Category: The Bush Legacy

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Criticism Foreign Policy Iran National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

John McCain’s Hip-Shooting Onanism

[digg-reddit-me]Joe Klein has had enough (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

McCain’s bleatings are either for domestic political consumption or self-satisfaction, a form of hip-shooting onanism that demonstrates why he would have been a foreign policy disaster had he been elected.

To put it as simply as possible, McCain – and his cohorts – are trying to score political points against the President in the midst of an international crisis. It is the sort of behavior that Republicans routinely call “unpatriotic” when Democrats are doing it. I would never question John McCain’s patriotism, no matter how misguided his sense of the country’s best interests sometimes seems. His behavior has nothing to do with love of country; it has everything to do with love of self…

The protesters admire our freedom, but…[they] consider Ahmadinejad the George W. Bush of Iran – a crude, unsophisticated demagogue…

Certainly, Bush the Younger, McCain and the rest of that crowd have absolutely no idea who the Iranian people are. The are not Hungarians in 1956. They do not believe they live in an Evil Empire. They still support their revolution. They shout “Allahu Akbar” in the streets, which was the rallying cry of 1979. They are proud of their nuclear program…

Klein’s exactly right on all counts. Except perhaps the “hip-shooting onanism” – that’s an image too far. For those unfamiliar with the biblical term, it refers to the story of Onan who was struck dead by God for “spilling his seed” on the ground. Onan was actually having sex with his dead brother’s wife at the time – but that was okay as his duty was to impregnate her. But he attempted to avoid impregnating her by “spilling his seed” – which wasn’t okay – and thus he was killed by God.
Despite the disturbing image, I can see why Klein found it hard to resist labelling McCain’s foreign policy views mastubatory. The compelling argument for the necessity of the President taking the side of the Iranian protestors is the same as the rationale for masturbation: It feels good, so do it.

Obama, meanwhile, has reiterated his position today:

This is not about the United States and the West; this is about the people of Iran, and the future that they – and only they – will choose.

Obama realizes this is not about us – but about Iran. And though his comments equating Mousavi and Ahmadinejad may have gone too far, it is important to realize that we are not likely to see a Western-style democracy coming out of Iran. Many of the protesters in the street want more freedom – but they still support the nuclear program and political Islam and see the 1979 revolution as a positive event. But the rising up of the people helps to demonstrate why I believed – and still believe – “Iran and America are natural allies on most issues.” It’s why I find Les Gelb’s assertion that “Within ten years, Iran will be our closest ally in the region,” to be convincing despite our history of conflict over the past three decades.

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Law National Security Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Experimenting With National Security Policy

[digg-reddit-me]On September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was taken by surprise. Their immediate reactions are forgivable, if disheartening – the 7 1/2 minutes reading a book after being told “America is under attack;” the quick spreading of false information at the top levels as officials thought that the State Department had been attacked and that taxi cabs were planning on blowing themselves up in front of major Washington buildings; the order by Cheney to take out a civilian airliner, usurping the role of the president. President Bush and Condi Rice clearly panicked – as Rice has essentially admitted since leaving office:

Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11th, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans. And I know a lot of people are second-guessing now, but let me tell you what the second-guessing that would really have hurt me – if the second-guessing had been about 3,000 more Americans dying because we didn’t do everything we could to protect them.

Karl Rove, seeing his dream of a realignment of the electorate threatened by the biggest terrorist attack in American history likewise panicked.

Cheney though was emboldened – his sense of purpose, his disdain for America’s delicate system of checks and balances, and his radicalism imbued Bush’s first term with a reactionary fervor. The War on Terror became synonymous with Cheney’s goal of creating an imperial presidency. At this point, in the aftermath of this devastating attack, Rove began to plan for ways to turn this glaring weakness into a strength; and Cheney attempted to change the American structure of government – believing that 9/11 would have been prevented if only the president had more power. Thus, Cheney began to systematically use this crisis to centralize more power in the White House – and to assert greater executive powers and to outright reject the powers of the legislative, judicial, and quasi-independent branches of government to check his or the president’s power. Laws were read in such a way as to maximally expand presidential power – with a statute declaring war on Al Qaeda secretly being understood to overturn decades of legislation, for example; vast areas of law were secretly held to be unconstitutional checks on the president’s power and were ignored. In so doing, Cheney began to fundamentally alter the American social bargain.

