Last July, many of those surveillance techniques were codified into law as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA). In fact, according to the Inspectors General report, "this legislation gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications" than the warrantless surveillance operations had. Yet despite this increased power, congressional oversight committees have recently discovered that the agency has been over-collecting on the domestic communications of Americans, thus even exceeding the excessive reach granted them by the FAA.

I am an author and journalist specializing in national security issues and terrorism, and often communicate with parties in the Middle East as part of my work. Because of concerns that my communications might have been monitored, in early 2006, shortly after NSA's warrantless surveillance program was revealed by the New York Times, I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NSA that argued that the program was illegal and should be shut down. We prevailed in federal district court, with Judge Anna Diggs Taylor finding that President Bush had violated both the law and the Constitution, but lost on the government's appeal when the court ruled the plaintiffs could not prove that they were personally victims of the secret eavesdropping program. In a decision worthy of Lewis Carroll, the appeals court held both that the government could refuse to confirm or deny whether it had monitored plaintiffs' communications and that plaintiffs could not challenge the constitutionality of the program unless they could show that their communications had been monitored. A dissenting judge pointed out that the court's decision was inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent and would effectively render the program unreviewable by the courts.

On Wednesday, the ACLU will once again appear in federal court, this time in a separate lawsuit charging that the new FAA statute is unconstitutional. The ACLU is right. While the FAA prohibits the agency from intentionally "targeting" people within the U.S., it places virtually no restrictions on the targeting of people outside the U.S. even if those targets are communicating with U.S. citizens and residents. The law essentially allows the agency virtually unfettered access to the international communications of innocent Americans in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Also troublesome is the fact that the FAA emasculates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the one independent check and balance between the agency and the American public. Originally established as a response to the discovery by Congress in the mid-1970s that the NSA had been illegally eavesdropping domestically for decades, the FISA court required the government to show that there was probable cause to believe that its surveillance target was an agent of a foreign government or terrorist group in order to obtain a necessary warrant. But the new law does away with this requirement, and now the NSA does not even have to identify the targets of its surveillance at all as long as it is targeting people outside the U.S., leaving the agency free, for example, to target human rights activists or media organizations overseas, even if they are communicating with family or editors back in the U.S. As former NSA "voice interceptor" Adrienne Kinne told me in my book, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," the agency targeted both groups during the Bush administration, including eavesdropping on intimate bedroom conversations.

Further removing the FISA court from any meaningful role, the new law even gags the judges, prohibiting them from asking the government who, what, where or why it is launching any particular surveillance program.

Finally, the FAA fails to place any meaningful limitations on the NSA's retention of phone calls, e-mail and other communications that it collects -- necessitating the colossal data storage mausoleums it is now building. The agency need only show that it has "reasonably designed" procedures to minimize information retention, which must give way to the NSA's need "to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information." And because "foreign intelligence" is very broadly defined, this allows the NSA to conduct immense data mining operations within those centers.

Among the most striking discoveries to come out of the Inspectors General report was that, despite the enormous expansion of the NSA's capabilities, including turning its giant ear inward for the first time in three decades, no one could point to any significant counterterrorism success. Instead, it warned that while the agency had little difficulty collecting vast amounts of data, the trouble was analyzing it all. It was a problem akin to Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood. In this "labyrinth of letters," Borges wrote, "there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences." In addition to the civil liberties and constitutional defects in the new surveillance law, another compelling argument against it is that it only increases the amount of "senseless cacophonies" in America's Library of Babel.

Though we can’t get anything like a complete picture because so much is still classified, the report says that the program exceeded the warrantless wiretapping we already knew about. The IGs use the term “President’s Surveillance Program” to encompass the full monitoring effort.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has a good run-down of key nuggets from the report. Most notably, at the urging of Vice President Cheney, President Bush recertified the program without the consent of the Department of Justice, outraging Deputy Attorney General James Comey. In fact, for two years, no one in the DOJ who ranked below deputy attorney general even knew about the program, with one exception: John Yoo, who was somewhat mysteriously tasked with writing legal opinions in defense of the operation. (Indeed, Ambinder says, it's not even clear that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft knew that Yoo was providing the department's legal opinions on the program.)

The surveillance operation appears to have been quite large, because random sampling was used, rather than case-by-case examination, to make sure that it was monitoring appropriately suspicious targets. Senior intelligence officials were unsure whether the surveillance had led to any arrests, but the IGs seem to believe it did.

