(Cross-posted at Blue Hampshire)
E.J. Dionne is a must-read today.
Politically, Republicans won this round in two ways. They got the president the bill he wanted and, as a result, they created absolute fury in the Democratic base. Pelosi has received more than 200,000 e-mails of protest, according to an aide, for letting the bill go forward.
Democrats concede they made an enormous tactical blunder by not dealing with the issue earlier, forcing the question to the fore in the days before the recess. One anxiety hovered over the debate: If a terrorist attack happened and Congress had not given Bush what he wanted, the Democrats would get blamed for a lack of vigilance.
“Could something happen over August?” Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) asked in an interview. “Sure it could. What bothered me is that too many Democrats allowed that fear to turn into a demand for some atrocious legislation.”
The saga also underscored how constrained congressional Democrats feel because of their tenuous majority in the Senate. Had the Senate sent the House an alternative bill, sponsored by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the two houses could have put a more limited proposal on the president’s desk and challenged him to veto it. But the Levin-Rockefeller proposal failed.
Absolute fury indeed. We need a unified Democratic bill, the other side can’t be trusted on this.
When will the Dems realize that the Republicans win by being polarizing, divisive, and partisan and through this energize their base to vote for them. In doing this they gained absolutely no votes from those that view them as “defeatorats” and just angered the people that were sure to give them votes, money, and support. Im tired of this wavering Dems, just stick to your convictions.
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I honestly wonder if President Bush proposed a “Emergency Pro-Freedom Anti Terror Act” whose only provision was repealing the Bill of Rights how many of those idiots would vote for it to appear “tough” on national security.
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Clearly the current bill allows for wiretapping terrorists, if we suspect someone is a terrorist the court will allow it. The only reason to remove such oversight is so the Justice Department does not need to have reasonable suspicion that someone is a terrorist, i.e that they wont be using this for terrorists they will be spying on anyone they want.
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In the long run I am quite certain they will wiretap on political dissidents like they did with the COUNTERINTEL campaign of the 1960’s, the DEA will try to conduct drug busts, and they will use it to fight crime too, except that in all cases none of the evidence will be valid in any American court so in reality this makes law enforcement weaker while not improving anti-terror efforts at all.
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Despicable.
This is what’s crazy. I don’t understand waiting until the last moment on a bill like this where the Republicans are guaranteed to pull out their scary, scary fear tactics.
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Perhaps someone should be monitoring the Congressional agenda and making sure they do their homework. Had they done their homework on Alito, we wouldn’t be looking at the slow dismantling of the achievements of Civil Rights movement. Is anyone already doing this monitoring? If someone is, we should emblazon their work across the web? Anyone know?
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Another side of this is the excessive, daintiness of the opposition compared to what the Republican noise machine does. As a nation, we have not concluded that a big part of 9/11 occurring was the Bush Administration’s malfeasance. (It didn’t heed the August warnings. It didn’t shake the trees and find out what the CIA knew and what the FBI knew. Its un-Clinton approach to policy led it into ignoring Al Qaeda and obsessing on Iraq.) Because of that we have this, essentially false Republican narrative that an excess of bureaucracy and process are what kept us from stopping the terrorists. I don’t get this not wanting to hurt tender Republican feelings about 9/11. Why can’t Democrats hammer the August 2001 incompetence? Not doing so boxes them in on protecting the Constitution.
At the risk of becoming a mutual admiration society, I think you’re dead on about the Dems looking like they got caught flatfooted. Dionne has them admitting it.
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And I think Dems could flip the terror issue if they made it clear that more information is not what we need; more effective use of the information is what we need. After all, they need to say, we had everything we needed to prevent 9/11 but competent use of the information.
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And though I’m not ready to endorse, I’d say Billary might be the most effective at making this case on the campaign trail. There’s got to be a lot of displaced military/national security people who served under Clinton that would be willing to campaign.
I hadn’t thought about Sen. Clinton’s ability to turn this issue around. You’re right: she’s uniquely positioned to do so. It would be very nice if she could start doing that ahead of schedule. (Paging Melanie!)
But don’t forget why we call it the noise machine. They push toward simplicity, we takes things serious. So while our side was thinking about Constitional issues, they just pressed ahead.
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I think Bill Clinton was right when he said people prefer “strong and wrong” to “weak and right,” but in the context of terrorism, that dynamic favors the GOP.
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I thought how Howard Dean handles this is excellent. Republicans, he says, want America to be strong. Democrats want America to be smart and strong. He always delivers this looking straight into the camera, head still with an emphatic delivery. It admits that Republicans are sounding tough but yields not an inch to them. He has repeated that little speech a number of times.
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Other Democrats should learn how to do it, too. It might be just the antidote to Clinton’s observation. Wrong can lose as often as weak.
Polling on terrorism has shifted to favor Democrats, too. (Not that they act that way.)
It’s a very difficult case to make though that Democrats are smart and strong if they act neither toward Republicans. The irony is hard to disguise and wins nothing as jconway notes in our first comment.
As Ron Elving said on NPR the other day, terror is still the “trump card,” one the GOP will use to get what it wants. This is why they won’t compromise, because they own the issue (in the way that we own, say, healthcare). So we have to have our plan — not our version of their plan, our plan.