Pelosi, Reid, block special session on FISA.

[SirNitram]

Link

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) mistrust of President Bush is really well known and runs deep.

Fearing a recess appointment by Bush during the Christmas-New Year’s break, the Nevada Democrat refused to adjourn the chamber during the whole period, scheduling very, very brief pro forma sessions every couple of days to avoid any such appointments.

Now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has joined with her Senate colleague, scheduling two pro forma sessions for the House this week so that Bush cannot call Congress back into special session to take up the now-expired Protect America Act, an enhanced surveillance bill that lapsed over the weekend, or the Senate-passed amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Bush and the Republican congressional leaders have been pounding the Democrats, claiming they have endangered the country by allowing the law to lapse. Democrats counter that Republicans, joined by some conservative Democrats, blocked a three-week extension of the act, so they are at fault.

The House and Senate also disagree on the hugely controversial issue of retroactive legal immunity for telecommunications companies involved in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. The Senate has approved retroactive immunity, while the House has not. Talks are continuing this week, even as Congress is out.

Pelosi, fearing that Bush would try to capitalize on the House’s absence to call Congress back into a special session, scheduled two pro forma sessions on Tuesday and Thursday. The Senate will do the same at the same time. Since neither chamber goes out for more than three days, Bush cannot take the dramatic step of calling the Congress back for the first special session since Harry Truman did it in 1948.

And for all you progressives out there, the non-Republican senator you most love to hate – Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) – will be presiding over one of the pro forma sessions this week. So, you better keep an eye on him

Lieberman holding pro-forma? He'll either fall asleep or vote to make Israel the fifty-first state.

Kidding aside, it seems the spine the House found didn't flee with the morning sun. Wonder how long it'll last.

[Flagg]

I love the fact that we really don't even need the "Protect America Act" without telecomm imunity since FISA is more than adequate. Hell, I'd even argue that FISA goes over the line in allowing the government to wiretap for 3 days before even trying to get a warrant.

[Xisiqomelir]

I know it's just you two + elfdart and I who care about this, but this is good news.

[Johonebesus]

There are other like me, but we're just not so optimistic. I still say Pelosi is either incredibly stupid or plainly corrupt for forbidding any consideration of impeachment at all.

[CmdrWilkens]

There are other like me, but we're just not so optimistic. I still say Pelosi is either incredibly stupid or plainly corrupt for forbidding any consideration of impeachment at all.

I think it was a desire to address the rest of the agenda. More importantly if they win with the FISA fight, the contempt citation, and a few toher things then they still hammer the Bush adminitration AND they don't lose. basically she decided to play for the games that she coudl win and since House Republicans know that these moves are not the preliminary to an impeachment proceeding then they don't have as much ammunition to fire back with. I don't like it but it is good politics on her part.

[Darth Raptor]

Hell, I'd even argue that FISA goes over the line in allowing the government to wiretap for 3 days before even trying to get a warrant.

The FISA court is a motherfucking rubber stamp. The dicks at the NSA could even get a warrant after the fact. Why Bush saw the need to break the law is as bewildering as it is infuriating.

[Elfdart]

The head honcho at Qwest claims that the Cheney-Bush Junta leaned on him to start illegal wiretaps in February 2001. If that's true, it's just a replay of Watergate where one crime after another is committed to cover up an earlier one. Watergate was about covering up not only a widespread campaign of illegal surveillance, but Nixon's treachery in 1968 as well as an effort to find out who in Nixon's demonic coven squealed about Cambodia.

The thing to remember is that the Junta is made up of people who think the problem with Nixon's administration was NOT that he committed countless felonies, but that he didn't cover his tracks and resort to enough thuggery to stay in office. Dick Vader was one of Nixon's padawan learners back then, as was Rumsfeld. A popular saying among that type of Republitard is that where Nixon went wrong was that he didn't burn the incriminating Tapes (the ones where he offered a million dollar bribe to a grand jury witness, among other things) on the White House lawn -telling Congress and the courts to go fuck themselves (in Dick Vader's words 30 years later).

If court cases against the phone companies are allowed to proceed, the CEO of Qwest might be proved right. That's the only explanation I can think of that would explain the hysteria from Dubya's henchmen over this immunity clause.

[Pablo Sanchez]

The FISA court is a motherfucking rubber stamp. The dicks at the NSA could even get a warrant after the fact. Why Bush saw the need to break the law is as bewildering as it is infuriating.

My personal reading of the administration's actions viz. the illegal circumvention of FISA is they didn't want to leave any record of what they were doing. FISA is a secret court, sure, but it has a paper trail and spreads knowledge of the datamining programs to the court officers, who aren't necessarily members of the Bush team. And everybody knows how Bush feels about people who aren't on his team.

Given that we know so little about the specifics of who and what was actually illegally surveilled under the illegal NSA program, there's also the fascinating possibility that the program was so invasive and unjustifiable that they feared that even the rubber-stamp FISA court would reject it. Like maybe the NSA wanted to run wiretaps on the Quakers and the NAACP.

[Johonebesus]

There are other like me, but we're just not so optimistic. I still say Pelosi is either incredibly stupid or plainly corrupt for forbidding any consideration of impeachment at all.

I think it was a desire to address the rest of the agenda. More importantly if they win with the FISA fight, the contempt citation, and a few toher things then they still hammer the Bush adminitration AND they don't lose. basically she decided to play for the games that she coudl win and since House Republicans know that these moves are not the preliminary to an impeachment proceeding then they don't have as much ammunition to fire back with. I don't like it but it is good politics on her part.

What agenda? Why has it taken this long to start challenging the administration? Why didn't they start standing up to him a year ago? They don't have a huge majority, so they can't override a veto, and even if he decides not to veto something he will just issue a signing statement stating his intention not to enforce the law. They haven't gotten anything significant done and have caved on issue after issue until now. Even if they hadn't been so timid they wouldn't have been able to accomplish much of any significance without the votes to overcome a veto. Have they succeeded in de-escalating Iraq, or doing anything for health care, or increasing taxes on the rich, or balancing the budget? If they had aggressively stood up to Shrub from the start you might have a point, but they didn't.

Given the abysmal approval ratings of the Congress and public support for impeachment or at least thorough investigations, I don't see how you can say her decision was politically smart. The only way the Democrats will hold onto the Congress is through a combination of hatred of Shrub and voter apathy. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised of the Republicans take back both houses, even if Obama wins.