A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Indy Star has an editorial entitled Trim highway bill or kill it outright

According to the Star, a federal highway bill that both Sens. Bayh and Lugar voted for is in conference committee. It’s expensive and laden with pork. They urge Pres. Bush to veto it.

I’m a little torn here. Government spending on transportation infrastructure is one of the good things the federal government can do. I’d prefer to see the feds spending money there than more wasteful undertakings like entering into a war of choice in Iraq. But, given that Congress and the President have already chosen to blow their budget on spending in Iraq, a hugely expensive highway bill with no source of funding increases will increase the deficit even more. Balanced budgets are of primary importance in a healthy economy, in my opinion. (Though, it’s my understanding as a non-economist, that sometimes deficit spending is necessary in a Keynesean pump priming situation to get the economy going — that’s not how we’ve been spending our federal money lately.)

These deficits highlight the need for a bit of gridlock in Congress. Seems like our best budget balancing experience in the past 30 years has been a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. (We overspent during the Reagan/Bush I years when we had the reverse. And, we’ve overspent during the Bush II years when we had Republican control. The only balanced budgets we’ve had in recent memory are the Clinton years.)

The New York Times has an article entitled In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths It is a lengthy article, based on a confidential Army file obtained by the New York Times that contains the investigation of the deaths of two Afghans at Bagram. The first death the New York Times describes is that of a 22 year old named “Dilawar”. Army investigators learned “most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.” Even so, he was shackled to the top of his cell by his wrists in a fixed position for days at a time.

At the interrogators’ behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.

According to the newspaper, the rules of engagement for the interrogators weren’t very clear at the time the Bagram interrogations were being conducted.

The platoon had the standard interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners “humanely,” and when possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush’s final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they “could deviate slightly from the rules,” said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.

“There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists,” Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.

The article is well worth the read — unless you’re squeamish about descriptions of interrogation techniques like the interrogator holding his penis against an inmates’ face and threatening to rape him. Too bad Newsweek had that sentence about flushing the Koran. Otherwise, the people of Afghanistan would surely love us.

During the debate on whether the filibuster was permissible to block judicial nominees, Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum declared of the Senate Democrats: “It’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942.” He said Democratic protests over Republican efforts to ensure confirmation votes would be like the Nazi dictator seizing Paris and then saying, “I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city. It’s mine.”

Now, I don’t know what the heck he was babbling about in the last couple of sentences, but I sure know what “equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 means.” The junior Senator from Pennsylvania is right up there with evangelical Christian leader Pat Robertson who claims that federal judges are worse threat to America than Al Qaeda (or the Nazis). It’s reminiscent of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson’s claim that Catholic Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is a ‘God’s people hater’ (“I don’t know if he hates God, but he hates God’s people,” Dobson said [Daily Oklahoman, 10/23/04].”) and also compared the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan.

Dobson’s newspaper columns tend to seem reasonable, but he’s really coming across badly with regard to his public statements about the federal judiciary. Media Matters chronicles some falsehoods he told over on Fox News:

Focus on the Family founder and chairman James C. Dobson made a series of false and misleading claims about the Senate’s use of the filibuster to block judicial nominees. On the April 21 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Dobson asserted: 1) that former Clinton nominee Richard A. Paez “was not an appeals court judge” and would not “have had a majority if given a simple up-or-down vote”; 2) that former President Bill Clinton “got 100 percent” of his appellate court nominees who reached the floor approved; and 3) that the “ABA [American Bar Association] had given its highest stamp of approval” to the 10 Bush nominees filibustered by Senate Democrats.

First, Clinton did indeed nominate Paez for an appellate court seat; he was finally confirmed in March 2000 after four years of delay by the Republican-controlled Senate. Second, Republican senators blocked 16 of Clinton’s appellate court nominees in his second term alone. Finally, only three of the 10 Bush nominees that Democrats have filibustered have received the ABA’s highest rating.

Responding to co-host Alan Colmes’s suggestion that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is being “disingenuous” by “acting as if the filibuster’s a terrible thing” after Frist himself had voted to filibuster Paez’s nomination, Dobson replied: “That was not an appeals court judge. And it was not a situation where the judge would have had a majority if given a simple up-or-down vote.” But Paez was an appeals court nominee, and he was ultimately approved in an up-or-down vote. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 13, 2003: “As recently as March 2000, several Republicans voted to filibuster two Californians whom President Clinton had named to the 9th Circuit appellate court: Richard A. Paez and Marsha L. Berzon. … Ultimately, the Republican stalling tactics failed, and both jurists now sit on the appellate court.”

