Bill Maher has built a career making fun of politicians. Now he wants to use his perch on late-night TV to end a congressional representative’s career.
The comedian announced his plan to engage in “outright meddling with the political process” on the January 31st episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, his weekly HBO late-night talk show. Flip A District sounds like a stunt, and to a degree it is; attacking buffoonish politicians, particularly the Republicans he’s most likely to target, has been Maher’s stock-in-trade for many years. But Maher and his producers say they’re serious about trying to make a difference in a winnable district. In America’s post-Citizens United political landscape, Flip A District really could potentially influence an election. Maher’s program draws an average of 4.1 million viewers, but its true reach is much larger thanks to shareable video clips social media. The show’s producers are smartly leveraging this by encouraging viewers to use the hashtag #flipadistrict to tell them who the show should go after in the election.
With Congress’ overall approval rating hovering at 12 percent, it’s no surprise that Maher is already being flooded with a variety suggestions. Republican standard bearers like Paul Ryan and Darrell Issa have been popular suggestions so far. Wingnuts like Michele Bachmann have also come up. If the eventual choice isn’t one of them, it’s likely to be someone like them – a socially conservative lightning rod who drops scary soundbites with regularity. If so, Maher will be missing out on an opportunity to make a difference by taking out a major roadblock to reforming the National Security Agency and the rest of the American military-intelligence complex. The NSA has a legitimate role to play in the national defense of the United States, one that is supposed to be subject to oversight by the legislative branch. But with Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan’s 8th District at the head of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the chance of such oversight ever being exercised properly approaches zero.
A former FBI agent, Rogers is the NSA’s biggest mouthpiece in the House. He’s prone to making big, scary, and unsubstantiated claims to the press, particularly on the Sunday morning network TV talk shows. His recent suggestion that Edward Snowden was helped by Russia is a good example. So was the recent attack on a White House policy curtailing drone-strike assassinations as it tries to engage in peace talks in Pakistan, in which Rogers claimed that “individuals who would have been previously removed from the battlefield by U.S. counterterrorism operations for attacking or plotting to attack against U.S. interests remain free because of self-imposed red tape.”
Worse is his abuse of the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee to make the same sort of claims on the Congressional record, as he did when he equated First Amendment-protected coverage of the NSA with selling stolen documents. (Glenn Greenwald flatly denied ever having sold any of the documents Snowden gave him, telling , “I have never, ever sold a document, where I get money and I say ‘here’s a document, go off and do whatever you want with it.’) It’s the same sort of tactic James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, recently used before Congress when he referred to the journalists who have worked to publish stories about the former NSA contractor’s leaked documents “accomplices.”
Rogers has also shown that his dedication to protecting the intelligence agencies’ interests ahead of all other considerations has no bounds, even when it comes to exercising his duties as the head of the Intelligence committee. Before a vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, he withheld from members of the House a classified Department of Justice briefing paper that was entrusted to him as committee chairman to share with his fellow representatives in order to “inform the legislative debate about reauthorization.” Employing such tactics is the very definition of creating an uneven playing field. And he’s also not above using his position to promote his own self-interest along with the NSA’s. He pimped CISPA in the House without mentioning that his wife’s security defense contracting firm stood to benefit greatly from the legislation – but he did slip up on Twitter and point out that he and politicians like him received lots of campaign cash from pro-CISPA groups.
If Maher passes up the chance to flip Rogers’ district, it won’t be particularly surprising. He donated $1 million in the 2012 election to a super PAC benefiting the NSA’s chief protector, Barack Obama, who on these issues is very much in line with Rogers, and has previously said that he’s “willing to give up some liberty for some security” when it comes to the NSA’s dragnet collection of communications in the U.S. But it will be disappointing. As long as Rogers remains in a position of authority over the intelligence services, Congress is a hostile environment for civil liberties – particularly the First Amendment that protects Bill Maher’s freedom to use his TV show to meddle with politics.
