Kneecapping Your Own Quarterback (with update)

(see Update below)
So forty-seven U.S. Senators went and did a thing this weekend, where they sent a rather demeaning and error-filled letter to the Iranian government warning them that any treaty deal over stopping Iran's uranium nuclear-bomb projects will be meaningless:

...What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time...

The Senators are basically telling the Iranians "Screw it.  No matter what deal you make with Obama, we'll just vote it down or ignore it and if we get a Republican in the White House in 2016 you are all bombing targets."

One of the sins that these Senators committed: the whole "advise and consent" element in Article II of the Constitution is that the Senate should be advising OUR PRESIDENT and NOT advising the foreign power.  The Senators are openly influencing - through reckless intimidation - another nation into NOT dealing with our government over a possibly peaceful solution to a serious problem.  This sort of move reeks of war-mongering (the GOP wants a war with Iran, in case you hadn't noticed), this sort of move reeks of treason interfering with our government's ability to work with other nations.

The other sin is that this move reeks of the Senators being total assholes.

The Republicans have taken their 6-years-and-counting obstruction against Barack Obama and turned it into an international scandal.

There are certain things in politics, in the halls of power, you just don't do.  There are written rules of conduct, official checks and balances codified into the Constitution itself.  There are the unwritten rules of decorum and behavior, of ceremony and tradition where certain offices are granted a lot of leeway to get work done.  There's the common sense things where you don't go tugging on Superman's cape or spit into the wind.

It's been an unwritten rule since the days of Washington himself where the President, via his executive offices of the State Department, handles all the heavy lifting and deal-making of treaties with foreign nations.  In this, the Senate only comes in either as individual experts on certain topics or nations to consult with the President directly, and otherwise the Senate waits until a treaty gets signed before it comes to them for 2/3rds vote to ratify.  There was a sense of decorum about it: let the President handle the foreign policies as Head of State.

This letter nukes all of that, metaphorically and literally.  It's an open warning shot across the bow.  It's a blatant show of disrespect towards a President they've accused again and again of being un-American, and it's a disgusting display of obstruction no other President has ever had to cope with in the 220-plus years of our nation's dealings with the world.

I've looked at that Logan Act, the law making it a crime to interfere directly or indirectly with a President's ability to form treaties or deal with foreign powers.

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

I swear, that Senate letter reads to me like it's violating the part of the Act I've marked in bold.  The only thing that's keeping me from screaming about these Senators committing outright treason is that bit about "without authority of the United States."  As Senators, they DO have authority... but my question would be "do they have THIS kind of authority to directly parley or communicate with a foreign nation, in direct interference with the State Department which DOES have the authority? And in direct interference with the President of the United States who DOES have the authority?"

At what point did the Senate cross the line on the Logan Act?  They sure as hell crossed the line for decorum and decency with this bullshit stunt.  This is an open act of sabotage against the President of the United States.  A President in Barack Obama who's won two majority elections to serve as President.  A President who's been attacked again and again for no sane reason other than the Republicans being hateful bastards.

UPDATE: I think I found the answer to the question above ("At what point did the Senate cross the line on the Logan Act?").  There was a court ruling back in 1936 - U.S. vs. Curtiss-Wright Export - where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the President using his powers to go after arms dealers selling to foreign nations/powers.  Part 9 of the ruling says "In international relations, the President is the sole organ of the Federal Government." To wit:

...In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems, the President alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation. He makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate; but he alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation the Senate cannot intrude, and Congress itself is powerless to invade it... They think the interference of the Senate in the direction of foreign negotiations calculated to diminish that responsibility, and thereby to impair the best security for the national safety...

I really believe the 47 Senators broke the law: they calculated to diminish President Obama's responsibility to negotiate with the world.  I really believe they should be charged and held accountable.  The Logan Act requires it.  The Supreme Court confirms it.  The only question now should be "who has standing to file the charge?"  If it's Obama, dammit man NOW is the time to fight the fire burning down our political system.  If it's the State Department, your very office DEMANDS you secure your ability to negotiate with foreign powers.  If it can be someone in the Senate, dammit Democrats MAN UP.

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Follow-Up to Obama's 2015 State of the Union

While I didn't completely get what I wanted from Obama's address - although he DID push for an economic and tax agenda I can support - I did get to bear witness to one of the epic smackdowns in American History:

During his scripted speech, Obama claimed his position as "I have no more campaigns to run."

This prompted a round of applause from the Republican Congresscritters seemingly celebrating that Obama's unable to run for re-election.

Obama then ad-libbed "I know... because I won both of them."

Boom.

Burn.

Dunk.

Mic Drop.

Linkage to some Twitter reactions - usually the go-to source for the immediate OMG pulse of the moment - here and here and a few others if you look for them.

It was sweet.

If I ever have kids, I will tell them of this moment.

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What I'd Like To Hear From Obama's State Of the Union Tonight

I'll be working evening shift so I won't see any of it until I get home.

So here's the list I hope to hear about later.

1) "The state of our union is ROBUST." I am sick and tired of hearing 'strong'.  IT'S CALLED A THESAURUS PEOPLE, THEY HAVE THEM ONLINE NOW.

2) "Thanks to massive gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states and pitiful voter turnout efforts by Democrats that turned into a turnoff, a meager 36 percent of voters this past November put a bunch of batsh-t crazy politicians in charge of Congress.  Yeah, I went there.  Now I gotta manage the crazy 24-7 until 2017.  Like I said, thanks."

3) "I will not make any deals on Social Security or Medicare. You are not going after our social safety nets that do work, that just needs minor and yes I mean minor reforms to make them solvent.  Just don't even try cutting Social Security benefits, Congress.  I will make you eat your own serving if you bring that sh-t to my house."

4) "I will insist on a budget where the nation's entire tax burden will be placed on Grover Norquist.  I'm gonna drown YOU, buddy."

5) "We as a nation thrive on immigration.  It's how we went from some rustic backwater of the 19th Century into a major superpower by the 20th Century.  It's how we keep ourselves innovative and refreshed with talent and drive.  For us to turn our backs on millions of hard-working, intelligent young adults that can become part of this great nation through the DREAM reform efforts is not only offensive, it is short-sighted and harmful.  We are going to reform our immigration policies to make it easier to keep families together, to make it easier for our workforce to stay strong."

6) "We need to do something about reducing college costs.  This is why I'm pushing for local, community college programs to be free to millions of American families.  We need to do more to stop the growing amount of financial debt that millions of families are incurring in order to have their own children achieve success.  What good will all that effort be if entire communities go bankrupt, killing all hope for that success?"

7) "If Congress passes one more self-serving pay raise while doing nothing about the wages of all other workers, I swear to God I will personally bitch-slap each and every one of you.  You're already earning six-figure salaries with this job, that's more than what 95 percent of our nation's workers ever see."

8) "Seriously Hollywood, you pat yourselves on the back for awarding a hokey, poorly-scripted movie on race like Crash and yet you snub the hell out of a historic, well-acted and genuinely impactful film like Selma?  I was already upset with your Oscars voters for how they snubbed TRON for Best Visual Effects - TWICE - but now this sh-t..."

9) "We are this close to letting Disney take over Cuba as the first nation-sized Epcot Center.  Don't ruin the deal, Congress, just let me handle it..."

