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Everything is relative or so said Einstein:
Placing trust in Obama is like dancing with a bear - do so at the risk of being clawed to death. (See 1 below.)
Top Administration Official refers to Netanyahu as "Chicken Shit."
Priebus responds: “This administration consistently gets it wrong on foreign policy. Instead of taking the ISIS threat seriously, President Obama called them the ‘JV’ team. Now, instead of working with our allies in the region to protect democracy and innocent lives, the administration is hurling expletives at Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
Meanwhile, Ari Fliescher said a staffer would not have said it had it not first been said by the president.
My own observation is the staffer is the ass hole from which the alleged 'chicken shit 'came.
As for Obama, we already now he is an unmitigated liar. (See 1a, 1b, 1c and 1d below.)
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We gave our son and daughter in law a weekend at The Hershey Hotel for their tenth anniversary and Daniel reported on their visit to The Hershey School. Fascinating. (See 2 below.)
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Obama soaks the rich and drowns the middles class. (See 3 below.)
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Political campaigns take more and more money and thus, patronizing to contributors and raising money now drives policy. (See 4 below.)
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Reid has protected Obama and his party and after the Nov. election, like Pelosi said, we will find out more about what Obama has in store for what will be left of America after his change attack. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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Dick
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1) U.S., Iran Relations Move to Détente
Interests Align Over Fight Against Islamic State, Other Policies
The Obama administration and Iran, engaged in direct nuclear negotiations and facing a common threat from Islamic State militants, have moved into an effective state of détente over the past year, according to senior U.S. and Arab officials.
The shift could drastically alter the balance of power in the region, and risks alienating key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates who are central to the coalition fighting Islamic State. Sunni Arab leaders view the threat posed by Shiite Iran as equal to or greater than that posed by the Sunni radical group Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Israel contends the U.S. has weakened the terms of its negotiations with Iran and played down Tehran’s destabilizing role in the region.
Over the past decade, Washington and Tehran have engaged in fierce battles for influence and power in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan fueled by the U.S. overthrow of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the Arab Spring revolutions that began in late 2010. U.S. officials still say the option of military action remains on the table to thwart Iran’s nuclear program.
But recent months have ushered in a change as the two countries have grown into alignment on a spectrum of causes, chief among them promoting peaceful political transitions in Baghdad and Kabul and pursuing military operations against Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, according to these officials.
The Obama administration also has markedly softened its confrontational stance toward Iran’s most important nonstate allies, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Lebanese militant and political organization, Hezbollah. American diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry , negotiated with Hamas leaders through Turkish and Qatari intermediaries during cease-fire talks in July that were aimed at ending the Palestinian group’s rocket attacks on Israel, according to senior U.S. officials.
U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly tipped off Lebanese law-enforcement bodies close to Hezbollah about threats posed to Beirut’s government by Sunni extremist groups, including al Qaeda and its affiliate Nusra Front in Syria, Lebanese and U.S. officials said.
“This shows that although we see Turkey and Arab states as our closest allies, our interests and policies are converging with Iran’s,” said Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a former Obama administration official. “This is a geostrategic reality at this moment, more than a conscious U.S. policy.”
Obama administration officials stressed they’re not directly coordinating their regional policies or the war against Islamic State with Iran. They also said pervasive U.S. economic sanctions remain in place on Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Still, these officials said the intensive negotiations the U.S. has pursued with Iran since last year on the nuclear issue could help stabilize the Mideast and have improved understanding.
“The world is clearly better off now than it would have been if the leaders on both sides had ignored this opening,” Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator with Iran, said last week.
Iranian officials, including President Hasan Rouhani, have said there could be more cooperation with the U.S. in the war on Islamic State, but only if a nuclear accord is reached.
Administration critics, including Israel and Arab states, see the White House as determined to seal a deal with Iran as a monument to President Barack Obama’s foreign policy record.
“The Iranian regime is revolutionary and can’t get too close to us. So I’d be wary of any rapprochement,” said Scott Modell, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I think they are hell bent on pursuing a number of courses that run counter to U.S. interests.”
Iraq has been at the center of a regional proxy war between the U.S. and Iran since the George W. Bush administration invaded Baghdad in 2003.
Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, established and trained a network of Shiite militias that attacked U.S. and coalition troops stationed in Iraq over the past decade, according to U.S. defense officials. Tehran, according to U.S. officials, also introduced into Iraq the most dangerous kind of improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs that the Pentagon says were the largest single cause of deaths among American servicemen who fought in the war.
Since the U.S. resumed military operations inside Iraq in August, however, the Revolutionary Guard, or IRGC, has explicitly ordered its local proxies not to target American military personnel conducting and coordinating attacks against Islamic State from bases around Baghdad and Iraq’s Kurdish region, according to U.S. officials who have tracked Iranian communications.
Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Guard’s overseas operations known as the Qods Force, specifically instructed Iraqi Shiite militias long at war with the U.S., such as the Mahdi Army and Kata’ib Hezbollah, that American efforts to weaken Islamic State were in the long-term interests of Tehran and its allies, said these officials.
“It has gone quiet because these guys have been told by the IRGC not to attack,” said a U.S. intelligence officer who tracks Gen. Soleimani. “The Iraqi Shiite groups went to Soleimani and said they wanted to go after the American embassy and target Americans. Soleimani said: ‘No, No, No. Unless they get into your areas of control, don’t attack.’”
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is planning to play down and avoid publicity for the annual minesweeping exercise being organized by U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. In past years, the exercise has been used to highlight unified opposition to Iranian activities in the Persian Gulf, according to a U.S. official.
Some officials say de-emphasizing deterrence against Iran could be destabilizing, signaling to the Revolutionary Guard that the U.S. isn't going to take steps to counter their measures.
However, the U.S. now has gone beyond the use of signals. American officials said the Obama administration has passed messages to Tehran by using the offices of Iraq’s new Shiite prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, as well as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shiite Islam’s most senior clerics.
The U.S. has also made it clear to Tehran that its stepped-up military strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria won’t be turned on forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to U.S. officials.
Mr. Assad is Iran’s closest Arab ally. And the Revolutionary Guard and Gen. Soleimani have mobilized Iranian military personnel and Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite militiamen to fight inside Syria in support of the Damascus regime. Any U.S. strikes on Mr. Assad’s security forces could end up hitting Iranian or Hezbollah soldiers and military advisers, sparking a broader conflict, U.S. and Arab officials said.
“They [the U.S.] want to focus on ISIL and they are worried about antagonizing the Iranians, which they say may cause them to react or the Shiite militias in Iraq to react against our embassy and interests in Iraq and derail the [nuclear] talks,” said a senior U.S. defense official working on Iraq. “They are articulating in high-level interagency meetings that they don’t want to do anything that’s…interpreted by the Iranians as threatening to the regime.”
