Last week, for community access television advocates, I prepared and posted a Google docs spreadsheet showing known and potential freshmen for the 112th Congress - the idea being that these are the new legislators who will need to be quickly educated on 1) the unique value of access television, 2) the harms being done by industry practices and the wave of recent states' video franchising laws, and 3) the urgent need for passage of Rep. Tammy Baldwin's Community Access Preservation Act (HR 3745).
In alphanumeric order by state and CD, the spreadsheet shows all 535 incumbents (with links to their GovTrack CD maps), along with the Democratic and Republican candidates for those seats. All open seats (55, right?) are highlighted, as are all seats where any major pollster has judged an incumbent to be facing serious competition (seemingly 92, as of Sep. 19). Where known, the latest poll results for the incumbents' seats in play is given (source: electoral-vote.com). Because I developed this for the community media and media reform communities, I've also highlighted those incumbents who are members of the Senate Commerce Committee, the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, and the Future of American Media Caucus. I've also included contact info for the incumbents and their telecommunications legislative aides, where known.
Readers and contributors of OpenLeft might appreciate seeing this, both for figuring your own angles in the 112th, and for helping to identify races where you and your associates may feel the need to get involved. Possibly some of you might want to adapt this spreadsheet to track incumbent/freshmen turn-over on any committees salient to your own interests.
I spent some time today collecting the list of 19k people who signed the noretroactiveimmunity.com petition to hand in with the letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last week was really quite a stunning outburst, and with all petitions in from various groups at least three hundred thousand people have petitioned their government not to grant amnesty to corporate interests who spy on us.
The Senate Intelligence panel has approved a bill that would establish new procedures for court warrants for foreign-intelligence surveillance on Americans, but some of those provisions did not go far enough to satisfy some liberal Democrats and civil liberties groups.
Most controversial, however, was the measure's inclusion of a provision that would grant retroactive immunity for telecommunications firms that participated in the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Although the Intelligence panel saw the internal White House documents on the NSA program before it voted on the bill, most freshmen are unlikely to see those papers. That puts them in a tough spot as they decide whether to support a Bush-backed provision to wipe away about 40 lawsuits accusing the companies of giving away private information to the government.
"I'm a little bit concerned ... of fear-mongering and politics by the Bush administration and an enormous amount of confusion kicked up around this," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
Whitehouse joined 12 of his colleagues in voting for the Intelligence panel's bill earlier this month. He signaled that there would likely be efforts to alter that language when the Judiciary Committee considers the bill in coming weeks.
Whitehouse is one of the people who voted for retroactive immunity in the Senate Intelligence committee, so it's good he's having second thoughts. It looks like various freshmen understand that the Republicans are going to throw the terrorism card at them no matter what they do.
"Republicans are going to say we're weak on terror - that's their rhetoric, that's what they're going to say," said freshman Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.), who voted for the PAA and is planning on supporting the leading House bill.
Altmire is one of the more conservative House freshmen, a 'Bush Dog', so it's a positive sign that he's aware of the fearmongering going on and the strategic stupidity of knuckling under to it for political expediency.
I'd be impressed if Congress managed to hold firm on this. I don't know if they will, but activism works.
STATE BLOGS
