The Nation

John Cornyn. (Courtesy of Flickr user Gage Skidmore)

After months of behind-the-scenes haggling and committee work—and really, years and years of organizing, activism and elections—comprehensive immigration reform will have its moment on the big stage of the Senate floor this week.

Monday evening, the Senate will hold a roll call vote on a five-year farm bill, and assuming there are no hitches, will then begin floor debate on immigration reform. It will take weeks, but Democrats want the debate wrapped up and a bill passed by the July 1 recess.

As it stands now, the legislation (known officially as Senate bill 744, The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013) creates a path to citizenship for most—but not all—of the 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in America. That’s a huge step forward, and Congress hasn’t seriously debated anything like it since 1986.

But it also spends $5.5 billion over ten years on border security, on top of the $18 billion the country spends annually on border enforcement, more than all other law enforcement activities combines. The ACLU warns that the legislation “creates the kind of militarized environment along our southern border that is extremely costly, harmful to border communities’ quality of life, and enormously inefficient.”

Over the coming weeks, a fascinating push-and-pull will happen through the amendment process. Senate conservatives will propose measures that, if they pass, would amount to a “poison pill” that renders the entire legislation un-passable because Democrats wouldn’t be able to support it. Meanwhile, pro-reform activists and senators will be attempting to push the bill as far towards justice as is possible, with the aim of including the most possible people and removing as many roadblocks as possible.

Here are a few of the major flashpoints to watch for:

Senator John Cornyn’s border security amendment. Things will get interesting right away, as the Texas Senator and minority whip in the Senate will introduce a measure this week that basically tears out all the border security sections agreed upon by the “Gang of Eight” and the Senate Judiciary Committee, and replaces them with much tougher—and to most Democrats and reformers, unacceptable—requirements.

Cornyn’s amendment would deny undocumented immigrants permanent residency until there was 100 percent surveillance of every mile of the southern border, a 90 percent apprehension rate, a national E-Verify system, and a biometric ID system at all airports and ports. The head of the Department of Homeland Security and the Government Accountability office would be the arbiters of whether those goals were met. He would also require even more spending on border enforcement, and narrow the group of people eligible for citizenship further by excluding “serious misdemeanors.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already deemed these provisions unacceptable, and said this weekend:

QUESTION: How far are you willing to compromise on this bill to make it happen? In other words, what are you willing to give up and what is a deal-breaker?

REID: Well, I will not accept any poison pills. I mean, we have a senator from Texas, Senator Cornyn, who wants to change border security, a trigger, saying that it has to be 100 percent border security, or there’ll be no bill. That’s a poison pill….we’re not going to have big changes in this legislation.

The question now is obviously whether Cornyn can marshal enough votes—he would need all Republicans and some conservative Democrats—to pass the amendment. Just as important will be how Senate conservatives react if the amendment failed. Senator Marco Rubio hasn’t explicitly backed Cornyn’s amendment but has certainly suggested he favors it. If it fails, will Rubio declare the process dead and walk away?

Rubio’s own border security measures. Despite Harry Reid’s declaration that no “major changes” to the bill will be made, Rubio has repeatedly insisted that the legislation must move to the right in order to pass.

In particular, Rubio has said he will introduce a measure that makes Congress, not the executive branch, responsible for deeming that certain triggers have been met before citizenship can be granted. He also wants to further limit the government benefits that provisional immigrants can receive.

Democrats oppose these measures but haven’t thrown down the gauntlet as they have with Cornyn. Some degree of compromise with Rubio will be likely, but how far? At what point do the Democrats say no? At what point would Rubio walk away?

Agitation by far-right senators. There’s a group of far-right conservatives in the Senate who have made it pretty clear they oppose immigration reform outright. One of the leaders of this movement, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, is proposing all kinds of extreme amendments, like 700 miles of double-layered fencing on the southern border and exit visa tracking at every point of entry in the United States, not just air and sea.