10) "The real reason this nation's future this year is so incredible, why we've got a good year ahead of us?  Because Age of Ultron AND Episode VII are coming out this year!  YES DAMMIT IT IS GOOD TO BE A GEEK IN THE USA!  GOD BLESS US!  LIVE LONG AND PROSPER!"

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Take This Plane to Cuba

And from today onward you don't have to hijack said plane to do so.

While the travel rules aren't completely opened, you can meet one of twelve criteria to make a trip to Cuba.  As Ferdman writes in that article, the rules are flexible to where the American traveler "...will no longer have to obtain a special license from the government, which seems to pave the way for a future in which leisure travel is more common, if not completely legal. As part of the updated regulations, those hoping to travel to Havana will only need a general license, which they can declare as individuals. In practice, this will effectively mean that people can claim they are traveling under one of the dozen approved categories, and then book a flight..."

So for example I could claim I was traveling to Cuba to obtain research materials for a book on Caribbean history I've been writing since 1996, check off a box on the State Department paper claiming so, make a 10-minute visit to Cuban archives to photocopy some pages from Jamaica Today, and then spend about two more days on the coast without worrying I'm facing jail time or lawsuits when I get back to the U.S.

I hope.

In strictly legal sense, the 12 criteria covers a lot of professional and personal reasons to make the trip: the best part is allowing family trips, for members of the exiled community here in Florida and elsewhere in the U.S. to make the 90-mile journey across the waters to return "home" and visit those who stayed behind.

One of the expected impacts of this loosening of travel is how it will make it easier for U.S.-based Cubans to ship over money and resources to the more impoverished relatives back on the isle.  The other is that the interactions without repercussions can lead to a softening of the harsh divisions between the exiles and homeland.  While that heated opposition won't go away overnight, it could - and should - diminish to where reasonable solutions towards ending the 50-plus years of hostility between the sides can be reached.

Meanwhile, I'm now conflicted between either saving up money for a trip to Ireland or a trip to Cuba.  Should I flip a coin, seven blog readers?

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Brief Thoughts On Cuba, Again

I'd written about Cuba before (back in 2008), noting how the 50-plus years of sanctions and embargoes had proven to be a colossal waste of time and resources:

...The big reason why there won't be any change is because of us, the United States. Our stance on Cuba has not changed in 49 years (then), and at some points have even worsened, simply because of ideology and stubbornness. While we have legitimate grievances against Castro's communist (and post-Soviet authortarian) regime, we've never attempted genuine diplomacy and dialog. Instead we've forced embargoes, sanctions, denials, covert ops, basically every hardliner stance we could think of. We'd also tried invasion once. We'd also tried exploding cigars and Nair assaults on Castro's beard (I'm not kidding!).

The problem is that all our efforts are wasted: other countries do not observe the sanctions and embargoes, so Cuba stays afloat (barely) financially. Castro and his buddies, meanwhile, use our bullying ways to act defiant and manly, and they get to look good while they do it. And what's worse, we know it's working for them, and not for us.

But we can't change, can we? Even with all the expert advise, all the obvious clues, we can't change our behavior towards Cuba because no one in D.C. wants to upset 200,000 plus Cuban exiles sitting in South Florida... even though a growing number of them think the sanctions and embargoes need to go...

This month, President Obama changed the rules: he's making open gestures to the Cuban government to work towards ending this half-century of hostility (via Jeffrey Goldberg):

...Critics of the Obama administration, and critics of the Castro regime, will say that today's decision to normalize relations between the two countries represents a victory for one-party rule. I think they are wrong; there is a very good chance that the U.S. comes out the winner in this new arrangement, and not only because Alan Gross is now home.

It is difficult for a Castro to agree to normalized relations with the United States; anti-Americanism is a pillar of the regime. But looking around Cuba earlier this year, it was apparent that there was an opening for the Obama administration to change direction and actually influence the course of events inside Cuba.

President Obama—and Benjamin Rhodes, the National Security Council aide who led the negotiations with Cuba—saw an opportunity to open up Cuba to American influence, and they took it. They will be criticized mercilessly—they already are—for giving too much ground to the Cuban regime. But Obama and his team knew something that many previous administrations before them also knew: U.S. policy toward Cuba was self-defeating. Five decades of an embargo, five decades of hostility, had not dislodged the Castro brothers, and had not brought even a suggestion of democracy to the island...

At first, my immediate response was to think - and claim elsewhere - that 50 years of sanctions had not worked.  But... kinda... in a way it did.  While the embargo and open hostility made the United States into an international bully picking on our neighbor state, and while it made Cuba under the Castro brothers into an intransigent one-party dictatorship with a horrible record of human rights violations, it also made Cuba into a very weak, economically unstable regime.

Goldberg's own article opens with him showing his kids around the backroads of Cuba, where poverty was constant and nearly everything rusted out and worn down.  Where most other Caribbean and Central/South American nations have at least kept up with economic growth and the Internet thanks to various trading deals with the U.S. as a major partner, Cuba's been stuck - literally - in 1959.

The only things keeping the Castro regime in power - after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 - were its ardent anti-American stance, and an alliance with Venezuela that kept it supplied with oil to keep up with energy needs.  And now with Venezuela facing dire bankruptcy problems of its own, Cuba is running out of trading partners - other nations don't respect the embargoes too much, but those sanctions have crimped how much they can do with Cuba - to keep it afloat.  In this regard - economics - the sanctions did have an effect.

Where the sanctions failed was forcing the Castros and their leadership partners into any kind of political reforms.  As long as the sanctions were in place and as long as the anti-Castro forces poised along the Florida coastline stoked with anger towards them, Fidel and his brother Raul were in no rush to do anything like open elections.

The current push for openness between Cuba and the United States is noticeably limited and still requiring a lot of negotiation.  This is where diplomacy - actual dialog, not gunboat - comes into play.  If the United States deals from a position of respect - not strength, which was how those sanctions have been viewed all these decades - with the Cuban leadership, they can craft a decent economic and cultural deal that can directly impact the nation towards a path of media and social openness in ways to affect the political.

Goldberg's follow-up article covers why diplomacy with Cuba compares a lot to the U.S. dealing with other one-party (formerly Communist) nations like China and Vietnam, with one notable exception where U.S. intervention might help:

There will be many ways to test whether the Obama administration, and those who support its decision to reestablish ties with Cuba after a half-century hiatus (including yours truly), are correct in arguing that broad exposure to America, to its people and to its businesses, will translate into greater openness and freedom for ordinary Cubans. One of the most important ways to measure this will be to watch levels of Internet connectivity—open, affordable, unfiltered connectivity. Many Cubans I've met have quite literally never been on the Internet. In two years, if rates of exposure to the Internet remain the same, then the great Obama experiment could be judged, provisionally, a failure.

Critics of Obama's overture to Cuba argue that close U.S. ties with Vietnam and China are proof that exposure to America does not translate into political freedom—it translates into greater access to Coca-Cola products, but not to the spread of American ideals of free speech and pluralism. These critics have a point, of course (though critics of these critics also have a point: If the U.S. can have normal diplomatic and commercial ties with China, a terrible violator of human rights, why should it not have normal diplomatic and commercial ties with Cuba, a country ruled by a government that is less malignant than China's?)...

