Fiercer on FISA

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) decision last week not to bend to White House demands on the government’s eavesdropping authority has triggered a flurry of partisan rhetoric. Whether you agree or disagree with Pelosi’s move, it was undoubtedly a bold move.

Throughout 2007, House Democrats made a series of politically safe moves. They started out by moving their Six for ’06 campaign pledge, legislative items that were popular with Democrats, independents and even some Republicans.

Then Democrats tried to end the war, which was growing more unpopular in the months after they assumed the congressional majority.

In the wake of the mass murder by a deranged gunman at Virginia Tech, House Democrats did not reflexively introduce a gun control measure. Instead, they worked with the National Rifle Association to seek common ground.

When push came to shove with the White House on the Alternative Minimum Tax late last year, Democrats in the lower chamber, hampered by a lack of votes in the Senate, reluctantly agreed to waive their pay-as-you-go budgetary rules.

These were all politically safe maneuvers made by a slim House majority that was worried about moving too far left and putting some of its politically vulnerable members at risk.

Similarly, before the August 2007 recess, Democrats begrudgingly agreed to bring a GOP-backed surveillance bill to a vote after failing to pass their own version. The Protect America Act, which had first cleared the Senate, passed 227-183, with 181 of 222 House Democrats rejecting it.

Pelosi, who as Speaker rarely votes on measures, voted no on the bill. At the time, she vowed to rework the law, claiming that many of its provisions were “unacceptable.”

Fast-forward six months to last week, when the Protect America Act was set to expire. The Senate had passed a surveillance bill that split Democrats while attracting the support of President Bush and every voting Republican.

Ironically, House leaders initially attempted to extend the Protect America Act for another 21 days to buy more time to work with the Senate on the surveillance bill.

But a collection of 34 House liberals and conservatives, for different reasons, rejected that measure and it fell, 191-229. Democrats who voted against it included Reps. Collin Peterson (Minn.) and Bob Filner (Calif.) and a handful of freshmen.

So House Democrats were faced again with the politically safe move of passing the surveillance bill that Bush favored or letting it lapse while ironing out a compromise with the upper chamber. This time, Pelosi chose the latter course.

In a statement, the Speaker said, “Unlike last August, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] court has no backlog of cases, and thus can issue necessary court orders for surveillance immediately.”

That may be true, but politics came into her calculation. House Democrats are feeling more confident, as they should, that their majority is safe and they decided against making the politically safe move on FISA.