John Nichols | The Nation

Former senator Russ Feingold. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Russ Feingold is no longer in the US Senate.

And that is unfortunate.

No one took more seriously the duty to defend privacy rights than the civil libertarian senator from Wisconsin, who served for the better part of two decades as the essential member of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee—and who cast the only Senate vote against the Patriot Act because of the threat he recognized to the guarantees outline in the Fourth Amendment.

But with the report by The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA has been tracking every call by Verizon business customers, and with The Washington Post report that a National Security Agency program took e-mails and other information from companies that included “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, it is vital that the new Feingolds in the Senate start to make a lot more noise.

With revelations that "open the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants," engagd members of the House and Senate know that congressional response has to be far more aggressive, as past failures by the House and Senate to provide proper oversight has left the Fourth Amendment at best vulnerable and at worst shredded.

Some senators think that’s acceptable. Indeed, Senator Lindsay Graham, R-SC, has declared himself “glad” that the National Security Agency is obtaining the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. And key Democrats, such as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-California, have adopted a “what’s-the-big-deal?” stance that says the spying is old news that senators should have been aware of.

But many of the sharpest and most engaged members of the chamber are rejecting that assessment. Among those stepping up today were Democrats and Republicans who have histories of expressing concern about abuses of privacy rights. In the House, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Michigan Democrat John Conyers, Jr., and the ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, and the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, Virginia Democrat Robert C. "Bobby" Scott moved fast to declare: "The recent revelation that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved the blanket and ongoing collection of telephone records -- including those of everyday Americans with absolutely no ties to terrorism -- is highly problematic and reveals serious flaws in the scope and application of the USA PATRIOT Act. We believe this type of program is far too broad and is inconsistent with our Nation's founding principles. We cannot defeat terrorism by compromising our commitment to our civil rights and liberties."

They're calling for immediate hearings.

But the real action is likely to be in the Senate.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has become increasingly outspoken on civil liberties issues, was quick to respond to the Greenwald story, saying: "The American people have a right to know whether their government thinks that the sweeping, dragnet surveillance that has been alleged in this story is allowed under the law and whether it is actually being conducted."

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who has led the fight to declassify secret rulings by so-called FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts, was even more pointed in his response to the revelations.

“This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans’ privacy. I have had significant concerns about the intelligence community over-collecting information about Americans’ telephone calls, emails, and other records and that is why I voted against the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act provisions in 2011 and the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act just six months ago,” says Merkley. “This bulk data collection is being done under interpretations of the law that have been kept secret from the public. Significant FISA court opinions that determine the scope of our laws should be declassified. Can the FBI or the NSA really claim that they need data scooped up on tens of millions of Americans?”

Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who voted against the Patriot Act as a member of the House, made no bones about his objections to Obama-era extensions of a domestic surveillance program that has swept up millions of telephone records on calls by Americans who were not suspected of any wrongdoing.

“The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Congress must address this issue and protect the constitutional rights of the American people,” said Sanders. “While we must aggressively pursue international terrorists and all of those who would do us harm, we must do it in a way that protects the Constitution and the civil liberties which make us proud to be Americans.”

The senator cut the current administration no slack. But he put the broad debate over the NSA phone sweeps—which Senate Intelligence Committee leaders say have been going on since 2007—in perspective.

“As one of the few members of Congress who consistently voted against the Patriot Act, I expressed concern at the time of passage that it gave the government far too much power to spy on innocent United State citizens and provided for very little oversight or disclosure,” said Sanders. “Unfortunately, what I said turned out to be exactly true.”

Their expressions of concern have been echoed by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who termed the NSA activities an “astounding assault on the Constitution.”

Paul argues that “If the President and Congress would obey the Fourth Amendment we all swore to uphold, this new shocking revelation that the government is now spying on citizens’ phone data en masse would never have happened.”

The key there is the reference to Congress. The inconvenient truth is that presidents, be they Republicans or Democrats, tend to claim the constitutional space that is afforded them by the House and Senate.

That’s no excuse for the actions of George Bush or Barack Obama. But it is a fact that Congress has done a lousy job of checking and balancing successive administrations who it comes to privacy concerns.

In May, 2011, a complicated set of votes were held on extension of the Patriot Act. Amendments that would have protected privacy rights were defeated and the final vote saw just twenty-three senators—eighteen Democrats including Merkley, independent Sanders and four Republicans including Paul—vote “no.”

That’s way better than the one “no” vote Feingold cast in 2001.

But it is way short of what is needed to defend privacy rights.

