Author: Andrew Sullivan

Oklahoma and Utah grab a beer. “We’re not gay, right?” “Nah, man. We’re as straight as they come.” “Did our knees touch? Never mind.”

— Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) January 15, 2014

Lyle Denniston unpacks yesterday’s news out of Oklahoma:

In ruling against the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, the judge declared that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of legal equality.  He ruled that the Supreme Court’s ruling last Term in United States v. Windsor actually provided some support both for the challenging couple and for state officials defending the state ban.

The Windsor decision, the judge said, supports a plea for marriage equality because much of the reasoning of the Court majority about the purpose behind DOMA could also be applied to state bans on same-sex marriage.  It supports the state, the judge added, because of the lengthy commentary in the opinion about states’ primary power to define marriage.

In the end, however, the judge decided that Oklahoma’s ban was based on intentional discrimination, with a “stark” negative impact on gay and lesbian couples.  “This is not a case where the law has a small or incidental effect on the defined class; it is a total exclusion of only one group.”

Allahpundit chimes in:

If they want to discriminate against gay couples, they need to show some rational reason for doing so.

“Moral disapproval” isn’t a rational reason per the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark case from 2003 that declared Texas’s anti-sodomy law unconstitutional. The upshot of Lawrence is that you can’t legislate morality when you’re targeting intimate relationships between consenting adults. You can regulate those relationships if you have some other rational reason for doing so, but the state couldn’t produce one here: “Encouraging procreation” doesn’t fly if you’re not also excluding straight infertile couples from marriage and “encouraging mother/father households” doesn’t fly if you can’t show how banning gay marriage would actually encourage the formation of those households. As I say, all of this is S.O.P. for federal SSM jurisprudence lately. The only real novelty is that, between this ruling and the ruling in Utah last month, the new legal battlefield over gay marriage lies in America’s reddest states. That may be an extra inducement for SCOTUS to deal with this sooner rather than later.

Jeremy Lott hopes GOP presidential hopefuls will face reality:

Any Republican seeking nomination for the 2016 presidential election should at a minimum be willing to admit Iraq was a mistake.  It was an error that cost us upwards of $1.5 trillion, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, while seriously hindering our efforts to track down the real culprits of September 11. (The war, incidentally, helped pave the way for a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House and a Barack Obama-controlled White House, as well.)

Larison sees this as improbable:

There are some obstacles to what Lott proposes. Chief among them is the difficulty that many hawks in the party still truly don’t accept that the Iraq war was a mistake. Despite the fact that by virtually any measurable standard the Iraq war was a senseless waste of lives and resources, they don’t consider this to be the truth, so they won’t greet it with relief. At best, many hawks will agree that the there were flaws in the execution, but they remain convinced that the original idea was sound.

Readers know how terrible a mistake this was and is, in my judgment. Listening to what passes for “debate” about the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq – which never ended, and was never resolved by the surge, and is the core reason why Iraq as a country remains a democratic impossibility – has been a sobering moment. Men like John McCain have obviously not internalized for a millisecond the awful error they made. Their response has been either utter denialism or silence – which was roughly their position throughout the entire, horrifying experience.

And that helps explain a little the total bafflement of these old warriors at the possibility of a rapprochement with Iran. Because they haven’t yet absorbed the uselessness of military force to advance our interests in the region – indeed, its capacity to make our position measurably worse – they still see warfare as the natural response to a country now so crushed by sanctions it has allowed a relative moderate to take control. They cannot even see that the only real option to advance some kind of peace in Iraq is through Tehran, a natural ally against Sunni extremists in that “country”. And they cannot see that further polarization between the Muslim world (especially its most pro-American population in Iran) and the West does nothing but hurt us, and our standing in the world at large.

Meanwhile, Crowley wonders whether Clinton’s support of the Iraq War will become an issue in 2016:

If Clinton runs for president in 2016, she’s likely to emphasize the more dovish aspects of her record—including her public diplomacy to repair America’s international image, her focus on building ties in Asia, and her attention to women’s rights and development issues.

But at a time when fewer Americans support an active U.S. role in foreign affairs, Clinton’s comfort with the harder side of American power could be a vulnerability. A liberal primary challenger might well reprise Barack Obama’s 2007 line that Hillary’s record amounts to “Bush-Cheney lite.” One potential contender, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, has already been zinging her over her 2002 Iraq vote. “When George Bush got a bunch of [Democrats] to vote for that war, I was just shaking my head in Montana,” he said recently. Whether such attacks will hold even a fraction of the valence they did at the Iraq war’s peak remains to be seen.

