Zoë Carpenter | The Nation
Government Shutdown Will Hit Federal Workers, Poor Americans
The US Capitol in Washington, Saturday, September 28, 2013, with the midnight Monday deadline fast approaching for Congress to break an impasse over funding the government. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Shortly after 2 pm today the Senate stripped several of the House GOP’s amendments from a short-term funding bill and sent the legislation back, making it all but certain that a partial government shutdown will occur at midnight.
The economic impact of a shutdown depends on how long it lasts, but workers and the poor are likely to be hit the hardest. About 800,000 of 2.1 million federal employees will be furloughed, with no guarantee of retroactive pay. “Essential” employees like active-duty service members, scientists posted to the International Space Station, mine inspectors for the Department of Labor, and Secret Service agents will continue to work, many without pay. The members of Congress creating the mess are considered essential, and will receive their paychecks.
Low-income women and children, on the other hand, may not be able to access food and health care. That’s because federal funds will not be available for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides food benefits and clinical services. States may have enough cash to continue operations for a few days, but even federal contingency funds “would not fully mitigate a shortfall for the entire month of October,” according to the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program. Food stamp recipients would still receive their benefits through the SNAP program, but other nutritional programs would shut down.
Several Head Start programs, which have already experienced crippling budget cuts under sequestration, would feel immediate effects and may be unable to offer educational services to children. By late October, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs will run out of funds to pay compensation and pension to more than 3.6 million veterans.
The DC area would feel the shutdown most acutely. According to the New York Times the federal government employs about 30 percent of the workers in the District of the Columbia, 20 percent of those in Arlington County, Virginia, and 10 percent in Montgomery County, Maryland. Because of the sequester government workers have already been hit with pay freezes and furloughs, and 330,000 people in the region lost their jobs.
“Our members have already suffered through six days of furloughs this year, we’ve been in a three-year pay freeze and there’s been a constant threat of job loss. It’s been a year of total uncertainty,” said J. David Cox, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal employee union. According to Cox, most of the union’s members make between $35,000 and $40,000 a year. “Federal employees have given enough. We’ve given [billions of] dollars to the federal deficit. It’s time to quit looking to us to be the bargaining chip.”
The District would be legally bound to curtail all of its services, including garbage collection, and to furlough all but essential employees. Frustrated by the lack of budget autonomy in the District, city leaders have made their own plans, which include declaring all workers essential and drafting legislation to pay them with a contingency fund.
Although the shutdown isn’t expected to be catastrophic, as would a default on the national debt (which will happen if the debt ceiling isn’t raised by October 17), failing to fund the government will still cost taxpayers. The shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 cost $1.4 billion, about $2 billion when adjusted for inflation. That figure is probably low, as Ezra Klein points out, because it leaves out the lost value of uncompleted work and revenue lost from actions like shuttering the national parks.
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The immediate effects of a shutdown would also ripple out to businesses and the stock market. “The government plays a huge role in the markets—that’s the case in every advanced economy. If it’s not functioning it’s simply going to hurt many aspects of the everyday economy,” said Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Piling another crisis on top of a feeble economy could shake consumer confidence, which plummeted during the debt ceiling standoff in 2011. Not knowing if they’ll be paid retroactively, furloughed employees are likely to reel in spending. “We’re already dealing with a recovery that’s too weak from that perspective,” Bernstein said.
To avoid a shutdown or to end it the House and the Senate will have to agree on a short-term spending bill that’s likely to maintain funding at current levels. But if the Continuing Resolution lasts only a week or two, Congress will soon be back in the same soup. On the other hand, a longer CR locks in a bad budget, helping to turn post-sequester spending levels into a new normal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, maintaining the sequester’s spending cuts would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs next year, and reduce gross domestic product. “We are very much defining ‘normal’ downwards,” said Bernstein. “In many ways, the solution we’re all hoping for is one that locks in its own version of dysfunction.”
Ultimately, the millions of Americans waiting for a budget that addresses long-term unemployment and wage stagnation, that provides adequate funding for public services and that strengthens the economy as a whole will be hurt by a government shutdown and any other delays in the passage of a long-term spending bill. But instead of governing, the GOP will turn the lights off—and even that won’t stop the Affordable Care Act rollout.
The Justice Department is bringing North Carolina’s voter suppression law to court.
Scientific Consensus Won’t Change the Politics of Climate Change
A lake formed from melt water from the Pastoruri glacier, as seen from atop the glacier in Huaraz, September 19, 2013. The nearby Pastoruri glacier is one of the fastest-receding glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range, according to a 2012 paper by the University of Texas and the Huascaran National Park. (Reuters/Mariana Bazo)
One of the most comprehensive scientific reviews ever assembled confirms what most people already acknowledge about climate change: it is happening, human activity is causing it, and we have a rapidly closing window of time to prevent unprecedented, potentially catastrophic climatic shifts.
What the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change report summary released this morning in Stockholm adds is near-certainty that warming is man-made, and stronger language to describe the changes underway.
Global warming is “unequivocal,” and its effects “unprecedented over decades to millennia,” states the IPCC, which considered the research of some 600 scientists from thirty-two countries, and concluded that there are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now than at any point in at least 800,000 years. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” states the report. Fossil fuel emissions and to a lesser extent land-use changes account for a 40 percent increase in carbon dioxide concentrations since pre-industrial times.
According to the IPCC, the atmosphere can absorb no more than 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide without warming exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists have agreed is crucial to stay below in order to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change. More than half of that carbon dioxide has already been emitted, and the world is on track to pump out the rest within 40 years, The New York Times reports. (Other models suggest we have even less time.)
Climate change is not only unprecedented but also “irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale.” Even if no new greenhouse gasses were added to the atmosphere, temperatures will stay high for centuries. And don’t count on geoengineering to save the planet. Proposed solutions like sucking carbon out of the atmosphere or spraying sulfur into the air to block sunlight face “biogeochemical and technological limitations,” and, in the case of solar radiation management, would “modify the global water cycle, and would not reduce ocean acidification.”