The détente that has taken hold is filtering into other theaters of traditional American-Iranian conflict, said U.S. and Arab officials.
Washington for years has sought to weaken Hezbollah’s political and military power in Lebanon through sanctions and the backing of rival political parties in Beirut. But the threat posed by Islamic State, Nusra Front and other Sunni extremist groups to Lebanon has changed the security dynamics there, said U.S. and Arab officials.
U.S. intelligence agencies on a number of occasions have provided tips on terrorist threats to Lebanese security agencies that are known to be close or under the sway of Hezbollah, said U.S. and Arab officials. Among them is the intelligence unit, known as the General Security Directorate, which has arrested Nusra Front cells in Beirut and northern Lebanon over the past two years.
The Obama administration’s indirect diplomatic engagement with Hamas has unnerved Israel and allied Arab states. Washington maintains a policy of no direct talks with the Palestinian group, which is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union. But Mr. Kerry and other U.S. officials regularly conveyed messages to Hamas’s political chief, Khaled Meshaal, through Qatari and Turkish diplomats during cease-fire talks this summer.
Israeli and Arab officials argued this engagement strengthened Hamas’s profile at the expense of the moderate Palestinian leadership led by Mahmoud Abbas.
The regional truce playing out between Washington and Tehran is fragile and could easily be reversed, said U.S., Arab and Iranian officials.
The two sides have set a late November deadline to conclude a comprehensive agreement aimed at curtailing Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for an easing of Western sanctions. U.S. officials say the prospects for the accord remain only 50/50 and that tensions between the two sides could quickly ratchet up in the wake of a diplomatic failure.
“There is no question that, if everything goes away, escalation will be the name of the game on all sides, and none of that is good,” Ms. Sherman said last week.
—Julian E. Barnes contributed to this article.
1a) Who’s ‘Chickensh*t’? The Goldberg Variation
BY ROGER L. SIMON
In an already much talked about article for The Atlantic, “The Crisis in U. S. – Israeli Relations is Officially Here,” Jeffrey Goldberg quotes a senior administration official accusing Benjamin Netanyahu – among a long list of unpleasant things — of being a “chickensh*t.”
The administration critique of Netanyahu as a coward stems from its disgust with his failure to make peace with the Palestinians as well as their impatience with his criticisms of their zeal for a deal with Iran even if it means allowing the Islamist regime to become a threshold nuclear power. But this is about more than policy. The prickly Netanyahu is well known to be a tough guy to like personally even if you are one of his allies. But President Obama and his foreign-policy team aren’t just annoyed by the prime minister. They’ve come to view him as public enemy No. 1, using language about him and giving assessments of his policies that are far harsher than they have ever used against even avowed enemies of the United States, let alone one of its closest allies.
So rather than merely chide him for caution they call him a coward and taunt him for being reluctant to make war on Hamas and even to launch a strike on Iran. They don’t merely castigate him as a small-time politician without vision; they accuse him of putting his political survival above the interests of his nation.
It’s quite an indictment but once you get beyond the personal dislike of the individual on the part of the president, Secretary of State Kerry, and any other “senior officials” that speak without attribution on the subject of Israel’s prime minister, all you have is a thin veil of invective covering up six years of Obama administration failures in the Middle East that have the region more dangerous for both Israel and the United States. For all of his personal failings, it is not Netanyahu—a man who actually served as a combat soldier under fire in his country’s most elite commando unit—who is a coward or a small-minded failure. It is Obama and Kerry who have fecklessly sabotaged a special relationship, an act whose consequences have already led to disaster and bloodshed and may yet bring worse in their final two years of power.
On Iran, it has not been Netanyahu’s bluffing about a strike that is the problem but Obama’s policies. Despite good rhetoric about stopping Tehran’s push for a nuke, the president has pursued a policy of appeasement that caused it to discard its significant military and economic leverage and accept a weak interim deal that began the process of unraveling the international sanctions that represented the best chance for a solution without the use of force.
So why is the administration so angry with Netanyahu? It can’t be because Netanyahu is preventing peace with the Palestinians. After the failure of Kerry’s fool’s errand negotiations and the Hamas missile war on Israel, not even Obama can think peace is at hand. Nor does he really think Netanyahu can stop him from appeasing Iran if Tehran is willing to sign even a weak deal.
The real reason to target Netanyahu is that it is easier to scapegoat the Israelis than to own up to the administration’s mistakes. Rather than usher in a new era of good feelings with the Arab world in keeping with his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama has been the author of policies that have left an already messy Middle East far more dangerous. Rather than ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his decision to withdraw U.S. troops and to dither over the crisis in Syria led to more conflict and the rise of ISIS. Instead of ending the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama is on the road to enabling it. And rather than manage an Israeli-Palestinian standoff that no serious person thought was on the verge of resolution, Obama made things worse with his and Kerry’s hubristic initiatives and constant bickering with Israel.
Despite the administration’s insults, it is not Netanyahu who is weak. He has shown great courage and good judgment in defending his country’s interests even as Obama has encouraged the Palestinians to believe they can hold out for even more unrealistic terms while denying Israel the ammunition it needed to fight Hamas terrorists. While we don’t know whether, as Goldberg believes, it is too late for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, it is Obama that Iran considers weak as it plays U.S. negotiators for suckers in the firm belief that the U.S. is a paper tiger that is not to be feared any longer.
If there is a crisis, it is one that was created by Obama’s failures and inability to grasp that his ideological prejudices were
out of touch with Middle East realities.
The next two years may well see, as Goldberg ominously predicts, even more actions by the administration to downgrade the alliance with Israel. But the blame for this will belong to a president who has never been comfortable with Israel and who has, at every conceivable opportunity, sought conflict with it even though doing so did not advance U.S. interests or the cause of peace. No insult directed at Netanyahu, no matter how crude or pointless, can cover up the president’s record of failure.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger at www.commentarymagazine.com.
For estates more than $5.3 million in value, the estate tax in 2013 rose to 40% from 35% in 2012. This tax is a confiscatory double tax on a lifetime of savings, and the money reinvested in stocks or a family business.
A comparison with the Reagan years when investment taxes were cut tells the story. From 1983 to 1988, private investment averaged 12% of GDP, one-third faster than the 9% since 2009 under Obama. In the aftermath of the Kennedy, Clinton and George W. Bushcapital-gains tax cuts (1998-2006), the investment rate rose sharply and immediately.
