GOP looks to back Obama into a corner
Congressional Republicans are angling for some big wins before the New Year.
By Seung Min Kim
With just two weeks left until the government runs out of money, there is increasing pressure from congressional Republicans to use a must-pass spending bill to force President Barack Obama into accepting several controversial policy riders — including new curbs on the Syrian resettlement program.
Sporting solid majorities in both chambers, Republicans are angling for some big wins in the first year-end shutdown fight since the GOP took control of Capitol Hill. But it will be a challenge to secure enough concessions from Democrats to mollify the right wing while avoiding the political risks of shutdown brinkmanship.
After Obama and congressional Democrats stymied their agenda for years, Republicans see the end-of-year funding bill due Dec. 11 as their best path for achieving their top policy priorities. They reason Democrats will accept some riders — especially measures with bipartisan backing — to avoid a knock-down, drag-out shutdown fight this December.
The universe of the hundreds of possible policy riders is vast, and many issues could be potential land mines. But rollbacks of Obama’s environmental and financial regulations are among some of the stickiest areas, Democratic aides said. Meanwhile, Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), are lobbying to loosen some campaign finance regulations. And there is the mounting pressure from dozens of GOP lawmakers to curb the flow of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria into the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris.
“Why wouldn’t it be included in the omnibus? This is not a poison pill,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) about the provisions dealing with the Syrian resettlement program. “That’s the story of this bill, if you have a veto-proof majority in the House, despite the pressure [from the White House], how is that a poison pill?”
Congressional negotiators were still hashing out the particulars of the massive $1.15 trillion spending bill on Sunday.
“Negotiations have been going over the weekend and are ongoing. Progress is being made,” Jennifer Hing, spokeswoman for House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), said Sunday. “We do not have an update on timing, but it is expected the bill will be ready for the floor prior to the deadline.”
Control of both chambers should give Republicans more leverage in the spending fight, but the GOP will almost certainly need Democratic votes to carry the spending bill over the finish line — giving the minority party at least some say over how the sweeping omnibus legislation turns out.
Still, one senior Democratic aide lamented last week that talks on riders had gotten “nowhere.” And some Democrats are complaining about the level of funding for key government agencies and arguing that spending for some areas, such as the measure that covers labor, health and education programs, is getting shortchanged.
And there are lingering disputes over funding for financial services programs, with Democrats calling for more spending for agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, according to Republicans.
Congress confronted another government shutdown battle in September over Planned Parenthood funding, but the news of the sudden resignation of then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sucked up all of Congress’ attention — and extending government funding became largely a formality. So now, this December’s omnibus spending measure will be the arena for the two parties to fight it out over government spending and what policies Republicans can force on the White House.
A major complication is what to do with Syrian refugees seeking to come to the United States. Congressional Republicans, especially conservative lawmakers, insist that any spending bill include provisions to tighten the vetting process for Syrian refugees. The House passed legislation beefing up those standards before Thanksgiving; McConnell has fast-tracked that bill to the Senate floor but has not yet indicated when it could come up for a vote.
Some GOP lawmakers want to go further. Rep. Brian Babin of Texas sent a letter with 73 GOP co-signers to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Rogers urging them to stop funds for refugee relocation in the spending bill unless the Obama administration puts in place a long-term monitoring system for refugees. The spending limitation would include not just Syrian and Iraqi refugees, but individuals from the Middle East broadly and Northern Africa.
Babin is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, a group of about 40 Republicans who have largely stated they would support an omnibus only if it includes language on Syria.
As one of the few must-pass bills that has to clear Congress, the spending bill is quickly becoming a magnet for pet priorities. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is calling for repeal of the risk corridors provision in Obamacare — a move Rubio says will shield taxpayer money from bailing out health insurers. But Democrats are insistent that the funding remain intact, Republicans say.
Another collision point is spending for the Green Climate Fund, which is run by the United Nations and helps distribute money to developing countries to deal with the effects of climate change. But congressional Republicans disagree the money should be used that way; Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a member of his chamber’s leadership, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week arguing that the money will end up being wasted.
Meanwhile, campaign finance issues are surfacing during the year-end spending talks again. McConnell has a proposal that would remove limits on parties’ coordination of spending with political candidates. A spokesman for the majority leader said “there is a bipartisan desire to have that provision done,” although the language is not final.
Also on the GOP hit list: blocking the Waters of the United States rule, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency’s clean power plan, limiting a proposed rule to make financial brokers liable for the investment advice they give, among other proposals.
“There is concern Republicans are not going to back off of them,” a senior Senate Democratic aide said of policy riders. “Democrats are trying to be constructive, but we have said from the beginning we will not accept poison pill ideological riders and we mean that.”
Of course, the spending bill is not the only item on Congress’ agenda as lawmakers sprint to finish their work before the holiday season. Senate Republicans will try to knock off another major item on their to-do list: sending Obama a repeal of his signature health care law.
The House passed legislation dismantling core provisions of Obamacare and defunding Planned Parenthood weeks ago, with just seven dissenting Republican votes. But Senate Republicans have had to navigate a tougher path toward passage, considering the narrower majority they hold in the chamber and resistance from both the conservative and moderate parts of their conference.
Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, both GOP presidential candidates, and Mike Lee of Utah won’t vote for the current Obamacare repeal unless the bill is expanded to eliminate more core provisions of the law. But moderates such as Maine Sen. Susan Collins, Mark Kirk of Illinois and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have objections to defunding Planned Parenthood, which the House-passed version of the bill currently does.
McConnell has called a senators-only meeting on Monday at 6 p.m. to discuss the Obamacare repeal and Planned Parenthood legislation. Republicans plan to use the powerful reconciliation process on the bill: By requiring just a 51-vote simple majority, it would allow Republicans to avoid a Democratic filibuster.
“The bill we need to pass is the House-passed bill,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said. “To me, it makes sense for us to send the president an Obamacare repeal bill that got all but seven Republican votes in the House. It’s what I used to call a no-brainer.”
Republicans are also staring down a deadline for a multiyear highway and transit program before funding for the transportation programs runs out on Friday. That bill would also revive the moribund Export-Import Bank, the export credit agency that shuttered in July because of conservative opposition.
Also on tap for Congress in December are extending a host of expiring tax provisions, a routine task lawmakers face at the end of every year. And congressional negotiators are still plugging away on a conference report for a sweeping rewrite of the No Child Left Behind education law. Lawmakers want to release the House-Senate education compromise on Monday, with passage first in the House and then in the Senate shortly after that.
November 30, 2015
5 takes
5 takes on 2016 as the campaign kicks into high gear
Trump could win, Cruz runs the best campaign, and Rubio has to start fighting to survive.
By Glenn Thrush
The untamable 2016 campaign has settled into a kind of comprehensible chaos with 60 days until the Iowa aucuses.
Donald Trump, a contender who embodies the ultimate cross-pollination of politics and entertainment that began with Ronald Reagan, continues to easily outpace Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio in what has become essentially a four-man field (with Jeb Bush and his millions lingering outside the circle of power). Hillary Clinton is still outrunning the wolves of scandal, but she hasn’t entirely dispatched Bernie Sanders yet — or shown signs of crossing over to capture independents in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and Iowa in the general election.
As befits the season, America is still very much in shopping mode, with major swaths of both parties still willing to jump from one candidate to the next. Here are five state-of-the-race takeaways, 60 days ahead of the first balloting:
1. Trump remains all the rage. The mystery of why Republican voters love Donald Trump more each time he makes up a story about Muslims dancing on rooftops after 9/11 or slimes a disabled reporter isn’t really very mysterious after all. All that engineered outrageousness isn’t about fact, or politics, or messaging, it’s about channeling the rawest emotions of his fans (and they are fans, not political supporters in a conventional sense). Nobody’s got a firmer grasp on the GOP’s amygdala — perhaps nobody ever has — or given voice to the sense of creeping decline so acutely felt in white America.
The base is seething, for real, with a recent Pew poll finding three times as many Republican voters describing themselves as anger-motivated compared with Democrats. Trump may be the ultimate it’s-all-about-me candidate, but the piercing paradox of 2016 is that it actually isn’t about him — but about his ability to capture the mood of his voters, and that, more than anything, explains his pundit-defying durability. He’s earned every percentage point of popularity: When Ben Carson swooned, who picked up much of his support? Trump, it seems.
“He's going to tell us exactly the way it is,” a South Carolina defense contractor named Richard Hippey (yes, that’s his real name) told my former colleague Dave Cantonese recently. This, about a candidate with a zero percent “true” score on Politifact. “We're tired of political correctness… [We] want to hear the truth.”
Here’s what those of us trapped inside the gilded New York-Washington brain cage miss: Trump may not be telling the truth, but he’s sure as hell telling their truth. This allows him to shatter most conventions of presidential campaigning, especially the notion that you have to run a positive campaign (or at least outsource your vitriol to surrogates) in order to win. Jeb Bush’s super PAC has spent millions to get out his positive message, all to get into the mid-single digits. Pluck off the happy-talk hat, and Trump has ridden up to 30 percent on almost unrelentingly negative, Reagan-on-downers message: Build a wall to keep out Mexicans; my opponents are fat, stupid, ugly, nasty, sweaty and poor; keep your “Morning in America,” I’m calling my campaign book “Crippled America.”
The question is no longer whether Trump can win the GOP nomination. He can. It’s whether his message will appeal to general election voters (or those Republicans most concerned with winning back the White House) who don’t share his anger or definition of the truth.
2. Ted Cruz is running the best campaign. The only thing less popular on Capitol Hill than Cruz is a cash bar. That’s just fine with the Texas senator, whose pitch-perfect attacks on the Dem-publican “Washington Cartel” are increasingly resonating in red states. If Trump tosses rhetoric as though he’s firing a T-Shirt cannon, Cruz has a political professional’s knack for packaging stiletto sound bites that burnish his image.
D.C. types find Cruz smarmy and stagy. No matter. Cruz often writes a script other candidates (especially Trump) later follow, sans credit: At last month’s CNBC debate, it was Cruz who whipped up the faithful by drawing first blood on the moderators whom he accused of sowing discord. “You look at the questions,” he intoned to applause so loud it nearly drowned him out. “Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here. Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?”