Dobson then purported to “quote the statistics” to Colmes on the ratio of appellate nominees approved during the Clinton and Bush administrations: “President Bush has only gotten 67 percent of his appeals court nominees through when they got to the floor of the Senate. Bill Clinton got 100 percent.” But Dobson’s statistic is highly misleading; in fact, the Republican-led Senate kept 16 of Clinton’s second-term appellate court nominees “off the floor,” in most cases denying them even committee hearings.

Finally, in response to Colmes, who said of Democratic filibusters that “we’re talking about 10 [nominees] out of 205 who have been confirmed,” Dobson countered that those 10 nominees had received the ABA’s “highest stamp of approval.” But of the 10 Bush nominees filibustered by Senate Democrats, only three — Miguel Estrada, David McKeague, and Priscilla Owen — have received a unanimous “Well Qualified” rating from the ABA (ratings for all nominees are listed during the 108th Congress and the 109th Congress), and McKeague initially received a split rating of “Well Qualified” and “Qualified” during the 108th Congress before receiving an unanimous “Well Qualified” rating during the 109th Congress. Of the remaining seven filibustered nominees, four received a split rating of “Well Qualified” and “Qualified,” and three received a split rating of “Qualified” and “Not Qualified.” (Internal links omitted.)

I just wrote Senator Lugar to urge him to oppose Senator Frist’s “nuclear option”. The text of my letter:

Dear Senator Lugar:

I am writing to urge you to oppose Senator Frist’s use of the nuclear option. I know you are a good Republican and loyal to your party. That is to be admired. Your constituents, such as myself, voted for you expecting you to be a Republican. However, the use of the filibuster and observance of Senate Rules go beyond party loyalty. The appointment or non-appointment of federal judges, even though the appointments are for life, are transient when compared to the issues of the filibuster and observance of Senate Rules. Those are keystones of our Republic. I am sure it is frustrating to let a minority block the appointment of a dozen or so judges, but temporary annoyance is insufficient reason to tamper with the foundations of our democracy.

If you are kind enough to honor me with a response, I would thank you. But it would be my sincere hope that such a response would not contain disingenous arguments such as those I have heard from Senator Frist. Preventing Presidential nominees from receiving an up or down vote on the Senate floor is not unprecedented. The Senate has a long and somewhat proud history of such obstruction. Senator Frist has defined the issue so narrowly as to possibly be technically true but quite disingenuous: “unprecedented to filibuster a judicial nominee with majority support to prevent an up or down vote.” As a long-serving Hoosier with an honorable record of service, I suspect you understand the potential hazards of Senator Frist’s nuclear option. Those long-term hazards outweigh any short-term gain. As I said, I know you are a loyal party man. But, at this time, I believe the party’s course of action poses a serious threat to the health of the Republic. I would therefore urge you to split with your party if that becomes necessary to prevent the evisceration of the filibuster and to continue the faithful observance of the Senate’s Rules.

I thank you for your thoughtful consideration of this matter.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a good entry on the Republicans using the “nuclear option” to stop the Democratic filibuster of 5% of Bush’s judicial nominees.

(Just to be crystal clear, what the senate is about to do is not changing their rules. They are about to find that their existing rules are unconstitutional, thus getting around the established procedures by which senate rules can be changed.)

Their reasoning will be that the federal constitution requires that the president makes such nominations “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate” and that that means an up or down vote by the full senate.

Nobody believes that.

Also, David Brock’s Media Matters has The Top 10 Filibuster Falsehoods. It’s a good guide to deconstructing claims that Democrats are acting in an “unprecedented” manner by denying Bush’s judicial nominees an “up or down vote” on the Senate floor.

Zach Wendling over at In the Agora has a very thoughtful analysis of the John Bolton nomination. Bolton, you may recall, is George Bush’s nominee for the position of U.N. ambassador. He’s come under fire for being anti-U.N. generally as well as being temperamentally unsound. (Described as a “kiss up, kick down” kind of guy.) Incidentally, I wrote in to Sen. Lugar to express my concerns. His staffer wrote back with a “Bolton is qualified, the U.N. needs reform” letter. I suppose his hands are kind of tied on this one.

Anwyay, I highly recommend Mr. Wendling’s analysis.