What does investment have to do with stagnant wages? Everything. As Paul Samuelson, the premiere Keynesian economist who sold more economics textbooks than anyone in history, once explained: “What happens to the wage rate when each person works with more capital goods? Because each worker has more capital to work with, his or her marginal product [or productivity] rises. Therefore, the competitive real wage rises as workers become worth more to capitalists and meet with spirited bidding up of their market wage rates.”
The high corporate tax rate is also holding the economy back. Twenty years ago the U.S. rate was about at the international average, but now we are about 15 percentage points above the rate of most of our competitors and nearly three times higher than countries like Ireland. The American Enterprise Institute has found that “a 1% increase in corporate tax rates is associated with nearly a 1% drop in wage rates” because when corporations invest less here at home, worker productivity suffers.
Mr. Obama’s investment tax hike was designed to soak the rich. But it is the middle class who have taken a bath. Republicans should be telling American wage-earners that the best way to increase their take-home pay is to repeal Mr. Obama’s tax hikes and chop the corporate tax rate to the international average, so more and better jobs are created on these shores, not abroad.
Mr. Kyl, former Republican senator from Arizona, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior counsel at Covington & Burling LLP. Mr. Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.
That is the textbook theory of representative democracy. It sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, because it is. Today, the distinction between campaigning and governing has collapsed, and governing has been reconstructed along campaign lines, with endless survey research playing a pivotal role. The consequence for our politics has been catastrophic, and we don’t know what to do about it.
You might think, for example, that next week’s midterm elections would create an interval for serious policy-making. And they may. But those intent on getting down to work will have to defy a Washington establishment—including much of the media—that will swiftly shift its focus to the 2016 elections. Legislators who want to take on tough issues such as immigration and taxation will have to buck leaders worried about the consequences for potential presidential nominees.
This situation has been four decades in the making. In December 1976, Patrick Caddell, president-elect Jimmy Carter ’s pollster, drafted one of the most fateful memos in modern political history. He summarized its thesis in nine lapidary words; “Governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.” Four years later, journalist Sidney Blumenthal codified this thesis in “The Permanent Campaign,” a title that became an enduring trope of political discourse.
This new view of American politics followed the political explosion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which led both parties to shift control of presidential nominations away from party leaders toward popular elections—primaries and caucuses. Jimmy Carter was the first candidate to “come out of nowhere,” seize the nomination from well-known establishment figures such as Sen. Henry Jackson, and win the presidency. Mr. Carter would not be the last.
A candidate without strong party ties, elected through a popular mobilization that may prove fleeting, has little choice but to attend closely to public opinion. He has no other base of support. The consequence is a shift from strategy to tactics, from future-oriented policies to the daily news cycle, from the politics of consensus-building to a “war room” approach.
Reflecting on these developments in 2000, political scientist Hugh Heclo asked the crucial question: Why should we care? His astute answer: “Because our politics will become more hostile than needed, more foolhardy in disregarding the long-term, and more benighted in mistaking persuasions for reality.” Sadly, seven congresses and two presidential administrations have done little to disprove his prediction.
At the risk of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned, I offer a Madisonian reflection: There is a difference between the vagaries of public opinion and the long-term interests of the people, and it is the task of representative democracy to reflect that difference. Pursuing the people’s long-term interests may sometimes require elected officials to disregard the kinds of preferences that the people reveal in public-opinion surveys or even in elections. Changes in the political system that make it more difficult for elected officials to give adequate weight to the long-term are changes for the worse, however “democratic” they may appear.
As Madison insisted, we will wait in vain for public-spiritedness to become a pervasive motive in our politics. Instead, we must create—and if necessary re-create—institutions that channel human nature as it is toward promoting the permanent interests of the community. If representative institutions move too far in the direction of government by plebiscite, we need an era of institutional reform to renew them.
Renewal does not mean restoring the vanished past. It means accepting certain changes as irreversible and rethinking old institutions in light of new circumstances. Here are three ideas.
First: Whatever may have been the case in the 18th century, today two-year House terms condemn 435 representatives to permanent campaigns. To create more opportunity for governing, we should change to four-year terms.
Second: Low and variable participation in formal elections increases the influence of plebiscitary devices such as surveys. To strengthen the former and weaken the latter, we should consider instituting the system of mandatory voting that Australia adopted nearly a century ago.
Third: Our current presidential nominating system tends to reward candidates who are talented campaigners. Only if we get lucky do effective campaigners turn out to have a capacity for governing. Can anyone seriously contend that the ability to win the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary is a good leading indicator of the capacity to serve as chief executive? The worst system of all is an unrepresentative plebiscite, but that is what the past four decades have yielded.
It is time for both political parties to reflect on the consequences of the system they have created and to draw the necessary conclusions. If they are unwilling or unable to undertake this task, it may be time for the federal government to step in, to the extent the Constitution permits.
Now these Senators are all again on the ballot, most of them pretending in one way or another that they have had little to do with that agenda, or want to reform it, or are really the solution to gridlock.
They have also been handmaidens to Harry Reid , the Majority Leader who has devoted the last four years to protecting Mr. Obama while turning the Senate into the world’s least deliberative body. Next Tuesday’s vote is above all a referendum on whether the Senate will spend two more years in this Obama-Reid dead zone.
But there’s also his record, or lack of one, including the startling fact that he has never been allowed a roll-call vote on an amendment he has offered. Not once in six years. This is because Mr. Reid has deliberately blocked the normal flow of Senate debate so Democrats won’t have a voting record that folks at home might notice.
Then there’s Jeanne Shaheen, the New Hampshire Democrat who won in 2008 by opposing the war in Iraq and embracing all things Obama. She too was the decisive vote for ObamaCare. Now she too claims to want to fix it, not that she has succeeded in getting a vote to do so.
Amid the health-care rollout in February, Ms. Shaheen said “I think we need to fix the things that are not working, and that’s what I am committed to.” But by Oct. 22 she had backtracked to proposing merely “an independent CEO and advisory committee that would oversee the health-care website, because we saw some issues with the rollout of the website.” Translation: If she wins, she’ll do whatever Mr. Obama asks.
We could continue down the list: Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Pryor of Arkansas,Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Udall of Colorado. They are all Mr. Obama’s children and Mr. Reid’s lieutenants.
In the media’s telling, gridlock in Washington is due to tea party pressure on House Republicans to resist Mr. Obama’s agenda. There is some of that, reflecting different views of government. But at least the House debates and votes in plain sight. Mr. Reid won’t allow the normal give and take of democratic voting and accountability that is the reason to have a legislature.
The Reid shutdown runs even to the core legislative function of funding the government. The House has passed seven of 12 annual appropriations bills, most with big bipartisan majorities. Chairman Barbara Mikulski has passed eight of the 12 out of her Senate Appropriations Committee, and Republicans wanted to debate. Mr. Reid blocked a floor vote on every one.
