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Democrats Propose Commission To Investigate Spying
metalman writes "Wired has a story on a proposal by House Democrats to 'establish a national commission — similar to the 9/11 Commission... to find out — and publish — what exactly the nation's spies were up to during their five-year warrantless, domestic surveillance program.' The draft bill would also preserve the requirement of court orders and remove 'retroactive immunity for telecom companies.' (We've discussed various government wiretaps, phone companies, and privacy violations before.) But it seems unlikely that such an alternative on phone immunity would pass both the House and Senate, let alone survive a Presidential veto."
A presidential veto can then in return be overridden by a two-thirds majority. The Democrats intend to try and get the ban on waterboarding through a veto, I believe. The problem is that the Americans have a two-party system and the one the president belongs to generally has plenty votes to block the two-thirds thing easily.
If they, then they will be labled a "do nothing congress". By sending bills to the president they know will vetoed they are able to propose much stronger bills than they would be really comfortable with, have them Vetoed, have the Bill & the Veto to talk about during the campaign. Then next year they can quietly pass a weeker bill and no one will notice.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
The Veto is not automatic nor absolute. A 2/3 vote by Congress can overrule the president. In addition, a ruling by the Judicial System can overrule either. Congress also has a check on the President in that they are the sole people able to issue money for programs, the power of the purse, but they are acting like an abused spouce, afraid to actually cut the purse strings that prop this president up.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I'd like to point out that the last sentence is pretty much true of both parties. People tend to forget that politicians in the Democrat party are also fabulously rich, and are magically "Just like us" because they're a Democrat. Mostly they're just angry that the Republicans got to abuse the system, and they didn't.
I think that a stronger Congress and a weaker president is better, because it makes things less radical and responsibility is divided more evenly. It would also make people able to vote for representatives locally who could eventually influence things, but while the president is too powerful change is not possible if you have to gain the presidential seat to actually do anything, given the state of media and related issues.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
All this commotion about domestic spying, wire-tapping, etc. could have easily been avoided if everybody was playing by the rules and held accountable to the rules. There already exists a method for the president to issue warrant-less wiretaps within FISA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy#FISA. The big difference between the current methods and FISA is the lack of oversight. FISA requires that a warrantless wire tap is brought before a judge in closed session within 72 hours of its inception.
This means that in a "ticking time bomb" scenario, investigators have the power to tap and begin monitoring suspects before a proper warrant can be obtained. Once the surveillance has begun, investigators have 72 hours (an ample amount of time in a ticking bomb scenario) to collect evidence and present it. If there indeed is a bomb out there, the judge should have no problem issuing a proper warrant.
The current problem is this; nobody wants to play by the rules. Everybody in the intelligence community along with most of the executive branch want to play king. They want to work independently and forgo the checks and balances. It is not that uncommon for branches of government to try to gain more power so they can do their work "easily." Unfortunately, it's our civil liberties that are being stomped on.
Transparent and balanced oversight is the only thing that will cure this ill. Without a diverse and unconnected group monitoring each other, we will lose the liberties that make this country so fantastic. Sure, it's scary to think about dying in a World Trade Center type attack, but it's much more scary to live in a state with secret police secretly monitoring you. The chances of dying in a terrorist attack are vanishingly small; the chances of losing your civil liberties if laws like the Protect America Act are allowed to exist are alarmingly high.
I for one, believe that laws like the Protect America Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_America_Act_of_2007 are just the thing that erode our liberty for the fleeting promise of a tiny bit of security. Without judicial or congressional oversight, who polices the police? The answer is scary and we only need to look to Peru, East Germany or any other state with Stazi like organizations for the answer.
Ben Franklin said it best over 200 years ago, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." It's almost like he knew what he was doing...
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Actually the President is elected by the electoral college not the people. That is the government's ace in the hole for the off-chance that the people actually elect someone the government doesn't want.
So your vote really is worthless.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
Amusingly, one of the Republican talking points was a complaint that the Democrats were wasting their time on a doomed-to-fail veto override attempt instead of working on passing a renewal of the previously-expired wiretap legislation (honestly, the Democrats hold all the cards on that situation, since "no action" is much closer to their desired position than to that of the Republicans).
