Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Constitutional Issues Where Is Congress' Spine?

Congress suffered a collective failure of courage this past August by failing to stand up for Americans’ due process and privacy rights when it mattered most. The Senate and House caved under White House pressure and voted to OK the gutting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Put in place after the overreaching of Nixon’s White House, FISA has helped protect Americans’ liberties for 30 years by acting as a check on the government’s surveillance activities for intelligence purposes.

That all changed in August, when Congress – cowering in the face of the White House’s threats – agreed to ratify and expand the Bush-Cheney Administration’s power to spy on Americans, at home and abroad, without warrants.

Take action now: send your Representatives and Senators in Congress a spine so that they can stand up to the White House and fix FISA. We can’t accept anything less than a law that will protect Americans’ constitutional rights and provide oversight of government surveillance.

Help Congress Grow a Spine

https://www.kintera.com/AccountTempFiles/account7839/images/spine.jpg

The Democrats Who Enable Bush

By Helen Thomas, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party’s leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.

Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.

Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is another Democratic leader who has empowered Bush’s war. Pelosi removed a provision from the most recent war-funding bill that would have required Bush to seek the permission of Congress before launching any attack on Iran. Her spokesman gave the lame excuse that she didn’t like the wording of the provision. More likely, she bowed to political pressure.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/27476

There are some pundits and activists who want the US to withdraw from Iraq now, but that was not the stance that gave the Democrats control fo Congress. Few running for the House or Senate who won voiced such a view. Most put forth a more nuanced "get them out soon but safely" position and that is what the Democratic party has pursued.

On one hand of course they will be accused of "losing" the war if they do what Helen Thomas calls for, and on the other hand anything but a full pullout dissatisifies the left.

Yet, the Pelosi-Reid leadership does seem to be screwing things up even within the narrow wiggle room given their narrow margin.

Good points, Phil. And how quickly Helen Thomas forgets that Hillary Clinton has never taken a position of withdrawing all the troops, and Edwards, when he was a Senator, voted for the Oct 2002 Authorization to Use Force. Later he said he "made a mistake". Later, when it was clear that his newly-organized constituency of progressive middle class people were almost unanimously opposed to continuing the Occupation.

Thomas also quickly forgets that while most Americans do think it is time to end the Occupation, very few support the idea of the military abandoning Iraq altogether.

As I have harped and harangued in other discussions, the Dem's could win with ANY of the three top candidates and we'd be a THOUSAND percent better off, just on the basis of what they did promise. Just a reminder, folks.

• CLINTON: "vast majority" out by 2013
• OBAMA: "end all combat missions immediately"
• EDWARDS: All combat troops withdrawn "within months".

I confess to being on the side of seeing the glass as half full. Meanwhile, I continue my earnest support for Dennis Kucinich, the candidate who can fill the glass all the way.

That is like saying the Bush administration "nuanced" the public into supporting his un-necessary invasion of Iraq. The public in 2004 were led to think that the Demo Party was going to get the US out of Iraq -- Now! And the public was led to believe in 2002-2003 that Iraq would be the source of mushroom clouds over American cities -- Now!

The Demo Party took back Congress in 2004 by sending out anti-Iraq 'war' candidates against Republican-held seats while the Democratic leaders focused on getting back the trappings of power and the goodies that befall those who hold it. Guess which of the two the voters were listening to during the campaign?;-)
Yours,
Issodhos

That certainly is what the GOP is saying but it isn't what the democratic candidates themselves said. Unless, of course, you can find a link to some -- who won.

We could hardly have hoped for a better election result than the one we had in 2006.

The Democrats get the Pyrrhic victory of slim majorities in Congress: They are pretty much forced to crow about a victory that gives them only the appearance of power.

In a battle against the resolute President George Walker Bush, they can never enact a bill that the president does not whole-heartedly support. So far, it hasn't even been a contest - Congress has folded every time even before the hand's been dealt.

In any ultimate showdown, the Supreme Court has shown itself to always, in the end, come down on the right side. With a right-thinking man leading the court, we can be secure in the knowledge that only the right cases will be heard and only the right decisions will come down.

The entire situation is a win-win-win-win:

1)Only the president's legislation is passed.

2)The Democrats take the heat for nothing positive happening since 2004.

3) And the party of True Americans gets to reinforce its image of steadfastness and moral superiority retaining the presidency in 2008.

4) More traitorous liberals will leave the court and be replaced by right-thinking Americans.

I am at a loss to understand why this is considered to the fault of Democrats.

S. 1927 - A bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to provide additional procedures for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence information and for other purposes. It was introduced by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and had one co-sponsor, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO). Bond is one of the nine Senators who voted against McCain's anti-torture amendment on October 5, 2005.

The Relevant Roll Call Votes for S. 1927 were

Senate Roll Call vote No. 309

Yeas
43 Republicans
16 Democrats
1 Independent (Lieberman)

Nays
27 Democrats
1 Independent (Sanders)
0 Republicans

Not Voting
6 Republicans
6 Democrats

House Roll call Vote No 836

Yeas
186 Republicans
41 Democrats

Nays
181 Democrats
2 Republicans

Not Voting
14 Republicans
9 Democrats

Both Reid and Pelosi voted against the bill.

This misconception has been corrected on another thread but is worth mentioning here as well. First of all, just for the record, it was 2006 not 2004 when the Dem's took over the majority in Congress.

But principally, the misconception that the Dem's won Congress back because they fielded anti-war candidates is simply untrue. Look back at the origins of the newly elected, and you will find that most of them, like my newly-elected Dem, are of the Blue Dog variety, and did not campaign on an anti-war platform. Indeed, it was one of the "shames" heaped upon the Dem Leadership Council by the left edge of the Party that Rahm Emmanuel and Co. did not offer much support to those candidates who were openly anti-war, choosing instead to throw their money and influence at the more circumspect, and reticent, when it came to Iraq.

And as a knight points out (thank you!), very few Dem's in either the House or the Senate, voted for this legislation, especially not the leadership. The Blue Dog Democrats are the largest single caucus in the House, with 75 members. Only 41 Democrats in the House voted for the legislation. That means at least 34 - almost half - voted against it.

How Congress Forgot Its Own Strength

By MARIO M. CUOMO
October 7, 2007

SENATORS Jim Webb of Virginia and Hillary Clinton of New York are right to demand that the president go before Congress to ask for a “declaration of war” before proceeding with an attack against Iran or any other nation. But there is no need for this demand to be put into law, as the two Democrats and their colleagues are seeking to do, any more than there is need for legislation to guarantee our right of free speech or anything else protected by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 already provides that only Congress has the power to declare war. Perhaps the founders’ greatest concern in writing the Constitution was that they might unintentionally create a president who was too much like the British monarch, whom they despised. They expressed that concern in part by assuring that the president would not have the power to declare war.

Congress’s refusal to comply with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution has led to a catastrophic aftermath. Such a tragedy should never be allowed to happen again. Rather than enact new legislation that would create constitutional ambiguity, the Democratic leadership in Congress should assert its strength by simply announcing it will allow no “resolutions” or “authorizations” purporting to delegate to the president Congress’s constitutional power to declare war against any other nation. Nor will there be any new war without Congress’s solemn deliberation and declaration of war.

The Democrats should go still further and announce that no money will be appropriated for any military action against another nation without a proper declaration of war. And this should be the position of the Democratic presidential candidates as well. How else can they make the case that they are less likely than President Bush to wage dangerous, improvident wars?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07cuomo.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin