SUMMARY: White House Communications Director Hope Hicks made the surprising announcement on Wednesday that she will leave the Trump administration in the coming weeks. The news comes a day after Hicks testifies for hours before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Russia probe. Judy Woodruff learns more from Ashley Parker of The Washington Post.
Rachel Maddow reports on the latest developments in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the possibility of coordination with the Donald Trump campaign, including the arrest of a Russian hacker in Spain.
A senior U.S. official, briefed on an intelligence presentation made to members of Congress, told the Post that it's “the consensus view” of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia's alleged crimes had one specific purpose: “Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.”
There's been some speculation in recent months that Putin's suspected interference was intended to undermine American democracy in general, casting doubts about the strength of our system and its institutions. The Washington Post's report indicates that those assessments were incomplete: Russia wanted Donald Trump in the White House, so Russian officials allegedly took a variety of criminal steps to ensure that outcome.
The White House, swayed by the evidence, wanted bipartisan support to pushback against Russian intrusion, and in mid-September, President Obama dispatched counter-terrorism adviser Lisa Monaco, FBI Director James Comey, and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to brief top members of Congress (the “Gang of 12”). Obama didn't want to be seen as using intelligence for partisan or electoral ends, so he sought a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against foreign manipulation of our democracy.
That didn't happen, in large part because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused, raising questions about whether the Republican leader intentionally put his party's interests ahead of the nation's.
Indeed, given the fact that a variety of GOP leaders were made aware of Russia's attempts to hijack the American election for its own purposes, Evan McMullin, an independent presidential candidate and former GOP policy staffer on Capitol Hill, asserted over the weekend, “Republican leaders knew Russia was undermining our democracy during the election and they chose to ignore it.”
Congressman Eliot Engel of the Bronx, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview while the President was reaching his Syria decision that there was nothing worse than doing nothing. Unfortunately the President found something worse. He tossed the ball to the Congress and now puts the prestige of his Presidency on the line, as already was the credibility of his country. Instead of speaking softly and carrying a big stick President Obama spoke loudly and often about the Syrian use of chemical weapons and then asked permission to use a stick. Regardless of whether the Congress authorizes him to strike Syria he has done inestimable damage to the office of the Presidency and to our nation’s alliances throughout the world.
If the Congress votes no, and as I write this on Sept. 5 it appears the Senate will vote yes and the House no, the ball is back in the President’s court. If he then acts he negates the very logic and sincerity of going to Congress but if he doesn’t act abdicates the position of the United States as the world leader - a position assumed after WWII because our failure to take that leadership after WWI was in part a cause of WWII.
Should other nations be responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons? YES. But should the failure of others to do something justify our doing nothing. NO. During the Second World War many people went to FDR and asked him to bomb the death camps - he was dissuaded by those who said we would be killing the inmates (incredible) and by those who questioned the veracity of the evidence. When General Eisenhower liberated the camps he had film makers and photographers take as many pictures as they could because he wanted people never to forget. It doesn’t matter if we remember atrocities if we do nothing when they reoccur. Due to a courageous American President the genocide in Kosovo was ended and democracy brought to Serbia and Kosovo without one losing the life of one American soldier. Had he asked Congress first who knows if we would have done anything?
American Presidents of course should ask Congress, under the Constitution, to declare war and Madison. Polk, McKinley, Wilson, and FDR did so. But for limited military actions most Presidents have sought either Congress’ unofficial approval or post action approval. In 1801/02 President Jefferson with an almost non-existent Navy sent a battleship to the Mediterranean to combat the Tripolitania pirates -- sufficient force was used to get a negotiated peace -- and he was praised for doing it.
Americans don’t like War. We as a people have opposed almost every war we’ve been in before it was declared and get weary and unsupportive if the war lasts to long. And, that includes the first one - the War for Independence. But Americans will support their President when they use military force to defend our interests and our values (most notably the support of Pres. Lincoln in both saving the union and freeing the slaves). Limited strikes such as Jefferson in Tripoli, Reagan in Grenada, Clinton in Kosovo, these met with public approval as did Korea in the early years after Truman acted; but, Americans are not going to decide to involve us in a foreign war when most of them can’t identify countries on a map outside of Mexico and Canada.
