Feingold compares new Obama fundraising group to Karl Rove

By Sahil Kapur - RAW Story
Friday, April 29th, 2011

WASHINGTON – Former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) on Friday tore into Democrats for launching a new outside group to aid President Barack Obama's re-election efforts in part by raising undisclosed funds.

"Democrats who mirror the right-wing tactics of Karl Rove and David Koch do our nation no favors," said Feingold, a longtime opponent of industry-funded elections who now helms Progressives United, according to Politico's Ben Smith. "Our democracy is best served by rejecting the fundamentally corrupt strategy of embracing unlimited corporate influence."

The group, Priorities USA, is poised to receive the kinds of unlimited, undisclosed donations that Obama has spoken out against. It's similar in some respects to Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, which spent millions in anonymous money trying to defeat Democratic candidates last year.

"It has everything to do with Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers," former Obama White House spokesman Bill Burton told The Associated Press. "As long as they play by one set of rules, we're not going to be boxed in by a double standard."

The creation of the group suggests that the White House and Democrats have -- at least for now -- thrown in the towel on campaign finance reform and chosen to fight fire with fire. They'd be trounced in election spending by Republicans if they didn't adopt similar fundraising tactics.
Raising unlimited campaign funds from anonymous donors was made possible last year by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United v. FEC ruling.

‘Progressives United’ PAC to fight corporate influence

Feingold returns
By Stephen C. Webster | Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Former Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) was defeated in 2010 amid a tea party wave that thumped Democrats' majority in Congress, but did not topple it completely. As one of the Senate's top progressive voices, many on the left saw the Wisconsin vote as a great loss to their cause.

But now, Feingold has returned -- and like so many other former politicos, he's leading a new political action committee.

Called "Progressives United," Feingold said he intended for the group to stand up to undue corporate influence in the halls of American governance.

"As progressives, it's time we made our voices heard," he said in a video published to YouTube. "Washington, sadly, has become a playground for corporations and their lobbyists. For too long we've watched as our jobs have been shipped overseas, and we've seen our leaders in Washington coddle the Wall Street banks, then turn around and water down the very financial reforms that our country desperately needs."

And the key component of Feingold's solution: "Together, we'll start a movement. We're starting a new organization: Progressives United. It will help us fight back."

He said the group would work to support progressive candidates and encourage officials to take a more friendly view of progressive causes. He even said they would actively "call out the media" when they "hide from the real story."

Feingold also called the Supreme Court's Citizens United vs. FEC decision "one of the most lawless decisions in the history of our country," and pitched the group as a potential bulwark against the renewed influence of money in elections.

The Citizens United case overturned generations of US campaign law by allowing political ad buys to be made by groups that do not reveal their financial backers. Feingold and many other Democrats, including President Barack Obama, have been ardent in criticizing it as permitting limitless corporate and foreign influence in US elections.

Former Rep. John Hall (D-NY), who was also defeated in 2010, even went so far as to say that Citizens United put America on the path to fascism, and a Washington economic development panel warned that it could lead to corporations becoming akin to subsidiaries of the major political parties.

"That's why I need your help," Feingold implored.

This video is from Progressives United, published to YouTube on Feb. 15, 2011.

Reversing 'Citizens United'

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 by The Washington Post

It will be a year this week since Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative activist colleagues on the Supreme Court joined together in a dramatic assault on American democracy. Their decision in the Citizens United case overturned more than a century's worth of precedent by awarding corporations the rights of citizens with regard to electioneering. The court did away with limits on when corporations can spend on elections, how much they can spend and how they can spend their money, allowing unlimited contributions from corporate treasuries to flood the electoral landscape.


As The Nation noted in the days after the case was decided, "This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation's most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself."


According to Bill de Blasio, New York City's public advocate, Citizens United spending - that is, spending that was only made possible by the court's ruling - accounted for 15 percent of the roughly $4 billion spent on the 2010 midterm elections. Eighty-five million dollars of Citizens United money was spent on U.S. Senate races alone. Worse, 30 percent of all spending by outside groups was funded by anonymous donations, an illegal action prior to the ruling. Forty million of the dollars spent on Senate races came from sources that might never be revealed.


But as striking as these consequences might be, the 2010 election was just an experiment, the first opportunity to test the new law. In future elections, corporations and shadowy organizations will have a clearer understanding of the boundaries they are operating within, a reality that is sure to translate into more undisclosed cash. And the savvier corporate players know that the mere threat of a corporate onslaught of funding for or against a candidate is enough to win legislative favor, in effect blunting prospects for sound regulation, consumer protection and fair tax policies. As former senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), himself a victim of Citizens United spending, said, "It is going to be worse in 2012 unless we do something - much worse."


Yet even as we lament this decision, we should recognize the opportunity it presents. Justice Roberts and his allies overreached so brazenly that they have created an opening for genuine reform.


There are multiple steps that can be taken, both short-term and long-term, to roll back the corrosive impact not just of Citizens United but of preceding campaign finance cases and statutes that already had flooded the electoral landscape with special-interest spending. At the more modest end of the spectrum is the option of reviving the Disclose Act or introducing similar legislation that would require corporations to show how they spend money on elections and provide disincentives to spending it. This would be a good step, but it is mere triage; if not accompanied by a broader push for a bolder set of reforms, its success would do little to curb the corporate takeover of American elections.


One potential policy change that could accompany greater disclosure would be the introduction of a public financing system, which would empower small donors. Legislation has already been introduced in Congress - the Fair Elections Now Act, which has more than 160 supporters in the House. A similar system has been adopted in Arizona, and, in 2007, New York City adopted an intriguing mechanism of public finance in which the city matches small donations at a 6-1 ratio, boosting grass-roots fundraising.


The result? According to the New York Times, the changes "drastically curtailed the role of businesses, political committees and lobbyists in campaigns" and, importantly, "caused a major drop in donations from those doing business with the city." Such a system, implemented on the national level, could greatly increase the influence of average citizens. In the post-Citizens United era, there are already efforts afoot to weaken such systems. In Arizona, for example, the Chamber of Commerce is working aggressively to overturn the state's clean-money legislation. A push for national public financing, then, must be accompanied by a strong defense of those systems already in place.


The clearest and boldest counter to the court's ruling would be a constitutional amendment stating unequivocally that corporations are not people and do not have the right to buy elections. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) introduced such an amendment to counter Citizens United during the last session of Congress and views it as the only sure way to beat back the court. "Justice Brandeis got it right," she noted last February. " 'We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' "


Campaigns for constitutional amendments demand a great deal of patience and tenacity. But as Jamie Raskin, a Democratic Maryland state senator and professor of constitutional law at American University, notes, "American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy's enemies." Not only is a push for an amendment a worthy act, it also provides a unique opportunity to educate the broader public, raise the profile of this important issue and force elected officials to go on record as to where they stand. The campaign could create enormous pressure on state legislatures and Congress, prompting changes to campaign finance even before an amendment is ratified.


Success will require a coalition that transcends party. In this case, there is promising news. An August 2010 Survey USA poll found that 77 percent of all voters - including 70 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents - view corporate spending in elections as akin to bribery. Broad majorities favor limiting corporate control over our political lives. A coordinated effort, executed right, could unite progressives, good-government reformers and conservative libertarians in a fight to restore democracy.


The multitude of reform groups working to build a more just and democratic political system understand that if this issue is to grip people's imaginations, it must be about more than process. In a nation where recovery still feels like recession, the suffocating grip of corporate money is anything but abstract. Mobilizing the American people to make reform a priority will demand making the clearest possible link between the rise of corporate power and the challenges of everyday lives.


That's not a tough pitch.


In just the past two years, corporate money can be blamed for watering down consumer protections and diluting health-care and financial reform. In truth, there is almost no conversation we have in American politics in which corporations don't occupy all the seats at the table. As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged while talking about big banks during last year's financial reform debate: "They frankly own the place."


Changing that dynamic might well be the central challenge of this generation. Reversing Citizens United is about more than any one issue or court case - it is, at its base, a question of whether American democracy itself can beat back a corporate takeover, whether our most cherished principles of self-government can ultimately prevail.

Russ Feingold, the Senate's True Maverick

by John Nichols - Thursday, September 23, 2010 by The Nation

When Russ Feingold jogs onto the stage of the Barrymore Theatre on a Friday night in Madison, Wisconsin, a thousand old-school progressives—not liberals avoiding the L-word but heart-and-soul believers in a political ethic that traces back to the trustbusters and anti-imperialists of a century ago—rise to cheer the living embodiment of their faith. The three-term senator speaks to them in the language of another time in America, when populists shouted from the backs of farm wagons and urban radicals mounted soapboxes to spread the social gospel. "There is no institution in our society that is safe from the power and greed and corruption of these corporations," rages Feingold, who speaks against the warping of foreign policy by military contractors, the molding of the national debate by consolidated media and the pay-to-play politics of business interests, before lowering his voice for a dramatic declaration: "Now, after they attacked the media, the Congress and the executive branch, they have managed to corrupt the US Supreme Court."

