limited time? By sticking to the Republicans’ campaign script.
As they prepare for a critical pre-election legislative stretch, Congressional Republican leaders have all but abandoned a broad overhaul of immigration laws and instead will concentrate on national security issues they believe play to their political strength.
With Congress reconvening Tuesday after an August break, Republicans in the House and Senate say they will focus on Pentagon and domestic security spending bills, port security legislation and measures that would authorize the administration’s terror surveillance program and create military tribunals to try terror suspects.
Near the top of the list will be a White House plan to expand the president’s surveillance powers, based on a “compromise” the Bush gang struck with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). With the debate about to heat up again, it’s worth taking a moment to remember just how awful this plan really is.
As Glenn Greenwald put it, the plan would “‘amend’ FISA by making it optional (rather than mandatory) for the President to comply with it, thereby removing all limitations on his power to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans.”
Nearly two months ago, the [tag]White House[/tag], which has circumvented the law with a [tag]warrant[/tag]less-[tag]search[/tag] program that operates with no accountability or oversight, struck a deal with Specter in which the president didn’t have to give up anything. [tag]Specter[/tag] huffed and puffed about Bush’s legally dubious surveillance scheme, at one point saying that “there is no doubt that this is inappropriate,” but when it came time to strike a deal, the president got everything he wanted — and then some.
Glenn anticipates the inevitable arguments in support of the Bush-Specter deal and does his best to explain why it’s a mistake, and why much of what we’re about to hear is wrong.
If I had one wish, it would be for journalists everywhere to ingest this one extremely simple, undeniable fact — FISA, as written, allows the President to “listen in when Osama bin Laden is calling.” Under the law as it has existed for 28 years, “if al Qaeda is calling into the United States [the President can] know why they’re calling.” The “Terrorist Surveillance Program” doesn’t give the President the power to listen in on those calls because he already has that power under FISA.
The difference between FISA and the warrantless eavesdropping program is not about whether the President can eavesdrop on terrorists. He can eavesdrop on all of the terrorists he wants under FISA as it is written. What is being debated — the only difference — is whether he should be able to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans with judicial oversight (as all Presidents have done for the last 30 years) or whether he can eavesdrop on Americans in secret, without oversight (which led to severe abuses of the eavesdropping powers in the four decades prior to FISA). That is what is being decided, not whether he can eavesdrop on terrorists.
Leaving FISA as is — or eliminating The Terrorist Surveillance Program today — would mean that the President can still freely eavesdrop on Al Qaeda’s conversations. If we eliminated The Terrorist Surveillance Program this minute, the President could still listen in when Osama bin Laden calls. That’s because FISA, as is, vests aggressive power in the President to eavesdrop on America’s enemies. Why is that so hard for journalists to comprehend?
Those who oppose the Specter bill favor aggressive eavesdropping on terrorists. What they oppose is allowing the President to eavesdrop on Americans in secret, with no judicial oversight.
Something to keep in mind over the next several weeks.