Obama’s Cynical Maneuvering on the Health-Care Mandate
In his 42-page ruling that the keystone provision in President Obama’s health-care law — the mandate to force Americans to purchase health insurance — is unconstitutional, Judge Henry E. Hudson made several powerful arguments. But there is one to which I want to draw particular attention.
On page 25 of his decision, Judge Hudson writes, “Despite pre-enactment representations to the contrary by the Executive and Legislative branches, the Secretary now argues that the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is, in essence, a ‘tax penalty.’”That’s a polite way of saying that the Obama administration willfully misled the public during the health-care debate. In fact, President Obama repeatedly denied that the mandate was a tax — but now, in order to pass constitutional muster, his administration is insisting it is. I urge you to watch the president’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos to see just how emphatic Obama was. When Stephanopoulos says that the mandate is a tax increase, Obama scolds Stephanopoulos. “That’s not true, George,” the president says. “[It] is absolutely not a tax increase.”
Now the president and his administration are arguing exactly the opposite.
This is a deeply cynical maneuver on the part of the man who promised to put an end to cynical political acts. Like so much of what Obama said, this promise was fraudulent. Perhaps the White House press corps will insist that the president and his spokesman explain the inconsistency between what Obama said and what his administration is now asserting.
Obama’s Cynical Maneuvering on the Health-Care Mandate
Must-Reads from Magazine
Trump, Not Comey is Hillary’s Asset
Today’s hearing by the House Committee on Government Oversight provided the American people with a familiar tableau showing just how dysfunctional their political system has become. As we’ve seen in virtually every investigation of Obama administration wrongdoing since the Republicans won back control of Congress, the session was a partisan mess. GOP members tried in vain to get FBI Director James Comey to admit that Hillary Clinton had been given a break when he chose not to recommend she be charged in spite of her negligence and lies. Democrats spent their time praising Comey, defending Clinton, and claiming the whole thing was just a Republican witch-hunt. In other words, Capitol Hill business as usual.
Or, at least, that’s the assumption on the part of many Democrats, who have effectively changed their main talking point in the last 48 hours from “Hillary did nothing” to “nobody cares about any of this outside of Washington.” But despite the inability of the committee’s Republican majority to get the best of Comey should not be any cause for Democrats to celebrate.It’s entirely possible that the GOP would have been better off not hauling Comey before Congress and merely letting his Tuesday announcement stand on its own without giving him more chance to explain his decision in depth in a way that can be interpreted as favorable to the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. But the real issue is not Comey’s controversial decision; it’s that Clinton played fast and loose with national security and lied about it.
Like his Tuesday announcement, Comey’s testimony provided a number of difficult moments for the Clinton campaign. He reiterated that her use of a private email server was unauthorized and that it exposed U.S. secrets to hostile powers. Most importantly, although he said she didn’t lie in her interview with the FBI, he also made it clear that her repeated denials about transmitting classified information in her emails were untrue.
That has already led to a Republican referral to the FBI to investigate whether Clinton committed perjury when she testified before the House Benghazi Committee because her statements at that time were contradicted by Comey. Of course, after failing to charge her for her conduct, there’s no chance that the Obama administration will ever consent to trying her for lying about it. But even if they are in the right, the GOP should not invest much effort in continuing to follow Clinton down that rabbit hole, and attacking Comey (though his judgment in this matter is questionable) is a waste of time.
The only judges and jury Clinton will ever face are the voters who will go to the polls in November, and it is to them alone that Republicans who are outraged by this scandal should address their concerns. And what was said by Comey this week undermines the case both for Clinton as a competent public servant and a responsible guardian of America’s national security.
By choosing to have another hearing, House Republicans were using one of the few levers of power they control. But as they should have learned from their similarly dismal efforts to hold the IRS accountable and past tries to get to the truth about Benghazi, the willingness of every Congressional Democrat to treat any investigation into misconduct or untruthfulness on the part of one their own as anything but a GOP plot has undermined the usefulness of these exercises. The fact that most of the Republicans who serve on these committees (with a few exceptions such as Rep. Trey Gowdy) have no ability to conduct a cross-examination gives an advantage to the Democrats in their effort to obfuscate the issues and put it all down to partisan bickering.
Yet what those frustrated about these proceedings must remember is that the GOP already has mined political gold from Comey’s findings even if his assertions that she didn’t break the law is illogical. Comey said anyone who behaved in this manner would need to be given serious discipline, and that is what the voters can provide if Republicans stick to what is already on the record and continue to point out that she lied and endangered national security in Comey’s own words.
