Obama’s (In)Decision on Afghanistan
According to CBS News, President Barack Obama will send most, if not all, of the 40,000 additional troops that General Stanley McChrystal requested and reportedly plans to keep those troops in Afghanistan for the long-term.
If the CBS report turns out to be true—the White House has backed away, and other news outlets are leaving the story alone for the moment—the president’s decision is disappointing, but expected. Last month, the administration ruled out the notion of a near-term U.S. exit from Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban and al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States. But if avoiding a perception of weakness is the rationale that the administration is operating under then we have already lost by allowing our enemies to dictate the terms of the war.
Gen. McChrystal’s ambitious strategy hopes to integrate U.S. troops into the Afghan population. These additional troops might reduce violence in the short- to medium-term. But this strategy rests on the presumption that Afghans in heavily contested areas want the protection of foreign troops. The reality might be very different; western forces might instead be perceived as a magnet for violence.
McChrystal’s strategy also presumes that an additional 40,000 troops will be enough. But proponents of an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy need to come clean on the total bill that would be required. For a country the size of Afghanistan, with roughly 31 million people, the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine advises between 620,000 to 775,000 counterinsurgents—whether native or foreign. Furthermore, typical counterinsurgency missions require such concentrations of forces for a decade or more. Given these realities, we could soon hear cries of “surge,” “if only,” and “not enough.”
Even if the United States and its allies committed themselves to decades of armed nation building, success against al Qaeda would hardly be guaranteed. After all, in the unlikely event that we forged a stable Afghanistan, al Qaeda would simply reposition its presence into other regions of the world.
It is well past time for the United States to adapt means to ends. The choice for President Obama is not between counterterrorism or counterinsurgency; but between counterterrorism and counterterrorism combined with counterinsurgency. Protecting the United States from terrorism does not require U.S. troops to police Afghan villages. Where terrorists do appear, we hardly need to tinker with their communal identities. We can target our enemies with allies on the ground or, if that fails, by relying on timely intelligence for use in targeted airstrikes or small-unit raids.
President Obama’s decision on Afghanistan could define his presidency. If an escalating military strategy leads only to thousands of more deaths, and at a cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, then that is a bitter legacy indeed.
The Slippery Slope Goes Vertical
In the Obama era, the slippery slope has gone vertical. Instead of “eventually,” the feared extensions of government power come immediately.
When President Obama decided to convert George W. Bush’s bailout of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler L.L.C. into effective government ownership, critics warned that this could lead to political intrusion into the management of automobile companies, with decisions being made for political instead of economic reasons. The companies would get less efficient. The government might try to preserve jobs or engage in political grandstanding rather than build sound companies that serve consumers – eventually.
But there was no “eventually” about it. Before he had even secured government control, Obama fired the chief executive officer of General Motors. He decided what the ownership structure of the companies should be. He insisted that the companies build “clean cars” rather than cars that consumers want to buy. And as soon as a deal was concluded, members of Congress started trying to block the closing of inefficient dealerships and to require the companies to buy their palladium in Montana, use unionized trucking companies, remove mercury from scrapped cars, and so on. Politics reared its ugly head in the first moments of government control.
Now we have the federal government’s unprecedented intrusions into executive-pay decisions at seven bailed-out banks and automobile companies….
Read more at today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
Cato Podcast Exposes Anti-Poor Bias of U.S. Tariffs
The dirty secret of the U.S. tariff code is that it is not only insanely complex but that it is biased against the poor. Our highest remaining trade barriers are imposed on goods that loom the largest in the budgets of poor and middle-income families — such as food, shoes, and clothing.
Politicians and interest groups that fight any reduction of U.S. tariffs are unwittingly picking the pockets of the poor every day. I discuss how President Obama supports this unfair status quo in a new Cato podcast, in an earlier newspaper column, and in Chapter 9 of Mad about Trade.
And you can bet your imported t-shirt that I will highlight this inconvenient truth during my presentation at today’s Cato book forum. You can watch it live online beginning at noon, eastern time. Commenting on Mad about Trade will be Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post.
Attending to Business
In today’s Politico Arena, the editors ask:
Is Obama “dithering” on Afghanistan (Cheney) or fulfilling his “solemn responsibility” (Gibbs)?
