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Will Obama Comply with the War Powers Resolution?
Six Republican senators are challenging President Obama’s authority to conduct an open-ended war in Libya without congressional authorization. The six conservative lawmakers (Rand Paul (R‑KY), Jim DeMint (R‑SC), Mike Lee (R‑UT), Ron Johnson (R‑WI), Tom Coburn (R‑OK), and John Cornyn (R‑TX)) sent a letter to the president on May 18th asking if he intends to comply with the War Powers Resolution. The full text of the letter can be found here.
The law stipulates that the president must terminate military operations within 60 days, unless Congress explicitly authorizes the action, or grants an extension. The clock on the Libya operation started ticking on March 21, 2011. Congress has neither formally approved of the mission, nor has it granted an extension. Therefore, the 60-day limit expires tomorrow, May 20th.
Last week at The Skeptics, I noted Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he suggested that the administration wanted to comply, but was consulting with Congress about how to do so. The New York Times presented some of the creative ideas that the administration was considering in order to adhere to circumvent the law. But the senators can read the Times, too. In their letter to the president, they write:
Last week some in your Administration indicated use of the United States Armed Forces will continue indefinitely, while others said you would act in a manner consistent with the War Powers Resolution. Therefore, we are writing to ask whether you intend to comply with the requirements of the War Powers Resolution. We await your response.
Let me be clear about one thing: I’m not a huge fan of the War Powers Resolution, per se. To me, it is silly, sort of like a law that affirmed the Congress’s authority to levy taxes, borrow and coin money, and establish Post Offices. In the same section where these powers are delegated, the Constitution clearly stipulates that Congress shall have the power to declare war. So why does there also need to be legislation?
Most presidents have complied with the spirit of the War Powers Resolution, but more out of deference to the notion that Congress has some role in whether the United States goes to war, not out of genuine conviction that Congress does/should have the most important role in deciding such things. By all appearances, President Obama is bypassing the charade.
I anxiously await his response to the senators’ letter, and am likewise curious to see if other senators raise questions about the administration’s intentions.
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Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal Virginians
The Washington Post just did a major poll of Virginians and tantalizingly included this note in writing up the results:
In contrast to four years ago, about as many Virginians consider themselves to be liberal on social matters as call themselves conservative. Fiscal conservatism is on the rise, but on these social issues, it’s liberalism that’s ticked higher.
But those questions were not included in the published data. Thanks to the generosity of Post polling director Jon Cohen, I can report that the percentage of Virginians who said they were socially liberal or moderate and fiscally conservative went from 16 in 2007 to 23 in the latest poll. This reflects a small increase in the number of social liberals and a larger increase in the number of fiscal conservatives. And here are the tables on those questions:
We’ve written about fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters before, notably here and here, and in relation to Virginia and in the Republican party. Apparently when you ask people, “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?”, you get a higher percentage than when you ask the questions separately, as the Post did. When the Zogby Poll asked that question to actual voters in 2006, fully 59 percent said yes. Broader background on the “libertarian vote” here.
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UPDATE: Liu Cloture Fails
This morning I outlined the stakes of today’s seminal cloture vote on Goodwin’s Liu’s nomination to the Ninth Circuit. Well, now we have a result: cloture failed 52–43, with Senator Ben Nelson (D‑NE) joining all voting Republicans except Lisa Murkowski (R‑AK) against cloture. Three Republicans plus Max Baucus (D‑MT) were absent, while Orrin Hatch (R‑UT) voted present because of his previous strong position against filibusters.
This is the first judicial nominee filibustered since the Gang of 14 brokered an agreement on President Bush’s nominees in 2005, forestalling then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s use of the so-called nuclear option (changing Senate rules to eliminate the judicial filibuster). That agreement, to the extent it’s even still valid given the changed composition of the Senate (and with five of the 14 Gang members no longer in the Senate), allowed filibusters only in “extraordinary circumstances,” leaving that term undefined.
And so we may have just have witnessed the re-ignition of the war over judicial nominees. Stay tuned as to whether today’s vote will come to signify the “Water-Liu”—h/t Walter Olson—for one party or another, or for our judiciary.
