Stop Specter from giving our country away

As I mentioned in an earlier post today, this week will see the beginning of the Senate debate over the Specter bill to make the President a king. Glenn Greenwald gets his dander up about it today. Here's the beginning:

It is now undeniably clear to everyone that the sole hope Bush supporters have for staving off disaster in the midterm elections is to (a) hype the terrorist threat as shrilly and irresponsibly as possible and then (b) depict Democrats as weak appeasers of The Terrorists whose cowardly refusal to fight them will endanger everyone. One of the principal instruments they intend to use to accomplish that goal begins this week -- with consideration of the bill proposed by Arlen Specter (and a similar one introduced in the House by Rep. Heather Wilson), which would "amend" FISA by making it optional (rather than mandatory) for the President to comply with it, thereby removing all limitations on his power to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans.

As Bill Frist and others have made abundantly clear, the Specter bill will serve as one of the Republicans' principal political weapons for depicting Democrats as weak on terrorism. The argument, of course, will be that Republicans want to listen in when Osama bin Laden calls and Democrats don't, as evidenced by their opposition to the Specter bill, and that Democrats therefore oppose a surveillance program which most Americans support. Put another way, the Republicans will attempt to exploit this debate by advancing two factually false claims:

Falsehood # 1: the debate is about whether the President can eavesdrop on Al Qaeda and other terrorists;

Falsehood # 2: "most Americans" support warrantless eavesdropping.

In my judgment, we need to make sure the Democrats don't whimp out on this one, as they have so many times before. First, we need to convince them to block the Specter bill at every step, up to and including fillibuster. Second, we need to convince them that this won't backfire on them in November. Most Americans are not in support of warrantless evasedropping and most Americans believe this president has gone too far in his power grab. Those who oppose the president on this will be the ones who win the votes. Please write to your Senators to let them know your opinions on this. The Contact Congress panel at the bottom of the left-hand column in this blog will take you right to your Senators' e-mail addresses.