2008 presidential candidates on executive power: an interactive, downloadable spreadsheet
The spreadsheet below organizes the responses of twelve presidential candidates* to twelve questions about their views on executive power, in light of President Bush's myriad abuses thereof. The questions were posed by the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage; the Boston Globe web site with the questions and all the answers is here ("Candidates on executive power: a full spectrum," Dec. 22).



I developed this so I could play around with grading the responses and see if I could find someone head and shoulders ahead or behind the rest of the pack. Rather than give the full answer to each question, I've excerpted the key part or summarized the answer; the full answer can be accessed via the candidate or question links. I graded on a fairly generous 0-4 scale, with answers I saw little or no problem with getting a 4, little problems getting a 3, and so on. I also gave -1's to "declined to answer" or the like. The last two questions (about who advises the candidates, and whether they think all candidates should answer) struck me as less informative for my purposes, so I gave them lower weights in my results. The weighted average scores -- 3.8 for Obama, 3.6 for Clinton in the image above -- are the overall score to look at.

The upshot: I see much to welcome about the three top Democratic candidates -- or at least expect of them -- and little to make me think one or the other is definitely best on this score. Edwards spoke in more of a campaign soundbite format, Obama tended to give long answers. I was mildly surprised that I thought Biden (also prone to some very long answers) did the best overall of the Democrats, but again, the differences were slight. While I'm an Edwards supporter, his answers were sometimes not fully responsive to the question or my concerns for the future; thus, I didn't reward him merely saying he didn't "envision" disregarding a congressional statute limiting troop deployments. I'm not sure what happened to Kucinich and Gravel, but they're missing from this survey, which seems a shame to me.

On the Republican side, I thought Ron Paul was far and away the best of the bunch, though he'd be merely in the middle of the Democratic pack given his answers to congressional limits on troop deployments, and making detainee habeas rights a matter of the specific war involved. McCain was, I thought, noticeably worse than any of the Democratic candidates -- yet he'd be a huge improvement on Bush. Romney, on the other hand, distinguished himself by giving one disturbing answer after the other, perhaps most notably his answer to Question 7:

If Congress defines a specific interrogation technique as prohibited under all circumstances, does the president's authority as commander in chief ever permit him to instruct his subordinates to employ that technique despite the statute?

ROMNEY: A President should decline ...to provide an opinion as to whether Congress may validly limit his power as to the use of a particular technique…

... but also Question 10:

Is there any executive power the Bush administration has claimed or exercised that you think is unconstitutional? Anything you think is simply a bad idea?

ROMNEY: The Bush Administration has kept the American people safe since 9/11. The Administration’s strong view on executive power may well have contributed to that fact.

So given a chance to put some daylight, any daylight at all between himself and Bush, Romney chose not to. Elect this man at your peril, America.

But Giuliani, Thompson, and Huckabee, by contrast, distinguished themselves by not answering at all -- something I can understand for one or the other question, but not for all of them. To me, the issue of overreaching executive power is one of the most fundamental and important issues of the past 7 years, and of this election; a candidate who refuses to inform the public about any of his positions doesn't deserve anyone's vote, and his voters are raising their hands that they'd like to live in a dictatorship.

But why take my word for it when you can download this spreadsheet and come to your own conclusions? I don't see the stuff above as my final answer, for that matter; I could be convinced I've got the scores wrong for one set of questions or another, or for one candidate versus another.

Anyway, have a look. For a more convenient look at the spreadsheet itself, go here. To download it to your computer in a useable, interactive Excel form, click here.



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* Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel either weren't asked or didn't respond in time -- judging by how they're not listed as "declined to state" for any of the questions.

UPDATE, 1/15: For other reactions to the questionnaire, see the estimable law professors Marty Lederman and Jack Balkin (”Balkinization”), as well as Andrew Sullivan, Arianna Huffington, Glenn Greenwald, and more. posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:04:00 PM -- |  

 
Philly Inquirer runs Rep. Wexler's impeachment op-ed
While the op-ed is titled "Impeach Cheney," what Representatives Robert Wexler (D-FL-19), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL-4) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI-2) are actually calling for is impeachment hearings in the Judiciary Committee:

Last month, the House of Representatives voted to send a resolution of impeachment of Vice President Cheney to the Judiciary Committee. As members of the House Judiciary Committee, we strongly believe these important hearings should begin.