President Obama probably isn’t thrilled that the compromise, for which he caught so much flak, hasn’t put the issue to bed. Judging by his performance thus far on sensitive constitutional and national security issues, we can probably expect him to try to avoid getting too involved in the impact of this report, though it may affect some terrorism prosecutions.

The most intensely fought civil liberties battle of 2008 -- the one waged over FISA and telecom immunity -- ended the way most similar battles of the last eight years have: with total defeat for civil libertarians. Even before Democrats were handed control of Congress at the beginning of 2007, the Bush administration had been demanding legislation to legalize its illegal warrantless NSA eavesdropping program and to retroactively immunize the telecom industry for its participation in those programs. Yet even with Bill Frist and Denny Hastert in control of the Congress, the administration couldn't get its way.

Not even the most cynical political observer would have believed that it was the ascension of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that would be the necessary catalyst for satisfying Bush's most audacious demands, concerning his most brazenly illegal actions. If anything, hopes were high that Democratic control of Congress would entail a legislative halt to warrantless eavesdropping or, at the very least, some meaningful investigation and disclosure -- what we once charmingly called "oversight" -- regarding what Bush's domestic spying had really entailed. After all, the NSA program was the purified embodiment of the most radical attributes of a radical regime -- pure lawlessness, absolute secrecy, a Stasi-like fixation on domestic surveillance. It was widely assumed, even among embittered cynics, that the new Democratic leadership in Congress would not use their newfound control to protect and endorse these abuses.

Yet in July 2008, there stood Pelosi and Reid, leading their caucuses as they stamped their imprimatur of approval on Bush's spying programs. The so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed with virtually unanimous GOP and substantial Democratic support, including the entire top level of the House Democratic leadership. It legalized vast new categories of warrantless eavesdropping and endowed telecoms with full immunity for prior surveillance lawbreaking. Most important, it ensured a permanent and harmless end to what appeared to be the devastating scandal that exploded in 2005 when the New York Times revealed to the country that the Bush administration was spying on Americans illegally, without warrants of any kind.

With passage of the Act, Democrats delivered to the Bush administration everything it wanted -- and more. GOP Sen. Kit Bond actually taunted the Democrats in the Times for giving away the store: "I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get." Making matters much worse, by delivering this massive gift to the White House, the House undid one of its very few good deeds since taking over in 2006: its galvanizing February 2008 refusal to succumb to Bush's rank fear-mongering by allowing "The Protect America Act" to expire instead of following the Senate's lead in making it permanent.

Adding the final insult to this constitutional injury, Barack Obama infamously violated his emphatic pledge, made during the Democratic primary, to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity. With the Democratic nomination fully secured, Obama blithely tossed that commitment aside, instead joining his party's leadership in voting for cloture on the bill -- the opposite of a filibuster -- and then in favor of the bill itself. The photographs of the celebratory, bipartisan signing ceremony that followed at the White House -- where an understandably jubilant George Bush and Dick Cheney were joined by a grinning Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and Steny Hoyer -- was the vivid, wretched symbol of what, in 2008, became the fully bipartisan assault on America's basic constitutional guarantees and form of government.

The FISA fight was the destructive template that drove virtually every other civil liberties battle of the last year. Time and again, Democrats failed to deliver on a single promise. They failed to overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate to restore habeas corpus, which had been partially abolished in 2006 as a result of the Military Commissions Act that passed with substantial Democratic support and wholesale Democratic passivity. Notably, while Senate Democrats, when in the minority, never even considered a filibuster to block the Military Commissions Act, it was simply assumed that the GOP, when it was in the minority, would filibuster in order to prevent passage of the Habeas Restoration Act. And filibuster they did.

A similar scenario played out with the attempt in February to redress America's torture crisis by enacting an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act compelling all government agencies, including the CIA, to comply with the Army Field Manual when interrogating detainees. The most immediate effect of such a law would have been to impose an absolute ban on the use of waterboarding, along with any other coercive tactics -- torture techniques -- which the Manual does not explicitly authorize.

Knowing that the president would veto the bill, the GOP allowed a floor vote on the Army Field Manual amendment. Signaling what would be his year-long, soul-selling captivity to the far right of his party, John McCain -- despite years of parading around as a righteous opponent of torture -- voted against the torture ban. The bill passed both houses largely along party lines, President Bush vetoed it as promised, and the House then failed to override the veto. The path taken was slightly different, but the outcome was the same: total failure in reining in Bush's abuses. Indeed, by the end of 2008, civil libertarians could point to many defeats suffered in the Democratic-controlled Congress, but not a single victory.

