The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon — Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Tim Kaine | ||||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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(The health care discussion occurs between 2:00 and 3:15.)
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon — Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Tim Kaine | ||||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
|
(The health care discussion occurs between 2:00 and 3:15.)
Today President Obama appointed Austan Goolsbee to be his new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, replacing Christina Romer, who has headed back to Berkeley. Because Goolsbee is already a member of the CEA, the appointment helps Obama avoid a Senate confirmation process that could have easily become a referendum on his administration’s economic policies.
Given that the appointment seems more one of convenience that anything else — Goolsbee is not a macroeconomist, which would seem to be what one would want at the moment. His primary expertise is in tax policy. So let’s look at some of his work:
On private research and development — where the President has proposed new incentives — Goolsbee wrote in the American Economic Review: “When the government increases R&D spending through subsidies or by direct provision, a significant fraction of the increased spending goes directly into higher wages, an increase in the price rather than the quantity of inventive activity.” That hardly seems like a ringing endorsement of more R&D tax credits.
Goolsbee has also written on investment tax incentives, which are also being pushed by Obama. In the Quarterly Journal of Economics, he writes: ” much of the benefit of investment tax incentives does not go to investing firms but rather to capital suppliers through higher prices. A 10 percent investment tax credit increases equipment prices by 3.5–7.0 percent.” It seems that Obama wants to do for capital what he’s tried to do for housing, just inflate prices without really changing the fundamentals and spend a lot of money doing so.
Here’s to hoping that Goolsbee doesn’t suffer the fate of his predecessor by abandoning everything he’s previously written in the interest of political expediency.
A split panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided, on a 6–5 vote, that a lawsuit filed by extraordinary rendition and torture victims is barred by the State Secrets Privilege. Over a year ago, a three-judge panel ruled that the case should proceed with traditional application of the Privilege — individual pieces of evidence would be excluded based on their secret nature, but other evidence would remain available for litigation.
Robert Chesney has some thoughtful commentary on how the current state of the law deals with rule of law versus individual justice concerns. By any measure this is, as Glenn Greenwald notes, a broad victory for the government and further evidence of continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations’ approaches to terrorism.
The program of warrantless NSA wiretapping (and data mining) authorized by President George W. Bush shortly after the 9/11 attacks prompted a flurry of intense debate over its legality when it was disclosed by The New York Times back in 2005. Those arguments have, by now, been so thoroughly rehearsed that there’s not a whole lot new to say about it.
But like Monty Python’s Black Knight, some of those old arguments keep popping up — as evidenced by John Eastman’s contribution to the Cato Unbound roundtable on the digital surveillance state we held last month. So while the roundtable’s over, I thought it would be convenient to round up a compact version of the main arguments in one place, for the convenience of folks who might not want to slog through the many law review articles that have been written on the subject.
The touchstone for modern analysis of executive war powers is, by general consensus, the tripartite schema elaborated by Justice Jackson in his concurrence in the Youngstown steel seizure case :
1. When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate. In these circumstances, and in these only, may he be said (for what it may be worth) to personify the federal sovereignty. If his act is held unconstitutional under these circumstances, it usually means that the Federal Government, as an undivided whole, lacks power…
2. When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain…
3. When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter… Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.
Using this as our starting point, it becomes clear that an analysis of the NSA program entails answering a series of distinct (though related) questions. First, we need to determine which level of the Youngstown schema applies. If we’re in Youngstown’s Category I, then the NSA program was illegal only if it exceeded the constitutional constraints on government surveillance established by the Fourth Amendment. If, on the other hand, we’re in Category III, a constitutionally permissible surveillance program might nevertheless be illegal. So I’ll consider three questions in turn: Did the NSA program violate federal statute? If so, does the statute trump whatever inherent power the president might enjoy as commander in chief in this context? Finally, does the program, as it’s been publicly described, violate the Fourth Amendment? An affirmative answer to either the first pair of questions or the third will entail that the NSA program was illegal.
The statutory question may seem like something of a no-brainer: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 states explicitly that its procedures establish the “exclusive means” for domestic electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. In this case, the obvious answer is the right one. But the Justice Department has attempted to claim that Congress cleverly managed to repeal the “exclusive means” language without telling anyone about it back in 2001, when it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Probably the most decisive demolition of that argument was offered by David Kris, who currently heads the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, but it’s worth reviewing briefly why this argument is so implausible.
