Congressional Democrats have so little faith in Trump’s leadership that they’ve awarded him the power to conduct limitless, warrantless mass surveillance of Americans
When Congress voted last week
to renew the NSA’s controversial Section 702 powers, which gives the
spy agency the power to conduct mass, secret, warrantless surveillance
on Americans, they also voted down a bipartisan amendment that would
have limited the president’s ability to abuse these powers, injecting
the barest minimum of accountability and proportionality into a system
that Republican and Democratic presidents alike have abused for decades.
The amendment was voted down because Democrats didn’t support it. The
same Democrats who show up on the news every night, telling us that
Trump is a dangerous authoritarian who can’t be trusted, just caved to
the “intelligence community” and gave that dangerous authoritarian
virtually unlimited powers to spy on every one of us.
The campaign to sabotage the amendment was led by Democratic Congressjerk Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff,
the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has
repeatedly claimed that Trump is abusing presidential powers to attack
Trump’s political enemies, including Hillary Clinton. Schiff’s campaign
to ensure that Trump would face no limits or oversight in his spying
power was joined by Nancy Pelosi. 55 Democrats in all ensured that
spying powers were renewed and the amendment was voted down, including
the loathsome poster-child for corruption Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and
Steny Hoyer, the second most senior Democrat in the House.
As Lambert Strether writes on Naked Capitalism: “Watch what they do, not what they say.”
Not all Democratic politicians were so blithe about giving Trump the a
blank surveillance check. Senator Ron Wyden continued his
career-spanning, principled commitment to the Fourth Amendment: “This
Section 702 bill would give AG Jeff Sessions unchecked power to use this
information against Americans. This bill prevents his decisions from
EVER being challenged in court.” And California Democratic Congressman
Ro Khanna wrote, “When @justinamash & @VoteMeadows, chair of the
freedom caucus, vote against surveillance, but scores of Democrats vote
for it, then its fair to ask what does our party stand for? If we can’t
be unified around the principle of civil liberties, then what is the
soul of our party?”
Glenn Greenwald gets the last word: “How can anyone rational possibly
take seriously all the righteous denunciations from people like Pelosi,
Schiff, and Swalwell about how Trump is a lawless, authoritarian tyrant
existentially threatening American democracy when those very same people
just yesterday voted in favor of vesting him the virtually limitless
power to spy on Americans with no warrants or safeguards?”
