| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty August 30, 2013 What Is the Consequence of a War Without Congressional Authorization? Call me schizophrenic. Call me an extremist. You can recall that I'm supportive of air strikes to punish Syrian dictator Bashir Assad for using chemical weapons -- as long as we're sure his side used the chemical weapons and that he ordered the launch. But if a president were to A) take military action against Syria without seeking a resolution authorizing military action or B) Congress rejected the resolution, but he went ahead anyway . . . Would that be grounds for impeachment? Probably not. There's some precedent for this sort of thing: The War Powers Resolution passed by Congress in 1973 requires that the president seek consent from Congress before force is used, or within 60 days of the start of hostilities. It also says the president must provide Congress with reports throughout the conflict. Since 1973, the United States has used military force in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Haiti in 1994 and Kosovo in 1999. In all those instances, presidents -- both Democrats and Republicans -- sidestepped Congress and committed U.S. military forces without obtaining congressional approval. I think CNN is wrong above when it mentions the Persian Gulf War. Perhaps they meant Somalia? Congress did, however, provide President George W. Bush with its approval for the war in Iraq in 2002 and the war in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Now, House Republicans lead the calls for President Barack Obama to convene a joint session of Congress to lay out his case to the lawmakers and the American people. Some in both parties demand a vote before any military strikes occur. More than 90 members of Congress, most of them Republican, have signed a letter to the president urging him "to consult and receive authorization" before authorizing any such military action, according to the office of GOP Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia. Meanwhile, 54 House Democrats mostly representing the party's progressive wing sent Obama a letter Thursday that said "we strongly urge you to seek an affirmative decision of Congress prior to committing any U.S. military engagement to this complex crisis." It is not good to have laws on the books that are optional. On the other hand, public opinion is pretty united: "Fifty percent of Americans say they oppose the United States taking military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad, and nearly eight-in-10 believe President Barack Obama should receive congressional approval before using any force, according to a new NBC News poll." What's more, "a whopping 79 percent of respondents – including nearly seven-in-10 Democrats and 90 percent of Republicans – say the president should be required to receive congressional approval before taking any action." Obama may not realize it, but his presidency's in a precarious position here: The NBC also shows that President Obama's overall job-approval rating has dropped one point since last month to 44 percent, which is tied for his lowest mark in the survey. He gets even lower marks on foreign policy: Just 41 percent approve of his handling of the issue – an all-time low. And only 35 percent approve of his handling of the situation in Syria. Cory Booker, Just Plain Weird Cory Booker is still heavily favored to win New Jersey's special Senate election. But his golden aura is seriously cracked, thanks to the reporting of our Eliana Johnson: Sources tell National Review Online that the central character in one of Booker's oft-repeated stories — T-Bone, the drug pusher who the mayor has said threatened his life at one turn and sobbed on his shoulder the next — is a figment of his imagination, even though Booker has talked about him in highly emotional terms and in great detail. The tale is one Booker admits he's told "a million" times, according to the Newark Star Ledger. Ronald Rice Jr., a Newark city councilman and Booker ally who has known the mayor since 1998, says the T-Bone story was "a fixture" of Booker's unsuccessful 2002 mayoral bid against corrupt Newark political boss Sharpe James, perhaps for its symbolic value. In Booker's mind, according to the city councilman, "It's not so much the details of the story" that matter, but the principle that "these things happen, they happen to real people, they happen in the city of Newark." Rice, a Newark native, says he doesn't know whether T-Bone exists. But, he explains, "if Cory had to tell a story or two and mix details up for Newark to get the funding for it, I see that as something that's taking tragedy and doing something productive for it." . . . Booker has never publicly said that T-Bone does not exist. In fact, he has done quite the opposite. And, this questioning from last night is . . . unexpected: Newark mayor and New Jersey Senate candidate Cory Booker sat down with MSNBC's Chris Hayes for a wide-ranging interview tonight that also touched upon the rumors that Booker might be gay. Booker has denied nothing, merely dismissed it as ridiculous, and Thursday night Hayes surprisingly pushed back against Booker. Hayes argued from a progressive perspective, there is a significance to someone like Booker coming out, especially with the recent legislative gains for gay marriage, and if he was really gay, "why would you not just come out?" Booker found it ridiculous anyone would "ask the question in the first place" in this day and age, dodging the question directly, but Hayes interrupted to "push back from a progressive perspective." He admitted that most of the rumor-mongering over Booker's sexuality is being done in a "gross" way, but argued that when people in positions like Booker's come out, it can have a "very positive political effect." Didn't Supreme Court Justice Kagan have to go through this? A widespread perception that she was when she wasn't? And if being closeted is an injustice -- i.e., the world thinks you're straight, and you're secretly not -- why wouldn't the reverse be an injustice? Bonus Section: What I Said to Heritage Yesterday Here are my prepared opening remarks from yesterday's appearance at the Heritage Foundation (video is here; skip through the first 16 minutes or so of dead air): I want to begin with a question: How many of us had a cell phone on 9/11? According to the wireless industry association, 128 million Americans had a cell phone in 2001. It passed 300 million in 2010. Pew Research found this summer that 91 percent of Americans have a cellular phone and 56 percent of Americans had a smart phone -- meaning it probably has a camera, taking photos, and a GPS tracking device, letting certain folks know where you are -- like your service provider, and any police authorities they choose to share it with -- more than 1.3 million times in 2011, most of the time without a warrant. Obama keeps emphasizing that the NSA isn't listening in on people's phone calls, but is merely collecting "metadata." But let's face it, the content of the phone call is probably the least interesting bit of information that passes through your phone every day. The laws governing our surveillance state were passed about twelve years ago, but