Echoing former Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, whose memory he has come to honor with activists from across the state, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act says he knows there are reasons to fear big government. "But," he adds, in a speech that decries the High Court's decision to let corporations spend as they choose on elections, "there is one thing that's worse: government controlled by, dominated by, corporate special interest."

For Feingold, though he is locked in a brutal battle with a free-spending millionaire Republican who cloaks allegiance to Wall Street in the populist rhetoric of the Tea Party, the essential question of the moment has less to do with party politics than with the money that's turning the major parties into two sides of one corporate coin. His re-election fight is being covered by much of the national media as just another partisan horse race, one of several in which senior Democratic senators, like California's Barbara Boxer and Washington's Patty Murray, are in unexpectedly tough re-election struggles that could determine whether their party retains control of the Senate. But Feingold's race raises more basic questions about how much our politics are becoming nationalized and homogeneous, about whether the parties are more than mere extensions of sitting presidents or in opposition to them, about whether there is a place for the independent man or woman of principle—especially one who rejects the dictates of Wall Street and multinational corporations—in an increasingly managed and manipulated Senate.

Feingold has taken these questions on the road in a campaign that is like no other this year. With the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling opening the floodgates for special-interest spending, the Senate's fiercest campaign finance reformer says the Court is "turning our system of government and our democracy into another example of what is essentially corporate naming rights."

"What do they want us to do: choose between Republican toothpaste and Democratic toothpaste?" asks Feingold over an approving roar from the crowd that has gathered on a late summer night. The progressive faithful are with him, but the polls show Feingold struggling to keep even with GOP businessman Ron Johnson, who has pledged to spend as much as $15 million on a campaign so carefully plotted to exploit frustration with President Obama, fears about the economy and anger at Washington that it appears to have been squeezed from Karl Rove's tube. The contrast is sufficiently stark that the result on November 2, no matter what happens elsewhere in the country, will tell us something about the politics of our era.

Everything about Feingold's Senate career has been a fight against a future where Crest Democrats do battle with Colgate Republicans. More than his sometime ally John McCain, the man from Wisconsin is the Senate's true maverick. And unlike McCain, whose "independence" always had about it an air of self-absorption and attentiveness to the media, Feingold has never been a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. His eighteen years in the Senate have been defined by a steadiness of commitment that pays little regard to presidents or parties.

Feingold opposed Bill Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement and normalization of trade with China; he opposed George W. Bush's Central American Free Trade Agreement; now he is challenging attempts by the Obama administration to advance trade policies that do too much for multinational corporations and too little for workers and farmers here and abroad. Feingold was the leading Senate critic of Clinton's failure to abide by the War Powers Act; he opposed Bush's rush to war in Iraq and was the first senator to call for a timeline to bring the troops home; now he complains that the Obama administration is not moving fast enough to wind that war down. Feingold noisily challenged constitutional abuses during the Clinton and Obama years, and as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution subcommittee, he is pressing the Obama administration to get serious about civil liberties. Feingold opposed Clinton's proposal to loosen bank rules, arguing that doing so could threaten financial stability; he opposed Bush's bank bailout; and he was the sole Democrat to object that the reforms Obama backed did not go far enough because they did not do away with "too big to fail" banks and did not adequately protect consumers or taxpayers.

Much has been made this election season of Democrats distancing themselves from Obama; but Feingold and the president parted company years ago. The Illinoisan said during his 2004 Senate campaign that he saw Feingold as a role model. But once in the Senate, Obama kept clear of Feingold's effort to censure Bush over abuses of privacy rights and the Wisconsinite's lonely defense of arms control treaties. Feingold cast his Wisconsin primary vote in 2008 for Obama over Hillary Clinton, and he backed Obama's economic stimulus and healthcare reform. But he opposed Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, objected to Obama's plan to surge more troops into Afghanistan and has complained loudly about the administration's uneven response to soaring unemployment.

This independent streak has frustrated Democrats who don't "get" Feingold's votes. He's not a movement politician, in the sense that his friend and frequent ally former Senator Paul Wellstone, was; while Wellstone worked with liberals when they said they needed him to take the lead in challenging conservative overreach in fights about the impeachment of Bill Clinton or the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general, Feingold cast the sole Democratic vote to continue Clinton's Senate trial and argued, based on their joint service on the Judiciary Committee, that Ashcroft was more respectful of the Constitution than anyone else George Bush would pick. Those votes infuriated interest groups and Democratic leaders in Congress. But many Feingold backers share the opinion of Wisconsin union activist Terry Fritter, who says, "A lot of people get mad at Russ when he casts one of those 'only Democrat' votes. Then they calm down and think, if Russ did it, there had to be a principle involved."

Over time, Feingold's antiwar and anticorporate record, as well as his defense of civil liberties, have made him a hero to progressive populists. "Russ is not shy about taking on the forces of arrogance and ignorance in my party," says author and activist Jim Hightower. Since the death of Wellstone, says Hightower, "Feingold's the one Democrat I don't have to apologize for." Unfortunately, Feingold's independence isn't inspiring the enthusiasm it once did among Wisconsin swing voters. He's running well with Democrats, but polls have him trailing among unaffiliated voters. And Republicans give him no more credit than they do party-line Democrats. "Politics are more partisan now, more cynical," says former Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager. "You used to hear people say, 'I don't agree with him on the issues, but he's his own man' or 'I'm not a Democrat, but I'm proud of him.' Now a lot more people are in their camps; they don't want to think someone on the other side might be honorable."

Lautenschlager's words apply not just in Wisconsin but nationally. Bush's Iraq War, abuses of civil liberties and failed economic policies have resulted in growing division between the two major parties. Rhode Island Democrats and independents, furious with Bush and Senate GOP leaders, refused to vote as they once had for liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee in 2006. Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter stopped believing that Democrats would cross over and vote for him, and Delaware Congressman Mike Castle learned—after his Senate primary defeat at the hands of a Tea Party firebrand—that there are no longer many moderates voting in GOP primaries. The remarkably unified "Party of No" response to Obama's initiatives by Congressional Republicans, combined with the relentless assault by right-wing media on Democrats and compromise-oriented "RINOs" (Republicans in Name Only), appears to have fostered an edgy and unforgiving partisanship even in states where ticket-splitting was once common. This explains the devolution of McCain on issues ranging from immigration to climate change; it also explains why Chuck Grassley, who once served as a reasonably rational "Bob Dole Republican" (working with Democrat Tom Harkin to enact the Americans With Disabilities Act), is now best known for repeating absurd claims about "death panels."

The bitter divisions over the Bush and Obama presidencies have highlighted longer-term shifts in the makeup and dynamics of the Senate. When Feingold arrived in Washington, regional differences and personal styles were still very much on display in what were far more ideologically diverse party caucuses. The Senate's most consistently antiwar member in the early 1990s was a Republican, Oregon's Mark Hatfield, who also happened to be a steady foe of the death penalty, school prayer and discrimination against gays and lesbians. There were more conservative Democrats from the South in those days, but there were also Southern Democratic populists like Fritz Hollings, who backed Jesse Jackson for president in 1988 and often sounded like Ralph Nader when talking about corporate power. New England Republicans weren't the faint hopes represented by the likes of Maine's Susan Collins; they were proud independents like Rhode Island's John Chafee, one of the biggest backers of moves to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income children and pregnant women. When the Senate debated whether to ban flag-burning, there were votes when more Republicans opposed the assault on freedom of expression than Democrats.

Feingold has seen the Senate grow more partisan and dysfunctional since the days when McCain crossed the aisle and asked the young reformer from Wisconsin to help him squeeze soft money out of national politics. The men and women of principle, the outliers who cast unexpected votes and who forged unlikely coalitions, have mostly been replaced by programmed politicians who dare not deviate from party talking points. The late Senator Robert Byrd—Feingold's ally in resisting the steady creep of executive power—worried aloud in his last years about the way the "history and tradition of being the world's greatest deliberative body is being snubbed."

