HOLY SHIT WE GOT A REPRIEVE

[solarbird]

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.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

w00t.

Set yourself a timer; we'll have to do this all over again when it comes around on the guitar.... (Alice's Restaurant reference)

[solarbird]

Yes. But I believe this resets some timers - and votes.

Senator Dodd is promising right now that he'll filibuster in January too if the same bill moves to the floor.

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind my posting it, here's another blog with another letter, from a different angle (http://codepiranha.org/2007/12/15/telecom-immunity-up-for-vote-again/). That angle is Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution, which states "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." (Italics mine)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

The only problem with that angle is (a) you have to have standing and enough lawyer money to get to the Supreme Court to use it, and (b) there's no penalty for voting for something blatantly unconstitutional.

(At least in Canada if you pass a Notwithstanding bill (a) it dies in 5 years and (b) the electorate will run you out of town on a rail.)

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

"At least in Canada if you pass a Notwithstanding bill (a) it dies in 5 years and (b) the electorate will run you out of town on a rail."

I suppose this is the cue for the northern political gallery to weigh in. It's fair to say that, outside of the Canadian branch of the Council of American-Islamic Relationships, and the Canadian branch of Focus on the Family [1], that the vast majority of Canadians view the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as being something fairly close to holy writ: it is a consistently popular law, and must be closely tied in popularity to the Canada Health Act, which enshrines single-payer universal publically-funded health care. I know that I would certainly go out there and rip up pavements to build barricades to defend those two laws. So would my neighbours (except for thems wot support C-CAIR and C-FOF: we have a few of those nutters in our village).

The Charter does indeed carry within it a notwithstanding clause, which in theory allows a provincial government to pass laws, on provincially-regulated issues, that are in conflict with the Charter provisions. But that notwithstanding clause comes with a safety valve built-in: a provincial government must give notice of intent to exercise its 'notwithstanding' option. Thus far we've seen Quebec try that on immigration, and Alberta try it on health-care and marriage (a quasi-DOMA scheme) -- in all of these cases, public opinion has been massively against such moves, and the provincial legislation has died before ever getting to the order table in the respective House or National Assembly.

I side with the Council of Canadians in suspecting that the notwithstanding clause is mainly used to placate Alberta's and Quebec's religious right fringes, as a way of displaying occasional acknowledgement to their respective bases.

You are utterly right that if a notwithstanding clause were rammed through a provincial legislature, the parties responsible would be extinguished: dead as a dodo for at least several election cycles. Sure, we probably do have our nut-bar crazy radical fringe element [and I am probably, fairly measured, a member of the dream-addled Left fringe myself], but they do not control the reins of power. And maybe that's the difference that makes the difference, at least for now.

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[1] Is this a sign that we are finally being taken seriously by Riyadh and Washington, that we have our own right-wing lobby-groups being funded by Saudi and American money respectively?

[solarbird]

As I mentioned the last time someone brought that up, while literally true, it has generally been held that bills providing relief from legal action by the government do not qualify in the sense intended by this clause, because that's the Anglo-Saxon legal precedent going back a very long time, and because the same can be accomplished through pardons. What could make this different is that the relief would be provided for claims by a separate party, not the government, thus interfering with their ability to be made whole, in a legal sense. This would require evaluation by the courts, but it's an awfully thin thread from which to hang, as it were.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

"Signed" and sent.

Kentucky just went through a "retroactive pardon" mess which was part of the reason the previous governor failed to be re-elected. It seems this lesson was not learned at the federal level.

[emrecom.livejournal.com]

When CNN announced I thought I'd slipped into some weird alternate universe where things occasionally made sense.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Color me surprised, but heartened. A temporary victory is better than a loss, and we can keep the pressure on.