The fate of civil liberties in the judiciary was much more mixed, punctuated with several significant victories. Undoubtedly the most important win was the Supreme Court's June decision in the Boumediene case, which struck down as unconstitutional one of the worst constitutional assaults of the Bush era: Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act, which had purported to abolish habeas corpus for Guantánamo detainees and prohibited them from challenging their detention in a federal court.

The Court ruled, by a precarious 5-4 margin, that Guantánamo detainees could not constitutionally be denied the right to have their detentions reviewed by an American federal court. That seminal ruling paid quick dividends for some of the detainees. Last month, a Bush 43 federal judge -- the same jurist who had originally upheld the Act's abolition of habeas review for Guantánamo detainees and was ultimately reversed by the Boumediene court -- conducted a habeas hearing for six Algerian-Bosnian detainees imprisoned without charges at Guantánamo for the last six years.

The judge concluded that the Bush administration had no credible evidence to justify the detention of five out of the six detainees and thus ordered them released immediately. Four of the five are now back in Bosnia, while the fifth awaits release. Without the Boumediene ruling, the truly heinous provisions of the Military Commissions Act would still be operative and would continue to empower the government to hold those detainees -- along with dozens if not hundreds of others -- indefinitely and without charges. Boumediene is one of the few civil liberties bright spots of this decade.

The Bush administration, also earlier this year, suffered another judicial defeat at the hands of a very conservative, Bush 43-appointed federal judge, when that judge emphatically rejected the administration's claim that Bush aides Harriet Miers (former White House counsel) and Josh Bolten (former White House chief of staff) are entitled to absolute immunity from Congressional subpoenas. That dispute, which arose from the House Judiciary Committee's efforts to investigate the notorious firing of nine U.S. attorneys, dispensed with one of the administration's most radical tools -- a claim of absolute, unconstitutional executive privilege -- for shielding itself from accountability.

One of the most potentially damaging judicial developments of the year was a horrendous ruling issued in July by the conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. The al-Marri court actually upheld the president's claimed authority to detain legal residents and even U.S. citizens in a military prison as "enemy combatants," rather than charge them in a civilian court with a crime. But the damage done by that ruling was mitigated substantially when the U.S. Supreme Court announced just two weeks ago that it has agreed to review the al-Marri ruling, and civil libertarians are cautiously optimistic that the Court will likely reverse it.

For the last seven years, Democrats have repeatedly cited GOP political dominance to excuse their wholesale failures to limit, let alone reverse, the devastating war waged by the Bush administration on America's core liberties and form of government. With a new Democratic president and large majorities in both Congressional houses, those excuses will no longer be so expedient. As dark and depressing as these last seven years have been for civil libertarians, culminating in an almost entirely grim 2008, there is no question that the Obama administration and the Democrats generally now possess the power to reverse these abuses and restore our national political values. But as the events of the last 12 months conclusively demonstrate, there are substantial questions as to whether they have the will to do so.

A cornerstone case in this legal battle is that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc., an Oregon-based charity group, in which there appears to be the most known evidence of such spying. And, as it turns out, one need look no further than the FBI's official Web site to find irrefutable evidence that surveillance of the group occurred -- and that the government's persistent claims of maintaining secrecy about it have been spurious.

I am an attorney on the legal team representing Al-Haramain and two lawyers, Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, who represented Al-Haramain in 2004 when the FBI was investigating the charity to determine whether it should be declared a terrorist organization. Al-Haramain, Belew and Ghafoor have sued the Bush administration for warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone conversations between Belew and Ghafoor and one of Al-Haramain's directors during March and April 2004.


As I recounted in Salon in July, lawyers for the Bush administration have gone to extreme and even bizarre lengths in their attempts to prevent the federal courts from determining the legality of the president's warrantless electronic surveillance program. A key problem for them is a top-secret document that the Treasury Department accidentally disclosed to Al-Haramain's lawyers in 2004. The document confirmed the surveillance of our clients, and thus, we contend, their legal standing to sue as victims of the program.

The government lawyers want to prevent our legal team from using the document as evidence in the case -- in fact, they want to erase the document from all memory. Belew and Ghafoor had to return their copies of the document to the FBI, and the Bush lawyers have urged the courts not to allow us even to describe its contents in confidential court filings. Again, they have argued that U.S. national security hangs in the balance.

In the most recent ruling in the case, on July 2, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said we could not use the document until we first made a preliminary showing of electronic surveillance using only nonclassified information. Judge Walker gave us 30 days to restructure our complaint in an attempt to make that preliminary showing.

