The Cincinnati Beacon

In the latest bipartisan effort to destroy our civil liberties and constitution, they’ve even thrown out the mere appearance of checks and balances. I guess throwing away that pesky rubber stamp (FISA) will save time. Here’s the most recent example of the corporate Democrats’ complete failure to act as an opposition party.

The Democrat-led Congress voted to broadly expand the government’s authority to eavesdrop without warrants on the international telephone calls and email messages of American citizens. Both the House and Senate approved rewriting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). It’s a big legislative victory for President Bush and a huge loss of freedom and liberty for the American people.

‘The Democratic-controlled Congress did the unthinkable on Saturday night: They gave President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales more unchecked power to wiretap Americans without a warrant. Yes, that’s the same Attorney General who is currently mired in scandal and probably committed perjury on this very issue.”

Their answer: “Because the president used fear to intimidate them and it worked.”

The American Civil Liberties Union also condemned the votes. Anthony Romero of the ACLU said “This congress may prove to be as spineless in standing up to the Bush Administration as the one that enacted the PATRIOT Act or the Military Commissions Act.”

With 65% of Americans disapproving of what he’s doing in office, President Bush has the lowest poll numbers in modern polling history. Only Nixon had more with 66% disapproving, and he redesigned four days later. Despite this extraordinarily low approval rating, the Democratic-led Congress felt pressured to comply with his demands. Why were they so intimidated?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We work hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short. I ask Congress to stay in session until they pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States.

And with those “haunting” words the Democrats responded quickly. Just hours after Bush spoke the Senate passed the so-called Protect America Act of 2007. Shortly after that the Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bill in the House.

Glen Greenwald is a constitutional attorney and author of the new book “A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.” He’s also a political and legal blogger for Salon.com.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it’s inconceivable on every level that the Democrats would capitulate in this way, and it’s disgraceful beyond what I think can be adequately described.

The Democrats have been offering to revise FISA in whatever ways the administration wanted for several years now. And the administration has repeatedly said, “We don’t need revisions to FISA. We don’t want you to revise FISA,” in essence because they were violating FISA and eavesdropping however they wanted. Suddenly, about several weeks ago, the President insisted that FISA had to be revised almost immediately and essentially said that if it wasn’t revised in exactly the way he wanted that the nation would be at risk to terrorism.

What really precipitated this was that the FISA court issued a ruling several months ago that in a very narrow way said that for certain types of calls, namely where there’s one person calling another person and both are outside of the country, and yet the call, because of technological reasons, is routed through the United States, that the Bush administration would need a FISA warrant in order to eavesdrop on that category of phone calls. And that was never the intent of FISA. It was a ruling that really for the first time said warrants were required, and everybody agreed that FISA should be revised in order to fix that one deficiency. And yet, the Democrats offered a bill that would have fixed that deficiency. The White House said, “No, we want much greater eavesdropping powers far beyond even this one fix,” and the Democrats ended up capitulating and giving the President vast new powers to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.

Keep in mind that it’s not only President Bush that has low poll numbers. The Congress also has very low poll numbers and that’s because they have failed to end the war, torture, and spying on American citizens. The messianic militarist in the White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and he has done so virtually without opposition.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of the new book “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.”

MARJORIE COHN: The reason that FISA was enacted in the first place in 1978 was in response to incredible overreaching and illegality by the FBI with its COINTELPRO, Counter-Intelligence Program, targeting Martin Luther King, Jr. and other organizations and Richard Nixon’s illegal surveillance of people who dissented against his policies. FISA set up a very conservative system with judges, who meet in secret, appointed by the chief justice, and in almost every case have issued warrants for wiretapping based on probable cause.

AMY GOODMAN: So, in a sense, it was a rubber stamp.

MARJORIE COHN: It was basically a rubber stamp. But that wasn’t good enough for the Bush administration. Bush, in 2001, secretly set up his so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program to illegally spy on Americans and—Americans and other people, as well, but it included Americans. And, in fact, the violation of FISA is a felony. And each violation can result in five years in prison. So the Bush administration has been breaking the law, has been committing crimes.

And what’s happened now with the Congress capitulating to really a much broader program than even the Terrorist Surveillance Program, they have not only legalized what Bush was doing before, but I think it’s highly unlikely that the Bush administration officials will be brought to justice for the felonies that they have been committing since 2001.

In the final analysis, voting for the least worse doesn’t bring justice, it doesn’t restore our constitution, it doesn’t end the war, it doesn’t support human rights, and it doesn’t move our country forward. Americans have a long history of cherishing our constitution and civil liberties, we believe in the rule of law and we believe in checks and balances. We want to live in peace and be a beacon of freedom and human rights that will lead the world forward.

These are the fundamental values that real Americans share and we can no longer afford to be marginalized and misled by two parties that are beholden to the corporations and special interests that own our country. Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil. It’s time for a new politics in this country that puts the needs of the many first instead of the greed of the few for a change.

We must demand real election reform where we have more voices, more choices and clean and fair elections for a change. America gets better when ‘We the People’ demand more. Real change has always come from the American people.

Sending messages to your representatives on the issues that matter to you is an important part of being a citizen. You don’t have to wait till November so act now. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport.

A good place to start is by having hundreds of thousands of us sign on to this petition demanding that Congress reverse their capitulation to Bush and the politics of fear. You can read the petition statement in the box on the right. If enough of us speak out we’ll send a clear message that Americans aren’t buying the administration’s scare tactics. Clicking here will add your name

This column has been printed from The Cincinnati Beacon: Where Divergent Views Collide!

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