The report is the strongest show yet of the scientific consensus on the occurrence and implications of anthropogenic climate change, but it is unlikely to stir up any political action in proportion to the science. “This is science, these are facts, and action is our only option,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement in response to the report. The report’s near-certainty in linking human activity to climate change is striking in light of the fact that the 1990 report did not quantify the human contribution at all, and the 1995 report pointed only to a “discernable human influence on climate.”
But the right has not been waiting for better science in order to make up its mind about climate change. Conservatives long ago decided that “science” was a liberal scheme, in order to disregard its policy implications. Efforts to implement reproductive health restrictions around the country that directly contradict medical knowledge testify to this end. The media’s obsession with “balance” also dulls the influence of scientific consensus, by granting unsubstantiated denials the same weight as evidence-backed experts.
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“The IPCC glossed over the ongoing fifteen-year pause in temperature increases and did nothing to suggest that their predictions might be wrong,” said Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. In fact, the report’s authors went to some length to consider the perceived slowdown in temperature rise, concluding that the oceans have absorbed more heat than normal in recent years, and that short-term patterns “do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.” Variance in the levels of certainty for specific projections are made clear throughout the report. The true uncertainty in climate science is how a global shift will play out locally and regionally. It’s difficult to model, particularly since the changes are “unprecedented,” and that is precisely what makes it so dangerous to carry on business as usual.
At this point even the things we can predict, like the number of years we have until we cross the emissions threshold, are of limited use. Knowing how much carbon the world can emit helps governments set reduction targets, but these targets don’t mean much if we can’t design and implement policies to help us meet them. That means not only “saying no” to projects that perpetuate dependency on fossil fuels, like Keystone XL, but incubating creative alternatives in both the technological and political realm.
For conservatives, as David Roberts explains, accepting climate science means acknowledging the gravity and urgency of global warming, which would force into public the choice between sweeping new federal policies or massive human suffering. That climate denial is in effect choosing the latter is what needs to be made clear to the public.
Republican lawmakers like Lamar Smith have already discredited the report for being “more political than scientific,” and though he’s wrong about the rigor of the IPCC’s review, it will be more productive for progressives to challenge the climate deniers’ politics, rather than their science. It is the same politics of greed and cruelty displayed in the vote to cut food stamps, in the opposition to healthcare reform, and in the disregard for the wellbeing of workers and immigrants. Of course congressional Republicans aren’t the only stumbling block to climate progress, just as they aren’t the sole cause of economic inequality. But if predatory capitalism is the enemy, not just emissions, the coalition of allies is much, much larger.
Omar Ghabra on the loss of his homeland, Syria.
Congress Renews Efforts to Curb NSA Surveillance
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-VT, at a panel on Wednesday, July 31, 2013, where top Obama administration officials were questioned about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
These days it’s difficult to imagine Congress’s return to the business of governance. Still, several lawmakers have refocused their attention on the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices, suggesting that the resolve to reform did not die down during the August recess or the crises that followed. At least a dozen bills aimed at the NSA’s spying powers are pending in Congress, and key committees will hold hearings in the next two weeks.
Senator Patrick Leahy spoke forcefully today at Georgetown University Law Center about the need to curb the reach of the NSA and to reconsider the structure of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that authorizes the agency’s spying requests. “The Section 215 bulk collection of Americans’ phone records must end,” said Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, which is responsible for marking up several of the bills. “The government has not made its case that this is an effective counterterrorism tool, especially in light of the intrusion on Americans’ privacy rights.”
On Monday, Leahy and a bipartisan group of eight other senators sent a letter to the intelligence community’s inspector general requesting a “full accounting” of the government’s surveillance practices between 2010 and 2013, particularly in regards to US citizens. Leahy has already introduced legislation that would revise Section 215 of the Patriot Act to raise the standard required of the government to justify the collection of data in a terrorism investigation. Leahy’s bill would also increase transparency, public reporting, and inspector general oversight.
Democratic Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden have also introduced legislation targeting Section 215, as have House Democrat John Conyers and Republican Justin Amash. A proposal from New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt goes even further, repealing the entire Patriot Act and the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that give the NSA its sweeping reach.
Limiting the NSA’s surveillance authority will only be meaningful if the court charged with interpreting those laws is strengthened, something that Leahy pointed to in his remarks. “I am convinced the system set up in the 1970s to regulate the surveillance capabilities of our intelligence community is no longer working,” Leahy said in reference to FISC, the secret court created after the passage of FISA in 1978 to address widespread domestic spying by the NSA, CIA and FBI, which was exposed in a series of congressional investigations by a group of senators known as the Church Committee.
Several of that committee’s key participants, including former Vice President and Senator Walter Mondale and former Senator Gary Hart, also spoke at Georgetown on Tuesday, providing a historical perspective on the court they said has drifted from its original intent in a dangerous way. These lawmakers expected the court to halt warrantless wiretapping and other illegal practices by authorizing only legitimate requests, while meeting the state’s need for secrecy. But recent revelations about the unprecedented scope of domestic information-gathering, and the fact that the court has approved virtually all of the requests for authorization brought before it, suggest that the court has not served as a meaningful check.
Instead, as Leahy argued, the technological changes that have vastly altered the intelligence landscape have also expanded the court’s role in unintended ways. “These judges are now rendering complex constitutional decisions about massive surveillance programs that have major implications for Americans’ privacy. They are conducting oversight of highly technical programs that even the agency running them apparently did not understand and certainly did not accurately explain to the court,” Leahy said.
Moreover, as Leahy noted, the court is creating a secret body of law to govern current and future intelligence practices. “I don’t think any of us anticipated that that same court, protected from any outside interference at all, operating in secret…would have the authority to declare law that the intelligence agencies could then use to justify what they’re doing.“ said Mondale, who said Congress should consider how legislation could bring the court back within its intended, more limited role.
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Another weakness in the FISC structure is the absence of an advocate to challenge the government before the court. “I sort of assumed, without precedent, that a FISA judge would represent the public interest and the Fourth Amendment,” Hart said. “At the very least this 99-plus percent positive rulings for warrants suggests that the law ought to be amended so that there is an…advocate for the Fourth Amendment to make the other side of the argument.” That idea has purchase with lawmakers: Senator Richard Blumenthal authored a bill installing independent attorneys on the court to argue on behalf of civil liberties, and California Democrat Adam Schiff introduced similar legislation in the House last week. (My colleague George Zornick spoke to Schiff about his bill in July.)