Of course, the funny thing is that they could just wait a year. All three of the remaining Presidential candidates are against waterboarding.
He doesn't.
He needs the support and agreement of one third of each of the houses of Congress. In effect, a supermajority is required to pass any law in the face of opposition by the President.
The reason that it doesn't happen all the time is that the President wants things from Congress he can' get any other way. It works better than you'd think, but it makes slanting the power balance between Congress and the President in the direction of the President a very bad idea. The veto power makes that balance unstable the moment the President can pursue his ends without Congressional cooperation. As soon as the President and his aides feel they can operate independently of Congressional oversight and appropriations power, Congress becomes powerless and Presidential power becomes practically unlimited.
That's what made the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan administration a much bigger deal than most people realized. It wasn't just that it was a strategically stupid thing to do, what prompted the stupidity was the desire of the Reagan administration to develop their own sources of funding which Congress did not control, in fact was completely unaware of. To a lesser degree, that's why the Bush administration's insistence on exempting the DHS from civil service worrisome. Civil service regulations are a form of Congressional oversight; the idea that the President should be able to move personnel around and have them do whatever he wants is really giving him a kind of de jure power to alter the DHS budget under any circumstances whatsoever, over and above the de facto power he has to do this in a clear national emergency.
There are a number of structural faults in the US Constitution, and one of them is the delicacy of balance between the President and Congress. The basic idea was patterned on the relationship between George Washington and the Continental Congress: you get a powerful leader who has a free hand within the scope of his powers, but that "free hand" is subject to oversight, regulation and budgetary restraint. When this works, it works extremely well. But when you have a narcissistic and self-righteous President, supported by a sufficiently large block of Congressional sycophants, his power is only limited by what he imagines it to be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You have a two party system because the system is built in a way to favor a two party system, smaller parties have huge barriers of entry and they cannot gain traction.
Of course as ultimately a society is determined by the people composing it, the responsibility belongs to the people for the state of matters, but the current sitation is different than just living in a two party system and most people accepting it.
Consider voter turnout, it is considered very low, even for a (sort-of) democratic country. People would vote for other parties, but those parties never get the chance to gain traction due to the built-in favorism in the system towards major power blocks. Ultimately, this is going to be an uphill battle for you guys, you need to change the way your system works and probably the most success you'd have is by going on a roundabout way on this matter: start from education, from history: do not worship your founding fathers because they established this system (even if it was considered enlightened in their age), teach critical thinking, disrespect for authority, establish independent information channels, inform, inform, inform. Tell people about things they don't want to hear: individual social responsibility, collective action for the individual (but overally positive-sum) good, etc.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I think you need to put your prejudices down for a second a take a clear look at the situation. The administration is actively partisan and hostile to the Democrats. The Democrats have something along the lines of 51% of the Congress. They can't override a veto without a significant portion of the Republicans breaking ranks to do so, and there's very little chance of them doing so on any issue. Any issue of substance that they could pass a bill will either a) serve Bush's (and Republican) interests or b) get Vetoed. So the essence is, there really isn't anything they can accomplish.
They're biding their time until they face a less hostile president, but while doing so, Republican media assets are accusing them of being a "do nothing congress", so they're working on useless projects that they know are useless but look better than doing nothing.
It's all politics.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
That the House even put something like this out there at all. If we hadn't been sending many, passionate letters demanding Congress deny amnesty to the telcos for illegally spying on us, then they wouldn't have bothered to float this proposal.
So to all those out there who think that there's nothing anyone can do to change the course of government, this is evidence you can; you just have to take a little time to write a letter or make a phone call to your representative.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
My blog
The administration's instinct to strip away our freedoms in the name of desperate fear is misguided. Rather, we should be supportive of people in the middle east who are growing weary of being ruled by fundamentalist Islam. Fundamentalism, whether Islamic, Christian, or otherwise is fine for those folks who self select into it but it is tyranny when it gains the backing of coercive power.
This article is about one Sheikh in Saudi Arabia who is tired of being bullied by fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia. The US should invest 1.0% of its current Iraq war budget in people like him rather than creating converts to funadmentalist Islam with our war in Iraq. Nurture a moderate alternative and fundamentalism will remain small.
