COWARDS, FOOLS, AND LIARS

Okay, a quick refresher course: the new FISA bill, regarding telephone and internet surveillance, has been a big deal for the last few months for a lot of reasons, not least because various versions of it have contained retroactive amnesty for telecommunications companies which have acted in direct and separate violation of the law in aiding and abetting illegal warrantless wiretapping and communications monitoring by the Chief Executive in the United States.

This retroactive amnesty is important because the Justice Department has refused to investigate these crimes, the Democratic Party-controled congress is an absolute, active part of the problem and similarly refuses to take any action other than enabling. The only course of investigation left open are lawsuits by individuals and civil rights groups such as the EFF against the telecom companies. That's all we've got.

Retroactive amnesty is designed, from top to bottom, to end this line of investigation by making it moot. If this bill passes, the court cases are over. The investigations end.

The Democratic leadership has been vital in getting this amnesty moved forward. I rather suspect at this point it's because they don't want to get implicated in this either, and are about as guilty.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is up to bat for the enablers today. There were two versions of the FISA bill in the Senate, as reported out of two committees. One contained amnesty and extremely weak oversight - tantamount to no oversight - of the wiretapping FISA authorises. The other contained no amnesty, and did contain at least some oversight. Senator Dodd announced plans to fight this, via two steps: 1) a "Hold" on the "amnesty" version of the bill, which, if honoured - as is traditional and by Senate rules - stops it dead in its tracks, and 2) a threat of filibuster. This outraged Senate Democratic leadership, as it hurts their efforts to stop investigation into the massive violations of law and Constitution via warrantless surveillance of Americans. It also slowed them down for a couple of months.

Senator Reid - who has honoured literally dozens of GOP "hold"s on bills, including one placed by GOP Senator Tom Coburn to reopen and investigate a slate of Civil Rights Era murders, is ignoring this hold. That's legal; he can do that. However, I do flash back to the Days of Horror when the GOP was going to ignore cloture rules if the Democrats didn't fold on judicial appointment after judicial appointment, and how scandalous it was to threaten to violate Senate tradition and rules. What a load of crap that was. (For the record: it was. But here we see that was never the point for the Democratic Party.)

Senator Reid is bringing the FISA bill with retroactive amnesty to the floor. It will require 60 votes to remove retroactive amnesty; that won't happen. 49 GOP votes + 10 or so from the Democratic leadership (including Senator Lieberman) to continue this obstruction of justice will insure that never happens. Accordingly, the last remaining option is a filibuster, presumably to be led by Senator Dodd.

As a side note, Senator Reid, in a stunning display of bullshit, is trying to blame Senator Dodd for his own refusal to recognise Senator Dodd's hold. It is genuinely appalling.

Regardless, two things need to happen:

1: All the Democratic presidential candidates need not just to endorse Senator Dodd's filibuster against his own party, but actively work to support it. They need to be in DC, they need to be doing the work. If they're not in the Senate, they should be telling at people who are. Lip service - all the Democrats ever seem to have - Does Not Count. At all. It counts for zero. No; it counts for negative points. Your local Senators should be doing the same thing. There will reportedly be a cloture vote early on Monday, as Senator Reid has scheduled debate over a weekend to insure as little coverage as possible. From the count above, it is clear that they will be very close to getting cloture of the retroactive-amnesty-inclusive bill. This must be prevented.

(Clinton: contact form, fax: 212.688.7444, vox: 212.688.6262
 Obama: contact form, fax: 202.228.4260, vox: 202.224.2854
 Biden: contact form, fax: 202.224.0139, vox: 202.224.5042
 Edwards: contact form, fax: 919.967.3644, vox: 919.636.3131
 Gravel: contact form, fax: 703.349.2958, vox: 703.652.4698
 Kucinich: contact form, vox: (877) 41-DENNIS)

ETA: Senator Dodd calls Clinton, Obama, Biden on their support pledges, saying he's heading back to DC - asks, are they're coming?

2: Senator Reid could still change his mind and choose to honour the bill. Senator Reid's voice phone (202.224.3542) needs to melt with complaints. His inbox needs to overflow with email and faxes (202.224.7327), all of which need to say NO AMNESTY.

This all needs to happen now. Go. Do.

(Material from Christy Hardin Smith, Glenn Greenwald, others.)

Here's the thing

People keep telling me that the Democrats aren't as bad as the Republicans, and even when they do crap like this, it's important to vote for them anyway; the "right president" will bully them in the right direction. And that it's particularly important 'cause I'm queer.

And I think about it for a second, and I go, "well, you might think that," but then I look at history.

The Clinton era with a Democratic congress got us what? A military policy that let you be an out gay man or lesbian woman who were abstinent replaced with a Federal law that declared queers "an unacceptable threat... to the armed forces" and wrote specific discrimination against us into Federal law for the first time. A huge setback.

The Clinton era with a Republican congress? DOMA, the law that said the Feds won't recognise our marriages (when we couldn't even get married anywhere yet - it was in response to a potential) and that other states could ignore faggot marrige from other states, too. It passed with overwhelming Democratic support. Another huge setback. President Clinton would later urge candidate John Kerry to attack marriage rights in his campaign for office.

The Bush era with a Republican congress? Sure, lots of rhetoric. And showboating action on an incredibly vile Federal anti-marriage amendment - action that failed, tho' damn few Democrats actually came out and said it was wrong, it was always just "inappropriate" or "unnecessary," given DOMA. And Mr. Bush's fundamentalist asshat appointees certainly made things worse for queer government employees. (Not to mention the assraping of the constitution and the disaster it has been for the country as a whole. But that's a bigger topic than this one, specifically, and likewise has Democratic support.) But in law?

...Bueller?

...Bueller?

Hmmmmm.

The Bush era with a Democratic congress? Whelp, despite a promised veto, the Democrats and their toady, the Human Rights Campaign, broke up the GBLT coalition to get a vote in the House by throwing the T under the bus, all for a bill that probably won't get through the Senate and certainly won't get signed. Then the Dems turned around and threw all the queers under the very next bus in the "hate-crimes" law, using exactly the same rationale when ripping sexual orientation and identity out before passing it applicable to race, religion, gender, and an assortment of other categories. So in less than a year, we've had another set of political setbacks that has ripped apart a longstanding coalition, setting back some elements of it decades, harmed the greater cause in the eyes of straight people, and hurt themselves as a party in the process. Really, it's a classic Democratic maneuver.

So given all this, why, again, am I supposed to give a fucking fuck - specifically as a queer rights activist - about the fucking Democratic party? This is where that whole "lesser of two evils" thing has gotten us. It's not fucking working.