Obama’s Venezuelan Challenge

There is no shortage of foreign policy challenges for Barack Obama as he prepares to take office in a few short weeks.  And over the next few months, you’re likely to read hundreds of thousands of words analyzing a small handful of them, namely those challenges that involve Middle Eastern countries that start with the letter “I.”

But what you will not read much about are the other foreign policy challenges that are equally as important, but not quite as familiar.  So, in an effort to shed some light on the massive, worldwide foreign policy shadow cast by Iraq, Iran and Israel, this piece will be the first in a series of three highlighting the most important “other” foreign policy challenges. While all three of these scenarios will require great diplomatic skill, some are more difficult than others, and we’ll begin with the most manageable in Venezuela and work our way to the most challenging in Pakistan via Cuba.

The Challenge: Keep Venezuelan oil flowing in the short-term before the U.S. can eventually wean itself off of it in the long-term.  At the same time, peace must be kept between Venezuela and its neighbor to the west, Colombia, despite increasing tensions between the two.

The Obstacles: Bad blood has been brewing for the past eight years between George W. Bush and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.  President Chavez has accused the Bush Administration of being responsible for the coup that briefly ousted him from power in 2002 and of plotting another coup attempt in 2006.  If Chavez maintains the perception within Venezuela that the leaders in Washington are still out to destroy both Venezuela and his presidency, he has the ability to wreck havoc with the U.S. economy by shutting off approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil a day that Venezuela currently exports to the United States.

With regards to Colombia, it is no surprise that the left-wing Hugo Chavez and the right-wing president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, do not get along.  What is a surprise is that the two men managed to maintain a cordial and somewhat productive relationship as long as they did.  For five years, from Uribe’s election in 2002 until 2007, the only major diplomatic dispute between the two nations was quickly resolved when Chavez and Uribe spoke to one another and agreed that they were both at fault for using the media rather than official diplomatic channels to air their grievances.

But then, in late 2007, the relationship between Venezuela and Colombia took an abrupt turn for the worse when negotiations between the Colombian government and its long-time enemy, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), broke down. Chavez, who many view as sympathetic to FARC’s cause, was involved in the negotiations, and Uribe felt as though its failure to produce any positive results was partially the Venezuelan president’s fault.  This led to a “freezing” of political relations between the two nations. Then, the situation was made much worse just a few months later, on March 1, 2008,  when Colombian forces went after and killed a FARC commander inside Ecuadorian territory.  Ecuador was not pleased with the Colombian invasion of its sovereignty and cut diplomatic ties with Colombia.  Venezuela immediately followed suit.

To make matters worse, the following day, Chavez condemned Colombia’s actions by saying that if Uribe took similar actions in Venezuela, it would provoke war:

“Don’t even think about doing something like this over here (Colombian) President Uribe, because that would be extremely serious….A military incursion on Venezuelan soil would be a cause for war.”

Of course, this comment served only to fuel the perception that Hugo Chavez was and is more interested in harboring the leftist rebels and furthering their cause than he is in actually bringing about peace in the region.  Conversely, Chavez accused both Uribe and the United States of not actually wanting the war to end.  What began as an effort to bring about a greater dialogue ended in complete lack of trust in this strategically important region.

While the probability of all out war between Colombia and Venezuela is slim, if the situation is allowed to continue to deteriorate, the results could be catastrophic.  Further, if such a string of events would occur, it would most likely occur with little or no warning.  Colombia, whose military is partially supported by billions of dollars from Washington and who is already mobilized militarily from their internal war against the FARC, is prepared for an attack from Venezuela at any time.  Recent history shows that the Colombian military has displayed very little qualms about invading another nation’s territory, and if a worthwhile target were to appear across the Orinoco River in Venezuela, Colombia may decide that such an incursion is worth the risk of retaliation. In Venezuela, President Chavez has aggressively been building up his military over the past decade.  In fact, the buildup has been so quick that some U.S. officials have openly discussed concerns that the rapidly expanding Venezuelan military could trigger an arms race in Latin America.  More than 80,000 Venezuelans serve in the country’s army, navy, air force and national guard, and many of them are eager to test out their new toys.

With as little trust as there is between the two neighbors at the moment, it wouldn’t take much to touch off this Amazonian powder keg.  The Americas have been relatively peaceful since WWII, and it is in everyone’s best interest to keep it that way.  President-elect Obama must find a way to rebuild the trust between not only Chavez and Uribe, but also between the peoples and militaries of Venezuela and Colombia.

The Solutions: If there is any hope for the Obama Administration to help rebuild the trust between Venezuela and its neighbor to the west, it must first work with Hugo Chavez to build a stable and more trusting relationship between the United States and Venezuela.