technologically, we're in a dramatically different world. In 2001, when the Patriot Act passed, there was no Facebook. There was no Twitter, no Instagram, no YouTube. There wasn't even MySpace. In the decade since 9/11, we've all become very comfortable with putting all kinds of information up onto the Internet, largely voluntarily. And we think that it's secure, that it's only accessible by our "Friends," and now we're learning . . . not so much. It turns out all of us signed up for Verizon's "Share Everything" plan. The CBS television show, "Person of Interest," is about the creator of a massive government surveillance and data-mining computer -- and the Bad Guy from Lost and Vigilante Jesus go around and stop crimes using it. There's a scene where the Bad Guy from Lost says that he found it too hard and complicated to get people's personal information, so he invented a way to get people to give it up voluntarily: social networking. So when we hear about the vast surveillance abilities of the National Security Agency today, Americans react differently than they might have a decade ago. You notice this debate doesn't break down along the usual partisan lines. It's not really about left or right; it's about whether or not you have a security clearance. Democrats and Republicans who have security clearances keep telling us this program is awesome, and that it's instrumental to stopping attacks, and it could never be abused -- man, it's nothing like the Internal Revenue Service! Some of these are very smart and some of these people are Joe Biden. Some of these people are very dedicated, very good, very honest, and some of these people are Eric Holder. Yet many of us outside government are . . . not so reassured. A big reason that we're having this discussion is a guy named Edward Snowden. It was fascinating how quickly coverage of the NSA revelations turned to a binary choice -- is Snowden a hero or traitor? -- apparently there's no in-between, and no way his actions could be useful for informing the American public AND our enemies simultaneously -- and about him, instead of what the NSA is doing. The defenders of the NSA have a problem, and that's the more that they criticize Snowden -- often entirely accurately and fairly -- the worse they look. Sure, the moment Snowden ended up hanging with China, and then jetting off to eat McBorscht at the Moscow McDonalds for a few weeks -- he looked, at best, as a man with such enormous naïveté that it can only be measured with the Hubble telescope and at worst a foreign agent -- but the problem is, the NSA hired him, and gave him the keys to the kingdom. The dumber and more sinister he is, the worse the NSA looks. The other complication is that administration has really poisoned the water hole on this debate by not leveling with the American people. All too often, when somebody in authority tries to reassure us by describing what the NSA is doing, it turns out to be a lie. Well, either it's a lie, or they don't know what they're talking about. Like when President Obama told Charlie Rose that the FISA court is "transparent." Only in Obamaland is a court where proceedings are entirely in secret declared "transparent." Now remember, in a FISA court, there is no equivalent of a defense attorney speaking on behalf of the person being investigated. It is not an adversarial court. Nobody speaks for you, Joe Citizen. The government makes its case, and the judge either says, "okay," or "no, I'm not convinced." You can guess at how that works out: Since the start of the War on Terror, the FISA court has denied ten applications, and modified several dozen, while approving more than 15,000. I don't know about you, but I'm left wondering . . . with an approval rate of 99.99 percent, just what the heck do you have to ask for to get your request denied? "Your honor, we absolutely, positively, must get immediate access to the pictures on Scarlett Johansson's cell phone. It's a matter of national security." You'll recall that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, under oath before Congress, that the NSA never gathered "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans." He later claimed he misunderstood the direct question posed to him and apologized to Congress. Now, when your excuse is that you don't know what the term "any data" means, you're not allowed to have the word "intelligence" in your job title. Or when President Obama tells Jay Leno, "we don't have a domestic spying program" -- and then we learn that the NSA gathered "tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans" with no connection to terrorism . . . well, you begin to understand why the president is answering questions from Jay Leno instead of Jake Tapper or Bret Baier. I was still willing to believe that that the problem was the administration, and that most NSA employees were the most swell and honorable crowd this side of Dudley Do-Right . . . and then we learn that they've been using their tech to keep tabs on their exes. They even have a term for it, "Love-Int." Dianne Feinstein tried to assure us that this was a rare series of isolated incidents . . . but I'm going to quote the John Woo cinematic masterpiece, Broken Arrow, and declare, "I don't know what's scarier, the fact that it happens, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it." ADDENDA: Popehat responds to that Slate article contending that parents who send their kids to private school are bad people: I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I'm not a big-L Libertarian, although I have small-l libertarian leanings. If you asked me to summarize my domestic political outlook, you could do worse than this: I want to minimize the ability of people like Alison Benedikt, who tend to encrust government, to tell me how to raise my family or live my life. I believe in free expression, free worship, free conscience, personal responsibility, the rule of law, strictly limited government (and the strict limitation of people with clipboards and people with guns and badges, thank you very much), and that the best society is one in which free people make free choices, not one in which you allow the Alison Benedikts of the world to make the best interests of your children subservient to the best interests of a collective imagined by a smug self-appointed elite.
NRO Digest — August 30, 2013 Today on National Review Online . . . | CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: If Obama is going to strike Syria, he should do it constitutionally and with purpose. Shamed into War. RICH LOWRY: There's no getting around the fact that Obama warned Assad about chemical-weapons use. Syria. JOHN YOO: Must the legislature pre-approve all hostilities? Syria Academics. KEVIN D WILLIAMSON: Mayor Garcetti does not know how to save the L.A. economy. Hollywood, Babble On. ANDREW STILES: Even the Times once recognized the threat low-skilled immigration presents to U.S. workers. The Gang of Eight's 'Can't Cut It' Argument. ANDREW JOHNSON: Sports teams' nicknames and iconography reinforce derogatory stereotypes about whites. More Racist Mascots. SLIDESHOW: The Obama Economy. | To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com
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