Scarcely two weeks after the Justice Department was found to be referring volunteers in its Operation TIPS domestic-spy program to Fox TV’s “America’s Most Wanted” crime hotline, Attorney General John Ashcroft is making plans to farm out the TIPS hotline to a different private organization.
The Richmond, Va.-based nonprofit company, called the National White Collar Crime Center, confirmed Wednesday that it is discussing plans with the Justice Department to operate a hotline that would take calls from citizens that the department signs up in its planned Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) spy program. Civil libertarians are outraged by the plan to privatize the operation. “It’s troubling that the Justice Department would go out of its way to try to get around the Fourth Amendment and the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act this way,” says John Whitehead, president of the conservative Rutherford Institute.
Meanwhile, a battle is shaping up in Congress over efforts to block funding for the TIPS program entirely. Last month, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Homeland Security bill with a measure added by Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, that prohibited federal funding for programs that would have American citizens spying on each other. But an effort by Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., to do the same thing with the Senate’s version of the bill was stymied by Senate Government Operations Committee Chair Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
Lieberman, according to a member of his staff, is in favor of a limited version of Ashcroft’s TIPS program, which would only involve recruiting workers in certain industries — such as trucking, mass transit and shipping — as citizen spies. “The senator likes the idea of a program limited to certain types of workers,” says one staffer.
Rachel King, a congressional lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, says “Lieberman seems to be in communication with Ashcroft because they’re both talking about the same kind of limited program.”
Word of the Justice Department’s new privatization scheme has civil libertarians, already worried about the premise of TIPS, even more concerned about the program.
“It’s clearly an end run around the Freedom of Information Act,” says Kit Gage, president of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom and an executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild. “It doesn’t resolve any of the concerns that have been expressed about TIPS and instead creates dozens of new ones.” She notes that a private hotline not run by the federal government would be free of congressional oversight, and would not need to follow federal guidelines regarding the gathering or holding of personal data. (For example, federal investigators are supposed to avoid interfering with free speech or religious practice.) An additional concern would be the sharing of information with other agencies and organizations.
“The attorney general takes an oath to protect the Constitution and here he is doing the opposite,” says the Rutherford Institute’s Whitehead.
Significantly, the National White Collar Crime Center is a membership organization composed of state and local law-enforcement agencies, making the wide transfer of information gathered by TIPSters that much easier and more likely. Says Bob Levy of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “This means instead of one databank, there will be 70 — or 700.”
A spokesperson at the Justice Department responsible for fielding questions about TIPS says concerns about the program are overblown. “We don’t have any plans for a database,” she said. But asked what the department planned to do with taped calls about “suspicious behavior” reported by TIPS volunteers calling into the hotline, she conceded that she didn’t know how the material would be handled. As envisioned by the Justice Department, she explained, the TIPS hotline would operate much like local 911 systems, with operators routing TIPSters’ calls to “the most appropriate federal, state or local agency.”
Asked to explain how it intended to handle operation of the planned TIPS hotline, and the information it collects on people via that hotline, Ronda Ellcessor, a spokeswoman for the National White Collar Crime Center, said bluntly, “We have no information available for the public.”
The TIPS program has been under fire almost since it was first announced in January as part of President Bush’s “volunteerism initiative” in his State of the Union address. As originally proposed, the program hoped to enlist over 20 million citizen spies who would report on the suspicious behavior of their neighbors. That plan, and a 10-city test involving some 1 million citizen spies set for this month, was scrapped after critics said it resembled the kind of neighborhood spying that for years permeated East Germany and China.
A chastened Ashcroft responded to the criticism by proposing a much more limited TIPS program.
Those independent citizens who had volunteered to join the TIPS program were sent e-mail messages earlier this month by the department saying that they were no longer needed and that the planned hotline number would only be provided “through their employers” to workers in the selected industries. “Unlike other Citizen Corps programs, which invite the participation of the general public, only those who work in the trucking, maritime, shipping, and mass transit industries will be eligible to participate in this information referral service,” the mass mailing to TIPS volunteers stated. “General information about the program will continue to be available to the public; however, the TIPS hotline number will only be provided to participating industries.”
Even this more limited TIPS plan has critics worried, however, especially because Lieberman has indicated that he supports the Justice Department’s more limited plan. Lieberman ignored a request by Leahy to include a measure similar to Armey’s in the Senate’s version of the Homeland Security Bill, which is being handled by Lieberman’s Government Affairs Committee, saying it had been presented to the committee “too late” for consideration.