Friedersdorf adds:

There is next to no chance I’d vote for a Republican who thought the Iraq War was prudent, or showed an eagerness for more military interventions. But neither is it enough for a Democratic candidate to claim that the problem with the Iraq was the way that the Bush Administration executed it. Habitual hawks like Clinton have to clear a particularly high hurdle. And no one should be elected president without showing, beyond any doubt, that they understand why the war was a mistake and how to avoid like mistakes in the future.

I’m with Conor on this one, unreservedly. Clinton gets no pass. I want to know how she understands her own responsibility for the fiasco. And how she accounts for it.

A New America Foundation study calls into question the government’s claims about the NSA’s metadata dragnet:

Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group. Furthermore, our examination of the role of the database of U.S. citizens’ telephone metadata in the single plot the government uses to justify the importance of the program – that of Basaaly Moalin, a San Diego cabdriver who in 2007 and 2008 provided $8,500 to al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia – calls into question the necessity of the Section 215 bulk collection program.

According to the government, the database of American phone metadata allows intelligence authorities to quickly circumvent the traditional burden of proof associated with criminal warrants, thus allowing them to “connect the dots” faster and prevent future 9/11-scale attacks. Yet in the Moalin case, after using the NSA’s phone database to link a number in Somalia to Moalin, the FBI waited two months to begin an investigation and wiretap his phone. Although it’s unclear why there was a delay between the NSA tip and the FBI wiretapping, court documents show there was a two-month period in which the FBI was not monitoring Moalin’s calls, despite official statements that the bureau had Moalin’s phone number and had identified him. This undercuts the government’s theory that the database of Americans’ telephone metadata is necessary to expedite the investigative process, since it clearly didn’t expedite the process in the single case the government uses to extol its virtues.

Meghan Neal is unsurprised:

This is hardly the first time experts have searched for a link between bulk metadata collection and foiled terrorist plots and come up empty-handed. So far, the only real value in collecting and monitoring billions of US phone records has been to provide extra support in investigations already underway by the FBI or another agency, or to verify that a rumored threat isn’t real (the “peace of mind” metric), the report found. But that hasn’t stopped NSA officials and the Obama administration from drumming up a connection between terrorist attacks and surveillance to defend the agency’s snooping.

Morrissey examines the pie chart seen above and asks if the program is worth it:

What has been the most effective method? Of those explicitly stated, it’s “if you see something, say something.” Community and family tips accounted for 17.8% of the origins of investigations, followed closely by 16% started by other informants. However, 27.6% are categorized as “unclear” — the largest single category, which makes the analysis much less reliable,  and might raise questions about how the NSA got those FISA warrants. Still, there were four cases unearthed through Section 215 (and possibly more in the “unclear” category). Is that enough to justify the program as a necessary evil to prevent worse evil from prevailing?

Zack Beauchamp thinks not:

NSA metadata collection isn’t totally useless; it’s just not very useful. When you start to look at the specific cases that metadata surveillance played a key role in, the picture gets grimmer for the NSA. The New America researchers found that metadata searches never led to an arrest that actually prevented a terrorist attack. Take, for instance, the arrest of Basaaly Moalin — the only case, according to NSA Director Keith Alexander’s sworn testimony, metadata surveillance may have sparked an investigation that stopped “terrorist activity.” All the government found on Moalin was $8,500 donated to Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab; “the case involved no attack plot anywhere in the world,” according to New America’s review. In almost all of the cases profiled by New America, metadata surveillance played a supporting role, unnecessarily displaced traditional investigative methods, or failed to uncover a serious plot.

Digby reminds us that for all it doesn’t do, this data program costs an awful lot of money:

And keep in mind this whole thing is happening in the context of an ongoing, long term austerity push that has us cutting off the long term unemployed and ending food stamp benefits. That Utah data farm alone cost 1.2 billion and is reportedly going to cost at least a couple billion more before it’s online. There was a moment in the early days of the NSA story in which we discussed the incredible boondoggle all this really was but it passed as the revelations unfolded. It’s good that the congress has decided to shine a light on that again, however briefly, in this budget process. After all, we have real people suffering in a stuck economy without enough jobs. We have a growing poverty rate. Our bridges and schools are crumbling. And yet the money for the military, police and all these attendant “intelligence” agencies has been kept secret until now. It’s only right that the people should at least know what the numbers really are.