Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Senator Specter Preparing Bill that will Allow Congress to Sue President over his Misuse of Presidential Signing Statements

Senator Specter Readies Bill to Sue Bush
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer, Jul 25
WASHINGTON - A powerful Republican committee chairman who has led the fight against President Bush's signing statements said Monday he would have a bill ready by the end of the week allowing Congress to sue him in federal court.

"We will submit legislation to the United States Senate which will...authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president's acts declared unconstitutional," Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said on the Senate floor.

Specter's announcement came the same day that an American Bar Association task force concluded that by attaching conditions to legislation, the president has sidestepped his constitutional duty to either sign a bill, veto it, or take no action.

Bush has issued at least 750 signing statements during his presidency, reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard laws on national security and constitutional grounds.

To read more of this article, click here.

US News and World Report Article, "Bar association task force urges Congress to push for judicial review of Bush signing statements" (7/21/06)

ABA Recommendation of TASK FORCE ON PRESIDENTIAL SIGNING STATEMENTS AND THE SEPARATION OF POWERS DOCTRINE

More information from the ABA on the Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine

FIASCO: How the Bush Administration Has Gotten Us into a "War" We Cannot "Win"



For extensive documentation of the "fiasco" of the Bush administration policy in Iraq, see the newly published book by Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks, FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

From July 23 Washington Post article, by Ricks, "In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam: Early Missteps by U.S. Left Troops Unprepared for Guerrilla Warfare":
The real war in Iraq -- the one to determine the future of the country -- began on Aug. 7, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 and wounding more than 50.

That bombing came almost exactly four months after the U.S. military thought it had prevailed in Iraq, and it launched the insurgency, the bloody and protracted struggle with guerrilla fighters that has tied the United States down to this day.

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But there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.

The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials.

Read more of this article here--

This is the first of two articles adapted from the book "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin Press, New York, © 2006.

Friday, July 21, 2006

Bush Administration Policy of STAY and BLEED in Iraq is Losing the so-called "War on Terrorism": Overwhelming Majority of Policy Experts Agree

According to the overwhelming majority (84 percent) of top foreign policy experts surveyed by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, we are losing the war on terrorism.

For further documentation of this point, see the newly published book by Washington Post war correspondent Thomas Ricks, FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

So now the only question for the Democratic Party is: When will it stop allowing Republican rhetoric about "cutting and running" to continue to cow Democrats in Congress into a defensive strategy? When will the Democrats turn this deceptive rhetoric around and put the emphasis where it should be: ON the fact that the Republican Strategy is one of keeping American Soldiers in Iraq to "stay and bleed" while the Bush administration continues to act without any clear policy whatsoever for decreasing the violence in the Middle-East?

When will the Democrats in Congress go on the offensive and label the Republican strategy what it is: a "stay and bleed" strategy of doing nothing while soldiers continue to die for the completely failed and inadequate policy agenda of the Bush administration?!!

To repeat (in case it's not clear yet!): It's time the Democrats start to speak out more boldly and clearly about the "stay and bleed" policy of the Republican administration and their Congressional lackeys. Until they do, and until our Congressional representatives of both parites get to work to produce a strategy that will either decrease the violence or get our soldiers out of it, US soldiers will continue to die in an ill-concieved, deceptive, and profiteering war created by an administration without vision or concern for the real suffering of American or Iraqi families, and for the increasing levels of violence this failed policy has been producing throughout the Middle-East.

It's time for a big change, and if our current members of Congress are not willing to make that change happen, the people of the United States must put into Congress people who will make that change.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Toward a New Democratic Vision: Common Sense for a Time of Crisis

For a new Vision and Framing of a Democratic Policy Agenda, check out this new version of "Common Sense," published on July 4, 2006: Common Sense for a Time of Crisis, by TomPaine06--

This Framing of a Democratic Policy Vision begins by reminding us of the vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt who--after a Republican policy agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and do-nothing government had driven the country into the depths of the Great Depression--understood that control of the government of the country needed to be taken back from the corporations and placed into the hands of the people.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Demand Leadership to End Global Warming Now!

Remember when people argued that global warming doesn't exist? (Exxon/Mobil, of course, still does, but we know why they want to obfuscate the truth.)

As we move into another summer of chronic wildfires and drought in western states, and melting icecaps and glaciers, it's hard to ignore evidence of global warming's devastating consequences. And all the while, energy prices continue to rise, along with the oil industry's profits.

