Filed under: Author - ACG, Politics | Tags: Fundamentalism, Political rhetoric, Republican Party, Sarah Palin, Tea party
Routinization.
Even by the standards that’ve defined her almost quantum career, Friday was a counterintuitive night for Sarah Palin, but more so for her latest project, the “tea party movement.” To date, we’ve been told that “tea party” groups are grassroots, bipartisan organizations, built out of a common desire to eliminate wasteful spending and put over-hyped politicians in their place. If that’s their message, offering Sarah Palin $100,000 to address guests at a $350-a-head shrimp & steak dinner might send the wrong message.
In fact, choosing Palin as a speaker itself sends the wrong message, and the proof is everywhere. Post-event, the National Tea Party Convention now provides Palin, and Palin alone, with a campaign-style headline bio, one that struggles to provide her with meaningful context (note the lack of any mention of her future with Fox News, and the stilted main-page description of her title: “Governor of Alaska, 2006-2009″).
Similarly, perhaps the group could be forgiven for taking fringe endorsements, and for its more, ah, subversive elements, but the focus on Palin functions to put divisive culture issues front and center (“If there’s hope in Massachusetts, there’s hope anywhere!”), subordinating and ignoring the economic message upon which the movement is allegedly based. If for nothing else, Friday should be remembered as the day the tea party movement’s leaders forfeited their populist bona fides for a listless star, visibly out of depth even in her preparation, and a string of birthers.
There’s a place in this country for a group of honest budget hawks cum libertarians, concerned with personal (not economic) liberty. Last week’s National Tea Party Convention just proves that the “tea party movement” isn’t it. It’s a tale as old as human history: a charismatic movement, built out of true believers (for so they may be), gets co-opted by the mainstream, causing the original idea to fizzle for lack of a guiding force. The media may continue to credit tea party groups as grassroots organizations, but we’ll be dealing with a hollow movement, and should so note.
Filed under: Author - ACG, Politics | Tags: Don't ask don't tell, Equality, Gay rights, War
Res ipsa loquitor:
Filed under: Author - ACG, Politics | Tags: Al-Marri, Boumediene v. Bush, Counterterrorism, Democracy, Guantanamo Bay, Habeas corpus, Justice, Law, Supreme Court, War
A recent letter from Attorney General Ben Holder to Senator McConnell (R-KY) (pdf) confronts, head on, Republican allegations that the civilization system is inappropriate for trying putative terrorists. Holder characterizes the debate as follows:
The decision to charge Mr. Abdulmutallab in federal court, and the methods used to interrogate him, are fully consistent with the long-established and publicly known policies and practices of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the United States Government as a whole, as implemented for many years by Administrations of both parties. Those policies and practices, which were not criticized when employed by previous Administrations, have been and remain extremely effective in protecting national security. They are among the many powerful weapons this country can and should use to win the war against al-Qaeda
And he goes on to argue that current law in fact prohibits military detention of a U.S. citizen captured in the United States.
In Mr. Padilla’s case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the President did not have the authority to detain him under the law of war.
At National Review Online, Shannen Coffin, formerly advocatus diaboli, calls him on it, arguing that the two most important test cases, those of José Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, cut the other way. Specifically, as to Mr. Padilla:
The Second Circuit’s decision was vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that the Second Circuit had no jurisdiction to decide Padilla’s habeas corpus petition, since he was being held outside of that jurisdiction in a brig in South Carolina. [. . . .]
[Later, t]he Fourth Circuit affirmed the power of the President to detain Jose Padilla — a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil — “as a fundamental incident to the conduct of war.”
In a way, they’re both right. But regardless of the site and manner of detention, the law requires that an enemy combatant still have some access to the civilian courts, making Coffin’s ultimate argument a loser. Here’s why.
