“This Time, They’ve Gone Too Far”: Republicans Are Beginning To Act As Though Barack Obama Isn’t Even The President
It’s safe to say that no president in modern times has had his legitimacy questioned by the opposition party as much as Barack Obama. But as his term in office enters its final phase, Republicans are embarking on an entirely new enterprise: They have decided that as long as he holds the office of the presidency, it’s no longer necessary to respect the office itself.
Is that a bit hyperbolic? Maybe. But this news is nothing short of stunning:
A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.
Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber’s entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.
“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the senators wrote. “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.”
It’s one thing to criticize the administration’s actions, or try to impede them through the legislative process. But to directly communicate with a foreign power in order to undermine ongoing negotiations? That is appalling. And just imagine what those same Republicans would have said if Democratic senators had tried such a thing when George W. Bush was president.
The only direct precedent I can think of for this occurred in 1968, when as a presidential candidate Richard Nixon secretly communicated with the government of South Vietnam in an attempt to scuttle peace negotiations the Johnson administration was engaged in. It worked: those negotiations failed, and the war dragged on for another seven years. Many people are convinced that what Nixon did was an act of treason; at the very least it was a clear violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits American citizens from communicating with foreign governments to conduct their own foreign policy.
This move by Republicans is not quite at that level. As Dan Drezner wrote, “I don’t think an open letter from members of the legislative branch quite rises to Logan Act violations, but if there’s ever a trolling amendment to the Logan Act, this would qualify,” and at least it’s out in the open. But it makes clear that they believe that when they disagree with an administration policy, they can act as though Barack Obama isn’t even the president of the United States.
And it isn’t just in foreign affairs. In an op-ed last week in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Mitch McConnell urged states to refuse to comply with proposed rules on greenhouse gas emissions from the Environmental Protection Agency. Never mind that agency regulations like these have the force of law, and the Supreme Court has upheld the EPA’s responsibility under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions — if you don’t like the law, just act as though it doesn’t apply to you. “I can’t recall a majority leader calling on states to disobey the law,” said Barbara Boxer, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, “and I’ve been here almost 24 years.”
The American political system runs according to a whole series of norms, many of which we don’t notice until they’re violated. For instance, the Speaker of the House can invite a foreign leader to address Congress for the sole purpose of criticizing the administration, and he can even do it without letting the White House know in advance. There’s no law against it. But doing so violates a norm not only of simple respect and courtesy, but one that says that the exercise of foreign policy belongs to the administration. Congress can advise, criticize, and legislate to shape it, but if they simply take it upon themselves to make their own foreign policy, they’ve gone too far.
But as has happened so many times before, Republicans seem to have concluded that there is one set of rules and norms that apply in ordinary times, and an entirely different set that applies when Barack Obama is the president. You no longer need to show the president even a modicum of respect. You can tell states to ignore the law. You can sabotage delicate negotiations with a hostile foreign power by communicating directly with that power.
I wonder what they’d say if you asked them whether it would be acceptable for Democrats to treat the next Republican president that way. My guess is that the question wouldn’t even make sense to them. After all, that person would be a Republican. So how could anyone even think of such a thing?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, March 9, 2015
“Crime-For-Profit Syndicates”: Why Are We Taxpayers Subsidizing Corporate Crime?
“Do the crime, do the time,” the old saying goes. Unless, of course, the criminals are corporate executives. In those cases, the culprits are practically always given a “Get out of jail free” card.
Even the corporate crimes that produce horrible injuries, illnesses, death, massive pollution, consumer ripoffs, etc. are routinely settled by fines and payoffs from the corporate treasury, with no punishment of the honchos who oversee what amount to crime-for-profit syndicates. The only bit of justice in these money settlements is that some of them have become quite large, with multibillion-dollar “punitive damages” meant to deter the perpetrators from doing it again. Yet the same bad corporate actors seem to keep at it.
What’s going on here is a game of winkin’ ‘n’ noddin’, in which corporate criminals know that those headline-grabbing assessments for damages they’ve caused have a secret escape hatch built into them. Congress has generously written the law so corporations can deduct much of their punitive payments from their income taxes! As Senator Pat Leahy points out, “This tax loophole allows corporations to wreak havoc and then write it off as a cost of doing business.”
