Category: The Dish

Can Obama Seal The Iran Deal Without Congress?

Earlier this week, David Sanger reported that the administration is looking at ways to avoid a Congressional vote on a nuclear agreement with Iran, including ways to suspend sanctions via executive fiat. Jack Goldsmith takes issue with that approach, arguing that it would make any eventual deal very tenuous:

The fact that the President does not think he can get Congress on board for any deal with Iran signals to Iran that any deal would be with the President alone, and would last only as long as his waiver authority – i.e. two more years.  The deal could last longer, as it did with the last major unilateral presidential deal with Iran, the 1981 Algiers Accords that effectuated the release of the hostages.  In the transition between the Carter and Reagan administrations in January 1981 some in Congress and the press questioned whether President Reagan should honor the deal that Carter struck with Iran through Algerian intermediaries.  President Reagan did honor it, of course, and the courts upheld his and Carter’s actions.  But the situation with Iran today is different than 1981. …

The bottom line, then, is that any deal struck by President Obama with Iran will probably appear to the Iranians to be, at best, short-term and tenuous.  And so we can probably expect, at best, only a short-term and tenuous commitment from Iran in return.

William Tobey is on the same page:

For good or for ill, he will own any agreement completely.  If a deal is reached, 35 years of American foreign policy designed to isolate Iran, will inevitably be reversed, with no enabling legislation by Congress and no supporting consensus required or expected in the foreign policy community.  While the American president has broad Constitutional discretion to make foreign policy, the most effective and enduring decisions have enjoyed bi-partisan support. American politics can be unpredictable, but we know that in 27 months Barack Obama will no longer be president.  His successor will then be responsible for implementing any agreement with Iran.  Unbound by treaty, or even any implementing legislation, his or her discretion will be nearly absolute. This is a fragile foundation for an enduring agreement.

Paul Pillar, on the other hand, argues that “for anyone who realizes the advantages of having a deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program versus not having a deal, the less Congressional involvement right now the better”:

The agreement would impose no new costs on the nation; in fact, it would involve reducing the cost that sanctions inflict on the United States. It does not create, as warfare does, any new exceptions to normal peacetime relations with other states; instead, it would be a move toward restoring normality. It does not, as do some other matters that are appropriately codified in treaties subject to Senate confirmation, impose any new legal obligations on U.S. persons; instead it is a step toward reducing the costly and cumbersome restrictions on U.S. business that the sanctions involve. It does not mark a departure in national goals and objectives, because it is an almost unanimously shared objective that Iran not acquire a nuclear weapon. The issue instead is what is the best way of executing policy to achieve that objective; that is part of what the executive branch is supposed to do.

Drezner’s contribution to the conversation:

Iran appears to recognize that it won’t be able to get all of the sanctions lifted in this round of negotiations. This means that there’s less bypassing of Congress anyway.

More importantly, it seems increasingly clear that the negotiation process itself is less than half the game when it comes to this particular interaction. Any deal between Iran and the United States will also require a long, drawn-out process of trust-building on both sides. Even if it appears thatIran is complying with the interim nuclear deal, members of Congress will need to be persuaded that this represents a genuine shift in Iranian policy. So it’s premature for Congress to permanently revoke sanctions anyway. My hunch is that it would take a less hawkish Prime Minister of Israel years of observed and verified Iranian compliance before Congress could be persuaded to authorize a permanent lifting of sanctions.

The State Of The Race In South Dakota

Earlier this week a reader from Texas gave us a great rundown of midterms down there. A reader in South Dakota follows suit:

Six months ago, I would tell anybody who would listen that there was zero chance that the Senate seat held by Democrat Tim Johnson was going to go to another Democrat.  Former Governor Mike Rounds, a Republican, would win by a land slide.  I used to laugh when I would see SD even put in any category but a surefire GOP win.

Now, I am not so sure.  There is a big scandal here in SD that has the potential of dragging Mike Rounds down.

I don’t think it means that the Democrat candidate, Weiland, is going to win.  I do, however, think that there is a 50-50 chance that Larry Pressler, the former Republican running as an Independent could win.   And, it is not entirely certain that Pressler would caucus with the Republicans.

