One thing Progressives have constantly been up in arms about since we helped the Democrats win back Congress in 2006 is the FISA fight. Many of us think that this bill was completely unneccesary, and that it was a bad idea. It wasn't that we needed new, broad ranging powers for the Federal Government to keep us safe, we just needed a competent administration in place to use laws already in place to protect us. That is what failed us on that terrible day of 9-11-01.

When I heard that FISA was back, and this time at the behest of our own side, I determined that I wouldn't get complacent... that's what this is all about:  If they keep bringing it up, and we stop caring, the Bush Administration and the complicit telecoms will get away with spying on us and abridging our rights.  

This is not good bipartisanship, this is the bipartisanship of a bad date: they walk out on you, and you get to pay the bill.

It's even worse than expected. When you read it, it's actually hard to believe that the Congress is about to make this into our law. Then again, this is the same Congress that abolished habeas corpus with the Military Commissions Act, and legalized George Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program with the "Protect America Act," so it shouldn't be hard to believe at all. Seeing the words in print, though, adds a new dimension to appreciating just how corrupt and repugnant this is.

What happens in Podunk shouldn't stay there.  Or at least if it does, the Democratic Party Establishment, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, the Blue Dogs among us, will have won one more unrecorded battle against those of us who want real change.

What's happening most immediately in the IL-14 corner of Podunk (a term I use here to describe anything not directly inside the DC Beltway) is a primary and a special primary on Tuesday, between the DC insider "pick" for our district, an attorney who is a relative newcomer to both politics and our area, and John Laesch, the nominee against Denny Hastert last time out, and the only progressive in the race.

At this point, I'd call it a significant bellwether for the upcoming Congressional elections that virtually no one outside of IL-14 is paying much attention to in the glare of the presidential race, as well as a bellwether event in the battle for control of the party.  So while I don't expect this diary to get much attention, I want to leave a record of what has happened in this primary.  Bellwethers, however unobserved at the time, sometimes have a way of becoming useful history for those who follow.  

It always pays to go argue with people, to exit the city and hang out in towns where Republicans tend to breed.  In a cafe in Manchester, NH, a friend uncovered the mindset of the poor dupes who want us to attack Iran.  She was wearing her impeach Bush-Cheney sticker when a few young males started in on her, which is interesting because she being about 5'3" always seems to draw fire of this sort, whereas I wear my sticker everywhere but, benching 300, guys seem to hold their tongues, and I am actually looking for these "loud discussions" whereas she is not.  Lesson number one: the Brownshirt mentality is cowardly.  I can't count the number of times women who wear impeachment stickers tell me they get it constantly, and here I am lonely and no one wants to talk about what I want to talk about, except beefy union-looking dudes who walk over with their hands outstretched saying F-ing A!  Impeach!

Cutting to the chase, these people have bought the Amadinajed-as-Hitler line hook-line-and-sinker.  Friend reports that the most heated arguer was "invoking the death camps in Germany & a friend of his telling me that if I didn't want a war with Iran, I was spitting on his grandmother's grave."

I wonder if Amadinajed knows how perfectly his remarks on Israel, meant to bolster his standing among Middle East hardliners, have played into Bush's set-up of Iran as the new Nazi Germany?  This is a guy who gets booed at his own Iranian University.  His support in Iran is zilch.

This is a valuable insight.  If the Iranians were smart they would dump him, for stupidity.  No one says they can't stand up to the United States, but a good politician should have a clue about how different people think and know how to weigh their words, a skill neither Bush nor Amadinajed have.  We're following two idiots over a cliff.  This was an impassioned argument in that cafe.  No sneers about turning the Middle East into a parking lot or to hell with them all.  These guys really, truly believed this Hitler shit.  I feel sorry for them, and think I understand now.

