H.R. 4681 Passes Congress – Justin Amash Calls It: “One of the Most Egregious Sections of Law I’ve Encountered During My Time as a Representative”

Screen Shot 2014-12-12 at 12.10.06 PMDecency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.

–  Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, in 1928

While most Americans are busy Christmas shopping and making preparations for trips to see family, Congress remains hard at work doing what it does best. Giving gifts to Wall Street and trampling on citizens’ civil liberties.

I knew the plebs were about to be royally screwed a week ago when I published the post: Wall Street Moves to Put Taxpayers on the Hook for Derivatives Trades. The piece concluded with the following:

Remember what Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets. Have a great weekend chumps.

Naturally, Wall Street got what it wanted. In fact, this provision was so important to the financial oligarchs that Jaime Dimon called around to encourage our (Wall Street’s) representatives to support it. The Washington Post reports that:

The acrimony that erupted Thursday between President Obama and members of his own party largely pivoted on a single item in a 1,600-page piece of legislation to keep the government funded: Should banks be allowed to make risky investments using taxpayer-backed money?

The very idea was abhorrent to many Democrats on Capitol Hill. And some were stunned that the White House would support the bill with that provision intact, given that it would erase a key provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, one of Obama’s signature achievements.

But perhaps even more outrageous to Democrats was that the language in the bill appeared to come directly from the pens of lobbyists at the nation’s biggest banks, aides said. The provision was so important to the profits at those companies that J.P.Morgan’s chief executive Jamie Dimon himself telephoned individual lawmakers to urge them to vote for it, according to a person familiar with the effort.

The nation’s biggest banks — led by Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America — have been lobbying for the change in Dodd Frank, which had given them a period of years to comply. Trade associations representing banks, the Financial Services Roundtable and the American Bankers Association, emphasized that regional banks are supportive of the change as well.

But the regulatory change could also boost the profits of major banks, which is why they are pushing so hard for passage, said Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“It is because there is a lot of money at stake,” Johnson said. “They want to be able to take big risks where they get the upside and the taxpayer gets the potential downside,” he said.

While that’s bad enough, the lame duck Congress clearly didn’t consider its job done without legislating away the 4th Amendment. Here is some of what one of the only decent members of Congress, Justin Amash, wrote on Facebook:

When I learned that the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2015 was being rushed to the floor for a vote—with little debate and only a voice vote expected (i.e., simply declared “passed” with almost nobody in the room)—I asked my legislative staff to quickly review the bill for unusual language. What they discovered is one of the most egregious sections of law I’ve encountered during my time as a representative: It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American.

On Wednesday afternoon, I went to the House floor to demand a roll call vote on the bill so that everyone’s vote would have to be recorded. I also sent the letter below to every representative.

With more time to spread the word, we would have stopped this bill, which passed 325-100. Thanks to the 99 other representatives—44 Republicans and 55 Democrats—who voted to protect our rights and uphold the Constitution. And thanks to my incredibly talented staff.

###

Block New Spying on U.S. Citizens: Vote “NO” on H.R. 4681

Dear Colleague:

The intelligence reauthorization bill, which the House will vote on today, contains a troubling new provision that for the first time statutorily authorizes spying on U.S. citizens without legal process.

Last night, the Senate passed an amended version of the intelligence reauthorization bill with a new Sec. 309—one the House never has considered. Sec. 309 authorizes “the acquisition, retention, and dissemination” of nonpublic communications, including those to and from U.S. persons. The section contemplates that those private communications of Americans, obtained without a court order, may be transferred to domestic law enforcement for criminal investigations.

To be clear, Sec. 309 provides the first statutory authority for the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of U.S. persons’ private communications obtained without legal process such as a court order or a subpoena. The administration currently may conduct such surveillance under a claim of executive authority, such as E.O. 12333. However, Congress never has approved of using executive authority in that way to capture and use Americans’ private telephone records, electronic communications, or cloud data.

