The Next Hurrah

Nobody for Attorney General

by Kagro X

Michael Mukasey is certainly qualified to be Attorney General of the United States, if Alberto Gonzales sets any precedent. And while that may be the least convincing recommendation anyone can ever be given for the job, consider that Mukasey yesterday gave perhaps the least convincing answer to one of the most important questions asked of him -- by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)-- in his confirmation hearing:

We Can't Wait for Bipartisan Solutions

by DHinMI

"We need a consensus."

This is what Joe Biden said a little while ago, when asked by Keith Olberman if he would appoint a Republican to head up the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security.  I don’t have the exact language, but he seemed to imply that nothing would work unless it had significant support from Republicans.

I was floored.

If there is anything that has been apparent since the Democratic takeover of Congress, it’s that many and probably most of the current Republican members of Congress will NEVER work with Democrats for the good of the country.  Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, the majority of Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that they don’t care about the good of the country.  Grover Norquist is inadvertently one of the most honest of conservatives, and when he referred to bipartisanship as date rape, he wasn’t revealing just his own personal view, he was describing the mindset of much of the Republican Congressional caucus and it’s allies in think tanks, among campaign hacks and activists, and in a sizeable chunk of its electoral base. 

It’s a realization many of us had come to long ago.  It’s one of the reasons many of us ended up on progressive blogs, the knowledge that George W Bush, his allies in Congress and the people who push them in to power will use unscrupulous means to attain, maintain and exercise power. They know they have to conceal their unscrupulousness from the public. While the Republican party has veered farther and farther to the right, the American people haven’t really budged.  In fact, on individual issues, the American public is more liberal today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and far more liberal than it was when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which provided the mandate to enact our major civil rights legislation and the most major extension of the social welfare state since the New Deal and World War II.  Republicans involved in organizing and running elections and selling their policy positions to the press and the talking heads know that the American public is far to their left.  But they conceal their radicalism through clever marketing scams like Frank Luntz’ Contract on America and the pabulum of "compassionate conservatism." 

Good News/Bad News on Defunding

by Kagro X

I'll start with the good news. I found a very informative article in the Military Law Review, written in 1998 by a Colonel in the Army JAG Corps, that makes a pretty thorough study of the questions involved and concludes just what we all knew he must: that the president has no independent spending authority.

Colonel Richard D. Rosen is now retired from a 26-year military career, during which he served as Commandant (essentially the Dean) of the Army's JAG school and Deputy Legal Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His paper, "Funding 'Non-Traditional' Military Operations: The Alluring Myth of a Presidential Power of the Purse," (PDF) is an excellent resource for reviewing the history, mechanics and outcomes from numerous examples in which military operations have created conflicting funding questions in the past. As such, I think it makes a similarly excellent resource in any effort to define the outer boundaries for the questions I have about defunding Iraq operations.

Colonel Rosen's own restatement of the good news, which for him was apparently bad news:

YouBudget

by emptypockets

With remnants of Tax Day still on my mind (and my desk), I wanted to bring up a point I heard tossed out by a woman who, I think, was from the IRS when she was a guest on a CSPAN call-in show a month or two ago.

She pointed out that tax returns are the largest national survey taken annually and we could have more "fun" with them than we do. (And as a wonky-seeming government analyst, it really did, endearingly, seem to be her idea of fun.)

One thought she threw out there in passing has to do with the Revenue and Expenditure charts that used to be included with the instructions for the 1040 form. I believe they were not included this year, but the ones for last year (with data for 2005) look like this:

The coming Justice Department disaster

by Kagro X

How deep are we in it over the politicization of the Justice Department (and probably others) under the Bush "administration?"

Way deep.

This is a planned disaster. A burning of all bridges and a scorching of all escape routes. In other words, the routine Republican m.o.: destroy all paths back to the status quo, so that even if our theories don't pan out, nobody can pull them out by the roots -- they can only tinker with the ruins.

