Category: Government, Policy, & Politics

Source: Limit Executive Power Now, Before Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton Can Take Office – The Atlantic

Bush and Obama ran roughshod over Madisonian checks and balances, but there’s still time to restore them.

Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after. Behold the items on an aspiring tyrant’s checklist that they’ve provided their successors:

• A precedent that allows the president to kill citizens in secret without prior judicial or legislative review
• The power to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial
• Ongoing warrantless surveillance on millions of Americans accused of no wrongdoing, converted into a permanent database so that data of innocents spied upon in 2007 can be accessed in 2027
• Using ethnic profiling to choose the targets of secret spying, as the NYPD did with John Brennan’s blessing
• Normalizing situations in which the law itself is secret — and whatever mischief is hiding in those secret interpretations
• The permissibility of droning to death people whose identities are not even known to those doing the killing
• The ability to collect DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if they haven’t been convicted of anything
• A torture program that could be restarted with an executive order

Even if you think Bush and Obama exercised those extraordinary powers responsibly, what makes you think every president would? How can anyone fail to see the huge potential for abuses?

The Republican front-runner is exploiting popular anger against the policing of ordinary conversation—but also violating norms that protect America’s basic liberties.

Source: How to Take ‘Political Correctness’ Away From Donald Trump – The Atlantic

One gets the sense from our current political class that, for example, torture and unconstrained drone strike assassination isn’t actually morally wrong as long as you adopt a furrowed brow
…
And it is profoundly ugly when Trump just gleefully says, more or less, I love torture and we’re going to be doing a lot of it. BUT, on the other hand, it’s not so clear at all that his stance on those things would really be any more assertive than people who adopt more pleasant, civil, “serious” rhetoric on these topics.

Every “crazy” Trump quote may be “politically incorrect,” but those labels conflate all categories of controversial rhetoric as if their substance is equally wrong. Neither impoliteness nor tone-deafness nor crude insults are to his credit. But a pol who seeks to gain power by demonizing ethnic-minority groups and threatening their core rights is engaged in a special category of leadership failure.

Too few Americans see that distinction. And Trump benefits from their dearth of discernment.

Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated, according to experiments I conducted recently with Ronald E. Robertson.

In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session.

Source: How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election – POLITICO Magazine

In most discussions of the nuclear accord, the Iraq War never comes up. That’s insane.

smart people may offer smart explanations for why the demand for capitulation that proved so disastrous in America’s dealings with Iraq is well-suited to America’s dealings with the country on Iraq’s eastern border. My point is merely this: These people should be required to offer those explanations

Source: Why Is the Iraq War Never Mentioned in Debates About the Iran Deal? – The Atlantic

The opposition in the effort to make sure that American interrogators never inflict severe pain or mental anguish on prisoners again

• Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a former U.S. attorney and state attorney general
• Tom Cotton of Arkansas, an Iraq War combat veteran
• Michael Crapo of Idaho
• James Risch of Idaho
• Daniel Coats of Indiana, who is not expected to seek reelection
• Joni Ernst of Iowa, who has served more than two decades in the Army Reserve and National Guard
• Pat Roberts of Kansas, a former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, which oversees the CIA
• Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader
• David Vitter of Louisiana
• Thad Cochran of Mississippi, a former Eagle Scout and Navy veteran, and current chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee
• Roy Blunt of Missouri
• Deb Fischer of Nebraska
• Benjamin Sasse of Nebraska
• Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who said during a congressional hearing into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, “I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.”
• James Lankford of Oklahoma, who holds a graduate degree in divinity and was formerly an evangelism specialist for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma
• Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination and worked to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to hear cases from Guantanamo Bay detainees
• Tim Scott of South Carolina, an evangelical Christian who is opposed to abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, and euthanasia, and once fought to install the ten commandments outside a municipal building where he was an elected official
• John Cornyn of Texas, a former state attorney general and associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court
• Orrin Hatch of Utah, who called Jay Bybee, a primary author of Bush era torture memos, “one of the most honorable people you’ll ever meet” while defending him against torture critics who wanted to remove him from a federal judgeship.
• Mike Lee of Utah, who has opposed extending controversial portions of the Patriot Act as well as the indefinite detention of Americans in the War on Terrorism
• John Barrasso of Wyoming

Source: These 21 Republicans Voted Against the McCain-Feinstein Amendment to Prevent Torture – The Atlantic