Brian Beutler explains how a poison-pill amendment brought down the wiretapping bill:
When the House Democrats prepared to rein in the administration's surveillance program Wednesday morning, Virginia Republican Eric Cantor knew just what buttons to push to make them panic. He announced a poison pill amendment: Nothing in the bill, Cantor wrote, "shall be construed to prohibit the intelligence community from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization … from attacking the United States or any United States person."The amendment was clearly a political stunt, but it was worse than that -- it was a sure-fire torpedo for sinking Speaker Nancy Pelosi's much-anticipated second shot at reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Indeed, if Democrats had voted the amendment down, they would have handed Republicans ample material to accuse them of being soft on terrorism. But if Cantor's amendment had passed, it would have forced Pelosi's bill -- the so-called RESTORE Act -- back into committee, creating an indefinite delay and potentially writing a redundancy into the bill. RESTORE, according to New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, already "includes emergency provisions, including the ability to get a warrant after the fact, to ensure the government will never have to stop listening to a suspected terrorist."Unable to keep the caucus together for a "no" vote, but also unwilling to allow such a chink in the bill, Democratic leadership decided not to allow a vote at all -- and what could have been a tremendous victory for Pelosi turned into a major defeat.
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
