Received this e-mail today from Senator Jeff Merkley (D. OR):
71.
That's how many cases of sexual assault or unwanted sexual contact happen on average every single day in America's military. That's over 26,000 each year.
These numbers are shameful. Absolutely unacceptable.
But, as a husband and a father, I know that numbers don't capture the problem adequately. Every single one represents a human being who has been betrayed.
I'm teaming up with several of my fellow Senators to do something about it. Sign our petition: Join me in demanding the Senate vote on the Military Justice Improvement Act:
http://endsexualassault.com/...
It's outrageous that every day 71 women who have sacrificed to serve our country are victimized. It's even worse that so few get justice from the military whose uniform they wear.
Victims of sexual misconduct deserve to have their case heard before independently trained military prosecutors - not officers in their chain of command.
We need to act. Now.
Sign our petition: Demand a full Senate vote on the Military Justice Improvement Act:
http://endsexualassault.com/...
Thanks,
Senator Jeff Merkley
You can click here to sign Merkley's petition:
http://endsexualassault.com/...
And while I'm here, let me do a little recap of what Merkley's been up to. First, Merkley received his 51st co-sponsor for ENDA:
http://www.advocate.com/...
Delaware senator Tom Carper has become the 51st sponsor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would ban discrimination against workers on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Sen. Carper believes it is important for federal law to explicitly prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — in the same way that current law addresses race, sex or religion — in order to ensure that all Americans are protected equally under the law,” Carper spokesman Ian Sams told the Washington Blade.
Carper was a cosponsor of the bill during the 112th Congress.
Most recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota signed on as cosponsors to Oregon senator Jeff Merkley's bill. - The Advocate, 6/18/13
Merkley, along with Senator Ron Wyden (D. OR) recently applauded the passing of legislation to look our for wildlife and rural schools:
http://www.ktvz.com/...
Oregon Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., today applauded the passage of legislation through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that would expand wild and scenic river and wilderness protections for lands in Oregon, as well as provide much-needed payments to timber communities through the Secure Rural Schools program. Both bills now are eligible to be considered by the full Senate.
The committee passed a one-year extension of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (SRS) to provide rural timber communities in more than 700 counties with payments totaling about $329 million for fiscal year 2014 – a five percent reduction from fiscal year 2013. The payments mitigate the severe impacts felt in these communities as a result of lost revenue from declining timber revenues on federal forest lands. Oregon would receive roughly $100 million, although the exact amount may vary depending on the funding formula and mandatory budget cuts.
“Secure Rural Schools payments extend a lifeline to resource-dependent communities that in many cases are perched on the edge of financial disaster,” Wyden said. “I’ve been working on a long-term answer to challenges for rural areas that can find common cause between the communities on the Gulf Coast and the timber towns in Oregon and other resource-dependent communities. But while that effort is underway, it is critical for rural counties to keep law enforcement on the roads, and teachers in classrooms, which is why it is so important to renew this program for the next year.”
“It’s great news that the Energy and Natural Resources committee has passed a one-year extension of county payments to help keep our rural timber counties afloat,” Merkley said. “This is an important bridge to building a sustainable harvest plan that will strengthen our timber economy.” - KTVZ, 6/18/13
And lately he's been pushing to make the NSA more transparent:
http://www.webpronews.com/...
The Hill reports that Sen. Jeff Merkley has introduced a bill that would force the secret FISA courts to declassify its “significant opinions” regarding NSA requests for data under the FISA amendments and PATRIOT Act. The bill is aimed directly at the assumption that the FISA courts use alternate interpretations of the law to bypass the “plain reading of the law passed by Congress.”
Merkley also says that he wants the opinions out in the open so that the American people can better debate the pros and cons of the NSA spy program:
“Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law. There is plenty of room to have this debate without compromising our surveillance sources or methods or tipping our hand to our enemies. We can’t have a serious debate about how much surveillance of Americans’ communications should be permitted without ending secret law.”
One of the bill’s co-sponsors and outspoken NSA opponent, Sen. Ron Wyden, echoed Merkley:
“It is impossible for the American people to have an informed public debate about laws that are interpreted, enforced, and adjudicated in complete secrecy. When talking about the laws governing Intelligence operations, the process has little to no transparency. Declassifying FISA Court opinions in a form that does not put sources and methods at risk will give the American people insight into what government officials believe the law allows them to do.” - WebPro News, 6/12/13
Here's a little more info on Merkley's bill:
http://www.theverge.com/...
Now that surveillance is back in the news in a big way, Merkley is trying again to pass his bill, getting the backing of seven of his colleagues, including prominent privacy-advocating Senators Al Franken (D-MN), Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Republican Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dean Heller (R-NV) are also endorsing the bill. The bill specifically targets the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secret legal system set up in 1978 that issues classified orders requiring companies to hand over information as part of investigations into foreign threats, including suspected terrorist plotters. - The Verge, 6/11/13
And a little more info:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Specifically, the bill would compel the first public airing of the so-called Fisa court's understandings of section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the government has cited as the basis for collecting the phone records of millions of Americans; and section 702 of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act, which the government has cited as the basis for the NSA internet monitoring program known as Prism.