With the latest revelation, Congress has an opportunity to do what Feingold begged the House and especially the Senate to do from 2001 on: provide meaningful oversight and real checks and balances on surveillance initiatives that are clearly at odds with a Fourth Amendment protection that says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”

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Feingold warned us five years ago that Congress, through its inaction and its explicit authorizations of unchecked surveillance in the Patriot Act and rewrites of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, ushered in “one of the greatest intrusions, potentially, on the rights of Americans protected under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution in the history of our country.”

Ideally, the pair of former senators who once expressed deep concerns about abuses of privacy rights and now serve as president and vice president would take the lead in addressing abuses.

But it is an understanding that the executive branch rarely surrenders authority that had been ceded to it that led the founders to separate the powers of the federal government. They wanted to assure that, when the executive branch did not act properly, the legislative branch could step up.

It is time for Congress to recognize that Feingold was right in his warning. The potential for for intrusions on the rights of Americans protected under the Fourth Amendment has been realized.

And it must be addressed by a Congress that understands and embraces its role as a defender of the Constitution to which every member swears an oath.

John Nichols is the author (with Robert W. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it details how the collapse of journalism and the rise of big-money politics threatens to turn our democracy into a dollarocracy.

Frank Lautenberg speaks on Hurricane Sandy, December 5, 2012. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Frank Lautenberg, the son of a Paterson, New Jersey, silk mill worker and the last World War II veteran serving in the US Senate, took his cues from another political time: a time when liberals were bold and unapologetic, a time when it was understood that government could and should do great things.

One of the few members of Congress who could remember listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio and going to college on the initial GI Bill, Lautenberg served five terms in the US Senate as a champion of great big infrastructure investments—especially for Amtrak and urban public transportation—great big environmental regulations, great big consumer protections and great big investigations of wrongdoing by Wall Street.

It can fairly be said that the New Jersey senator, who died Monday at age 89, kept the New Deal flame lit. Indeed, one of his last major pieces of legislation proposed to renew one of FDR’s greatest legacies: the Works Progress Administration, which provided public-works employment for millions of Americans during the Great Depression that defined Lautenberg’s youth.

When he introduced his “21st Century WPA Act” two years ago, Lautenberg declared, “Our economy will not recover and our nation will not move forward until we put jobs first. Establishing a 21st Century Works Progress Administration would immediately put Americans to work rebuilding our nation and strengthening our communities. Across the country, we continue to benefit from projects completed under President Roosevelt’s WPA, which employed more than three million Americans during a time of great need. A 21st Century WPA would tackle our nation’s job crisis head-on and accelerate our economic recovery.”

A self-made millionaire who paid his own way into politics at age 58, Lautenberg never forgot that government programs lifted him out of poverty. And he refused to bend to the austerity fantasies of official Washington. Indeed, he attacked them with gusto, especially after returning to the Senate in 2003 following a bizarre turn of political events in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

First elected to the Senate in 1982, Lautenberg retired in 2000, saying he was sick of the money chase required to fund big-budget campaigns. Two years later, New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, a more centrist Democrat with whom Lautenberg had frequently sparred, was hit with a corruption scandal in the midst of the 2002 campaign. Torricelli had to quit, creating a circumstance where it looked as if the Republicans would take the seat virtually by default. But Lautenberg elbowed his way into the race, fought in the courts for a place on the ballot and was easily reelected to the Senate at age 78.

While other Democrats were still trying to figure out how to take on the Bush administration, Lautenberg arrived ready for a fight—calling for investigations into the Bush-Cheney White House and launching blistering attacks on political cronyism. Democracy for America's Jim Dean recalls that the new senator was "vigorously opposing the war in Iraq when far too many Democrats in Washington stood silent."

Lautrenberg was, as well, an ardent foe of the social-conservative policies of the administration—and of Democrats who were willing to compromise with the White House. Unabashedly pro-choice and pro–LGBT rights, Lautenberg was a leading champion of gun control who, when his long battle with cancer and related ailments took a turn for the worse this spring, said that one of his biggest regrets was missing the debates over new gun-control legislation because “my victories over the gun lobby are among my proudest accomplishments.” The senator was, as well, a fierce defender of affirmative action—earning the admiration of the NAACP, along with a 100 percent rating for his votes. And, as Senator Bernie Sanders noted, "He was also one of the great environmental champions in Congress."

Lautenberg’s liberalism was robust. Unlike many members of the Democratic Caucus, his commitment to the ideology was of the broad-spectrum variety. Yes, Lautenberg was one of the most committed social liberals in the Senate. But like his old friend Paul Wellstone, Lautenberg was equally committed to economic liberalism.

