The rage of Dick Cheney

Vice President Dick Cheney gave an interview to CNN's Wolf Blitzer today.

Actors who want to do a character study of anger should get a copy of that tape.

Dick Cheney has been in politics and public life a long, long time, and he said all the things that politicians say when confronted with nasty quotes and questions. It wasn't so much what he said. It was the way he said it.

Words were coming out of him like bullets.

Interesting.

Something's coming.



Copyright 2007

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Jimmy Carter's evil secret

Last week C-SPAN covered a town hall meeting held by former President Jimmy Carter in Athens, Georgia, part of a conference Carter was holding on his presidency.

A questioner in the audience criticized Carter for using the word "apartheid" in the title of his new book. Why would the former president choose a word so freighted with racism, the questioner asked, to describe Israel's policy toward the Palestinians?

Jimmy Carter patiently explained that he didn't mean to imply that racism motivated the Israeli policy. What he meant by "apartheid," he said, was that Israel's policy is motivated entirely by "greed for Palestinian land."

Then he described more fully what he thought about Israel's policy, repeatedly using phrases like "the Palestinians' land," "the Palestinians, on their own land," and "land that belongs to the Palestinians."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the status of that land was the subject of negotiations that have been going on for decades and are not anywhere near concluded yet.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought those territories were won by Israel in a war that began when Israel was attacked by its Arab neighbors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Israel gave up control of some of that land to the Palestinians in exchange for a cessation of terror and violent attacks, a promise on which the Palestinians have utterly failed to deliver.

Jimmy Carter speaks often about the power of the "Israeli lobby," implying that the only reason anyone in Washington would support that democratic sliver of the Middle East is that large sums of money have been paid to those who agree to whore for the Israeli government.

Now we know why he thinks that. That's what he's doing. But for the other side.

National Review's January 29 issue includes an article by Claudia Rosett about some recent journalistic inquiries into the funding of the Carter Center. Among the major supporters who have been disclosed: the Saudi government, the Saudi prince who unsuccessfully offered Rudy Giuliani a ten-million-dollar donation for 9/11 victims along with a letter blaming U.S. support of Israel for the attack, and the Saudi BinLaden Group -- yes, that bin Laden, or at least his brother. Many other donors remain secret. U.S. law does not require the Carter Center to disclose the names and contributions of its supporters.

Jimmy Carter doesn't matter at all, but Americans should be very concerned about the practice of funding presidential libraries and "centers" with secret donations from undisclosed donors. Senator Hillary Clinton's husband has raised a prodigious amount of money for his library and foundation, and President Bush's library will reportedly cost $500 million. Last November the New York Daily News reported that Bush fund-raisers hope to raise $250 million from "megadonations" of $10 million to $20 million each. According to Washington Bureau Chief Tom DeFrank, "Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential 'mega' donors" and "their names aren't required to be made public."

It's a formula for disaster. People who hold public office in the United States cannot be permitted to solicit secret donations from anybody, let alone from foreign governments and the individuals who head them. The law has to be changed to prevent current public officials, former U.S. presidents, and their spouses from taking a single dime from anybody for any kind of foundation unless it is fully and promptly disclosed to the public.

The American taxpayers provide former presidents with a fair amount of money to pay for an office and a staff. It's not unreasonable to ask for full disclosure of donations to their foundations as a condition of that support.

This is not to say that anyone is dishonest or corrupt. But if our presidents and former presidents are going to spend their time raising hundreds of millions of dollars for their own use, we had better keep the lights on. And the windows open.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "The president's motive in the ports deal."


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Health Care Follies on Ice!

At last, some good news for the Republicans on Capitol Hill.

They don't have to pretend to support the president's new health care reform proposal. It will die in the car on the way to the House chamber.

President Bush's new idea for health care reform, which he formally unveils in tonight's State of the Union address, is perhaps the best evidence yet that he's drinking again.

Or maybe it's mushrooms.

You would have to be hallucinating to think anybody in Congress is going to vote for a law that would assign a cash value to employer-paid health benefits and then add that number to everybody's taxable income. Yes, the president proposes a tax deduction to offset the extra income, $15,000 for "families" and $7,500 for "singles," but that's where the thing really turns ugly.

The president thinks it would be a good idea for people to choose less expensive health insurance coverage, the kind with fewer benefits and higher deductibles and co-pays. The less expensive your health insurance, the more likely it is that the $15,000 or $7,500 tax deduction will cover or exceed the cost.

