“Presidents Negotiate Arms Agreements”: Cotton And The War Caucus Count On Constituents’ Ignorance
When a Man’s fancy gets astride on his Reason; When Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses; and common Understanding, as well as common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself. Jonathan Swift, 1704
As near as I can determine, Senator Tom Cotton’s biggest worry about Iran is that its government is as bellicose and fanatical as he is.
The good news is that based on the Islamic Republic’s response to the condescending, adolescent tone of the “open letter” he and 46 Republican senators addressed to Iran’s leaders, that seems unlikely. Judging by their measured responses, Iranian politicians appear to understand that they weren’t its real audience.
Rather, it was a grandstand play directed at Cotton’s own constituents among the GOP’s unappeasable Tea Party base. Its actual purpose was to express contempt and defiance toward President Obama, always popular among the Fox News white-bread demographic — basically the same motive that led Cotton to repeat Obama’s name 74 times during a 2014 election debate with Senator Mark Pryor.
That big doodyhead Barack Obama’s not the boss of them.
Except that particularly with regard to foreign policy, he is. But hold that thought.
Javad Zarif, the American-educated Iranian foreign minister involved in intense negotiations with Secretary of State John Kerry, observed that the senators’ letter has “no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy.”
The Persian diplomat pointed out that the agreement’s not being hashed out between the U.S. and Iran, but also among Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. Any deal would be put before the UN Security Council and have the force of international law.
A future U.S. president could renounce it, but at significant political cost unless Iran clearly violated its terms.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan points out chief executives from FDR and Reagan to George W. Bush have negotiated arms control deals negotiated in ports of call from Yalta to Helsinki. “In other words,” Kaplan writes, “contrary to the letter writers, Congress has no legal or constitutional role in the drafting, approval, or modification of this deal.”
Presidents negotiate arms agreements, not raw-carrot freshman senators.
Iran’s crafty old “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei lamented “the decay of political ethics in the American system,” but added that he stood by the process. “Every time we reach a stage where the end of the negotiations is in sight,” Khamenei said, “the tone of the other side, specifically the Americans, becomes harsher, coarser and tougher.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus reported the score: “Qom Theological Seminary 1, Harvard Law 0. When an ayatollah sounds more statesmanlike than the U.S. Senate, it’s not a good sign.”
Bargaining is practically the Persian national sport. They’re inclined to see a my-way-or-the-highway type like Tom Cotton as unserious and immature.
As if to confirm that impression, the Arkansas senator took his newfound notoriety to CBS’s Face the Nation, where he complained about Iran’s growing “empire.”
“They already control Tehran, increasingly they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad and now Sana’a as well,” Cotton said. “They do all that without a nuclear weapon. Imagine what they would do with a nuclear weapon.”
You read that correctly. Arkansas’ brilliant Harvard law graduate complained about Iran’s control of Tehran — the nation’s capital since 1796.
As for Iran’s alleged “control” of Baghdad, you’d think an Iraq veteran like Cotton would have some clue how that came about. Hint: President George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The Bush administration deposed Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, whose invasion of neighboring Iran led to an eight-year war killing roughly a million people. They installed as prime minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite nationalist who’d spent 24 years exiled in, yes, Iran.
How Iranian-armed Shiite militias came to be leading the fight against ISIS terrorists west of Baghdad is that the Iraqi government begged for their help. It’s in Tehran’s national interest to defeat ISIS even more than in Washington’s. Can this possibly be news to Cotton?
Probably not, but he can count on his constituents’ ignorance. It would be astonishing if 20 percent of Arkansas voters could locate Iran on a world map, much less grasp that if Iran looks stronger, it’s because the U.S. keeps attacking its enemies. “Like all the Iran hawks before him,” Daniel Larison writes in American Conservative, “Cotton claims to fear growing Iranian influence while supporting policies that have facilitated its growth.”
For President Obama, a verifiable agreement preventing the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons they say they don’t want could be a diplomatic triumph, reshaping the entire Middle East without firing a shot.