The GOP problem isn’t that Comey was too able a witness to be pinned down on his faulty judgment or that the Democrats’ defense of Clinton was persuasive. It’s that Clinton’s opponent is too flawed and too obsessed with defending his mistakes and offensive comments to focus on Clinton’s unfitness for office. If the election is a referendum on Hillary Clinton’s untrustworthiness, negligence, paranoia about transparency, and corrupt conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation, the Republicans have all they need to win. But since Donald Trump has shown his unfitness in other ways and can’t stay on message enough to make that case, Clinton may get away with it. As long as he is distracting the voters from the truth about Clinton, she will be off the hook.
Harassing Diplomats, Then and Now
The harassment of American diplomats outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow is making headline news. Here, for example, is the Bloomberg report:
Russian television broadcast footage of a policeman tackling a man the report said was an undercover CIA agent trying to enter the U.S. embassy in Moscow without identifying himself. In the grainy, approximately 15-second clip, the man exits a taxi and is almost immediately tackled by a policeman who emerges from a guard box and wrestles him to the ground. In the ensuing struggle, the man manages to push himself through a door into the embassy compound, while the officer attempts to pin him down… The footage of the skirmish contradicts a version of the incident given by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Its spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said in a website statement June 30 that the diplomat punched the police officer after he was stopped and asked for identification.
The Bloomberg report continues:Harassment of U.S. diplomats in Moscow has increased significantly over the last two years, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said in a June 27 press briefing. Secretary of State John Kerry has raised the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin, she said.
So, Secretary of State John Kerry apparently has said “pretty please” to Putin and requested that the schoolyard bullies stop attacking U.S. diplomats or, as Josh Rogin has reported, breaking into their houses and killing their dogs. It does not appear, however, that Putin has taken Kerry’s request seriously. Schoolyard bullies seldom listen to those they consider effete, gullible, and weak. And, of course, Kerry’s predecessor Hillary Clinton did little effective to stop near-constant harassment of democracy specialist Michael McFaul during his troubled tenure as U.S. ambassador in Moscow.
It is not the first time that states have harassed or threatened to reject diplomats. South African President P.W. Botha was not pleased when President Ronald Reagan dispatched Edward Perkins to be the U.S. ambassador to South Africa at the height of Apartheid. Reagan stood by Perkins; the Apartheid regime acquiesced. They understood they could not bully America.
Middle Eastern countries have, on occasion, also expressed displeasure at U.S. diplomats. Twelve years ago, after the passing of U.S. diplomat Hume Horan, I pieced together a remembrance of him and his life’s work for the Middle East Quarterly, a journal that I edited at the time. Horan may have been the most talented Arabic linguist the State Department has ever had. That was not necessarily a quality appreciated in countries like Saudi Arabia, whose officials too often prefer credulous diplomats who believe what they are told in English.
Robert Kaplan, in his masterwork Arabists, described Horan’s experience in Saudi Arabia:
For a while Washington was pleased with the appointment of Horan as ambassador, the Saudi rulers were less so. To an extent Horan was their worst nightmare. Horan’s Falasha escapade may have been water off a duck’s back to the Saudis, but the last thing King Fahd and his cronies wanted was a hands-on type of American in Riyadh, one who knew Arabic, who was streetwise, and who consequently would be able to challenge the rosy-eyed vision of Saudi Arabian life being peddled in Washington by the Saudis’ all-powerful ambassador, Prince Bandar Ibn Sultan … There was also the matter of Horan’s Iranian paternity, which he neither advertised nor kept secret. There may have been no reasoning with the Saudis on this matter. It was the kind of issue, like their aversion to Jews, that highlighted the worst aspect of the Saudi national character: its tendency for the nastiest and most infantile sort of conspiracy mongering, something to which the most sophisticated of Saudis were prone.
That Secretary of State George Schultz effectively acquiesced to Saudi Arabia’s bullying was not Schultz’s finest hour. Horan himself contrasted the end of his tenure in Riyadh to what happened when the Sudanese government demanded his ouster after Horan’s role facilitating the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel became public:
After the facts of the Falasha rescue became known and the new Sudanese government wanted me removed, Chet Crocker [the assistant secretary of state for Africa] bluntly informed Khartoum that if “Sudan wanted to continue to deal with Washington, it would have to do so through Hume Horan.” I’ll always be grateful to Crocker for that support. As for how the Department reacted when the Saudis applied similar pressure, let’s just say that it was not a Corregidor performance.