Americans would support a President who would tell them the truth, and Obama has, and take a course of action supporting our nation’s historic opposition to use of chemical weapons. One person is elected to make this tough decision - and it’s not the members of Congress who are elected based on local issues and district boundaries. And, this nation decided over 225 years ago that the British Parliament doesn’t speak for us. While we created and have been the world’s greatest proponent of the United Nations we made clear after 1945 that we would not let the veto power hamper action in our nation’s interest and we would not subordinate our values and commitments to a majority vote among nations.
The President gave the nation his decision. He should have owned it and taken action accordingly. When the history of this time is written, in fifty years, I hope no historian has to write that America could have stopped a future holocaust had it taken action in 2013 as they write about how the west could have stopped Hitler had they taken action in 1936.
When the southern states seceded President Buchanan was urged by some members of his Cabinet to take action. Buchanan was a long time Pennsylvania lawyer and got his start in politics at the local level in 1812 - he knew some of the authors of the Constitution. So he came to the conclusion that the Constitution did not permit secession -- but, alas, the Constitution according to Buchanan did not permit the President to do anything about it. In 2008 and 2012 I truly believe that most Americans thought they were electing another Lincoln not another Buchanan.
Yesterday in Siskiyou County, California, the board of supervisors voted to issue a declaration of secession from the rest of California. The far-northern county wants to be known as the free state of Jefferson, a land removed from "loony California" and uniting non-loony counties now languishing there and in Oregon (see map at right, not including the Southern California and Nevada counties they'd like to recruit).
Seceding from a state and forming a new one requires the approval of the both the original state and the U.S. Congress. It's almost impossible. Siskiyou County supervisors voted 4-1 to get out of California anyway. The Redding Record-Searchlight relays this from the meeting:
"Many proposed laws are unconstitutional and deny us our God-given rights," said Gabe Garrison of Happy Camp. "We need our own state so we can make laws that fit our way of life."
The State of Jefferson would be our 52nd state, the 51st being the now-aborning North Colorado. In both cases, organizers say their desire to secede stems from the conviction that rural values and rural needs are not represented well in state capitals they consider urban-centric.
It's apparently an appealing frustration. The map for the Colorado-based 51st State Initiative has been growing. Marked in blue below are counties where leader Jeffrey Hare says citizens or officials have shown "significant "support. Yellow is for counties where people are actively working on secession. Green is for counties that already have some kind of popular vote scheduled or have joined the working group. White is for counties in Kansas that might want to come over. And red is for Boulder and Denver, a/k/a not interested.
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| State of North Colorado |
We talked yesterday about Attorney General Eric Holder giving officials in Colorado and Washington a green light on their state measures legalizing recreational use of marijuana, but the story, which Rachel explored in more detail last night, got me thinking about Holder's tenure.
For a typical conservative, I suspect the Attorney General would top the list for his or her least favorite member of President Obama's cabinet. Holder is truly reviled on the right, to the point that calls for his resignation have come from the RNC, many Senate Republicans, and at last count, 122 House Republicans.
But once we get past the partisan sniping and consider the policy breakthroughs, Eric Holder appears to have quietly positioned himself not only as a progressive champion, but as one of the more accomplished attorneys general in recent memory.
Think about some of the recent policies Holder has chosen to tackle: voting rights; sentencing reforms; condemnations of "Stand Your Ground" laws, and of course the drug policy announced yesterday. These are critically important law-enforcement policies, some of which have been neglected and ignored by officials in both parties for years, long in need of leadership -- which Holder is now providing.
Even when the Justice Department arguably went too far in subpoenaing reporters' phone logs as part of a leak investigation, it was Holder who soon after approved reforms to make it more difficult for this to happen in the future through higher search-warrant standards, and ensuring more advance notice for news organizations.
The A.G. isn't just breaking sharply with Justice Department practices in the Bush/Cheney era; Holder is changing the trajectory of regressive policies that have gotten worse for decades.
This certainly isn't to say his tenure has been flawless, but the political world generally only focuses on Holder when Republicans are attacking him, and that's a shame. On a variety of key areas, the Attorney General seems wildly underrated.
