Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats left Washington, DC for their district’s comforts without passing the FISA reform bill. In fact, they didn’t even debate the Senate bill that passed with 68 votes two days earlier. Pelosi’s collection of irresponsible legislators should be tarred and feathered in their hometown and national press every day that they aren’t in session. Investors’ Business Daily has started that tar and feathering with this editorial. Here’s the key paragraph:
Congress has had nearly seven months to renew and update this vital law. Yet just look at what the House of Reprehensibles was wasting its time with last week, when it should have been working night and day on FISA.
They didn’t stop there:
The Senate-passed bill that Pelosi and House Democrats consider less important than wedding receptions and steroids abuse got a bipartisan majority of 68 votes in the Senate last week. Much of it was written by a liberal Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The bill gives U.S. intelligence agencies “the tools they need to track down terrorists,” as Rockefeller noted. It also provides retroactive immunity to telecom carriers being sued for assisting in the terrorist surveillance program.
Firms such as AT&T (NYSE:SBT) (NYSE:T) , Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) and Verizon (NYSE:VZC) (NYSE:VZ) face lengthy litigation, and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, spearheaded by the ACLU all because they helped save lives
As Rockefeller, a foe of most of the president’s policies in the global war on terror, pointed out, “The companies believed their cooperation was necessary, legal and would help stop future terrorist attacks.”
Pelosi’s bunch care more about collecting campaign contributions from their nutroots crazies than they care about preventing the next terrorist attack. (I’m not saying that they don’t care whatsoever about national security. I’m simply saying that, with their actions, they’ve just put the crazies’ campaign contributions as their higher priority.)
Ms. Pelosi and the Democratic leadership will attempt to spin this but the American people have just witnessed with their own eyes Pelosi’s Democrats walk away from solving an important problem. Rest assured that that will become a campaign issue, if not the major campaign issue this fall.
You can rest assured that the freshmen Democrats that got elected in swing districts will take alot of heat for sitting on their hands. Freshmen Democratic senators stepped out on several issues. Why aren’t freshmen Democratic representatives stepping out and taking the initiative on this? Here in Minnesota, we should be asking why Tim Walz did nothing while the Protect America Act expired. Ditto with CAIR’s congressman Keith Ellison. They should be asked if they just didn’t care about national security or if they sat silent to be obedient to Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers respectively. As such, we’re left with no other option than to conclude that they’re lapdogs for their superiors.
If they were bipartisan leaders, they would’ve reached out to Republicans to force a vote on the Senate bill passed last week. They didn’t. Frankly, I didn’t expect much from either of these gents. I knew that it was all posturing when Walz said that he’d be “an independent voice for Minnesota.” Since getting elected, he’s voted the way Nancy Pelosi has wanted him to. That isn’t to imply that she’s had to order him to vote that way. I think it’s played out that way because he’s far more liberal than the image that he’s tried to craft.
Elsewhere, Republicans should be stepping up the pressure on Joe Donnelley, Brad Ellsworth and Baron Hill of Indiana, Nancy Boyda in Kansas, Heath Shuler in North Carolina, Jason Altmire and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania why they didn’t take constructive steps in protecting us. If they aren’t going to take national security issues seriously, then that needs to be repeatedly pointed out.
I’d specifically recommend that we push these representatives on the issue of immunity for the telecoms. If A T & T, Verizon and other telecoms have to worry about getting sued for diing their part in preventing terrorist attacks, they’ll stop cooperating with the NSA. At that point, our intelligence gathering will become much more difficult and less productive.
Any representative that doesn’t take their most important responsibility seriously shouldn’t be part of the 111th Congress in 2009. We’re in a fight with a determined enemy. To do anything less than our best isn’t acceptable.
Technorati: Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, Nancy Boyda, Heath Shuler, Joe Sestak, Democrats, National Security, FISA, NRCC, Election 2008
Cross-posted at California Conservative