The central problem with reliance on the AUMF is that FISA itself contains a provision providing a 15-day surveillance grace period following a declaration of war. As the legislative conference report explains, this was intended to provide time for Congress to consider whether any wartime modifications to the FISA structure were necessary. Plainly, then, Congress did not imagine or intend that a declaration of war (or “authorization of force”) would in itself implicitly loosen FISA’s fetters beyond that grace period.
Moreover, Congress has repeatedly amended FISA since the 9/11 attacks, both in the PATRIOT Act passed almost simultaneously with the AUMF, and in subsequent legislation over a period of years. As Glenn Greenwald recounted in his lead essay for the Cato roundtable, Congress has expanded government surveillance powers in a variety of ways, but none of these prior to the Protect America Act of 2007 (superseded by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008) approached the breadth of the NSA program, and even these establish at least a modicum of judicial oversight, however inadequate. Again, this history sits uneasily with the premise that Congress understood itself to have authorized such broad domestic surveillance when it passed the AUMF.
Indeed, as former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle explained in a Washington Post op-ed shortly after the revelation of the warrantless wiretap program, the Senate explicitly rejected language sought by the White House that would have extended the authorization to actions within the United States. Then–attorney general Alberto Gonzales has publicly acknowledged that the Bush administration contemplated asking for a more specific amendment to FISA authorizing something like the NSA program, but concluded that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” to get such an amendment adopted. We are being asked to believe, in other words, that Congress intended to implicitly grant authority that the administration was certain would be refused had it been requested overtly. It is, as Justice Frankfurter put it in Youngstown, “quite impossible … to find secreted in the interstices of legislation the very grant of power which Congress consciously withheld.”
Basic principles of statutory construction disfavor inferring implicit repeal of specific statutory language from more general authorizations, except in the face of “overwhelming evidence” of congressional intent — and the Court has accordingly rejected parallel arguments in several recent War on Terror cases, as in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the court found “nothing in the text or legislative history of the AUMF even hinting that Congress intended to expand or alter the authorization” for military commissions spelled out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The evidence here is indeed overwhelming, and it uniformly cuts against the fanciful proposition that Congress somehow enacted a kind of sub silentio repeal of FISA. I’m inclined to assume this argument was offered primarily because of an understandable reluctance to rely entirely on a radical theory of inherent and preclusive executive powers, to which I turn next.
The first thing to observe with respect to claims of inherent executive authority is that if we exclude non-binding dicta, the evidence for a constitutional power to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes is almost wholly negative. That is to say, it turns on inferences from questions the Supreme Court has declined to directly address rather than on its affirmative holdings. As we’ll see, this is a thin reed on which to hang ambitious claims.
Consider, for instance, the so-called Keith case. In addressing the scope of presidential power to authorize warrantless surveillance against domestic national security threats, the majority noted that they had “not addressed, and express no opinion as to, the issues which may be involved with respect to activities of foreign powers or their agents.” But in that very case, the unanimous majority held that a warrant was required in cases involving domestic national security threats, resolving a lacuna expressed in very similar language in a footnote to a previous ruling involving wiretaps:
Whether safeguards other than prior authorization by a magistrate would satisfy the Fourth Amendment in a situation involving the national security is a question not presented by this case.
The arguments deployed against unchecked executive discretion in Keith clearly have substantial cross-application to the War on Terror, which in many respects bears as much resemblance to those domestic threats as it does to traditional nation state–sponsored espionage and warfare. It will suffice to note, however, that declining to foreclose a power because the fact pattern under consideration provided no occasion to consider the distinct issues involved, as the Court did in both Katz and Keith, is not at all the same as affirmatively asserting it, let alone defining its scope — a point to which I’ll return in the next section.
Nevertheless, let’s suppose arguendo that there is some such inherent power, whether broad or narrow. Eastman and other defenders of the NSA program still err in conflating inherent power with preclusive or indefeasible power. As a simple conceptual matter, this cannot be right, or else the third Youngstown category would collapse into the second: If all “inherent” presidential powers were per se immune to Congressional limitation, Category III would be superfluous, since it would never yield a result different from analysis under Category II.
