Saturday Coffee--Zimbabwe

For months Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell taunted Barack Obama to create a bipartisan commission to deal with the deficit. Republicans like John McCain and Judd Gregg co-sponsored the legislation. And then when President Obama says he supports the plan, the Republicans abandoned ship and voted against it, killing the plan in the Senate. Today in his radio address, President Obama announced by executive order he was creating the commission.

Which leads to where we are in the state of the union. Presently over 200 House bills are languishing for action by the Senate. Taken together these bills would place adequate regulations on the financial industry, create a robust jobs bill, and give the American people a chance at an adequate health care system. Even if 50% of the provisions of these bills were implemented , America would be on the road to economic and social recovery from The Great Recession. The odds of them becoming law now are slim as Republicans in the Senate have officially embraced the idea that all major legislation needs a supermajority, something that even Senate rules do not agree on. Republicans have now used the filibuster a staggering 115 times--over twice the number of Democrats in the last year of the Bush Administration.

There is a method to their madness. By thwarting the President and the Democratic majority, Republicans want to present the image that Government is incapable to ameliorating the average American's problems. Unfortunately, they are succeeding because confidence in government after the Bush-Cheney years has fallen to a new low. To capitalize on the phenomenon they created, Republicans have embraced a radical right agenda against government itself.

President Obama has adopted many of the former Republican ideas. Tax breaks for the middle class, small business and the end of a capital gains tax on small businesses. Incredibly the Republicans have voted against all of these. As a result, polls show that only 15% of Americans believe Obama cut their taxes, more actually believe the Republican line that he has raised taxes. As he made it clear in his State of the Union address, he hasn't raised anyone's taxes, although he should.

President Obama signed into law the PayGo provisions that require Congress to either cut expenditures or raise revenues to pay for the programs they pass. The Republicans, who have blasted the President on fiscal irresponsibility, voted against this seemingly logical idea. We know it was highly successful during the Clinton years to produce large surpluses. The new Republican platform calls for balanced federal budgets, except in time of war. I always believed that post-9/11, to reinforce the idea of sacrifice Americans should have been asked to pay more taxes to fund the war effort and not for the rich to receive a large tax break. But no matter.

The new so-called bipartisan jobs bill was scrapped by Harry Reid for a more modest one. The $80 billion bill penned by Grassley and Baucus included such Republican favorites as the end to estate taxes. Right now, you have to pay taxes on an estate more than $7 million, an amount very few Americans will ever see. (Also added to the bill was a re-authorization of the Patriot Act.) The end of the estate tax will exacerbate the growing inequality of income distribution. Today, the United States has the most dramatic gulf between the richest and the poorest than any developed nation. We are actually falling into the realm of such discrepancy of wealth as El Salvador and other oil-producing states in Africa. For years, foreign policy analysts on both sides of the aisle ghave argued that such disequilbrium produces political instability.

The Harry Reid $18 billion effort looks puny and may not create any jobs.

So what's a poor guy do but create a rock-and-roll band? To overcome the Senate stalemate, President Obama will have to use the process of reconciliation to pass his highest priorities. The Health Care Bill is already passed. Even if it can not be massaged as would be normal in a functioning democracy, the Democrats must move it anyway. The whole financial reform package, which would prevent another meltdown, needs to be passed the same way. The Democrats have to understand that even if the Republicans come roaring back in the 2010 elections, the new Congress would not sit until early 2011. As I wrote when I started this blog, Obama has only the first two years to achieve his domestic agenda. The rest of his time he will be engaged in rear-guard action.

The past week we have seen a very curious resurrection of Republican attacks on the Obama Administration concerning his anti-terrorist policy. Normally, this would be attributed to Republicans trying to maintain their national security mantle, which they believe is their greatest electoral strength. But these attacks are much more focused and coordinated than the attacks at the beginning of his administration. The lines of argument have changed. The argument that the gonad bomber is not like the shoe bomber is that the Bush Administration did not have their splendid torture apparatus in place yet. Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for the Bush Administration and former Jesse Helms aide, blasted Obama for killing too many terrorists too quickly in Foreign Policy and then went on national television to say that the gonad bomber should have been subjected to interrogation by the intelligence community, not the FBI. (As a note, the FBI has routinely outperformed both Defense and the Intelligence community in this function.) He pointed to the great success in waterboarding that prevented the Los Angeles terror plot. As I wrote at the beginning of this blog long ago, the Los Angeles plot was stopped a year before the waterboarding of Sheik Muhammed because the FBI arrested an Al Qaeda member on a tip from Canada as he cross into the United States from Vancouver.

