The Return of the Filibuster Dumping Gang (The Hidden Brooks)

In Sunday's David Brooks column--Bring Back the Gang of 14 (full column accessible to Times Select subscribers)--he opines that the Gang of 14, the group of moderate Senators from both sides of the aisle who brokered the agreement on avoiding the "nuclear option" of dismantling the Senate's historic filibuster technique, was a boon to the far-right conservative side (including Dobson and Bauer, who complained mightily about it):

The Gang of 14 agreement was no defeat. It was a triumph. It preserved the traditions of the Senate. It lowered the ideological temperature. Most of all, it transformed what had been an abstract ideological feud about Senate procedures into a concrete exercise in democracy.

If that deal hadn't been forged and the nuclear option had been exercised, the Roberts and Alito nominations would have been subsumed in a continuing holy war. Passions would have been aboil, party lines would have been rigid. The individual merits of Roberts and Alito would have been lost amid the bitterness and hatred.

But as it was, the hearings were relatively civil. The American people got a chance to see Roberts and Alito unobstructed. They were favorably impressed by their calm demeanors and unimpressed by the partisan assassins.

One might say "unobstructed" by obfuscation. But I digress. Mr. Brooks believes the Gang needs to return in a sequel to vanquish the partisan qualms over the BushCo administration's warrantless wiretapping program:

As the global riots last week make abundantly clear, we are facing a generation-long war, and we will not be able to fight effectively if we keep squabbling this way. That's why we need another Gang of 14 to devise a sustainable bipartisan solution.

That solution would be based on a series of truths. First, we need aggressive intelligence programs to head off attacks. Second, whatever you think of the legal and constitutional merits, those programs will not survive with the current level of Congressional disquiet. Third, despite what Arlen Specter is proposing, we can't throw the mess to the courts to resolve. Unelected judges should not be put in charge of national security decisions. It is Congress's job to oversee the executive.

The central problem today is that senators have the power to criticize and tear down N.S.A.-style programs, but it won't be their rear ends in a sling if we are attacked. It will be the president's. We need a Gang of 14 to draft legislation that will hold presidents and senators, Republicans and Democrats accountable for national security decisions. We need legislation that causes both parties to think concretely about how to succeed and share blame in case of failure.

Here's how you do it. You exempt searches covered by the Bush program from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. You give the intelligence committees oversight responsibilities for those programs. You toughen the penalties for anybody who dares to leak secrets about those programs. You let committee members know that if the United States is attacked, and they opposed programs that could have prevented that attack, then it will be their name in the headlines, their name going down in historical infamy.

That kind of shared responsibility will induce a little seriousness. That will break through the abstract partisan warfare. Democratic senators know their party can't win elections if they continually position themselves as A.C.L.U. doves in security fights. Republican senators know they weren't elected just to serve as serfs and servants to the almighty executive. The question is: Who will lead the next Gang of 14 to broker this deal?

Again and again I return to this--why does this issue have to be one or the other, civil liberties for all or security for all? I understand the need to monitor the communications of persons suspected of aiding in potential terrorist attacks. What I don't understand is why the Executive branch of this government won't work with existing laws to do so, or to work with Congress to amend those laws to make it a legal framework that is agreeable to the people of this nation, whom the Congress and the Executive serve. That is the crux of this whole debate--Executive powers trumping all. I thought we'd encountered this and put the brakes on it back in the early 1970s with Nixon. Apparently not.

But I do agree that it is the Congress's job to oversee the Executive branch. We need a bipartisan approach to seeking some answers to some very serious and very appropriate questions that the BushCo administration is very tight-lipped about.