Check out what happened in the House yesterday --

DeepModem Mom

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Thu Oct-18-07 11:38 AM
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Check out what happened in the House yesterday --

Edited on Thu Oct-18-07 11:52 AM by DeepModem Mom

buried in this article in the New York Times:

(NOTE: Here is a link to LBN post, and discussion, of the main portion of the article, about the Senate deal on phone company immunity: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3033330.)

Senate Deal on Immunity for Phone Companies
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: October 18, 2007

....At the start of the day, Democrats were confident that the measure would gain approval in the House despite a veto threat from President Bush. But after an afternoon of partisan sniping, Democratic leaders put off that vote because of a competing measure from Republicans that on its face asked lawmakers to declare where they stood on stopping Osama bin Laden from attacking the United States again.

The Republican measure declared that nothing in the broader bill should be construed as prohibiting intelligence officials from conducting the surveillance needed to prevent Mr. bin Laden or Al Qaeda “from attacking the United States.” Had it passed, it threatened to derail the Democratic measure altogether.

Democrats denounced the Republicans’ poison pill on Mr. bin Laden as a cynical political ploy and “a cheap shot.” But Democratic leaders realized that they were at risk of losing the votes of a contingent of more moderate Democrats who did not want to be left vulnerable for voting against a resolution to stop Al Qaeda, officials said. So the leaders pulled the measure, promising to take it up again next week once they could solidify support.

The Republican maneuver “would have killed the bill, and we couldn’t risk that,” said a senior Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal leadership deliberations. “We thought we’d be able to defeat it, but it became clear that we couldn’t.” The episode revealed, once again, fault lines within the Democratic Party over how to tackle national security questions without appearing “soft” on terrorism in the face of Republican criticism.

Indeed, Republican leaders immediately praised their ability to block the N.S.A. measure as a sign of the Democrats’ weakness on that issue. Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, said Speaker Nancy Pelosi “underestimated the intelligence of the American people and the bipartisan majority in the Congress to understand what matters most: preventing another terrorist attack.” Democrats, clearly thrown on the defensive, countered that Republicans were the ones playing politics with national security....The Democratic measure would have sought to restore some of the restrictions on the security agency’s wiretapping powers that had been loosened under a temporary measure approved by Congress just before its August recess....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/washington/18nsa.html?ref=todayspaper