The New Jersey senator sided with organized labor and earned top ratings from the Drum Major Institute for his battles on behalf of working families. A businessman who never forgot that his dad sweated in the silk mills and died young, Lautenberg fought for minimum-wage hikes, factory safety and fair trade—a commitment that led him to break with the Clinton administration to oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement. But his biggest fight was for a renewal of the New Deal commitment of government to invest in job creation.

Lautenberg really did believe in putting the government to work on the task of putting people to work. His legislative record was packed with proposals for infrastructure investment and jobs programs—including the recent American Infrastructure Investment Fund Act of 2013, with its plan for a $5 billion fund to incentivize private, state and regional investments in transportation projects around the country by providing eligible products with financial assistance.

Even after he announced that he would retire in 2015, at the end of his current term (which will now be filled by an interim senator appointed by Republican Governor Chris Christie), Lautenberg kept that New Deal flame lit. Barely a week before his death, the senator was one of the first members of Congress to respond to the bridge collapse of the Interstate 5 in Washington State.

“The bridge collapse in Washington State is simply unacceptable. Families in America should not have to worry that the bridges they cross are unstable,” he said. “Far too many bridges across the country and in my home state of New Jersey are aging and in urgent need of repair. This scary bridge collapse shows why the Senate should act quickly to pass my bill to strengthen America’s crumbling infrastructure, create jobs and boost our economy.”

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Frank Lautenberg, who made his fortune in the private sector before ever considering a political career, had no patience with those who would limit the ability of government to respond to the physical crisis of a bridge collapsing or the human crisis of widespread unemployment. Like FDR, he understood the power of government to renew the economy.

To a greater extent than all but a few in Congress, he kept alive the New Deal faith that Roosevelt articulated in one of those “fireside chats” Lautenberg listened to as child growing up poor in mill towns of north Jersey: “To those who say that our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources,” FDR said. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that for the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade. What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility to determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed.”

John Nichols is the author (with Robert W. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. Center for Media and Democracy executive director Lisa Graves says: "The billionaires are buying our media and our elections. They're spinning our democracy into a dollarocracy. John Nichols and Bob McChesney expose the culprits who steered America into the quagmire of big money and provide us with the tools to free ourselves and our republic from the corporate kleptocrats."

Where have the seven seas gone? Read Lewis Lapham’s essay.

Michelle Bachmann speaks at a Tea Party rally in April 2011. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Remember when Michele Bachmann announced after the 2010 election that she wanted to chair the House Republican Conference? And Republicans lined up to block her run?

Remember when Michele Bachmann stepped on House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s response to the 2011 State of the Union address? And she diluted the GOP message?

Remember when Michele Bachmann launched a high-profile bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination? And she finished in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses, with barely 5 percent of the vote and carrying no counties?

Republicans who are serious about the future of their party do. That’s why there will be no mourning in the top ranks of the Grand Old Party over the decision by Bachmann that she will not seek re-election in 2014.

Bachmann has been the face of what ails the GOP. And Republicans who recognize the party’s fundamental challenges may well understand this.

But the dynamics that made Bachmann an outsized figure in the party are not going away. That’s because Michele Bachmann did not elbow her way into the game on the basis of the Tea Party politics she embraced after the movement got going, and the “constitutional conservatism” she spent so much time talking about. (Indeed, she often stumbled when discussing constitutional matters, and regularly split with libertarian-leaning Republicans when core questions of civil liberties and executive power arose.)

Bachmann was a prominent figure because she figured out how to channel big donations from right-wing donors in states far from Minnesota into an electoral insurance policy.

When she sought re-election after her losing presidential bid, Bachmann ran for re-election in Minnesota, raised almost $15 million and spent almost $12 million on her congressional race.

Add on the fundraising and spending by her leadership PAC and she was over $16 million, with spending over $13 million. And that’s not even counting the $10.5 million she raised and mostly spent in a presidential bid that that has inspired investigations into possible misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Election Commission, the Office of Congressional Ethics and the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee.

Bachmann didn’t just outspend her challenger in Minnesota, Jim Graves. She overwhelmed the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party nominee, who raised and spent roughly $2.3 million. Yet Graves came within 4,600 votes (1.2 percent) of winning—in one of the closest contests in the country.

Does anyone really think that Bachmann would have beaten Graves had the spending been evenly matched? Seriously?

And does anyone think that Bachmann (who still has almost $2 million in her campaign account) could have raised tens of millions in her Minnesota district? Or even in Minnesota?

We actually have the answer to those latter questions.

