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Please Show Your Work

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Ryan Lizza claims:

So the partisans on the left cheering Feingold appear to have both the policy and the politics wrong. Censure is meaningless. Changing the FISA law is the way to address Bush’s overreach. And the only way for Democrats to change FISA is for them to take back the Senate. This week, Feingold’s censure petition has made that goal just a little bit more difficult to achieve. What an ass.

On the second point, the main question is what exactly the evidence is that Feingold’s censure resolution will make it more difficult to take back the Senate in ’08. Is the censure proposal unpopular? Does it draw attention away “from providing a check on Bush and the Republican dominance of Washington”? There’s some rather glaring gaps here. It may be true that it’s bad politics, but bare assertions that it makes Ryan Lizza mythical swing voters uncomfortable do not constitute evidence.

But even more problematic is Lizza’s suggestion for a more effectual solution. How, exactly, does “changing the FISA law” address the problem? Bush, remember, is claiming an unreguable arbitrary authority to violate the law. Changing the law really couldn’t be more beside the point, and certainly doesn’t represent the slightest check on the President’s power. And, of course, the changes to the law actually being proposed–which would essentially constitute a retrospective endorsement of the President’s illegal behavior–would not merely not address the problem, but would actually compound it. If Lizza means a very different set of reforms, then his argument is self-evidently illogical: it’s political poison for the Democrats to censure the President’s illegal wiretapping, but it would be politically viable for the Democrats to endorse strong checks on President’s warrantless wiretapping? Why? And if the Democrats believe that he was breaking the law, why on earth shouldn’t he be censured? This is TNR center-right contrarianism at its most vacuous.

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