I'll leave it up to you to judge the sincerity and intentions of Obama regarding yesterday's little show:
Charles Krauthammer: On yesterday’s health-care summit:
After seven and a half hours, the president reveals the purpose [of the meeting] practically in the last minute, in which he said: We're going to give it a month or so. We're going to see if we can agree.
Obviously they are not going to agree. Obviously this was all about giving the appearance of reaching out for other ideas. And it was all about setting the premise for a pivot to reconciliation, i.e., meaning the Democrats are going to try to ram it through on a procedural trick in the Senate and try to cobble the votes required in the House.
Now, I think the Democrats actually helped themselves in the process. They did have a seven and a half hour show in which it appeared as if they were genuinely open. I think it was quite cynical, but I think it allowed at least them to argue to independents, who want to see a kind of an ecumenical effort, [that]: We tried. We went the last mile. And we failed. So in order to get health-care reform, we had to go by this partisan procedure.
However, on the other hand, the Republicans really helped themselves. The argument [was that they are] the party of no, they have no ideas, they are against anything, they're nihilists.
In fact, they spent seven hours, I think, presenting a very strong case. They're knowledgeable. They have ideas. They are interested in reform. But they have differences.
Lamar Alexander was dazzling. Paul Ryan was rapier sharp in rebutting all of the smoke and mirrors that the Democrats had presented.
I think it's going to help the Republicans in November on their image. But in the short run, it's going to help the Democrats in trying to ram the thing through.
On reconciliation:
It's a trick because Senator Byrd, who invented it ... said it was never intended for anything like this. It is a trick in the sense that it was ... designed as a way to harmonize budgets and ... raise taxes and cut spending. It was never designed as a way to execute a reform for a sixth of the economy.
Someone else:
The Democrats came to the summit armed with constituent stories illustrating the single point on which there is no disagreement: something needs to be done about health care in America. President Obama respectfully listened to these stories without comment.
Eric Cantor came to the meeting armed with a copy of the bill that represents the central purpose of this gathering. And the president gratuitously mocked the presence of the bill as an irrelevant political prop.
This told me everything I needed to know about the summit.
Dems: 'We are NOT Doing a Scaled Back Bill' [Daniel Foster]
If it is all-or-nothing for the Democrats on the health-care bill, at this point I'd wager — at even money — on "nothing."
They need 217 votes, a majority of the 432 members currently in Congress. They don’t have them right now.
If the House doesn’t have the votes, senior White House officials say they would like Congress to pursue a more modest health care reform bill.
But there seems little desire for that among House Democrats, who would like to focus on jobs.
“We are NOT doing scaled back bill,” a senior House leadership source emails ABC News.
Full story here. Tapper also notes that Rep. Marion "The Difference Is Me" Berry (D., Ark.) has not decided how he is going to vote this time around.
UPDATE: Sen. Ben Nelson (D., Neb.) says (for whatever it is worth) that he doesn't know if Democrats have the votes to do a comprehensive bill:
"We may be forced to doing healthcare — to use my analogy — by making a pie a piece at a time, which is typically not the preferred way to handle legislation," the senator added. "But this is so big, and has so many moving parts and has so many supporters and detractors, that maybe that's the only thing you can do. Grab a piece of it here, grab a piece of it there and try to put together as much of it as you can."
Friday, February 26, 2010
Charlie Rangel's Ethics (or lack thereof) -- What's Wrong with gaming the system ?
Gov. David Patterson is mauled by his own party b/c he is weak and unelectable (and has some ethical issues).
But Powerful Charlie Rangel, embroiled in multiple and significant corrupt activities, can't be touched.
Why is this man not gone ?
Pelosi Defends Rangel; Other Dems, Not So Much [Daniel Foster]
The day after a House ethics panel admonished Rep. Charlie Rangel (D., N.Y.) for improperly accepting gifts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the senior Democrat from calls that he be stripped of his gavel as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
Pelosi said Rangel "did not violate the rules of the House," and that the ethics committee "did not take action against him" yet, ABC News's Rick Klein reports. The ethics panel said it was uncertain whether Rangel himself knew the trips were improper, but found that members of Rangel's staff did know, and that Rangel had a responsibility to find out.
Pelosi side-stepped questions about Rangel's future in the party leadership.
"We'll just see what happens next," she told reporters, adding that she wants to read the ethics committee's full report, and await its conclusions on other targets of its investigation, such as Rangel's taxes and financial disclosures, and his apparent use of House resources to raise money for a non-profit institution in his name.
"There's more to Mr. Rangel's situation and we look forward to hearing from Mr. Rangel on that," she said.
But some other Democrats are not waiting to call on Rangel to step down as Ways and Means chair.
Today, Reps. Paul Hodes (D., N.H.), Gene Taylor (D., Miss.) and Bobby Bright (D., Ala.) all called on Rangel to quit the powerful committee. In a statement, Hodes said:
"I honor and respect Charlie Rangel’s lifetime of service as a soldier serving our country in Korea and as a public servant. But Washington must be held to the highest ethical standards. Regrettably, with the finding of ethics violations, Charlie Rangel should step down from his leadership position.”
Taylor said that Rangel "should step down, or at least step aside until all this is resolved," and Bright said that "my opinion is that he should step down."
UPDATE: Rangel told reporters he will not step down as Ways and Means chairman, and said that the ethics report "exonerates" him from wrongdoing.
But Powerful Charlie Rangel, embroiled in multiple and significant corrupt activities, can't be touched.
Why is this man not gone ?
Pelosi Defends Rangel; Other Dems, Not So Much [Daniel Foster]
The day after a House ethics panel admonished Rep. Charlie Rangel (D., N.Y.) for improperly accepting gifts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the senior Democrat from calls that he be stripped of his gavel as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
Pelosi said Rangel "did not violate the rules of the House," and that the ethics committee "did not take action against him" yet, ABC News's Rick Klein reports. The ethics panel said it was uncertain whether Rangel himself knew the trips were improper, but found that members of Rangel's staff did know, and that Rangel had a responsibility to find out.
Pelosi side-stepped questions about Rangel's future in the party leadership.
"We'll just see what happens next," she told reporters, adding that she wants to read the ethics committee's full report, and await its conclusions on other targets of its investigation, such as Rangel's taxes and financial disclosures, and his apparent use of House resources to raise money for a non-profit institution in his name.
"There's more to Mr. Rangel's situation and we look forward to hearing from Mr. Rangel on that," she said.
But some other Democrats are not waiting to call on Rangel to step down as Ways and Means chair.
Today, Reps. Paul Hodes (D., N.H.), Gene Taylor (D., Miss.) and Bobby Bright (D., Ala.) all called on Rangel to quit the powerful committee. In a statement, Hodes said:
"I honor and respect Charlie Rangel’s lifetime of service as a soldier serving our country in Korea and as a public servant. But Washington must be held to the highest ethical standards. Regrettably, with the finding of ethics violations, Charlie Rangel should step down from his leadership position.”
Taylor said that Rangel "should step down, or at least step aside until all this is resolved," and Bright said that "my opinion is that he should step down."
UPDATE: Rangel told reporters he will not step down as Ways and Means chairman, and said that the ethics report "exonerates" him from wrongdoing.
The Dumbest Thing I Read Today -- Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
Mass Murder Civilians and Get Gold-Plated Due Process [Andy McCarthy]
That's the upshot of an absurd op-ed in the Washington Post today from former Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.
He writes:
The attorney general should reject the suggestion that Mohammed be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else. His crimes were civil, not military. Mohammed owed no allegiance to any flag, nor did he wear the uniform of any country. He answered to no code of military honor or of the law of war. His targets and victims were innocent civilians who had never sought to harm him. His weapons were four stolen commercial civilian aircraft. He was not captured on a battlefield; he was hunted down like any common felon, hiding in disguise among civilians in a city far removed from military activity.
So, according to the judge, if you kill more people than the Japanese killed at Pearl Harbor, and you do it by flouting the laws of war — i.e., you don't identify yourself as a warrior, you don't carry your weapons openly, you target civilians and civilian infrastructure for mass-destruction attacks, and you further endanger civilians by hiding among them, making retaliation and capture difficult — we should reward you with all the majesty of the Bill of Rights and all the privileges of the citizens you have massacred. Very sensible.
