solarbird | FISA tactic: stall for time

Okay, so the plan to fight FISA is to try to run out the clock in the Senate before the summer break; getting the bill through in the short pre-election session will be difficult, tho' by no means impossible, and every delay is a win for our side.

Prolifigate backstabber Majority Leader Harry Reid has pretended to sign on to the effort to delay, but 1) he's full of shit, he's done everything he can to get all this passed, and 2) as Glenn Greenwald says, you can "rarely go wrong by assuming Reid's motives are something other than he claims them to be." And lo, emptywheel throws a convincing theory that it's actually about the foreclosure-relief bill that Mr. Bush has threatened to veto; basically it's a quid pro quo of "you sign off on this, we'll get you your immunity." I know that I don't trust Mr. Reid and you shouldn't either; I find his attempt to indicate that you should to be insulting and tiresome in the extreme.

Christy at Firedoglake points to a speech by Senator Dodd against the bill as a whole and in particular against immunity. This is part of the attempt to stall the bill out. But the speech is pretty good. While irrelevant, Ron Paul has issued a strong statement against the whole fiasco. And Russ Feingold has gotten quite forthright in attacking the Democratic party over this, as he should be. Also, you really should read Greenwald's discussion of the naked corruption of the entire process:

Beyond the FISA bill's evisceration of the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and surveillance safeguards, what has always been so striking with this controversy has been how transparently sleazy and corrupt it reveals the Congress to be. Right out in the open, telecoms have just led Congressional supporters of telecom immunity around like little puppets. It's just amazing -- though extremely common -- that while negotiations over the bill occurred in total secrecy, with civil liberties groups and the public at large being completely excluded, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer "negotiated" directly with the telecoms over how the telecoms' amnesty bill should be written.

Telecoms broke our surveillance laws, and then our Democratic Congressional leaders ran to them to take instructions on how to write the special law to protect them, and they didn't even really bother to hide that...

Whatever else is true, if Democrats and Barack Obama vote this bill into law, they will be (a) legalizing warrantless spying on Americans and (b) embracing the core premise of Bush radicalism: that as long as the President says something is legal (as he told telecoms that warrantless spying was legal), then it ought to be treated as such.

So as Digby says,

So go ahead and make calls to your Senators, and they'll be tracked (by more people than you think), but we have a ruling class that has invaded your privacy more and more over the years. All for your protection, of course. The daddies in Washington want you to know they have an eye on the bad guys for you. Problem is, they think you are the bad guy.

Click here for the list of people to call. Also, contribute to the fund against retroactive immunity and to remove House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer from office. Contributions slowed quite a bit after hitting $300,000, but the goal is $500,000, and that's a long way off.