If Bush bombs Iran, it will be based on a false flag attack against us.  He will eventually be impeached or run out of office, because the retaliatory terror attacks right here are guaranteed.  Iran is no Iraq.  I would just prefer to avoid the round of civilian casualties, domestic attacks, martial law, social unrest, Americans fighting Americans, and eventual restoration of the republic that we will have to go through, and all the attendant grieving, because of the media's decision to go along with Bush's set-up uncritically.  It would be beyond what our national soul could bear, to bomb Iran after what we did to them in 1953.

Can we save ourselves all this grief and just impeach them now?  

Chart with contact links to the major campaign contributors of all members of the House Judiciary Committee, where the impeachment of Cheney is now bottled up.  Beg, please not another dime until they do their duty to impeach.

Okay here it is, a look under the hood of what makes our political system work, the muscles and sinews that will make impeachment happen if it ever does.  This is a full list of the top 3 or 4 major campaign contributors to every House Judiciary Committee member who refuses to get on the impeachment train, with a link to contact that contributor.  It's all in the hands of 40 people now, a manageable number.  Forget it if you are a mere constituent.  These are who gets their phone calls returned.  

Some of them are a lot richer than you or me, but they are still Americans who were born with the same rights that are now being taken away, and the same interest in the rule of law.  Bush could have been a good "Republican" president, mere pillaging and looting the treasury for corporate friends.  That we expect, hell, Democrats too.  But he started messing with our rights, and bankrupting the country in a way that hurts nearly everyone.  If your writing hand is sore writing letters to congressmen who just throw them in the trash, let's write to the people they HAVE to listen to.

The goal is to persuade contributors to tell these guys they aren't getting another dime until they do their duty to impeach Cheney first, then Bush.  This works in a couple of ways.  First, there are patriots everywhere, and we can't assume that because someone is a captain of industry, is loaded, and is hooked into the system, he isn't pissed about what has been happening too.  Over Thanksgiving I talked with four or five former hardcore Bush supporters, invited to the inaugural and everything, who now say they don't care if he's impeached and probably deserves it.  The reasons they want him impeached are different from the reasons I do, but the effect is the same.  We had a good laugh and actually agreed on something.  The iron is hot.

The other level on which this works is that this is interesting reading.  I initially thought I was in for hours of drudgery putting these links together, but I found myself intrigued at who is giving money to whom.  Sometimes it makes sense, like a the big defense contractor in town is obviously going to ante up when the congressman comes a-calling.  But why would a real estate developer in Arizona be giving the max to a congressman in Indiana (Pence)?  By the time I was done, I think I had a pretty good idea of how the machine works, with LOTS of questions.  Ordinary people poking around these reports, and asking questions, is what congressmen DO NOT want.  

The broad outlines don't surprise me.  Defense, finance and real estate, oil and gas, telecommunications, all seem to pop up with predictable regularity.  But then you'll see a company that makes you wonder what kind of business they could possibly have before the government, like McWane Co., cast iron pipe fittings (Artur Davis, Alabama, Democrat.)  You google a bit and viola!  Turns out McWane has been having some serious problems with OSHA, one of the "most dangerous places to work in America."  These guys aren't congressmen; they're enterprises.

For my money the best bet is to focus on the unions.  They give enormous sums, and if they said "dance," the Dems would dance.  

Write nice letters and emails asking these organizations to put impeachment on their agendas when it comes time to discuss which candidates they will support.  Being on the "inside," a union or professional association member, or the holder of a few shares who asks to speak about the company PAC at a shareholder's meeting, is best.  But as many impassioned pleas to your fellow Americans as you can manage, about our disappearing rights, about how everyone wants impeachment but it just won't start, may be the shove that undoes the logjam.  We found out the hard way the congressmen don't give a rat's ass what we think.  In our Massachusetts 1st, Congressman John Olver acknowledged that an "overwhelming majority" of his district wanted him to co-sponsor Kucinich's H.Res.333 for the impeachment of Cheney, and even said he was concerned Bush would attack Iran from the air, declare a national emergency upon the inevitable retaliation of terror attacks here, and cancel the 2008 elections (why is it Americans are the only people who get offended if folks don't hold still while we bomb them?)  These fantastic, surreal things came out of his mouth, and still he is against impeachment.  He now has a primary challenge from attorney Bob Feuer of the Northeast Impeachment Coalition.