Leahy intends to introduce his amendment, which would ban funding for tips TIPS altogether, when the bill goes to a vote after the Senate’s summer recess. Congressional observers say its prospects for passage are 50-50 at best.
A Leahy spokesman said that reports of the new privatized hotline plan “will raise new questions in the Senate and House while leaving unanswered all the earlier ones about how tip information will be shared and stored.”
Leahy has been critical of the Justice Department, saying Ashcroft has been stonewalling Congress in its efforts to learn more about the government’s plans for Operation TIPS. “As Congress has moved toward dismantling the program, the Justice Department’s response has been not to work systematically with Congress to address concerns about the program,” the senator told Salon. “The administration’s response has been to backpedal to try to change the program’s image. The Senate hearing on this was more than a month ago and we still do not have answers to even basic questions about who would have access to these files and how they would be stored, shared and processed. In the meantime, the FBI and other agencies already receive more information than they have figured out how to handle.”
King, the ACLU lobbyist, predicts that Leahy’s amendment banning funding for TIPS will have tough sledding in the Senate. “Sen. Lieberman is against it,” she explains. She says the best chance for banning TIPS lies in a future Senate-House conference to reconcile the two houses’ versions of the Homeland Security Bill. Armey, who is not running for reelection, has vowed to make sure his ban survives that conference. The key question will be how strong Lieberman’s support is for Ashcroft’s citizen spy scheme.
A major concern about TIPS among civil libertarians is that it would encourage ordinary citizens to snoop on neighbors in ways that legitimate law-enforcement personnel are barred from doing. “For example,” says the Rutherford Institute’s Whitehead, “a meter reader or a truck driver making a delivery could come into my house and report on me because he saw a book by Nat Hentoff on my shelf. He wouldn’t need a warrant to come into my house the way an FBI agent would.”
“Of course you need to collect information, and make sure everyone understands their responsibility concerning terrorist threats,” says the National Lawyers Guild’s Gage. “But this ‘Operation Snitch’ of Ashcroft’s is something very different from that. By its very nature, Operation TIPS is likely to focus on collection of First-Amendment-protected kinds of information: some foreign-looking people criticizing the government, or some dark-skinned people practicing a strange religious rite.”
If the TIPS program does get Congress’ blessing, it will face a fierce battle in the courts. “Whether by law or by litigation, this end run around the mandate for openness and accountability by the Justice Department cannot be permitted,” says New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman (no relation). “It’s a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the law for the Justice Department to seek to avoid accountability by farming the program out to private entities.”
When John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman join forces, you can be sure of one thing: It will involve state-sponsored violence. Today, they want us to arm Syrian rebels. Though, you know, what they really wanted to call for was actually bombing the hell out of Syria, until there is freedom. They’re just taking it slow.
The Senate’s three most predictable and least credible warmongering “moderates” frequently join forces to publish joint Op-Eds or hold press conferences and the one thing they always, invariably want is for the United States to have just a little bit more war than it currently has, somewhere far away. Sure, we could draw down in Iraq … or we could listen to McCain, Lieberman and Graham and draw back up. We could draw down in Afghanistan … or we could stay the course and keep sending troops there until we win! Americans may be tired of endless war with no coherent goal, but on the other hand, “only decisive force can prevail in [whatever country John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman are talking about now].”
As the Hill recently explained in a story on how John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman were pushing for a resolution basically promising to make war with Iran, “Graham, Lieberman and McCain are considered some of the top foreign policy experts in the upper chamber,” because they always, invariably support military intervention everywhere for any reason, and that is invariably considered a sign of “seriousness” in Washington. If you don’t like waging wars everywhere, forever, you are a weird kooky hippie, and everyone laughs at you. If you believe that bombs and troops have the power to magically solve all problems, you are invited on all the Sunday shows every week to offer your sober analysis of the foreign situation.
You just never know which country these three will decide needs bombing next! One time the three amigos also took a trip to Tripoli to hang out with Moammar Gadhafi. (They invited Susan Collins along, though usually their sleepover parties are strictly “no girls allowed.”) Sadly, by April of last year, they were no longer friends with Gadhafi, and the three had decided that the United States should assassinate him. (That is not really legal but, you know, “war on terror” and “serious, muscular foreign policy” or something.)
