This has been a uniquely bad week for civil libertarians. The Obama Administration appears to be rushing to dispel any notions that Obama will fight for civil liberties or war crimes investigations. After Eric Holder allegedly assured a senator that there would be no war crimes investigation and seemed to defend Bush policies, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, Obama’s Solicitor General nominee, reportedly told a Republican senator that the Administration agreed with Bush that we are “at war” and therefore can hold enemy combatants indefinitely. In the meantime, Obama himself seemed to tie himself in knots when asked about investigating war crimes and leading democrats are again pushing for a symbolic “truth commission.” I discussed these issues in this segment of Countdown this week.
Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) both raised the issue with Kagan. Both supported Bush’s policies. Graham asked Kagan: “Do you believe we are at war?”
“I do, Senator,” Kagan replied.
One would have hoped that a solicitor general nominee would ask if he meant a constitutional war or a policy war. We have declared wars on everything from illiteracy to inflation. However, the framers treated war as a more serious matter that required a declaration (though Congress has effectively gutted that requirement through the use of resolutions). If we are at war, when does it end? Terrorism will continue for centuries. Will we remain at war with war time powers being exercised? Since the Solicitor General is required to apply the law with precision, Kagan’s reply is extremely alarming.
Graham then asked “If our intelligence agencies should capture someone in the Philippines that is suspected of financing Al Qaeda worldwide, would you consider that person part of the battlefield?” “Do you agree with that?”
Kagan replied, “I do” and the marriage with the Bush policies was complete. So much for change. Both Holder and Kagan have now taken such a vow with Senators in order to secure their confirmations. The message appears to be a uniquely English approach to government. We will continue policies and laws that can do great harm to civil liberties, but we will use them in a beneficent way. Your “change” is not that we will get rid of the policies. Your change is that you get us. This “trust us we’re the government” approach to civil liberties was precisely what Madison and other framers rejected. To have a well-respected academic voice such views is a terrible disappointment for civil libertarians, who are being offered a meaningful commission as a type of air kiss toward war crimes.
For the full story, click here.
Thanks JT for beating the drum on this issue. Thanks to KO as well for having you on his show repeatedly. You express the problem and solution clearly. My stomach turns with this posting and watching the street signs Obama appears to be constructing.
President Lincoln was pretty sharp, damn 43 is a Saudi savant.
Buddha,
I liiked the Slate linked article. We do need to start making some noise about the war crime investigations that should be a no brainer. I still have confidence that Obama/Holder will do more than they are showing now, but even I am getting anxious when I read what Dean Kagan is saying. I think it is time that Obama needs to realize that we are at war alright. We are at war with war criminals trying to cover their crimes and those same criminals and their comrades are also trying to defeat Obama before he even gets started. He needs to do what Bush did. Declare that he is using his alleged Article Two power to state that Lindsey Graham is an enemy combatant and can be held indefinitely.
Wait!
Their disrespect for We the People gets even funnier.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/11/gop-rep-cantor-attacked-f_n_166033.html
Here’s another gem. Less specific, more general.
http://www.slate.com/id/2210918/?from=rss
You are most welcome.
Thank you, you also provided it! Thanks BIL
The private sectors job is profit. To earn a return on capitol they stay one to two steps ahead of gov regs. mespo & BIF put it more eloquently here:
hhttp://jonathanturley.org/2009/02/09/cutting-a-deal-with-the-death-dealers-soldier-attempts-suicide-so-army-charges-him-criminally-and-has-his-mother-paint-his-suicide-note-on-his-bedroom-wall/#more-791
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/11/two-pennsylvania-judges-a_n_166149.html
The story somewhere here on this site about the two PA Judges taking kick backs from the owners of juvenile detention centers speaks to your question Bron98.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29142654/
This is one link, but the story is here in Turley land.
Mespo:
I thank you. I need to read it again, it has been awhile. Does government need to perform those oversights? What about UL or Consumer Reports? They provide a valuable function and give a “sterling mark” to the products they test and evaluate. I do agree that some things need to be under government control-defense, fire, police, courts. Maybe highways, you can make an argument for private toll roads especially the major interstates. Why cant you have private companies/organizations providing the sterling mark, why does it have to be government?
