The Nation

Activists in Chicago. (Photo by Kira Mardikes.) 

Elijah Zarlin, who worked as a senior email writer at Obama campaign headquarters in 2008, was back in Chicago yesterday—in the First Precinct jail, following a peaceful sit-in in protest of the Keystone XL pipeline.

“It felt strange,” Zarlin said, “to be getting arrested in order to send a message to the president that he needs to make good on his commitment to fight climate change.”

Twenty-two people were detained in front of the Metcalfe Federal Building, where the State Department keeps an office. Protestors ranged in age from a high school student to a grandfather. Many wore t-shirts that read, “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” a pledge on climate change that Obama made during this year’s State of the Union address.

But action has yet to materialize, and supporters are getting impatient. “The president has said over and over that he wants to do something big on climate,” said Andrew Nazdin, 24, who worked as a deputy training instructor for Organizing for Action (OFA) in Virginia in 2012 and protested yesterday. “The president has a tremendous opportunity to reject this pipeline, since the decision sits with him. But we are going to need to continue to push him.”

The administration will make a decision on the pipeline in the next few months, pending completion of a State Department environmental review. A draft released earlier this year, which the EPA criticized as “insufficient,” found no compelling reason to reject the pipeline.

Fear that the State Department findings will grease the skids for approval is creating a rift between Organizing for Action, the former campaign army now tasked with promoting the president’s agenda, and other activists and donors who are frustrated with the administration’s reticence not only on Keystone but also on a range of climate change actions.

Organizing for Action stated clearly last month that it will not support grassroots activism against Keystone right now. “Organizing for Action’s mission is to support President Obama’s agenda,” reads the first in a list of talking-points for volunteers. “The Keystone XL pipeline is still under review, and OFA supports and respects the process as it is currently underway.”  

The global warming campaign unveiled by OFA in May skirted the president’s timid record on climate by asking supporters to call out climate change deniers in Congress via social media.

It isn’t clear to serious activists how tweeting at John Boehner to “stop denying the science of climate change” will have an impact if the people who already acknowledge the real and immediate danger of greenhouse gas emissions, like President Obama, won’t act themselves. “Given that it’s unlikely that the majority is going to change in Congress, and certainly that no action is going to be taken by this Congress on climate, it’s really the president who needs to show leadership,” said Zarlin.

Along with rejecting Keystone XL, there are several options for addressing the causes of climate change that do not require congressional approval, particularly capping emissions from power plants, which are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. But in April the EPA announced that it was putting a decision to regulate new generating stations on hold indefinitely. According to The New York Times, EPA officials said the rule “would be rewritten to address the concerns raised by the industry.” The delay effectively rules out the possibility that a separate decision to regulate existing plants more strictly will go forward in the near future.

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While the administration dithers, the grassroots climate movement is gaining momentum, with Keystone as the touchstone. “This decision more than any other will signal your direction, your commitment, your resolve,” a group of heavy-hitting donors wrote to the president last month. “It is the biggest, most explicit statement you will make in this historic moment, the moment when America turns from denial to solutions.” More than 62,000 have committed to engaging in civil disobedience should Obama approve the pipeline. Yesterday’s sit-in, organized by CREDO, Rainforest Action Network and the Other 98%, was just one of the many demonstrations that have been planned for the summer.

Former OFA staffers don’t see their colleagues as complacent enough to stay out of the action. “We, as some of his biggest supporters, who put in countless hours—twelve, fourteen hour days—to get him elected, are serious about making sure he does the right thing on climate,” said Nazdin, who expects that the disconnect between the president’s slow action and the urgency that many young Americans feel will dampen OFA’s effort to mobilize young volunteers. “Unfortunately, we’re not going to sign up to volunteer and we’re not going to be donating money when we’re getting arrested,” Nazdin said. “We’re organizing to push him on something that right now he’s failing to address.”

Protesters are taking to the streets in Brazil. Read Dave Zirin's analysis here.