Follow that?

The president wants to use the tax code to push Americans to choose minimal, you might say crummy, health insurance coverage. If you currently have pretty good coverage, the president would like you to pay more in taxes.

The premise here is that Americans are luxuriating in unnecessary medical procedures. That premise might be wrong. It could be that Americans are simply receiving appropriate medical care recommended by their doctors. Could they make do with less? Is it the appropriate role of the government to force them to find out?

Health insurance is very expensive, and for some time now businesses have been pressured by rising prices into pushing more of the costs onto their employees. Perhaps we have reached the point where a significant number of businesses are about to stop offering health insurance as an employee benefit.

That would at least explain the president's otherwise inexplicable proposal. But it doesn't make it any more likely that it's going to pass Congress, or even survive the first House subcommittee hearing.

For one thing, the proposal will sound like highway robbery to people who don't pay income taxes, like all the families with moderate income who take advantage of child tax credits. At a thousand dollars a tot, those credits already wipe out the entire income tax bill for a lot of people, so promising that there might be a little extra tax deduction left over after the cost of health insurance is not going to be a selling point.

For another thing, health insurance prices go up and up and up. They go up as you get older. They go up if you get sick. They go up when the government mandates coverage for an extra night in the hospital, or mental health care, or erectile dysfunction drugs, or free medical care for people who just came over the border illegally in a crowded truck and now have a nasty cough that kind of sounds contagious.

Imagine getting a year-end statement from your employer that your health insurance benefit "income" is thirty percent higher than it was last year, and you owe tax on that money as if you received it in cash. Maybe the $15,000 deduction was enough to cover the extra "income" before, but maybe it isn't any longer.

Well, then, mister, you just call your employee benefits manager and tell that person you want some crummier health care coverage. It's the cowboy way.

The president is right when he says the tax code discriminates against people who buy individual policies with their own money. For example, employers who pay for coverage for their employees can deduct the entire cost of the premium, while self-employed people who buy coverage for themselves can deduct only a portion of the premiums they pay. The easy way to fix that is to make health insurance premiums fully deductible for self-employed people, not to make benefits taxable for everybody else.

But that won't happen either, because Democrats are dead-set against any policy that makes it easier for individuals to buy their own health insurance. When President Bush proposed tax credits for that purpose in 2003, Senator Ted Kennedy thundered righteously, "We must reject the preposterous proposal to misuse the health crisis as an excuse to modify the tax code and bestow even greater tax breaks on the healthy and wealthy."

A lot of self-employed people might take issue with that characterization. When you pay double Social Security tax and double Medicare tax in addition to income tax, "sick and broke" might be a better description.

Still, Ted Kennedy is a responsible adult compared to Hillary Clinton, who this week announced she will introduce legislation to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program to all families who need it, "regardless of income."

Regardless of income.

That means the government will take money by force, through the tax code, from people who do not have children, and spend it to cover the expenses of children whose parents can very well afford to look after their own kids.

Then those parents can spend their money on something more pleasant.

How nice for them.

What is Hillary Clinton thinking? Are the Democrats all high? Can you get high from sniffing baby powder?

This business of dragging children all over Washington like Fagan's pickpockets has got to stop. The federal government cannot just chant "For the Children" every time it wants to take more of your freedom and more of your money.

Pick up the phone and call them, if you haven't already, and tell them to get their hands off those kids and out of your pockets. Seems like there's never a cop around when you need one.


Copyright 2007

Source note: The Senator Kennedy "healthy and wealthy" quotation appears in a January 21, 2003, Reuters story headlined "Senator Renews National Health Insurance Push," by Julie Rovner.

Editor's note: You might be interested in "The Tyranny of the Children," at www.SusanShelley.com.

Phone numbers: The White House comment line is 202-456-1111, the switchboard is 202-456-1414. Ask for your senator's office at 202-224-3121. You can find the phone number for your representative in Congress at this link, or at www.house.gov.

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More of the same in Iraq

We can't say we weren't warned.

"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department."

James Madison wrote that in 1793.

"Every just view that can be taken of this subject," Madison continued, "admonishes the public of the necessity of a rigid adherence to the simple, the received, and the fundamental doctrine of the constitution, that the power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature; that the executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war; that the right of convening and informing congress, whenever such a question seems to call for a decision, is all the right which the constitution has deemed requisite or proper."

In the future, it might be a good idea for the American people to stop treating the U.S. Constitution like a museum piece. Perhaps we could make our government work if we tried reading the directions.