For civil libertarians, the Second Circuit’s Padilla v. Rumsfeld, 352 F.3d 695 (2d Cir. 2003) is indeed a pretty great case, for its utter rejection of the power of indefinite detention, at least as applied to U.S. citizens. True, the Supreme Court did eventually vacate the Second Circuit’s opinion and remand the matter to the Fourth Circuit, but they did so by disposing of Padilla’s case on the technical ground that he had sued the wrong defendant in the wrong court: he should’ve sued his immediate warden, in South Carolina, not the executive branch. As they have on so many great questions of our day, the Supreme Court punted, expressly declining to approve of or reject the Second Circuit’s reasoning on the detention issue. Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 524 U.S. 426, 430 (2004). Holder is right to find the Second Circuit’s holding persuasive; but Coffin is right to note that it isn’t exactly binding.
Coffin is also right to imply that Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, 534 F.3d 213 (4th Cir. 2008) (see previous coverage) is similarly less than helpful for Holder’s position. But Holder says as much and, more importantly, Al-Marri acknowledges an important nuance that Coffin scrupulously avoids. There, the Fourth Circuit (pdf), taking the executive branch’s allegations against Ali Al-Marri as true, approved of Al-Marri’s continued detention, but held that the executive branch could not continue to detain him without trial indefinitely, and must provide alleged terrorists detained on American soil with some semblance of due process. Coffin fails to raise the question of what happens once the power to detain is upheld, because by avoiding the issue, she hopes to trick the unaware into thinking that it’s an either/or distinction — executive detention & military trial, or civil detention & civil trial. It’s not. Even if we grant Coffin her greatest desire, and remove all suspected terrorists from civilian custody, the logic animating Al-Marri and Boumediene v. Bush will conspire to give detainees their day in court, one way or another. That aspect of the counterterror process is, I assure you, quite out of President Obama’s hands, but Coffin wants to create the illusion that Obama is, in every respect, opting for a less rigorous, more trial-like process, when in fact he’s just abiding by the law.
Further, there’s reason to doubt the more restrictive Al-Marri holding going forwards. There, the evidence against Al-Marri was not before the court. The panel chose to accept the evidence as true, and treat the president’s power to detain in the abstract. Where courts have instead engaged with the facts, and looked at the intelligence the previous administration regarded as determinative of a detainee’s guilt, they’ve been… less than impressed. The NY Times has the brutal, nasty quote from the D.C. Circuit in Parhat v. Gates, 532 F.3d 834 (D.C. Cir. 2008):
Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has “said it thrice” does not make an allegation true. See LEWIS CARROLL, THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) (“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”). In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions. [. . .]
Many of [the government's] assertions are made in identical language, suggesting that later documents may merely be citing earlier ones, and hence that all may ultimately derive from a single source. And as we have also noted, Parhat has made a credible argument that — at least for some of the assertions — the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.
The court here ultimately rejected the argument that Combatant Status Review Tribunals (military tribunals) could protect a defendant’s rights. And they ordered the guy released. Both reflect poorly on the Al-Marri court’s hearty endorsement of CSRTs, and both prove that, if Coffin wins the battle against Holder, she must still lose the war over military trials. If she wants to prove that Holder’s overstating his case, case law is her friend; but if she wants a legal victory, and not a rhetorical one, it’s her greatest enemy.
Filed under: Author - ACG, Politics | Tags: Barack Obama, Democracy, First Amendment, Free speech, Question Time, Republican Party
Or, "He shall, from time to time..."
For the record, I’ve been calling for a “Question Time for the President” in this country since long before it was cool — and so has Senator John McCain (R-AZ). Surprisingly, despite a left eager to showcase our litigator President, and a right somehow convinced that, “one fine morning,” they’ll be able to catch him, the proposal to institute a regular “question time” has drawn some objections, among them a fear that routinizing the process would kill its magic; that it would somehow equate the President with the Queen of England (fallacy somewhere, I fancy); that it would diminish the majesty of our august legislative chambers; and finally, that it would be unconstitutional.
None of these really make much sense. Like, at all. In order, now: concerns about whether a routine question time wouldn’t be “spontaneous” enough goes to its one-time political utility for the winner, which is pointedly not the reason to implement it. Question time isn’t about the “head of state”; it’s about the executive branch meeting the legislative (in the U.K., every minister has “Question Time,” at least every two weeks). The once-august image of our legislative chambers already stands quite tarnished — if it ever looked that great to begin with. And apart from a few specific obligations, the Constitution is quite silent about what the President can do with his time, and when and how he can meet with the legislature. The State of the Union clause is a floor, not a ceiling,
He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient (U.S. Const., Art. II, § 3, cl. 1)
Like Holmes’ dog barking in the night, any statement of the regularity with which this ritual should occur is conspicuous for its absence.
