Erika Eichelberger

Reporting Fellow

Erika Eichelberger is a reporting fellow in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She has also written for The Nation, The Brooklyn Rail, and TomDispatch. Email her at eeichelberger [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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FISA Court Has Rejected .03 Percent Of All Government Surveillance Requests

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Mon Jun. 10, 2013 10:30 AM PDT

After last week's revelations extensive National Security Agency surveillance of phone and internet communications, President Barack Obama made it a point to assure Americans that, not to worry, there is plenty of oversight of his administration's snooping programs. "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said Friday, referring in part to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which was created in 1979 to oversee Department of Justice requests for surveillance warrants against foreign agents suspected of espionage or terrorism in the United States. But the FISC has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. That's a rate of .03 percent, which raises questions about just how much judicial oversight is actually being provided.

"The FISA system is broken," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Journal. "At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of US citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review."

But according to Timothy Edgar, a top privacy lawyer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council under Bush and Obama, it's not quite as simple as the FISC rubber stamping nearly every application the government puts in front of it.

The reason so many orders are approved, he said, is that the Justice Department office that manages the process vets the applications rigorously... [S]o getting the order approved by the Justice Department lawyers is perhaps the biggest hurdle to approval. "The culture of that office is very reluctant to get a denial," he [told the Journal].

Still, the entire process is closed. The FISC court hears evidence for surveillance applications presented solely by the Department of Justice. The court does not have to release its opinions or any information regarding such hearings.

In February, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), wrote a letter to the FISC asking the court to consider releasing portions of its opinions to the public by "writing summaries of its significant interpretations of the law in a manner that separates the classified facts of the application under review from the legal analysis, so as to enable declassification." After the revelations on the spying programs last week, Sen. Al Franken called the same thing.

In response to the senators' letter, the FISA court's presiding judge, Reggie B. Walton, said in March that it would be very difficult to release summaries of the court's opinions to the public, because the legal analysis in most opinions is "inextricably intertwined" with classified information.

This post has been corrected. A commenter pointed out that a previous version stated that the FISA court has rejected .0003 percent of all government surveillance requests. The correct percentage is .03. Apologies for the bad math.

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MAP: These States Rejected Federal Money to Fix Their Terrible Mental Health Systems

Some 1.2 million mentally ill Americans will be left without Medicaid coverage as a result.

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Mon Jun. 10, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Thanamat Somwan/Shutterstock

Less than half of Americans living with mental illness receive the treatment they need—a failure that lands large numbers of mentally ill people in jails, emergency rooms, and on the streets. One provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, a.k.a Obamacare, would help fix the problem. Under the law, states will get hundreds of billions in federal money over the next ten years to provide health care to 2.7 million poor mentally ill people who are currently uninsured. But 17 states—including some states with among the worst mental-health programs in the country—are rejecting these funds.

Here's how it was supposed to work. Obamacare aimed to cover a huge chunk of uninsured mentally ill people by making more Americans eligible for Medicaid, the joint state-federal program that provides health insurance for pregnant women, infants, and people with disabilities. Starting next year, the Affordable Care Act will pay for states to expand Medicaid coverage to all Americans that live on or under 138 percent of the poverty line—$15,856 per year for an individual, or $32,499 for a family of four. About a third of currently uninsured adults who would be able to get health care coverage through this expansion are mentally ill.

In short, the plan was for the federal government to foot the bill for states to provide lots of mentally ill people with health insurance.

[Read the full article]

"This Is Morally Wrong": Watch Elizabeth Warren on GOP and Student Loans

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri Jun. 7, 2013 3:17 PM PDT

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed Republicans for blocking a bill that would give Americans relief on their student loan debt.

Student loan interest rates are set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1 unless Congress acts. Warren has introduced a short-term plan that would drop rates on federal loans for needy students to near zero for a year, and Sens. Jack Reed (D-RI), and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) have co-sponsored a bill that would freeze interest rates at 3.4 percent for two years. But the GOP has other ideas. Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked passage of Reed and Harkin's bill, arguing instead for plans that Republicans in both chambers have introduced that would increase interest rates on student loans.

