Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will allow telecom immunity to come up for a floor vote.

[babylonsister]

He's a spineless, wishy-washy, weak man. :grr:


Reid Chooses Admin-Friendly Measure as Basis for Surveillance Bill
By Spencer Ackerman - December 14, 2007, 5:23PM


Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is taking an enormous amount of criticism from the left -- see Glenn Greenwald and Christy Hardin Smith, for starters -- for putting the Senate intelligence committee's version of the surveillance bill on the floor as the "base text" for a vote on Monday and offering the Senate Judiciary Committee's version as a standing amendment. In a nutshell, Judiciary's version doesn't provide retroactive telecom immunity and offers more civil-liberties protections. (TPMm homie Julian Sanchez has a good rundown of the differences at Ars Technica.)

Reid spokesman Jim Manley tells us that Reid wants both bills to contend, doesn't intend to favor one over the other, and the reason why the intelligence committee's version is the base text owes to "the order in which they considered the bill." (Intelligence marked it up before Judiciary.)

In a floor statement today, Reid said that he "personally favor{s} many of the additional protections included in the Judiciary Committee bill, and I oppose the concept of retroactive immunity in the Intelligence bill." But it would "be wrong of me to simply choose one committee's bill over the other." He added that the "consensus" emerged between himself, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) that using intelligence's bill as the base text was the right way to go. Reid's full statement is after the jump.

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