George Zornick | The Nation

Environmental leaders and activists handcuff themselves to the White House gate on February 13, 2013. (George Zornick)

As an administration decision on Keystone XL looms—Secretary of State John Kerry said last week it would come in the “near term”—the protests and civil disobedience in Washington are heating up once again.

It’s hard to say that the initial postponement of the pipeline wasn’t a direct result of the protests outside the White House in summer 2011, which were the largest acts of civil disobedience undertaken by the environmental movement in decades and thrust the pipeline into the national spotlight. So it makes sense that the same crowd is back again to try to push the White House away from approval.

A throng of at least 200 people gathered in Lafayette Park outside the White House on Wednesday morning, only about 12 hours after Obama had finished his State of the Union speech. (The president talked extensively about climate change, but did not mention the pipeline.) Speakers rallied up the crowd and portrayed the Keystone pipeline as a seminal moment in the environmental movement—something that was important not just because of the deleterious carbon emissions it will create, but also because stopping it has become a symbolic fight for the burgeoning environmental movement. “This is our Birmingham,” said Reverend Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus.

The crowd then moved towards the White House, with about 50 protestors marching directly to the White House gate and cuffing themselves to it or sitting down, both of which are against US Park Police regulations for protests. They held a large banner that implored the president to “Lead on Climate—Reject KXL Pipeline.”

The crowd at the gate included Bill McKibben, head of 350.org, the actress Daryl Hannah, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., NASA Scientist James Hansen, Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director and Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP. Notably, this was the first time the Sierra Club engaged in civil disobedience in its 120-year history.

After three warnings from police, the crowd was placed verbally under arrest and then handcuffed and taken to a staging area one by one, as a nearby crowd of supporters chanted “Hey, Obama, we don’t want no climate drama.”

The actress Daryl Hannah is arrested by US Park Police outside the White House. (George Zornick) 

The protest was smaller than last time, when over the course of several days over 1,000 people were arrested outside the White House. Another large-scale rally, with no arrests planned, is scheduled for this weekend.

It’s even more crucial this time around for the movement to mobilize public support for rejecting the pipeline—there’s no election hanging over Obama’s head, and every indication so far is that the administration may be leaning towards approval.

Late last month, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked about the pipeline, and responded that the White House’s chief concern was the objection of the Nebraska governor, which has since been overcome:

It’s interesting—you mention the Nebraska governor. This whole process, as you remember, got sort of derailed because of insistence on sort of politicizing something that was not political. It was a process that followed the format that had been used in the past in terms of the State Department’s role in approving these types of pipelines when they cross international boundaries. One of the things that delayed or postponed this process had to do with the opposition of the Nebraska governor and others in that state to the route Keystone was proposed to take, the pipeline was proposed to take, so I think that’s just an instructive reminder about how this ended up where it is now.

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Then, last week, at a joint appearance with Canada’s foreign minister—who has repeatedly pressed for the project to be approved—Secretary Kerry had this to say when asked about Keystone:

With respect to the Keystone, Secretary Clinton has put in place a very open and transparent process which I am trying to, committed to seeing through. I can guarantee you that it will be fair, and transparent, and accountable, and we hope that we will be able to be in a position to make an announcement in the near term. I don’t want to pin down precisely when, but I assure you in the near term. I’m not going to go into the merits of it here today. I pay great respect, as I did in my comments earlier, to the important energy relationship with Canada and the importance of the overall relationship. But we have a legitimate process that is underway, and I intend to honor that.

Neither of these comments are encouraging for pipeline opponents. I read both as prepping the public for approval. They respectively cite the accession of the Nebraska governor and the “important energy relationship” with Canada, without any acknowledgment of the huge environmental implications. The Keystone protestors certainly have their work cut out for them. 

Read Michael Klare's take on the importance of the Keystone battle. 

TAKE ACTION: Stop the Keystone Pipeline.