It wasn’t until far right-wingers from Office of Legal Counsel Director Jack Goldsmith, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Deputy Attorney General James Comey, and quite a few other top CIA, FBI, and Justice employees were about to resign that Bush finally realized how radical his administration had become. By Bush’s second term, he began to walk most of his more radical policies back – though refusing to admit any fault and maintaining his authority to do all of it.

Now that Bush is no longer in office, liberals, libertarians, progressives, and other Bush administration opponents had two basic conceptions of how to move forward and how to look at the radicalism of Bush’s first term and his assertions of executive power that he maintained until he left office. The first conception was well expressed by Tom Malinowski of the Human Rights Watch at a Congressional hearing on June 11, 2009:

We should stop experimenting. We should not build yet another untested structure on a foundation of failure. We should finally, at long last, bring to justice the men who killed thousands of people on September 11, and others who have committed or planned or aided the murder of Americans. And we should do it in a system that works.

On the other side, some who opposed the radical actions of Bush-Cheney still saw within September 11 something similar to what Cheney did – a unique threat to our way of life. What these individuals are forced to do is balance the threat of catastrophic terrorism with the desire to preserve our way of life. Rather than starting with the assumption that a stronger president with fewer checks on his or her power is the only way to prevent terrorism, these individuals believe we must experiment with our laws and institutions, to tinker with them, to achieve this right balance – all within the public realm and with the consent of the people, rather than in secret.

In an interview with a British paper, Philip Bobbitt, for example, makes the case for why we need to experiment with our national security policy – focusing specifically on the idea of stockpiling laws:

I think when you go to weapons of mass destruction you’re talking about just a completely different level of horror and disruption…We must come, as societies, to some understanding of what we’re facing, and in these times of tranquillity organise ourselves and debate about what we will do if a catastrophe should come to pass. We should stockpile laws for such an eventuality, just as we stockpile vaccines. Then I think we have an excellent chance of getting through these attacks with systems of consent in place. But if we don’t do that, if we say oh, get real, this isn’t another second world war, surely you’re exaggerating the threat, this couldn’t possibly threaten our society now! It hasn’t yet! And if you don’t use the democratic process to put laws in place now, then in a way you become the ally of the terrorists because when a truly terrible series of mass atrocities really does occur and you don’t have anything to fall back on, that’s when you get martial law, that’s when you get the system that’s in democratic collapse, and you become the source of terror yourself. No, Bin Ladin isn’t going to invade and occupy Westminster and put Mullah Omar in the House of Lords, he’s not going to take over. If Britain becomes a state of terror it will be because we did it to ourselves and we did it because we did not prepare when we had the time and the peace to do so by law and by consensual systems.The United States can do the same thing. If we are busy throwing away laws, the one steady craft we have to get through this, Washington will turn us into a state of terror, we’ll do it. We’ll embrace it enthusiastically…

We need to focus on making our society more resilient in the event of an attack, on spreading information regarding terrorism so that citizens can make informed choices (as was successful in preventing the fourth attack on September 11). The laws regarding continuity of government – from my understanding – are incomplete Cold War relics. We need to take the threat of terrorism from the realm of fear and bring into the realm of rational thought. Obama, as president, is uniquely positioned to do this.

It seems to me that Malinowski’s approach – while understandable – is misguided. In a changing world,  our government must adapt, must experiment. And the threat from catastrophic terrorism – the threat inherent in a globalized world, with technology increasing the power of individuals exponentially – is real. It must change the calculus, the balancing test. We need to experiment with our national security policies – and get away from the Culture War politics that thanks to Rove and Cheney have come to dominate this arena. The Rule of Law and our way of life is better protected if we reflectively plan for an emergency now rather than overreacting in fear in the moment.

