The Talking Dog, who is a bit of a lawyer himself, professionally, has been interviewing the lawyers for a number of the defendants who have been caught up in the current administration’s no-constitutional-rights-for-citizens-we-say-are-terrorists (only we don’t have to prove it) legal policy.
As you may or may not know, the current administration is attempting to transfer Mr. Padilla’s case from the military courts to the criminal courts in an attempt (unsuccessful, so far) to keep the Supreme Court from deciding on the constitutionality of their denial of constitutional protections to Mr. Padilla, on the basis of their argument that the executive branch has the right to ignore the constitution.
That right, presumably, emanating from the penumbra of something or other. Love me some original intenters.
President George Bush is giving $US6000 ($8000) in political contributions from Abramoff, his wife and a client to charity, but will keep more than $US100,000 that Abramoff collected for Mr Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, officials said.
The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the $US6000 from the Abramoffs and the Saginaw Chippewa tribe of Michigan would go to the American Heart Association.
A Republican National Committee spokeswoman, Tracey Schmitt, said the money Abramoff raised as a “pioneer” for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign would be kept. “There is nothing to indicate that those contributions reflect anything but support for the re-election campaign,” she said.
And truly, Mr. Abramoff’s associates and clients (he doesn’t appear to have too many friends, now, does he?) had a long list of reasons to be very, very interested in keeping Our Fearless Leader in the White House.
A few highlights:
Abramoff Arranged White House Meeting at in Exchange for Donation to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. A lawyer for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian tribe in Michigan revealed that tribal leaders had “three or four” meetings at the White House—including one with Bush and another with Rove—after they gave a $25,000 donation to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform at Jack Abramoff’s request. ATR later confirmed that Norquist arranged White House meetings for Indian tribal leaders and others who were “supportive of the president’s agenda.” [Newsweek, 5/2/05]
Jack Abramoff Advised Department of Interior Transition. Abramoff advised the Interior Department during the Bush transition. [Wall Street Journal, 3/19/01]
Abramoff’s Former Assistant Became Rove’s Gate Keeper. In 2001 Abramoff’s personal assistant, Susan Ralston, took a similar job under Karl Rove in the White House. This move essentially made Ralston, “Rove’s gatekeeper.” [New York Times, 5/1/05]
Lobbying Network Involved Bush Administrator. According to The Washington Post, “in an attempt to influence the Interior Department — which has the final say on a tribe’s gambling ambitions — Abramoff directed his tribal clients to give at least $225,000 to the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a conservative group that was founded by Gale A. Norton before President Bush chose her to be his interior secretary. [Washington Post, 3/13/05]
DC Lobbyist Jack Abramoff Advised Bush Interior Department Transition While Representing Indian Tribes. Abramoff advised the Interior Department during the Bush transition. Aside from the Department of Homeland Security, which regulates coastline gaming, and the Department of Treasury, which regulates illegal financial transactions, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is one of the few means the Federal Government has to regulate the gaming industry, specifically the Native American gaming industry. [Wall Street Journal, 3/19/01; www.doi.gov]
Abramoff Directed Tribal Clients Contributions to Interior Secretary Gail Norton’s Foundation. According to The Washington Post, “in an attempt to influence the Interior Department — which has the final say on a tribe’s gambling ambitions — Abramoff directed his tribal clients to give at least $225,000 to the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a conservative group that was founded by Gale A. Norton before President Bush chose her to be his interior secretary. [Washington Post, 3/13/05]
Abramoff Also Arranged A Meeting With Interior Secretary Gail Norton For the Coushattas Tribe. Abramoff also invited the Coushattas to a fall 2001 dinner party attended by Interior Secretary Gale Norton. The Coushattas provided Abramoff with millions in consulting fees and contracts. [National Journal, 4/20/02]
Obviously Mr. Abramoff’s little circle was extremely anxious to keep the current team in place.
After all, they’d already paid a great deal of money to Mr. Abramoff in return for favors from inside the White House. They had an investment to protect.