In contrast to the Clinton impeachment, the representatives argue,

The charges against Cheney are not personal. They go to the core of the actions of this administration, and deserve consideration in a way the Clinton scandal never did. The American people understand this, and a majority supports hearings, according to a Nov. 13 poll by the American Research Group. In fact, 70 percent of voters say the vice president has abused his powers, and 43 percent say he should be removed from office right now. The American people understand the magnitude of what has been done and what is at stake if we fail to act. It is time for Congress to catch up.

(Link added.) As noted in my earlier post about Wexler et al, the representatives argue that the hearings need not and would not detract from the other business of the House -- and that these hearings would be the real, imperative business of the House:

Holding hearings would put the evidence on the table, and the evidence - not politics - should determine the outcome. Even if the hearings do not lead to removal from office, putting these grievous abuses on the record is important for the sake of history. For an administration that has consistently skirted the Constitution and asserted that it is above the law, it is imperative for Congress to make clear that we do not accept this dangerous precedent. Our Founding Fathers provided Congress the power of impeachment for just this reason, and we must now at least consider using it.

Because his op-ed wasn't published by major news media, Wexler established a web site -- WexlerWantsHearings.com -- to push the idea and disseminate the op-ed; the site also provides a form letting you add your name to a growing list of impeachment hearings supporters. ThinkProgress reports there are already over 140,000 people on the list. (The Miami Herald has a report on Wexler's campaign, and there's also an video interview with Wexler by impeachment activists Bob Fertik, David Swanson, and Dave Lindorff.)

Sharp-eyed "newsrack" readers may have noticed this new button at the upper right (it rotates with another one pointed to "AfterDowningStreet.org). Click through and add your name to the list for a Happy New Year! posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:15:00 PM -- |  

 
We had a deal: contra Henley and Ron Paul on the Civil War
It doesn't surprise me that Jim Henley's defense of Ron Paul's assertion ("Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery" -- ) is more interesting than Paul's own -- partly, of course, because the latter was abridged by the format of a Sunday news soundbite show, but mainly because I think Henley is a more capable essayist and thinker than Paul.

Henley's title -- "A Fiery Gospel Writ in Burnished Rows of Steel" -- is a quote, of course, from Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I think Henley has a point if he wishes that our republic didn't have "battle hymns," and that our political culture didn't confuse wars and hegemony with national purpose -- rather than simply seeing that purpose as protecting the liberties of all its citizens. There's not enough "constitutional patriotism" in the United States these days, and too much "military history patriotism" that seems to make blood sacrifice the point of our history.

Nevertheless, I think Henley's argument in this post is as wrong as Ron Paul's, and I'll try to explain why. Others -- see particularly Ari Kelman ("The Edge of the West") -- have rehearsed the events preceding the outbreak of the Civil War at some length, so that need not be recapitulated here, other than the fairly important points that (1) Lincoln was duly elected, (2) his platform merely sought to limit the spread of slavery, and (3) that the Confederacy fired the first shot at Fort Sumter.

For his part, Henley begins his argument as a rejoinder to this comment by Matthew Yglesias on the matter:

The South ... decided that rather than abide by the results of the election, they would secede from the country and establish a new herrenvolk democracy committed to slavery uber alles. They, not Lincoln, put resolution of the slavery issue through the political process out of reach.

Henley replies this is only partly correct:

Rather, they put the resolution of slavery through a peaceful political process of “The United States of America” out of reach, because they decided not to be in it any more. There are all kinds of bad things that might have attended the North letting the South go - one possibility is decades worth of border wars in the western territories as the USA and CSA tried to expand at each other’s expense. Imagine a “bleeding Kansas” stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean. That might have happened. And Saddam Hussein might have decided to underwrite a biological terror strike on Chicago. Or, maybe not! But the bad possible alternatives are distinct from “American slavery lasts forever."