Cuba, of course, is not China, and it is not Vietnam: China is large enough to create its own weather, and Vietnam is 8,000 miles away. The U.S. will have influence in Havana—a 45-minute flight from Miami—in profound and useful ways...

What Goldberg is getting at is how the United States' influence on Cuba will be overwhelming, not just economically but culturally. It's the closest Caribbean nation to us where tourism will become a major industry practically overnight (since all the others already have it): considering the curiosity factor alone, the first year of open travel would be huge.  Take the tourism numbers (and dollars) of places like Jamaica and Bahamas (two of the biggest destinations for Americans), and add them together to consider how many will travel to Cuba as a bucket-list thing to do.  Cuba's not part of the cruise line stopovers: once a deal's in place, every line will bid like mad for friendly ports (and a lot of construction at those ports for hotels, restaurants, amusement parks, shopping venues.  Infrastructure such as roads, water and sewage, communication networks will see a huge business boom).

And more than just the massive influx of tourism dollars, it will be the exposure to Americans and Cubans, person-to-person in ways we don't do enough with China and Vietnam (literally half the world away).  I'd like to think enough decent Americans visiting over there will meet enough decent Cubans to where Cubans will see American attitudes - and, let's be blunt, our bluntness - as our way of being open and honest with ourselves and with others.

And that's just the tourism bit.  One of the big benefits of ending the hostility will be the chance of families - the Cuban exile community - divided by decades of political bullheadedness having a chance to go home in peace, or at least visit regularly and rebuild lost legacies.

Again, a lot of this is going to have to involve delicate dealings with a lot of egos on both sides to soothe: the pro-Castro regime is not going to like any demands from the anti-Castro exiles and vice versa.  The sticking point will be settling reparations or restorations of properties/businesses from the 1960s.  The anti-Castro groups will most likely insist on criminal charges for human rights violations as well (as anyone fighting over the U.S. torture regime and our failure to indict any of those criminals will attest, it's a messy argument).

Thing is, let's face facts: the Cold War is over.  We won.  Yay capitalism.  Our ongoing hostility towards Cuba was really going nowhere in terms of our international standing.  Out of sheer spite - out of America's paternalistic political world-view of North America as our personal playground - we've been perpetuating an economic lockdown of a nation that could prove a solid trading ally and a force for regional good instead of evil.

It's been eleven Presidnets - Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Lesser, Obama - since those sanctions were placed.  Ever since Bush the Elder's tenure, when the Soviet Union fell and Cuba lost its protector, we should have been making this effort to normalize relations and use peace to end the Castro regimes.

At least Obama is making the effort now.  While the Republicans and the Far Right (among them the exile hard-liners) will scream bloody murder about this, nearly every other player involved - our allies, local nations, a majority of Americans a lot of whom weren't even alive when the Cold War ended - will see this as a good thing.

via Huffington Post

And with luck, Disney will be smart enough to keep the 1950s Art Deco retro look when they turn all of Havana into an Epcot Center.

(caveat: I am writing this from Florida.  Any Floridian will tell you: Do Not F-CK with Disney.  They're like Hyman Roth, only with better PR.  If they wanna turn all of Havana into an Epcot, nothing's gonna stop them)

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Can The Elephant Ever Thread The Eye of the Needle?

(Update: The GOP House is attempting to get something resolved, but it's doubtful the bill - something that would nuke DACA with extreme prejudice -would survive its trip to the Senate, let alone getting to Obama's Oval Office where it'll get vetoed.)
I've mentioned before how this Republican-led House in the U.S. Congress may be one of the most incompetent ever, but today's failure to even get a vote out on an emergency border bill takes the prize (via Washington Monthly):

Despite some nativist tweaks aimed at getting conservatives on board, the House GOP leadership (operating for the first time with Kevin McCarthy instead of Eric Cantor holding the whip) had to pull its much trumpeted border bill this afternoon, apparently abandoning the whole effort while Members head off on their long August recess...

This article quickly links to Talking Points Memo for more:

...Immigration-weary conservatives said the $659 million supplemental, and the subsequent measure to end the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, didn't go far enough in rebuking the president's actions.

It was a remarkable defeat for the new GOP leadership team on the day that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) stepped down as majority leader.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) announced the decision in a joint statement with his new leadership team, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)...

Why the hair-pulling?

Because of three things of direct concern: 1) there is a major crisis at the moment with an influx of children immigrants flooding across the US-Mexico border, a lot of them fleeing an increase in violence and corruption in places like Honduras and Guatemala, 2) the prolonged failure by Republican Party leadership to address any form of immigration reform was starting to show, and 3) the Republicans were poised to use this bill to force draconian cuts to Obama's planned efforts of immigration reform (he had asked for 3.7 billion in comprehensive funding to which the House slashed it down to barely 659 million for border security only, and the Far Right in the House were aiming to slash at other programs like DACA), positioning themselves to look good to their base while making Obama choke on the sh-t sandwich they were going to serve him.  Now they can't even serve him a sh-t sandwich (even with them trying to blame this all on Obama anyway).

Another problem?  The one thing this House did vote for this final week was a resolution granting Speaker Boehner the power to file a lawsuit against Obama's "unlawful" abuse of Executive Orders.  Like I said before, more a political stunt to appease their base, but now this lawsuit creates a paradox.  Because House Republicans can't pass the legislation needed to get things done, they're forcing Obama into the position of issuing Executive Orders to cover the gaps that failure of legislating is creating.  Per the Washington Post:

...When Obama takes some kind of executive action to address the broader immigration problem, Republican complaints that he’s being tyrannical will be undermined by the GOP’s abysmal failure to offer an alternative. If they had passed a border bill he vetoed, or one that died in the Senate, they could claim they tried to solve the problem. But now all they’ve got to show for the end of the session is a lawsuit — one that will probably offer their own right wing nothing but frustration and disappointment, and will validate everything Obama is saying about them.

This is the best that the Republicans in the House could do this summer?

Some of the other things worth mentioning: we were promised an exclusive special committee getting into the bottom of Benghazi, yet I can't recall a single news report about them since May (turns out they're scheduled to hold hearings this September); Congress has been having problems funding bills for our nation's transportation infrastructure; the only thing that this Congress seems able to pass is a major reform and funding package for the Veterans Affairs department that was facing serious breakdowns in service and management... and that's pretty much because the failures at the VA were so great and so prolonged that both parties had to respond quickly to fix it.

We're discussing one of the least productive Congressional sessions in recent memory (barely doing any better than the previous one of 2011-13, which wasn't all that busy anyway).  Like it or not, we as a nation need a functioning Congress to uphold the legislative duties that keep our government working.  When it doesn't work, very little else can...

There is a possibility that the House will delay their planned August recess - for a few days at least - in order to pass something of a border security bill, and avoid the outright embarrassment of heading off to their fundraiser parties at country clubs.  But given the dysfunction of this party - their obsession to embarrass Obama at all hazards, their failure to keep their more extremist factions in check - I doubt the House Republicans will get anything done before they blame their failures on Obama and move on.

This is not a political party geared towards passing any decent legislation.

Reason #4793178 you shouldn't vote Republican.

