“Stick A Fork In It, It’s Done”: When Even ‘Definitive’ Isn’t Enough For The House GOP
Towards the end of the House Intelligence Committee’s report on the 2012 attack in Benghazi, the document notes that the panel’s findings were the result of two years of “intensive investigation,” which included careful review of thousands of pages of materials, 20 events and hearings, and extensive interviews.
“The report,” the Republican-led Committee concluded, “is therefore meant to serve as the definitive House statement on the Intelligence Community’s activities before, during and after the tragic events that caused the deaths of four brave Americans.”
And yet, even now, the House Republican leadership just doesn’t care.
House Speaker John A. Boehner announced Monday he will re-appoint Rep. Trey Gowdy as chairman of the Select Committee on the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya in the 114th Congress.
“On September 11, 2012, four Americans were killed in a brutal terrorist attack in Libya. Two years later, the American people still have far too many questions about what happened that night – and why,” Boehner said in a statement.
To date, Boehner, who didn’t want the Select Committee in the first place, has failed to identify even one of these questions that has not already been answered.
Several Senate Republicans don’t care, either.
Senate Republican leaders are under pressure from GOP lawmakers with presidential ambitions to join the House in investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), three young rising conservative stars who are weighing 2016 bids, say the Senate should participate in a joint investigation with the House.
This really is getting embarrassing.
As we talked about yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the State Department’s independent Accountability Review Board have all published reports on the 2012 attack, and each found the same thing: none of the conspiracy theories are true.
In addition, the attack has been scrutinized by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, each of which has held hearings, and each of which failed to find even a shred of evidence to bolster the conspiracy theorists.
Do Boehner and other Republicans believe their own allies are somehow in on the conspiracy? That GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate have somehow been co-opted into hiding imaginary evidence?
The “definitive” report, prepared by House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, makes it painfully obvious that this story has run its course. It’s over. Done. Stick a fork in it.
And yet, there’s the hapless House Speaker, pointing to questions he can’t identify, saying what the nation really needs is … another committee.
The irony is, the far-right went looking for a scandal, and in the process, they created one themselves. The political scandal isn’t the attack that left four Americans dead in Libya, it’s the ugly exploitation of the tragedy by mindless partisans looking for electoral and fundraising gimmicks, raising the prospect of important questions that have already been answered repeatedly.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 25, 2014
“Darren Wilson Saw ‘A Demon.’ What Do You See?”: Michael Brown Was A Very Human Being
“He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face.” That’s how police officer Darren Wilson described unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon.”
Wilson’s testimony convinced the grand jurors and others that the officer was justified in shooting and killing Brown last summer in Ferguson, Mo. Yes, the citizens did a tough job admirably when confronted with mountains of material. But could they also have been affected by research that says black boys as young as 10 are seen as older and guiltier than their white peers?
In an August column “So, black teens who aren’t angels deserve whatever they get?” I wrote, “The shelf life for innocence is short when you are a black male — and there is no room for error.” You don’t get the second chance others might have after an incident of teenage rebellion, such as mouthing off to an authority figure or a more serious scrape. See any number of car-overturning, fire-burning melees after a big sports victory or loss for proof of a double standard.
The answer to the question I posed then has consequences for all Americans because Ferguson, Mo., is about more than one shooting in one town in Middle America. Whatever anyone thinks of the grand jury’s findings, “it” was not a “demon.” Michael Brown was a very human being.
By: Mary C. Curtis, She The People, The Washington Post, November 25, 2014
“Lift Yourself Up”: Rand Paul Wants To Prevent Another Ferguson By Scolding The Poor
Rand Paul begins his Time op-ed about Ferguson with a good point: One concrete way politicians can lessen discrimination in the criminal justice system is by reforming policing practices and the war on drugs. “Michael Brown’s death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America,” the Kentucky senator writes. “The War on Drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation.”