To the War Party, that would be a bad thing. Meanwhile, Tom Cotton gave his first speech in the U.S. Senate, prating about “global military dominance” and “hegemonic strength” like the villain in a James Bond movie.
It was a performance calculated to make him a star.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 18, 2015
“The Senate’s 47 Percent”: Many Republicans Seem To Believe Anything Is Permissible As Long As It’s Designed To Foil Obama
In September 2002, three Democratic congressmen visited Iraq in an effort to prevent a war they thought was a terrible idea.
Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) said very little there, explaining afterward that his sole purpose was to tell Iraqi officials that “if they want to prevent a war, they need to prevail upon Saddam Hussein to provide unrestricted, unfettered access to the weapons inspectors.”
On the other hand, former Rep. David Bonior (D-MI) and especially Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) were quite outspoken while on Iraqi soil. McDermott urged Americans to take Saddam’s promises on weapons inspections at “face value” and charged that President Bush was willing to “mislead the American people.”
Needless to say, supporters of Bush and his policies did not deal kindly with McDermott and Bonior. Writing at the time in the pro-war Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes called them “The Baghdad Democrats” and said: “What apparently didn’t concern the congressmen was the damage their trip might do abroad to any U.S.-led effort to deal with Saddam.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Republicans are now reminding everyone of the trio’s journey. To defend the 47 Republican senators who signed a letter to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” they invoke the everybody-does-it argument: that interfering with a president conducting a negotiation is as American as apple pie.
The letter itself, written in strangely condescending language that a good civics teacher would never use, instructs the Iranians about our Constitution. Any deal reached by President Obama without congressional approval would be nothing more than an “executive agreement,” the senators said. It could be voided “with the stroke of a pen” by a future president, and “future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.” It was a blatant effort to blow up the negotiations.
In fact, it is utterly baffling that champions of this letter would even bring up McDermott and his colleagues. For one thing, many of the very same people who denounced the Democratic trio are now praising the letter. Hayes, for example, in an article posted last week headlined “A Contrived Controversy,” said the letter, offered by “patriotic senators,” was “a fact-based, substantive argument, in public, about a matter of critical importance to the national security of the United States.”
Let’s see: It’s patriotic if members of Congress contact a foreign leader to interfere with a president whose policies you don’t like, but outrageous for politicians to do a similar thing to undermine a president whose policies you support.
Which goes to the larger point: The three members of Congress went to Iraq on their own, without any support from their party’s leaders, and were actively taken to task even by opponents of Bush’s policies. At the time, I wrote a column highly critical of the visit that I didn’t enjoy writing because I respect the three men. I also noted that, in light of all the pressures to fall into line behind Bush, “anyone with the gumption to dissent these days deserves some kudos for courage.”
Nonetheless, I argued that just as the Vietnam anti-war movement was damaged by “the open identification of some in its ranks with America’s enemies,” so did the congressional visit set back the cause of those who, at the time, were trying to get Congress to pass a far more restrained war resolution.
By contrast, the 47 Republicans undercutting Obama included the Senate majority leader and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and clearly speak for most of their party. Only seven Senate Republicans, to their credit, refused to sign, including Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Two stipulations: While I support Obama’s effort to reach an agreement with Iran, I also believe in a strong congressional role in setting foreign policy and embrace the freedom to dissent from a president’s choices on war, peace and diplomacy. And, yes, most of us have had moments of inconsistency when our beliefs about a substantive matter distorted our views on process issues.
But tossing off a letter to leaders of a foreign state plainly designed to sandbag a president in the middle of negotiations goes far beyond normal procedural disagreements. It makes Congress and the United States look foolish to the world. It weakens our standing with allies and adversaries alike. And, yes, many Republicans seem to believe anything is permissible as long as it’s designed to foil Obama.
