Folks,
I am asking you to take action today to protect our nation by going to www.timbee.com and make a contribution. We need to send Tim Bee to Congress. Your contribution, no matter how small or how large can make that happen. It is important that you act today. Tim is starting to attract a lot of national attention. We need to demonstrate to the nation, with our financial support, that we fully support Tim and are going to make sure he wins in November.
I am going to try to keep this simple. Many of you tell me you or your spouse or your friends support Gabby Giffords because “she is doing a pretty good job.”
Gabby is not doing a good job. She is putting our nation at risk by voting for Nancy Pelosi’s agenda.
Last August the Congress enacted the Protect America Act. The purpose of this act was to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so that our intelligence agencies could monitor telephone and internet traffic involving known or suspected terrorists that came through systems located in the United States. This was necessary because a lot of this traffic originates outside the U.S. but comes within the territory of the United States. When that happens all of the protections of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution attaches. In order to listen to these phone calls and read this email from the terrorists, FISA had to be amended to provide a process for intelligence surveillance. The Protect America Act allowed the telecommunications industry to work with our intelligence agencies, with oversight and approval of the FISA courts, to grant access to the various communications.
In January, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the Protect America Act so that the intelligence surveillance to protect our country could continue. The House of Representatives had a different idea. They demand that the telecommunications companies who have assisted our government in protecting the nation be subject to a never-ending string of lawsuits. There are over 40 such lawsuits pending right now. There are billions of dollars at stake, for both the telecommunications companies that have to defend themselves and for the trial attorneys who know that these suits will probably be settled out of court in order to avoid the lengthy and costly litigation process. These lawsuits are without merit and brought primarily for the lawyers to collect their exorbitant fees from the telecommunications companies when they settle to avoid litigation and trial costs.
The Democrats in the House and their trial attorney financial supporters want more. The plaintiffs in these suits claim that their constitutional rights have been or could be violated by the surveillance activity. The ACLU brought a case in this matter. The trial court in Michigan found for the plaintiffs. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio found that none of the plaintiffs had shown any injury and that they had no standing to bring suit because you can’t sue when your only claim is that some foreign party might not do business with you because they feared that their phone conversation might not be private. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the Sixth Circuit and affirmed the dismissal of the ACLU suit.
The same thing should happen to the other suits as well. The plaintiffs can show no injury but the trial lawyers don’t care, they just want to collect their fees.
There were 21 Democrats in the House that asked Speaker Pelosi in a letter on January 28 to bring the Senate amendment to the Protect America Act to the floor of the House so they could vote on it. Giffords did not join that group of 21 Blue Dog Democrats even though she pretends to be a member of that coalition so she can fool the voters in the district that she is moderate. Since Giffords did not want to vote on the Senate amendment and she needed some political cover, she decided on February 14 to send Nancy Pelosi a note asking her to keep the House in session until they had done something about FISA. The Speaker apparently did not feel compelled to do what the freshman congresswoman from Arizona had asked her to do. On February 15, the members of the House left town for an extended break.
At that point the Protect America Act expired and our intelligence community was prohibited by law from initiating any new surveillance programs against known or suspected terrorists whose communications came through the U.S. We could keep looking at the old cell phone numbers and old email addresses because we already had warrants for those.
So here is the question: If you are a terrorist and you know the U.S. can’t listen to a new cell phone number or read email from a new email address, how long do you think it takes to get a new cell phone or establish a new email account. The answer: About a heartbeat.
Thus, when the House let the Protect America Act expire our intelligence community lost an important tool they need to protect us.
Gabby Giffords is not doing a “pretty good job.” She is putting our national security at risk. That is not acceptable.
Giffords says one thing in her “town halls” and corner meetings and fundraisers in the district. Then she goes back to D.C. and votes with Pelosi. That is not “doing a pretty good job.”
I know that most of you can’t afford to give a lot. All I want you to do is give what you can. Give $10, $20, $50, $100 or whatever you can. What is important is that you help.
Go to https://www.timbee.com/contribute/Default.aspx right now and make a contribution!
It is important that we contribute as much as we can prior to March 31 in order to convince everyone in the nation who is watching this race that Tim Bee has the support of the voters in his district.
Thanks for you support of Tim Bee.