For his part, the Venezuelan President has already shown some signs that he may be willing to make this relationship work.  Since the November 4 election of Barack Obama, President Chavez has made some initial efforts to ease tensions with the United States.  In early November, when the Bush Administration made a slightly provocative move by “inviting” the Venezuelan consul in Houston to leave the country, Chavez, surprisingly, did not take the bait.  Instead, he accepted Washington’s decision and admitted that the Venezuelans had been in the wrong. Additionally, days before the U.S. Election, the Venezuelan President acknowledged that relations between the U.S. and Venezuela were at an all time low, but an Obama victory could go a long way to change that.  Further, Chavez has stated publically that he is willing to talk with the Obama Administration, something neither side has been willing to do during the Bush Administration.

While making a small concession and a non-binding promise to talk may not seem like much to work with for President-elect Obama, it is a move in the right direction and a far cry from the belligerent name-calling that has gone on between the two nations over the past eight years. The Bush Administration’s approach to Venezuela and Hugo Chavez has been to deem Chavez an evil dictator (not quite the axis of evil, but close) and to play off of the American public’s misperceptions about Chavez (which they helped create) in order to score cheap political points at home. This practice needs to come to an immediate end when Obama is sworn in.  One step in this direction would be for President-elect Obama to ensure that no one in his new administration, especially his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, publically refers to Chavez as a dictator, tyrant, or anything other than the President of Venezuela.

This, however, may be easier said than done.  Given the American public’s perception that Chavez is a dictator and enemy of the United States, it may be tempting for the Obama Administration to try to score some of the same political points that Bush did, particularly if some sort of diplomatic hitch arises. If and when Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez do sit down for a face-to-face talk, Obama should make it clear that his overarching philosophy of cooperation will be applied to everyone, not just to Americans, and despite the differences between Venezuela and the United States, he will sit down and figure out where there is common ground between the two countries.

Finding that common ground will be key to building a better, more trusting relationship with Chavez, and it will provide the U.S. with a slightly more secure source of oil, but more importantly, it will provide an opportunity to influence Colombian-Venezuelan relations. War may not be imminent between these two Latin American nations, but such a war would be a nightmare situation that U.S. must do everything to prevent.  Such a war would most likely draw U.S. troops and lead to the loss of its fourth largest supplier of oil in Venezuela.  As such, the incoming Obama Administration must work very hard to prevent such a worst-case scenario from developing.

The Bottom Line: In general, any solution regarding Venezuela is going to be tricky.  President-elect Obama and Secretary of State Clinton will have to walk a diplomatic tightrope, mending a broken relationship with a recent adversary in Venezuela while being careful not to offend long-time ally Colombia. The good news is that because of recent statements by Hugo Chavez, there appears to be a small window of opportunity for the United States and Obama and Clinton to successfully walk such a tightrope. However, faced with many competing international priorities right out of the gate, especially in the Middle East, the Obama administration may be tempted to devote most of their attention elsewhere. They would be wise not to ignore Latin America for long. If they do, the current window of opportunity in Venezuela may be slammed shut. The geopolitical consequences of this could be dire.

Obama’s Progressive Street Cred

The selection of Rick Warren for the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration is troubling, to say the least. Many progressives are rightly outraged at the selection of a man who is virulently anti-choice and homophobic. Yet, this is only the latest in a series of Obama decisions that has left many progressives wondering who it was, exactly, they voted for. Apparently, “change” looks a lot like the Clinton administration. Rahm Emanuel is back. So is Eric Holder, formerly Deputy Attorney General. Most conspicuous of all, Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State. A bevy of liberal-but-not-quite-progressive apologists have tried to explain away all of Obama’s decisions. Here is a list of some of their justifications:

• Obama is pursuing Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach. Authors of this justification also cite Lyndon Johnson’s phrase: it’s better to keep one’s enemies “on the inside, pissing out” rather than “on the outside, pissing in.” By keeping his enemies in the White House, those enemies are not in Congress or on K Street trying to defeat his plans.
• Remember how we all said for six months that Obama’s qualifications don’t matter? Not so much. As such, he’s surrounding himself with a group of people who have experience working in a presidential administration, and the last Democratic presidency was Bill Clinton’s, so it only makes sense that he would choose people from there.
• Obama is sneakier than he seems (think I, Claudius, I suppose). He’s putting a lot of center-left (and, in some cases, center-right) Washington establishment politicians in key positions to pay lip service to that establishment. Don’t worry, it’s only a front. The real reforms are going to happen, but from behind a veil of mainstream non-reform. That’s the only way he can get things done down there.
• Obama does not want to continue the divisive politics of George W. Bush. Even though it might anger those on the hard left, Obama would rather heal and reconcile than punish.  Turn that cheek!