The invaluable Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe (he of the "signing statements" reportage) has a new blockbuster (the same that emptywheel pointed to earlier) on the role played by Pat Robertson's Regent University in the politicization of the federal government bureaucracy, and specifically the Department of Justice. And as emptywheel told you, Josh Marshall has the key paragraph and what it means.

Reading and Discussion: Constitutional Hardball

by Kagro X

Whenever I'm looking to put the political plays of the Bush "administration" in long-term context, I point people to "Constitutional Hardball," (PDF) a law review article written by Georgetown now Harvard Law Prof. Mark Tushnet. I think it's a real eye-opener for those who might otherwise advocate simply waiting out the Bush gang, and "fixing" the problems they've created at the ballot box. What is constitutional hardball?

A shorthand sketch of constitutional hardball is this: It consists of political claims and practices -- legislative and executive initiatives -- that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.³ It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents' victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.

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³ By this I mean the "go without saying" assumptions that underpin working systems of constitutional government. They are had to identify outside times of crisis precisely because they go without saying. (An alternative term would be conventions.)

How do you know when it's happening?

One way to distinguish periods of ordinary politics from periods of transformation is that during the former pre-constitutional understandings are taken for granted, whereas during the latter such understandings are brought into question.

And what's really going on when it's happening?

The idea is that the institutional arrangements characteristic of a particular constitutional order -- characteristic, that is, of each specific period of ordinary politics -- are the presuppositions accepted by all politically significant actors in that period, whereas the whole point of constitutional transformation is to alter the previously taken-for-granted institutional arrangements. Of course the proponents of transformation are going to place pre-constitutional understandings in question, because they want to replace those understandings with others.

How does this relate, exactly, to today's situation? Read on after the jump.

Bad Apples, Bad Barrels, Bad Barrel Makers

By Mimikatz

If you know of Philip Zimbardo, it is probably in connection with the Stanford Prison Experiment, undertaken in 1971.  In that experiment,  Zimbardo and others took carefully screened, normal college students and randomly assigned them to be guards or prisoners in a mock prison set up in the basement of the Stanford Psych Department.  Nothing happened at first, but after 36 hours the prisoners revolted.  The guards asked Zimbardo what to do. He responded, "It's your prison," but cautioned them against using violence.  After 6 days the situation became completely out of control, with brutality by the guards and psychological breakdown among the prisoners.  But only when one of his former graduate students, after seeing what was happening, tearfully told him she was not sure she wanted to have anything more to do with him did he decide to stop the experiment.

Fast forward to 2004.  Zimbardo became an expert witness in the trial of Ivan "Chip" Frederick, one of the MPs accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib, where the Stanford Prison Experiment was in effect replicated in real life.  This gave Zimbardo access to documents, photos and reports about Abu Ghraib and caused him to ponder the lessons that were not learned from the Stanford Experiment. 

The result is The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.  In this long, difficult but very informative book Zimbardo explains both how good people come to do incredibly evil acts but why. The core of the book is a very detailed description of the Stanford Experiment, but Zimbardo also looks at situations such as Rwanda and the Holocaust, along with Abu Ghraib.  In a nutshell, Zimbardo argues that we do not have the stable personalities we often think we have; our actions are in fact much more dependent on the situations we find ourselves in.  Under the "right" conditions, almost anyone can perform evil acts.  Contrary to the typical medical and legal model, such things as Abu Ghraib are not the result of a few "bad apples," but happen because of "bad barrels."  As the Stanford Experiment had shown, combining absolute power, secrecy, lack of clear rules and supervision, and boredom could create a situation in which pacifists became brutal guards. 

But are "bad barrels" accidental happenings?  Zimbardo pushes his analysis further to ask questions about the "barrel makers" (himself included) who allow such conditions to exist.  Do certain types of systems encourage "bad barrels?"  In the next to last chapter he essentially puts the Bush Administration on trial for the conditions at Abu Ghraib. 

