DADT and the Justice Department

This is something I’ve been really interested in the last couple of weeks, and that is the obligation of the Justice Department to defend extant US Law in the court system. My opinion was that it was the obligation of every Justice Department to defend laws, even ones the current administration does not like, and that seems to be true, but this statement from Ted Olson suggests that after the initial defense, they are not obligated to appeal:

“It happens every once in awhile at the federal level when the solicitor general, on behalf of the U.S., will confess error or decline to defend a law,” said former George W. Bush administration solicitor general Ted Olson, who is leading the legal challenge of California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state attorney general have both declined to defend the law in court.

“I don’t know what is going through the [Obama] administration’s thought process on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Olson said. “It would be appropriate for them to say ‘the law has been deemed unconstitutional, we are not going to seek further review of that.’”

Anyone have any examples of a Justice Department initially defending a law and then refusing to appeal?

I’m still of the opinion that once the elections are over, DADT will be repealed with the Defense Authorization Act. The recent court rulings will provide enough cover for a few Senators to vote the other way.

DADT/Dream Act

Both are up for a vote today, and both will be filibustered:

In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama repeated a campaign-trail promise to the gay community.

By the end of the year, Mr. Obama said, he would seek a full repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which bars gay and transgender people from serving openly in the armed forces.

The president called it a “law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are,” and he said repealing it was “the right thing to do.”M

The promise faces a critical test today as supporters of the current policy say they will try to filibuster military defense legislation that includes the repeal. With midterm elections just six weeks away, a unified Republicans filibuster would likely mean a delay in fulfilling the president’s pledge until next year.

Opponents of an unrelated immigration measure included in the annual defense authorization bill are also vowing to filibuster, increasing the odds that both issues will be put off.

If the Democrats can’t muster 60 votes to cut off debate, the delay on “don’t ask, don’t tell” would be a blow to gay activists, members of a key White House constituency who fear that next year’s Congress will be less sympathetic to a repeal of the 17-year-old ban. The policy was enacted during President Bill Clinton’s first term.

I doubt President Snowe or Collins will come through, although Scott Brown might flinch. McCain, being all mavericky, has flip-flopped so many times I have no damned clue which way he will vote. And, of course, if we do get a republican to vote for cloture, that means President Nelson can hold up the Senate for some sweetheart deal for the real Murrikens in whatever shitty flyover state he represents.

Also, it goes without saying that any failure to have these two items passed is not the fault of the troglodyte bigots who blocked the bills or the dysfunctional Senate rules that always seem to call for a supermajority when the President is a Democrat, but Obama for failing to use the bully pulpit.

Where Have They Been

If this is true, this is just gross political incompetence at the White House political division:

President Obama’s political advisers, looking for ways to help Democrats and alter the course of the midterm elections in the final weeks, are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists, people involved in the discussion said.

White House and Congressional Democratic strategists are trying to energize dispirited Democratic voters over the coming six weeks, in hopes of limiting the party’s losses and keeping control of the House and Senate. The strategists see openings to exploit after a string of Tea Party successes split Republicans in a number of states, culminating last week with developments that scrambled Senate races in Delaware and Alaska.

“We need to get out the message that it’s now really dangerous to re-empower the Republican Party,” said one Democratic strategist who has spoken with White House advisers but requested anonymity to discuss private strategy talks.

Apparently, the only places left on earth where they do not realize that the tea party is a GOP operation are Fox News and the White House.

Too little, too late

At this point, the Warren appointment feels like a slap in the face.

Update. On the bright side, when Obama adds James Carville and David Gergen to his communications team after the November losses, the roll-outs will be a lot more effective.

How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away

No one could have predicted this:

When the Obama administration called a halt to virtually all deepwater drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon blowout and fire in April, oil executives, economists and local officials complained that the six-month moratorium would cost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost revenue.

Oil supply firms went to court to have the moratorium overturned, calling it illegal and warning that it would exacerbate the nation’s economic woes, lead to oil shortages and cause an exodus of drilling rigs from the gulf to other fields around the world. Two federal courts agreed.