Yet it is not merely an increasingly White House–focused politics—and the media that reinforce it—that has changed the character of the Senate. The most significant change has been in the way senators get elected and re-elected. In 1992, when Feingold first ran, most races cost millions, with only a few costing tens of millions. Candidates rarely relied entirely on home-state donors, but it was still possible to suggest that most politics was local. Now serious Senate contenders—if they are not independently wealthy—count on massive spending by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which collected $162 million and $94 million, respectively, in 2008, and on the myriad special-interest groups that have wildly inflated the cost of getting elected. And those staggering figures do not take into account the enormous spending by supposedly independent groups. The "money power," as Feingold's progressive forebears referred to it, has redefined Senate races and senators. "In most cases, candidates no longer control their own campaigns," says Ed Garvey, who once sought Feingold's seat and over the past quarter-century has been a leading campaign finance reform activist. "Even candidates who get into politics with the best of intentions start thinking they can't get re-elected without money from the party leaders, from the people in Washington, to keep their jobs. Senators get so reliant on the money that they reflect it; they stop thinking for themselves, stop thinking like the people who elected them. They just worry about getting the money."

More than any current senator, Feingold has resisted the march of money, not merely by fighting for campaign finance reform but by trying to get opponents to agree to limit spending and keep special-interest groups from pouring money into Wisconsin. But his opponent, Johnson, secured the GOP nomination with a promise to use his family fortune to mount one of the most expensive TV ad campaigns in Wisconsin history. Johnson's ads not only distort Feingold's record on specific issues but foster the fantasy that the only Democrat to oppose Obama's mild banking reforms is a rubber-stamp for president and party. "Russ Feingold normally and almost always votes on party lines," claims a Johnson TV ad. "He's right in the Reid, Pelosi, Obama camp." The claim is absurd—Feingold crosses party lines more frequently than all but six senators. But the relentless attacks have had an impact; Johnson pulled even with Feingold in summer polls, and the race moved from a "safe Democratic" rating to one of the year's most competitive. That's certain to steer more corporate money into Wisconsin. Karl Rove says he expects to raise $50 million to defeat Democrats, and Democracy 21's Fred Wertheimer says, "Shadow Republican groups formed by longtime party officials and party operatives are raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this election."

So it is that Russ Feingold finds himself in the fight of his life. He has built a campaign fund of almost $14 million the hard way: with an average contribution of $53. In the past, that would have been more than sufficient to keep the poorest Democrat in the Senate competitive. But not this year, in the aftermath of Citizens United, with corporate money flowing more freely than ever before. Corporate-allied groups like the Club for Growth are already buying heavily to attack Feingold and support Johnson.

Feingold's sure he'll be outspent. But he's also sure he'll win. A political junkie whose father was active in Wisconsin's independent Progressive Party of the 1930s and '40s before becoming a Democratic stalwart in the factory town of Janesville, Feingold is betting it's still possible to counter organized money with organized people. Borrowing a page from Wellstone's remarkable re-election races of 1996 and 2002, Feingold is determined to "win this campaign at the grassroots." To that end, he has opened sixteen field offices, from Ashland on the shores of Lake Superior to Kenosha on the Illinois border. Twenty-seven regional steering committees have taken his campaign into the most rural counties. By early September, canvassers had knocked on more than 105,000 doors and made more than 107,000 phone calls to targeted voters. Feingold is doing much of the asking himself, keeping to a relentless schedule that sends him to the state's most Republican counties to compare notes on the Constitution with conservatives, who don't see many Democrats these days.

The tech-savvy Feingold campaign has 25,000 Facebook friends and 11,000 Twitter followers. Supporters even download "Feintunes"—the senator's picks of songs by Wisconsin artists like Bon Iver and the BoDeans. Yet while he embraces the bells and whistles of modern campaigning, Feingold is betting more on message than mechanics. "I still think people understand," he says, that they need senators willing to stand up to "the power and greed and corruption of Wall Street...the power and greed and corruption of the pharmaceutical companies...the power and greed and corruption of the health insurance companies." Feingold is counting on that understanding to see him through a year when more cautious Democrats may not make it. He says that like the progressives of old, he wants to beat the "money power" in this race so he can go back and fight it in the Senate. "I want you to know that I am committed to this cause because I think it goes to the very core of our democracy," the senator declared on that Friday night when he rallied the faithful.

"You do it, Russ!" came a shout from the crowd.

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe, people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.

On Opposing the USA Patriot Act (from 2001)

by Russ Feingold

Editor’s note: In an address given October 12, 2001, to the Associated Press Managing Editors Conference at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sen. Feingold (D-Wis) explained why he, alone among United States Senators, voted against the Administration-sponsored “U.S.A. Patriot” Act. The text below followed his introductory remarks.

[T]his conference comes at a tragic time for our country. Let us first pause to remember, through one small story, how September 11th has irrevocably changed so many lives. In a letter to The Washington Post last Saturday, a man wrote that as he went jogging near the Pentagon, he came across the makeshift memorial built for those who lost their lives there. He slowed to a walk as he took in the sight before him – the red, white and blue flowers covering the structure, and then, off to the side, a second, smaller memorial with a card.

The card read, “ Happy Birthday Mommy. Although you died and are no longer with me, I feel as if I still have you in my life. I think about you every day.”

After reading the card, the man felt as if he were “drowning in the names of dead mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.” The author of this letter shared a moment in his own life that so many of us have had – the moment where televised pictures of the destruction are made painfully real to us. We read a card, or see the anguished face of a grieving loved one, and we suddenly feel the enormity of what has happened to so many American families, and to all of us as a people.

We all also had our own initial reactions, and my first and most powerful emotion was a solemn resolve to stop these terrorists. And that remains my principal reaction to these events. But I also quickly realized that two cautions were necessary and I raised them on the Senate floor within one day of the attacks.

The first caution was that we must continue to respect our Constitution and protect our civil liberties in the wake of the attacks. As the chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, I recognize this is a different world with different technologies, different issues, and different threats. Yet we must examine every item that is proposed in response to these events to be sure we are not rewarding these terrorists and weakening ourselves by giving up the cherished freedoms that they seek to destroy.

The second caution I issued was a warning against the mistreatment of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asians, or others in this country. Already, one day after the attacks, we were hearing news reports that misguided anger against people of these backgrounds had led to harassment, violence, and even death.

I suppose I was reacting instinctively to the unfolding events in the spirit of the Irish statesman John Philpot Curran, who said: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

During those first few hours after the attacks, I kept remembering a sentence from a case I had studied in law school. Not surprisingly, I didn’t remember which case it was, who wrote the opinion, or what it was about, but I did remember these words: “While the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.” I took these words as a challenge to my concerns about civil liberties at such a momentous time in our history; that we must be careful to not take civil liberties so literally that we allow ourselves to be destroyed.

But upon reviewing the case itself, Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, I found that Justice Arthur Goldberg had made this statement but then ruled in favor of the civil liberties position in the case, which was about draft evasion. He elaborated:

“It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation’s foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action. “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.... In no other way can we transmit to posterity unimpaired the blessings of liberty, consecrated by the sacrifices of the Revolution.”

I have approached the events of the past month and my role in proposing and reviewing legislation relating to it in this spirit.

And so we must redouble our vigilance. We must redouble our vigilance to ensure our security and to prevent further acts of terror. But we must also redouble our vigilance to preserve our values and the basic rights that make us who we are.

The Founders who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights exercised that vigilance even though they had recently fought and won the Revolutionary War. They did not live in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies. They wrote a Constitution of limited powers and an explicit Bill of Rights to protect liberty in times of war, as well as in times of peace.

There have been periods in our nation’s history when civil liberties have taken a back seat to what appeared at the time to be the legitimate exigencies of war. Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events: The Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans during World War II, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during the Vietnam War. We must not allow these pieces of our past to become prologue.

As this morning’s panel has discussed, even in our great land, wartime has sometimes brought us the greatest tests of our Bill of Rights.

For example, during the Civil War, the government arrested some 13,000 civilians, implementing a system akin to martial law. President Lincoln issued a proclamation ordering the arrest and military trial of any persons “discouraging volunteer enlistments, [or] resisting militia drafts.” Wisconsin provided one of the first challenges of this order. Draft protests rose up in Milwaukee and Sheboygan. And an anti-draft riot broke out among Germans and Luxembourgers in Port Washington. When the government arrested one of the leaders of the riot, his attorney sought a writ of habeas corpus. His military captors said that the President had abolished the writ. The Wisconsin Supreme Court was among the first to rule that the President had exceeded his authority.

In 1917, the Postmaster General revoked the mailing privileges of the newspaper the Milwaukee Leader because he felt that some of its articles impeded the war effort and the draft. Articles called the President an aristocrat and called the draft oppressive. Over dissents by Justices Brandeis and Holmes, the Supreme Court upheld the action.