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Barack Obama Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

How Obama Uses Civility and Respect as Political Weapons

[digg-reddit-me]Jonathan Chait describes “The Obama Method” in a not-yet posted piece on The New Republic. He tries to explain the eerie similarity between how Obama has reached out to moderate Republicans and independents at home while marginalizing right-wingers and how Obama reached out to the majority of Muslims while isolating the extremists in his foreign policy (and specifically the Cairo speech.) Chait also tries to tie this in to different critiques of Obama:

Democratic partisans think the enemy is vicious and must be met with uncompromising force. That’s exactly how conservative foreign policy hawks feel about the world. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing foreign policy critique of Obama today sounds eerily like the partisan Democratic critique of Obama during the primary.

Let’s call this method in foreign policy – which assumes every foreign rival is a reincarnation of Nazi Germany – the Bush doctrine; and in domestic policy, in domestic politics – assuming that all Republicans lie about their goals and probably hate the poor and downtrodden and merely want to aid the rich in getting richer – we can call this the Krugman doctrine. (On the Republican side of this, it would be the Rove doctrine, but that’s not relevant here.) The Bush/Krugman doctrine – in assuming that all opponents are acting in bad faith – is rather simple.

  • Identify your opponents.
  • Tell everyone what you believe and call your opponents names (your skill at name-calling is the only way to demonstrate your moral clarity).
  • Everyone will see how right you are.

This isn’t that bad of an approach for a newspaper column – it can be downright entertaining and sometimes even enlightening. As a basis for foreign policy or domestic political agenda though, it is poisonous – and though it may work for a time, the results diminish rapidly. Obama’s method operates differently:

  • Demonstrate one’s respect for one’s opponent.
  • Start with the assumption they are acting in good faith.
  • Invite them to a conversation about what needs to be done to solve the problem(s) on which they are opponents.
  • If they are acting in good faith, they can be worked with.
  • If they are not, “by demonstrating [one’s] own goodwill and interest in accord, [one] can win over a portion of [one’s] adversaries’ constituents as well as third parties.”

I disagree with Chait that Obama’s method “entails  small acts of intellectual dishonesty in the pursuit of common ground,” though. Chait, for example,  cites the line I criticized in Obama’s Cairo speech in which he called the Middle East the region where Islam “was first revealed.” In this case, I think Chait is right – that this line is intellectually dishonest. But his appreciation for Reagan which Chait also cites seems perhaps a bit exaggerated, but consistent with the rest of Obama’s beliefs – which tend to find a balance between Reaganesque individual responsibility and Kennedyesque calls for national responsibility.

Chait traces this method back to a Obama’s training as a community organizer. He cites a Mark Schmitt piece in The American Prospect which describes the community organizer method of dealing with opponents acting in bad faith:

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists – it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands – put ‘em on a committee. Then define the committee’s mission your way.

Chait explains why Obama’s approach is so successful:

The rhetoric removes the locus of debate from the realm of tribal conflict – red state versus blue state, Islam versus America – and puts it onto specific questions – Is the American health care system fair? Is terrorism justified? – where Obama believes he can win support from soft adherent of the opposing camp.

Obama’s method seems designed to short-circuit the dynamics of moral outrage that lead to polarization, extremism, and even violence. He illustrated this in his campaign – as he tried to calm his supporters down, defending pro-life demonstraters and on the eve of the election, as his crowd booed McCain, chiding them: “You don’t need to boo. You just need to vote.” And now, in reaching out to the Muslim world he is demonstrating this same grasp of how to defuse the escalating cycle of moral outrage – by treating his opponents with respect and as “people of goodwill.”

A little bit of civility will not remake the world – but it can go a long way in calming tensions.

[Image from the White House at Flickr.]

