Wiretap Bill passes, 21 Dems cave, including Obama
Posted by Jacque on July 10th, 2008
The word was out earlier at the New York Times and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that wiretapping bill H.R. 6304 had passed with the help of 21 democrats voting in favor of it along with all Republicans.
I decided to wait for this post until I had a list of how Senators voted and, as I expected, it appeared on Open Congress today.
They note that after almost a year of wrangling with the White House, the bill was finalized to modernize and broaden the government’s ability to wiretap, and to provide retroactive legal immunity to telecoms who previously supplied customer phone data to the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program from 2001 to 2007. The latter is the provision around which most disagreement and dissent has occurred, especially from the EFF and like-minded civil libertarians.
The twenty one Democrats who voted in favor of the bill, including Barack Obama, are listed here.
Three amendments were introduced before the vote on the final bill, but all were rejected. Open Congress has more information on the amendments and the vote results
Seven Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman (CT) voted against all of the telecom-immunity-altering amendments as well as voting in favor of the overall bill. They include Evan Bayh (IN), Thomas Carper (DE), Daniel Inouye (HI), Mary Landrieu (LA), Ben Nelson (NE), Mark Pryor (AR), John Rockefeller (WV).
“It is an immeasurable tragedy that just after its return from the Fourth of July holiday, the Senate has chosen to pass a bill that betrays the spirit of 1776 by radically expanding the president’s spying powers and granting immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal surveillance program,” said Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “This so-called compromise bill represents a shameful capitulation to the overreaching demands of an imperial president. As Senator Leahy put it in yesterday’s debate, the retroactive immunity provision of the bill upends the scales of justice and makes Congress and the courts handmaidens to the White House’s cover-up of its illegal surveillance program.”
TechCrunch, which endorsed Barack Obama partially on his policies towards telecommunications companies, said yesterday, “In voting for the bill, Obama acted in direct contradiction to his earlier statements. In 2007 Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman, said ‘To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.’”
Senator John McCain was not present for the vote but there is existing information about his views.
For a broader outline of how this bill will change the government’s wiretapping policies, Open Congress suggests this post from ArsTechnica entitled The new FISA compromise: it’s worse than you think.
There has also been discussion of how campaign contribuitons might have affected telecom amnesty votes.
Image by Scruffy Dan and Breanne. Creative Commons license.