During World War II, President Roosevelt signed orders to incarcerate more than 110,000 people of Japanese origin, as well as some roughly 11,000 of German origin and 3,000 of Italian origin.
Earlier this year, I introduced legislation to set up a commission to review the wartime treatment of Germans, Italians, and other Europeans during that period. That bill came out of heartfelt meetings in which constituents told me their stories. They were German-Americans, who came to me with some trepidation. They had waited fifty years to raise the issue with a member of Congress. They did not want compensation. They came to me with some uneasiness. But they had seen the government’s commission on the wartime internment of people of Japanese origin, and they wanted their story to be told, and an official acknowledgment as well.

Now some may say, indeed we may hope, that we have come a long way since the those days of infringements on civil liberties. But there is ample reason for concern. I have been troubled in the past month by the potential loss of commitment to traditional civil liberties.

As it seeks to combat terrorism, the Justice Department is making extraordinary use of its power to arrest and detain individuals, jailing hundreds of people on immigration violations and arresting more than a dozen “material witnesses” not charged with any crime. Although the government has used these authorities before, it has not done so on such a broad scale. Judging from government announcements, the government has not brought any criminal charges related to the attacks with regard to the overwhelming majority of these detainees.

For example, the FBI arrested as a material witness the San Antonio radiologist Albader Al-Hazmi, who has a name like two of the hijackers, and who tried to book a flight to San Diego for a medical conference. According to his lawyer, the government held Al-Hazmi incommunicado after his arrest, and it took six days for lawyers to get access to him. After the FBI released him, his lawyer said, “This is a good lesson about how frail our processes are. It’s how we treat people in difficult times like these that is the true test of the democracy and civil liberties that we brag so much about throughout the world.”

Now, it so happens that since early 1999, I have been working on another bill that is poignantly relevant to recent events: legislation to prohibit racial profiling, especially the practice of targeting pedestrians or drivers for stops and searches based on the color of their skin. Before September 11th, people spoke of the issue mostly in the context of African-Americans and Latino-Americans who had been profiled. But after September 11, the issue has taken on a new context and a new urgency. 

Even as America addresses the demanding security challenges before us, we must strive mightily also to guard our values and basic rights. We must guard against racism and ethnic discrimination against people of Arab and South Asian origin and those who are Muslim.

We who don’t have Arabic names or don’t wear turbans or headscarves may not feel the weight of these times as much as Americans from the Middle East and South Asia do. But as the great jurist Learned Hand said in a speech in New York’s Central Park during World War II: “[T]he spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias . . . .”

Was it not at least partially bias, however, when passengers on a Northwest Airlines flight in Minneapolis three weeks ago insisted that Northwest remove from the plane three Arab men who had cleared security?

Of course, given the enormous anxiety and fears generated by the events of September 11th, it would not have been difficult to anticipate some of these reactions, both by our government and some of our people. And, of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists.

But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. That would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.

Preserving our freedom is the reason that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people. 

That is why I found the antiterrorism bill originally proposed by Attorney General Ashcroft and President Bush to be troubling.

The proposed bill contained vast new powers for law enforcement, some seemingly drafted in haste and others that came from the FBI’s wish list that Congress has rejected in the past. You may remember that the Attorney General announced his intention to introduce a bill shortly after the September 11 attacks. He provided the text of the bill the following Wednesday, and urged Congress to enact it by the end of the week. That was plainly impossible, but the pressure to move on this bill quickly, without deliberation and debate, has been relentless ever since.

It is one thing to shortcut the legislative process in order to get federal financial aid to the cities hit by terrorism. We did that, and no one complained that we moved too quickly. It is quite another to press for the enactment of sweeping new powers for law enforcement that directly affect the civil liberties of the American people without due deliberation by the peoples’ elected representatives.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed at least to some extent, and while this bill has been on a fast track, there has been time to make some changes and reach agreement on a bill that is less objectionable than the bill that the Administration originally proposed.

As I will discuss in a moment, I concluded that the Senate bill still does not strike the right balance between empowering law enforcement and protecting civil liberties. But that does not mean that I oppose everything in the bill. Indeed many of its provisions are entirely reasonable, and I hope they will help law enforcement more effectively counter the threat of terrorism.

For example, it is entirely appropriate that with a warrant the FBI be able to seize voice mail messages as well as tap a phone. It is also reasonable, even necessary, to update the federal criminal offense relating to possession and use of biological weapons. It made sense to make sure that phone conversations carried over cables would not have more protection from surveillance than conversations carried over phone lines. And it made sense to stiffen penalties and lengthen or eliminate statutes of limitation for certain terrorist crimes.

There are other non-controversial provisions in the bill which I support – those to assist the victims of crime, to streamline the application process for public safety officers benefits and increase those benefits, to provide more funds to strengthen immigration controls at our Northern borders, expedite the hiring of translators at the FBI, and many others.

In the end, however, my focus on this bill, as Chair of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, was on those provisions that implicate our constitutional freedoms. And it was in reviewing those provisions that I came to feel that the Administration’s demand for haste was inappropriate; indeed, it was dangerous. Our process in the Senate, as truncated as it was, did lead to the elimination or significant rewriting of a number of audacious proposals that I and many other members found objectionable.

For example, the original Administration proposal that was dropped contained a provision that would have allowed the use in U.S. criminal proceedings against U.S. citizens of information obtained by foreign law enforcement agencies in wiretaps that would be illegal in this country. In other words, evidence obtained in an unconstitutional search overseas was to be allowed in a U.S. court.

Another provision would have broadened the criminal forfeiture laws to permit – prior to conviction – the freezing of assets entirely unrelated to an alleged crime. The Justice Department has wanted this authority for years, and Congress has never been willing to give it. For one thing, it touches on the right to counsel, since assets that are frozen cannot be used to pay a lawyer. The courts have almost uniformly rejected efforts to restrain assets before conviction unless they are assets gained in the alleged criminal enterprise. This proposal, in my view, was simply an effort on the part of the Department to take advantage of the emergency situation and get something that they’ve wanted to get for a long time.

The foreign wiretap and criminal forfeiture provisions were dropped from the bill that we considered in the Senate. Other provisions were rewritten based on objections that I and others raised about them. For example, the original bill contained sweeping permission for the Attorney General to get copies of educational records without a court order. The final bill in the Senate requires a court order and the certification by the Attorney General that he has reason to believe that the records contain information that is relevant to an investigation of terrorism.

Another provision increased penalties for conspiracy to the level of the penalties for the underlying crime. I was concerned that this might bring the federal death penalty into play for conspiracy. The provision was modified to make life in prison the maximum penalty for conspiracy.

And the definition of “federal terrorism offense,” originally a laundry list of federal crimes that in some instances might, but in most instances would not, relate to terrorism was significantly narrowed.

So the bill the Senate passed last night was certainly improved from the bill that the Administration sent to us on September 19, and wanted us to pass on September 21. But again, in my judgement, it did not strike the right balance between empowering law enforcement and protecting constitutional freedoms. Let me take a moment to discuss some of the shortcomings of the bill that we passed in the Senate very late Thursday night, by a vote of 96-1. And I guess you know by now who the “one” was.

First, the bill contains some very significant changes in criminal procedure that will apply to every federal criminal investigation in this country, not just those involving terrorism. One provision would greatly expand the circumstances in which law enforcement agencies can search homes and offices without notifying the owner prior to the search. The longstanding practice under the Fourth Amendment of serving a warrant prior to executing a search could be easily avoided in virtually every case because the government would simply have to show that it has “reasonable cause to believe” that providing notice “may” “seriously jeopardize an investigation.” This is a significant infringement on personal liberty.

Notice is a key element of Fourth Amendment protections. It allows a person to point out mistakes in a warrant and make sure that a search is limited to the terms of a warrant. Just think about the possibility of the police showing up at your door with a warrant to search your house. You look at the warrant and say, “yes, that’s my address, but the name on the warrant isn’t me.” And the police realize a mistake has been made an go away. If you’re not home, and the police have received permission to do a “sneak and peak” search, they can come in your house, look around, and leave, and may never have to tell you.

Another very troubling provision has to do with the effort to combat computer crime. The bill allows law enforcement to monitor a computer with the permission of its owner or operator, without the need to get a warrant or show probable cause. That’s fine in the case of a so called “denial of service attack” or plain old computer hacking. A computer owner should be able to give the police permission to monitor communications coming from what amounts to a trespasser on the computer.

