By now my fellow bloggers have spilled plenty of bytes on the serious problems with the Administration’s bailout proposal.  I have nothing new to add to that discussion, but I do want to some thoughts on one provision of the bill that many people have overlooked.

If the current bailout proposal passes unamended, Congress will have just given Henry Paulson a degree of power that no Cabinet Secretary — or President for that matter — has ever had.  This is Section 8 of the bill as it now stands:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

This language represents nothing less than the institutionalization of the Cheney-Addington concept of an all-powerful, unitary executive that cannot be checked by either Congress or the courts.  It would represent the single greatest expansion of Presidential power in American history.  As written, not even the Supreme Court would have the authority to overturn it as unconstitutional:

As Congress prepares to act speedily on the grant of power to the Treasury Secretary to buy up $700 billion worth of bundles of bad mortage loans, the Supreme Court may watch in fascination, but it would have no power to second-guess the “bailout,” if enacted.  Given the sweep of the authority that would go to the Secretary, it might raise some constitutional questions. But there would be no way to test those in court.

According to press accounts, when Barnake and Paulson went up to Capitol Hill to brief Congressional leaders last week, they painted a terrifying portrait of economic collapse.  They warned lawmakers warned that we are teetering on the edge of a precipice, and that Congress needed to take urgent action to prevent a disaster.  Congressional leaders emerged from the meeting looking like they had been hit by a bus.

Sound familiar?  The Bush Administration used similar language to convince Congress to pass post-9/11 restrictions on civil liberties (most notably the Patriot Act); to authorize the invasion of Iraq; and to adopt both the Military Commissions Act (including the provision exempting CIA agents from laws banning torture) and the recent FISA bill.

To put it another way, every time this Administration has convinced Congress to adopt laws that expand executive power or erode civil liberties, it has scared Congress into going along it.  This time the threat is not terrorism but economic collapse.  But don’t kid yourself:  Section 8 could mark the beginning of the end of the separation of powers and the rule of law.

To me, all the other questions about this highly problematic bill pale in comparison.  Congress must not agree to this bill as long as Section 8 remains. If it does, it might as well pack up and go home.

Related posts

• The Margin Call
• Morning Haikus
• Live Blogging Dubya on the Bailout
• A Crisis in Confidence, Not Liquidity
• Thought of the Morning

So far we’ve seen dozens of speakers at the Democratic National Convention.  They’ve attacked Bush and McCain.  They’ve touted solutions to energy and climate change.  They’ve talked about Supreme Court justices and choice.  They’ve talked getting out of Iraq, and winning the war against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.  A few have even mentioned, in passing, that the United States needs to rebuild its relationship with allies, once agan leading rather than dictating to the rest of the world.

But there is one set of issues that we haven’t heard about yet — not once in two days of banal blathering.

Call it the destruction of American values.  It includes a number of things.

Like torture.

Guantanamo.

Abu Ghraib.

Indefinite detention of American citizens.

Denial of habeas corpus.

Waterboarding.

Rendition.

Black sites.

It’s as if the books by Jane Meyer, Jack Goldsmith, Philippe Sands, and so many others have gone right down the memory hole.

Where’s the anger at this desecration of everything America supposedly stands for?  Where’s the condemnation of the Bush Administration’s trashing of the Constitution?  Where are the demands that these things stop, and stop immediately?

And where are the attacks on the man who most needs to answer for his role in not just allowing, but promoting these abominations?  Where is the condemnation and vilification of Dick Cheney?

There isn’t a politician more unpopular in America today.  More importantly, there isn’t anyone more responsible for the trashing of America’s reputation in the world.

Yet after two days, we’ve heard nothing about him or his comprehensive attack on human rights and civil liberties.  Nothing about his single-minded shredding of the Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, and Convention against Torture.  Nothing about waterboarding, sleep deprivation, the use of dogs, or forced confinement.  Nothing about the fact that our allies now believe that this Administration has committed war crimes.

We’ve heard plenty about windmills and wages, but nothing about Cheney’s conscious destruction of American values.

In less than a week, Dick Cheney will take the Darth Vader world tour to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.  In his primetime speech, he will call Democrats weak, inept, and unwilling to face down “evil.”

If the Democrats fail to call him out on his own evil this week, he’ll be right.