Some of these justifications are disturbing. The last one, that Obama should be conciliatory instead of punitive, is put forth by people who believe that the crimes of the George W. Bush administration should not be investigated. The country needs to heal, they say. It’s time to get on with the business of the United States, where “business” is defined so as to exclude investigations of the previous administration. Of course, this logic ignores the fact that the law has been broken. As Glenn Greenwald has observed, politicians are more than ready to throw the full force of the law at marijuana dealers, but when it comes to prosecuting their own, politicians are equally ready to be lenient, even though the marijuana dealer harmed no one and the politician may have, oh, I don’t know, been responsible for torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping at the least. When crimes are committed, they should be investigated and prosecuted – not just for poor people, but for everyone, including politicians. For Barack Obama to suggest that Bush administration criminals should go free is to suggest that politicians live in a special class above the reach of the law. It also encourages more illegal activity in the future, once it is known that the government won’t prosecute those activities.

Furthermore, it’s not even up to Barack Obama to decide what is or is not investigated. The cult of personality surrounding him is great (in fact, it contributed to getting him elected), but even though we like him we must not forget that, as the president, he has constitutional limitations. It was irresponsible for the media to even ask what Barack Obama thought about Joe Lieberman being kicked out of the Democratic caucus. On November 5, Obama’s life as a senator ended, even though he didn’t officially resign the position until three weeks later. The president has absolutely no say – none! – in the operation of Congress. It would be different if Obama were acting in his capacity as a senator, but after winning the presidential election, especially in a nation eager for a new leader, any notion of Obama acting solely in his capacity as a senator would be extremely naïve. Obama must repudiate the unconstitutional powers that George W. Bush has claimed for himself, either through complete fabrication or malicious misreading of constitutional law.

Given his opinion of things like same-sex marriage (he tactfully says that same-sex couples should not be allowed to “marry” as such, but then says that they should have the same rights as heterosexual couples), NAFTA/CAFTA, and Israel, no one could confuse him for a true progressive. Obama’s apologists rationalize his decisions by pointing out that Obama never claimed to be a progressive at all!

Or could they? George W. Bush’s method of saying-without-saying is well-documented. While he never explicitly said that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, there is definitely a reason why, in 2001, virtually no Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible, but in 2003, one third of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible.

Could it be that Barack Obama, whose campaign P.R. was spectacular, performed the same saying-but-not-saying function? Yes, it is entirely possible that Obama clothed himself in the cloak of progressivism while still wearing the mainstream Democrat’s clothes underneath. He has suggested massive new spending on entitlement programs, but he wants to increase the size of the military. He wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, but he voted in favor of retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the administration in warrantless wiretapping. His foreign policy goals consist of using real diplomacy instead of threats, but he voted in favor of NAFTA. He wants to provide government health care for people who have no health care, but he stops short of suggesting a universal-payer system like Canada’s or Great Britain’s. Obama’s positions are a wash: for every progressive-sounding idea, there is another conservative-sounding one to balance it out.

Or, on the other hand, it could be that Obama never suggested anything, but that he was forthcoming about his non-progressive credentials. It could be that we, the progressive Americans, were so thirsty for a change that we latched onto the only candidate (outside of Dennis Kucinich) who even brought up the issue of health care reform (at those early Republican primary debates, not a single candidate brought up the issue of health care), social reform, and getting out of Iraq (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards failed on at least one of these). We projected onto him the candidate we wanted him to be, ignoring the fact that he was not that candidate. Did we set ourselves up for disappointment? Yes, that is possible, too.

And then there’s the argument that all this complaining is pointless, that Obama isn’t even the president yet, and we should all just wait and see what happens on Jan. 20. Well, Rick Warren will happen Jan. 20, and that gives me even less optimism that, at noon on that day, Obama will suddenly throw aside his centrist mask and shout, “You fools! You thought I was just like Bill Clinton! But you were wrong! Free health care for everybody!” Agreeing to take part in Warren’s Saddleback (which sounds dangerously like “bareback”) debate with John McCain, Obama could conceivably have been seen as paying lip service to evangelical Protestantism, just like every president since Nixon has had to do. But putting Warren on the bill for Inauguration Day? Imagine if George W. Bush had hired Hillary Clinton to give a speech at his second inauguration. Yeah, it’s like.

Most troubling in my opinion, though, is Obama’s own insistence, ever since March of 2007, when he announced his candidacy, that he is not an ordinary politician. His grassroots, fifty-state strategy was unparalleled in its success. His speech about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was intelligent and it treated the American people as though they, too, could understand long speeches that contained nuanced thoughts, as opposed to the Manichean sound bites of George W. Bush. His political maturity happened after the Vietnam War era, and, as Andrew Sullivan has suggested, the very core of his being is not instilled with a reflexive fear of Republicans and conservatism.

