Here’s the roll call on the Amash amendment, which would have ended the NSA’s collection of domestic phone records. The defeat was narrow (217-205) and bi-partisan, with Boehner, Pelosi, Cantor and Hoyer all voting no, along with a bunch of committee chairs and ranking members from both parties. Here’s the Guardian’s story.
Bill Killed
by $8 blue check mistermix| 77 Comments
This post is in: Security Theatre
Jeremy
I will also point out that the bill included a provision that wouldn’t allow the president to close Guantanamo.
Ben Cisco
Ugh.
That some people confuse “cowardly and reactionary” with “patriotic” is nauseating.
Wonder if they are/will collect Weiner pics too.
John Oliver CRUSHED NakedWeinerGate last night.
Anybodybuther2016
Does this mean Nancy is just like Bush too?
JGabriel
Saw these two headlines, one directly above the other, at TPM this morning:
Priorities: As long we can listen in, we don’t care if you live or die.
Edited to Add: If wingnuts shut down the gov’t, can we blame the next terror attack on them for leaving us vulnerable to unsurveilled phone calls during the shutdown?
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gene108
No one in a leadership position in government, especially the Executive branch, should want to undo the security state. The political down side risk of a major terrorist attack is much higher than any 4th Amendment / civil liberties argument.
Maybe change the political dynamic and it’d make sense for politicians to undo the security state.
JGabriel
gene108:
9/11 didn’t seem to hurt Bush at all.
ETA: By which I mean, I think it’s the destruction and loss of life that’s the downside to a terrorist attack. Politically, though, an attack on the U.S. helps the incumbent more than it hurts, as illogical as that may seem.
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Omnes Omnibus
There are other, arguably better bills in the hopper to address surveillance. I would not read anything, good or bad, into the defeat of this particular bill. I think the fact that Congress is taking any sort of action to deal with the issue is rather amazing.
NonyNony
@JGabriel:
I think this is true if the incumbent is a Republican, given the values of Democratic Party voters and the values of Republican Party voters.
If the incumbent is a Democrat, an attack on the US will leave him flayed and filleted politically.
Thus the obvious reason why there’s absolutely NO incentive for a Democratic President to push for reducing the security state. This is going to have to come from the bottom up if it is ever to come at all.
(And by the values of the voters – Democratic voters value cooperation, working together, and setting aside differences in the face of adversity. This is what Democratic voters call “patriotism”, and this is why Bush the Lesser had such high job approval ratings right after 9/11. Republican voters value tribalism and pissing off Democrats. This is what Republican voters call “patriotism” and is why I strongly suspect that if Gore had been in office and 9/11 had happened he would have been impeached. More than half of the political problems in this country are a result of the folks in the two political parties having a common vocabulary without speaking the same language…)
Va Highlander
@NonyNony:
I was tempted to make that argument but how did the Boston attack hurt Obama?
Chris
@NonyNony:
This.
The two big crises that’ve occurred in America in my short politically aware lifetime were 9/11 and the financial crisis. After 9/11, Democrats set aside partisanship and supported the president (taking it much farther than they ever should have), because in a time of crisis, the country needed to stand together. After the financial crisis, Republicans said “I hope he fails” and made “making Obama a one term president” their own proclaimed number one priority, even going back on things they’d previously supported simply so that they could oppose the presidency.
It’s a fitting summary of who really does believe in putting country first and who doesn’t.
Redshirt
Impeach Pelosi!
TS
@JGabriel:
Might help a white incumbent – NO WAY would it help President Obama. The GOP are looking for ANY way to bring down the black guy – defunding security and then blaming him for a terrorist attack – just what the GOP ordered.
Betty Cracker
@Chris: True. Why this isn’t blatantly obvious to every sentient being is a mystery to me.
Eric U.
an act which reduces the capability to track terrorists prior to a terrorist attack would probably be an impeachable offense for the repubs. No matter how ineffective/unconstitutional that capability might be.
