It’s no secret that many think the fierce mood of partisanship is routinely crippling Washington. While most of the fur flies between the major parties in Congress — with the president weighing in occasionally to keep his party leaders on message — this week has seen an outbreak of hostilities in a less traditional venue: between the Supreme Court and the president.
In a controversy stretching back to January’s State of the Union Address, Chief Justice John Roberts told a group of law students at the University of Alabama that President Obama’s very public dissent from the Court’s Citizens United ruling, which effectively rolled back most existing restraints on corporate funding of political campaigns, was a provocation to the court’s cherished independence.
“On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances, and the decorum,” said Roberts. “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.”
It’s true that Obama pulled few punches in characterizing the Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down just prior to the State of the Union speech.
“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. “Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
Some of the lawmakers on hand interrupted Obama’s remarks with cheers of support. But television cameras panned the Court members in attendance and caught Justice Samuel Alito mouthing the words “not true.”
In Washington and in public debate, response to the dust-up split down partisan lines. Conservatives took issue with Obama’s criticism of the court, and liberals decried Alito’s breach of protocol. Outside of Washington, though, recent polling has shown that the decision is widely unpopular with Americans across the ideological spectrum.
Of course, Roberts wasn’t always so hands-off with the Supreme Court. When he worked for the Reagan administration, he was an aggressive public advocate pressuring the Court and was privately highly critical of how it organized its own business.
And for all the hubbub, it’s worth recalling that smack-downs between the two branches of government, while rare, are not unheard of. In his memoir, President Clinton was critical of the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision that ended that year’s election; Nixon fumed about the Burger Court’s ruling that he couldn’t protect himself during Watergate with “executive privilege;” and way back in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt proposed an additional three justices to the Court so that he could appoint them himself and skew the Court’s decisions in favor of his New Deal proposals.
But it is somewhat rare that these battles are as public or intense as this one appears to be getting. That may be because the Court’s decision was an historic one justifying intense debate, or it may be because politics are getting more conflict-driven across the board.
Atlanta – The Obama administration has proposed using United Nations-guided principles to expand a type of zoning to coastal and even some inland waters. That’s raising concerns among fishermen that their favorite fishing holes may soon be off-limits for bait-casting. In the battle of incremental change that epitomizes the American conservation movement, many weekend anglers fear that the Obama administration’s promise to “fundamentally change” water management in the US will erode what they call the public’s “right to fish,” in turn creating economic losses for the $82 billion recreational fishing industry and a further deterioration of the American outdoorsman’s legacy. Proponents say the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force established by President Obama last June will ultimately benefit the fishing public by managing ecosystems in their entirety rather than by individual uses such as fishing, shipping, or oil exploration. “It’s not an environmentalist manifesto,” says Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s multiple-use planning for the environment, and making sure various uses … are sustainable.” (Amateur outdoorsmen have been fighting for their rights for years, as the Monitor reports here.)
New way to manage marine resourcesFaced with the prospect of further industrialization along America’s coasts and the Great Lakes (wind turbines and natural-gas exploration, for example), the task force is charged with putting in place a new ecosystem management process called marine spatial planning. Marine spatial planning (MSP), according to the United Nations, is “a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives that usually have been specified through a political process.” That kind of government-speak scares Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs at the reel-and-rod maker Shimano. Mr. Morlock points to references by the ocean task force to “one global sea” as evidence that what’s really being proposed are broad changes to America’s user-funded conservation strategy, potentially affecting even inland waters. “I suggest that the task force recommend our model to the United Nations rather than us adopting the United Nations model,” he says in a phone interview. “The American model is the best in the world, so our question is: Why seek the lowest common denominator?”
Protections for recreational fishermenMr. Obama has said he will not override protections put in place by Presidents Clinton and Bush that established recreational fishermen as a special class.
But critics still worry about the Obama administration’s ties to environmental groups that espouse “anti-use” policies that put some habitats out of reach even for rod and reel fishermen, who take only 3 percent of America’s landed catch every year. “Angling advocates point out that senior policy officials on the task force seem inclined to ally themselves with preservationists and environmental extremists who want to create ‘no fishing’ preserves, with no scientific justification,” writes ESPN.com’s Robert Montgomery. On the other hand, nonpartisan experts say the task force has already made strides in better recognizing various stakeholder groups, including recreational fishermen, and that it doesn’t intend to undermine the ability of states to manage their natural resources, as many fishermen fear. “There’s been huge progress by the task force in terms of being more inclusive in thinking about economic, ecological, social, and political concerns,” says Mr. Crowder at Duke. “The paranoia – and there is paranoia on all sides – is that the process will be captured. My hope is that mutual concern gets people to the table.” The final report of the task force is expected in late March. Congress will decide its fate, unless Obama issues an executive order establishing MSP as the law of the water.
President Obama visits Glenside, Pennsylvania today promoting his health care plan and points out that most people in DC are more worried about the political score instead of results.