The Consequences of Our War on Low-Skilled Immigrant Labor
Credit: Chiapas state government website[/caption]
Authorities in Mexico intercepted two semi-trucks on Tuesday containing more than 500 migrants being smuggled across the border from Guatemala and presumably headed for the United States. An x‑ray of one of the trucks that revealed the migrants struck me for its resemblance to those 18th century woodcarvings of slave ships crossing the Atlantic.
That analogy shouldn’t be taken too far, of course. According to the news reports, the migrants voluntarily paid $7,000 each for the chance to be smuggled into the United States. But like the slave ships, the conditions in the trucks were horrific, putting the lives of the men, women and some children in real danger.
People across the spectrum will try to make hay from this, but to me it argues that the status quo is unacceptable. No respectable party is in favor of illegal immigration. The real debate is over how to reduce it and all the underground pathologies that accompany it.
We can continue to ramp up border and interior enforcement, as we have relentlessly for more than a decade, driving low-skilled migrants further underground while driving smuggling fees higher and higher. Or we can expand opportunities for legal entry into the United States, and by doing so shrink the underground network of smuggling and document fraud.
Like the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, real immigration reform would go a long way to eliminating the human bootlegging that was exposed in Mexico this week. A robust temporary worker program would allow foreign-born workers to enter the country in a safe, orderly, and legal way through established ports of entry. It would allow resources now going to smugglers to be collected as fees by our government and otherwise put to work in our economy. It would save the lives of hundreds of people who needlessly die each year trying to re-locate for a better job.
If Congress enacted the kind of immigration reform we have long advocated in my department at Cato, our economy would be stronger and the human smuggling networks a lot less busy.
What Did Orwell Say?
Steve Simpson and Paul Sherman of the Institute for Justice have written an excellent short essay about Stephen Colbert’s effort to undermine the Citizens United decision. But the joke is on Colbert:
Campaign-finance laws are so complicated that few can navigate them successfully and speak during elections—which is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect. As the Supreme Court noted in Citizens United, federal laws have created “71 distinct entities” that “are subject to different rules for 33 different types of political speech.” The FEC has adopted 568 pages of regulations and thousands of pages of explanations and opinions on what the laws mean. “Legalese” doesn’t begin to describe this mess.
So what is someone who wants to speak during elections to do? If you’re Stephen Colbert, the answer is to instruct high-priced attorneys to plead your case with the FEC: Last Friday, he filed a formal request with the FEC for a “media exemption” that would allow him to publicize his Super PAC on air without creating legal headaches for Viacom.
How’s that for a punch line? Rich and successful television personality needs powerful corporate lawyers to convince the FEC to allow him to continue making fun of the Supreme Court. Hilarious.
Of course, there’s nothing new about the argument Mr. Colbert’s lawyers are making to the FEC. Media companies’ exemption from campaign-finance laws has existed for decades. That was part of the Supreme Court’s point in Citizens United: Media corporations are allowed to spend lots of money on campaign speech, so why not other corporations?
Because some animals are more equal than other animals, I suppose.
Europe Has Done Enough Harm to the IMF
With Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK to his friends and lovers) having finally resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund, the race has begun among those in Europe who wish to succeed him. First, the real debate should be over how soon can we shut down the IMF, not over who should be reaping the spoils. Its original purpose under Bretton Woods became irrelevant decades ago. And while it found a new role as bailout fund for international banks, this new role is not one we should be supporting.
Given we are probably stuck with the IMF, the question becomes who should run it. Europeans are now arguing that the European sovereign debt crisis displays the need for Europe to remain in control. In fact I believe it demonstrates the opposite: European politicians have time and time again proven they cannot be trusted with a large pot of taxpayer’s money, whether it is the Greek government or the IMF. To put another European in charge is the financial market equivalent of letting the alcoholic guard the liquor cabinet. Any European politician will likely hand out funds without any real strings attached. Just as a European-led IMF was all too happy to force restructuring on developing countries (rather than allow Western bondholders to take a loss), real reductions in government spending should be required of any country accepting IMF assistance. Else the losses should be imposed on those who gambled: the bondholders. If we fear such losses will push European banks into failure, then deal with those failures directly, honestly and transparently. Citizens around the world are tired of bank bailouts, backdoor or otherwise. As long as the political elite remained deaf to public objections to the bailouts, we should not entrust these same politicians with the IMF.