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A State-by-State Update on Voter Suppression

October 28, 2013 – 8:18 am

Since June’s Supreme Court ruling that threw out parts of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department has lost its ability to block state laws designed to disenfranchise blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities. Subsequently, Republican-run states have been eagerly taking advantage of their vote-suppressing opportunities.

Here are the stories I ran across just this month:

North Carolina. The can’t-miss video clip of the week was The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi interviewing North Carolina Republican Executive Committee member Don Yelton. Yelton

  • admitted that the voter-fraud problem in his county was no more than 1 or 2 people out of 60,000
  • used the cliche “One of my best friends is black.”
  • admitted he shared the famous Obama-witch-doctor photo on Facebook
  • admitted that North Carolina’s voter-suppression law “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. … If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get off their bohunkus and get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” When Mandvi summed up “and it just so happens that a lot of those people vote Democrat”, Yelton sarcastically said “Gee” as if no one could have possibly foreseen that.
  • justified voter suppression by pointing to people “too stupid” to get a photo ID and asking: “Do you want those people picking your president?”

At one point Yelton’s responses caused Mandvi to say, “You know that we can hear you, right?” Apparently the local Republican Committee chair could hear him too, because he asked for and got Yelton’s resignation.

Virginia. Virginia has a statewide election a week from tomorrow, so of course it’s time for a last-minute purge of the voter rolls. (That’s how Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State — and George W. Bush campaign chair — Katherine Harris won the White House for Jeb’s brother in 2000.) MSNBC reports:

Lawrence Haake III, the registrar of Chesterfield County and a Republican, told MSNBC he received a list from state election officials in August of around 2,200 voters in his county to be struck from the rolls. The state said the names had shown up in a database of voters registered in more than one state.

But when Haake tested a sample of around 1000 names, he found that 174 of them had registered in Virginia more recently than any other state, meaning they were eligible to vote. In an affidavit filed as part of the Democratic challenge to the purge, Haake called the list “clearly inaccurate and unreliable.”

Since there is no evidence that any of the voters on the purge list have voted in multiple states at once (or intend to), the main (and possibly the only) effect on Virginia’s elections will be to disenfranchise voters who believe they are registered legally.

The court challenge to the purge was denied. (Since Haake and a few other local election officials had refused to purge any name they found to be inaccurate, there was no proof that any specific person had been unfairly disenfranchised, despite the fact that other officials appear to have implemented the purge without further investigation.) The purge was defended in court by the Virginia Attorney General’s office. Coincidentally, the AG is Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who is currently trailing in the polls.

The problem here is similar to the one in South Carolina that I discussed in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“: When you assemble lists like this by matching computer databases (in SC they matched voter rolls against death notices) you make mistakes. Taking a voter off the rolls needs to be treated as a serious matter, requiring human oversight. Those humans need time to do their jobs, and the purged voters need to be notified and given time to protest, rather than just being told they can’t vote when they show up at the polls.

Texas. Texas women are discovering an important reason everyone should care about protecting everyone else’s vote: You might be next. The new Texas voter-ID law mandates that the name on your voter registration and the ID you show match exactly, which can be a problem for many women. The new law tripped up Judge Sandra Watts, because her driver’s license lists her maiden name as her middle name (as was standard in 1964 when she got married); her voter registration lists her actual middle name.

KIII TV reports: “Nueces County election officials say it is often a problem for women who use maiden names or hyphenated names.” As for the voter fraud this law supposedly targets, KIII quotes District Attorney Mark Skurka: “I have never seen an issue of that in Nueces County, in all the years that I’ve been here.”

Because local election officials determined that the name on Judge Watts’ driver’s license was “substantially similar” [definition here] to her voter registration, she did get to vote after signing an additional affidavit. (Not only does this take extra time, but it gives a vote-suppressing local official an opportunity to cut corners on the definition of “substantially similar” or to say menacing things about the penalties for perjury in hopes that the voter will be intimidated and go away.) She could also have voted a provisional ballot, which would only be counted if she came back with “proper identification” within six days. If the problem is a name mismatch, proper ID might have to include a marriage or divorce certificate. (And if you can’t lay your hands on those documents and say “screw it, the election wasn’t decided by one vote anyway”, the vote suppressors win.)

Of course the primary targets of voter suppression are people who don’t drive: primarily the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. If you’re poor, live in a city, and take the bus to work, Republicans want to make it as hard as possible for you to vote.

It’s estimated that 1.4 million Texans who would otherwise be eligible to vote don’t have a driver’s license or other acceptable ID. Supposedly that’s OK, because they can obtain a free state ID card. According to the Dallas Morning News, 41 such cards have been issued.

Again, you need documentation verifying your current name. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, about 1/3 of women can’t meet that standard. Time quotes the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser: “A full 34% of women don’t have documents proving citizenship with their current name on it.”

And this is all supposed to solve the problem of voter impersonation, which the Dallas Morning News describes as “nearly non-existent“. In July I described the attempt of the conservative media to create a different impression in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“.

Kansas and Arizona. Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement for registering to vote was thrown out by the Supreme Court in June — it was so bad that the 7-2 majority opinion was written by arch-conservative Justice Scalia — because it violated the federal National Voter Registration Act. But Arizona (and Kansas, which passed a similar law) think they have a way around the Court’s ruling: two-tier voting. Federal elections may be subject to the NVRA, but maybe if a separate registration is required for state and local elections, the citizenship-proof requirement can be applied to them. And if the dual-registration process is time-consuming and confusing for new voters … well, that’s win/win, isn’t it?

If that tactic reminds you of Jim Crow, it should. The Nation’s Ari Berman quotes the ACLU’s Dale Ho:

These dual registration systems have a really ugly racial history. They were set up after Reconstruction alongside poll taxes, literacy tests and all the other devices that were used to disenfranchise African-American voters.

This time Hispanics are the primary target, but they’re also suppressing Arizona’s Native American vote. (The Intertribal Council was the lead plaintiff in the suit against the Arizona law. Native Americans have been specifically targeted in South Dakota and Montana.) (BTW, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly apparently did NOT say Native Americans were illegal immigrants. That rumor is another case of satire jumping the fence into the news pasture.)

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (1)

Don’t Means-Test Medicare

October 14, 2013 – 9:57 am

Sooner or later (I hope) Congress will get past self-created problems like the shutdown and the debt ceiling and start talking about something real: the long-term budget and how to pay for expensive-but-necessary programs like Social Security and Medicare. And when that day comes, one idea the Republicans will put forward is means-testing. (It’s already happening: Tuesday 51 Republican congressmen wrote to Speaker Boehner calling for “Means-testing benefits for high-income recipients of Social Security”.)

At first glance, it makes sense: The $15,000 a year that Social Security pays the average retiree may be a lifesaver to people who didn’t manage to save anything when they were working (or who did save but lost it all to fraud, accident, or a health problem), but Warren Buffett probably won’t even notice if his checks stop coming. And how much are janitors and check-out clerks putting into Medicare just so the government can pay for Warren’s cancer treatments?

Back in February, Yuval Levin put the case like this:

Democrats want to close the budget gap by having the government lean more heavily on the wealthy, while Republicans want to close it by having the government spend less money. Both sides should agree at least to spend less money on the wealthy — via means testing. It may surprise some Americans to learn that the United States spends quite a lot on the affluent, especially through the entitlement programs at the heart of the budget fight: Social Security and Medicare. Both programs move money from relatively poorer young people to relatively richer old people, and they are growing ever more expensive. Means-testing — allocating benefits according to need — might offer both sides a way out.

Levin is a conservative who used to work for the Bush administration, edits the right-leaning National Affairs, and occasionally writes for the conservative flagship, National Review. So what does he have against the rich? And why does a liberal like Paul Krugman defend those upper-class benefits?

Part of the issue is technical: When you do the math, means-testing doesn’t save any significant amount of money unless you’re cutting benefits for people considerably closer to the middle class than Warren Buffett. (Conservatives often make that case with regard to tax increases, but it’s much more true here. The top 1% make 19.3% of the national income, but I doubt they account for 19.3% of Medicare spending.)

But that can’t be the heart of it, because every little bit helps, right? Even if we’re not talking about much money, every dollar we don’t spend on wealthy people is one more we don’t have to borrow.

Here’s the heart of it: Means-testing is actually the opening shot in a much longer strategy to cut entitlement benefits for everyone. It relies on a broader principle you can see all around you: If you want to destroy a public program, first get the rich people out of it.

Think about cities with first-class public transportation like San Francisco or Washington. At rush hour on the BART or the Metro you’ll see a lot of three-piece suits, because no matter how much money you make, public transit is just a good way to get to work. But in cities with crappy systems — dirty buses that don’t come very often and don’t go where you want — public transit is mainly for the underclass. Maids and janitors take the bus to work, but bankers don’t.

Now obviously, rich people have options, so they won’t ride a crappy system. But the arrow of causality also points the other way: Systems that rich people don’t ride tend to get crappier and crappier. It’s not hard to understand why: When there’s a budget crunch, the people who decide what to cut are rich, or at least well-to-do politicians who have to answer to rich donors. If they think of public transit as something other (i.e. poorer) people use, it’s easy for them to imagine those people making do with less. But if they use it themselves, they’re going to fight to keep it operating at a high level.

Ditto for schools. In towns where everybody’s kids — rich and poor alike — go to the public high school, you can be sure the school will have a full range of options and amenities. When times are tough, the well-to-do decision-makers may not understand why poor kids need foreign languages or music or calculus. But it’s different if their own kids and grandkids are going to have to do without (and explain that deficiency when they apply to Harvard).