Yet the worst of those forecasts has failed to materialize, as companies wait to see how long the moratorium will last before making critical decisions on spending cuts and layoffs. Unemployment claims related to the oil industry along the Gulf Coast have been in the hundreds, not the thousands, and while oil production from the gulf is down because of the drilling halt, supplies from the region are expected to rebound in future years. Only 2 of the 33 deepwater rigs operating in the gulf before the BP rig exploded have left for other fields.

So maybe pausing drilling for a couple months after a catastrophic disaster may have been a reasonable thing to do after all.

Just words

This means nothing until Gibbs apologizes:

President Obama on Friday took a strong stand in favor of building a mosque near the site where Muslim terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, breaking his silence on a political tempest that has left the country divided.

Speaking at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan, Obama framed the issue as one of religious freedom.

Muslims “have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country,” Obama said, according to a White House transcript. “That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

Guess Who

“President Obama has the power to stop this ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ business. Just sign an executive order. I don’t know why it’s taking so long—it’s not fair. We should stop this nonsense.”

With failures like these

Politico has one of those 10,000 Harris/VandeHei word what-does-it-all-mean pieces about the Obama presidency. These pieces are often revolting, but IMHO, their piece in May/June 2008 (I can’t find it by google search) on how Hillary had no chance was one of the most sensible pieces on the 2008 campaign (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I think their take on Obama is reasonably accurate:

The imminent passage of financial reform, just a couple months after the passage of comprehensive health care, should decisively end the narrative that President Obama represents a Jimmy Carter-style case of naïve hope crushed by the inability to master Washington.

Yet the mystery remains: Having moved swiftly toward achieving the very policy objectives he promised voters as a candidate, Obama is still widely perceived as flirting with a failed presidency.

[.....]

The problem is that he and his West Wing turn out to be not especially good at politics, or communications — in other words, largely ineffective at the very things on which their campaign reputation was built. And the promises he made in two years of campaigning turn out to be much less appealing as actual policies.

I think it’s a bit silly to conclude that the Obama administration is bad at politics (as opposed to passing bills), given that Obama’s approval rating is higher (eye-balling the numbers, about 3-4 points higher) than Reagan’s was at the same point of his presidency, in midst of an economy that is at least as bad as that of 1982. Reagan is, for better or worse (and I would say worse, of course), the dominant figure in American politics of the past 30 years, as Tom Schaller capably explain here. I can’t see how doing a little better than Reagan under equally tough or tougher circumstances makes the Obama administration bad at politics.

That said, I think the Politico piece is pretty good and I think this observation explains a lot of what is going on in terms of Obama media coverage:

In what would surprise media critics outside Washington, many reporters don’t much like Obama or his gang either. They accurately perceive the contempt with which they are held by his White House, an attitude that undoubtedly flows from the top. Insults and blustery non-responses, f-bombs flying, are common in how West Wing aides speak to reporters.

In a transactional city like Washington, personal relations usually only matter at the margins. But in a poor political climate those margins can be important, and there’s no mistaking that across the capital there are many people who seem to be enjoying the president’s travails, and cheering whenever he takes a cream pie to the face.

Update. Greg Sargent is right that the Politico analysis of liberal bloggers is dumb. I have to confess that my lack of interest in what Politico thinks about liberal bloggers made me skip over it when I read the article.

This

1000 times this:

I think the frustration that supporters of the president have (at least it is for me) is that his critics give him credit for nothing. NOTHING.

He gets a health care reform bill passed that is sweeping in scope and more than anyone has done in decades. And the left-wing critics say “Not enough.”

He gets a stimulus bill passed that pretty much kept a massive recession from getting worse and all the left-wing critics said was “Not enough.”

He’s on the verge of getting DADT repealed through law as opposed to using a reversible executive order and all the left-wing critics say is “Not enough.”

He gives a speech that talks about peak oil, points out how government corruption played a role and begins to lay out the way forward towards an alternative energy future and all the left-wing critics say is “Not enough” while having orgasms to Rachael Maddow’s satisfying-but-completely unrealistic “Fake President” speech.

Never mind Lily Leadbetter, killing the F-22 (something BUSH couldn’t do), expanding SCHIP, credit card reform, tobacco regulation…but no, it’s not enough. It’s NEVER enough with some people.

