Category Archives: Business as Usual

Rep. Trent Franks Blocks Rep. Norton From Testifying at Hearing on DC Abortion Restrictions | Video Cafe

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Rep. Trent Franks Blocks Rep. Norton From Testifying at Hearing on DC Abortion Restrictions | Video Cafe.

It appears the House Republicans, this time lead by Arizona Rep. Trent Franks are about to give us a sort of a rerun of the Sandra Fluke debacle, only this time the woman they’re refusing to allow to testify before a Congressional hearing is D.C.’s only elected representative, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton:

Trent Franks Blocks D.C. Representative From Testifying About Proposed D.C. Abortion Ban:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) wants to restrict abortions in the District of Columbia, but he refuses to allow D.C.’s delegate from testifying on behalf of the city’s residents during a hearing about his proposal. Franks’ “fetal pain” bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in D.C. even though there is no scientific proof that a fetus can feel pain at that point and a fetus is not viable.

Del. Eleanor Norton (D), D.C.’s only elected represetative, asked Franks last week if she could testify about the bill at an upcoming Thursday hearing. Franks denied her request, which Norton said breaks tradition of allowing members of Congress to testify about a bill that affects their constituents. Similarly, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) prevented women from testifying on a panel about contraception back in February.

Norton told the Huffington Post that her constituents are “up in arms” about the proposed abortion ban:

“This is the first bill in history that attempts to take the residents of the District of Columbia outside of the protection of the Constitution,” she continued. “The right to have an abortion until viability is a mandated right under Roe v. Wade. I think it takes a lot of nerve to single out the constituents of another member’s district for discriminatory treatment, and we deeply resent it.” [...]

D.C. is an easy target for anti-abortion bills, Norton said, because it doesn’t have any elected officials who can vote in Congress.

“Why wouldn’t they put this bill in for the entire country if they feel so deeply about it?”

In December, House Republicans forced a ban on funding for abortion services in D.C. to avoid a government shutdown and even prevented the city from using local taxes to pay for abortion care, reinstating a 13-year ban on abortion funding in D.C. that President Obama overturned in 2009.

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Homeland Battlefield Act Portion Found Unconstitutional By New York Judge

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Homeland Battlefield Act Portion Found Unconstitutional By New York Judge.

All I can say is, YAYAYAYYAYAYAY!

WASHINGTON — A day before Congress weighs an amendment to end indefinite military detentions in the U.S., a federal judge Wednesday ruled the law that allows the practice unconstitutional.

Saying the measure has “chilling impact on First Amendment rights,” U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, of New York’s Eastern District, found that a group of reporters and activists who brought the lawsuit had no way of knowing whether they could be subjected to it. That makes it an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment’s free speech right and the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process, Forrest said in a written opinion.

The lead plaintiffs — Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges of the Nation Institute and Tangerine Bolen, who runs the website RevolutionTruth — argued that they conceivably could be grabbed under the law because they deal with sources that U.S. authorities may deem to fall under the law, Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The law defines the suspects who can be detained as a “person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces.”

Forrest found the language too vague, and repeatedly tried to get government attorneys to say that the reporters’ fears were unfounded. The lawyers declined.

“At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [section] 1021,” Forrest wrote. “Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years.

“An individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so,” Forrest wrote. “In the face of what could be indeterminate military detention, due process requires more.”

“We dealt a pretty big blow to two branches of Congress and President Obama,” Bolen told The Huffington Post. Bolen got involved in the lawsuit because she worked extensively on the Wikileaks and Bradley Manning cases, and used her website to expose where the war on terror has gone tragically wrong, including interviewing Iraqis and Afghans with damning tales to tell.

“Given that I engage in those two activities and I have an entire team around the world, I really felt that under the vague language of the NDAA, someone like me could easily get in trouble,” Bolen said.

“If I start showing that we’re behaving in such an egregious manner in this country in our alleged war on terror, and I become a thorn in the side of the U.S government in fighting for our rights — the phrase material support, I’m talking to, quote, alleged terrorists or people around the world who may be questionable — just by talking to them and interviewing them on a platform, am I providing them material support?” Bolen said. “That was my fear.”

The author and activist Naomi Wolf said watching the judge question administration lawyers repeatedly on the issue of who might be detained under the law — and the lawyers not answering — was downright chilling. To have the judge find that state of affairs unconstitutional was a profound relief, Wolf said in an interview.

“To hear those words — it’s so true, it’s so obvious — it puts in glaring relief the hideousness, the unconstitutionality, the darkness of this legislative efffort and others like it,” Wolf said. “She is so completely, obviously right. It’s nothing short of treason to have put forward legislation like this, let alone to have had most of the people who represent us and our president sign off on this clearly, obviously criminally unconstitutional — unconstitutional is inadequate. It’s anti-constitutional. It’s dictatorial.

“I’m so happy as a mother. It’s so profound. All of us were put in danger by this law.”

The White House had no comment on the ruling Wednesday night.

Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.) are offering an amendment on Thursday to the 2013 Defense Authorization Act that would end the law. Amash sent an appeal to fellow lawmakers soon after the ruling, asking them to pass it.

“The amendment I’m offering with Rep. Adam Smith is the ONLY amendment that ensures that persons arrested on U.S. soil aren’t detained indefinitely without charge or trial,” Amash wrote. “Voting against the Smith-Amash amendment allows the government to retain the power to detain persons, picked up in the U.S., for life, on the suspicion that they ‘substantially supported’ forces ‘associated’ with our enemies.”

“If our constituents haven’t sent a clear enough message, tonight’s ruling surely does: Congress must act now to guarantee the constitutional right to a charge and a trial,” Amash wrote.

The progressive group Demand Progress was among those directing voters to contact their elected representives about the law, using an online petition and a new Facebook tool.

The government has 60 days to decide whether to appeal.

Michael McAuliff covers politics and Congress for The Huffington Post. Talk to him on Facebook.

To most Americans, it doesn’t feel like an economic recovery – CNN.com

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To most Americans, it doesn’t feel like an economic recovery – CNN.com.

A job seeker holds an employment application during a job fair last month in San Francisco.
A job seeker holds an employment application during a job fair last month in San Francisco.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • David Frum: Friday’s weak jobs report is a sign of America’s economic future
  • Frum says we are many years away from regaining all jobs lost in the recession
  • Most Americans are seeing their economic future changed for the worse, he says
  • Frum: Politicians in both parties will find it hard to adopt policies to reinvigorate economy

Editor’s note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002 and is the author of six books, including “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again.”

(CNN) — Friday’s weak jobs report is more than a disappointing blip.

It is a glimpse ahead of our disappointing future.

Nearly three years from the beginning of the economic recovery in the summer of 2009, the U.S. economy has replaced not even half the jobs lost in the slump of 2007-2009. At the current pace of job creation, it will take until 2017 to replace all the jobs lost.

But of course the population has grown since 2007, so “replacement” is not good enough. We are even further away from equaling the employment rate of 2007 — the proportion of the working-age population at work.

Even when (or if) full job recovery does come, it will not restore the economy of 2007 just as it was.

Recessions reshape economies.

DNC chair: GOP wants bad economy

Arguments for, against economic recovery

Jobs report weaker than expected

The best book written about the social effects of the Great Recession is Don Peck’s “Pinched.”

Peck shows us a new world emerging from the catastrophe of 2008, a new world that most Americans will find harsher than the old.

For example: Despite the long, slow relative decline of manufacturing as a source of American jobs, the total number of manufacturing jobs in the United States had remained constant at about 18 million for decades. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 6 million.

While manufacturing is beginning a recovery now, it seems impossible that the sector will regenerate to anything like its former extent.

The new jobs being added to the U.S. economy pay less, on average, than the jobs lost — which is why the average rate of pay in the United States remains stagnant or even drops as the number of jobs slowly grows.

At the top of the economic heap, recovery has been more complete. The richest Americans suffered sharp shocks to their wealth when markets collapsed in 2008-2009. As financial markets have revived, so has the wealth of the top 1% (households earning more than $380,000 per year.)

The top 5% have done OK, too. (The top 5% begins a little south of $200,000 in household income.)

For most of the country, however, the outlook is — to borrow Peck’s title — “pinched.” Young people who come of age in the crisis will earn less through their lives than those who came of age during happier times. Marriages break up. Babies are not born. A sense of unfairness spreads through the society. Politics becomes angrier and more paranoid — for those who take part — while many others drop out of public life entirely, disregarded and alienated.

The country’s political class tends to discuss these hard economic and cultural facts as if they were interesting only in relation to the presidential race, as if the only questions that mattered about economics were: “Good for Obama?” “Bad for Obama?”

For most of the country, however, Barack Obama is a flickering electronic image, an only intermittently interesting distraction from the realities of life: stagnant pay, unattractive job options, darkening retirement prospects for the middle-aged and narrowing opportunities for the young.

What would it take to do better? The answer, ironically, will be nearly equally difficult (but in very different ways) for politicians of either party.

To do better, we’ll need a program to stimulate employment for the long-term unemployed — including potentially a New Deal-style requirement that nobody receive benefits without working. It’s no good to anybody — the unemployed least of all — to allow the unemployed to collect two years’ worth of benefits while waiting at home, their skills atrophying, their resumes going stale.

To do better, we may need to induce employers to create jobs, not only through tax cuts but through direct subsidies, including subsidies of the cost of health coverage. (Especially for older workers, health costs can be more of a deterrent to hiring even than the cost of wages.)

We will need to curtail the generosity of Medicare to open fiscal room for government programs to support opportunities for the young.

We will need a permissive monetary policy that accepts moderate inflation to reduce the burden of mortgages and other debts — even if it bites a little into savings and fixed incomes.

We’ll need above all to recognize the magnitude of the social distress we still face, even as the economic statistics tell us of a recovery that moves financial markets and presidential polls — but that threatens to bypass tens of millions of Americans for months and years.