The question isn’t really whether these will pass—they won’t—but how much Sessions is able to rile up the right-wing base when they fail.

Until now the far right has been relatively quiet on immigration reform. There have been no rallies against reform, as there were in 2007, and evangelical churches are playing a key role in calling for real reform.

Sessions’ floor speeches and media appearances are basically more important than his amendments. His goal isn’t really to change the bill—he can’t—but to wake up and shake up the base. His op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on Monday is a good demonstration of this effort. “Should it pass, [this legislation] would represent the ultimate triumph of the Washington elite over the everyday citizen to whom Congress properly owes its loyalty,” he wrote.

Who is eligible? Senators are going to keep trying to both trim and expand the number of people eligible for citizenship.

The headline will be Senator Patrick Leahy’s effort to include LGBT immigrants in reform, so that all partners are eligible for benefits and citizenship that until now is limited to straight immigrants and their families. Leahy was unable to marshal many of his fellow Democrats on the committee to support it, let alone any Republicans—who again, are having their rear covered at this point by evangelical churches—and the amendment is likely to fail on the Senate floor.

Activists are also focusing on the cut-off date in the bill: anyone who came after December 11, 2011, is ineligible for any path to citizenship. So hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came since then would continue living in a shadow society, and some senators may try to push that date forward. There is also serious concern about the list of criminal offenses that can lead to denial of citizenship and deportation, that reformers view as “quite extreme.”

But some senators are trying to pull it in the other direction. There is Cornyn’s aforementioned effort to expand the list of criminal offenses that ultimately lead to denial of citizenship. Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat, is set to introduce an amendment that would force the children of undocumented immigrants to get a college degree or join the military before receiving citizenship.

Samantha Power. (Wikimedia Commons)

Whether or not the Geneva conference on Syria, backed by both the United States and Russia, takes place—it’s now been pushed back from June to July—the Syrian rebels are not acquitting themselves well. They’ve now refused outright to attend, unless the United States and the Europeans supply them with heavy weapons, a kind of blackmail that won’t sit well with their backers in Washington and elsewhere. General Idris—the commander of the rebel forces, who just had a session with John McCain, who no doubt encouraged him in his anti-Geneva stance—is saying this:

“If we don’t receive ammunition and weapons to change the position on the ground, to change the balance on the ground, very frankly I can say we will not go to Geneva. There will be no Geneva.”

McCain, of course, is incessantly demanding direct American involvement in the war.

Meanwhile, the government of President Bashar al-Assad is making important military gains on the ground while telling the Russians that they’ll attend Geneva.

In a perfect world, Secretary of State John Kerry would read the riot act to the rebel leaders, explaining not-so-patiently that there will be no military solution to the civil war in Syria. Kerry’s message ought to be that the United States will cut off the rebels if they don’t attend Geneva. Further, the United States must start putting intense pressure on Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the rebels’s main arms suppliers, to slow down the weapons pipeline, especially to the ultra-Islamists and the Al Qaeda types who are the rebels’s strongest fighters. And Kerry ought to make it clear to the world that Iran will be welcome in Geneva, since Tehran has great influence over the course of the war in Syria.

Meanwhile, Kerry will have to deal patiently, as well, with Susan Rice, the new US national security adviser to-be, and with Samantha Power, the yet-to-be-confirmed replacement for Rice at the United Nations, both of whom are likely to push for more American support for the beleaguered anti-Assad forces.

Perhaps realizing that the alliance between Al Qaeda in Iraq and Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, the so-called Nusra Front, had resulted in poor public relations for Al Qaeda, the organization’s top leader—Ayman al-Zawahiri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as chieftain—has annulled the marriage of Nusra and AQI. According to Reuters:

“The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is canceled, and work continues under the name the Islamic State of Iraq,” he said in the letter posted on the website on Sunday night. “The Nusra Front for the People of the Levant is an independent branch” of al Qaeda, Zawahiri said, urging both groups to “stop arguing in this dispute, and to stop the harassment among the Muslims.”