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Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

NSA’s Secret Pinwale Program Used to Spy on Bill Clinton

[digg-reddit-me]James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the Times – who previously broke the wireless wiretapping story – relay concerns of a number of Congressmen about the extent of email surveillance by the NSA. These Congressmen are concerned about the number of domestic emails being intercepted and analyzed under the current program – which is identified as “Pinwale.” Marc Ambinder identifies this as the fourth NSA anti-terrorist surveillance program we’ve found out about in his piece responding to the story. Risen and Lichtblau also reveal for the first time that it was this Pinwale program that was at the heart of the dispute that led to the dramatic middle-of-the-night hospital room showdown between Acting Attorney General Comey, ailing Attorney General Ashcroft, and FBI director Mueller and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff Andy Card.

But what got my attention was a small side-note buried in the story:

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

I had presumed the program worked by screening vast amounts of email for keywords and perhaps tracking who particular people emailed, creating webs of relationships – with attempts to filter results to exclude Americans. This is how the program had been described – and through most of this most recent piece, it clearly suggests the program works this way. But this particular item here suggests that this NSA program is of a different sort – and  is capable of accessing any email account individually – and that this is so easy to do that one can look into a prominent former official’s emails just to see what’s up.

The possibility of abuse in this is clearly enormous  – from spying on one’s girlfriend or wife to fishing for embarassing information on politicians whose job it is to regulate you.

What this story confirms is that if the potential for abuse exists, abuse will occur.

[Image by jacromer licensed under Creative Commons]

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Barack Obama Election 2012 Foreign Policy Iran National Security Romney The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

A New Phase in the Culture War: National Security

[digg-reddit-me]As Barack Obama and Dick Cheney prepared their dueling speeches last month, Reihan Salam observed:

National security has become part of the culture wars, only with Dick Cheney as the new Jerry Falwell. It doesn’t matter that Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan or that he’s embraced rendition. To Cheney, Obama’s anti-torture stance represents the moral vanity of a naïve one-worlder.

We’ll be hearing much more about this new culture clash. During the hearings on Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment, Republicans will spend more time hammering the Democratic nominee on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush than about Roe v. Wade. At the moment, Obama looks untouchable. But the politics of national security could prove his undoing.

This observation is seeming more and more apt as the months go by. And yesterday morning’s appearance by Mitt Romney on This Week With George Stephanopoulos suggested that if Romney has anything to do with it, the Culture War will extend to foreign policy as well.

Foreign policy and national security have always been matters of contention between the political parties – but Culture War issues functioned a certain distinct way.

In some sense, the Culture War can be traced back to the “psychodrama of the baby boom generation” as they fought over Vietnam and then social issues. By the 1990s, the Baby Boom generation dominated most institutions in the country and  a large number of Americans had divided into two warring camps along a familiar lineup of issues: abortion, homosexuality, guns, censorship, separation of church and state, etcetera. Each party became dominated by those with the most extreme positions on these issues. There were only two ways for savvy politicians to position themselves – to triangulate and try to find some reasonable accommodation; or alternately to find a reasonable position and  make sure that they were wrong – but on the right side of the issue. During this time, issues of national security and foreign policy didn’t break down in the same partisan way. Republicans opposed Clinton’s proposed anti-terrorism measures; Democrats were more hawkish than Republicans in Bosnia – and in both cases, neither side was completely aligned. These issues weren’t litmus tests – but matters upon which reasonable people could and did disagree.

Then came September 11 and George W. Bush’s and Karl Rove’s explicit decision to use the War on Terror as a political weapon. There were no mainstream Democrats opposed to most aspects of Bush’s emergency measures, so Rove tried to make any slight suggestion of disagreement tantamount to treason. Though this worked well enough as a political tactic, it still hadn’t moved national security issues into the Culture War entirely.

The turning point came when allegations of torture began to surfare – and the photos of the abuse at Abu Ghraib came to light. Everyone was shocked – Republican and Democrat. Everyone condemned it. Except the far-right partisans. I remember reading The Corner and other blogs around this time – and an extraordinary thing happened. For weeks, these men and women had been insisting that America did not torture – only, maybe  some bad apples  – and that to suggest we did torture was a form of America-hating. Then, almost overnight, all of these same men and women began to talk about ticking time bombs and demanding to know why we shouldn’t torture a terrorist who hated America!