The imperative of international humanitarian law is to incent people to follow the laws of war and shield civilians from attack. Judge Jackson — speaking like a man who spent his the last quarter-century not having to face voters — would instead encourage attacks on civilians (no doubt, unwittingly).
His rationale has already been rejected by Congress and even the Obama administration. Jackson suggests that KSM should not be treated to military procedures (like a commission trial) because he did not conduct himself like an honorable soldier and was captured far from a conventional battlefield. But Congress overwhelmingly authorized a military response to al-Qaeda after 9/11 knowing this was how bin Laden's network operates. Then lawmakers provided for trials by military commission for enemy combatants. The Obama administration, moreover, has referred the attackers of the U.S.S. Cole for a military commission trial (even though the Cole bombing happened before military commissions were authorized, and even though there was a pending civilian indictment against the Cole bombers). The fact that terrorists pretend to be civilians is a reason for denying them due-process protections, not, as Jackson would have it, a point in their favor.
Jackson goes on to say that the judges and juries in the District of Columbia are first rate. So are the judges, juries and prosecutors in New York. That has never been the issue. The issue is recognizing that we are at war, regarding the enemy as a wartime enemy, and discouraging attacks on civilians by withholding from those who engage in them the rights of the American citizens they kill. Judge Jackson doesn't get that. He is a prime exemplar of why — as Justice Robert Jackson explained — counterterrorism policy should be made by the political branches who answer to the people whose lives are at stake, not by federal judges who don't.
That's the upshot of an absurd op-ed in the Washington Post today from former Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.
He writes:
The attorney general should reject the suggestion that Mohammed be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else. His crimes were civil, not military. Mohammed owed no allegiance to any flag, nor did he wear the uniform of any country. He answered to no code of military honor or of the law of war. His targets and victims were innocent civilians who had never sought to harm him. His weapons were four stolen commercial civilian aircraft. He was not captured on a battlefield; he was hunted down like any common felon, hiding in disguise among civilians in a city far removed from military activity.
So, according to the judge, if you kill more people than the Japanese killed at Pearl Harbor, and you do it by flouting the laws of war — i.e., you don't identify yourself as a warrior, you don't carry your weapons openly, you target civilians and civilian infrastructure for mass-destruction attacks, and you further endanger civilians by hiding among them, making retaliation and capture difficult — we should reward you with all the majesty of the Bill of Rights and all the privileges of the citizens you have massacred. Very sensible.
The imperative of international humanitarian law is to incent people to follow the laws of war and shield civilians from attack. Judge Jackson — speaking like a man who spent his the last quarter-century not having to face voters — would instead encourage attacks on civilians (no doubt, unwittingly).
His rationale has already been rejected by Congress and even the Obama administration. Jackson suggests that KSM should not be treated to military procedures (like a commission trial) because he did not conduct himself like an honorable soldier and was captured far from a conventional battlefield. But Congress overwhelmingly authorized a military response to al-Qaeda after 9/11 knowing this was how bin Laden's network operates. Then lawmakers provided for trials by military commission for enemy combatants. The Obama administration, moreover, has referred the attackers of the U.S.S. Cole for a military commission trial (even though the Cole bombing happened before military commissions were authorized, and even though there was a pending civilian indictment against the Cole bombers). The fact that terrorists pretend to be civilians is a reason for denying them due-process protections, not, as Jackson would have it, a point in their favor.
Jackson goes on to say that the judges and juries in the District of Columbia are first rate. So are the judges, juries and prosecutors in New York. That has never been the issue. The issue is recognizing that we are at war, regarding the enemy as a wartime enemy, and discouraging attacks on civilians by withholding from those who engage in them the rights of the American citizens they kill. Judge Jackson doesn't get that. He is a prime exemplar of why — as Justice Robert Jackson explained — counterterrorism policy should be made by the political branches who answer to the people whose lives are at stake, not by federal judges who don't.
Barrack the Charmer
He bugs me, too.
A Hidden Cost of the Health-Care Summit [Jonah Goldberg]
It seems that I wasn't alone in finding Obama increasingly un-charming as the event unfolded yesterday. Even Dana Milbank notes that Obama ultimately came across as a bit of a condescending, well, jerk. Here's Michael Gerson: "President Obama, as usual, was fluent, professorial and occasionally prickly. Some are impressed by the president’s informed, academic manner. Others (myself included) find an annoying condescension in Obama’s never-ending seminar."
Obama's habit of deciding what is a serious point and what are mere "talking points," started out seeming like an attempt at fairness but ultimately revealed itself to be one of the more grating aspects of his personality and his philosophy (It's worth noting that many points become talking points because they are such good points!). After awhile, it seemed Obama deemed many talking points to be illegitimate simply because they were inconvenient to his argument.
This is not news to certain people who have greater immunity to his charms. Obama has a very thin skin when it comes to disagreement. He has a Fox News obsession. At campaign-style events, Obama has insisted that he doesn't want to "hear any talk" from the people who "created this mess" or some such. Remember his call for a "new declaration of independence not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry." Translation: Ideological objections to what I want to do are akin to bigotry and stupidity.
I think one of the great explanations for the mess the Obama administration is in — the whole cowbell dynamic — is that he, his advisers, and many of his fans in the press cannot fully grasp or appreciate the fact that he is not as charming to everyone else as he is to them (or himself). Hence, they think that the more he talks, the more persuasive he will be. Every president faces a similar problem which is why, until Obama, every White House tried to economize the deployment of the president's political capital. The Obama White House strategy is almost the rhetorical version of its Keynesianism, the more you spend, the bigger the payoff.
The hidden cost of this strategy is that the more he talks the more pronounced or noticeable this tendency becomes for the average American. Eventually, it could come to define him.
Presidents — all presidents — get caricatured eventually because certain traits become more identifiable over time. That's one reason why parodies of presidents on Saturday Night Live get more convincing and funnier at the end of their terms — everyone can recognize the traits and habits by then. The more instances where Obama grabs all of the attention while acting like an arrogant college professor — particularly as memories of Bush fade — the more opportunities the White House creates where people can say, "Hey, I finally figured out what bugs me about this guy." Not long after that, it becomes a journalistic convention, a staple of late-night jokes and basis of SNL parodies.
A Hidden Cost of the Health-Care Summit [Jonah Goldberg]
It seems that I wasn't alone in finding Obama increasingly un-charming as the event unfolded yesterday. Even Dana Milbank notes that Obama ultimately came across as a bit of a condescending, well, jerk. Here's Michael Gerson: "President Obama, as usual, was fluent, professorial and occasionally prickly. Some are impressed by the president’s informed, academic manner. Others (myself included) find an annoying condescension in Obama’s never-ending seminar."
Obama's habit of deciding what is a serious point and what are mere "talking points," started out seeming like an attempt at fairness but ultimately revealed itself to be one of the more grating aspects of his personality and his philosophy (It's worth noting that many points become talking points because they are such good points!). After awhile, it seemed Obama deemed many talking points to be illegitimate simply because they were inconvenient to his argument.
This is not news to certain people who have greater immunity to his charms. Obama has a very thin skin when it comes to disagreement. He has a Fox News obsession. At campaign-style events, Obama has insisted that he doesn't want to "hear any talk" from the people who "created this mess" or some such. Remember his call for a "new declaration of independence not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry." Translation: Ideological objections to what I want to do are akin to bigotry and stupidity.
I think one of the great explanations for the mess the Obama administration is in — the whole cowbell dynamic — is that he, his advisers, and many of his fans in the press cannot fully grasp or appreciate the fact that he is not as charming to everyone else as he is to them (or himself). Hence, they think that the more he talks, the more persuasive he will be. Every president faces a similar problem which is why, until Obama, every White House tried to economize the deployment of the president's political capital. The Obama White House strategy is almost the rhetorical version of its Keynesianism, the more you spend, the bigger the payoff.
The hidden cost of this strategy is that the more he talks the more pronounced or noticeable this tendency becomes for the average American. Eventually, it could come to define him.
Presidents — all presidents — get caricatured eventually because certain traits become more identifiable over time. That's one reason why parodies of presidents on Saturday Night Live get more convincing and funnier at the end of their terms — everyone can recognize the traits and habits by then. The more instances where Obama grabs all of the attention while acting like an arrogant college professor — particularly as memories of Bush fade — the more opportunities the White House creates where people can say, "Hey, I finally figured out what bugs me about this guy." Not long after that, it becomes a journalistic convention, a staple of late-night jokes and basis of SNL parodies.