For example, oil giant BP certainly wreaked havoc with its careless oil rig explosion in 2010, killing 11 workers, deeply contaminating the Gulf of Mexico and devastating the livelihoods of millions of people along the Gulf coast. So, BP was socked with a punishing payout topping $42 billion. But — shhhh — 80 percent of that was eligible for a tax deduction, a little fact that’s been effectively covered up by the bosses and politicians.
This crazy quirk in America’s laws to deter corporate crime forces victims to help subsidize criminals. Follow the bouncing ball here: First, a court orders a corporation to pay punitive damages to a victim of its criminal acts; second, the corporate offender pays up, and then merrily subtracts a big chunk of that payment from its income tax, effectively taking money out of our public treasury; third, while the criminal is counting its tax break, the victim is notified that the punitive damage money he or she received from the corporation will be taxed as “regular income;” fourth, that means a big chunk of the victim’s payment goes into the treasury to replenish the public money the corporate villain subtracted.
This is nothing but shameful pandering by government officials to rich and powerful criminals. It’s bad enough that corporate-financed lawmakers legalize such encouragement of criminality, but corporate-coddling judges are playing the same disgraceful game — drastically reducing the amounts that juries order corporations to pay. In a Montana case, for example, a jury awarded $240 million in punitive damages to the families of three people, including two teenagers, killed in a car crash. The deaths were blamed on a steering defect that South Korean automaker Hyundai was found to have known about and “recklessly” ignored for more than a decade. But a district judge has since supplanted the jury’s ruling with her own. While declaring that Hyundai’s “reprehensibility” certainly warrants a sizeable punishment, she cut the corporation’s punitive payment down to $73 million.
Hello — that’s not punishment to a $79-billion-a-year car giant, it’s pocket change. Why would Hyundai executives quit putting corporate profits over people’s lives if that’s their “punishment”?
Plus, we taxpayers and the victims’ families are still lined up to subsidize whatever “punishment” Hyundai ultimately pays. With subsidies and wrist-slaps, the corporate criminal whirligig will continue to spin, making a mockery of justice. Fortunately, Senator Leahy has had the good sense to introduce legislation to lock down this escape hatch for thieves, killers and other executive-suite villains. For more information on the moral outrage of ordinary taxpayers being forced to subsidize corporate criminals, contact U.S. PIRG at http://www.uspirg.org.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, March 11, 2015
“Bibi’s U.S. Senatorial Negotiator”: Representing Netanyahu In A Communication With A Hostile Foreign Country
It’s bad enough that Republicans are beginning to treat Bibi Netanyahu as their fantasy President. It’s getting a lot worse when 47 Republican senators basically choose to represent him in a communication with a hostile foreign country with whom our actual president is in sensitive negotiations.
From informal comments I’ve heard elsewhere, I was not alone in reacting to the news of this Republican letter to Iran basically telling them not to rely on any diplomatic commitments from the United State government by thinking: Can they do that? Is there any precedent for this?
I gather the only clear analog was a series of actions taken by Republican senators to undermine European trust in Woodrow Wilson’s position during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. So it’s not unprecedented but it’s been a while, and history has not been kind to Wilson’s senatorial tormenters.
It’s depressing to note that of the handful of senators who did not sign this letter three (Alexander, Coats and Cochran) are likely in their final terms, and a fourth (Murkowski) was last elected as a write-in candidate running against the GOP nominee. Whether it’s true or not, the perception among Senate Republicans certainly seems to be that “the base” demands this.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 10, 2015
“Willful Suspension Of Disbelief”: See No Climate Change, Hear No Climate Change, Speak No Climate Change
We already knew that Republicans like to live in their own alternate version of reality, sanitized of any inconvenient truths that might interfere with their ideology. But Florida (as usual) is pushing even the GOP’s incredible willful suspension of disbelief:
The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years.
But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes.
DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. The policy goes beyond semantics and has affected reports, educational efforts and public policy in a department that has about 3,200 employees and $1.4 billion budget.
“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’ ” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”
The creepy Orwellianism on display is exacerbated by the fact that of all places in the U.S., ignoring climate change is particularly suicidal for Florida, a state that will be almost entirely inundated as sea levels rise.
For state officials in Florida to ban the words “climate change” from even being uttered for ideological reasons verges perilously on death cult territory. And for what? So that a few rich extraction-based millionaires can stay just a little richer, just a while longer? So that the people who still buy into objectivist ideas about the economy can live in their delusional bubble for a few more years before drowning in the oncoming tide?