So if you want to kill public schools in your town, start a voucher program that draws the children of the well-to-do to private schools. That way, rich and professional-class parents — people who have the ear of decision-makers and could be articulate spokesmen for all parents — will stop taking public-school issues personally. Debates about public education will be about those people — and what can you really expect out of their kids anyway? Rhetoric about “throwing money down a rat hole” won’t offend anybody who really matters.

Imagine if we means-tested the public libraries or the parks. You could only get in if you could prove that you were too poor to afford your own books or a yard big enough for your kids to play in. I think before long we’d decide that the poor don’t need a lot of books, and if their parks are over-crowded and poorly maintained, well, what do they expect?

So yeah, let’s remove the rich people from Medicare. Let’s turn it into a welfare program, and make non-participation a status symbol. Then when we cut taxes again and create new deficits, budget-cutters can sharpen their pencils, secure in the knowledge that benefit cuts won’t hurt anybody who lives in their neighborhood. (I mean, seriously, do waitresses really need the latest chemo-therapy drugs? What do those people expect, anyway?)

On the other hand, we could let entitlements be entitlements — care you get not because you’re poor, but because you’re American. Then when future budget-cutters make their proposals, they’ll have to explain why Americans don’t deserve the best.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Seven Key Points About the Shutdown

October 7, 2013 – 1:10 pm

1. This is not a pox-on-both-your-houses situation. The Republicans planned this shutdown and carried it out.

Last Monday, on the eve of the shutdown, Rachel Maddow showed the tapes of one Republican candidate after another making campaign speeches about shutting down the government and being cheered for it. That never happens on the Democratic side. No Democratic candidate for Congress tells his crowds he’s going to shut down the government and expects to get a cheer. Rachel summarized:

What is happening tonight is happening tonight because this is what Republicans want to do. This is what they promised to do. … Elect Republicans and they will burn the place down and they will laugh while they do it and have a great time.

The Daily Beast’s David Freedlander talked to a number of Republican donors from the banking industry, who said Rep. Walden (chair of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, which wants their money) told them “We have to do this because of the Tea Party.” (An NRCC spokesman denies Walden said that.)

Jonathan Chait traces the Republicans’ post-2012-defeat strategy to a meeting in January.

If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.

The first element of the strategy is a kind of legislative strike. Initially, House Republicans decided to boycott all direct negotiations with President Obama, and then subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the Democratic Senate. (Senate Democrats have spent months pleading with House Republicans to negotiate with them, to no avail.) This kind of refusal to even enter negotiations is highly unusual. The way to make sense of it is that Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to accede to large chunks of the Republican agenda, without Republicans having to offer any policy concessions of their own.

2. This “budget” showdown has nothing to do with the budget. Both sides agree on the spending number that should be in the continuing resolution.

That’s because Democrats agreed to the Republicans’ number. In other words, the only genuine concession in this process has come from the Democrats. John Boehner could have taken that concession, passed a continuing resolution to avoid the shutdown, and then called a press conference to declare victory. Instead he shut down the government.

3. The threat not to raise the debt ceiling is unprecedented, except for when these same Republicans made the same threat in 2011.

Posturing about the debt ceiling is perennial: “Look how profligate the party in power is. They’ve run up so much debt we have to raise the ceiling.” But making a credible threat not to raise the debt ceiling unless your legislative demands are met? No. That is an absolutely new tactic in American politics.

Slate’s David Weigel goes through all the alleged examples of the Democrats threatening the debt ceiling. In 1981, Tip O’Neil tried to get President Reagan to promise that Republicans wouldn’t use a debt-ceiling vote against incumbent Democrats in the next election cycle (i.e., no policy demands), but passed it in plenty of time. In 1984, a Democratic committee chair blocked a debt ceiling bill for one day, seeking defense spending cuts. He was roundly criticized for “brinksmanship” and backed down.

That’s it. Dozens of other times Democratic majorities in Congress have passed debt-ceiling increases proposed by Republican presidents without making an issue of it.

If Democrats accepted the tactic Republicans are using, the September, 2007 debt-ceiling increase would have been an opportunity for Nancy Pelosi to demand deficit-reducing changes like a repeal of the Bush tax cuts or an end to Iraq War. But that didn’t happen, because Democrats don’t operate by extortion.

4. Republicans have redefined he words negotiate and compromise.

ThinkProgress’ Judd Legum summed up the Republican “negotiation”:

Can I burn down your house?
No
Just the 2nd floor?
No
Garage?
No
Let’s talk about what I can burn down.
No
YOU AREN’T COMPROMISING!

In a real compromise, both sides give something and both sides get something. So far, the Democrats have been offered nothing.

In the 2011 crisis, President Obama repeatedly tried to negotiate a “grand bargain” with Speaker Boehner that would knock trillions off the long-term deficit. That failed, and the “supercommitte” negotiations that were supposed to replace the sequester failed, on the same point: Republicans insisted there could be no tax increases in the deficit reduction plan. Zero. During one Republican presidential debate, the candidates were asked whether they would accept a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. All said no.

Since April, Harry Reid has been trying to form a conference committee so that the House and Senate can work out a budget compromise. The Republicans have refused to appoint their conferees, preferring to wait until they had the “leverage” of a government shutdown and debt default. The point here is exactly what Chait said above: to extort concessions out of the Democrats without offering any concessions of their own. “OK then, half the ransom” is not a concession, no matter what Ted Cruz says.

5. The principle at stake is majority rule.

I talked about this in detail last week. Speaker Boehner wants to tell the story that the shutdown represents a disagreement between two branches of government that have conflicting popular mandates: The public elected President Obama, but it also elected a Republican House of Representatives.

That’s not what this is about at all. If it were, Boehner could bring the Senate’s clean continuing resolution to the House floor for a vote and defeat it. He can’t do that, because given the chance the people’s representatives would pass it. In blocking that resolution, Boehner does not represent the majority of the House, he only represents “the majority of the majority”, i.e. a minority.

The entire give-us-what-we-want-or-we’ll-burn-the-house-down strategy is against all American ideals of democracy. The constitutional way to pass a law (or repeal a law you don’t like) is to do what the Democrats did to pass ObamaCare in the first place: Win not just a majority in the House, but also a substantial majority in the Senate (to overcome a filibuster, which the Founders never envisioned), and win the White House (to avoid a veto). The Republicans can’t do that, because they are a minority. (Even their House candidates collectively got a million fewer votes than the Democrats in 2012.)

6. Don’t believe the leak that John Boehner won’t allow a debt-ceiling default.

Thursday the NYT quoted multiple anonymous Republican congressmen saying that Boehner had told them he wouldn’t allow a default. But Matt Yglesias points out that Boehner has been saying such things all along, while also saying the opposite.

Boehner’s position, dating back to 2011, has been twofold. On the one hand he says that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be catastrophic and that he favors avoiding catastrophe. On the other hand he says that he requires unrelated public policy concessions in order to agree to a measure that he himself says he supports.

It is, in other words, the classic suicide hostage strategy: Do what I want or I’ll detonate the bomb strapped to my chest. This has always been Boehner’s position.

For example, on Friday Boehner said:

I don’t believe that we should default on our debt. It’s not good for our country. But after 55 years of spending more than what you bring in, something ought to be addressed. I think the American people expect if we’re going to raise the amount of money we can borrow, we ought to do something about our spending problem and the lack of economic growth in our country.

In other words, he wants concessions. And notice: Boehner doesn’t suggest doing something about the deficit, which has a revenue side. He only wants to discuss “our spending problem”. So he’s seeking spending cuts with no tax increases, the same no-compromise position that doomed the budget negotiations in 2011.

And then Sunday he reiterated:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So under no circumstances will you pass a clean debt limit?

BOEHNER: We’re not going down that path.

Stephanopoulos’ question: “So you sit down with the president. What would you offer him in that conversation?” got no answer. And when pushed on the tax issue Boehner said: “Very simple. We’re not raising taxes.”

He described Harry Reid’s proposal to negotiate about the budget after the shutdown and debt ceiling had been dealt with as

My way or the highway. That’s what he’s saying. Complete surrender and then we’ll talk to you.

So he wants concessions and won’t give anything in return. Without his extortion demand, he has nothing to talk about, so giving it up is “complete surrender”.

7. The clearest head in the room belongs to Elizabeth Warren.

The boogeyman government is like the Boogyman under the bed. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist. What is real, what does exist are all those specific important things that we as Americans have chosen to do together through our government. In our democracy, government is not some make-believe thing that has an independent will of its own. In our democracy, government is just how we describe the things that We the People have already decided to do together.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

Countdown to Augustus

October 7, 2013 – 11:53 am

Losing the Republic one day at a time

About once a year, I recommend that Sift readers take a look at Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series of novels. It covers the final century of the Roman Republic, from the rise of Gaius Marius to the establishment of the Empire under Caesar Augustus. I recommend the series not just because it’s a good yarn (which it is), but because it’s a cautionary tale about how republics are lost.

Your high school world history class probably gave you a highlight-reel version of the fall of the Roman Republic — crossing the Rubicon and all that — but didn’t really cover the century-long erosion of public trust that made the big rockslides inevitable.

The highlight reel may have left you with the impression that at a few key moments, individuals failed or made bad, self-serving decisions: If Cicero and Cato had carried the day, if Julius Caesar didn’t march on Rome, if Octavian had restored the power of the Senate after Actium rather than becoming Emperor… everything would have worked out. And so people who apply the Roman model to the American Republic usually end up matching personalities: Who is our Caesar, our Cicero, our Brutus? Is there a parallel between FDR’s four terms and Marius’ seven consulships? Between the assassinations of the Kennedies and of the Gracchi brothers? And so on.

That’s a fun party conversation for history geeks, but the closer (and scarier) match is in the steady erosion of political norms.

