The Senate parliamentarian has reportedly told the Senate GOP leadership that in order for reconciliation to be applied to the health-care reform bill, the original bill must first be passed by the House and signed by the president. Will House Democrats go through with accepting legislation that might never be fixed? Recall that earlier in the day it was reported that Harry Reid wrote a stern letter to Mitch McConnell, condemning the GOP's deliberate efforts to derail health-care reform, their tireless obstructionism and abuse of Senate procedure, and their shameless resort to lies to scare the public. That letter also promised that Democrats will move forward with reconciliation, hypocritical Republican whining on the issue aside.
In other reconciliation news, former Senate parliamentarian Robert Dove has toldGreg Sargent that during reconciliation Republicans can and will subject every amendment to the Byrd Rule, so Democrats had better have a "bulletproof" bill. And even though the vice president can overrule the parliamentarian, such a step would be "unprecedented" in Dove's opinion. The good news is that the public option will make an eleventh-hour appearance courtesy of Bernie Sanders, subject to a majority vote (provided reconciliation still happens).
Reading a Washington Postprofile of Hillary Clinton's State Department one year in, Michael Cohenis disappointed that Obama administration has staffed its foreign policy ranks with competent, capable people ... who fail to espouse a strategic vision. Indeed, that lack of vision is what is so puzzling about the claims that Obama is taking American foreign policy in some sort of unprecedented or radical direction. The real criticism is that he hasn't done enough to change the basic foreign policy pattern established by all of his postwar predecessors. Roger Cohen might worry himself that Obama lacks emotional attachment to the Allied invasion of Europe, but this hasn't dissuaded him to watch yet another Hollywood tribute to WWII with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg in the White House theater.
Speaking of media failure, I too am speechless at Massa coverage. The resulting freak show has enabled House Republicans to force a vote on investigating the matter, allowing them to downplay the significance of their own massive ethical problems that ultimately consumed them in the lead-up to the 2006 midterm elections.
Remainders: Full credit to the two Republican lawmakers who successfully pushed to ban misleading "census" mailers being used by their own party; credit too to VA Gov. Bob McDonnell for reversing a reinstatement of discriminatory state hiring practices; why is it so hard for people to understand that issuing decisions bound to piss people off is essentially why the Supreme Court exists; global warming is "generally exaggerated" according to an increasing number of Americans; I have no idea why National Review is highlighting a 30 year old issue of their magazine featuring a cover story on detente; Reason magazine thinks the "ideas" in John "centrists save America" Avlon's book are worth a ten minute interview; and irrespective of the quality (poor) of the other Democratic candidates, I agree that John Kerry was a terrible candidate for a job he would have filled well.
Earlier today it looked like student loan reform had run into some serious trouble, but following this afternoon's Democratic Caucus meeting, it seems that the important legislation to cut subsidies to student lenders and use the savings to fund Pell Grants -- a major part of the President Obama's higher ed agenda -- is back on track.
A concentrated grassroots lobbying effort, combined with personal discussions at this afternoon's meeting of the Senate Democratic Caucus, seems to have convinced Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad that including the student loan bill in reconciliation wouldn't hinder health care reform efforts, congressional aides told the Prospect. Conrad worried that the addition of the education legislation might present an obstacle to already delicate negotiations to modify the health care bill so the House would pass it. However, discussions with his colleagues and the senate's parliamentarian lead him to tell the Washington Post today that "we're leaning toward" including student loan reform in the reconciliation process. (The Senate voted to include the legislation in the reconciliation process last April).
While Hill staff caution that nothing is done until it is done, the news that Conrad is back on board with reformers' original plan to pass the bill is much rosier than this morning's more ominous signs. Senate Leader Harry Reid's office declined to comment on the issue.
After I wrote a column supporting New York's latest effort to tax sugary drinks, I read RaceWire's column on how it's just another tax to hurt poor people. While, yes, sales taxes are regressive, decrying this tax as a social justice issue misses the point.
For starters, as I wrote in my piece, this sales tax hits producers who use concentrated syrups to add a lot of calories to their drinks. That might sound like a moot point, since the tax will be passed on to consumers as a higher-priced drink, but it's important to note that it also includes fruit juices with added sugar. In those instances, consumers can very easily shift their purchases to juices with more natural fruit that are slightly less sweet and have higher nutritional value per calorie.
(The science on how bad sugary drinks are for us is pretty clear, but for some
reason the RaceWire author, Michelle Chen, calls it uncertain. To support that, she links
to a newspaper article that notes scientific consensus but quotes the
beverage industry calling that into question.)
Second, assuming that the tax will disproportionately hit poor families assumes they won't shift their purchases elsewhere in response. The average price of milk is $3.50 a gallon, while the average price of a 2-liter bottle of Coke is $1.70. Two bottles of Coke, which would provide about the same amount of liquid as a gallon of milk, would still be 10 cents cheaper. Part of the reason it's so cheap is because sweeteners like corn syrup are cheap, and they're so cheap because of government subsidies. (The dairy industry is also, obviously, heavily subsidized, but making it even cheaper to compete with soda isn't the answer). It's fine to talk about personal choice, but you have to note that the government is already interfering in such a way that it encourages families to buy more soda than is healthy. It's possible, then, that families now are actually forgoing drinks like milk because soda's so much cheaper. We're subsidizing junk food, which to me is a more important social justice issue. The food we make most available to people who are watching their wallets is the food that will cost them most in the long run.
You could make an argument that ending subsidies would do that better, which Chen acknowledges, but that would still result in making soda more expensive. Moreover, it would require a national consensus. And lowering the price of healthier foods doesn't discourage purchasing soda, because subsidizing healthier foods just encourages spending more money on more calories overall. If public health is the goal, the better way to address it is to raise the price of soda to encourage families to spend money elsewhere. The tax would be used to close a budget gap in the Department of Health which, incidentally, provides medical care to the poor. So to me, this is akin to raising the gas tax and subsidizing public transportation. It might disproportionately hit poor people at the stands, but overall, it's a progressive policy.
So while Chen says Albany should be more worried about balanced diets than balanced budgets, it seems to me they're concerned with both. And she says she doesn't see a parallel effort to expand access to good food in all areas of New York, which is funny, because New York City isactuallydoing a pretty good job at that very thing. Chen links to a piece that notes some of the problems with the supermarket initiative, but the fact remains that bodegas often do not carry fruit and vegetables, though the Bloomberg administration tried that too. And, in the meantime, 1,000 fruit carts have been dispatched to under-served communities.
It's not as though there's a perfect food solution. But just because lower-income families spend a higher percentage of their income on soda and any tax attached to it, that doesn't mean middle-class and higher-income families aren't helping to foot the bill every time they buy soda, too. That's why Coca-Cola has it's eye on the worldwide emerging middle class. And though it's bad to entirely rely on sin taxes to close budget holes when there are better ways to raise revenues, this is more about making soda sensibly priced.
Citing declining enrollment and money issues, the Kansas City School Board plans to close 29 of its 61 schools. Kansas City's educational system has long been in decline, due to the hollowing out of the the city's urban core and the resulting re-segregation of area schools. Many scholars have cited Kansas City as a prime example of post-WWII white flight to the suburbs. Some blameBrown v. Board of Education for helping to spur it.
