While I’m incredibly angry about today’s vote in the Senate on the FISA amendment, I’m not surprised and I refuse to be at effect of the outcome. The forces of evil that brought us this are undoubtedly planning the next outrage as you read this, and we can ill afford to sit back and wait for their next attack. There will always be people who want to take away our rights because there will always be money in it. And, we are losing because we have not come to grips with the seriousness of the threat nor have we put together the proper forces to deal with that threat.
We need to look immediately to the next constitutional battle and prepare for it; and that’s what this piece is about. Good strategy dictates that we choose the battle and that we shape the battlefield. I think we should do that right now, rather than morn the loss of yet another set of rights.
Know Your Enemy
Who is it that has it in for our rights? I call these people "The Bandits". For a long time, we’ve thought of the enemy as the Republicans, the conservatives, the neocons, and various other political groups, but the real enemy is a group of people who want money and don’t care about the public interest if it stands in their way of getting it. These people wrap themselves in the flag, but they ain’t no patriots. They would put money into the army and have it fight to keep some other group out of the United States, but not to defend the country. No, they just want the money. If they could sell the landmass for a suitable profit, they’d do it. No patriotism is involved.
This isn’t a political battle. It’s a battle about wealth and power. Don’t think of them as anything but greedy bastards, because if you are off in that assessment, then you haven’t missed the mark by much.
As such, they will sell out any of your liberties. In fact, the Constitution is nothing to them but a smorgasbord of goodies, each with a price. If you break it all down into the twenty or so essential freedoms and rights guaranteed by the Constitution, there are about two dozen profit centers, as far as The Bandits are concerned.
And they will crush anyone in their way to getting that money. Nancy Pelosi is just roadkill on the way to riches, as far as they’re concerned.
Know Yourself
The only people who care about defending our rights, and the only people who aren’t willing to sell them for a price, are defenders of democracy. Call them "Forces of Democracy" for short. That’s us. We know that democracy is more than a (rigged) election; it means specific rights that are defined and defended within the governmental system. It means restraining the power of government enough to allow individual freedom and responsibility. It means restraining even the good guys when they have good intentions from doing things according to procedures that violate human rights, dignity and privacy. It is patriotic to be in the Forces of Democracy and defend the Constitution and what it stands for. You don’t have to wear a flag lapel pin to qualify.
A Winning Strategy
The current situation is completely untenable. We have no organized force to counter The Bandits. We only respond when attacked. We have no standing in the Democratic Party to bring those forces to bear when needed, so we aren’t really in any position to counter an attack. That’s why we’ve lost battle after battle to The Bandits on constitutional issues. They’ve taken over the White House and the apparatus of the Republican Party, so they can use those assets against us pretty much any time they want. That was the fault of patriots in the Republican Party, who didn’t fight hard enough to keep these people out, but blaming them doesn’t help us. We have to get organized ourselves, and that means turning the Democratic Party into our fighting force.
Not only that, but The Bandits are the ones on the attack. We have done nothing but defend. If you grant this the status of a strategy, it’s a losing strategy. If you do nothing but defend, then you are destined eventually to be defeated. A defensive strategy is a strategy to lose.
Ask the Democratic Party about it. They’ve had a defensive strategy for years, and what have they done over and over? Lose. They might win this election not because they have a good strategy or anything positive to sell, but merely because their opponents have exhausted themselves gorging on the spoils and are too fat, dumb and happy to take the field.
We must go on the attack. Only an attacking strategy can win. We must go on the offense and define future battles. The only way to win is to take the offensive.
Choose Your Battles
The next constitutional battle needs to be about increasing civil liberties. The next bill to hit Congress needs to be written specifically to increase civil liberties and shore up constitutional rights. It should not just reaffirm the Fourth Amendment; it should put in place specific mechanisms for ensuring that searches are carried out only with specific reason to believe that those being searched have committed or are committing a crime. It should strengthen due process. It should positively affirm the right to individual privacy and put in place procedures and structures to guard that privacy.
