House Dem Opposes Extension to Administration Surveillance Bill

As if things weren’t complicated enough….

Over in the House, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a member of the House intelligence committee, took to the floor this afternoon to urge others to vote against any extension to the Protect America Act. His reasoning: 1) the administration’s bill was bad law in the first place and brought home the lesson to never pass legislation under “duress brought on by propaganda, misinformation, and fear mongering,” 2) surveillance authorized under the PAA would continue even if the law lapsed, and 3) it wouldn’t improve the Dems’ negotiating position.

Here’s video of his remarks:

He reiterated this in a “Dear Colleague” letter sent to all of the other lawmakers who had voted against the PAA back in August. That letter is below.

So the question becomes whether other Dems will break ranks (all in all, 181 voted against the PAA last August). The vote on the extension is likely to take place in the next hour or so in the House.

In the Senate, they’ll get back to debating the surveillance bill as well. Things still seem at a standstill, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) insisting on simple majority votes for all of the amendments — including the crucial Feingold/Dodd amendment to strip retroactive immunity for telecoms that participated in the administration’s warrantless wiretapping — and the Republicans refusing. We’ll keep you updated.

Dear Colleague,

Later today, the House will consider under suspension of the rules H.R. 5104, a bill that would extend the Protect America Act (PAA) by 30 days. Like you, I voted against it last August.

Last August, the Congress made a serious mistake by passing the PAA in a panic driven by a Bush administration fear-mongering campaign. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Eric Mink noted in the aftermath of the vote “After two weeks of hyping reports about al-Qaida activities, administration strategists shrewdly leveraged the need for a small fix in the FISA law into an expansion of spying power and a reduction of independent oversight.”

The PAA allows the President to conduct surveillance for virtually any reason with absolutely no oversight by a court, which means the administration’s surveillance activities don’t have a meet an independent judicial standard for appropriateness. It has been demonstrated that when officials must establish before a court that they have reason to intercept communications, we get better intelligence than through indiscriminate collection and fishing expeditions.

Passing this extension, rather than letting the PAA expire, achieves nothing from an operational point of view. This is a political calculation intended to facilitate our negotiations with the Senate and the White House. I disagree—this would not improve our negotiating position. If the PAA expires, all current surveillance orders issued under its authority will continue in effect until they expire. It’s also important to note that any existing PAA orders that continue in effect after the act’s expiration date are general enough to allow any necessary surveillance activity that may be required.

As Majority Leader Hoyer said on the floor last week “When the present Protect America Act, which we passed in [the] August time frame comes to an end the 1st of the month, of course the intelligence community will not go dark. The authorizations issued under the Protect America Act are in effect for up to, as you well know, a full year, so that those matters that have been approved for interception will not terminate.”

The House passed a good FISA modernization bill late last year (the RESTORE Act), and any House-Senate conference discussion on how to modernize FISA should start with that bill. In the meantime, our intelligence services will continue have the tools they need to protect us.

Since December, the Bush administration has been using the same playbook—claiming that our ability to detect and defeat terrorist plots would be fatally compromised unless the Congress makes the PAA permanent before its February 1, 2008 expiration date. Their current fear campaign is just as misleading as the one they waged in August.

The claims in August that we would face disaster if we did not pass PAA were phony. As we begin debating extending the PAA, I believe it wise to bear all of this in mind.

Sincerely,

RUSH HOLT

Member of Congress