As the table shows, the city's white population has remained relatively stable, but this masks the overall population increase in the metro area -- and as author Joshua Dunnnotes, younger, middle-class whites fled to the suburbs while the remaining white population aged. With fewer school-age white children in Kansas City, enrollment dropped and racial composition changed dramatically. In 1959, 6.6 percent of Paseo High School students were African American. Twenty years later, that number jumped to 97.8 percent.
Supporters of "vouchers" and charter schools should take heed. The district's long-standing policy of allowing students to transfer from one school to another so long as there's space only undermined desegregation efforts and helped spur flight to the suburbs. In Kansas City, as across the country, the "competition" and mobility touted by conservatives has meant re-segregation, declining enrollment and funds, and ultimately, job losses and school closures in the middle of a recession.
A terrible synergy of special interests has jeopardized a key student loan reform that would eliminate billions of dollars in subsidies to private lenders. The legislation would cut out private lenders who currently act as middlemen when the government makes loans to students -- it would expand the Federal Direct Lending program and plow the savings into Pell grants for students.
The problem, though, is that this legislation is opposed by moderate Democrats who have received donations from the industry or represent states where the student lenders are based. (Republican opposition, of course, remains constant across the board.) This wouldn't have been a big deal, since the provision is slated to go through the budget reconciliation process, which allows the bill to pass on a simple majority vote. But now that the passage of health-care reform legislation requires it to go through the same reconciliation process, reform opponents are threatening both bills, forcing leadership to choose between them -- and health care is likely to come out on top. The House, of course, passed both bills last year.
What's next? If the Obama administration and Senate leaders can't corral enough votes for both measures, it's likely that health-care reform will be the top priority, leaving student-loan improvements by the wayside. After that, there is a lender-supported compromise bill that still retains unnecessary subsidies or the possibility of giving the legislation another shot in a few months, an idea floated by Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad. Reformers worry that delay could kill the bill. That would be a huge loss for both college students and responsible public policy.
“College students are graduating with deep student loan debt and borrowers are increasingly defaulting on their loans. We must make college more affordable and accessible now. In order to lower student loan debt, we need to increase grant aid—money for college that students don’t have to repay," Rich Williams of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, one of many groups organizing support for the legislation, said today. "If student aid reform is cut from the final reconciliation package, then large banks and lenders will prevail over struggling students and their families."
Earlier this morning, Sen. Dick Durbin announced that he and Sen. Jeff Sessions had reached a "compromise" in the Senate gym over Durbin's bill, which would have eliminated the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity for crack vs. powder cocaine.
"If you ever wonder if anything good ever happens there, it appears something good might have happened there," Durbin said, which may or may not have been an oblique reference to former Congressman Eric Massa's tale about being lobbied by Rahm Emanuel in the House gym. "Senator [Orrin] Hatch was there to witness it."
The compromise was that Durbin would accept Sessions' amendment to change the disparity from 100 to 1 to 20 to 1. In return, Sessions offered to withdraw his amendments that would have narrowed the circumstances under which a judge could reduce penalties for offenders who acted with "fear, impulse or affection," and would have imposed a 10-year mandatory maximum for simple possession rather than eliminating the five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession entirely.
"My position is for one to one, equity and equality in sentencing, but in order to get things done you have to be prepared to make mutual concessions," Durbin said. "That's what we have done."
In a statement, the ACLU Legislative Counsel Jennifer Bellamy urged Congress to eliminate the disparity entirely, saying, "We finally have the political will and momentum to end this unconstitutional disparity. We should not miss this opportunity to effect real change and ensure fair sentencing for all Americans."
The Judiciary Committee passed the bill, which will go to the full Senate for a floor vote. Instead of eliminating the crack/powder disparity, which practically everyone in the committee acknowledged disproportionately affects black Americans, the senators opted to make the law one-fifth as racist as it used to be.
The senators on the committee spent the rest of the markup complimenting each other on all they had achieved with their bipartisanship.
There's one thing on which nearly everyone can agree: The overconsumption of soda and sugar-sweetened drinks is harmful to our health, especially for kids. That's why New York state's budget measure to tax those drinks is a win for public health.
Gov. David Paterson of New York dropped a similar proposal last year after the bill garnered little support among lawmakers and received a lot of pushback from the beverage industry. This year, a new and improved effort that is part of Paterson's upcoming budget has a better shot. Still, many state senators, and some unions, oppose the tax. They say that touting it as a measure to curb obesity is just an excuse to tax. "This year, my rule is I'm not voting for any new taxes. None at all, at any time," state Sen. Joseph Robach told News 10 in New York.
Progressives surely understand by now that Barack Obama has no intention of making the rhetorical case for progressivism a theme of his presidency. This is a continuing disappointment; if he spent as much time attacking conservatism as, say, Ronald Reagan did attacking liberalism, we might actually be able to change our national conversation on the role of government. And unfortunately, what ought to be the most powerful tool in that effort -- strong policy -- may have only limited effect. Republicans today decry the potential horror of government health insurance while simultaneously posing as valiant defenders of Medicare; tomorrow they will likely celebrate the health insurance exchanges the current reform establishes, while they mount a rearguard action against a public option.
Given that Democrats have control of government for the moment, perhaps it would be a good time to come up with some creative ideas to shift the public's perceptions about government -- not in a propagandist way, but in a way that actually enhances understanding. Writing in Democracy, Ethan Porter has one such idea: "Let's offer individual taxpayers a clear breakdown of what they're getting in return for their taxes. The IRS should provide individual taxpayers with a receipt." It would lay out, in broad terms, where your tax money went: This many of your dollars went to defense, this many of your dollars went to transportation programs, this many went to education, and so on.
It would be hard for conservatives to argue that there is something sinister about letting Americans know what the government does with their taxes. Yet such an effort would, in fact, advance progressive goals. The reason is that the public is massively misinformed about what tax money goes toward, and in a particular way: They tend to overestimate the amount of money spent on programs they don't like. For instance, lots of people believe that much of the federal budget goes for welfare or for foreign aid (neither very popular), when the actual amount spent on each of those items is less than 1 percent of the budget. And when you give them the opportunity to say how they'd like their tax money spent, they give very progressive answers: Cut defense spending, but increase spending on education, medical research, and renewable energy.
Congress could enact Porter's idea -- a yearly mailing to every household following tax day -- at relatively low cost. It would be a boon to public understanding about government, which would increase the likelihood that the next major debate could be a little more grounded in reality. Why not?
Courtney Martin writes that this International Women's Day, we should look at gender inequality in our own communities. Each day this week on TAPPED we will run a profile of an organization doing exactly that.
COLOR, the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights, is barely a decade old but is already breaking new ground in Colorado. Their success in the 2008 election was a testament to their innovation, when they helped defeat a slate of ballot initiatives that would have meant setbacks in reproductive rights, worker’s rights, and minority achievement.
At first, COLOR was against Amendment 46, which would have defined an unborn child as a person, which was being challenged by a coalition of traditional reproductive-rights groups. At the same time, COLOR was also concentrated on other amendments that were up for consideration that year—including amendment 48, which would have banned affirmative action in Colorado.
COLOR decided they needed a new strategy that would combine the opposition to the two amendments and would also reach the Latino community on the Amendment 46 issue better than traditional reproductive-rights groups could. Pre-election polling determined that pairing opposition to the two amendments in one campaign translated to an 8 percent jump in opposition, according to Daniel Gonzales, political and reproductive-justice advocacy coordinator with COLOR.