But for all the dire predictions, there are also sensible solutions. America has the technological know-how to reduce our reliance on oil and other fossil fuels, reduce wasteful emissions which are causing global warming, and make our economy more energy efficient. We as citizens must demand that elected officials act now to develop policies to stop global warming before our environment is irreparably harmed.

Today I participated in the League of Conservation Voters' new summer campaign - The Heat is On! Demand Global Warming Leadership Now! - to raise awareness about global warming. Please join me in calling on Congress, the President, and both political parties to make global warming a central issue in the upcoming elections in November. Just click here.

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Demand Global Warming Leadership Now!

Sign the Global Warming Leadership Petition. Send a message to political leaders, and those running for re-election in November, that Americans want energy leadership from their government. We have the technological know-how to turn the tide on global warming and the energy crisis. We as citizens must demand that elected officials act now to develop policies to stop global warming before our environment is irreparably harmed.

Sensible solutions to global warming and our energy problems already exist - we can own our energy future and reinvigorate our economy. Sign the petition and demand that politicians and candidates for office make global warming and clean energy a priority in the 2006 elections. Just fill out the form.
Send this petition to:

* President George W. Bush
* Democratic National Committee
* Republican National Committee
* Your Congressperson
* Your Senators

I am concerned about the disastrous effects of global warming and our continued reliance on oil, therefore I strongly urge you to make these issues a priority in the coming 2006 elections.

Make global warming and energy security issues during the election -- in speeches, at town hall meetings, on your web site, at campaign events, in advertisements and flyers. Let voters know which global warming solutions you support. And encourage your colleagues in Washington to do the same.

Future leaders hold the key to solving our epic energy problems, and the 2006 elections is the starting point.

Join the Campaign against global warming now, before it is too late!

Friday, July 07, 2006

REAL QUESTIONS to Ask the President, if Journalists Wish to Avoid Larry King-style Lovefests While This Country Burns

From Policybusters:

As many commentators have noted, this country is facing a perfect storm of mounting crises of national and global significance. Yet members of the Press, like Larry King, who have rare opportunities to seriously interview or question the President, continue to fiddle with the President and members of Congress, and to offer us lovefests rather than serious interviews, while the country burns (perhaps this was a condition of permitting Larry to do the interview: Did you have to sign a prior restraint agreement, Larry, promising to ask only lovefest questions? If not, all the more reason you should be ashamed of yourself for not fulfilling your obligations as a journalist to your fellow citizens--)

We don't need to wait for terrorists to attack to have a crisis or disaster of national proportions, as Katrina proved. And this disaster, which is already here, is growing worse every day, as the President, Congress, and the national Press seem to do little more than help each other to avoid addressing the real issues inflicting pain and suffering on the lives of American citizens every day: inadequate health care, poverty, lack of effective and adequate disaster relief aid, global warming, non-existent energy policy....

There is a growing constitutional crisis over the Executive Administration's deliberate defiance of Congressionally-mandated laws like FISA, as well as multiple international crises (the worsening wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the missile crisis in N. Korea), and growing domestic crises related to rising poverty rates, terrible health care, a non-existent energy policy, and global warming.

Meanwhile, the President and Congress are fiddling while the country is burning (in some places literally: witness the many fires burning in the West, which a recent scientific study has attributed to global warming)-- the President and Congress would rather spend tax-payer money advocating flag-burning amendments and anti-gay constitutional initiatives and discriminatory legislation, than address the real life-or-death crises facing the citizens of this country.

And what is the Press doing, when it has a chance to ask the President direct questions? Larry King's birthday lovefest with the President yesterday still seems to be all too typical of the way the people of the Press (& especially those in Washington who are privileged with the power and access to challenge political leaders to get off their butts and do something real) are continually failing to fulfill their responsibility to US citizens.

Larry King had a whole hour with the President in the White House yesterday, and yet not one tough question was asked. The whole interview amounted to little more than a publicity event for the President. Thank you, Larry King, for helping the President once again to avoid addressing any serious questions. Once again I naively hoped that at least one solid and real question would be asked of the President, but alas--how foolish I was to hope....

I once believed the members of the National Press were supposed to be concerned about more than simply providing politicians free opportunities to bloviate and obscure all that they are not doing to address this country's pressing problems. But except for the rare instances when a newspaper like the New York Times actually has the courage to challenge the status quo, the national Press seems to be failing to ask the hard questions of our political leaders that need to be asked, if our democratic system of government is to be preserved in this century.

