There is a passage in today’s WaPo article on the Senate capitulation on FISA that demonstrates how little Democrats understand of the power of the Congress to do nothing:

An adroit Republican parliamentary maneuver ultimately sank the bill. GOP leaders offered a motion that would have sent it back to the House intelligence and Judiciary committees with a requirement that they add language specifying that nothing in the measure would apply to surveilling the communications of bin Laden, al-Qaeda or other foreign terrorist organizations.

Approval of the motion would have restarted the legislative process, effectively killing the measure by delay. Democratic leaders scrambled to persuade their members to oppose it, but with Republicans accusing Democrats of being weak on terrorism, a “no” vote proved too hard to sell, and so the bill was pulled from the floor.

Stacey Bernards, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), called the Republican maneuver “a cheap shot, totally political.”

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called it a “perfect storm” of progressive Democrats who did not think the bill protected basic constitutional rights and of Republicans who took advantage of the lack of unity. “It was too precipitous a process, and it ended up in a train wreck,” she said. “It was total meltdown.”

I love the ACLU and Caroline Frederickson in particular. They do great work. But from the perspective of a progressive and the ACLU, WHICH OPPOSED the House bill (because of the question of bypassing indivudualized warrants for surveillance, adopting instead a “basket” approach), the failure of this bill SHOULD BE great news.

Like Iraq funding, the FISA extension past the February date when the current capitulation bill expires, is a problem for the Bush administration, not the Congress. IF the Congress passes nothing, then the law will revert to the original FISA law that prevailed prior to this summer’s capitulation. There is nothing wrong with that, DESPITE the gnashing of teeth from the Bush administration. IF there were, they would not block THIS BILL.

If the Democrats, PARTICULARLY the Progressive Caucus, sticks to its guns, it will either get a good bill, or no bill at all. OF course the preference is a good bill. But after that, no bill at all is eminently preferable to a BAD bill. Frankly, the House bill was not a good bill imo. Nor was it a good bill in the ACLU’s opinion. Its demise is nothing to lament. So long as Democrats understand the power of doing nothing.

Buhdy e-mails me about this:

Pelosi made three specific promises on the question of funding the war and on the Congressional battle over FISA: 1) that the House will not take up a war appropriations bill this year 2) that there will be no war appropriations bill next year that doesn’t include a fixed date for bringing the troops home 3) that House Democrats will put up a major fight over the Bush administration’s desire to make permanent the FISA law passed in August, particularly over the issue of retroactive immunity that the Senate has already given in on.

and asks:

Parsing? or Progress?

Here’s my take – let’s act as if it is a real promise from Nancy Pelosi. Let’s praise and cheer her for standing up. Let’s tell her we have her back on this.

Why? Because it has a better chance of becoming true if we react to it in that way. And that is all that matters.

One of the biggest problems of the Netroots remains its inability to take criticism. Consider this post from Matt Stoller:

Frank Rich wrote a column called ‘The Good Germans’.  He spends a bunch of column inches lamenting how ‘we’ have let the war go on, and are as complicit as the Germans during the Nazi regime.  Here’s the nub:

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

And yet, last month, here’s Frank Rich.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the “General Betray-Us” headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction.

Rich is operating according to the rules of the media elite.  It’s ok to whine about the problem, but try to do anything about it and you’re getting very much uncivil, sir.

Um Matt, it was not the incivility, it was the stupidity. The Netroots’ problem on Move On, indeed, regarding ANY criticism of the Netroots, is the uncheckable impulse to attack the criticizer instead of considering the point. Matt might be interested to learn that Frank Rich was harshly critical of General Petraeus in repeated columns, including in the very column cited by Stoller.

It so happens that I myself was subject to criticism in a Frank Rich column:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told George Stepanapoulos today:

I am one of the most vociferous opponents of the [Iraq] War . . .

Excuse me Madame Speaker, but are you fucking kidding me? Nearly 90 House members have signed this letter:

The Honorable George W. Bush
President
United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Seventy House Members wrote in July to inform you that they will only support appropriating additional funds for U.S. military operations in Iraq during Fiscal Year 2008 and beyond for the protection and safe redeployment of our troops out of Iraq before you leave office.

Now you are requesting an additional $45 billion to sustain your escalation of U.S. military operations in Iraq through next April, on top of the $145 billion you requested for military operations during FY08 in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accordingly, even more of us are writing anew to underscore our opposition to appropriating any additional funds for U.S. military operations in Iraq other than a time-bound, safe redeployment as stipulated above.

More than 3,742 of our brave soldiers have died in Iraq. More than 27,000 have been seriously wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or injured in the hostilities and more than 4 million have been displaced from their homes. Furthermore, this conflict has degenerated into a sectarian civil war and U.S. taxpayers have paid more than $500 billion, despite assurances that you and your key advisors gave our nation at the time you ordered the invasion in March, 2003 that this military intervention would cost far less and be paid from Iraqi oil revenues.

We agree with a clear and growing majority of the American people who are opposed to continued, open-ended U.S. military operations in Iraq, and believe it is unwise and unacceptable for you to continue to unilaterally impose these staggering costs and the soaring debt on Americans currently and for generations to come.

Sincerely,

Co-signers: Murphy (CT), Jackson, Brown (FL), Thompson (MS), Watt, Meeks, Loebsack, Weiner, Kucinich, DeFazio, Farr, Waxman, Thompson (CA), Lee, Woolsey, Waters, Watson, Frank, Conyers, Filner, Rush, Towns, Clay, Wynn, Delahunt, Holmes-Norton, Butterfield, Solis, Maloney, Nadler, Honda, Cohen, Hare, Napolitano, Hastings, McGovern, Kaptur, Schakowsky, Carson, Linda Sanchez, Grijalva, Olver, Jackson-Lee, McDermott, Markey, Fattah, Pallone, Hinojosa, Stark, Scott (VA), Moran, McCollum, Oberstar, DeGette, Tauscher, Holt, Hinchey, Pastor, Davis (IL), Hall, Velazquez, Rangel, Hodes, Blumenauer, Lynch, Artur Davis, Johnson (GA), Payne, Cleaver, Lewis, Clarke, Abercrombie, Moore(WI), Ellison, Baldwin, Christensen, Scott (GA), Paul, Gutierrez, Welch, Capps, Rothman, Cummings, Tierney, Doggett, Eshoo, and Tubbs-Jones.

The name Pelosi is not among the signatories. When Pelosi signs that letter; when she promises that she will not put forward any bills to fund Iraq without a date certain to end the Iraq Debacle, then she can claim to be “one of the most vocieferous opponents of the Iraq War.” She is not one of the most vociferous opponents of the Iraq war. She needs to do everything she can to end it and then she can truthfully claim to be such. Until then, Pelosi is simply not telling the truth.