Category: Barack Obama

Moral Clarity

Peter Daou’s Huffington Post column on the imperative for the Obama administration to restore the rule of law without hesitation raises excellent points about both what change really must mean under Obama and how the netroots community is trying to ensure this happens. Demands for investigation, transparency, and accountability in the face of Let’s-Move-On-itis common to Washington Democrats and Beltway pundits are not, as Daou says, “the rantings of immature outsiders and political neophytes.” Daou writes:

But as always, the progressive community, a far more efficient thinking machine than a handful of strategists and advisers, is looking ahead and raising a unified alarm. The message is this: anything less than absolute moral clarity from Democrats, who now control the levers of power, will enshrine Bush’s abuses and undermine the rule of law for generations to come.

I feel as if we’re a country balanced on the blade of a knife.  Decisive action, done out of moral clarity to restore America’s good name, can save us. There must be unequivocal support for the rule of law. This should not be negotiable, because anything less will ensure that there is no effective break from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. We will instead have a largely better actor who is less likely to move to systematically undermine the rule of law, who presides over a system that is functionally identical in mechanism and meaning to what was constructed under Bush and Cheney.

It’s hard to think of a more troubling outcome with the change in administrations than one which leaves us in a place we thought we had left when we voted on November 4th, 2008.

Bad Faith Bipartisanship

The Obama administration has consistently made good on President Obama’s campaign promise to govern as a post-partisan and look to bring Republicans into the governing process. Multiple Republicans were nominated to cabinet posts. And despite fears to the contrary by Republicans and Beltway journalists, the administration has refused to pursue any policy course that could possibly be described as “vindictive” following eight years of Republican failure and lawbreaking.

But how has the administration been repaid for their magnanimity? Well as anyone who has paid attention to the Republican Party over the last forty years (and especially the last sixteen) would expect, the Republicans have remained committed to partisan obstructionism for the sake of politics. No matter how far President Obama has gone to bring Republicans along on the path of rebuilding this country, their response has not changed. They opposed the stimulus effectively unanimously. They opposed national service. They opposed making banks accountable to government oversight. Every where we look, we see partisan Republican obstructionism (though liberal Democrats seem far more likely to be called out for partisan behavior).

The latest example is found in Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. Brownback had come out strongly in favor of the nomination of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius for Secretary of Health and Human Services. In fact, his endorsement initially augured a swift confirmation for Sebelius. Now, months later, Sebelius languishes awaiting confirmation and Brownback is making noises about opposing her.

This is a joke, played out on repeat, because it’s the only joke the Republican Party knows how to tell. It’s as if a political party was created around the premise of bad faith in all their business.

Hopefully the administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are cognizant of what is happening. The press certainly isn’t in an uproar over Republican obstructionism of the popular president’s election-mandated agenda, so it will require an iota of scrutiny for the Democrats to see what’s going on on their own. As much as it might be comforting to treat their political opponents as good faith agents to be worked with for the betterment of the country in a way that was entirely absent the previous eight years, Republicans do not operate in good faith. Policy efforts aiming to achieve their goals with the help of mythical good faith Republicans are sadly doomed to failure. It’s time to reevaluate, sharpen our collective elbows, and start muscling through the agenda President Obama was elected to implement.

Not All Lobbyists Are Created Equally

The New York Times has an article today on the emergence of a problem area in the Obama administration’s nearly-blanket exclusion of lobbyists from holding positions in the administration. Essentially while President Obama’s campaign promise to shut out lobbyists has largely worked, it has also meant many uniquely talented individuals who have spent their career lobbying for non-profits, charities, and human rights groups are ineligible to roles they would be excessively well suited for. At issue is the simple reality that not all lobbyists are created equally. It is fairly nonsensical for administration officials to contend that someone who has spent a career working for Human Rights Watch is indistinguishable from someone who has spent their career lobbying for Philip Morris, Pfizer, or Wal-Mart.

The article reminded me of the exchange during the 2007 Yearly Kos Presidential Forum, where Hillary Clinton was heavily booed for saying she would continue to accept lobbyist contributions to her campaign.

While Clinton’s answer was politically problematic in front of a very progressive audience that largely, at that time, backed Obama and John Edwards, in hindsight the point she’s making should be quite clear. Lobbyists fighting for nurses, firefighters, child care workers, or victims of genocide simply are not the same as lobbyists for major corporations. Unfortunately for Clinton, while she was making a true assertion about different types of lobbyists, she would not extend that distinction to her finance department’s guidelines for accepting donations. That is, she used nurses to cover for pharmaceutical lobbyists and was largely punished for it politically.