There is legit criticism to be made when it comes to President Obama, especially in the civil rights arena. But to hear the WATBs on the left tell it, he hasn’t done a damn thing. And that is simply not true.

And when you point that out, you are hippie-punching or just an O-bot and not a critical thinker. And he managed to do all this without ANY help from the Republicans and minimal help from the Blue Dogs, all while dealing with a childish media (Is he smoking? Does he hate the womyn folks because he won’t shoot hoops with them? Is he angry enough?) and a left-flank that thinks teaming up with Grover Norquist and echoing Republican talking points is moving the fucking Overton Window.

You point out the fact that this is the most successful Democratic Presidency in my lifetime and all you hear is but, but but… He didn’t get single payer!

And now this thread will rapidly become populated with WATB telling me I’m just as in the tank for Obama as I was for Republicans and that I hate the left and that I’m showing my authoritarian Republican roots and, oh, forget it. You know the damned drill. If I were a tough manly man like Keith Olbermann, a fierce and independent thinker who alone has the insight, bravery and knowledge to criticize the President, I’d just pre-emptively shut this blog down because you just know some anonymous commenter is going to say something mean on the internet and break my heart.

All I know is that if Obama doesn’t stop the oil leak with his massive Kenyan penis and then give a rousing FDR/Trumanesque speech delivered using a grade 7.5 language level that gives Chris Matthews a blue-vein hard-on and then personally scrubs every drop of oil from the gulf without hurting BP’s profits and making sure every oil worker has a job, I’m out. I mean, come on. That isn’t asking too much, is it? And why don’t we have gay marriage and a cure for cancer? What a loser! If only he hadn’t turned off his progressive base, all this could happen. Ed Schultz told me so.

And he better wear a flag lapel pin while doing it.

*** Update ***

Here’s what we’re dealing with:

Obama gives a speech on energy, but can’t bring himself to say “climate change.”

Beyond parody.

What Can He Do?

Here is a good comment from the post yesterday about the oil spill and the Obama response, with some specific suggestions. I’ll just post it here, because I think some of the suggestions are genuinely good:

Rayne over at Firedoglake has specific answers to your question. And this is only the beginning of what the administration could do. Cole seems to lack an appreciation of what power the president SHOULD wield on behalf of our country.

Rayne’s full post here.

1) Obama needs to use that goddamned unitary executive power he’s been clinging to and declare a state of emergency in federal waters along the Gulf of Mexico, using an Executive Order. This is now an international situation, not just an American one, because the oil will eventually end up in the North Atlantic.

2) Declare British Petroleum in violation of its lease and kick them off the site. Threaten to seize all American assets of BP-America immediately if they do not assist in setting up a claims system which will be administered and overseen by the U.S. and paid by BP. (Hire all those poor Sallie Mae folks who were going to lose their jobs because of student loan reform for this purpose. /snark)

3) Ask the Department of Energy’s Steve Chu to create a skunkworks rapid solutions team from NASA and DARPA along with schools which specialize in oceanography, mechanical technology, geology, and computer modeling. Stop waiting for the nice old farts they pulled from JASON because this is an emergency, goddamnitall, we don’t have time for them to come up with a vetted, peer-reviewed whitepaper on this. Don’t listen to anybody’s crap about so-called experts on deepwater drilling and how they’ll solve the problem. As my 16-year-old said, “If there’s experts, where are they? Show me one.” Yeah. What she said.

4) Threaten to kick Ken Salazar to the curb if he doesn’t not immediately have every one of the 15+ deepwater offshore drilling sites reevaluated; every evaluation must be on POTUS desk inside 15 days from the date the Executive Order. And we want the evaluations made public — no more of this bullshit opacity the White House calls transparency. No excuses; all this stuff should have been submitted when BP and the other oil industry firms applied for the leases to begin with.

5) Approach corporations to develop an X-Prize type program to develop a private solution in tandem with the skunkworks solution. Ask Congress to create a special R&D tax credit for firms which donate money to the X-Prize for development.

6) Approach Florida State University (which now owns the former Scripps’ Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and its submersibles) along with Mississippi State (which has an oceanography program) and ask them to work with NIUST to develop models of the plume’s distribution, along with identifying the impact short and long-term on the ocean bottom and the ecosystem above it.