Everybody's last resort, I know. Just a suggestion.

Last night President Bush talked wistfully about the 2005 elections in Iraq, when millions of people dipped their finger in purple ink and voted for a free government. He said he thought the elections would bring the Iraqi people together and allow some of the U.S. troops to come home. "But in 2006," the president admitted, "the opposite happened."

This is where Ayn Rand would have advised the president to check his premises. "When you are on the wrong premise," she often said, "you will always achieve the opposite of what you intend."

President Bush's flawed premise is that Iraq is a free country because it held elections.

Lots of countries have elections. That doesn't make them free.

What makes a country free is a government of limited power. Iraq's government has unlimited economic power. It owns all the oil and all the major industries of the country. It hands out all the money and most of the jobs.

That's why the Iraqis are fighting for control of the government. That's the motive for murder, "ethnic cleansing," and subterranean alliances between government officials and armed militias.

President Bush's plan for economic reform in Iraq asks the Iraqi government to hand out oil revenue and jobs to the Iraqi people.

But that's not the solution. That's the problem.

The solution is privatization of the state-owned enterprises. At the end of a successful economic reform plan in Iraq, there would be powerful private business interests, and powerful government officials, and they would be locked in a clinch like heavyweight fighters while individual Iraqis went about their jobs and their lives, complaining about the weather.

There was a newspaper report in London last week that the Bush administration has circulated a plan to oil company executives that would bring private companies into Iraq to run the oil industry. Revenue would be split between the companies and the Iraqi government.

This would provide private-sector jobs for Iraqis, which would be a big improvement over jobs handed out by the government. But as long as the Iraqi share of the oil revenue belongs to the government and not to individual Iraqi shareholders, the government will have too much power and there will be a savage fight for control of it.

Put yourself in the shoes of an Iraqi citizen. If you are forced to rely on the government for financial survival, you can't risk offending whoever is in charge--or who might be in charge--of the government. You have to show loyalty. You have to have good connections. You have to watch your words and your actions, everywhere, always.

That's not freedom. No wonder the Iraqis don't show up to fight for it.


Copyright 2007


Source note:
James Madison, Letters of Helvidius, in Writings, ed. G. Hunt (New York, Putnam, 1900-1910) vol. 6, p. 174, quoted in Raoul Berger, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth (Harvard Press, 1974) p. 65, 68-9.

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Fred Fielding falls for it

Time magazine's Mike Allen reports today that President Bush has chosen "the widely respected Republican lawyer Fred F. Fielding" to be his new White House counsel.

Mr. Fielding, who was President Reagan's White House counsel from 1981 to 1986, was described by the multi-partisan David Gergen as "an example of how a lawyer can make his children proud."

Time magazine says Mr. Fielding was persuaded to leave his position as a senior partner in a Washington law firm by "an appeal to patriotism."

That old trick.

Mr. Fielding is going to be a busy man.

The new crop of Democratic committee chairmen on Capitol Hill would like information from the White House about many different aspects of the Iraq war, about the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and about the warrantless surveillance of Americans who may or may not be linked to overseas terrorists.

The previous crop of Republican committee chairman wanted that information, too. When the White House refused to provide it, they could have issued subpoenas and taken the administration to court to enforce them.

But they didn't, and now they have offices in the basement.

So there's a huge backlog of information requests waiting for the White House counsel's attention, and the chairs aren't even warm yet.

In the matters of Iraq, Katrina, and surveillance, we can expect the White House to defend its limitless secrecy by citing vital national security interests and the importance of confidentiality in all matters related to the workings of the Homeland Security Department.

But that's not going to explain the administration's decision last spring, in the middle of an investigation into the influence-peddling activities of now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, to take the White House visitor logs out of the category of Secret Service records, where they were subject to Freedom of Information requests, and put them into the category of presidential records, where they can be kept secret forever under an executive order signed by President Bush during his first term.

This fact came out last week in connection with administration's appeal of a federal judge's order to release two years of visitor logs showing who came to see Vice President Dick Cheney and his top advisers. The Washington Post filed a lawsuit to get the records, and U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ordered the administration to turn them over last fall.

The White House did not comply with the order.

This is going to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which, if history is any guide, will order the administration to release the records. That's because there actually is no such thing as executive privilege, as Presidents Nixon and Clinton discovered. The president is not above the law, and even the most brilliant White House counsel will not be able to concoct a legal strategy to put him there.