All of this suits a larger strategic purpose: Cruz, despised as an unprincipled rabble-rouser by Republican Hill leadership, has transformed himself into a much more dignified figure in the primaries, a self-appointed guardian of Reaganesque party unity. Cruz has been almost painfully respectful to those sitting above him in the polls, especially Carson and Trump, the better to make himself a palatable alternative when, or if, they fall. It’s paying off: Last week, he vaulted over Carson into a statistical dead heat with Trump in Iowa — a seismic shift if it holds.
The fundamentals are in place for a big winter push. Cruz’s fundraising has been near the top of the field ($26 million as of Oct. 15) and his campaign has an efficient 50 percent burn rate with about $14 million cash on hand.
Even the enemy is starting to take notice: Several Democratic sources told me that Hillary and Bill Clinton have increasingly begun to muse about the possibility of a Cruz candidacy — after months of focusing on the fast-fading Jeb Bush.
3. The biggest threats to Hillary Clinton: Loretta Lynch and the economy. Bernie Sanders has proved to be a tough, appealing and, at times, lovably crusty foil for Clinton. But, as my colleague Annie Karni and I pointed out a few weeks back, he runs his campaign like a small improvisational jazz collective — and that can’t quite compete with Clinton’s relentless, if tuneless, marching band campaign. Sanders may say he doesn’t give a damn about Clinton’s email scandal, but voters do, and it seems highly unlikely he’ll be able to mount a serious counteroffensive without another server eruption. Fortunately for him, that’s entirely possible, thanks to a pending investigation conducted by Lynch’s Justice Department.
Clinton’s campaign has repeatedly said DOJ will exonerate her (“I’m starting to really think it’s finally behind us,” a top Clinton ally told me recently) and Lynch’s attorneys recently ruled that Clinton was within her legal rights to use her “home-brew” server, so long as she turned over documents covered by law and regulation. But it won’t take a lot to reignite the controversy — conservative critics expect a finding that she transmitted classified material, perhaps knowingly — and that could shift the narrative back to “Can you trust Hillary?” in a heartbeat.
Then there’s the not-so-minor matter of the economy, or more precisely the “Obama-Clinton economy,” which is what Republicans will call it if China drags the world into recession. Many economists say that’s not likely, but the U.S. economy is overdue for a dip — and recent estimates are for an at-best blah 2016. On the day after Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip tweeted: “Ouch: Due to ‘downward trajectory in underlying productivity growth ... our estimate of US potential has fallen to 1.5%-1.75%.’ - JP Morgan.”
4. Marco Rubio will have to attack Trump. A couple of months ago in this space, I placed a $5 wager on the fresh-faced Florida senator who seemed, at the time, to be the only Republican capable of winning both the primaries and the general election. I was hardly alone in that assessment: Rubio’s top aides are unnervingly confident he’ll win — provided he doesn’t peak too soon, and hammers away on his Obama-like message of generational change.
Discipline is no guarantee of success, not this year. Rubio’s in very solid shape in the polls, and he’s locking up some of the party’s top super PAC money men. But he remains the only top GOP contender without a firm hold on any one voting group — and it’s not entirely clear where new Rubio voters will come from, despite the claims of Rubio-associated operatives that he will eventually draw disaffected Trumpites.
Sooner or later, he’ll have to go seriously negative — and that will almost certainly involve going after Trump. So far, he’s been exceedingly cautious (apart from some light sparring with Trump over immigration) perhaps responding to sharp-elbowed allegations stemming from his 2010 Senate win. Lately, he’s appeared to be using Cruz as target practice ahead of the great Trump hunt. Over the past month, Rubio and Cruz have clashed repeatedly — and with increasing bitterness — over immigration.
But Rubio’s core rationale — that the party will ultimately anoint a young, electable, rational conservative — is no sure thing. It may rest on the flawed assumption that the 2016 contest will revert to the historical mean and that the thinker will prevail over the shouter. Case in point: Rubio, a hawkish foreign policy expert, should have been a dominant voice following the Paris attacks. Attempting to make an overly nuanced point (a rarity in 2016), he told CBS he viewed the massacre as a “positive development” that would steel U.S. resolve in fighting Islamic extremism. Unlike the never-say-sorry Trump, he quickly walked it back; Trump — making one outlandish assertion after the next — never budged, devoured media attention and enjoyed a bump in several polls.
5. This is the dawning of the Age of the Super PAC. Not. Scott Walker built his presidential campaign around a super PAC and didn’t make it to Halloween. Jeb Bush was supposed to revolutionize the business of presidential electioneering by splitting his forces into a Florida-based campaign apparatus and a California-run super PAC with $100 million in the bank. He’s at 5 percent, and struggling to scrape up enough in hard-dollar fundraising to pay his dwindling staff. The independent-expenditure cash machines may prove their worth in a general election, where Republicans can converge their scattered attacks on a common target. But the super PAC model has yet to establish anything close to dominance in the primaries, where it seems to have grown at the expense — not to the benefit — of traditional candidate campaigns.
Trump could win, Cruz runs the best campaign, and Rubio has to start fighting to survive.
By Glenn Thrush
The untamable 2016 campaign has settled into a kind of comprehensible chaos with 60 days until the Iowa aucuses.
Donald Trump, a contender who embodies the ultimate cross-pollination of politics and entertainment that began with Ronald Reagan, continues to easily outpace Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio in what has become essentially a four-man field (with Jeb Bush and his millions lingering outside the circle of power). Hillary Clinton is still outrunning the wolves of scandal, but she hasn’t entirely dispatched Bernie Sanders yet — or shown signs of crossing over to capture independents in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and Iowa in the general election.
As befits the season, America is still very much in shopping mode, with major swaths of both parties still willing to jump from one candidate to the next. Here are five state-of-the-race takeaways, 60 days ahead of the first balloting:
1. Trump remains all the rage. The mystery of why Republican voters love Donald Trump more each time he makes up a story about Muslims dancing on rooftops after 9/11 or slimes a disabled reporter isn’t really very mysterious after all. All that engineered outrageousness isn’t about fact, or politics, or messaging, it’s about channeling the rawest emotions of his fans (and they are fans, not political supporters in a conventional sense). Nobody’s got a firmer grasp on the GOP’s amygdala — perhaps nobody ever has — or given voice to the sense of creeping decline so acutely felt in white America.
The base is seething, for real, with a recent Pew poll finding three times as many Republican voters describing themselves as anger-motivated compared with Democrats. Trump may be the ultimate it’s-all-about-me candidate, but the piercing paradox of 2016 is that it actually isn’t about him — but about his ability to capture the mood of his voters, and that, more than anything, explains his pundit-defying durability. He’s earned every percentage point of popularity: When Ben Carson swooned, who picked up much of his support? Trump, it seems.
“He's going to tell us exactly the way it is,” a South Carolina defense contractor named Richard Hippey (yes, that’s his real name) told my former colleague Dave Cantonese recently. This, about a candidate with a zero percent “true” score on Politifact. “We're tired of political correctness… [We] want to hear the truth.”
Here’s what those of us trapped inside the gilded New York-Washington brain cage miss: Trump may not be telling the truth, but he’s sure as hell telling their truth. This allows him to shatter most conventions of presidential campaigning, especially the notion that you have to run a positive campaign (or at least outsource your vitriol to surrogates) in order to win. Jeb Bush’s super PAC has spent millions to get out his positive message, all to get into the mid-single digits. Pluck off the happy-talk hat, and Trump has ridden up to 30 percent on almost unrelentingly negative, Reagan-on-downers message: Build a wall to keep out Mexicans; my opponents are fat, stupid, ugly, nasty, sweaty and poor; keep your “Morning in America,” I’m calling my campaign book “Crippled America.”
The question is no longer whether Trump can win the GOP nomination. He can. It’s whether his message will appeal to general election voters (or those Republicans most concerned with winning back the White House) who don’t share his anger or definition of the truth.
2. Ted Cruz is running the best campaign. The only thing less popular on Capitol Hill than Cruz is a cash bar. That’s just fine with the Texas senator, whose pitch-perfect attacks on the Dem-publican “Washington Cartel” are increasingly resonating in red states. If Trump tosses rhetoric as though he’s firing a T-Shirt cannon, Cruz has a political professional’s knack for packaging stiletto sound bites that burnish his image.
D.C. types find Cruz smarmy and stagy. No matter. Cruz often writes a script other candidates (especially Trump) later follow, sans credit: At last month’s CNBC debate, it was Cruz who whipped up the faithful by drawing first blood on the moderators whom he accused of sowing discord. “You look at the questions,” he intoned to applause so loud it nearly drowned him out. “Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here. Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?”
All of this suits a larger strategic purpose: Cruz, despised as an unprincipled rabble-rouser by Republican Hill leadership, has transformed himself into a much more dignified figure in the primaries, a self-appointed guardian of Reaganesque party unity. Cruz has been almost painfully respectful to those sitting above him in the polls, especially Carson and Trump, the better to make himself a palatable alternative when, or if, they fall. It’s paying off: Last week, he vaulted over Carson into a statistical dead heat with Trump in Iowa — a seismic shift if it holds.
The fundamentals are in place for a big winter push. Cruz’s fundraising has been near the top of the field ($26 million as of Oct. 15) and his campaign has an efficient 50 percent burn rate with about $14 million cash on hand.
Even the enemy is starting to take notice: Several Democratic sources told me that Hillary and Bill Clinton have increasingly begun to muse about the possibility of a Cruz candidacy — after months of focusing on the fast-fading Jeb Bush.
3. The biggest threats to Hillary Clinton: Loretta Lynch and the economy. Bernie Sanders has proved to be a tough, appealing and, at times, lovably crusty foil for Clinton. But, as my colleague Annie Karni and I pointed out a few weeks back, he runs his campaign like a small improvisational jazz collective — and that can’t quite compete with Clinton’s relentless, if tuneless, marching band campaign. Sanders may say he doesn’t give a damn about Clinton’s email scandal, but voters do, and it seems highly unlikely he’ll be able to mount a serious counteroffensive without another server eruption. Fortunately for him, that’s entirely possible, thanks to a pending investigation conducted by Lynch’s Justice Department.