As drafted in the Senate bill, however, the provision might permit an employer to give permission to the police to monitor the emails of an employee who has used her computer at work to shop for Christmas gifts. Or someone who uses a computer at a library or at school and happens to go to a gambling or pornography site in violation of the Internet use policies of the library or the university might also be subjected to government surveillance – without probable cause and without any time limit.

I am also very troubled by the broad expansion of government power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. When Congress passed FISA in 1978 it granted to the executive branch the power to conduct surveillance in foreign intelligence investigations without meeting the rigorous probable cause standard under the Fourth Amendment that is required for criminal investigations. There is a lower threshold for obtaining a wiretap order from the FISA court because the FBI is not investigating a crime, it is investigating foreign intelligence activities. The law currently requires that intelligence gathering be the primary purpose of the investigation in order for this lower standard to apply.

The bill that passed the Senate last night changes that requirement. If it becomes law, and there is every reason to believe with a Senate vote of 96-1 that it will, the government will only have to show that intelligence is a “significant purpose” of the investigation. Even if the primary purpose is a criminal investigation, the heightened protections of the Fourth Amendment won’t apply.

It seems obvious that with this lower standard, the FBI will try to use FISA as much as it can. And of course, with terrorism investigations that won’t be difficult because the terrorists are apparently sponsored or at least supported by foreign governments.

But the significance of the breakdown of the distinction between intelligence and criminal investigations becomes apparent when you see the other expansions of government power under FISA in this bill. One provision that troubles me a great deal is a provision that permits the government under FISA to compel the production of records from any business regarding any person if that information is sought in connection with an investigation of terrorism or espionage.

Now we’re not talking here about travel records pertaining to a terrorist suspect, which we all can see can be highly relevant to an investigation of a terrorist plot. FISA already gives the FBI the power to get airline, train, hotel, car rental and other records of a suspect.

But under the Senate bill, the government can compel the disclosure of anyone – perhaps someone who worked with, or lived next door to, or went to school with, or sat on an airplane with, or has been seen in the company of, or whose phone number was called by the target of the investigation.

And under this new provisions all business records can be compelled, including those containing sensitive personal information like medical records from hospitals or doctors, or educational records, or records of what books someone has taken out of the library. This is an enormous expansion of authority, under a law that provides only minimal judicial supervision.

Under this provision, the government can apparently go on a fishing expedition and collect information on virtually anyone. All it has to allege in order to get an order for these records from the court is that the information is sought for an investigation of international terrorism or clandestine intelligence gathering. That’s it. On that minimal showing in an ex parte application to a secret court, with no showing even that the information is relevant to the investigation, the government can lawfully compel a doctor or hospital to release medical records, or a library to release circulation records. This is a truly breathtaking expansion of police power.

As some of you know, I raised a few of these issues during our debate on the bill on Thursday night. I had to wage war with my own leadership over the previous two days to get that opportunity. The leadership of both parties wanted to take this bill, which was never considered or voted on in the Judiciary Committee, and ram it through the U.S. Senate without a single amendment being offered.

In the end, the high water mark for my three amendments was 13 votes – that was on the amendment to the computer trespass provision. Prior to that vote the majority leader of the Senate stood up and implored the Senate to vote down all of my amendments, not on their merits, but because a deal had been struck on this bill.

This was not, in my view, the finest hour for the United States Senate. The debate on a bill that may have the most far reaching consequences on the civil liberties of the American people in a generation was a non-debate. The merits took a back seat to the deal.

Let me turn to a final area of real concern about this legislation because I think it brings us full circle to the cautions I expressed on the day after the attacks. There are two very troubling provisions dealing with our immigration laws in this bill.

First, the Administration’s original proposal would have granted the Attorney General extraordinary powers to detain immigrants indefinitely, including legal permanent residents. The Attorney General could do so based on mere suspicion that the person is engaged in terrorism. I believe the Administration was really over-reaching here, and I am pleased that Senator Leahy was able to negotiate some protections. The Senate bill now requires the Attorney General to charge the immigrant within seven days with a criminal offense or immigration violation. In the event that the Attorney General does not charge the immigrant, the immigrant must be released.

While this protection is an improvement, the provision remains fundamentally flawed. The Senate bill, even with this seven-day charging requirement, would nevertheless continue to permit the indefinite detention in two situations. First, immigrants who win their deportation cases could continue to be held if the Attorney General continues to have suspicions. Second, this provision creates a deep unfairness to immigrants who are found not to be deportable for terrorism but have an immigration status violation, such as overstaying a visa. If the immigration judge finds that they are eligible for relief from deportation, and therefore can stay in the country because, for example, they have longstanding family ties here, the Attorney General could continue to hold them indefinitely.

The second provision in the bill that deeply troubles me allows the detention and deportation of people engaging in innocent associational activity. But the Senate bill would allow for the detention and deportation of individuals who provide lawful assistance to groups that are not even designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist organizations, but instead have engaged in vaguely defined “terrorist activity” sometime in the past. To avoid deportation, the immigrant is required to prove a negative: that he or she did not know, and should not have known, that the assistance would further terrorist activity.

This language creates a very real risk that truly innocent individuals could be deported for innocent associations with humanitarian or political groups that the government later chooses to regard as terrorist organizations. Groups that might fit this definition could include Operation Rescue, Greenpeace, and even the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. This provision amounts to “guilt by association,” which I believe violates the First Amendment. 

And speaking of the First Amendment, under this bill, a lawful permanent resident who makes a controversial speech that the government deems to be supportive of terrorism might be barred from returning to his or her family after taking a trip abroad.

Now here’s where my cautions in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and my concern over the reach of the anti-terrorism bill come together. To the extent that the expansive new immigration powers that the bill grants to the Attorney General are subject to abuse, who do we think is most likely to bear the brunt of that abuse? It won’t be immigrants from Ireland, it won’t be immigrants from El Salvador or Nicaragua, it won’t even be immigrants from Haiti or Africa. It will be immigrants from Arab, Muslim, and South Asian countries. In the wake of these terrible events, our government has been given vast new powers and they may fall most heavily on a minority of our population who already feel particularly acutely the pain of this disaster.

The anti-terrorism bill that we considered in the Senate this week highlights the march of technology, and how that march cuts both for and against personal liberty. Justice Brandeis foresaw some of the future in a 1928 dissent, when he wrote:

“The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. . . . Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?”

We must grant law enforcement the tools that it needs to stop this terrible threat. But we must give them only those extraordinary tools that they need and that relate specifically to the task at hand.

In the play, “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More questions the bounder Roper whether he would level the forest of English laws to punish the Devil. “What would you do?” More asks, “Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Roper affirms, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that.” To which More replies:

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake. ”

We must maintain our vigilance to preserve our laws and our basic rights.

You and I have a duty to analyze, to test, to weigh new laws that the zealous and often sincere advocates of security would suggest to us. This is what I have tried to do with the so-called anti-terrorism bill.

Protecting the safety of the American people is a solemn duty of the Congress; we must work tirelessly to prevent more tragedies like the devastating attacks of September 11th. We must prevent more children from losing their mothers, more wives from losing their husbands, and more firefighters from losing their brave and heroic colleagues. But the Congress will fulfill its duty only when it protects both the American people and the freedoms at the foundation of American society. So let us preserve our heritage of basic rights. Let us practice that liberty. And let us fight to maintain that freedom that we call America.

Russ Feingold: I Won't Be Done In By Citizens United Ruling

Not so concerned the about the Citizen United decision for his own political future, the Democratic Senator from Wisconsin thinks corporate spending will have a dramatic impact on the next US Presidential election.
by Sam Stein | Tuesday, August 24, 2010 by Huffington Post

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) stressed on Monday that in his tight re-election contest, he won't be done in by the unraveling of campaign finance laws that he principally authored.

The Wisconsin Democrat, in a conference call with bloggers and new media reporters, said he did not expect the fallout of the Supreme Court's late January Citizens United ruling to reach his Senate race. The Court's decision took apart a major portion of the 2002 campaign finance law Feingold famously authored with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), prompting widespread Democratic fear that corporations could now spend unlimited amounts of money on "electioneering communications."

"This is not divine torture," he said, responding to a question from the Huffington Post. "This is divine vindication."

"I've been through this before. In 1998 I promised to live by the rules of McCain-Feingold and I refused to take soft money. As a result [former congressman] Mark Neumann outspent me dramatically. He had far more ads than I did because he took soft money, and I had a very close race. It was 51-49. There were a lot of people who were angry with me because I stuck with what I believed to be a right approach. But I said I thought people in the state would see what was wrong here. The congressman who was challenging a senator had far more ads, why was that? Because he was taking advantage of soft money. That's why we ran an ad called the 'high road' which showed that we weren't doing that and we basically took the issue and essentially made their strength a weakness by pointing out that they were trying to buy the election... That's what's going to happen this time."