My response:
President Obama got some adult criticism this week from Dick Cheney, none too soon. While the risk to American troops in Afghanistan grows, Obama dithers, unable to decide whether to get in or get out — whether to be the one thing the Constitution authorizes him to be, Commander in Chief. Yet he finds time to fly off to Copenhagen to promote Chicago for the Olympics, to insinuate himself in local political campaigns, to go on “Fox hunts,” yesterday excluding Fox News from the White House pool allowed to interview his executive pay czar, and now, we learn, to slash executive salaries at companies not only partially owned but simply regulated by the government. Are there no limits to the man’s hubris?
Even the Washington Post this morning, no bastion of free-market fervor, noted that this “represents a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment,” moving us ever closer to the European model. But it was Arena contributor Allan Meltzer who yesterday hit the nail on the head: ”All the noise about pay and pay cuts is part of an effort to divert the public’s attention from the main cause of the mortgage fiasco — the role that Congressman Frank and others had in creating the mortgage crisis by refusing to limit the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac after 2003.” That these regulators will be able to calculate the salary that is appropriate to discourage excessive risk-taking is simply comical.
And so we have here a textbook example of modern government: Obama fails to do or do well what he is authorized to do, yet he strides into matter far beyond his authority — or competence. He seems not to understand the Constitution he once taught, and more recently promised to uphold.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Yes, Mr. President, a Free Market Can Fix Health Care
At his White House forum on health reform back in March, President Barack Obama offered:
If there is a way of getting this done where we’re driving down costs and people are getting health insurance at an affordable rate, and have choice of doctor, have flexibility in terms of their plans, and we could do that entirely through the market, I’d be happy to do it that way.
In a new Cato study titled, “Yes, Mr. President, a Free Market Can Fix Health Care,” I take up the president’s challenge and explain that markets are indeed the only way to achieve those goals. I also explain how Congress can remove the impediments that currently prevent markets from doing so:
- Give Medicare enrollees a voucher (adjusted for their means and health risk) and let them purchase any health plan on the market,
- Reform the tax treatment of health care with “large” health savings accounts, which would give workers a $9.7 trillion tax cut (without increasing the deficit) and free them to purchase secure coverage that meets their needs,
- Free consumers and employers to purchase health insurance across state lines (i.e., licensed by other states), which could cover up to one third of the uninsured,
- Make state-issued clinician licenses portable, which would increase access to care and competition among health plans, and
- Block-grant Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, just as Congress did with welfare.
Unlike the president’s health care proposals (which, as Victor Fuchs explains, would merely shift costs), these reforms would reduce costs, expand coverage, and improve health care quality – without new taxes, government subsidies, or deficit spending.
Would a free market be nirvana? Of course not. But fewer Americans would fall through the cracks than under the status quo or the government takeover advancing through Congress.
There is a better way.
(Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Nice Insurance Company. Shame If Anything Were to Happen to It.
Just days after the health-insurance lobby released a report criticizing the Senate Finance Committee’s health care overhaul (for not expanding government enough!), Democrats and President Barack Obama lashed out at health insurers, threatening to revoke what the Government Accountability Office calls the insurers’ “very limited exemption from the federal antitrust laws.”
Democrats say they’re motivated by the need to increase competition in health insurance markets. Right.
According to Business Week:
David Hyman, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Illinois College of Law and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute…considers it unlikely that repeal would fundamentally change the nature of the market. While it might increase competition in some markets, he says, it could actually decrease it in others, such as those where small insurers survive because they have access to larger providers’ data. Changes to the act could therefore hurt smaller companies more than larger ones, he says.
Because the act doesn’t outlaw the existence of a dominant provider but simply prohibits collusion, says Hyman, a repeal would fall short of breaking up existing market monopolies that are blamed for artificially inflating prices. The current move against [the] McCarran-Ferguson [Act], he says, “has more to do with the politics of pushing back against the insurance industry’s opposition to health reform than it does with increasing competition in health-insurance markets.”
Combined with what The New York Times described as the Obama administration’s “ham-handed” attempt to censor insurers who communicated with seniors about the effects of the president’s health plan — the Times editorialized: “the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to stretch facts to the breaking point to make a weak case that the insurers were doing anything improper” — it’s hard to argue that this is anything but Democrats threatening to use the power of the state to punish dissidents.
When Republicans were in power, dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now that Democrats are in power, obedience is the highest form of patriotism.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Law and Civil Liberties
Obama: ‘All Part of the Job’
Via the Spectator’s Alex Massie, comes this ABC News report on last Thursday’s Obama town hall in New Orleans:
“Why do people hate you?”, a fourth-grade boy asked Obama …. “They’re supposed to love you. And God is love.”