So began a campaign with a truly diverse message, and one that resonated within the group's target communities. Instead of rhetoric about “keeping the government off our bodies,” a typical reproductive-rights message used to defeat anti-abortion initiatives, COLOR named their campaign “Latino families for health and opportunity.” What resulted was a cross-movement coalition that brought together groups working in communities of color, labor unions, immigrant-rights organizations, and reproductive-rights groups, an unprecedented alliance.
In the last four days leading up to the election, they bundled opposition to even more amendments into the campaign—including three anti-worker amendments. They defeated four of the five amendments that year, and the one that passed was recently deemed unconstitutional. The framework for this campaign platform used by COLOR was reproductive justice—a theoretical underpinning that is defined as being more broadly about women's health than just the abortion issue. Gonzales explained:
[Reproductive justice is] about creating entry points for folks to participate in the work. We have to acknowledge all of a person’s identity and we have to work at the intersections to create long-term change. The reproductive justice framework is an amazing tool to help people get past their silos.
Reproductive justice is gaining popularity among reproductive-rights groups precisely because the ideology allows them to make connections to other issues their constituents care about.
When the staff at COLOR aren’t working on these amendment campaigns, they work on leadership development and sex education programs in Denver public schools. They've seen success in their youth program, Latinas of Vision, which recently campaigned to bring sex education issues into the school board election discussion. Reproductive justice allows COLOR to bring all these elements together into a cohesive but multi-issue strategy. COLOR isn’t the only group using this framework, but their experience in 2008 is a testament to its potential for success in the electoral arena. “It’s not only a more complete analysis; it’s also a winning strategy,” Gonzales said.
The last time Dodd and Schumer unveiled the regulatory reform bill.
Two exciting pieces of regulatory reform news today. One is that Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd is set to release a new version of legislation designed to overhaul financial regulations on Monday. The second is, though it will reflect his negotiations with Sen. Bob Corker, it may not be bipartisan:
Over the last few months, Banking Committee members have worked together to try and produce a consensus package. Together we have made significant progress and resolved a many of the items, but a few outstanding issues remain.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, smelling some leverage, jumped on the event, issuing a tough statement on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that begins with a reference to "GOP POSSIBLY ABANDONING BIPARTISAN TALKS ON REG REFORM":
"The new consumer protection agency shouldn’t be designed to exempt payday lenders, it should be designed to put them out of business,” Schumer said. “It is unfathomable that we would leave some of the most disreputable actors in today’s marketplace free to continue ripping off innocent Americans. This is too big a sacrifice to make."
And proving that he's a man after my own heart, Schumer also says that letting Republicans weaken the bill in negotiations and then not vote for it isn't very smart:
This would be a bad policy even if it were bipartisan. But there’s even less reason to accept a watered-down watchdog agency if those who insisted on it are prepared to walk away from the negotiations.
The quality of the bill remains up in the air -- there's been a lot of different compromises on the table and it's unclear which will make it to the final version. But any progress toward the floor, and hope of improvement, is a better sign than unending negotiations in committee.
Adam Serwer argues for ending the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine:
The sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine is a national disgrace. Both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have called for it to be ended, and prominent Republicans like Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn have indicated they're sympathetic to the idea. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the Fair Sentencing Act, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's proposal to eliminate the disparity entirely.
"It is plainly unjust to hand down wildly disparate prison sentences for materially similar crimes," Holder said at a D.C. Court of Appeals Judicial Conference last summer. "It is unjust to have a sentencing disparity that disproportionately and illogically affects some racial groups."
It's always amusing when conservatives try to portray increasing government revenue as fiscally irresponsible. But the ridiculousness reached its height in Carly Fiorina's Demon Sheep ad against her Senate opponent Tom Campbell, which portrayed his past support of tax increases to balance California's budget as such.
But of course, when lawmakers are actually faced with the real consequences of governing, tax increases are an important tool for maintaining important things, like schools. That's the choice facing Illinois lawmakers, who are considering Gov. Patrick Quinn's budget, which raises income taxes by 1 percentage point, from 3 percent to 4 percent.
A targeted increase for higher earners might be better, but it's a minor increase that would preserve the education budget at current levels. The article in The New York Times said Democrats in the state Legislature, which are the majority party, were so far noncommittal. But it's telling that the biggest criticism came from the Republican leaders from the outside, who hope to retake the state this year. The state party chair, Pat Brady called the budget irresponsible and portrayed the tax increase as a 33 percent raise, a true number but one that makes it sound bigger than it is.
But Quinn seems to be hoping a tax increase won't play that way on the campaign:
'That 1 percent will be enough to restore our education budget to current levels,' he said, 'and allow us to get caught up on some of the millions of dollars we owe to our public schools, to our community colleges, to our four-year universities. I believe this 1 percent for education makes sense, and I think the people of Illinois will understand.'
Yesterday we posted a ton of analysis of Rep. Paul Ryan's budget proposals, but I didn't have much sense of how it compared to the president's budget.
However, if you use the Tax Policy Center's data on revenues rather than the placeholder provided by Ryan's office (they still have not explained where they got their revenue projections, despite this strange response to TPC's findings), it turns out that Ryan's plan is actually less effective at balancing the budget than President Obama's. Check out my mash-up table below, which combines the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' analysis and the latest Congressional Budget Office estimate [PDF] of the president's budget. All figures are in percent of gross domestic product:
It's interesting to see that Obama's plan is more fiscally responsible in the midterm, if you measure that in terms of lowering the deficit. And Obama's plan doesn't radically change the entire social-insurance system or create an incredibly regressive tax regime.
Conservatives have obsessively slammed the Classified Information Procedures Act, which regulates the disclosure of classified information in civilian courts proceedings, by claiming it would lead to terrorists getting top-secret information. This has never happened before. The only example conservatives regularly point to is the 1995 Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman case, in which the government simply failed to classify a list of un-indicted co-conspirators that made its way to Osama bin Laden -- who had declared war on the U.S. three years earlier anyway.
Again, the mythical disclosure of classified information in civilian court has never happened, over hundreds of terrorism cases.
This argument in favor of the military commissions for trying terrorists is flawed, but Spencer Ackermanreports today exactly how flawed it is:
But the military framework for handling classified information is almost exactly the civilian framework for handling it. The Military Commissions Act of 2009, which set procedure for the revised military commissions, explicitly instructs military judges to look to the civilian rules for protecting classified information, known as the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. Under the Act’s fifth subchapter governing the “construction of provisions” for the “protection of classified information,” the text says that “the judicial construction of the Classified Information Procedures Act (18 U.S.C. App.) shall be authoritative,” except in certain specific cases that Justice Department officials said are legally arcane.
It makes sense that military courts would take guidance from the civilian courts in such matters, because military courts aren't used to trying terrorism cases. Former State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger IIIsaid months ago that the Bush administration was moving to shore up military lawyers with civilian lawyers from the Justice Department, precisely because they have more experience in such matters.
Military commissions are haphazard. They tend to give out lighter sentences. They don't appear to offer any real "advantages" in terms of protecting classified information. Virtually the only "positive" is that they tend to offer the government more certainty of conviction.
