The Osterley Times: Senate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance

I find the spinelessness of some Democrats simply stupefying. Even with Bush's popularity through the floor, with 45% of the electorate calling for him to be impeached, all he has to do is demand that Congress give him even more power - with even less oversight - otherwise the next terrorist attack will be your fault, and some Democrats simply roll over and play dead.

Here are the sixteen Democratic tossers who gave Bush what he wanted, despite being elected by a public that wanted more Congressional oversight:

Evan Bayh (Indiana); Tom Carper (Delaware); Bob Casey (Pennsylvania); Kent Conrad (North Dakota); Dianne Feinstein (California); Daniel Inouye (Hawai‘i); Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota); Mary Landrieu (Louisiana); Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas); Claire McCaskill (Missouri); Barbara Mikulski (Maryland); Bill Nelson (Florida); Ben Nelson (Nebraska); Mark Pryor (Arkansas); Ken Salazar (Colorado); Jim Webb (Virginia).

Obviously Joe Liebermann voted to give Bush more power although even Liebermann admitted that the bill is far from perfect: "We're at war. The enemy wants to attack us," Lieberman said during the Senate debate. "This is not the time to strive for legislative perfection."

Democrats like those listed above - we can excuse Liebermann as no-one is remotely surprised when that right wing loon votes with the other right wing loons - however, those members of the Democratic Party who were elected only last November to bring this administration to heel, deserve to be held in the deepest contempt. What they have done goes beyond spineless, it is simply shameful... shameful.

Don't these guys ever check an opinion poll? Why do they fall for Bush's faux threats each and every time?

Harry Reid did his best to blame the Republicans:

"My Republican colleagues chose to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal that fails to provide the accountability needed in the light of the administration's past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror," said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Sorry, Harry, that simply won't wash. Were it not for the 16 Democrats who also voted "to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal" then they would have never got away with it.

Democrats "have a Pavlovian reaction: Whenever the president says the word 'terrorism,' they roll over and play dead," said Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, predicted that the bill's approval would lead to the monitoring of ordinary Americans by the National Security Agency, which conducts most of the government's electronic surveillance. "If this bill becomes law, Americans who communicate with a person abroad can count on one thing: The NSA may be listening," he said.

I am so glad I am not an American. I find Britain hard enough to deal with where the nearest we can come to a progressive government is New Labour who, to be fair, do engage in some progressive politics. However, in the US I would have no-one representing me at election time. And I certainly couldn't bring myself to vote Democrat if one of those sixteen tossers represented my state.

Greenwald, as always, sums it up best:

Examine virtually every Bush scandal and it increasingly bears the mark not merely of Democratic capitulation, but Democratic participation. In August of 2006, the Supreme Court finally asserted the first real limit on Bush's radical executive power theories in Hamdan, only for Congress, months later, to completely eviscerate those minimal limits -- and then go far beyond -- by enacting the grotesque Military Commissions Act with the support of substantial numbers of Democrats. What began as a covert and illegal Bush interrogation and detention program became the officially sanctioned, bipartisan policy of the United States.

Grave dangers are posed to our basic constitutional safeguards by the replacement of Sandra Day O'Connor with Sam Alito, whose elevation to the Supreme Court Congressional Democrats chose to permit. Vast abuses and criminality in surveillance remain undisclosed, uninvestigated and unimpeded because Congressional Democrats have stood meekly by while the administration refuses to disclose what it has been doing in how it spies on us. And we remain in Iraq, in direct defiance of the will of the vast majority of the country, because the Democratic Beltway establishment lacks both the courage and the desire to compel an end to that war.

And now Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with revealing symbolism, cancel their scheduled appearances this morning at Yearly Kos because George Bush ordered them to remain in Washington in order to re-write and expand FISA -- a law which he has repeatedly refused to allow to be revised for years and which he has openly and proudly violated. Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.

The intense rush to amend this legislation means that most of them have no idea what they are actually enacting -- even less of an idea than they typically have. But what they know is that George Bush and Fox News and the Beltway establishment have told them that they would be irresponsible and weak and unserious if they failed to comply with George Bush's instructions, and hence, they comply.

He's demanded that they amend a law that he doesn't even comply with - that fact alone should be the subject of impeachment proceedings, the President has openly and brazenly admitted to committing a Federal crime - but these buggers are falling over themselves to give him exactly what he asks them for, even though they have no idea at all how the wiretapping programme is being implemented.

Those sixteen Democrats don't deserve to be re-elected in 2008. They were elected to stop Bush's blatant misuse of power and asked to restore the balance between the executive and the other branches of government. They have not only failed to stop him but they have gone further and legalised his criminality.

Balkinisation:

In the category of "Glass Half-Full," how's this?:
"I’m not thrilled," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. "There are some changes we need to make to make sure that American citizens are protected. But it's a lot better than a lot of things that have been forced down this Congress' throat right before recesses that trampled on American's liberties."
Now there's an inspiring selling point: "Vote for the FISA Amendment -- It Tramples on Even Fewer Liberties Than the Military Commissions Act!" (That's going to go over really well at the YearlyKos breakfast this morning.) House vote tomorrow. It is expected that the bill will be approved. The Republican strategy? Comments such as this, from the chief Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith: "I hope that there are no attacks before we are able to effectively update this important act."