Clinton’s campaign has repeatedly said DOJ will exonerate her (“I’m starting to really think it’s finally behind us,” a top Clinton ally told me recently) and Lynch’s attorneys recently ruled that Clinton was within her legal rights to use her “home-brew” server, so long as she turned over documents covered by law and regulation. But it won’t take a lot to reignite the controversy — conservative critics expect a finding that she transmitted classified material, perhaps knowingly — and that could shift the narrative back to “Can you trust Hillary?” in a heartbeat.
Then there’s the not-so-minor matter of the economy, or more precisely the “Obama-Clinton economy,” which is what Republicans will call it if China drags the world into recession. Many economists say that’s not likely, but the U.S. economy is overdue for a dip — and recent estimates are for an at-best blah 2016. On the day after Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip tweeted: “Ouch: Due to ‘downward trajectory in underlying productivity growth ... our estimate of US potential has fallen to 1.5%-1.75%.’ - JP Morgan.”
4. Marco Rubio will have to attack Trump. A couple of months ago in this space, I placed a $5 wager on the fresh-faced Florida senator who seemed, at the time, to be the only Republican capable of winning both the primaries and the general election. I was hardly alone in that assessment: Rubio’s top aides are unnervingly confident he’ll win — provided he doesn’t peak too soon, and hammers away on his Obama-like message of generational change.
Discipline is no guarantee of success, not this year. Rubio’s in very solid shape in the polls, and he’s locking up some of the party’s top super PAC money men. But he remains the only top GOP contender without a firm hold on any one voting group — and it’s not entirely clear where new Rubio voters will come from, despite the claims of Rubio-associated operatives that he will eventually draw disaffected Trumpites.
Sooner or later, he’ll have to go seriously negative — and that will almost certainly involve going after Trump. So far, he’s been exceedingly cautious (apart from some light sparring with Trump over immigration) perhaps responding to sharp-elbowed allegations stemming from his 2010 Senate win. Lately, he’s appeared to be using Cruz as target practice ahead of the great Trump hunt. Over the past month, Rubio and Cruz have clashed repeatedly — and with increasing bitterness — over immigration.
But Rubio’s core rationale — that the party will ultimately anoint a young, electable, rational conservative — is no sure thing. It may rest on the flawed assumption that the 2016 contest will revert to the historical mean and that the thinker will prevail over the shouter. Case in point: Rubio, a hawkish foreign policy expert, should have been a dominant voice following the Paris attacks. Attempting to make an overly nuanced point (a rarity in 2016), he told CBS he viewed the massacre as a “positive development” that would steel U.S. resolve in fighting Islamic extremism. Unlike the never-say-sorry Trump, he quickly walked it back; Trump — making one outlandish assertion after the next — never budged, devoured media attention and enjoyed a bump in several polls.
5. This is the dawning of the Age of the Super PAC. Not. Scott Walker built his presidential campaign around a super PAC and didn’t make it to Halloween. Jeb Bush was supposed to revolutionize the business of presidential electioneering by splitting his forces into a Florida-based campaign apparatus and a California-run super PAC with $100 million in the bank. He’s at 5 percent, and struggling to scrape up enough in hard-dollar fundraising to pay his dwindling staff. The independent-expenditure cash machines may prove their worth in a general election, where Republicans can converge their scattered attacks on a common target. But the super PAC model has yet to establish anything close to dominance in the primaries, where it seems to have grown at the expense — not to the benefit — of traditional candidate campaigns.
November 27, 2015
Corruption in Congress
Dividing the Spoils
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
We’ve been watching Congress since the mid-term elections and reading Zephyr Teachout’s terrific history book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. That snuff box was a gift from King Louis XVI of France. His Majesty was a good friend of the American Revolution but when he gave Benjamin Franklin the gold box, featuring the monarch’s portrait surrounded with diamonds, some of our Founding Fathers objected. They worried that the gift would corrupt his judgment and unduly bias Franklin in France’s favor.
The framers debated the meaning of corruption at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and Americans have been arguing about it ever since. Today, gifts to politicians that were once called graft or bribes are called contributions. The Supreme Court has granted corporations the rights our founders reserved for people, and told those corporations they can give just about anything they want to elect politicians favorable to their interests. Diamond and gold snuff boxes are as outmoded as the king’s powdered wig. Now we’re talking cash — millions upon millions of dollars. Quadrupled, quintupled and then some – and it’s not considered corruption.
Consider the new report from the watchdog Sunlight Foundation: From 2007 to 2012, the two hundred most politically active corporations in the United States spent almost $6 billion for lobbying and campaign contributions. And they received more than $4 trillion in US government contracts and other forms of assistance. That’s $760 for every dollar spent on influence, a stunning return on investment.
Peter Overby at National Public Radio reported that “Military contractors lead the list of contract recipients, and they hover in the upper ranks of companies with the biggest campaign contributions.” Raytheon, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin – all of them made hefty political donations to Republican campaigns. Not coincidentally, this year the Pentagon is due to spend $163 billion on research, development and procurement.
Our government has become a clearing house for corporations and plutocrats whose dollars grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation.
Then look at who’s expected to be the new Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee – Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Breathlessly, The Washington Post writes, “This could mean additional funding for the Navy to modernize its fleet and potentially benefit contractors such as shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls.” Guess what company describes itself as “the largest manufacturing employer in Mississippi and a major contributor to the economic growth of the state,” not to mention a major contributor this year to Thad Cochran’s re-election campaign? Why, shiver our timbers, it’s Huntington Ingalls.
“The other dominant corporate sector is finance,” Overby said. “Some of the country’s biggest financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others — are the top recipients of federal aid. That’s because it cost so much to rescue the financial sector after the 2008 market crash.”
Throw in the health insurers, media and telecommunications, retailers, Big Pharma – no wonder Washington’s K Street is lobbying’s road to Paradise. But it runs in both directions. NPR’s Overby talked with political scientist David Primo, who thinks Congress may be spending more time studying The Godfather than Robert’s Rules of Order. Primo told him, “The conventional wisdom out there is that businesses are going to Washington, writing checks and expecting big returns. But the other side of the story is that members of Congress may implicitly threaten businesses that if they don’t change their policy, or if they are not heavily involved in the political process, that bad things might happen to them.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are so compromised by their own addiction to Big Money they have forgotten their history as champion of the working stiff, the little folks down there at the bottom.
It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business. Our government has become a clearing house for corporations and plutocrats whose dollars grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation. It’s all pay for play, and look the other way. Partisans of the system say, hey, it’s just business as usual, but that, of course, is the problem. We were struck by this headline in The Washington Post after the November elections: “Parties head back to Capitol to begin carving up spoils, remains from midterms.” Right: Not only leadership posts and committee chairmanships, but carving, dividing up the spoils also means divvying up the loot. And those contributions were not made for the sake of charity.
Once upon a time the GOP stood for Grand Old Party — now it stands for Guardians of Privilege, and this is payback time for everything from fracking to getting the big banks off the hook; from doing away with the minimum wage and coddling off-shore corporate tax avoiders to privatizing Medicare and Social Security; to gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, even the US Postal Service.
And that’s just for starters. House Speaker John Boehner, his majority now greater than ever, will govern as you might expect from the man who once handed out checks from the tobacco industry to members on the floor. And Mitch McConnell, finally in his ascendancy as Senate Majority Leader, will manipulate more powerfully than ever the Capitol Hill and K Street mechanisms that he has mastered – helped along by the clever placement of loyal former staff members in positions of influence. They assist him in the dispensation of favors to donors from on high. “We’re very excited,” one Republican lobbyist told the Post, the understatement of the century.
Democrats, meanwhile, are so compromised by their own addiction to Big Money they have forgotten their history as champion of the working stiff, the little folks down there at the bottom. The great problems facing everyday people in America – inequality, stagnant wages, children in poverty, our degraded infrastructure and stressed environment — are not being seriously addressed because the political class is afraid to offend the people who write the checks — the corporations and the rich. Everyone else can be safely ignored.
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
We’ve been watching Congress since the mid-term elections and reading Zephyr Teachout’s terrific history book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. That snuff box was a gift from King Louis XVI of France. His Majesty was a good friend of the American Revolution but when he gave Benjamin Franklin the gold box, featuring the monarch’s portrait surrounded with diamonds, some of our Founding Fathers objected. They worried that the gift would corrupt his judgment and unduly bias Franklin in France’s favor.
The framers debated the meaning of corruption at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and Americans have been arguing about it ever since. Today, gifts to politicians that were once called graft or bribes are called contributions. The Supreme Court has granted corporations the rights our founders reserved for people, and told those corporations they can give just about anything they want to elect politicians favorable to their interests. Diamond and gold snuff boxes are as outmoded as the king’s powdered wig. Now we’re talking cash — millions upon millions of dollars. Quadrupled, quintupled and then some – and it’s not considered corruption.
Consider the new report from the watchdog Sunlight Foundation: From 2007 to 2012, the two hundred most politically active corporations in the United States spent almost $6 billion for lobbying and campaign contributions. And they received more than $4 trillion in US government contracts and other forms of assistance. That’s $760 for every dollar spent on influence, a stunning return on investment.
Peter Overby at National Public Radio reported that “Military contractors lead the list of contract recipients, and they hover in the upper ranks of companies with the biggest campaign contributions.” Raytheon, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin – all of them made hefty political donations to Republican campaigns. Not coincidentally, this year the Pentagon is due to spend $163 billion on research, development and procurement.
Our government has become a clearing house for corporations and plutocrats whose dollars grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation.
Then look at who’s expected to be the new Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee – Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Breathlessly, The Washington Post writes, “This could mean additional funding for the Navy to modernize its fleet and potentially benefit contractors such as shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls.” Guess what company describes itself as “the largest manufacturing employer in Mississippi and a major contributor to the economic growth of the state,” not to mention a major contributor this year to Thad Cochran’s re-election campaign? Why, shiver our timbers, it’s Huntington Ingalls.
“The other dominant corporate sector is finance,” Overby said. “Some of the country’s biggest financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others — are the top recipients of federal aid. That’s because it cost so much to rescue the financial sector after the 2008 market crash.”