They keep spinning along about elections and bills which, once passed, Bush will ignore with a signing statement anyway.  He can put in his signing statement that THAT wasn't the bill, THIS was.  Right now everything, the rule of law itself, is at stake.

These are the folks who helped get these congressmen elected.  They will bear some responsibility in the eyes of history.

HERE IS THE LIST OF CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTORS AND LINKS STRAIGHT TO THEIR CONTACT/EMAIL INFORMATION.  BOOKMARK THIS PAGE AND PASS IT AROUND!  DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT!

Links to help you compose your letter/email (cutting and pasting is fine):

Impeach Investiations?  Here, They're Done! The Public Evidence for Impeachment

The President Himself

Enormous thanks to the patriots at the non-profit opensecrets.org, who did the real work of putting this info online.  It has no value until we USE it.

To: Steny Hoyer, Dutch Ruppersberger, Ben Cardin, Barbara Mikulski

What have you to fear?

Last night, the House and the Senate, yourselves included, voted to approve continued funding for the war in Iraq without language mandating a phased redeployment of troops from Iraq over the next year, and without mandating that the President require that the Iraqi government meet certain benchmarks in order to receive continued aid. While it was clear that President Bush was going to veto anything that fell short of giving him carte blanche to carry on the war as he sees fits, I was nevertheless astonished at how quickly the Democratic leadership in Congress capitulated to his demands.

With today's fairly stunning (though not shocking) comments from AG Gonzales on habeas, it's worth running down the legislative strategy for restoring this basic tenet of the American legal system.  First of all, this is a core base issue.  Among others, Moveon went out today with an email on the Habeas restoration, and as the Times has noted, there are half a dozen bills on habeas floating around the House.  The key to successfully moving this through Congress is to show that there is a majority on habeas with a floor vote, and then use that show of strength to attach a habeas restoration to one of any number of 'must-pass' legislative vehicles.  

The DoD Authorization is one such vehicle, though there are many others, such as various Appropriations bills and Budget bills.  To see an example of how this works, consider the difference between passing a stand-alone withdrawal timeline versus attaching it to a funding bill.  If we wanted to put withdrawal timelines alone through Congress, they could be stopped by the House, the Senate, or Bush, easily.  But when these timelines are attached to a larger vehicle, money the troops need, lots of on-the-fence members voted for something they wouldn't were it a stand-alone bill.  This is actually a standard legislative tactic, and why crushing net neutrality was thrown into a large telecom reform bill last cycle which had some stuff we actually like (like cable competition).  At the end of the day, of course, the President has to sign these bills for them to become law, so there's always the veto threat.  This is why bills often tend to take more than one Congress to pass.  For instance, the Bankruptcy Bill was coming up regularly in the late 1990s, and only passed in 2005.  Habeas restoration could be on a similar track.  

In this cycle, though, what legislative strategy we chooses hinges on the need for a majority of members to vote for a restoration of habeas.  It's unclear that there is in fact a majority.  There are 34 Democrats who voted for the Military Commissions Act under intense GOP pressure, and presumably some of them can be moved to vote for a restoration of habeas with leadership arm-twisting on the other side.  We got 168 votes against the MCA, which means that we have to build 50 more votes to get to a majority of 218 votes.  We picked up 30 seats in the 2006 election, flipped from Harold Ford to Steve Cohen (and Sherrod Brown was replaced), and there are 7 Democrats who didn't vote.  So starting from the very peak of possibilities and assuming that all the newly elected Democrats are yes votes (a strong assumption), we are at 206 pro-habeas votes.  That's 12 short of a majority, though it's more like 20-25 short of a majority considering we'll probably lose a few Blue Dogs and some Republicans who were with us last time.

