“But He’s Our Imperial President”
My Washington Examiner column today closes out a three-part series this week on “Obama’s Imperial Presidency” (also running at Reason.com). Tuesday’s column covered Obama’s expansion of executive power abroad, and Wednesday’s looked at the ways in which Obama has turned the Imperial Presidency inward against the private sector.
Today’s column begins with a recap of the powers 44 holds:
Abroad, Obama claims the power to start wars at will; scoop up your email and phone records without answering to a judge; assassinate you via drone strike far from any battlefield, and — should your relatives complain — keep the whole thing secret in the name of national security.
At home, Obama has summarily fired the CEO of General Motors, America’s largest automaker; flouted bankruptcy law to shaft Chrysler’s creditors and pay off his union allies; pressured half-nationalized car companies to produce pokey little electric cars, had his National Labor Relations Board assert veto power over a private company’s decision to move a factory to a “right to work” state; and, via imperial edict, began restructuring the industrial economy by imposing restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions despite Congress’ refusal to pass cap-and-trade legislation.
Left or Right, Red or Blue, no American should be comfortable with any one man wielding that much power. Yet too many Americans embrace a philosophy of “situational constitutionalism”: they only get disturbed about the menacing concentration of power in the executive branch when they don’t care for the guy who has the scepter and the crown:
Conservatives who defended every excess of the Bush administration now rail against Obama’s Imperial Presidency, and liberals who considered the Bush era one long descent into the dark night of fascism seem blithely indifferent to the present Oval Office occupant’s multiplying executive power grabs.
Apparently, phrases like “he killed his own people” only grate when pronounced in a clipped, West Texas accent — otherwise, “wars of choice” against third-rate dictators go down smoothly.
But “situational constitutionalism” is the constitutionalism of fools: there’s something absurd–or at least insincere–about people who decide to worry about the Imperial Presidency only every four to eight years, and only when the “other team” holds the office.
Blame power-hungry presidents and feckless Congresses all you want. We’ll never solve the problem of the Imperial Presidency until more Americans manage to pry their eyes away from the Red-Team/Blue Team sideshow and recognize that who holds the office is less important than the powers the office holds.
A New Day? Obama Faces Reality
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
The president will address this new political reality at a 1 p.m. news conference. What should President Obama say to reckon with the reality of the Democratic debacle?
My response:
What the president should say and what he will say at his press conference this afternoon are likely to be two different things. He should say that he and his party seriously misread the 2008 election results: Americans were rejecting the Bush administration’s eight years of expansive government. But he can hardly say that without repudiating the last two years: After all, he doubled down on Bush’s policies. Yesterday the vast majority of Americans said, in effect, “And we mean it!”
Not everywhere, to be sure, but look at the House map this morning: It’s almost all red, with scattered pockets of blue. Obama should recognize that reality, but to do so would be to abandon the dream, and he is nothing if not a dreamer. Throughout this campaign administration apologists kept saying that the problem was not in the product but in the packaging – in the delivery. No. It was the product. Americans didn’t want it.
So Obama will doubtless give lip service to yesterday’s results and talk about the need for all to work together “to solve America’s problems” – as though we were all on some grand collective mission. But in his subsequent actions he will likely turn to the elites in those isolated urban and academic blue pockets on the map to try to fashion a comeback consistent with his dream, because a Bill Clinton pivot would be wholly out of character with a man who branded opponents as “the enemy.” We’re probably in for two years of gridlock before we can return to fundamental principles of limited government, and that’s good.
War in Iraq Not Over
President Obama will not declare “mission accomplished” in his prime-time speech on Iraq tonight, nor should he. He should not claim that a flowering democracy has been created in Iraq. He should not make unrealistic predictions about the long-term prospects for that shattered country.
The war isn’t over for the 50,000 U.S. troops left behind in Iraq. The president should recognize the sacrifice of all our troops, who have performed admirably. The war won’t be over for Americans back home until every last man and woman in uniform returns home safely from a conflict that has claimed so many lives and consumed so much treasure.
The president should reaffirm the strategic rationale for the drawdown set in motion by the Bush administration in consultation with the Iraqi government. Leaving U.S. troops in Iraq for another seven years will not make Americans safer. U.S. troops should not try to fashion a functioning state in Iraq. That task is the responsibility of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people. Likewise, our troops should not serve as Iraq’s police force.