The GOP has wanted to put Democrats on record on Mr. Obama’s regulatory overreach, such as targeting coal for extinction, or on the Administration’s refusal to fast-track approval for natural gas exports that might help Europe become less dependent onVladimir Putin . No votes allowed.
Wyoming Republican John Barrasso kept a running tally of Mr. Reid’s amendment blockade through July. In the previous 12 months Senators introduced 1,952 amendments—1,105 from Republicans and 847 from Democrats. Mr. Reid blocked all but 19.
Legislation? Mr. Reid has blocked at least 10 bills sent to him by the House that passed with notable bipartisan support. Some 35 House Democrats voted with Republicans to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate; 46 Democrats voted to expedite the approval of liquefied natural gas exports; 130 Democrats voted for patent-reform legislation; 158 Democrats voted to expand access to charter schools; and 183 Democrats voted (in a bill that passed 406-1) to exempt certain veterans from the ObamaCare employer mandate. Mr. Reid’s response: No debate, no vote.
1) Immigration. How many millions will the president let in? On what terms? One hint: The Department of Homeland Security recently ordered more than four million green cards and visas for next year and says it might order another 29 million for future years. The cards would give immigrants who are here illegally the right to continue living and working in the U.S. legally—and perhaps receive a variety of federal and state benefits. Should the president unilaterally issue these cards, there will be a brutal debate over the wisdom of this policy, whether it extends to welfare benefits, and whether the president has the constitutional authority to issue so many cards without specific congressional approval.
2) The next U.S. attorney general. The president wants a crusader on progressive causes and a reliable firewall to protect him, just as Eric Holder has done. Rumor has it that he wants Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has been the point man on racial preferences.
Mr. Perez’s most controversial, and constitutionally questionable, position is his support for “disparate impact” as a measure of discrimination. According to this theory, if fewer blacks or Hispanics are hired than their percentage of the “relevant” population, then the employer must have discriminated, even if all hiring procedures were fair and racially neutral. If the president nominates Mr. Perez, expect a nasty confirmation fight. Even if the president nominates someone less controversial, tough hearings are almost certain.
3) Keystone XL Pipeline. Given his druthers, the president almost certainly would prefer to kill this project and appease his environmentalist supporters. But he won’t do that before the final votes are tallied for Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu , who is running for re-election. She is in favor of the project, and her campaign hinges on the perception that, as chairwoman of the Senate Energy Committee, she actually affects policy.
4) Bergdahl. The Pentagon has completed a long-delayed report on Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl but won’t tell us what it says. Sgt. Bergdahl walked away from his unit in Afghanistan, was taken in by the Taliban, and was finally swapped for five Taliban leaders who were detained at Guantanamo Bay. If Sgt. Bergdahl is found to have deserted his post, the report will be bad news for the White House. People will ask why the president gave up so much for a turncoat and why the president held a Rose Garden celebration to mark Sgt. Bergdahl’s return.
5) Iraq and Syria. No one knows what the president will do with regard to Islamic State; in fact, it is now virtually impossible to tell who our “friends” are since America’s opposition to ISIS, a Sunni group, makes the U.S. effectively a partner of its Shiite opponents in Tehran and Damascus. The Saudis, who lead the Sunni coalition, are livid and wonder if the U.S. has switched sides in the Persian Gulf, flipping from its longtime partnership with Saudi Arabia to a de facto one with Iran. Everyone wonders what the president’s strategy really is and whether he will stick to it after the election.
6) Iran. This is the big enchilada. If the president cuts a major deal on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program—which will surely include major concessions on U.S. economic sanctions, he will face a storm of controversy among the public and on Capitol Hill. Worse, Mr. Obama might refuse to submit the deal to Congress, claiming that it is an agreement and not a treaty requiring Senate approval. That could generate a true constitutional crisis.
The crucial actor here is Sen. Robert Menendez , the tough-minded New Jersey Democrat and Foreign Relations Committee chairman. Sen. Menendez’s position is vital because Majority Leader Harry Reid will give the president a pass, as he has for six years. Sen. Reid’s genuflection to the White House raises serious issues because it fundamentally undermines James Madison ’s vision of how the Constitution limits overweening government power.
The problem, as the Founders saw it, is to prevent the president or Congress from acquiring unchecked power, as they will inevitably try to do. The solution was to divide powers between the executive and the legislature and hope that they would be constrained by countervailing institutional interests. But Harry Reid is a “party man,” not a “Senate man.” The question is whether Sen. Menendez and perhaps other senior Democrats with strong foreign-policy credentials, such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, will break ranks with Sen. Reid and the White House.
Mr. Lipson is a professor of political science and director of the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security at the University of Chicago.
1a) Who’s ‘Chickensh*t’? The Goldberg Variation
BY ROGER L. SIMON
In an already much talked about article for The Atlantic, “The Crisis in U. S. – Israeli Relations is Officially Here,” Jeffrey Goldberg quotes a senior administration official accusing Benjamin Netanyahu – among a long list of unpleasant things — of being a “chickensh*t.”
Never mind for a moment the absurdity of an (of course anonymous) Obama official calling the Israeli PM a coward when Netanyahu has been personally under fire in two wars, volunteering for the second after having been wounded by a gun shot in the first (his brother, as many will remember, was killed during the raid on Entebbe — both Netanyahus were in Sayeret Matkal) at approximately the time the official’s boss Barry was lulling on a balmy Hawaiian beach smoking “choom” with his gang. What’s the right word for this? Hypocrisy is a bit weak, isn’t it? Or is it simply the desperate rumblings of a failed administration?
In any case, Goldberg was a “good boy” for transmitting it and I hope he gets another opportunity for a “hard-hitting” interview with POTUS. I further hope the author achieves his ambition and restrains those bellicose Israelis from renting or buying apartments in Arab East Jerusalem. After all, the Arab countries have been so welcoming to their Jewish populations. Oh, wait… they’re Judenrein, barely a single Jew in evidence. And Abu Mazen has refused ever to have Jews living within a future Palestinian state. My mistake. Never mind again. I’m sure Goldberg omitted all this by accident.
Actually, ninety percent of his article is on the level of dog bites man. We all know Obama et al don’t like the Israelis, not just their prime minister and his supposedly loose-lipped defense minister Yaalon, and probably a whole host of other officials of the Jewish state, not to mention a vast percentage of the Israeli populace. This opprobrium on Obama’s part has been going on for a long time, even before he took office. (Remember the still mysterious Khalidi tape?)
