Newark Mayor Corey Booker offered a rejoinder to Gov. Chris Christie’s call for a public referendum on marriage equality that should put an end to the argument once and for all.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1
The last vestige of a politician who knows he is on the wrong side of a civil rights issue is to ask for a referendum.
Gov. Chris Christie did just that today, as the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage in the state. On the surface, this would seem like a significant concession on his part — polls have shown support in recent years.
But that is not the point. Same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. Allowing the state to retain an outmoded and religiously based definition of marriage treats gay and lesbian couples as second-class citizens. Pretending to address this issue by offering a public vote on whether gays and lesbians should be treated as equals under the law is cynical and cowardly.
I want to buy into the program being outlined tonight by President Barack Obama, at least a good chunk of it (not the gas drilling or the veiled allusion to merit pay for teachers), but I am troubled by the nagging reality of the calendar.
Obama was sworn in as president three years ago. He entered office with one of the largest Congressional and Senate majorities in recent memory. Yet, he was unable to parlay this basic reality into anything more than an industry-friendly health plan and a fiscal stimulus that was too small by at least half.
Apologists will blame the Republicans, will point to their obstructionism. Fair, perhaps, but only to a point. Obama failed to understand that he owned the bully pulpit and an early approval rating that gave him a boat load of political capital. Rather than get into the trenches and fight for an aggressive implementation of a Rooseveltian agenda, he bowed to the false god of compromise and bipartisanship.
In doing so, he allowed the political moment to pass. The economy continued to sputter (at best) and the right wing regained its confidence, with a grassroots Tea Party movement empowered by lobbying money supplying the ground troops. The recession no longer was about Wall Street and deregulation, but about over-regulation and high taxes.
Republicans won back the House and gained seats in the Senate, leaving a president whose viewed compromise as more important than any ideology, which is another way of saying that principles are fungible.
The Obama presidency looked in trouble until the reality of the Republican primary contestants (a collection of liars, cheaters, lunatics and morons) set in. Obama likely will win another term, but I hold no hope that he will do anything but fiddle around the edges of the status quo. He is not a transformational figure, but another in a long line of corporate-friendly Democrats who will win the support of liberals and progressives because the alternative is worse.
That explains the speech we are watching tonight, one in which he has cobbled together an agenda from a menu of offerings designed to appeal to as much of the political class as he can. It is an agenda that is a mile wide and an inch deep and will do nothing to alter the basic structural problems we face.
It’s easy to blame George W. Bush for the damage that his administration did to the Constitution.
But we need to be clear that the assault on the separation of powers has been a bipartisan affair, reaching back at least to the Kennedy administration. And nothing done by the Obama administration has halted this dangerous slide.
Peter Singer, in a piece in The New York Times today, the current outlines of the problem, which has left Congress without the power it was given by the Founders to limit the president’s war-making ability.
Our new technology — in particular, unmanned drones — “removes the last political barriers to war.”
The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.
We can freight with seeming impunity, allowing those off us on the home front to pretend that nothing of any consequence is happening.
We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, from unmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war.
And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way — not for those that involve waging war by other means.
WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.
Unmanned operations are not “costless,” as they are too often described in the news media and government deliberations. Even worthy actions can sometimes have unintended consequences. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, was drawn into terrorism by the very Predator strikes in Pakistan meant to stop terrorism.
Similarly, C.I.A. drone strikes outside of declared war zones are setting a troubling precedent that we might not want to see followed by the close to 50 other nations that now possess the same unmanned technology — including China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.
A deep deliberation on war was something the framers of the Constitution sought to build into our system. Yet on Tuesday, when President Obama talks about his wartime accomplishments during the State of the Union address, Congress will have to admit that its role has been reduced to the same part it plays during the president’s big speech. These days, when it comes to authorizing war, Congress generally sits there silently, except for the occasional clapping. And we do the same at home.
Last year, I met with senior Pentagon officials to discuss the many tough issues emerging from our growing use of robots in war. One of them asked, “So, who then is thinking about all this stuff?”
America’s founding fathers may not have been able to imagine robotic drones, but they did provide an answer. The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone.
In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us.
Not that anyone, aside from Ron Paul, is talking about this on the campaign trail.
Bruce Springsteen is a bit angry. And it’s good for his music.
The new single — “We Take Care of Our Own” — soars and seethes, and in the process washes away the taste of his last, and weakest, record, “Working on a Dream.”
Slate discussed the record earlier this weak. David Haglund quoted “someone close to Bruce Springsteen” calling Wrecking Ball “the angriest album he’s ever made.” Haglund then quotes from the single’s second verse:
From Chicago to New Orleans
From the muscle to the bone
From the shotgun shack to the Superdome
We yelled “help” but the cavalry stayed home
There ain’t no-one hearing the bugle blown
Haglund’s response:
I’d say that’s fairly angry. The chorus—“Wherever this flag’s flown / We take care of our own”—sounds rousingly optimistic, but may be intended, at least in part, ironically; that would be a familiar approach for Springsteen.
The Katrina reference, meanwhile, recalls another comment from that Springsteen acquaintance quoted above: The Boss apparently “wrote and recorded the majority of the album before the Occupy movements started, so he’s not just setting headlines to music.”
The B-side for this single (on vinyl, at least) is “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a 1990s-era Springsteen tune. Since Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine apparently features on Wrecking Ball, I’m guessing it’s the version of that song he memorably contributed to. Hope so.
I hope so too. Wrecking Ball is his first release in the post-Big Man-era, a loss that could have stripped the passion from the music. The Boss bought into the optimism of Barack Obama’s election win, allowing it to soften his music and cut short the momentum of the truly great Magic album.
If the alum is like the single, we can expect a set of muscular, political tunes and a return to relevance for the Steinbeck of rock and roll.