7) Suck up the arrogance and pride and ask the elder statesman of the environment to be the face of this effort. Ask Al Gore to do the legwork with the corporations and educational facilities whose cooperation is needed. Tell him this is to be used as an example of what people can do for the larger environment if they focus on this problem first. If they can solve this, they can solve the big problems.

8) Tell the Catfood Commission (read: Presidential Deficit Commission) to find a way to shoehorn in funding for an alternative energy Apollo Program or Marshall Plan. If you have to find a front man, go to Al Gore because this was his idea back in 1992. Jeebus, catch a clue and use the resources you have already; Gore wrote it all out for you in 1992.

9) Call that lazy-assed sad-sack Joe Lieberman and tell him whatever super-secret-y deal you guys have going in the way of a quid pro quo is off if Lieberman cannot find some reason to investigate the relationships between Department of Interior and any corporation with which it deals. Make the call private, and tell him if he doesn’t have hearings within 15 days you are going to publicly call him on the carpet for the benefit of CT voters every chance you get until 2012.

10) You know damned well if they cut corners in the Gulf of Mexico, they did it elsewhere. Threaten to go for the jugular on them if they don’t continue to play ball with clean-up in the Gulf.Take a bunch of bloggers up to BP’s operations in Alaska and let them roam around for a couple weeks. Make BP pay for it — figure it out, you have the EO in one hand and the power to print money in the other. Keep the pressure on BP until they beg for mercy.

11) And right now I’m tempted to tell one Barack Obama to get really, genuinely excitedly-upset, be more than that Spock character for once, add the passion of Captain Kirk and the anger of Dr. McCoy in the mix. That fakery last week only made us heave with nausea. And Rahm? Just bite me; whatever counsel you’ve offered Mr. Spock-the-President has been both incompetent and impotent.

While some of them are interesting, I’m still puzzled by the “kick BP off the site” stuff. And then what? Issue sternly worded letters to the spill? The government does not have the equipment to stop this spill. I’m not sure how many times this can be pointed out.

And point eleven is just more of this “We need a cheerleader” nonsense. Of all people, George Will made a lot of sense about this in the green room after an appearance on ABC’s This Week. Scroll to about 2 minutes in when Will starts to talk about the “cult of the Presidency.”

But He Didn’t Do It in the Loudest and Most Disruptive Manner Possible, So It Doesn’t Really Count!

Meanwhile:

Congress appears poised to repeal the ban on gays in the military, with the quiet support of the White House and without opposition from the Pentagon, according to statements out from gay rights groups this evening.

The repeal is a careful dance: The Pentagon has remained publicly neutral in the process, while the Administration weighed in in a low-key, wonky, two-paragraph letter to Congress that makes no reference to the moral case for repeal. It is signed not by President Obama but by Budget Director Peter Orszag.

The effect of the public relations moves is to put the credit or blame for repeal on Congress and a group led by Senators Carl Levin and Joe Lieberman and Rep. Patrick Murphy. But the practical effect is the same: A military that, some time next year, will likely begin to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly.

And I bet there will be a very limited public freak-out by the GOP.

If he’d really cared, he would have signed an executive order on day one and said “F- You bigots,” then it would have counted and Democrats would be motivated to go to the polls. But this doing things through the legislature so it is permanent and official and successful- that’s not the hope and change we signed up for. Where’s the passion! Where’s his inner Truman FDR George Bush…

I’m Moving to Canada

I can’t take it anymore:

The ferocious oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening President Barack Obama’s reputation for competence, just as surely as it endangers the Gulf ecosystem.

So White House aides are escalating their efforts to reassure Congress and the public in the face of a slow-motion catastrophe, even though it’s not clear they can bring it under control anytime soon.

“There is no good answer to this,” one senior administration official said. “There is no readily apparent solution besides one that could take three months. ... If it doesn’t show the impotence of the government, it shows the limits of the government.”

Hope and change was Obama’s headline message in 2008, but those atop his campaign have always said that it was Obama’s cool competence — exemplified by his level-headed handling of the financial meltdown during the campaign’s waning days — that sealed the deal with independents and skeptical Democrats. The promise of rational, responsive and efficient government is Obama’s brand, his justification for bigger and bolder federal interventions and, ultimately, his rationale for a second term.

