The common wisdom in the media is that Sen. Obama is showing strength by "standing up to the left" by signing on to the FISA compromise. Like so much of what passes for intelligence on the idiot box this is a bunch of hooey. The charitable reading is that it puts a fig leaf over a very obscene part of Obama’s campaign. If it weren’t so logically flawed and the stakes were not so high, then it would be mildly amusing. But, that presupposes it’s a political fight, like some dustup over whether to do away with Social Security, and it presupposes that this was a left-right, liberal/conservative issue. Of course, neither of those premises holds.
But, I find myself somewhat less than surprised over Obama’s position and hardly outraged. After all, we all knew he was a politician, and we’ve learned that can be an epithet as well as a laudatory label. In the event, he may be irrelevant to the discussion. It would be good to know that someone about to take the oath of office would mean the words they speak, but is that ever the case?
Fortunately, Senators Dodd and Feingold have already announced that they plan to filibuster. While the legislation may yet pass, with even a vote in the affirmative by our fearless leader, the fact that it is a bumpy ride is a good sign. I don’t like to go down in defeat, especially on a defining issue like this, but I’m happier to lose if I know that the Democratic politicians are beginning to wake up and fight back.
And, it’s not like Obama is a constitutional scholar or anything. (He went to school where? He taught what? Hmm, that’s awkward.) Sure, someone who wants to be President is honor bound to understand the foundation document of the republic and have a good feel for what it means. Sure, we would expect a President to be on the front lines of defending our rights, in the tradition of those great people who founded the country and brought us two hundred years or so of real freedom. But, it is a tough election, and people everywhere are just now waking up from the haze of self-indulgence and freeloading on our traditions from the neoconservative Republican binge. Like waking up from a good, long sleep, it will take some time to shake the fuzziness out of our brains, look around, and get the picture.
As I’ve said before, we must be ready to force Obama to do the right thing. If we, as a popular movement, stop this bill in its tracks without his support (and, in fact, his active defiance) then we will have succeeded in that step. Obama won’t be able to give us what we need on his own, even if he were so inclined. Just electing him to office won’t change anything. It is the result of the change, not the cause of it.
I still have faith in the online movement that produced the Obama phenomenon. The combination of unfettered discussion on the blogs, direct campaign giving over the Internet, direct messages from campaigns to the people with e-mail and websites, the social networking, millions of streaming videos, and the rest are changing politics. I believe, they are changing it for the better. I call this Al Gore’s Revenge, and revenge is sweet.
Whether it will result in a victory this time around or not, we will soon see. Whether we will be able to sustain that movement in the absence of a victory on the basic mechanisms of spying on Americans is troubling and problematic. The forces against this movement are powerful and well-funded, as well as unscrupulous and savvy. They have all the interior channels, and they have been laying out their killing fields for longer than we can fathom. Still, the sheer numbers on the people’s side, I believe, are eventually destined to overwhelm their defenses and burn down their missions.
It was nice, briefly, to think that we had someone in Obama who would fight the good fight because he always infallibly knew what was right. I was looking forward to contributing (in various ways) to a Democratic campaign where I fully believed in the candidate. I’ll be waiting a little while longer for that. I wish him well on his campaign because he is a much better politician than his opponent, and will be invaluable to repairing the economic and other damage to our country wrought by the repeated attacks of the selfish. With some luck, he’ll find enough political support in the middle to get elected without us.
In the meantime, we must use this as another lesson in what must be our strategy. We need to build our liberal muscle. The way to do that is to focus on the down-ticket races, channeling your time and money to the candidates of your choice (or against those who are hopeless, Democrat as well as Republican). Take that money you would have sent to Obama and look for a worthy politician running for Congress or a state office. Think globally, act locally. Eschew the DSCC and the DCCC, who haven’t shown any inclination to listen to the Democratic rank and file, and give directly to the candidates.
Call up the person running for your congressional seat and ask them what their position on FISA was. Make it clear that this is a defining factor in your willingness to contribute to or against their campaign. If they voted for the FISA compromise, ask them why they thought that the existing FISA needed to be changed. And don’t take any BS about fighting terrorism, which is a red herring. Ask them the pointed questions. What about congressional oversight? What about independent court review? Is it sufficient to have bulk warrants that hide the details? And what happens if we give the executive carte blanche to spy without adequate oversight? Suppose a foreign government infiltrated that operation. Suppose someone wanted to spy on a political campaign. Do we have adequate safeguards in this new legislation?
This is what the fight is really about. It’s about whether we really will have Fourth Amendment protections or not. The Obama campaign seems to think that the compromise somehow restores these constitutional protections. Would that it were true. You can’t do that by compromising what the Constitution means. That’s like saying that you can make it right to steal by changing the law so that stealing has no criminal penalties.
What FISA must do is maintain independent judicial review of individual cases and base findings on real evidence that the individual(s) involved are committing a crime. There must be a specific reason to suspect a person before they start spying on them. This must be a finding that the executive convinces the judicial branch of. The original mechanism, set up after Watergate does just that. Tampering with it is unnecessary and dangerous to democracy.
The horror of Watergate wasn’t that the President lied or that he was involved in a crime, the horror was what that crime was about. That crime was about spying on a political campaign. FISA was specifically intended to prevent that from happening again. If they are going to modify it in any way, I want to have full confidence that this essential feature is preserved. It can only be preserved with adequate oversight by the independent branches of government. Having it done in secret is scary enough, without having that oversight diminished in any way.
This is a core issue about how government operates. It is not a partisan issue, except to the degree that Republicans have caved in on it. If they listed to their own "screaming whackos" long enough to get the message, they would be ashamed of doing so. The winners here, if this bill goes down to defeat, are people everywhere, the people who deserve to have their privacy and their dignity maintained by the government. The losers, if it dies in the Senate are only a few people who want to circumvent democracy. That is probably a set of rogues that includes the bitterest enemies of the American people.
In the end, I’m hoping that this pulls us together to stand for what we should all believe in. If that happens, then I’ll not worry too much that Obama abandoned us on this core issue, because when the issues come up we will have the strength we need. Maybe it will mean that we will have the power to demand a fix to the fix that seems to be in. Maybe we will overpower the bad with the good. That’s the silver lining that I’m looking for in what could be a very dark storm cloud.
PS: Look for them to try to strip out telecom immunity and then claim a victory. That’s a sham. The real problem with this bill is what it does to independent review. Congress doesn’t have the power to give amnesty to the telecoms, and I believe they all know that. These companies violated the Constitution. They would need an amendment to get immunity, and I expect the courts to find that, in the end. Telecom immunity is about pressuring the courts to do something. Pressuring the courts should raise red flags. If you talk with anyone about this, please skip directly to the main issue and attack the compromise on its own demerits, having to do with independent oversight. If it goes down, telecom immunity goes down with it.