Are Democrats afraid?  Are they unwilling to confront Bush, Cheney, and McCain on foreign policy?   Are they afraid of John McCain because he keeps reminding people on every possible occasion that he was a POW?

There’s a simple way to handle this.  All the Democrats have to say is that the Bush Administration believes that it doesn’t torture.  Then talk about all the things that they now do that the North Vietnamese did to John McCain.  And then point out that according to George Bush and Dick Cheney, John McCain wasn’t tortured. And then say how dare they implement polices once used against our brave servicemen and women.  And also make sure that people know that John McCain actually sanctions torture, as long as it’s committed by the CIA.

It’s the truth.  It reminds Americans of what we stand for without dragging them through the muck and horror of the past seven years.  It also has the advantage of putting both McCain and the Bushies on the defensive.

We’ve heard that Obama-Biden will be different, that they will no longer concede the high ground on foreign policy issues to the Republicans.  But if they never mention torture, Guantanamo, or any of the other terrors that Cheney, Addington, Yoo and company have inflicted on America and the world, then they are just as fearful and timorous as past candidates.

And next week, the Republicans will have free reign to make them look like apologists and traitors.

And in November, Barack Obama will lose.

Related posts

• Obama, Messaging, and Dean Wormer
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• Ambassador for All War Crimes except Our Own
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I’ve always respected blogger and attorney Glenn Greenwald.  I haven’t always agreed with him, but I thought he was a valuable voice in the blogging community — and an important champion of civil liberties in this country.

I don’t respect him anymore.  Yesterday, he mounted a major hatchet job against Morton Halperin, suggesting that his supposed shift on FISA was the product of some sort of misplaced ambition.  I think it’s a scurrilous attack, and completely unjustified.

I should state three things up front.

First, I know Mort. I had the opportunity to work with him at the State Department during the Clinton Administration, when I was Chief of Staff to Assistant Secretary Harold Hongju Koh in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and he was Director of Policy Planning.  That said, I neither contacted nor consulted him before writing this post.

Second, I respectfully disagree with Halperin on the FISA bill.  I do not think that he should have supported it, nor do I think that Congress should have passed it. So the purpose of my post here is not to defend Halperin’s decision to support the bill, but rather to condemn Greenwald’s ad hominem attack.

Third, as I have acknowledged repeatedly in this blog, I am one of 300-odd “informal foreign policy advisors” to the Obama campaign.  I don’t know whether Halperin is as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me.  There are more than three hundred of us, after all, and if he is like me, he occasionally fires off memos to key people in the campaign.  That’s what informal policy advisors do.

In his post (and in the transcript of his Salon Radio interview with Halperin), Greenwald lays out his brief like a prosecutor who has only circumstantial evidence on which to build a case.  At the core of Greenwald’s argument are two events:  a June 9, 2008 letter opposing a version of the FISA bill sponsored by Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), which Halperin allegedly signed on behalf of the Open Society Policy Center (OSPC); and Halperin’s July 8 op-ed in The New York Times, in which he came out in favor of a different version of the FISA bill as “our best chance to protect both our national security and our civil liberties.”

But instead of paraphrasing, let me reproduce Greenwald’s core argument:

What made his Op-Ed particularly confounding was that a mere one month earlier — on June 9, 2008 — Halperin had signed a letter on behalf of OSPI, [sic] also signed by numerous other civil liberties and advocacy groups, in which he expressed steadfast opposition to the FISA “compromise” (which was then known as the “Bond compromise,” after GOP Sen. Kit Bond). A copy of that June 9 letter opposing the FISA bill, which Halperin joined on behalf of his group, is here (.pdf).

[snip]

Manifestly, there was only one meaningful change that occurred between Halperin’s June 9 opposition and his July 8 support: namely, it was in that interim — on June 20 — that Barack Obama announced that he would support the FISA bill, and many have speculated (and it is just speculation) that Halperin, who has served in numerous administrations over the past four decades (beginning with the Nixon administration) and is eager for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration, offered to give Obama cover by coming out and supporting the FISA bill even though, only weeks earlier, he had vigorously opposed it. Lending even stronger support to that hypothesis is a document I obtained that Halperin wrote and which Obama’s office circulated to numerous Democratic Senators, dated June 22 (only two days after Obama announced his support for the bill), in which Halperin heaped praise on the FISA bill and urged Democratic Senators to support it (Halperin’s June 22 memo to Senators is here).