Conservatism demands the acknowledgment of a false dualism in every aspect of life, with the promise that conservatism will lead people to the correct side of this duality. Democrats buy into this framework and then try to argue the opposite side. The true progressive would never let the Republicans frame the debate and then proceed to work within their ill-conceived framework. To the progressive, there is no debate about whether or not health care should be free, or if there should be a premium for minimum services, or if the government should control it. The answer is: the current system of privatized health care doesn’t work and it should not be repaired, it must be rebuilt from the ground up. Obama appeared unafraid to work outside the existing framework and create a new framework that works in the interests of everyone. “Should it be a public solution or a private solution?” is not the correct question. “What solution is best for the country?” Now that’s the right question. It’s a question that Obama appeared to be asking during the campaign, but one that is being substituted by justifications for increasingly conservative behavior.

Circuit Court Strikes Down National Security Letters

One of the more controversial components of 2001’s USA PATRIOT Act is the expanded use of national security letters (NSLs). These are letters given by the FBI to people who have information the FBI wants. The letters, which do not require approval by a judge, amount to a combination search warrant/gag order. The letter requires the recipient to produce information about a third party, whom the FBI is investigating. The recipient is forbidden from discussing, with anyone, the nature of the information requested — but it doesn’t stop there! NSLs also forbid the recipients from even disclosing the fact that they received such an inquiry.

In 2006, an internal audit found that the FBI’s use of national security letters had increased dramatically from 2003 to 2005, and many of those letters were authorized by people who were not in a position to authorize them. In 2008, another audit revealed that the FBI was still improperly issuing NSLs, and what’s more, 60% of the letters targeted American citizens.

Well, in 2007, the ACLU decided it had had enough. It filed suit against the government on behalf of several John Does named in NSLs, alleging that the letters violated the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, since the letters’ gag orders improperly curtailed freedom of speech without “due process of law” (that’s a Fifth Amendment guarantee that means a person cannot be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” without a trial), and the letters themselves were not issued with proper judicial authority. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York agreed, rendering unconstitutional the NSL provision of the USA PATRIOT Act.

The government appealed. On Monday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court’s decision in part. It agreed that the gag order provision violates the First Amendment because it is not “narrowly tailored” as is required by the strict scrutiny standard. It also agreed that the government, not the recipient of a NSL, has the burden of defending the validity of a gag order (under the statute, it was the recipient who had the burden of proving the gag order was not valid). The USA PATRIOT Act assumed that the government’s arguments in favor of a gag order were always correct.

With regard to the First Amendment, the Circuit Court found that the statute was overbroad specifically because the gag order does not have a temporal limitation. The government analogized the NSLs’ secrecy requirement to a jury’s secrecy requirement; however, the court disagreed, since a jury may talk about the case once it’s over, but the recipient of a NSL could conceivably be silenced forever, even long after the FBI’s investigation is over.

The court was troubled by the degree of deference to the Justice Department the USA PATRIOT Act requested of judges. I’ll let the Circuit Court speak for itself:

Assessing the Government’s showing of a good reason to believe that an enumerated harm may result will present a district court with a delicate task. While the court will normally defer to the Government’s considered assessment of why disclosure in a particular case may result in an enumerated harm related to such grave matters as international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, it cannot, consistent with strict scrutiny standards, uphold a nondisclosure requirement on a conclusory assurance that such a likelihood exists. In this case, the director of the FBI certified that “the disclosure of the NSL itself or its contents may endanger the national security of the United States.” To accept that conclusion without requiring some elaboration would “cast Article III judges in the role of petty functionaries, persons required to enter as a court judgment an executive officer’s decision, but stripped of capacity to evaluate independently whether the executive’s decision is correct.” Gutierrez de Martinez v. Lamagno, 515 U.S. 417, 426 (1995).

Of course, that was the whole point of the USA PATRIOT Act: to strip from the law the requirement that a judge authorize a warrant. NSLs are designed to permit the executive, with the barest minimum of oversight (if any at all), to gather any amount of information, at any time, from any person, without the authorization of an independent third party. The Bush administration has shown that it would love nothing more than to turn judges into “petty functionaries” who are, at once, required to sign off on a warrant, giving it the appearance of third-party review (and thus legitimacy), while at the same time preventing those judges from conducting any actual, meaningful review. Bush’s Justice Department has argued that the September 11, 2001 attacks were so horrifying that the shock waves rippled through the Constitution itself, ostensibly amending it to create a parallel Constitution for “a post-9/11 world” in which the executive must have unquestionable power to arrest, detain, try, convict, and torture anyone it feels may possibly present a threat to national security. To follow the rule of law that has operated the United States for 219 years would only aid terrorists and put everyone at risk of another attack. These arguments have been refuted time and time again by courts, which — despite attempts at legislation to the contrary — still retain the authority “to say what the law is.” As it turns out, even an event as traumatic as the September 11 attacks cannot spawn into being a parallel, Bizzaro constitution that contains nearly-unlimited executive powers. There is no constitutional equivalent of a virgin birth.