A member of a rebel group called the Martyr Al-Abbas throws a handmade weapon in Aleppo, June 11, 2013. (REUTERS/Muzaffar Salman)

The Constitution is clear. Written by revolutionaries fresh from a protracted battle against a colonial empire that was forever involving them in wars of whim, the document was designed to assure that the powers of war making and military adventuring would never be concentrated in the hands of a monarch—or a president. So it is that, while the American president has from the founding of the republic been designated as the commander-in-chief, it is the Congress that retains the sole power to declare wars and to set terms for the engagement of the United States in the country in the “attachments and entanglements in foreign affairs” against which George Washington warned.

While it can be argued that presidents have the authority to act unilaterally to repel attacks and defend the country, there is far less justification for the wars of whim and casual military engagements that have come to define the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first.

Yet, since 1941, succeeding executives have entered into wars, military engagements and schemes to aid foreign armies without ever seeking or receiving congressional authorization.

Often, the United States has policed the world without the informed consent of the American people, and without any evidence of the popular support that ought to be achieved before any country mingles its destiny with the struggles of distant lands.

Such is the case with the Syrian imbroglio.

That Syria has degenerated into crisis is clear.

That the violence on the ground is atrocious, and horrifying, goes without saying.

But the notion that the Syrian mess is an American problem, or that the United States can or should choose a favorite in the fight, is highly debatable. There is no defense for the actions of the Syrian government, but only the most casual observers presume that the rebels are universally committed to noble and democratic ends.

The American people “get” that the Syrian conflict is complicated, and that any US involvement there had the potential to make untenable demands on this country’s future. Polls by the Pew Research Center and various media outlets have found high levels of opposition to even the most minimal of US engagement with the rebels.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans have consistently said that the United States does not have a responsibility to intervene in the Syrian conflict. Late last year, Pew found that 65 percent of Americans oppose any move by the United States and its allies to provide arms to anti-government forces in Syria.

Since the Obama administration—under pressure from Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, and other hawks—announced this month that the United States would aid the Syrian rebels, opposition to the move has actually risen. Indeed, the latest polling shows that 70 percent of Americans oppose the United States and its allies’ sending arms and military supplies to anti-government groups in Syria. A mere 20 percent favor the initiative.

Yet Obama is taking the next step toward an active US role in the conflict.

Public opinion is not the only measure to be applied in weighing military engagements. But the wisdom of the people ought not be casually dismissed—especially when it comes to questions of whether their country should involve itself in distant civil wars.

If ever there was a time when congressional oversight needed—make that required, if one inclined toward a literal reading of the Constitution—this would seem to be it.

But Congress is disengaged and dysfunctional.

The House and the Senate choose not, for the most part, to govern. And they are especially resistant to governing when it comes to checking and balancing presidential decisions to embark upon military endeavors that carry with them the prospect of escalation and blowback. Congress relies too frequently on the convoluted and constitutionally dubious War Powers Act as an out for avoiding direct responsibility.

This is deeply unfortunate, not just in the immediate moment but on the long arc of history.

The United States is ill-suited to a career of empire, as former Secretary of State John Quincy Adams reminded the Congress in 1821.

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” Adams explained four years before he would assume the presidency. “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

It was an understanding of the many threats that go with the search for monsters to destroy that led the framers to rest the war-making power with the Congress. Now, however, Congress is resistant to taking up the basic work of oversight.

Indeed, its inclination is toward writing blank checks.

During the recent debate over the National Defense Authorization Act, Congressman Chris Gibson, R-New York, and John Garamendi, D-California, submitted a bipartisan amendment that would have removed “Sense of Congress” language—previously added to the NDAA—which might be read as signaling support for US military interventions and engagements in Syria. Only 123 members of the House (sixty-two Republicans, sixty-one Democrats) supported the amendment, while 301 members (168 Republicans and 133 Democrats) opposed it.

Garamendi is generally a supporter of President Obama, as are most of the sixty Democrats who joined him in supporting the amendment. They understand that congressional oversight does not weaken or undermine the executive; rather, it establishes a framework in which presidents, their aides and military commanders can operate.