As Chris Hayes has observed on several occasions (at around the 3:30 mark here, for example), republics don’t work just by rules, the dos and don’t explicitly spelled out in their constitutions. They also need norms, things that are technically within the rules — or at least within the powers that the rules establish — but “just aren’t done” and arouse public anger when anyone gets close to doing them. But for that public anger, you can often get an advantage by skirting the norms. And when it looks like you might get away with it, the other side has a powerful motivation to cut some other corner to keep you in check.

For the last few decades, we’ve been in a Romanesque downward spiral of norm-skirting. One side does something that just isn’t done, but calibrates it to avoid a rush of public anger. And the other side responds by doing something else that isn’t (or didn’t used to be) done.

One example has been growing use of the filibuster in the Senate. Once an arcane device that showed up more often in movies than in the Capitol, the filibuster is now in such constant use that journalists now write as if the Constitution required 60 Senate votes to pass a law. The brand new use of the filibuster not just to block the passage of laws but to nullify laws already passed (by blocking appointments to the agencies that enforce those laws) led the Obama administration to push the boundaries of recess appointments, which then led the courts to push the boundaries of their norms against getting involved in political conflicts between the executive and legislative branches.

Another example is impeachment. When Democrats began an impeachment process against President Nixon  in 1974, both parties proceeded somberly and with utmost caution, because the only precedent, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment in 1868, wasn’t something to take pride in. By contrast, the impeachment and trial of President Clinton in 1998-1999 had a circus atmosphere; Republicans were giddy that one of their endless investigations had turned up something they could exaggerate into an impeachable offense. Today, Tea Party Republicans see the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense as a technicality. This August, Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) told his constituents that impeaching President Obama would be a “dream come true” except for the annoying little detail that “you’ve got to have evidence” and he doesn’t have any.

That follows a pattern that a Masters of Rome reader easily recognizes: The rules give an explicit power to some office, along with the implicit duty to wield that power to achieve a particular public purpose. But as the erosion of norms proceeds, the power becomes something the officeholder owns, and can use however he likes. So Congress was given the impeachment power to save the Republic from a president who had been suborned by a foreign power or domestic special interest. But the Tea Party believes a Republican Congress just owns that power to use according to its whims; the hurdle to overcome isn’t assembling the evidence, it’s acquiring the votes.

Similarly, the president has the power to enforce the laws and the Supreme Court has the power to interpret the Constitution. More and more, those institutions are coming to own those powers rather than wield them for a public purpose. So the meaning Constitution’s commerce clause changes from one case to the next, according to the whims of the Court’s conservative majority.

An abuse by one branch legitimizes an abuse by another. Congress’ inability to even compose a new immigration law (much less debate it and bring it to a vote) allows President Obama to be the champion of the popular Dreamers by stretching his powers of prosecutorial discretion. The norms of Congress used to allow simple legislative fixes to complex programs during the implementation phase; even if you opposed a program to begin with, you supported improving it once it was already established in law. But the refusal of the Republican House to allow any changes in ObamaCare short of repeal or sabotage has legitimized Obama in pushing the limits of executive orders.

That also is something an MoR reader will recognize: About half of the erosion in Rome was done by the good guys, in order to seek justice for popular causes that the system had stymied.

And that brings us to the present showdown over funding the government and managing the debt ceiling. Until Newt Gingrich, government shutdowns were glitches: Congress thought it could get the laws passed in time, but something went wrong and the government had to shut down for a day or two until Congress could get it fixed. With Gingrich the government shutdown became a tactic, comparable to a labor strike closing a factory: Give us what we want, or we’ll shut the place down.

In 1995-96, the public recognized that the norms had been violated and reacted with appropriate anger. Gingrich had to back down, and his partner-in-crime Bob Dole was soundly thrashed by Bill Clinton in the next presidential election.

President Bush’s clashes with Democrats in Congress were bitter, but impeachment and shutdown were never serious threats. With the anti-Obama backlash and the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, government shutdown has again become just another tool in the congressional toolbox. And for the first time, threatening the debt ceiling has become a tactic. Both parties had repeatedly postured over the debt ceiling in the past, but in 2011 it was a brand new norm-violation to demand concessions in exchange for allowing the government to pay debts lawfully incurred. Obama blundered by not standing on principle then, and so we are where we are.

Later today I’ll have more to say about where that is, but right now I just want to point out where it fits in the larger pattern. The Republicans have President Obama in a Roman-style box: He can surrender to this new minority-rule tactic with the prospect of more surrenders in the future, or he can watch havoc unleashed on the financial markets, with unpredictable effects on the American economy, or he can break the norms himself by invoking the 14th Amendment or minting a trillion-dollar coin or choosing which of Congress’s contradictory laws (the appropriations bills or the debt ceiling) he will enforce.

In the short run, the third choice — find your own norms to violate — does the least damage to the country.  But it keeps the countdown-to-Augustus clock ticking. As Congress becomes increasingly dysfunctional, as it sets up more and more of these holding-the-country-hostage situations, presidents will feel more and more justified in cutting Congress out of the picture.

We know where that goes: Eventually the Great Man on Horseback appears and relieves us of the burden of Congress entirely. He may come from either the Left or the Right, but when he arrives the people will cheer — as the people cheered first Julius Caesar and then Caesar Augustus — because the trust they have placed in the Republic has been so badly abused.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (17)

Tea Trek: Into Darkness

September 30, 2013 – 12:08 pm

The same people who told us a government shutdown couldn’t happen are now sure we’ll avoid a debt-ceiling crisis.

Unless a miracle occurs, the lights go off at midnight.

This week we got to see House Speaker John Boehner repeatedly flummoxed by events that played out in an utterly predictable way: Tea Partiers in the House refused to fund the government without killing ObamaCare. (Delaying it is just killing it in stages. If threatening a government shutdown or a debt-ceiling catastrophe can get it delayed this year, delaying it further can be an annual ransom demand for as long as Republicans have a majority in the House or 41 seats in the Senate.) Democrats in the Senate refused to let a minority party (even the Republicans in the House represent a minority of the voters) repeal laws.

And so the government will shut down at midnight.

For weeks, pundits have been telling us it wouldn’t come to this. No one could lay out a plausible alternate scenario, but it just wouldn’t happen. Boehner or somebody would pull a rabbit out of this hat and the government would get funded, like it (almost) always does.

Now the same pundits are telling us that a short shutdown won’t be that bad, and it really, really won’t come to a debt-ceiling default.*

However, the same configuration holds: House Tea Partiers insist on killing ObamaCare and Senate Democrats refuse to let a minority party repeal laws.

Late last week, several talking heads I usually agree with (like Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein) were even rooting for a shutdown, under the theory (as Rachel Maddow summarized it) that Republicans would “get their ya-yas out” and then be more reasonable about the debt ceiling. I think this view projects too much rationality onto the Tea Partiers. More likely, they will look at a government shutdown and say, “Look what we can do if we stick together and refuse to compromise! On to the debt ceiling! Obama may not be caving in yet, but he’ll really have to surrender then!”

As Rick Perlstein wrote Wednesday:

Despite a continuous flow of examples to the contrary this spring, summer and, now, autumn, our side keeps on wishfully, willfully and rather ignorantly denying the plain evidence in front of their faces about how conservative politics works. Namely, I keep seeing predictions that this, that or the other signal from polls or the political establishment or a traumatized public will “finally” “break the spell” of right-wing extremism on a certain issue, or even on all issues—and then we see that prediction spectacularly fail.

We can’t keep on going this way, my friend. You have to finally come to terms with how conservatism works. Now, that guy in the White House, Obama—I’ve given up hope that he’ll ever get it. I still have faith in you, though. Stop judging conservative by the logic of “normal” politics, or by the epistemology of the world as you, a liberal, understand it. Or as Poli Sci 101 understands it. Every time you do that, you denude us of strength for the fight. Grasp the right on its own terms. Stop trying to make it make sense on your own.

Jonathan Chait followed Perlstein’s lead in a fascinating-but-scary post on Friday.

Chait sees the current showdown in terms of a prophetic article “2012 or Never” that he wrote a year and a half ago during the Republican primary campaign. The Right was being unusually hysterical in 2012 — the same Mitt Romney who had been the conservative alternative to John McCain in 2008 was now far too moderate, despite having moved further the the right in the meantime — because it could feel the country slipping away from its control forever. Every cycle, it saw the electorate become less white, more secular, and less homophobic. Young voters and new citizens were breaking decisively against it.

Gay-bashing and immigrant-bashing used to be surefire crowd-pleasers. But now the right-wing populists were being told to tone it down for fear of spooking the independents.

2012 wasn’t just another election, it was the Right’s last chance.

If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner. This was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves.

At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that has driven Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they have concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost.

Rebuild or dig in? After 2012’s decisive loss, number-crunching Republican consultants like Karl Rove preached adjustment: Soft-pedal the now unpopular social issues, placate the growing Hispanic bloc with immigration reform, reach out to young voters. Younger conservative pundits have imagined a Republican Party that offers right-leaning solutions to the problems of working poor, the struggling middle class, and those without health insurance, a party that has its own plan to deal with climate change, rather than denying the ever-increasing scientific consensus. Bobby Jindal fantasizes about not being “the stupid party” any more.

But it hasn’t gone that way, has it?

Instead of seeking to rebuild a majority, the Right now boldly seeks to rule from the minority. Their strategy is to gerrymander, block any path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, suppress voter turnout, and double down on the white vote. The Hastert Rule, that a bill won’t come to the floor of the House for a vote unless it has “a majority of the majority”, is a prescription for minority rule: A majority can be 51%, and a majority-of-the-majority can be 26%. LIkewise, the increasing abuse of the filibuster in the Senate allows 41% of the Senate (which might represent a much smaller percentage of voters, since Utah gets the same number of senators as California) to thwart the will of the majority.

