OPINION - Shields and Brooks 3/17/2017

"Shields and Brooks on GOP health care bill pushback, Trump's dramatic budget" PBS NewsHour 3/17/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's news, including the conundrum for Republicans trying to pass a health care bill to replace the Affordable Care Act in the face of different factions of opposition, the White House budget blueprint offering sweeping cuts, plus the continuing allegation of a Trump Tower wiretap.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks.  That's syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentleman.

So, let's pick up with the conversation, David, that Jeffrey Brown was just having with the head of the American Medical Association.

President Trump is saying again today the health care overhaul is moving along very well, it's going to move through the House.

What do you see as the prospects?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times:  It has no critics. (satirically)

No.  I'm first all amazed that they did it first.  Of all the issues to tackle, health care is probably the hardest one.  And so every four or eight years, some President decides, you know, let's do health care first.  And it hurts them every single time.

Whether the prospects of this bill are good, I tend to doubt.  It has very few fans in the Senate.  And it has two wings of opposition which are in contradiction, what we call the coverage caucus, who want a little more expensive bill that will cover more people; and the Freedom Caucus wants a less expensive bill to cover less.

You can't — they have to win both of these groups.  And how do you do this, when they are mutually contradictory?  And so the Senate is very daunting.  So, therefore, you're asking the House members to vote for something that will take away coverage that already exists, for a bill that probably doesn't have great prospects in the long run.

I personally bet they get through the House, just because it's so hard to go against the sitting President in his first major thing.  But I wouldn't want to bet on the eventual passage of this.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And, Mark, what we hear is the main argument they are using now in the House as it gets closer to the vote is the political vote, you can't go against your President.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist:  Yes.

It's an argument that used, used in 1993 for the Democrats and Bill Clinton on his major budget and tax increase, which, by the way, per what David was talking about, included a BTU tax that House members voted on.  It passed the House in a very difficult vote and died in the Senate.

Several moderate to conservative Democrats walked away from it.  And it left those House members with a vote that they really couldn't — it became politically mortal — fatal in several instances.  I think the same thing is true here, and for good reasons, Judy.

I mean, the Republicans — part of David's answer — they pledged in 2010, they pledged in 2012, they pledged in 2016.  That was the one pledge they had,  repeal Obamacare.  It was an applause line.

So, it really did take on almost a moral imperative, or at least a political imperative.  But, Judy, this is going to radically overhaul the Affordable Care Act.  It going to radically overhaul Medicaid.  You heard Dr. Gurman in his interview with Jeff.

The reality is, providers are not going to provide coverage.  They're not going to take on as patients people under Medicaid, because they are not going to have the money to pay for it.  They are talking — one figure that jumps out, beyond all the questions of deductibles and everything else, 24 million Americans.  That's what the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

And Republicans just kind of recoiled.  That is the number that has hung around — are going to lose coverage.  Lose coverage.  That just is — that is truly unforgivable.  It's morally indefensible.  And I think, in this case, it will be politically indefensible.

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DAVID BROOKS:  Yes.  I’m — was looking for the political philosophy that might be inherent in a budget.

And some of them are just weird, even for Republicans, as Mark said, $6 million — $6 billion off the National Institutes of Health.  That is an investment in scientific advance and economic growth.  And why would you do that?  That doesn’t even seem particularly Republican.

But, basically, what you’re doing, they are investing in everything that is hard power.  They’re investing in the military, in homeland security, everything that is about threat and fear.

And they are disinvesting in everything that has to do with compassion, with care, thinking, innovation.  And it’s almost like emotionally consistent.  It’s just hardness and toughness and fear.  And everything else just has to go.

POLITICS - The Long View, Wiretapping

What caught my eye about the below article was the author's name. It's hard not to remember such a name if you are a contemporary.

"The Wiretap This Time" by Studs Terkel, New York Times Opinion

EARLIER this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House agreed to allow the executive branch to conduct dragnet interceptions of the electronic communications of people in the United States. They also agreed to “immunize” American telephone companies from lawsuits charging that after 9/11 some companies collaborated with the government to violate the Constitution and existing federal law. I am a plaintiff in one of those lawsuits, and I hope Congress thinks carefully before denying me, and millions of other Americans, our day in court.