The DCCC has updated their scandal website with the latest noisome details.
Among those who now recognize that the Bush Administration has not just deliberately and repeatedly broken the law, but is literally claiming that George Bush has the “wartime” power to continue to break the law, there is a growing impatience to move to the next step – to take action to ensure that there are serious consequences from Bush’s brazen law-breaking. But in order for that to happen, Bush opponents must finally overcome the one weapon which has protected George Bush again and again: fear. Fear of terrorism is what the Administration has successfully inflamed and exploited for four years in order to justify its most extreme and even illegal actions undertaken in the name of fighting terrorism.
Without pause, the Administration has sought to make Americans as frightened as possible about terrorism and has used that fear to justify its actions with regard to almost every issue. Here is Dick Cheney, just yesterday, proudly defending the Administration’s illegal NSA program by arguing that Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, like everything else the Administration does, is justified by fear of terrorists:
As we get farther away from September 11th, some in Washington are yielding to the temptation to downplay the ongoing threat to our country, and to back away from the business at hand. . .
The enemy that struck on 9/11 is weakened and fractured yet it is still lethal and trying to hit us again. Either we are serious about fighting this war or we are not. And as long as George W. Bush is President of the United States, we are serious — and we will not let down our guard.
As always, Cheney urgently warns Americans not to let our fear of terrorism diminish. George Bush has also been fueling these flames of fear in almost every speech he’s given since September 11, 2001. Here he is in a quite typical speech delivered on October 6, 2005, transparently attempting to whip up as much fear as possible in order to bolster support for our ongoing occupation of Iraq:
We know the vision of the radicals because they’ve openly stated it — in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. . . . Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 — only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.
“The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.”
“Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, ‘We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life.’ And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history.
“The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. . . .
With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new challenges and unprecedented dangers.
Islamic terrorists here, as always, are depicted as omnipotent villains with quite attainable dreams of world domination, genocide, and the obliteration of the United States. They are trying to take over the world and murder us all. And this is not merely a threat we face. It is much more than that. It is the predominant issue facing the United States — more important than all others. Everything pales in comparison to fighting off this danger. We face not merely a danger, but, in Bush’s words, an “unprecedented danger” — the worst, scariest, most threatening danger ever.
And literally for four years, this is what Americans have heard over and over and over from their Government – that we face a mortal and incomparably powerful enemy on the precipice of destroying us, and only the most extreme measures taken by our Government can save us. We are a nation engaged in a War of Civilizations whose very existence is in imminent jeopardy. All of those plans for the future, dreams for your children, career aspirations, life goals – it’s all subordinate, it’s all for naught, unless, first and foremost, we stand loyally behind George Bush as he invokes extreme and unprecedented measures necessary to protect us from this extreme and unprecedented threat.
It is that deeply irrational, fear-driven view of the world which has to be undermined in order to make headway in convincing Americans that this Administration is engaged in intolerable excesses and abuses of its power. The argument which needs to be made is the one that we have seen starting to arise in the blogosphere and elsewhere: that living in irrational fear of terrorists and sacrificing our liberties and all of our other national goals in their name is the approach of hysterics and cowards, not of a strong, courageous and resolute nation.
Several weeks ago, Digby wrote a widely-discussed post describing how Bush followers are driven by their all-consuming and pitifully child-like fears of terrorists, leading them to consent to any measures taken by George Bush as long as he promises to save them. And this weekend, Kos wrote a similar post, in which he contrasted the classic and previously defining American bravery of Patrick Henry with the frightened Bush followers who beg the Government to restrict their liberties in exchange for saving them from the terrorists.
If the blogospheric reaction of Bush supporters is any indication, this argument is as politically potent as it is self-evidently true. Kos’s post provoked shrieking seizures among the tough-guy, blindly loyal Bush followers — the ones who revealingly give themselves play name like Rocket and Captain and who never tire of touting their own toughness. In response to Kos’s post, they squealed and they yelled and they called him all kinds of names – they did everything but refute the argument.