-- A. Serwer
Prior to becoming attorney general, Eric Holder held public views that were to the right of the ones he holds now. He believed that placing suspected terrorists in the criminal justice system might compromise intelligence gathering. He wrote as much in a brief submitted in the Rumsfeld v. Padilla case, in which he writes:
[We] recognize that these limitations might impede the investigation of a terrorist offense in some circumstances. It is conceivable that, in some hypothetical situation, despite the array of powers described above, the government might be unable to detain a dangerous terrorist or to interrogate him or her effectively. But this is an inherent consequence of the limitation of Executive power. No doubt many other steps could be taken that would increase our security, and could enable us to prevent terrorist attacks that might otherwise occur. But our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens.
Dana Perino and Bill Burck, who have spent the last couple of months fudging national-security questions over at National Review, have presented this as a kind of trump card proving that trying terrorists in the criminal-justice system is a bad idea. They don't have any harsh words for their boss, but this is of a piece with the larger conservative attempt to revise history and erase the more than 100 terrorist cases tried in civilian courts during the Bush administration from public memory. The deviation between the Bush administration post-2006 and the Obama administration is minimal.
At issue is the fact that Holder didn't disclose the above briefing during his confirmation hearing, which is an oversight worthy of criticism. However, Burck and Perino aren't happy merely making that argument -- they have to fudge the conclusions of U.S. courts in order to justify their belief that the government can hold anyone, anywhere, indefinitely, merely on suspicion of terrorism.
The briefs help to explain a great deal about Holder’s approach to KSM and Abdulmutallab, and detainee policy more broadly. The briefs provide insight into why Holder has refused to acknowledge that Abdulmutallab could have been lawfully detained as an enemy combatant. Holder has insisted for weeks that there is substantial legal doubt on this score because Abdulmutallab was caught in the U.S., not in a recognized battle zone. His position ignores the court-of-appeals ruling in the Padilla case, which held that a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil may be detained as an enemy combatant. That decision is still good law — but Holder appears to discount it; after all, he supported Padilla. He prefers the earlier ruling of a different court of appeals, which sided with Padilla, even though that ruling was vacated by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court dismissed Padilla's habeas petition -- it didn't rule in favor of the idea that the government can detain someone captured on U.S. soil indefinitely without trial. In fact, the Bush administration moved Padilla into the criminal-justice system precisely to avoid a confrontation with the Supreme Court on this point, which Burck and Perino misleadingly suggest is settled law. The Obama administration did the same thing with Ali Saleh al-Marri, a foreign citizen who was in the U.S. legally and was detained for nearly seven years in a military brig. They were justifiably afraid that they would get stomped in court, just like their predecessors. Civil-liberties advocates wanted this fight, and they were denied it.
So it really isn't clear that the U.S. could have held Abdulmutallab that way. In fact it likely would have set up the very same kind of epic constitutional confrontation that both Bush and Obama have desperately tried to avoid.
Not only that, but in terms of collecting intelligence, precedent suggests holding Abdulmutallab this way would have been a bad idea. Padilla gave the U.S. scratch zero in terms of intelligence while he was detained in military custody, and al-Marri didn't start talking until he was taken out of the brig. According to the Charleston Post and Courier:
A day after he took office, President Barack Obama reversed the Bush administration's enemy combatant stance and ordered al-Marri transferred from military custody to the courts. Before al-Marri agreed to plead guilty, al-Marri sat with investigators for hours, Savage said. In this less-threatening setting, al-Marri verified some of the government's accusations against him and steered the government away from errors in its intelligence.
Maybe Holder is being reckless. Or maybe, having considered the two examples in which the U.S. held someone captured on American soil as an enemy combatant and got nothing out of it, he simply changed his mind.
At any rate, as I've pointed out before, Holder's current view, that access to an attorney doesn't impede intelligence gathering, isn't that unusual. It was the view of former Attorney General Michael Mukasey when he was a federal judge ruling on the Padilla case. Mukasey said of Padilla's access to an attorney, “The interference with interrogation would be minimal or nonexistent.” Since then, Mukasey's changed his mind. But no Republicans -- certainly not Perino or Burck -- found this to be a dangerous view during Mukasey's confirmation several years ago. It's a credit to the GOP media operation that they managed to get Politico to write a whole article on this subject without mentioning that.
The more disturbing part of Burck's and Perino's reasoning is the aspersions they cast on Holder's notion that some level of risk of terrorist attack is acceptable in order to respect the law. The logical conclusion of their argument is that Perino and Burck think that some level of "absolute safety" can be achieved and would be a desirable state of affairs, if we just ignored the law all together. American public servants swear an oath to protect the Constitution and not the people of the United States in order to avoid the monstrous acts that would be otherwise justified in the name of "security."
Perino and Burck, like Obama, rhetorically reject the "false choice" between liberty and security. But only because they seem to believe that there's no contest -- they'd give up freedom for security in a heartbeat.
-- A. Serwer
American politics and American foreign policy partake heavily of certain pieties. At the intersection of the two one finds above all the piety that they should not intersect. Politics, as the saying goes, ought to stop at the water's edge. Except, as the historian Julian Zelizer demonstrates in his new book Arsenal of Democracy, things have never worked that way. Nor is it clear how they ever could if the United States is to remain both a democracy and a world power. Since the early decades of the 20th century, America has played an important role on the world stage. In order to do so, it has built a vast national-security apparatus -- including a far-flung military, global intelligence operations, and research into new weapons technologies -- whose extent and use are necessarily the subject of political controversy.
Indeed, Zelizer's account makes it clear that political motives were at the root of even the relatively brief period of bipartisan collaboration between President Harry Truman and congressional Republicans in the late 1940s that gave rise to the misleading cliché about politics stopping at the "water's edge." Combining anti-communism abroad with a progressive approach at home helped Truman hold the Democratic coalition together despite a growing divide between North and South within his party. At the same time, Republicans suffering politically from the taint of "isolationism" found it convenient to collaborate with Truman in order to rehabilitate themselves.
Some folks, mainly those with a financial interest in NASA's program to develop new manned spacecraft, are in a tizzy because the president's budget eliminates NASA's Constellation program, designed to return humans to the moon. Instead, Obama is funding new research and development and asking the private sector to handle the task of manned spaceflight. Even as he does this, Obama is increasing overall funding to the agency -- while he promotes a non-security discretionary spending freeze amid a recession! But this isn't enough for former astronaut and Republican Sen. Harrison Schmitt, who had this to say:
It's bad for the country. This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism.
Boy, that's harsh! It should be noted that since we already went to the moon, it's not that exceptional a destination. It should also be noted that Harrison is a crank global warming denier, but maybe he's the best source Post writer Joel Achenbach could find. I guess Sally Ride and Leroy Chiao, both former astronauts and members of the expert commission who investigated the program and recommended its cancellation, weren't available for comment. I suppose Harrison's insane rambling, lacking any kind of argument, helps inform readers more than what they might have said. (The head of the commission did tell Achenbach the rocket wouldn't have a useful role.)
Though I'm not an expert on space flight (I'll trust the commission), it does seem like NASA has lost direction in recent years, so perhaps refocusing on a new goal is best before continuing to dump money into a program that's over-budget and behind schedule. And while my liberal bones cry out for a huge government program to send Americans to Mars and jump-start decades of scientific innovation, pragmatism suggests that letting private companies develop space flight while the government agency focuses on earthbound development isn't the worst idea until the economy gets on its feet.