Rachel Maddow reviews a number of changes that have taken place under the Obama administration that seemed previously impossible, including same-sex marriage, a reduction in the prison population and health care reform - and now, in small steps, a dialing back of the so-called war on drugs.
SUMMARY: As United Nations inspectors wrap up their investigation into alleged chemical arms use by the Assad regime in Syria, U.S. legislators are demanding Congressional approval of any American military action. Jeffrey Brown reports on the state of international debate among European allies Britain, France and Germany.
SUMMARY: The world is waiting for United Nations inspectors to announce their findings over the alleged use of chemical warfare in Syria. What are inspectors looking for? And how would they be able to tell if the weapons came from the Assad regime? Jeffrey Brown gets analysis from former UN and U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer.
A few incumbent Republican senators have primary opponents to worry about -- most notably Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) -- but Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) doesn't appear to be one of them. The two-term senator and former governor remains fairly popular in the Volunteer State and is generally expected to win re-election easily.
But yesterday, a group of Tea Party organizations wrote Alexander a letter, urging him to quit and make room for a more right-wing candidate. Their letter included a classic line, that speaks volumes about Tea Partiers' ideology.
"During your tenure in the Senate we have no doubt that you voted in a way which you felt was appropriate. Unfortunately, our great nation can no longer afford compromise and bipartisanship, two traits for which you have become famous."
Got that? After more than a decade on Capitol Hill, Alexander has developed a reputation as a senator capable of working with people he disagrees with -- and the Tea Party groups consider this outrageous. "Compromise and bipartisanship" have been repackaged as insulting words senators would be wise to avoid.
Indeed, the letter added, "Quite honestly, your voting record shows that you do not represent the conservative values that we hold dear and the votes you have cast as Senator are intolerable to us."
Reading the letter, one might get the impression that Alexander has a voting record slightly to the left of Olympia Snowe, infuriating the GOP's far-right base. But reality belies the caricature.
The Tennessee Republican has voted against every major priority pushed by President Obama; he has a 77% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union; he recently argued the minimum wage shouldn't exist at all; and in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Alexander told a national television audience, "I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people."
Lamar Alexander, in other words, is a conservative Republican. To say he's too moderate to represent the right's interest is like saying Dick Lugar should be defeated in a primary. Oh wait.
For what it's worth, Alexander has no announced primary opponent, though it now appears likely that Tea Partiers are looking for one.
It's pretty easy to assume that fierce Republican opposition will doom comprehensive immigration reform. Indeed, for much of the summer, House GOP extremism on the issue has reinforced fears that the odds are poor.
But there's been some gradual movement of late, and it's given new hope to reform proponents.
Members of Congress have been on recess for only a few days, but it already seems the time away from Washington means more support for a pathway to citizenship among some Republicans.
In the past few days, two Republican members of the House of Representatives — Daniel Webster in Florida, Aaron Schock in Illinois — have expressed preliminary support for a way to legalize undocumented immigrants and allow them to eventually earn full citizenship. Even the House GOP whip, Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), announced support for legal status, although he stopped just short of supporting full citizenship.
After this ABC News report ran, Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash,) also endorsed a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the United States.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a congressional leader on immigration policy, said yesterday there are "40 to 50 Republicans" in the House who are ready to support a comprehensive bill, even if they're reluctant to say so publicly at this point.
If even half of them were willing to sign a discharge petition -- or pull a "Reese Witherspoon" -- a bipartisan reform bill could reach the House floor for a vote, at which point things would get awfully interesting.
This isn't to say success appears likely, but rather, that reform still has a pulse -- which is more than we could have said in June. Greg Sargent, after conceding that the odds still favor far-right opponents, noted yesterday, "[T]he easy conventional wisdom about what's happening now — which holds that the conservative base controls the outcome completely, that the death of reform is preordained, and that House Republicans are only looking for a way to kill reform blamelessly — is overly simplistic and is increasingly looking like it's just wrong."
And what about the prospects of using the August recess to push the debate in one direction or the other?
Let's not forget this Byron York piece we discussed briefly yesterday.
"There's definitely more interest right now in Obamacare than immigration, partly because folks believe immigration has been stopped or slowed," says conservative radio host Bill Bennett of the calls he receives from listeners. "The passion against Obamacare never subsides." [...]
