Late Nite FDL: Why Are You Here?

A friend asked me last night if I was going to submit a question to the Presidential debate at Yearly Kos. I had to think about it for a minute, then I realized that my question isn’t so much for the whole group of candidates, but rather for the four who are currently U.S. Senators.

So, here’s my question:

Senator Biden, Senator Clinton, Senator Dodd, and Senator Obama, why the hell are you here and not in Washington doing your job? I understand that campaigning is important, but the election is nearly a year and a half away. The primaries are still six months away. Is all this glad-handing really necessary?

If you really want to prove to me that you should be the next U.S. President, then cool it with this pas de deux you’re locked into with the media and act like you actually care about your current job. The people who elected you are still counting on you to be their Senator, and the people of the U.S. are counting on you to help do something about the current, miserable state of affairs in our nation’s capital.

Use vs. Abuse (of power)

Under our Constitution there are various acts a President may take which are “unreviewable.” For example, you may have heard — over and over again — that the USE of the Pardon Power is unreviewable. This is correct. However, many folks don’t know what the term “unreviewable” actually means. Like so many things in law, a word you think you know may not mean what you think it means.

Unreviewable simply means you cannot challenge it in court. Now there can be several reasons why you cannot challenge something in court: you may not have standing to sue, as seems to be the situation in the recent NSA spying case, wherein the court found that the plaintiffs could not show that the had personally suffered any harm from the secret program because the evidence they needed to show harm was, well secret, and so they could not present any evidence to show they had standing. Whew!

Or, as in the lead up cases to Roe v. Wade where the court repeatedly found that cases which took more than 9 months to get to SCOTUS would not present a “case in controversy” by the time it reached SCOTUS, because the plaintiff, the woman bringing suit, would no longer be pregnant and therefor would no longer need an abortion. You just can’t make this stuff up.

However, could someone PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME how we go from “unreviewable in court” to “nothing can be done about it”?

Abuse of power by the President, no matter what the source of that power (ie, statute, Constitution, common law) is ALWAYS subject to oversight by Congress. Such abuse can be curbed or remediated by various means available to the Legislative Branch, including : legislation, power of the purse and, yes, Impeachment by the House and Trial by the Senate, or even Amendment to the Constitution.

In order to determine whether an abuse of power has occurred and fashion an appropriate remedy, curb or check; it is necessary for Congress to investigate. Rule one in any investigation is to follow the facts and law wherever they may lead you and never pre-determine the outcome.

Oversight by Congress acting in its Constitutional role in the system of checks and balances established by the Framers is every bit as much a part of Congress’ role as is passing legislation. In the long run, of the two tasks, oversight may be the more important.

For those who believe in less government, a gridlocked Congress unable to pass legislation might even seem like a good thing. But to any patriot, to anyone who believes in the rule of law, to anyone who believes in the genius of the Constitution and who takes the words of the Framers seriously, oversight and acting as a counterweight to Executive excess is the essence of our three-branch system.

Look, as a practical matter, the Republicans have made it clear that they will not let the Democrats achieve their legislative agenda and that they intend to gridlock the Senate. I read the newspapers, and the Republicans are not being shy about making their intentions known.

Since we aren’t going to do any meaningful lawmaking (though I whole heartedly support the notion that Harry Reid should DO HIS DAMN JOB and force the Republicans to actually make good on their filibuster threats), shouldn’t we at least get some productivity out of Congress in the form of some MEANINGFUL oversight?

I’m with constitutional and international lawyer, Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and was a member of the ABA Task Force on presidential signing statements. As he pointed out in a recent edition of Bill Moyer’s Journal; “Impeachment is not a constitutional crisis; it is the cure for a constitutional crisis.”

Dear Congress: Get off your ass. Stop worrying about legislation that the republicans will never let you get a cloture on, and DO YOUR JOB. Get thee to some oversight!