The scandal is something that I would put in a category of “you just can’t make this stuff up”. It involves a program under Rounds called EB-5, where foreigners essentially can “buy” green cards for $500,000 as part of an economic development project. The program was administered by a person called Joop Bollen, who under Rounds went from administering this program as part of a business institute at a university to a corporation he formed and that he made millions from. He did that in concert with Richard Benda, former Secretary of Tourism and Economic Development under Rounds. Benda has since committed suicide in circumstances that seem very odd (shotgun propped up by a tree with a stick used to pull the trigger).

The problem for Rounds is that he continues to change his story. He continues to refuse to just own the program. The big project at the heart of the current scandal is a beef-packing plant that was a centerpiece of his economic development ideas for the state.

There are many crazy things about this whole program and the actions of Joop Bollen, and the spin that has back-fired on Rounds.  See the liberal blog, Madville Times, for more coverage. For a just-the-facts, no-spin take, there’s this article from the Argus Leader.

I am bringing this up because my parents are staunch Republican voters. They voted for Rounds in the primary. But they are voting for Pressler. The reason? Rounds is not trustworthy to them. They just don’t believe him. At a minimum, it reflects serious issues with his governance if he knew nothing – and that just doesn’t pass the smell test. As I understand it, all the negative attack ads paid for by outside groups are just negative on Rounds without endorsing any other candidate – and some suspect that may be intentional by the national Democrats.

Pressler doesn’t have a ground game and doesn’t have much of a campaign.  But he does have name recognition as being a former Republican Senator. And so people who are troubled by this scandal have an option. The Democrats would vote for Weiland anyway. Since the Democrats don’t have any significant state office and barely have any seats in the legislature, the real challenge for Rounds are the disaffected Republicans who are disgusted with this scandal and want an alternative.

It’s not a shoe-in for Pressler by any means. But I would put this seat as a race between Rounds and an Independent.

Previous Dish on the South Dakota race here.

Dissents Of The Day

A reader quotes me:

I still favor maximal religious liberty – even for a public accommodation like this one because requiring individuals to perform a marriage ceremony against their beliefs is just something we don’t do in a liberal society.

This business had two parts, based on the descriptions you provided.  The first part was in the performance of marriages by the owners, and I agree that the owners should not be forced to perform a marriage contrary to their beliefs.  But it sounds like their second business was in renting the space like you’d rent a ballroom at a hotel, with someone else performing the marriage. If they continue to rent the space to others, I don’t see why they should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws in who they rent to.

Another expands on that point:

I think the big legal issue here isn’t whether we should force ministers to perform gay weddings (I don’t think we should), but whether a for-profit business can use entirely pretextual changes to circumvent regulations.  The ADF is picking a situation engineered to elicit a favorable response to the question – gay marriage, local ordinance – but the implications are massive.  This is a shot strait at expanding corporate ability to exploit the Religious Freedom Restoration Act far beyond its intended purpose.  In its Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court made the point that the courts are not in the job of measuring the religious sincerity of litigants.  This case tests that proposition.  Do we want a world where any for-profit business can escape regulations it finds burdensome by filing a few documents with the Secretary of State and changing the mission statement on its website?  How long till a cottage industry of Corporate Religion Consultants starts advising every closely-held company on whether being Muslim or Mormon creates a better regulatory environment?

Another brings up the racial comparison:

As a country, we have been down this road before.

For example, many Christian bigots (including clergy) played a large role in sustaining the laws against interracial marriage, and fighting against the repeal of such laws.  Their racist views often were genuinely held religious beliefs, as is some of the bigotry directed against homosexuals today.  But we got it right back then.  No matter how racist a minister may be, whether religiously inspired or otherwise – he knows he can’t open a private “whites-only” wedding hall business.  The civic morality of that is clear, and homosexuals deserve no less.  And it seems like one day homosexuals will reach full civil equality too.

I know Libertarians, Tea Partiers and, probably, you, hate the analogy between racism in the public square to anti-homosexual prejudice in the public square.  I can’t help you there.  Like some in the 1950s, etc., you just got to work that shit out yourself.