Only an hour before President Obama is expected to deliver his State of the Union address—in which he might “go big” on the issue of combating climate change—two Senators announced they will introduce comprehensive climate change legislation this week, presenting a possible vehicle in the Senate for Obama’s ambitions.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer will outline the legislation on Thursday morning. Details are scant, though it’s being billed as “major” and “comprehensive” legislation, and will have a carbon tax, per a statement from Sanders’s office:

Under the legislation, a fee on carbon pollution emissions would fund historic investments in energy efficiency and sustainable energy technologies such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. The proposal also would provide rebates to consumers to offset any efforts by oil, coal or gas companies to raise prices.

Boxer is the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, so this is not a fringe effort by any means. And some heavy environmental and institutional groups will be on hand Thursday, including Bill McKibben of 350.org and representatives from the Center for American Progress, Sierra Club, Public Citizen, and the National Community Action Foundation.

We reported last month that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Henry Waxman launched a Congressional task force, which aims to push the executive branch on new regulations, and to serve as a laboratory for new legislation—and while it’s not clear if Boxer is acting through this working group, the legislation is clearly ready to go.

TAKE ACTION: Stop the Keystone Pipeline.
 

Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew. (AP Photo/Scott Applewhite, File.)

There are many, many important lines of questioning for Jack Lew as he faces Senate confirmation to be the next Treasury secretary. Unfortunately, as is too often the case, Republicans seem uninterested in pursuing them—and have instead settled on a truly ridiculous, and entirely hypocritical, plan to slow down his nomination.

The GOP says the administration’s failure to issue a plan to slash Medicare, which they assert is required by an obscure federal provision, has put Lew’s nomination “at risk.” The silliness of that requirement aside, nobody in the GOP appears to have noticed that the provision also applies to Republicans in Congress—and they’ve also failed to act.

Here’s the background: when crafting the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, the hugely controversial bill that brought us the Medicare Part D drug plan, the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress inserted a little-noticed clause intended to force deep cuts in Medicare several years later.

Buried in the legislation was something known as the “Medicare trigger.” It required the Medicare trustees to issue an annual “alert” if they determined that Medicare general revenues (that is, the amount collected in federal income taxes for the program) would finance more than 45 percent of Medicare expenditures over the next six years. This was supposed to be a warning that the program was becoming insolvent, despite the rather arbitrary selection of a 45 percent cutoff.

Once that report has been issued by the trustees—which it has been every year since 2007—the bill said the president must send legislation to Congress within fifteen days, explaining how he or she will bring Medicare expenditures back under 45 percent of general revenue for the following six years. Congress must consider that legislation, but is not required to pass it.

President Obama has completely ignored this provision for his entire first term—and now, since as Treasury Secretary, Lew would also become chairman of the Medicare trustees, and since he’s been in the White House for four years, Republicans think they have a big ol’ gotcha.

“Congress will need documents pertaining to [Lew’s] role in the violation of this law, as well as a concrete legislative proposal that brings the administration into legal compliance,” said a letter from Alabama Senator Jeff Session last week to the White House. “Failure to do so could make it difficult for Mr. Lew’s nomination to move forward.” Eight GOP Senators sent a similar letter last week, too.

You can see the beauty of this plan from the eyes of the GOP—even if they can’t stop Lew, perhaps they can get the White House to issue a sweeping plan to reduce Medicare, which is something the Republicans badly want but have been afraid to directly propose. Or at the very least, Republicans can beat the White House up for this supposed failure.

But there’s one problem—these Republicans apparently didn’t read the entire 2003 Medicare bill. It also says that regardless of whether the president submits legislation, relevant committees in the House and Senate must also create legislation to cut Medicare back under 45 percent, by June 30 of that year. See:

So there should have been Congressional responses to the Medicare trigger for the past several years. This is also the conclusion of a Congressional Research Service report on the trigger. The relevant committees in the House are Ways and Means, Judiciary, and Energy and Commerce. In the Senate, it’s the Finance Committee. “Medicare funding legislation” is specifically defined in the bill as either relating to what the president submitted, or failing that, “any bill the title of which is as follows: ‘A bill to respond to a medicare funding warning.’”