1b)
RNC: Administration Insult of Netanyahu ‘Inexplicable and Dangerous’
By Bridget Johnson
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus just issued a statement firing back at a senior administration official calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “chickenshit” in an interview with The Atlantic.
“ISIS is on a rampage through the Middle East, slaughtering innocents and committing mass murder while plotting to kill more Americans,” Priebus said. “The priority of the Obama administration should be defeating our enemies; instead they are once again insulting our allies. It’s inexplicable and dangerous.”
“This administration consistently gets it wrong on foreign policy. Instead of taking the ISIS threat seriously, President Obama called them the ‘JV’ team. Now, instead of working with our allies in the region to protect democracy and innocent lives, the administration is hurling expletives at Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
One week out of Election Day, in a midterm where foreign policy has gotten more air time than in previously years, the RNC chairman stressed, “Americans should not accept this.”
“We should never betray our ally Israel. We need a foreign policy that is focused, not fumbling. The country is increasingly concerned about our national security, yet the administration is not inspiring confidence,” Priebus said.
Haaretz got reaction from Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, who noted that “such severe curse words against the Israeli prime minister are harmful to millions of Israeli citizens and Jews worldwide.”
“The prime minister is not a private person, but the leader of the Jewish state and the Jewish world,” Bennett said, adding that it wasn’t Bashar Assad, “who slaughtered 150,000 of his citizens,” nor the leader of Saudi Arabia, “who stones women and homosexuals,” who earned the title “chickenshit” from the Obama administration — but the leader of ”the only democratic state in the Middle East.”
1c). Feathers Fly Over “Chickensh*t” Interview
Already strained US-Israel ties became even more frayed when an anonymous “senior Obama administration official” launched unusual and undiplomatic attack on Benjamin Netanyahu. Here’s what he told Jeffrey Goldberg:
“The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said, expanding the definition of what a chickenshit Israeli prime minister looks like. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin.He’s got no guts.”I ran this notion by another senior official who deals with the Israel file regularly.This official agreed that Netanyahu is a “chickenshit” on matters related to the comatose peace process, but added that he’s also a “coward” on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat
Netanyahu rebuffed the comments; a White House spokesperson said the comment was, as you’d expect, “inappropriate and counter-productive,” though no apology was made. Roger Cohen and Ari Fleischer had the most interesting tweets.
Since Barack Obama became president, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has been a reliable indicator of administration opinion about foreign-policy issues. Like some other journalists who can be counted on to support the president, he has been the recipient of some juicy leaks, especially when the White House wants to trash Israel’s government. But Goldberg and his “senior administration sources” reached a new low today when he published a piece in which those anonymous figures labeled Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a “chickenshit” and a “coward.” The remarks are clearly not so much a warning to the Israelis to stop complaining about the U.S. push for appeasement of a nuclear Iran and the administration’s clueless approach to the conflict with the Palestinians. Rather the story is, as Goldberg rightly characterizes it, a genuine crisis in the relationship. That much is plain but where Goldberg and the talkative administration members are wrong is their belief that this is all Netanyahu’s fault. Their attacks on him are not only plainly false but are motivated by a desire to find an excuse that will be used to justify a drastic turn in U.S. foreign policy against Israel.
The administration critique of Netanyahu as a coward stems from its disgust with his failure to make peace with the Palestinians as well as their impatience with his criticisms of their zeal for a deal with Iran even if it means allowing the Islamist regime to become a threshold nuclear power. But this is about more than policy. The prickly Netanyahu is well known to be a tough guy to like personally even if you are one of his allies. But President Obama and his foreign-policy team aren’t just annoyed by the prime minister. They’ve come to view him as public enemy No. 1, using language about him and giving assessments of his policies that are far harsher than they have ever used against even avowed enemies of the United States, let alone one of its closest allies.
So rather than merely chide him for caution they call him a coward and taunt him for being reluctant to make war on Hamas and even to launch a strike on Iran. They don’t merely castigate him as a small-time politician without vision; they accuse him of putting his political survival above the interests of his nation.
It’s quite an indictment but once you get beyond the personal dislike of the individual on the part of the president, Secretary of State Kerry, and any other “senior officials” that speak without attribution on the subject of Israel’s prime minister, all you have is a thin veil of invective covering up six years of Obama administration failures in the Middle East that have the region more dangerous for both Israel and the United States. For all of his personal failings, it is not Netanyahu—a man who actually served as a combat soldier under fire in his country’s most elite commando unit—who is a coward or a small-minded failure. It is Obama and Kerry who have fecklessly sabotaged a special relationship, an act whose consequences have already led to disaster and bloodshed and may yet bring worse in their final two years of power.
It was, after all, Obama (and in the last two years, Kerry) who has spent his time in office picking pointless fights with Israel over issues like settlements and Jerusalem. They were pointless not because there aren’t genuine disagreements between the two countries on the ideal terms for peace. But rather because the Palestinians have never, despite the administration’s best efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their favor, seized the chance for peace. No matter how much Obama praises Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and slights Netanyahu, the former has never been willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn. They also chose to launch a peace process in spite of the fact that the Palestinians remain divided between Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas-ruled Gaza, a situation that makes it impossible for the PA to make peace even if it wanted to do so. The result of their heedless push for negotiations that were bound to fail was another round of violence this summer and the possibility of another terrorist intifada in the West Bank.
On Iran, it has not been Netanyahu’s bluffing about a strike that is the problem but Obama’s policies. Despite good rhetoric about stopping Tehran’s push for a nuke, the president has pursued a policy of appeasement that caused it to discard its significant military and economic leverage and accept a weak interim deal that began the process of unraveling the international sanctions that represented the best chance for a solution without the use of force.
Even faithful Obama supporter Goldberg understands that it would be madness for Israel to withdraw from more territory and replicate the Gaza terror experiment in the West Bank. He also worries that the administration is making a “weak” Iran deal even though he may be the only person on the planet who actually thinks Obama would use force to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon.
So why is the administration so angry with Netanyahu? It can’t be because Netanyahu is preventing peace with the Palestinians. After the failure of Kerry’s fool’s errand negotiations and the Hamas missile war on Israel, not even Obama can think peace is at hand. Nor does he really think Netanyahu can stop him from appeasing Iran if Tehran is willing to sign even a weak deal.
The real reason to target Netanyahu is that it is easier to scapegoat the Israelis than to own up to the administration’s mistakes. Rather than usher in a new era of good feelings with the Arab world in keeping with his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama has been the author of policies that have left an already messy Middle East far more dangerous. Rather than ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his decision to withdraw U.S. troops and to dither over the crisis in Syria led to more conflict and the rise of ISIS. Instead of ending the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama is on the road to enabling it. And rather than manage an Israeli-Palestinian standoff that no serious person thought was on the verge of resolution, Obama made things worse with his and Kerry’s hubristic initiatives and constant bickering with Israel.
