constitution – Hank Kalet

Cenk Ugyur seeks change in constitution

My latest post on Patch is based on an interview with Cenk Uguyur, host of The Young Turks. He has started the Wolf PAC and makes a convincing case as to the need for change:

“It is not the most important issue, it is the only issue,” he told me last week. “Until we solve the problem of all this money we will not have an honest debate in the country. Our democracy is in big, big trouble.”

As he would say, “Have at it, hoss!”

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Giving states the veto is a bad idea

I would dismiss this as a joke, but given the looniness we’ve seen grow on the issue of federal power it obviously is not a joke.

The this, in this case, is an amendment that would grant state legislatures the power to repeal federal law — two-thirds of all state legislatures would need to vote for repeal. It has the backing of folks in 12 states (the story says legislatures, including New Jersey, when it needs to be made clear that full legislatures are not on board in most cases) and some in Congress — which leaves me wondering if anyone is thinking clearly out there.

The amendment is being pushed as a way to trim federal sails and force national lawmakers to consider the impact of their actions on the states, which sounds logical in theory but would create chaos in practice and do little more than further empower small states and, more ominously, make progressive reform impossible.

As with the filibuster, the threat of a repeal vote might be enough to stall action — consider what might have happened to civil rights legislation had this been in effect in the mid-1960s. The reality is that the federal government has no choice but to step in sometimes — to address questions of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, to impose regulatory rules that can act as a baseline and so on.

Giving a veto to the states will create a downward pull on all of these issues, because there will be no incentive for states with the weakest environmental regulations, those with out workplace safety laws, without a minimum wage, etc., to improve, no minimum standards to meet, etc. States with effective laws will have little choice but to gut their own regulatory apparatus to keep business from fleeing to the states of least resistance.

This craziness, of course, is brought to you by the same people who believe that democracy would be enhanced by taking the right to vote for U.S. Senators away from the people and handing it to the very state legislatures that have proven inept and corrupt. (Does anyone really think that the people we send to Trenton would do a better job picking Senators than the voters? Does anyone think that the people in Trenton will be thinking of us and not of themselves?)

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

A constitutional disconnect

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m missing something, but am I the only one who sees a massive contradiction between what President Barack Obama said today at the Naval Academy and what he said I just don’t see how this statement — his commitment to the “enduring truth”: “The values and ideals in (the Constitution) are not simply words written into aging parchment, they are the bedrock of our liberty and our security.”

We uphold our fundamental principles and values not just because we choose to, but because we swear to; not because they feel good, but because they help keep us safe and keep us true to who we are.

And yet, he is planning to create a class “detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” This group of detainees, he said yesterday at the National Archives, “are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.”

I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded.

Essentially, the president has bought into the underlying argument that has underpinned every bad decision we have made as a nation for the last eight years — that we are in a state of war, that terrorism, rather than being a law-enforcement or intelligence issue, is a military problem that demands military solutions. That has put us in the position of using our howitzers to kill a scorpion.

Yes, the Obama plan is better than the Bush plan. But just about anything would have been an improvement. It doesn’t mean that Obama has found a way of mixing pragmatism and principle.

As I said, same as the old boss.

Power’s prerogative: Protecting presidential power

President Barack Obama has opted to protect presidential privilege, rather than allow the spotlight to be shined on the crimes and cynicism of the Bush years. He has released the so-called torture memos, but he also has said that futher investigation into the administration is dangerous.

The memos were released after a tense internal debate at the White House. Saying that it is a “time for reflection, not retribution,” Mr. Obama reiterated his opposition to a extensive investigation of controversial counterterrorism programs.

“In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carrying out their duties relying in good faith upon the legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,” theWhite House statement said.

This is a mistake. The decisions made by the Bush administration, their justifications for disregarding international law, must be made public and those responsible must be brought to justice. Not out of some sense of retribution — that would make us look like a banana republic.

Rather, we should investigate and prosecute because laws may have been broken and to allow the transgressions to stand only further erodes our constitutional system of checks and balances. To allow the Our system of laws depends upon it.

This is not about retribution — that would be foolishused to recast our violation

Militarized zone

Josh Marshall describes the basic problem with viewing the presidency only through the commander-in-chief lens, call its use as a substitute for president “novel and in many ways pernicious”:

(T)he growing use of the term in this sense is an effective barometer of the progressive militarization of our concept of the presidency and our government itself.

We see it here in its semantic form but we can observe its concrete effect in the Bush administration’s claims of almost absolute presidential power well outside of war-fighting — almost as if the president is a kind of warlord simultaneously directing the military and the civilian governments with similar fiat powers.

Marshall then reminds us just how wrongheaded this is, and how it contradicts the founders’ intent.

(T)he point of the constitution’s explicitly giving the president the title of commander-in-chief was not to make him into a quasi-military figure. It was precisely the opposite — to create no doubt that the armed forces answered not to a chief of staff or senior general or even a Secretary of Defense (originally, Secretaries of War and Navy) but to a civilian elected officeholder who operates with the constrained and limited power of that world rather than the unbound authority of military command.

That’s something the next president needs to remember.