Kevin Drum - May 2012

Friday Cat Blogging — 18 May 2012

| Fri May 18, 2012 2:58 PM EDT

So I know you guys are probably missing Inkblot and Domino, but fortunately I have a few cat pictures for you. At the moment I live in a house with four fat orange cats I affectionately refer to as a "herd of Garfields" for reasons that will become immediately obvious below.

Here's Burns and Pumpkin falling asleep in a sunbeam:


And here's Pumpkin again, dressed up in his Sunday best (slightly Instagrammed):


I hope you guys can be okay with these until Kevin gets back. See you next week.

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin is on vacation.

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Obama Love Letter Truthers

| Fri May 18, 2012 2:00 PM EDT

Slate's Dave Weigel checks in on Jack Cashill, the conservative writer who intiated the conspiracy theory that Bill Ayers actually wrote Barack Obama's autobiography, and finds Cashill in disbelief over mid-20s love letters Obama wrote to a girlfriend that were uncovered by David Maraniss:



So, Cashill's argument that Obama didn't write his book, or the letters, is that there's no way Obama is smarter than him. I wonder what makes him so certain about that?

My colleague Tim Murphy has more.

Reefer Madness in the Trayvon Case

| Fri May 18, 2012 12:01 PM EDT

Though the web headlines have been altered since, several news organizations (including Mother Jones) led their stories on Thursday's evidence dump in the Trayvon Martin shooting case with the revelation that Martin had small amounts of THC in his system.

This in itself is not all that surprising—Martin was suspended from school for possession of marijuana shortly before he was killed. The decision to lead with that information, however, suggests that it's somehow material to the guilt or innocence of George Zimmerman, and I'm puzzled as to why anyone would think that's the case. Here's National Review's Andrew McCarthy, who in response to a report from ABC seems to regard the news as fully exonerating Zimmerman:

The report neglects to mention that in the 911 tape, George Zimmerman reported to the police dispatcher that Martin seemed suspicious to him because it seemed Martin was "on drugs or something."

The report doesn't say Martin was high at the time, or how that would have justified the use of lethal force by Zimmerman, but McCarthy seems to believe the case is closed. McCarthy's reaction is indicative of the conversation surrounding the Martin killing, which has at times seemed less about the facts of the case and more about whether Martin was the type of scary black person Zimmerman would have been justified in fearing. There's a discomfiting parallel here with rape cases, where too often the facts are subsumed in a debate about whether the victim had it coming. 

That Martin's exposure to marjiuana should be central to this argument, however, seems particularly absurd. The last three presidents of the United States have all but admitted to smoking marijuana, with George W. Bush demurring on the basis that admitting he had done so might set a bad example for children. This is not a drug that turns people into the Incredible Hulk. 

Conservatives might respond that Zimmerman's personality is equally on trial, given that many liberals believe he racially profiled Martin prior to their confrontation. Zimmerman, however, is still alive to defend himself, both in a Florida court and in the court of public opinion. Martin is not.

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin is on vacation. 

House GOP Kills Proposal to Block Indefinite Detention of US Citizens

| Fri May 18, 2012 9:12 AM EDT
An anti-NDAA protest in Portland, Oregon, in January 2012.

At least it's on the record: Most House Republicans support the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens. 

During Thursday's floor debate over the latest national defense authorization act, the House GOP brought out their long knives for Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who, in their view, had collaborated on a nefarious plot to undermine national security. Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) accused the lawmakers of wanting to "coddle terrorists," while Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.) warned that under an amendment they'd introduced, "as soon as a member of Al Qaeda sets foot on US soil, they hear you have the right to remain silent." National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has never heard of a same-sex marriage supporting, pro-financial regulation liberal who wasn't secretly a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote that their proposal was the result of "libertarian extremists" teaming up with liberals with an "obsession" with giving "more rights" to "mass murderers."

What exactly was the diabolical scheme Smith and Amash had proposed, which would lead to a Normandy-like invasion of Al Qaeda terrorists armed with Muslim Heat Vision and bent on taking advantage of America's adversarial court system? It was an amendment to the defense bill that says anyone arrested on American soil on suspicion of terrorism would get a fair trial in a civilian court, where their guilt would have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Last year's defense bill provoked a backlash, because Congress failed to establish clearly whether or not the president can lock up an American citizen without ever having to charge them with a crime. (The bill's detention provisions were just blocked by an Obama-appointed judge, in part because a government attorney couldn't answer the judge's question about whether a journalist reporting on a terrorist group could be indefinitely detained without trial.)