Despite the administration’s insults, it is not Netanyahu who is weak. He has shown great courage and good judgment in defending his country’s interests even as Obama has encouraged the Palestinians to believe they can hold out for even more unrealistic terms while denying Israel the ammunition it needed to fight Hamas terrorists. While we don’t know whether, as Goldberg believes, it is too late for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, it is Obama that Iran considers weak as it plays U.S. negotiators for suckers in the firm belief that the U.S. is a paper tiger that is not to be feared any longer.
If there is a crisis, it is one that was created by Obama’s failures and inability to grasp that his ideological prejudices were
out of touch with Middle East realities.
The next two years may well see, as Goldberg ominously predicts, even more actions by the administration to downgrade the alliance with Israel. But the blame for this will belong to a president who has never been comfortable with Israel and who has, at every conceivable opportunity, sought conflict with it even though doing so did not advance U.S. interests or the cause of peace. No insult directed at Netanyahu, no matter how crude or pointless, can cover up the president’s record of failure.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger at www.commentarymagazine.com.
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2)-1. Hershey was the son of a of a serially failed entrepreneur, Henry Hershey. Milton went to 7 schools by the 4th grade as the family chased the next big opportunity and moved to avoid creditors.
2. By the time he was 30, Milton was following the same path having declared bankruptcy 4 times.
3. In 1887 The bank initiated foreclose proceedings on His 5th business as well, the Lancaster caramel company. When the banker came to reposes the assets, Hershey presented a contract from an importer in England who had placed an order the day before that if filled, would rescue the business. The local banker was so impressed that he stopped the foreclosure and co-signed on the business loan to Hershey.
4. In 1900 the sale of the Lancaster caramel company and founded the Hershey Chocolate company which as of 2013 employs 14,800 people around the globe.
5. The Milton Hershey School, a free private learning institution for qualified underprivileged and impoverished students ages 4-18 has an enrollment of 2,500 students and is growing. It has the largest endowment of any private academic institution in the world with a 78% controlling interest in the Hershey company and 100% ownership of the Hershey Hotel, Chocolate World visitor center and Hershey Park. It has an additional $7.8 billion in outside investments and cash. It spends more per capita ($111,000 annually) on each student than any other private academic institution in the world. It is not funded with any public dollars
6. Hershey provided millions in subsidized housing and services to employees and suppliers in Pennsylvania as well as Cuba and parts of west Africa (from where a majority of their supply of cocoa comes)
7. In 1933 Hershey funded public works projects with his own private and company money including the Hershey hotel and a major expansion of the park and gardens so that none of his employees lost their jobs in the great depression.
8. When he died in 1945 he didn’t have a penny to his name having contributed everything to charity.
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3) Obama Soaks the Rich, Drowns the Middle Class
The ripple effect of the president’s tax hikes is swamping take-home pay.
The curse of the U.S. economy today is the downward trend in “take-home pay.” This is the most crucial economic indicator for most Americans, but when President Obama said in a recent speech at Northwestern that nearly every economic measure shows improvement from five years ago, he conspicuously left this one out.
Most workers’ pay has not kept up with inflation for at least six years. Even as hiring picked up over the past year, wages and salaries have inched up by 2%, barely ahead of inflation. This probably explains why half of Americans say the recession never ended. They are experiencing what Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen last week described as “stagnant living standards for the majority.”
Why aren’t wages rising? There are several reasons, including that many jobs today don’t pay as well as the ones lost during the recession. ObamaCare has made health insurance more expensive for businesses—as the nation’s biggest employer, Wal-Mart , recently reported—and that takes a bite out of take-home pay. Yet one factor is often overlooked: the tax increase on “the rich” at the beginning of 2013.
How could higher taxes on the top 2% or 3% hurt the middle class? Part of the answer is that when upper-income Americans spend their money on vacations or cars, they are taxed only once, after they earn it. But if they put their money to work by, for example, building out a family business, they got socked a second time by higher investment taxes. And this discourages the investments that grow the economy.
Although the Obama administration argues otherwise, these tax hikes were not minor. The tax rate on capital gains for high-income earners shot up to 23.8%—20% plus the 3.8% ObamaCare investment surtax. Ditto for the tax on dividends. So taxes on business investment rose by nearly 60% in 2013 and are nearly 20% higher
than in the Clinton years.
than in the Clinton years.
For estates more than $5.3 million in value, the estate tax in 2013 rose to 40% from 35% in 2012. This tax is a confiscatory double tax on a lifetime of savings, and the money reinvested in stocks or a family business.
The overall effect of the 2013 tax hike was not minor. The highest income-tax rate on small business income has risen to almost 42% from 35%. That’s a 20% spike in the small business tax for successful companies. When the government takes more, there is less to plow back into the business or invest elsewhere.
This may help explain the paradox that even as American businesses today are generally efficient and highly profitable, they aren’t reinvesting in new plants, equipment and technology or hiring more workers at the pace they normally would. Business investment was up last quarter—a hopeful sign—but over the recovery the trend has been sluggish.
A comparison with the Reagan years when investment taxes were cut tells the story. From 1983 to 1988, private investment averaged 12% of GDP, one-third faster than the 9% since 2009 under Obama. In the aftermath of the Kennedy, Clinton and George W. Bushcapital-gains tax cuts (1998-2006), the investment rate rose sharply and immediately.
What does investment have to do with stagnant wages? Everything. As Paul Samuelson, the premiere Keynesian economist who sold more economics textbooks than anyone in history, once explained: “What happens to the wage rate when each person works with more capital goods? Because each worker has more capital to work with, his or her marginal product [or productivity] rises. Therefore, the competitive real wage rises as workers become worth more to capitalists and meet with spirited bidding up of their market wage rates.”
History bears this out. Workers did very well in jobs and rising incomes in the 1960s, 1980s and late 1990s when capital gains and dividend taxes fell.
The high corporate tax rate is also holding the economy back. Twenty years ago the U.S. rate was about at the international average, but now we are about 15 percentage points above the rate of most of our competitors and nearly three times higher than countries like Ireland. The American Enterprise Institute has found that “a 1% increase in corporate tax rates is associated with nearly a 1% drop in wage rates” because when corporations invest less here at home, worker productivity suffers.
Mr. Obama’s investment tax hike was designed to soak the rich. But it is the middle class who have taken a bath. Republicans should be telling American wage-earners that the best way to increase their take-home pay is to repeal Mr. Obama’s tax hikes and chop the corporate tax rate to the international average, so more and better jobs are created on these shores, not abroad.