It's important for Obama and other politicos to remember that Harrison was a one-term senator. In 1982, he was defeated by the current incumbent, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, whose slogan was "What on Earth has he done for you lately?" That's certainly the same attitude voters are going to have this year and in 2012.
In today's edition of groundless electoral prognostication, Stuart Rothenberg takes great pains to understand why, after triumph in 2006 and 2008, Democrats are not poised to make big gains in 2010. Jon Chaitrefuses to believe that Rothenberg is unaware that the president's party historically loses seats in the first midterm after the election, and wonders why he "seems to be grasping for some fact in which to ground his otherwise groundless assertions that the Democrats' legislative strategy has produced political disaster." Further, while Rothenberg acknowledges unemployment as a drag on the incumbent party, he turns to a myriad of other possible explanations to understand Democrats' electoral problems. I realize that "presidential approval rating tracks with the unemployment rate" is unsexy and a conversation ender, but it's the truth, and trying to find other causes is just killing time until the election.
Turning to the genre of "I can read the minds of U.S. Presidents," Roger Cohen writes a rather insulting column where he asserts that "at heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist" who was not shaped by "the great struggles of the Cold War, which bound Europe and the United States," "whose intellect and priorities were shaped by globalization," and "he’s probably the first U.S. president for whom the Allied landing [at Normandy] is emotionally remote." This is the companion piece to the Ponnuru and Lowry thesis of American exceptionalism: Only whereas the latter believe Obama has been too corrupted by European ideas, Cohen believes Obama lacks sufficient "ties" to Europe. Both are false, and both assume that there is something illegitimate about this president.
Conspiracy-theory roundup: The Obama administration contemplates a ban on sport fishing; Glenn Beck argues that the Census increases slavery; buy your "survival seeds" privately, because the "secret" government hoard isn't for Real Americans; and Senate Democrats are trying to silence the alternative media (Drudge) with software viruses.
Remainders: I spoke too soon, the welfare queens are back; reflecting on the quality of California's next potential Republican governor, one must conclude that The Onion got it right again; I think this Scott Brown fellow might be too reasonable to caucus with the GOP; the libertarian's endless contempt for our "nightmare" government helping people is beyond my ability to comprehend; Stephen Spruiell doesn't think much of automobile safety, and he's pretty sure the government is to blame; and for the last time, David Petraeus is not, repeat, not, running for president.
Now that it's looking like there's not much they can do to stop health-care reform (if it does go down, it will be because of recalcitrant centrist Democrats), Republicans have taken to warning their opponents that if HCR passes, it will mean electoral doom for Democrats. So here's a question some intrepid interviewer might ask as a follow-up when they repeat this:
OK, Mr. Republican Senator, if you think that Democrats will suffer a stunning defeat if they pass health-care reform, why not end your filibuster? Then, instead of the House passing the Senate's version of HCR, the Senate could pass the House's version, and it would be done. You could await your stunning victories in 2010 and 2012, and then repeal the bill before most of the key provisions take effect in 2014 (or actually 2013, under the House's bill). Then you'd have your smashing political victory, and the dreaded socialist takeover would never have occurred. If you really believe what you're saying, wouldn't that be the best of all possible worlds? So how about it -- why not end your filibuster?
Andrew Sullivanposts a rage-inducing reaction to Mo'Nique's much ballyhooed Oscar acceptance speech:
Your reader's defense of Mo'Nique was nice but erroneous. Large black ladies have never been "vilified" in this country. Made fun of and stereotyped, yes, but not "vilified."
The notion of the strong Black Mammy is one of the most positive portrayals of Black folk in the US going back to slavery times. And there was nothing "cringe-worthy" in Hattie McDaniel's portrayal in "Gone With The Wind" -- she was in complete control. In fact, her portrayal was just about the only positive portrayal of Black people in that movie. And, yes, Mo'Nique's award acceptance speech was extremely self-conscious, self-aware, and self-important.
Look, "Mammy" is not a "positive" stereotype. There are no "positive" stereotypes, all stereotypes are created with a dehumanizing flip side that is inseparable from the faint "compliment" used to justify their invocation. But the legacy of the Mammy in particular is a grotesque one. Like every other carefully engineered old-school caricature of black people, it's meant to reinforce notions of what kind of behavior is appropriate--in this case, a docile, even happy acquiescence to white authority. "Mammy" was meant to depict black women as ugly and asexual, content to exist as surrogate mothers to the saintly white children of their owners or employers. Mammy's false happiness assures white people that the institutions of slavery and later Jim Crow have black people's consent and approval, her rotund body an alibi for the rampant exploitation of black women by their white slave masters.
There's simply nothing "positive" about it. Mammy may give some
people the warm fuzzies, but that has to do with whom the stereotype
flatters. It sure as hell doesn't flatter black women.
There was something subversive about Hattie McDaniel making her money and winning an Oscar in her day, but it was also the beginning of an ugly and frustrating trend when it comes to black people and the Academy Awards. McDaniel's character in Gone With The Wind -- willing to stick with her owners even after those mean ol' Union soldiers have burnt the plantation to the ground -- is a perfect example of how conditional Academy Awards seem to be on how the role in question makes a white audience feel. Oscars are like Supreme Court decisions in that while the proponents argue that the decision was made on the merits, it often has a lot to do with the historical context in which that decision is made. It's not just about race, but that's a part of it. It's the only thing that, in my view, explains Denzel Washington losing out for Malcolm X but winning for his portrayal of a crooked drug-dealing cop who compares himself to King Kong--years after Sidney Poiter won for helping those nice white nuns build their church. Let's not even get started on the race and gender politics of Halle Berry sleeping with her husband's white executioner in Monster's Ball, which would really entail a whole other post.
I tend to think that this phenomenon diminishes with the frequency black actors end up winning a given award. But it's still there nonetheless, and the idea that people still think of the Mammy stereotype as a positive just reinforces the idea that for a black actor, winning an acting award has a lot to do with how a mostly white audience responds to the character you've chosen to play.
Republican Rep. Paul Ryan was in the news earlier this year after releasing a budget designed to eliminate the deficit and federal debt. Many argued that, though it contained radical changes in Social Security and Medicare as well as draconian budget cuts, it also represented a good-faith effort to make hard choices about the budget. But several new analyses show that not only is the plan incredibly regressive, it fails to actually solve the debt problem. Here's your background on the issue:
Ryan's Plan: "A Roadmap for America's Future" [PDF] was released in January; it promises major changes in social insurance, tax policy, and spending cuts that would cut deficits and gradually eliminate the national debt.
Tax Policy Center Analysis: However, the respected Tax Policy Center highlighted an important problem [PDF] in these calculations: The expected tax-revenue figures -- approximately 19 percent of GDP -- were assigned arbitrarily. When TPC ran the numbers, they found that Ryan's plan was billions of dollars short and would also result in extraordinary regressive tax policy, with large cuts for the wealthy but tax increases [PDF] for almost everyone else.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Analysis: The CBPP took the TPC analysis and went one step further, looking at the impact on other government programs, noting that the plan "would eliminate traditional Medicare, most of Medicaid, and all of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)." It's funding for private Social Security accounts "would leave the program with a deep financial hole."