[snip]

Halperin clearly decided to repudiate his own opposition to this bill in order to offer himself up to Obama as the public shill supporting the bill, so that Obama defenders could gain cover for themselves by saying things like “even life-long civil libertarian Mort Halperin says this is a good bill.”  [Emphasis from original.]

So Greenwald would have us believe that Halperin’s naked political ambition has led him to violate his principles in order to curry favor with the Obama campaign.

Let me start by picking a couple of nits, not for their own sake, but to demonstrate just how sloppy Greenwald’s argument is.  First, Halperin was the executive director of the Open Society Policy Center, not President of the Open Society Policy Institute.  Second, Halperin’s service began not with the Nixon Administration, but rather the Johnson Administration, in which he served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Now let’s move on to Greenwald’s most important piece of evidence:  the June 22 joint letter that Halperin allegedly “signed. . .on behalf of OSPI” was in fact an institutional sign-on letter.  If you go to the PDF, you’ll see that organizations signed, not individuals on behalf of organizations.  This is an important distinction because when it is an institutional signature, it signifies that the organization, not its head, supports a position.

I wouldn’t split this hair, except that Greenwald uses it as supposedly devastating proof that Halperin opposed FISA before he supported it.  But the fact that OSPC supported a position is not in any way, shape, or form evidence that Halperin supported the position. I have yet to work for an organization with which I agreed all of the time.  Sometimes you set aside your personal opinions and act according to what the institution decides is its best course of action.

That means that Greenwald has no real evidence to prove his core allegation:  that Halperin changed his opinion between June 9 and July 8.

Perhaps the best example of the weakness of Greenwald’s case is the transcript of his interview with Halperin.  Greenwald approaches it not as a conversation or debate, but as a prosecutor dealing with a hostile witness.  He repeatedly tries to get Halperin to confess to the sin of ambition.  Not surprisingly, Halperin refuses to engage, and the interview falls apart.  Greenwald then cites Halperin’s refusal to debate the minutiae as further evidence of his alleged careerism.  It’s a circular argument, and not even a good one at that.

But Greenwald isn’t content with abusing the facts; he also thinks it’s necessary to make ad hominem attacks.  He states that Halperin has “served in numerous administrations. . .beginning with the Nixon administration,” as if Halperin is some sort of secret Republican who once served for that paragon of secrecy and deceit.  I could easily defend Halperin from this, but it’s better to let him do it himself.  This is the section of his NYT op-ed that discusses his service in the Nixon Administration:

When I was on the staff of the National Security Council, my home phone was tapped by the Nixon administration — without a warrant — beginning in 1969. The wiretap stayed on for 21 months. The reason? My boss, Henry Kissinger, and the director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, believed that I might have leaked information to this newspaper. Even after I left government, and went to work on Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign, the F.B.I. continued to listen in and made periodic reports to the president.

I was No. 8 on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” — a strange assemblage of 20 people who had incurred the White House’s wrath because they had disagreed with administration policy. As the presidential counsel John Dean explained it in 1971, the list was part of a plan to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” My guess is that I earned this dubious distinction because of my opposition to the Vietnam War, though no one ever said for sure.

Greenwald never mentions any of this.  He doesn’t say that the information Halperin allegedly leaked to the NYT was the Pentagon Papers the Nixon Administration’s secret bombing of Cambodia.  He doesn’t acknowledge that Halperin refused to let Nixon, Kissinger, and Hoover intimidate him; in fact, he sued Nixon and won the case.  He doesn’t note that Halperin was on Nixon’s enemies list.  Those are no small things.  Instead, Greenwald merely says that Halperin worked in the Nixon Administration, which in the insular world of progressive blogs, will be read as an indictment.

Greenwald goes on to claim that Halperin, “eager for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration, offered to give Obama cover by coming out and supporting the FISA bill even though, only weeks earlier, he had vigorously opposed it [emphasis in original].”  Greenwald acknowledges that this is “just speculation,” and offers no evidence to back his allegation. In other words, he is, by his own admission, using scuttlebutt and gossip rather than facts.