Rick Perlstein points out that there is another scenario for the youth vote other than the left-turn predicted by Peter Beinart:

So let’s assume Beinart is right in his generational diagnosis: kids who came to their maturity during the “Age of Fail,” whose formative experience of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally crappy, are pissed, and are willing to work hard for politicians who are willing to do something about it.

If that is so, another scenario looks like this: young citizens motivated by left-leaning passions run into a brick wall again and again and again trying to turn their convictions into power. The defining story of our next political era becomes not a New New Left but a corrosive disillusionment that drives the country into ever deeper sloughs of apathy.

This is the future the Republican Party is currently seeking.

Down with democracy. Much of the Republican rhetorical response to the 2012 loss wasn’t to learn lessons from the voters, but to disparage American democracy entirely. Building on Romney’s famous 47% argument, apologists for Romney’s loss (including Romney himself) argued that the United States had reached a “tipping point” where an electoral majority is dependent on government, and so will automatically vote for the Democrats.

Follow that thought to its logical conclusion: Elections are now illegitimate if the Democrat wins.

Friday Chait observed how this is playing out:

Paul Ryan candidly explained the calculation: “The reason this debt limit fight is different is, we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves. We are stuck with this government another three years.” This is a remarkable confession. Republicans need to compel Obama to accept their agenda, not in spite of the fact that the voters rejected it at the polls but precisely for that reason.

People who think this way are not going to change their minds when they see the polls turn against them. Quite the opposite, if Republicans become convinced that they will lose their House majority in 2014, that will make Tea Partiers all the more determined to have the decisive confrontation now.

Why ObamaCare? Why now? Sometimes, Ted Cruz claims he is representing the American people when he fights to repeal ObamaCare. But sometimes another agenda comes out:

No major entitlement, once it has been implemented, has ever been unwound. If we don’t do it now, in all likelihood we never will.

Again, that’s Chait’s now-or-never logic. And the threat it acknowledges is that once Americans see ObamaCare in action, they will like it. But there’s a deeper level to see than that: Cruz’s argument only makes sense if he’d like to repeal other entitlements like Social Security or Medicare, but can’t because they’re popular. This is an example of what Perlstein calls “time-biding”, in which conservatives pretend to support a popular program until they’re in a position to scuttle it.

Conservatives are time-biders. … They could not survive as a political tendency unless they clothed reaction in liberal raiment. You’ve seen that happen over and over again—like when people like Grover Norquist, whose aim is to roll back the entire welfare state, including Social Security, says what he’s really trying to do is save Social Security.

Where does it end? I have a prognosticating principle for situations like this: When a situation can only end one way, it will end that way — no matter how implausible that may look.

Tea Partiers will not back down. As Chait observes, Obama can’t back down either. Otherwise he is ratifying minority rule into the future. What he doesn’t surrender in this hostage crisis, conservatives will demand in the next one. And as elections are increasingly nullified by minority-rule tactics, the voters Democrats depend on for their future majorities will tune politics out. The Republicans’ whole 2012-or-never problem might go away.

So we’re on track for a debt-ceiling default. The only way out I can see is for Boehner and a handful of House Republicans to join Democrats in passing a clean debt-ceiling increase. Under the current balance of forces that can’t happen, because Boehner is afraid of losing the Speakership and the Republicans who might join him are afraid of Tea Party primary challengers.

What could change that calculation? The business community could change it. But why would they? A stock market crash could put the fear of God into them.

That’s what happened in the TARP vote in 2008. Bush administration Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke went to Congress and more-or-less said the financial markets would melt down without the $700 billion bailout package. The House voted it down anyway on September 29, and the next day the Dow dropped 777 points. The House passed TARP on October 3, after 57 representatives changed their minds.

I don’t know whether to expect that crash before or after we hit the debt ceiling. (As I write this, the Dow is drifting downward, but not crashing.) But I don’t see any other way out of this scenario.

* There’s been a lot of confusion about what this means, and this is one of the rare occasions where the media’s both-sides-do-it trope is really true. Republicans minimize the effects (building on their unfounded belief that vast amounts of wasteful government spending could just not be paid out without hurting anybody), while Democrats jump straight to defaulting on government bonds, which would send the world economy into chaos. A clearer picture is presented in slides put together by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

When the government can no longer borrow money, it will have to make do with the revenue coming in. Currently, that would mean cutting government spending by an average of 32%, though it would be more complicated than that because both expenditures and revenues are “lumpy”; it’s not like 68% of expenditures comes in every day. It’s also not clear how much the economic effects of a debt-ceiling breach would decrease revenue.

Interest payments on the debt average about 6% of the federal budget, so they could probably be made (despite the lumpiness) if the Treasury prioritized those obligations over, say, Social Security checks, disaster relief, supporting our troops in the field, and all the other obligations of the federal government. However, it’s not clear whether anybody has the constitutional authority to make choices like that. Up until now, a US government obligation has been as good as gold, whether it was a bond or a procurement contract or a pension. Appropriation bills and entitlement programs are laws, after all. If the law says a payment is to be made, who has the authority to say otherwise?

So the economic chaos will be compounded by legal chaos, as everyone whose payments are delayed sues. Who then can predict what the courts will do with those suits, or what the Treasury will do with whatever court orders it gets?

By weeklysift | Comments (6)

Pots, Kettles, and Projections from the Religious Right

September 23, 2013 – 11:48 am

Unlike Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut or Newt Gingrich labeling Barack Obama “the Food Stamp President“, I don’t think Stephen Baskerville was trolling when he delivered the annual mandatory-attendance Faith and Reason Lecture ten days ago at Patrick Henry College. On the contrary, I think this was one of those among-the-faithful communications that Alternet’s Amanda Marcotte says the rest of us should be paying more attention to.

Several other writers — at first former PHC students like QueerPHC and David Sessions, then others — have already picked out the outrageous highlights of Baskerville’s speech: gays are responsible for the rise Nazism, prisons are overcrowded because feminists “invented crimes” to control men, sex education is “government-sponsored pornography”, the welfare state caused the financial crisis, and on and on. It’s hard to read more than a paragraph of Baskerville’s text without finding something objectionable.

But I want to back up a step, look at the speech as a whole, and consider what it tells us about the extreme Christianist* mindset. Religious-Right writings are often unintentionally revealing, because of a unique dogmatic quirk: To look at their own worldview as if it were one belief system among many is to commit the sin of relativism.

Self-awareness. People of all religions and philosophies find it hard to “see ourselves as others see us”, but most of us at least pay lip service to the idea that we should. On the Religious Right, though, it’s not just hard to look at your faith from the outside, it’s wrong. (Something similar happens on the political Right with “American exceptionalism”; it’s not just difficult for Americans to see the United States as a nation among other nations, it’s a mistake that should be rejected out of hand.)

This dogmatic quirk has a predictable result: Religious Right speakers and authors have a profound lack of self-awareness. When anybody else would stop and think, “Whoa. What did I just hear come out of my mouth?” Christianist extremists like Stephen Baskerville reject that self-criticism as the voice of the Devil and say “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

That lack of self-awareness is exacerbated when Christianists segregate themselves behind the walls of an institution in which “our Christian faith precedes and informs all that we at Patrick Henry College study, teach, and learn.” Now imagine being a voice of authority in such a place, where those who disagree with you are not just mistaken, they are a corrupting influence on the entire community. What kind of unchecked nonsense would get into your head?

Projection. People who lack self-awareness are prone to what psychologists call projection — their repressed self-criticism doesn’t just evaporate, it comes out as criticism of others. Projection is why liars don’t trust anybody and gossips believe everyone is talking about them. Projection is why puritans imagine that everyone else is obsessed with sex, and ideologues see themselves beset by everyone else’s ideology.

That’s what’s going on in this speech,”Politicizing Potiphar’s Wife: Today’s New Ideology“. Baskerville is pointing to what he sees as an important problem in American society today: Ideologues are politicizing sex and the family.

Where, oh where, might he look to see such a phenomenon?

The setting. As you read the speech, keep in mind that Baskerville isn’t one of those unfortunate professors who had an ill-considered ramble recorded on somebody’s iPhone and posted to the world.

Patrick Henry College is the intellectual center of the evangelical Christian home-schooling movement**. It’s the subject of Hanna Rosin’s book God’s Harvard: a Christian College on a mission to save America. The school’s purpose is to take home-schooled evangelicals and groom them for positions in politics and government. It was a disproportionate source of Bush administration interns.

The Faith and Reason Lecture highlights an annual day-long festival and student attendance is mandatory. The PHC web site quotes its provost:

To me, the Faith & Reason festival exemplifies what Patrick Henry College is all about: committed Christians pursuing the highest level of academic scholarship.

David Sessions recalls that the original Faith and Reason lecture in 2005 was pre-screened by the college president and presented only after numerous changes. So he finds it “difficult to imagine” that Baskerville’s speech was not endorsed by the administration.

Ideology. The “ideologies” Baskerville warns his students against are feminism (renamed “sexual radicalism” or “sexualityism”) and Islamism. He never defines ideology, but he explicitly denies that Christianity can be an ideology.

One obvious reason why Christian faith is not an ideology is because of its unique and highly qualified relationship with the state; Christianity does not augment state power but limits it. Yet equally plausible is that Christianity is not an ideology because it has a unique theology of resentment. All true ideologies channel grievances into government power, with the ultimate aim of settling scores against politically defined criminals. Christianity alone offers a theology of forgiveness that neutralizes resentment and channels its sources into service for others and for God.

I’m sure that women forced to have unwanted vaginal probes or scientists who have to fight for their right to teach science in public schools will be comforted to learn that Christianity does not augment state power. LIkewise, I’m sure people who knew and loved Dr. George Tiller appreciate the Religious Right’s forgiving nature. And all you have to do is finish reading Baskerville’s speech to find a litany of Christianist resentment and grievance, a topic I have written about at length elsewhere. You will search in vain to find any hint of Baskerville neutralizing his resentment or channeling it into service — he can’t neutralize his own resentment and grievance because that only exists in other people.

