In the end, President George Bush played a high-stakes card game with the Democratic controlled Senate, went on the offensive on TV and got just what he wanted:
The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government’s terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.
The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted.
Although Democratic leaders expressed disappointment that it had passed, the bottom line was that the vote passed via a coalition of 16 Democrats and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman joining all 43 Republicans to pass the measure. Lieberman said:
“We’re at war. The enemy wants to attack us,” Lieberman said during the Senate debate. “This is not the time to strive for legislative perfection.
The White House was pleased — but some others weren’t:
Privacy advocates accused the Democrats of selling out and charged that this bill gives the government more authority than it had under a controversial warrantless wiretapping program begun in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Under that program, the government could conduct surveillance without judicial oversight only if it had a reason to believe that one party to the call was a member of or affiliated with al-Qaeda or a related terrorist organization. This bill drops that condition, they noted.
Democrats “have a Pavlovian reaction: Whenever the president says the word ‘terrorism,’ they roll over and play dead,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, predicted that the bill’s approval would lead to the monitoring of ordinary Americans by the National Security Agency, which conducts most of the government’s electronic surveillance. “If this bill becomes law, Americans who communicate with a person abroad can count on one thing: The NSA may be listening,” he said.
Meanwhile, if a post in Talking Points Memo Muckraker is true, Bush got exactly what he wanted from the Senate after nixing a deal between the House’s Democratic leadership and his own intelligence bigwig. He then coupled that with a dramatic, almost angry demand on TV that Democrats pass an intelligence bill:
Today, while standing with Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, President Bush lamented the inability of Congressional Democrats to give McConnell the tools he needed to capture the communications of terrorists….
There’s only one problem with Bush’s statement: it isn’t true.
A key Democrat in the negotiations, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), says that a deal had in fact been reached with McConnell, who has been busy lobbying Congress on a FISA update all week. “We had an agreement with DNI McConnell,” Hoyer spokeswoman Stacey Bernards tells TPMmuckraker, “and then the White House quashed the agreement.”
The debate will continue (and is) about whether during this era of a genuine terrorist threat it is wise and common sense to give the government all the tools it says it wants. The authority is “temporary.”
But the problem is that the Bush administration has not just shown that it skirts oversight on intelligence but it won’t reveal even to Congress what it is really doing. Its motif has been to use Congressional approvals to increasingly expand its power. This isn’t a case of a White House working in partnership with Congress but a White House that shows disdain for Congress, checks and balances, and serious oversight of its policies and actions.
From a strictly political standpoint, if the TPM piece is indeed true, Bush held out for the strongest deal he could get, went on TV and seemingly scared some Democrats to go along with him (some other Democrats clearly agreed the law update was needed) since his TV talk centered on how critical it was to give government these new updated tools to protect the U.S. And it worked — indicating a) he still has a lot of clout since he can peel off wavering or sympathetic Democrats so they join in coalition with GOPers and b) if it worked this time chances are this tactic will be used on other high-stakes measures.
Likely outcome: it’s going to further hurt the Democratic leadership with its base since it will be seen to be the equivalent of former Majority Leader Bill Frist, who seemed powerless and outmaneuvered on key votes.
Reaction from administration critics on the web, Democrats and some Republicans who are uneasy over giving this administration any new powers is likely to be swift.
The always independent-minded The Talking Dog, for instance, writes:
Ah, don’t we all remember August, 2002? We were all getting ready for that manly celebration of September 11th +1.0, when the President could tell us how manly he handled the whole thing because he showed up a week later with a bullhorn, kind of like how he did back at dear old Yale and Andover with the boy-cheerleader teams. Andy Card told us we didn’t roll out new products in August. And I concluded that a war in Iraq was being played for domestic political purposes, to wit, to corner Democrats into a no win situation of either supporting an unjustified war or being painted as “soft on terrorism” (as if they wouldn’t be anyway), and decided once and for all that I was opposed to the Iraq war for good.
Its 2007, now, and Democrats are in control of both houses of Congress (really?), Iraq has gone to hell in a hand-basket (and will keep going further and further to hell), the President’s ideological and heavy-handed tactics have been widely discredited, the Attorney General blatantly lies to Congress and no one takes any action to stop him, the President’s approval rating hovers in the 20’s… and yet.
Further down TTD writes:
Hackneyed and overplayed as it is, I guess the guy whose office happens to be a block from the World Trade Center site, as it was on September 11, 2001 (that would be me) is once again reduced to stunned speechlessness, and quoting Ben Franklin: “They who would give up their precious liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.” And if George W. Bush is in charge, we will likely end up with neither anyway.
And after over 6 1/2 years of disastrous administration of our government by George W. Bush, Democratic members of Congress seem incapable of figuring this out. Remarkable. A long– a very long– 534 days to go.
Read the entire post.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.