And with this, the gambit is more or less complete, with both Henley (and Paul) adding the final move of positing the inevitable end of slavery within a few decades, based on Russia's and Brazil's emancipations and various stratagems for undermining the CSA (buying slaves in border states, assisting fugitive slaves, homesteading the freedmen in the USA Western territories, etc.) Like Ron Paul, Henley frames his Civil War analysis as one about the wisdom or morality of the Civil War as a method of ending slavery.

But that wasn't what it began as: a war for preserving a particular democracy in a particular time and place. That is, there was actually an even more fundamental issue than the particular one of slavery at stake: whether deeply divisive issues such as slavery could be settled by unilateral secession. A United States that allowed itself to be dissolved and fired upon -- especially if the dissolution and violence were because of the outcome of an election -- is one that would have had no convincing legal answer to further secessions later on, as diminishing centripetal forces of scale and allegiance were outweighed by the centrifugal ones of local advantages via location and alliances.

Henley's arguments about the war also ignore that peaceful, constitutional mechanisms for achieving disunion were readily available -- and were proposed by Lincoln himself in his First Inaugural address:

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right* to dismember or overthrow it. I cannot be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the national Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it.

I will venture to add that to me the Convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions, originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse.

Henley and Paul are right to be horrified at the cost of the Civil War; they may even be right to suggest that if ending slavery -- or washing one's hands of it -- was all it was about, the Civil War was not the only or necessarily the best option. (Though I shall argue that's a somewhat surprising position for them to take.) But any nation "so conceived and so dedicated" as the United States would have had to make the same decision to resist secession, or accept crumbling into its constituent parts. Lincoln, as usual, said it best, both in his First Inaugural address...

If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government, is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority, in such case, will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.

...and in the famed heartbreaking words of his Second Inaugural address:

Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

Henley also makes a somewhat unexpected argument when he posits the "the near certitude that American chattel slavery as such would end within the generation that saw 1865" -- and then writes: "Would the lives of American blacks by 1890 have been better than the lives of American blacks in the 1890 we actually had? I think it’s very likely."

Even accepting arguendo that blacks would indeed have been emancipated everywhere in North America by 1890,** that's still a remarkable bargain to make: the basic freedom of millions for "very likely" a generation (but possibly longer) to prevent the battlefield deaths of hundreds of thousands (but "likely" fewer, to recall the beliefs on both sides at the outset of the conflict). Say what you will about the Civil War, but even as waged it was a far quicker and surer route to emancipation than anything Henley imagines -- even if that wasn't the original intent.

And that's a benefit I'd have thought worth its weight in gold to libertarians like Ron Paul or Henley. Henley, at least, often and rightly rejects the infringement of a single person's human rights for the sake of unspecified, unproven national security benefits, as reckoned in American lives purportedly saved or guarded. It seems inconsistent to reverse that calculus for our forebears -- even if the argument somehow nibbles at the origins of the modern American nation state.

I think the relationship of ending slavery to the Civil War is much as Lincoln described it in his Second Inaugural:

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.

That is, ending slavery was not the first object of Lincoln and the United States in The War of the Rebellion, as it is referred to in United States records. Rather, that object was simply but forcefully to insist that we had a deal: our Constitution foresaw some ways of resolving political conflict, but not others. Nevertheless, slavery was the root cause of that political conflict and that war, and slavery's demise quickly (and foreseeably) became a corollary of ending the war on terms favorable to the Constitution and its Union.

Thus Henley (and Ron Paul) mislead themselves and others by arguing ending slavery was insufficient grounds for resisting secession. No: slavery's preemptive defense was insufficient grounds -- nay, evil and repugnant grounds -- for proceeding with secession from this Constitution and this republic. I think constitutional patriots and defenders of liberty -- ones like Henley, and perhaps like Ron Paul -- do themselves no favor implying otherwise.