But if commission of evil acts is at least as much situational as dispositional (based on the individual personality), what can be done to resist evil?  As Zimbardo shows through his own and his colleagues' avid participation in the Stanford Experiment until challenged by a former student, this is a very complex issue.  He and all of the other researchers got sucked into the experiment, as it deteriorated slowly over time, thrilled at the behavioral changes they were witnessing.  She came in as a substitute on Day 6 when another researcher had to leave for a family emergency.  Moreover, she had become romantically involved with Zimbardo once she finished her PhD.  Coming into the experiment somewhat unwillingly, suddenly exposed to the degradation that had built up over days, she was horrified both at what she saw and at Zimbardo's reaction when she confronted him.  (He told her she would never make a good  researcher if she got so emotional.)  Ultimately he realized that she was right, that he and the others had also internalized the institutional values of the experiment to the exclusion of their humanitarian values, and he called a halt to the experiment.  (Their relationship survived and they are evidently still married.)

The implications of this book, especially his observations on what makes and what prevents situations like Abu Ghraib, and how it relates to our resistance to the Bush Administration and the evil in outr society, are considerable.  Delineating the positive lessons will take another post.  Suffice it to say that no one can look at himself or herself with quite the same smugness after reading this book.

How process shapes substance on Iraq

by Kagro X

The fight within the House Democratic Caucus over the upcoming Iraq supplemental appropriations bill has broken down generally along Blue Dog/Progressive Caucus lines. Caught in the divide is the so-called Murtha Plan -- a mechanism that reportedly used the Congressional "power of the purse" to prohibit the use of appropriated funds for the deployment of troops who were not adequately trained, rested, armored, and combat ready. Additional differences have arisen over the use of the same "power of the purse" to give teeth to the so-called "benchmarks" for progress the president would be required to meet in order to continue to prosecute his war in Iraq.

Now, the bill's not public yet, but I'm told that the language most at issue reads like this:

Funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this or any other Act may not be obligated or expended to deploy or continue to deploy members or units of the Armed Forces in Iraq after the conclusion of the 180 day period for redeployment specified in subsections (c) and (d).

What are subsections (c) and (d) about? I'm informed that they're apparently the ones that lay out the so-called "benchmarks," which means this language -- since removed from the bill at the behest of the Blue Dogs -- was the mechanism for enforcing those benchmarks.

Covering the New Secrecy

by emptywheel

You wouldn't know it from reading the editorial on Iraq in today's NYT, but at a U Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellows panel on "Covering the New Secrecy" yesterday, NYT Managing Editor Jill Abramson came as close as I've ever seen the NYT to disavowing the reporting of Judy Miller. Her comments came in response to my question about whether the press lost credibility wrt increased secrecy given its complicity in the run-up to the war. Sure, there was the typical NYT denial, most notably as she tried to take credit for debunking the Mohammed Atta in Prague story while ignoring NYT's role in disseminating that story (at least in this case, both stories made it to A1). But Abramson welcomed the question as an opportunity to show that the press is in greater danger of relying too much on government officials rather than (as one of the GOP shills on the panel, Brad Berenson, would have it) too inclined to reveal damaging information. [The damn moderator edited my question, btw, to challenge Berenson, who had emphasized the importance of protecting HUMINT; I had a second part that asked him specifically about the government's insistence that we protect Chalabi's fabricators, but alas, he never had to answer.]

Abramson mentioned the NYT's (read, Judy Miller's) credulity toward defectors. She admitted the NYT was instrumental in amplifying bad WMD claims. Most impressive, to me, was that she hailed Knight-Ridder's coverage, noting how much more successful they were at reporting the truth largely because they relied on mid-level sources, rather than Scooter Libby SAOs.

The nightmare scenario.

by Kagro X

So, Democrats have won back the Congress. Impeachment is "off the table," but Pelosi apparently stands by her assertion that the most valuable part of the victory will be "subpoena power." We're going to have investigations. And the environment is "target rich" enough, it seems, so that Rep. Henry Waxman, the presumptive chair of the Government Operations Reform and Oversight committee (the Republicans changed the name from Operations to Reform and Oversight in the wake of their 1994 victory, perhaps preemptively overcompensating for their later intention not to conduct any) says, “The most difficult thing will be to pick and choose.”