One time Lieberman and Graham tried to hang out with a different senator and they all came up with an idea that didn’t involve bombing anyone but that made McCain mad and he yelled at them. Don’t hang out with John Kerry and try to solve climate change! Hang out with me and let’s try to convince everyone to bomb Russia or something!
Sadly, Joe Lieberman will be leaving the U.S. Senate soon, which means John McCain and Lindsey Graham will need to find a new fake-Democrat best friend to add a patina of “bipartisanship” to their endless demands for explosions and shooting and death.
No Labels, the 501(c)(4) founded and run by longtime political operatives dedicated to nonpartisan political “problem-solving” through endless moralist posturing and symbolic nonsense, sent an email to its subscribers today with the subject line “thank you.” They were not thanking me (or you), though, but Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut.
Thank you, Joe!
Lieberman apparently agreed to give some No Labels-supported bill a hearing at the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. The bill would deny salaries to members of Congress in the event that they fail to pass budgets on time, because that will definitely make the comfortable millionaires in Congress work together.
(Does the content of the budget bill matter? Like, at all? Isn’t no budget better than, I dunno, a budget that spends a zillion dollars on magic beans? Or warplanes that don’t work and might kill their pilots?)
So go thank Joe Lieberman for his leadership, on his Facebook page!
“Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress,” President Obama told the assembled members of the House and Senate in his State of the Union address last week, “and I will sign it tomorrow.”
If only it were that simple.
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a bill that prohibits legislators and federal officials from knowingly profiting off of nonpublic information related to impending legislation and regulatory decisions, looks certain to pass the Senate this week. On Monday, senators overwhelmingly approved a motion to cloture on S.2038 preventing the bill from being filibustered. But on Wednesday in the House of Representatives Reps. Tim Walz, D-Minn., and Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., demanded a straight up or down vote on a different bill, HR 1148, also known as the STOCK Act. The House bill already has 271 sponsors.
And therein lies a tale of Washington. No one in Washington favors allowing Capitol Hill insiders using non-public information to reap profits — at least not publicly. But privately, well, that’s a different story.
The Senate version of the STOCK Act differs from the House version in crucial ways. The House bill regulates the so-called political intelligence industry, which consists of lobbyists and private businesses who milk information from members of Congress and their staff and sell it to hedge funds and other investors. The House bill requires people in the political intelligence industry to register as lobbyists. The Senate bill merely calls for study of this obscure sector of the Washington economy, which is worth an estimated $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
As the Journal explained last year:
Information about what’s happening in Washington is at a premium on Wall Street these days. Government regulatory changes and economic initiatives following the 2008 financial crisis have affected numerous industries, and even minor shifts in policy can be of interest to hedge-fund managers. When the health-care bill was snaking its way through Congress in 2009, for example, hedge funds wanted to know about every twist and turn. They followed the debt-ceiling showdown over the summer just as closely.
Keen for information about what’s happening behind the scenes, hedge funds have been drilling ever deeper into the government. Thousands of political insiders are being paid by hedge funds, private-equity firms and other big investors. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, for example, is an adviser to Paulson & Co., and former Treasury Secretary John Snow works for Cerberus Capital Management. SAC Capital Advisors and Eton Park Capital Management have hired former congressional staffers.
The move to limit the scope of the STOCK Act seems to have been led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the less prominent but no less well connected Managed Funds Association. According to 2011 lobbying disclosure forms, lobbyists for both groups reached out to Congress with their clients’ concerns about the legislation.
According to Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a transparency advocacy group that lobbied for the House version of the STOCK Act, the two groups were especially concerned about the regulation of the political intelligence industry.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents some of the most powerful corporations in America and spent almost $350 million lobbying Congress over the past three years, according to OpenSecrets.org. A spokesperson for the Chamber said that the group has not taken a position on the STOCK Act.
The Managed Funds Association lists influential investment firms and banks, such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, UBS and Barclay’s Capital as “strategic partners.” The group’s senior advisors include representatives from Eton Park Capital Management, which received an insider tip about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in July 2008, as well as representatives from Paulson & Co., SAC Capital Advisors, and Soros Fund Management. A spokesperson for the Managed Funds Association declined to comment on the STOCK Act.
Whether or not these lobbying groups had a hand in the writing of the Senate bill, its provisions provide protections to the political intelligence industry that the House bill does not.
Walz’s version of the STOCK Act prohibits “any person from buying or selling any commodity for future delivery or swap while the person is in possession of material nonpublic information relating to any pending or prospective legislative action” or “material nonpublic information derived from Federal employment relating to the commodity.” It also requires political intelligence firms to register as lobbyists under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995.