Fortunately, we need not restrict ourselves to conceptual analysis, because precedent and practice both speak directly to the question, and both support robust legislative power to constrain even those presidential powers grounded in Article II. The legislature has, from the founding era on, assumed that its Article I power to make “rules for the government of the land and naval forces” enabled it to cabin the discretion of the commander in chief, often in frankly picayune ways, by establishing general rules limiting the conduct of a conflict. Prior to the Truman administration there was little indication that presidents saw this as encroaching upon sacrosanct executive prerogatives. Even Lincoln — probably the most obvious early example of a wartime president acting without or contrary to statutory authority — did not claim some general constitutional power to defy Congress. Rather, he argued that when hostilities commenced during a congressional recess, he had acted as he thought necessary given the impracticality of securing advance approval, while acknowledging that it fell to the legislature to ratify or overrule his judgment once it reconvened.
In the few cases where the Supreme Court has had occasion to rule on the scope of executive power at “lowest ebb,” it has repeatedly confirmed that federal law binds the president even in war. In Little v. Barreme, during a conflict with France, the Court found that a specific congressional authorization for the seizure of ships bound to French ports rendered invalid an executive order that also permitted seizure of ships bound from those ports. And this was so, the Court noted, even though the president’s own commander-in-chief powers would have permitted him this discretion had Congress not spoken. Since the inauguration of the War on Terror, the Court has reaffirmed the validity of such statutory limits on executive discretion, as in Hamdan. Bush’s own Office of Legal Counsel ultimately repudiated a series of memos, penned by John Yoo, that had relied on a more expansive conception of executive power to justify the administration’s War on Terror programs, concluding that they were “not supported by convincing reasoning.”
There is, by general consensus, some “preclusive core” to the executive’s commander-in-chief authority. This includes, at the least, a prerogative of “superintendence”: Congress could not appoint Nancy Pelosi commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and forbid the president to remove her. Most commentators see it as similarly foreclosing efforts to achieve the same end by a series of micromanagerial statutes commanding specific tactics be employed at particular times. But the notion that this preclusive core encompasses discretion to unilaterally disregard a general statutory framework governing protracted electronic surveillance of U.S. persons on American soil is simply insupportable in the face of both history and precedent. The argument is, if anything, more absurd when it comes to the government’s illegal acquisition of the statutorily protected calling records of tens of millions of Americans, the vast majority of whom obviously have no ties to terrorism or Al Qaeda. Attempts to stitch together a countervailing line from desultory snatches of language about the president’s role as “sole organ” in foreign affairs are entertaining as a sort of exercise in experimental Burroughsian cut-up narrative, but as legal analysis they seem pretty desperate.
Finally, we turn to the Fourth Amendment. I will, for the most part, consider how the Fourth Amendment applies to the NSA surveillance program prior to the 2008 passage of the FISA Amendments Act.
As Eastman notes, while in most contexts the prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures” requires surveillance to be authorized by a probable cause warrant based on individualized suspicion, there are a variety of circumstances in which warrantless searches may nevertheless be reasonable. While this is not the place to conduct a detailed survey of such “special needs” exemptions, such exceptions tend to involve cases in which the subjects of the search are already understood to enjoy a diminished expectation of privacy (students in school), where the searches are standardized and minimally intrusive, where the targets are in a position to raise challenges before a neutral magistrate if necessary, and where prior court authorization would be highly impractical. No exception that I am aware of can plausibly be stretched so far as to permit sustained, discretionary, warrantless electronic surveillance of members of the general population — a method recognized to be so intrusive that in the criminal context, federal statute requires investigators to meet a higher standard than applies to ordinary physical search warrants.
It’s worth noting in passing that the existence of the statutory FISA framework is at least arguably relevant to the Fourth Amendment analysis here. What measures are “reasonable” will often depend on context, and upon the available alternatives: The use of lethal force in self-defense might be found reasonable as a last resort, but not when the victim has an easy avenue of escape or a taser handy. Similarly, if the only alternative to conventional criminal courts were warrantless surveillance — if Congress had made no provision for a highly secretive court to consider classified applications under secure conditions, with ample flexibility in cases of emergency — one might be more inclined to sympathize with some degree of executive improvisation. In light of the elaborate mechanisms Congress has provided, an appeal to impracticality is considerably less compelling.
