1 Boring Old Man

Senate Republicans Won’t Fight Sotomayor
Open Left
by: Chris Bowers
May 27, 2009

It looks like the Sotomayor nomination fight is over before it began:

Top Senate Republican strategists tell POLITICO that, barring unknown facts about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the GOP plans no scorched-earth opposition to her confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. More than 24 hours after the White House unveiling, no senator has come out in opposition to Sotomayor’s confirmation. "The sentiment is overwhelming that the Senate should do due diligence but should not make a mountain out of a molehill," said a top Senate Republican aide. "If there’s no ‘there’ there, we shouldn’t try to create one."

Barring something currently unforeseen, this one is over.

Even so, the process of the appearance of a fight still holds a lot of potential benefits for Democrats and progressives. First, a weak opposition to Sotomayor by Senate Republicans could open a real "rootsgap" between Republican Senate leaders and an activist base that has long rabidly focused on the judiciary. Second, Democrats can continue to concern troll the racially charged conservative media attacks on Sotomayor, which threaten both to drive a further wedge between Latinos and Republicans, and also to further the process story of "Republicans in serious electoral trouble."

Confirming Sotomayor will be a substantive victory for Democrats [at least compared to the sort of nominee a Republican would have picked, if not over Souter’s rulings]. Right now, however, with that victory all but guaranteed, we need to keep hammering on the process of the fight, because it can do real long-term damage to the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

When you serve on intelligence committee you sign a second oath — one of secrecy,” she [Harman] said. “I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything.

Cowed into timid supplicants pretty much sums up what George Bush and Dick Cheney did to to the Congress. In this instance, there were only a handful of Representatives and Senators that could have addressed the ills at hand, and they failed their duty, failed their oath and failed their country. Yes it would have taken a huge "Profile In Courage" for them to have availed themselves of the Speech and Debate privilege and stood in the wells of Congress to right the matter… Courage is what this country was founded on and propagated by, we can ill afford to be in such short supply of it in the most critical moments when the Constitution is being undermined.

I remember clearly what I thought back then, towards the end of 2002. When Bush began to foment for war in earnest in September, I was dubious. I didn’t know if Saddam Hussein had weapons of Mass Destruction or not, but I saw no urgency in having some immediate invasion. I kept thinking, "But we’re after Osama Bin Laden, and al Qaeda, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Why is he talking about Iraq?" When people said, "He’s after their oil" or "He wants to avenge the plot against his father," I thought they were just creating reasons because they didn’t like him. I guess I hoped there was something the Administration knew that justified this change of plans. But when I heard Colin Powell’s U.N. speech, I was plenty underwhelmed.

But, for me, it wasn’t until there were no WMD’s and then Bush got re-elected that I began to really think something was bad wrong in Washington. Nowdays, the deceit of the Bush Administration is just an everyday truth, but back then, it was a series of painful revelations. I didn’t know about the PNAC, or AEI, or OSP, or WHIG, or Judy Miller, or Amhad Chalabi. I had never heard of the Unitary Executive Theory or the Bush Doctrine or Extrordinary Rendition or Enhanced Interrogation Techniques or even about Waterboarding. It’s still hard for me to hold onto the fact that our government actually did the things I now know that our government actually did. And I recall the ridicule that people who actually spoke out received – Paul O’neill, Richard Clarks, Joseph Wilson.

But in 2002 or 2003? I couldn’t have even imagined that such things were possible outside some cheap escapist thriller. And I wonder what I would’ve thought had I been a Congresswoman being "briefed" about what we were doing. Even if I’d been told the truth, which I doubt they were, would I have stood up in Congress and said "The C.I.A. is mistreating the Terrorist prisoners, torturing them"? Even more, can you imagine standing up in Congress and saying, "President Bush and Dick Cheney are torturing the prisoners to try to force them to admit that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are in cahoots so they can have an excuse to invade Iraq." I doubt I could’ve imagined such a thing, much less given it as a speech.