The President's Budget: For comparison, here is the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of President Barack Obama's preliminary budget proposal, which, while it does not purport to eliminate the deficit and the debt, it does propose the (barely) feasible goal of lowering the deficit to the point where the national debt is sustainable.
Most civil-liberties advocates acknowledge that the government has the authority to detain fighters it captures in an ongoing theater of military combat until the end of hostilities. They maintain however, that terrorist suspects captured outside military combat zones, regardless of whether the U.S. is in an indefinite war with al-Qaeda, aren't appropriate candidates for indefinite military detention. These individuals are criminals. (This is my view as well.)
These groups have criticized the Obama administration's decision to indefinitely detain a so-called fifth category of individuals, who are "too dangerous to release" but whom can't be charged with crimes. Sen. Lindsey Graham is planning to propose legislation that would place the process of indefinite detention under court review. Spencer Ackermanreported that this would be distinct from the McCain-Lieberman proposal, which would basically allow the executive branch to detain anyone they wanted, including American citizens for an indefinite amount of time.
Ben Wittes, the centrist legal scholar with the Brookings Institution who circulated the petition criticizing the smear campaign against Justice Department lawyers who had represented suspected terror detainees, wrote a draft of a similar proposal last year. Wittes argued without endorsing Graham's effort explicitly that since we're going to have indefinite detention anyway, a Graham-like proposal is the only way to ensure that the process is fair.
“Given that we’re going to be doing these things and there’s a political consensus among anyone who’s going to run the executive branch that we’re going to be doing this, there should be rules for how we do this thing,” Wittes says.
In an op-ed for TheWashington Post last year, Wittes argued that an indefinite-detention proposal that would "involve regular review and ongoing oversight" would give "many more opportunities for error correction and for detainees to convince authorities that they no longer pose a danger that requires their incarceration."
Reached for comment over e-mail, the ACLU's Jonathan Hafetz, who was part of the defense team of Ali Saleh al-Marri, who was held for nearly seven years in a military brig in South Carolina, said the proposal was unconstitutional and a bad idea. "Congress has never before authorized this type of detention scheme -- and it should not do so now," Hafetz says. "Detentions are already subject to Court review via habeas corpus." The government has lost around three-quarters of the habeas cases filed by Guantanamo detainees.
Wittes claims that part of the problems is that the judges currently evaluating the habeas cases of Guantanamo detainees don't have a clear set of rules for how these cases should be handled, leaving them to "wing it, and figure it out for themselves how the rules should be.”
Last summer, the Obama administration seemed poised to enact an indefinite-detention law but didn't. Current Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyalargued for a "national security court" that would oversee indefinite detention alongside former Bush-era Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith back in 2007.
Jake Blumgartlooks at why Barack Obama is having such a difficult time undoing Bush-era damage to the Department of Labor:
On Feb. 4, a full year into Barack Obama's presidency, conservative influence over the Department of Labor finally loosened. After a grueling nine-and-a-half-month confirmation process, Patricia Smith overcame the Senate hold on her nomination as Labor Department solicitor, the third ranking position within the department. Her victory had been anything but certain: Fierce Republican opposition had already compelled another Obama Labor Department nominee, Lorelei Boylan, to withdraw her nomination as head of the vital Wage and Hour Division.
The slow, grinding process of reforming the department, particularly the Wage and Hour Division, has proved exceptionally difficult, and it isn't over yet. George W. Bush staffed his Department of Labor with rigidly pro-business ideologues who allowed the department's investigative functions to wither. Obama promised to end conservative influence over the department, freeing the career staff to fulfill the agency's core missions.
There's little good news to be found for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms, but one race that's shaping up to be interesting is that of Rep. Kendrick Meek, who is running for Florida's open Senate seat. While coverage of the race has been focused on an increasingly bitter internecine fight between Republicans Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio, Meek has been criss-crossing the state on a low-key grass-roots campaign. While Meek isn't well known outside his Miami district, this PPP poll should perk your interest:
The general election scenario that would give Democrats the best chance at winning the seat is a straight on contest between Rubio and Meek. The Republican leads 44-39 in that match up, and because there are a lot more undecided Democrats (20%) than Republicans (12%) the race is realistically probably even closer than 5 points. Rubio benefits from a more unified party with 77% of Republicans already committed to voting for him compared to 67% of Democrats who say they'll vote for Meek. But Meek leads 41-34 with independents, a very rare outcome in this political climate when independents are usually leaning strongly toward the GOP.
With the ultra-conservative Rubio leading in the primary and Crist strenuously denying that he'll run as an independent, this trend is surprisingly good for Meek.
In a Times op-ed today, Barry Friedman and Andrew Martin advocate a proposal you often see in blog comment sections: restoring the "real" filibuster as a solution for gridlock:
...the Democrats need to take three steps: First, they should announce the order in which they will take up their legislative agenda. Next, they should declare that they will no longer be using dual tracking, so that the Senate will hear just one issue at a time. Finally, Democrats should require those who want to filibuster legislation or appointments to actually do so, by holding the floor, talking the issue to death and bringing everything to a halt.
The new-school filibuster would preserve minority rights in the Senate, while imposing significant costs on obstructionist members, changing the calculus that causes today’s logjam. Stuck on the Senate floor, filibustering senators couldn’t meet with lobbyists or attend campaign fund-raising events; they couldn’t do much of anything, really, until their filibuster ended.
I am skeptical of this kind of proposal for three reasons:
While it's true that such a change would make it much more difficult to sustain a single-person, Jimmy Stewart-style filibuster, it's less clear how much more difficult it would make a filibuster supported by an entire minority party. The 41 Republicans in the Senate could keep a filibuster of health-care reform going without an enormous sacrifice to any one member.
More important, the classic filibuster also entails greatly increased costs to the majority party. The minority party is likely in many cases to see the obstruction of other aspects of the Senate's agenda as a feature, not a bug. Moreover, the political reality is that the majority party will be blamed for failures in government regardless of the merits. Because of this, it's far from clear if this rule change would even make that much difference -- a credible threat to filibuster by the minority party leadership would probably remain enough to get a bill removed from the Senate's agenda.
Whether the rule change would be a marginal improvement, make things marginally worse, or have no effect at all, my biggest disagreement with the proposal is the undefended assumption that the "rights" of legislative minorities to block initiatives with majority support are worth preserving at all. A vastly superior reform of the Senate would be to simply get rid of the filibuster altogether and use the same decision rules that work well for most of the world's other democratic legislative bodies. I particularly object to the use of the "minority rights" locution, which ties the filibuster to a genuinely important democratic value: the protection of underrepresented minorities against domination. The filibuster's effect on this kind of minority rights, however, has been and will almost certainly continue to be a net negative. Rather, the filibuster protects the interests of minorities that are already substantially overrepresented by the American political system.
Courtney Martin writes that this International Women's Day, we should look at gender inequality in our own communities. Each day this week on TAPPED we will run a profile of an organization doing exactly that.
When Hurricane Katrina hit Sharon Hanshaw's hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi, it destroyed her house and her beauty shop, a business she'd been building for 21 years. The few belongings she could salvage were in rough shape. After hours of cleaning off family photos, all that was left was a collection of silhouettes. "We just said we'll keep 'em, because at least we knew we did exist."
With Coastal Women for Change, a Biloxi-based organization she helped build in the aftermath of the storm, Hanshaw has done something similar for women struggling to rebuild their lives. Her goal was simple: "I'll make sure our community is valid, our voices will be heard."