Greenwald does produce a memo Halperin wrote on June 22 (two days after Obama came out in support of the bill) to “interested parties” expressing his opinion that the bill was the best possible compromise available.  To be clear, Halperin does express his support for the bill.  But he also says the following:

In my view the service providers who assisted the government in violation of FISA should not be granted immunity. The original FISA legislation clearly provided that the companies were only to cooperate pursuant to the provisions of the law. The service providers should have had no reasonable doubt that the requests from the administration to provide support outside of the statute was both illegal and unconstitutional. The current court cases should be allowed to proceed unhindered by the Congress.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.  Greenwald chooses not to highlight it.

If that weren’t enough, Greenwald later added a postscript to his piece:

Several people have emailed to complain — correctly — that I was remiss in failing to note that Mort Halperin is the father of the incomparably execrable Mark Halperin, formerly of ABC News and now of Time. My apologies for the oversight. If there is any system more nepotistic and incestuous than our Beltway political and media institutions, I don’t know what it is.

So Greenwald would have us believe that the father should be held accountable for the supposed sins of the son, and vice versa, and that Mark Halperin’s success is based entirely on his “famous” father.  I don’t know Mark Halperin.  I have no idea how he got his first job in Washington.  But I’m guessing that his subsequent success just might be based on his own achievements and not because of his dad.

So in sum, Greenwald uses what at best could be called a mix of circumstantial evidence and gossip to condemn someone who has long championed the very causes that Greenwald professes to support.  He does so because Halperin happens to differ with him on a single issue.  If Greenwald was in court, his case wouldn’t stand.  But he’s not in court.  He’s online.  And somehow he has come to regard that as a free ticket to impugn a good man’s character.

Next time, he should try sticking to the facts.

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Quite of few of my favorite bloggers are in Austin, Texas right now to attend — and blog on — the Netroots Nation conference.  I’m not there because… well, because I’m so new at this that I had no idea it was going on.  So I’m not opposed to it or anything — I’ll try to go next year.

At first, I found the blanket coverage interesting.  Then I started reading a minimum of four different posts on a given panel — no, make that every panel.   And I began to feel like a few of the panels — for example, the one on whether bloggers should swear — were a bit self-referential, but then again so are panels at meetings of neurosurgeons, historians, or about any other profession you can think about.

But the thing is, hardly anyone at those other conventions blogs about them.  At Netroots Nation, everybody does.  And after a while, bloggers blogging about bloggers talking about blogging gets just a little too meta for my tastes.  It’s not like Austin is the blogger version of Rashomon or something.

Even then, I wasn’t planning to write about it.  After all, the only thing more meta would be to blog about bloggers blogging about bloggers talking about blogging.  But then I saw this (from the usually quite sensible Sean-Paul Kelley, better known as The Agonist):

It’s only the most important gathering of progressive, liberal democratic activists in the nation, right? It happens once a year and is a gathering full of people most likely to network, donate their time to grassroots efforts and all those signal issues that Democrats are supposed to be about and guess who’s not there?

You got it: Obama.

Obama doesn’t care about the Netroots. He’s made that clear. It’s all about ‘unity porn’ not partisanship. And this will come back to haunt him. Maybe in the general election, maybe when he is president. But it will, at some point, cost him on an issue critical to him.

Yeah, yeah, I know he’s in the Middle East right now, honing his bona fides on national security policy. But still: netroots has been on the calendar for a full year. And he picks now to go to the Middle East?

This is so narcissistic on so many levels I don’t know where to start.  Let me just say that the Agonist has managed in a single post to reinforce everything bad that average people think about both the left in general and progressive bloggers in particular.

Oh, by the way, Obama did videotape an address, and his campaign did come out in force.  And if you go to the Netroots Nation home page, there’s even a photo of someone holding up a “Change We Can Believe In” sign.  You know who else wasn’t there, by the way?  Sean Paul Kelley.  In fairness, he does have a real job — in Singapore — but come on, you can’t really be critical of someone for not showing up when you don’t show up.

Sorry, Agonist, but I’ll take Obama eating breakfast with the troops in Afghanistan (and on videotape in Austin) over him eating crow on FISA in front of the bloggers in Austin.  I want him to win.  So frankly, I don’t care if he hurts my feelings, or yours,  or anyone else’s along the way.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be happy about everthing he does (like his FISA vote).  But last I checked, people are supporting him because they believe he will be a pretty good President and not because he will adhere rigidly to a particular scorecard.  I mean, come on — didn’t we learn anything about the problems with ideological rigidity from the guy currently holding down the job?

Okay that’s enough.  Time to stop perpetuating the madness by blogging more about blogging.

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