Having defended against self-awareness, he goes on to express clear insight into resentment:

resentment is simply the form of pride that is directed at those possessing power that we feel we deserve.

Just so, Stephen. Just so.

Ending disagreement. Since Baskerville doesn’t define ideology, the only way to know what he means is to watch how he uses it. We’ve already seen that Christianity isn’t an ideology. Further “Ideology is a defining feature of modernity” that didn’t exist until it was invented, along with other modern notions like political parties, the left-right spectrum, and progress.

What he’s actually pointing to is ideological conflict: two or more ideologies co-existing in the same society. That really is a feature of modernity. Christianity by itself doesn’t lead to ideological conflict, but a Christianist society that lets Islam or feminism into the public square does have ideological conflict. If only we could get back to a society where Christianity is the only ideology and all other views are aberrations, then we could ignore the existence of ideology altogether. That seems to be his goal.

My argument is not that we must win the ideological wars but that we should be endeavouring to put the ideological genie back into the bottle.

Freedom is slavery. Slavery is freedom. Baskerville admiringly quotes Puritan minister John Geree from 1641:

There is a service which is freedom, the service of Christ; and there is a freedom which is servitude, the freedom to sin. There is a liberty which is bondage and … a bondage which is liberty.

This Orwellian principle explains how PHC can advocate repressive policies against women, gays, and non-Christians under the college slogan “for Christ and for Liberty”. Forcing others to live by Religious Right principles “liberates” them from the bondage of sin. Conversely,

sin enslaves and license destroys freedom.

The frame here is addiction: When your child is addicted to heroin, you may be justified in locking him up until he finishes going through withdrawal. (He may thank you later, once the craving is gone.) If you apply that model to, say, homosexuality, you are justified in packing your kid off to an ex-gay camp to be deprogrammed.

In the larger world, Christianists picture themselves in the parental role and see the rest of us as addicted to sin. This frame justifies them in seizing whatever power they need to make us behave, all in the name of “liberty”.

This view has become part of the conservative mainstream. In the 2012 campaign, for example, Rick Santorum redefined the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as “God gave us rights to life and to freedom to pursue His will. [my emphasis] That’s what the moral foundation of our country is.” So gays, feminists, and Muslims can be enemies of freedom, but by definition true Christians cannot.

Tactics for seizing power. Once you put aside the dodge that Baskerville is talking about other people, his criticisms are right on target.

What Gottschalk has stumbled upon is our own homegrown version of Stalinism: the process by which triumphant radicals first challenge and then commandeer both traditional values and the instruments of state repression for their own purposes as they trade ideological purity for power.

Quite right, Prof. Baskerville: America does have a movement that justifies its quest for power by commandeering “traditional values”.

The new ideology uses sexuality — and also its products, children — as instruments to acquire political power. … If one wishes to enact measures that intrude into the private lives of adults, the way to neutralize opposition is to present it as being “for the children.”

Indeed. Christianist attempts to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying the people they love are typically framed as a defense of children. Similarly, the government must intrude into what you read or see on TV or on the internet to protect children.

Baskerville understands that other people’s obsessive focus on sex is bad for society.

It is unhealthy for any society to have its civic life so dominated by sex as ours has now become. When sex becomes a society’s political currency, the public agenda comes to be controlled by those willing to use sexuality as a weapon to acquire power.

A good example of this would be how Republicans used ban-gay-marriage ballot proposals to boost evangelical turnout in key swing states in 2004.

The Hungarian Stalinist Matyas Rakosi coined the term “salami tactics” to describe how determined, disciplined, and organized activists can seize power by wheedling their way into key institutions, such as the police, justice system, penal apparatus, and military.

Baskerville could be describing the mission of Patrick Henry College itself.

The Vision of Patrick Henry College is to aid in the transformation of American society by training Christian students to serve God and mankind with a passion for righteousness, justice, and mercy, through careers of public service and cultural influence.

Later in the speech, Baskerville applies a military analogy to PHC.

This “university” is tiny, but so was the army of Gideon.

And the Bolsheviks. Don’t forget the Bolsheviks.

Grievances. If your plan is to “channel grievances into government power”, then you have to be able to manufacture grievances.

Here too, we also see the familiar pattern of radical ideologies creating the very evils they then re-package as grievances, and which then serve to rationalize further “empowerment”.

Who manufactures more grievances than the Religious Right, with its imaginary War on Christmas and its belief that its religious freedom has been violated whenever it is not allowed to rule over everyone else?

Invented crimes. Baskerville spends a great deal of time talking about “new crimes” that come from looking at the world through a feminist lens: He puts scare quotes around “rape”, “harassment”, “child abuse”, “stalking”, and “bullying”. (I won’t detail this because Libby Anne already has.)

But he ignores new crimes like fetal homicide, which have been foisted upon us by the Religious Right, or the proposal that Virginia women report their miscarriages to the police within 24 hours. Failure to report could lead to a year in prison.

Not hypocrisy. The temptation is to label this kind of double-standard-keeping as hypocrisy. But it’s stranger than that: The Religious Right isn’t hypocritical, it is just profoundly lacking in self-awareness. They really have no idea that the criticisms they aim outward apply more accurately to themselves.

And how would they? In order to see how their criticisms apply to their own actions, they’d have to consider their worldview as one among many. And to them, that’s relativism. It’s just wrong.

* I use Christianist in the same sense that the mainstream media uses Islamist. I am not talking about all Christians, but specifically about those who believe that their particular version of Christianity should control the government, and especially those who are working to achieve that goal.

** It’s not my intention to smear home-schooling in general. I know more than one home-schooling household personally and I have participated in a few of their projects. Parents might home-school to deal with special needs, to be more involved in their children’s lives, to nurture special talents, to escape bullying, or for many other benign or admirable reasons.

But Christian home-schooling often has an additional goal: “protecting” children from learning about evolution, homosexuality, or feminism, or hearing any cogent criticism of a fundamentalist worldview. The more radical a Christianist group is, the more likely it is to advocate home-schooling.

A report by the National Center for Education Statistics said 1.5 million American children were being home-schooled in 2007 (up from 1.1 million in 2003), with 72% of parents citing “religious or moral instruction” as a reason. Not all of those folks are radical Christian supremacists, but given growth and whatnot we still might be talking about a million kids.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Hunger Games: Who’s Right About Food Stamps?

September 23, 2013 – 9:02 am

Beyond the anecdotes about lazy surfers and hungry kids, where do the savings really come from?

Thursday, the House passed a bill to spend $39 billion less on Food Stamps (than current law would spend) over the next ten years. All Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against it, but it passed 217-210. President Obama has pledged to veto it, but before it reaches his desk it still has to be reconciled with the Senate farm bill, which cuts Food Stamps by $4 billion.

Image vs. fact. The public debate around Food Stamp cuts has consisted almost entirely of imagery. Fox News’ hour-long special “The Great Food Stamps Binge” anointed lobster-buying surfer-musician Jason Greenslate “the new face of Food Stamps”, while MSNBC focused on kids and military families. Ezra Klein interviewed author and ex-sergeant Kayla Williams about growing up on Food Stamps, and quoted a blog post by an unemployed Afghanistan veteran currently receiving Food Stamps.

Each image is moving in its own way, but how well do any of them represent reality?

First, let’s establish some facts: We’re talking about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which cost the government $74.6 billion in FY 2012. As of last September, 47.7 million Americans — about 1 in 7 — were receiving SNAP benefits that averaged $134 a month. To be eligible for SNAP, your income must be lower than 130% of the poverty level, or about $30,000 for a family of four.

As you can see from the chart, the percentage of the population getting SNAP benefits fluctuated with the business cycle until Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996, then started increasing again when the 2002 Farm Bill loosened up eligibility. (The anomaly in the chart is the increase during the “Bush Boom” of 2002-2006.) It really took off when the Great Recession hit in 2008. Recently, the number of households receiving SNAP has roughly matched the USDA estimate of the number of households that are “food insecure”. Both numbers jumped between 2007 and 2009, and both are currently about 1 in 7.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the number of recipients would go back down to 34 million by 2023 even with no changes in eligibility. (I’d guess that follows from the assumption that the economy goes back to normal by then.) Benefits were increased in the stimulus bill of 2009, and those increases (a little less than 6%) will run out this November. (That’s already baked into the numbers and does not figure in the $39 billion of cuts.)

Lost in most of the discussion is the question of where the estimated $39 billion savings comes from. Anecdotes or even averages about SNAP recipients are meaningless in this discussion unless they apply specifically to the people who will lose their benefits.

The detailed CBO estimates show that most of the provisions of the House bill have little impact on cost. (It didn’t even bother to figure the savings from Section 110, “Ending supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits for lottery or gambling winners.”) The entire $39 billion comes from three changes.

Work requirements. The biggest chunk, $19 billion, come from Section 109, “Repeal of state work program waiver authority.” That also accounts for the most immediate impact: $3.3 billion in FY 2015.

This sounds like the waivers in welfare work requirements that Mitt Romney so brazenly misrepresented in 2012, but it’s actually different. The SNAP rules say that able-bodied adults without children are limited to receiving 3 months of SNAP benefits every 3 years, unless they are spending at least 20 hours a week either working or participating in a job training program. The 1996 law that established that requirement allowed governors to apply for waivers if their states had high unemployment, figuring that it’s not fair to require hungry people to work if there are no jobs. That’s what’s being repealed.