The group started informally, a collection of about 25 women ages 18 to 82 getting together in East Biloxi to talk about life after Katrina and what was going on in their neighborhood. But the focus soon began to shift, as developers and casino owners took the lead in planning Biloxi's recovery, squeezing out the voices -- and the needs -- of the city's poor residents.
Since 2006, with Hanshaw serving as its executive director, Coastal Women for Change has helped women and poor people play a role in rebuilding their community and shaping its long-term future. The group's first event, a public forum with the mayor, City Council, and other elected officials, drew 200 people and gave them a chance to ask the mayor about his plans for addressing their needs.
After that, CWC got involved in the city's planning commission and worked with the NAACP to craft a plan for addressing the area's housing crisis, collecting 950 signatures on a fair-housing petition that was presented to elected officials. Coastal Women for Change identified other needs, too. With door-to-door surveys, they realized the depth of the city's child-care shortage; they asked the police to increase patrols around seniors who feared crime in their trailers, and they created emergency-preparedness kits for elderly residents in case another storm hit.
CWC helped 10 low-income families get $500 grants for home-improvement repairs. The group pushed for public housing, in parts of the city where people want to live. Its current focus includes mentoring and support groups for young leaders, more help for the elderly, and improved early education and child care. And it continues to make sure that community residents have information about what's going on, and ways to influence important decisions.
Hanshaw has started to think globally, too. She is part of Oxfam's Sisters on the Planet project, a network of American women concerned about climate change and its effect on women and the poor, and was in Washington this week to demand that Congress take action.
But her focus is at home. "Although the whole Gulf Coast was devastated, the poor were hit hardest as they had no resources to fall back on, and women most of all, especially single mothers with no housing or childcare who were forced to leave their children with strangers so that they could look for work," Hanshaw wrote this week on The Huffington Post.
Her own transformation has been remarkable. "Cosmetologist to activist," Hanshaw says. Her city's transformation is far from complete.
It's becoming difficult to cover the shifting ground in the Senate Banking Committee's financial regulatory reform negotiations, and perhaps the better part of wisdom will be simply waiting for the final product, since even many reformers despair of influencing the process until the Dodd-Corker negotiations are complete. But then you read something like this; you have to sit up and take note:
Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders, people involved in the talks said. The industry is politically influential in his home state and a significant contributor to his campaigns, records show.
Payday lenders are some of the foremost practitioners of pernicious consumer lending practices; a recent study by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that just two low-income New York City neighborhoods paid $19 million a year in check-cashing fees alone, when sustainable credit could be found much more cheaply if the market wasn't flooded with usurious lenders. Failing to include payday lending in consumer financial protection legislation would be a major failure and continue to contribute to the cycle of debt that leaves our country's financial system weakened. Ironically, Corker was at a National Journal breakfast this morning, where he told attendees that "there will be no carve outs in consumer protection."
Connecticut might be closer to passing a bill that would require employers to provide paid sick leave, an effort that is similar to a bill proposed in the fall by Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd. But the Senate is tied up with bigger bills.
The Connecticut Business and Industry Association helped stop the bill the last time it passed committee, and, as Daniel Schwartz at the Connecticut Employment Law Blog notes, the bill might not have a better chance in the state General Assembly this time around.
It's easy to see why businesses would be against such a bill, since at first blush it looks like a higher cost, but it's hard to see how legislators can justify voting against it. As Shani O. Hiltonwrote on the blog in the fall, only 40 percent of private-sector workers have paid sick leave. And as Jodie Levin-Epsteinwrote a few years ago, more flexible workplaces, including those that allow sick leave, are better for businesses too. Employers like to think of low-income workers as expendable, but it costs money to hire and train new employees. Sick leave would also prevent illnesses from spreading, which seems especially important in the food-service industry.
New York City is re-introducing a similar bill soon. The idea may not have the urgency it did in the fall, when swine flu was a big public-health concern, but it's nice to see states and municipalities considering it in the absence of a public-health concern, since the focus really should be for the low-income workers who can't take care of themselves, their health, and their families now.
Friend of TAPDayo Olopade has a fantastic series (Read part one, two, and three) over at The Root on black women and political power in the United States.
Olopade writes, "The real obstacles to elective office may be about less rights and more about belonging to the right club." Well, part of that is on us to install the standard bearers of black female political power into our cannon. Here are three women whose voices you should know:
"All this was on account of we want to register. To become first class citizens. ... Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America." Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil-rights activist, addressing the 1964 Democratic National Committee as the vice chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The MFDP was seeking to be seated as a challenge to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party.
"I look at the faces of the black youth of America. And they say, 'Chisholm, we know what you're going through. We know how rough and how tough. But we know you have the courage, the balls, the audacity to shake the system up, within the system." Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1969. She ran a groundbreaking campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. The video comprises clips from that campaign.
"What is different? What is special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker." Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas, was the first woman and African American keynote speaker at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has an op-ed in TheWall Street Journal taking the Ted Olsonview that criticism of the Justice Department lawyers smeared as terrorist sympathizers and criticism of John Yoo and Jay Bybee are somehow equivalent.
This is all of a piece, and what it is a piece of is something both shoddy and dangerous. A lawyer who represents a party in a contested matter has an ethical obligation to make any and all tenable legal arguments that will help that party. A lawyer in public service, particularly one dealing with sensitive matters of national security, has the obligation to authorize any step or practice the law permits in order to keep the nation and its citizens safe. And a lawyer who undertakes to represent someone whom his neighbors--perhaps rightly--revile as a threat to the public welfare is obligated to bring his talents to bear just as forcefully in favor of that client as he would if he were representing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who in 1895 was found guilty of treason and sent to Devil's Island for little more than being Jewish.
There's simply no comparison between Justice Department lawyers who worked to ensure the integrity of our system of Justice and the torture lawyers who worked to circumvent it, in the process narrowly avoiding professional sanction for their approval of methods of interrogation that violate domestic and international laws against torture.
I originally wrote that I thought the Keep America Safe ads were an attempt to rescue the reputations of Yoo and Bybee in the aftermath of the release of the OPR report. In doing so, they would be "validating" the lawless policies of the prior administration. Some of the conservative defenders of the smeared DoJ lawyers clearly have a similar goal in mind. The irony is that, at this point even John Yoo himself has criticized the ad.
In addition to Mukasey and Yoo, yesterday Sen. Lindsey Grahamcalled the ad accusing the Justice Department lawyers who did work on behalf of terror detainees of being terrorist sympathizers "shameful" and Sen. Jeff Sessions called the ad "over the top and unjustified," while nevertheless agreeing with the idea that the reason the Obama Justice Department has continued the policies of the Bush Justice Department is because of the smeared DoJ attorneys.
Greg Sargentthinks all the attention paid to this makes Cheney the winner. I think there's a tipping point where bad publicity stops being "publicity" and actually starts to become simply bad, and I wouldn't know how to exactly determine that point but I think it's around the time when Jeff "the NAACP is communist inspired" Sessions says you've gone too far, a Jewish Republican former attorney general starts invoking the Dreyfus affair, and the guy who rubber-stamped waterboarding is asking, "What's the big whoop?"