Now, we have done exactly that. For many months, we had been gathering public information about the warrantless surveillance program in general and the 2004 investigation of Al-Haramain in particular, including congressional testimony and speeches by various public officials in which, bit by bit, they have revealed key information in surprising detail. By the time of Judge Walker's July 2 ruling, we had assembled the following timeline, based solely on public information and Belew's and Ghafoor's recollections of the 2004 telephone conversations:

In February 2004, upon the Treasury Department's preliminary designation of Al-Haramain as a terrorist organization, the FBI began investigating Al-Haramain, ostensibly for currency and tax law violations. During the following weeks, Belew and Ghafoor had numerous telephone conversations with an Al-Haramain director in which they discussed, among other things, Ghafoor's representation of three persons -- a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden's and two clerics whom bin Laden claimed had inspired him -- in a lawsuit filed by victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In September 2004, upon formally declaring Al-Haramain to be a terrorist organization, the Treasury Department issued a press release claiming, for the first time, that Al-Haramain had "direct links" with Osama bin Laden. The obvious inference is that the government had relied on electronic surveillance of the telephone conversations -- as confirmed by the top-secret document later accidentally disclosed -- to tie Al-Haramain to Osama bin Laden.

But since the July 2 ruling, we have discovered additional evidence of surveillance of our clients. In fall 2007, FBI deputy director John Pistole gave a speech at a conference of bankers and lawyers in which Pistole thanked the bankers for their cooperation in giving the FBI financial records for terrorist financing investigations, and then went on to describe the FBI's 2004 investigation of Al-Haramain. In the text of the speech -- which is posted on the FBI's Web site -- Pistole explicitly admitted that the FBI had used "surveillance" among other "investigative tools" in the Al-Haramain investigation, noting that "it was the financial evidence that provided justification for the initial [terrorist] designation" in February 2004.

Remarkably, Pistole made these public statements months after Bush's lawyers had told the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (in mid-2007) that whether Al-Haramain was surveilled in 2004 -- with wiretapping or in any other way -- is a state secret that the government can neither confirm nor deny. As defense counsel Thomas Bondy put it then: "It is absolutely clear and undisputed that the world at large, the whole world, does not know whether or not any of the plaintiffs were surveilled."

Pistole's speech tells us not only that the government surveilled Al-Haramain but that the government relied on financial information for Al-Haramain's initial terrorist designation in February 2004 and then relied on surveillance -- undoubtedly including the telephone conversations intercepted by the National Security Agency in March and April -- later to issue the formal terrorist designation purporting to tie Al-Haramain to bin Laden.

Judge Walker will next decide, in a hearing scheduled for Friday, what procedures he will follow in deciding whether we have presented enough nonclassified information to go forward with the lawsuit. For purposes of that decision, Pistole's speech certainly makes it difficult for Bush's lawyers to claim with any credibility that it remains a secret vital to U.S. national security whether Al-Haramain was surveilled under Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.

Earlier this month, Rasmussen Reports announced the humiliating finding that "the percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits [9 percent] for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history." That extremely negative view of Congress cuts across partisan and ideological lines, as only small percentages of Democrats (13 percent), Republicans (8 percent) and independents (3 percent) believe that Congress is doing an "excellent" or even a "good" job. Perhaps most remarkable, some polls -- such as one from Fox News last month -- reveal that the Democratic-led Congress is actually more unpopular among Democrats than among Republicans, with 23 percent of Republicans approving of Congress compared with only 18 percent of Democrats. One would be hard-pressed to find a time in modern American history, if such a time exists at all, when a Congress was more unpopular among the party that controls it than among voters from the opposition party.

That a Democratic Congress is so deeply unpopular even among Democrats may be historically unusual, but it is hardly surprising or difficult to understand. On key issue after key issue, it is the Bush White House and Republican caucus that have received virtually everything they wanted from Congress, while the base of the Democratic Party has received virtually nothing other than disappointment and an overt repudiation of its agenda. Since the American people gave them control of Congress, the Democrats in Congress have given the country the following:

Unlimited and unconditional funding for the Iraq war. Vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and retroactive amnesty for their telecom donors -- measures the administration tried, but failed, to obtain from the GOP Congress. The ability to ignore congressional subpoenas with utter impunity. A resolution formally decreeing parts of the Iranian government to be a "terrorist organization." A failure to outlaw waterboarding, to apply the torture ban to the CIA, to restore the habeas corpus rights abolished by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to impose the requirement of congressional approval before President Bush can attack Iran. Confirmation of highly controversial Bush nominees, including Michael Mukasey as attorney general even after he embraced the most radical Bush theories of executive power and repeatedly refused to say that waterboarding was torture.