If Feingold was exhibiting a bit of nonchalance about the effect Citizens United could have on his re-election hopes, he did so for a variety of reasons. For starters, his opponent, businessman Ron Johnson, is poised to spend an unprecedented amount (much of it his personal wealth) during the course of the election, making the need for outside help somewhat moot. Secondly, Feingold predicted that the corporate entities that have compelling reasons to dabble in electoral politics may end up holding their fire until 2012 -- at least when it comes to Wisconsin.

"I don't think [Citizens United] will be particularly relevant to my future," Feingold said. "But I think it will be enormously relevant to the presidential race. That's where I think it is going to explode."

Senate Passes Toothless Bank Reform Bill

Feingold explains ‘no’ vote: Washington once again caved to Wall Street
By Agence France-Presse | Thursday, July 15th, 2010

The US Senate voted Thursday to send President Barack Obama the most sweeping rewrite of Wall Street rules since the Great Depression of the 1930s, handing him a historic political win. The bill passed 60-39.

However, a top Democratic senator who voted "no" is arguing that "Washington once again caved to Wall Street."

Lawmakers voted 60-38 to end a year of often bitter partisan debate on the 2,300-page measure and set the stage for a final passage ballot expected shortly after a last procedural test at 2:00 pm. (1800 GMT).

The bill, Obama's top domestic priority, aims to rein in risky investment practices blamed for the 2007-2009 global financial meltdown and give regulators an arsenal of new weapons against shady big-bank dealings.

"We will fundamentally change the way our financial system is regulated, to rein in Wall Street and create a sound foundation to grow our economy and create jobs," said Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd, a Democrat and a key author of the legislation.

It creates a new consumer financial protection agency, an early-warning system to predict and prevent the next crisis, and mechanisms aimed at liquidating rather than saving companies once deemed "too big to fail."

The legislation also closes loopholes in regulations and requires greater transparency and accountability for hedge funds, mortgage brokers and payday lenders, and arcane financial instruments called derivatives.

It also includes a somewhat diluted version of the so-called "Volcker Rule" -- named for former Fed chairman Paul Volcker -- curbing commercial banks' ability to make speculative investments that are not on behalf of clients.

Republicans mostly opposed the bill, charging it gives too much more power to regulators who failed to stem the previous crisis and does nothing to rein in activities by government-backed mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

"What we're going to wind up doing is we're going to be driving jobs and business overseas with this massive piece of legislation that truly doesn't address the problem," Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss charged Thursday.

Dodd said the bill was not "perfect" but underlined: "We must act now. Many of the same risks to our financial sector remain."

Just three of the Senate's 41 Republicans -- Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts -- lined up with 55 Democrats and two independents behind the bill, while Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho did not vote.

Democratic Senator Russell Feingold opposed the measure, which he charged did not go far enough to curtail the dealings that led to the international economic collapse.

"I made clear that my test for this bill would be whether it prevents another economic crisis. Unfortunately, this bill falls short," he said in a statement after the vote.

Feingold's statement added,

The reckless practices of Wall Street sent our economy reeling, triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression, and left millions of Americans to foot the bill. Despite these cataclysmic events, Washington once again caved to Wall Street on key issues and produced a bill that fails to protect the American people from the pain of another economic disaster. I will not support a bill that fails to adequately protect the people of Wisconsin from the recklessness of Wall Street.

Amid stubbornly high unemployment near ten percent and deep US public anger at Wall Street four months before November mid-term elections, Obama has led Democrats in painting Republicans as opposed to common-sense reforms.

Republicans have repeatedly denounced key planks of the Democratic platform as "job-killing" and accused the president of not doing enough to fix the crisis he inherited from Republican predecessor George W. Bush.

The US House of Representatives approved the legislation on June 30 in a largely party-line 237-192 vote.

Final passage of the bill would hand Obama a second historic legislative triumph after successfully pushing the US Congress to overhaul the US health care system over fierce Republican objections.

Russ Feingold's Defiance Irks Liberals

(I applaud him! Way to go, Russ! The Financial reform bill is a joke, just like the healthcare reform bill. Obama takes credit for "legislative victories" in which "we the people" are the ones screwed.--jef)


Tuesday, July 13, 2010 by Politico.com
by Carrie Budoff Brown

He's been a hero to liberals for voting against big banks, the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.

But Sen. Russ Feingold's decision to become the only Democratic vote against Wall Street reform has left many questioning his strategy.

Progressives figured the Wisconsin Democrat would be first in line to sign on to the financial regulatory overhaul. Instead, he's been stubbornly, defiantly opposed to the legislation - Feingold calls it a cave-in to Wall Street - almost single-handedly delaying the final vote and denying, at least temporarily, President Barack Obama's second legislative triumph.

But what really galls some on the left is that Feingold's resistance opened the door for deal making - and Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown walked right through, making Brown the kingmaker on the bill that many on the left thought Feingold could have been.

"If he had said loudly and clearly during recent conference negotiations that he'd vote yes if, and only if, the strongest version of the Lincoln proposal and ‘Volcker rule' were in the final bill, it would have made Scott Brown irrelevant and dramatically changed the negotiations," said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, referring to Sen. Blanche Lincoln's derivatives crackdown and former Fed chief Paul Volcker's limits on risky bank investments.

"Instead, he remained silent, let the bill get watered down and then spoke out after the negotiations were over. That's not bold; it's weak and unstrategic - and it helped Wall Street rip off the public to the tune of billions in the future," Green said.

Brown's sway over the bill was illustrated again Monday when he announced he would vote yes, allowing Democrats to finally get the 60 votes they need to pass the landmark legislation - but not before Democrats watered down key parts of the bill to Brown's liking, including allowing banks to do a small bit of trading with their own funds.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) also announced that she, too, would support the bill - potentially clearing the way for a vote as early as this week.

In an interview Monday, Feingold remained unapologetic and took issue with claims that he didn't do enough.

At the outset of the floor debate, he detailed his test for this legislation: whether it would prevent another financial crisis. He co-sponsored five amendments that he said would have addressed his issues, namely restoring Glass-Steagall Act firewalls between commercial and investment banking and restricting banks from becoming so big that they threaten the financial system.

And Feingold said that he spoke several times with administration officials, Senate leaders and members of the conference committee, but at no time did they show any interest in moving closer to his position. Once it became clear that his two biggest issues had no shot in the Senate, he said he couldn't get to "yes."

Feingold said criticism of him as less than involved is generated by those within the "axis between Wall Street and Washington, and I'm not part of that axis."

"I don't know what they are talking about," Feingold said. "Why would I try to work with people who are trying to kill the things that I think are most important? They were asking me to cut a deal that was against the interests of the American people and the people of Wisconsin."

To be sure, some progressives cheered Feingold for stating what one called "inconvenient truths" about the legislation. And Feingold is known as a contrarian who has bucked his party at times. Even if he had engaged more vigorously in the negotiations, his demands might have alienated moderates.

But his opposition to the Wall Street reform legislation struck some of his allies as a step too far and caught off-guard even those well acquainted with his against-the-grain voting patterns.

"There wasn't a sense of it early on that he should be one of the targets," said Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin and longtime observer of Feingold. "I really don't think he developed into a Tier One target where people thought he was a problem until very late in the process. On the national level, they were assuming he would come around."

He never did - and now, he has come to embody Democrats' divided emotions over the bill. "A lot of us want to love Russ Feingold, but he consistently shows lackluster ability to use smart leverage in important policy fights like health care and Wall Street reform," Green said.

The Wall Street bill reinforced Feingold's standing as a Washington irritant, but back in Wisconsin, he's banking on that reputation to pull him through what is turning into a tough reelection.

Feingold released a 60-second radio ad Tuesday, positioning himself as a scourge of special interests and party leaders.

"I continue to be an independent voice who is tough on government spending and will stand up to both political parties," he said in the commercial. "Maybe I won't make a lot of new friends, but at least you will have one fighting for you and future generations."

One Democratic Senate aide said Feingold should have made more of a public push to fix the bill. Sure, he signed on to the amendments most wanted by liberals, but he didn't put any work into building support for them, the aide said.

Because of his lower profile, some Democrats were shocked when he was one of only two Democrats to oppose moving the bill to final passage in May after three weeks of debate.

His criticism irked colleagues, who objected to his claim that the bill failed to address the threat posed by "too big to fail" banks. Annoyance with Feingold came to a head during one of the Senate votes, when Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) confronted him on the floor, setting off an animated discussion over his public statements.