As our troops work hard to execute their mission, however, a rising chorus of voices is working diligently against the ultimate goal of U.S. withdrawal and Iraqi self-sufficiency. Some people are advising the president to leave a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, essentially arguing that the United States is the rightful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty, and that the Iraqis simply can’t be trusted with security matters. The president has wisely turned aside such recommendations in the past, and should do so again.
‘Mountain of Debt’
The White House Office of Management and Budget homepage currently features the following quote from the president:
President Obama says he wants to “invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt.”
That’s a curious statement because the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the president’s current budget proposal projects that publicly held debt as a share of the economy would reach levels last seen at the end of the Second World War.
When the CBO’s numbers are plugged into a bar chart, the projected Obama debt levels (red bars) look like…the upward slope of a mountain (!):
To be fair, Obama’s predecessors — particularly the previous Bush administration — share in the responsibility for the mountainous rise in federal debt. However, that’s all the more reason for the Obama administration to work toward a peak instead of a steeper incline.
Obama, Civil Liberties, & the Left
A confession: For all my innumerable policy disagreements with Barack Obama, on election night 2008, I found myself cheering with the rest of the throng on U Street. I fully expected to be appalled by much of his agenda — but I had also spent years covering the Bush administration’s relentless arrogation of power to the executive in the name of the War on Terror, its glib invocation of “national security” to squelch the least gesture toward transparency or accountability, its easy contempt for civil liberties and the rule of law. However fitfully, I thought, we could finally hope to see that appalling legacy reversed. And that seemed worth celebrating even if little else about the declared Obama agenda was.
As you might guess, I had a lot of disappointment coming — and not just with Obama. There were, of course, principled civil libertarians on the left, like Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald and Firedoglake‘s Marcy Wheeler who kept banging the drum with undiminished fury. But many progressives seemed prepared to assume that Bush’s War-on-Terror policies would be out the door close on the heels of their author — conspicuously muting their outrage even as the reasons for it persisted. Meanwhile, the right — disappointingly if not entirely surprisingly — managed to fuse a penchant for breathless Stalin analogies with an attitude toward expansive surveillance powers and arbitrary detention authority that ranged from indifference to endorsement.
So it’s a little encouraging to see evidence over the last few weeks that burgeoning progressive disenchantment with Obama along a number of dimensions seems to be bringing these issues back into sharper focus. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame (described by the paper as a “lefty icon”) blasted Obama for “continuing the worst of the Bush administration in terms of civil liberties.” ACLU director Anthony Romero declared himself “disgusted” with the president, and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones catalogued a slew of reasons to agree with that appraisal. The real test of an issue’s salience, however, is whether it makes The Daily Show, and so perhaps the most significant bellwether is Jon Stewart’s decision to devote an unusually long and blistering segment to Obama’s failure to live up to his rhetoric on civil liberties and executive power:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Respect My Authoritah | ||||
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Democrats have spent most of the past decade playing defense against “soft on national security” attacks from the right, on the assumption — borne out thus far — that the base wasn’t going to punish them for folding on civil liberties issues. But while many progressive complaints now being aired are themselves the product of an unrealistic view of presidential puissance, this really is one sphere where the president has enormous latitude to unilaterally affect policy. It’s therefore also a set of issues where scant progress can’t easily be blamed on Republican obstructionism.
During the Bush era, we saw the brief emergence of a small but hardy left-right “strange bedfellows” coalition opposed to the FISA Amendments Act. Now I find myself wondering: If progressive grumblings on this front continue and grow louder, will the Tea Party movement that’s sprung up in the intervening years realize that their own rhetoric logically commits them to the same position? And if they do, will civil libertarians on the left be open to resurrecting that odd alliance?
Meet the New Minerals Management Service
In a move reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration is cracking down on the Minerals Management Service…by changing the agency’s name.
The MMS has fallen into disrepute because, well, as E&ENews PM put it, “employees accepted gifts from oil and gas companies, participated in ‘a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity,’ and considered themselves exempt from federal ethics rules.” The “drug and sex abuse [occurred] both inside the program and ‘in consort with industry.’ “ The New York Times reports that MMS employees “viewed pornography at work and even considered themselves part of industry.” Yet this government agency somehow failed to prevent the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
So the Obama administration is giving MMS a makeover. The agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service will hereafter be known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement.