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Executive's Order, Speaker's Chaos

I had about five other things I wanted to write about - after long weeks of having little to discuss that could be resolved in a simple, "what the hell?" retort - but I spotted this halfway through the day and felt compelled to lead off with this.

Speaker John Boehner is seriously reviewing his options on pursuing a lawsuit against Barack Obama's use of Executive Orders.  To wit (via the Washington Post):

Reports today indicate that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is planning a lawsuit over Barack Obama's use of executive orders. These orders have long been a focal point of right-wing anger, particularly since January of this year when Obama announced he'd be using more of them to bypass a gridlocked and dysfunctional Congress.

After the immediate round of laughing my ass off, I had to consider the actual seriousness of what Boehner's hoping to accomplish.

With regards to EOs (abbrev. Executive Order, natch), there has been a long history of Presidents issuing such things ever since the first one under the Constitution, George Washington himself.  The argument for them stems from the interpretation of Article II, Section 1 Clause 1 that grants Presidents the power to "faithfully execute the laws": in order to execute - or perform duties - under such laws the President has to establish the who, how, where and when those laws have to be enforced (the "why" of the laws fall under judicial review set by the Supreme Court).  The only noticeable time Executive Orders were even considered by SCOTUS, it was when they overturned an EO issued by Truman because it "attempted to make law" rather than enforce one.

Ever since that, Presidents made the effort to relate their EOs to congressional laws.  Legal scholars, however, still consider Executive Orders in a kind of gray zone where their actual constitutionality might or might not exist.  It's in the gray zone that Boehner wants to attack Obama's efforts to use EOs this year to work around GOP Congressional obstruction.

Thing is, Boehner's case is weak to begin with.  Obama's case history of issuing EOs demonstrate he's not the great offender Boehner and the Far Right make him out to be:

That Post chart tells the facts: compared to modern Presidents, Obama's issued the fewest EOs in decades.  For the most part of the 19th Century, you'll note the lack of executive activity... up until Teddy Roosevelt, that bundle of energy who defined the modern Presidency with his progressive activism.  It calmed down by the time of Eisenhower, and even then the EO average hadn't been reached since the days of Jimmy Carter.

And while the modern conservative wingnut faction of the GOP are screaming about Obama's "overreach", his 175 (as of March 2014) EO count in six years comes nowhere near sainted Ronald Reagan's 381 total (Obama would have to double his EO count in the next two years to even come close).

Despite what Boehner claims, this whole thing smells of setting up for cause to impeach.  They couldn't impeach over the birth certificate, they couldn't impeach over Solyndra, they couldn't impeach over ObamaCare, and the Far Right are finding out they don't have much to impeach with over Benghazi, the IRS SuperPAC investigation, Benghazi, the prisoner exchange for the sole POW we had in Afghanistan, Benghazi, Obama's method of shoelace tying, and BENGHAZI.

So they're going after Executive Orders.  The plan looks to be simple:

1) Get the courts to establish that Executive Orders in general are not allowed under the Constitution: that it's executive law-making, conflicting with the Legislative power to make laws.
2) Argue that considering Obama used EOs throughout his tenure, he was committing impeachable acts all along.
3) IMPEACH.

Which brings up the unpleasant reality that EVERY President - save William Henry Harrison (I died in 30 days!) - would have to be retroactively impeached.  Not to mention the fact that any future President coming out of the Republican ranks (if that ever happens again, considering how f-cked the party's becoming at the national level) is suddenly going to have no executive power of his/her own to wield if Boehner and the Far Right succeed at this.

This obsession with stopping Obama at all costs is both ridiculous and dangerous.  Ridiculous in that the GOP's efforts are going against decades if not centuries of effective government traditions.  Dangerous in that if any of these efforts succeed we could see the end of the system of checks and balances that made our federal republic work all those centuries.

The courts already established clear limits on EOs: banning them outright can restrict a President's ability to enact any law not without instructions spelled out by Congress to the letter.  And considering how some laws may conflict with others, it'd end up to the courts clearing that chaos which could take years to resolve, which a smartly-worded EO would otherwise straighten out.  We've been doing this for decades, as history shows us: even during the questionable periods of civil war and world wars, overall this system worked.

Now, just to deny Obama anything, Boehner and his congressional allies want to wipe that all out.

"This is about faithfully executing the laws of our country," says Boehner.

Problem with that, Mr. Boehner, when you were asked which laws weren't being executed, you couldn't provide a single example.

If you were serious about this, Mr. Boehner, you'd have a violation on hand, you'd have an excuse, before coming to the cameras to make your threat known.

The Speaker of the House is inviting chaos into our system of checks and balances.  This is what we've come to.

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Trying to Rank Scandals, Phase Four: When It's More About Humiliation Than About Justice...

It's been awhile since I've written about scandals - and how we need to form an unbiased effective means of determining which scandals need investigating and which deserve to get ignored - but an update with one of the events talked about - the GOP obsession with Benghazi - has taken place:

It is by sheer coincidence that just as Obamacare recedes as an issue, House GOP leaders have announced their intent to create a Select Committee on Benghazi—something they've long resisted—and that Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, perhaps overcome by zeal to maintain control over the issue, subpoenas Secretary of State John Kerry to testify about the 2012 attack—despite the fact that Kerry was a senator at the time, and hasn't been invited to testify, and is currently visiting Sudan.

The pretext for all this is the release of an email from White House adviser Ben Rhodes, which includes as a bullet point the goal that in speaking about the attack, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice should "reinforce the President and Administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges."

Slate's Dave Weigel did a great job earlier this week of placing the email in chronological context, to discredit the argument that the email represents evidence of a "cover-up." And while it might appear a bit unseemly for administration officials to be concerning themselves with the president's image and the administration's competence in the midst a crisis… this is actually completely uncontroversial. Would John Boehner and Darrell Issa have preferred it if Susan Rice went on TV that week and granted that the administration was in complete disarray? Or had refused to take a position on the administration's handling of the situation?...

The early responses from the left side of the aisle has been "Oh great, they're finally going there" alongside analysis that the Republicans are desperate to re-stage another round of Benghazi investigations because their 2014 Midterms talking point of "ObamaCare is broken and must be repealed" is falling apart as enough voters don't believe it's broken and are seeing enough benefits out of it.

But it's problematic to just dismiss the Republican obsession with Benghazi off-hand.

The reason the Republicans keep jumping on Benghazi is because it is a legitimate tragedy: four people died due to errors in security.  This isn't like the Far Right harping on Obama's birth certificate, or mocking whether or not Obama uses a teleprompter, or whether Obama ties his shoelaces in a proper American fashion.  This isn't even the matter where an IRS office in Ohio investigated Tea Party SuperPACs (the other big scandal the wingnuts obsess over, but which is meaningless because the IRS office investigated a lot of other SuperPAC 501s as well).  Benghazi is a real problem because people died.

But the Republicans have to realize they're pushing a scandal well out-of-proportion to the facts, and pushing it in such a way that all other outside observers will view it as insanity.  The Republicans seem to focus on how the Obama White House was handling the "messaging" in the wake of the attack, as though that was a cover-up worth having (or that the messaging would reveal malign intent of some kind).  The GOP House is looking into the standard back-and-forth of interoffice communications rather than focus on the real scandal: how the security systems for our overseas consulates broke down (and what can be done to re-enforce that security).