Patriot Act Reauthorized - shhhhhhh
Mr. National Security, Andrew McCarthy is on the case & has the details:
Shhhhh, Don't Tell Anyone — The Patriot Act Was Reauthorized [Andy McCarthy]
After a lot of huffing and puffing, about the need to add more civil-liberties protections to a law already teeming with them, the Democrat-controlled Senate quietly voted to extend the three Patriot Act provisions that would have expired without reauthorization. Although beating back Patriot and its sensible national-security provisions has been a rallying cry for the Left, Senate Democrats agreed to a clean reauthorization on a voice-vote.
The New York Times managed just a paragraph, culled from the AP wire, to report the extension. Why so quiet? There are a couple of reasons, I suspect, and Michelle Malkin — ever on the case — gives us both of them.
First, as Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.) points out, the Patriot Act surveillance measures were critical to the FBI's ability to break the case against Najibullah Zazi, who wanted to mark the eighth anniversary of 9/11 by bombing New York City. As I noted in a column earlier this week, the Obama administration is dubiously using the Zazi case as a testament to the effectiveness of the civilian justice system in countering "violent extremism" (wouldn't want to use the I-word or the T-word). So it's bad timing to be dumping on Patriot.
Second, Michelle adds, is the leadership of the anti-Patriot movement: CAIR. Who wouldn't want to be associated on a terrori "violent extremism "issue with a Muslim Brotherhood front, created for the purpose of promoting Hamas under the camouflage of "civil rights," that was recently alleged and shown to be a co-conspirator in a Hamas-financing case? Laughably, CAIR alleges that the Patriot Act is "undermining the integration" of the Muslim community in the U.S. The last thing CAIR is interested in is integrating the Muslim community. To the contrary, CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood groups pursue a strategy of voluntary apartheid, the goal of which is to set up Islamic enclaves living under sharia law — the very strategy that is now dis-integrating Europe.
In any event, kudos go not just to Pete King but to others, including Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), who worked diligently to get Patriot re-authorized.
Senator Sessions put out this statement last night:
The PATRIOT Act is a bipartisan bill that has helped save countless lives by equipping our national security community with the tools it needs to keep America safe. Recent terror attacks, such as those at Ft. Hood and on Christmas Day, demonstrate just how severe of a threat we are facing. There is simply no reason to weaken the PATRIOT Act—and every reason not to. This extension keeps PATRIOT’s security measures in place and demonstrates that there is a growing recognition that these crucial provisions must be preserved. We are now one step closer to what is needed: a full, long-term reauthorization.
Senator Sessions, it should be noted, tried along with Sens. Kit Bond (R., Mo.) and Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) to get Patriot reauthorized for four years. In the event, it was only reauthorized for one. Obviously, Democrats decided the timing was bad now, but they'll be back yet again next year to try to gut the contested provisions.
That goes to show just how lunatic they are on security issues. To sensible people, there is absolutely nothing objectionable about the three Patriot powers in question. One is roving wiretaps, which criminal investigators have been using for years so that they don't need to get a new court order every time a suspect changes phones. Another is the business-records provision — the Left sometimes calls it the "library records" provision even though library records are not mentioned in it — which simply allows national-security agents to collect information on terrorist suspects almost (but not quite) as easily as criminal investigators can. And finally, there is the "lone wolf" law (not part of the original Patriot Act but now tied to it), which allows agents to go after someone as to whom the evidence that he is a terrorist is strong but the evidence that he is tied to a known terrorist organization is weak.
You may ask: Why should there be any time limits on the operation of these laws? Wouldn't we always want our agents to be able to do these things — a year from now, four years from now, or a hundred years from now? Good questions.
Shhhhh, Don't Tell Anyone — The Patriot Act Was Reauthorized [Andy McCarthy]
After a lot of huffing and puffing, about the need to add more civil-liberties protections to a law already teeming with them, the Democrat-controlled Senate quietly voted to extend the three Patriot Act provisions that would have expired without reauthorization. Although beating back Patriot and its sensible national-security provisions has been a rallying cry for the Left, Senate Democrats agreed to a clean reauthorization on a voice-vote.
The New York Times managed just a paragraph, culled from the AP wire, to report the extension. Why so quiet? There are a couple of reasons, I suspect, and Michelle Malkin — ever on the case — gives us both of them.
First, as Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.) points out, the Patriot Act surveillance measures were critical to the FBI's ability to break the case against Najibullah Zazi, who wanted to mark the eighth anniversary of 9/11 by bombing New York City. As I noted in a column earlier this week, the Obama administration is dubiously using the Zazi case as a testament to the effectiveness of the civilian justice system in countering "violent extremism" (wouldn't want to use the I-word or the T-word). So it's bad timing to be dumping on Patriot.
Second, Michelle adds, is the leadership of the anti-Patriot movement: CAIR. Who wouldn't want to be associated on a terrori "violent extremism "issue with a Muslim Brotherhood front, created for the purpose of promoting Hamas under the camouflage of "civil rights," that was recently alleged and shown to be a co-conspirator in a Hamas-financing case? Laughably, CAIR alleges that the Patriot Act is "undermining the integration" of the Muslim community in the U.S. The last thing CAIR is interested in is integrating the Muslim community. To the contrary, CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood groups pursue a strategy of voluntary apartheid, the goal of which is to set up Islamic enclaves living under sharia law — the very strategy that is now dis-integrating Europe.
In any event, kudos go not just to Pete King but to others, including Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), who worked diligently to get Patriot re-authorized.
Senator Sessions put out this statement last night:
The PATRIOT Act is a bipartisan bill that has helped save countless lives by equipping our national security community with the tools it needs to keep America safe. Recent terror attacks, such as those at Ft. Hood and on Christmas Day, demonstrate just how severe of a threat we are facing. There is simply no reason to weaken the PATRIOT Act—and every reason not to. This extension keeps PATRIOT’s security measures in place and demonstrates that there is a growing recognition that these crucial provisions must be preserved. We are now one step closer to what is needed: a full, long-term reauthorization.
Senator Sessions, it should be noted, tried along with Sens. Kit Bond (R., Mo.) and Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) to get Patriot reauthorized for four years. In the event, it was only reauthorized for one. Obviously, Democrats decided the timing was bad now, but they'll be back yet again next year to try to gut the contested provisions.
That goes to show just how lunatic they are on security issues. To sensible people, there is absolutely nothing objectionable about the three Patriot powers in question. One is roving wiretaps, which criminal investigators have been using for years so that they don't need to get a new court order every time a suspect changes phones. Another is the business-records provision — the Left sometimes calls it the "library records" provision even though library records are not mentioned in it — which simply allows national-security agents to collect information on terrorist suspects almost (but not quite) as easily as criminal investigators can. And finally, there is the "lone wolf" law (not part of the original Patriot Act but now tied to it), which allows agents to go after someone as to whom the evidence that he is a terrorist is strong but the evidence that he is tied to a known terrorist organization is weak.
You may ask: Why should there be any time limits on the operation of these laws? Wouldn't we always want our agents to be able to do these things — a year from now, four years from now, or a hundred years from now? Good questions.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
ObamaCare Kabuki Theater -- Well, What Happened ?
First of all, is this Bi-Partisan Debate: ?
President Obama spoke for 119 minutes, other Democrats for 114 minutes, and Congressional Republicans for 110 minutes. That's 233 minutes for Democrats, 110 minutes for Republicans.
I confess only to listening to O's and Lamar Alexander's opening statements in the background. The rest of this snoozefest, I leave to other pundits to decipher.
Here are a few reactions:
The consensus seems to be that the Democrats did not come off well, the Republican's did, and Obama was diminished by the whole silly thing.
The Democrats’ Mistake [Jay Nordlinger]
Let me try something out on you: This health-care summit was a bad idea for the Democrats for this reason: They have long benefited from a perception — a perception greatly abetted by the media: The Republicans don’t care about health care, they don’t know about health care, they are the Party of No. All the ideas and caring are on the Democratic side.It is not so, and it has never been so. And now everybody knows it.
The Summit So Far [Yuval Levin]
Things could surely change this afternoon, but so far it is hard to see how the Democrats are doing themselves anything but harm with the health-care summit.