Other reforms pointed to by former Church Committee members include making the court’s opinions public, and changing the process by which FISC judges are chosen. Currently, the chief justice of the Supreme Court appoints judges to seven-year terms with no congressional oversight. John Roberts’ appointments have been almost exclusively Republican. Under another bill put forward by Senator Blumenthal, the Chief Justice would select from a pool of judges nominated by each of the federal circuits. Schiff wrote a bill reforming the nomination process so that it requires presidential appointment and Senate confirmation, and yet another to increase transparency (with a major national security loophole). Because FISC does not have oversight over the NSA’s adherence to its rulings, boosting the role of the inspector general is also critical for enforcing any new legislation.
One of the greatest lessons to be drawn from the Church Committee is of the significant role Congress can play in investigating and challenging abuses of civil liberties by the government. While the committee’s tangible legacy was the laws that, for a while at least, curtailed domestic spying, it was the information made public through exhaustive hearings that made legislative action possible. These revelations were not about only domestic spying but also the assassination of foreign leaders and other shocking examples of executive overreach. Whether Congress will crack down on the intelligence community is one question; whether it will make room for a broader debate about the power of America’s surveillance state is another matter entirely.
Bob Dreyfuss on Obama’s UN speech and American interventionalism.
EPA Announces First-Ever Carbon Limits for New Power Plants
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy speaks at a climate workshop at Georgetown University in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
On Friday the Environmental Protection Agency announced rules to cap carbon pollution from new power plants, the first regulation of its kind. The EPA’s proposal would cut emissions from new coal plants to roughly half as much carbon dioxide as today’s coal-fired generators pump into the air.
The new rules, along with guidelines for existing plants still to be written, are the heart of the Obama administration’s climate action plan. Power plants emit about 40 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases, more than any other single source, and limiting their output is one of the most significant moves the administration can make to combat climate change without cooperation in Congress.
The rules announced today won’t do anything to reduce current carbon pollution, because they apply only to plants not yet built. They do set an important legal precedent for the regulation of carbon under the Clean Air Act, which the agency will rely on when it puts forward performance targets for existing plants next year.
The proposal sets separate standards for new coal and gas fired plants, unlike a similar rule suggested last year. According to EPA officials, most gas-fired power plants built recently already meet the new standards, which would permit new facilities to emit 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour, or 1,100 pounds for smaller plants. Coal plants would face a limit of 1,100 pounds per megawatt hour, or a slightly stricter standard averaged over seven years. Today’s coal plants emit about 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour, according to EPA.
“We want to send a signal to the market today about what kind of facilities the US government thinks are going to be effective in a carbon-constrained world,” an EPA official said Friday about the new rule on a conference call with reporters. In other words, said the Sierra Club’s Melinda Pierce, the standards are meant to drive investment decisions away from coal and to cleaner sources of energy.
Legislators from coal regions and industry leaders have already linked the new rules to the “war on coal,” and opposition will mount during the sixty-day comment period and while the EPA finalizes the rule, which should be complete next year. Legal challenges are likely to assert that Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS), the technology that several facilities currently under construction are implementing, is not viable or affordable. West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin denounced the new standards, saying they would “have devastating impacts to the coal industry.”
Prior to the new standards, however, interest in new coal-fired plants had all but disappeared. “A sudden increase in spot prices for Appalachian coal during 2008 has been followed by a sustained decline in the delivered cost of natural gas…favoring natural gas‐fired units over coal‐fired units,” the Energy Information Administration wrote in 2012. Cheap natural gas outcompetes coal easily on the energy market, while solar and wind are taking up growing shares of the utility market. “The world has changed,” said Pierce. “The era of building a bunch of new coal plants to add to the fleet is really over.”
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More critical for the climate and the future of the coal industry are guidelines for the more than 1,500 power plants operating across the country. The EPA’s process for regulating existing facilities will differ considerably from the rule proposed today, in that the agency will ask states to put forward their own plan to meet performance targets that the EPA will propose in June 2014. The agency launched an outreach campaign last month to engage regional administrators, state governments, industry, public health organizations and environmental stakeholders in the development of the new guidelines. It isn’t clear what kind of benchmark the EPA will ask states to meet; options include an emissions cap similar to the rule for new plants, an efficiency standard or a regional cap-and-trade program.
Regulating existing plants will be a costly and complicated process reliant on cooperation from state government. States like Texas, Pierce said, are unlikely to put forward an implementation plan when the EPA issues its guidelines. “It sets up a situation where recalcitrant states may choose not to comply, and then the cop on the beat has to come in and hold them accountable,” she said.
Obama’s stated goal is to see both sets of rules enacted by the time he leaves office in 2017. While “Big Green” organizations lauded the standards proposed today and have expressed optimism about the development of flexible, state-specific regulation of existing plants, the plans are vulnerable to a change of leadership in the White House, and are only a small part of any serious attempt to curb climate change.
Rejecting Keystone XL would be a strong next step, followed by a close look at other infrastructure projects that expedite the burning of fossil fuels like the Flanagan South Pipeline, the government’s eagerness to lease federal lands for oil and coal development and the environmental and health effects of natural gas production. Ultimately, effective federal policy will require voters to hold Congress accountable. With roughly thirty years remaining before the world hits the carbon threshold likely to increase global temperatures beyond the crucial two degrees Celsius mark, today’s announcement should provoke more action than satisfaction.
Lee Fang on how Republican lawmakers are playing politics with human lives.
Anatomy of Outrage: On the Obamacare Resistance
Senator Ted Cruz speaks at a news conference with conservative congressional Republicans who persuaded the House leadership to include defunding the Affordable Care Act legislation to prevent a government shutdown. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The House of Representatives voted this morning for a short-term spending bill that would strip all funding for Obamacare, pushing the government down an uncertain path toward shutdown. Next, Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless the law is gutted.