Corregidor, of course, refers to the U.S. army’s fierce resistance on Corregidor Island to the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1942. Ultimately, Horan stayed to the end of his term.
There can always be an excuse for appeasement. The State Department never wants unnecessary impediments to relations. Standing firm, however, and staring down adversaries is often more effective than 100 demarches or even a secretary of state’s pleading.
Kerry should not merely ask Russian officials to stop harassing U.S. diplomats. Rather, he should instruct the U.S. Embassy to stop issuing visas for Russians to come to the United States until Putin provides an adequate explanation. If the Russian embassy in Washington reciprocates as such, so be it. It might create a diplomatic spat in the short term, but it is far more important in the long term that Putin understand the U.S. government protects its personnel, there are responsibilities incumbent in hosting embassies, and that red lines really do exist.
Cops and the Crisis of Confidence
On Capitol Hill on Thursday, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy spent the morning probing FBI Director James Comey to explain the contradictory logic that led him to implicate Hillary Clinton in recklessly endangering American national security but not recommending her indictment. In Gowdy’s view, Comey had led Americans to conclude there is a “double track justice system” in the United States; one for the powerful and famous and another for the rest of us. The presumption of a two-tiered system is a familiar one for millions of African-Americans. Rightly or not, many black Americans fear that they or their loved ones may become the targets of unnecessary police violence simply because of their backgrounds. These are two chapters in the same story—it tells a tale of a society-wide crisis of confidence in American institutions and leadership.
This summer—and it is always the summer—looks set to be marred again by politically charged allegations of inappropriate police-related violence leading to the deaths of African-American men.
The shooting death of Alton Sterling in Louisiana has sparked a familiar spate of condemnations from black leaders. Like so many similar incidents, all the facts of the case are not known, but the circumstantial evidence is raising eyebrows. A grainy cell phone video captured the incident in which Sterling, on the ground and on his back while being subdued by two police officers, was shot to death after an officer alleged that he was carrying a gun. Those officers were responding to reports that a man matching Sterling’s description was armed and loitering outside a convenience store while selling CDs.
Another incident that occurred just hours later in Minnesota is even more questionable. 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer on Wednesday during a routine traffic stop. Castile allegedly informed the officer who pulled him over for a broken tail light that he was licensed to carry a firearm and was reaching for the appropriate documentation when he was fatally shot. The aftermath of this incident was also caught on camera. It reveals a scene of shock and confusion on both the part of the victim and his girlfriend as well as the responding officer.
The images emerging from these two episodes in Minnesota and Louisiana are lamentably familiar, as is the predictable wagon circling that they have prompted. Those who are invested in either the presumed racism of the members of law enforcement or their infallibility have a tendency to rush to judgment after episodes like these. Unlike the last three summers in which violence like this sparks a national outcry, however, the reaction to these events from the politically active members of the African-American community has been something even more disheartening: resignation. Outrage has yielded to sorrow and a mournful acceptance of this, the new normal. For many, healthy cynicism has given way to acquiescence.
That kind of cynicism is unhealthy. Though it is of a different species, this kind of fatalism is poisoning the public discourse and is putting the voters in a mutinous mood. Moreover, the institutions established to serve the public are losing their faith and trust.
Gallup, which has been tracking Americans’ faith in a variety of national institutions since 1973, has been following a worrying trend. For years now, they have consistently found that the military and the police are the only governmental organizations that enjoy either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of public confidence in a majority of those surveyed. This year, those organizations are followed by the presidency and the Supreme Court (36 percent each), public schools (30 percent), the justice system (23 percent) and Congress (6 percent). A republic that has lost all faith in its civilian leadership and looks more to the authority of its various armed forces for virtue and guidance cannot long endure.
Gallup also revealed that only 14 percent of those surveyed think that average constituents have “a lot” of influence over congressional votes. What’s more, there is no measurable partisan divide on that question. Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike are in nearly uniform agreement that donors and lobbyists, not voters or even party leaders, are the real sources of power in the federal legislature. “If you want to know why Americans were willing to throw the electoral Hail Marys that are/were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, this is it,” wrote the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. That’s about right, but not entirely. These candidacies and the movements they represent are not expressions of agency but of helplessness. They represent a collective admission that the whole enterprise as it is currently constituted is not worth saving.