That’s exactly how the Bush administration dealt with the unpopularity of the Health Care Financing Administration, the agency responsible for Medicare and Medicaid: by changing its name to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. With candor and humor — two scarce commodities in such circles — Bush’s HCFA/CMS administrator Tom Scully explained the rationale:
The health care market . . . is extremely muted and extremely screwed up and it’s largely because of my agency. For those of you who don’t follow CMS, which used to be called HCFA, we changed the name because it was so well loved. I always say it’s kind of like when Enron comes out of bankruptcy, they’ll probably change their name. So, HCFA—Secretary Thompson and I decided to confuse everybody. We changed the name to CMS for a couple of years so people wouldn’t realize we’re actually HCFA. So far, it’s worked reasonably well.
For more on the pervasive cozy relationship between big business and big government, read Tim Carney’s Obamanomics.
For even more candor and humor concerning Medicare, read David Hyman’s Medicare Meets Mephistopheles.
John Ashcroft Returns to Heritage Foundation
Dana Milbank has an article about an Ashcroft address at Heritage yesterday.
Here’s an excerpt:
Ashcroft, in his own conciliatory gesture, implicitly acknowledged that he was on the wrong side in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld detention case, in which the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration. “The Hamdi case was a bit of an anomaly because Hamdi was an American citizen, and it’s been considered settled law for a long time that American citizens always have the right in American courts to petition the court for habeas corpus,” Ashcroft allowed.
Well, yes, it was settled law right up until Bush’s lawyers launched their attack on the writ of habeas corpus. Nowadays those lawyers play down the dangerous legal positions they advanced during their tenure. Cheney is the exception.
Regulatory Spending Actually Rose under Bush
Analysts across the ideological spectrum generally agree that the government’s regulatory bodies fail far too frequently. However, analysts seem to learn different lessons from this experience.
Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein cites numerous examples of failure and concludes, “It’s time for the business community to give up its jihad against regulation.”
He says:
It hardly captures the breadth and depth of these regulatory failures to say that during the Bush administration the pendulum swung a bit too far in the direction of deregulation and lax enforcement. What it misses is just how dramatically the regulatory agencies have been shrunken in size, stripped of talent and resources, demoralized by lousy leadership, captured by the industries they were meant to oversee and undermined by political interference and relentless attacks on their competence and purpose.
It’s true that regulators often do the bidding of the industries that they regulate. But “regulatory capture” is a long recognized phenomenon that undermines the contention that the government is well-suited to be a watchdog.
Regardless, is Pearlstein right that federal regulatory agencies were “dramatically” shrunk? Not according to a new study from George Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis. The figure shows that regulatory spending actually rose an inflation-adjusted 31 percent during the Bush administration (FY2002-FY2009):
Similarly, regulatory staff jumped by 42 percent under Bush’s watch:
The Wall Street Journal’s Surveillance Fantasies
There are too few periodical venues for good short fiction these days, so I’d normally be enthusiastic about the Wall Street Journal‘s decision to print works of fantasy. Unfortunately, they’ve opted to do so on their editorial page—starting with a long farrago of hypotheticals concerning the putative role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in hindering the detection and apprehension of failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. In fairness to the editors, they acknowledge near the end of the piece that much of it is unvarnished speculation, but their flights of creative fancy extend to many claims presented as fact.
Let’s begin with the acknowledged fiction. The Journal editors wonder whether Shahzad might have been under surveillance before his botched Times Square attack, and posit that the NSA might have intercepted communications from “Waziristan Taliban talking about ‘our American brother Faisal,’ which could have been cross-referenced against Karachi flight manifests,” or “maybe Shahzad traded seemingly innocuous emails with Pakistani terrorists, and minimization precluded analysts from detecting a pattern.” Anything is possible. But it’s a leap to make this inference merely because investigators appear to have had fairly specific knowledge about his contacts with terrorists after he had already been identified. They would not have needed to “retroactively to reconstruct his activities from other already-gathered foreign wiretaps:” Once they had zeroed in on Shahzad, his calling patterns could have been reconstructed from phone company calling records whether or not he or his confederates were being targeted at the time the communications occurred, and indeed, those records could have been obtained by means of a National Security Letter without any oversight from the FISA Court.
Estrada and Taylor on Kagan
Kagan gets an endorsement from superstar conservative appellate litigator and Bush II appellate nominee (also my old boss) Miguel Estrada here (see last paragraph).