"He very much wanted me to accept the idea that this bill was significant on the issues I care about," Feingold said. "I said it didn't get to the core of the problem."

Green said his group offered "many times" to meet with Feingold aides, to no avail, creating a stark contrast with the relationship forged with Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who led efforts to strengthen the Volcker rule.

As someone who has opposed interstate banking, the bank deregulation in 1999 and the 2008 bank bailout, Feingold said, "I don't really have to put up with people who say I haven't been involved in this."

Kraig, the Wisconsin operative, said Feingold was being Feingold. His approach to the bill carried the hallmarks of his leadership style: He doesn't take up the role of backroom deal maker. Instead, he makes an assessment about a bill on its merits, and if lawmakers want to get his vote, they have to meet his standards.

"It's not like he is constantly voting against something that is not perfect," Kraig said. "But when he does make a decision and digs in, he is hard to persuade."

Standing Up to the Unholy Alliance Between Washington and Wall Street

(Atta boy, Russ! I don't care which party you claim, Russ Feingold is a stand-up guy for the people. If there were only more legislators like him, we wouldn't be in half as much trouble.--jef)

***

Standing Up to the Unholy Alliance Between Washington and Wall Street
by Sen. Russ Feingold - U.S. Senator from Wisconsin
Posted: June 30, 2010

Wall Street and its allies have been calling the shots in Congress for decades, so they must be glad to see how things are shaping up on financial regulatory reform. Congress is about to vote on a final bill that fails to fix the key flaws in the bills passed by both the House and Senate. At the start of this process I made clear that I had a simple test for financial reform -- will it stop another financial meltdown? This bill fails that test, and I won't support legislation that fails to protect the people of Wisconsin from the pain of another economic disaster. And I don't need to be lectured about this issue by people who supported the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which paved the way for this terrible recession.

I had hoped I would be able to support the legislation, given the clear need for strong reform. I cosponsored a number of critical amendments during Senate consideration of the bill including a Cantwell-McCain amendment to restore Glass-Steagall safeguards, Senator Dorgan's amendment that addressed the problem of "too big to fail" financial institutions, and another "too big to fail" reform offered by Senators Brown and Kaufman that proposed strict limits on the size of those institutions. Each of those amendments would have improved the bill significantly, and each of them either failed or was blocked from even getting a vote.

After that, it wasn't a close call for me. It would be a huge mistake to pass a bill that purports to re-regulate the financial industry but is simply too weak to protect people from the recklessness of Wall Street. That would be like building an impressive-looking dam without telling everyone that it has a few leaks in it. False security is no security at all.

Since the Senate bill passed, I have had a number of conversations with key members of the administration, Senate leadership and the conference committee that drafted the final bill. Unfortunately, not once has anyone suggested in those conversations the possibility of strengthening the bill to address my concerns and win my support. People want my vote, but they want it for a bill that, while including some positive provisions, has Wall Street's fingerprints all over it.

In fact, reports indicate that the administration and conference leaders have gone to significant lengths to avoid making the bill stronger. Rather than discussing with me ways to strengthen the bill, for example, they chose to eliminate a levy that was to be imposed on the largest banks and hedge funds in order to obtain the vote of members who prefer a weaker bill. Nothing could be more revealing of the true position of those who are crafting this legislation. They had a choice between pursuing a weaker bill or a stronger one. Their decision is clear.

On this bill, like the others that preceded it, the biggest financial interests have won.

I've seen this too many times before. When I was in the Wisconsin State Senate, I chaired the Senate Banking Committee for nearly a decade, and fought against enactment of an interstate banking law that resulted in the concentration of financial assets and most large Wisconsin banks being bought up by even larger out-of-state banks.

Shortly after I came to the U.S. Senate we considered a national interstate banking bill, the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Act of 1994, which accelerated the concentration of financial assets, and the creation of "too big to fail" firms. I was one of only four senators to oppose that legislation. Five years later, I was one of only eight Senators to oppose the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the bill that repealed Glass-Steagall and paved the way for this disastrous recession, which has been an economic nightmare for so many Americans.

Those two measures -- the 1994 law and the 1999 law -- accelerated the trend toward increased concentration of financial assets, aggravating the problem of "too big to fail." Before those two laws were enacted, the six largest U.S. banks had assets equal to 17 percent of our GDP. Today the six largest U.S. banks have assets equal to more than 60 percent of our GDP.

Ultimately, it was the threat of the failure of the nation's largest financial institutions that spurred the Wall Street bailout. I opposed that measure as well, in part because it was not tied to any fundamental reforms of our financial system that would prevent a future crisis and the need for another bailout. We could have had a much tougher reform package if the bailout had been tied to such a measure.

Every single one of those bills caved to Wall Street and the biggest financial interests, and so does the current regulatory reform bill. Economist Dean Baker called this bill a "fig leaf," and former IMF Economist Simon Johnson has slammed the bill's failure to address "too big to fail." These experts paint an accurate picture of this bill's failings, and frankly those failings shouldn't come as a surprise. Many of the critical actors who shaped this bill were present at the creation of the financial crisis. They supported the enactment of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, deregulating derivatives, even the massive Interstate Banking bill that helped grease the "too big to fail" skids. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the final version of the bill looks the way it does, or that I won't fall in line with their version of "reform."

This bill caves to Wall Street interests, it doesn't meet the test of preventing another financial crisis, and it won't get my vote.

Feingold to vote ‘no’ on Wall Street bill that ‘fails [the] test’

By Agence France-Presse | Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

WASHINGTON — US Senate Democrats struggled without success Monday to rally the 60 votes needed to ensure passage of a sweeping Wall Street overhaul bill after the death of Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.

Democratic Senator Russell Feingold dashed hopes he would abandon his opposition to the bill after Byrd's passing, saying in a statement that the measure did not go far enough to forestall a repeat of the 2008 meltdown.

“As I have indicated for some time now, my test for the financial regulatory reform bill is whether it will prevent another crisis,” Mr. Feingold said in a statement.

“The conference committee’s proposal fails that test and for that reason I will not vote to advance it. During debate on the bill, I supported several efforts to break up ‘too big to fail’ Wall Street banks and restore the proven safeguards established after the Great Depression separating Main Street banks from big Wall Street firms, among other issues. Unfortunately, these crucial reforms were rejected. While there are some positive provisions in the final measure, the lack of strong reforms is clear confirmation that Wall Street lobbyists and their allies in Washington continue to wield significant influence on the process.”

The New York Times notes that "Feingold’s continuing opposition and the death on Monday of Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia who had supported the bill, mean that Democrats face an even tougher than expected challenge in winning approval of the regulatory overhaul."

Mr. Feingold cited five amendments to the Senate version of the legislation that he supported and said would have made the bill stronger. None of them were included in the final version of the legislation. The amendments included a proposal sponsored by Ms. Cantwell to restore the firewall between commercial banking and investment banking in the Glass-Steagall Act, which was approved in response to the Great Depression and repealed in 1999. Mr. Feingold voted against the repeal. 

Mr. Feingold also cited an amendment by Senators Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, and Edward E. Kaufmann, Democrat of Delaware, that would break up some of the nation’s biggest banks and an amendment by Senators Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, that would impose tight restrictions on the ability of banks that hold clients’ deposits to trade stocks and make other risky investments for their own gain.

Democrats and their two independent allies control 58 Senate seats in the wake of Byrd's death, but Feingold opposes the bill, and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell has yet to commit to voting for the reform package.

That leaves Democrats hunting for at least three Republicans to back the legislation, which needs 60 votes to pass in the 11-seat chamber.

Feingold amendment requesting a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan voted down 18-80.

This morning, the Senate debated Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) amendment to the war supplemental bill, which called on President Obama to provide a flexible timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan to Congress. Arguing for the amendment on the floor, Feingold complained that he is “disppointed that” Congress is passing a bill “providing tens of billions of dollars to keep this war going with so little public debate about whether this approach makes any sense.” After Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) objected to the Feingold amendment, arguing that it sends the wrong message to the region, Feingold retorted, “The Senator suggests that somehow this sends the wrong message to the region. The real wrong message is that we intend to be there forever”:

FEINGOLD: In light of our deficit and domestic needs and in light of rising casualty rates in Afghanistan and in light of the growing Al Qaeda threat around the world, an expensive troop-intensive nation-building campaign just doesn’t add up for me. We should be focusing on Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other terrorist safe havens. Frankly I am disappointed that we are about to pass a bill providing tens of billions of dollars to keep this war going with so little public debate about whether this approach makes any sense.