That change shouldn’t affect any children, but it should cut off both Fox’s freeloading surfer and MSNBC’s unemployed Afghanistan veteran. (I didn’t find national estimates, but adults without children who don’t work 20 hours a week are about 8% of SNAP recipients in Texas, according to the Dallas Morning News. ) How you feel about it largely depends on which one you think is more typical. I suspect the vet is more typical, but I don’t really know.

How you feel also depends on your mercy/severity bias. Some people would gladly feed ten freeloaders to save one person from going hungry through no fault of his or her own. Others feel justified in cutting off ten hungry innocents to force one Jason Greenslate back into the job market.

Categorical eligibility. The second biggest savings, $11.6 billion ($1.3 billion in 2015), comes from Section 105, “Updating Program Eligibility”, which eliminates something known as “categorical eligibility”. CE amounts to the idea that if you’ve already qualified for one needs-based government program, you can qualify automatically for some others, even if the eligibility requirements don’t match perfectly. This saves overhead costs for the government and shortens the lag time of waiting for your paperwork to go through, at the cost of giving benefits to people who might make a little more than 130% of the poverty level.

So the main folks this hurts are the working poor, those lucky couples with kids who get SNAP even though they make slightly over $30,000 a year. It hits them in multiple ways, because qualifying for SNAP can also automatically qualify their kids for free school lunches. Bread for the World estimates that 2-3 million people will lose SNAP benefits if CE is eliminated, and that 280,000 children will lose free school lunches. (It’s tricky, but not impossible, to make that estimate match the CBO’s $1.3 billion. Using the $133-a-month average benefit, we’d be talking about 10 million person-months. That could be 2 million people getting SNAP for an average of five months each during a year. My best guess, though, is that we’re more likely talking about 1 million people, with the other 1-2 million losing benefits only briefly while they re-apply and re-qualify.)

Heat and eat. $8.7 billion in savings ($840 million in 2015) doesn’t actually concern food at all. It comes from eliminating the so-called “Heat and Eat” program, through which SNAP recipients can get assistance paying their utility bills. Bloomberg’s article says this would affect 850,000 people currently getting about $90 a month. (Again, I think you make that work with the $840-million-a-year CBO estimate by assuming not everybody gets assistance for the full 12 months.)

So that’s the whole $39 billion right there. Everything else in the bill is window dressing. For example, drug-testing recipients — which the House bill does not mandate but allows states to do — will almost certainly cost the government more for the tests than it can save by denying benefits to drug users. That was already true when Florida tried it for welfare applicants, and since SNAP benefits-per-person are much less, the loss should be even bigger.

Dependence. The Republican rhetoric on this issue revolves around the word dependence: dependence on government, creating dependence, and so on. The implicit assumption is that people who are getting aid would otherwise take matters in hand somehow. (And that we would approve of how they did it. After all, isn’t Breaking Bad the story of a man realizing that no one is going to help him and taking matters in hand?) And that in turn is based on the assumption that poverty is caused by poor people; if they’d just get out and work, they wouldn’t be poor. A third assumption is that it’s OK for children to suffer for the misbehavior of their parents; seeing their children hungry is part of what’s supposed to motivate the poor not to be poor.

I see two things going on here. First, what I like to call the Musical Chairs Fallacy, which is a version of the Composition Fallacy. If a particular child is always the first one out in musical chairs, you could train him/her to be quicker and more alert. But if you trained all the kids, someone would still be the first one out, because there aren’t enough chairs.

Similarly, you can imagine individual parents watching their children plead for more food and getting a burst of desperate energy that propels them into jobs they might otherwise not have found. But if all the poor get desperate at once, will that desperation create enough jobs to feed all their children? Or are a certain number of people going to go out of the game when the music stops (no matter how quick or alert everyone is) because there aren’t enough chairs?

Second, there’s the problem of the working poor. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is lower than it was when I made it back in the 1970s.

And our economy is creating more and more part-time and minimum-wage jobs. The increasing numbers of people on food stamps is how we’re dealing with those trends. If you’re working 30 hours a week at WalMart, you can’t feed your kids. Politicians who are against raising the minimum wage and also against Food Stamps need to spell out their plan for those kids.

Summing up. The $39 billion saved by the House bill comes from three places: Cutting off benefits for unemployed adults without kids and trusting that they will find legal jobs rather than go hungry or turn to crime; stopping benefits for the working poor who make slightly too much money; and poor families being hotter in the summer and colder in the winter.

What’s next? The Senate passed much smaller Food Stamp cuts (about $4 billion over ten years) back in June. That was part of a bipartisan farm bill that got 48 Democratic and 18 Republican votes. Now the House and Senate have to meet in a conference committee to work out a compromise bill, though it’s hard to imagine what that might look like. Like all the other spending bills that are hung up in this Congress, it has an October 1 deadline.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (1)

A brief meditation on white twerking

September 16, 2013 – 11:23 am

One of the more interesting discussions to come out of Miley Cyrus’ controversial performance at the Video Music Award (which I gave links for two weeks ago) concerns cultural exploitation: When is it OK or not OK to steal or borrow from an ethnic culture not your own?

White people (like me) have trouble wrapping our minds around this topic, because we’d prefer to ignore power imbalances and express everything in terms of universal principles. When you do that, examples of whites “stealing” from black culture (like Elvis, Eminem, and even Paul Simon) look just like blacks participating in European genres like opera or classical. If you want to get stupid about it, you can make your principles so sweeping that whites shouldn’t make tacos and only Greeks should teach Plato.

I’ve been looking for an analogy that would bring the power dynamics back into the equation, and I’ve finally got one that works for me.

Imagine you own the only restaurant in a small mostly-segregated town where whites are generally richer than blacks. A black family opens a new restaurant in the black part of town, but it doesn’t affect your business much because white people don’t want to go there and blacks don’t have enough money to eat out much anyway.

But they do have one fabulous dish that’s like nothing on your menu. You go there and try it, and it’s every bit as good as you’ve heard. And you immediately have a bunch of motives to imitate it. First, just as a lover of food and a creative chef you can’t help thinking: “I could do this! It would be great!” Second, as a businessman you think: “My customers would love this!”

There’s nothing wrong with either of those motives. But take a step back and ask why your customers would love to order the dish off your menu, but they won’t go to the black restaurant for it. Well, in a word, racism. If the town weren’t racist, they’d get the dish from the family that invented it. If you can figure out how to make it better, you might win some of those customers honestly. But as it stands you’ll get those customers just by being white.

So what you’d be doing by imitating the dish is lowering the cost of racism. Without your imitation, your racist customers would have to do without something they want.

And while you might argue you’re providing your white customers a bridge to black culture, it would be a toll bridge, and you’d be collecting the tolls. So you’re profiting from racism, and the money that you make (and the black family doesn’t) is a tangible measure of your white privilege.

The same considerations probably don’t apply if the black restaurant imitates your strudel or goulash. They may be able to profit if they make it better than you do, but they won’t profit just by being black.

So the question to ask when you’re borrowing from some other ethnic culture is: To what extent am I participating in a field that is open to everybody, and to what extent am I collecting a toll from racism? And if I am collecting a toll, is there some way I can share that profit with the community I’m borrowing from (i.e., Paul Simon popularizing South African groups) rather than keep it all for myself?

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The Summer of Snowden I: language of denial

September 16, 2013 – 10:18 am

We now have seen enough NSA denials to decrypt what they’re really saying.

Liberal, conservative, or independent, our news media does a bad job covering stories that play out over months. “News” is what’s happening right now — the newest revelation and the latest denial — embedded in a cloud of speculation about what might happen tomorrow. That focus on today’s scoop increases political polarization: When today’s headline contradicts yesterday’s and tomorrow’s is different yet, it’s tempting only to remember the ones that fit your prior bias. The one’s that don’t fit, well, they were all refuted by later developments, weren’t they?

In this series I’m going to take a longer perspective. What do we know about the NSA’s domestic spying that we didn’t know (or weren’t as sure of) in May? And I’m going to begin the series with a topic that would fit better in a college-course syllabus than a news article: vocabulary.

That may sound boring, but it’s the right place to start. The big reason this story keeps ping-ponging between alarm and reassurance is that the words the NSA uses in its comforting denials don’t really mean what you think they mean.

Ping-pong. Since June 5, when The Guardian and The Washington Post began publishing NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revelations about the NSA’s spying on Americans have had a back-and-forth quality. Something alarming comes out, then more details are released that make the initial story seem overblown, then we discover that the comforting safeguards in the second round of stories are often violated in practice, and on it goes.

So, for example, the public’s initial worries (ping!) about domestic spying were countered by assurances (pong!) that it happened only under warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which had been established by Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). That felt familiar, like the police-procedural shows on TV; authorities have to convince a judge they have a good reason to be suspicious of you before they can invade your privacy.

Then Snowden revealed just how open-ended those orders can be: Verizon was ordered not to turn over not just data about specific people connected to a particular terrorism investigation, but data about all calls going through its system. Apparently, the NSA was building a database of all phone calls in the United States — who called who, when, from where, and for how long. Ping!

But then we found out (pong!) that further FISC orders were required whenever the NSA used the database, and the database itself had auditing procedures to make sure analysts weren’t just messing around with it whenever they wanted. The Week reports:

In order to access the stored data sets, the NSA needs to have a real tangible reason. … [The] law has been interpreted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to relate only to the way in which the data is used.

And then last month (ping!) it came out that the FISC had reprimanded the NSA for lying to it about what it was doing:

The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding N.S.A.’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.

Those abuses, we are told, were all corrected in 2011 (pong!), so everything is hunky-dory now.

Meanwhile, another Snowden leak (ping!) gave us an internal audit in which the NSA found it had violated its own safeguards 2776 times during the year ending in March 2012. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that even this report is incomplete: “the thousands of violations only include the NSA’s main office in Maryland—not the other—potentially hundreds—of other NSA offices across the country.”)

