Showing posts with label THE WEEKIY STANDARD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label THE WEEKIY STANDARD. Show all posts

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Obama’s ‘Transparent’ Secrecy

Imagine the reaction if President Obama and congressional Democrats had released a sweeping health care bill, drafted in closed-door meetings, and demanded its approval by Congress immediately. There would have been national outrage over the secrecy, lack of time for public hearings, and the absence of discussion, revisions, amendments, and multiple votes.
Yet that is exactly what the White House and Democrats are proposing once – and if – a deal on raising the debt limit by as much as $2 trillion is reached. The administration now insists on an agreement by July 22 in order for the government to avert a default on August 2.
The agreement, assuming there is one, will have been hammered out in secret meetings involving the White House and congressional Democrats and Republicans. At the moment, they are nowhere near a deal after weeks of negotiating sessions, all held privately and led by Vice President Joe Biden.
To remedy the rush to ratify a pact that neither the public nor most members of Congress may have seen for more than a day or two, two senior Republican senators asked the president on Friday to leave time for congressional hearings “to weigh the plan’s budgetary and fiscal impact.”
“A last-minute deal, delivered under the threat of panic, will not be acceptable,” the senators wrote in a letter to Obama. It was signed by Jeff Sessions, ranking member of the Budget Committee, and Orrin Hatch, ranking member of the Finance Committee.
“While we may disagree about how best to confront our deficits, or on how severe and immediate a threat they pose, we can surely agree that the American people deserve time to study the decisions their leaders are making on their behalf,” the Republican senators wrote.
Even as the debt limit talks continue, details of what is being proposed should be provided to Congress, they said. “Unfortunately, this information is being kept a secret as part of closed-door negotiations.” The senators asked Obama to provide, “in detail, the most recent version of the proposals that were discussed, including a list of any tax increases for which the White House reportedly advocated.”
Sessions also wants a 7-day period between the release of an agreement and a vote in Congress – enough time for analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and hearings. A period as short as three days isn’t sufficient to bring the public into the discussion, Sessions believes.
The secrecy of the process began with the failure of Senate Democrats to pass a 2012 budget, even after House Republicans approved one of their own. This meant the normal procedure of hearings, floor debate, and a bipartisan House-Senate conference could not take place.
The president issued a budget in February, but after it was widely criticized, it was rendered inoperative in a speech by Obama that attacked the Republican plan while offering only vague guidance on his alternative. This step by Obama short-circuited the normal process.
Instead of public consideration of a hike in the debt ceiling, plus the spending cuts that Republicans require to gain their support, the White House proposed the Biden-run talks – in secret.  Those talks ended last week, with minimal progress, when Republicans walked out and said the president must get personally involved.
Obama has, but not much. He talked this week to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, but not to House speaker John Boehner. Boehner’s role, however, is more critical, since the biggest hurdle to raising the debt limit is gaining the House’s approval.
Except for Sessions, few members of Congress have questioned the secrecy of the negotiations. And the participants have said practically nothing about what has gone on.
Because of this, Obama’s statements in his press conference on Wednesday are unverifiable. For instance, he said, “both parties had identified more than $1 trillion worth of spending cuts already.”
What are the cuts specifically? Obama didn’t say. Might they be “spending in the tax code,” a favorite term of Obama? Republicans regard these as tax increases. Again, Obama didn’t say.
When he was running for president in 2008, Obama promised his administration would be utterly “transparent.” But the consideration of the debt limit bill has – because the White House has rejected the regular way borrowing and spending measures are handled – been quite the opposite. 

Monday, June 20, 2011

President Obama Rejects Justice Department's War Powers Interpretation

When the White House announced last week that it would not comply with the requirements of the War Powers Resolution because the Libya operation does not involve "hostilities," eyebrows arched in curiosity. Many observers questioned the administration's conclusion that America's involvement in the Libya operation no longer fit within the statute's term "hostilities." (The administration's explanation is found on page 25 of this White House report.)
But even more curious was the White House's explanation of how the administration reached this conclusion. Rather than releasing a memorandum from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)—as it did at the outset of the military campaign—the administration offered no specific source for its legal conclusions. Instead, the White House's report simply stated that "the President is of the view that" the War Powers Resolution does not apply.
The New York Times's Charlie Savage—who made his name covering the Bush White House's internal debates over the Constitution and the Global War on Terror—immediately picked up on this:
It was not clear whether the Justice Department had endorsed the White House’s interpretation of hostilities. [White House Counsel Bob Bauer] declined to say whether it had signed off on the theory, saying he would not discuss interagency deliberations. In his letter on Tuesday, Mr. Boehner demanded to know whether there was internal dissent about the administration’s legal stance.
Or as Jack Goldsmith succinctly put it: "This is odd." Goldsmith—who was at the center of the Bush-era OLC debates—guessed that "OLC or DOJ has problems of some sort with the Administration’s legal theory."
The speculation was short lived. Yesterday morning the New York Times confirmed that the White House's interpretation of the War Powers Resolution was, in fact, rejected by both the Office of Legal Counsel and the Defense Department:
Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.
But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.
This is an extraordinary story, for several reasons:
1. It reveals the desperate extent to which President Obama is willing to stretch his position to avoid agreeing with the modern conservative position that Congress has specific constitutional tools for limiting the president's war power—most importantly, the power of the purse, and the power to hold up executive and judicial nominations and obstruct other administration priorities—but statutes like the War Powers Act are not among them.  
Rather than conceding that point—and thus flatly contradicting his own campaign rhetoric—he has adopted the strained "view" that American armed forces are not still engaged in "hostilities or ... situations where imminent involvement in hostilities" (i.e., the War Powers Resolution's triggering requirement), even though (by the White House's own characterization) U.S. strike sorties are contributing to "the suppression of enemy air defense," as well as a majority of the coalition's refueling assets.