In my retirement volunteer job at a clinic for children and adolescents, I had seen a high school sophmore, a likely Gay woman, quite bright, who was at war with her parents. They had betrayed her when she was younger in a variety of ways, and the family had been in a state of seige for years., and the girl was "living for the day" she could leave home. The story was complicated by their religious fundamentalism [re "Gay"] and her parents fear of her taking medicine for an obvious attentional problem. The girl was hostile, "acting out," and "acting up." We had recently convinced the parent to let us try medications, and the result was dramatic – "I made a 100 on a math test. Never did that before!" In spite of an I.Q. of 125, this girl had a dismal sub-C average.

To our surprise, we got a call from the mother that the girl had had a "meltdown" on the way home from school not long after she was started on medication, something she was happy about. The mother reported that the girl was in utter dispair about her life, crying, suicidal. She had no idea herself why she had gotten so upset. I asked about the day. Nothing much had gone on. It was the last week of school. They’d had assembly and had gotten out early.

I asked, "What was the assembly about?" She said, "Oh nothing." I asked again. "It was awards day," she said. Then it was easy. She had just realized that she could do well in school after all [the medication]. And she longed to finish school to get the "Hope Scholarship" [free tuition to college for a B Average] as a way to get away from home. As she saw the seniors receive their awards, she felt the deep hole of her C- average, and how much it was the result of her distractability [untreated] and her acting out her anger towards her parents at school. Thus, her "meltdown. Neither she nor her mother had made the connection. It was "unconscious."

So, President Obama wants his SCOTUS pick to have empathy. What that means is for the judge to be able to understand from the "inside." That means he wants a Hispanic lady with a poor background to be able to "get into the skin" of a rich white guy from Long Island who manages a Hedge Fund. You don’t need empathy to deal with people like you. You need it as a tool to understand people who are not. I don’t need empathy to understand the heterosexual guy getting an award on awards day. I was one of those. I need it to understand a gay woman with ADD who didn’t.

Empathy Triumphs Over Excellence
American Enterprise Institute
By John Yoo
May 26, 2009

President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor shows that empathy has won out over excellence in the White House. Sotomayor has sterling credentials: Princeton, Yale Law School, former prosecutor, and federal trial and appellate judge. But credentials do not an excellent justice make. Justice Souter, whom Sotomayor would replace, had an equally fine c.v., but turned out to be a weak force on the high court.

Obama had some truly outstanding legal intellectuals and judges to choose from—Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, and Diane Wood come immediately to mind. The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.

Sotomayor’s record on the bench, at first glance, appears undistinguished. She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.

But conservatives should not be pleased simply because Sotomayor is not a threat to the conservative revolution in constitutional law begun under the Reagan administration. Conservatives should defend the Supreme Court as a place where cases are decided by a faithful application of the Constitution, not personal politics, backgrounds, and feelings. Republican senators will have to conduct thorough questioning in the confirmation hearings to make sure that she will not be a results-oriented voter, voting her emotions and politics rather than the law…

Dick Cheney’s Torture Kabuki
By: emptywheel
May 26, 2009

I wanted to pull three threads together in this post, which suggest how Cheney instituted torture in this country:

• Alberto Gonzales may have been approving torture even while Condi Rice and others went through the show of getting an OLC opinion to authorize it;
• CIA claimed to be briefing Congress when it wasn’t;
• The Bush Administration then claimed Congress had bought off on torture to persuade those objecting to torture within the administration.

There are also certain parallels with the way Cheney implemented his illegal wiretap program…

Alberto Gonzales’ approvals

As Ari Shapiro reported last week, Alberto Gonzales was personally approving the techniques Mitchell’s torturers would use on a daily basis…

The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

…this raises the possibility that the OLC approval process was all just show, basically endorsing torture that had gone on for some time already…

So that’s the first data point: that the CIA may have started torturing, and only got an OLC opinion to authorize it because Condi and Bellinger were inquiring into the legal basis for it.