Throw in the health insurers, media and telecommunications, retailers, Big Pharma – no wonder Washington’s K Street is lobbying’s road to Paradise. But it runs in both directions. NPR’s Overby talked with political scientist David Primo, who thinks Congress may be spending more time studying The Godfather than Robert’s Rules of Order. Primo told him, “The conventional wisdom out there is that businesses are going to Washington, writing checks and expecting big returns. But the other side of the story is that members of Congress may implicitly threaten businesses that if they don’t change their policy, or if they are not heavily involved in the political process, that bad things might happen to them.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are so compromised by their own addiction to Big Money they have forgotten their history as champion of the working stiff, the little folks down there at the bottom.
It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business. Our government has become a clearing house for corporations and plutocrats whose dollars grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation. It’s all pay for play, and look the other way. Partisans of the system say, hey, it’s just business as usual, but that, of course, is the problem. We were struck by this headline in The Washington Post after the November elections: “Parties head back to Capitol to begin carving up spoils, remains from midterms.” Right: Not only leadership posts and committee chairmanships, but carving, dividing up the spoils also means divvying up the loot. And those contributions were not made for the sake of charity.
Once upon a time the GOP stood for Grand Old Party — now it stands for Guardians of Privilege, and this is payback time for everything from fracking to getting the big banks off the hook; from doing away with the minimum wage and coddling off-shore corporate tax avoiders to privatizing Medicare and Social Security; to gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, even the US Postal Service.
And that’s just for starters. House Speaker John Boehner, his majority now greater than ever, will govern as you might expect from the man who once handed out checks from the tobacco industry to members on the floor. And Mitch McConnell, finally in his ascendancy as Senate Majority Leader, will manipulate more powerfully than ever the Capitol Hill and K Street mechanisms that he has mastered – helped along by the clever placement of loyal former staff members in positions of influence. They assist him in the dispensation of favors to donors from on high. “We’re very excited,” one Republican lobbyist told the Post, the understatement of the century.
Democrats, meanwhile, are so compromised by their own addiction to Big Money they have forgotten their history as champion of the working stiff, the little folks down there at the bottom. The great problems facing everyday people in America – inequality, stagnant wages, children in poverty, our degraded infrastructure and stressed environment — are not being seriously addressed because the political class is afraid to offend the people who write the checks — the corporations and the rich. Everyone else can be safely ignored.
Mock the Poor
Black Friday Now Just Another Opportunity to Mock the Poor
By Kevin Drum
Luke O'Neil regales us this weekend with a roundup of media coverage of Black Friday:
Consider the jocular hosts’ grinning affect as they relate news of brawls throughout the country in this clip from Fox & Friends First today, for example, or how numerous Web sites will round up the best brawl videos. As Yahoo News writes on the spread of Black Friday violence to Britain this year, “That means even more grown adults fighting over discounted underwear, and more opportunities to for us to gawk at them.” Or take this video of a fight inside of a Houston Wal-Mart. You’ll notice producers from a variety of television programs — “Good Morning America,” Fox News, CNN — all asking for permission to use the video on their broadcasts, because they know this type of shopper-on-shopper violence is a huge draw.
So what does it all mean? O'Neil points out that coverage of Black Friday brawls is a big ratings draw, which makes it the perfect place for yet more commercials to promote Black Friday sales:
It’s hard to avoid the message of those ads. We’ve been bombarded with them for weeks now, from corporations eager to entice shoppers with so-called “door-buster” deals. And then, once the shopping public falls for them, a privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes them for its collective amusement. Look at these hilarious poor people, struggling to take advantage of a deal on something they might not otherwise be able to afford on items that we take for granted, we joke on Twitter. The message is the same: this is shameful, materialistic behavior. And by pointing it out, we differentiate ourselves, reaffirm our class status as being above the fray of the lowly and desperate.
If you read this wrong, it can seem like just a bit of tiresome PC tsk-tsking. Do we have to feel guilty about everything these days?
But O'Neil has a point, and it's one that irks me as well. It's similar to my irkitude over loyalty cards. Some of this, I'll admit, is just my own personal brand of curmudgeonliness, but mainly it's because the discounts they provide have become so damn big in recent years. For me, loyalty cards are optional if I feel like being cranky about it, but most people no longer have that luxury. If you're living on a working-class income, you flatly can't afford to give up a 10 or 15 percent discount on your food every week. You have to fork over your loyalty card number, and that means everything you buy is sliced, diced, tracked, and sold to every marketer in the world. Don't like it? If you're poor, that's tough. Your privacy is no longer even an option.
In a sense, of course, these are both just routine examples of how the lives of the poor are harder than the lives of the non-poor—and there's hardly anything insightful in pointing out that the poor lead hard lives. Still, there are limits. Do we really have to mock them for the mere fact of having incomes low enough that Black Friday sales are meaningful to them? Do we really have to create a marketplace in which merely having a low income forces you to make the most intimate details of your life available to anyone willing to pay a few dollars for it?
These are hardly the biggest problems of the poor. I don't even know if they'd make the top 100. But they're both examples of the way in which being poor doesn't just mean you can't afford as much nice stuff as richer folks. They're examples of ways that we rob the poor of dignity for no real reason other than being poor. So even if they aren't the biggest problems in the world, they're worth thinking about occasionally.
By Kevin Drum
Luke O'Neil regales us this weekend with a roundup of media coverage of Black Friday:
Consider the jocular hosts’ grinning affect as they relate news of brawls throughout the country in this clip from Fox & Friends First today, for example, or how numerous Web sites will round up the best brawl videos. As Yahoo News writes on the spread of Black Friday violence to Britain this year, “That means even more grown adults fighting over discounted underwear, and more opportunities to for us to gawk at them.” Or take this video of a fight inside of a Houston Wal-Mart. You’ll notice producers from a variety of television programs — “Good Morning America,” Fox News, CNN — all asking for permission to use the video on their broadcasts, because they know this type of shopper-on-shopper violence is a huge draw.
So what does it all mean? O'Neil points out that coverage of Black Friday brawls is a big ratings draw, which makes it the perfect place for yet more commercials to promote Black Friday sales:
It’s hard to avoid the message of those ads. We’ve been bombarded with them for weeks now, from corporations eager to entice shoppers with so-called “door-buster” deals. And then, once the shopping public falls for them, a privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes them for its collective amusement. Look at these hilarious poor people, struggling to take advantage of a deal on something they might not otherwise be able to afford on items that we take for granted, we joke on Twitter. The message is the same: this is shameful, materialistic behavior. And by pointing it out, we differentiate ourselves, reaffirm our class status as being above the fray of the lowly and desperate.
If you read this wrong, it can seem like just a bit of tiresome PC tsk-tsking. Do we have to feel guilty about everything these days?
But O'Neil has a point, and it's one that irks me as well. It's similar to my irkitude over loyalty cards. Some of this, I'll admit, is just my own personal brand of curmudgeonliness, but mainly it's because the discounts they provide have become so damn big in recent years. For me, loyalty cards are optional if I feel like being cranky about it, but most people no longer have that luxury. If you're living on a working-class income, you flatly can't afford to give up a 10 or 15 percent discount on your food every week. You have to fork over your loyalty card number, and that means everything you buy is sliced, diced, tracked, and sold to every marketer in the world. Don't like it? If you're poor, that's tough. Your privacy is no longer even an option.
In a sense, of course, these are both just routine examples of how the lives of the poor are harder than the lives of the non-poor—and there's hardly anything insightful in pointing out that the poor lead hard lives. Still, there are limits. Do we really have to mock them for the mere fact of having incomes low enough that Black Friday sales are meaningful to them? Do we really have to create a marketplace in which merely having a low income forces you to make the most intimate details of your life available to anyone willing to pay a few dollars for it?
These are hardly the biggest problems of the poor. I don't even know if they'd make the top 100. But they're both examples of the way in which being poor doesn't just mean you can't afford as much nice stuff as richer folks. They're examples of ways that we rob the poor of dignity for no real reason other than being poor. So even if they aren't the biggest problems in the world, they're worth thinking about occasionally.
They Fired Me!!!
Walmart Cut My Hours, I Protested, and They Fired Me
"I told them I could only work between 5:30 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. That way I could get home to my son."
As told to Josh Harkinson
Today, the union-backed Our Walmart campaign will hold demonstrations across the country calling on Walmart managers to reverse disciplinary actions against 35 workers in nine states who participated in Black Friday protests against the retailer. Our Walmart will also add claims of illegal retaliation against the workers to an existing case filed with the National Labor Relations Board in October. One of the workers being added to the case is 26-year-old Kiana Howard of Sacramento, California. This is her story, edited for length and clarity, as told to Mother Jones:
My mom worked for the state legislative office for about 17 years and then she got laid off. My dad was in our life at the beginning, then he wasn't around. Still, we have a big family and I had a pretty good life growing up, although I grew up in East Sacramento, in the ghetto. I didn't graduate from high school because I couldn't pass the math part of the exit exam. I did go back in 2013 and get my diploma. I was screaming and crying. I was so happy.
About a week later, I started working at the local Walmart. I love working around people and having conversations while ringing them up. You could be having a bad day and one customer in line says a joke and changes your whole day. My coworkers there were like family. We took care of each other because we were all going through the same situation. The managers, on the other hand, they don't give a damn about us.
I started off at $8.40 an hour. Then California raised the minimum wage, and I got my yearly raise, which put me up to $9.80. But the most hours I could get in any week after picking up extra days and taking extra shifts was 36. After paying rent and utilities, I was barely scraping by. I was on welfare, getting $300. When they cut that off, I really started struggling. And then they cut my food stamps down by more than half, to $136, so I started having to spend money on food. I went to food banks to make sure I fed my seven-year-old son.
I live an hour away. I don't have a car. I have to catch the bus and the light rail every day. My schedule was all over the place. Some days I would have to be at work at 5:30 in the morning, and then some days I would work from 8 p.m. to midnight. I was tired all the time. It was just madness. Especially because there's no buses that run after 10 p.m.
Sometimes coworkers would give me rides home, but sometimes they would be like, "Oh, I can't go that way, I don't have the gas." And I didn't have gas money for them. Other times I would get on Facebook and ask people to give me rides.
Or there was this dating website called Tagged. I would write on my status: "Could anybody give me a ride home? Stranded at work." And then people would message me. "Well, what time are you off?"