Now watch the following video:

Finally, this is what I think of Congress:

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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9 thoughts on “H.R. 4681 Passes Congress – Justin Amash Calls It: “One of the Most Egregious Sections of Law I’ve Encountered During My Time as a Representative””

  1. Wall Street spends it’s money buying Congress. That dynamic is a *result,* not the *cause* of their power.

    To address the problem requires attacking Wall Street at the base of it’s power.

    Reply
  2. Hmmm

    It appears that Congress has chosen once again to accept the bribes and sell out the people so that a handful of people who own/control a couple of banks can add a couple of hundred billion more to their bottom line. Clearly they understand the depths of their treason and depravity.The almost unimaginable size and scope of the government’s Gestapo like police state is a reflection of the size and scope of the treason the Congress and their handlers have perpetrated against the American people. They know full well that their only chance of long term survival is the complete destruction of the Republic as it existed circa 1962. People that mission is just about complete. We are no more a Republic today than Israel is a civilized, democratic peace, loving state. There is a direct connection between the ever closer ties between these 2 countries and the destruction of our civil liberties.

    Reply
  3. Long time reader of yours, and ZH, TAE, O2M, Mish etc. What difference does it make if things are written into law at this point sadly? TPTB just change the rules after the fact anyways if need be. Me thinks they are just playing with us to fragment the citizens into even more groups, divide and conquer style. After all, we are the only ones up in arms over this crap. We understand the left-right paradigm is an illusion. Where is Bernie and Rand with their sponsored resolutions to fix anything? Warren have you done ANYTHING, EVER to deserve the bumper stickers I see on cars? I only see actors in this bizarre theater. Perhaps the bail-in will be the event which unites everyone in actual revolution, we can dream, can’t we?

    Reply
  4. But it seems to me that as an observation that so called Americans at present are rather willing to bend over, cough cough.
    So the whole lets blame game 2.0 is old old and tired like Nancy Pelosi’s dildo.
    I myself am looking to move from the the Empire asap. I still have panic attacks thinking about the time my luggage was searched or rather strewn across a table in search of a heirloom penknife that my step father had given me assuring me that the Homeland wouldn’t be lame enough to tweak on that.
    I remember the frightened rabbit looks from the steroid males and there Gap Normalcy Bias female wives and how they huddled in the waiting room as our flight was late. I understood what tit was to be the other like in a way that evoked Nazi Germany.
    THe Amerricnas desrve EVERYTHING COMING THEIR WAY. COULDN’T”T HAPPEN TO A BETTER LOT.

    Reply
  5. Surprised? Why? Do you have any recollection of when was the “law of the land” (if the ever was a law of the land) applied when banks and subsidiaries are involved in wrong doing? And just for the record,” the Banks are the Law”.

    Reply
  6. The truly frightening thing? How unconstrained Congress is by that pesky constitution. Seriously. You can’t just legislate away the fourth amendment. That would require a constitutional amendment with all the associated hassle. Still, the law is passed, and now it’s up to someone like the ACLU to spend millions and years fighting have the constitutional order reestablished.

    Seriously, no law should pass without some reasonable comment period. This makes a travesty of democracy.

    Thanks for reporting on this important issue.

    Saludos,

    Kim G
    Boston, MA
    Where it’s a rare day that we don’t fee some sense of outrage about what our elected “representatives” are up to.

    Reply
  7. This was perhaps the swiftest payoff in world history: Wall street & friends spent $2 billion on the 2014 election. They got their obligatory 5,000% return within 45 days. And I don’t mean the $1,000,000,000,000 omnibus deal, but rather the credit default swaps hanging over the trillion dollars worth of loans ploughed into shale oil that are about to fail thanks to Saudi Arabia. Every shale oil firm goes bust on January 1st, the CDOs go “pop” and the banks get to seize our savings and retirement accounts to pay themselves for their wise bets.

    Reply

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