But let’s bracket that for the moment, and again suppose for the sake of argument that the president has some inherent authority to conduct warrantless domestic wartime surveillance. Let’s further assume away any statutory problems. Can the NSA program be squared with the Fourth Amendment injunction that searches be reasonable, based on what little we know of it? It seems highly unlikely.
Multiple accounts suggest that the NSA program involved algorithmic selection of surveillance targets, possibly triggered by keywords within the communications themselves, almost certainly based on pattern analysis of calling records or other transactional data. The result, according to the Bush administration, was that the international communications of approximately 500 persons within the United States were being intercepted at any given time. Since the program operated for several years, both before and after being disclosed, a conservative estimate would place the total number of persons subject to surveillance in the thousands, and most likely in the tens of thousands.
What did all this spying yield? In 2006, under the headline “Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects,” the Washington Post reported:
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well.
Nearly all the “leads” produced by the program appear to have been dead ends. Indeed, despite the assurances of the Bush administration that the NSA program had saved thousands of lives, a postmortem review by the intelligence community’s inspectors general found that officials they spoke to “had difficulty citing specific instances where [NSA program] reporting had directly contributed to counterterrorism successes,” though a classified version of the report apparently cites a handful of instances in which the program “may have contributed.”
As a point of reference, the government’s reporting suggests that under criminal wiretap orders, about 30 percent of intercepted communications contain incriminating content. Since “minimization” of innocent communications is necessarily imperfect, and since even the most hardened criminals presumably spend most of their time conversing about more mundane matters, the number of targets engaged in at least some incriminating communication is clearly far higher. That’s what one would expect when evidence establishing “probable cause” must justify surveillance — and Bush officials have claimed the NSA program’s targeting met the same standards. The evidence suggests otherwise.
I’m happy to grant that we should accept a somewhat lower “hit rate” when interception is geared toward protecting the nation from major terror attacks. But if the requirement that searches be “reasonable” is not to be rendered completely vacuous or totally severed from even a diluted standard of “probable cause,” then there must be some substantive test of whether such highly intrusive techniques are actually in service of that vital state interest. It cannot possibly be enough to simply observe that the president has uttered the magical incantation “War on Terror.” And it cannot possibly be enough that a program involving interception of the private conversations of thousands or tens of thousands of U.S. persons “may have contributed” to a handful of successful investigations. The question is closer with respect to post-FISAAA programs of interception, which are at least subject to some modicum of independent oversight, but unless we have gotten vastly better at sifting the guilty from the innocent, grave constitutional doubts should remain.
I was a bit critical of Laura Tyson’s New York Times article on “Why We Need a Second Stimulus.” Apparently I wasn’t nearly critical enough.
The Nation and National Public Radio are advising President Obama to “stop listening to infrastructure-phobic advisers like Larry Summers and start taking counsel from Laura Tyson, a member of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board who argues that $1 trillion in infrastructure investment is needed over the next five years.”
At The Atlantic, senior editor (and Boston Globe columnist) Joshua Green thinks Laura Tyson’s article “underscored what a loss it is for the Obama administration that it couldn’t manage to find a place for her on its economic team.” Mr. Green can’t imagine why a Berkeley professor who wants to add an extra trillion to federal spending wouldn’t be the ideal budget director.
In the article that so impressed Mr. Green, Tyson wrote, “The primary cause of the [current] labor market crisis is a collapse in private demand… By late 2009, in response to unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, household and business spending began to recover. But by the second quarter of this year, economic growth had slowed to 1.6 percent.”
Combining “fiscal and monetary stimulus” in a single phrase is a clumsy way to conceal the irrelevance of “fiscal stimulus” (debt-financed federal spending) to GDP growth in 2009. Fiscal stimulus means the Treasury sells more bonds. Monetary stimulus means the Fed buys more bonds. To discuss those transactions as if they had the same effect is just another mysterious Keynesian incantation.
Tyson claims there is “too little appreciation for how stimulus spending has helped stabilize the economy and how more of the right kind of government spending could boost job creation and economic growth.” She wants much more spending on unemployment benefits (a paradoxical definition of a jobs program) and on aid to state and local governments (where unemployment rates are relatively low).
