Outside vs. Inside: A Western View

By Joan McCarter, 6-24-08

Last week’s vote in the House of Representatives to give big corporations who broke the law a free pass and to expand the powers of the president to spy on Americans essentially at will provided some stark contrasts among our leaders and would-be leaders. Case in point, Colorado Rep. Mark Udall and Wyoming candidate Gary Trauner.

If you had to choose whether the “Boulder liberal” or the guy facing a tough race in solid red Wyoming would take the corporatist, conservative track on this legislation, siding with the Bush administration, you might be in for a surprise.

Proving again why he deserves to take Dick Cheney’s old Congressional seat away from the Republicans, Wyoming House candidate Gary Trauner wrote about the vote at his campaign Web site. I’m excerpting, which is hard to do because it really should be read in its entirety:

Is that what it’s come to? Our federal government says you must do something, even if it is against the law, and we “need” to do it? Well, I don’t care whether it’s the Republican Leadership in Washington or the Democrats in the House, I’ll proudly tell them – and you - where I stand on warrantless wiretapping, the rule of law and protecting our national security:

• I want to ensure that my children, and all of our children, are safe from terrorist attacks by beefing up our intelligence capabilities, protecting vulnerable targets, proactively taking out terrorists such as Al-Qaeda in their hideouts in Afghanistan, Pakistan and around the world, and working to remove safe havens for terrorists by winning the battle of ideas, not simply the battle for Tikrit.


• I believe in the Constitution and rule of law, the two things that define our great American experiment. We must not gut our freedoms in order to save our freedoms. If we do that, those who use terror as a tactic will achieve their goal – after all, what would we be fighting to protect?.


• We can protect our nation without sacrificing everything our founding fathers and millions of veterans fought for; the FISA law, already updated in 2001 after 9/11 and recently patched to fix some omissions due to changing technology, works.


• I would rather bring Osama Bin Laden to justice than help large corporations avoid justice.


• If we value our Constitutional rights such as the 2^nd amendment right to bear arms, we better think twice about ignoring other Constitutional rights, such as the 4^th Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant and probable cause. Because once we cherry pick the Constitution, someone will eventually come after the rights we hold most dear.

And here’s Colorado Rep. Mark Udall:

“With the passage of today’s bipartisan FISA bill, we have strengthened our national security and given our intelligence community the 21st century tools they need to fight terrorism. Just as importantly, we have done so in a way that stands up to the abuses of the Bush Administration and protects the civil liberties that make America great.

“I supported this bipartisan effort because it ensures there will be no gap in intelligence collection against terrorists, while preventing the government from surveilling American citizens without a lawful warrant.

“And though this bill does not address all of my concerns about the issue of retroactive immunity, it does reject blanket immunity and instead directs federal courts to determine whether evidence supports civil protection for telecom companies that aided the government after 9/11.

“As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I am very aware of the critical importance of intelligence in the support of our troops in the field. This bill ensures that we can provide those men and women with the information they need to carry out their missions, while protecting the rights of the American citizens that they are fighting to defend.”

I’m not sure whether Rep. Udall is reading the same bill that I am, or that Gary Trauner did. While it might be bipartisan, it’s certainly not much else in the way of good, particularly from the standpoint of holding anyone accountable for breaking the law--whether it be AT&T and Verizon, or the White House staff who cooked up this little plan to toss aside the 4th Amendment. All it says is that a district court has to determine if the companies got a piece of paper from the Attorney General saying they could spy. We already know they got that piece of paper. Ergo, the bill grants blanket immunity. Even more disturbing, it certainly doesn’t expand the protections Americans had under the existing FISA law from warrantless, illegal surveillance, but gives this president and all the future ones expanded power to secretly spy on us. They just have to say “it’s an emergency, we don’t have time to do it legally,” and bingo. They don’t even have to dump the data they collect if a judge does someday decide that they did it illegally.

I know that our representatives in Congress are really busy people from having worked for one, and I know they have an awful lot to try to keep up on. Trying to read every bill they vote on is next too impossible. But here’s the thing. There’s this oath that Congress people take on their first day in office. An oath to uphold and protect the Constitution. All of it. Not the bits and pieces that are politically expedient.

That oath might mean more to someone who is looking at this from the outside, particularly from someone who really hopes to take that oath, who means it when he says “I believe in the Constitution and the rule of law.” Who hasn’t had lobbyists from some big telecommunications company drop by his office or schmooze with him at a reception. Who hasn’t had someone from his party leadership line out the quid pro quo of “taking one for the team.”

Or who just hasn’t spent so much time in Washington that he’s so woefully out of touch to think that Americans could possibly believe that letting AT&T get off scott-free will do anything at all to protect the country, or that allowing the government to scoop up all of the e-mails between a parent in the U.S. and their son or daughter serving in Iraq or Afghanistan or to listen in on their phone conversations in secret, with no court oversight, will somehow make us safe.

It’s hard to imagine that Colorado and Wyoming could be looking at this issue so divergently. Coloradans have to hold their Constitutional rights as dear as do the folks in Wyoming, although Wyoming might have a bit of an edge on its devotion to the 2nd Amendment. Mark Udall is an intelligent man, and has been a good representative to his constituents on a lot of issues. So how could he get this one so wrong? My guess he was listening to all the wrong people, the ones back in Washington.

On the other hand, Gary Trauner has just one thing to give in return for the votes of the people of Wyoming--his word.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of NewWest.Net/Politics’ “Diary of a Mad Voter” feature, a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. For more columns check in with www.newwest.net/madvoter. And for more information on each of the bloggers, click here.