“According to a CRP analysis, 86 percent of her big-dollar [more than $200] donations from individuals came from people who did not live in Minnesota,” notes the Center for Responsive Politics. “Eighty-six percent of her big dollar donations from individuals came from people who did not live in Minnesota. Only five of her top 10 zip codes for contributions were in Minnesota, and she appeared to have strong donor bases in Texas, California and Florida.”

Notably, those are the same states that are prime sources of cash for many of the most controversial figures in Republican politics—folks like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. (Walker’s final fundraising report before then 2012 recall election showed that 70 percent of Walker’s money was raised from outside Wisconsin—with big donors from Texas, Florida and California topping the lists.)

Don’t think for a second that Bachmann’s exit will cause the donors in Texas and elsewhere to close the checkbooks that have pulled the GOP so far to the right on social and economic issues.

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the GOP’s 1996 presidential candidate, says that Republicans need to “rethink their approach as a political party.” And he’s not alone. Former Maine Senator Olympia Snowe says, “I certainly do agree with the former majority leader, Bob Dole, with whom I worked when I first entered the Senate and who was a consensus builder and understood what was essential and important for the Republican Party and what was important for America. And that, unfortunately, has been lost today on Capitol Hill.”

It’s not just a Capitol Hill problem.

It’s a money problem.

The fact is that, while extreme and obstructionist figures may come and go, the funding sources for the politics that drags the party away from any sort of consensus building are not going away.

This is why Republicans who want their party to reenter the mainstream have begun to speak up. Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr., a contender the 2012 GOP presidential nod who finished third in the New Hampshire primary (ahead of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, as well as Bachmann, who had quit the race) complains that the United States has a “broken” political system, in which “everyone is pretty much owned by special interests.” Of the GOP, Huntsman says, “The party has become a holding company for Super PACs.”

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In fact, it’s not just organized special interests and political action committees.

It’s big donors who pour money into campaigns in distant states and use their immense resources to create a politics that reflects their ideology—not the values of the districts and states where they “invest” their money, and not the interests of the party they profess to be aligned with.

Bob Dole is right. The Republican Party does need to “rethink” its approach. But the rethink won’t happen when political parties can be whipsawed by big donors, Super PACS and all the money pathologies of the contemporary politics.

Until we discuss what progressive Republicans of a century ago referred to as “the money power,” no party will change for the better—not even a post–Michele Bachmann Republican Party.

John Nichols is the author (with Robert W. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it details how big-money politics warps our politics.

An anti-GMO rally in Seattle. (Flickr/Alexis Baden-Mayer)

Simple concept: people who consume food should have information about what’s in their food.

And if foods contain genetically modified organisms, consumers surely have a right to know.

Who could disagree? Most senators, that’s who.

While sixty-four countries around the world require labeling of foods with genetically engineered ingredients, while the American Public Health Association and the American Nurses Association have passed resolutions supporting this sort of labeling in the United States, the Senate voted 71-27 to keep Americans in the dark.

US Senator Bernie Sanders proposed an amendment to the federal farm bill that would have allowed states to require clear labels on any food or beverage containing ingredients that have been genetically modified. Sanders said, “I believe that when a mother goes to the store and purchases food for her child, she has the right to know what she is feeding her child.”

Fearing lawsuits from multinational biotechnology, agribusiness and food production firms—which also maintain some of the most efficient lobbying teams in Washington—even states with long histories of consumer protection and right-to-know legislation have been cautious about introducing this sort of food labeling. The Sanders amendment addressed that threat, establishing a clear federal policy that states are allowed to require clear labels so that consumers know what they’re eating.

“Monsanto and other major corporations should not get to decide this, the people and their elected representatives should,” said the independent senator from Vermont, where the state assembly recently voted 99-42 to call for labeling.

When the Senate vote came on Thursday, however, only twenty-four Democrats, two independents (Sanders and Maine’s Angus King) and one Republican (Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski) backed the labeling amendment. As Food & Water Watch’s Patty Lovera noted, many of the “yes” votes came from senators who “represent states with active grassroots campaigns to pass state laws on GE labeling, including both senators from Alaska, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia, as well as Senator Bennett from Colorado, Senator Tester from Montana, Senator Reid from Nevada, Senator Heinrich from New Mexico and Senator Schumer from New York.”

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Of the 71 “no” votes, twenty-eight came from Democrats—many of whom fancy themselves consumer advocates and backers of the public’s right to know. The other forty-three “no” votes came Republicans, almost all of who say they want to free up the states to experiment and innovate.

Unfortunately, some of the loudest lobbyist voices in Washington say different.

John Nichols is the author (with Robert W. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it details how the collapse of journalism and the rise of big-money politics threatens to turn our democracy into a dollarocracy.