“Shallow, Ignorant, And Totally Unserious”: Why Republicans Can No Longer Be Trusted on National Security
It’s been clear, at least since the 2012 election, that the Republican Party has abrogated its role—really, abandoned any interest—in shaping or seriously discussing American foreign policy. But only recently has this indifference shifted into toxic territory, and on Tuesday the fumes formed a poisonous cloud, the likes of which hadn’t been witnessed in decades.
The occasion was the Senate Armed Services Committee’s vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense. In the end, Hagel pulled through, but only on a party-line vote (all Democrats in favor, all Republicans opposed) and after a debate that raised doubts less about Hagel than about the modern GOP’s inclination—and the Senate’s ability—to oversee anything as consequential as national security.
Hagel’s Jan. 31 confirmation hearings had been appalling enough—not just for his own lackluster performance, but more for his inquisitors’ bizarrely narrow focus. They asked almost nothing about the issues that will face the next defense secretary: the budget, the roles and missions of the Army, the balance of drones vs. manned aircraft, the size of the Navy, the future of Afghanistan, or the “pivot” from Europe to Asia. Instead, they hectored the nominee about the adequacy of his fealty toward Israel, his animosity toward Iran, and whether he was right or wrong about the 2007 troop-surge in Iraq.
There was all that in the follow-up session on Feb. 12, plus a whiff of paranoia and sedition that’s rarely been cracked open since the days of Joseph McCarthy.
The stench started wafting through the air with the comments of Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, who trumpeted the warnings that in 2008 Hagel gave a speech to the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. Vitter called for halting the hearings until a video of the speech could be found, to see whether the nominee had voiced extremist or anti-Israeli comments.
Then came Sen. Ted Cruz, freshman Republican from Texas, who seemed to be explicitly angling for McCarthy’s inheritance. Cruz shuddered that Hagel had made $200,000 over a two-year period from Corsair Capital, which has contracts abroad, yet he could not tell the committee whether any of that money came from a foreign government. It would be “relevant to know,” Cruz intoned, “if that $200,000 … came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea. I have no evidence to suggest that it is or isn’t,” but there should be an investigation.
At that point, Sen. Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, lambasted Cruz for having “impugned the patriotism” of Hagel, for accusing him of getting “cozy” with terrorists.
Now Cruz is but a freshman; his idiocies can’t be ascribed to his party as a whole. But Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma is the Armed Services Committee’s top-ranking Republican, and he not only sided with Cruz but snapped back at Nelson’s admonitions. Hagel’s nomination had been “endorsed” by the Iranian government, Inhofe said. “You can’t get any cozier than that.”
That was too much for Sen. Carl Levin, the usually amiable and tolerant committee chairman. “I have been endorsed by people I disagree with totally,” he said. “I don’t want people who hate me to ruin my career by endorsing me.”
Sen. Claire McCaskell went further, warning Inhofe and Cruz, in a “have you no shame, senator” moment, to “be careful” with their tactics of character-smear and guilt-by-association.
Even Sen. John McCain, the erstwhile Republican leader, seemed abashed by the storm he’d helped unleashed against the nominee a month before. “I just want to make it clear,” McCain said, “Sen. Hagel is an honorable man. He has served his country. And no one on this committee at any time should impugn his character or his integrity.” It was reminiscent of the time, on the 2008 campaign trail, when a woman, fired up by the gunplay rhetoric of his running mate Sarah Palin, started going on about the socialist Muslim Barack Obama—and McCain felt compelled to dial down the passion, defending his opponent as a good American. One wonders, does McCain lie awake at night, gnashing his teeth at the hash that he’s made of his own reputation and the noisome role he’s played in turning his country’s politics into a cesspool?
Still, McCain’s move to reticence had no effect on Inhofe, who clanged the alarm bells still louder. Hagel, he said, had voted against a bill labeling the Iranian Republican Guard Corps as a terrorist organization (because, by definition, it wasn’t). He’d voted against unilateral sanctions against Iran (because unilateral sanctions have no effect). He’d appeared on Al Jazeera TV and agreed with the show’s hosts that Israel had committed war crimes (the first part is true, the second part is not).