Beyond particular observations about individual exchanges or moments I would say the morning’s session suggests three broad points. First, the Democrats appear to have no particular purpose in mind for this event. They’re not driving anywhere, or making a clear individual case, while Republicans clearly want to get across the point that we should scrap the current bills and start over in pursuit of a few incremental steps. The Democrats may have thought that simply putting the spotlight on Republicans when the subject is health care would make the GOP look bad. But Republicans so far seem prepared enough and focused enough to avoid that, and to make the Democrats look rather aimless by comparison.
Second, the Democrats are going to great lengths to argue that their bill incorporates some Republican ideas—by which they mean that it includes insurance exchanges and the like—suggesting that this means they are moving in the direction of Republicans and toward some middle ground. They fail to see (or to acknowledge) that while some similar mechanisms may be proposed by wonks on both sides, Republicans and Democrats in fact want to move in nearly opposite directions from our current health-care arrangements: Republicans toward a genuine individual market and Democrats toward a greater socialization of costs. That makes a great deal of what Obama and the Democrats said this morning basically meaningless. (This is a point I tried to argue more fully in this space a while back.)
Third, an important part of the Democrats’ problem is that Obama himself is their only star, and this format is not working for him. He certainly seems engaged and well informed (even given a few misstatements of fact, at least one of which John Kyl made very clear.) But he doesn’t seem like the President of the United States—more like a slightly cranky committee chairman or a patronizing professor who thinks that saying something is “a legitimate argument” is a way to avoid having an argument. He is diminished by the circumstances, he’s cranky and prickly when challenged, and he’s got no one to help him. The other Democrats around the table have been worse than unimpressive. The Republicans seem genuinely well-prepared, seem to have thought through the question of who should speak about what rather carefully, and several of them have done quite a good job making their case against the Democrats’ approach. If we were to judge by debating points, Republicans certainly won the morning handily.
It’s easy to dismiss all this by saying no one is watching anyway, but that’s not quite true. The purpose of this spectacle is not so much to move the public as to move Democratic members of Congress—to create some momentum that might last long enough to help wavering Democrats cast a very painful vote. That audience very likely is watching, and they are seeing their leadership fail to make a straightforward case for the Democratic approach to health care, or to respond to the most basic Republican objections about high costs, excessive spending, overregulation, and the effect of this plan on American families. They are managing to lose an argument about health care to Republican members of Congress—no mean feat.
Other Reactions:
Observer #1:
I cannot get over the President of the United States being a time keeper and moderator of this. These tasks seem to be beneath the office. AND he does not even appear to be able to keep control — they're already way over time, which seems to be his biggest concern. It's hard to believe he has done this to himself. In my mind, this has been a disaster for him. He continues to look professorly and cool and Rs look passionate and knowledgeable. To say nothing of the substance of the arguments . . .
Observer #2
watched portions of the summit, and a few things struck me:
- Paul Ryan was the star of the show, hands down.
- Obama still does not handle being questioned or refuted well. At all.
- It was more than a bit tiresome to hear people, mostly Democrats, keep wheeling out sob stories to try to make their point. That assumes a dishonest position - that the Republicans are advocating doing nothing, something they repeatedly refuted.
- It was also tiresome that every Republican felt the need to thank the President for inviting them. They should have just done it once.
- It was dismaying to see so many Republicans back off when Obama challenged them. For example, when the point was made that high-risk policies actually lead to more responsible use of health care, Obama first tossed out a strawman about moving Congress over to high-risk policies, then when it was firmly hit back to him, he tried to make the argument about how much money the Congressmen make. Yet the person doing the rebuttal (whose name I did not note) did not point out that Obama had framed the question, so the issue of Congressional pay was irrelevant. Nor did he hammer home his point about lower-income federal employees. It left Obama looking stronger even though he made no actual point on the issue.
- Why could nobody make the point about the CBO not being a "take it or leave it" authority? They rate bills based on the information given. Obviously, then, if the information given is bad, the rating is bad. This seemed an easy point to make, and only Ryan touched on it.
At the end of the day, what bugs me about this meeting is that it really won't change anyone's mind. The people who blindly worship Obama will come away saying that he 'held his own', even though he never discussed specifics and resorted to anecdotes and proven falsehoods many times, and - most damningly - never proved how his approach would fix anything. Those who have doubts about his approach were probably screaming at their TVs, as I was, as easy points were missed and opportunities lost.
Observer #3
Someone elsewhere said, and I agree, wouldn't it have been so much better for President Obama to have done this a year ago — and then several more times. Whether they were speaking to or past each other — and in truth there was some of both—every American could see it, and all sides, and attitudes. As is, about a year ago there was some 70+% for comprehensive health care reform. Now that number has flipped. Not very good politics from the White House—in fact that's nearly the definition of really bad politics.Best performance: Hard to say, truly I thought it odd how much conversation the President cut off. Wouldn't it have been so much better to see him really go back-and-forth with Paul Ryan and John Barrasso rather than allowing them to make a point, answer it, and then move on. We all could see the GOP members, whoever they were, when the President answered, had something to say in return. Heck, if he didn't think he had an answer, the President could have asked for another to engage in dialogue on any of the member's points. But for bringing his A game and then some, yes, Paul Ryan.
President Obama spoke for 119 minutes, other Democrats for 114 minutes, and Congressional Republicans for 110 minutes. That's 233 minutes for Democrats, 110 minutes for Republicans.
I confess only to listening to O's and Lamar Alexander's opening statements in the background. The rest of this snoozefest, I leave to other pundits to decipher.
Here are a few reactions:
The consensus seems to be that the Democrats did not come off well, the Republican's did, and Obama was diminished by the whole silly thing.
The Democrats’ Mistake [Jay Nordlinger]
Let me try something out on you: This health-care summit was a bad idea for the Democrats for this reason: They have long benefited from a perception — a perception greatly abetted by the media: The Republicans don’t care about health care, they don’t know about health care, they are the Party of No. All the ideas and caring are on the Democratic side.It is not so, and it has never been so. And now everybody knows it.
The Summit So Far [Yuval Levin]
Things could surely change this afternoon, but so far it is hard to see how the Democrats are doing themselves anything but harm with the health-care summit.
Beyond particular observations about individual exchanges or moments I would say the morning’s session suggests three broad points. First, the Democrats appear to have no particular purpose in mind for this event. They’re not driving anywhere, or making a clear individual case, while Republicans clearly want to get across the point that we should scrap the current bills and start over in pursuit of a few incremental steps. The Democrats may have thought that simply putting the spotlight on Republicans when the subject is health care would make the GOP look bad. But Republicans so far seem prepared enough and focused enough to avoid that, and to make the Democrats look rather aimless by comparison.
Second, the Democrats are going to great lengths to argue that their bill incorporates some Republican ideas—by which they mean that it includes insurance exchanges and the like—suggesting that this means they are moving in the direction of Republicans and toward some middle ground. They fail to see (or to acknowledge) that while some similar mechanisms may be proposed by wonks on both sides, Republicans and Democrats in fact want to move in nearly opposite directions from our current health-care arrangements: Republicans toward a genuine individual market and Democrats toward a greater socialization of costs. That makes a great deal of what Obama and the Democrats said this morning basically meaningless. (This is a point I tried to argue more fully in this space a while back.)
Third, an important part of the Democrats’ problem is that Obama himself is their only star, and this format is not working for him. He certainly seems engaged and well informed (even given a few misstatements of fact, at least one of which John Kyl made very clear.) But he doesn’t seem like the President of the United States—more like a slightly cranky committee chairman or a patronizing professor who thinks that saying something is “a legitimate argument” is a way to avoid having an argument. He is diminished by the circumstances, he’s cranky and prickly when challenged, and he’s got no one to help him. The other Democrats around the table have been worse than unimpressive. The Republicans seem genuinely well-prepared, seem to have thought through the question of who should speak about what rather carefully, and several of them have done quite a good job making their case against the Democrats’ approach. If we were to judge by debating points, Republicans certainly won the morning handily.
It’s easy to dismiss all this by saying no one is watching anyway, but that’s not quite true. The purpose of this spectacle is not so much to move the public as to move Democratic members of Congress—to create some momentum that might last long enough to help wavering Democrats cast a very painful vote. That audience very likely is watching, and they are seeing their leadership fail to make a straightforward case for the Democratic approach to health care, or to respond to the most basic Republican objections about high costs, excessive spending, overregulation, and the effect of this plan on American families. They are managing to lose an argument about health care to Republican members of Congress—no mean feat.