The popularly anarchistic idea that the whole American edifice is a rotten one that would benefit from some demolition is more perception than reality. In the case of police killings, for example, the statistics do not suggest a plague of violence is upon us. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted, the number of unarmed black men who are shot by police is probably inflated in the public imagination by the disproportionate media coverage each episode receives. Of the 990 arrest-related deaths in 2015, for example, “38 were black and unarmed,” he noted. “Of the 505 people shot dead by police in 2016 so far, 37 were unarmed; 13 were black and unarmed.” Similarly, the nation’s political class is less reliant on campaign funds to save them from the wrath of voters than at any point in decades.
The democratization and proliferation of news and information sources have had the perverse effect of making the political process more generally accessible while simultaneously making average Americans feel more isolated from it. All this has led to a very real crisis of confidence in the American mission statement. Politicians ignore it at their peril, but American business and media elites stoke these sentiments at theirs as well. The backlash they are incubating is coming for the system that made them who they are today, and the revolution always eats its children.
What Trump Needs or Wants in a Veep
With less than two weeks to go before Republicans assemble in Cleveland to nominate Donald Trump for president, the field for his running mate continues to narrow. In the last 24 hours, two more possible contenders seemed to cross themselves off the list. Senators Bob Corker and Joni Ernst both made it clear they were not interested in the job. Characteristically, the Trump campaign then leaked that neither of them were on the candidate’s short list. It’s not exactly a secret that most leading Republicans are fleeing from Trump as their desire to be potentially one heartbeat from the presidency has been offset by their fear of being tainted by a connection to the billionaire and the likelihood that he is leading their party to electoral disaster this fall.
But what is clearly apparent is that, like everything else about this bizarre political year, the 2016 GOP veepstakes must be handicapped in a very different manner than any previous search for a running mate. In the past, a vice president might be picked for political considerations such as geographical or ideological balance or to provide characteristics that were absent in the presidential candidate such as governing experience. But since there is no precedent for a person such as Donald Trump being nominated for president, it necessarily follows that choosing his running mate will take us into uncharted territory. However, the answers to the question of what Trump needs in order to bolster his chances of winning or governing effectively if he does prevail in November may be different from what Trump wants or can tolerate.The list of characteristics that Trump needs is long. Someone that could help him unite Republicans behind him ought to be a priority given the fact that many in the GOP are still appalled by the fact that their party is about to nominate a candidate whose views on a host of issues are antithetical to the core principles of the GOP since Ronald Reagan. He also needs someone with the sort of experience that will ensure that someone in the West Wing has some idea of how the government actually works. A candidate with the sort of sober temperament who the public could readily see was qualified to step in and become president is also necessary.
But it’s not clear that’s what Trump is seeking or will get.
Everything we know about Trump and which he continues to demonstrate every day on the campaign trail is that this is not a man who is interested even in theory in an Abraham Lincoln-style government of rivals in which the top thinkers and political talents, even those who have opposed him, will be recruited to join his efforts. No one likes criticism, but even when compared to the notoriously thin-skinned President Obama, Trump comes across as someone who cannot tolerate even the mildest dissent or challenges. So we know that what he needs isn’t someone who will act as a break on his worst instincts.
Considering the egos of the people who have reached the top rung of our political ladder, that rules out most potential veeps. Corker is the most pliable of Washington politicians, whose willingness to be rolled on the Iran nuclear deal by the Democrats should eliminate him from consideration were talent the main consideration. But, as Josh Rogin reports in the Washington Post, even he found it impossible to live with Trump’s inability to formulate a coherent foreign policy doctrine.
That factor may also wind up eliminating Senator Tom Cotton, who, alone of the party’s young stars, has not taken himself out of consideration. Cotton is one of the most articulate exponents of a strong internationalist foreign policy. Even if he were willing to abandon his principles, it’s doubtful that Trump would embrace someone who disagreed with him. Which is good news for Cotton, who might be throwing away a bright future by accepting a ticket on what turn out to be a political Titanic.
Assuming that we can ignore Trump’s vague talk about nominating a former general (since none that come to mind are sufficiently famous in order to provide Trump with the sort of pizzazz that would balance out their political inexperience) that leaves us with the two men who are the consensus finalists: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
Gingrich certainly has the governing experience to balance Trump’s inexperience. But the man who was the clear leader of the conservative movement for a short while in the mid-1990s is at this point no more capable of uniting the GOP than Trump. The downside for Gingrich is that, although he has been consistently supportive of Trump, he did blast him for his attacks on the “Mexican” judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case. Since Trump requires absolute loyalty, he may not be comfortable with Gingrich.
