So America Decided To Turn Itself Into A Surveillance State?

The Patriot Act should have been repealed the second the Democrats won control of Congress. Instead, many Democrats worked with Republicans to keep it in place. Same for FISA. Now people are demanding Congress investigate the NSA's and Verizon's indiscriminate, bulk spying on American citizens. Congress? Investigate? What a joke! Congress is responsible for this-- and in a very conservative consensus ("bipartisan") way. Lindsey Graham, hardly an Obama apologist, was just on Fox saying "I’m sure we should be doing this.”

Yesterday, the NY Times slapped the Obama Administration down big time:

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive-- whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism-- especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

...This stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

When FISA came up for reauthorization last year it passed the House in a landslide, 301-118. 74 Democrats joined 227 Republicans in favor, including Hoyer of course, but also, very disappointingly, Pelosi. Meanwhile 7 Republicans joined the 111 Democrats who opposed it. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, rallied votes against it. The one member of the Democratic House leadership who bucked that leadership and voted "no" was Xavier Becerra (CA). It's worth noting that then-Senate candidates Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) voted "no" and were elected and wretched New Dem Shelly Berkley (NV) voted "yes" and was defeated.

Bernie Sanders wasn't as surprised as he was ready to tear someone's head off. "As one of the few members of Congress who consistently voted against the Patriot Act, I expressed concern at the time of passage that it gave the government far too much power to spy on innocent United State citizens and provided for very little oversight or disclosure. Unfortunately, what I said turned out to be exactly true. The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Congress must address this issue and protect the constitutional rights of the American people."

Voting with the Republicans in favor of reauthorizing FISA was one of the last votes in the dreadful careers of Jason Altmire (Blue Dog/New Dem-PA), Joe Baca (Blue Dog-CA), Howard Berman (D-Israel), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA), Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY), Mark Critz (PA), Kathy Hochul (New Dem-NY), Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA), Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC), Silvestre Reyes (TX), Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR), and Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC). Ed Markey (D-MA), who will face Massachusetts voters June 25, voted against reauthorizing FISA. The Republicans in opposition to Boehner and Obama on this included libertarian-leaning conservatives like Walter Jones (NC), Ron Paul (TX), Jimmy Duncan (TN), Tom McClintock (CA) and Justin Amash (MI).

And I might add that corrupt New Dem Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii, currently challenging progressive Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, was a proponent of FISA, voted for it and continues to be one of the most shady Democrats when it comes to taking legalistic bribes from the worst players in the Military-Industrial Complex President Eisenhower warned us against. Hanabusa has been a real problem in the House and she wants to get into the Senate-- where she can do even more damage. You can help keep her out of the Senate by backing Schatz's reelection bid. He has a very different approach to domestic spying than Hanabusa:

"My first vote as United States Senator was against the FISA Amendments Act because it failed to provide transparency, accountability and reasonable limits when the federal government conducts surveillance for intelligence purposes. While I recognize that the FISA Amendments Act has helped to produce useful intelligence, I fear that we do not have a full understanding of the impact that this law has on the privacy of Americans. We need a comprehensive review of the FISA Amendments Act to ensure that Americans’ privacy and civil liberties are protected."

Not just different... better, much better.

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Etzioni Explains How Beltway Conseratives Rule America

I was a sociology student in college. The most revered contemporary writer at the time was Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli who had escaped from fascist Germany as a child and who I assumed was Italian because if his name. His first book, Modern Organizations made such an impression on me that years later I used it to run my record company. I feel there are a lot of people who had great influence on how I've turned out, my grandfather for example, but Etzioni sure fits into that category. I'd like to share a short essay he wrote for Salon this week, How conservatives still run America, despite losing elections. If you're a regular DWT reader I think you'll recognize his premises. The Conservative Consensus really is what this blog has always been all about.

There is more than may appear in President Obama’s plan to cut the social safety net in his new budget proposal. The offer, on the face of it, reflects a significant violation of a major liberal creed, discarding the strongest liberal political card and Obama’s peculiar negotiation style of making major concessions at the opening of a give-and-take session. But it also reflects the sad but true fact that the dynamics of American politics cannot be understood in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans. Party labels aside, the nation is still being ruled by what I call a majority “conservative party.”

If Democrats and Republicans were the true divide, the meager gun control measures recently introduced in the Senate would have the majority needed to pass. After all, there are 53 Democratic Senators (and two Independents who generally side with them). Moreover, this time, the threat of a GOP filibuster is not to blame. Yet the Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, removed the assault weapons ban from the draft bill because some 15 Democratic senators, in effect, supported the conservative pro-gun position, making up-- with the Republican senators-- that majority “conservative party.” Thanks to this party, the same legislative defeat is about to befall liberal proposals to curtail high-capacity magazines. This leaves only better background checks on the table, but these, too, will inevitably be rendered ineffective by the conservatives via the underhanded gutting of enforcement (more about this shortly).

Social security and gun safety are but a couple of the numerous issues on which conservatives in Washington get their way and the minority liberal party loses out. Most recently, every Republican and 33 Democratic conservatives came together to repeal a tax on medical devices, a major source of funding for Obamacare. And on Dec 28, the conservative party-- 42 Republicans, 30 Democrats and 1 Independent senator-- voted to extend the foreign intelligence law known as FISA, opposed by civil libertarians. We should further expect that the conservative party will keep winning on many fronts, from greatly limiting all new investments in education to unduly slashing social spending.

