Full frontal assault on FISA capitulation

By Libby

As my favorite pundit in the world, Yogi Berra, once said, "It ain't over till it's over" and the activists are in overdrive this week in organizing the opposition to the impending sellout of the rule of the law in the Senate on FISA. As usual, FDL is leading the charge and today's post consolidates the current actions. They're busier than the shoemaker's elves over there and have invented a new call tool from Blue America that makes it easier than ever to make those phone calls and more importantly to track the results on the feedback. They also conjured up a much needed tool to track public appearances of our Congresslizards while they're at home in our districts and offer some practical actions we can take to focus attention on pending issues.

Meanwhile, at the GOS, McJoan has additional actions that have the potential to greatly impact the debate. My favorite comes from my old pal Ben.

One option for fulfilling your duty as a private citizen is Ben Masel's Operation Read the Bill. Print a copy of the bill, find your Senators while they are home during this recess--the 4th of July recess, no less--and ask them if they've done their duty of reading the bill. Ask them if they know that they're about to redefine the term "WMD" to possibly include many weapons that the U.S. military uses. Ask them if they know they are about to cede even more of their power--the power of protecting us, their constituents, from unlawful surveillance--to the executive.

Finally, in case you missed it, Russ Feingold issued a terrific statement on the FISA mess earlier in the week.

The outpouring of support from you and across the country, in letters and e-mails and phone calls and the blogs has been absolutely fantastic. It really made a difference, as we mounted a challenge this week that almost nobody thought could work. We did stop this thing for now -- it is delayed until after the July 4th weekend.

I teased some of my colleagues...I said, we can celebrate the constitution on July 4th, and when we come back maybe you'll decide not to tear it up....I'm deeply grateful for your support.

As they said at FDL. this is what a real patriot sounds like. One can only hope it goes from his mouth to Obama's ears. It would be really nice to see this kind of bold leadership from our presumptive candidate. In the interim, you know what to do. We may still lose, but we could still win and in any event, it's best to go down fighting.

Update: Dan at Pruning Shears checks into comments to remind us that you can also become a citizen co-sponsor of the Dodd-Feingold Amendment to strip retroactive immunity from pending FISA legislation. I signed onto that a while ago, but if you haven't, it only takes a minute to do so.

Comments

[Dan]

Hi Libby. You can also be a citizen co-sponsor of the Dodd-Feingold Amendment to strip retroactive immunity from pending FISA legislation. And by the way, if the Dems don't recognize Al-Haramain as a gift-wrapped excuse to scrap the whole FISA bill then they are beyond hope.