Massie comments,
Obama’s answer is actually pretty reasonable. But this is what happens when you make a mere elected politician assume the status of Priest-King. It is, in its own way, a corrupting influence. I don’t blame the kid asking the question since, heck, there are plenty of professional journalists in DC who basically think along the same lines. This isn’t Obama’s fault, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
True enough, Americans had an irrational conception of presidential responsibility long before 44 took office. Still, Obama’s far from blameless. At the same town hall, Obama commented :
“You know, I listen to, sometimes, these reporters on the news: Well, why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?” he joked.
Ha: silly reporters! They should ask the president about something he’s actually promised to do, like provide “a cure for cancer in our time,” or stop the oceans’ rise, or “create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”
Obama’s right that it’s “part of the job” that the president gets an outsized share of credit or blame for the direction of the country. It’s been that way for a long time. As Thomas Cronin put it in his classic 1970 essay “Superman: Our Textbook President”:
on both sides of the presidential popularity equation [the president’s] importance is inflated beyond reasonable bounds. On one side, there is a nearly blind faith that the president embodies national virtue and that any detractor must be an effete snob or a nervous Nellie. On the other side, the president becomes the cause of all personal maladies, the originator of poverty and racism, inventor of the establishment, and the party responsible for a choleric national disposition.
Barack Obama didn’t create this view of presidential responsibility; he inherited it. But, other than the occasional “change is hard” caveat, it’s not as though Obama’s sought to dispel the irrational expectations people invest in the office. To the contrary, he’s done more than any president in living memory to encourage the view that the president is a benevolent father protector endowed with magical powers — a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. It’s the sort of view that people ought to — but often don’t — grow out of by, say, fifth grade. And a good deal of the burgeoning public dissatisfaction with Obama stems from his aggressive attempts to secure powers to match the boundless responsibilities he embraces.
Should the White House Be Taking on Fox?
Today’s Arena question over at Politico asks:
Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” Is the White House smart, or not so smart, to take on Fox?
Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” As compared to what? The New York Times? NPR? MSNBC? Please.
The Obama team, Democrats like my good friend Walter Dellinger, and the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) howl about Fox News for two main reasons. First, Fox is covering news the MSM ignores because it doesn’t “fit.” And second, in part because of that, the Fox audience continues to grow while the MSM audience is shrinking, raising a serious question about whether the MSM is any longer “mainstream.”
Let’s not pretend that the MSM doesn’t “manage” the news. It does it mainly by deciding daily what is and is not “news” and then by deciding how to report that news. Do we need any better example than the current ACORN story? As Fox was bringing the facts to light, nowhere were those facts to be found in the MSM — until they could be ignored no longer. Or take the huge 9/12 anti-big-government rally here in Washington. Fox covered it for the event that it was. Where was it covered in The New York Times? On page A37. And more revealing still, in the NYT electronic edition, the second of three stories posted under “Politics” was headlined “Thousands Rally in Minnesota Behind Obama’s Call for Health Care Overhaul,” the third was headlined “Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government” — the implication being that the two rallies were equivalent in size when in fact the protest rally dwarfed the Obama rally by many multiples.
But why pretend it’s otherwise? The president himself admits the MSM bias. Speaking at the May 9 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table.” A good laugh line in that setting, to be sure, but only because he’s said at last what we all know to be true.
Walter Dellinger may write, citing no evidence, that the Tax Day Tea Party protests were “conceived and executed by Fox News,” but he surely knows that’s not true. He hails from North Carolina, albeit now from Duke. He knows that outside that cloister there’s protest in the land. Fox News isn’t generating that opposition to the Obama juggernaut. It’s real, but it’s so much easier for the MSM to blame the bearer of that news than to face the reasons for their own falling numbers: Their “news” doesn’t fit with what so many people see with their own eyes. I’m reminded of the great Groucho Marx line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
C/P Politico’s Arena
U.S. Standing in the World
Well before Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Americans were speculating on whether his ascendancy to the highest office in the land would help to improve the United States’ tarnished reputation in the world.
The early indications were encouraging, but largely anecdotal. The Pew Research Center provided data from surveys taken in May and June, and found a mixed picture: attitudes toward the United States were most improved in Western Europe, East Asia, and Africa (Nigeria and Kenya), but barely changed in the several predominantly Muslim countries polled, including U.S. allies Turkey and Pakistan.
The more relevant question is whether we should care. International relations is not a popularity contest. In the classical formulation, nation-states pursue policies that they believe will advance their interests. Sometimes these policies backfire. Sometimes they fail. But, all other factors being equal, we should assume that policies are directed from within, and not much influenced by without.
