Despite opposition from progressive leaders and activists, yesterday’s debate on FISA — and retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with Bush’s warrantless-surveillance scheme — was poised to go very badly. The political establishment had all but decided that this was a good bill, the media was treating the debate as a nuisance, and when it was time to bring the bill to the floor, only 10 senators expressed opposition.
It was going to be a long day — right up until we won a surprising, hard-earned, and entirely temporary victory. Sam Stein reports:
Senator Chris Dodd won a temporary victory today after his threats of a filibuster forced Democratic leadership to push back consideration of a measure that would grant immunity to telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless surveillance.
The measure was part of a greater bill to reorganize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Earlier on Monday, the Senate, agreed to address a bill that would have overhauled FISA, authorized the monitoring of people outside the United States, given secret courts the power to approve aspects of surveillance, and granted telecom companies retroactive immunity for past cooperation.
But the threat of Dodd’s filibuster, aimed primarily at the latter measure, persuaded Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, to table the act until January. A compromise on the immunity will ostensibly be worked out in the interim period.
“We have tried to work through this process and it appears quite clear at this stage on this bill that we’re not going to be able to do that,” said Reid. “We are at the last few hours of the last few days of this year’s session of Congress… I think it’s very clear we’re not going to be able to move into the amendments…. I’ve spoken with a number of Senators and we feel it would be in the best interest of the Senate to take at look at this when we come back next year.”
Good. Chris Dodd, to his enormous credit, had been making his case to his colleagues, off and on, for nearly eight hours, and was prepared to keep going, until he physically couldn’t continue. Reid’s office later said the decision to pull the bill wasn’t in response to Dodd’s efforts, but I think it’s entirely fair to say that were it not for Dodd, this legislation would have sailed through the Senate yesterday.
By all indications, the Senate leadership seems to be pushing for some kind of resolution before they reconsider the measure next month. Here’s a statement from Reid’s office:
“The Senate is committed to improving our nation’s intelligence laws to fight terrorism while protecting Americans’ civil liberties. We need to take the time necessary to debate a bill that does just that, rather than rushing one through the legislative process. While we had hoped to complete the FISA bill this week, it is clear that is not possible. With more than a dozen amendments to this complex and controversial bill, this legislation deserves time for thorough discussion on the floor.
“We will consider this bill when we return in January. In the meantime, I again encourage the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to make available to all Senators the relevant documents on retroactive immunity, so that each may reach an informed decision on how to proceed on this provision. I oppose retroactive immunity, but believe every Senator must have access to the information to make this important decision.”
At the risk of engaging in blog triumphalism, the netroots has every reason to pat themselves on the back for this. Several leading sites, most notably Glenn Greenwald and FireDogLake, rallied the “troops” on a measure that most of the political establishment ignored, and found a willing ally in Chris Dodd. It made yesterday an impressive win — and sent a signal that there’s a lot of work to be done over the next month to ensure the immunity measure isn’t passed in January.
The legislation touched a nerve, and the community responded. Matt Browner-Hamlin, who works for Dodd’s presidential campaign, noted that 16,000 people visited Dodd’s page for emailing their senators about this, and a total of more than 11,300 emails were sent — all in a fairly short amount of time, about a measure that gained very little media attention.
For all the recent legislative disappointments, it was heartening to see a positive result yesterday.