Some of the guys were people that I knew. Other guys I didn't know. A lot of times I was scared but I had pepper spray and I was ready for whatever. I just had to make sure I got home. I was not spending the night at Walmart.
At the time, I was trying to get promoted to customer service. The manager kept telling me she was going to pick me, but then she takes somebody who has been at Walmart for a month and puts her there instead because she hadn't missed any days. But she doesn't have a child like I do. I missed three days because my son was sick, and I was late three days. They hold that against us for a whole year, and I feel like that's just too long.
I actually started applying at different jobs. I applied at Burlington Coat Factory, Macy's, Sears. But I just wasn't getting calls back from those people. I just kind of gave up and kept working at Walmart.
Around August of last year, I'd had enough and put in an availability change with my supervisor. I told them I could only work between 5:30 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. That way I could get home to my son. People who had worked there for years told me, "Oh, they are going to cut your hours back for a while, and then you will get them back again." But they cut my hours back—to just 23 a week—and they kept them cut back. It went on for a good month or two. That's one reason I decided to join Our Walmart.
I feel like we were overworked and underpaid. When my customer service manager, who is in Our Walmart, told me we are going to be fighting for $15 and full time, I just felt like it needed to be done. A lot of associates were like, well, isn't that too much for Walmart? I'm like, "No, dude! This is the richest family in America! What do you mean that's too much? Really?" Walmart, I call it the devil's palace. That's how I feel.
On Black Friday we went on strike. The organizers picked us up in a white van and drove us to a picket at the Rancho Cordova store. It was me and a couple of other Our Walmart people. They had balloons; they tied them on our wrists. They had posters. And we stood out there for a minute, we talked, and we had people get on the mic and speak. We had a DJ out there. It was like a little party. I did an interview on the news.
Then we stated marching. They had me and my son in the front. We were chanting and singing and people were jumping and dancing. Then the police came. The people that got arrested, they were sitting down in the street. Santa Claus got arrested as well. They didn't put handcuffs on Santa Claus, though. We took lots of pictures. It was good. I felt great. Everybody was like, "I seen you on the news!"
They retaliated on January 13, which was the day I got fired. I had a four-hour shift. Thirty minutes before I was about to get off, they pulled me off the register and brought me in the office. It was like, "You went on strike for Black Friday…" I wasn't listening because I was upset. She said it counted as my fourth unexcused absence and that rolls over into me being terminated. I signed my papers and I gave her my badge and my vest and I left.
Since then, it has been hard. Our Walmart is going to help out with the retaliation fund, but that only lasts six months. With my last check I was able to pay my rent, but I can't do laundry, I can't pay any bills. I ran out of food and I had to go to the food bank once again. I feel like I'm gong into a depression. I just try to keep myself humble, because my son needs me. I can't show him that I'm going through a lot right now.
Some employees don't want to join Our Walmart because they don't want to be in a predicament like I am. But I know they believe we're fighting for a good cause. I'm just trying to stay prayed up and hope for the best.
"I told them I could only work between 5:30 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. That way I could get home to my son."
As told to Josh Harkinson
Today, the union-backed Our Walmart campaign will hold demonstrations across the country calling on Walmart managers to reverse disciplinary actions against 35 workers in nine states who participated in Black Friday protests against the retailer. Our Walmart will also add claims of illegal retaliation against the workers to an existing case filed with the National Labor Relations Board in October. One of the workers being added to the case is 26-year-old Kiana Howard of Sacramento, California. This is her story, edited for length and clarity, as told to Mother Jones:
My mom worked for the state legislative office for about 17 years and then she got laid off. My dad was in our life at the beginning, then he wasn't around. Still, we have a big family and I had a pretty good life growing up, although I grew up in East Sacramento, in the ghetto. I didn't graduate from high school because I couldn't pass the math part of the exit exam. I did go back in 2013 and get my diploma. I was screaming and crying. I was so happy.
About a week later, I started working at the local Walmart. I love working around people and having conversations while ringing them up. You could be having a bad day and one customer in line says a joke and changes your whole day. My coworkers there were like family. We took care of each other because we were all going through the same situation. The managers, on the other hand, they don't give a damn about us.
I started off at $8.40 an hour. Then California raised the minimum wage, and I got my yearly raise, which put me up to $9.80. But the most hours I could get in any week after picking up extra days and taking extra shifts was 36. After paying rent and utilities, I was barely scraping by. I was on welfare, getting $300. When they cut that off, I really started struggling. And then they cut my food stamps down by more than half, to $136, so I started having to spend money on food. I went to food banks to make sure I fed my seven-year-old son.
I live an hour away. I don't have a car. I have to catch the bus and the light rail every day. My schedule was all over the place. Some days I would have to be at work at 5:30 in the morning, and then some days I would work from 8 p.m. to midnight. I was tired all the time. It was just madness. Especially because there's no buses that run after 10 p.m.
Sometimes coworkers would give me rides home, but sometimes they would be like, "Oh, I can't go that way, I don't have the gas." And I didn't have gas money for them. Other times I would get on Facebook and ask people to give me rides.
Or there was this dating website called Tagged. I would write on my status: "Could anybody give me a ride home? Stranded at work." And then people would message me. "Well, what time are you off?"
Some of the guys were people that I knew. Other guys I didn't know. A lot of times I was scared but I had pepper spray and I was ready for whatever. I just had to make sure I got home. I was not spending the night at Walmart.
At the time, I was trying to get promoted to customer service. The manager kept telling me she was going to pick me, but then she takes somebody who has been at Walmart for a month and puts her there instead because she hadn't missed any days. But she doesn't have a child like I do. I missed three days because my son was sick, and I was late three days. They hold that against us for a whole year, and I feel like that's just too long.
I actually started applying at different jobs. I applied at Burlington Coat Factory, Macy's, Sears. But I just wasn't getting calls back from those people. I just kind of gave up and kept working at Walmart.
Around August of last year, I'd had enough and put in an availability change with my supervisor. I told them I could only work between 5:30 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. That way I could get home to my son. People who had worked there for years told me, "Oh, they are going to cut your hours back for a while, and then you will get them back again." But they cut my hours back—to just 23 a week—and they kept them cut back. It went on for a good month or two. That's one reason I decided to join Our Walmart.
I feel like we were overworked and underpaid. When my customer service manager, who is in Our Walmart, told me we are going to be fighting for $15 and full time, I just felt like it needed to be done. A lot of associates were like, well, isn't that too much for Walmart? I'm like, "No, dude! This is the richest family in America! What do you mean that's too much? Really?" Walmart, I call it the devil's palace. That's how I feel.
On Black Friday we went on strike. The organizers picked us up in a white van and drove us to a picket at the Rancho Cordova store. It was me and a couple of other Our Walmart people. They had balloons; they tied them on our wrists. They had posters. And we stood out there for a minute, we talked, and we had people get on the mic and speak. We had a DJ out there. It was like a little party. I did an interview on the news.
Then we stated marching. They had me and my son in the front. We were chanting and singing and people were jumping and dancing. Then the police came. The people that got arrested, they were sitting down in the street. Santa Claus got arrested as well. They didn't put handcuffs on Santa Claus, though. We took lots of pictures. It was good. I felt great. Everybody was like, "I seen you on the news!"
They retaliated on January 13, which was the day I got fired. I had a four-hour shift. Thirty minutes before I was about to get off, they pulled me off the register and brought me in the office. It was like, "You went on strike for Black Friday…" I wasn't listening because I was upset. She said it counted as my fourth unexcused absence and that rolls over into me being terminated. I signed my papers and I gave her my badge and my vest and I left.
Since then, it has been hard. Our Walmart is going to help out with the retaliation fund, but that only lasts six months. With my last check I was able to pay my rent, but I can't do laundry, I can't pay any bills. I ran out of food and I had to go to the food bank once again. I feel like I'm gong into a depression. I just try to keep myself humble, because my son needs me. I can't show him that I'm going through a lot right now.
Some employees don't want to join Our Walmart because they don't want to be in a predicament like I am. But I know they believe we're fighting for a good cause. I'm just trying to stay prayed up and hope for the best.
The law
Yes, we should consider refugees’ religion
It’s not only fair, it’s written into the law.
By Michael W. McConnell
Americans have heard a lot of nonsense in the past week about the role of religion in our refugee policy – from both sides. Senator Ted Cruz has been derided, mostly justly, for saying that no Muslim refugees – but only Christians – should be admitted to this country from the killing fields of Syria and Iraq. But President Obama’s angry reaction that use of a “religious test” for evaluating asylum seekers would be “shameful” and “not American” is even more wrongheaded. “That's not who we are,” he said to an audience in Turkey, apparently in response to Cruz. “We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
Except we do. It’s in the law.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which governs these issues, defines “refugee” as someone who has fled from his or her home country and cannot return because he or she has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of “religion” – as well as race, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. This certainly doesn’t let us use a religious test to filter otherwise-eligible immigrants out. But it does mean that when we’re deciding who to admit as refugees, religion matters.
So, when we think about religious refugees from the war-torn parts of the Middle East, who are we talking about? Right now Christians who are being singled out for religious persecution – beheadings, beatings, rape, forced conversions, enslavement. So also Yazidis, Mandaeans, and a few other smaller groups. Many Muslims are also displaced and suffering, but the Islamic State is not systematically targeting them for being Islamic. Our refugee policy should take that into consideration. This is not a “religious test.” It is a persecution test.
If we look directly at where the persecution really lies, it’s reasonable to say we should be considering religion when deciding which of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the wars in Syria and Iraq should be admitted as refugee to the United States. That means, primarily though not exclusively, Christians and Yazidis.
The 2015 Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom concluded:
Yazidis and Christians have borne the worst brunt of the persecution by ISIL and other violent religious extremists. From summary executions to forced conversions, rape to sexual enslavement, abducted children to destroyed houses of worship, attacks on these communities are part of a systematic effort to erase their presence from the Middle East.
For example, when IS forces overran the city of Mosul in June, 2014, all Christians were ordered to convert to Islam, leave Mosul, pay a tax, or face death. As IS has conquered more and more territory, this policy has extended. An estimated two thirds of Iraq’s Christians have been driven from their homes. Just last month, thirty-five Assyrian Christian villages in northern Syria were captured by IS fighters. Some 4,000 Christian families fled, and there were reports that a Christian religious leader was crucified.