So for all journalists who might have an opportunity to ask the President or others in the Administration a real question or two about what is really happening in this country, here are a few sample questions you might ask, to begin to put some real pressure on politicians for real answers:

(For background reading on basis for some of these questions, check out two great articles by New Yorker investigative reporter Jane Mayer:

THE HIDDEN POWER: The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror

THE MEMO: How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted

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Real Questions for the President:

Mr. President, in a recent profile of the Vice-President's Chief of Staff David Addington for the New Yorker (by Jane Mayer), Addington is said to have asserted that he and Dick Cheney were interested in "merging the VP's office with the President's office into a single Exec. Office." Any comment?

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In accepting the Office of President of the United States, you swore to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States"

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution reads:
"The Congress shall have power to …provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; [The explicit stated powers of Congress include]:
"To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
"To declare war, …and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
"To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces"--

Do you believe that during time of war the President has the authority to ignore any of these congressional powers in the name of national security?

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Your administration obviously believes in a strong and robust executive authority in relation to Congress. Do you believe that your authority as commander in chief during time of war extends to ignoring or circumventing Congressional authority to oversee and limit the power of the president in accord with Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, or to set aside congressional statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance, as in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?

Example: The US War Crimes Act passed into law by Congress, forbids the violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, which bars cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, as well as outrages against human dignity. By not accepting the relevance of Common Article 3 in your conduct of the war on terror, and the establishment of detention centers at Guantanamo and elsewhere, are you not ignoring or contravening laws established by Congress?

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Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has stated that a state of war does not give any President a blank check to ignore constitutional limitations on presidential power. Do you disagree with Justice O'Connor?

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Do you believe that in the name of national security you have the authority to ignore or defy congressional oversight laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or to set aside congressional statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance?

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If the American people, through a majority of their elected representatives in Congress, pass a law that says the President cannot do such and such a thing, as happened after Watergate in response to Nixon's abuse of executive powers when Congress enacted the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] law to protect civil liberties and keep future Presidents from abusing their authority-- do you believe the President has the right to ignore or defy that Congressional legislation?

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The famous presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger has stated that this administration has turned historical aberrations of executive overreach, such as Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus rights during the Civil War, into a regular policy of government? Any response?

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Your administration's interpretation of law has been challenged on several major issues, including your conduct of surveillance in seeming defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and your appointment of military commissions, along with your very liberal use of signing statements (over 750 so far)—

This has suggested to some that the policy strategies being employed by your administration amount not only to defying Constitutional law, which gives Congress significant responsibilities of oversight, but to setting your office in defiance of basic constitutional doctrine of checks and balances. Any comment?

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On Signing Statements:

The American Bar Association has recently started an investigation into your use of signing statements as a potentially unconstitutional method for simply ignoring the laws passed by Congress. Instead of being accountable to the public by openly vetoing the law or committing yourself to following it, you seem to be reserving the right to ignore Congressional legislation as you wish.

Bruce Fein, a lawyer and former deputy attorney general in the Reagan admin, and someone who voted for you in both elections, argues that Addington’s signing statements are “unconstitutional as a strategy,” because the Founding Fathers wanted Presidents to veto congressional legislation openly, as part of the balancing process, if they thought the bills were unconstitutional, and that this was a way of keeping both the President and Congress accountable to the American people for their actions. Fein has also stated the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what you have done…. Why are you using signing statements in a way that seems to make you unaccountable to both Congress and the American people?

On Military Commissions:

David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, has been directly involved in the creation of the military commissions that the Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional, even as other senior cabinet officials, including Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, were left out of the process of decision-making related to the creation of those commissions--

Since there has been so little positive progress on this issue, and now that the Supreme Court decision has declared these commissions to be unconstitutional (as you were warned they would), do you have any regrets about the form of decision-making within your administration, which seems to have handed over to one person in the VP's office unprecedented latitude to define the policy of your administration on such important issues as this? Have you learned any lessons about the positive value of involving a much wider number of senior cabinet officials, such as the secretary of state, in key decisions such as this?

Any thoughts of taking responsibility for these mistakes of overreach by asking David Addington (who is also involved in the signing statements and in articulating the administration's position on surveillance issues) to resign?

