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

[solarbird]

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.

Comments

[solarbird]

Because I can do math. 72% of existing Democrats voted for cloture. Any new Democrats would be coming from states whose representatives currently support Republicans. Where are these like-the-28%-minourity Democrats supposed to come from? Mars?

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Idaho, for one. A recent poll has a generic Dem outpolling a generic Republican for the race to replace Larry Craig, by a substantial margin. Idaho, like Montana, is a conservative state but it tends to be a more libertarian conservatism, with a long-suppressed but real progressive streak to back it up. Now, otherwise progressive Senator Tester of Montana voted for cloture, but so did a lot of Dems with a decent record who are on record opposing telecom immunity. I really don't think you can conclusively use this cloture vote to predict the one that counts, even if it is a bad sign. If the final cloture vote looks like this, then we can despair.

Bottom line: keep calling our Senators. We have until Friday.

[solarbird]

I can only note that your example of the kind of "generic Dem" that could appear from someplace other than Mars... voted for cloture.

That said, there's a petition against Senator Reid hosted here, it'll be delivered in a few days. I've signed it this afternoon.