Libya, Obama, and the War Powers Act

Remember during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when then-President Clinton responded to a question by quibbling with terms? "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," he told his interlocutors, and the moment became emblematic of Clinton's lawyerly slipperiness--not a great moment, even if you thought he was wrongly pursued.

Well, war is a lot more serious than a consensual affair in the life of a nation, but it appears that President Obama is determined to create a similar moment for himself:

In a broader package of materials the Obama administration is sending to Congress on Wednesday defending its Libya policy, the White House, for the first time, offers lawmakers and the public an argument for why Mr. Obama has not been violating the War Powers Resolution since May 20.

On that day, the Vietnam-era law’s 60-day deadline for terminating unauthorized hostilities appeared to pass. But the White House argued that the activities of United States military forces in Libya do not amount to full-blown “hostilities” at the level necessary to involve the section of the War Powers Resolution that imposes the deadline.

The two senior administration lawyers contended that American forces have not been in “hostilities” at least since April 7, when NATO took over leadership in maintaining a no-flight zone in Libya, and the United States took up what is mainly a supporting role — providing surveillance and refueling for allied warplanes — although unmanned drones operated by the United States periodically fire missiles as well.

They argued that United States forces are at little risk in the operation because there are no American troops on the ground and Libyan forces are unable to exchange meaningful fire with American forces. They said that there was little risk of the military mission escalating, because it is constrained by the United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized use of air power to defend civilians.

We're only a little bit at war, you see. Not even enough to count!

Poppycock.

The War Powers Resolution is actually fairly clear on this, from my reading: Just because the United States is in a support role doesn't mean that President Obama can ignore the resolution. The act specifically states the president must report to Congress when U.S. forces "command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities." It's not just when American trigger-pullers are pulling triggers, in other words, but when our forces are actively supporting other forces engaged in combat.

Under the most Obama-friendly reading of the circumstances—that we're only supporting the fighting countries, not fighting ourselves—he is still required to be accountable to Congress. Instead, his legal team has ignored the definition in the law and created its own.

I supported Obama in 2008 because he said things like this: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

He lied. And he's trying to elide that fact with an unseemly parsing of words. How embarrassing. How wrong.

Federalist 45: James Madison was wrong about (almost) everything

Returning to Federalist blogging after a too-long hiatus....

By now, I've made the point a few times that today's Tea Partiers have more in common with the original Antifederalists than with the actual framers of the Constitution. The Antifederalists wanted governance to remain primarily with the states, and while the Federalists certainly wanted more centralized federal governance than the Antifederalists, they still paid strong lip service to the idea that states would retain substantial power. The problem, some two centuries later, is that they were pretty much wrong about how that would play out—and nowhere is this more clear than in James Madison's Federalist 45.

Let's set the stage, though, by glancing at Antifederalist 45, written by "Sydney." He writes:

It appears that the general government, when completely organized, will absorb all those powers of the state which the framers of its constitution had declared should be only exercised by the representatives of the people of the state; that the burdens and expense of supporting a state establishment will be perpetuated; but its operations to ensure or contribute to any essential measures promotive of the happiness of the people may be totally prostrated, the general government arrogating to itself the right of interfering in the most minute objects of internal police, and the most trifling domestic concerns of every state, by possessing a power of passing laws "to provide for the general welfare of the United States," which may affect life, liberty and property in every modification they may think expedient, unchecked by cautionary reservations, and unrestrained by a declaration of any of those rights which the wisdom and prudence of America in the year 1776 held ought to be at all events protected from violation.

Viewed from a 2011 vantage point, this seems rather hyperbolic—Sydney asserts that the diminuition of state power will "destroy the rights and liberties of the people" and that seems incorrect. But it's surely the case that as the federal government has grown larger and more centralized that state governments have nonetheless also grown bigger and more expensive—and, in a lot of cases, funded by the federal taxpayer instead of just local folks.

Federalist 45 is part of Madison's attempt to defend against this charge, and there are two things to note here. A) He resorts to shameless demagoguery. And B) in making the arguments about why states would retain substantial power, he was wrong about just about everything.

The evidence for A) comes when Madison offers his first argument. So you say the states are going to lose their power, huh? Why do you hate the troops?

If that sounds like exaggeration on my part, here's what Madison actually wrote:

Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty?