Other Reactions:
Observer #1:
I cannot get over the President of the United States being a time keeper and moderator of this. These tasks seem to be beneath the office. AND he does not even appear to be able to keep control — they're already way over time, which seems to be his biggest concern. It's hard to believe he has done this to himself. In my mind, this has been a disaster for him. He continues to look professorly and cool and Rs look passionate and knowledgeable. To say nothing of the substance of the arguments . . .
Observer #2
watched portions of the summit, and a few things struck me:
- Paul Ryan was the star of the show, hands down.
- Obama still does not handle being questioned or refuted well. At all.
- It was more than a bit tiresome to hear people, mostly Democrats, keep wheeling out sob stories to try to make their point. That assumes a dishonest position - that the Republicans are advocating doing nothing, something they repeatedly refuted.
- It was also tiresome that every Republican felt the need to thank the President for inviting them. They should have just done it once.
- It was dismaying to see so many Republicans back off when Obama challenged them. For example, when the point was made that high-risk policies actually lead to more responsible use of health care, Obama first tossed out a strawman about moving Congress over to high-risk policies, then when it was firmly hit back to him, he tried to make the argument about how much money the Congressmen make. Yet the person doing the rebuttal (whose name I did not note) did not point out that Obama had framed the question, so the issue of Congressional pay was irrelevant. Nor did he hammer home his point about lower-income federal employees. It left Obama looking stronger even though he made no actual point on the issue.
- Why could nobody make the point about the CBO not being a "take it or leave it" authority? They rate bills based on the information given. Obviously, then, if the information given is bad, the rating is bad. This seemed an easy point to make, and only Ryan touched on it.
At the end of the day, what bugs me about this meeting is that it really won't change anyone's mind. The people who blindly worship Obama will come away saying that he 'held his own', even though he never discussed specifics and resorted to anecdotes and proven falsehoods many times, and - most damningly - never proved how his approach would fix anything. Those who have doubts about his approach were probably screaming at their TVs, as I was, as easy points were missed and opportunities lost.
Observer #3
Someone elsewhere said, and I agree, wouldn't it have been so much better for President Obama to have done this a year ago — and then several more times. Whether they were speaking to or past each other — and in truth there was some of both—every American could see it, and all sides, and attitudes. As is, about a year ago there was some 70+% for comprehensive health care reform. Now that number has flipped. Not very good politics from the White House—in fact that's nearly the definition of really bad politics.Best performance: Hard to say, truly I thought it odd how much conversation the President cut off. Wouldn't it have been so much better to see him really go back-and-forth with Paul Ryan and John Barrasso rather than allowing them to make a point, answer it, and then move on. We all could see the GOP members, whoever they were, when the President answered, had something to say in return. Heck, if he didn't think he had an answer, the President could have asked for another to engage in dialogue on any of the member's points. But for bringing his A game and then some, yes, Paul Ryan.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Holder & DOJ Terrorist Advocates
Too many "lawyers" in the Dept. of Justice have been involved in representing or advocating for Guantanamo detainees. Atty General Eric Holder (and obviously, Obama) are trying to hide this from the American People.
Sen. Grassley is on the case:
What’s Holder Hiding? [Robert Costa]
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) is warring with Attorney General Eric Holder over potential conflicts of interest in the Department of Justice over the handling of terrorist detainees. In a recent letter to Grassley, Holder admitted that nine Obama Justice Department appointees represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the department. Holder acknowledged only two by name — principal deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal, a former attorney for Osama bin Laden’s driver, and Jennifer Daskal, a former detainee advocate at Human Rights Watch.
In an interview with National Review Online, Grassley fumed. Holder’s letter, he said, which was sent in response to a request Grassley made last November, leaves much unanswered. “The country has the right to know what the predilections of people in the Justice Department are toward terrorism, especially if they’re giving constitutional rights to terrorists,” he says. “They’re going to regret hiding names. I don’t know why they’re hiding, unless they have something to hide.”
“To me, this is a case of our own public servants or political appointees having an agenda of their own instead of being concerned with the national security of the United States,” Grassley says. “This letter creates a lot of suspicion about conflicts of interest, and it’s out of character for an administration that promised transparency. If I was in the majority, this would demand a hearing or an investigation.” He adds that all attorneys who have been involved with terrorist detainee cases before joining the department should reveal themselves, or be revealed by Holder, and recuse themselves from any case involving terrorists and national security.
Calling Holder’s response simultaneously “obnoxious” and “ludicrous,” Grassley concludes that “without the names and details, we have a reason to question what’s really going on here.”
Byron York: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Holder-admits-nine-Obama-Dept-of-Justice-officials-worked-for-terrorist-detainees-offers-no-details-84799487.html
Holder admits nine Obama Dept. of Justice officials worked for terrorist detainees, offers no details
By: Byron YorkChief Political Correspondent02/19/10 3:52 PM EST
Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.
Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, formerly represented Osama bin Laden's driver, and another appointee, Jennifer Daskal, previously advocated for detainees at Human Rights Watch, Grassley asked Holder to give the Senate Judiciary Committee "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf…the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department…and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department."
In his response, Holder has given Grassley almost nothing. He says nine Obama political appointees at the Justice Department have advocated on behalf of detainees, but did not identify any of the nine other than the two, Katyal and Daskal, whose names Grassley already knew. "To the best of our knowledge,"
Holder writes,
during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees in those components represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.
Holder says other Obama appointees, like Holder himself, came from law firms which represented detainees but did no work on behalf of the terrorist prisoners. But other than Katyal and Daskal, Holder does not reveal any names of any Obama appointees, nor does he mention the cases they worked on.
And what are they recused from, anyway? Very little. Holder writes that Katyal has not worked on any Guantanamo detainee matters but has participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan and in litigation involving [Ali Saleh Kahlah] al-Marri, who was detained on U.S. soil." As for Daskal, "she has generally worked on policy issues related to detainees," Holder writes. "Her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations."
As for everyone else, Holder lists no names and no cases, but in a paragraph filled with modifiers, he makes it clear that all the lawyers who had advocated for detainees are free to work on general detainee matters.
The senior Department officials referenced above, like other political appointees who are similarly situated, have recused from particular matters regarding specific detainees in which their former firms represent the detainee or another party and from decisions relating specifically to the dispositions of particular detainees represented by their former firms. These recusals pertain to decisions relating to particularmatters involving specific parties who
are or have been represented by their former law firms within the relevant time period. However, as noted above, these senior officials have been authorized to participate in policy and legal decisions regarding detainee matters, in particular matters regarding specific detainees whom their prior employer did not represent, and in decisions relating to the disposition of such detainees. [emphasis added]
Finally, it is possible that there are more than nine political appointees who worked for detainees. Holder tells Grassley that he did not survey the Justice Department as a whole but instead canvassed several large offices within the organization.
Bottom line: Holder revealed no names beyond the two already publicly known. He revealed no cases from which Justice political appointees recused themselves. The letter, which will likely be interpreted on Capitol Hill as a thumb-your-nose statement, is sure to anger Republican senators more than satisfy them.
Sen. Grassley is on the case:
What’s Holder Hiding? [Robert Costa]
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) is warring with Attorney General Eric Holder over potential conflicts of interest in the Department of Justice over the handling of terrorist detainees. In a recent letter to Grassley, Holder admitted that nine Obama Justice Department appointees represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the department. Holder acknowledged only two by name — principal deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal, a former attorney for Osama bin Laden’s driver, and Jennifer Daskal, a former detainee advocate at Human Rights Watch.
In an interview with National Review Online, Grassley fumed. Holder’s letter, he said, which was sent in response to a request Grassley made last November, leaves much unanswered. “The country has the right to know what the predilections of people in the Justice Department are toward terrorism, especially if they’re giving constitutional rights to terrorists,” he says. “They’re going to regret hiding names. I don’t know why they’re hiding, unless they have something to hide.”
“To me, this is a case of our own public servants or political appointees having an agenda of their own instead of being concerned with the national security of the United States,” Grassley says. “This letter creates a lot of suspicion about conflicts of interest, and it’s out of character for an administration that promised transparency. If I was in the majority, this would demand a hearing or an investigation.” He adds that all attorneys who have been involved with terrorist detainee cases before joining the department should reveal themselves, or be revealed by Holder, and recuse themselves from any case involving terrorists and national security.