A recent study published by the American Political Science Association makes a reasonably convincing case that Americans should care about U.S. “standing” not purely for the sake of feeling good about ourselves, but also because improved standing is likely to contribute to more effective foreign policy. “Diminished standing may make it harder for the United States to get things done in world politics,” the report explains. In this context, the report continues, we should “think of standing … as the foreign-policy equivalent of ‘political capital.’” If we have a stored reserve of such capital, we can deploy this to mobilize international support. At a minimum, this will convince other countries to go along with us; in ideal cases, we might obtain their active support.
The report was commissioned by the outgoing APSA president, Peter J. Katzenstein of Cornell University, and the task force was chaired by Jeffrey Legro of the University of Virginia, and included a number of eminent scholars. [The full report is available here, a shorter public version was made available here, and Katzenstein and Legro summarized the findings in a recent article at Foreign Policy.com.]
Peace? The Promise of Peace? Eh, Close Enough
Worse choices have been made than Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize.
There was Woodrow Wilson in 1919, an award that rates as one of history’s more grotesque international jokes. Wilson promised to keep us out of war and promptly got us into it, meanwhile laying the ideological and geopolitical foundations for 90 years of war-nationalism, war-liberalism, and war-socialism. To say nothing of saddling us with the terrible idea of world government. Among those who weren’t Nazis or communists, Wilson may have done more than any other individual to promote human suffering in the last hundred years.
So yes, there have been worse choices. (Next to Wilson, I’d have to give Al Gore and Yasser Arafat both honorable mentions. We could go on, of course.) But still, Barack Obama? Seriously? I doubt the committee has any idea how badly their choice will be mocked in the United States.
Over here, the prize will be a disappointment to the anti-war left, the anti-war right, and, of course, the pro-war right. The only contingent I can see taking pride in it over here is the establishment left, which hasn’t had much time lately for substantive work on peace, but which is always happy to make speeches and receive awards. Sometimes, the American image abroad is just that important.
Rather than piling on in what is sure to be a bipartisan laugh-fest, let’s think about what Barack Obama actually could have done for world peace. And weep.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
There Is No Peace for the Uninsured
President Obama wants to put people in jail if they don’t buy health insurance. Give that man a peace prize.
Cross-posted at Politico’s The Arena.
Why the Obama Administration Is All Over the Map on Afghanistan
Hey Rajiv Chandrasekaran, what the heck happened back in March when Obama decided to send 17,000 more troops into Afghanistan and started telling everyone we needed a more expansive approach there?
Everyone, save Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, agreed that the United States needed to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency mission to defeat the Taliban…
[...]
To senior military commanders, the [implications were] unambiguous: U.S. and NATO forces would have to change the way they operated in Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents, the troops would have to concentrate on protecting the good Afghans from the bad ones.
And to carry out such a counterinsurgency effort the way its doctrine prescribes, the military would almost certainly need more boots on the ground.
To some civilians who participated in the strategic review, that conclusion was much less clear. Some took it as inevitable that more troops would be needed, but others thought the thrust of the new approach was to send over scores more diplomats and reconstruction experts. They figured a counterinsurgency mission could be accomplished with the forces already in the country, plus the 17,000 new troops Obama had authorized in February.
“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency. (emphasis mine)
This sort of thing is almost enough to make you feel for the COIN clique. Barack Obama fancies himself a foreign-policy thinker, and his national-security staff no doubt think highly of their strategic vision and would like to advance the idea that Democratic administrations make better foreign-policy decisions than Republican administrations. But when Obama and his administration come out in March and say “yes, we’d like a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan,” and then send McChrystal over to do an assessment of what a COIN mission would need in terms of resources, it’s just absurd for them flutter six months later that “well, we didn’t know what we were getting into! They didn’t tell us it was going to be long and hard and costly!”
We’ve been having a discussion on counterinsurgency — indeed we’ve been doing counterinsurgency — for the last few years. There are lots of us who think that COIN in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand. My view is that COIN more generally is an intellectually insular doctrine purveyed by a cadre of scholar-practitioners who’ve either situated the doctrine in an absurd strategic context [.pdf] or else failed even to attempt to situate the approach inside any larger strategy.
But to be fair to them, they’ve been pretty candid about how hard counterinsurgency is. It’s just ridiculous for the administration to protest that they didn’t know it was going to be so expensive. The policy outcome the Obama administration produced was simply to throw more resources at the problem without bothering to think carefully about the connections between strategy, doctrine, and resources. Not encouraging.