These moves won’t have any real effect on Obamacare, and they come against the judgment of party leaders and public opinion. President Obama won’t sign either piece of legislation even if it passes the Senate. Far more threatening to healthcare reform is the aggressive, localized campaign to sabotage the law’s implementation.
The fracas in Washington will probably cost the Republican Party far more than anyone else. Meanwhile, it’s making a lot of money for the conservatives who started it all.
* * *
On a Thursday evening in late August, in the ballroom of a Double Tree hotel outside Wilmington, Delaware, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father Rafael rallied a few hundred conservatives to his son’s chief cause, the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act. “They can take our lives, they can take our fortunes,” the Cuban-born pastor shouted, wagging a finger at the crowd, which whistled and cheered. “But they cannot take our honor! No one can take our honor.”
It was the last stop of the Heritage Action Fund’s Defund Obamacare tour, a nine-city whipping-up of Tea Party fury designed to pressure congressional Republicans into a budget showdown over the health care law. Former Senator Jim DeMint, now the head of the Heritage Foundation, impressed upon the crowd the need to break the law before October 1, when the insurance exchanges open for enrollment. “If there’s ever been anything worth fighting for in the political arena, it’s this,” he said. “This is our time to stop it…. This is a winnable battle.”
His crusade seemed quixotic then. Only a handful of conservative members of Congress had signed the pledge to walk away from any spending bill or debt-ceiling deal that left Obamacare intact. Party leadership dismissed the Defunders, wary of being blamed for a government shutdown or a default. “Do you want to risk the full faith and credit of the US government over Obamacare?” House Speaker John Boehner asked in March. “That’s a very tough argument to make.”
Outside the Double Tree, a small group smoking cigarettes around a trashcan was more optimistic. “I think everybody that was there is motivated to do something,” mused a woman named Pat. “We’re losing the country.” They felt they were losing the Republican Party, too. “They’re weenies,” a man named Joe said about the leaders. “They’re really Democrats called Republicans,” Pat added. Joe again: “Democrat-lites.” He paused to consider. “They’re French Republicans!”
Two weeks later, spines in Washington have stiffened—really, they’ve bowed to the hard right. Boehner was forced to withdraw a short-term spending bill with a nonbinding rider that stripped funding from Obamacare when conservatives balked at a vote they said was merely symbolic. It’s no surprise House Republicans are tired of such gestures, after voting more than forty times to repeal or delay the law with nothing to show but a cost upwards of $50 million to taxpayers. The continuing resolution that passed the House on Friday defunds the healthcare law, and Republicans will now set to work on a bill to raise the debt ceiling for another year’s worth of borrowing, contingent also upon the demise of the ACA, as well as expedited construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and other Democratic non-starters.
Neither bill can pass the Senate, much less the White House, and so without compromise from House Republicans the government is headed for a shutdown on October 1. More alarming is the prospect of a default, an unprecedented event that could roil the global economy. While this brinkmanship jeopardizes the country’s economic stability, it poses virtually no threat to Obamacare. With polling indicating that most Americans would blame Republicans for the shutdown, the White House has no reason to blink.
* * *
The Defund Obamacare movement represents irresponsible governing at its apex, but what’s insidious about the whole show is the way it distracts from the actual threat to healthcare reform: the efforts to cripple the law’s implementation, led by Republican-controlled state governments and a range of right-wing PACs.
Sixteen states have imposed unnecessary restrictions on “navigators,” a workforce drawn from nonprofit and government agencies to educate consumers about their options and walk them through the new system. Twenty-one states have refused to expand Medicaid, which was intended to cover 17 million uninsured, low-income Americans. Officials in Missouri have been barred from doing anything to implement the law. A handful of other states are refusing to enforce its consumer protections, most critically the provision that bans insurers from rejecting applicants with preexisting conditions.
At the center of the “Obamacare resistance” is a media campaign to discourage young people from signing up for the exchanges. In order for the economics to work, the costs of adding unhealthy people to the insurance pool must be offset by premiums paid by the healthy. With only six in ten people aware of the exchanges and some 2.7 million young enrollees needed next year for the program to work, the administration has committed millions to reach young adults and get them enrolled. Earlier this year conservatives harassed organizations partnering with Health and Human Services on public-awareness campaigns; now they’re targeting young Americans directly.
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Koch-funded Generation Opportunity launched a web series on Thursday as part of a six-figure campaign designed, in the words the nonprofit’s president Even Feinberg, “to communicate, ‘No, you’re actually not required to buy health insurance.’ You might have to pay a fine, but that’s going to be cheaper for you and better for you.” In one video, a leering Uncle Sam pops up between the legs of a young woman who has recently signed up for Obamacare and is reclining on the examining table, waiting for a pap smear. “Don’t let government play doctor,” the text reads, as Uncle Sam ratchets out the forceps, “Opt out of Obamacare.” Tinged with sexual violence, the ad is rich in irony, coming from the party that aggressively “plays doctor” to women across the country and isn’t exactly sure what rape is.
Generation Opportunity will tour twenty college campuses this fall, dogging nonprofits like Enroll America that are signing up young Americans. A slew of other organizations are working in tandem, including FreedomWorks, which encourages college students to burn Obamacare “draft cards,” and YG Network, which ran an anti-Obamacare ad on Saturday Night Live. Just like the assault on women’s health providers, these attempts to convince young people that being uninsured is “better for you” are dangerous. Young adults are the people least likely to have insurance, and unexpected health emergencies can be financially crippling. Under Obamacare, subsidies will dramatically lower the cost of coverage, to as little as $5 a month for some 21-year-olds in California. Other provisions will give young people access to essential preventative services, with no copay—like the gynecological exam denigrated in the Generation Opportunity ad.
* * *
Those discouraged or prevented from obtaining insurance will be the collateral damage of the Obamacare wars. Complication and confusion will continue to trouble the rollout, but it would take a mass panic across insurers, customers and legislators to bury the law. The loser, then, will be the Republican Party, which has staked its entire identity on opposition to healthcare reform. Once benefits begin to flow on January 1, it will be politically impossible to take them away. Without Obamacare, what is the GOP?