Calling Holder’s response simultaneously “obnoxious” and “ludicrous,” Grassley concludes that “without the names and details, we have a reason to question what’s really going on here.”
Byron York: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Holder-admits-nine-Obama-Dept-of-Justice-officials-worked-for-terrorist-detainees-offers-no-details-84799487.html
Holder admits nine Obama Dept. of Justice officials worked for terrorist detainees, offers no details
By: Byron YorkChief Political Correspondent02/19/10 3:52 PM EST
Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.
Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, formerly represented Osama bin Laden's driver, and another appointee, Jennifer Daskal, previously advocated for detainees at Human Rights Watch, Grassley asked Holder to give the Senate Judiciary Committee "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf…the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department…and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department."
In his response, Holder has given Grassley almost nothing. He says nine Obama political appointees at the Justice Department have advocated on behalf of detainees, but did not identify any of the nine other than the two, Katyal and Daskal, whose names Grassley already knew. "To the best of our knowledge,"
Holder writes,
during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees in those components represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.
Holder says other Obama appointees, like Holder himself, came from law firms which represented detainees but did no work on behalf of the terrorist prisoners. But other than Katyal and Daskal, Holder does not reveal any names of any Obama appointees, nor does he mention the cases they worked on.
And what are they recused from, anyway? Very little. Holder writes that Katyal has not worked on any Guantanamo detainee matters but has participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan and in litigation involving [Ali Saleh Kahlah] al-Marri, who was detained on U.S. soil." As for Daskal, "she has generally worked on policy issues related to detainees," Holder writes. "Her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations."
As for everyone else, Holder lists no names and no cases, but in a paragraph filled with modifiers, he makes it clear that all the lawyers who had advocated for detainees are free to work on general detainee matters.
The senior Department officials referenced above, like other political appointees who are similarly situated, have recused from particular matters regarding specific detainees in which their former firms represent the detainee or another party and from decisions relating specifically to the dispositions of particular detainees represented by their former firms. These recusals pertain to decisions relating to particularmatters involving specific parties who
are or have been represented by their former law firms within the relevant time period. However, as noted above, these senior officials have been authorized to participate in policy and legal decisions regarding detainee matters, in particular matters regarding specific detainees whom their prior employer did not represent, and in decisions relating to the disposition of such detainees. [emphasis added]
Finally, it is possible that there are more than nine political appointees who worked for detainees. Holder tells Grassley that he did not survey the Justice Department as a whole but instead canvassed several large offices within the organization.
Bottom line: Holder revealed no names beyond the two already publicly known. He revealed no cases from which Justice political appointees recused themselves. The letter, which will likely be interpreted on Capitol Hill as a thumb-your-nose statement, is sure to anger Republican senators more than satisfy them.
ACORN & SEIU
Congressman Issa w/ a damning report ...
Issa vs. ACORN [Kevin D. Williamson]
If you're not inclined to read all of Rep. Issa's 67-page report on ACORN and SEIU, I dig into it here. It's shocking and depressing reading. If Issa really has everything he seems to have, then there should be prosecutions.
But I was a bit put out by the Republicans' kitchen-sink approach, trying to blame ACORN for the subprime meltdown and whining about the organization's political tactics. I have no doubt that ACORN used the Community Reinvestment Act as a weapon; I also know that Republicans had years to repeal that act and did not do so. Likewise, ACORN was a minor player in the subprime bubble; Congress was a major one. Better to keep following the money and keep the focus on possible criminal acts; politics ain't beanbag, and neither is real estate.
Issa vs. ACORN [Kevin D. Williamson]
If you're not inclined to read all of Rep. Issa's 67-page report on ACORN and SEIU, I dig into it here. It's shocking and depressing reading. If Issa really has everything he seems to have, then there should be prosecutions.
But I was a bit put out by the Republicans' kitchen-sink approach, trying to blame ACORN for the subprime meltdown and whining about the organization's political tactics. I have no doubt that ACORN used the Community Reinvestment Act as a weapon; I also know that Republicans had years to repeal that act and did not do so. Likewise, ACORN was a minor player in the subprime bubble; Congress was a major one. Better to keep following the money and keep the focus on possible criminal acts; politics ain't beanbag, and neither is real estate.
Holder DOJ Witchhunt Slapped Down
and deservedly so ...
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjllMDAyOGE1MDhhZDk0Y2QwNDc2OTU0NGMzMWFlMGI=
Attorney General Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Filip Shredded OPR's Misconduct Allegations Against Bush Lawyers [Andy McCarthy]
The Justice Department last night released the Office of Professional Responsibility’s report clearing Bush-era attorneys of professional misconduct. The baseless claims of ethical lapses stemmed mostly from 2002 legal opinions issued by DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in connection with the CIA’s interrogation program.
For whatever reason, when the Justice Department released its report to Congress, inevitably ensuring that it would be made public, it did not release a crucial letter to OPR written by the Bush Justice Department’s two highest officials, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip. That letter, dated January 19, 2009 (the last full day of the Bush administration), shredded OPR’s initial Draft Report and the process by which OPR's preliminary conclusions about ethical misconduct were reached.
I have obtained a copy of that letter and I am releasing it here on NRO this morning. It can be found here.
Messrs. Mukasey and Filip are both distinguished former federal judges, and their 14-page analysis of OPR’s shoddy work is withering. The letter ought to be read in full, but here are some highlights:
After taking nearly five years to complete a nearly 200-page, single-space report, OPR withheld it’s work from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General until December 23, 2008 – right before the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and four weeks before the conclusion of the Bush administration, so that DOJ was then busy with transition to the new Obama administration. OPR did this with an eye toward releasing the report on January 12, 2009. This schedule would have ensured no meaningful review by top DOJ officials, and no meaningful opportunity for comment on the report from counsel for the Bush OLC attorneys whose work was criticized (even though OPR had made a commitment that there would be an opportunity for review and comment).
The original OPR draft report proceeded, as Mukasey and Filip put it, “seemingly without any consideration of the context in which the OLC opinions were prepared”—namely, in the aftermath of a catastrophic attack on the United States in which almost 3000 Americans were killed, and under circumstances where the OLC lawyers were under “virtually incomparable and extended pressure” to provide guidance to the intelligence community.
The OPR draft report, after taking nearly five years to review the law, derided the Bush OLC lawyers for failing to cite Khanuja v. I.N.S., a Ninth Circuit case interpreting the UN Convention Against Torture. However, Khanuja is an unpublished opinion, and under Ninth Circuit rules (which are well known to Justice Department lawyers), the citation of unpublished opinions is prohibited and lawyers who disregard this rule may be sanctioned for ethical misconduct.
Despite having had nearly five years to do its own legal analysis, OPR relied heavily on the work of academic critics of the Bush administration without (a) any explanation of why their work was somehow authoritative, and (b) balance in the form of views of other academics and commentators who had defended the professionalism of the OLC lawyers. For example, in critiquing the work of Bush OLC lawyers John Yoo (a legal scholar and tenured professor of law at the prestigious University of California Boalt School of Law) and Jay Bybee (an accomplished lawyer and now a federal appellate judge), OPR relied extensively on Professor David Luban. As Mukasey and Filip noted, though obviously a thoughtful and prolific scholar, Prof. Luban is not an attorney, has never practiced law (he is a trained philosopher), and is a vigorous critic of the Bush administration and the War on Terror generally. There was no mention of this background and Prof. Luban's patent potential bias in OPR’s Ddraft Rreport.
The OPR draft report claimed it was “unreasonable” for the Bush OLC lawyers, in construing the concept of “severe pain” for purposes of the federal torture statute, to rely on Congress’s use of the term “severe pain” in a health care statute. But there was no direct precedent for the meaning of “severe pain” in the torture statute, and, as Mukasey and Filip observed, “it is a common practice for lawyers to look to other sources for guidance in interpretation when there is no direct precedent” – and that is exactly what the OLC lawyers explained that they were doing, in addition to turning to dictionary definitions, another common practice.
