Whose Congress is It? Harry Reid also got money from Telecoms!

[KoKo]

Whose Congress Is It?

President George W. Bush has shown that with support from his dead-ender Republican allies in Congress he can prevent good bills from becoming law. Now let’s hope that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can stop bad bills from becoming law.

But don’t count on it after the Democratic leaders’ gutless performances in the last week.

House Democrats from the Judiciary and Intelligence committees drafted a bill that would revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to replace a stopgap measure that was hurriedly passed this summer. The new bill would maintain court jurisdiction over domestic wiretaps. The Dems refused to consider the White House’s demand of immunity for US phone companies that cooperated with the administration’s illegal wiretaps, at least until the White House produces long-sought documents on the origin and extent of the eavesdropping.

But when the Dems tried to bring the bill to the House floor, House Republicans tied it up in procedural knots. Rather than vote down the GOP, and risk being accused as “soft on terrorists,” the Dems pulled their own bill.

-snip-

In a press release, Rockefeller noted that, after reviewing the documents, the issue of whether the administration acted illegally in authorizing its warrantless surveillance program is still an “open question.”

So, Spencer Ackerman noted at TPMMuckraker.com (Oct. 23), “in other words, Rockefeller just blessed a program that he can’t yet certify is legal; and included in his blessing a blanket promise of immunity for companies that he can’t say didn’t break the law.”

When Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said he would put a hold on the Senate bill, it was reported that Reid still planned to bring up the bill in mid-November. That “raised some eyebrows” as a potential breach of much-vaunted Senate courtesy for a member of Reid’s own caucus.

It turns out that executives of the two biggest phone companies -- AT&T and Verizon -- gave Rockefeller more than $42,000 in political donations while seeking his support for immunity from lawsuits from customers who say their privacy was violated, the New York Times reported Oct. 23. According to OpenSecrets.org, AT&T also gave Harry Reid $22,000.

Dodd said he would filibuster the bill. We’ll see if there are 40 votes in the Senate to uphold the Bill of Rights -- because it looks like Reid and Rockefeller won’t be much help.

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http://www.populist.com/07.20.edit.html