"I think that Americans deserve to know how our government is interpreting the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act," Jamal Raad, a spokesman for Merkley, told the Guardian on Tuesday. "After these disclosures, folks will want to know how that works within the plain language of the law, of the Patriot Act. How does one get to gather anything, anytime, anywhere from grabbing 'any tangible thing relevant to an investigation'."
Merkley, a civil libertarian, has fought these battles before. At the end of 2012, Merkley jumped into the legislative fight over reauthorising a crucial surveillance law, known as the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, to compel the government to declassify some of the Fisa court's orders. The Senate ultimately rejected Merkley's amendment by a 54-37 vote.
Raad said the new bill would closely resemble Merkley's 2012 amendment. The bill focuses on the Fisa court opinions, not the secret executive-branch interpretations themselves, he said, because "the Fisa court is where those decisions are made on what's allowed under the law." - The Guardian, 6/11/13
Merkley also grilled the NSA chief regarding how the NSA's legal standards have become unrecognizable:
Towards the end of his hearing Wednesday on cyber threats and the intelligence community’s surveillance efforts, Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, was asked if he’d support making public the legal decisions justifying some of those surveillance programs.
“Do you support the standards of law, the interpretations of the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Court -- of the plain language -- to be set before the American people, so we can have this debate?” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wanted to know.
For Merkley and other lawmakers who have raised concerns about the NSA’s data-mining operations, the FISA Court opinions are not some shiny political object. They’re a linchpin for understanding the scope of the surveillance regime currently in place. Having been kept secret from the public -- on grounds that disclosure could have national security ramifications -- the opinions would reveal how the government views its legal authorities under the Patriot Act.
And so, when Alexander answered his question in the affirmative, Merkley was pleasantly surprised.
“I think that makes sense,” said the NSA leader. “I’m not the only decision-maker in the administration on this process ... I don’t want to jeopardize the security of Americans by making the mistake and saying, yes we are going to do all that. But the intent is to get the transparency there.”
For several years now, Merkley has been readying for this moment. The Oregon Democrat said he’s had grave concerns about the NSA’s phone surveillance program but felt restricted in what he could do to register his complaints. So he and others have pressed for the FISA Court opinions, hoping to reveal how the administration argues that specific or future investigations that deal with a finite amount of phone call data allow them to collect massive swaths of data on millions of individuals.
“The administration keeps saying: ‘Well, Congress authorized this. Well, what Congress authorized is all of the standards [for phone surveillance],” Merkley said in an interview. You have to do an application, you have to specify the tangible thing you want, you have to show that there are reasonable grounds and that those things are relevant to an authorized investigation.”
“Somehow the standards in the law have been interpreted and they've been interpreted in ways that change the standards into apparently something that is unrecognizable, which is anything, anytime, anyplace, or all records, all times, all places. And what gives us that translation are the FISA court opinions.” - Huffington Post, 6/13/13
Of course Merkley faced some scrutiny in the press:
http://www.mediaite.com/...
Last week, after President Barack Obama addressed the breaking revelations regarding the National Security Agency’s sweeping monitoring of Americans’ communications and said that all members of Congress had been briefed on those programs, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-CO) contradicted that claim. He told MSNBC host Alex Wagner on June 7 that he had never been briefed on these programs and suspected those briefings were limited to congressional intelligence committees. On Friday, former White House advisor David Axelrod said that it turns out Merkley was too busy doing another MSNBC interview to attend the NSA briefing.
“So many members of Congress, and we’ve had them on this program, saying, ‘we weren’t fully briefed,” said Alex Wagner.
“One of them was a guest on your show and said he wasn’t briefed on the PRISM program, and it turned out that he was doing another fine program on MSNBC at the time that the administration was briefing senators on that program,” Axelrod said. - Mediaite, 6/14/13
But Merkley's office has gone on the defensive and clarified a few things:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Merkley’s office acknowledged the lawmaker missed the meeting but insisted he remains deeply troubled with NSA’s activities.
“Sen. Merkley is deeply concerned about the privacy of American citizens and the scope of government data collection, and has sought out various information in that regard,” a spokesman for Merkely said. “In this case, Sen. Merkley thought the meeting would be on an area that he had already been briefed on, and when conflicts arose he missed the meeting.”
Another aide familar with the meeting told BuzzFeed “there was no reason for the Senator to believe this was going to be a meeting about this new wide-ranging surveillance program.”
“How was it that all of Congress was briefed if the only way Sen. Merkley could have known about it was a meeting held by special request?” the aide added. - BuzzFeed, 6/12/13
I believe Merkley and his staff and I applaud them for their work on this issue and several other issues. As much as I like David Axelrod, that was a dick move on his behalf. Lets let Merkley know we have his back by donating to his 2014 re-election campaign:
https://secure.actblue.com/...