On FISA:

Fourteen prominent constitutional scholars have written an open letter to Congress arguing that the N.S.A. surveillance program violates constitutional law, because your administration has not amended the FISA law, but has chosen simply to ignore it--

After the abuses of executive power by President Nixon that led to Watergate, Congress passed laws designed to protect civil liberties and curb abuses of executive power in order to protect civil liberties and try to insure that no President would repeat Nixon's abuses. Yet it is a matter of record that within your administration head legal advisors, such as David Addington, Cheney's Chief of Staff, and Cheney himself, believe these laws are not legitimate because they put too much restraint on the president's power. Do you agree with Cheney and Addington in thinking that the legal restrictions placed on presidential power after Watergate ought to be abandoned?

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All of these questions address real and serious crises that need immediate attention and strategic action NOW, not 2 or 4 years from now. Yet none of these crises are being meaningfully addressed by the President or Congress or the Press in a sustained way, even as much energy is focused on debating symbolic issues like flag burning, and on depriving gay people of the right to marriage and a family, all in the name of so-called "family values." (Presumably, this is why the anti-gay crowd would rather have foster children needing adoption remain in foster homes, rather than have them adopted by loving gay parents!)

Apparently, what these anti-gay values people "value" is more about discriminating against gays, than it is about offering as many people as possible in this country the opportunity to participate in the institutions of married and family life. For those who subscribe to the "Heterosexuals Only" Family Policy, "family" is only what homophobic heterosexuals define it to be. If you're not heterosexual, or if you're a child looking for loving parents, who might happen to be gay, too bad for you!

This country's "Heterosexuals Only" Family policy would rather keep kids in foster homes or send them and their potential gay adoptive parents to hell than allow them to participate in the very institution these anti-gay heterosexuals say is the bedrock of a "decent" moral society. How wonderfully "decent" and hypocritical it is for the laws of this country to deprive an entire class of persons in our society the right to equal participation in the very institutions of marriage and family so-called pro-family advocates say they value as the bedrock of our civilization.

But so it goes in this country that seems to have lost its mind, along with its heart and soul, as decisions are made, like those in New York and Georgia this week.

And meanwhile, the forests of this country--which help to absorb carbon dioxide and keep global warming from worsening--are burning. This is an issue that should be of REAL and immediate concern to pro-family advocates, since all families will suffer from the effects of global warming --including those loving gay families that will continue to exist in spite of all efforts to discriminate and legislate against them.

And to the extent that this country continues to invest its time, energy, and political focus on passing laws to discriminate against gay families, rather than to address the serious policy issues of energy, global warming, and the preservation of our democratic constitutional order, well--what can we say about such insanity, other than--For Shame!

--What a tragic shame, for all Americans, our children, and the people of the rest of the world--

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

The North Pole Ice Is Breaking Up While ExxonMobil Continues to Oppose Action on Global Warming

Eric Larsen and Lonnie Dupre, of Greenpeace, who began their trek to the North Pole on May 1, reached their destination over the holiday weekend, and they report their own shock at the degree to which the ice is breaking up due to the effects of global warming:
Over the last 60 days, we have seen many signs of global warming, and the ice conditions have been much worse than we ever anticipated. The closer we got to our destination, the more the ice broke up. We spent more and more time in our canoes, and we really believe that we may be the first and last people on Earth who will ever reach the North Pole in summer by foot. Unless we all do something now to combat global warming, those who follow in our footsteps may not be walking at all, but may arrive here by sailboat instead. The scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who have helped guide our progress during this expedition, tell us this summer could be a record breaking year for melting ice in the Arctic.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil continues to use the power of its money and lobbying to combat the attempts of citizens across the globe to take action to reduce global warming. Until ExxonMobil joins with us to battle against global warming, rather than battle against us, we must turn their own battle against the citizens and enviroment of the world against them, and "mobilize against Exxon."

From Greenpeace, here are 5 reasons why ExxonMobil is even worse than other oil companies:
1. ExxonMobil tries to convince the public that global warming isn't happening even though ExxonMobil is one of its main causes. It spends millions of dollars on misleading propaganda every year.

2. ExxonMobil has played a leading role in sabotaging international attempts to stop global warming. It would rather sell more gasoline than protect future generations.

3. ExxonMobil doesn't believe renewable energy has a future. "With no readily available economic alternatives on the horizon, fossil fuels will continue to supply most of the world's energy needs for the foreseeable future." --Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil CEO, 1997

4. ExxonMobil is the biggest oil company in the world - its profits totalled more than US$12 billion in 2000. If anyone can afford to help stop global warming it's ExxonMobil.

5. ExxonMobil was one of the main financial contributors to George Bush's election campaign. As soon as George Bush became president, he announced that the U.S. would pull out of international agreements to stop global warming - exactly the position that ExxonMobil was promoting.