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
If you rely on corporate media outlets who constantly excuse and enable Republican BS or you are barely sentient, you will have an extremely skewed understanding of the situation.
Belafon
@Va Highlander: I think the thing about Boston was that it was small scale, and you had the Boston PD go full force on solving it. It’s hard to say what would happen to the president if another 9/11 were to occur, but you’re not going to get a president to give up any power he has easily.
ETA: Also though, there can never be another 9/11. There could be another large attack, but, in a morbid way, Bush got a free one since no one else had seen an attack on American soil like that. No one else gets to claim naivety.
negative 1
@JGabriel: I think that there is an argument to be made, however, that they think that the improper collection of data is mostly an argument on how that information could be used in the future, versus an actually demonstrated threat.
Additionally, call me cynical, but how many ‘low information voters’ out there will yell about this result and then scream “why couldn’t this have been prevented” at the next terrorist attack. I’ll bet that cynical outlook on the majority of voters is kind of a bipartisan feeling.
CS
Help me get this right, if I am remembering incorrectly.
When the idiot with a bomb in his underwear tried to blow himself up, he was on a Northwest Airlines flight landing at Detroit. The news media went and found Pete Hoekstra, Republican from Michigan, and asked him for his thoughts on the incident a few hours later. His response was (paraphrased) “I haven’t been briefed yet, so I don’t know the details, but I’m sure it’s Obama’s fault.”
This is the mindset Obama faces, and it’s only gotten worse. How do you beat that?
Anybodybuther2016
defunding security and then blaming him for a terrorist attack – just what the GOP ordered.
srv
Taking a productive stand on Civil Liberties would win back a lot of disaffected youth who think Obama == Bush (cry all you want, but that’s what a million redditors think) and neuter half of the reason anyone listens to glibertarian republicans.
Nobody has a boner for the National Security State outside of the beltway anymore. Sequestration has proved that.
Socoolsofresh
This is good news for authoritarians over a nothingburger! Can we please go back to talking about Snowdens personality?
Botsplainer
Clearly, I should be sad that neither monkeywrenching ecodorks, business district raging anarchists, nor govt building bombing racist militia fucktards can be secure in using electronic means to conspire to destroy lives.
Ronnie Pudding
Majority of Dems voted for, majority of Republicans against. Fairly close on both sides, however.
japa21
Personally, I am glad the amendment was killed. Like the sequester it was a case of taking a sledge hammer instead of a scapel. Excellent read, and one of the few articles about the issue which is not filled with a bunch of hyperbole from either side: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/chris-hayes-and-david-sirota-have-4-hour-erection-over-amash-amendment/
Redshirt
@srv: redditors, by and large, are basement dwelling Libertarians who preach Male Rights and condone child porn and spousal abuse. Who cares what they think?
Belafon
@srv: Very few people outside of blogs even care about the conversation. I bet a poll on it would find very few people disaffected by it.
Patrick
@Jeremy:
Anybody who supported this bill is pretty hypocritical. They were against closing Gitmo in the name of fighting terrorism (I assume), but they were against NSA’s domestic collection of phone records, which is also in the name of fighting terrorism. Makes no sense.
It is just sad that there are still Democrats who are against closing Gitmo.
Sloegin
It wasn’t a good bill, yet a majority of house Dems voted in favor of it.
What we can argue all day is privacy vs. security. What we can’t argue is Lord Acton’s maxim and the NSA.
For all we know, General Alexander is a new J. Edgar Hoover. But we can’t know, can we, nor is there any way we can ever find out.
Jeremy
@srv: Some people will never be satisfied. Every democratic president is considered a failure when they were in office. The same complaints we hear about Obama were said about others. It’s only until the president leaves office people want to be revisionist. Take jimmy carter for example. The guy signed the fisa act in 1978 which lead to the modern day NSA, his attorney general defended the idea of wiretapping without court approval, but now cater acts like he was against it and the purity left pretends the guy is a liberal saint. I like jimmy carter but the facts contradict the bull shit.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Jeremy: Which would be redundant, as there is already a law against both closing Guantanamo and against bringing any of the detainees onto US soil.