This is far more damaging to us than what those three congressmen did in Baghdad.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 15, 2015
“Scott Walker; W. Without The Compassion”: With Walker, Conservative Evangelicals Don’t Much Feel The Need For Compassion
While it’s becoming common to hear Scott Walker dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan or Flavor of the Month or Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time gaffmeister sure to be pushed aside to make way for Jeb’s Brinks truck of cash or Rubio’s glamor, there are less-apparent aspects of his appeal worth noting. That intrepid translator of the Christian Right’s codes, Sarah Posner, has a fascinating take at Religion Dispatches about Walker perfectly matching a growing mood among politically active conservative evangelicals who want a less showy but more reliable champion:
Should he run for president, Walker may very well turn out to be the 2016 cycle’s evangelical favorite—not because he ticks off a laundry list of culture war talking points, pledges fealty to a “Christian nation,” or because he’s made a show of praying publicly to curry political favor. Although by no means universal, some conservative evangelicals—those who eschew the fever swamps of talk radio, yet share the same political stances of the religious right—are weary of the old style of campaigning. They’re turned off by the culture war red meat, the dutiful but insincere orations of piety….
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote that in 2016 evangelicals won’t be looking to candidates to “know the words to hymns,” “repeat cliches about appointing Supreme Court justices who will ‘interpret the law, not make the law,’” or to use “‘God and country’ talk borrowed from a 1980s-era television evangelist.”
Moore “has a good feel of the pulse of evangelicals” and “represents a wide segment” of them, said Tobin Grant, a political scientist at Southern Illinois University and blogger on religion and politics for Religion News Service. Unlike his predecessor, Richard Land, known for inflaming the culture wars, Moore’s “focus is more on religious and social concerns than directly political ones” and has “less interest in changing DC and more interest in keeping DC out of the way of the church,” Grant said.
These evangelicals are listening for a candidate who can signal he is “one of us” without pandering. Both evangelical and Catholic candidates who have earned the culture warrior label for their strident pronouncements—Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, or Mike Huckabee—are seen as embarrassing embodiments of stereotypes these conservative Christians would like to shed….
Walker hits the right evangelical notes without overplaying his hand—and that’s exactly the way they want him to keep it. John Mark Reynolds, professor of philosophy and provost at Houston Baptist University, said that Walker “would do well to do nothing to appeal to us. We get it. He’s one of us. He sounds like one of us. He leans forward like one of us. He answers questions like one of us.”
Now this isn’t to say the new strain among conservative Christians involves any changes in their positions on culture-war issues, or a tolerance for different opinions: it’s a matter of tone and emphasis–and of trust.
You may recall how effective George W. Bush was in dropping little indicators of his evangelical piety (even though, technically, he attended a mainline Protestant church), like a secret handshake, when he showed up on the campaign trail in the 2000 cycle: Bible quotes, allusions to hymns, and evangelical catch-phrases were modestly arrayed in his rhetoric–not abrasively, but just enough that believers saw it, and as with Walker, knew he was “one of us.” Bush, of course, also grounded much of his “compassionate conservative” agenda in church work and religious sentiment. It seems that with Walker conservative evangelicals don’t much feel the need for compassion, which is a good thing, since it’s not one of his more obvious traits. No, they want something else:
Instead of talking about opposition to marriage equality, evangelical activists say, religious freedom has become the new defining mantra. Unlike marriage equality, on which white evangelicals, particularly Millennials, are divided, religious freedom unifies them like no other issue but abortion.
“What will matter to evangelicals,” Moore wrote in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, “is how the candidate, if elected president, will articulate and defend religious-liberty rights.”
The religious liberty issue is, for evangelicals, a “four-alarm fire,” said Denny Burk, Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, part of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He said evangelicals expect the candidates “to have the courage of their convictions to persuade people about what’s going on.”
From the Hobby Lobby litigation to cases involving florists, bakers, and photographers refusing to provide services for same-sex ceremonies, the issue has been percolating in the evangelical community for years. In recent weeks, conservative Christians have talked and written prolifically about Barronelle Stutzman, a Washington state florist found liable under the state’s anti-discrimination laws for refusing to provide flowers for a long-time gay customer’s wedding, and Kelvin Cochran, the Atlanta fire chief fired after revelations about anti-gay comments he wrote in a book.