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NOTES: Kelman via Josh Marshall, where video of Ron Paul's "Meet the Press" statements can be seen. "War of the Rebellion": Cornell University "Making of America" digital archives.
* This would seem to open a loophole, but Lincoln closes it elsewhere: "If by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution -- certainly would, if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case" (because ending slavery was not Lincoln's aim at that time). While I don't know Ron Paul's mind on the subject, I can't imagine Henley would categorize a potential future threat to a class of property he finds an "abomination"as sufficient grounds for revolution.
** However, I do not actually accept it. A successful Confederacy need not have cared a whit for events in Russia and Brazil, would have been a new alliance partner for European countries, and might have maintained and perpetuated slavery in old forms or new (mining, assembly lines) all but indefinitely even if agricultural slavery waned -- also not a given. It's hard to believe a country that went to war for the right to expand its substantial interest in slavery to new areas would not in fact have done so, and did not rightly anticipate material rewards from that.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:38:00 AM -- |  

 
Washington Ballet Nutcracker season over
It's been fun getting Maddie to the Washington Ballet Nutcracker shows and being part of the hustle and bustle of Christmastime. I helped sell Nutcracker paraphernalia during intermission a few times, benefiting the Washington Ballet School's scholarship funds. Before the show, at intermission, after the show: a crush of people -- what's the price on that? I'll find out for you; yes, we take credit cards, would you like that wrapped, hope the credit card connection doesn't hang -- and then it's over with a litter of tissue paper, paper rolls, and shopping bags around you and "see you next time"s. I kind of like it.

But it's also been a little exhausting after a while -- between that and Christmas shopping, neighborhood parties and an end of year crunch at work, I've been even more sporadic about blogging than usual.

Maddie's in her second year as a "Fox page" in the Sugar Plum Fairy's woodland (rather than Land of Sweets) court scenes, mainly early in the second act. She comes skittering out with a bouquet for Clara and the Nutcracker Prince, does a little dance around them with other woodland creatures, and then retires to a side stage to watch the rest of the proceedings -- which were also fabulous, as ever. The show is really fun; kids of almost all skill levels are integrated into an imaginative, "Americanized" production of the ballet (in this case set in 1880s or so Georgetown, and then in the dreams of the American Clara, peopled by Betsy Ross, Ben Franklin, a King George Rat, etc.).

The top pros are scintillating -- while I'm no expert, I was particularly impressed by the Sugar Plum Fairy, and the dancers of the "Arabian Dance" (recast as "Anacostian Indians" in this production). But I was also very impressed with the top ballet school students (I believe), some of whom put in several pieces of hard work (and some very quick costume changes!) per performance -- party girl to Snowflake to Cardinal to Cherry Blossom -- always dancing beautifully.

There may be other good Nutcracker productions out there, but I don't think there could be a better one. It's well worth your while if you get a chance; but at this point this parent and volunteer is relieved that won't be until next year! posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:33:00 PM -- |  

 
Kiriakou: apologist or whistleblower?
Maybe a little of both, maybe neither.

John Kiriakou is the ex-CIA man who spoke earlier this month to ABC News about what he knew about the waterboarding of Al Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah. Now the Department of Justice has reportedly received a criminal referral from the CIA to investigate Kiriakou. The McClatchy news story says the probe is about whether Kiriakou illegally revealed classified information -- and implies waterboarding was the secret involved. But Harper's Scott Horton reports his intelligence source tells him that may not be the real focus -- or at least the real motive -- behind the investigation:

It was not Kiriakou’s discussion of waterboarding which gave rise to concern, according to the source, but the fact that he described the decision-making process, linking it straight to the Department of Justice and the White House.

On the other hand, Kiriakou also managed to simultaneously convey second thoughts about waterboarding while all the while claiming that it was effective at coercing Zubaydah into becoming cooperative -- moreover, a Zubaydah he claimed then gave valuable testimony:

...a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visit him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate because his cooperation would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured. And from that day on he answered every question just like I'm sitting here speaking to you. [...]