Capitulation to the repeal coalition signifies a rejection of the lesson in demographics offered by the 2012 election. Millennials didn’t fall for the conservative ads targeted at them then, and polls suggest they want insurance now. The people gunning for the healthcare law are mainly old and white, as the crowd packed into the ballroom in Wilmington suggested. Out in the parking lot, a tall African-American man told me that “hot air” was all he’d heard inside. “There’s no way the conservative party is going to be a nationwide party with the crowd that showed up tonight. I mean, I’m probably the youngest person in here.” He didn’t mention that he was probably the only person of color in the room, too. “This crowd here—I cannot vote Republican,” he went on. “This tonight is people who lost an election, and this man [DeMint] is selling them snake oil.”
Selling is right. Heritage Action and other PACs are profiting from the attacks on their own party by riling up rank-and-file Obamacare haters and picking their pockets to fund an unwinnable campaign. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a former DeMint project, raised more than $1.5 million in August, mostly from small donors, “the largest-ever monthly small-donor total brought in” by the group, according to The Huffington Post. Daily e-mails from Heritage feature a large red “Donate” button. The millions of signatures collected on the online petitions give the PACs a network to plumb for future causes, or candidates: Ted Cruz’s election campaign was bankrolled by the Senate Conservatives Fund in 2012.
“These organizations, ensconced in Northern Virginia office parks and elsewhere, aren’t worried about the establishment’s ire,” wrote National Review’s Bob Costa. “In fact, they welcome it. Business has boomed since the push to defund Obamacare caught on. Conservative activists are lighting up social media, donations are pouring in and e-mail lists are growing.” Brian Walsh, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, explained, “Money begets TV ads which begets even more money for these groups’ personal coffers. Pointing fingers and attacking Republicans is apparently a very profitable fundraising business.”
Rafael Cruz was right when he cried out to the Wilmington crowd, “They cannot take our honor!” The Obamacare opposition has no honor left to take.
Conservatives can blame anything on feminists, says Jessica Valenti.
Poverty Rate and Income Stagnate as Conservatives Attack the Safety Net
A map at Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that depicts food distribution points across the state. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)
Exactly five years since the onset of the financial crisis, income data released this morning by the Census Bureau indicates that the spike in poverty triggered by the recession has become the status quo. Middle-class incomes are stagnant, too.
The numbers come as House Republicans move to kick as many as 4 million Americans off food stamps by cutting $40 billion from the program. In their budget proposals, conservatives are also proposing to maintain the deep sequestration reductions that have cut tens of thousands of young children out of Head Start, as well as childcare assistance, Meals On Wheels for seniors, unemployment benefits, and housing assistance.
More than 46 million Americans lived in poverty last year, representing 15 percent of the population. For three years now there have been more Americans in poverty than at any other point since the Census Bureau began collecting data in 1959, and the poverty rate is hovering at its highest level since 1997. While many economists had hoped to see a small decrease in the poverty rate, the only statistically significant change was the additional 300,000 elderly Americans who fell below the poverty line.
“This far out from the great recession it would have been really nice to see gains to income, and reductions in poverty and large increases in health insurance coverage, and we didn’t see any of that,” said Elise Gould, an Economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Overall, she said, the Census figures show that the economic recovery has passed over most Americans. “When I think about economic growth, I think about economic growth for everyday Americans. There we’re talking about median households, median families; we’re also talking about people at the bottom.”
The numbers show that poverty grips women and children particularly fiercely. More than a fifth of all children live in poverty; one in three poor Americans are children. Inequality across race persists, too, with more than a quarter of black and Hispanic Americans living in poverty, compared to just 9.7 percent of whites.
While the poverty rate rose for both women and men during the recession, the percentage of men in poverty last year was still lower than it has ever been for women. Joan Entmacher, the vice president of Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center, said that decades of unequal wages along with the uneven effects of the recession account for the gender gap. “The jobs that are coming back in this recovery, especially for women, are very low wage jobs. And there aren’t enough of them,” she said.
Entmacher also pointed to the Census’ finding that nearly half of children living in single-parent families headed by women are poor. “If you’re concerned about child poverty and the way it stunts children’s life chances then you have to be concerned about the poverty rate for women,” she said. Reductions in social programs like food stamps and Head Start are particularly devastating to mothers. “Childcare…is absolutely critical if low income women are going to be able to enter and stay in the labor force, but those supports have been cut back,” said Entmacher.
The entrenchment of poverty in American society is alarming on its own, but it is particularly striking in the shadow of a massive rebound in the stock market and in corporate profits. The Census’ measure of inequality in 2012 is on par with the all-time high found the previous year.
The recovery has simply missed most Americans, with the upturn’s benefits accruing largely at the upper echelons of society: the top 1 percent has captured 95 percent of the income gains made since the recession. While income grew by more than 30 percent for the 1 percent between 2009 and 2012, all other Americans together made gains amounting to less than half-of-one percent.
The median income in 2012 was $51,017, still about 8 percent lower than in the year before the financial crisis. But incomes were already falling before the crash; in fact, the peak median income came in 1997. Poverty, too, has been rising since the late 1990s. “It’s really not surprising that we’re seeing flat or stagnant incomes and poverty rates because employment growth has been so modest,” said Gould. “This recovery…[is] really on the tail of thirty years of policies that have been put in place that aren’t really benefiting everyday Americans.”
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President Obama acknowledged as much in his speech on Monday. “The trends that have taken hold over the past few decades of a winner-take-all economy…have been made worse by the recession,” he said, and went on to make the case that “what happens up on Capitol Hill” during the current budget showdown is critical to reversing the slide.
Instead of pursuing policies to promote employment and wage increases at the bottom and middle, however, Congress is poised to enact fiscal policies that hit the vulnerable even harder. The proposed Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program cutbacks are particularly outrageous, but even President Obama’s budget proposal includes a change to the way inflation is calculated that would amount to both a benefit cut and a tax increase for seniors. The tax reforms coming together in the Senate Finance Committee will likely include a lower corporate tax rate, without doing much for poor and middle-class families. It seems unlikely that Congress will lift the sequester anytime soon, which means continued reductions in the social safety net.