Facing The “Dark Assessment”

We’ve had an extraordinary week of leaked candor about the catastrophic state of US foreign policy under the Bush/Cheney regime, predictably followed by Presidential denials that al Qaeda is back and blatant propaganda that we’re making “satisfactory” progress on the few Iraq benchmarks that are virtually meaningless. The White House, which has always confused inflexible standards and testing with genuine education and wisdom, has been reduced to giving out report cards on itself that translate to “improvement needed” on everything that really matters.

But the reality based assessments dominated the news. First it was the intelligence community’s pre-denial assessment that al Qaeda has been allowed to regroup along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to become as threatening as ever, both for Europe and possibly the US. The obvious conclusion is that the President’s six year global war on terror is not only an abject failure but a growing threat to our security.

Then there were the pre-spin reports about the virtual absence of any meaningful progress in achieving the objectives of the US troop surge. And Thursday Bob Woodward released his history of intelligence briefings the CIA gave the Iraq Study Group last fall, briefings that revealed what Condi Rice described as “the dark assessment” that security conditions had so deteriorated as to be “irretrievable,” while the al Maliki government was so inherently ineffectual, that there was virtually nothing the US could do to make things turn out right in Iraq. That sobering assessment was reaffirmed this week by Stephen Biddle’s op-ed explaining why the only realistic but unavoidably awful choices had narrowed to “go deep” or “get out,” since staying the course had become increasingly untenable and morally dubious.

We are left with the unspoken and unspeakable conclusion that the real rationale for keeping so many U.S. soldiers in harm’s way – in the middle of Iraq’s irreconcilable sectarian and civil wars — is that they serve as our national punishment for the inexcusable blunder our government made in invading and occupying Iraq and opening this pandora’s box in the first place.

By their unanimous vote for Senator Webb’s amendment to give our troops a break between hellish deployments, the Democrats in Congress clearly sense the moral hazard of asking our soldiers to pay an undeserved penalty for the blunders of their leaders. The President and his Senate supporters showed their true colors in providing (with Lieberman) the 41 votes needed to obstruct Webb’s proposal, the only genuine “support the troops” measure before them.

Yet even that is not as shameful as having deliberately misidentified and conflated our multiple opponents in Iraq as the same al Qaeda that flew planes into the Twin Towers, as the President did again Thursday. What is incomprehensible is that Democrats who should know better have allowed this President to maneuver them into agreeing to leave combat forces in Iraq indefinitely to fight these terrorists, even though it is doubtful that most of those we’re fighting want any more than to get us out of their country; there is scant evidence that they identify with Osama bin Laden or his aims.

Despite Thursday’s 223-201 House vote for “redeployment,” much of the current debate in Congress is deeply dishonest. The Senate is considering various proposals, all of which agree to keep an unspecified number of combat forces in Iraq for “limited” purposes (including counterterrorism), but there is no basis for assuming this President will implement such ambiguous language in good faith. No matter what we do, it is foolhardy to leave any further planning and execution to this President, whose lack of competence and candor in dealing with dark truths seems boundless. Allowing the decision to be manipulated behind the scenes by Vice President Cheney and his neocon minions who championed but are still in denial about their fiasco would require an act of collective, national insanity.

To avoid extreme cognitive dissonance, it will be tempting to do the next least upsetting thing and decide not to decide. Congress seems likely to enact some deceptive proposal that adopts the rhetoric of withdrawal but allows the President to continue doing what we’re doing now with as many troops as we can sustain, because we can’t face the consequences of doing anything different. In the meantime, the Republicans and their neocon allies will continue to delude themselves into hoping the American people will not figure out or remember who got them into this awful dilemma, and Democrats will bet that no one can see through the sham.

I fear we will stay in Iraq, not because it makes any sense, not because there is even a remote connection between staying and the furtherance of any justifiable US strategic objective in that region, and certainly not because it helps deal with radical terrorism when it so plainly exacerbates it. No, we will stay because to do otherwise would require our leaders and the media to acknowledge their collective responsibility for the suffering we have unleashed on the Iraqis and our own soldiers. Has any nation ever managed in its own time such painful self recognition?