Other than (arguably) the resignation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and a very modest increase in the minimum wage (enacted in the first month after Democrats took control of Congress), one is hard-pressed to identify a single event or issue since November 2006 that would have been meaningfully different had the GOP retained control of Congress. The Congress of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi has been every bit as passive, impotent and complicit as the Congress of Bill Frist and Denny Hastert was. Worse, in contrast to the Frist/Hastert-led Congress, which at least had the excuse that it enabled a wartime president from its own party while he enjoyed high approval ratings, the Reid/Pelosi Congress has capitulated to every presidential whim despite an "opposition party" president who is now one of the most unpopular in modern American history. It's difficult to imagine how even Reid and Pelosi themselves could contest the claim that the Democratic-led Congress, from the perspective of Democratic voters, has been a profound failure.

With those depressing facts assembled, the only question worth asking among those who are so dissatisfied with congressional Democrats is this: What can be done to change this conduct? As proved by the 2006 midterm elections -- which the Democrats dominated in a historically lopsided manner -- mindlessly electing more Democrats to Congress will not improve anything. Such uncritical support for the party is actually likely to have the opposite effect. It's axiomatic that rewarding politicians -- which is what will happen if congressional Democrats end up with more seats and greater control after 2008 than they had after 2006 -- only ensures that they will continue the same behavior. If, after spending two years accommodating one extremist policy after the next favored by the right, congressional Democrats become further entrenched in their power by winning even more seats, what would one expect them to do other than conclude that this approach works and therefore continue to pursue it?

If simply voting for more Democrats will achieve nothing in the way of meaningful change, what, if anything, will? At minimum, two steps are required to begin to influence Democratic leaders to change course: 1) Impose a real political price that they must pay when they capitulate to -- or actively embrace -- the right's agenda and ignore the political values of their base, and 2) decrease the power and influence of the conservative "Blue Dog" contingent within the Democratic caucus, who have proved excessively willing to accommodate the excesses of the Bush administration, by selecting their members for defeat and removing them from office. And that means running progressive challengers against them in primaries, or targeting them with critical ads, even if doing so, in isolated cases, risks the loss of a Democratic seat in Congress.

Those goals are the basis of the recent campaign that I helped launch -- along with progressive bloggers such as Jane Hamsher and the Blue America PAC -- to target selected Democratic members of Congress who have been responsible for some of the worst acts of complicity and capitulation. The campaign we launched, which raised over $350,000 in a very short time largely from dissatisfied progressives, has run multimedia ads criticizing the likes of Blue Dog Rep. Chris Carney and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, despite the fact that neither has a primary challenger and despite the fact that Carney is quite vulnerable in his reelection effort this year.

The Blue America campaign also ran ads against Blue Dog Rep. John Barrow in Georgia, who did have a progressive primary challenger, state Sen. Regina Thomas. It was always clear that Barrow was highly likely to defeat Thomas in the primary. It was also clear that if Thomas beat the odds and won the primary, her chances of beating the Republican in the general election was far less than the chances of the more conservative and incumbent Barrow, who himself had to fight hard to win reelection in 2006. Knowing that a Barrow defeat in the primary might make a Republican win more likely in November, Blue America nonetheless ran ads against him. We believed that even if Barrow prevailed in his primary (as he ultimately did), the ad campaign against him would undermine his reputation in his district and could thus force Barrow, the Blue Dog caucus and the Democratic leadership to devote far more resources to defending his seat for November. That is what it means to attach a price to trampling on the political values of Democratic supporters.

Barrow and the two other two solidly pro-war Democrats targeted -- Carney and Hoyer -- were not merely supporters, but vocal and active leaders, of the effort to have Congress give to George W. Bush the sweeping new warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom immunity Bush demanded. Why would any progressive want to see that behavior rewarded by having those three safely reelected? Given the certainty of Democratic control under all circumstances, what possible benefit comes from their seamless return to power?