Yet not since 2008 has any such bill been produced. Notably, for the two years that Republicans have controlled all three of those committees in the House, there have been no bills responding to the Medicare trigger, nor even any attempt The Nation can find to pass one out. The Senate Finance Committee, controlled by Democrats, has similarly failed. We can find no effort on behalf of the committee’s Republicans—many of whom signed that letter to the White House last week—to pass out a bill dealing with the Medicare trigger, either.

So forget the gotcha. Whatever obligation Obama hasn’t fulfilled regarding the Medicare trigger, neither have Republicans in Congress. Also, when the 2003 bill was passed, there were some constitutional questions raised about whether Congress could compel the president to present legislation. (Indeed, that’s what the White House is arguing now: “[T]he Executive Branch considers the requirement to submit legislation in response to the Medicare funding warning to be advisory and not binding, in accordance with the Recommendations Clause of the Constitution,” the Office of Management and Budget said on February 5.)

If one gives credence to that argument, then Republicans have much more straightforwardly failed to respond to the Medicare trigger they’re so hyped up about.

In any case, the trigger is worth ignoring—it’s only the Republican hypocrisy in doing so that’s notable. The Medicare trigger is a really cynical bit of policy: the 2003 legislation drastically expanded Medicare expenditures by creating Part D, so the trigger was designed to go off very quickly. And the way the trigger is set up virtually guarantees deep benefit cuts with no progressive tax increases.

Think about it: if the president and Congress took the trigger seriously, they would have to create a plan that ensures the general fund revenue pays for less than 45 percent of Medicare expenditures. But that means the government can’t raise progressive income taxes, or that percentage would actually get higher. So instead the only remaining options would be raising regressive payroll taxes, raising premiums, or cutting benefits and provider payments.

In a 2008 paper, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities called the trigger “an ideologically driven approach to Medicare financing that would effectively protect the nation’s most affluent residents and corporations at the expense of Medicare beneficiaries and working families of more modest means.”

It would be extremely unusual for Obama to issue such a plan, which is likely why he hasn’t—the question is, if they’re so fired up about it, why hasn’t the GOP? 

John Brennan. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.)

Targeted, extrajudicial killings outside theaters of war—95 percent of which are carried out with armed drones—have become an increasing and disturbing staple of US national security policy over the past decade. George W. Bush ordered fifty non-battlefield targeted killings, more than any other president, and President Obama has already more than septupled that number. Moreover, Obama has expanded the internal legal justification for these strikes to include American citizens as victims, and is reportedly creating an institutional framework for at least another decade of targeted killings.

Despite this dramatic and unprecedented development—which has happened almost entirely in secret, with the administration refusing to even acknowledge the existence of drone strikes until very recently—there hasn’t been one congressional hearing into these killings. Not one.

Already, the looming hearing forced the administration to provide members of the committee with Office of Legal Counsel memos that attempt to justify the legal rationale behind targeted killings, which followed the leak to NBC News of a non-classified Department of Justice white paper on the same topic.

But these revelations have created more questions than answers. Here is a non-exhaustive list of basic questions senators should require Brennan to answer today. To invert the recent parlance about the DoJ memo, this is a floor, not a ceiling—just some basic questions the public deserves answers to.

(1) First of all, why not release the OLC memos to the public? Showing them to a handful of senators is a step in the right direction, but Obama boldly released the infamous Bush torture memos at the start of his administration, and there’s just no compelling argument why these memos are any different. Let the people know how their government is justifying extrajudicial killings—especially since any American can is eligible as a target. Also, do any other memos exist, and will they be released?

(2) Why do “informed, high-level official(s) of the United States” get sole determination over whether the government can kill an American? First of all, what’s the framework for deciding who this is? It doesn’t explicitly mention the president—which advisers have this power? Where is the cut-off? Moreover, why is there no judicial review before the government denies a citizen due process and kills him? This is a truly radical concept.