I remember some Republican piece of shit – oh yeah, Boehner, the Drunken God of Orange – recently saying something about getting rid of unnecessary laws something something. I’m sure it was meant in all sincerity.
Belafon
@japa21: I think his rant about the NSA scandal being a white people’s problem is even better.
scav
I somehow doubt any congress, let alone this congress, could come up with and agree upon a nuanced, considered, reasonable piece of legislation (with actual intended consequences with odds of actually occurring as planned!) this quickly, let alone on this subject. Death of a Cobbled-together Grandstand, bof.
Jeremy
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Yeah. I think they are trying to close any back door way the president might use to close the prison. At this point they are only concerned with making the president look bad.
jon
@Belafon: I’m thinking that the Boston bombing proved how useful this program was in focusing on the friends and associates of the bombers. The three (later taken into custody) may have led to others turning on the brothers and giving them fewer places to hide. I don’t think blanket info gathering will do much against initial attacks, but they definitely can stop spree criminals of the sort these brothers wanted to be.
Can still be misused to an incredible degree, but useless? I’m not so sure. The Boston PD did a lot of footwork, but they got a list of people to visit, and that may have helped.
Culture of Truth
This was a clumsy attempt, poorly worded, hastily written, and not a litmus test as to whether someone is in favor of privacy or massive surveillance. Let the Congress hold hearings on the Patriot Act and re-write it, rather than using a vague funding amendment.
Zifnab
@Jeremy:
I can’t find anything to back this claim up. But if you could post a link to back up this claim, I would absolutely love it.
Patricia Kayden
@srv: And so what if disaffected youth believe Obama == Bush? Obama is not running again. I don’t see how what the NSA is doing is going to hurt Hilary Clinton should she decide to run in 2016.
japa21
@Belafon: You are correct. It becomes a question of whose ox is getting gored.
Chris
@Jeremy:
The popular idea of Carter as a liberal saint… is really, really, weird when you’ve read that 1998 interview from his national security adviser claiming that the administration started shipping arms to the mujahidin in Afghanistan in order to increase the likelihood of a Soviet intervention, so that they could give them their Vietnam. That’s about as cold and calculating a strategy as any Kissinger wannabe could’ve come up with. Not saying I wouldn’t have voted for Carter, just that he had a dark side too, just like every Democratic president. Like I said, the popular image of him as a saint is peculiar to say the least.
amk
@srv: LOL. redditors? That toked out bunch who couldn’t find their way to the voting booth?
japa21
@Patricia Kayden: Nor would Hilary have done anything different regards the program. I am not even sure she would have tightened it up like Obama and Holder did in 2009 when it was discovered some abuses were taking place.
Jockey Full of Malbec
@Belafon:
Tommy Christopher’s coverage of this has been quiet good. From the article:
Emphasis mine.
For all the sound and fury, I’ve yet to hear or read a cogent explanation from any of our newly minted Leftist Champions of Civil Liberties what, exactly, the fucking problem is.
More and more this is just looking like ill-informed hysterics on the part of a generation that grew up thinking that The X-Files was a documentary.
Zifnab
@Chris: Given that he was book-ended by Nixon/Ford and Reagan, he comes across as a Saint by comparison.
ruemara
@Zifnab: To channel the T&H block of BJ, that’s hardly a recommendation. And I say that as a child who observed the Reagan/Carter election and knew Reagan was bullshit in a wig and Carter was the better person.
LAC
@Culture of Truth:Bingo!
JasonF
The House bill was overbroad and created perverse incentives for NSA to open more investigations, not fewer. I like Senator Leahy’s proposal, which would require more court and Congressional oversight of NSA.
gene108
@Chris:
I don’t think they took it further than they needed to. As the below post points out:
@NonyNony:
Republicans took 9/11/01 as a political opportunity to stick a shiv in the side of the Democratic Party. And to a large extent it worked in 2002.