So that's where we are.  20-25 votes short of a pro-habeas majority.  Here's a list of the 34 Democrats who voted for the Military Commissions Act.  These are the members to work on, and you'll recognize a bunch of them from earlier, um, problematic positions.

Robert Andrews, John Barrow, Melissa Bean, Sanford Bishop, Dan Boren, Leonar d Boswell, Allen Boyd, Sherrod Brown, Ben Chandler, Bud Cramer, Henry Cuellar, Artur Davis, Lincoln Davis, Chet Edwards, Bob Etheridge, Harold Ford, Bart Gordon, Stephanie Herseth, Brian Higgins, Tim Holden, Jim Marshall, Jim Matheson, Mike McIntyre, Charles Melancon, Michael Michaud, Dennis Moore, Collin Peterson, Earl Pomeroy, Mike Ross, John Salazar, David Scott, John Spratt, John Tanner, Gene Taylor

First of all, let's note that that's a lot of dudes.  My gender is laaaame.  Ok, second of all, it's pretty clear that voting for Habeas is not a flip-flop against the MCA, since they are different bills, and momentum from leadership can move some of these votes.  Third, Ike Skelton, who is a very conservative Democrat, is committed to the restoration of habeas corpus, which is helpful in terms of convincing a lot of these members that they aren't solely associating with liberals here.

Early next week, it's being reported that Tauscher and Skelton are going to 'drop a bill' restoring habeas.  It's not clear what this bill will say, and if it will be as strong as Nadler's bill.  What will happen is that this is going to go through both the Judiciary and Armed Services Committees before hitting the floor.  The timing for this to go to the floor is in June at the earliest, since floor time is tough to come by.  The move for a habeas restoration in the DoD Authorization was a quick attempt to stick the bill that looks like it failed, though it's still possible to bring the habeas restoration amendment to the floor during the DoD authorization debate.  It wasn't done openly, but you can read the code in the editorials in the NYT and the Washington Post.  The insiders were in the know.

There are lots of strategic openings with habeas, and lobbyists and different player are trying different tactics.  Some of them are open and many of them are not.  There are different rumors flying around, some of which pan out and some don't.  What I heard on Tuesday from a well-placed source, while not inaccurate, was certainly out-of-date by the time she told me.  That's why I wrote at the time that it was an outside shot.

Long story short, here's the essential roadmap, along with our role.  It's never entirely clear how to move something through Congress.  There are 435 members and thousands of people involved.  We need to take advantage of every single opportunity to put pressure on our members.  There are times when legislative changes can be snuck into bills, and if members know that they have felt pressure on a related issue, they will be more likely to sneak our stuff in there or look out and object to bad stuff being put in there.

I have one other observation.  Sometimes we'll need to put pressure on Blue Dogs, but sometimes we'll need to put pressure on progressives.  Some progressives will just not vote for certain types of legislative vehicles, like the DoD Authorization, because they don't want to legimitize our use of the military.  The 37 members that voted 'no' in 2006 for the DoD Authorization bill are after the flip.  Most of these members understand and will vote for something like the DoD Authorization if it has a habeas restoration in, but we need to make sure that they do in fact do this.  This DoD Authorization bill has some good stuff in it, like Walter Reed changes, cuts in missile defense, and global warming initiatives, and it may get vetoed regardless.  But the squeeze between progressives and Blue Dogs is a tight one, and will have to be managed for most important bills going through Congress.

There are a half-dozen bills in the House and the Senate that would restore habeas corpus. But the Democratic leadership has not found a way to bring the issue to a vote. The first vehicle is the Defense Department's budget authorization bill. But Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, chose not to include habeas corpus in his baseline version of the measure, known as the chairman's mark, which will be taken up by the committee today.