It requires a great deal of paranoia and passive-aggressive claims of “persecution,” of course, to take isolated collisions between anti-discrimination laws and religious principles into a major threat to the immensely privileged position of Christians in the United States. But it seems Christian Right leaders are up to the task, and here, too, Walker, with his quiet but insistent talk about death threats from the enemies he’s made in Wisconsin, fills the bill.
Speaking in 2012 to a teleconference with activists from Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Walker said his faith has enabled him to rise above the “vitriol, and the constant, ongoing hatred” during the recall election he faced in the wake of his anti-union legislation, which has crippled the state’s once-iconic labor movement. Along with the unmistakable contrast of his church-going family with the profane and progressive activists, Walker cited two Bible verses. He didn’t recite them, but for anyone who knows their Bible—as Walker, the son of a Baptist pastor, does—the meaning was clear. The verses that helped him withstand the hatred were Romans 16:20 (“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you”) and Isaiah 54:17 (“no weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.”)
Don’t know about you, but I’d interpret those two verses as consolatory promises of Christian vengeance, not turn-the-other-cheeck pacifism. And so it may be Walker is giving exactly the right impression of representing stolid but not showy vindicator who’s in for a long fight with secular socialists and their union allies.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 13, 2015
“Don’t Let The GOP Buy Your Vote, Stupid”: The GOP Has Zero Credibility When It Comes To Fiscal Responsibility
If you want to understand exactly how the Republicans plan to buy the votes needed to win the 2016 presidential election, look no further than “The Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Plan.”
Heard of it? The plan, which is being touted with Willy Loman-esque desperation by Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, seeks to fix our “antiquated and dysfunctional…federal tax system.” And it’s won slow clap after slow clap from Republican-friendly conservatives at Americans for Tax Reform, National Review, and The American Enterprise Institute, whose James Pethokoukis raves, “Lee and Rubio might have cooked up the first great tax cut plan of the 2000s.”
Yeah, not so much. Despite some good features that would likely spur economic growth—such as reducing corporate tax rates by 10 percentage points, switching to a territorial collection system, and capping business-income rates filed on individual Schedule C forms—what the plan does is return us to the early years of the George W. Bush presidency, when budget continence was never allowed to get in the way of shoveling cash to targeted voters.
Recall, for instance, how Bush and a Republican Congress pushed through an unfunded (and unnecessary) Medicare prescription drug plan back in 2003 as a straight-up gift to seniors, who had voted Democratic in 2000. Mission accomplished: Bush went from getting just 47 percent of the senior vote against Al Gore in 2000 to pulling 52 percent of the 65-plus crowd against John Kerry in 2004.
At least Bush was pissing away theoretical budget surpluses that were falsely projected to last far into the future. After years of record-setting deficits and mounting national debt, today’s politicians certainly don’t have that excuse. Yet last year’s Republican budget resolution called for net spending increases every year for the next 10 years, starting at $3.7 trillion and culminating in projected spending of $5 trillion in 2024 (in current dollars). And given the whopping increases in real per-capita spending under a Republican president and Congress during Bush’s first term in office, the GOP has zero credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.
There’s no doubt that a spending hawk such as Lee, who has proposed a balanced-budget amendment in the past, knows that. Yet at the heart of his and Marco Rubio’s plan is a massive giveaway to parents in the form of a new $2,500 child tax credit (this would be added to an already existing $1,000 child credit) with no phase-out due to income. However, because it’s “limited to the sum of total income and payroll tax liabilities, including employer-side payroll tax liability,” it means that low-income parents won’t be able to claim the full amount.
The expanded child credit is a big reason why, as AEI’s Pethokoukis grants, the plan would “lose something like $4 trillion in federal tax revenue over a decade, maybe half that if you apply ‘dynamic scoring’ that factors in the effects of economic growth.” (Dynamic scoring attempts to model changes in people’s behavior to changes in the tax code. While the method is easily abused, its core insight—that we change our consumption patterns when costs and benefits vary—is sound.)