In August, 2014, IS forces took over the largely Yazidi town of Sinjar and ordered inhabitants to convert to Islam or die. Some 200,000 Yazidis fled the city, and thousands of Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped, raped, and sold as sex slaves. Jews would no doubt suffer a similar fate, but for the fact that almost all of them were expelled from the Muslim countries of the Middle East years ago.
Attacks on Christians are not confined to Syria and Iraq. During last week’s terrorist attack on the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, Mali, gunmen apparently associated with Al Qaeda demanded that hostages recite passages from the Koran, and released only those who could do so. Boko Haram, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Nigeria, has vowed to expel all Christians from the northern part of that country. After a mob attack on Christians in a village in Pakistan in 2013, the attackers were released on bail; the only person punished was a Christian who was sentenced to death for “blasphemy.” And who can forget the video of twenty-one Coptic Christians being beheaded on the beach in Libya last February by Islamic extremists?
In the face of the deliberate targeting of particular religious minorities by IS and related forces, it is altogether proper for asylum countries, such as the United States, to prioritize protection to the victims over economic refuges and other displaced persons. This is what the Immigration Act demands. When persecutors employ a “religious test,” it is wrong for asylum nations to turn a blind eye.
Yet Christians have been a tiny percentage of Syrian refugees accepted into this country – two percent, according to the State Department. One reason is that most applicants for refugee status come from United Nations refugee camps, and there have been credible reports that Christians are terrorized in those camps, causing them to seek other places of refuge. One practical step to redress the balance is to process refugees from these other sites. More generally, the President should instruct his immigration officials to examine agency practice to ensure that victims of religious persecution receive the special consideration to which they are entitled by law. He would probably discover that this would inspire wider public support for his desired policy of welcoming more refugees to our shores.
The Christian communities of the Middle East date back more than 1,700 years, to before the birth of Mohammed. As recently as a decade ago, Christians of various persuasions – Assyrian, Orthodox, Armenian, Catholic – constituted some ten percent of the Syrian population. There were an estimated million Christians in Iraq. Many observers believe these ancient communities will be entirely gone within a few years. IS will have achieved its goal to “erase their presence from the Middle East.”
Some defenders of the President’s stance have demanded to know how U.S. immigration officials can tell who among the applicants for refugee status are Christians. Would they “accept baptismal certificates, or notes from pastors?” one writer sarcastically inquired. But immigration officers are specifically trained to make factual judgments of this sort. It is no more difficult to determine religious affiliation than political views, and far less difficult than determining whether an applicant harbors sympathy for extremism – factors that no one denies should be considered in making asylum determinations.
United States diplomats understandably do not want the rest of the world, and especially Muslim countries, to think that we, as a majority Christian nation, are favoring Christians over equally meritorious applicants. But there is something seriously amiss when those who bear “the largest brunt of persecution” are the least likely to get asylum.
So, by all means reject Ted Cruz’s suggestion to exclude all Muslim asylum seekers. But it is equally wrong to disregard the fact that Christians, as such, are the principal victims of targeted religious persecution by the Islamic State and its allies. They are entitled by law to preferred consideration for asylum.
It’s not only fair, it’s written into the law.
By Michael W. McConnell
Americans have heard a lot of nonsense in the past week about the role of religion in our refugee policy – from both sides. Senator Ted Cruz has been derided, mostly justly, for saying that no Muslim refugees – but only Christians – should be admitted to this country from the killing fields of Syria and Iraq. But President Obama’s angry reaction that use of a “religious test” for evaluating asylum seekers would be “shameful” and “not American” is even more wrongheaded. “That's not who we are,” he said to an audience in Turkey, apparently in response to Cruz. “We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
Except we do. It’s in the law.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which governs these issues, defines “refugee” as someone who has fled from his or her home country and cannot return because he or she has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of “religion” – as well as race, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. This certainly doesn’t let us use a religious test to filter otherwise-eligible immigrants out. But it does mean that when we’re deciding who to admit as refugees, religion matters.
So, when we think about religious refugees from the war-torn parts of the Middle East, who are we talking about? Right now Christians who are being singled out for religious persecution – beheadings, beatings, rape, forced conversions, enslavement. So also Yazidis, Mandaeans, and a few other smaller groups. Many Muslims are also displaced and suffering, but the Islamic State is not systematically targeting them for being Islamic. Our refugee policy should take that into consideration. This is not a “religious test.” It is a persecution test.
If we look directly at where the persecution really lies, it’s reasonable to say we should be considering religion when deciding which of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the wars in Syria and Iraq should be admitted as refugee to the United States. That means, primarily though not exclusively, Christians and Yazidis.
The 2015 Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom concluded:
Yazidis and Christians have borne the worst brunt of the persecution by ISIL and other violent religious extremists. From summary executions to forced conversions, rape to sexual enslavement, abducted children to destroyed houses of worship, attacks on these communities are part of a systematic effort to erase their presence from the Middle East.
For example, when IS forces overran the city of Mosul in June, 2014, all Christians were ordered to convert to Islam, leave Mosul, pay a tax, or face death. As IS has conquered more and more territory, this policy has extended. An estimated two thirds of Iraq’s Christians have been driven from their homes. Just last month, thirty-five Assyrian Christian villages in northern Syria were captured by IS fighters. Some 4,000 Christian families fled, and there were reports that a Christian religious leader was crucified.
In August, 2014, IS forces took over the largely Yazidi town of Sinjar and ordered inhabitants to convert to Islam or die. Some 200,000 Yazidis fled the city, and thousands of Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped, raped, and sold as sex slaves. Jews would no doubt suffer a similar fate, but for the fact that almost all of them were expelled from the Muslim countries of the Middle East years ago.
Attacks on Christians are not confined to Syria and Iraq. During last week’s terrorist attack on the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, Mali, gunmen apparently associated with Al Qaeda demanded that hostages recite passages from the Koran, and released only those who could do so. Boko Haram, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Nigeria, has vowed to expel all Christians from the northern part of that country. After a mob attack on Christians in a village in Pakistan in 2013, the attackers were released on bail; the only person punished was a Christian who was sentenced to death for “blasphemy.” And who can forget the video of twenty-one Coptic Christians being beheaded on the beach in Libya last February by Islamic extremists?
In the face of the deliberate targeting of particular religious minorities by IS and related forces, it is altogether proper for asylum countries, such as the United States, to prioritize protection to the victims over economic refuges and other displaced persons. This is what the Immigration Act demands. When persecutors employ a “religious test,” it is wrong for asylum nations to turn a blind eye.
Yet Christians have been a tiny percentage of Syrian refugees accepted into this country – two percent, according to the State Department. One reason is that most applicants for refugee status come from United Nations refugee camps, and there have been credible reports that Christians are terrorized in those camps, causing them to seek other places of refuge. One practical step to redress the balance is to process refugees from these other sites. More generally, the President should instruct his immigration officials to examine agency practice to ensure that victims of religious persecution receive the special consideration to which they are entitled by law. He would probably discover that this would inspire wider public support for his desired policy of welcoming more refugees to our shores.
The Christian communities of the Middle East date back more than 1,700 years, to before the birth of Mohammed. As recently as a decade ago, Christians of various persuasions – Assyrian, Orthodox, Armenian, Catholic – constituted some ten percent of the Syrian population. There were an estimated million Christians in Iraq. Many observers believe these ancient communities will be entirely gone within a few years. IS will have achieved its goal to “erase their presence from the Middle East.”
Some defenders of the President’s stance have demanded to know how U.S. immigration officials can tell who among the applicants for refugee status are Christians. Would they “accept baptismal certificates, or notes from pastors?” one writer sarcastically inquired. But immigration officers are specifically trained to make factual judgments of this sort. It is no more difficult to determine religious affiliation than political views, and far less difficult than determining whether an applicant harbors sympathy for extremism – factors that no one denies should be considered in making asylum determinations.
United States diplomats understandably do not want the rest of the world, and especially Muslim countries, to think that we, as a majority Christian nation, are favoring Christians over equally meritorious applicants. But there is something seriously amiss when those who bear “the largest brunt of persecution” are the least likely to get asylum.
So, by all means reject Ted Cruz’s suggestion to exclude all Muslim asylum seekers. But it is equally wrong to disregard the fact that Christians, as such, are the principal victims of targeted religious persecution by the Islamic State and its allies. They are entitled by law to preferred consideration for asylum.
Sues panel
Ex-staffer sues Gowdy and Benghazi panel
By Rachael Bade
The ex-GOP House Benghazi Committee investigator who accused the panel of conducting a partisan witch hunt against Hillary Clinton filed suit Monday against the committee and Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) for wrongful termination and defamation.
Air Force Reserve Maj. Brad Podliska in his court filing alleged he was fired from his post in June because he took leave for active duty. He also says he was singled out because he refused to focus his investigative work on Clinton and the State Department.
The Benghazi Committee and Gowdy have denied both accusations, arguing that the panel, which employs several former military officers and law enforcement agents, would never punish a military member for his service. And during the back-and-forth that followed Podliska’s allegations, first made public in late September, the committee also rejected the notion that they’re out to get Clinton, arguing that Podliska himself had asked interns to take up partisan projects after being warned against it.
The panel says he was fired for misbehavior and mishandling classified information, both of which Podliska denies.
Podliska announced his intent to file suit at the end of September, but in a new twist, Podliska is also alleging that Gowdy illegally defamed him during the public skirmish that erupted after Podliska first went on national TV to accuse the panel of wrongdoing.
In his suit, Podliska alleges that Gowdy’s accusation that he mishandled sensitive material has damaged his reputation. And he says that the information he received was from “publicly available sources from the Internet."
“Chairman Gowdy, personally and through his agents, tied these defamatory statements to Podliska’s firing to damage Podliska’s reputation and his ability to seek or secure employment in his chosen field, depriving Podliska of his rights under the Constitution,” the filing says.
The filing says three additional staffers were also sat down by a security staffer about having potentially mishandled classified information. But those staffers were never punished, according to the filing.
“Ultimately, Plaintiff was the only one of the four accused of the trumped-up security violation to be reprimanded by the Majority Staff or subjected to any adverse employment action,” the filing reads, arguing that the security staffer later admitted the information was not, in fact, classified.