This time around, the line is absolutely clear. Smith and Amash proposed that the government actually has to prove you're guilty of a crime before depriving you of your liberty, something that the founding fathers found significant enough to write into the Constitution. Their opponents want the government to have the power to lock up American citizens without ever convicting them of anything, just because it says someone is a terrorist. Their proposal went down by a vote of 182-231, with only a handful of Republicans joining Amash in support.

As Smith pointed out during yesterday's floor debate, the Fifth Amendment says no "person" shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law. It doesn't say "citizen," and the text of the Constitution uses both words enough that it's clear the framers understood the difference. "Your beef is with James Madison," Smith told Thornberry on Thursday. So keep in mind, when Republicans like Rooney say that Smith and Amash want to "coddle terrorists," they're not necessarily talking about some heavily armed Al Qaeda fighter in Kandahar. They're potentially talking about you.

It's worth noting that only twice have suspected terrorists captured on American soil been shunted into military detention, and both times the individuals in question were transferred back into the criminal justice system because of fears the Supreme Court would declare such powers unconstitutional. Since then, federal courts and civilian authorities have easily handled terrorists, citizen or otherwise, from "Underwear Bomber" Umar Abdulmutallab to Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. To underscore: the power to hold terror suspects captured in the US in military detention is of questionable constitutionality, has almost never been used, and confers no advantages either to incapacitating terrorists or gathering intelligence that civilian authorities don't already possess.

Republicans opposed to the Smith-Amash amendment proposed a hoax fix that "reaffirms" Americans' right to habeas corpus. Only the right to habeas was never in question, so their proposal doesn't actually do anything. It is a complete non-sequitur, a bad-faith attempt to prevent Smith and Amash from closing a gaping "terrorism exception" to Americans' due process rights. That amendment passed by almost the same overwhelming margin that the Smith-Amash amendment failed, by a vote of 243-173.

If nothing else however, it's illuminating to watch "small-government" Republicans—who have spent the last three years lamenting the loss of freedom caused by a higher marginal tax rate or the regulation of derivatives—defend the most arbitrary big government power imaginable. 

The End Of White America

| Thu May 17, 2012 5:00 PM EDT

Thursday's New York Times had news sure to provoke demographic panic in some of the more unsavory corners of American society: the Census Bureau announced that non-white babies now account for the majority of births in the US. Here's the Times writeup: 




I'm generally skeptical of stuff like this, because the definition of "white" has never been static. White ethnics—Irish, Italians, Jews—were long excluded from whiteness on the grounds that they were racially inferior, but they were integrated into a more inclusive redefinition of whiteness post-World War II. The same is likely to happen in the next generation—people that we don't consider to be white today might identify as such in the future.

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin is on vacation.

Would Mitt Romney Be the Most Right-Wing President Ever?

| Thu May 17, 2012 3:38 PM EDT

My former colleague Jamelle Bouie's cover story for the American Prospect suggests that if elected, Mitt Romney would be the most conservative president in recent memory:

These aren't idle expectations. If Romney wins the White House, it's a sure bet that Republicans will also win the Senate—Democrats are defending a disproportionately large number of seats this year—and maintain their majority in the House of Representatives. More important, Romney's agenda is almost entirely fiscal: cuts to taxes, cuts to entitlements, and cuts to domestic programs. All of this can be passed through budget reconciliation, which makes it immune to a filibuster. Republicans could force through their ideas without a single Democratic vote.

In terms of figuring out what you're actually voting for, it makes more sense to think about yourself as voting for a party rather than a candidate. That candidate will pursue the party's agenda within whatever objective structural constraints exist, meaning even if Barack Obama were the closet radical so many conservatives think he is, his policy agenda would still have been subject to the whims of Democratic centrists in the Senate.

If Mitt Romney wins, he'll likely be facing fewer of those constraints. The Democratic Party is a coalition of liberals and moderates. The Republican Party is currently dominated by conservatives. Obama had to tailor his policy preferences to appeal Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to beat Republican filibusters, but it's unlikely Democrats will be able to act with the same ideological discipline that Republicans have displayed over the past few years. 

Even so, Romney seems uniquely suited to fitting the "warm body" standard—that all Republicans need is a president ready to rubber-stamp whatever Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) comes up with—that Bouie refers to at the beginning of his piece. The best explanation I've seen for the two Romneys (The moderate Massachussetts governor and the conservative standard-bearer) comes from Reason's Peter Suderman, who compares Romney to a business consultant who views his task as "presenting the customer with a slicker, better packaged, but fundamentally unchanged version of itself." When the client was liberal Massachussetts, Romney was a moderate. As the leader of the post-Tea Party GOP, he will as conservative as his clients need him to be. 