(Corbis)
Armenian orphans in Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, board a ship bound for Greece. The ship was laid on during World War One by Near East Relief, an American charity
WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly on Thursday to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that seemed sure to offend Ankara and jeopardize delicate efforts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
The vote on the nonbinding resolution, a perennial point of friction addressing a dark, century-old chapter of Turkish history, was 23 to 22. A similar resolution passed by a slightly wider margin in 2007, but the Bush administration, fearful of losing Turkish cooperation over Iraq, lobbied forcefully to keep it from reaching the House floor. Whether this resolution will reach a floor vote remains unclear.
In Ankara, the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately issued a sharp rebuke. “We condemn this bill that denounces the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed,” said the statement. It said that Ambassador Namik Tan, who had only weeks ago taken up his post in Washington, was being recalled to Ankara, the Turkish capital, for consultations.
Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died amid the chaos and unrest surrounding World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies, however, that this was a planned genocide, and had mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign against the resolution.
A White House spokesman, Mike Hammer, said Thursday that Mrs. Clinton had told Representative Howard L. Berman, the committee chairman, late Wednesday that a vote would be harmful, jeopardizing Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts that last year yielded two protocols aimed at a thawing of relations.
President Obama spoke to the President Abdullah Gul of Turkey on Wednesday to endorse the efforts at normalization with Armenia, said Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman.
“We’ve pressed hard to see the progress that we’ve seen to date, and we certainly do not want to see that jeopardized,” he said.
The timing of the administration’s plea seemed to catch some committee members by surprise. Early in the meeting on Thursday, the ranking Republican member, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, declared that the administration had taken no position on the vote. But several minutes later she requested time to correct herself: an aide had handed her a wire-service story describing the administration’s newly announced opposition.
Suat Kiniklioglu, a Turkish member of Parliament in Washington to meet with lawmakers, said later that he thought the intervention by Mrs. Clinton — who was asked about the resolution last week before the same House committee but did not then condemn it explicitly — had come too late.
“It was done in a fashion to be able to allow this administration to say in future, when things go wrong, that they did intervene” in support of Turkey, he said.
Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America, also said he doubted Mrs. Clinton’s intervention changed much. He said of the vote: “It was closer than anticipated but at the end of the day the truth prevailed and the members made a very affirmative statement in the face of the opposition.”
Committee members were clearly torn between what they said was a moral obligation to condemn one of the darkest periods of the last century and the need to protect an ongoing relationship with a NATO partner vital to American regional and security interests, on issues from Afghanistan to Iran.
“This is not one of those issues that members of Congress look forward to voting on,” said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York.
Like nearly every member, Mr. Berman saluted Turkey as an important ally. “Be that as it may,” he added, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.”
“The Turks say passing this resolution could have terrible consequences for our bilateral relationship,” Mr. Berman said. “But I believe that Turkey values its relations with the United States at least as much as we value our relations with Turkey.”
While still in the Senate, Mr. Obama had described the killings of Armenians at Ottoman hands as genocide. Mrs. Clinton, also then a senator, had taken a similar stance.
Last year, she strongly supported talks that led to two protocols between Turkey and Armenia calling for closer ties, open borders and the creation of a commission to examine the historical evidence in dispute.
Those accords, not yet ratified by either nation’s parliament, could now be endangered, opponents of the resolution said. “This is a fragile process that destabilizes the protocols,” said Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana.
In Istanbul, Ozdem Sanberk of Global Political Trends Center at Istanbul Kultur University, agreed that the protocols would suffer. “With this result,” he said, “the effectiveness of the ethnic lobbies got maximized and American foreign policy got hurt.”
In 1915, the decaying Ottoman Empire launched a pogrom against eastern Turkey’s Armenian population, falsely accusing them of supporting a Russian invasion. Tens of thousands of men were shot and hundreds of thousands of women and children driven out of their homes and on forced marches towards Syria and Iraq. The death toll is estimated to have been a million people.
It was also one of the century’s first atrocities to be photographically covered; there are anonymous photographs and there are signed and documented photographs that corroborated witness accounts. A German military officer Armin T. Wegner, stationed with the 6th Ottoman Army, took a series of photographs of dying and dead Armenians. These pictures anticipates photographs that were to follow during the Second World War, and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
In fact, the international nonchalance over the Armenian genocide emboldened Hitler. In his August 1939, he spoke “Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” in an haunting harbinger of his own Holocaust. “The world believes only in success,” he added, justifying his potential invasion of Poland and all the deeds that would follow that calamitous event.
Atlanta – The Obama administration has proposed using United Nations-guided principles to expand a type of zoning to coastal and even some inland waters. That’s raising concerns among fishermen that their favorite fishing holes may soon be off-limits for bait-casting. In the battle of incremental change that epitomizes the American conservation movement, many weekend anglers fear that the Obama administration’s promise to “fundamentally change” water management in the US will erode what they call the public’s “right to fish,” in turn creating economic losses for the $82 billion recreational fishing industry and a further deterioration of the American outdoorsman’s legacy. Proponents say the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force established by President Obama last June will ultimately benefit the fishing public by managing ecosystems in their entirety rather than by individual uses such as fishing, shipping, or oil exploration. “It’s not an environmentalist manifesto,” says Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s multiple-use planning for the environment, and making sure various uses … are sustainable.” (Amateur outdoorsmen have been fighting for their rights for years, as the Monitor reports here.)
