Dumped by the Democrats, or What have the Telecomms Got that I Ain't Got?

Dumped by the Democrats, or What have the Telecomms Got that I Ain't Got?

It's the fate of a progressive Democrat. You keep hoping this time your party is going to tie the knot and make all your dreams come true, and there you find yourself all alone at the chapel, jilted one more time as Democrats make nice with the Bush administration allegedly to court the “center” of the electorate.

Actually, I've never been that naïve about any political party, but it has been a hard slog these past eight years watching the Bush Administration and a Republican-controlled Congress eviscerate the regulatory authority of agencies from the EPA to NEA, try to deep-six any factual information about climate change, and wreak havoc with the Constitution, especially when it comes to Americans' civil liberties.

But I really feel betrayed by Democrats over the recent so-called “compromise” FISA legislation which is less “compromise” than “capitulation” by the one group of politicians progressives have supported through thick and thin, mostly thin, for the last eight years.

What is going on with the Democratic party? Here we have a piece of legislation that will tear the guts out of a law Democrats sought as a check on unbridled executive power when Nixon authorized the burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters that created the Watergate scandal. And yet Democrats are voluntarily lying down in front of this legislative steamroller, led by Representative Steny Hoyer, and Senators Pelosi and Reid, as if they had never heard of Nixon, Watergate, and have suffered collective amnesia about the Bush administration's repeated attempts to subvert constitutional checks on its power at every turn. Have they even read any of Bush's recent signing statements?

I hate to seem paranoid, but I can can only wonder what the telecommunications lobbyists have been up to on Capitol Hill lately. According to Wired, for example, “Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to [Senator Jay] Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon),” (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/dem-pushing-spy.html). Jay Rockefeller is one of the main proponents of the “compromise” legislation.

On the other side of the aisle, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has “dozens of lobbyists [with] political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate,” according to USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-03-23-mccainlobbyists_N.htm).

According to statistics compiled by MAPlight.org, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave contributions averaging $8,359 to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for the telecommunications companies and $4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity. 88% of the Democrats who changed their position to support immunity(83 of 94 Democratic representatives) received PAC contributions from telecommunications companies affected by the proposed legislation during the last three years.

As the late Molly Ivins used to say, “It's not that they sell themselves that hurts, it's that they sell themselves so damned cheap.”

From the 69-28 vote in the Senate today, it's clear that Democrats really don't want to fight the administration any longer to protect Americans from whole-sale spying. Instead they've been buying into the Republican spin that we should protect and even thank these “patriotic” corporations for their assistance in the fight on terrorism. Oh sure, please read my email, listen into my phone calls – does anybody really care about unreasonable search and seizure anymore?

I wish I could still find words to convey a sense of outrage that this latest assault on the very values we once fought an empire over – the right to free from government intrusion on our lives – has now been turned on its head – and any resistance to government intrusion recast as “unpatriotic.” But frankly, I feel exhausted by the accumulation of eight years of being told we have to give up our civil liberties in order to be “safe” without anyone debating whether we really want to be safe at that price.

But I should remind Democrats that in an election when every vote counts, they may have sold their patriotism cheap. The same progressive anger that fueled the rise of internet political actions groups like MoveOn.org can easily turn off a significant portion of their base support if voters like me are so disgusted with their so-called compromise that we keep our money in our pockets and turn out as merely opponents of John McCain instead of partisans for Barack Obama. Change needs to mean something, and one of things it has to mean is a serious commitment to restoring Americans' civil liberties and putting real limits on executive power.