(3) When should the Authorization for Use of Military Force expire? One answer to the prior question is that Congress explicitly gave the president authorization to combat Al Qaeda and “associate forces” when it passed the AUMF in 2001, and so Obama (and future presidents) can order the deaths of anyone who fits that description, American or otherwise, without judicial review. That may be true—so when should the AUMF be repealed? At what point is it fair to say that Al Qaeda has been defeated, given that it’s provably been greatly diminished in size and is without its leader, Osama bin Laden? How many “associate forces” are we going to keep including in that definition? Brennan would likely punt this question by saying that’s up to Congress, which is true, but as the guy tasked with carrying out the killings it’s certainly fair to ask for his input.

(4) Relatedly, what about the “filling the bucket” problem? This was the terminology of former White House chief of staff Bill Daley. He meant, at what point is enough enough? If we keep adding people to the “kill list,” or the “disposition matrix” as they call it, while the power of Al Qaeda is simultaneously being diminished, aren’t we just killing less and less important people, because we can? In the words of a former counterterrorism official to The Washington Post, “Is the person currently Number 4 as good as the Number 4 seven years ago? Probably not.” Can Brennan at least acknowledge that?

(5) Is the administration open to ending “signature strikes” and if so, can it at least acknowledge the inherent problems with it? The centrist Center on Foreign Relations has called on the administration to end “signature strikes,” which are when instead of specifically targeting Al Qaeda leaders, unknown and anonymous people who fit certain criteria are targeted. (One official told The New York Times that there’s an inside joke that “three guys doing jumping jacks,” is a terrorist training camp.) A key fact of our drone warfare policy is that a vast majority of those killed are not in Al Qaeda or the Taliban, but “low-level militants”—and who sometimes aren’t even involved in any plots against the United States, but rather against allies.

(6) Why is the DoJ so overly broad with the definition of “imminent”? The DoJ memo says drone strikes against Americans can only happen if there’s an “imminent” danger, and then proceeds to strip virtually all meaning from that word. Brennan should be pressed heavily on this indefensible expansion. A good test question: say someone—and American—just had an idle fantasy in their head about blowing up the Pentagon. If they scribble it on a piece of paper, crumple it up and throw it out, and the CIA comes across it, can they kill that person under the current DoJ guidelines? (The answer is almost certainly ‘yes.’)

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(7) Can Brennan pledge that lethal drones will never be fully autonomous? Drones are already unmanned, and can respond to certain stimuli without human direction. Also, the government is developing certain pre-set criteria that make people eligible for “signature strikes.” You can see where this is going. Government officials have said anonymously that ongoing drone research and development does not include drones that can make lethal decisions without human input, but can Brennan explicitly confirm that, on the record and under oath? Can he rule it out as something he would pursue as CIA director?

(8) Can Brennan admit that the administration is vastly undercounting civilian casualties to drone strikes? By virtually every external measure, the civilian casualties from drone strikes are, by many orders of magnitude, much higher than the administration admits. (They only recently admitted there were any). The public knows it, journalists know it, foreign governments know it. Why can’t Brennan just be honest about it?

(9) Relatedly, what is an honest assessment of the blowback from drone strikes, and is it worth it? Drone strikes in Yemen, which vastly expanded under Obama following the Fort Hood shootings and the Christmas bomber plot, are unquestionably responsible for a rapid expansion of radicalism in that country. Do drone strikes create a vicious cycle in which more people are radicalized, thus requiring more strikes? As one former counterterrorism put it, “The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower. You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.” The man convicted of trying to blow up a truck in Times Square complained to the judge that “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.” Is Brennan at all alarmed by the blowback effect, and how does he honestly evaluate the risks? He has previously said that he’s seen “little evidence that these actions are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits,” and he should be pressed on that obvious misperception. (An inquiring senator might point out that former general Stanley McChrystal disagrees. He’s said that “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes…is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”)

This is far from an exhaustive list, but just some of the fundamental questions that need to be answered. There are other areas that need to be explored too, like Brennan’s earlier support for “enhanced interrogation” during the Bush administration, which he has since disavowed. Brennan’s initial written answers to some committee questions paint the picture of a man unwilling to be forthcoming about most of this, but senators have a responsibility to press him.

The drones now patrolling our borders are indicative of the emerging surveillance state here at home, Todd Miller writes.