Making exceptions to this policy wouldn’t be hard. An easy guideline would be to limit acceptable lobbyists to those that have worked in social services, human rights, labor unions, and environmental organizations. Or, on the other hand, you could exclude anyone who has lobbied on behalf of a Fortune 500 company or industry lobbying group. This would work because the problem isn’t constitutionally protected lobbying activities, but the influence of money on politics. I’ve never heard of Human Rights Watch being associated with someone like Jack Abramoff, though I can’t say the same for many business lobbies. Those are the areas whose influence the Obama administration should seek to reduce in their house, not people working honorably for human rights and charitable purposes.

On Triple Counting

It seems judgmental DC reporters are making a lot of the fact that Organizing for America’s 642,000 delivered signatures to Congress is based on triple counting each signatory and sending a copy to both members of the Senate and the Representative for that person’s home district.

Guys, this is not triple counting. For a citizen to lobby the delegation that represents him or her, that person must contact three offices. If they only contacted one, two offices would not have been reached.  This is how the legislative branch is structured in the US government. To put it a different way, lobbying Congress is not like lobbying the White House; citizens can’t just send one email or fax to have achieved what they’re trying to do. OFA is enabling citizens to successfully lobby all the people who represent them. It’s not a number dodge, it’s how the system works.

A Radical Idea

This Rasmussen poll gives strength to the long-standing netroots critique of timid Democrats – namely that by standing strongly for Democratic principles and by being an unapologetic partisan for a Democratic agenda, Democrats can succeed at a higher rate than we currently do. There’s a strong case to be made that our electoral successes of 2006 and 2008 came on the backs of Democrats being willing to create strong points of contrast with Republican incumbents. But now we see that this applies to governance, too. The poll shows that 11% more Americans think President Obama is “governing as a partisan Democrat” than two months ago, while simultaneously showing an increased approval rating of Obama. Which is to say that Obama has become more popular, not less, for being a Democrat who stands up for his beliefs about how to steward the country.

There are two relevant audiences for the meaning of this information: the press and the Democratic establishment (of which the White House is a subset). The media needs to start recognizing that Obama is under no obligation to govern as a post-partisan – he can stand up for his ideas and he should be judged according to his willingness and ability to realize them — as opposed to, say, judging him on his ability to live up to John McCain’s campaign progresses (see: no earmarks in the budget). Simultaneously, the Democratic establishment and especially the White House need to see this data as a sign that they have to be forceful in their pursuit of a progressive agenda, unapologetically. As Oliver Willis has long said, we’re right. Let’s not forget that.

Releasing Secret Documents

As I’ve been intermittently critical of the Obama administration’s course of action on rule of law questions, I think it’s important to note that the release of secret legal documents yesterday is a huge step in the right direction and a meaningful signifier of the sort of change that is possible with Obama in the White House. Glenn Greenwald’s look at “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S.” is particularly instructive of where we are today, less than two months after the conclusion of the Bush administration.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens.  And it wasn’t only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls “domestic military operations” was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying — in secret and with no oversight — on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Clearly the task in front of the Obama administration to unwind and rollback extreme, anti-constitutional executive branch legal positions like this is great. It is up to Obama and his legal counsel to take all that was wrong and cut it out, swiftly and with no hesitation. If Obama’s team proves slow or even unwilling to do this, the onus must fall out congressional leaders to do what they failed to do over the last eight years: be an assertive check on the executive branch.

Greenwald points out the the military operations authorized were not abstract, but were actualized by NSA warrantless wiretapping of Americans on U.S. soil. Understanding the sort of legal doctrines the Bush administration used to justify these actions is a necessary, but not sufficient, step for restoring the rule of law in America. We also must know what specifically was done following the establishment of these legal positions. We must know who was spied upon, who tortured our prisoners, and who was sent abroad to be tortured. We must know how wide a net the federal government cast in their suspicions of innocent Americans. Knowing what secret laws were and are in place is a step in the right direction, but it is by no means a meaningful accounting of the assault on the Constitution under the Bush administration.

Via Greenwald, Scott Horton writes:

 We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it. [Greenwald’s emphasis]

This is the imperative the Obama administration faces: how do we have such an accounting of the Bush “dictatorship” so as to restore the Constitution, while simultaneously instilling in the American public a degree of outrage and skepticism that will ensure that such actions are never again deemed acceptable by anyone serving in the federal government? Looking at our past is precisely what will ensure that our nation’s future is bright and defined by our freedoms and not their absence.