The Census figures show that such spending is more essential than ever, as it is these programs rather than the uptick in the economy keeping heads above water. According to the Census, 1.7 million people avoided poverty last year thanks to unemployment insurance. Although neither SNAP benefits nor the Earned Income Tax Credit are counted in the poverty rate, the two programs lifted a combined 9.5 million out of poverty in 2012. And though the full effects of the Affordable Care Act haven’t yet been felt, the level of uninsured Americans continued to fall last year, and the number of uninsured children reached an historic low.
Allison Kilkenny on the Occupy movement’s second anniversary.
Flawed Media Shield Law Goes to the Senate Floor
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) confer during a news conference for new media shield legislation, July 17, 2013. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
When a federal appeals court ruled in July that the First Amendment did not protect New York Times reporter James Risen from being compelled to testify against a former CIA official charged with leaking classified documents to him, it set a precedent with grave implications for investigative journalism, particularly in matters of national security.
The ruling followed revelations that the Department of Justice secretly seized the records from Associated Press phone lines and the emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen, who the DOJ deemed an “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a criminal leak of State Department records. This aggressive pursuit of journalists and their sources reignited calls for federal media shield legislation, which had stalled out twice in Congress.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the “Free Flow of Information Act,” designed to protect journalists ordered to reveal confidential information. Because of a loophole for national security cases, however, the law may not shield the reporters who need it most—like Risen.
As written, the Senate bill would not protect journalists if the government could make the case that the information sought would assist in mitigating “acts that are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security,” a phrase so full of ambiguities as to be essentially useless. “Basically all leak cases that involve journalists’ emails or themselves getting subpoenaed to appear in front of a judge involve national security cases, so this exception basically just tilts the playing field to the government. The burden that the journalist has to overcome is virtually impossible,” said Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The way the bill is written gives all deference to prosecutors’ claims on national security.”
While the Obama administration’s campaign against leakers spurred the reintroduction of the shield law, the national security carve-out rendering it toothless is the president’s work, too. Obama cosponsored the original shield legislation in the Senate, only to demand deep revisions from the Oval Office in 2009—including the exemption for leaks affecting national security. “The White House’s opposition to the fundamental essence of this bill is an unexpected and significant setback,” Senator Chuck Schumer, who was a primary sponsor of the legislation, said at the time, noting, “it will make it hard to pass this legislation.” Indeed, the bill died in the Senate.
Days after the AP story broke in May, Obama asked Schumer to reintroduce the legislation, which included the national security loophole. But most of the following media scrutiny focused on a different flaw in the legislation: its attempt define who qualified as a journalist.
When the Department of Justice rolled out new policies intended to “strengthen protections for members of the news media” this summer, it wasn’t clear who belonged to the “news media.” Other DOJ documents suggest a narrow application to professional, traditional journalists. (The DOJ did not return a request to clarify the agency’s definition of “news media.”) The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide excludes bloggers from the news media, along with “persons and entities that simply make information available,” like Wikileaks. These policies are guidelines, not directives, but as the Freedom of the Press Foundation points out, they are “part of a broader legislative effort in Washington to simultaneously offer protection for the press while narrowing the scope of who is afforded it.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein argued for an amendment that would have restricted the shield to salaried journalists. “Should this privilege apply to anyone, to a seventeen year-old who drops out of high school, buys a website for five dollars and starts a blog? Or should it apply to journalists, to reporters, who have bona fide credentials?” Feinstein asked during Thursday’s markup. The committee compromised, defining a “covered journalist” as someone who has worked for at least one full year in the last twenty, or for a continuous three-month period within the last five years; has contributed to a “significant number” of published works within the past five years; or is a journalism student.
Critically, the Senate bill gives judges discretion to apply the protections “in the interest of justice” to any other person who doesn’t fit the criteria for a “covered journalist.” Several press freedom advocates said this provision alleviates many of their concerns that the bill’s definition of a journalist wasn’t inclusive enough. “The definition is one of the most problematic and difficult areas of the shield law. Giving judges this power and discretion is a really good idea,” said David Greene, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Both Timm and Gregg Leslie, the legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that the shield would now probably apply to many bloggers that had previously been left out.
Still, advocates point out that protecting acts of journalism, rather than journalists, would provide a more robust and inclusive defense, particularly for nontraditional reporters. Journalism, said Harvard legal studies professor Yochai Benkler, “is not an institution anymore. It’s a function.” He went on, “What this law does is try to close its eye and shut its ears to the fact that this new third modality of production—the decentralized, the social, the engaged non-profit—is as central to the ecosystem as commercial entities are.”
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According to Benkler the shield “essentially puts a thumb on the scale” against independent or citizen journalists, privileging corporate media outlets. “For any potential source, it increases the risk of going through a non-establishment journalist,” he said. “If you are a source, and you have a choice between going to feed someone who clearly falls under the shield, and someone you have to rely on pulling the right judge, you’re going to go to the established journalist.”
Another area of concern is a provision known as the “Wikileaks exemption.” The law explicitly excludes people and organizations “whose principal function…is to publish primary source documents that have been disclosed…without authorization.” Wikileaks is hardly the only organization that might fall within this category. “Part of journalism, especially when you have the capacity to do so, is disclosing primary source documents,” said Greene, who believes the exemption could capture entities and people legitimately practicing journalism depending on how “principal function” is interpreted.
The House Judiciary Committee has yet to consider its version of the shield law, which in many respects offers the broader protections that advocates would like to see in the Senate’s bill. The House version does not include such a wide national security carve-out, and defines a “covered person” simply as anyone engaged in, “the gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.”
Even the Senate’s version, many advocates said, would be better than nothing. It’s impossible to tell how broadly the national security exemption would be interpreted in court; Benkler said he expected to see “a lot of legal wrangling.” But Timm isn’t convinced the shield is worth much if it doesn’t protect the journalists most likely to be targeted by the government, namely national security reporters. “It’s kind of disingenuous to say this bill alone would fix those problems,” he said.
Tim Shorrock covers Obama’s crackdown on whistleblowers.
Failures to Sell War Make a Strong Case for Diplomacy
President Barack Obama speaks at a G-20 press conference. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais.)