Tuesday Links
- Well, is conservatism “brain dead” after all? David Boaz: “What does conservatism stand for today, other than opposition to President Obama?”
- Why Congress should not renew the PATRIOT Act’s “lone wolf” provision.
- Sex and security in Afghanistan.
- Barack Obama: “The omnipresent omnipresident.“
- Federal spending has doubled in less than a decade. Here’s what we can do about it.
- Podcast: “Unemployment and Stimulus Part II“
Dear President Obama: It Will Take True Leadership to Get Us Out of Afghanistan
At a recent town hall meeting, [via Ryan Jaroncyk at The Humble Libertarian], U.S. Rep. Tim Johnson (R-IL) explained why he wants a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan:
I’m suggesting to you that there is no end game. I believe that our men and women are there in a mission that is ill-defined… I think we’re losing people by the day, here and over there, with no even indirect relationship to our national security.
Within a couple of weeks, I’m going to be looking at legislation and issuing a definitive statement on my position on Afghanistan, which at this point I would suggest would call for our withdrawal of troops forthwith.
We’ve had a succession from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, and the net result has been thousands of lives lost, and very little progress made… I’m in favor of doing everything we can to make America secure, to make sure we don’t have another 9/11 or even anything analogous to that, but I’m also convinced that our continued presence in Afghanistan is not serving that role. And we need to seriously re-examine where we’re at.
As I mentioned back in February of this year, “There is immense pressure to infuse greater troops in the region, but there is no objective in mind — and before you deploy the troops, you want to have a strategy.” The Obama administration is still stuck at a crossroads: either send more troops to protect the villages of Afghanistan from the Taliban, or stay at present levels (or decrease U.S. troop commitments) to go after al Qaeda cells in Pakistan.
The Video Is Creepy, But the Public-Schooling Song Remains the Same
You’ve probably already seen it, but I thought I’d post it anyway. For those who haven’t yet watched it, below is the video of kids at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School — a public school in Burlington, New Jersey — belting out a little diddy about Barack Obama and all the wonderful things he’s declared. According to the school district, this Presidential Idol performance was put on as part of a Black History Month celebration.
In case you couldn’t make out everything the kiddos were singing, here are the lyrics:
Song 1:
Mm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein ObamaHe said that all must lend a hand
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein ObamaHe said we must be fair today
Equal work means equal pay
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein ObamaHe said that we must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein ObamaHe said red, yellow, black or white
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein ObamaYes!
Mmm, mmm, mm
Barack Hussein Obama
Thursday Links
- Obama can twist words all he wants, but a government mandate to buy health insurance is still a tax. “Think of it this way: If the government took money directly from you, then turned around and gave it to an insurance company, everyone would agree that you’ve been taxed.” Nobody considers it a tax? Even his advisers call it a tax.
- More on the health care mandate: “Compulsory health insurance could require nearly 100 million Americans to switch to a more expensive health plan and would therefore violate President Barack Obama’s pledge to let people keep their current health insurance.”
- Why the U.S. slapped a trade tariff on Chinese tires: “President Obama’s decision was guided strictly by selfish, political considerations: He felt he owed American unions for their previous and continuing support, regardless of the economic and diplomatic fallout.”
- Vital data on climate change mysteriously disappear.
- Podcast: “Twenty Years Since the Fall of Communism” featuring Czech President Václav Klaus.
State Secrets, State Secrets Are No Fun
Despite Barack Obama’s frequent paeans to the value of transparency during the presidential campaign, his Justice Department has incensed civil liberties advocates by parroting the Bush administration’s broad invocations of the “state secrets privilege” in an effort to torpedo lawsuits challenging controversial interrogation and surveillance policies. Though in many cases the underlying facts have already been widely reported, DOJ lawyers implausibly claimed, not merely that particular classified information should not be aired in open court, but that any discussion of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of detainees to torture-friendly regimes, or of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, would imperil national security.
That may—emphasis on may—finally begin to change as of October 1st, when new guidelines for the invocation of the privilege issued by Attorney General Eric Holder kick in. Part of the change is procedural: state secrets claims will need to go through a review board and secure the personal approval of the Attorney General. Substantively, the new rules raise the bar for assertions of privilege by requiring attorneys to provide courts with specific evidence showing reason to expect disclosure would result in “significant harm” to national security. Moreover, those assertions would have to be narrowly tailored so as to allow cases to proceed on the basis of as much information as can safely be disclosed.