Still at issue is whether or not the government is acting in good faith. Why is this secrecy necessary? Does it stem from an actual belief that disclosure of NSLs will endanger the country? Is it paranoia? Or is it something more sinister, a primitive desire for power and control? Vice President Cheney articulated “the one percent doctrine,” the idea that a 1% chance of a terrorist attack should be treated as a 100% chance of a terrorist attack. On its face, this belief is ludicrous: to be implemented properly, this policy would require a police state of the type seen only in China or the old Soviet Union. Cheney is no dummy, and must therefore understand that The One Percent Doctrine, from both a statistical, policy, and security standpoint, is foolish. Is it, then, a facile attempt to increase surveillance power?

These questions may end up never being answered; Cheney will take them with him to the grave. President Bush has no mind for complexity and thus cannot answer these questions, either. Bush is concerned about his legacy, not unlike Richard Nixon. But Bush’s mind is Cheney’s mind, and while Cheney may be as smart as Nixon was, Cheney does not have the same hang-ups about his reputation. Our only insight into the nation’s operation for eight years will be investigations upon investigations into what our government has been doing and why our government has been doing it.

Lone Star Rumblings: So Goes the Party

Top to bottom, the GOP in Texas seems to be foundering in a sea of disillusionment and infighting. Not just nationally, but in the Lone Star State as well, the Republican flock that gave rise to the Bush dynasty seems to have lost its faith.

The State of the Electorate

If a recent poll from Hill Research Consultants, entitled “Beyond Bush: Texas Republicans in an Obama Era,” is to be believed, Texas voters suffer from “Bush fatigue,” believe that the GOP is “arrogant, racist, corrupt, and unwelcoming” when compared to its Democrat counterparts. A generic R vs. D gubernatorial ballot gives Democrats a clear advantage at both the state representative and gubernatorial levels.

Generic Ballot Preferences	Republicans	Democrats
Governor	31%	44%
State Representative	31%	45%

Other points of interest note that “multiple deceased Democrats handily beat still living Republican office-holders in favorability,” and “Republicans are also failing to connect with younger voters and the Hispanic community.” Considering the state of Texas is growing younger and more Hispanic by the day, the Texas GOP seems to be on the wrong side of demographic trends.

So goes the opinion of the electorate in Texas, once the bread and butter of the Republican Party. They seem disillusioned and wavering in their support of the GOP and its direction. Hill, et al., warn that what happened in Colorado, a decidedly red state in 2000 whose governor, both chambers of the legislature, and both U.S. senators are now all Democratic, could happen in Texas. “The time to ring the alarm bell, if necessary, is now,” declares Hill.

Finally, it must be noted that the poll referenced in detail above was taken November 15-17^th, right on the heels of the general election. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the voters surveyed were encircled by the “Obama halo,” a feel-good sentiment that seemed to wash over much of the country, proud of itself for electing its first African-American president. In general, polls taken in the weeks immediately after an election are not as reliable. Many moderate voters often have a confirmation bias toward the winning candidate or party. However, with that said, the Texas GOP should ignore the results of this poll at their own peril.

Gubernatorial and Senatorial Implications

With the laity in such disarray, it’s no surprise that the Republican Party leadership is struggling to maintain order within its own ranks. Two key Texas Republicans are looking vulnerable, and not necessarily just from Democratic vectors.

Sitting Governor Rick Perry, who won reelection in 2006 with only 39.3% of the vote, announced in April his intention to run again in 2010. Texas does not place limits on reelecting its governor, but a third term would be unprecedented and apparently not necessarily welcomed by some of the Republican elite.

On December 4^th,Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior U.S. Senator from Texas, filed paperwork with the Texas Ethics Commission to form an exploratory committee for the office of governor. The filing was not revelatory, as she’s been dodgy for months about directly answering the “would she or wouldn’t she run” question, and noises were even made about her running against Perry in 2006 and 2002. What was surprising was the speed with which the two camps traded barbs after her filing.

Hutchison initially remarked that there’s “too much bitterness, too much anger, too little trust, too little consensus and too much infighting” in Austin. Mark Miner, a Perry spokesman, replied “Kay Bailout has been talking about running for governor and passing legislation for years, and neither has ever happened.”

It will be an interesting gubernatorial primary in 2010, indeed.

Other Political Rumblings

Hutchison’s U.S. Senate seat does not come up for re-election until 2012. Should she vacate the Senate before then (she doesn’t have to in order to run for state office), the governor has the power to appoint a replacement. The word around the campfire is that sitting Lt. Governor,David Dewhurst, would be at the top of Perry’s short list.