The OPR draft report, on the basis of no evidence, questions not only the methods but the motives of the Bush OLC lawyers, claiming that they attempted to reverse a refusal by DOJ’s Criminal Division to decline prosecution for future violations of the torture statute. As Mukasey and Filip recount, “Notably, the Draft Report presents no evidence that the OLC attorneys even opposed the Department’s decision to decline prosecution; to the contrary, OLC was tasked with drafting the written notice refusing to decline prosecution of future statutory violations.”
OPR privately acknowledged to Mukasey and Filip that there was no direct evidence that the OLC opinions reflected anything other than the OLC lawyers’ “best legal judgment at the time.” Yet, astoundingly, that fact was not mentioned a single time in OPR’s draft report – a report that was centrally about whether the OLC lawyers had provided their best legal judgment.
It was the OPR Draft Report that recommended the re-examination by DOJ of various declinations to prosecute incidents of detainee abuse. Those declinations were reviewed “independently by two sets of prosecutors, first in the Counterterrorism Section … and later in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia”; they were arrived at based on case-related considerations that had nothing to do with the information examined in OPR’s Draft Report; and, indeed, the review by the career prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia occurred in 2005 – long after the 2002 OLC memos had been withdrawn by DOJ. (ACM note: Attorney General Holder ordered a review of these declinations anyway, just as OPR recommended.)
OPR’s draft report recommended that later OLC memos be reviewed, alleging that there was “pressure … to complete legal opinions which would allow the CIA interrogation program to go forward.” As Mukasey and Filip recount, this allegation “misinterprets the only evidence it cites.” In fact, Stephen Bradbury, the well-regarded OLC chief behind those memos, stated repeatedly – both in sworn testimony and in interviews with OPR – that “he was never pressured to reach any particular result in his evaluation of the CIA’s interrogation program.”
The OPR report urged that the Bradbury memos be reviewed by the Justice Department despite the fact that they had already been personally reviewed by Attorney General Mukasey, pursuant to a request by Congress.
The OPR faulted OLC for failing “to consider and address the moral and policy considerations triggered by the issues.” Yet the precise job of OLC is to provide strict legal advice, shorn of policy and other considerations. Moreover, as Mukasey and Filip concluded, OPR’s suggestion would run afoul of the D.C. Bar’s ethical rules, which counsel that a lawyer is to provide technical legal advice when asked for purely technical legal advice – only where a client is “inexperienced in legal matters” should guidance go beyond “strictly legal considerations.” Nothing in the profession of lawyering makes one expert in matters of morality and policy, and the point is to avoid a situation in which the lawyer’s personal predilections are masqueraded as legal requirements.
I recommend that the letter be read in its entirety.
Friday Night Hack Attack [Bill Burck and Dana Perino]
On February 19, Attorney General Eric Holder took part in the time-honored Washington tradition of dumping undesired news on Friday afternoons or evenings. After weeks of leaks, the Justice Department officially exonerated Bush-era lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the authors of the original legal opinions on the lawfulness of the CIA interrogation program, which are known pejoratively as the “torture memos” to critics.
This is bad news for Holder and certain other Obama appointees at Justice — it undermines the story they’ve been telling for years that the lawyers who found the CIA program lawful were sadistic criminals committed to torturing poor souls such as Khalid Sheik Muhammad — but it is a vindication of an important principle that, prior to the Holder reign, had been adhered to across administrations: honestly held legal and policy opinions are not cause for prosecution or professional discipline.
For years now this principle has been under sustained attack by hard-core left-wing congressional partisans such as Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine some of the more wild-eyed among them searching for ways to revoke the law licenses of conservative Supreme Court justices. Fortunately, this country is not Venezuela — at least not yet; we should not rest easy.
This was a very narrow escape that came down to the brave decision of a long-time career official at Justice named David Margolis. Margolis is a widely respected 40-year veteran who has been tasked over the years with handling many of the more sensitive internal inquiries at the Justice Department. One of his responsibilities — which he has performed honorably for a number of different attorneys general in Democratic and Republican administrations — has been to oversee inquiries conducted by lawyers in the little-known Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR. OPR is the office that recommended Yoo and Bybee be subject to disciplinary proceedings. Margolis rejected OPR’s recommendation and most of its analysis.
OPR is the equivalent of internal affairs at a police department, conducting inquiries of alleged misconduct by Justice Department lawyers and other staff and making disciplinary recommendations. OPR has an important role to play to ensure that misconduct is discovered and punished. But OPR’s investigation of the legal advice provided by Yoo and Bybee was, by its own admission, extremely unusual.
Keep reading this post . .
Sweeping Up the Friday Dump [Jonah Goldberg]
Do read Bill and Dana's post below as well as this morning's outstanding editorial over at theWall Street Journal. Here's the opening of the (long) Journal editorial:
So after five years of investigation, partisan accusations and unethical media leaks, the Justice Department's senior ethicist has concluded that Bush Administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed no professional misconduct. The issue now is whether the protégés of Attorney General Eric Holder who led this exercise at Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) should themselves be in the dock.
That's our reading of the analysis by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, a career official who reviewed both the Bush-era legal memos on interrogating terror suspects and their review by the lawyers at OPR. Remarkably, his report is far more scathing about OPR than it is about Messrs. Yoo and Bybee, who he says made legal errors but did so in good faith, out of honest legal analysis, and in the ethical service of their clients in the executive branch at a time of war.
Mr. Margolis's review overrules both a draft OPR report whose contents were leaked to the media last year and a final OPR report that was released along with the Margolis review late Friday. Those OPR reports recommended disciplinary action and potential disbarment for Messrs. Bybee and Yoo for their advice while working in the Office of Legal Counsel in the frantic months after September 11. The leaks were themselves an unethical attempt to smear the reputations of the lawyers while they were under a gag order and unable to reply.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjllMDAyOGE1MDhhZDk0Y2QwNDc2OTU0NGMzMWFlMGI=
Attorney General Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Filip Shredded OPR's Misconduct Allegations Against Bush Lawyers [Andy McCarthy]
The Justice Department last night released the Office of Professional Responsibility’s report clearing Bush-era attorneys of professional misconduct. The baseless claims of ethical lapses stemmed mostly from 2002 legal opinions issued by DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in connection with the CIA’s interrogation program.
For whatever reason, when the Justice Department released its report to Congress, inevitably ensuring that it would be made public, it did not release a crucial letter to OPR written by the Bush Justice Department’s two highest officials, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip. That letter, dated January 19, 2009 (the last full day of the Bush administration), shredded OPR’s initial Draft Report and the process by which OPR's preliminary conclusions about ethical misconduct were reached.
I have obtained a copy of that letter and I am releasing it here on NRO this morning. It can be found here.
Messrs. Mukasey and Filip are both distinguished former federal judges, and their 14-page analysis of OPR’s shoddy work is withering. The letter ought to be read in full, but here are some highlights:
After taking nearly five years to complete a nearly 200-page, single-space report, OPR withheld it’s work from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General until December 23, 2008 – right before the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and four weeks before the conclusion of the Bush administration, so that DOJ was then busy with transition to the new Obama administration. OPR did this with an eye toward releasing the report on January 12, 2009. This schedule would have ensured no meaningful review by top DOJ officials, and no meaningful opportunity for comment on the report from counsel for the Bush OLC attorneys whose work was criticized (even though OPR had made a commitment that there would be an opportunity for review and comment).
The original OPR draft report proceeded, as Mukasey and Filip put it, “seemingly without any consideration of the context in which the OLC opinions were prepared”—namely, in the aftermath of a catastrophic attack on the United States in which almost 3000 Americans were killed, and under circumstances where the OLC lawyers were under “virtually incomparable and extended pressure” to provide guidance to the intelligence community.
The OPR draft report, after taking nearly five years to review the law, derided the Bush OLC lawyers for failing to cite Khanuja v. I.N.S., a Ninth Circuit case interpreting the UN Convention Against Torture. However, Khanuja is an unpublished opinion, and under Ninth Circuit rules (which are well known to Justice Department lawyers), the citation of unpublished opinions is prohibited and lawyers who disregard this rule may be sanctioned for ethical misconduct.