Some argue that the president is trying to build up a broad following so that, come the 2014 elections, the Democrats will carry the House and he will be able to push through a progressive agenda in the second half of his term. These doe-eyed optimists disregard the fact that, even if the Democrats hold both chambers, the additional Democrats elected in 2014 will largely be from so-called red (i.e., conservative) districts. The situation then will be much like it was in 2009 when the Democrats had a majority in the House, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a president in the White House and yet still could enact very little progressive legislation. The reason? Very much the same: conservative Democrats voting with the GOP to extend the Bush tax cuts, cut social spending, weaken financial regulations and so on.

I must regretfully add that the situation in Washington is even bleaker than what I have laid out so far. While gun control legislation makes its way through Congress (we may get slightly stricter background checks), the conservatives in Congress have passed various measures that eviscerate the agency charged with enforcing these background checks, new and old, thereby ensuring that they will remain weak and ineffective. Liberals tend to focus on passing laws; conservatives, when they cannot block or weaken the laws themselves, see to it that they are not enforced.

Conservatives in Congress have a long history of undermining the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and new moves to this effect pile on top of old ones. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 bans the ATF from inspecting gun dealers more than once in any 12-month period, even if violations are uncovered, and it reduces record-keeping violations from a felony to a misdemeanor offense, the result being that they are very rarely prosecuted. The 2003 and 2004 Tiahrt amendments, named for their sponsor Rep. Todd Tiahrt, require that records from the background checks of gun buyers be destroyed within 24 hours, bar requiring gun dealers to conduct inventory checks to monitor gun thefts, and prevent crime gun trace data from being used in court, even when a dealer has broken the law. In addition, Congress has barred the ATF repeatedly from creating a computerized database, so when a gun is recovered at a crime scene, agents must manually search through boxes of paper records to trace the firearm to dealer or purchaser.

Most recently, with the prospect of new gun-safety legislation on the horizon, the House and Senate appropriations committees-- including both Republicans and Democrats-- have tacked “riders” onto a short-term spending agreement that make permanent what had previously been a set of temporary, pro-gun provisions. The bill prohibits the Justice Department from keeping an inventory of gun dealers. It also prevents the ATF from refusing to renew the licenses of dealers “due to a lack of business activity,” thereby hampering law enforcement’s ability to clamp down on illegitimate dealers, and includes a requirement that the ATF disclose in its reports that gun trace data “cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about firearms-related crime.” The details of these amendments are “boring”-- they rarely make headlines. However, they do tie the hands of the ATF and send a message to the dealers: We have your back. And the ATF agents would be foolish to ignore the implied warning: Take it easy or expect new obstacles. Case in point: In January 2013, President Obama sought to reinvigorate the agency by giving it a director (something it has not had in six years), but his nominee, B. Todd Jones, has yet to be confirmed because of conservative opposition. This further hamstrings the ATF, as there are many operations that agencies without a director are banned from undertaking.

A favorite line of the National Rifle Association is, “Why not just enforce the laws that are already on the books?” A very good question, and the answer is exceedingly clear: Because the conservative party won’t let us. Further, we will not progress in curbing gun violence-- or on most other political fronts-- until we correctly read the political layout.

We have a conservative majority and a liberal minority, not two more or less equal parties. How we may change this line-up is the political challenge of the generation. But one thing is for sure: Simply voting for Democrats will not do the trick.

For sure. Let me add that among House Democratic freshmen elected in November only three-- Matt Cartwright (PA), Tony Cardenas (CA) and Mark Pocan (WI) have perfect 100% progressive voting scores. Half a dozen others are close enough-- 94.44: Joyce Beatty (OH), Alan Grayson (FL), Jared Huffman (CA), Hakeem Jeffries (NY), Joe Kennedy (MA), and Rick Nolan (MN). No one else is over 90%. And around two dozen of them are below 65%, helping explain what Etzioni means by the conservative party. Vaguely from bad to worst. Much of this is the garbage that was recruited and nurtured by the arch-conservatives who run the DCCC (thanks Nancy):

• Elizabeth Esty (New Dem-CT)
• Tulsi Gabbard (HI)
• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)
• Suzane DelBene (New Dem-WA)
• Michelle Lujan Grisham (NM)
• Julia Brownley (CA)
• Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX)
• Joe Garcia  (New Dem-FL)
• Gloria Negrete McLeod (CA)
• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)
• Bill Enyart (IL)
• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)
• Brad Schneider (New Dem-IL)
• Cheri Bustos (IL)
• Bill Foster (New Dem-IL)
• Annie Kuster (NH)
• Dan Maffei (New Dem-NY)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Raul Ruiz (CA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)
• Ron Barber (New Dem-AZ)
• Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ)

Asked to comment on the Obama-Boehner "compromise" to destroy Social Security, which he media calmly calls "the chained CPI scenario," liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown told Salon, “This is unacceptable. There are common-sense ways we can reduce the deficit that do not demand sacrifice from the most vulnerable Americans.” I hope that means he'll join Bernie Sanders' filibuster that keeps it from happening and uses a conservative toll against a bad conservative idea. and then there's the new/old conservative schemes to disenfranchise voters-- like "character tests:"

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