Having met these spurious objections, let’s return to the reasons to institute a form of “question time.” First, it’s easy. The President need only make himself available; legislation would only encumber the ritual, and if the concern is continuity between Presidents, that’s no matter. These things have a way of ingraining themselves into political culture: once started, it won’t readily be stopped without raising a few eyebrows. Second, it is the very definition of transparency. Negotiations between the President and Congress, today, go on behind closed doors. Obama can and should change that in other ways, but exposing at least one aspect of the executive/legislative relationship to the public represents a compelling first step. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it cuts the media out of the debate between President and Congress. Both the internet and cable television have conspired to produce such a multitude of niche programming, that it’s all too easy to insulate oneself from controversy in all matters political. The lack of visible — and watchable — clash between political actors enforces this trend, and a popular political forum focused on each side scoring points off each other, and where spin can be called out as such, would go a long way to solving the problem.
Unfortunately for President Obama, and the country by extension, the President’s triumphant showing at “question time” with congressional Republicans last week does not exhaust the recent similarities between our government’s functioning, and that of a parliamentary democracy. Per James Fallows:
The GOP now maintains party discipline by the equivalent of a parliamentary party’s tools: The GOP can effectively deny a candidate the party label (by running a more conservative GOP candidate against him or her), and the GOP can also provide the needed funds to the candidate of the party’s choice. And every GOP member of Congress knows it.
The result is, necessarily, an utter lack of bipartisanship, because Republicans have more to lose by defecting than they do by cooperating. In a true parliamentary system, that’s no matter. The minority is unnecessary to the work of governing: because the majority party selects the prime minister, the PM’s agenda is a fortiori assured passage at the outset, and on a rolling basis due to the ever-present threat of pulling an MP from the party slate.
Of course, President Obama lacks these tools. Because we are not a parliamentary democracy, he has no legislative mandate, even if he retains a popular mandate, and he cannot otherwise enforce discipline. When this happens in a parliamentary system, the government is said to have “fallen,” and new coalitions are made, or new elections called. Even these answers are foreclosed: GOP victories in 2010 will deepen, not ease gridlock. It’s a nightmare scenario, but unfortunately also the logical conclusion of Fallows’ tragically apt metaphor.
The only way out is to alter the underlying assumptions. On that note, we may be the victims of our own success. The appearance of a sixty-vote “supermajority” convinced the public that, as in a parliamentary democracy, the majority could be credited with, or blamed for, all government action, this despite the fact that the supermajority was always illusory. Before we campaign against the Republicans, we must accordingly campaign against the notion that the Republicans are, like a parliamentary minority, unnecessary to the work of governing. Obama’s State of the Union was a step in the right direction (“The responsibility to govern is now yours as well”). So is Harry Reid’s newfound willingness to challenge Republican “holds” on important positions for what they are — naked attempts to mortgage long-term security for short-term political gain. A concerted effort to remove from our party the veneer of Total Victory that we never actually had will, by returning responsibility to their ranks, bring Republicans back to the table. For the next month at least, every setback is therefore an opportunity. God willing, as Republican incentives to filibuster dissipate, so will their newfound fondness for the device.
Filed under: Author - ACG, Politics | Tags: Conservapedia, Creationism, Fundamentalism, Political rhetoric
Last Friday, Obama mocked congressional Republicans for characterizing his “pretty centrist” healthcare plan as some kind of “Bolshevik plot,” explaining that such scorched-earth argumentation leaves Republicans with little to no room to maneuver, and in fact demonstrates the party’s bad faith. Watch:
Clever, hard-hitting, and long overdue. But from the minute Obama said the word “Bolshevik,” this reaction from far-right outlets was unavoidable:
Conservapedia has never been one for metaphor or literary devices. A respect for context, and a willingness to look for meaning beyond the literal, is too much to ask from young-earth creationists.