The media was complicit in pushing the “with us or against us” rhetoric that dominated the airwaves. Look back on what the media and right-wing voters were saying about President Bush after the invasion of Iraq. A good many folks felt he was the greatest President evah.
Max Cleland lost his re-election bid to Saxby Chambliss because he wasn’t sufficiently kow-towing to Bush & Co.
There really was a great political opportunity post-9/11/01 to bring this country together, but Bush the Lesser and his brain, Karl Rove, decided to use it for short term political gain. We are still paying the political price for their decision to polarize the country after 9/11/01.
gene108
@Jockey Full of Malbec:
Well said.
This isn’t the terrible abuse of government power you think it is. I have more grief from traffic light cameras than I do with this program, with regards to government’s use of technology to see what I’m doing and when I’m doing it.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Jockey Full of Malbec: Prove that’s all they’re looking at.
Don’t get me wrong, I doubt that they’re looking at much else, but I can’t prove that. And you can’t either. And neither can any journalist. Neither can Ed Snowden. Nobody can who is not directly working on the program right now, and they are not talking.
Because it’s secret. And we have been told flat out that we don’t have the right to be told what information gathering exists, what gets looked at or why, or what their capabilities are.
The reporters are pulling it out of their asses just as much as the crazy homeless guy I walk by every morning on my way to work. The homeless guy may well have a better idea of what’s going on, given the abysmal track record of our useless media on, well, everything.
Mnemosyne
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
How do you ever prove a negative?
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Mnemosyne: If you cannot prove an assertion, don’t make it.
If the apologists for this administration and domestic spying program are telling me there’s nothing to worry about, then they must have access to information that proves that, right? Since they don’t, and have no facts to back up their assertions, they need to acknowledge that.
Jockey Full of Malbec
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I’m not the one asserting a positive claim here.
Example: ‘Prove’ to me that you’re not a domestic terrorist, trying to undermine anything that could potentially thwart you. (See what a bullshit argument technique that is?)
Dana Priest has been on this story since 2002. And Mark Klein went to the press half a decade ago. Neither of them are in jail.
If you didn’t know these things already, then you just weren’t paying attention.
Plantsmantx
@japa21:
A post headlined “Chris Hayes And David Sirota Have 4-Hour Erection Over Amash Amendment” is hyperbole-free?:)
Mnemosyne
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
You acknowledged that the people saying that they are looking at your information don’t have any proof, either. So are you reserving judgement entirely, or are you assuming that the people making the assertion that your information is being looked at are telling the truth based on your own biases?
On balance, I find it unlikely that they’re looking at everyone’s information because (a) you would need a frickin’ army to do that and (b) every bit of information that is currently available says that a warrant is required. I’m going with the currently available information but am willing to change my mind if new evidence is presented — how about you?
smintheus
The amendment simply re-affirmed existing federal law on pen registers. So the House rejected the public law and endorsed the secret law, which is secret even to the House.
smintheus
@Chris: When he ran for president, Carter was considered a conservative Democrat. His record as governor was conservative, even reactionary at times (e.g. ‘Lt. Calley Day’).
gene108
@smintheus:
From what I gather, pre-Reagan the difference between Democrats and Republicans was Democrats were more pro-labor, while Republicans were more pro-business.
On social issues, there wasn’t the stark gaping chasm that developed after Reagan gathered up all the social conservatives into the Republican bucket.
I’ve met several very conservative folks, who voted for Carter in 1976 and that was the last time they ever voted for a Democrat.
NR
Republicans and Democrats coming together to fuck over the country. Obama’s idea of bipartisanship is alive and well in DC.
Omnes Omnibus
@NR: Was it a good bill? If so, why?
Redshirt
@Forum Transmitted Disease: So who do you support? What do you support? Or is it only critiques of how Obama has failed you?