But I doubt the Republicans will want to dig too deep into the real scandal of Benghazi: that's the problem behind the GOP's All-Benghazi mission.  The Republicans' objective isn't to fix the problems: the Republicans' objective is to make Obama look like a failed President (and the Democrats all look like librul un-American incompetents).  At all costs.

The other reason the GOP is hitting hard on Benghazi is that it's also a way to attack the supposed front-runner for the Democratic Presidential primaries for 2016.  As Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton is someone the Republicans want to have held accountable: they want to drop the four dead State employees around her neck like a millstone.  The Republicans want to turn this tragedy into another Chappaquiddick, another Willie Horton.

It's as TBogg writes over on Raw Story: Benghazi is all they got (remember Solyandra?  Remember the Birth Certificate?  Remember Rev. Wright's radical Christianity and Obama Still being a Secret Muslim on the side?  Remember Death Panels?  Remember a failed website rollout?  Remember nationalizing the auto industry?  Remember how Obama ties his shoes, even when he wears loafers?).   Just like pursuing Bill Clinton over Whitewater and Vince Foster led to getting impeached over blowjobs: the Republicans do not care about the facts or about justice, they only care about purging anybody who stands in their way of achieving their "permanent majority rule" of their 100-year Pax Reaganicus.

Someone tweeted or blogged a quip that ended up in the recent Balloon Juice take on the Benghazi obsession: Who could’ve predicted that when the GOP establishment handed Nixon the pearl handled revolver in the parlor, we would have to impeach every Democratic President for the next forty years to balance things out? It seems that way, doesn't it?  I mean, granted they never impeached Carter, but that's because Democrats controlled Congress his term of office (and Carter still angered Congress enough to hover on the edge of impeachment).  It's been noted before how it's gotten to where it's expected for the Republicans to impeach a Democratic President because they can't handle the idea of a Democrat sitting in the Oval Office... the current GOP can't seem to handle the idea of honest bipartisanship... the Far Right can't accept the possibility of making political deals and compromises of any kind, and there's no moderate faction (hello, RINO purity purge) to make those deals anymore...

So we get this: a partisan response to investigating a scandal.  What happened in Benghazi does deserve investigation... but not as a political attack aimed to humiliate Obama or Hillary.  That way lies madness, and a refusal to make things work in government while the powers-that-be pursue a bullsh-t political agenda.

This is not how we should fix the nation's woes.

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Presidential Character: Week Forty-Four, the Long Game of Barack Obama

Or, as Andrew Sullivan is fond of paraphrasing it: Meep Meep.

It's difficult, but not impossible, to speak on a sitting President's political Character. Professor James David Barber did it himself during the Nixon administration, predicting the collapse of Nixon's second term mere weeks before the Watergate break-in.  Barber was subsequently asked to predict the following Presidencies before they took office, and reviewed them accordingly.  It helps, mind you, to have the distance of time to look back with less biased views - I'm one of the amateur historians who'll argue that RANKING a current President should have to wait 20 years before you can see how bad the damage was - but when you're doing the full roster for evaluation you might as well evaluate.

I also have to make it clear - if it hasn't been noticed yet - that I have a positive bias for Barack Obama ever since he showed up on the primaries circuit for the 2008 election.  Granted, I compared him to Jed Bartlett (quoting the origin myth of Mrs. Landingham telling the teen Bartlett he was a "boy king" destined for great things), but that wasn't meant to be a full slight: I was noting how Obama fit the profile of the idealized Democratic left-wing leader, youthful and energetic and forward-looking, in the style of Kennedy (and to a lesser extent Clinton) in terms of motivation and demeanor.  If it was a negative comparison it was referring to his lack of national credentials to serve as President.

Obama also appeared on the scene as an innovation: a political figure of African-American heritage actually running on the issues rather than his race.  Unlike Jesse Jackson, the last major black candidate for the White House, Obama had electoral (and legislative) experience.  The only previous candidate I could compare him to in this regard was Shirley Chisholm who ran back in 1972, but that was honestly a hopeless attempt (just coming out of the Sixties when a lot of animosity over civil rights remained: Chisholm survived three assassination attempts, that was how seriously bad it was).  By 2008, the nation was honestly ready for Obama to run - and for Obama to win - the Presidency.

I should amend that.  By 2008 (and 2012), most of the nation was honestly ready for Obama to run and win the Presidency.

I thought during the Nineties that the hostility the Republicans had towards Bill Clinton was over-the-top (the obsessiveness of the likes of Limbaugh and Sciafe, for example).  That it was partisan political positioning - to make the sitting President representing the other party look a failure to voters and to history - at its worst.  But that was nothing compared to the open hatred I see anymore from the Far Right and the modern GOP party as a whole when it comes to Obama.

We had a Republican Party from Day One of Obama's tenure push a program to ensure he failed, completely, even at the cost of competent governance and legislation.  Before 2012 it was to make sure Obama was a One-Termer: after 2012, when that didn't work, it's to make sure Obama never gets anywhere near the Top Twenty rankings (where a lot of Two-Termers save the really bad ones  cough Grant and Bush cough end up).

Never mind the possibilities that the Republicans could have maintained some semblance of respect with a Beltway media market that prizes "bipartisanship" above all else.  Or at least provide more input into political agendas with an Obama administration that keeps approaching the GOP for deals primarily because the nations expects sensible leaders to do that.

It's a pity of the Republican hard-liners that they've gotten to the point where any compromise is viewed as a surrender, where any deal is viewed as a defeat.  A saner political opposition would be taking advantage of the fact that Obama is an Active-Positive President, which means that compromises and deal-making would be the norm with Obama rather than a hard ideological stance.  The GOP keeps seeing Obama through a biased lens of "Kenyan Socialist Fascist Usurper Who's Lazy and Needs Teleprompters" (oh yeah, not racist at all /headdesk) when they should have been - and should be - seeing Obama as a pragmatic centrist whose liberal leanings are nowhere near where the Far Left ever hopes them to be.

Rather than pursue straight-up Far Left policies, Obama has publicly encouraged and endorsed more centrist positions on the budget, on the economic recovery from the 2007-08 Recession, and on foreign policy issues.  Rather than accept that, the Far Right in control of the Republicans focus instead on the aspects of Obama's positions they deem "liberal" and "un-American": such as Obama's insisting on balancing a budget with tax increases on upper incomes (which a majority of Americans support), his "taking over of the automotive industry" (which was finally sold back this year after a successful industry-wide recovery), and attacking Obama on every foreign policy move - from Libya to Egypt to Syria to Iran - even when he changes gears and even when he produces results that A) prevent Americans from getting embroiled in another ground war and B) maintains respect with both our allies and our rivals.

Highlighting all this has been Obamacare, the signature law of Obama's administration that was designed to fix a broken health care system in the United States.  Even as the Far Right attack it as a "socialist" "failed" program, they refuse to recognize the facts that the law A) is based more on market control of managing health care costs, B) based on REPUBLICAN policy ideas designed to counter Bill Clinton's complex and ill-fated 1993 attempt, and C) nowhere near the truly socialist "universal healthcare" programs that are pretty much used IN EVERY OTHER INDUSTRIALIZED CAPITALIST NATION ON THE PLANET.  There's still a sizable number of leftists out there complaining we should be going to a "Medicare For All" system, fer crissakes...