But Kit Bond in the blizzard made it to the local television station to blast the Obama Administration on not sending the gonad bomber to a military tribunal and using the existing apparatus for interrogating him. He cited as his good authority Mike Mukasy who "Voila!" produced an op-ed in the Washington Post the next day, saying that cases like Richard Reid and Jose Padilla happened because the "apparatus" was not in place at the time. Senator Bond went out of his way to say that trying terrorists in civilian courts revealed too much intelligence to the enemy. He claims Bin Laden turned off his cellphones after a New York trial. Again, false. He turned them off when Bush administration officials, including the President, kept saying we were monitoring Al Qaeda's cellphones. None of the information from any civilian trial had any effect on Al Qaeda's defensive measures.

Then we are treated to Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson lamenting the cost of Gitmo to our prestige but saying the cost of closing it is also too high.

So what gives? As Janes Meyer documents in the latest New Yorker, the Obama administration has a tug of war going on between Rahm Emmanuel and Eric Holder on the civil trial of the 9/11 plotters. The Republicans, in my opinion, are trying to exploit this fight but for a precise purpose. If President Obama continues to be successful with his anti-terrorism program, he undercuts the reasoning of the Republicans or the Bush Administration. But, more precisely, civilian trials are not a threat because of Al Qaeda propaganda but what the American people may in fact learn about the failings of the past Administration and their use of torture. For instance, we now know that the three detainees who allegedly hung themselves alone and in separate cells in Gitmo were actually tortured to death at Camp No, a small facility on the grounds of Gitmo in 2007, at least two years after Bush supposedly outlawed torture. One of the victims was the young Saudi son of a police officer, who was scheduled to be released and who had no potential charges against him.

The Republican argument for military commissions is strange because of the only 3 cases tried so far, two of the defendents went free. Of the over 300 civilian trials of terrorist suspects, none have gone free and almost all have been sentenced to maximum security prisons for life. When Bob Gibbs raised this on television, Chuck Todd weirdly argued that none have received the death penalty. And then he criticized Gibbs for promising KSM would receive a death penalty, thereby saying civilian trials would be kangaroo courts. But so far the military commissions haven't sentenced anyone to death either. Missing from the Republican arguments this week was the recent trial of the MIT-educated woman member of Al Qaeda.

The issue of what to do with the Gitmo detainees who might face charges--probably 54 in total--provides the Obama Administration with a keen dilemma. No one can underestimate the mess the Bush Administration left behind here. The so-called apparatus really doesn't exist. The so-called military commissions, which may not even be constitutional, are barely up and barely functioning. The lack of notifying New York on the Al Qaeda trials led to unnecessary political blowback, which will hamper moving forward. The Obama Administration have bent over backwards to prevent the prosecution of Dick Cheney, the torture lawyers and the CIA personnel who were involved in the "enhanced interrogation" program. The Republicans have blocked the appointment of Dawn Johnson to the Department of Justice because she is on record saying these cases need to be examined and charges brought if need be.

The Bush Administration made a fundamental mistake from the beginning of their response to 9/11, which--for the record--they knew by 3pm that day Al Qaeda did it. They never consulted real national security lawyers, which exist in this town by the hundreds, about developing a process that was both constitutional and effective. By the time Bush admitted he wanted to close Gitmo, nothing had been done to even coordinate all the materials about the detainees so no cases could be made anyway.

Unfortunately, I am now leaning to supporting the idea expressed by the Washington Post of creating a national security court to handle terrorist cases. The immense damage done by the last eight years in this regard simply can not be overcome by the application of civilian courts. Such a court should have a limited duration.