And notably, in their anger, there was none of that smug bravado or all-too-familiar attacks on the courage of Bush opponents, because with this plainly accurate depiction, they stand revealed as being driven by nothing other than limitless, irrational fear. They are scared and they want to continue to implant their extreme fear into our national policies and onto our national character.
There is no more important goal than exposing and undermining the cowardly and exaggerated fear which lies at the core of the Bush agenda. If, as has been the case, we are bullied into starting from the tacit premise that Islamic terrorism is a unique and unprecedented evil which threatens our very existence — rather than one of many challenges which we must calmly face and overcome — then it is a foregone conclusion that whoever advocates the most extreme “anti-terrorist” measures, no matter how excessive and regardless of whether they comport with legal niceties, will prevail. If that fear-mongering premise is left unchallenged – if we are too afraid to dispute the premise that Islamic terrorism is the “unprecedented” existential threat to the United States which, at any moment, is likely to cause our cities to be in flames and our children to be glowing with radiation and therefore must outweigh every other issue and concern – then we will lose that debate every time, which is what has been happening.
After all, if it really were the case that Islamic terrorism constituted the sort of imminent, civilization-ending threat which the Administration has spent the last four years drumming into everyone’s head, then it would be extremely difficult to gin up much outrage over an eavesdropping program, warrants or not. When one’s very survival is at stake and is in imminent danger, what will matter is being protected from that danger. Everything else will pale in importance, and there will be extreme gratitude towards those who seek to save you, even if they break a few abstract rules to do it.
What must be emphasized is that one can protect against the threat of terrorism with courage, calm and resolve – the attributes which have always defined our nation as it has confronted other threats. Hysteria and fear-mongering are the opposite of strength. The strong remain rational and unafraid.
In a rational world, the basic principle of risk is that it equals impact times probability: “In professional risk assessments, risk combines the probability of a negative event occurring with how harmful that event would be.” But the Administration has spent four years urging Americans to ignore that way of thinking and instead assent to any Government measure, no matter the costs or comparative harms, as long as they are pursued in the name of fighting this Ultimate Evil.
In fact, it is now essentially prohibited in good company to even raise the prospect that the threat of terrorism is exaggerated. It is an inviolable piety that there is no such thing as overstating the terrorism risk. One is compelled to genuflect to, and tremble before, the paramounce of this Ultimate Threat upon pain of being cast aside as some sort of anti-American, terrorist-loving loon.
During the 2004 election, John Kerry accidentally stumbled in his clumsy and half-hearted way towards challenging this fear-mongering when he toldThe New York Times Sunday Magazine: ‘’We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.” That provoked the predictable outraged and pious braying that Democrats are unserious about the Terrorist Threat and too weak to protect our children from this unparalleled menace. And as happens almost always when Bush opponents express a view that meets with some initial disapproval, all sorts of apologetic backtracking and retraction ensued, and that topic has been basically off-limits since.
But this is a message which Americans are clearly ready to hear, if there are people willing to deliver it. We are four years away from September 11 and, despite the dire warnings of the Bush Administration, people in rural Kansas and suburban Georgia and everywhere else are beginning to realize that on the list of problems and threats which endanger their children and impede their dreams, the potential of an attack by Islamic terrorists is not anywhere near the top of that list. We are not engulfed by the Civil War or fighting World War II. And it is past time to bolster that growing recognition by pointing out over and over that the Bush Administration’s insistence that we live in never-ending fear and panic of terrorists is the opposite of the American virtues of strength and courage in the face of threats.
And it’s a message which Americans can understand. Most people know individuals in their lives who live in this type of irrational, all-consuming fear on the micro-level – people who are scared before they are anything else, pathologically risk-averse, always hiding and exerting excess caution lest something go wrong. In its more extreme version, that sort of fear manifests as a life-destroying mental disorder. It is a pitiful image, and such people typically achieve very little. They cannot, because their fear is paralyzing.