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was an election year – and with everything viewed through this prism, it’s easier to justify something awful. But regardless of the reason, in that moment, national security became part of the culture war. Karl Rove accomplished what he had been trying to do. He polarized the electorate so that it became necessary for any savvy politician on the right to be wrong on the right side of these issues.

By 2008, this was evident – as the sensible position that there had been overreach in Bush’s War on Terror – and that for example, Guantanamo should be closed down – gave way to Mitt Romney declaring that he would “double Guantanamo” to cheers. It’s a nonsense phrase – but the Culture War isn’t about policy – but about position.

Now, Romney is continuing this – and pushing it into foreign policy.

Yesterday morning, Romney, adopting the freedom of expression and lack of accountability typical of  party out of power, launched a critique of Obama’s response to the Iranian elections – and to the Middle East in general:

Romney criticises Obama’s use of “sweet words” (sounding eerily similar to Zawahiri who denigrated Obama’s “elegant words“) – yet his only suggestion for how to react differently to the Iranian elections would be to use Romney’s own words – which admittedly aren’t as “sweet” or “elegant.” And of course while Romney denigrates Obama for relying on words without action – Romney’s only response to the Iranian election is to use his own words.

(This brings up an interesting difference: Obama uses the power of words to affect what is going on, as in his Cairo speech, his race speech, his speech on national security – while Romney insists we must use our words to express ourselves and to show what side we are on. This difference in the use of language is precisely what makes Obama an effective speaker – but this is a topic for a different day.)

What Romney forgets is that – in Andrew Sullivan’s words:

This is not about us. It’s about them.

The time may come for the president to stand with the majority of Iranians – to voice his support – but Romney’s demand for instant moral clarity demonstrates a Culture War view of foreign policy – of a need to be wrong on the right side of the issue. As a candidate, this Culture War take on national security and foreign policy can be effective – but as a governing tactic, it is disastrous.

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Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Obama’s Grand Bargain (as a necessary response to the deficit problem)

[digg-reddit-me]David Leonhardt has a typically excellent piece in the Times with a helpful graph explaining the deficit problem. Leonhardt tells the story of how the $800 billion surpluses left by Bill Clinton have turned into $1.2 trillion deficits – or what he calls the “$2 trillion swing.” He identifies four categories of spending accounting for the swing in descending order of significance:

the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

Leonhardt identifies only 10% of the current deficit as resulting from either Obama’s stimulus package or new spending (which is only 3%). 20% of the deficit is traced to Bush policies set to expire that Obama is continuing – for example, a large portion of Bush’s tax cuts and the Iraq war. 33% comes from legislation signed by Bush – like the Medicare prescription act. And Leonhardt attributes 37% of these enormous deficits – the single largest factor – to the combination of increased counter-cyclical spending (on food stamps, unemployment, etc.) and a decrease in government revenues resulting from the downturn.

This math is a large part of what made those Tea Parties – as well as so much of the Republican opposition – ridiculous. First, these Tea Parties – and most of the opposition – was silent while George W. Bush pushed through legislation account for 53% of the current deficit – but suddenly was up in arms once a Democrat proposed 10% in spending to stimulate the economy and fix some significant problems. At the same time, many of those conservatives who were strong opponents of Bush continue to propose more tax cuts. In fact, during the debate over the stimulus bill, Republicans denounced the deficits being caused by government spending while proposing a tax cut bill that would create even large deficits.

What Leonhardt describes is a nation that has been subjected to the conservative “starve the beast” strategy of cutting taxes and increasing spending. This deliberate policy has brought us to the brink of disaster – as George Will describes:

For years, many conservatives advocated a “starve the beast” approach to limiting government. They supported any tax cut, of any size, at any time, for any purpose, assuming that, deprived of revenue, government spending would stop growing. But spending continued, and government borrowing encouraged government’s growth by making big government cheap: People were given $1 worth of government but were charged less than that, the balance being shifted, through debt, to future generations. In 2003, Republicans fattened the beast with the Medicare prescription drug benefit (Cooper opposed it), which added almost $8 trillion in the present value of benefits scheduled, but unfunded, over the next 75 years.