Staying the course, even under the dishonest guise that it represents a “consensus” rather than a moral quagmire is not a defensible policy. Rather, it is an implicit punishment imposed on the hundreds or perhaps thousands of US soldiers who will yet die or be maimed to atone for the errors of everyone who first authorized or still promotes and sanctions this war. But there is no prospect that George Bush or his Libby-loving supporters in Congress will agonize one minute over this, let alone insist he use his authority to commute the infinitely excessive sentences inflicted on our soldiers, who did no more than obey their Commander in Chief. And it will all be sold as “supporting the troops.”

Photo credit: Larry Downing/Reuters: Bush at press conference

Strongly Recommend: Use Diigo!

According to our surveys, many oD readers are involved in research in some form or other: as students or academics or media-folk or policy makers and influencers. So here is a recommendation that might well change the quality and usefulness of the web for you.

The best research tool I have come across in a long time - it has really transformed my web habits - is diigo.com, which gives me the ability to make notes as I read the web, to collect all my notes in one place and to share the notes with collaborators.

After joining, my recommendation is that you download and install the diigo toolbar - it makes adding notes and index-files of what you read very easy. It also has a number of other nice features that you’ll probably end up using - for example, you can highlight a word and perform a Google search on it without any further typing, which I liked …

Once you have joined diigo, make sure you sign up to the openDemocracy group on diigo. Joining the group will allow you to see the bookmarks and annotations from everywhere on the web of others who have chosen to share their notes with the openDemocracy group. You’ll see when you create a note - the options are pretty clear.

Once you have signed up to the openDemocracy group, you can have a look at an example of the group annotation feature here where Anthony Barnett and I have commented on the UK Labour Party Deputy Leadership attitudes gathered by OurKingdom.

diigo.com is the web tool I use most. I have met with Wade and Maggie, the brains and business minds behind it - I feel they really understand what researchers need and are working hard to supply it. I really look forward to using diigo.com more extensively on openDemocracy and exploring various collaborative experiments using it. More later …but in the meantime, do sign-up to diigo.com.

The Romneys

As you may have noticed, the race to be the next President of the USA has started very, very early. Despite the prospect of having to admit humiliating defeat in Iraq - or worse actually stay there, the reality of paying back trillions of dollars of debt, and the rather low esteem in which the office is now held, a lot of people are very keen on the job. Thus you have the spectacle of mass debates among many Red and Blue (Republican and Democrat) dwarves, and increasingly bizarre campaign advertising. To which we all say – Hooray.

The latest offering comes from everyone’s favourite Mormon, bar Prince, Mitt Romney. Mitt wants you to get to know his family – and with good reason, as Slate notes he ‘quickly emerges as the least interesting member of his own family’. Whilst the whole spectacle is completely contrived, the Romney’s are in fact outstandingly good at playing themselves, if only they would stand.

Meanwhile things may not be well on planet McCain, that is John McCain, former Presidential frontrunner, former Republican candidate with bi-partisan appeal, currently confused, considered MIA in McCainspace – myspace for the dead. On the plus side, his wife has an excellent recipe for Passion Fruit Mousse.

In the interests of bi-partisanship I end this brief trawl among the Democrats. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton has undertaken a bold-experiment in re-invigorating participatory democracy. The Hillary campaign-song competition has captured America’s attention for the same reasons the populace watched COPS, American Idol, and Survivor. It has boldly taken cultural cringe to new levels, flagellating an audience allowed to enjoy the oral equivalent of ripping off a puss-filled scab, that and for no reason the video introducing it blatantly references The Sopranos, thus firming up support for Hillary among the New York mafia. Alright so no-one really paid any attention to Hillary, but still, altogether now, ‘we were meant to fly..’