The Bush Administration has been trying for four years to reduce this country to a collective version of that affliction. And it is hard to imagine what a nation which is fueled by such fear can accomplish. Hysteria and paranoia have never been the American national character, but along with the founding principles of our Republic, the Bush Administration has been attempting to change that, too.
The Administration has managed to get away with the Orwellian depiction of fear as being the hallmark of courage, and conversely, depicting a rational and calm approach as being a mark of cowardice. They were aided in this effort by a terrified national media and a national political elite who live in Washington, DC and New York and were so petrified of further attacks that they were easily whipped into a state of passive, uncritical compliance in exchange for promises of protection. But we are far away from the emotional shock of September 11, and the power of that Fear weapon is breaking down.
In order to persuade the population that George Bush must not be allowed to claim the powers of a King, literally including the power to break the law, Bush opponents must attack that fear as the by-product of weakness and cowardice which it is. A strong nation does not give up its freedoms or sacrifice its national character in the name of fear and panic. But that is what George Bush has spent the last four years urging the country to do, and it is what he is counting on — it is the only chance he has — for having this NSA law-breaking scandal join the litany of other scandals which have meekly and inconsequentially faded away in a cloud of manufactured fear.
Listening to the Bush Administration and its defenders try to justify George Bush’s deliberate and ongoing violations of the law, one can’t help but notice that the Constitution and Congressional statutes sure do seem quite “flexible” in the hands of those seeking to defend him — a particular irony given how stridently Bush followers rail against such legal theories in other contexts. The defenses being dredged up to justify Bush’s law-breaking certainly are notable for the liberties they take with “conservative” principles of legal argument, as well as with how sharply they contradict the legal views which the Administration itself previously claimed it believed in.
The central problem for the Administration is that George Bush deliberately engaged in conduct which FISA clearly and expressly makes it a crime to engage in. All of the legalistic smoke screens aside, the issue really is that clear. That’s because the Administration cannot escape the plain and easy-to-understand language of Section 1809 of FISA:
“A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally— (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute.”
The Administration itself admits, as it must, that it engaged in electronic surveillance in a way that FISA expressly prohibits (by doing so secretly and without judicial approval). Section 1809 says that anyone who does that is guilty of a criminal offense. The law here is clear, and Bush’s violations of the law are equally clear. That presents the Administration with obvious difficulties in defending George Bush.
Because there is no plausible argument to make that Bush’s eavesdropping complied with the requirements of FISA, Alberto Gonzalez’s Justice Department is insisting that Bush had the legal right to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of that law. The DoJ issued a detailed Memorandum (.pdf) advocating its two principal legal theories as to why George Bush was permitted to engage in conduct which FISA makes it a crime to engage in. Both theories are about as far away as possible from the conservative legal principles which Bush has always claimed to believe in and which he says he wants his judicial appointees to apply.
Thus, we have one argument which claims that the 2001 Congressional Resolution authorizing military force in Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda (the “AUMF”) — a resolution which obviously never mentioned FISA, eavesdropping or surveillance, because it had nothing to do with any of those things — should nonetheless be “construed” and “interpreted” to have “impliedly” amended FISA by giving Bush an “exemption” entitling him to eavesdrop in violation of that law. And this argument is made even though the Congress which supposedly gave Bush that exemption says that it did no such thing, but to the contrary, expressly refused to provide that very authority.
