I saw the speech on TV before leaving for work this morning (Hawaii), and IIRC EW cuts off the speech before the ending. Again, IIRC, Whitehouse ended by endorsing Snarlin’ Arlen’s substitution language (WTF?!?!?) which goes back to the Q @7 about immunity: Apparently, Whitehouse wants the telcos to be able to pass guilt back to the Admin. I think this is a pretty bad idea, along with LHP? who wrote about it on FDL a few days ago.

Bob in HI

I found myself truly thankful that we had that storm yesterday, got an unexpected day off so I could watch : ) If you can find a link to Teddy’s speech and Dodd’s early speech, watch if you can, they were great.

the video webstreams will be at this link in c-span’s archives (probably it will take until tomorrow)

That protection woudl still exist, if Bush didn’t treat EOs like Pixie Dust. So Whitehouse is trying to put this into law so it’s no longer dependent on Bush’s Pixie Dust.

I read Jack Goldsmith’s book over the past few days. The OLC opinions written by Yoo are the root of all of this. That crappy wingnut lawyering got adopted as a (erstwhile) legal foundation because, and only because, human beings were too frightened at the time to think clearly or resist. Then layer upon layer of action and precedent built up around that flawed foundation. Now time and clear thinking and reason are finally revealing the original rotten lawyering to those on the inside — and if the end result of this filibuster is only the exposure of those documents in the OEOB that Wyden (and Whitehouse before him) illuminated, then it will have been well worth it. The original error won’t be corrected until and unless forced by sunshine. We can’t get back on the right course with a bent compass. We have to fix the compass.

So: Somebody on the floor in this debate needs to bring it around to the oath of office: Protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. To work to enable the evasion of the Fourth Amendment is to assail the Constitution. Tell it like it is.

If the R’s really believe that Article II wartime powers trump Article I and the Bill of Rights, then they should not be afraid to take it to the Courts and get a reported decision to settle the issue. I’m sure at least one of the cases in play on this point could be litigated without revealing essential state secrets. And clearly SCOTUS is in their pocket. According to Jack Goldsmith, the reason why they don’t is that simply by consenting to litigate the question, the Executive would be establish Article III’s precedence over Article II wartime powers, an outcome they would find just as intolerable as a precedence of Article I over Article II wartime powers. Executive assertion of exceptional Article II wartime powers is the common blocking issue in every single important instance of Executive overreach.

This is a Constitutional crisis. How do we arrive at a resolution of the underlying Article II wartime powers argument when it will never be brought to a Court of law? Can this debate be broadened out from the telco retroactive immunity issue to address the Constitutional crisis? Can we get the Senators to march en masse from the Hill over to the OEOB? That would make a statement. The people could fall in line behind, in their thousands.

Hmmm.

That’s what I think he was saying in a roundabout way.