More on Tom Kean Jr.’s murky position on Social Security here and here.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Does that answer your question?
Tom Kean Jr. tells The Star-Ledger that he opposes privitization of Social Security, responding to Democratic attacks that he backs the president’s plan for private accounts.
They pointed out the state Senator voted against a state Senate resolution opposing the Bush plan, saying it would drive “millions of Americans into poverty” while “destroying the most successful social insurance program ever created in the United States.”
Kean told the Ledger that
the resolution was nothing more than a “partisan attack” and that the state Senate should have been more concerned with dealing with state issues it has control over, such as New Jersey’s troubled pension system. If elected to the U.S. Senate, Kean said, he would push for a bipartisan plan to strengthen Social Security.
What that bipartisan plan might be remains a mystery, of course.
Talking Points Memo, in this post, dissects the Kean story and the GOP strategy on Social Security more generally.
The upshot is that, while it might appear that Tom Kean Jr. has taken a position, what his position is remains unclear.
Specter to the rescue
I never thought I’d call U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter heroic, but his decision to take on the White House over its use of signing statements to skirt the law makes him, well, heroic.
The Republican senator from Pennsylvania, who is chairman of the Senate Judicial Committee, plans to introduce legislation that would allow the Congress to challenge the president’s use of signing statements as de facto vetoes in court, hoping to have the president’s actions declared unconstitutional.
Specter was responding to a report from the American Bar Association that called the manner in which the president has used the signing statements — as extra-legal vetoes — “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers.”
The report, issued Monday, outlined the history of signing statements, demonstrating that President Bush’s use of them (800 so far, 200 more than all other presidents combined) is far different and far more pernicious than any of his predecessors. Earlier presidents used them but never as a replacement for the veto — the president’s sole avenue to enter the legislative process.
The president, the report says, has resisted the veto (until last week), avoiding the potential that Congress might attempt an override. Instead, he has used the signing statements to announce his intention to ignore all or parts of new laws with which he disagrees. The signing statements, the report says, generally lack any kind of documentation supporting the administration’s contentions.
The report cites several examples. The president has refused to carry out laws involving “Congressional requirements to report back to Congress on the use of Patriot Act authority to secretly search homes and seize private papers” and “the McCain amendment forbidding any U.S. officials to use torture or cruel and inhumane treatment on prisoners.”
The report also pointed to signing statements that made clear that the president did not believe he was mandated to make reports to Congress on intelligence issues — as required by the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2002. Instead, his signing statement announced that he viewed Congress as having an advisory capacity.
That’s the key to understanding the signing statements. The president views the legislative branch as the junior branch, believing that the executive can operate — especially in what the president determines as a time of war, as hazily defined as this war may be — without oversight and without interference.
Dick Polman, in his American Debate blog, describes the Bar Association report this way:
(T)hese pillars of the legal establishment are arguing that this particular president is potentially wreaking havoc with the Constitution, and that the only way to thwart him is for Congress to take drastic action that could put it on a collision course with the White House. I haven’t heard talk like this from the legal establishment since Richard Nixon’s executive excesses during Watergate.
That’s where Specter comes in. Specter is proposing legislation that would allow Congress to sue the president over his use of signing statements, legislation that he says “will give the Congress standing to seek relief in the federal courts in situations where the president has issued such signing statements and which will authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements, with the view to having the president’s acts declared unconstitutional.”
Dan Froomkin in his Washington Post White House Briefing says Specter’s challenge to the president “has the potential to spark a historic battle over the separation of powers.”
That’s assuming the legislation can get through both houses of Congress and win approval from the president.
Specter, as a Republican and as chairman of the committee that will hold hearings on the legislation, has as good a shot as anyone to move the bill along. And while I doubt it ultimately will make it to the president’s desk, Specter should be applauded for ensuring that there is some level of debate over the issue.
If a picture is worth a thousand words…
Then a cartoon is worth a million. Today’s cartoon by Dan Wasserman in The Boston Globe is worth checking out.
Nothing new on television news
Watching “Larry King Live” on the crisis at the Israel-Lebanon border and something strikes me: Guests include former Jean Kirkpatrick, an ambassador and national security adviser under Ronald Reagan, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who served as a negotiator in the Middle East for Bill Clinton, Zbigniew Brezinski, national security advisor to Jimmy Carter — a group associated with the handful of successes in the Middle East, but also associated with a trajectory of failure. Essentially, what the King lineup shows is the inability of the mainstream media to bring new voices to bear on the region and, perhaps more importantly, the inability (or unwillingness?) to bring creative voices from the region into the discussion.
Just a thought.
Hank Kalet 