And then we have the second Bush-defending argument: a dressed-up Constitutional theory which claims that George Bush has the “inherent” authority under Article II of the Constitution to violate Congressional law and eavesdrop on American citizens without the judicial oversight required by FISA – even though nothing in Article II mentions or even references the power to eavesdrop, the power to engage in surveillance, or the right to violate Congressional statutes. Indeed, the only express clause in Article II which seems to relate to this controversy is one that would rather strongly undercut the claim that the President has the right to violate Congressional law. That’s the part mandating that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . “
So much for plain language and original intent. Who has time for those fancy constructs when George Bush needs defending? What we have in their place are implied, hidden amendments to laws which are silently buried in other laws which don’t even reference the law which it supposedly amended. And that’s backed up by a claim that George Bush has certain Executive powers which the Constitution doesn’t mention, but which instead, one presumes, are lurking quietly somewhere in Article II of the Constitution, maybe hiding behind some penumbras or sprouting from the evolving, breathing document.
Just how frivolous (and, for self-proclaimed judicial conservatives, hypocritical) these defenses are is demonstrated by the fact that the Bush Administration itself has aggressively argued against the exact legal theory which it is now trying to peddle in order to argue that Congress silently gave Bush an “exemption” to FISA. In the case of Breuer v. Jim’s Concrete of Brevard, 538 U.S. 691 (2003), the Administration vehemently (and successfully) argued in a Brief to the U.S. Supreme Court (.pdf), signed by Bush’s own Solicitor General, Theodore Olson, that a statute (such as FISA) cannot be “amended by implication” in the absence of clear Congressional intent to amend it. Thus, the Bush Administration itself just two years ago emphasized:
the cardinal rule that repeals by implication are not favored, and will not be found unless an intent to repeal is clear and manifest. . . . In the absence of an affirmative showing of an intention to repeal, the only permissible justification for a repeal by implication is when the earlier and later statutes are irreconcilable. In other words, where the two statutes are capable of co-existence, it is the duty of the courts, absent a clearly expressed congressional intention to the contrary, to regard each as effective.
So, before George Bush needed an excuse for intentionally violating FISA, this was the Administration’s own argument — that Congress cannot be said to have silently repealed its own law except where it subsequently passes a new law that is in direct conflict with the first one.
The Administration’s previous view of this matter is, of course, the precise opposite of its position now. The Administration now seeks to claim that the Congress — when it enacted its 2001 resolution authorizing the use of military force in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda — somehow intended with that Resolution to amend FISA and thereby silently and “impliedly” gave the Administration the right to engage in exactly the secret, warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens which FISA makes it a criminal offense to engage in.
What we really have from these paragons of Judicial Restraint trying to defend George Bush is everything except plain language and original intent – the very tools of construction which these “conservatives,” when not concocting legal defenses for the President, claim that they believe in. That’s because the plain language of the law is crystal clear (“A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally— (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute”) and leaves no doubt that George Bush broke it.
The clarity of this law is why the Administration is reduced to peddling legal theories which, no matter how they are sliced, amount to a claim that George Bush has the right to break the law. And to argue that he has that right, they are employing on George Bush’s behalf the very legal theories which advocates of “judicial restraint” have spent the last two decades ridiculing and attacking.
Winners and losers in the Abramoff scandal The GOP could suffer, opening the way for a third-party movement
It’s really kind of sweet.
Mr. Fineman and his friends at the courthouse are shocked to discover that since the party they favor of the two existing parties has taken complete control over the federal government, the influence of money has sullied the spiritual purity of Washington.
Clearly, the answer is a new party who are nothing like Democrats and who are not called Republicans (Mr. Wittmann, your moment has arrived).
You know, it’s just that kind of bold thinking by Mr. Fineman and his friends that made us what we are today.
A country controlled by an incredibly corrupt single party that cares more about money than PhDs, and about the people not at all.
Unfortunately, I have to leave town for a couple of days and won’t be able to post. However, I am sure you will enjoy the blogospheric stylings of two fantastic guest bloggers: Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged and Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory.
Back when The NY Times was relentlessly flogging Whitewater, I agreed with Franklin Foer that it would be a bad idea to help discredit the mainstream press because their reputations would be so sullied that eventually they’d have no clout to protect sources and tell the truth.
I thought when the Washington Post took every self-serving leak from the Starr investigation and put it on the front page like it was VE Day that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to vilify their obvious slavishness to GOP operatives because it would be bad when we need the media to have credibility on other major issues.
