Good Morning, Eastern and Central United States!

Good morning! Here's what we're facing today. Read this, it's important.

If you've been away from Livejournal for the weekend, you've missed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's stunt on Friday night on behalf of Chief Executive Bush. The shortest form: Senator Reid is ignoring Senator Dodd's hold on the retroactive-immunity FISA bill and is moving ahead with the version that provides retroactive immunity, shutting down the last functional train of investigation into illegal domestic wiretapping in the United States under the Bush administration. (See here, and, arguably, here, for why this is the last functional investigative path.) The bill is moving forward today.

Senator Dodd has suspended his Presidential campaign and is flying back to DC to lead an old-school real-life filibuster starting sometime around 10am today (Monday, 17 December 2007) by taking the floor and not yielding it. He has called Senators Clinton, Obama, and Biden on their pledges to support the filibuster; as of my writing (21:48 Sunday, this is a delayed post) they are not following through.

You still have time to read my Friday briefing on this and get caught up here. That URL is to a previous entry of mine on this topic (written Friday), and, in addition to the sitrep, lists contact data for most of the major players. You should also read here for a further update posted Sunday.

Contacting your own Senators to have them support the filibuster is vital. This is in part because if we want to defeat this, we need 41 votes, and even more importantly, because other Senators can ask questions of Senator Dodd while he has the floor. These questions can take up to 20 minutes, regardless of content. During this time, Senator Dodd can run to the bathroom, sit down for short rests, and so on.

It is literally a test of physical endurance at this point. That's where we are at this point; that's the line in the sand. Go help. Now.

Senator Reid and the Senate Democrats deliver retroactive immunity to Mr. Bush and the telecoms

CSPAN CapitalNews description:

Senate votes 76-10 to advance warrantless wiretapping bill that gives phone companies retroactive immunity.

Damn, what a headline.

As I type, Senator Reid is formalising the 60-vote requirement for amendments for Senator Dodd's and other amendments stripping out retroactive immunity and he's wanting to let the Democrats out of having to vote yes on more cloture votes. (This was all part of the Democratic strategy to close down these investigations into the illegal warrantless wiretapping.) GOP members are also demanding the 60-vote majority... and Senator Reid is giving it to them. Senator Dodd is arguing against, saying that this sets a horrible precedent, because he is not offering anything out of the normal rules of order, but Senator Reid is refusing.

The 60-vote majority is now going to be a requirement. Senator Dood is being limited to an hour of commentary in the remaining 30 hours for amendments as they wish to get this through as quickly as possible.

Let's lay this out:

14 Senators did not bother to vote. Let's say all 49 Republicans voted for cloture and protecting their party retroactively from criminal offenses committed by Mr. Bush, and, separately, the criminal offenses committed by the telecommunications companies involved. This puts the best possible face on this for the Democrats, so don't accuse me of stacking the deck.

That means of the Democrats, 14 didn't bother voting, including all the major Democratic campaigners who are currently Senators. 36 Democrats, not counting Mr. Lieberman, voted. 26 voted for retroactive immunity for warrantless spying on Americans in direction violation of the law. Only 10 did not.

This is 72.2% of Democrats present in the Senate voting for this tragedy. Think about that. If the Democrats controlled every seat in the Senate, cloture passes 72-28. Even under the older rules used to keep civil rights law stalled in the 1950s and early 1960s - when getting cloture was more difficult - cloture would have passed.

Where are these supposed "Good Democrats?"

I don't see 'em. I see a fringe of people working against this who just got a bipartisan smackdown of the first order:

Senate votes 76-10 to advance warrantless wiretapping bill that gives phone companies retroactive immunity.

And people who didn't show up don't fucking count.

Here's another headline from yesterday, the kind of discovery the Democrats just voted overwhelmingly to end:

AT&T engineer says Bush Administration sought to implement domestic spying within two weeks of taking office
Raw Story

[...]
“What he saw,” Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told the Times, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”

What we can hope is that this individual lawsuit may get to continue moving forward on the basis that two weeks after inauguration is before the immunity start time in the bill. Assuming that doesn't get amended back to cover this, too. Hopefully they don't know about it yet, because if they do, and they think it's real, they will.

ETA: There are, reportedly, more rounds of cloture votes ahead, despite Senator Reid's move avoiding cloture votes on amendments. It is, I suppose, possible that 17 votes could be changed - that's the number necessary to support the filibuster. Cloture requires 60 votes outright, not 60%, so that means the coward no-shows can continue to be cowardly no-shows. See llachglin's flowchart comment below.

HOLY SHIT WE GOT A REPRIEVE

SENATOR DODD TALKED SENATOR REID INTO KICKING THE NEXT FISA VOTE OFF TO JANUARY. He must have been getting some traction. Or maybe Reid just wants to go on vacation. Or maybe it got too embarrassing for the major candidates, or for the party - Senator Dodd and his supporters were getting very, very frank on the floor. Who knows?

This does not mean it's over. But it means the fight gets kicked off until later, in January 2008. The end of the Republic is... delayed. The intent may well be to wait until they think the heat is off, or until after the Iowa caucuses are over. But regardless, it's a lot less out of the question to get 19 votes changed than it was 20 minutes ago.

ETA: Senator Dodd just promised live on the Senate floor that he will filibuster again in January 2008 if another retroactive immunity bill gets moved forward.

ETA 2: This means that all that emailing and calling and faxing needs to continue. This ain't over. It's only kicked back for a few weeks, then we likely end up doing this again. Phone. Email. Fax. Whatever. Here's a petition to Senator Reid that you can sign.