By all accounts, Fred Fielding is a man of unquestioned honor and integrity.

Sooner or later, that's going to be a problem.



Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Solving the mystery of who leaked the tunnel plot," and in the 1974 book Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth, by the late Harvard law professor and legal historian Raoul Berger.

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Harriet Miers says no

White House counsel Harriet Miers announced her resignation today. Presidential spokesman Tony Snow was asked at his daily briefing why she was leaving. "Basically, she has been here six years," he answered.

How charmingly opaque. He must wow the ladies at cocktail parties.

The White House counsel heads a team of lawyers who advise the president on legal matters. You might remember that President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court, then withdrew her nomination after Senate Republicans refused to back down from their demand for documents related to Ms. Miers' work in the White House.

As White House counsel, Harriet Miers was at the president's side when intelligence reports warned of al-Qaeda threats before 9/11. She was there when the president decided that pre-war intelligence justified an invasion of Iraq. She was there when the administration formulated its policies for imprisoning and interrogating terror suspects. She was there when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald started asking top officials about the leak of a CIA agent's identity.

As soon as it became clear that Senate Republicans were ready to use their subpoena power to compel the White House to answer their questions about Ms. Miers' work, President Bush decided to nominate somebody else.

The president contended that the information sought by the senators was protected by executive privilege, but he stopped short of going to court and fighting it out. That was a wise decision, because there actually is no such thing as executive privilege when the United States Congress demands information from the executive branch. (See the October 2005 post, "Senate Republicans Fire the Big Gun.")

Perhaps it is a coincidence, but on the very day that Democrats in the House and Senate acquired subpoena power, White House counsel Harriet Miers resigned.

Is it possible that the president asked her to destroy or hide documents and she refused to do it?

Is it possible that the president asked her to lead an administration-wide effort to defy congressional subpoenas? Did he ask her to craft a doctrine of national security privilege or executive privilege that would allow the Bush administration to keep its secrets forever?

Did she refuse?

We'll probably never know, although we'll get a good idea when the president names her replacement. Watch for someone with a long history of unquestioned loyalty to the president, perhaps someone with a skeleton or two in his closet to keep him from judging anybody else. Watch for someone old enough to look really pitiful if anyone suggests a prison term for contempt of Congress.

On the other hand, if the president names a lawyer with a reputation for independence and integrity, someone with a history of working with both Democrats and Republicans, it would be an indication that Harriet Miers' resignation had nothing to do with resisting congressional subpoenas.

Place your bets.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested to read the 1974 book, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth, by the late Harvard law professor and legal historian Raoul Berger.

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Barney Frank's "grand bargain"

Incoming House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank told the National Press Club Wednesday he would like to see a "grand bargain" between U.S. businesses and U.S. workers. The way he sees it, businesses should agree to higher wages, lower executive pay, single-payer national health insurance, taxes to pay for affordable housing, tougher labor and environmental standards in other countries, and laws that make union organizing easier.

In exchange, Congress would agree to pro-business policies on trade, foreign investment and immigration.

Apparently the "grand bargain" would replace the current bargain, a free market where people exchange their labor for a salary based on the scarcity and revenue-generating power of their skills, accompanied by pro-business policies in exchange for massive campaign contributions.

Congressman Frank's unspoken premise is that it's the proper role of government to enact a lot of restrictions on voluntary activity for no reason except to enable politicians to lift the restrictions in exchange for government-approved behavior in some unrelated area.

Then, not long afterwards, lawmakers can issue gentle reminders that it is only through their benevolence that those restrictions stay lifted, and unless they see some campaign contributions and a few free rides on the corporate jet, well, who knows what might happen.

What might happen is that lawmakers will go on television and thunder about doing away with special interest breaks and loopholes that are "costing" the Treasury billions of dollars.

What a racket.

For some reason, politicians think that when you give the government less of the money that belongs to you, what's actually happening is that the government is giving you the money that belongs to the Treasury.

People who do math this way should really not be voting on the federal budget.

Here's a bulletin for the new Democratic majorities: There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives the federal government the power to make life fair.

The Constitution gives the federal government very limited, enumerated powers. One of them is the power to make treaties. Another is the power to regulate interstate commerce. But those things cannot easily be stretched to accommodate a directive ordering private companies to pay their executives less and their rank-and-file employees more.

If Congressman Frank thinks he can fool or frighten corporate America's CEOs into overlooking that, he's about to find out why they get the big bucks.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Hillary Clinton and the 'basic bargain.'"

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