It is not a matter of partisanship that argues for congressional action. It is a combination of common sense and respect for the Constitution.

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In arguing for the amendment, Gibson made the wise case that “we need to proceed with more caution—having a full and robust debate on the situation in Syria and how and if the United States should be involved. As we saw in Libya—operations I opposed from the start—it is critical we use the utmost caution when involving Americans overseas.”

That was the common sense argument. But it did not prevail.

This is troubling.

It made even more troubling by the fact that the practical argument made by the congressman from New York is, as well, the constitutional argument.

A Congress that cedes its authority to check and balance the military manipulations of the executive branch does not merely diminish its own stature. It undermines the separation of powers that is essential to keeping the United States from involving itself “beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”

No war of whim should ever be embarked upon without a declaration from Congress.

No military endeavor—and that certainly includes the arming of rebels in foreign conflicts—should ever be engaged in without oversight from the US House and the US Senate. That’s a standard that ought to be applied by congressional conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, no matter who sits in the White House.

The new book by John Nichols and Robert McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Book),explores how big money has made politics and government dysfunctional. Naomi Klein says: “John Nichols and Bob McChesney make a compelling, and terrifying, case that American democracy is becoming American dollarocracy. Even more compelling, and hopeful, is their case for a radical reform agenda to take power back from the corporations and give it to the people.”

The Supreme Court defended voting rights in Arizona, but what part of the bill did the leave intact? Read Aura Bogado’s report here.

Taliban fighters. (Reuters)

The BBC, The New York Times, and other news outlets are reporting the crucial news that the United States and the Taliban will start peace talks in Doha, Qatar.

For months, as the United States has moved to drawdown its remaining forces in Afghanistan, President Obama has seemingly neglected diplomacy. For years, it has been apparent that as the United States and the rest of the military coalition backing Kabul departs, an accord involving the Taliban and the Afghan government—and backed by the United States, Pakistan, India, Russia and Iran—is critical if Afghanistan is to avoid slipping into full-blown civil war in 2015.

Now, it seems, diplomacy is being rekindled. According to the BBC:

US officials told reporters the first formal meeting between US and Taliban representatives was expected to take place in Doha next week, with talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban due a few days after that.

The New York Times adds:

The announcement came in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where negotiations have been under way for more than two years with a number of international participants in an attempt to start peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

In a televised speech announcing the opening of a Taliban political office in Doha, Mohammed Naim, a Taliban spokesman, said their political and military goals “are limited to Afghanistan” and that they did not wish to “harm other countries.”

That statement, presumably, is a Taliban pledge not to work with Al Qaeda. A Taliban commitment to break completely with Al Qaeda has been a key demand of the United States since the talks between the two parties began. Says the Times:

Senior Obama administration officials in Washington said the Taliban statement contained two key pledges: that the insurgents believed that Afghan soil should not be used to threaten other countries, and that they were committed to finding a peaceful solution to the war.

“Together, they fulfill the requirement for the Taliban to open a political office in Doha for the purposes of negotiation with the Afghan government,” a senior administration official said.

American officials had long insisted that the Taliban make both pledges before talks start. The first element, in particular, is vital—it represents the beginning of what is hoped will be the Taliban’s eventual public break with Al Qaeda, the officials said.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that President Karzai of Afghanistan is sending members of the High Peace Council, the often-disparaged but critical group that is assigned the task of talking with the Taliban, to Doha:

Karzai said three principles had been created to guide the talks — that having begun in Qatar, they must then immediately be moved to Afghanistan, that they bring about an end to violence and that they must not become a tool for a “third country's” exploitation of Afghanistan.

And Pajhwok, the Afghan news service, noted that a group of former Taliban and other leading Afghans had agreed to the opening of the Taliban office in Qatar:

Former jihadi leaders and some prominent politicians who held a meeting with President Hamid Karzai on Monday agreed to the opening of a Taliban political bureau in Qatar for the sake of a sustainable peace and stability in the country.

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James Harkin chronicles the battle for Aleppo from behind rebel lines.

Read all of Tom Tomorrow's toons here.