Many progressives and other Democratic supporters are reflexively opposed to any conduct that might result in the defeat of even a single, relatively inconsequential Democratic member of Congress or the transfer of even a single district to GOP control. No matter how dissatisfied such individuals might be with the Democratic Congress, they are unwilling to do anything different to change what they claim to find so unsatisfactory. Even though uncritically cheering on any and every candidate with a "D" after his or her name has resulted in virtually nothing positive -- and much that is negative -- many progressives continue, rather bafflingly and stubbornly, to insist that if they just keep doing the same thing (cheering for the election of more and more Democrats), then somehow, someday, something different might occur. But, as the cliché teaches, repeatedly engaging in the same conduct and expecting different results is the very definition of foolishness.

As foolish as it is, this intense aversion to jeopardizing any Democratic incumbents might be considered rational if doing so carried the risk of restoring Republican control of Congress. But there is no such risk, and there will be none for the foreseeable future. No matter what happens, the Democrats, by all accounts, are going to control both houses of Congress after the 2008 election. Their margin in the House, which is currently 31 seats, will, by even the most conservative estimates, increase to at least 50 seats. No advertising campaign or activist group could possibly swing control of Congress to the Republicans this year, and -- given the Brezhnev-era-like reelection rates for incumbents in America -- it is extremely unlikely that the House will be controlled by anyone other than Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi for years to come.

The critical question, then, is not who will control Congress. The Democrats will. That is a given. The vital question is what they will do with that control -- specifically, will they continue to maintain and increase their own power by accommodating the right, or will they be more responsive, accountable and attentive to the political values of their base?

As long as they know that progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do, then it will only be rational for congressional Democrats to ignore progressives and move as far to the right as they can. With the blind, unconditional support of Democrats securely in their back pocket, Democratic leaders will quite rationally conclude that the optimal way to increase their own power, to transform more Republican districts into Blue Dog Democratic seats, and thereby make themselves more secure in their leadership positions, is to move their caucus to the right. Because the principal concern of Democratic leaders is to maintain and increase their own power, they will always do what they perceive is most effective in achieving that goal, which right now means moving their caucus to the right to protect their Blue Dogs and elect new ones.

That is precisely what has happened over the past two years. It is why a functional right-wing majority has dominated the House notwithstanding the change of party control -- and the change in direction -- that American voters thought they were mandating in 2006. As progressive activist Matt Stoller put it, "Blue Dogs are the swing voting block in the House, they are self-described conservatives, and they are perfectly willing to use their status on every action considered by the House." The more the Democratic leadership accommodates the Blue Dog caucus -- the more their power relies upon expanding their numbers through the increase of Blue Dog seats -- the less relevant will be the question of which party controls Congress.

The linchpin for that destructive strategy is uncritical progressive support for congressional Democrats. That is what ensures that Democratic leaders will continue to pursue a rightward-moving strategy as the key to consolidating their own power. Right now, when it comes time to decide whether to capitulate to the demands of the right, Beltway Democrats think: "If we capitulate, that is one less issue the GOP can use to harm our Blue Dogs." And they have no countervailing consideration to weigh against that, because they perceive -- accurately -- that there is no cost to capitulating, only benefits from doing so, because progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do. That is the strategic calculus that must change if the behavior of Democrats in Congress is to change.

Democratic leaders must learn that they cannot increase their majority in Congress by trampling on the political values of their own base. It's crucial that they understand that they will not gain seats, but will lose seats, the more they accommodate the right's agenda. That, in turn, will happen only if progressives target for defeat selected members of the Democratic caucus who are responsible for that right-wing-enabling behavior. That is the only way to eliminate the incentive for the Democratic leadership to continue to follow the strategy of increasing their own power by mimicking Republicans. Those who disagree with that -- who object that it is oh-so-terrible to cause the defeat of any Democratic incumbents, no matter how complicit and irrelevant -- have the responsibility to identify what alternative strategy they think should be pursued in order to alter the behavior of the Democratic Party in Congress.

Defeating scattered, individual Democratic incumbents -- even if it means that a Republican wins -- will result in nothing negative. What is the difference -- specifically -- if Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel have a 43-seat margin of control rather than a 56-seat margin? There is no difference. Far more important than the size of the Democrats' majority is the question of who is dominating and controlling that majority.

At the moment, the Blue Dog contingent is dominant in the Democratic caucus and drives much of what the caucus does. The more Blue Dogs there are in the Democratic caucus, the more dominant they will be. Changing the face of Congress requires, first and foremost, that the face of the Democratic caucus change, that its strategic incentive scheme be altered. Until progressives make Democratic leaders pay a price for their allegiance to the right's agenda -- the only price that politicians recognize: having their power diminished and jeopardized -- then none of this will change. It will only continue to worsen.