During my lifetime, there has been a sea change in the way that politically active Americans view their relationship with government. In 1920, during my youth, I recall the Palmer raids in which more than 10,000 people were rounded up, most because they were members of particular labor unions or belonged to groups that advocated change in American domestic or foreign policy. Unrestrained surveillance was used to further the investigations leading to these detentions, and the Bureau of Investigation — the forerunner to the F.B.I. — eventually created a database on the activities of individuals. This activity continued through the Red Scare of the period.

In the 1950s, during the sad period known as the McCarthy era, one’s political beliefs again served as a rationale for government monitoring. Individual corporations and entire industries were coerced by government leaders into informing on individuals and barring their ability to earn a living.

I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My crime? I had signed petitions. Lots of them. I had signed on in opposition to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and in favor of rent control and pacifism. Because the petitions were thought to be Communist-inspired, I lost my ability to work in television and radio after refusing to say that I had been “duped” into signing my name to these causes.

By the 1960s, the inequities in civil rights and the debate over the Vietnam war spurred social justice movements. The government’s response? More surveillance. In the name of national security, the F.B.I. conducted warrantless wiretaps of political activists, journalists, former White House staff members and even a member of Congress.

Then things changed. In 1975, the hearings led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho revealed the scope of government surveillance of private citizens and lawful organizations. As Americans saw the damage, they reached a consensus that this unrestrained surveillance had a corrosive impact on us all.

In 1978, with broad public support, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which placed national security investigations, including wiretapping, under a system of warrants approved by a special court. The law was not perfect, but as a result of its enactment and a series of subsequent federal laws, a generation of Americans has come to adulthood protected by a legal structure and a social compact making clear that government will not engage in unbridled, dragnet seizure of electronic communications.

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it intends to search and what it expects to find.

Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a “get out of jail free card” to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them.

And it is not as though the telecommunications companies did not know that their actions were illegal. Judge Vaughn Walker of federal district court in San Francisco, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, noted that in an opinion in one of the immunity provision lawsuits the “very action in question has previously been held unlawful.”

I have observed and written about American life for some time. In truth, nothing much surprises me anymore. But I always feel uplifted by this: Given the facts and an opportunity to act, the body politic generally does the right thing. By revealing the truth in a public forum, the American people will have the facts to play their historic, heroic role in putting our nation back on the path toward freedom. That is why we deserve our day in court.

POLITICS - The Real Truth About Unwarranted Wiretaps

"The Lie Lives On ... and On ... and On" by Larry Beinhart, The Huffington Post

The Republican Senator tossed General Michael Hayden a big, fat softball of a question: "Do you think that if you had this program ...." of wiretaps without warrants, "... in place before September 11th you might have prevented it?"

General Hayden jumped right on it. He said that yes, if he had his secret powers then, that he has today, he could have stopped al Qaeda's plot.

Then he said, there were two guys in San Diego ...

He was referring to Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar. George Bush also talks about them when he wants to justify wiretaps without warrants. The truth is that Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar are the poster boys for missed opportunities. If the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and the White House had not screwed up so royally, mostly by cherishing their secrets, they would have had al Hasmi and al Mihdhar several times over.

Here are the facts.

Both of them were in the NSA and CIA files. They'd fought in Bosnia. They'd been to Afghanistan. They had friends and relatives who were jihadists and who were in Al Qaeda and they had associations with bin Laden.

In December, 1999 the NSA picked up several names in relation to an upcoming meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the capitol of Malaysia. They got al Mihdhar's full name but only al Hazmi's first name, Nawaf. They could have figured out who he was if they had checked in their own data base. But they didn't.

The CIA tracked al Mihdhar when he traveled from Yemen to the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, arriving on January 5th, 2000. The CIA had the event under surveillance. Al Mihdhar was photographed there. The team noted that some of the terrorists, including al Mihdhar and al Hazmi, flew to Bangkok on January 8th, where they lost track of them. Also in January, the CIA found out that al Mihdhar had a US passport.

The top people in the CIA and the FBI, including it's director, Louis Freeh, were briefed by the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) on the meeting.

In March, the CIA's Bangkok office reported that al Hazmi had left Thailand on January 15th and flown to Los Angeles. He was accompanied by al Mihdhar, though that did not show up on the flight report.

What we are supposed to believe is that unwarranted wiretaps would have made them smarter in connecting the dots. Yah, sure, and if we had 007 on the job he would have stopped 9/11.