If Sean Hannity claims the mantle of the Founders today, this is why it can sound plausible: Madison certainly sounds like a blowhard here. He opens not with a defense of the Constitution, but an attack on the motives of the Antifederalists—some of whom surely must've had some vested interests in the primacy of state governments, but some of whom opposed the Constitution based on their love of "peace, liberty, and safety."

But ugly political attacks always have been and always will be with us. For our purposes, it's more notable that Madison was really, really wrong in his central defense against the Antifederalists. Sure, he said, the Constitution empowers the federal government more than the Articles of Confederation—that's why we made it! But even under the Constitution, he says, "the State government will have the advantage of the Federal government."

It's easy to look at the landscape today and conclude Madison was wrong. That's the simple part. More complex is why Madison ended up being wrong.

At National Review, the facts don't matter as long as you connect a sex scandal to feminism

It was only a matter of time before somebody on the right tried to blame the Anthony Weiner scandal to ... feminism. What's remarkable about Sabrina L. Schaeffer's piece at National Review today is that it doesn't even bother to connect the facts of the Weiner scandal to feminism—in fact, the facts actually contradict the thesis.

For decades, modern feminists have undermined the idea of marriage, discouraged romance and courtship, encouraged a laissez-faire sexual culture, and done everything in their power to eliminate gender roles. Add to this the academic and professional opportunities available to women today, and the access to affordable birth control, and it’s clear that it’s much easier for women to participate in our “no strings attached” sexual culture than ever before. But this freedom, which has benefitted women so much, doesn’t come without consequences — namely, that it has allowed so many women to think it’s permissible to have an affair with a married man.

Two problems here:

• It's true: Before Betty Friedan wrote "The Feminine Mystique," it's true that married men never behaved badly, never tried to have affairs with women who weren't their wives. Feminism! (Shakes fist ruefully and angrily.)

• The evidence I've seen mostly reveals Anthony Weiner's behavior to be kind of predatory. The woman who was the recipient of the first underpants picture didn't appear to solicit it. Neither, apparently, did Meagan Broussard—the woman whose pictures forced Weiner to admit publicly his activities. Here's how she described their online relationship:

He was trying to get me to talk about myself sexually, and I said, straight up, I’m not an open book. I was real blunt. He would ask me weird things, like “Did you miss me?” I didn’t understand that–how could I miss someone I hadn’t met and didn’t know? What is there to miss about me if you don’t even know me?

He said that he was an open book, maybe way too open. And after that he said to me that I was “too fucking real,” not like other people who were all over him. He realized that I wasn’t taking the bait, and I think that intrigued him enough to send messages to me and open up to me and try to be real, too.

I gather Weiner and a porn star exchanged messages, but by and large it seems like the man was inflicting photographs of his torso on women he was talking to, hadn't established a romantic relationship with, and who didn't necessarily expect-welcome that kind of attention from him.

Nevermind that feminism—as I've understood it—tends to discourage such presumptuous behavior on the part of men. Clearly, by virtue of living in a feminist age, these women were asking for it.

I'd argue the idea that "modern feminists have discouraged romance and courtship"—I've got a pretty fine marriage with a feminist woman. But it's hardly worth the effort. Sabrina Schaeffer's mindset is this: Sex scandals are bad. Feminism is bad. Thus, when a sex scandal happens, feminism must bear the blame. It's such a simple framework that she drags it out even when the facts in question don't support the theory at all.

Bill Dunkelberg bait-and-switches Inquirer readers about the sick-leave bill

I'm not really decided about the merits of Philadelphia's proposed law to require employers to provide sick leave. I'm instinctively for it, and there's reason to believe it wouldn't have the deleterious effects its opponents suggest. Still, there's a lot of reason to believe it's not easy to do business in Philadelphia, and a lot of that has to do with local government regulation.

But sometimes opponents make such misleading arguments that it gets easier to choose sides. That's the case with today's Inquirer column from Bill Dunkelberg, a professor of economics at Temple University.

Here's how he starts:

Philadelphia universities clearly produce more graduates than we can use, so we "export" them. The Philadelphia region specializes in the production of drugs and graduates (among other things). It is silly to think we could keep most of them.

Graduates will stay only if there are jobs to be had. Yet Philadelphia is hostile to new business creation. The wage tax, the gross-receipts tax, the Department of Licenses and Inspections, and poor city services are just a few of the things that discourage job creation.

Now, City Council wants to put another nail in the job-creation coffin - a requirement that firms provide each employee a "paid sick days" benefit.