On a smaller scale, this kind of behavior would indicate a need for a social services intervention. At this scale it’s basically a human rights issue, and merits some sort of federal intervention. And possibly some form of libertarian cult deprogramming.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 9, 2015
“Ties To The Confederacy”: Racist Oklahoma Frat Founded By Racists
Every now and then I read a news story online that evokes such a strong visceral reaction that I actually feel like breaking my computer. Monday morning was one of those days.
I’m talking about the video that I’m sure many of you have seen by now of the racist white University of Oklahoma students—most of whom were members of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE)—gleefully singing in unison these despicably racist words:
“There will never be a nigger SAE. There will never be a nigger SAE . You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with me. There will never be a nigger SAE.”
Watching these white students—clad in tuxedos and cocktail dresses—sing these lyrics with such joy and gusto made it feel like it was a scene from a movie about cartoonish racism from an era gone by. But this video didn’t depict an incident that occurred decades ago. It happened on Sunday.
Yes, I know the students will say—as will their defenders—that they were just joking around. Bullshit. In today’s America, you know that singing about “niggers” being lynched is absolutely, unequivocally wrong. There’s no gray area.
How could this happen in 2015? I’d say the early history of SAE is very instructive on this point. This fraternity brags on its website that it was started in 1856 in the “Deep South.” (I can’t help but think racial dog whistle when I see that term, given the SAE’s founders’ ties to the Confederacy.) And SAE was at one time was a whites only fraternity as noted in its 1903 “book of rituals” that limited membership to “members of the Caucasian race”. Keep in mind that the students on the bus were heading, per media reports, to a Founders Day event to celebrate very white men who gave us these policies.
And this is not the only racist event featuring SAE. It’s merely the first incident to attract national headlines. Just three months ago, the Clemson University chapter was suspended after white students held a “Cripmas” party (“Cripmas” being a weird and really not remotely funny combination of Crips and Christmas) where they dressed in bandannas, Tupac T-shirts and sported fake “thug” tattoos.” And an SAE chapter at Washington University in St. Louis was suspended in 2013 after members sang racial slurs to African-American students pledging the fraternity.
But SAE is far from the only fraternity engaged in such racially insensitive activities. The critically acclaimed 2014 film, Dear White People, concluded by giving us a litany of similar racially insensitive events held by white college students in recent years. We are talking “thug parties” and “Crips and Bloods”-themed parties organized by white students where they dressed as the worst examples of the black community.
In this climate, we can’t be surprised to see that a few months ago at Oklahoma State University, a black sorority became the target of a slew of racist remarks on an anonymous app.
These incidents generally result in the students being punished on some level. As most are aware, the president of Oklahoma University David Boren, a former Oklahoma governor and U.S. senator, announced Monday morning that “effective immediately, all ties and affiliations between this University and the local SAE are hereby severed.” He closed the fraternity house effective Monday and condemned the students involved in the harshest terms.
That’s truly commendable. But it’s very likely that incidents like this and racial tensions will increase until we have an honest conversation about the underlying factors fostering racism. And it seems the time for this discussion can’t wait much longer. A recent poll released in connection with the 5oth anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma found that four in 10 American believe that racial relations have become worse during Barack Obama’s presidency.
So why aren’t we having this conversation? To be candid, the obstacle is coming from many in the white community. While black people are eager to have this much-needed discussion, most (not all) white people are not.
And that’s not just my opinion; It’s exactly what white and black people have been telling pollsters. For example, a 2013 Pew poll taken after the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin found that 78 percent of blacks said the incident raised important issues about race that need to be addressed. However, only 28 percent of whites agreed.
And in 2014, after the grand jury refused to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, we saw similar numbers, with 80 percent of blacks saying the case raised important issue about race while only 37 percent of whites agreed. In fact, 47 percent of whites responded that they thought race was getting too much attention.
Why do so many whites feel this way? Well, as I have witnessed firsthand, many white people think that any discussion about race is really an accusation. Consequently, they reflexively recoil when the issue is raised and become defensive.
Of course, there are some—mostly on far right—who truly believe that racism doesn’t exist. It’s unlikely anyone can reach those people.
But the hope is that for the others, an environment can be created on both a local and national level to have a brutally candid conversation on underlying factors and perceptions that are causing this tension. I’m not sure what will make white people comfortable enough to have this discussion. But I do know that we need to find a way.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, March 10, 2015
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