CIA claimed to be briefing Congress when it wasn’t

As I noted in a post that’s supposed to go up at the Guardian today, the CIA claimed to have briefed Congress before all this happened–in those two briefings they claimed to have given Bob Graham. In addition, they repeatedly claimed to have briefed Democrats on the program, when they actually did not…

The Administration then claimed Congress had bought off on torture

And then, backed by this false record, the Administration tried to persuade those within the Administration who were fighting the torture…

The similarity with the illegal wiretap program

This last bit–the claiming Congress approved when it didn’t – is a tactic they used with the illegal wiretap program, as well. Recall what we know: On March 9 and 10, 2004, Jim Comey refused to reauthorize the illegal wiretap program. So Cheney pulled in the Gang of Eight (the first time the full Gang of Eight got briefed together), and gave them some representation of Comey’s concerns. According to Nancy Pelosi (her again), she objected to continuing the program. Nevertheless, Alberto Gonzales (him again) and Andy Card intended to use this purported support from Congress to continue the illegal program to persuade John Ashcroft – then in ICU and not legally acting as AG – to override Comey’s refusal to reauthorize the program.

Most interesting, though, is the record-keeping. After Comey and Mueller made it clear they might resign over the program’s reauthorization (under Gonzales’ signature), George Bush ordered Gonzales to create notes of the Congressional briefing – the one that had occurred a few days earlier. Even more interesting, Gonzales went back and added one more sentence some time after that fact. And it’s those records that Gonzales relied on when he claimed to Congress that the entire Gang of Eight had bought off on the program.

So: Alberto Gonzales approves a program he has no authority to approve. They create records after the fact – the content of which is contested – to claim they had Congressional approval for the authorization. And then use that purported Congressional approval (though apparently, more members of Congress approved of this than have of torture)to try to persuade those at DOJ who objected to the program.

At least they’re consistent.

It reminds me of the methodology of September 8, 2002. The Administration leaked the ravings [all lies] of Curveball, the I.N.H. defector being interrogated by the Germans [who didn’t believe him], to Judith Miller of the New York Times. It was the fairy tale about Hussein’s impending atomic bombs.

THREATS AND RESPONSES:
THE IRAQIS; U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS
New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER
September 8, 2002

More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today….

These obvious hedging and leveraging methods alert us to how much this whole campaign for war [lasting from September 2002 to March 2003] was a sham. If you’ve got the goods on someone, you don’t have to go through all of these machinations and pertubations. So, carry on emptywheel, the Good-Guy Senators read your blog too. Load them up for bear until this truth can’t help but be plastered all over every t.v. set and front page in the country, "Invasion of Iraq was premeditated fraud, run by V.P."…

Our Crumbling Foundation
New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
May 25, 2009

I’m not sure that the catastrophic job losses of this recession, the worst since the Great Depression, have really sunk into the public’s consciousness. And that would mean that the ground has not been prepared for the kind of high-powered remedies needed to get the economy back into some kind of reasonable shape…

Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced a bill to establish a national infrastructure development bank that would use public and private capital to fund projects of regional and national significance. These are projects that are badly needed and would be a boon to employment. America has become self-destructively shortsighted in recent decades. That has kept us from acknowledging the awful long-term consequences of the tidal wave of joblessness that has swept over the nation since the start of the recession in December 2007. And it is keeping us from understanding how important the maintenance and development of the infrastructure is to the nation’s long-term social and economic prospects.