Mr. Kyl, former Republican senator from Arizona, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior counsel at Covington & Burling LLP. Mr. Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.
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4) The ‘Permanent Campaign’ = Perpetual Paralysis
For starters, make House terms four years and junk the primary system.
Campaigning is one thing, governing another. Politicians seek office to advance agendas they lay out during the campaign. If victorious, they do their best to turn promises into policy. Toward the end of their terms, the people pass judgment on their performance.
That is the textbook theory of representative democracy. It sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, because it is. Today, the distinction between campaigning and governing has collapsed, and governing has been reconstructed along campaign lines, with endless survey research playing a pivotal role. The consequence for our politics has been catastrophic, and we don’t know what to do about it.
You might think, for example, that next week’s midterm elections would create an interval for serious policy-making. And they may. But those intent on getting down to work will have to defy a Washington establishment—including much of the media—that will swiftly shift its focus to the 2016 elections. Legislators who want to take on tough issues such as immigration and taxation will have to buck leaders worried about the consequences for potential presidential nominees.
This situation has been four decades in the making. In December 1976, Patrick Caddell, president-elect Jimmy Carter ’s pollster, drafted one of the most fateful memos in modern political history. He summarized its thesis in nine lapidary words; “Governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.” Four years later, journalist Sidney Blumenthal codified this thesis in “The Permanent Campaign,” a title that became an enduring trope of political discourse.
This new view of American politics followed the political explosion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which led both parties to shift control of presidential nominations away from party leaders toward popular elections—primaries and caucuses. Jimmy Carter was the first candidate to “come out of nowhere,” seize the nomination from well-known establishment figures such as Sen. Henry Jackson, and win the presidency. Mr. Carter would not be the last.
A candidate without strong party ties, elected through a popular mobilization that may prove fleeting, has little choice but to attend closely to public opinion. He has no other base of support. The consequence is a shift from strategy to tactics, from future-oriented policies to the daily news cycle, from the politics of consensus-building to a “war room” approach.
Reflecting on these developments in 2000, political scientist Hugh Heclo asked the crucial question: Why should we care? His astute answer: “Because our politics will become more hostile than needed, more foolhardy in disregarding the long-term, and more benighted in mistaking persuasions for reality.” Sadly, seven congresses and two presidential administrations have done little to disprove his prediction.
At the risk of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned, I offer a Madisonian reflection: There is a difference between the vagaries of public opinion and the long-term interests of the people, and it is the task of representative democracy to reflect that difference. Pursuing the people’s long-term interests may sometimes require elected officials to disregard the kinds of preferences that the people reveal in public-opinion surveys or even in elections. Changes in the political system that make it more difficult for elected officials to give adequate weight to the long-term are changes for the worse, however “democratic” they may appear.
As Madison insisted, we will wait in vain for public-spiritedness to become a pervasive motive in our politics. Instead, we must create—and if necessary re-create—institutions that channel human nature as it is toward promoting the permanent interests of the community. If representative institutions move too far in the direction of government by plebiscite, we need an era of institutional reform to renew them.
Renewal does not mean restoring the vanished past. It means accepting certain changes as irreversible and rethinking old institutions in light of new circumstances. Here are three ideas.
First: Whatever may have been the case in the 18th century, today two-year House terms condemn 435 representatives to permanent campaigns. To create more opportunity for governing, we should change to four-year terms.
Second: Low and variable participation in formal elections increases the influence of plebiscitary devices such as surveys. To strengthen the former and weaken the latter, we should consider instituting the system of mandatory voting that Australia adopted nearly a century ago.
Third: Our current presidential nominating system tends to reward candidates who are talented campaigners. Only if we get lucky do effective campaigners turn out to have a capacity for governing. Can anyone seriously contend that the ability to win the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary is a good leading indicator of the capacity to serve as chief executive? The worst system of all is an unrepresentative plebiscite, but that is what the past four decades have yielded.
It is time for both political parties to reflect on the consequences of the system they have created and to draw the necessary conclusions. If they are unwilling or unable to undertake this task, it may be time for the federal government to step in, to the extent the Constitution permits.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5) The Senate Referendum
The Reid-Obama Democrats face an election reckoning.
With Election Day approaching, so is the democratic day of reckoning for the Democratic Senate class of 2008. Those are the Senators who gave President Obama and Nancy Pelosithe accidental 60-vote supermajority they needed to pass the burst of liberal legislation in 2009-2010 that had been pent-up for a generation—especially ObamaCare.
Now these Senators are all again on the ballot, most of them pretending in one way or another that they have had little to do with that agenda, or want to reform it, or are really the solution to gridlock.
The truth is that they are the main Washington problem. As President Obama said last week, they “are all folks who vote with me; they have supported my agenda.”
They have also been handmaidens to Harry Reid , the Majority Leader who has devoted the last four years to protecting Mr. Obama while turning the Senate into the world’s least deliberative body. Next Tuesday’s vote is above all a referendum on whether the Senate will spend two more years in this Obama-Reid dead zone.
Start with the unlikely way some of them won election in 2008. Alaska Democrat Mark Begich barely beat Ted Stevens after Justice Department lawyers withheld exculpatory evidence in a corruption case against him. A jury found Stevens guilty eight days before the election. Mr. Begich won by 47.8% to 46.5% on false pretenses and deserves defeat now on those grounds alone.
But there’s also his record, or lack of one, including the startling fact that he has never been allowed a roll-call vote on an amendment he has offered. Not once in six years. This is because Mr. Reid has deliberately blocked the normal flow of Senate debate so Democrats won’t have a voting record that folks at home might notice.
Or take Minnesota’s Al Franken, who trailed Republican Norm Coleman on Election Day but strong-armed a legal challenge to win the recount by 312 votes. He then became the 60th vote for ObamaCare, and now he is running for re-election by claiming he wants to repeal the law’s medical devices tax that is unpopular in Minnesota. Too bad Mr. Reid has blocked a binding vote on repeal so Mr. Franken and other Democrats can claim to favor repeal without having to do it.
Then there’s Jeanne Shaheen, the New Hampshire Democrat who won in 2008 by opposing the war in Iraq and embracing all things Obama. She too was the decisive vote for ObamaCare. Now she too claims to want to fix it, not that she has succeeded in getting a vote to do so.
Amid the health-care rollout in February, Ms. Shaheen said “I think we need to fix the things that are not working, and that’s what I am committed to.” But by Oct. 22 she had backtracked to proposing merely “an independent CEO and advisory committee that would oversee the health-care website, because we saw some issues with the rollout of the website.” Translation: If she wins, she’ll do whatever Mr. Obama asks.