But the violations appear to be accidental and trivial. (Pong!)  Senator Feinstein assured us that the Senate committee overseeing the NSA “has never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.” Well, except for NSA officers who spied on their partner or spouse. (PIng!) But that almost never happens (assuming we caught them all) and usually is abusing the NSA’s foreign intel, not domestic intel. (Pong!)

What has been reported as fact provides fertile ground for worrisome speculation: How hard it would be to hide a needle in that haystack of violations? And what if there’s a further layer to this onion, and malevolent or overzealous analysts have ways to circumvent the audits? The NSA, after all, is supposed to have the best hackers in the world. What if a few of them have hacked the NSA’s own systems? Snowden himself must have circumvented a few internal procedures to escape with all those documents.

Decrypting the NSA. Here’s the first lesson to learn from the Summer of Snowden: When the NSA makes those comforting denials, it is choosing words carefully and using them in non-standard ways. This summer we’ve heard so many denials that we’re now able to properly interpret statements that were constructed to obfuscate. (This work builds on the glossary that the Electronic Frontier Foundation started compiling during the Bush administration.) Ironically, this is a standard code-breaking technique: If you can induce your opponent to send a lot of coded messages, you have much more data to use in breaking the code.

Collect. In the  Free Online Dictionary, this is the first definition for collect:

To bring together in a group or mass; gather.

So if someone were gathering information about you and storing it in a database, you would probably say they were collecting information about you. Conversely, when the NSA says they aren’t collecting information about you, you probably think they are denying the existence of such a database.

They aren’t. In NSA parlance, information hasn’t been collected until it comes to the attention of a human analyst. If no database query returns your information to a person, it hasn’t been collected.

And so we can have public exchanges like this one in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12:

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon): Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: No, sir.

Senator Wyden: It does not?

Director Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.

Three months later we found out about the Verizon court order. Clapper undoubtedly knew in March that the NSA was assembling a database containing information on everyone who uses a phone, but since the number of Americans whose information is seen by a human analyst is less than “millions”, he could say no.

A small-scale analogy: Imagine that your neighbor raids your mailbox every day before you get home from work, steams the letters open, photocopies them, files the copies, and then reseals the envelopes and returns them to your box before you notice. In NSA terms, as long as he is just filing the copies and never reads them, he’s not collecting your mail.

Content. In the NSA’s public statements, only the body of an email or phone call is considered content. Anything in the header of an email — including the subject line — is metadata and not content. Likewise, the fact that you called so-and-so at a certain time from a certain place and talked for so many minutes is not content, even if what you said is easily deducible from that information. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer quotes the following example from Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau:

You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.

The Guardian has a good summary of what metadata means in the context of email, phone calls, web browsing, Google searches, photographs, and posts to Facebook or Twitter.

The EFF points out that content is defined much more broadly in the FISA law itself:

any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication

If the NSA used the law’s definition, it could not deny that it’s accessing the content of your communications.

Conversation and communication. Similarly, the NSA makes a distinction between communications and conversations. Your conversation is in the content of your phone call, while the communication includes the metadata. So in 2006 Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden was able to say:

the activities whose existence the president confirmed several weeks ago … is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about. This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda.

In reality, Hayden did have a driftnet gathering up metadata to feed into data-mining tools, as he later acknowledged. He just wasn’t feeding in conversations.

Specificity. Director Hayden’s statement is an example of another kind of trickery, which I made a little more obvious by the way I edited his quote: Denials are almost always about specific programs, not about the totality of the NSA’s activities.

The typical scenario goes like this: Questions will be raised about PRISM or XKeyscore or some other NSA program, and the official response seems to deny that the NSA is doing a certain kind of thing. But if you read the response carefully, all it really says is that the NSA isn’t doing that thing under that program.

Take another look at what Hayden said. If some other NSA program actually were scanning the content of conversations for keywords, he would not have lied.

Target. In an interview with Charlie Rose in June (beginning at about the 26-minutes-to-go mark), President Obama said:

President Obama: What I can say unequivocally is that, if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA. cannot target your e-mails.

Charlie Rose: And have not?

Obama: And have not.

The law does not allow the NSA to “target” an American’s phone calls and emails. But the ACLU explains how your privacy can be violated without “targeting” you.

if an American is communicating (however innocently) with a foreign “target” under the [FISA Amendments Act of 2008], the law allows the government to collect, inspect, and keep the content of that communication. … The target need not be a suspected terrorist or even suspected of any kind of wrongdoing. … While official defenses have flatly stated that targets under the FAA must be both foreign and abroad, the statute only requires that the government “reasonably believe” those things to be true.

The Washington Post elaborates:

Analysts who use the [PRISM] system from a Web portal at Fort Meade, Md., key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. …

Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially.

In July, AP reported that the system sucks in data about a vast number of non-targeted people.

For the first time, NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis disclosed that the agency sometimes conducts what is known as three-hop analysis. That means the government can look at the phone data of a suspected terrorist, plus the data of all of the contacts, then all of those people’s contacts, and all of those people’s contacts.

If the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Or, as Ben Brooks summarizes: “Two hops is a lot of people, three hops is basically anyone.” The ACLU concludes:

these exceptions and loopholes open the door to the routine interception of American communications. And this doesn’t just result from the odd mistake; this is what the law was designed to do. … Domestic communications can be retained forever if they contain “foreign intelligence information” or evidence of a crime, or if they are encrypted or aid “traffic analysis.” That’s a lot of exceptions. And even communications that do not meet any of these criteria can be stored in the NSA’s massive databases for as long as five years.

Once your information has been pulled out of the general database by such a search, it enters “the corporate store“, a database which NSA analysts can access without further court orders — even though you were never “targeted”.

Who does this fool? Notice that the exchange between Director Clapper and Senator Wyden wasn’t on some Sunday talk show; it was in a Senate committee hearing. We also have writings from FISC judges who complain about being misled by the NSA. And that leads to Part II of the Summer of Snowden series (which might appear next week if space allows): Why constitutional checks and balances aren’t working.

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Congress is listening: What should you say?

September 9, 2013 – 10:22 am

I was for Obama, against the Iraq War, and I wish Clinton had stopped the Rwanda genocide. What should I tell my undecided representative in Congress?

When President Obama asked for Congress to authorize a strike against Syria, he created a chance for your voice to be heard.

I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that’s why I’ve made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.

It’s just a chance, mind you. Congress often does unpopular things when powerful interests are involved or inside-the-beltway opinion-makers decide that the People don’t really understand the situation. And while the President asked for congressional authorization, he also said that he didn’t need it and he didn’t promise not to act without it. So it’s entirely possible that the attack will go forward whether the American public approves or not.

Still, you have opportunity to be heard. Lots of senators and representatives in both parties are still reported to be undecided, and I believe a number of them honestly don’t know what to do. The White House and the leadership of both parties in Congress want some form of an authorization to pass, so there will be a lot of pressure coming from that direction. If representatives don’t feel countervailing pressure from their constituents, the path of least resistance will be to go along.

So you should definitely contact your representative and senators this week, before they vote. But what should you say?

Pro-Obama but (mostly) anti-war. Syria has been a difficult question for me, and it seems to be difficult for many of my friends, both the face-to-face and Facebook varieties. As this blog’s regular readers undoubtedly know, I generally (though not always) support President Obama. I voted for him twice, I believe in his overall good intentions, and I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I also am not a pacifist. I supported President Clinton’s bombing campaign in Kosovo, and I regret that the United States did not try to stop the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. And though I was ambivalent about getting involved in the First Gulf War, when I saw how it played out I gave the first President Bush credit for engineering a broad international effort that achieved a decisive victory.

But I also grew up watching the Vietnam War unfold on television, and was glad that the draft ended before I had to decide what to do. While I initially supported the Afghan War (as part of the broad national consensus that we had to chase down the 9-11 planners no matter what government stood in our way), I soon became disillusioned with it. And I opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, because the second Bush administration’s multiple, conflicting justifications just didn’t add up. I supported anti-war candidates like Howard Dean in 2004 and (I thought) Barack Obama in 2008.

So now I have to think about Syria.

Make it stop. In some ways, Syria resembles Rwanda or Darfur: Civilians are being killed by the thousands — more than 4,000 in August, according to PBS. The UN estimates that more than 2 million people have left the country, and another 4.5 million are displaced inside Syria. In a country with a prewar population around 22 million, that means that more than 1/4 of the country has been displaced.

So it’s hard to argue with that voice in your head that says: “Make it stop.” But how?

The August 21 attack. The trigger for the current crisis was the chemical weapons attack on August 21, which the US government has estimated to have killed 1,429 people, mostly civilians, including 429 children. The Assad regime had been accused of using chemical weapons before, prompting President Obama to make his “red line” comment. (Assad’s ally Russia has put out a report claiming that the Aleppo chemical attack in March happened, but anti-Assad rebels were responsible. France, Britain, and the US have accused Assad.) But the evidence for the August 21 attacks near Damascus is clearer.

Multiple independent accounts make it fairly certain that somebody used chemical weapons near Damascus on August 21. You can argue how certain it is that Assad is responsible.  The most persuasive case I’ve heard that he wasn’t behind the August 21 attack comes from the octogenarian foreign policy analyst William Polk. Polk’s argument is basically that (because he was already winning the civil war) Assad had little to gain and a lot to lose by launching a chemical attack that would further destabilize Syria and give the United States a reason to intervene. Conversely, the rebels had reason to want to shake things up.

The German newspaper Bild Am Sonntag quotes German intelligence sources as saying that Assad’s forces launched the chemical attacks without his authorization, which seems a little far-fetched, particularly if you believe the Aleppo attacks happened. Assad also seems to be in no hurry to bring his war-criminal underlings to justice.