The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.

This is all in contrast to the picture painted for Ron Suskind by FBI sources in his 2006 book "One Percent Solution." In Suskind's account (mentioned here in June, 2006) Zubaydah was a low-level Al Qaeda schlemiel with severe mental health issues, put in charge of arranging transportation because he wasn't capable of much else. Suskind:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

But pressure was high to get something out of him:

'I said he was important,' Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. 'You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?' 'No sir, Mr. President,' Tenet replied. Bush 'was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,' Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, 'Do some of these harsh methods really work?' Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, 'thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.' And so, Suskind writes, 'the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.'

(Emphases mine) As Jim Henley suggested when Kiriakou's interview was aired, the accounts aren't entirely impossible to reconcile:

Suskind stresses the wild goose chases. Kiriakou emphasizes “a number, maybe dozens” of genuine terror plots stopped. Zubaydah could well have provided a mix of useful and useless leads, all of which needed running down, all of which incurred expense and opportunity costs to pursue.

Moreover, the value of Zubaydah's information -- particularly the information revealed after interrogations got rougher -- remains a matter of dispute. Reporting for the Washington Post last week, Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen write :

some FBI agents and analysts say he is largely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures. [...]

There is little dispute, according to officials from both agencies, that Abu Zubaida provided some valuable intelligence before CIA interrogators began to rough him up, including information that helped identify Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and al-Qaeda operative Jose Padilla. Footnotes in the 9/11 Commission report attribute information about a variety of al-Qaeda personnel and activities to interrogations of Abu Zubaida beginning in April 2002 and lasting through February 2004. [...]

But FBI officials, including agents who questioned him after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home, have concluded that even though he knew some al-Qaeda players, he provided interrogators with increasingly dubious information as the CIA's harsh treatment intensified in late 2002.

In legal papers prepared for a military hearing, Abu Zubaida himself has asserted that he told his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear to make the treatment stop.

Of course, Zubaydah would say that. But also of course, the same could be said of counterclaims by Kiriakou, the CIA top brass,Tenet, and their superiors at the White House, who have either their own consciences or legal consequences on the line. It's convenient to at least the latter's talking points these days that the videotapes of Zubaydah's interrogations were destroyed and that Kiriakou is so handsomely conflicted -- a kind of kinder, gentler Jack Bauer -- about waterboarding.

And it may even be convenient that he is now under investigation. Noting the Pincus/Eggen article, Matthew Yglesias wrote:

...it's hard to see what motive FBI people would have for going forward with their story if it's false. It's easy, by contrast, to see why administration and CIA sources who'd been torturing this guy might want to exaggerate how useful their torturing had been.

Horton and his sources argue that the motive for Kiriakou's criminal referral is because he's linked waterboarding to the "highest levels" -- i.e., the White House. But the connection between Bush and Zubaydah's waterboarding had already been established by Suskind, so Kiriakou merely provided a name and a face for a source for the charge. Meanwhile, Kiriakou's evaluation of waterboarding's efficacy has already reached the House Judiciary Committee, where Rep. Stephen Cohen (D-TN) mused about the procedure's effectiveness (without condoning it) in proceedings last week.

So why the criminal referral against Kiriakou? Maybe it really is simply that Kiriakou spoke out of turn about the torture and its approval at highest levels. But another answer is: why not? After all, maybe nothing will come of the investigation -- other than establishing Kiriakou's bona fides with the mainstream press. Meanwhile, Kiriakou's statements have made the "value" of Zubaydah's waterboarding a "he said/she said" dispute between the CIA and the FBI -- and that may unfortunately be the most lasting result of his ABC interview.


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NOTES: "ex CIA man": "Coming in From the Cold: CIA Spy Calls Waterboarding Necessary But Torture," ABC News interview of John Kiriakou by Brian Ross, 12/10/2007. "reported": "FBI, CIA Debate Significance of Terror Suspect," Washington Post, 12/18/07. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:10:00 PM -- |