I honestly belive that most of what the government does can be done by the private sector more effectively and for cheaper cost. I actually dont think neocons believe in smaller government (look at Bush)they just want to take your money and give it to religious charities to give away.
Buddha:
I think that’s what Stein was trying to say. They can also be a badge of stupidity when the wearer does so to promote some reductio ad absurdum argument.
mespo,
Thanks for the Smith refresher. Neckties can become a noose.
Bron98:
“Why do you think government can fill this function?”
*********
Because Smith believed it could. Former Chair of the President’s Council of Economics Advisors and UVA Professor Herbert Stein explained in his famous essay, “Adam Smith Did Not Wear an Adam Smith Necktie:”
[T]he people who wear the Adam Smith tie are not doing so to honor literary genius. They are doing so to make a statement of their devotion to the idea of free markets and limited government. What stands out in WofN, however, is that their patron saint was not pure or doctrinaire about this idea. He viewed government intervention in the market with great skepticism. He regarded his exposition of the virtues of the free market as his main contribution to policy, and the purpose for which his
economic analysis was developed.
Yet he was prepared to accept or propose qualifications to that policy in the specific cases where he judged that their net effect would be beneficial and would not undermine the basically free character of the system. He did not wear the Adam Smith necktie.
These cases were numerous, and some of them are surprising. I give here a list, certainly incomplete, largely derived from Viner’s article on Smith written for the sesquicentennial of the WofN. (The parentheses are mine.)
The government could legitimately do the following:
– Protect the merchant marine and give bounties to defense-related manufacturing industries.
– Impose tariffs on imports in order to bargain for reduction of tariffs by other countries.
– Punish, and take steps to prevent, dishonesty, violence and fraud. (Does this include the SEC, and would prevention of violence justify measures to assist ghetto youth?)
– Establish indicators of quality of goods, such as the sterling mark for silver. (Does this justify the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission?)
– Require employers to pay wages in cash rather than in kind. (Could the government conversely require employers to pay part of wages in the form of health benefits?)
– Regulate banking.
– Provide public goods, such as highways, harbors, bridges and canals. (What about railways, airlines?)
– Run the post office. (Also telephone, the information highway?)
– Grant patents and copyrights.
– Give a temporary monopoly to a trading company developing commerce in new and risky regions. (Is this industrial policy, managed trade?)
– Require children to have a certain level of education.
– Provide protection against communicable diseases.
– Require the streets to be kept clean. (Environmentalism?)
– Set a ceiling on interest rates.
– Impose discriminatory taxation to deter improper or luxurious behavior.”
The Constitution wins when the rule of law is restored. Property rights have nothing to do with criminal and anti-social behavior except as objects of abuse by those who are stealing and want rationale. There a huge difference between earned wealth and stolen wealth or blood money.
Is it fair that the haves will be lumped together? Perhaps not, not all of them are bad actors. That’s why turning over the guilty now to avoid loss of innocent life is critically important. The real fight will be over right vs. wrong (criminal/anti-social vs. not, Constitutionalists vs. Fascists) and equal protection, it’ll only look like class warfare because of the nature of fascism/corporatism. Indeed, many of the harmed will be harmed for defending a legal fiction or the principles of their own shortsighted greed. Most don’t care about people with just wealth, only those with blood money and legal fictions that act as soulless barricades for the sociopaths to hide behind. A guy who manufactures clothing is a long way from a defense contractor like Halliburton or Raytheon or the scumbags of Wall St. arbitrage, but they are just as likely to get blowback as not simply because when trouble hits, they’ll be visibly indistinguishable from the bad guys. No one is going to care that you both have a Lamborghini and a steak, only that they are on foot because they got fired, their kids are hungry and you’re sitting next to the guy that robbed them. Look, I’d rather avoid all this because a lot of hard working innocent people are going to get hurt in the fallout, but the simple truth is a small minority of the wealthy (the Neocons) have ruined this country and it’s economy at the expense of us all. And they did it out of pure ego and greed. Evil. Pure and simple. How many houses does a man need? Not want. NEED. Empire is a game with potentially fatal consequence and they should have thought about that before they hijacked the GOP and the Federal government. When your “want” impinges on others “needs”, that’s the fundamental recipe for trouble. If it gets that far and should their be collateral damage, that blood will go to the Neocon ledger as well, not the Constitutionalists. They broke the letter of the law and the rule of law. We the People will bring it back one way or another. We prefer the least amount of force possible, but it’s like judo. The more the Neocons resist or the harder they fight, the worse the damage will be. Any true martial artist prefers the least damaging outcome, but they are prepared to kill if required by the actions of an intransigent opponent. But it’s not just to take someone’s property, that’s not the motive. The motive is justice, equity, the rule of law and self-defense.