Indeed, the reason why Obama went with backing the Heritage Foundation's 1993 system of healthcare reform was based on the belief that it was a "centrist" position to take.  Translation: a "centrist" legislative bill is meant to curry support down the middle of both parties for the ones leaning right in the Democrats and those leaning left in the Republicans.  Obama wanted a bill that could pass support from both parties.  Pity was, by this point the Republicans didn't want to support anything that Obama would support. As John Cole notes in his epic one paragraph:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

But in some twisted way, a lot of this plays to Obama's advantages - and strengths.  Because while A-P Presidents tend to be Adaptive, they also tend to be very competitive game-players (SEE Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt) who relish challenges and better still view such challenges as a long-term, long-developing program.  And the game we're talking here is 3-Dimensional Chess (it helps that Obama is an open Geek.  Want more proof?  The top photo of this Wired article is of Obama wielding a lightsaber...).

Andrew Sullivan started off calling it "the long game," where Obama takes a practical, comprehensive view of the political landscape.  Other commentators refer to the chess-master strategy of playing the whole board, looking not only at the move made now but the moves needed to be made over the next five, ten, twenty moves.

A perfect example of that was Obama's stance on marriage equality for gays.  A major issue for the liberals who championed it, Obama for the most part kept a low profile on the issue and even issuing arguments against it, while the polls showed a slim (but shrinking) majority opposed to marriage equality.  When his Vice President Biden made a public speech claiming the White House would support gay marriage, the Far Right howled in eager response, thinking at last they could hit Obama for being too liberal (and un-Christian to boot).  Obama, however, gazed upon the landscape and saw two things: A) that supporting gay marriage at that moment would galvanize Democratic fund-raising, and B) the advantages of a Presidency's bully pulpit - used brilliantly by other A-Ps like both Roosevelts - meant he could tip the scales to make the nation more supportive of gay rights as well.  Obama came out in support of gay marriage, the nation visibly turned pro-gay (what I prefer to call pro-people), and the Far Right were left standing there going "WTF?"

It even caught Sullivan - who was already viewing Obama as a chessmaster - completely off-guard.  But later on, Sully started calling it something else.  "Meep Meep."

This is in reference to the Road Runner/Wil E. Coyote cartoons where an always moving, always faster road runner keeps running circles around an increasingly frustrated coyote who keeps self-inflicting the worst catastrophes on himself trying to catch/eat the road runner.  It became a near-perfect metaphor for how Obama was getting the modern Republicans to consistently self-destruct chasing after their illusory "Fake Obama" - think Clint Eastwood chiding an empty chair meant to represent Obama but in fact made a lot of commentators laugh their asses off - while he set policy goals in the real world.

Sullivan always seems to be constantly surprised by Obama's game-changing tactics, to which I emailed him about why he needs to read Barber's Presidential Character book to get a better idea about Obama's Active-Positive adaptability.  It was a bit of a thrill to see him post the email, to which I can only hope he's finding the time to read that book.  But my key point remains:

Adaptive A-P Presidents are more keen on compromise than the other three types (Active-Negatives won’t, Passive-Negatives might but would rather let someone else do it, Passive-Positives never want to rock any boat), and are certainly more creative in their solutions and in seeking alternate solutions as well. While the Active-Positive may look like a flip-flopper (especially to the more extremist wing of the president’s party) he’s actually shrewdly calculating the “long game” of getting his enemies to trip over themselves and his allies standing there gawking like they've never seen the Hand of God before.

The only problem with Obama's A-P habits has been the "long game" approach preventing a more proactive, let's-do-something-now approach to policy that would allow him to juggle multiple policy agendas more aggressively.  Some A-P Presidents are able to pursue a variety of issues and reforms and objectives all at once: others are hampered either by a desire to complete one project before starting another, or else hampered by external forces that make it difficult to diversify the administration's focus on multiple needs/wants.

I have to think it's the latter problem that kept Obama from focusing on too many other issues.  Most other Active-Positives able to pursue a broad range of policies - Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, in some respects Kennedy, and I think Fillmore was able as well - did so with political support from a Congress either held by the same party or else amenable to bipartisan deals.  The A-Ps unable to pursue more ambitious agendas - Hayes, Truman, Clinton, Obama - were/are dealing with recalcitrant legislatures that preferred conflict over deals.

It's been a Far Right Congress - first with a Senate bogged down by Cloture rules, then by a GOP-led House - that has prevented Obama from pursuing any stronger, more jobs-oriented stimulus packages to cope with the recession.  It's been a fight - even among Republicans themselves as the party recognizes the need but doesn't have the will - to even get any immigration reform considered by Congress.

In some respects Obama can't pursue a more aggressive agenda that an Active-Positive would like because the political landscape doesn't favor it.  While this kind of gridlock can sometimes help put the brakes on an over-ambitious A-P, there hasn't been any real sign that Obama is that ambitious - to hell with the haters, Obama's not a gun-taking, commie-loving, radical religious nut looking to impose sharia law - and so it's been a long, long administration this nation's been working with.

It's a good thing Obama's good at the long game.  Here's hoping he's got moves for 2014 to break the gridlock, and get some damn economic recovery reforms in place so we can get America back to Good Jobs At Good Wages, dammit.

Meep meep.

Next Up: A Review Of The Reviews.  We Tally Up the Numbers and See What's What.

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The Cooper Union Speech Shows Us the War Is Not Really Over

(NOTE: Had to edit for an accidental grammar error)
As the Shutdown Showdown of 2013 continues unabated - and in fact may get worse - more and more critics of the modern GOP's hardline stance find themselves referring to Abraham Lincoln and the Cooper Union speech he gave before the November 1860 elections (before he even won the nomination for the Republican Party of that age).

Here's a link to the Cooper Union speech as provided by the National Parks Service:

Oops.

Here's another link that might still be up.  Most of the first half of the speech is Lincoln setting up his lawyer's argument about how the Constitution came to be, how the Founders themselves spelled out their opposition to slavery's extension, and how the Republicans of 1860 were adhering to that argument - stopping slavery's spread not slavery itself - against the wild accusations and demands of the Southern Democrats.  The Southern states even by that date were threatening open secession unless they got their way.  Lincoln eventually gets to the meat of the speech to argue against that, the part of the speech everyone's quoting:

But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

If the arguments, nay demands, of the 1860 Southern Democrats sound a lot like the rhetoric of the 2013 House Republicans and their Far Right spokespeople in the media, don't be surprised.  A lot of this has to do with the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party under Nixon back in the 1970s.

The South as a voting bloc had been virulently pro-slavery since the 1820s (perhaps even earlier), and when slavery bit the dust post-Civil War and post-13th Amendment the South went virulently anti-Black.  That region of the nation was basically allowed to act that way for roughly 100 years because the North got tired of trying to fix that shit and collectively gave up.  The only reason the United States took the Civil Rights efforts of Black Americans seriously by the 1960s was because of public relations: as a global power pushing for liberty against the wave of Soviet oppression, it was hypocritical of us to deny our own citizens their own freedom and rights under the law.