The Senate version of the STOCK Act, sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., is less comprehensive. It merely prohibits any “Member of Congress and … employee of Congress” from using “any nonpublic information derived from the individual’s position as a Member of Congress or employee of Congress, or gained from performance of the individual’s duties, for personal benefit” (emphasis added). The actions of people in the political intelligence industry who use their congressional connections to sell information to the hedge funds would not be covered.
The Lieberman bill does not require political intelligence firms to register as lobbyists. It only mandates that the comptroller general and the Congressional Research Service submit studies on “the role of political intelligence in the financial markets” a year after the legislation is signed into law.
Rep. Slaughter, who has been championing the STOCK Act for five years, believes that curbing the power of the political intelligence industry is a crucial part of restoring the public’s trust in Congress.
“Our constituents didn’t send us here to line the pockets of hedge fund managers,” she has said. “If there was ever a case to show that Wall Street and Capitol Hill have become too cozy this is it, and the political intelligence industry is in desperate need of transparency, meaning they should register as lobbyists do.”
The House version of the STOCK Act got a boost from a “60 Minutes” feature on congressional insider trading last November that reported how members of Congress had used their insider’s knowledge to make profitable stock transactions. But when Republicans and Democrats rallied to support the House bill, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., suddenly balked. He canceled the mark-up by House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus, R-Ala. – a major player in the “60 Minutes” feature and one of those eager to row back from the scandal. Cantor, who came under fire himself for having made a $15,000 bet on the dollar’s decline before last year’s summer debt ceiling fight, later told CBS News that he wanted to ensure that the legislation accounted for more than just deals based on the trading of financial instruments.
After Obama’s speech, Lieberman and Cantor scrambled to protect the Senate bill.
In a colorful floor speech on Monday, Lieberman resisted amendments to his bill by invoking Thidwick the Moose, the kindhearted creature in a Dr. Seuss book who allowed so many of his fellow animals to climb on his antlers that they eventually fell off. (“Dr. Seuss,” it should be noted, was the pen name of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel, a liberal Democrat, who would probably not be amused to learn that one of his fictional creations had been conscripted in the effort to protect the paid informants of Wall Street tycoons.)
For his part, Cantor told Politico yesterday that he wanted to “strengthen” the Senate bill without changing the language that calls for the study — not regulation — of the political intelligence industry.
It’s not hard to guess why Cantor and Lieberman want to leave the political intelligence industry unregulated. According to the Sunlight Foundation’s influenceexplorer.com, they are both major beneficiaries of securities and investment firms. The House majority leader and the senator have received just under $1.4 million and $3.8 million, respectively, in campaign contributions from securities and investment firms over the course of their political careers.
In a statement released after Monday’s cloture vote, Cantor said that he is “pleased” with the Senate bill, but reiterated that he wants to have the final legislation account for more than just financial transactions based on securities exchanges. He also wants the bill to more thoroughly cover the personal finances of members of the executive branch. He said the bill did not “go far enough.”
As for regulation of the political intelligence industry, he suggested that would be going too far.
“I think that the Senate bill … speaks to the potential misuse of that kind of information and untoward activity on the part of, not Members of Congress, but others that are in the business of monitoring Washington,” he said on Tuesday at a press conference. “I think that in advocating — in putting forth a directive to get underneath that kind of activity — to really begin to determine what it is — is something that is helpful.”
If you parse Cantor’s nervous language, he is saying more time is needed to assess whether or not Congress should prohibit private interests from cashing in on insider knowledge harvested on Capitol Hill. If Cantor and Lieberman have their way, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act will ensure that some people can continue secretly trading on congressional knowledge.
Walz and Slaughter say they will file what is known as discharge petition to advance their bill this week. If a majority of the House signs the petition, the bill can immediately advance to the House floor for consideration. Whether their bill will reach President Obama’s desk is still in doubt. The hidden power of Wall Street and the hedge funds — “the political intelligence industry” — is not.
Politico gets a gold star today for writing a story that could be used by journalism professors as a textbook example of everything that is wrong with mainstream reporting on Congress. The story is about “Senate gridlock,” responsibility for which rests with “both parties.”
Here’s the first sentence:
Rival Democratic and Republican jobs bills failed in the Senate on Thursday, the latest sign of the partisan gridlock gripping Washington as Americans look for relief from high unemployment and a sagging economy.