Podliska isn’t asking for money for the alleged defamation piece of the lawsuit. Instead, he wants an injunction barring the panel from repeating the accusations and requiring Gowdy to say publicly that his allegations against Podliska were false.
This particular angle of the legal battle hits on a gray area in the law. While lawmakers have immunity for what they say during official duties, their statements to the media may or may not also be protected.
The filing alleges tensions between Podliska and other staff members, including committee staff director Phil Kiko, who Podliska says started treating him differently after his March 2015 active duty leave.
It also cites increased criticism of his work by Lt. Gen. Dana Chipman, the former Army Judge Advocate General. Chipman, Podliska said, called his work centered on the administration’s talking points after the attack, “sh--.” Podliska had been doing research for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) about whether or not the attack was terrorism or an out-of-control protest sparked by a controversial video.
“I know you have your post-attack piece. But, only right wing nut jobs care about that,” the filing quotes Kiko as saying.
The filing also accuses Chipman of questioning whether Podliska needed to serve in Germany and recounts the stories about "Wine Wednesday" drinking parties and a gun buying club that have become major talking points for Democrats who call the panel a waste of taxpayer money.
By Rachael Bade
The ex-GOP House Benghazi Committee investigator who accused the panel of conducting a partisan witch hunt against Hillary Clinton filed suit Monday against the committee and Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) for wrongful termination and defamation.
Air Force Reserve Maj. Brad Podliska in his court filing alleged he was fired from his post in June because he took leave for active duty. He also says he was singled out because he refused to focus his investigative work on Clinton and the State Department.
The Benghazi Committee and Gowdy have denied both accusations, arguing that the panel, which employs several former military officers and law enforcement agents, would never punish a military member for his service. And during the back-and-forth that followed Podliska’s allegations, first made public in late September, the committee also rejected the notion that they’re out to get Clinton, arguing that Podliska himself had asked interns to take up partisan projects after being warned against it.
The panel says he was fired for misbehavior and mishandling classified information, both of which Podliska denies.
Podliska announced his intent to file suit at the end of September, but in a new twist, Podliska is also alleging that Gowdy illegally defamed him during the public skirmish that erupted after Podliska first went on national TV to accuse the panel of wrongdoing.
In his suit, Podliska alleges that Gowdy’s accusation that he mishandled sensitive material has damaged his reputation. And he says that the information he received was from “publicly available sources from the Internet."
“Chairman Gowdy, personally and through his agents, tied these defamatory statements to Podliska’s firing to damage Podliska’s reputation and his ability to seek or secure employment in his chosen field, depriving Podliska of his rights under the Constitution,” the filing says.
The filing says three additional staffers were also sat down by a security staffer about having potentially mishandled classified information. But those staffers were never punished, according to the filing.
“Ultimately, Plaintiff was the only one of the four accused of the trumped-up security violation to be reprimanded by the Majority Staff or subjected to any adverse employment action,” the filing reads, arguing that the security staffer later admitted the information was not, in fact, classified.
Podliska isn’t asking for money for the alleged defamation piece of the lawsuit. Instead, he wants an injunction barring the panel from repeating the accusations and requiring Gowdy to say publicly that his allegations against Podliska were false.
This particular angle of the legal battle hits on a gray area in the law. While lawmakers have immunity for what they say during official duties, their statements to the media may or may not also be protected.
The filing alleges tensions between Podliska and other staff members, including committee staff director Phil Kiko, who Podliska says started treating him differently after his March 2015 active duty leave.
It also cites increased criticism of his work by Lt. Gen. Dana Chipman, the former Army Judge Advocate General. Chipman, Podliska said, called his work centered on the administration’s talking points after the attack, “sh--.” Podliska had been doing research for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) about whether or not the attack was terrorism or an out-of-control protest sparked by a controversial video.
“I know you have your post-attack piece. But, only right wing nut jobs care about that,” the filing quotes Kiko as saying.
The filing also accuses Chipman of questioning whether Podliska needed to serve in Germany and recounts the stories about "Wine Wednesday" drinking parties and a gun buying club that have become major talking points for Democrats who call the panel a waste of taxpayer money.
Climate
Meet the climate frenemies
Washington and Brussels both want a deal in Paris, but clash on the fundamentals.
By Sara Stefanini and Andrew Restuccia
Europeans and Americans desperately want to leave the Paris climate summit with a deal that erases six years of bad memories.
Back in 2009, the European Union left the flawed Copenhagen summit humiliated while the U.S. rammed through a deal that fell far short of expectations. Top negotiators in Washington and Brussels have spent the years since then trying to understand what went wrong and how to avoid a repeat.
The result is that the two sides head into the COP21 meeting Monday more aware of each other’s priorities and red lines, and deeply invested in reaching an agreement. U.S. President Barack Obama wants to burnish his climate legacy before he leaves office, while the Europeans want an ambitious worldwide deal that doesn’t leave the Continent’s businesses saddled with uncompetitive environmental rules.
There’s just one big problem: They remain sharply at odds over some fundamental issues.
“The kind of agreement the EU wants is more expensive than the one the U.S. wants,” Sarah Blau, the climate attaché from Luxembourg, which holds the European Union’s rotating six-month presidency, said at a conference in Brussels this month.
Letter of the law
The legal nature of the so-called climate action targets is perhaps the biggest tension point.
For U.S. officials, legally binding emissions targets, among other steps, are a nonstarter. They would compel Obama to secure the Senate’s approval for the climate deal, and that’s something the Republican-controlled chamber has already vowed to kill.
Instead, the United States has long advocated an approach first outlined by New Zealand, which would split the agreement in two. Countries would be legally bound to follow reporting and transparency procedures on their emissions so that everyone would see what they were doing. However, the actual emissions targets — many of which have already been promised ahead of the COP21 — would not have the force of international law behind them, and that would negate the need to get Senate approval.
That means if a country isn’t reaching its promised reduction targets, there would be no penalty, although the rest of the world would see that it wasn’t hitting its mark.
The EU insists that both the enforcement mechanism and the targets themselves be legally binding. However the agreement still wouldn’t punish those who fall short, making it a dispute about semantics.
“That’s just two ships in the night passing with different meanings,” said Nigel Purvis, a former U.S. diplomat who now leads the consulting firm Climate Advisers.
But those words are enormously important to Brussels, which is fighting hard for the COP21 to have the rest of the world make promises as ambitious as its own.
The bloc’s 2030 targets — a 40 percent cut in emissions, an increase in the share of renewables to 27 percent and a 27 percent improvement in energy efficiency — are already locked in law. The biggest concern, especially among the poorest, most fossil fuel-dependent EU members, is that the EU will be stuck with implementing the sometimes costly changes needed to meet those targets, while rivals take a slower and more investor-friendly approach. Poland in particular is leading the charge against the ambitious targets, warning that its smokestack industries and coal-fired power plants could be hurt.
“We need success in Paris, of course for the planet and for mankind, but also in order to re-establish a level playing field on the global industrial market,” Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission vice president, told POLITICO in September.
The appeal of a binding international treaty, for the EU as well as the private sector and many developing countries, is that it would provide long-term certainty.
“One of the dangers is if in the 2016 elections in the U.S. you end up with a climate-skeptic being elected, it could easily undo the progress made in Paris this year,” said Shane Tomlinson, a senior research fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House. “So I think Europe is looking for legal forms that mean that the regime as a whole can survive individual changes within countries over time.”
Washington, however, has long been averse to international climate treaties. The Clinton administration did sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but didn’t submit it to the Senate for ratification, and the subsequent Bush administration rejected the protocol. Secretary of State John Kerry made clear earlier this month that the U.S.’s position remains unchanged, telling the Financial Times that the COP21 deal is “definitively not going to be a treaty” and that there are “not going to be legally binding reductions.”
Kerry’s categorical statements, while negotiations were still underway, took European officials aback. To them, the comments reflected American arrogance, and came as a nervous reaction to a joint declaration France and China made a week earlier. The statement between French President François Hollande and Chinese President Xi Jinping calls for “an ambitious and legally binding” deal that takes into account “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” It also backs a measure for countries to take stock of their progress every five years, saying it would result in “regularly enhancing” climate action.
Common ground
Aside from the deal’s legal form, there are issues on which the U.S. and EU do largely agree, but to varying degrees.
Both want to blur the lines between developed and developing countries, which have traditionally been defined according to a U.N. list created in 1992. Rich countries want developing ones, which have grown richer since 1992, to bear more of the burden of climate policies.
They also agree that the COP21 agreement should set up a five-year review system starting in 2020, which would allow governments to gradually raise their emissions reduction targets.
Most experts and diplomats tracking the U.S.-EU climate talks agree that it’s a much stronger, more collaborative relationship now than it was in 2009. Obama has made particularly big climate overtures in recent months, introducing the Clean Power Plan aimed at phasing out coal, and vetoing the Keystone XL oil pipeline, designed to ship crude extracted from Canada’s oil sands down to the U.S.
Behind the scenes, the U.S. and EU will have to come up with a compromise that pleases Europe by making parts of the agreement binding and creates a system for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, while eschewing language that would require Obama to bring the deal before Congress.
“I think they’ll work it out,” said Daniel Bodansky, an Arizona State University law professor who served as a State Department climate coordinator at the end of the Clinton administration. “It doesn’t seem like that would be one of the issues that causes the Paris conference to flounder. I think they’ll find some formulation that will bridge the gap.”
Past climate friction
But the EU’s frustrations with America over its apparent lack of climate ambition date back to long before the Copenhagen disappointment.
During Bill Clinton’s tenure in the 1990s, U.S. officials believed Europe’s push for a top-down deal that mandated emissions cuts was unrealistic. The tension led to a string of late-night meetings that one former U.S. diplomat described as “the single most exhausting negotiation” of his career. George W. Bush’s decision to dump the Kyoto Protocol only exacerbated the distrust.
Under Obama, the U.S. has become much more sympathetic to climate arguments and wants Europe to recognize that. “Many Europeans come to these discussions with the expectation that the United States is a laggard,” said David Sandalow, who served as a top energy and climate change official during the Clinton and Obama administrations. “Now, U.S. emissions are at their lowest point in 20 years.”