Plus, Stuart Taylor says Kagan’s nomination could mean a more conservative Court:
Commentators on the left . . . complain that Kagan never compiled much of a record of aggressively championing liberal causes during her years as a law professor. Some say she was too friendly as dean of Harvard Law School to conservatives and did not recruit as many women and minorities for the faculty as diversitycrats desired.
Speaking as a moderate independent, I like everything about Kagan that the left dislikes. To borrow from my friend Harvey Silverglate, a leading Boston lawyer who champions both civil liberties and an old-fashioned liberal’s brand of political incorrectness, ‘they want people who look different but think alike.’
Kagan seems to be a woman who thinks for herself.
Taylor also highlights what many libertarians will find most troubling about her record (other than strong hints of her lack of sympathy, albeit predictable for a Democratic nominee, with the litigation interests of the business community): her apparent endorsement of the Bush administration’s legal framework for detention of enemy combatants.
Waking Up at Last
Tony Blankley, former press secretary to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, exults in the Washington Times that Americans are waking up “to our heritage of freedom” and to the abuse of the Constitution:
All the following acts have suddenly awakened Americans to their Constitution: (1) The nationalization of car companies and banks; (2) the subordination of the car companies’ legal bondholders to union bosses; (3) the creation of trillion-dollar slush funds (the stimulus package) used for, among other purposes, the corrupt purchase of congressional votes; (4) the mandating of individual health insurance purchase against the will of Americans; (5) the attempt to have Obamacare “deemed” to have been enacted, rather than actually publicly voted on by Congress.
Amazingly, spontaneously, Americans are educating themselves about the details of our Constitution.
He’s absolutely right. All those actions do raise serious questions about whether there are still any constitutional limitations on government, which is to say, whether the Constitution is still in effect, questions that Roger Pilon also raised this week in the Christian Science Monitor. But it would be even better if Americans had noticed the threats to constitutional government a bit earlier, if not during the New Deal or the Great Society, then perhaps during the past decade when, as Gene Healy and Tim Lynch wrote in 2006:
Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes
- a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
- a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
- a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror— in other words, perhaps forever; and
- a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.
President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.
But better late than never, and we join Tony Blankley in hoping that the Constitution’s limits on the powers of the federal government will once again be an issue in American politics and governance.
Son of the Stimulus
Like the sequel to a horror film, the politicians in Washington just passed another stimulus proposal. Only this time, they’re calling it a “jobs bill” in hopes that a different name will yield a better result.
But if past performance is any indicator of future results, this is bad news for taxpayers. By every possible measure, the first stimulus was a flop. But don’t take my word for it. Instead, look at what the White House said would happen.
The Administration early last year said that doing nothing would mean an unemployment rate of nine percent. Spending $787 billion, they said, was necessary to keep the unemployment rate at eight percent instead.
So what happened? As millions of Americans can painfully attest, the jobless rate actually climbed to 10 percent, a full percentage point higher than Obama claimed it would be if no bill was passed.
The President and his people also are arguing that the so-called stimulus is responsible for two million jobs. Yet according to the Department of Labor, total employment has dropped significantly — by more than three million — since the so-called stimulus was adopted. The White House wants us to believe this sow’s ear is really a silk purse by claiming that the economy actually would have lost more than five million jobs without all the new pork-barrel spending. This is the infamous “jobs saved or created” number. The advantage of this approach is that there are no objective benchmarks. Unemployment could climb to 15 percent, but Obama’s people can always say there would be two million fewer jobs without all the added government spending.
To be fair, this does not mean that Obama’s supposed stimulus caused unemployment to jump to 10 percent. In all likelihood, a big jump in unemployment was probably going to occur regardless of whether politicians squandered another $787 billion. The White House was foolish to make specific predictions that now can be used to discredit the stimulus, but it’s also true that Obama inherited a mess — and that mess seems to be worse than most people thought.
Moreover, it takes time for an Administration to implement changes and impact the economy’s performance. Reagan took office in early 1981 during an economic crisis, for instance, and it took about two years for his policies to rejuvenate the economy. It certainly seems fair to also give Obama time to get the economy moving again.
That being said, there is little reason to expect good results for Obama in the future. Reagan reversed the big-government policies of his predecessor. Obama, by contrast, is continuing Bush’s big-government approach. Heck, the only real difference in their economic policies is that Bush was a borrow-and-spender and Obama is a borrow-and-tax-and-spender.
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