To argue for more borrowing and spending, however, Tyson cannot credit monetary policy for helping the recovery. Because she explicitly advocates much more spending on “unemployment benefits and aid to state governments” (not just “infrastructure”), Tyson has to demonstrate that changes in federal spending (not Fed policy) explain why the economy appeared to be recovering in late 2009 but faltering by the second quarter of 2010. It is not enough to allude to simulations from Mark Zandi’s famously incorrect forecasting model, as the CEA and CBO have done. Tyson needs to show us a fact or two. She didn’t even try. She even got the size of Obama’s stimulus bill wrong, citing last year’s antiquated $787 billion figure that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has revised twice since January.
In reality, the 2009 stimulus bill was mostly about extending unemployment benefits, expanding Medicaid, dispensing small checks (refundable tax credits) and other schemes to rob Peter and pay Paul. Such transfer payments add nothing to GDP; they just discourage work. The increase in federal nondefense purchases (such as “shovel-ready” projects) contributed only two-tenths of one percent (0.2) to the change in GDP in 2009. That was no larger than in 2008 when the Recovery Act did not exist. And even that trivial sum is merely an accounting gain rather than a net economic gain, because federal borrowing is no free lunch. The reason Keynesian accounting is no substitute for economics is that governments can only spend what Danny DeVito called “OPM” (other peoples’ money). To claim that such spending is a net addition to “aggregate demand” is to ignore those other people — namely, current and future taxpayers.
The timing of Obama’s so-called stimulus spending has been totally inconsistent with Tyson’s description of how the economy supposedly responded in the past and present, and why she expects growth to slow by a percentage point or two next year unless the feds spend more on multi-year jobless benefits and deficit-sharing with the states. In its latest whitewash, the CBO “now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to $814 billion. Close to half of that impact is estimated to occur in fiscal year 2010, and about 70 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact will have been realized by the close of that fiscal year.” With half of the spending in fiscal 2010 and 30 percent in 2011 and beyond, that means just 20 percent of the $814 billion ($163 billion) had been spent by the end of October 2009. Yet it was in late 2009 when Tyson claims the stimulus had the most impact.
Tyson worries that “by next year, the [fiscal] stimulus will end.” That’s wrong too. The CBO estimates that 30 percent of the spending ($244 billion) will occur in fiscal 2011 (January to October) and beyond to 2019.
Unfortunately, Ms. Tyson’s reference to the second quarter’s GDP is entirely unrelated to her diagnosis of the problem as being “a collapse in private demand.” GDP does not measure private demand because it subtracts imports. Yet spending on imports is just as much a part of “demand” as is spending on domestic goods and services. Real gross domestic purchases increased at a 4.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter, up from 3.9 percent in the first. Neither figure suggests any paucity of private spending.
The second quarter surge in imports (which largely accounts for the wide gap between domestic purchases and GDP) looks like a statistical fluke. “Real” imports appeared to rise so much mainly because import prices supposedly fell at a 9.5 percent annual rate (which means a 2.38 percent rise in the quarter, multiplied by four to get the annual rate). By contrast, import prices rose at a 14.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter and at a 24.8 percent rate in the fourth quarter of 2009. Those figures say more about the folly of converting smallish price changes into annual rates than they do about the real economy. Besides, imports fell 2.1 percent in July and exports rose 1.8%, so the questionable second quarter trade figures did not indicate a lasting trend.
Tyson did not bother to figure out how large the first stimulus bill was, or when the borrowed loot was spent. She did not bother to look up the negligible contribution of federal spending to recent changes in GDP, and she confused GDP with domestic demand.
The press kept telling us that Tyson was almost certain to replace Peter Orszag as OMB director, and then to replace Christina Romer as head of the Council of Economic Advisers. Yet such plums keep slipping from her fingers, to the dismay of her fans at The Nation, NPR and The Atlantic. This is rare evidence of good judgment from the Obama White House.
Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
Today’s Washington Post contains a smart piece by Ted Koppel on how U.S. actions since 9/11 have handed Osama bin Laden a great victory. I think that goes too far. Bin Laden and his tiny band are still on the defensive. His grandiose goals are ridiculous, and we should stop pretending that they are plausible. But Koppel makes a good point about how a society’s reaction to terrorism does most of the work of terrorism. The solution? Stop terrorizing ourselves.
Read Koppel’s op-ed; and if you like what he has to say, read our book, which includes contributions from a number of leading counterterrorism experts.