Zawahiri’s intervention won’t do anything to remove the stain of Al Qaeda extremism from the Syrian revolt, however.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of speculation about what the addition of the two liberal interventionists, Rice and Power, will mean to the decision-making of the Obama administration. In the Los Angeles Times, the headline is: “At White House, liberal hawks ascend.” Says the paper:

Their promotions hints at a new source of fireworks in a growing foreign policy battle in the Obama administration. Liberal hawks and doves in the White House and the Democratic Party are struggling for hearts and minds over whether it makes sense to intervene in Syria and to attack Iran.

But Neil McFarquhar, in The New York Times over the weekend, is fairly certain that the Rice-Power axis won’t make much difference:

Could the fact that both Ms. Rice and Ms. Power have taken very public stances on the importance of humanitarian intervention mean they will shift American foreign policy in that direction? The consensus among experts and their ex-colleagues is that not much will change. Ms. Power’s appointment represents continuity, and neither of them differed publicly with President Obama on foreign policy issues.

James Mann, too, says in The Washington Post that Power, for all her tough talk about preventing genocide, won’t have a major impact at the UN, and that Obama’s own anti-interventionist instincts will hold sway:

Power is likely to get the opportunity to put these ideas into effect at the United Nations. In her daily work, proposals for U.S. military intervention will seem remote, if not entirely irrelevant.

Let’s hope he’s right. But I’m a lot less sanguine than McFarquhar and Mann, and a lot more worried that the pressure to intervene in hotspots from Africa to Syria to Iran will increase once Rice and Power settle into their new positions later this summer.

Edward Snowden. Courtesy: Guardiannews.com

What a day. Sunday opened with more fallout and media debate over the revelations from the pair of bombshells about NSA data collection and surveillance via The Guardian and The Washington Post. Glenn Greenwald, the main reason for The Guardian scoops, went on ABC from somewhere abroad for a valuable interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. A few hours later he was back—with the shocking news that the source for the leaks had chosen to reveal his identity and location.

Turns out Glenn was in Hong Kong.

The Guardian posted a full, riveting interview, words and video (shot by Laura Poitras of the Post), with the leaker, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who now works, or worked, for a major NSA contractor. He had fled to Hong Kong from Hawaii hoping to gain asylum there or in another place, such as Iceland, but he seemed to expect the worst.

You probably know all this already but if you need to catch up here’s how I followed news and reaction at my Pressing Issues blog, including an amazing interview with my old friend Dan Ellsberg, who said that even at his advanced age—if he’d been given this material himself this month he would have leaked it and accepted spending the rest of his life in prison. Snowden is being attacked by some for fleeing to repressive China—but others ask, what better options did he have?

But here’s an intriguing media angle. As I noted yesterday, Barton Gellman, the fine Washington Post reporter who had also been the recipient of Snowden’s leakage, followed The Guardian’s account of working with Snowden by writing his own first-person account. This repeated the pattern of the first big leak last week—The Guardian went first, the Post closely behind.  On PRISM, the Post beat The Guardian by twenty minutes, according to Mike Calderone of Huffington Post.

Gellman claimed that Snowden actually came to him first last month, then demanded that the Post publish his material within three days (for his own safety) and in full—that is, all forty-one slides from the now-fabled PRISM slide show. Gellman writes that after he told Snowden that the paper doesn’t operate that way and could not make such promises—and they’d have to check it out with government sources in any case—the whistleblower told him he would now go elsewhere with the material. About two weeks later the Post learned that the first Guardian report was about to explode, which prompted the Post to quickly go public. In both cases, with PRISM,  the news outlets used only four of forty-one slides.

But is this how it really went down? Greenwald tweets today: “Bart Gellman’s claims about Snowden’s interactions with me—when, how and why—are all false.” And: “The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with him since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman….I have no idea whether he had any conditions for WP, but he had none for us: we didn’t post all the slides.”