Mespo:
first of all I am not a neo-con, secondly my understanding of Wealth of Nations is that Adam Smith understood that businessmen were sons of bitches and so he thought the market/invisible hand was the best way to offset those tendencies.
Why do you think government can fill this function? they are humans to with the same failings. by your own admission our government is corrupt, what makes you think they can oversee the economy any better? From my vantage point government is far more corrupt than business.
Bron98:
Maybe you should read “Wealth of Nations” instead a merely some neo-con slanted summary that you posted here. No where does Adam Smith argue that the market is “morally neutral,” or that government acts only as referee. Smith understood that capitalists left to their own devices would transform society into a “Bleak House” landscape:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is im-possible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and jus-tice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies…
A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary.
An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.”
The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X
And the most prescient passage of all:
“The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI
Buddha:
I actually thought the civil war thing was a bit extreme (well actually nutty) until I was reading something by an author I respect and he was saying that he is amazed that it did not happen in the 70’s, I think he mentioned 74 or 76. At that point you had my attention. And I do believe he thought it would be between the haves and the have nots.
My question then is how will the constitution be the winner in the end? Are not property rights a very basic right? If the mob or collective if you like, take from people on the basis of economic status arent we all in trouble? I am just a middle class guy but I have more than say a guy working as a clerk for a construction company, is he entitled to my property by virtue of his economic status? And so on up the ladder. I see only loosers in a civil war of that nature.
MikeS:
I dont think we have seen a true free market in the US for about 100 years. It is a bastard stepchild of capitalism and socialism. How much did “government oversight” have to do with this problem?
The market is morally neutral. I would trust the combined judgement of 300,000,000 million people making personal decisions about resource allocation over a group of 1000 highly trained PhD’s in economics, it was tried in the Soviet Union and did not work and the mixed economy that we have is not working all that well either. The governments role is as referee with the constitution as the “rule book”.
Any company that breaks laws should be punished to the fullest extent possible. And I believe the profit motive is the best thing to keep companies honest. Government regulation dosent seem to do a very good job and lends itself to corruption. I think the evidence of the last few months is example enough.
And quite frankly I dont understand the objectiion to objectivist thought, the left has more in common with it than the right does. Mostly in the area of civil liberties. Objectivits are for personal freedom but not to the point of anarchy. Most of them are atheists, they believe in abortion rights, they think homosexuality is ok, the right to die, and on and on.
I would very much be interested in your reasons for being so ardently opposed to this line of thinking.
Bron,
You nailed on the first try.
It will be the haves vs. the have nots.
I’ve said all along it’s not about party or left or right. It’s about criminal and anti-social behavior by a minority that screwing it up for everyone. You may see ancillary conflict in the area of race or party affiliation (depending on where you live), but no one is going to care if you have a D or an R by your name when the shit hits the fan – just that you hurt them and payback is due. It’s just going to be on. As far as left and right? It’s going to end in the left winning simply because the far right authoritarians who think that might makes right are apparently incapable of math. Somewhere around 36% of Americans say they are Republicans. Of those, only about half are in the Palin/Fascism camp. That’s about 15%. Guns or not, that’s not a winning margin. It is indeed the Constitutionalists that will win eventually. How many corpses that will take, well, that’s another story.
Bron, you’ve come a long way and that post shows it. Now you’re thinking.
I’m glad you picked the red pill. To further The Matrix analogy by poor paraphrase of Morpheus, “I never said it would be easy, only that it would be true.”
Congratulations on waking up.
Seriously.
Now don’t nod off.