We could continue down the list: Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Pryor of Arkansas,Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Udall of Colorado. They are all Mr. Obama’s children and Mr. Reid’s lieutenants.
In the media’s telling, gridlock in Washington is due to tea party pressure on House Republicans to resist Mr. Obama’s agenda. There is some of that, reflecting different views of government. But at least the House debates and votes in plain sight. Mr. Reid won’t allow the normal give and take of democratic voting and accountability that is the reason to have a legislature.
The Reid shutdown runs even to the core legislative function of funding the government. The House has passed seven of 12 annual appropriations bills, most with big bipartisan majorities. Chairman Barbara Mikulski has passed eight of the 12 out of her Senate Appropriations Committee, and Republicans wanted to debate. Mr. Reid blocked a floor vote on every one.
The GOP has wanted to put Democrats on record on Mr. Obama’s regulatory overreach, such as targeting coal for extinction, or on the Administration’s refusal to fast-track approval for natural gas exports that might help Europe become less dependent onVladimir Putin . No votes allowed.
Wyoming Republican John Barrasso kept a running tally of Mr. Reid’s amendment blockade through July. In the previous 12 months Senators introduced 1,952 amendments—1,105 from Republicans and 847 from Democrats. Mr. Reid blocked all but 19.
Legislation? Mr. Reid has blocked at least 10 bills sent to him by the House that passed with notable bipartisan support. Some 35 House Democrats voted with Republicans to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate; 46 Democrats voted to expedite the approval of liquefied natural gas exports; 130 Democrats voted for patent-reform legislation; 158 Democrats voted to expand access to charter schools; and 183 Democrats voted (in a bill that passed 406-1) to exempt certain veterans from the ObamaCare employer mandate. Mr. Reid’s response: No debate, no vote.
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As the election nears, many voters are asking if a Republican Senate would make a difference. The Beltway media line is that it wouldn’t, which ignores that Mr. Reid’s tactics are an historic aberration. How could the Senate possibly be any worse? Mr. Obama would retain his veto against legislation passed by a Republican House and Senate, but at least the legislators would have to vote and be accountable. At least Congress would again resemble a democracy.
5a) Obama’s Post-Election Policy Blowout
Decisions on immigration, Iran and other hot issues that were delayed for political reasons will be coming soon.
By Charles Lipson
With the midterm elections looming, the White House has delayed controversial decisions and appointments. That makes sense politically. The administration doesn’t want to force Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Michelle Nunn, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, or other embattled Democrats to defend presidential actions right now, or worse, to oppose them publicly. But as soon as the voting is done (perhaps after runoffs in Louisiana and Georgia), several big shoes will drop. Here are the most likely ones.
1) Immigration. How many millions will the president let in? On what terms? One hint: The Department of Homeland Security recently ordered more than four million green cards and visas for next year and says it might order another 29 million for future years. The cards would give immigrants who are here illegally the right to continue living and working in the U.S. legally—and perhaps receive a variety of federal and state benefits. Should the president unilaterally issue these cards, there will be a brutal debate over the wisdom of this policy, whether it extends to welfare benefits, and whether the president has the constitutional authority to issue so many cards without specific congressional approval.
2) The next U.S. attorney general. The president wants a crusader on progressive causes and a reliable firewall to protect him, just as Eric Holder has done. Rumor has it that he wants Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has been the point man on racial preferences.
Mr. Perez’s most controversial, and constitutionally questionable, position is his support for “disparate impact” as a measure of discrimination. According to this theory, if fewer blacks or Hispanics are hired than their percentage of the “relevant” population, then the employer must have discriminated, even if all hiring procedures were fair and racially neutral. If the president nominates Mr. Perez, expect a nasty confirmation fight. Even if the president nominates someone less controversial, tough hearings are almost certain.
3) Keystone XL Pipeline. Given his druthers, the president almost certainly would prefer to kill this project and appease his environmentalist supporters. But he won’t do that before the final votes are tallied for Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu , who is running for re-election. She is in favor of the project, and her campaign hinges on the perception that, as chairwoman of the Senate Energy Committee, she actually affects policy.
4) Bergdahl. The Pentagon has completed a long-delayed report on Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl but won’t tell us what it says. Sgt. Bergdahl walked away from his unit in Afghanistan, was taken in by the Taliban, and was finally swapped for five Taliban leaders who were detained at Guantanamo Bay. If Sgt. Bergdahl is found to have deserted his post, the report will be bad news for the White House. People will ask why the president gave up so much for a turncoat and why the president held a Rose Garden celebration to mark Sgt. Bergdahl’s return.
5) Iraq and Syria. No one knows what the president will do with regard to Islamic State; in fact, it is now virtually impossible to tell who our “friends” are since America’s opposition to ISIS, a Sunni group, makes the U.S. effectively a partner of its Shiite opponents in Tehran and Damascus. The Saudis, who lead the Sunni coalition, are livid and wonder if the U.S. has switched sides in the Persian Gulf, flipping from its longtime partnership with Saudi Arabia to a de facto one with Iran. Everyone wonders what the president’s strategy really is and whether he will stick to it after the election.
6) Iran. This is the big enchilada. If the president cuts a major deal on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program—which will surely include major concessions on U.S. economic sanctions, he will face a storm of controversy among the public and on Capitol Hill. Worse, Mr. Obama might refuse to submit the deal to Congress, claiming that it is an agreement and not a treaty requiring Senate approval. That could generate a true constitutional crisis.
The crucial actor here is Sen. Robert Menendez , the tough-minded New Jersey Democrat and Foreign Relations Committee chairman. Sen. Menendez’s position is vital because Majority Leader Harry Reid will give the president a pass, as he has for six years. Sen. Reid’s genuflection to the White House raises serious issues because it fundamentally undermines James Madison ’s vision of how the Constitution limits overweening government power.
The problem, as the Founders saw it, is to prevent the president or Congress from acquiring unchecked power, as they will inevitably try to do. The solution was to divide powers between the executive and the legislature and hope that they would be constrained by countervailing institutional interests. But Harry Reid is a “party man,” not a “Senate man.” The question is whether Sen. Menendez and perhaps other senior Democrats with strong foreign-policy credentials, such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, will break ranks with Sen. Reid and the White House.
All of these matters have been high-profile and potentially deeply divisive. That is precisely why the White House is postponing any announcements. When the administration finally does speak, it will unleash a political storm, even if Democrats hold the Senate. If Republicans win, those winds will reach hurricane force, since the president will likely try to ram everything through a lame-duck Congress. If that happens, consider boarding up the windows.
Mr. Lipson is a professor of political science and director of the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security at the University of Chicago.
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