After a media blitz plagued by inconsistencies that deepened, rather than relieved, public skepticism, the administration’s case for bombing Syria has come undone. Congress now appears unlikely to authorize an immediate use of force, particularly since Russia, Syria and several lawmakers have undercut the administration’s claim to have “exhausted the alternatives” to war.
Tonight, President Obama will give a major prime-time address that was initially intended to drum up public support for the use of force. With the White House now backing an international diplomatic effort to secure Syria’s weapons, the president’s speech could mark a significant break from the message previously voiced by the administration. Even a tentative embrace of a diplomatic solution would be a profound shift. It would also be an implicit acknowledgment of how weakly the administration’s case for war has been made.
The White House’s attempt to sell military strikes to the public went nowhere. It was crowded, for one thing, with spokespeople such as John Kerry, Samantha Power and Susan Rice dispatched to think tanks and the Capitol to drum up support. Instead of presenting a unified front, officials often contradicted one another and the president, and raised more questions than they answered.
Take the issue of intelligence. Last week, Kerry said that the intelligence linking Assad to the August 21 chemical weapons attacks was “beyond a reasonable doubt—and I used to prosecute cases.” He continued, “And I can tell you, beyond a reasonable doubt, the evidence proves that the Assad regime prepared this attack and that they attacked exclusively opposition-controlled or -contested territory.” The administration maintained its public certainty about Assad’s culpability even while diverting public requests for the evidence, which reportedly includes transcripts of Syrian military communications connecting the government to the attack.
But when chief of staff Denis McDonough appeared on five Sunday talk shows to clear up questions about Syria, he wavered. After CNN’s Candy Crowley asked whether intelligence proved a “direct link” between Assad and the August 21 attack, McDonough replied, “All of that leads to…a quite strong common-sense test, irrespective of the intelligence, that suggests that the regime carried this out.” He went on: “Do we have a picture or do we have irrefutable, beyond a reasonable doubt evidence? This is not a court of law. And intelligence does not work that way.”
The administration also failed to answer questions about the scale of the strikes effectively. They will be “unbelievably small,” Kerry said on Monday. Hours later, Obama corrected him. “The US does not do pinpricks. Our military is the greatest the world has ever known,” he told Savannah Guthrie of ABC, in one of six interviews aired last night.
The underlying trouble with the White House’s message is that it has to appeal to too many factions with widely divergent interests. The administration claims the strikes will be forceful enough to “deter and degrade,” but not large enough to commit the United States to protracted engagement. The White House has to sell strikes to the hawks as a complement to a broader strategy of regime change, while simultaneously telling a war-shy public that military action is solely a punitive and isolated measure.
Given its inability to anchor such magical thinking to concrete strategy and objectives, the administration’s best case was to sell military strikes as, if not the best, the only option. Ironically, that’s the point that Kerry was trying to make when he unintentionally initiated an alternative solution.
Asked at a news conference in London whether Bashar al-Assad could do anything to avert American airstrikes, Kerry responded, “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week—turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting.” He dismissed the possibility immediately. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”
Obviously. The bottom line of the administration’s argument has been declarations of absolute fact and certainty that, when teased apart, appear hazy and inexact. The transformation happened rapidly after Kerry’s comment.
Russia, ignoring the State Department’s clarification that Kerry wasn’t actually proposing a diplomatic solution but was instead “making a rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood” of such an alternative, declared that it would work with the Syrian government to turn its chemical weapons over to international control if it would in fact forestall American military action. Syria’s foreign minister immediately said the government welcomed the Russian proposal. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and British Prime Minister David Cameron both endorsed the plan. Harry Reid put the authorization resolution on hold in the Senate. Even Hillary Clinton, who had been expected to throw her weight behind the administration when she spoke at the White House yesterday, conceded the Russian proposal could be “an important step.”
Obama, too, adapted his message to keep up with the events of the day in interviews with six major networks that aired last night. “My preference consistently has been a diplomatic resolution to this problem,” he said on NBC. “If we can accomplish this limited goal without taking military action, that would be my preference,” he told CNN. “We should explore and exhaust all avenues of diplomatic resolution to this,” he told Fox, breaking sharply from previous assertions that all of those avenues had already been followed to dead ends.
Clearly the administration’s PR malady lies deeper than rhetoric. Yes, there were plenty of poor rhetorical choices, particularly from Kerry, who compared Assad to Hitler and indicated that airstrikes could lead to boots on the ground, among other unwise comments. But the real problem wasn’t that Obama’s spokespeople, and Obama himself, chose the wrong words with which to sell military action. It was that the strategy itself was fundamentally untenable.
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Obama now has a chance to initiate a new message tonight, one that the public and Congress seems to want to hear: that there are nonmilitary alternatives to an immediate use of force, and he is committed to pursuing them. The public should be wary, however, of new words shrouding old plans. As my colleague George Zornick reports, hawks in the Senate may be preparing to make the case that authorizing a use of force is necessary to keep the Syrians at the bargaining table. Obama hinted as much last night when he told Scott Pelley of CBS, “I don’t think that we would’ve gotten to the point where they even put something out there publicly, had it not been—and if it doesn’t continue to be—a credible military threat from the United States.” As of this afternoon, it appears the president wants Congress to delay the vote on the use of force authorization, but to keep working on the resolution.
In fact, Moscow grabbed hold of the “rhetorical argument” cast aside by Kerry just as Obama’s case for war was rapidly unraveling at home, when the military threat was less certain than it had been at any point since the chemical weapons strike in August. The success of any diplomatic solution now depends on Russia and the United States bridging a wide gulf of mistrust. It seems the real need is for credible diplomacy.
Tom Tomorrow illustrates the contradictions in the White House’s campaign for a strike on Syria.
Samantha Power Sells Action in Syria to the Left
Samantha Power testifies at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, July 17, 2013. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen
Ambassador Samantha Power made her case for military strikes in Syria today at the Center for American Progress, where she argued that in the face of a “paralyzed” Security Council, the deployment of American war power is the only viable response to the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons, if one that supporters needed to “justify.”
“This is the right debate for us to have,” Power said, and yet took no questions, turning the assembled press into props. To be fair, President Obama answered many questions from reporters this morning. But the absence of a question-and-answer session created the impression that, despite the optics of appearing before the press at a progressive institution, Power wasn’t particularly interested in a real conversation. CAP president Neera Tanden, meanwhile, expressed her support for military intervention.
