A Rare Victory

by Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium: Mon., Jan 14, 2008
Filed under: Congressional Oversight

With Congress set to reconvene in earnest next week, we’ll know shortly whether this report is accurate:

Senator Chris Dodd’s Presidential campaign died with a whimper in Iowa. But he still seems to be dictating national security policy to fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill, and unless the Bush Administration is willing to fight, perhaps to the next President too.

We’re told that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is saying privately he now won’t attempt to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on the wiretapping of al Qaeda suspects. Instead, he’ll merely support another 18-month extension of the six-month-old Protect America Act. Among other problems, the temporary bill includes no retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that cooperated with the feds after 9/11.

It would certainly a victory for Dodd–he promised to block any bill that offered immunity to communications companies, and we’ll find out soon enough if he’s really succeeded. But though the Protect America Act doesn’t pardon the telecoms, it did contain a host of others provisions that Democratic leaders in the House sought to undo when they passed the RESTORE Act this fall. One dangerous example is a vague bit of language that allows the White House to conduct wiretapping without a warrant whenever a suspect is “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. Many worry that it’s “unreasonable” to leave standards for “reasonableness” up to these guys.

Now RESTORE is likely to be scuttled, too. Precluding an imbroglio between the White House and Senate Democrats about the amendments Dodd is blocking, that’ll still leave the president with some fairly extraordinary powers for the rest of his term. And it’ll leave the next president–Democrat or Republican–about six months to grow accustomed to the taste of the exact same powers. So the other important issue–whether the provisions that most endanger American civil liberties will be made permanent–has yet to be truly resolved. The reaction on the right? Predictable.