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin is on vacation.

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| Thu May 17, 2012 1:10 PM EDT


Here's the super-PAC's statement:





Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin Drum is on vacation.

RIP Chuck Brown

| Thu May 17, 2012 11:21 AM EDT
Chuck Brown, the Godfather of Go-go.

Judging by my college experience, for folks outside of the DC area, Go-go music probably conjures images of mod dancers in high boots. Within DC, though, it refers to the city's predominant musical genre, pioneered by the incomparable Chuck Brown, known as the Godfather of Go-go, who died Wednesday. The Root's Natalie Hopkinson, who recently wrote a history of Go-go music, has a great retrospective on the social and cultural trends that birthed Go-go:



Despite the migration of DC residents south, either permanently or to historically black colleges and universities, Go-go never quite managed to make it beyond the DC metro area. Some artists tried—you can hear it's influence in a few nationally released tracks, like Jill Scott's "It's Love," Ludacris' "Pimpin' All Over the World," and of course Wale's "Pretty Girls," but it remains a DMV (DC-Maryland-Virginia) thing. There's really nothing on Earth like a go-go, and absent the immediacy of being there, hearing the music, and dancing to it maybe the genre's appeal just can't really be understood. I'll spare MoJo readers an account of my first time at a Go-go, but aside from his profound role in shaping the culture of the city, every semi-awkward dude in DC owes Brown a debt of gratitude for his contributions to a genre of music that tends to be less uh, labor-intensive for men.

Anyway, here's Chuck Brown's Bustin' Loose:

One of the great things about Go-go is bands doing covers of pop songs. This Rare Essence version of Ashlee Simpson's Pieces of Me is one of my favorites, just because it's weird.

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin Drum is on vacation.

Judge Blocks Enforcement of National Defense Authorization Act

| Thu May 17, 2012 8:59 AM EDT

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin Drum is on vacation.

On Wednesday, Obama-appointed(!) Judge Katherine B. Forrest blocked the section of last year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that purported to "reaffirm" the 2001 authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda. A group of activists and journalists had argued that the vague wording of the law could subject them to indefinite military detention because their work brings them into contact with people whom the US considers to be terrorists, and in doing so violated their First Amendment rights. 

Forrest agreed with the plaintiffs that the relevant section of the law was "not merely an 'affirmation'" of the 2001 authorization for use of military force (AUMF). "Basic principles of legislative interpretation," she wrote, "require Congressional enactments to be given independent meaning"—judges can't simply assume a law does nothing. None of this brings the war on terror to a halt, mind you, because Forrest says there are "a variety of other statutes which can be utilized to detain those engaged in various levels of support of terrorists," so her injunction "does not divest the Government of its many other tools."

Forrest's logic is pretty sound: After all, there would have been no point to "reaffirming" the AUMF if doing so didn't expand the government's powers. Hawks in Congress wanted a "reaffirmation" to ensure groups like Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which didn't exist on 9/11, were covered under the 2001 law. The NDAA states in the "reaffirmation" section that people eligible for detention are those who have "substantially" supported Al Qaeda or any of its associated groups. The plaintiffs argued that section represented an expansion of existing governmental authority that could result in their detention.

Judge Forrest's decision, however, has to be read in the context of what happened in court: When Forrest asked the government lawyer charged with defending the statute whether the journalists, who said their work has brought them into contact with groups like Hamas or the Taliban, could be indefinitely detained, the government's lawyer wouldn't say:

JUDGE: Assume you were just an American citizen and you're reading the statute and you wanted to make sure you do not run afoul of it because you are a diligent U.S. citizen wanting to stay on the right side of [the law], and you read the phrase 'directly supported'. What does that mean to you?


JUDGE: That’s fine. Tell me what that means?

GOVERNMENT: I cannot offer a specific example. I don't have a specific example.

When asked again whether one of the journalists' activities would qualify as "substantial" support for a terrorist group, the government attorney said, "I don't know what she has been up to."

Asked direct questions about what might subject someone who wasn't actively engaging in hostilities to indefinite military detention, the official representative of the government responded with creepy Orwellianisms.

Congress had ample warning that the vagueness of "substantially supported" might make the NDAA vulnerable in court. Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson told the House Armed Services Committee in March that the language related to "substantial support" of terrorist groups "would give us litigation risk, without a doubt."

And what do you know? It did.

Jeremiah Wright Is Not a Silver Bullet

| Thu May 17, 2012 8:54 AM EDT
Jeremiah Wright at the Press Club in 2008.








Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin Drum is on vacation.