House Republicans, led by minority leader John Boehner and deputy whip Eric Cantor, refused to let them get away with it. Using a parliamentary maneuver known as the “motion to recommit,” they forced an amendment which would have specified that nothing in the bill prohibited the “surveillance needed to prevent Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization” from attacking the United States. Of course, the proposed legislation did precisely this. The stark clarity (which a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer risibly decried as “a cheap shot, totally political”) made support for Restore untenable. Consequently, Speaker Nancy Pelosi tactically pulled it yesterday afternoon, lest a scheduled vote put Democrats on record as favoring judicial protection from surveillance for alien enemies.
Right-wing bloggers say this is a clear win for Bush, and a loss for Pelosi and her left-wing cronies. Rep. Eric Cantor led the way with his charge that Democrats “have played petty politics with this bill…the intelligence agencies only wish to use the same investigative tools that have been used against organized crime for decades.” Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters outlines the FISA proceedings and says,
So far, the Democrats have done little as Congressional leaders but to continually embarrass themselves and to fight on the wrong hills against an administration that keeps whipping them. I know that Bush’s opponents like to paint him as dull-witted, but he keeps outwitting their leadership. What does that say about Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi?
Gary Gross at California Conservative agrees, noting:
I’m betting that people are noticing that President Bush isn’t the lame duck president that the Beltway media portrayed himself as. I’m equally certain that the MoveOn.org/DailyKos crowd has noticed that their Democrats have folded like a lawn chair once President Bush turned up the heat.
Jeff Emanuel at Redstate notes that Democrats lost “an opportunity…to go on the record, before America, and reaffirm their commitment to capturing him and to thwarting (and defeating) his terrorist network.” Why? AJ at the Strata-Sphere has a theory:
This incredible strange and obsessive fear that Uncle Sam is watching them has made the Liberals (and their Dem sock puppets) take some really dumb positions, especially when it comes to the NSA and FISA. I have finally realized that it is not so much Bush Derangement Syndromes (BDS) that drives the left on this matter (though that helps), but it is more their Obstinate, Obsessive Paranoia Syndrome (OOPS). Their big OOPS! Why else would Dems trap themselves in the corner of either voting to give terrorist communications unlimited sanctuary when dialing their buddies in the US, or the other option of just not monitoring terrorists at all! Only a massive case of OOPS could get them into that kind of a bind.
And Paul Mirengoff at Power Line adds, “My question is: how did the Democrats sink to a place where they place pandering to left-wing constituencies and sticking it to the president ahead of the safety of Americans, including American GIs? Tonight, more than a few ‘moderate’ congressional Dems are probably wondering the same thing.” Last week, via California Conservative, the New York Post reported some scary news about FISA legislation: U.S. intelligence agencies spent almost 10 hours trying to get approval to monitor the al Qaeda members who were suspected of kidnapping Spc. Alex Jimenez this spring. The Democrats’ bill, RESTORE, would have made approval even more difficult to obtain. As a reader at Ace of Spades asked, “Can we question their patriotism now?”