On the few occasions during the session when Republican senators explored substantive issues, it was soon clear they had no idea what they were talking about. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from New Hampshire who has often stood alongside McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham to bash President Obama on Benghazi, tried to make much of Hagel’s co-authorship of a 2012 report by an ad hoc group called the U.S. Global Zero Nuclear Policy Commission. Ayotte expressed shock that, in the wake of North Korea’s third nuclear test, Hagel had not removed his name from this report, which called for eliminating one leg of our nuclear triad. “We have three legs to our nuclear triad,” she said (yes, senator, that’s why it’s called a “triad”), as if it were some nuclear holy trinity.
Ayotte too is new; she seems not to know what a nuclear triad is. She certainly isn’t aware that, even among conservative thinkers in the nuclear-weapons realm, the idea of scrapping one leg of the triad—namely, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles—is at least a respectable notion. The argument is that ICBMs are vulnerable to nuclear attack and, at the same time, tipped with multiple, highly accurate warheads that make an opponent’s ICBMs vulnerable to attack. In other words, by their very existence, ICBMs create an incentive for both sides to launch a pre-emptive attack in the event of a crisis.
But Ayotte’s remarks were seconded by Sen. Jeff Sessions, who does know something about nukes yet seems trapped in 1982. Hagel, he charged, “comes out of the anti-nuclear left,” as if, first of all, there is such a thing these days. It’s worth noting who wrote that Global Zero report along with Hagel: Thomas Pickering, a veteran U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Moscow; Richard Burt, a State Department negotiator in the Reagan administration; retired Gen. John Sheehan, former commander-in-chief of U.S. Atlantic Command; and—not least—retired Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, before that, head of U.S. Strategic Command, which manages the nuclear arsenal. Hardly a pack of lefties.
Not to sound like a Golden Age nostalgic, but there once was a time when the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee prided themselves on having an understanding of military matters. They disagreed in their conclusions and sometimes their premises. But most of them worked to educate themselves, at least to the point where they could debate the issues, or ask questions of a general without coming off like complete idiots. The sad thing about this new crop of senators—especially on the Republican side—is they don’t even try to learn anything; they don’t care if they look like complete idiots, in part because their core constituents don’t care if they do either.
After Tuesday’s vote, Sen. Levin adjourned the session, saying, “We thank you all, and we look forward to another wonderful year together.” The other senators laughed, but it really wasn’t funny.
By: Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 13, 2013
“Radical Views”: Republican Senators Who Think The Violence Against Women Act Is Unconstitutional
Since then-Delaware Senator Joe Biden first authored the law in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has earned bipartisan praise for providing vital protections against domestic violence and assistance to victims. But of the eight Senators — all Republicans — who voted Monday against even considering VAWA renewal, at least four apparently did so because they believe the bill is unconstitutional.
Several of these senators have expressed similarly radical views about the constitutional role of the federal government in other contexts. Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) claimed that national child labor laws, Social Security and Medicare violate the Tenth Amendment, for example; and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) once led a Tenth Amendment project at a conservative think tank and co-authored a paper proposing an unconstitutional process to nullify the Affordable Care Act. The four senators who claim that the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional are:
1. Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID): In a statement, Risch explained: “It is at the state and local level where I believe enforcement and prosecution must remain. The federal government does not need to add another layer of bureaucracy to acts of violence that are being handled at the state and local level. In addition to my 10th Amendment concerns, this legislation raises additional constitutional questions regarding double jeopardy and due process. I opposed this legislation, however well intended it was, because it is another effort of the federal government extending its reach into the affairs of state and local jurisdictions.”
2. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): In a 2012 letter explaining his opposition to last year’s VAWA re-authorization attempt, Paul wrote: “Under our Constitution, states are given the responsibility for prosecution of those violent crimes. They don’t need Washington telling them how to provide services and prosecute criminals in these cases. Under the Constitution, states are responsible for enacting and enforcing criminal law. As written, S. 1925 muddles the lines between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement.”
3. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT): In 2012, Lee claimed VAWA “oversteps the Constitution’s rightful limits on federal power. Violent crimes are regulated and enforced almost exclusively by state governments. In fact, domestic violence is one of the few activities that the Supreme Court of the United States has specifically said Congress may not regulate under the Commerce Clause. As a matter of constitutional policy, Congress should not seek to impose rules and standards as conditions for federal funding in areas where the federal government lacks constitutional authority to regulate directly.”
4. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): A Cruz spokeswoman told ThinkProgress: “For many years, Senator Cruz has worked in law enforcement, helping lead the fight to ensure that violent criminals—and especially sexual predators who target women and children—should face the very strictest punishment. However, stopping and punishing violent criminals is primarily a state responsibility, and the federal government does not need to be dictating state criminal law.” While the statement does not explicitly call VAWA unconstitutional, his previous comments leave little doubt that that is what he means.
These senators’ apparent belief that the federal government cannot constitutionally play a role in preventing violence against women is not even shared by most Republican members of Congress. 216 House Republicans agreed just last year that the Constitution does not prohibit a version of the Violence Against Women Act. The Supreme Court did strike down one piece of VAWA in 2000, but it left most of the law intact.
While the other four Senators who voted against the “motion to proceed” did not respond to a request for an explanation of their votes, Sen. Tim Scott (R) voted for the watered-down House version of VAWA last year and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) claims he supports a scaled-back version of the legislation.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, February 2, 2013
“From Silly To Ridiculous”: How To Ignore A National Consensus On Gun Violence
There are some fairly dramatic divisions among Americans on the major issues of the day, so when more than 90% of the country supports a proposal, it’s tempting to think policymakers would take notice.
Take universal background checks for gun purchases, for example. A CBS News poll found 92% of Americans support the idea. A CNN poll found 97% of American women favor the proposal. This week, Quinnipiac polled voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and found between 92% and 95% backing for expanded background checks and requiring checks on people buying firearms at gun shows. Hell, before the NRA went berserk, even it supported a system of universal background checks.
This is about as close as we get in this country to a national consensus. And yet, the idea still faces stiff resistance from the usual suspects.
Pursuing even the most popular of measures to curb gun violence would be a step toward destroying Americans’ liberty, Sen. Orrin Hatch argued Thursday.
[For Hatch, this] is a move toward tyranny.
“That’s the way reductions in liberty occur,” Hatch told reporters outside the Senate chamber. “When you start saying people all have to sign up for something, and they have a database where they know exactly who’s who, and where government can persecute people because of the database, that alarms a lot of people in our country, and it flies in the face of liberty.”
Yes, for the senior senator from Utah, background checks could, in his mind, be used as part of a nefarious scheme by the government to persecute citizens. Of course, but Hatch’s logic, the United States should not only leave the gun-show loophole intact, it should also eliminate the existing background-check system altogether.
Hatch isn’t the only one.
Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sounded very skeptical about the idea because it might interfere with “private sales on Sunday between relatives.” This comes a week after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the gun-show loophole” doesn’t exist, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office said the idea is a “thinly-veiled national gun registration scheme” intended to “ensure federal government minders gain every bureaucratic tool they need for full-scale confiscation.”
And when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) was asked whether he could envision supporting the universal background checks bill, he responded, “You know, I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”
It’s worth emphasizing that there appears to be some divisions among Republicans on the policy, with some prominent GOP policymakers saying publicly that they’re open to the idea and may end up supporting it. But in the face of overwhelming public sentiment, plenty of Republicans have few qualms about rejecting reform, for reasons that range from silly to ridiculous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 1, 2013
“At Stake, The Core Of The GOP”: How Conservatives Might Hurt Republicans On Immigration
Us. Them.
There is quite a lot of posturing about who will introduce what part of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), 2013-style. It seems an article of faith that Republicans will take the lead on several initiatives, because they know that a bill associated with President Obama will be too much for them to sell to their base, and because party leaders genuinely want to take the issue off the front burner.
But how is this supposed to work?
GOP strategists and the establishment certainly understand that the party has a problem with Hispanics. And yes, the inability of Congress to pass immigration reform has contributed to the idea that Republicans don’t want it.
But the real thing that’s turned off Hispanics has nothing to do with legislation or even enforcement. (If enforcement was correlated with political adulation, President Obama would be in trouble with Latinos. He is not.)