Indeed, Europeans do see a change in the U.S. approach over the last six years.
Climate was a prominent issue in a leaders summit between the EU and U.S. in March 2014. Their joint statement stressed the need to tackle climate change to encourage sustainable economic growth and ensure global security, and pushed for governments to adopt a “protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force” at the COP21. They also pledged to start talks with the World Trade Organization about liberalizing trade on environmental goods, as a way of addressing climate change.
“Under Obama their collaboration has been huge, much more than there was before,” said Annika Hedberg, a senior analyst at the European Policy Centre. “You could push for more EU-U.S. collaboration, but the relationship has improved tremendously.”
But the memory of the disappointing Copenhagen summit is still painful.
The U.S. and China rammed through an unambitious agreement that left much of the world dissatisfied, and the EU was humiliated by being locked out of those last-minute talks.
“We acknowledge the difficulties in Copenhagen and we will try to solve it in the future,” Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU’s climate action and energy commissioner, told reporters on Wednesday. “For that the European Union has built lots of different alliances, but we also have a very good dialogue with China for sure and with the United States for sure. We agree to disagree in some elements, but we agree to agree in most elements.”
Washington and Brussels both want a deal in Paris, but clash on the fundamentals.
By Sara Stefanini and Andrew Restuccia
Europeans and Americans desperately want to leave the Paris climate summit with a deal that erases six years of bad memories.
Back in 2009, the European Union left the flawed Copenhagen summit humiliated while the U.S. rammed through a deal that fell far short of expectations. Top negotiators in Washington and Brussels have spent the years since then trying to understand what went wrong and how to avoid a repeat.
The result is that the two sides head into the COP21 meeting Monday more aware of each other’s priorities and red lines, and deeply invested in reaching an agreement. U.S. President Barack Obama wants to burnish his climate legacy before he leaves office, while the Europeans want an ambitious worldwide deal that doesn’t leave the Continent’s businesses saddled with uncompetitive environmental rules.
There’s just one big problem: They remain sharply at odds over some fundamental issues.
“The kind of agreement the EU wants is more expensive than the one the U.S. wants,” Sarah Blau, the climate attaché from Luxembourg, which holds the European Union’s rotating six-month presidency, said at a conference in Brussels this month.
Letter of the law
The legal nature of the so-called climate action targets is perhaps the biggest tension point.
For U.S. officials, legally binding emissions targets, among other steps, are a nonstarter. They would compel Obama to secure the Senate’s approval for the climate deal, and that’s something the Republican-controlled chamber has already vowed to kill.
Instead, the United States has long advocated an approach first outlined by New Zealand, which would split the agreement in two. Countries would be legally bound to follow reporting and transparency procedures on their emissions so that everyone would see what they were doing. However, the actual emissions targets — many of which have already been promised ahead of the COP21 — would not have the force of international law behind them, and that would negate the need to get Senate approval.
That means if a country isn’t reaching its promised reduction targets, there would be no penalty, although the rest of the world would see that it wasn’t hitting its mark.
The EU insists that both the enforcement mechanism and the targets themselves be legally binding. However the agreement still wouldn’t punish those who fall short, making it a dispute about semantics.
“That’s just two ships in the night passing with different meanings,” said Nigel Purvis, a former U.S. diplomat who now leads the consulting firm Climate Advisers.
But those words are enormously important to Brussels, which is fighting hard for the COP21 to have the rest of the world make promises as ambitious as its own.
The bloc’s 2030 targets — a 40 percent cut in emissions, an increase in the share of renewables to 27 percent and a 27 percent improvement in energy efficiency — are already locked in law. The biggest concern, especially among the poorest, most fossil fuel-dependent EU members, is that the EU will be stuck with implementing the sometimes costly changes needed to meet those targets, while rivals take a slower and more investor-friendly approach. Poland in particular is leading the charge against the ambitious targets, warning that its smokestack industries and coal-fired power plants could be hurt.
“We need success in Paris, of course for the planet and for mankind, but also in order to re-establish a level playing field on the global industrial market,” Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission vice president, told POLITICO in September.
The appeal of a binding international treaty, for the EU as well as the private sector and many developing countries, is that it would provide long-term certainty.
“One of the dangers is if in the 2016 elections in the U.S. you end up with a climate-skeptic being elected, it could easily undo the progress made in Paris this year,” said Shane Tomlinson, a senior research fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House. “So I think Europe is looking for legal forms that mean that the regime as a whole can survive individual changes within countries over time.”
Washington, however, has long been averse to international climate treaties. The Clinton administration did sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but didn’t submit it to the Senate for ratification, and the subsequent Bush administration rejected the protocol. Secretary of State John Kerry made clear earlier this month that the U.S.’s position remains unchanged, telling the Financial Times that the COP21 deal is “definitively not going to be a treaty” and that there are “not going to be legally binding reductions.”
Kerry’s categorical statements, while negotiations were still underway, took European officials aback. To them, the comments reflected American arrogance, and came as a nervous reaction to a joint declaration France and China made a week earlier. The statement between French President François Hollande and Chinese President Xi Jinping calls for “an ambitious and legally binding” deal that takes into account “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” It also backs a measure for countries to take stock of their progress every five years, saying it would result in “regularly enhancing” climate action.
Common ground
Aside from the deal’s legal form, there are issues on which the U.S. and EU do largely agree, but to varying degrees.
Both want to blur the lines between developed and developing countries, which have traditionally been defined according to a U.N. list created in 1992. Rich countries want developing ones, which have grown richer since 1992, to bear more of the burden of climate policies.
They also agree that the COP21 agreement should set up a five-year review system starting in 2020, which would allow governments to gradually raise their emissions reduction targets.
Most experts and diplomats tracking the U.S.-EU climate talks agree that it’s a much stronger, more collaborative relationship now than it was in 2009. Obama has made particularly big climate overtures in recent months, introducing the Clean Power Plan aimed at phasing out coal, and vetoing the Keystone XL oil pipeline, designed to ship crude extracted from Canada’s oil sands down to the U.S.
Behind the scenes, the U.S. and EU will have to come up with a compromise that pleases Europe by making parts of the agreement binding and creates a system for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, while eschewing language that would require Obama to bring the deal before Congress.
“I think they’ll work it out,” said Daniel Bodansky, an Arizona State University law professor who served as a State Department climate coordinator at the end of the Clinton administration. “It doesn’t seem like that would be one of the issues that causes the Paris conference to flounder. I think they’ll find some formulation that will bridge the gap.”
Past climate friction
But the EU’s frustrations with America over its apparent lack of climate ambition date back to long before the Copenhagen disappointment.
During Bill Clinton’s tenure in the 1990s, U.S. officials believed Europe’s push for a top-down deal that mandated emissions cuts was unrealistic. The tension led to a string of late-night meetings that one former U.S. diplomat described as “the single most exhausting negotiation” of his career. George W. Bush’s decision to dump the Kyoto Protocol only exacerbated the distrust.
Under Obama, the U.S. has become much more sympathetic to climate arguments and wants Europe to recognize that. “Many Europeans come to these discussions with the expectation that the United States is a laggard,” said David Sandalow, who served as a top energy and climate change official during the Clinton and Obama administrations. “Now, U.S. emissions are at their lowest point in 20 years.”
Indeed, Europeans do see a change in the U.S. approach over the last six years.
Climate was a prominent issue in a leaders summit between the EU and U.S. in March 2014. Their joint statement stressed the need to tackle climate change to encourage sustainable economic growth and ensure global security, and pushed for governments to adopt a “protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force” at the COP21. They also pledged to start talks with the World Trade Organization about liberalizing trade on environmental goods, as a way of addressing climate change.
“Under Obama their collaboration has been huge, much more than there was before,” said Annika Hedberg, a senior analyst at the European Policy Centre. “You could push for more EU-U.S. collaboration, but the relationship has improved tremendously.”
But the memory of the disappointing Copenhagen summit is still painful.
The U.S. and China rammed through an unambitious agreement that left much of the world dissatisfied, and the EU was humiliated by being locked out of those last-minute talks.
“We acknowledge the difficulties in Copenhagen and we will try to solve it in the future,” Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU’s climate action and energy commissioner, told reporters on Wednesday. “For that the European Union has built lots of different alliances, but we also have a very good dialogue with China for sure and with the United States for sure. We agree to disagree in some elements, but we agree to agree in most elements.”
Snooping
NSA bulk phone snooping program shuts down
By Alex Byers
The National Security Agency will no longer be able to collect phone records in bulk starting Nov. 29, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement Friday.
The program's closure was required by the USA Freedom Act, signed by President Barack Obama in early June. The program was allowed to continue since then as part of a six-month wind-down period, in which intelligence officials could create and test a new phone records program where the government can only obtain records connected to a specific entity like a person or device that is associated with a foreign power or terrorist group.
Some Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), tried to delay the program’s official end this month in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. But despite support from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the effort got no traction in Congress.
The NSA has requested that some officials continue to have access to data already collected by the agency for “technical” purposes — but not intelligence analysis— for another three months, according to ODNI. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is currently reviewing that request, ODNI said.
A federal court issued an order earlier this month holding the program unconstitutional and barring the collection of phone metadata pertaining to one California attorney and his law practice. However, after authorities argued that implementing the order would require the early shutdown of the whole program, a federal appeals court stayed the ruling.
By Alex Byers
The National Security Agency will no longer be able to collect phone records in bulk starting Nov. 29, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement Friday.
The program's closure was required by the USA Freedom Act, signed by President Barack Obama in early June. The program was allowed to continue since then as part of a six-month wind-down period, in which intelligence officials could create and test a new phone records program where the government can only obtain records connected to a specific entity like a person or device that is associated with a foreign power or terrorist group.
Some Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), tried to delay the program’s official end this month in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. But despite support from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the effort got no traction in Congress.
The NSA has requested that some officials continue to have access to data already collected by the agency for “technical” purposes — but not intelligence analysis— for another three months, according to ODNI. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is currently reviewing that request, ODNI said.
A federal court issued an order earlier this month holding the program unconstitutional and barring the collection of phone metadata pertaining to one California attorney and his law practice. However, after authorities argued that implementing the order would require the early shutdown of the whole program, a federal appeals court stayed the ruling.
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