I was angry about the fact that more than 60 newpapers, including the NY Times editorialized (“until the Starr investigation, ‘no citizen … could have grasped the completeness of President Clinton’s mendacity or the magnitude of his recklessness.'”) that Clinton should resign because of a personal indiscretion. But I didn’t rail against the press for jumping on this Republican manufactured bandwagon because I thought that it was important not to paint mainstream journalism with a broad brush just because they were being absurdly obtuse in this particular case.
When the media treated Al Gore like a circus clown and overlooked the fact that George W. Bush was a gibbering idiot (and admitted openly that they did it for fun) I held in my intemperate remarks because I thought it would harm the party in the long run if we attacked the press as the Republicans do. When they reported the election controversy as if it would create a constitutional crisis if the country had to wait more than a month to find out whether they had the right president I kept my own counsel. After all, who would defend democracy when something truly serious happened?
After 9/11 when they helped the president promote the idea that the country was at “war” (with what we didn’t exactly know) I knew it was a terrible mistake and would lead to a distorted foreign policy and twisted domestic politics. But I didn’t blame the media because it was very difficult to fight that at the time. They’re human, after all.
And when they helped the government make their case for this misbegotten war in Iraq, I assumed that they knew what they were talking about. After all, I had been defending their credibility for years now, in spite of everything I’ve mentioned. If they would screw up something like this, then for what was I holding back my criticism? This was the most serious issue this country had faced in many a decade.
When no WMD were found and I was informed that they had assigned a neocon shill to report the story, and then defended her when she was implicated in a white house smear to cover up its lies going into Iraq, I no longer saw any need to defend the NY Times.
This is fifteen long years of watching the Times and the rest of the mainstream media buckle under the pressure of GOP accusations that they are biased, repeatedly take bogus GOP manufactured scandals and run with them like kids with a brand new kite, treat our elections like they are entertainment vehicles for bored reporters and generally kowtow to the Republican establishment as the path of least resistence. I waited for years for them to recognise what was happening and fight back. It didn’t happen. And I began to see that the only way to get the press to work properly was to apply equal pressure from the opposite direction. It’s a tug of war. They were not strong enough to resist being dragged off to the right all by themselves. They needed some flamethrowers from our side pulling in the opposite direction to make it possible for them to avoid being pulled all the way over.
So, it is with great respect and reverence for the press, which I consider to be indispensible to democracy, that I have become a rabid critic. It did this country no good to allow the Republicans to perpetuate their permanent “mau-mau the media” campaign for 25 years. And it does the press no good to be defended by liberals when they succumb to the mau-mauing. Indeed, history shows that their reaction is to lean even more closely to the GOP to show they are not liberal themselves.
I have criticized the press for its absurd behavior in the Plame leak — refusing to write about it, protecting their powerful administration sources even when they’ve been used as a weapon for political purposes, their trivial cocktail party insularity. The politically powerful should not be allowed to use the press to do their ratfucking for them. There is, of course, a huge difference between that and protecting genuine whistle-blowers, which I defend unconditionally.
But I will no longer defend the press unconditionally. They have proved that they can’t resist the powerful pull of rightwing intimidation and seduction without some counterbalance on the left and I’m more than willing to call a spade a spade to do that. It has not served my politics or my country well to quietly support the media so that they could maintain crediblity. I honestly don’t see that we have anything more to lose when presidents are being impeached for trivial reasons, elections are being stolen and wars are being waged on lies. Just how bad would it have to get to justify criticizing the press for its complicity in those things?
He did, however, arrange a photo op with the last group of high-profile miners trapped in the ground, and said this for the cameras:
“It was their determination to stick together and to comfort each other that really defines kind of a new spirit that’s prevalent in our country, that when one of us suffer, all of us suffers.”
Mr. Bush, we are told, has given up spirits.
edit: are we all suffering now?