But unlike cutting taxes on business activity or trimming top marginal tax rates, expanding the child tax credit has nothing to do with spurring economic growth. This is something that conservatives grant in most contexts. As Curtis S. Dubay of the Heritage Foundation wrote just last year, “Increasing the credit would be a targeted tax cut that would put more money in the pockets of people who qualify for the expansion. However, it would not improve economic growth like rate reductions would because a [child tax credit] increase would not reduce those disincentives on productive activities.”
The free-market Tax Foundation agrees. In fact, in an analysis of the Rubio-Lee plan, it ran both static and dynamic scores of the plan. On its static score for the next 10 years, the Tax Foundation found the Rubio-Lee plan meant serious reductions in annual federal revenue. For instance, switching to just two tax brackets of 15 percent and 35 percent would mean $31 billion less each year compared to current law. The full expensing of business equipment would lead to another annual loss of $78 billion, while the changes to the business taxes would cut $210 billion. And the expanded child tax credit would mean the feds would forgo another $173 billion.
Yet in its dynamic score of the same provisions, something different happens. The consolidation of tax brackets yields an average annual net gain of $5 billion, full expensing yields of $115 billion, and the changes in business taxes pulls in a net of $210 billion a year. But the expanded child tax credit? It still shows an average annual loss of $173 billion.
So the expanded child tax credit has nothing to do with promoting growth. Indeed, as my frequent co-author Veronique de Rugy points out at National Review, the generally accepted best way to promote economic growth via tax policy is by cutting high marginal rates. But because of the size and scope of Rubio and Lee’s expanded child tax credit they can’t reduce the top individual rate below 35 percent without punching an even bigger hole in revenue. “If bolstering the economic status of families is the point of all this,” she writes, “the way to go is lower tax rates, not a tax credit.”
In their explanation of the plan, Rubio and Lee claim that the expanded child tax credit is simply a way of abolishing what they call “the Parent Tax Penalty.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who has trouble following the logic here: “As parents simultaneously pay payroll taxes while also paying to raise the next generation that will pay payroll taxes, parents pay more into the old-age entitlement systems.” Huh? Parents pay to raise their children, yes. When those kids enter the workforce, they (not their parents) will pay taxes on their wages. Forget those “It’s a child, not a choice” bumper stickers. Kids today apparently are to be most valued for their ability to pay into unsustainable old-age retirement plans that need to be scrapped, not propped up.
Questions abound: If the amount of income subject to Social Security taxes is capped, doesn’t it also make sense then to phase out the credit above certain income levels? What about all the tax dollars that flow to children (and their parents) during their first 18 to 21 years? And if the expanded child tax credit is supposed to credit parents for future tax payments made by their children (yes, getting complicated), then why are low-income parents’ credits “limited to the sum of total income and payroll tax liabilities”? Aren’t we crediting parents for their kids’ future tax payments?
I’d argue instead that the “family fairness” portion actually has very little to do with the future past the 2016 election. Expanding the child tax credit, especially in a way that keeps the full amount for middle- and upper-class parents while limiting the amount low-income parents can get, is a pretty obvious (and obnoxious) way to buy votes among likely Republican voters. Especially when we all know that the GOP has no intention of trimming $173 billion out of federal spending to pay for it.
We’re long past the time for a serious conversation about how much government we want to buy and at what price. If the Obama years are any indication, the Democrats are genuinely uninterested in having that conversation. (The president’s latest budget proposal would increase spending over the next decade by more than 50 percent and end the period with bigger annual deficits than we have today.) But the Republicans, who are supposed to know better and be better on fiscal issues, are part of the problem too.
Every bit as much as the tax-and-spend Dems they love to attack, the Party of Reagan ushered in “the Golden Age of Government by Groupon.”
The only question that remains is how much our kids and grandkids will hate us for how much debt—I mean “family fairness”—we’ve amassed in their name.
By: Nick Gillespie, The Daily Beast, March 13, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 