Despite having had nearly five years to do its own legal analysis, OPR relied heavily on the work of academic critics of the Bush administration without (a) any explanation of why their work was somehow authoritative, and (b) balance in the form of views of other academics and commentators who had defended the professionalism of the OLC lawyers. For example, in critiquing the work of Bush OLC lawyers John Yoo (a legal scholar and tenured professor of law at the prestigious University of California Boalt School of Law) and Jay Bybee (an accomplished lawyer and now a federal appellate judge), OPR relied extensively on Professor David Luban. As Mukasey and Filip noted, though obviously a thoughtful and prolific scholar, Prof. Luban is not an attorney, has never practiced law (he is a trained philosopher), and is a vigorous critic of the Bush administration and the War on Terror generally. There was no mention of this background and Prof. Luban's patent potential bias in OPR’s Ddraft Rreport.
The OPR draft report claimed it was “unreasonable” for the Bush OLC lawyers, in construing the concept of “severe pain” for purposes of the federal torture statute, to rely on Congress’s use of the term “severe pain” in a health care statute. But there was no direct precedent for the meaning of “severe pain” in the torture statute, and, as Mukasey and Filip observed, “it is a common practice for lawyers to look to other sources for guidance in interpretation when there is no direct precedent” – and that is exactly what the OLC lawyers explained that they were doing, in addition to turning to dictionary definitions, another common practice.
The OPR draft report, on the basis of no evidence, questions not only the methods but the motives of the Bush OLC lawyers, claiming that they attempted to reverse a refusal by DOJ’s Criminal Division to decline prosecution for future violations of the torture statute. As Mukasey and Filip recount, “Notably, the Draft Report presents no evidence that the OLC attorneys even opposed the Department’s decision to decline prosecution; to the contrary, OLC was tasked with drafting the written notice refusing to decline prosecution of future statutory violations.”
OPR privately acknowledged to Mukasey and Filip that there was no direct evidence that the OLC opinions reflected anything other than the OLC lawyers’ “best legal judgment at the time.” Yet, astoundingly, that fact was not mentioned a single time in OPR’s draft report – a report that was centrally about whether the OLC lawyers had provided their best legal judgment.
It was the OPR Draft Report that recommended the re-examination by DOJ of various declinations to prosecute incidents of detainee abuse. Those declinations were reviewed “independently by two sets of prosecutors, first in the Counterterrorism Section … and later in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia”; they were arrived at based on case-related considerations that had nothing to do with the information examined in OPR’s Draft Report; and, indeed, the review by the career prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia occurred in 2005 – long after the 2002 OLC memos had been withdrawn by DOJ. (ACM note: Attorney General Holder ordered a review of these declinations anyway, just as OPR recommended.)
OPR’s draft report recommended that later OLC memos be reviewed, alleging that there was “pressure … to complete legal opinions which would allow the CIA interrogation program to go forward.” As Mukasey and Filip recount, this allegation “misinterprets the only evidence it cites.” In fact, Stephen Bradbury, the well-regarded OLC chief behind those memos, stated repeatedly – both in sworn testimony and in interviews with OPR – that “he was never pressured to reach any particular result in his evaluation of the CIA’s interrogation program.”
The OPR report urged that the Bradbury memos be reviewed by the Justice Department despite the fact that they had already been personally reviewed by Attorney General Mukasey, pursuant to a request by Congress.
The OPR faulted OLC for failing “to consider and address the moral and policy considerations triggered by the issues.” Yet the precise job of OLC is to provide strict legal advice, shorn of policy and other considerations. Moreover, as Mukasey and Filip concluded, OPR’s suggestion would run afoul of the D.C. Bar’s ethical rules, which counsel that a lawyer is to provide technical legal advice when asked for purely technical legal advice – only where a client is “inexperienced in legal matters” should guidance go beyond “strictly legal considerations.” Nothing in the profession of lawyering makes one expert in matters of morality and policy, and the point is to avoid a situation in which the lawyer’s personal predilections are masqueraded as legal requirements.
I recommend that the letter be read in its entirety.
Friday Night Hack Attack [Bill Burck and Dana Perino]
On February 19, Attorney General Eric Holder took part in the time-honored Washington tradition of dumping undesired news on Friday afternoons or evenings. After weeks of leaks, the Justice Department officially exonerated Bush-era lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the authors of the original legal opinions on the lawfulness of the CIA interrogation program, which are known pejoratively as the “torture memos” to critics.
This is bad news for Holder and certain other Obama appointees at Justice — it undermines the story they’ve been telling for years that the lawyers who found the CIA program lawful were sadistic criminals committed to torturing poor souls such as Khalid Sheik Muhammad — but it is a vindication of an important principle that, prior to the Holder reign, had been adhered to across administrations: honestly held legal and policy opinions are not cause for prosecution or professional discipline.
For years now this principle has been under sustained attack by hard-core left-wing congressional partisans such as Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine some of the more wild-eyed among them searching for ways to revoke the law licenses of conservative Supreme Court justices. Fortunately, this country is not Venezuela — at least not yet; we should not rest easy.
This was a very narrow escape that came down to the brave decision of a long-time career official at Justice named David Margolis. Margolis is a widely respected 40-year veteran who has been tasked over the years with handling many of the more sensitive internal inquiries at the Justice Department. One of his responsibilities — which he has performed honorably for a number of different attorneys general in Democratic and Republican administrations — has been to oversee inquiries conducted by lawyers in the little-known Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR. OPR is the office that recommended Yoo and Bybee be subject to disciplinary proceedings. Margolis rejected OPR’s recommendation and most of its analysis.
OPR is the equivalent of internal affairs at a police department, conducting inquiries of alleged misconduct by Justice Department lawyers and other staff and making disciplinary recommendations. OPR has an important role to play to ensure that misconduct is discovered and punished. But OPR’s investigation of the legal advice provided by Yoo and Bybee was, by its own admission, extremely unusual.
Keep reading this post . .
Sweeping Up the Friday Dump [Jonah Goldberg]
Do read Bill and Dana's post below as well as this morning's outstanding editorial over at theWall Street Journal. Here's the opening of the (long) Journal editorial:
So after five years of investigation, partisan accusations and unethical media leaks, the Justice Department's senior ethicist has concluded that Bush Administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed no professional misconduct. The issue now is whether the protégés of Attorney General Eric Holder who led this exercise at Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) should themselves be in the dock.
That's our reading of the analysis by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, a career official who reviewed both the Bush-era legal memos on interrogating terror suspects and their review by the lawyers at OPR. Remarkably, his report is far more scathing about OPR than it is about Messrs. Yoo and Bybee, who he says made legal errors but did so in good faith, out of honest legal analysis, and in the ethical service of their clients in the executive branch at a time of war.
Mr. Margolis's review overrules both a draft OPR report whose contents were leaked to the media last year and a final OPR report that was released along with the Margolis review late Friday. Those OPR reports recommended disciplinary action and potential disbarment for Messrs. Bybee and Yoo for their advice while working in the Office of Legal Counsel in the frantic months after September 11. The leaks were themselves an unethical attempt to smear the reputations of the lawyers while they were under a gag order and unable to reply.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Iran - Nuclear Weapons update
Amir Taheri: Iran's Deadly Ambitions - Is It Too Late ?
So maybe it's time to take another look at that 2007 US intelligence assessment that found that Iran had halted work on a WMD program four years earlier.
Ralph Peters: Nuclear Countdown - UN admits Iran Warhead works
Another WMD "Oops"
It was just about 10 days ago that Iran's bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly boasted that Tehran had enriched uranium to nearly 20 percent purity -- a key development on the path to nuclear weapons.
To which White House spokesman Robert Gibbs declared: "We do not believe they have the capability to enrich to the degree they say they are enriching."
Wrong-O, Bobby Boy.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran did in fact reach the 20 percent level recently -- which "raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile."
So maybe it's time to take another look at that 2007 US intelligence assessment that found that Iran had halted work on a WMD program four years earlier.
Because the evidence, from a host of sources, strongly suggests otherwise.
That's especially true, now that Mohammed el Baradei, the IAEA's former head, has gone back to Egypt with his Nobel Peace Prize; as Ralph Peters notes on the previous page, the agency now can tell the truth.
And Washington desperately needs to catch up with what other Western intelligence agencies have determined about Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Bad intelligence brought about a political disaster for the Bush administration: WMDs the CIA was sure were in Iraq, weren't. This time, it's the opposite: The WMD capability that Washington's convinced doesn't exist, definitely does.
It's time to wake up on Iran. Accurate and timely intelligence would help.
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