-- A. Serwer
Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallahsay it is time for Obama to let go of his unimaginative strategy in the Middle East and take a more proactive approach:
About three years ago, it looked like the United States might be emerging from its long neoconservative night to play a constructive role in ending the Israeli-Palestinian and broader Israeli-Arab conflicts. In December 2006, the Iraq Study Group, a congressionally commissioned panel of elder statesmen led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, issued a pointed rebuke of Bush administration policy in the region. The significance of their report, however, lay not in the minutiae of strategy and tactics discussed but rather in its endorsement of a long-denied truth: American efforts to stabilize Iraq would require support from allies in the region, which in turn would be decisively influenced by America's ability to seriously address the Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts.
The Bush administration had long resisted that equation, influenced as it was by the neoconservatives and their often Likudist-inspired Middle East worldview. The conflict and the accumulating grievances that it has generated have a deeply corrosive effect on both America's standing and ability to get anything done in the region and beyond.
At about the same time, Barack Obama, then a young senator who was just launching his presidential campaign, seemed to get it. In an interview during the campaign, he described the unresolved Israel-Palestine problem as "this constant wound ... this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy." As president, Obama not only promised to resolve the conflict but put it in the broader context of American interests in the region and in relation to the Muslim world. That logic featured prominently in his historic June speech in Cairo. Achieving peace, for this administration, became not only about helping America's Israeli or even Palestinian friends. It was redefined as being something in America's own hard-nosed self-interest.
States may soon adopt national core standards for education that were designed by state governors and state school leaders, TheWashington Postreports. It's part of President Obama's efforts to improve academics across the country.
When the No Child Left Behind Act tried to make schools accountable for educating their students, perhaps the biggest misstep was penalizing schools that failed and relying on school choice and competition as the mechanisms for school improvement. That led to some states lowering their standards, since easier tests would be easier for students to pass, thus preventing a school from being labeled as failing.
Part of the backlash against No Child Left Behind has been criticism that teachers can best determine what and how their students can learn, and some are now trumpeting the idea that a sense of community might matter more than providing school choice. But those can still be valued while recognizing there are national standards toward which every school should strive.
Denying that there should be any standards on a national level at all ignores the fact that some students are at a great disadvantage simply because of geography. Wealthy suburban schools simply have access as a whole to better teachers and better school administrators than those in extremely poor rural or urban areas. It just might be that some teachers need guidance on what the next generation needs to know to compete with their peers. The difference will be in how schools are required to reach the benchmarks.
Ah, the zombie genre of "analyzing" politics through sheer presidential will. Brendan Nyhansays it best: "If/when the economy picks up, Obama's speeches will start 'connecting' and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become." Ironically, the advice to "give better speeches" applies better to the other prolific zombie genre, "the electorate is rejecting liberal ideology." When 44 percent of Democratic voters are not enthusiastic about voting in the midterm elections and Obama's approval rating sinks as core Democratic constituencies become disillusioned with him, clearly he needs to rally the Democratic base, not the country at large.
Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have written a response to the many critiques (mine here) of their unpersuasive celebration of American exceptionalism, opening with the rejoinder, "But while our essay on American exceptionalism has been attacked quite severely, the attacks are too weak to constitute a serious provocation, and thus no heavy artillery need be deployed." They could have stopped there, for I am convinced enough. But the best line, by far, is when they observe that "sadly, a worse institution [slavery] took root here, but never became part of the national psyche." Being a connoisseur of conservative thought, I immediately recalled a throwaway line from Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind in the chapter on John C. Calhoun: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon; yet it needs to be remembered that the wild demands and expectations of the abolitionists were quite as slippery a foundation for political decency."
I understand the concern for privacy that underlies this sentiment, but Mark Krikorian's suggestion that we all answer census questions on ethnicity with "American" is less an act of protest than it is to generate weird statistics. Indeed, the census map he links to (Krikorian notes that "'American' was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties") shows that our "Americans" hail overwhelmingly from Dixie. Thank God one region in this country has the courage to reject political correctness and truly embrace the color-blind American creed.
This back-and-forth between Ezra Klein and Stephen Spruiell, where Klein finds conservatives trafficking in misinformation on health care and Spruiell keeps insisting that his objection is government involvement in health care, neatly exposes the fundamental difference between liberals and small government conservatives. Klein is correct that the modest proposals in Congress hardly amount to a government takeover, and Spruiell is more or less correct that reform does open the door to (but does not assure) government-provided health insurance. This, by Spruiell's own admission, is the "most important" consequence of the current health-care reform proposal. In other words, government involvement is just bad, period, which is why eliminating subsidies for private student loans, which ought to be a no-brainer, is also depicted as a government takeover of the economy.
Remainders: The "tradition" of the filibuster was an accidental invention; our broken Senate discourages the House from working on progressive legislation; Mitt Romneygrapples with the realities of being a political chameleon; I'm glad somebody remembers that Carly Fiorina's keen and pragmatic business sense nearly destroyed Hewlett Packard; a Republican candidate stumps on George Bush's "vision" for privatizing Social Security; and Boeing cements its relationship with Congress forever more.
This morning, Angelisa Young and Sinjoyla Townsend were the first couple to legally get married in the nation's capital. At 1 p.m. the pair was still giving interviews to the press outside the Human Rights Campaign building, fielding questions about who made Angelisa's dress (a friend who works at Howard University) and how they intended to celebrate (sleep). What struck me about them was how ordinarily they portrayed their lives -- and how meaningful it was to have their 12-year-long relationship "official." In a sense, that's been the goal of the gay-rights movement all along: to live ordinary lives with the implicit support of our communities behind us.
Today's a day to celebrate, though perhaps guardedly. Harry Jackson's appeal to the Supreme Court to stop marriage equality from going into effect before a citywide referendum might have been denied, but there are still a few ways gays could be stripped of marriage rights:
1. The initiative process. Now that marriage equality is in place, its opponents can turn to the initiative process, which lets voters amend existing city law (as opposed to stopping it from going into effect via a referendum). As with the referendum, the D.C. Board of Elections ruled in September that having a citywide initiative on marriage would put human rights to a vote in violation of the D.C. Human Rights Act. Anti-marriage activists sued the city, saying that the D.C. charter confers the right to vote on any matter, but lost in the trial court.
The case is scheduled to be heard in the D.C. Court of Appeals in May and is expected to fail there too, but some have speculated that if the Supreme Court -- which for D.C. functions as a federal appeals court -- gets involved, marriage equality could end up being put to a vote. In Chief Justice John Robert's decision denying Jackson's request to stop the law from going into effect, he said the argument that the city's charter guaranteed the right to vote on the matter "has some force" and that the initiative process was still available to Jackson and his cohorts. Even though polls indicate 6 in 10 Washingtonians support marriage equality, given the success of the fear-mongering tactics by groups like the National Organization for Marriage, that's still too close for comfort.
2. Congressional appropriations. Chris Geidner at Metro Weeklynotes that Congress, which failed to act during the mandatory 30-day review period for local laws, could refuse to fund the new law when it sets D.C.'s budget. This appears not to be a problem in the House, where D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton has assured she has "found a way to keep [it] from coming up in the House appropriations process." But things are less clear in the Senate, where members can offer amendments on the Senate floor.
For better or worse, the initiative process is up to the courts now, but gay-rights supporters have more direct say in what their legislators do. As many others have noted, the momentum of today's victory should inspire grass-roots activism across the nation.
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