Third behind the governor and lieutenant governor in power, the Speaker of the Texas House is elected at the beginning of each new congressional session, the next one beginning January 13, 2009. Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, whose leadership style has been likened to that of Vlad the Impaler, has held the Speakership since 2003.

He has caused controversy and consternation among both Democrats and Republicans by his heavy-handed use, some would say abuse, of the powers given him as speaker by the Texas Constitution. Not only has he refused to recognize representatives motioning for house rules changes that may challenge his power, he has even refused to allow direct votes to remove him from power brought before the House by half a dozen of his fellow Republicans at the end of the last session. He thought it would set a bad precedent.  Those who have challenged him from his own party have found themselves being passed over for desirable positions that their seniority may have given them dibs on.

No less than eleven representatives, seven of which are from his own party, will challenge Craddick for the Speakership for the next legislative session. On Friday, December 12^th, Rep. Dan Gattis, R-Georgetown, filed a constitutional proposition that would allow the removal of a speaker in mid-session with the approval of 100 of the 150 representatives. Obviously, Craddick is not a popular guy, even among his own people.

Overall Lone Star Outlook

With a core constituency that no longer seems to trust its leadership or the direction the party is taking, the GOP in Texas is a rudderless mess. Its captains can’t decide who should be at the helm, and Texas Democrats are eagerly waiting in the wings to stage a mutiny the scale of which would be rivaled only by the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” In 2010, it looks like they’ll have their chance.

Team of Dysfunctional Rivals

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, has been all the rage lately, as President-elect Obama constantly cites it as a book from which he has learned a lot. For the sake of our country, I hope that he means that he has learned a lot about the general historical context and how to tell a good story. Because, if he is drawing on this book for factual accuracy, we are in for some problems. There is nothing wrong with Goodwin’s book, in the same sense that there is nothing wrong with historical fiction. Dr. Goodwin is a wonderful writer and an even better cult of personality. She takes history to the mainstream in a way for which every serious historian should be thankful.  Her eulogy at Tim Russert’s memorial service was graceful and poignant. However, her work should not be taken for God’s word. It isn’t the past plagiarism allegations or the fact that Dr. Goodwin does relatively little of her own research (a team of countless research assistants are said to do the bulk of the work for Dr. Goodwin) that particularly bothers me. In fact, the latter probably explains the former. What bothers me is that her work, like that of other historians-lite such as Michael Beschloss are taken as historical fact by the mainstream media and many of our politicians.

In an excellent op-ed piece in the November 19 issue of the New York Times, historian and Lincoln expert James Oakes wrote about how dysfunctional Lincoln’s cabinet was. This is an excellent read. (I also recommend Oakes book on the relationship between Lincoln and Fredrick Douglass.)

In this light, let’s go through some popular myths about Lincoln’s team of rivals that Oakes dismisses.  Not all these myths are portrayed in Team of Rivals, but each has become part of the conventional wisdom in recent weeks.  As such, many of the quasi-facts in Goodwin’s book have taken on a life of their own in the meme of the talking heads.

Myth 1: Lincoln selected rivals from other political parties.

This is not fact. Lincoln selected other Republican rivals, but not Democratic ones.

Myth 2: This practice was unique and unprecedented.

Far from it, this was common practice in that day. Many horribly unsuccessful Presidents, such as Lincoln’s predecessor James Buchanan also followed this practice. Oakes does a good job of giving us the history here. Does anyone remember stories of the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr? Hate to tell you, but those rivals were both part of Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet.

Myth 3: The cabinet worked well together.

Oakes dismisses this and seems to say that Lincoln succeeded not because of his cabinet, but in spite of it.

You may ask, why all this matters. It matters in the current context because if Obama is going to use Goodwin’s book for historical guidance in selecting his cabinet, it is important to know what really happened back in the 1860s. With this knowledge, perhaps one can better judge whether someone like Hillary Clinton is the best choice.

Now let me be clear–no matter how intriguing it might be–I’m not expecting any duels between Hillary Clinton and Janet Napolitano. However, we can expect some friction and not all of it will be healthy. Is this proposed “team of rivals” model better than classic JFK-LBJ cabinet groupthink that got us into the Bay of Pigs, and arugably led to the disaster in Vietnam? Of course.  Is it better than the one-man fiat of the last eight years (by the way, that one man is not George W. Bush)? Of course. However, we should be careful to draw historical parallels from half-truths and a good story.  Also, we should try to back up a step and determine whether one Republican and one Hillary Clinton truly make a team of rivals. Finally, even if we assume that Obama is aiming for a team of rivals, that he is drawing lessons from Kearns Goodwin, and that Kearns Goodwin’s outline of this history was completely accurate (huge ifs), we would still need to consider the differences in the context of those times that make extending such broad lessons next to impossible in the different world of today. As divided and red and blue states may seem, this not 1860, and we are much more united as a country than many partisans would like to admit.