Liberalism’s signature achievement — the welfare state’s entitlement buffet — will, unless radically reduced, starve government of resources needed for everything on liberalism’s agenda for people not elderly. Conservatives want government limited, but not this way.

Leonhardt quotes Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley,

Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, he’s not fixing it.

And not fixing it is, in a sense, making it worse.

I think Andrew Sullivan has the right tack on this:

I don’t blame Obama for failing to turn all this around in five months, and for running a debt this big right now. I willblame him if he does nothing serious to tackle this in the next year.

Leonhardt has been a reporter with good access to the White House in these early days of the presidency. Which suggests that this article is not coming out of the blue for this administration. In fact, shortly before taking office, Obama talked about the “Grand Bargain” he would need to negotiate to deal with precisely this issue. It seems to me that this piece begins to set the stage for what Obama is looking to do after cap-and-trade and health care are passed – to tackle the issues of tax reform and entitlement reform.

All this makes his continued and extraordinary attempts to woo members of the House and Senate – and his efforts to give them a role in determining policy (as described in Matt Bai’s new article) – essential. As Bai describes:

“One of the mistakes of the past is that when presidents arrive on Capitol Hill with legislation chiseled into stone, it’s not well received,” says David Axelrod, one of Obama’s most influential advisers. “You have to give people a sense of ownership.”

Obama seems to have decided early on that his model for pursuing legislation would be something closer to Ronald Reagan, a president whose political savvy he has often expressed admiration for. Partly by necessity, because he had to work with a Democratic Congress, Reagan was known for providing broad policy frameworks while delegating the details to lawmakers. In this way, he managed to fundamentally reform the tax code and shore up Social Security during his first year in office — achievements for which he gladly took credit, even if Congress didn’t give him precisely what he wanted. To this end, Obama’s chief health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, has been all over Capitol Hill, consulting with various members and soliciting their advice, but the administration has been careful not to weigh in with too much authority or to make any public pronouncements on the negotiations.

Obama may have been able to push through health care and cap-and-trade with his Democratic majorities and personal popularity. But he needs the Congress and Senate to work with him on tax reform and entitlement reform once the financial crisis has been dealt with. Or perhaps sooner – as the bond market pressures the administration to set a clear path which involves a return to fiscal sanity.

To do this, Obama needs the trust and support of a large majority of Congressmen and Senators. And he needs to mobilize public and elite opinion to support a significant change in our tax and spending policies. This article by David Leonhardt strikes me as an attempt to set the stage for this soon-to-be debate.

[Picture by Peter Souza courtesy of the White House.]

Categories
Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis Law Politics The Bush Legacy

The Supreme Court Holds Up the Chrysler Sale

I actually decided to write a short piece stating my hope that the Supreme Court would look into Obama’s and Bush’s expansion of executive powers in tackling the financial crisis before the Supreme Court delayed the sale of Chrysler to Fiat. Now that they have, I’m relieved if a bit nervous. The key issue is the use of executive power in a crisis – as Michael J. de la Merced explained the issue:

In a broader context, such a decision would also give the justices an early opportunity to consider the scope of the wide-ranging but not unlimited authority that Congress granted the president to address the economic crisis.

I think this is a good thing – though I’m not sure how the timing of this will affect things. Generally, the strongest decisions restricting the executive’s freedom in a crisis have come after the crisis has past. With the rash of bad news on the economic front – even as most indicators seem to be levelling off – this financial crisis is not yet over. On the one hand, strong action by the Court at this time to curb the power of the president could destabilize the economy, as it is confidence in the power and determination of the executive branch and the Federal Reserve to backstop the financial system that seem to have restored confidence in the market and economy itself. At the same time, the Supreme Court is less likely to challenge the president’s authority in the middle of a crisis – making it more likely the decision will be deferential.