That’s the theory, at any rate. The ACLU is skeptical, and argues that relying on AG guidelines to curb state secrets overreach is like relying on the fox to guard the hen house. And indeed, hours after the announcement of the new guidelines—admittedly not yet in effect—government attorneys were singing the state secrets song in a continuing effort to get a suit over allegations of illegal wiretapping tossed. The cynical read here is that the new guidelines are meant to mollify legislators contemplating statutory limits on state secrets claims while preserving executive discretion to continue making precisely the same arguments, so long as they add the word “significant” and jump through a few extra hoops. Presumably we’ll start to see how serious they are come October. And as for those proposed statutory limits, if the new administration’s commitment to greater accountability is genuine, they should now have no objection to formal rules that simply reinforce the procedures and principles they’ve voluntarily embraced.
It’s Friday — What Bad News Will Be Released Late Tonight?
President Obama promised to change the way things are done in Washington, but his administration has mastered one old Washington trick: releasing bad news late on Friday, or even on Saturday night of a long weekend, in the hope that journalists won’t have much chance to ask questions or get into the next day’s papers. Consider:
- The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama’s policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday.
—Washington Post, Saturday, August 22 - White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned late Saturday after weeks of pressure from the right over his past activism. “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Saturday.
—Washington Post, Sunday, September 6, 2009 - The White House late Friday announced it would impose high tariffs on imports of Chinese tires in a case seen as the first test of trade policy under President Barack Obama… The announcement was made in a release sent out by the White House press office at about 9:30 p.m. Friday night, a time when news is sometimes “dumped” in the hope it will attract less attention.
—TheHill.com, 10:56 p.m., Friday, September 11, 2009
So what will it be tonight? A late-night tax increase? The resignation of another administration appointee who didn’t pay his own taxes? More troops for Iraq?
A Chance to Fix the PATRIOT Act?
As Tim Lynch noted earlier this week, Barack Obama’s justice department has come out in favor of renewing three controversial PATRIOT Act provisions—on face another in a train of disappointments for anyone who’d hoped some of those broad executive branch surveillance powers might depart with the Bush administration.
But there is a potential silver lining: In the letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) making the case for renewal, the Justice Department also declares its openness to “modifications” of those provisions designed to provide checks and balances, provided they don’t undermine investigations. While the popular press has always framed the fight as being “supporters” and “opponents” of the PATRIOT Act, the problem with many of the law’s provisions is not that the powers they grant are inherently awful, but that they lack necessary constraints and oversight mechanisms.
Consider the much-contested “roving wiretap” provision allowing warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to cover all the communications devices a target might use without specifying the facilities to be monitored in advance—at least in cases where there are specific facts supporting the belief that a target is likely to take measures to thwart traditional surveillance. The objection to this provision is not that intelligence officers should never be allowed to obtain roving warrants, which also exist in the law governing ordinary law enforcement wiretaps. The issue is that FISA is fairly loosey-goosey about the specification of “targets”—they can be described rather than identified. That flexibility may make some sense in the foreign intel context, but when you combine it with similar flexibility in the specification of the facility to be monitored, you get something that looks a heck of a lot like a general warrant. It’s one thing to say “we have evidence this particular phone line and e-mail account are being used by terrorists, though we don’t know who they are” or “we have evidence this person is a terrorist, but he keeps changing phones.” It’s another—and should not be possible—to mock traditional particularity requirements by obtaining a warrant to tap someone on some line, to be determined. FISA warrants should “rove” over persons or facilities, but never both.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
That Costly Mandate
The Wall Street Journal notes that Sen. Max Baucus’s allegedly moderate health care plan “would increase the cost of insurance and then force people to buy it, requiring subsidies. Those subsidies would be paid for by taxes that make health care and thus insurance even more expensive, requiring even more subsidies and still higher taxes.” Other than that, it’s not so bad. The Journal also digs up a great graphic produced by the 2008 presidential campaign of a little-known Illinois senator named Barack Obama:
And speaking of health care mandates and how much they’re going to cost young people, as the Washington Post was yesterday, I just had lunch with Clark Ruper, program manager for Students for Liberty, who told me he’d be on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS tonight. In the interview he told them that as a young healthy person he has voluntarily chosen not to purchase health insurance and instead invests in his own savings. And he thinks a lot of young people make such choices and don’t want a government mandate requiring them to buy government-approved insurance. Check it out tonight on PBS.
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