Another has an interesting idea:

I’m curious how this would play out if business owners were allowed to discriminate, but only under the condition that they post a large “NO GAYS” sign on their front door. Then let the market decide. These business owners would be turning away a larger and larger portion of their potential business as same-sex marriage becomes more accepted in the general population.

For example, in North Carolina, it is legal to open-carry handguns (and concealed-carry once you take a class and pay for the permit). However, private businesses are allowed to refuse entry of persons with guns by simply posting a “NO GUNS” sign on their front door. Gun owners and those sympathetic to their cause have responded by refusing to do business at these locations. There’s even a smartphone app that can tell you what businesses are gun friendly.

Another adds:

Perhaps if we’re going to give maximum religious liberty to ministers when performing marriages, we also need to break the clergy monopoly on performing them. In Idaho, for example, one needs to be a current or retired judge, a current or former governor or lieutenant governor (because I’m sure they’re always free to do weddings), a tribal official, or a “priest or minister of the gospel of any denomination”. Judges work in courthouses, so unless you’re getting married at City Hall with a handful of witnesses, any formal wedding with friends and family is going to be done by a minister. Sure there are a bunch of mail-order seminaries for just this type of thing, but why can’t we let notaries or pretty much any other adult do this? Why no civil marriage officiants without a pretense of religion? Most other states aren’t much different, not even California.

Over at Patheos is one couple’s account of trying to get a nonreligious marriage:

The most disheartening part of our search was when we turned to the local mayors. In our area mayors perform many wedding ceremonies and seemed like a nice secular option. The mayors we contacted were uncomfortable performing a non-religious ceremony. The pre-planned ceremonies that they typically used all included religion. We finally found a mayor who was willing to work with us, albeit uncomfortably, but he bailed on us 3 days before the ceremony!

In a display of real compassion my mothers pastor saved the day. He agreed to let my friend perform the ceremony an afterwords to do a secular pronouncement and sign our marriage certificate. He did read 1 Corinthians 13:1-7; but this particular verse doesn’t mention god or faith so we felt it was pretty fair.

The Black Plague

https://twitter.com/InfectiousChris/statuses/524589007100186624

While Americans remain far safer from Ebola than you’d know from watching cable news, the epidemic still presents a real crisis in the three West African countries hardest hit, with the World Health Organization reporting almost 10,000 confirmed cases and at least 4,877 deaths, but probably a lot more:

The WHO has said real numbers of cases are believed to be much higher than reported: by a factor of 1.5 in Guinea, 2 in Sierra Leone and 2.5 in Liberia, while the death rate is thought to be about 70 percent of all cases. That would suggest a toll of almost 15,000. Liberia has been worst hit, with 4,665 recorded cases and 2,705 deaths, followed by Sierra Leone with 3,706 cases and 1,259 deaths. Guinea, where the outbreak originated, has had 1,540 cases and 904 deaths.

But how do the virus’s African origins affect the way we perceive it? For one thing, it leads to geographically ignorant nonsense such as this and, according to Lola Adesioye, it also inspires the media to stereotype the continent and its people:

[T]he media’s handling of the virus, its origins, and its propagation (which some in the media have suggested comes from people eating wildlife, even though this has not been scientifically proven) has reverted to an age-old reliance on lazy stereotypes, generalizations, and misleading information that once again disseminate a view of the African continent’s 1 billion people as wild-animal-eating, jungle-roaming, primitive, disease-carrying “others.”

Let’s take for example articles such as one that featured recently in the Washington Post, the headline of which was “Why West Africans keep hunting and eating bush meat despite Ebola concerns.” The reality is that not only do many West Africans not eat bush meat—defined as terrestrial mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians harvested for food—but that many Africans in general—whether from south, east, north or west—do not eat bush meat.