As the Democratic coalition fractured by 1968 with the Dixiecrats falling in power within their own ranks, the Republicans behind Goldwater and Nixon took notice and realized the South as a voting bloc was surprisingly tight (and growing as business markets shifted southward into Texas and Florida) and could be merged to the economic and religious conservatism of the GOP.  By the time of Reagan in 1980, he was able to put together a cultural/economic/religious voting bloc that led to a dynamic pro-Republican shift in the electoral system.

But now we're seeing the problem of going with the Southern Strategy.  By allowing a platform for the basically racist elements of the southern conservatives, the Republicans unwittingly (or even worse, willingly) allowed that strain of hate to spread to the other conservative elements of the party.  Why we're seeing Republicans from non-Southern places like Iowa and Ohio and California railing against social welfare services like food stamps is from the underlying belief that the primary recipients of social aid are Blacks and other minorities.

Joan Walsh in her Salon article:

Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they've been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for Birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats – machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power...

Obama's brought all this hatred out in a big way.  Part of the open hatred the GOP and the Far Right have towards Obama is that he's a Democrat interrupting the Glorious Pax Reaganicus Era of tax cuts, deregulation, and Commie-bashing (even though tax cuts didn't work, deregulation is why we're in our current mess, and Commie-bashing went out when Communism did).  But a lot of that hate is because of who Obama is as a person: they flat out can't accept him as an American at all, which is where the Birther obsession and the Kenyan Socialist obsession and Secret Muslim bomb-thrower obsession all come from.  That's not because he's a Democrat: Clinton never got this level of outrage, at worst he was a philandering pot-smoking hippie to them.

But racism is only part of the problem here.  The Southern Conservative mindset is obsessed with "their" rights above the rights of everyone else.  To them, they've got a right to abide their own laws, they've got a right to ignore laws they don't like.  The old strain of Nullification, the belief in State Rights that under the 10th Amendment they can do anything at the state level and to hell with anything federal law or Supreme Court interpretations of federalism - say, the court's approval of the Health Care Reform law (aka Obamacare) - have to say about it.

The Southern Conservative - the template of the modern Far Right wingnut - has no true love for the Federal Government, especially not a Federal government that insists on civil rights or regulatory practices.  The Republican outrage towards a 14th Amendment that both applies due process to all states and recognizes equal citizenship to all Americans is as much a target of their anger as Obama himself.

And all that anger, all that frustration has led them to this shore.  To a point where they don't mind - hell, they WANT to do this - shutting down the federal government the Far Right wingnuts view as The Enemy.

The Civil War is not over.  Not as long as there are wingnuts out there convinced of their radicalism - as Sully notes, this hasn't been true conservatism in ages - against the very concept of a United States of America.  No matter how much they try to wrap themselves up in the Stars And Stripes, they've made it abundantly clear they are the banner carriers of the Stars And Bars.  The Far Right Wingnuts want to Nullify laws they don't like.  They want to punish - if not banish - political leaders they don't like.

The Far Right Wingnuts want to rule or ruin.  We've seen them rule and it wasn't pretty.  Now they want to ruin.  At all costs.  And the way the situation is now, they're ruining us no matter what the rest of the nation wants.

For the LOVE OF GOD, stop voting Republican.

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How To Cut a Gordian Knot

Ever hear of Lateral Thinking?  It's a problem-solving method of using non-conventional or unorthodox means to solve an otherwise intractable problem.  Where logic fails, you apply some illogical method that most people wouldn't see coming.

An example would be the legend of Alexander the Great confronting the problem of the Gordian Knot.  Where most everyone else tried to physically untie the knot, Alexander cut it with his sword.  It may seem like cheating, but it wasn't against the rules.  It symbolized how Alexander would conquer Persia/Middle East with the sword.

A modern-day Gordian Knot is the whole Middle East itself: war-ravaged, divided, tribalistic... if there's been a solution to stopping the ongoing violence that has plagued the region since, well, ever, no one's found it yet.

Part of the problem is that each region has its own internal issues that forces external politics to react disproportionately... and reverberates against every other problematic nation within shouting (or shooting) distance.  You've got 20 Gordian Knots adding up to one big Knot... and there's not a big enough sword to cut them all, not all at once.

For the United States, tied into the Middle East due to our alliances to various nations in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya) - and our opposition to other nations such as Iran and Syria - we're coping with the disastrous civil war in Syria by trying to enforce the unenforceable.  Syria is one of the nations with a sizable chemical weapons stockpile, and there's been recent usage of chemical weapons that's killing/wounding hundreds of civilians caught in the cross-fire of the civil war.  Obama tried earlier to push a "red line" stance on the use of chemicals... but now that they've been used, Obama's finding himself in almost no position to enforce it.

The standard response to what's happened in Syria is a "surgical" or tactical strike against key Syrian government targets, usually buildings that we plan to have as few people in them as possible when the missiles/bombs hit.  However, this most likely won't discourage Assad or his allies: it may actually make them react in the worst way.

Troubling Obama is the fact that this time the United States doesn't have many allies lining up to back any such strike.  The British Parliament voted against it.  NATO (outside of France, who will only provide political cover and not much else) is reportedly not in favor either.  There hasn't been an attempt to take this to the UN for a resolution, since the odds are Russia (Syria's biggest ally) and China will not play along.  It's gotten to where the only way Obama can get any political cover for striking Syria is by taking this to Congress to get a vote on a "limited military action", which he's kinda supposed to do under the War Powers Act but is something most Presidents haven't done in what seems like ages (or at least since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991).

Worst of all: most Americans do not want to get involved in Syria.  And it's not just the Far Right population opposing Obama's stance on Syria simply on principle (of hating Obama).  And even in the face of the growing humanitarian disaster that is the refugee crisis.  We've been burned out by 10-plus years of unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Getting lied to by Cheney and Bush the Lesser about Saddam's WMDs is affecting the national mood.  If Congress votes No on Syria - and after my earlier contention that Congress might go along, there's signs now that the Far Right might not give Obama this - Obama will have no political cover to push for a strike.  He could still order it - the War Powers has yet to be constitutionally upheld, and it's in a grey area at best - but Obama would be held responsible on both the national and international stage for ignoring the people he's supposed to represent... and would be violating national laws he's supposed to uphold.

This is where Obama would be looking for a third option... an alternative solution to cut the Gordian Knot he's just tied himself into.

Who would have thought it would be diplomacy and NOT the sword that might actually solve the problem?

Secretary of State Kerry seemingly threw out there during a meeting with the UK Foreign Office the possibility that if Russia could talk Syria into giving up control of their chemical weapon stockpiles to international observers (UN most likely), it might resolve the issue and make a military strike moot.

When the State Department tried to talk back Kerry's statements, making it look like an off-the-record "gaffe" (wink wink), Russia's Foreign Minister quickly responded with favorable language, and Syria's foreign minister joined in.  This is kinda how Hollywood works when movie blockbusters have to be ironed out between supersized egos, I've been told.

If it turns into something that can get worked out between the key parties, the whole matter of chemical warfare - one of the Big No-Nos of fighting - could be taken out of the equation.

It won't resolve the civil war itself: Assad is fighting for his life, with his minority ethnic clan struggling alongside him, against a nationwide uprising against his family's brutal decades-long rule.  It will, however, get Obama and the United States out of a nasty political nightmare and give the major powers involved - Russia, US, France, Britain, Turkey and Iran - some room to maneuver regarding the Syrian disaster.

And who knows?  This diplomacy thing might catch on across the rest of the Middle East.  Trick is, of course, to make sure the goddamn killing stops first...

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When Politics Fails There's Always Impeachment

The summer recess that Congress takes is ostensibly done to allow the Congresspersons to head back to their districts and host Town Halls in order to shill their agenda and let the local voters vent on the issues of the day.  Venting also means a lot of crazy talk gets thrown out there for public consumption.  It gives the nation a chance to see which direction Teh Crazy wants to go.

The talk this summer has been split between how EVIL OBAMACARE IS (even though its' current implementation is winning people over), and how soon Congress will vote to impeach Obama out of office:

...And Republican politicians … well, their strategy (as Joan Walsh details in a nice item summing up these episodes) is all over the place. So we have Ted Cruz calling it a “good question” but noting that there just aren’t the votes in the Senate to convict; one member of the House saying that the votes are there in the House, but not in the Senate; another saying it would be a “dream come true” but that they just needed the “evidence”; and Sen. Tom Coburn saying that Obama is “perilously close” to impeachment.

Well, the answers are all over the place in one sense, but in another they are all actually pretty similar: None of them dismissed the idea out of hand. None of them simply said that impeachment is an extreme remedy for only the most serious malfeasance in office, and as wrong as they believe Barack Obama has been on matters of public policy, and as bad a president as they believe he has been, there’s absolutely nothing out there remotely in the neighborhood of an impeachable offense.

That’s what any responsible elected official would do...

I'd been wondering, since the 2010 midterms, when the Republicans would just jump straight into "Impeach Obama" Mode.  I honestly thought for awhile there they wouldn't even wait for an excuse and just go straight to the vague accusation of "high crimes": I keep saying, half in jest, that they'd impeach over how Obama ties his shoelaces.  So I ended up being wrong about how eager the Republicans were to use impeachment: in hindsight it made more sense for them to stick to obstructing government as it cost them less politically, and it meant they didn't have to work twice as hard (since impeaching means that, you know, they had to show up and do stuff when they'd rather be off yachting or golfing or both).

However, the talk has popped back up again.  Partly because of the faux controversies that Congress tried to stir up over Benghazi (a disaster that turned out to do more with Congress' refusal to fund adequate embassy security) or the IRS investigating Tea Party groups (it turned out to be internal overreach caused by confusing tax code distinctions between non-profits and PACs that investigated a lot of groups on both sides: worse, it also turned out members of Congress knew about it before Obama ever did).  Mostly because Obama's now a Second-Termer who won a solid majority for the second time and thus legitimate in the eyes of majority voters, in the face of constant reminders by the Far Right Noise Machine that Obama is a Secret Muslim Socialist Kenyan Racist Terrorist.  In short, the Far Right voters have been told enough times that Obama is illegitimate: now they want Congress to do something about it.

...But the second thing all these answers appear to have in common is actually even more astonishing and irresponsible: None of these politicians seem to feel any need to actually discuss the grounds for impeachment. At best there’s some hand-waving around the minor scandals of the last year, but for the most part it’s just assumed that impeachment is what Republicans normally do to Democratic presidents, just because.

The conclusions? Bill Clinton wasn’t impeached over sex (what Democrats believe) or over perjury (what Republicans claim); he was impeached because he was a Democrat in the White House. That’s enough...

...Part of the explanation: There are no core “conservative” ideas for these politicians to embrace, ideas that would allow them to successfully fight back against charges that they are squishes or “RINOs.” It’s not ideology; it’s partisanship...

So will we get an actual impeachment? On the one hand, it does seem that one positive lesson Republican congressional leaders did learn from the Newt Gingrich years is that a pointless impeachment without the votes to convict was a pretty bad idea. On the other hand, what Republicans also seemed to have learned from Newt is that impeachment is pretty much the normal punishment to administer to a president you don’t like much...

Impeachment is growing likelier, not because of anything Obama's done - and on some issues Obama's losing his base, such as the NRA warrantless wiretapping, but it's doubtful the Far Right will go after him on that as they like the idea of a surveillance state - but because the House Republicans have painted themselves into the corner on the issue.  They've spent so long working up their base into thinking Obama is this great evil that mere obstruction of policy or budgeting may no longer appease that base.  Some of the party leaders are already facing primary challenges from party members further to the Right than the leadership: in order to secure their Far Right bona fides they may well encourage or at least condone a lot of the nastier political scheming to bear fruition.

When Congress gets back, the House is expected to work on an immigration reform bill (most observers think it's dead, half because of the issue and half because there are more major issues to confront), and on a budget resolution to overcome the current sequester, and then most likely face another Debt Ceiling hike resolution.  On any of these points, the Republican Far Right are expected to hold a No-Compromises line, either against Obama's call for a tax hike on upper incomes (the top 5 percent), Obama's call for tax reform to close costly loopholes, and/or funding ObamaCare (the Far Right wants to kill it but since their 40 repeal votes never went anywhere, defunding it is their next worst solution).  Obama's not likely to budge on any of those counts either, especially on the "defund ObamaCare" part, so I'm half-expecting the House to vote for impeachment when those votes comes up and Obama and the Democrats turn the GOP down.

If any of the readers here have been tracking my year-long review of Presidential Character (based on James David Barber's work), you'd notice the few times impeachment ever came up as an issue.  Congress talked impeachment only rarely: in a case like John Tyler (when Tyler seemed to betray the Whig Party on a personal level); and in a case like Andrew Johnson (when party foolishness put a Democrat in the line of succession, leaving a Radical Republican Congress to reach for any excuse to purge him).  The impeachment process against Tyler went nowhere because the Whigs couldn't garner enough votes in the House: the impeachment against Johnson came one vote shy of success, which historians still argue was the closest we'd ever gotten to a political coup in our nation's history.  Both times, impeachment was used as a means to remove a President simply because of ideological conflict: neither one really broke the law (technically Johnson broke the Tenure of Office Act, but that law was specifically written against him, and the courts ruled it unconstitutional), they both were radically opposed to what Congress wanted.

This is the danger of impeachment: meant to be a tool to remove a powerful political figure that might otherwise be above the law, impeachment has rarely been used as such (only once).  It's gotten to where impeachment is not talked about as in the nation's best interests: it's in the interests of the radicals in charge of whichever party is in Congress in opposition of the sitting President.  It's worse when the radicals in charge are convinced there would be no political blow-back for what they do.  It's even worse when those same radicals - some of them still around from when they last tried this with Clinton - try the same damn trick near 12 years later.  It's like they totally forgot that SNL skit of ousted leaders Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston going "what the hell happened?"

As a secondary thought, it was surprising that the apparent issue of craziness - immigration reform - turned out to be a bit of a dud with the public.  The Far Right tried to host a few rallies here and there but a lot of them had a ton of no-shows.  While the Tea Partiers could raise a fuss over healthcare reform and tax reform, they couldn't get their base out to rail against The Other. It didn't help the GOP that the noisiest anti-immigrant voices like Rep. Steve King of Iowa jumped straight into some stupid racist comments that painted the Far Right's side in a bad light.  It may be that most of the GOP voters have an understanding of how complex, how human, the immigration debate can be...

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