A variety of conspiracy theories blame third parties for the attacks: Obama did it, the Israelis did it, and so on. (I haven’t found a space-alien theory yet, but why not? It sounds like exactly the kind of thing the Founders from the Gamma Quadrant would do to foment internal discord among the humans.) I have a high evidence threshold for such theories, so I’m ignoring them until I hear something a lot more substantial than what’s come out so far.

Maybe this is my general give-Obama-the-benefit-of-the-doubt assumption talking, but I find the argument the US government is making more convincing: Simultaneous attacks on multiple locations implies a level of coordination the rebels don’t have. The locations correspond to places the regime was shelling anyway. Satellite images show rocket launches from regime-controlled areas. And:

We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence. On the afternoon of August 21, we have intelligence that Syrian chemical weapons personnel were directed to cease operations.

Now, you and I can’t check the satellite imagery and the communication intercepts; all we have is the word of people like John Kerry. Presumably the classified briefing given to Congress had more details. According to the Washington Post, after hearing the briefing

Lawmakers from both parties said there was widespread agreement with the evidence that Bashar al-Assad’s regime carried out the chemical attacks

(That includes Ron Wyden, a Democrat who is skeptical of administration claims on other intelligence-related issues.) I interpret this to mean that if you doubt Assad is responsible, you have to believe that the Obama administration is fabricating evidence out of whole cloth. After the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, that kind of villainy in high places is not unthinkable. But I just don’t believe Obama is that dishonest, and I don’t see his motivation for trumping up an unnecessary war. (I know about the Iran pipeline theory, but I’m not persuaded.)

So I’m assuming the Assad regime used chemical weapons on August 21 near Damascus, and quite likely in March and April near Aleppo. I don’t see why we can’t or shouldn’t wait for the UN inspectors to confirm that conclusion — former UN inspector Hans Blix made this point to Rachel Maddow — but I expect that they will confirm it.

Why attack? The next step in the administration’s case is that we have a responsibility to enforce the international norms against chemical weapons use. Secretary of State Kerry put it like this: Our response

matters because a lot of other countries, whose polices challenges these international norms, are watching. … They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk.

This is where they lose me, in the steps from “Assad has done something evil.” to “Somebody should do something about it.” to “The United States should launch an attack.”

Inconsistent motives. The problem is that we’re juggling two very different motives: The humanitarian desire to make it stop (where the chemical attacks are only one slice of “it”) and the desire to punish Assad for using chemical weapons, in the belief that his punishment will deter governments in general from using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in the future.

Punishment produces the vision of a surgical strike: We’ll launch a wave of cruise missiles that destroy a bunch of stuff Assad values, convincing him that future chemical attacks will cost him more than he’ll gain. The whole thing will last a couple of days and then we can stand aside again. But make-it-stop requires a much more involved commitment: We need to hit Assad hard enough (with the threat of more later) to convince him he can’t win militarily, then broker a peace settlement and maybe provide peacekeeping troops to enforce it. (That’s the Kosovo scenario.)

Make-it-stop pushes us to act quickly: People are dying every day. That’s why we can’t wait for a laborious (and possibly broken) UN process to assess Assad’s responsibility and do something about it. But the punishment scenario is much less time-sensitive. If Assad winds up deposed and facing the World Court in five or ten years, the point will be made.

I’m worried that the combination of motives will get us in trouble: We’ll move quickly and imagine we can disengage quickly, only to discover we haven’t really accomplished either objective. Then what?

The Emperor of the World. The punishment motive also has two roots: Are we punishing Assad for violating international norms against chemical weapons, or for doing something the President of the United States told him not to do.

Much of the inside-the-Beltway talk revolves around the second root: President Obama drew a red line, and now he has to back it up. We have to prove that we mean what we say. Otherwise the United States will lose face in the world, with dire consequences like Iran going forward with a nuclear weapons program.

This is imperial thinking, and I believe it’s dangerously misguided. It frames the President as the Emperor of the World, empowered to decide who is allowed to fight whom and which countries can be granted which kinds of weapons. If we think this way, we will always be fighting a war somewhere, until ultimately our economy breaks under the strain.

I totally understand the temptation to fantasize about ruling the world and making everyone behave. Without that fantasy, the future is filled with fears I have no answer for, what-if-Iran-gets-the-bomb being only the beginning. But it is a fantasy and we need to plan for the real world, where not even the United States has the power to make everyone behave. It is simply insane to be debating whether we can afford Food Stamps or Social Security while at the same time imagining that we have the resources to rule the world.

Another example of imperial thinking: We always imagine that our opponents will submit to whatever moves we make rather than respond with moves of their own. We imagine that the battlefield will be the one we define, and the enemy won’t step outside it. What if we’re wrong about that? What if Assad or Iran or Hezbollah decides to expand the battlefield with assassinations or subway bombings or hostage-taking or something else we’re not discussing? If you’re prepared to take the first step, are you prepared to take more steps if that’s not the end of it?

The international process. I spent a little time this week looking into the international-law aspect of chemical weapons, and it turns out to be iffier than you might think. (Ezra Klein does an excellent summary.) The Geneva Protocol of 1925 (which Syria signed) does ban chemical weapons for “use in war”. At the time, everybody was thinking about World War I, so whether it was intended to ban governments from gassing their own people is still a dubious point. (Is Assad “at war” in the Geneva-1925 sense?) The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 is more sweeping, but Syria never signed it.

Still, let’s assume that taken together, these and other international agreements establish a global consensus against chemical-weapon attacks. How should that be enforced?

The CWC creates the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to monitor the agreement and delegates enforcement to the UN. Article XII says:

The Conference shall, in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.

Rajon Menon at The National Interest summarizes the weakness of Obama’s international-law case:

The president has also stated that it’s essential to ensure that the bans on chemical weapons are respected. Yet the 1925 Geneva Protocol contains no provisions for unilateral enforcement by states, let alone via military force. The same goes for the Chemical Weapons Convention (which Syria has not signed). It calls for “collective measures…in conformity with international law” to address serious breaches. There’s no basis for the United States to don the mantle of self-styled enforcer.

And the legal case for unilateral action is further weakened by the lack of a self-defense rationale under the terms of the UN Charter: Assad has not used chemical (or any other) weapons against the United States.

Our case would also be stronger if we supported international law across the board, rather than only when it suits us.

Everyone is assuming Russia will veto any action against Assad in the UN Security Council. But we don’t actually know that, and if it happens, we could still appeal to the General Assembly. (Both steps depend on the UN inspectors agreeing with our assessment that Assad used chemical weapons, or at least not contradicting it.) If that failed, we could still assemble a coalition of nations outside the UN. Assembling that coalition will be easier if the UN process is demonstrably broken, rather than if we just assume it won’t work and don’t try it.

The Iraq lesson. We always have these discussions in analogies. Is this Iraq or Kosovo or Vietnam or World War II? (BTW: I think it’s time to retire the Munich analogy. Assad is not going to conquer France if we fail to stop him now.)

Obviously, Syria is its own unique situation. So if we bring up another country from another time, we need to be specific about what lesson we’re trying to apply.

Here’s the lesson I bring forward from the decision to invade Iraq: It’s important to pin down one clear reason to act, with one clear goal for the action.

In the 2002-2003 Iraq debate, the Bush administration had at least half a dozen reasons to invade: Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, Saddam was evil to his own people, Iraq was a threat to Israel, we could make Iraq a beacon of democracy for the Muslim world, Saddam was responsible for 9-11, Saddam might give WMDs to al Qaeda, and on and on and on. None of them exactly held water, but if you challenged one, administration spokespeople would shift to another rather than answer your objections. So arguments with well-informed critics tended to go round and round rather than reach any clear conclusion.

The result of that muddle was that we invaded with no clear goal, so we could never declare victory and get out. We couldn’t get out quickly after toppling the regime, or later when we captured Saddam, or later when our inspectors determined there were no WMDs.

We’re out now. Do you feel victorious?

And so in Syria: Are we attacking to end the suffering of the Syrian people? To topple Assad? To punish a violation of international norms? To prove to Iran that we mean what we say?

You can’t say “all of the above” because there is no plan that accomplishes all those things. The only reason the administration is hinting in all those directions is that no single reason persuades enough people.

That’s dangerous. It invites mission creep, where we decide we’re doing a quick-and-easy strike to punish Assad, and then go further rather than explain why the strike didn’t accomplish all the objectives people had in mind when they supported it.

The objectives one-by-one. Make-it-stop is the motive I most sympathize with, but also the one that calls for the most open-ended commitment with the least chance of success. I like the goal, but I’m not willing to pay the price.

Punish-Assad-for-using-chemical-weapons is the low-cost scenario, but we need to be open about the limitations of the goal. We’ll hit Assad, stop, the killing will go on, and eventually Assad will probably win the war anyway. The public needs to understand that from the outset. So far, the administration has been hiding that limitation rather than explaining it clearly. I can’t support them until they discuss this more honestly, because otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for the mission to creep towards make-it-stop.

By itself, the anti-chemical-weapons motive is not time sensitive, and I think we’ll succeed better by playing a long game that goes through the UN process. Whether that process succeeds or fails, we’ll build a larger coalition that will be a more persuasive deterrent going forward.

Punish-Assad-for-defying-the-World-Emperor is part of a long-term delusion that will eventually crash the United States if we don’t root it out. We have to reject this thinking wherever it appears.

What I am telling Rep. Annie Kuster (NH-02), and what I hope you’ll tell your representative. The primary lesson of Iraq is that an intervention needs two things:

  • a single clear justification that gives us a single clear goal
  • a plan that leads to that goal at a price we are willing to pay

So far, President Obama has not identified that justification/goal/plan/price. Until he does, Congress should not authorize an intervention in Syria.

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