It’s not just about roads and bridges, although they are important. It’s also about schools, and the electrical grid, and environmental and technological innovation. It’s about establishing a world-class industrial and economic platform for a nation that is speeding toward second-class status on a range of important fronts. It’s about whether we’re serious about remaining a great nation. We don’t act like it. Here’s a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school…

The infrastructure bank would be authorized to issue bonds, provide loans and offer loan guarantees to finance large-scale projects. The idea would be to leverage substantial amounts of private capital in support of such projects, and to make more prudent decisions about which projects move ahead…

The link between the need to rebuild the nation’s crumbing infrastructure and the crucial need to find rich new sources of employment in this economic downturn should be obvious, a no-brainer. The Center for Labor Market Studies is at Northeastern University in Boston. A memo that I received a few days ago from the center’s director, Andrew Sum, notes that “no immediate recovery of jobs” is anticipated, even if the recession officially ends, as some have projected, by next fall…

If the U.S. is to have any hope of getting its economic act together over the next few years, there will have to be a much greater focus on putting people back to work. Rebuilding the infrastructure is the place to start.

Worldviews Collide
Obama or Cheney? It’s Your Choice.
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post
May 26, 2009

Which reality do you inhabit, Obama World or Cheney World? If it’s the latter, remember that storm clouds are always gathering. Don’t forget your umbrella. In Obama World, it’s always morning. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and the pollen count is low. In Cheney World, it’s perpetual twilight. Somewhere in the distance, a lone wolf howls at the rising moon.

In Obama World, human beings are flawed but essentially decent and rational. Most will behave in a way consistent with enlightened self-interest. In Cheney World, humanity’s defects are indelible and irredeemable. Absent evidence to the contrary, evil should be assumed to lurk in every heart. Better to do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you.

In Obama World, choices are artifacts of reasoning and thus are only as valid as the logic underlying them. Security and freedom, for example, do not have to be seen as an either-or proposition. The nation never came to a fork in the road with one path labeled "torture" and the other labeled "disaster." In Cheney World, choices are binary and absolute. There’s no wiggle room, no gray area, no time for second thoughts and no debate about how our options are framed. It’s my way or the highway, citizen.

In Obama World, objective fact matters. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is significant. The absence of any link between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is relevant. In Cheney World, facts are based more on conviction than evidence. If it’s possible to imagine "nuclear-armed terrorists," as Cheney did in his speech the other day, then they "exist" at least as a concept – and this conceptual existence justifies torture, among other abuses…

Obama World is an exciting place to live right now — not perfect, to be sure, but full of energy and hope. If Dick Cheney wants to stay in his bunker, that’s his business. Others might want to come up for some fresh air.

^{Cheney in the bunker on 9/11}

With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave now. A few moments later, I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below. There in the bunker came the reports and the images that so many Americans remember from that day: word of the crash in Pennsylvania, the final phone calls from hijacked planes, the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape being burned alive. In the years since, I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.

1. trauma specific fears
2. altered states of consciousness
3. re-enactments or re-experiences of the trauma
4. altered view of the self and the world

We know, in so far as we can know, that Cheney has this disorder – just reading the memos that he masterminded [below], or reviewing his NSA Surveillance Program, or thinking about his monomaniacal march to Iraq, tell us a lot. But listening to his speech is a chilling confirmation. We don’t know about numbers 2. and 3. above. He hasn’t told us. But 1. and 4. are solidly there. Unfortunately, people with P.T.S.D. often develop a "heart of darkness" [as I described below]. Ask the wives of some of our returning veterans. P.T.S.D. overrides many things – the statistical nature of things [if it might happen, it will happen], hope, empathy, connectedness, even reason.

I think if Saddam wasn’t there that his successor probably wouldn’t be notably friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of the world as of vital interest to the United States for the next hundred years it’s going to be the world’s supply of oil. We’ve got a lot of friends in the region. We’re always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it’s part of our national character, you know we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war and the problem goes away and it doesn’t work that way in the Middle East it never has and isn’t likely to in my lifetime.

We are always going to have to be involved there and Saddam is just one more irritant but there’s a long list of irritants in that part of the world and for us to have done what would have been necessary to get rid of him–certainly a very large force for a long time into Iraq to run him to ground and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And you then have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go muck around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it. I think the, the decision the President made in effect to stop when we did was the right one.