Philip Alcabes also ruminates on the role of race and “otherness” in the Ebola panic. In his conclusion, he laments “that the solipsism of self-protection makes it harder for us to see the crisis that Ebola really constitutes”:

The only reasonable path to prevent illness and death in America is to prevent further illness and death in western Africa. We can’t serve both our needs and those of the suffering countries when our only aim is to close our own borders, schools, or air lanes. And this self-referential panic, this intense attention by Americans to what is not a real threat to America and yet seems to embody so many of the unspoken fears that we harbor about ourselves—about race, our place in the world, health care, control, about what the sociologist Anthony Giddens called the unprecedented promise and unfathomable risks of “the double edge of modernity”—is going to make it impossible for us to devote our resources and our intellect to stopping the advance of Ebola.

A Warmer, More Violent Planet

Chris Mooney flags a new meta-study on “the existing research examining the relationship between climate change and violence and conflict”:

[F]or a degree Celsius of temperature increase (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), [Stanford researcher Marshall Burke] says there could be a 20 percent increase in civil conflict in Africa. The impact of warming varies by region, however; some places are more sensitive to small heat increases than others. In the United States, the estimate would be lower: For 1 degree Celsius of warming, he’d expect about a 1 percent increase in interpersonal conflicts, a category that includes crimes like assault and robbery but also road rage and fights at baseball games.

A Small Bit Of Justice For Iraqis

Four former Blackwater security contractors were found guilty yesterday in the infamous 2007 Nisour Square massacre, during which they shot 14 Iraqi civilians to death and injured 17 others:

In an overwhelming victory for prosecutors, a jury found Nicholas Slatten guilty of first-degree murder. The three other three guards — Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard — were found guilty of multiple counts of voluntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and gun charges. The four men had been charged with a combined 33 counts in the shootings and the jury was able to reach a verdict on all of them, with the exception of three charges against Heard. The prosecution agreed to drop those charges.

Max Boot approves, calling the verdict “a step forward in holding contractors accountable for their conduct on the battlefield, but only a small step”:

After all, it took seven years to conclude this case–not that it’s concluded now since the defendants are likely to appeal. That is hardly the definition of expeditious justice.

But it’s more than prosecutors have been able to accomplish in the past since only eight other individuals have been charged under statutes designed to hold contractors accountable for their battlefield conduct. There is an imperative to do better because as the U.S. military continues its unfortunate downsizing it will have to remain reliant in the future on contractors–but their actions can detract from mission objectives if they alienate locals in the process of delivering goods or dignitaries from Point A to Point B.

But in Jeremy Scahill’s opinion, it doesn’t deliver much justice, considering that Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince is unlikely to ever face consequences for his organization’s record of abuse:

Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries. Prince now has a new company, Frontier Services Group, which he founded with substantial investment from Chinese enterprises and which focuses on opportunities in Africa. Prince recently suggested that his forces at Blackwater could have confronted Ebola and ISIS. “If the administration cannot rally the political nerve or funding to send adequate active duty ground forces to answer the call, let the private sector finish the job,” he wrote.

Nicholas Slatten now faces a sentence of up to life in prison, while the other three are looking at decades behind bars. The families of their victims, however, prefer execution.

The Right’s Lingering Palin Problem

Screen Shot 2014-10-23 at 1.57.03 PM

I guess this was inevitable, if hilarious. After the Palin family got itself into a drunken brawl at someone else’s house, in which Bristol Palin is alleged to have punched the owner in the face multiple times – partly confirmed, by the way, by her own sister Willow (“She missed every fucking time!“) – a post simply pointing out the sheer vulgarity of the event is roundly criticized because it somehow diminishes the plight of Bristol who presents herself as purely a victim of the event.

Look: I abhor violence of all kind, especially against women, and have written that that was the furthest from my mind when selecting that colorful quote. But seriously: anyone reviewing the entire event who thinks that‘s what this was about is smoking something really good. To infer from the police report that the Palins were entirely the victims here is, well, bonkers, not least because it requires believing a single word any Palin family-member says. Track even gave a false name to the cops at first, the usual Palin reflex.