The Attorney General and the Unitary Executive

The attorney general’s is a strange office. On the one hand, the AG is appointed by the president (with the advice and consent of the Senate, of course). On the other hand, the AG may be required to defy the president, investigate him, or even indict him for criminal acts. It is this duality of the AG role that has put President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales into hot water over the past four years. As attorney general, it was Gonzales’ job to investigate wrongdoing; however, as a loyal member of the Bush cadre, investigating the boss would have been a capital no-no. So how does the president get away with such obvious nepotism?

Unitary executive.

The phrase has been bandied about for eight years by liberals who have something of an understanding of what it means. “The president has total power” is what they think it means. And that’s the conclusion that the unitary executive theory results in, but it is not the premise.

The unitary executive begins with the president as the head of the executive branch of government. The executive branch encompasses the president, the vice-president (despite what the current vice-president says), the cabinet departments (like the Department of Homeland Security), and the various agencies within those departments (like the Transportation Safety Administration or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to use the example of Homeland Security). There are also other myriad agencies like the Office of Management and Budget that live under what is called the Executive Office of the President. So far, so good. We’re not entering unknown waters. Of course this is the structure of the executive branch. It makes sense.

The theory of the unitary executive has always been with us, but it was taken to extremes by lawyers from the ultra-conservative Federalist Society. Some of America’s most conservative jurists, including Justice Antonin Scalia, Almost-Justice Robert Bork, and Chief Justice John Roberts, are or were members of the Federalist Society. This is the group responsible for the bogus interpretive theory called “originalism,” which holds that we can divine the intent of the Founding Fathers from the text of the Constitution, and oh, by the way, the Constitution never changes, except and exclusively through the amendment process. (Originalism’s counterpart is the living Constitution or active liberty, which says that the Constitution’s meanings must necessarily change as society changes, otherwise, the Constitution will find itself irrelevant and unenforceable.)

Under the unitary executive theory, the president has complete and total control over every office of the executive branch. The president should be free to fire whomever he wants, for any reason (or no reason at all), at any time. Furthermore, no executive agency should ever defy the president’s wishes, since all executive agencies are, reducto ad absurdum, the president. The president is the Justice Department. The president is the State Department. The president cannot be in conflict with himself; therefore, cabinet departments and agencies cannot be in conflict with the president’s wishes. This theory has been taken to court by the Justice Department, which held that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot sue the U.S. military, since the president would ultimately be the party on both sides, and the president certainly cannot sue himself!

The unitary executive then goes one step further: it declares that the president’s constitutional requirement to “take Care that the Laws [passed by Congress] be faithfully executed” means that the president’s powers cannot be constrained by Congress, since the president has a duty to execute the laws, and any Congressional hindrance of that duty, in the form of statutory limitations on the president’s power, is unconstitutional.

This is where President Bush’s signing statements come into play. Presidents have always issued signing statements, which are little interpretive blurbs written by the president when he signs a bill into law. The signing statements have, until now, been used to set down guidelines indicating how the president will enforce the particular law.

I say “until now” because Bush has used more signing statements than all other presidents combined, and he has used them most often to indicate that he will selectively ignore the parts of laws that restrict his power. Take this example from the Detainee Treatment Act, which Congress thought was going to be used to reign in Bush’s use of torture:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

In these signing statements, the president has reserved for himself the right to interpret what his constitutional powers are, and in so doing, reserved for himself the right to ignore provisions of laws passed by Congress that he feels are inconsistent with his interpretation of his own powers. This is the unitary executive theory in action (also inaction): whenever Congress attempts to place a check on the president’s power, the president sidesteps Congress, claiming that Congress cannot place any checks on the president’s constitutional duty to enforce the law.

I hope I don’t have to say that this is all highly questionable in terms of constitutionality. The president most certainly does not have the authority, constitutionally or otherwise, to interpret the law. That is the sole responsibility of the judicial branch of government. Chief Justice John Marshall, writing in Marbury v. Madison, put it simply and elegantly 205 years ago: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” No signing statement has ever been taken to federal court, but were that to happen, I can only hope that the court (which would be the D.C. Circuit Court) would refuse to grant the president judicial powers just like it refused to grant President Clinton legislative powers when he tried to use the line-item veto.

Back now to the attorney general. The next attorney general, who may very well be former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, knows what his role as AG would be. We know that he’s independent, meaning that, unlike Alberto Gonzales, he does not owe his entire career to the president. We know that he acknowledges that the AG is a unique office that, at times, requires “a closeness at the same time there needs to be distance.”