But Paul’s meandering argument unravels from there. Going into full libertarian mode, he writes that “we all hold a certain degree of responsibility for our lives and it’s a mistake to simply blame others for our problems.” He says, unbelievably, that “no law” can possibly reform the criminal justice system. Then he points to the “link between poverty, lack of education, and children outside of marriage is staggering and cuts across all racial groups.”
It sounds a bit like another one of his rambling speeches. And then there’s this:
I have no intention to scold, but escaping the poverty and crime trap will require more than just criminal justice reform. Escaping the poverty trap will require all of us to relearn that not only are we our brother’s keeper, we are our own keeper. While a hand-up can be part of the plan, if the plan doesn’t include the self-discovery of education, work, and the self-esteem that comes with work, the cycle of poverty will continue.
Paul is essentially arguing that escaping poverty is not just a matter of criminal justice reform, but of character reform, too, on both the individual and community level. Of course, in scolding the poor, he also manages to scold government assistance. Lift yourself up, he’s saying, because the government can’t—and shouldn’t—do it for you.
Paul’s references to “lack of education” and single parenthood are the only nods toward the systemic socioeconomic issues that make it so hard to escape poverty. And character’s hardly the reason for it. For starters, it’s the lack of job training and opportunities, inner-city schools’ inability to attract top talent, and the struggle to put enough food on the table (the link between learning and nutrition is well documented). And guess who has the power and means to address many of these problems? The very government whose laws Paul has no faith in.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, November 25, 2014
“Re-Purposing The Grand Jury”: The St. Louis County Prosecutor Implicitly Conceded The Need For A Trial
Here is the irony of St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s announcement Monday night that a grand jury had declined to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown: The entire presentation implicitly conceded the need for a trial.
McCulloch was at pains to persuade the public that the grand jury had extensively weighed all the available evidence, and that it pointed to the conclusion that Wilson had not committed a crime. He talked about witnesses who changed their stories once they were presented with knowable facts that contradicted their original claims. He discussed the forensic evidence suggesting that Wilson’s initial shots against Brown occurred during a struggle in or near Wilson’s police cruiser, and that Wilson only began firing again after Brown, who’d initially fled, began moving toward him again. He talked about the lack of agreement over the position of Brown’s hands when Wilson fired the second, fatal barrage of shots.
So far as I know, McCulloch was under no obligation to discuss this evidence publicly. Nor was he under any obligation to release the evidence into the public domain following his remarks, as he repeatedly pledged to do. He presumably did these things to assure us that the decision not to prosecute Wilson was arrived at fairly and justly.
The problem with this is that we already have a forum for establishing the underlying facts of a case—and, no less important, for convincing the public that justice is being served in a particular case. It’s called a trial. It, rather than the post-grand jury press conference, is where lawyers typically introduce mounds of evidence to the public, litigate arguments extensively, and generally establish whether or not someone is guilty of a crime. By contrast, as others have pointed out, the point of a grand jury isn’t to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt what actually happened. It’s to determine whether there’s probable cause for an indictment, which requires a significantly lower standard of proof. That McCulloch appeared to turn the grand jury into an exercise in sorting out the former rather than the latter suggested he wanted no part of a trial.*
And, in fairness, it would have been extremely difficult to convict Wilson in a trial. But that’s a separate question from whether or not the verdict would be seen as legitimate after the fact. If McCullough was truly as concerned as he suggested tonight that the public accept the process that’s allowed Darren Wilson to walk away a free man, he had an obvious way to help ensure that this would happen. That he chose to avoid it demonstrates a rather appalling level of cynicism.
UPDATE: Some readers have argued that it would have been unethical for McCulloch to go to trial with a case he didn’t believe in. Two points in response: 1. Well, he went to the grand jury with a case he didn’t believe in, and it’s pretty unusual for that to happen, too. Clearly, the reason he did that was to make the process of letting Wilson off the hook look fair–again, not the typical purpose of grand juries, which are about establishing probable cause for an indictment. My point is that there’s a much better venue for establishing the fairness of the process (and for nailing down what actually happened)–a trial. Conversely, if this were simply about assessing probable cause, then the platonically correct move would have been to avoid a grand jury altogether, since McCulloch clearly didn’t think it exists. 2. Yes, it would have been hard to convict Wilson. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a case to be built. That McCulloch didn’t believe in the case says as much about him and his biases as it does the underlying facts. A different prosecutor could have easily come down differently.
By: Norm Scheiber, The New Republic, November 25, 2014
“GOP Anger Cannot Obscure Legal Reality”: On Immigration Policy, The Law And Facts Are On Obama’s Side
There is an adage every young lawyer learns: If you have the law, pound the law; if you have the facts, pound the facts. But if you have neither, pound the table.
The heated Republican rhetoric in response to President Obama’s immigration announcement is unquestionably table-pounding. His opponents have neither the law nor the facts on their side, so they have resorted to name calling and threats. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued a news release referring to “Emperor Obama,” while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused him of being like a monarch and of having a “temper tantrum.” Some conservative legislators have called for censuring the president, or even initiating impeachment proceedings.
As a matter of law, however, it is absolutely clear that Obama has the authority to decide not to prosecute or deport anyone he chooses. Prosecutorial discretion is an inherent part of presidential power. The Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon declared: “The Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.”
No one believes that the federal government has to prosecute every violation of every federal crime or to deport every person who is eligible for deportation. The federal government, for example, long has not prosecuted people caught with small amounts of marijuana even though it violates the federal controlled substance act.
Choices about whether to prosecute are based on a wide array of policy considerations, including how to best allocate scarce prosecutorial resources and whether enforcing a law produces desirable outcomes. Constitutionality is another issue that can be taken into account. It is well established that the president does not have to enforce laws that he believes to be unconstitutional; indeed, to do so would violate his oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Nor does the president have to enforce laws that he believes to be unwise.
All of this is especially clear in the area of immigration policy. The Supreme Court long has recognized that immigration and deportations are closely tied to foreign policy, which is uniquely in the domain of executive power and control. The executive discretion granted by the Constitution certainly includes deciding whether to bring deportation proceedings. Throughout history, the federal government has chosen — for humanitarian concerns or foreign policy reasons — to not try to deport some individuals or classes of individuals, even though they are not lawfully in the United States.
Republican presidents have used this discretion as much as Democratic ones. In 1987, in a decidedly political move by a president who opposed the Sandinista regime, the Reagan administration took executive action to stop deportations of 200,000 Nicaraguan exiles. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush, to advance his foreign policy, stopped deportations of Chinese students and in 1991 prevented hundreds of Kuwait citizens who were illegally in the United States from being deported. In 2001, President George W. Bush limited deportation of Salvadoran citizens at the request of the Salvadoran president, ordering that deportation decisions include consideration of factors such as whether a mother was nursing a child or whether an undocumented person was a U.S. military veteran.
All of the Republican anger cannot obscure the legal reality: Obama has the authority to decide to suspend deportations. Likewise, the facts support Obama. A cruel aspect of immigration policy is that it often separates parents, who are in the United States illegally, from their children who are U.S. citizens because they were born in this country.
Nora Sandigo, in Miami, has a sticker in her car that says “Every child is a blessing.” It is a reminder for her as she drives around to pick up yet another child whose parents have been deported. Since 2009, Sandigo has taken legal guardianship of 812 U.S. citizens whose parents have been deported. “La Gran Madre” is what many call her, but she knows her limitations. “All I can do is hold back some of the bleeding. There is no way I can give 812 children the love and attention they need, but … the system is broken.”
It is estimated that there may be as many as 5 million parents in this situation. The irony is that Republican rhetoric for years has emphasized “family values,” but it is Obama who is acting in a profoundly pro-family way.
By: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and Samuel Kleiner, a fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project; Published in The National Memo, November 24, 2014
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