Gellman has not replied to Greenwald on Twitter, but on Sunday he tweeted, “Snowden didn’t bolt when I refused guarantees, just quit going steady. And not because I consulted USG [US government].” Tim Noah, late of Slate, tweeted: “By (rightly) not allowing Snowden to dictate how and when of release, Wash Post lost exclusive.” Gellman did hit back at a WikiLeaks charge that he had informed on the leaker in going to the US government: “Accusing me of ‘informing’ on Snowden to USG is garbage. I told him I’d seek comment and did. Period.” He also told Charlie Savage of The New York Times, via Twitter, that if he saw the still-secret slides he wouldn’t publish them either.

Calderone has just written this valuable untangling, with Poitras, it turns out, playing perhaps THE key role.  Snowden, he explains,  first approached Greenwald months ago but Glenn was stymied by tech issues and didn't know what the leak entailed.  Poitras met Greenwald later and told him that Snowden had told her details and this sparked all that followed.   As for Gellman:  It appears true that Snowden did go to him first with PRISM, and then to Greenwald.  But Greenwald objects to Gellman suggesting that Glenn was the second choice all along, when in fact he had gotten the first leak...first.

Stay tuned for more on this—here’s a new Greenwald interview with NBC—and the numerous other angles on this tremendously important story.

UPDATES Kevin Drum at Mother Jones asks what's on the many slides not published by the two news outlets—and why not published? Though surely not up to Greenwald and Gellman alone. More updates: USA Today and Reuters ID'd Snowden’s hotel, but he had already checked out. Smearing of Snowden begins. The AP declares that Snowden, and Bradley Manning, are "leakers" not "whistle-blowers."

Glenn Greenwald plays a pivotal role in my book (with Kevin Gosztola) on the Bradley Manning case, just published in an updated edition. Soime of my other books on political campaigns, atomic coverups and more here.

James Naismith. (Wikimedia Commons)

This season’s NBA playoffs have produced some timely commentary by Nation sports correspondent Dave Zirin, whose recent basketball-related dispatches discussed the emergence of Jason Collins as the first openly gay major-sports player and defended the pundit Bill Simmons’s controversial comments about fans of the Memphis Grizzlies still being affected by the trauma of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination forty-five years ago. Zirin’s thoughtful reporting from the intersection of politics, sports and culture is unique in today’s highly stratified media environment.

And yet the coverage of basketball in the pages of The Nation has a long history. As early as 1935, a writer using the pseudonym Left Wing documented and decried “the growth of that extraordinary sport which for want of a better name is called basketball.” Wing noted that basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a physical education instructor at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, sarcastically adding:

Only a retainer of the Y could possibly have invented such a fiendish pastime, a game which in forty short years has been responsible for as many brawls, lost tempers, broken relations, fights, arguments, and discussions as any branch of athletics. Most of us are ashamed of our mistakes and try to hide them, but the inventor…actually boasts of the fact that basketball is played in countries as remote as Latvia, Turkey, Arabia, Madagascar, Uruguay, Bulgaria, and Korea.

Wing went on to dismiss the game as “a sort of winter rival to football,” inferior to the older, more popular game because unlike football, “basketball is played in overheated gymnasiums or field houses, in a dusty, smoke-laden atmosphere conducive to anything except sport.”