That’s Mike Allen and Glenn Thrush in the Politico, sneering that Obama’s “Hope and Change” 2008 slogan hasn’t plugged the worst oil spill in world history.

Assholes. I don’t think it is fair to the rest of us, but these douchebags in the beltway media deserve to live in a world ruled by Sarah Palin and Bill Kristol.

What He Said

Greenwald nails this one:

Let’s spend just a moment thinking about what this means. We’ve known since December, 2005, that Bush officials, including at the NSA, committed felonies by eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law—crimes punishable by a five-year prison term and$10,000 fine for each offense. All three federal judges to rule on the question have found those actions to be in violation of the law. Yet there have been no criminal investigations, let alone indictments, for those crimes, and there won’t be any, due to Barack Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward.” Thus, the high-level political officials who committed crimes while running the NSA will be completely immunized for their serious crimes.

By stark contrast, an NSA official who brought to the public’s attention towering failures and waste at the NSA —revelations that led to exposés that, as Shane put it, were “honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists”—is now being prosecuted for crimes that could lead to a lengthy prison term. Why doesn’t Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward,” protect this NSA whistle-blower from prosecution at least as much as the high-level Bush officials who criminally spied on American citizens? Isn’t the DOJ’s prosecution of Drake the classic case of “Looking Backward,” by digging into Bush-era crimes, controversies and disclosures?

Meanwhile, who wants to bet we won’t “look backward” when it comes to this:

Porter J. Goss, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2005 approved of the decision by one of his top aides to destroy dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two detainees, according to an internal C.I.A. document released Thursday.

Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, Mr. Goss told Mr. Rodriguez that he “agreed” with the decision, according to the document. He even joked after Mr. Rodriguez offered to “take the heat” for destroying the tapes.

“PG laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat,” according to one document, an internal C.I.A. e-mail message.

The message is clear- you torture people and then destroy the evidence, and you get off without so much as a sternly worded letter.

If you are a whistle blower outlining criminal behavior by the government, you get prosecuted.

I expected better from Obama and Holder.

Nothing Could Go Wrong Here

This is a great idea, Sarah:

During her “Redneck-Woodstock” speech in Searchlight, Nevada on March 27, 2010, Sarah Palin had a suggestion for her audience:

“That bumper sticker that maybe you’ll see on the next Subaru driving by—an Obama bumper sticker—you should stop the driver and say, ‘So how is that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?’”

I can’t be the only one who could see a potential problem with teabagging Palinites randomly stopping people with Obama stickers and taunting them. Certainly nothing could go wrong with this plan.

Which reminds me- I need a new Obama sticker for my Subaru. Anyone have “Vets for Obama” sticker lying around unused?

Brownstein nails it… (update)

Across the so called progressive blog-o-sphere the hand-wringing and worrying about President Obama has been repeated so often that it is like listening to a toddler tell the same joke over and over for weeks. The cuteness factor wears off in a hurry and soon you just pray that a new diversion will get the little tyke onto some other shiny object.

The trouble where I sit is that most folks think about what Obama should be doing while wearing very narrow blinders. I think much of the HCR debate fits that frame.

Over at the National Journal, Ron Brownstein looks at the field of play without the blinders of conventional wisdom and I think he nails it in this graph:

The fight has opened a second window into Obama. The key here is his 2008 campaign assertion that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America” more than Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton did. The health care struggle suggests that Obama views changing that trajectory as the ultimate measure of a presidency’s success. His aim is to establish a long-term political direction—one centered on a more activist government that shapes and polices the market to strengthen the foundation for sustainable, broadly shared growth. Everything else—the legislative tactics, even most individual policies—is negotiable. He wants to chart the course for the supertanker, not to steer it around each wave or decide which crates are loaded into its hull.

The entire piece is worth a read.

I think the Obama Era after HCR is going to get pretty interesting.

Cheers

dengre

ps: But first, HCR must pass… So please plan on setting some time aside to make a few calls on Saturday—we need to keep the pressure on full boil.

Update: Moses2317 give us a great calling list for the morning.