To hear him tell it, Rep. Jamie Raskin is running to be the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to protect democracy.
“We are in the fight of our lives. The stakes have gone up since the election,” he wrote to his fellow Democrats this week. With Donald Trump in the White House, he and House Democrats as a whole were duty bound to “defend our nation against tyranny” and to “stand in the breach to defend the principles and institutions of constitutional democracy.”
“We dare not fail,” he warned.
The only problem is, they already did — and they did so in large part thanks to Raskin himself, a longtime progressive legislator who earlier this year cast the crucial vote that killed a surveillance reform and handed the incoming president the exact kind of tyrannical powers he now says he will devote himself to resisting.
The April 2024 episode concerned a set of proposed reforms to the “backdoor search” loophole in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) law that has allowed agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI to read Americans’ private messages for years without the constitutionally required nuisance of getting a warrant. Privacy and civil liberties advocates spent more than a decade trying to get rid of the wildly abused provision, which lets government agencies get away with this intrusion as long as they do it with communications that were “incidentally” collected — meaning, that were gathered and stored after an American talked to a foreigner, whom US agencies can freely spy on without a warrant.
This past April provided an ideal chance to finally end this practice. Trump’s outrage at the FBI surveillance of his 2016 presidential campaign produced an unlikely coalition…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