As Glenn Greenwald reports, though, Holder made some comments after the September 11, 2001 attacks that people who voted for Change should find disturbing. Of the inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison, he said, “It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war.” Even the U.S. Supreme Court eventually recognized that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to Geneva Convention protections.

Is there no one out there who has a more progressive view of indefinite detentions? The Constitution is quite clear: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” And yet there are still people out there — lots of them, apparently, all in positions of power — who believe that there’s nothing wrong with a little indefinite detention among friends.

Is this the change we voted for?

What Today Means

Today is not just about voting Barack Obama into office. It’s like a national colon cleansing. Today, hopefully, we will vote to restore the rule of law and the Constitution to their rightful places. Today, we will vote to end the doctrine of preemptive war, dial down the militarism, and begin focusing on fixing the problems we have in this country rather than starting new problems in other countries. John McCain would indeed continue the failed policies of George W. Bush, but voting for Obama is not merely about making sure McCain doesn’t become president. It’s about removing the Republican Party from power and in so doing, sending its operatives a clear message that we will no longer stand idly by as our nation engages in war, terror, and torture in our names, under the moniker of protecting the “homeland.” We will no longer watch as we are told that the government is not here to help us, that we should not help each other, but that we should fend for ourselves, and if we lack the wealth or imagination to do so, then so be it.

For eight years I have not been proud of the United States. It has engaged in atrocities that I had never thought a country as grand as ours could engage in. Most cynically, the president, vice president, and the Republican Party used the spirit of cooperation that existed after September 11 (Karl Rove’s imagined memories to the contrary) as their ticket to pure, unbridled power. In attempting to analyze why things have happened the way they have, this is the conclusion I come to: power. Though we often want to ignore the more animalistic parts of our brains, the limbic systems of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others are alive and well and thirsty for control. I can think of no other explanation.

The machinery that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton designed to prevent the concentration of power is failing us as the executive asserts ever more “powers” that are not to be found in statues or the Constitution. As long as the Republican Party remains in control of the country, that machinery will continue to deteriorate.

This is not to say that the Republican Party has always been bad. It was once the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It was once the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who helped create the America we know today. Even Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency; but Nixon’s contempt for the law was his own, not the party’s.

But the Republican Party has mutated into something that none of the above people would recognize today. Even Ronald Reagan, the venerable godfather of modern conservatism, would not recognize the Republican Party. Its sleaze knows no bounds: like a feral dog, it resorts to its most primal responses when threatened. As it has sensed, over the past few weeks, that its time is up, it has tried to associate Barack Obama with terrorists, socialists, Marxists, Muslims, and anyone else it thinks are evil. When that has failed, experience has shown us that it will resort to trying to forcibly stop people from voting, by placing “observers” at polling places to question legitimate voters’ registrations (in swing states only), intentionally delivering too few voting machines to Democratic precincts, or attempting to cut Democrats from voter lists altogether.

Karl Rove’s attempts to create a “permanent majority” have led to an undeniable fact: the Republican Party of 2008 does not care about anyone but itself. It seeks to enrich itself, to place its operatives in positions of power so that those operatives can amass wealth, and most of all, power. The party that clothes itself in patriotism is, underneath the bloody flags it wears, virulently unpatriotic. “Patriotism” involves respect for the nation and its people. The modern Republican Party has nothing but contempt for the nation and its laws, especially when those laws get in the way of its quest for power. And the people? The modern Republican Party doesn’t care about anyone who is not an elite member of the party. George W. Bush would be perfectly happy to throw Joe the Plumber to the sharks — if, that is, he didn’t need Joe’s vote.

And then we come to soldiers. Time and time again, President Bush has shown that he doesn’t care about soldiers. He wants meat that can absorb bullets in his ill-begotten, ill-fated War on Terrorism. Once the meat comes home to its family, brimming with trauma — both physical and mental — from the experience of war, President Bush has fought as hard as he can against paying for that meat, which it turns out, is a living, breathing human being that must now be taken care of.

Today is probably the nation’s most important day in many, many years. A vote for Obama is a tourniquet to stop eight years’ worth of hemorrhaging caused by a party that couldn’t care less about anyone but itself. A vote for McCain is a vote to continue things as they have been, despite his protestations to the contrary. McCain has demonstrated — not the least through the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate — that the modern Republican Party will continue to play an intimate role in the operation of the United States, as it has for eight years. Four more years of that will run our country’s veins dry.

Barack Obama does represent change. He represents hope. He represents a return to the Constitution, a return to the values of equal protection under the law, a return to a nation that defends itself when actually threatened and not a nation that attacks other countries due to perceived threats. A President Obama will lead a nation that we can be proud of again.

SNL Thursday: Will Ferrell Returns as George W. Bush

In one of the funniest SNL skits this season (and there have been many), Will Ferrell returns as George W. Bush: