House Minority Whip Roy Blunt issued a press release last night lambasting Democrats. It's music to my ears. Here's the opening paragraph:
"The Democrats' full-scale retreat on FISA this evening was spurred by a single amendment, a provision that would've made clear that nothing in their bill could be used to prevent U.S. agents from tracking al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists abroad. But rather than taking that vote and joining with Republicans to send a clear message of intent with this bill, the majority decided that plan carried too much political risk. And so here we sit this evening with no FISA bill to debate.OUCH!!! That'll leave a mark. Democrats will have a difficult time explaining why they removed this bill from consideration. Rep. Blunt puts them in a really tight box when he says that they tabled the bill when Republicans offered a straightforward amendment to the RESTORE Act.
What will their defense be? I'm certain that this decision is adding lots more grey hair to Rahm Emanuel's hair. Rahm's got the bad misfortune of chairing the House Democratic Caucus and the DCCC. He's a longtime spinmeister from the Clinton administration so I'm sure he's already developing some way to spin this but I'm certain that it won't pass the laugh test.
Here's another devastating paragraph from Rep. Blunt's press release:
NOTE: The majority's FISA bill sought to prevent the tracking and monitoring of foreign organizations of terror by requiring our intelligence agents to obtain court orders before listening to their communications. The Republican motion-to-recommit would've highlighted that error and taking positive steps to help correct it. But faced with the prospect of losing huge swaths of their membership on the vote, Democratic leadership struck the bill from this evening's schedule.This is a major problem for Democrats. The NSA's intercept program has been wildly popular ever since the first polling came out on the subject in December, 2005. Democrats didn't learn the most important lesson about this issue. They didn't notice that the people's highest priority was for the federal government to protect them from future terrorist attacks. They like civil liberties but they demand to be protected from terorrists.
Because they didn't learn that lesson, they've been on the wrong side of this issue politically since it emerged. Democrats didn't want to believe that national security trumped civil liberties. Now they're on the verge of paying a substantial political price for that disbelief.
Conservative congratulations to Rep. Blunt for putting this statement together. There's never a wrong time to highlight bad national security policies.