As for Charles Cooke’s point: “Why are we spilling so much ink on this topic at all?” allow me to point out that I’ve barely expended any. Two short posts and a paragraph in The Best of the Dish Today over nearly two months. But isn’t it obvious why there has been so much press? This is an amazingly lurid, tabloid story and it gains traction because it contrasts this trashy, violent Jerry Springer behavior with someone who actually ran for vice-president of the United States six years ago. Of course the press will cover this. It’s irresistible and further proof that what John McCain did in 2008 disqualified him from any serious, subsequent role in our public life. And that was my only point. If McCain were retired or had the good sense to leave public life after that fiasco, it would be another thing entirely. But he carries on, never publicly acknowledging the greatest fuck-up (of so many) in his public life.

Have I let Hunter Biden off the hook?

I haven’t commented on his testing positive for cocaine – but then, compared with the rest of the media, I’ve barely commented on the Palin brawl. I also tend to view public violence, with clear victims of said violence, in a different light than private, non-violent drug-use (whose excessive criminalization I oppose). And, sure, if the vice-president were right there in public with his son while Hunter was doing blow, complete with police record and audio (and possible video), there would be some kind of analogy to the Palins being in the middle of a fist-fight on someone else’s property. And if Hunter Biden had been on Dancing With The Stars and on reality TV and countless other money-grubbing celebrity stunts, instead of serving in the Navy Reserve, more attention might have been paid.

But still otherwise sane conservatives continue to attack those noting this absurd public figure not because they don’t know what a joke she is and what a joke she still makes of their party; of course they do. They do it to stoke culture war resentment (an easy partisan dodge around their own fantastic misjudgment), and to falsely play the feminist card. Sorry, but they lost that card when they nominated a woman candidate who couldn’t even finish one term of office as governor of Alaska, who knew next to nothing about the world, who told transparently tall tales about her own biography, and who had to be quarantined for much of her own campaign, for fear of her actual nutso persona being rumbled by a lazy media.

That’s my point. And they know it’s irrefutable. Maybe one day they’ll have the balls to apologize. And then we can all move on.

(Photo: a police photo of the scene of the brawl)

The Most Expensive Midterms Ever

The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) does the calculations:

Almost $4 billion will be spent for this year’s midterm election, the [CRP] is projecting. That figure makes this year’s election by far the most expensive midterm ever. The candidates and parties alone will combine to spend about $2.7 billion, while outside groups will likely spend close to $900 million on their own — a figure that veers close to the $1.3 billion spent by outside groups in 2012, when the hyper-expensive presidential race was fueling the fire. …

The 2010 midterm cost $3.6 billion; this one will run an estimated $333 million more than that. The congressional portion of the 2012 race cost about $3.6 billion as well.

Evan Osnos asks, “Will anything stop those sums from growing again in two years, and two years after that? “:

I live in Washington, so I am supposed to say no. A heat map of conversations in our nation’s capital this week would show that campaign-finance reform is generating about as much urgent attention as the disappearance of the honeybee. If the reflexive talking point in San Francisco is to bet on disruption, the conventional line in Washington is that the forces arrayed against change are the stronger ones.

And, yet, it’s hard not to sense that a combination of forces is making change, of some kind, unavoidable. At a moment when Americans are divided along party lines, they are united in their abject loathing of the United States Congress, which is on track this year to pass fewer laws than any Congress in history. In a Gallup poll, seven per cent of Americans reported having confidence in Congress, the lowest level that Gallup has ever recorded for any institution.

Michael Tomasky focuses on the dark money being pumped into the campaigns:

Here’s the situation. Outside spending—that is, the spending not by candidates’ own committees—may possibly surpass total candidate spending, at least in the competitive races, for the first time. And of that outside spending, an increasing amount is the category they call “dark” money, which is money whose sources and donors don’t have to be disclosed. I mean, don’t have to be disclosed. At all. That’s because these aren’t SuperPACs, which at least do have to disclose their donor lists, but are 501c4 “social welfare” (!) groups that don’t have to file anything with the Federal Elections Commission.

Cillizza isn’t holding his breath for change:

Money and politics always seem to find their way to one another — no matter what blockades are thrown in their paths.  It’s hard to imagine elections getting any less expensive any time soon. Or any broad swath of the public really caring.