“Partisan gridlock” is to blame for the failure of “jobs bills” from each party.
Which partisans, exactly?
Senate Democrats on Thursday came up nine votes short of the 60 needed to advance their infrastructure bill past a key procedural hurdle. The vote was 51-49, with all Republicans and two members of the Democratic caucus — Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) — voting no.
What happened is that the big jobs bill “failed” in the Senate despite receiving more than 50 votes because of the Republican tactic of effectively filibustering everything. So Democrats split the big bill into smaller bills, which have also failed because every single Republican plus independent Sen. Joe Lieberman and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson joined Republicans in refusing to invoke cloture, thus preventing the bills from actually coming to a real vote. The Republican “jobs bill” is a “jobs bill” in name only, and was presented solely so that Republicans could claim to have a “jobs bill.” Also, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are trolls who hate the Democratic Party and constantly work against its interests.
The press has helpfully enabled Republican Senate obstructionism by reporting on it as if bills “losing” despite winning 51 percent of the vote is totally normal and acceptable.
The problem, basically, is that “Republicans continue now-normalized practice of abuse of Senate procedure to block popular jobs bills because they object to raising taxes on rich people and wish to deny the president legislative victories” does not sound as objective as “Both parties block jobs bills.”
But even by the sorry standards of the mainstream press, this story is ridiculous. Both parties have jobs bills, both parties block jobs bills, and the concept of “partisan gridlock” has somehow gained sentience and agency and now works to defeat popular legislation independent of the actions and desires of actual human legislators!
Joe Lieberman is retiring from the U.S. Senate, because he’s a widely hated troll with no chance of winning another term, but before he goes he’s going to take every opportunity possible to do what he feels G-d Himself sent him to Congress to do: Annoy liberals. Today, he gives an interview to the National Review in which he lavishes praise on two Republican presidential candidates.
Lieberman, the “model purple senator” and avowed champion of moderation, is surely praising centrist Republican Jon Huntsman and pragmatic former blue-state governor Mitt Romney, right? Nope. Lieberman instead has kind words for Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, the 2012 race’s two most outspoken conservatives.
Why does Joe Lieberman, former Democratic candidate for vice president, like Bachmann and Perry so much? (I mean besides because those two are the ones who inspire the more liberal fear and loathing?) Because Bachmann and Perry share Joe Lieberman’s love of constant sanctimonious religious moralizing, of course.
Lieberman respects Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, two Republican presidential contenders who have spoken up about their faith on the trail. “I know this got controversial recently, with Governor Perry and Congresswoman Bachmann. But they didn’t give up their First Amendment right to free expression and freedom of religion when they decided to run for president,” he says. “I like it when a candidate, if they feel comfortable, talks about their faith. It’s very interesting to me; it tells me more about the candidate, giving me one more factor to evaluate about what kind of president they would be.”
“Others may be turned off by it, even by the very fact that you’re talking about it, or the way you’re articulating it,” Lieberman says. “That’s the risk you take.” But he emphasizes that while some may find Perry’s public prayers troubling, or Bachmann’s Christian declarations strange, many Americans find such words “reassuring.” In this sense, he urges all politicians, if they are so inclined, to speak up, even if they are not religious experts, in order to make politics more hospitable to religious discussions.
Yes, a lot of work still needs to be done to make politics more hospitable to constant pious invocations of The Lord. It is a good thing Joe Lieberman is standing up for the First Amendment right of all politicians everywhere to be an outspoken evangelical Christian who uses religious arguments to justify political decisions.
“This is classic America,” Lieberman says. “The Constitution promises freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. The whole history of the country is intertwined with religion. The founding documents are premised on a world view, actually a very creationist world view.” Since then, “We have found a way to invite religion into the public square without pushing all but one religion out. It’s remarkable.”
Classic America.
The Constitution actually “promises” that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” which is arguably closer to “freedom from religion” than the other way around, but that’s splitting hairs. What’s important is that we all agree that the Constitution is “creationist” (?!) and Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are Classic America.
(Does Joe Lieberman know that there are actually a couple members of a religious minority in the GOP race, by the way? Wouldn’t the Mormon candidates be a better example of America “inviting religions into the public square without pushing all but one religion out” than the dominionist Protestants?)
John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman (Credit: AP) 
Inside traders (Credit: AP/Reuters) 
Sen. Ben Nelson and Sen. Joe Lieberman (Credit: AP/Reuters) 
Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sen. Joe Lieberman 