Too bad that despite eight years of intense scrutiny, multi-million dollar bounties, and boundless efforts to fabricate evidence, no attempt to show that this Administration has flagrantly broken the law, let alone for the purpose of self-enrichment, has succeeded. This idiotic expenditure of congressional calendar and of taxpayer money won't either. Haliburton has received fewer no-bid contracts under Bush than they did under Clinton.
Okay, first of all, as the earlier response mentioned, Congress has only been in the Democrats hands for a couple of years. During the time that the Republicans were in control, there was virtually no oversight of the administration. When the Democrats did gain control, they have razor thin margins in both houses. I will admit that occasionally there is grandstanding, but at least they are trying to do some of the oversight that is spelled out in the Constitution. And I believe that your "efforts to fabricate evidence" needs a big fat citation needed.
Also worth mentioning is the size of those Haliburton no-bid contracts. It means nothing for the pure numbers of contracts if the size of those contracts are not the same. A wartime budget surely is higher in price than the previous contracts they may have gotten.
In fact, 'Bush & Co.' will leave the White House significantly poorer than the previous Administration who received all kinds of payments for things like pardons, government subsidized loans, putting friends up in the White House, and selling White House furniture and flatware. Al Gore alone is worth two hundred million these days, more than the entire administration combined.
Again, citation needed please. Plus, let's just wait to see what "W" does in his last few days in office. That's traditionally when previous Presidents have handed out their bulk of pardons.
I wouldn't oppose this kind of investigation if there were any legal standing for a complaint. But it's been quite clear for years now that what Democrats refer to as 'domestic spying' includes phone calls that route through the US but whose endpoints are both foreign and made by non-citizens. The Constitutional protections of due process were not intended to protect these calls any more than they protected the Soviets and Nazis internal communications.
Once again, please cite where you get this kind of classification for domestic spying. One of the main arguments the Democrats have had against expanded wiretap authority has been the availability of the FISA courts which in the past has worked quickly, efficiently and rarely if ever turns down a legitimate request. It sounds to me that this description of the Democrats stance on domestic spying is the product of the echo chamber of conservative radio and pundits.
Even with all of that, I could accept that it's the prerogative of the party in power to cudgel the party not in power if only Congress wasn't still trying to finish last year's budgets. They've accomplished nothing so far and they're not even doing that well.
First, the nation's business, THEN play self-indignant party apparatchik.
Let's not forget that the Republican congress two years ago, in the final months before they lost control of Congress decided to go into recess early and not finish the budget at all during their calendar year. This action unnecessarily passed responsibility of the previous Congress onto the incoming Congress. They could have done the nation's business, they could have passed budget items the nation needed, but instead decided to pick up camp stakes and go home.
However, the current problem with government is that they have forgotten how to govern. Part of that responsibility is the ability and the necessity to compromise. However, with hard-nose tactics and frequent grandstanding by both parties, the very thought that just this Congressional session is a do-nothing Congress full of grandstanding is just not seeing the Congress over the last fifteen years.
"Of course, the funny thing is that they could just wait a year. All three of the remaining Presidential candidates are against waterboarding."
It makes a powerful political statement to stand up against torture, even if it's bound to fail. It also makes a powerful statement to just sit and do nothing about it and hope the next president maintains his/her current opinion on torture.
This is a very necessary "waste of time".
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I think the basic difference of opinion is that I consider the military a valid expenditure and part of the correct habits of our national government - whereas I don't think that healthcare and retirement plans are.
I know this makes me a horrible, old-fashioned, poor-person hater in the eyes of liberal European government.
I maintain that the only reason that Western Europe in general can afford so many government programs is that in the last fifty years our military budget has been paying for a large part of their safekeeping. Military requirements can grow and shrink, but they never go away, and as bad of a hegemon as the US can be at times, most people would consider the Soviet Union or China to be worse. We're in a rare lull with a single super power here - it's not going to last.
And finally - I don't believe that government handouts are the way to help poor people. My family background is poor, dirt farmer poor - but they never took farm subsidies because that meant that the government had control over your land. In just one generation after that their children were solidly middle class, and now my generation is all college educated with good jobs. The government lifting people up isn't the answer - giving people opportunities to lift themselves up is. That means stop worrying about healthcare for unemployed people and try to fix why those people don't have jobs in the first place.