If August goes quietly on the immigration front, some Republican lawmakers may return to Washington with the sense that voters back home don't really mind that immigration reform goes forward. And then it will. If, on the other hand, lawmakers hear expressions of serious opposition at town meetings, their conclusion will be just the opposite. And reform will likely go down to defeat.
So Democrats don't really mind if Republicans use up all their grass-roots energy railing about Obamacare. It's already the law. What would be a problem for Democrats, and for some pro-reform Republicans, is if the GOP grassroots concentrated its fire on immigration reform. That could well mean the end of President Obama's top legislative priority for his second term.
Ed Kilgore's question rings true: "[W]hat if the sudden conservative activist obsession with 'defunding Obamacare' as a demand being made of Republican Members of Congress convinces those self-same Members that allowing an immigration bill to come to a vote in the House isn't the career-ender it looked like a few weeks ago?"
It's probably safe to say Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has had better weeks. Just over the last few days he started to lose his cool on NPR when asked about a neo-confederate he co-authored a book with; he was caught making ridiculous boasts about his record on minority rights; and he repeated a bizarre conspiracy theory about George Stephanopoulos that's already been debunked.
And then, after all of this, the Kentucky Republican sat down for a chat with Businessweek's Josh Green.
Green: A recent article in the New Republic said your budget would eviscerate the departments of Energy, State, Commerce, EPA, FDA, Education, and many others. Would Americans support that?
Paul: My budget is similar to the Penny Plan, which cuts 1 percent a year for five or six years and balances the budget. Many Americans who have suffered during a recession have had to cut their spending 1 percent, and they didn't like doing it, but they were able to do it to get their family's finances back in order. I see no reason why government can't cut 1 percent of its spending.
Except, whether the senator realizes it or not, his description of his plan is extremely deceptive. As Ezra Klein explained, Paul's response wasn't actually an answer: "Paul's budget eliminates the Department of Commerce. It also eliminates the Department of Education. And the Department for Housing and Urban Development. And the Department of Energy. The State Department gets cut by more than 50 percent. Meanwhile, it increases spending on defense by $126 billion. Perhaps these are good ideas! But Paul doesn't defend them. He obscures them. He tries to make his cuts sound small even though, in the areas Green asked about, they're huge."
In theory, Paul could at least try to explain why he thinks cutting the State Department budget in half would be good for the United States. But he either can't or won't do that, so he repeats vague talking points that obscure the facts.
Wait, it gets worse.
Green: Any political consultant who saw that list [of cabinet agencies Paul intends to eliminate] would tear out his hair and say the American people would never accept it. You disagree with that conventional wisdom?
Paul: You know, the thing is, people want to say it's extreme. But what I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year. I mean, that's an extremely bad situation.
Except, we're not running trillion-dollar deficits every year. If the senator takes this issue so seriously, shouldn't he keep up with the basics of current events?
Green: Who would your ideal Fed chairman be?
Paul: Hayek would be good, but he's deceased.
Green: Nondead Fed chairman.
Paul: Friedman would probably be pretty good, too, and he's not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have.
Again, Paul doesn't seem to know what he's saying. As Jon Chait explained, the senator's answer "makes no sense" because, "Paul is a hard-money fanatic who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve's role in using money policy to stabilize the economy. That's the joke. Milton Friedman, though, had the complete opposite view of monetary policy. His central academic insight was support for very active monetary policy."
My principal concern with Rand Paul is not his ideology. On plenty of subjective questions, he and I would recommend very different courses of action, which is what spirited political debate is all about.
Rather, what troubles me about the senator is that he doesn't seem to have the foggiest idea what he's talking about. Worse, it's not like he's ignorant of obscure policy details on issues he deems irrelevant -- Paul is strikingly confused about the issues he claims to care about most.
This Businessweek interview was a mess for the senator on economic matters, but let's not forget that Paul also doesn't seem to understand his own views on the use of drones, which is another issue he says he cares deeply about.
If this guy intends to seek national office and ask the American mainstream to consider him credible, he has a lot of homework to do -- homework he probably should have done before making the transition from self-accredited ophthalmologist to U.S. senator.