Specifically, we need to immediately push to have friendly representatives in the House work to establish a body with the explicit goal of increasing support for constitutional rights. This body could be a subcommittee or an independent group (similar to a grand jury) commissioned specifically to look at the current and past operations of the intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies of the federal government and make recommendations on how to simultaneously increase protections of fundamental rights and increase national security. Members should be given security clearances under the same terms that anyone else is, so that they have complete freedom to investigate and research what is currently being done.
The important point here is to set as the next constitutional battle restoring rights. This means that The Bandits will be forced to fight a defensive battle. This will reverse the flow of events and make it difficult for further liberties to be taken away.
At the same time, we need to get into the public mind that there is no inherent tradeoff between security and rights. Anyone who tells you there’s a tradeoff is guilt of lazy thinking. They haven’t done the work necessary to reconcile the two. Our enemies want us to be lazy. We can’t afford to be. We have to think and work hard. You don’t have to lose rights to get security. If you architect the intelligence gathering and law enforcement processes and structures correctly, you can do both.
Make sure you are clear to people that this is not a tradeoff. Doing so will make it harder to argue for undermining constitutional rights in future battles.
In addition, we need to make sure that the telecom amnesty passed today is a Pyrrhic victory. I think someone needs to propose a bill in the House that would require the telecoms to put up a bond as insurance against their future compliance with a lawless administration. The telecom companies today were, in effect, found guilty of criminally aiding the Bush Administration in spying on Americans. They should each be required to put up a bond that they would forfeit if they ever again aided an administration in illegally spying on Americans. I suggest $10 billion each would be enough to make them think twice about this kind of behavior. Let’s press Congress to pass such a bill.
And, finally, since Congress took the power away from the courts to look into charges against the telecoms, then the House Judiciary Committee needs to convene a special session where it brings in all the players and investigate the charges itself. The entire lot of these cases should be transferred bodily to Congress to look at. In this way, the crimes committed by the Bush Administration will still go on the public record.
Gathering Our Forces
We need to make sure that we don’t lose control of the forces that are going to make future decisions. This means both defining and leading the people who are part of the group I just mentioned and controlling the people in Congress who will bring and vote on future bills. By "control" I’m not talking about dictating to them what they do at the fine level, but rather making sure that we don’t get any ringers from The Bandits in this force. They have to be dedicated to the best interests of the country, not some group out for personal gain.
So, whatever subcommittee or task force looks into this, it must include a majority of people we know to be solid on constitutional rights. This would include lawyers who have defended those rights previously in court and independent authorities on the Constitution from law schools and other sources. We should be looking for people who are not under control of the intelligence community, the military, any large corporation, or a moneyed interest. Or the Republican Party.
As for those who would see the bill through Congress, we need to take control of the Democratic Party to the extent that we don’t have to worry about a Nancy Pelosi or a Steny Hoyer undermining the results. To do that, we have to choose carefully who we vote for and who we support with our time and money in the coming elections. And we need to work to change the "leadership" in Congress to put people in those positions who strongly defend Democratic principles (including fundamental principles of democracy) instead of the people we’ve got.
Talking Points
Here are the essential talking points:
- Congress must set up a group right now to look at how to increase privacy and civil liberties
- Congress must then act to strengthen our rights.
- You are losing your rights to privacy and personal security because of actions taken by corporations and the government.
- This is unnecessary. There’s no tradeoff between rights and security—you can have both.
- Anyone who tells you that you must give up rights for security is a lazy thinker.
- Defending constitutional rights is a patriotic duty.
It is important for the Forces of Democracy to take immediate action to define and shape the next battle over constitutional rights. That means pushing increased rights. It also means putting a new person in any position of leadership that would oppose moving ahead on constitutional rights.
The End Game
In the end we can win this battle for democracy. But we have to take it much more seriously than we have to date. We’ve been lackadaisical and much too willing to compromise with people that we agree with on other matters. It’s very clear from today’s results that those people will sell out your most fundamental rights for whatever cut flowers they can get today.
Here’s my call to action: Whenever possible press for Congress to charter a subcommittee or other group to write legislation that would change the processes to enhance constitutional rights. This is a very specific proposal that we can press forward on. Take the offensive and demand that rights be restored.
Otherwise, The Bandits will choose the next battle and how it is fought.