We hope habeas will be added to the bill by the committee, or that other sponsors of measures to restore the ancient right, including Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Jerrold Nadler of New York, and Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, will find ways to bring their bills to a vote.

The mark-up continues through tomorrow, so we'll see what happens. There are reporters snooping around to figure out the contours of the internal debate. Interestingly, it seems to be an entirely political problem; the votes are there for the restoration of habeas, but leadership is worried about taking heat from Republicans. So if there's a vote, we'll probably win. We can have a vote in committee or on the floor, in an amendment or in the bill itself. The ideal scenario is to have the Chairman, Ike Skelton, include habeas in his version of the bill, but he didn't do that. That said, if we lose this fight, there are other legislative vehicles coming down the pike we can use for the restoration of habeas, so our effort will not be wasted either way.

If we can't move habeas in the DoD Authorization bill, Ellen Tauscher's press secretary is saying that Ike Skelton will be introducing a bill early next week. It's not clear to me why they are playing these games unless they don't want this bill attached to something that has to pass. So keep calling. And if you donated to any of the officials on the committee, call them.

Leadership
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (202) 225-4965
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, (202) 225-4131

Armed Services Committee Democrats
Ike Skelton, Missouri, Chairman, 202-225-2876
John Spratt, South Carolina, 202-225-5501
Solomon P. Ortiz, Texas, (202) 225-7742
Gene Taylor, Mississippi, 202 225-5772
Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii, (202) 225-2726
Marty Meehan, Massachusetts, (202) 225-3411
Silvestre Reyes, Texas, (202) 225-4831
Vic Snyder, Arkansas, 202-225-2506
Adam Smith, Washington, (202) 225-8901
Loretta Sanchez, California, 202-225-5859
Mike McIntyre, North Carolina,  (202) 225-2731
Ellen O. Tauscher, California,  (202) 225-1880
Robert A. Brady, Pennsylvania, (202) 225-4731
Robert Andrews, New Jersey, 202-225-6501
Susan A. Davis, California, (202) 225-2040
Rick Larsen, Washington, (202) 225-2605
Jim Cooper, Tennessee, 202-225-4311
Jim Marshall, Georgia, 202-225-4311
Madeleine Z. Bordallo, Guam, (202) 225-1188
Mark Udall, Colorado, (202) 225-2161
Dan Boren, Oklahoma, (202) 225-2701
Brad Ellsworth, Indiana, (202) 225-4636
Nancy Boyda, Kansas, (202) 225-6601
Patrick Murphy, Pennsylvania, (202) 225-4276
Hank Johnson, Georgia, (202) 225-1605
Carol Shea-Porter, New Hampshire,(202) 225-5456
Joe Courtney, Connecticut, (202) 225-2076
David Loebsack, Iowa, 202.225.6576
Kirsten Gillibrand, New York, (202) 225-5614
Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania, (202) 225-2011
Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona, (202) 225-2542
Elijah Cummings, Maryland, (202) 225-4741
Kendrick Meek, Florida, 202-225-4506
Kathy Castor, Florida, (202)225-3376

So far, the following blogs have blogged about this and/or encouraged people to call in. More groups are going to jump on soon, and with these blogs plus the Times and the Post, a few million people are aware of this immediate fight. The Democrats are going to have to move on this, and if they don't do it now they will have to get it done later.

Firedoglake
Atrios
Glenn Greenwald
Dailykos
Andrew Sullivan
Talkleft
Down with Tyranny
LeftInLowell
Prospect Park Project
Iowa Independent
Calitics
Digby
Valerie Sanford sent it to her list.
Taylor Marsh
Capitol Defense Weekly
Partnership for a Secure America
The Tail of One, Squirrel
Correntewire
The Impolitic
Working For Change
Obsidian Wings
Republic of Dogs
A Spork in the Drawer
Boulder County Dems
A Socialable Loner
Right-thinking from the Left Coast
My Left Nutmeg
American Torture
Leanleft
West Virginia Blue