I'd very nearly given up trying to convince the political world that sequestration cuts still matter. But then yesterday, something changed my mind.
For those who still care about the policy that was designed to hurt the country on purpose, there's been quite a bit of news lately, all of it showing the sequester doing what it was intended to do. In addition to the voluminous list of documented problems, just over the last few days we've gotten a better sense of the ways in which the policy is hurting the military, public schools, parks, and the justice system. The poor and minorities are disproportionately suffering.
Did the political world care about these stories? Not really. Generally speaking, the slow-motion disaster on auto-pilot just keeps plodding along, with little more than indifference from the Beltway.
So what made yesterday different? This did.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Thursday estimated that keeping the spending cuts from sequestration in place through fiscal 2014 would cost up to 1.6 million jobs.
Canceling the cuts, on the other hand, would yield between 300,000 to 1.6 million new jobs, with the most likely outcome being the addition of 900,000, the CBO said.
The full CBO report, requested by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), is online here.
And why might this part of the sequestration story matter, even after the other elements of the story were largely ignored? Because it offers the political world an important test.
A month ago, several congressional Republican leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), insisted publicly that job creation is their "number one priority." If those claims were true, I have good news -- now they can prove they meant it.
After all, we now have independent confirmation that this one policy, if it remains in place, will cost the nation about 1.6 million jobs through next year. End the policy, on the other hand, and the U.S. economy adds 900,000 jobs.
For those who say the job market is their "number one priority," this is what's commonly known as a "no-brainer."
Let's make this incredibly simple for Congress, either job creation is your top priority or it isn't. If it is, then the House and Senate could take five minutes, scrap the sequester, and help the U.S. job market. A lot.
Is it really that simple? Well, yes, actually it is that simple.
But won't that mean slightly higher spending levels? And won't that mean slightly less deficit reduction?
Perhaps, but either job creation is your top priority or it isn't. If someone says, "I'd like to end the sequester, but not if it means increased spending and higher deficits," then we know, in a very literal sense, that the jobs are not their "number one priority."
It's a straightforward, binary choice. Your call, Republicans.
Reuters reports this morning, in a matter-of-fact sort of way, that when it comes to implementation of federal health care law, Republicans and their allies "are mobilizing ... to dissuade uninsured Americans from obtaining health coverage."
I hope folks will pause to let that sentence sink in for a moment. Unlike every other industrialized democracy on the planet, the United States -- easily the wealthiest nation on earth -- tolerates a significant chunk of its population to go without basic health care coverage. These Americans and their families can't afford to see a doctor and are one serious illness from financial ruin.
After nearly a century of politicians talking about the problem, President Obama actually signed the Affordable Care Act into law three years ago, giving working families a level of health-care security they've never had before, and throwing a life preserver to the uninsured. Now, Republicans aren't just actively trying to sabotage the law, they're telling struggling Americans it's better to drown than accept the life preserver.
Writing in National Journal overnight, Norm Ornstein accurately describes the GOP efforts as "contemptible" and "spinning out of control."
It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply unprecedented.... For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the post that McClellan had held in 2003-04 -- in order to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats -- to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan. [...]
What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous -- just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing.
For the unhinged right, there's apparent confusion over these criticisms. "We hate the health-care reform law," they argue, "so it's hardly outrageous for us to try to stand in its way."
This might help Republicans live with themselves, but it's a lousy argument.
More from Ornstein:
When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable -- unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better -- not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.
But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation -- which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil -- is simply unacceptable, even contemptible.
It's worth emphasizing that Ornstein isn't some liberal firebrand. When folks like, say, me write about Republican efforts to sabotage federal health care law, hoping to make millions suffer out of partisan spite, it's largely expected. Ornstein, however, is a celebrated and respected figure of the Washington establishment, an independent political scientist, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
In other words, when he writes columns like these, even the laziest both-sides-are-always-to-blame-for-everything Beltway talking head should take note.
And finally, let's also not forget that the sabotage-governing strategy is not the radical vision of the fringe; it's the official position of the elected Republican leadership in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. No further proof of the radicalization of GOP politics in the Obama era should be necessary.
A variety of adjectives come to mind to describe Republican efforts on this issue, but as this is a family blog, "contemptible" is as good a word as any.