LEVIN: If we adopt the Feingold amendment, Mrs. Madame president, we’ll be sending a…message to the government and people of Afghanistan. It would reinforce the fear, if we adopt this amendment, already a deep seated fear in Afghanistan, that the United States will abandon the region. That is a message that we can ill afford to send regarding the future stability of Afghanistan, and it is a particularly unwise message to send while our forces are still deploying to Afghanistan.

FEINGOLD: The Senator suggests that somehow this sends the wrong message to the region. The real wrong message is that we intend to be there forever.

Following the debate, the Feingold amendment was voted down 18-80. See the roll call vote here. This past Tuesday, the Defense Department released troop numbers that reveal there are now more U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan than Iraq.

UPDATE On May 30th, the combined cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is expected to reach $1 trillion. Brave New Foundation has created a Facebook application that allows Americans to see what, other than war, $1 trillion can be spent on. Access it here.

Feingold to Hold Hearing on Line-Item Veto

Office of Management and Budget Official to Testify

May 21, 2010

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) announced today that he will hold a hearing on May 26th on giving the president a line-item veto to eliminate wasteful spending. The hearing comes after it was reported that President Obama would ask Congress for line-item veto authority this month. Feingold, the author of legislation to authorize a limited line-item veto for the president, will chair the hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution. Feingold introduced his bipartisan Congressional Accountability and Line-Item Veto Act along with Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and fellow Janesville, Wisconsin, native Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Feingold also included the line-item veto in his Control Spending Now Act, legislation made up of more than forty specific spending cuts that will save taxpayers about one half trillion dollars.

“A line-item veto, like the one I proposed with Rep. Ryan and Sen. McCain, would be a useful tool for the president to slash wasteful spending,” Feingold said. “This hearing will focus on ensuring that any line-item veto bill we advance is constitutional and effective at stopping unnecessary and wasteful spending. I am pleased the administration is sending a witness to testify, and I look forward to hearing more about the administration’s proposal and how it intends to use line-item veto authority.”

While added transparency requirements have helped, unauthorized earmarks continue to be a problem. The omnibus appropriations bill passed in 2009 contained over 8,000 earmarks at a cost of more than $7 billion. The Feingold-McCain-Ryan bill provides the president with new expedited rescission authority to remove congressional earmarks from larger bills and send them back to Congress to be voted on separately. The Senate bill is cosponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ), John Barrasso (R-WY), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Mike Johanns (R-NE), George LeMieux (R-FL), Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), James Risch (R-ID), Mark Udall (D-CO) and Mark Warner (D-VA).

The hearing will be held on May 26th at 10:00 a.m. ET in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 226. The witnesses will include:

Jeffrey Liebman, Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget
Ryan Alexander, President of Taxpayers for Common Sense
Charles J. Cooper, Partner at Cooper & Kirk, PLLC; Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan.

Why the Financial Reform Bill Doesn't Go Far Enough

Go, Russ!

###

Ending Too Big to Fail
by Russ Feingold

I am glad the Senate is finally considering the critically important issue of financial regulatory reform. Few things are as important as ensuring we never again suffer the kind of meltdown in the financial markets that shoved our economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

It remains to be seen if this bill will do that. While it includes some good reforms, more needs to be done, and the track record of Congress in this area is at best checkered.

For the last thirty years, Presidents and Congresses have consistently given in to Wall Street lobbyists and weakened essential safeguards. And as has been the case in so many areas, members of both political parties are to blame. Legislation that paved the way for the creation of massive Wall Street entities and removed essential protections for our economy passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

From the Savings and Loan crisis in the late 1980s to the more recent financial crisis that triggered the horrible economic downturn from which we are still recovering, those three decades of bipartisan blunders have been devastating for our Nation. And the price of those blunders has been paid by homeowners, Main Street businesses, retirees, and millions of families facing an uncertain economic future.

The impact of the recent financial crisis on the Nation’s economy has been enormous. Millions have lost their job, and millions more lucky enough to have a job are forced to work fewer hours than they want and need to work. According to a study done by the Pew Trust, the financial crisis cost American households an average of nearly $5,800 in lost income.

And, of course, families lost a significant amount of personal savings. As a nation, we lost $7.4 trillion in stock wealth between July 2008 and March 2009, and another $3.4 trillion in real estate wealth during that same time.

We simply cannot afford to continue down the path policymakers have set over the last thirty years.

The test for this legislation is a simple one - whether or not it will prevent another financial crisis. And central to that test will be how this bill will address “too big to fail.”

This is a critical issue that has been growing for some time now as increased economic concentration in the financial services sector has put more and more financial assets under the control of fewer and fewer decision-makers.

Mr. President, years ago, a former Senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, noted that as banking assets become more concentrated, the banking system itself becomes less stable as there is greater potential for system-wide failures. Sadly, Senator Proxmire was absolutely right as recent events have proven.

Even beyond the issue of systemic stability, the trend toward further concentration of economic power and economic decision-making, especially in the financial sector, is not healthy for the Nation's economy.

Banks have a very special role in our free market system; they are rationers of capital. When fewer and fewer banks are making more and more of the critical decisions about where capital is allocated, there is an increased risk that many worthy enterprises will not receive the capital needed to grow and flourish.

For years, a strength of the American banking system was the strong community and local nature of that system. Locally made decisions made by locally owned financial institutions - institutions whose economic prospects are tied to the financial health of the community they serve - played a critical role in the economic development of our Nation, and especially for our smaller communities and rural areas.

But we have moved away from that system. Directly as a result of policy changes made by Congress and regulators, banking assets are controlled by fewer and fewer institutions, and the diminishment of that locally owned and controlled capital has not benefited either businesses or consumers.

And of course most dramatically, taxpayers across the country must now realize that Senator Proxmire’s warning about the concentration of banking assets proved to be all too prescient when President Bush and Congress decided to bail out those mammoth financial institutions rather than allowing them to fail, a bailout I strongly opposed.

The trend toward increased concentration of capital was greatly accelerated in 1994 by the enactment of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Act and especially in 1999 by the enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which tore down the protective firewalls between commercial banking and Wall Street investment firms. Those firewalls had been established in the wake of the country’s last great financial crisis 80 years ago by the Banking Act of 1933, the famous reform measure also known as the Glass-Steagall Act.

Prior to Glass-Steagall, devastating financial panics had been a regular feature of our economy. But that changed with the enactment of that momentous legislation, which stabilized our banking system by implementing two key reforms. First, it established an insurance system for deposits, reassuring bank customers that their deposits were safe and thus forestalling bank runs. And second, it erected a firewall between securities underwriting and commercial banking. Financial firms had to choose which business to be in.

That firewall was a crucial part of establishing another protection, deposit insurance, because it prevented banks that accepted FDIC insured deposits from making speculative investment bets with that money.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act tore down that firewall, as well as the firewall that separated insurance from Wall Street banks, and we have seen the disastrous results of that policy. I voted against tearing down the firewall that separated Main Street from the Wall Street banks, and I did it for the same reason I voted against the Wall Street bailout – because I listened to the people of Wisconsin, who didn’t want to give Wall Street more and more power. Wall Street was gambling with the money of hardworking families, and too many members of Congress voted to let them do it. Well, I didn’t support it before, and I won’t support it now. We’ve got to get this legislation right, and protect the people of Wisconsin, and every state, from something like this happening ever again.

I was pleased to join the Senator from Washington (Ms. Cantwell) and the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain) in introducing legislation to correct that enormous mistake Congress made in passing Gramm-Leach Bliley. And I look forward to supporting an amendment to this measure based on the Cantwell-McCain-Feingold bill.

The measure before us seeks to make up for the lack of a protective firewall between the speculative investment bets made by Wall Street firms and the safety net-backed activities of commercial banking by imposing greater regulatory oversight. But we have seen just how creative financial firms can be at eluding regulation when so much profit is at stake. No amount of regulatory oversight can take the place of the legal firewall established by Glass-Steagall. When it is offered, I urge my colleagues to support Senator Cantwell’s amendment to restore that sensible protection. Rebuilding the Glass-Steagall firewall is essential in preventing another financial crisis.

But even if we restore Glass-Steagall, there are additional steps we should take to address “too big to fail” in this bill. I am pleased to be joining the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Dorgan) in offering his amendment to address the problem directly by requiring that no financial entity be permitted to become so large that its failure threatens the financial stability of the United States.

And I also look forward to supporting an amendment that will be offered by the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Kaufman) that proposes bright line limits on the size of financial institutions.

The disposition of those three proposals will go a long way in determining my vote for the final version of this measure. I very much want this body to craft a bill that can prevent the kind of crisis we experienced in the future. But the bill before us needs some work before we can make that claim.