The next major Nation article on basketball came in 1960, when the novelist Willard Manus wrote about the gambling scandals that had plagued the game throughout “the Fixed Fifties…this flabby decade.” As Manus wrote, bookies and athletes routinely conspired to fix the score of college basketball games in order to reap major gambling profits. “College basketball is, as it was ten years ago, a maggoty mess of moral hypocrisy, out-and-out dishonesty, side-of-the-mouth connivery,” Manus wrote. “The current scandal stands as an almost too-pat symbol of the moral journey to nowhere that college basketball is making.” Manus also paused to criticize professional basketball, whose rising popularity in the 1950s, he claimed, was directly due to fallout from the early ’50s college basketball fixing scandals and the contemporaneous rise of television. The same sports promoters who had profited illegally from the college scandals had colluded to professionalize their schemes, Manus explained:

They did it by pandering to the lowest tastes of the new fans of the TV age—armchair addicts who crave high scores, sensational shooting matches, speeded-up action. Out the window went all the old subtleties and niceties of the game: intricate zone defenses, possession paly, clever passing and strategy. The pro game became all offense and no defense. To these eyes, watching it is about as exciting as watching pinball game for two hours.

Even if subsequent changes in the rules and culture of the game have rendered obsolete many of Manus’s complaints, one thing remains obvious: basketball, at both the college and professional levels, is undoubtedly “big business.”

* * *

In recent decades Nation writers have more directly addressed the politics and socioeconomics of basketball. In a special sports issue in July, 1998, Peter Rothberg—now our associate publisher—wrote about the issues surrounding the NBA lockout that significantly truncated the 1998–99 season. “The marketing and packaging of the NBA and, yes, the crazy salaries have led to a glittery product long on flash but short on fundamentals and passion,” Rothberg wrote.

Longtime fans have become increasingly alienated by the transformation of their sport into glam entertainment. No one at the top cares, though, as long as the corporate boxes keep selling and ticket prices keep rising…So what if lifelong fans are leaving their seats in droves. There’s still a waiting list for tickets, and the kids priced out of the games can still buy Bulls jackets.

A 2003 Comment piece by sportswriter Murray Polner, “Dissent and Basketball,” told the story of Toni Smith, captain of a Division III basketball team outside New York City, who had stoked national outrage for refusing to salute the American flag before games, citing an abhorrence for economic inequality and the impending war with Iraq. “We have to wonder whether an obscure 21-year-old would have caused the media storm she did if this country weren’t so divided, anxious and fearful about the threat of war—and if dissent among big-time athletes hadn’t become so exceedingly rare,” Polner said. An article the following year by Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier made the same point. In “Where are the Jocks for Justice?” they attributed the relative dearth of politically involved athletes to an improvement in their collective economic situation, in part thanks to a strong labor movement. “Morality is much bigger than athletics,” the writers concluded. Dave Zirin, a jock for justice if ever there were one, would certainly agree.

For our second special issue on sports in August 2011, Ari Paul updated readers on the NBA’s labor disputes—the league was then in the midst of yet another lockout. Paul argued that although “many fans dismiss sports labor conflicts as squabbles between billionaires and millionaires,” there were real labor and class issues at stake. The majority of NBA players, Paul made clear, were not earning gargantuan salaries like Kobe Bryant or LeBron James: “You don’t see most players in commercials, and while they might earn more than the blue-collar worker watching the Finals in a bar, they don’t accumulate ruling-class wealth.”

Moreover, he noted that players weren’t the only employees who the owners were locking out—that group also included parking lot attendants, bartenders and merchandise retailers—Paul claimed “the struggle is really not about billionaires versus millionaires but billionaires versus everyone else—including consumers.” Ultimately, the owners’ assault on NBA players was not that different from the attacks on labor that were seen around the country in 2011 and since:

The reality here is that owners are using a recessionary market to justify economic restructuring that would put more money in their pockets, taking it from the highly skilled laborers who make the product so singularly mesmerizing. There is an impulse in the United States to say to skilled workers that they can afford to take some cuts. But that impulse typically stops at CEOs and owners. Maybe this high-profile labor struggle is an opportunity to confront that logical inconsistency.

The NBA labor dispute was eventually settled, but that logical inconsistency, in sports and in society at large, lives large.

* * *

Subscribers to The Nation can access our fully searchable digital archive, which contains thousands of historic articles, essays and reviews, letters to the editor and editorials dating back to July 6, 1865.