I Guess This Is How It’s Done

Glenn Greenwald has a very telling interview with Chris Dodd at Salon, where Dodd describes what happened in the Senate with the habeas battle and the Military Commissions Act:

GG: I want to ask you about habeas restoration. And the first question I want to ask you is this – obviously, the reason why it is so difficult now is because you have to get a veto-proof majority in order to restore habeas. But had the habeas elimination statute not been enacted in October, we wouldn’t be in this situation now. Was there a real consideration in the caucus about filibustering the Military Commissions Act?

CD: I’m smiling because . . . I have this book coming out on the 12th. . . . I tell the story of what happened with the Act. There was a caucus meeting. Carl Levin makes the case that this may be the best we can do. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as it could be, and we’ve got the support of John Warner and John McCain and Lindsey Graham. They’re fighting and they’re going to stick with us and keep this thing on a basic constitutional level.

And Pat Leahy spoke up and I spoke up and Leahy was very clear — this may be the worst potential vote if it goes sour on us — the last vote, the [Iraq] Authorization, didn’t matter as much because Bush was going to war no matter what. This was real, it had real effects. The other thing [about the Iraq AUMF] – now we know they were going to do it anyway.

GG: Right – they only sought a vote in advance on the war once they knew they would win it.

CD: Right. So then they mark the bill up in the Armed Services Committee, and of course the three Senators who voted for it were lobbied, and they changed it dramatically. It was really what caused me to become so concerned about it.

And I was on the floor of the Senate, one of those spontaneous moments, and I was with Byron Dogran, and we were both talking about it — this is really bad — and we spontaneously walked into Harry Reid’s office and we said we want to filibuster, and he said, “look, you’ll have 10 votes.”

And a lot of guys here, we went through Max Cleland, in 2002, and all the morphing and so forth. In a sense, it was one of those moments, because at the end, there were 34 votes against it. And I think had we really had worked it a little longer, we could have produced those 40 votes.

I want you to re-read this passage again, because I had to read it several times to appreciate how genuinely unprepared, disorganized an non-strategic the leadership response was on one of the most important issues of our time, the destruction of habeas corpus. God bless Chris Dodd for trying, but he and Dorgan wandering into Reid’s office and Reid saying “have a Coke and a smile, guys, not gonna happen”? That’s pretty shocking.

I know we were all shaking our heads with dismay about how easily Bush bullied Congress into passing the FISA legislation, but from a strategic point of view it makes no sense. Bush wanted two things — a) the updating of the FISA bill to include the ability to wiretap foreign-to-foreign communications that were routed through the US, which even Russ Feingold said was necessary and b) language that essentially gave him the ability to spy on anyone without a warrant. Why for the love of Mary did the Democrats not craft a bill legislating “a” and when Bush refused to sign it because it did not include “b” did they not scream from the high holy heavens that he was not giving the intelligence community the tools it needed to do its job? It was the perfect moment to pivot back on the Republicans and protect our civil liberties at the same time. But it would have required some strategic thinking and forethought that Chris Dodd’s tale indicates is just not a part of how these decisions get made.

During his breakout session at YearlyKos Dodd was critical of Senate leadership for not forcing Republicans to actually filibuster, they are allowed to obstruct everything simply with the threat of filibuster. I realize dealing with the GOP is always going to be an encounter fraught with problems, but we all worked hard to help the Democrats win back he majority last fall. They need to develop a bit more dexterity at using it.

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