There's an implication here that the sick days benefit will chase away Philadelphia's best and brightest—that it will so thoroughly kill the creation of new jobs that folks from Penn, Drexel, Temple, Villanova and all the other universities will have to leave town in greater numbers than they already do.

But does that make sense? If you go by Dunkelberg's examples, I'd say no:

For a small restaurant with 10 employees, paying $10 an hour on average, this could add up to serious dollars. Let's say it creates $7,000 in additional annual expense. To make this up, firms with, for example, a 10 percent profit margin, would need to generate $70,000 in new business to cover the increase in costs.

For the small competitive firms that provide most of our jobs, this is not chump change.

Certainly not, but ask yourself a question: If you're a grad of Penn, Drexel, Temple, or Villanova, is a $10-an-hour restaurant job going to keep you in Philadelphia? In most cases, the answer is no.

In fact, if you think about the types of jobs the majority of those grads will be looking for, one thing is probably self-evident: those jobs probably come with sick leave benefits. Does Comcast make its employees come in with the flu or stay at home without pay? The pharmaceutical companies? The hospitals? That's where a lot of Philadelphia's brightest young workers are going.

In fact, I'd suggest that Dunkelberg uses the $10-an-hour example precisely because those kinds of jobs—physically laborious, low-paying—are actually the kinds of jobs that are targeted by the bill, where sick leave isn't generally offered, and where employees could really use it. These aren't university-grad jobs; in lots of cases they're not even high-school grad jobs.

Dunkelberg is on safer ground when he argues the other possible economic consequences of the bill. (Although his suggestion that Philadelphia workers are itching for an opportunity to rip off their employers is contemptible, as it is when every other opponent makes it.) But Dunkelberg clearly wants you to think that the bill will chase high-education high-wage jobs away from Philadelphia. Since those jobs generally already provide such benefits, that result is unlikely. And Dunkelberg surely knows that.

Facebook, Twitter, depression, my surgery, and 'quiet dignity'

My blog post about using social media in the hospital was adapted for an article at Macworld. There were lots of nice comments and Tweets from around the world—which was gratifying—but I'm afraid the one that stood out was the commenter LJMAC's observation that more or less criticized me.

I dunno. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but for me this kind of thing is just too private to tweet about - I feel it's something that should be endured with "quite (sic) dignity", as people always did for decades before the advent of social networking. I think times like this are good for quiet reflection and contemplation - something I feel people do too little of these days, in our constantly connected world.

There's something appealing to this vision. I'm not above seeking a little solitude to contemplate and reflect. But even if I were capable of "quiet dignity"—and honestly, I'm probably not—I think LJMAC would be dead wrong.

For me, at least, "quiet dignity" would've meant "quiet suffering." And there's nothing inherently ennobling about suffering, I think, when it's done in a vacuum. Pain, depression, loneliness, the drug-induced sense of not quite existing in the real world—none of these things made me a better man. None of them were likely to. And anybody who implies I—or you—should be quiet and endure probably has a romantic view of life that renders them callous to actual human pain.

In fact, it was the support of my friends and family through Facebook and Twitter that actually provided the benefits that LJMAC thinks comes from "quiet dignity." A few weeks ago, I posted this message to my private Facebook account:

In recent weeks, I have been the recipient of prayers and hopeful thoughts from an unexpectedly wide range of people: Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics and atheists. Democrats, Republicans, and socialists. Journalists and non-journalists. Folks in Europe, Asia, and more than a few of the 50 states. People I've argued with heatedly, and people who probably have every right to hate me or hold me in contempt. I've been offered grace from people I never expected to give it, from folks I didn't think were capable of it.

I've learned humility on my own because, well, poop has been an integral element of every bad thing that's happened to me in the last month. But I've also learned humility because I've seen kindness from so many unexpected sources in the last month that I find it a bit more difficult to easily assign folks to binary groups of black hats and white hats.

I am not who I was five years ago, or 10 or 15 or 20. But ... neither are many of you. I've been guilty of not recognizing the growth that other people experience. I've been guilty of not always recognizing their humanity.

There are a lot of changes I expect to make as a result of this spring and summer of discontent. Mostly, though, I hope to be more patient and generous in spirit. I have been the recipient of that in the last month. I am grateful for it. And I thank you all.

Solitude has its uses. So does community. There will be times when I need the former; the latter has been crucial to my recent survival ... and growth.

Slick Rick at Odunde

Taken at ODUNDE!!!

Odunde!

Taken at ODUNDE!!!