It is possible that all of these competing claims could be dealt with responsibly – with a Solomonic decision along the lines of Marbury v. Madison. It’s also possible that the Court may find Presidents Bush and Obama both acted constitutionally in their response. But as a matter of policy, the recent government interventions into the market are ill-advised if they extend beyond the minimum amount of time. As I wrote regarding Obama and the Rule of Law:

The power of the executive branch has grown enormously in the financial crisis – between the Stimulus Bill and the bank bailout. While in the short-term this may be necessary, if steps are not taken, this would undermine the balance of power between the federal government and the states. While this in itself is not a violation of the Rule of Law – it does weaken the system which together helps maintain the Rule of Law.

The one issue that strikes me as worth considering – on matters of constitutionality rather than policy – is whether or not Bush and then Obama acted within their powers in providing loans to Chrysler and General Motors; perhaps a Court should also look at the broad authority given by the TARP bill itself and set some standards regarding what authorities and monies can and cannot be extended to the executive branch by the legislative.

The whole process of drafting and passing the TARP bill was obviously flawed – though it’s difficult to judge legislation passed in the midst of a crisis. The only logical way out of this I’ve heard mentioned would be to “stockpile laws” as Philip Bobbitt once suggested with regards to terrorism.

But even as there is a flawed process, it’s not clear what if anything was unconstitutional.

At the same time, I’m glad to see the Court looking seriously at getting involved. I’m all for these checks and balances.

Categories
Barack Obama National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

“Nobody’s going to wage a tough political battle to give up power.”

Yglesias makes a good point about the odd dynamic Republicans are creating on the national security front:

Part of why it’s so problematic for congressional Republicans to be so busy attacking the Obama administration as too hesitant to torture people and so forth is that the natural order of checks and balances is totally turned on its head when the opposition is urging the executive to seize more power and become less transparent. Nobody’s going to wage a tough political battle to give up power.

I’ve stated before that I believe it is primarily the job of the Courts and legislature – and even of individual citizens to the extent they are able – to provide a check on the Executive branch – as not only can one not expect a president to give up power – but for him to do so unilaterly serves to strengthen the power of the executive in the future. If the Courts or the Congress forces him or her to give up power, then the system of checks and balances is working – and the executive is seen to be subject to them in the future.

Categories
National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Irony Watch: Cheney on Euphemisms

From Yglesias:

Benjy Sarlin, over email: “Dick Cheney, who brought us the phrase ‘enhanced interrogation methods,’ is currently railing against those who use ‘euphemisms’ to obscure the debate over national security.”

Categories
National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

A Truth Commission

While not rejecting the idea of prosecutions for clear cases in which the law was broken, there seems to be a growing consensus about the necessity of a truth commission. It has become more and more clear that the fault lies within our system as much as it does in particular individuals. Jeffrey Record reviewing Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side [pdf] for the Army War College journal, Parameters quotes Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis whose insight points towards both why we need a truth commissin of a type – and why prosecution is not the most effective option (h/t Tom Ricks):

[T]he greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

This goes to the argument that Bush administration apologists keep making – that these officials were acting in good faith, were panicked, and though they may have broken some rules, they did so to protect American lives. But this is precisely what Brandeis saw was the most serious danger to liberty. 

Tom Ricks gives his opinion of what we need – basing his argument on military strategy – rather than the protection of our way of life:

Just because you have an embarrassing problem, you shouldn’t try to hide it, because dealing with it may prepare you for an even bigger challenge down the road. So let’s get the torture and interrogation situation straightened out before the next big terrorist attack. My preference, as I’ve stated before, is for a truth and reconciliation commission that offers an amnesty period during which people would be invited to step forward. Anyone not ‘fessing up during that time would face the possibility of prosecution. Again, I think this effort should target those who departed from American history and made torture national policy.

Maureen Dowd has also come around – and she too is looking at the perverse effect on our system of checks and balances that not following up on this matter is having:

I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism. Even if it only makes one ambitious congresswoman pay more attention in some future briefing about some future secret technique that is “uniquely” designed to protect us, it will be worth it.