What mattered is what the party stood for at its core: What it expects of others and what it expects of everyone else. And the core of the Republican Party today does not believe that the immigration reform approach now championed by its own leaders is right for the country or fair to Americans who already live here.
And for Republicans who are looking to shake up the party, immigration remains a fabulous issue. Fabulous. A conservative revolt is inevitable, I think. The talk show vocalists of the base just hate the idea that de-facto amnesty will depend upon President Obama’s enforcement initiatives. They hate the fact that the GOP leadership has bought into the (Democratic/media) idea that undocumented Latinos need and want government subsidies and sanction for their crime. They don’t believe that Hispanics will shift toward the GOP anyway, unless the GOP truly focuses on the things that conservatives like to essentialize about Hispanics: They’re family-oriented, religious, entrepreneurial.
But they recognize that Marco Rubio is the best voice the party has right now, and it’s still January of 2013.
Give it time.
Is it fair to magnetize U.S. borders and give businesses a cheap supply of new labor at the expense of Americans who are looking for jobs? Will the tax base really broaden because most new immigrants won’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes?
The moment conservatives make immigration into a 2014 election issue, insisting that their candidates either disavow what they voted on in 2013 or promise to repeal it is the moment that the party’s attempt to make amends with Hispanics gets put on hold.
An enterprising 2016 presidential candidate (Sen. Ted Cruz? Sarah Palin?) could step in to represent this part of the party.
Truth be told, I don’t know how Republicans solve their “Latino” problem anytime soon. It is manifold and multi-causal. But the coming “us versus them” backlash will not be helpful.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, January 30, 2013
“A Skeptical Argument”: It’s Silly To Oppose A Path To Citizenship Because It’s “Unfair”
Senator Ted Cruz isn’t a fan of the “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants already in the United States. His remarks on the subject were a response to a new immigration proposal in Congress. “There are some good elements in this proposal, especially increasing the resources and manpower to secure our border and also improving and streamlining legal immigration,” he said. “I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship. To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with the rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally.”
Over the years, I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of that argument.
The typical illegal immigrant is born, through no fault of his own, into an impoverished country with low standards of living, endemic corruption, and few economic opportunities for bettering his lot. There are richer countries where he could live a much better life. But the people born into those richer countries, owing to nothing but dumb luck, have enacted restrictive immigration laws that make it effectively impossible for someone of his stature to immigrate legally.
In one of those rich countries, the United States, most people who made the restrictive laws wouldn’t even be here but for the unrestricted immigration policy that prevailed when their ancestors arrived.
But back to the typical illegal immigrant.
In his impoverished land, he faces a choice: severely limit his life opportunities by staying in his home country; play the lottery of immigrating legally, which almost always consigns him to the same fate; or bid his family goodbye, sneak across the border, get a job, send much-needed money home to his loved ones, and radically improve his own life prospects by performing honest labor for people who want to buy it. His sneaking in doesn’t take anyone else’s “spot.” No legal immigrant was slowed down by his illegal entry. But he did break a duly codified law.
Is that unfair? Let’s say that it is.
Here he is in the United States seven years later. He’s been regularly employed. He hasn’t committed any crimes. He’s better off. His family back home is better off. His employer is better off. There may be people without high-school diplomas who are slightly worse off due to lower wages.
Am I to understand that fairness demands that the people born into the rich country through sheer luck forcibly repatriate the man to the poor country where he was born through no fault of his own?
That’s counterintuitive!
In fact, it’s among the worst of the arguments against a path to citizenship. And it isn’t improved by invoking supposedly wronged legal immigrants. There’s a tiny subset of people from other countries so unusually lucky that they win the immigration lottery — they get to come here legally, without sneaking across a dangerous border, because of luck. You’re telling me that fairness is advanced if, for those lucky few, we deport the guy who lost the immigration lottery?
When he is arrested, jailed for a few months, flown to a city not his own in his home country, and returns to the place of his birth, an impoverished village where he has no friends or prospects, I’m supposed to look at that outcome and think, Well, good, the fair thing happened!?
There may be good arguments for opposing a “path to citizenship.” Fairness is not one of them.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 29, 2013
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