Power did strike a humble, open-minded note in acknowledging the validity of the many questions raised by skeptics of intervention. “There is no risk-free door number-two that we can choose,” she said, and recognized that the administration must “[accept] responsibility for the risks and potential consequences of action.” But she spent little time considering those risks and how they might be contained, and instead focused on the failures and shortcomings of non-military solutions.
“At this stage, the diplomatic process has been stalled because one side has been gassed and the other side thinks it’s gotten away with it,” Power said. “What would words, in the form of belated diplomatic condemnation, achieve?” She described the Security Council as “paralyzed” by Russia, argued that going to the International Criminal Court would be of limited use because of the need for quick action, and said new economic sanctions would be undercut by Syria’s allies.
Power said it was “good and important” to ask how the United States could avoid being drawn deeper into the conflict in Syria once military action were initiated, but she offered a less-than-satisfying answer. “The president has repeatedly demonstrated that he will not put American boots on the ground to fight another war in the Middle East. The draft resolution before Congress makes this clear,” she said. As I wrote yesterday, these promises are relatively meaningless, since military strikes invite an uncertain reaction from Syria and its allies. “The United States has the discipline, as a country, to maintain these limits,” Power said.
Power seemed to characterize congressional authorization as helpful, but unnecessary, saying, “There is no question that authorization by our Congress will help strengthen our case.” She drew parallels between public skepticism about military action in Syria and opposition to President Clinton’s decision to bomb Serbian forces in Bosnia in 1995, saying there were times when a president’s concern for national interest trumped public opinion. She asserted that “there is no question that [the] deployment of American power” after the House failed to authorize further military action in 1999 “saved lives and returned stability to the a critical region,” raising yet more questions about whether the administration intends to proceed with airstrikes regardless of the vote in Congress. (This morning, Obama refused to give a direct response to repeated questioning on this point.)
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Power asserted the now-familiar administration message that the military strikes in Syria are essential to deter Iran and North Korea from going nuclear. As Bob Dreyfuss points out, the decision to initiate military action in Syria is perhaps guided less by conditions on the ground in Syria than by concerns about the implications for the slow-churning conflict between Israel and Iran. Power nodded toward this dynamic when she said, “Israel’s security is threatened by instability in the region, and its security is enhanced when those who would do it harm know that the United States stands behind its word,” she said.
“Does anybody really believe that same approaches will suddenly be effective?” Power asked. Most opposed to military action in Syria would likely answer with a resounding no. But the administration has thus far failed to articulate how military strikes, too, will be effective, and Power was no exception.
There could be a compromise bill on Syrian intervention in US Senate.
The Senate's 'Limited' Authorization Is Full of Holes
Secretary of State John Kerry, center, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, September 3, 2013, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted yesterday to authorize the use of force in Syria, sending a resolution full of broad, imprecise language on to the full Senate. The committee split 10-7, with Democrats Chris Murphy and Tom Udall and Republican presidential hopefuls Rand Paul and Marco Rubio among those voting against the authorization.
The resolution is in some respects narrower than what the administration proposed, but it retains a number of loopholes. While it gives the president the power to use the armed forces only within Syria, and “in a limited and specified manner against legitimate military targets,” the president reserves the ability to determine what constitutes “limited” and “legitimate.”
The resolution authorizes the president to use force not only for the purposes of deterring and degrading Assad’s ability to launch future chemical attacks, but also to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorists, to non-state actors within Syria or to another state. While the transfer of chemical weapons is a legitimate concern, that language broadens the scope of the authorization well beyond what the administration claims to be the intention of the strikes.
The resolution appears to prohibit “boots on the ground,” a priority for lawmakers wary of deeper entanglement. But at closer inspection, that limitation is hollow. The resolution states that it “does not authorize the use the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.” It says nothing about the use of Special Forces, which may already be engaged in Syria, and it would permit the deployment of ground troops for purposes other than “combat operations.”
The ultimate problem with the limitation on boots on the ground is that no language can control how the Syrian government or its allies will respond to American airstrikes. Initiating military action in Syria, however limited, invites a response that could escalate the conflict to an extent that effectively forces the United States to introduce ground troops. If US allies or American personnel were directly targeted, it would be nearly impossible to limit the scale of US involvement.
I wrote yesterday about the last “whereas” clause in the draft resolution (preserved in the final version), which offers a shockingly broad interpretation of executive war power, particularly in combination with other “whereas” clauses in the authorization. The resolution makes the claim that the “the President has authority under the Constitution to use force in order to defend the national security interests of the United States.” What constitutes national security interests, and who decides when they are threatened? According to previous clauses, “Syria’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction” and “Syria’s use of weapons of mass destruction and its conduct and actions” both threaten “the national security interests of the United States.”
It would appear then that the Foreign Relations Committee agrees with the administration’s claim that it does not need congressional authorization to initiate military strikes. Furthermore, the broadened constitutional authority that the resolution acknowledges is not limited to Syria, and so could be abused by an executive in future decisions regarding the use of force. While the “whereas” clause is essentially meaningless in terms of the practical application of the resolution, it does send a troubling signal about how much constitutional power Congress is willing to cede to the executive branch. As Jack Goldsmith, formerly assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Council and now a Harvard law professor, wrote yesterday, the authorization “gives significant support to the position that the President has some (uncertain) independent constitutional authority to use force in Syria, regardless of what Congress authorizes, and (perhaps) beyond what Congress authorizes.”
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Senator Rand Paul introduced an amendment clarifying the constitutional limits on the president’s authority to act unilaterally, but it failed to win approval from the committee. Two amendments, proposed by John McCain and Chris Coons, were added by voice vote; they assert that official US policy is “to change the momentum on the battlefield in Syria” in a way that “leads to a democratic government,” and that US strategy should aim to upgrade the capacity of “vetted elements” of the opposition.
The Obama administration commended the passage of the authorization, as it should. The resolution is well “tailored” to fit its agenda.
Take Action: Demand Your Reps Vote No on Military Intervention in Syria
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