Which leaves us with Christie. There are a lot of reasons why any normal nominee wouldn’t consider the governor. His Bridgegate troubles and current unpopularity at home will be fodder for the Democrats. He is also an attack dog for a ticket that already has one. He has no Washington experience and has some of the same anger issues and temperamental defects that afflict Trump. But if he is the current favorite for the job it is because he has already demonstrated that he is willing to trade his principles and even his dignity in order to tie himself to the GOP nominee.
What Trump needs is a sober conservative Republican who will signal to the country that the GOP has at least one adult on the ticket. But unless he surprises us, Trump’s need for a faithful doormat may make Christie the only possible choice.
Trump’s Saddam Fallacy
On July 5, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump opined about Saddam Hussein:
“He was a bad guy — really bad guy. But you know what? He did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.”
Here at COMMENTARY, Noah Rothman properly eviscerated Trump’s memory:Saddam Hussein was not good at killing terrorists; he was good at aiding and abetting them. His regime paid salaries to the relatives of suicide bombers who killed Israelis and Jews. He hosted and trained paramilitary fighters, including al-Qaeda-linked fighters from North Africa. “Saddam’s regime first and foremost was a skilled user of terrorism to intimidate Iraqis and eliminate any opponents, real and imaginary,” read the conclusion of the 9-11 Commission’s final report, which noted that Iraq-trained terrorists also targeted and killed Americans.
This really was just the tip of the iceberg, however. Some partisans might dismiss anything that came out of the Bush administration, so here is the 1999 State Department’s “Patterns of Global Terrorism” entry on Iraq:
Iraq continued to plan and sponsor international terrorism in 1999. Although Baghdad focused primarily on the antiregime opposition both at home and abroad, it continued to provide safehaven and support to various terrorist groups.Press reports stated that, according to a defecting Iraqi intelligence agent, the Iraqi intelligence service had planned to bomb the offices of Radio Free Europe in Prague. Radio Free Europe offices include Radio Liberty, which began broadcasting news and information to Iraq in October 1998. The plot was foiled when it became public in early 1999… Iraq continued to provide safehaven to a variety of Palestinian rejectionist groups, including the Abu Nidal organization, the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), and the former head of the now-defunct 15 May Organization, Abu Ibrahim, who masterminded several bombings of U.S. aircraft.
But that was secular terrorism, right? Trump—and many proponents of his “Saddam promoted stability” school falls for two additional fallacies:
First, it’s become conventional wisdom to say that al-Qaeda in Iraq (or Islamic State) terrorism was the creation of the Iraq war. In reality, however, al-Qaeda in Iraq predated the Iraq war. Remember: Several months before the Iraq war, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group assassinated an American diplomat in Amman, Jordan.
Second, too many people consider Saddam Hussein a secularist. He was far less a secularist though than he was a cynic. He drank, he womanized, and there is no evidence he prayed with any regularity. But, when it was in his interest, he reached out and promoted not only Islam but also its most radical interpretations. In the aftermath of his expulsion from Kuwait, Saddam ‘found religion,’ commissioned a Koran written in his blood, and put “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) on the Iraqi flag. Anyone who has been to Baghdad can see other elements of Saddam’s over-the-top religiosity.
In his last years, his “Fedayeen al-Saddam” acted not only as political enforcers but also as religious police. Consider this from the State Department human rights report from 2000:
In October security forces reportedly beheaded a number of women suspected of prostitution and some men suspected of facilitating or covering up such activities. Security agents reportedly decapitated numerous women and men in front of their family members. According to Amnesty International (AI), the victim’s heads were displayed in front of their homes for several days. Thirty of the victims’ names reportedly were published, including three doctors and one medical assistant.
The prosecution charge was nonsense—made even more clear by the presence of doctors and other professionals. Saddam’s vigilantes were effectively appeasing radical Islamists by attacking more secular-oriented women.
To say that Saddam Hussein understood how to tackle terrorism is akin to saying eyesight was better under Pol Pot because no one wore glasses or that Attila the Hun understood how to alleviate prison overcrowding.
If Donald Trump wants a model about how to fight terrorism, he shouldn’t look toward Saddam. Rather, he might consider the U.S. Navy Seals, Yonatan Netanyahu or those who hunted down the terrorists who murdered many Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972.