Warren suggested the GOP was morally bankrupt for blocking the student loan proposals. Here is part of her speech:

There are strong proposals on the table that would keep interest rates low while Congress has time to work out a permanent solution. And yet, Congress fails to act. Why? Two issues: money and values.

First, money. Some have argued that we can’t afford to keep interest rates low. But let’s be clear: Right now the federal government is making a profit from our students. Just last month, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that the government will make $51 billion this year off student loans…

[Yet] two weeks ago, House Republicans passed a plan that would produce higher profits off the backs of our college students. And here in the Senate, Senator Coburn has introduced a similar bill that makes student loans more profitable…

The second issue is values….Have we become a people who will support our big banks with nearly free loans, while we crush our kids who are trying to get an education?...This is morally wrong, and we must put a stop to it.

US Economy Adds 175,000 Jobs, Economy "Putters" Along

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri Jun. 7, 2013 7:29 AM PDT

deviant art

The US economy added 175,000 jobs in May, more than economists had predicted, the Labor Department reported Friday. More people started looking for jobs again, too. But because the government's main measure of unemployment only counts people as unemployed if they're seeking work, the increase in job-seekers increased the official unemployment rate to 7.6 percent, up from April's four-year low of 7.5 percent.

Employment increased in the service sector—in retail, hospitality, temporary help agencies, and education and health services, i.e. in the low-wage work that has been the hallmark of the current economic recovery. New jobs were also added in high-salaried professional services, such as accounting, consulting, PR, and legal work. And employment ticked upwards in construction, as new housing construction begins (barely) to come back to life. Factory work and government employment decreased.

Here's what job creation in various industries looked like last month, via Quartz:

And here's where the economy lost jobs:

Women did better than men last month, though in general men have fared better during the recovery:

Women gained 82K jobs in May & 112K in April. Men gained 93K jobs in May & 37K in April. Household report shows a greater skew toward women.
— Betsey Stevenson (@BetseyStevenson) June 7, 2013

The economy is only recovering gradually. Consumer confidence is up and stock and home values are up, but the total labor force is still a much smaller percentage of the population than it was before the recession.

"In general, the economy is just puttering along," Joshua Shapiro, chief US economist with the consulting firm MFR Inc., told the New York Times Friday. "Companies can get by without hiring people, so they do." A private-sector jobs report released earlier this week partially blamed government spending cuts and tax increases for mediocre job growth.

Even with the small improvement in jobs numbers, there has been little gain in wages: wages are up only 2 percent over the past year, Bloomberg reports.

And those who are still unemployed are faring worse. As the Times reports, the sequester cuts have forced almost every state to cut back on unemployment insurance benefits.

Report: When It Comes To the Deficit, Washington is Still Acting Like It's 2010

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu Jun. 6, 2013 9:41 AM PDT

Washington's obsession with the nation's budget deficit is a mistake, according to a new report released Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP). Congress and President Barack Obama are locked in a budget-cutting state of mind, still hoping to reach some sort of a grand bargain deficit reduction deal later this year that would replace the sweeping spending cuts that went into effect in March.

But as the report notes, the state of the economy has changed since 2010, the year that talks over how to reduce the deficit began:

The deficit has fallen by $2.5 trillion, due to tax increases and big spending cuts already enacted.
Growth in health care costs has slowed.
Inflation and interest rates are still low, despite concern that running a big deficit would increase them.
The key academic argument that high debt causes slower economic growth has fallen apart.
Austerity policies in Europe have not worked out so well.
The US economy has not come back to life as quickly as was projected when all the budget cutting began.

"Much has changed," Michael Linden, the author of the CAP report, writes, "and the debate should change with it."

Although the initial push for austerity came from the right, Obama and congressional Democrats soon fell in line. As Ezra Klein noted at Wonkblog Thursday, lower deficit forecasts didn't change Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wisc.) budget-cutting mania. "With some of the urgency gone, did Ryan ease up on the cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps?" Klein writes. "Of course not....The facts changed. The policies in the Republican budget didn't." As for Democrats, Klein says, "they’ve kept pursuing the exact kind of budget deals that led to sequestration in the first place." Obama put forward a budget in April that, as Linden says, "goes well beyond halfway to meet the demands of conservatives in Congress."

"It is time to reset the entire budget debate," Linden says. "No more pretending that the sky is falling."