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne: To say nothing of the fact that if they were, in fact, actually LOOKING AT people’s information, then the only thing we ever would have heard of Edward Snowden would have been “NSA Contractor Arrested for Theft of Government Property” or (if you seriously conspiratorially minded) “NSA Contractor killed in Traffic Accident.”
This is why nobody takes the Snowden/Greenwald fanboys seriously. Because their very existence disproves their claims.
Lurking Canadian
@gene108: Change that to “would” and I will agree. The notion that politicians *should not* put principle above personal gain makes baby Jesus cry.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Mnemosyne: I am absolutely reserving judgment entirely.
I find the incredibly hostile reactions generated by a mere recitation of the facts – that you cannot know what cannot be verified – to be quite amusing, though. So I’m going to keep doing it.
@Redshirt: Haven’t said a word about Obama failing anyone. As far as “who do I support?” what the fuck kind of question is that? We’re not talking the NFL here (for the record, I support the 49ers). I support the truth. The truth, at the moment, is unknowable.
For the record, I find the only thing that Obama has truly “failed” on is educational policy. The rest of it…well, kinda hard to do a good job when you’re being sabotaged at every turn, isn’t it?
Omnes Omnibus
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I ought to pie you for that.
GxB
@NonyNony: Pretty good observation IMO, especially the whole patriotism definition for D vs R. I’d maintain that if Gore had been in office on 9/11, I don’t think events would have played out the same. First off I don’t see Al as an “…alright you covered your ass…” (and drop the whole thing) kind of guy. Second – recall that we had all kinds of intel on the terrorists prior to the actual event without all this homeland security BS.
Yeah, yeah, hypotheticals and and all water under the bridge I know, but the end fact remains that the bar for all things political will remain obscenely high for D’s and laughably low for the R’s. What a country.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s been a brutal ride since 1994. Isn’t their record punishment enough?
Omnes Omnibus
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
No. I am a Packer fan and I have my reasons.
Mnemosyne
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
As long as you’re equally vigilant in reminding the pro-Snowden crowd that they can’t prove their claims, either, that’s fine. I haven’t really noticed that from you, though.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne:
Haven’t you been taking care of that and more?
TG Chicago
@Soonergrunt: So you believe that it’s impossible for the NSA to be overreaching, but be less than 100% competent? That strikes me as unserious.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m not the one claiming total neutrality on the subject. I have an opinion, and I’ve stated it.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, you do. I give you the traditional greeting of the 49er fan to the Packer fan: “Die, heretic scum.”
@Mnemosyne: Isn’t needed. Most of the posters here jump all over those folks. If it will make you feel better I could do that, but that seems merely to be piling on to where the groupthink is going anyway.
Heliopause
@NonyNony:
Only one small problem with your hypothesis: the actual facts.
Carter got a huge approval bump, which lasted for months, from the Iran Hostage Crisis. He even got a small bump from the failed rescue attempt. As the crisis dragged on with no end in sight his approval eventually fell back to where it was immediately before, which raises the question of whether the entire ordeal, usually cited as a big reason that Reagan was elected, was really just a zero sum for Carter politically.
Clinton got a modest approval bump after the OKC bombing and was easily re-elected in 1996.
Neither Benghazi nor Boston made much difference to Obama’s approval.
Mnemosyne
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought. So much for neutrality.
LAC
@Omnes Omnibus: You are not really expecting an answer from NR, are you?
Omnes Omnibus
@LAC: Of course not. That was for the audience.
I think the Leahy bill, off a quick scan, is a better bet for doing something both smart and effective.
Soonergrunt
@TG Chicago: No. It strikes me that they are technically capable of overreaching but are not doing so because they have neither the time nor the manpower to do so. It’s entirely possible that they don’t have the interest in doing so for philosophical reasons either.
So far, the only overreaching I’ve seen in this whole affair is the massive overreaching done by Snowden, Greenwald, and their fanboys. To deny that such is taking place is…unserious.