Scott and Barb tell us that the mine in question had (among other issues) a full 273 safety violations in the past two years
I’m Julia, and Digby’s asked me to put some stuff up here for a few days.
I thought I’d introduce myself by giving you a little background on our local New York Republican mess, since it’s been in the national papers quite abit lately, and there’s nothing quite so… operatic… in its sheer byzantine silliness as our local New York Republican mess.
Alfonse M. D’Amato, the former senator, sharply criticized a leading Republican candidate for governor, William F. Weld, saying last night that Mr. Weld was under the “cloud” of a federal investigation for once running a “sham college.”
Mr. D’Amato, a Republican, also chastised Mr. Weld for resigning as governor of Massachusetts in 1997, before his second term was over, and then seeking to lead New York “without any real experience here.”
…
Mr. D’Amato also said that Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, had done an “excellent” job in office.
This is remarkably interesting for what it says about the current state of New York Republican politics.
a brief digression about Mr. Pataki, Mr. D’Amato and local politics, recent and not-so-recent, here in New York
Mr. D’Amato was, for many years, the autocrat of the New York Republican party, and he pretty much invented our departing Republican governor (mostly to piss Rudy Giuliani off – New York Republicans don’t much like Mr. Giuliani, but Mr. D’Amato likes him less than most. Mr. Giuliani is also a bit of a crook, but not part of this group). Unfortunately for the former Senator, Mr. Pataki isn’t doing all that well, and the rest of his current political stable is – shall we say – not quite ready for prime time.
In this, parenthetically, he differs from Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire who is in it for the good the Republican party can do his media empire through judicious deregulation. There are those cynical souls who think that his single-minded focus on the good of media company stockholders might have had something to do with the universal press support he got at election time for his less-than-universally-appreciated performance in office, but I digress.
Back to the strike: Like Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Pataki saw an opportunity to get himself back in the good graces of fiscal hawks by cracking down on the transit union. With his usual deft political touch, he saw this opportunity after Bloomberg, badly bloodied in the court of public opinion, caved, declared victory and went home.
Part of Mr. Bloomberg’s cave-in was a deal to give the transit workers a refund of pension contributions they had made prior to an earlier contract which lowered the percentage of their pension contributions. This is particularly humiliating for Mr. Bloomberg, since the givebacks will more than cover any Taylor Law fines (two days’ pay for every day out on strike-public employees are barred by law from striking in New York) that were levied against unionmembers during the course of the strike, but of course Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t much care how much of the MTA’s money he spends to make his little problems go away (you’d want to keep in mind that Mr. Bloomberg might only control four out of the nine MTA board, but Mr. Pataki needs Republican friends with money very badly right now).
This left the field wide-open for Mr. Pataki, who is currently playing to the balcony by attempting to retroactively derail the contract agreement. Says the MTA board (which kept him apprised of the negotiations) never told him about the giveback (they say they did). Now he wants to unilaterally change the MTA’s agreement with the union to remove the givebacks, which would most likely send the union back out on strike, as well as (and here’s the beauty part) removing the “bargaining in good faith” component of the MTA’s negotiations that trigger the Taylor Law.
Honestly, it’s better than All My Children. You just have to find someplace other than the Times to read about most of it. I recommend Newsday.
end of brief digression about Mr. Pataki and local politics, recent and not-so-recent, here in New York
Back to Mr. D’Amato and Mr. Weld: it seems that the former Senator is still a bit testy about the former Governor leading the Justice Department investigation of the former Senator’s brother for misusing the former Senator’s office for private profit which ended in the conviction of the former Senator’s brother (later overturned on appeal). This is one of the factors that led to the former Senator’s defeat by Mr. Schumer, thus ending a staggering series of ethics violations and endless televised bootless trips to the fishing hole on Whitewater.
Amusingly, Mr. Weld’s experience in Tennessee is controversial specifically because it involved, er, for-profit education, working-class students getting screwed and backdoor union-busting.