You can
just envision President Obama sitting in the Oval Office a month ago, hoping
that June would bring some “page turners” to get the American people past the trifecta
of messy May controversies: the IRS
“targeting” Tea Party-esque organizations, the Justice Department pulling phone
records of AP journalists and, of course, Benghazi, yet again.
Beware of
what you wish for? It was quite a month,
with more consequential actions, perhaps, than the rest of 2013 to date.
It did not
take long for Edward Snowden to change the dialogue in a hurry. Snowden, of
course, is the 29-year old contractor hired by the NSA, who suddenly had access
to all sorts of secrets on their anti-terrorist programs, which he proceeded to
document and reveal. Most damaging was
the existence of a massive “data mining” NSA project to collect and analyze
phone calls of virtually all Americans, sifting for calls to anyone on the terrorist
watch list or any other suspicious patterns.
Ironically, this was not really a revelation. Check out this story from the USA Today:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call
records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T,
Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA
This story was published on May 11, 2006. Imagine someone telling Nixon that someone
had already leaked the Pentagon Papers seven years before Daniel Ellsburg, so
what’s the big deal?
But the Snowden story sparked a brief national dialogue on
the trade-offs inherent in battling terrorists versus preserving our civil
liberties. Gallup
The story turned instead to the micro-issue of whether
Snowden was a “whistleblower,” “traitor,” “civil disobedience hero” or “felon”
and it might have died out right there.
But it was given new legs by Snowden’s exotic global escape plan, which
took him from Hong Kong to a Moscow Airport , embarrassing President Obama and roiling the
diplomatic waters with both China
and Russia
The Senate overwhelmingly (68 to 32) passed a major immigration
reform bill, led by a bi-partisan “Gang of Eight” Senators, a disparate and
star-studded group including John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Marco
Rubio. Schumer and McCain have high
hopes that such a margin will put pressure on the House to follow suit. Because the House always seems to bend to
such pressure….oh wait, actually they never do.
The House thus far is refusing to even consider the Senate version,
working on their own bill that ignores the crucial issue of finding a path to
citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in America
Bypassing Congress entirely, President Obama announced a
comprehensive program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions via a set of executive
actions. Expect the courts to be busy as
Obama is relying on decades old legislation (like Nixon’s landmark Clean Air
Act) as the basis for setting tough new standards on coal. And while Obama’s leadership is welcome on
this front, our emissions are already declining…the real threat is from China and the Far East
where they grow alarmingly and virtually unchecked.
President Obama also overcame his long resistance to
providing arms to the Syrian rebels in their deadly war with President Assad,
disappointing those who considered his restraint to date to be a welcome change
from prior drifts into Mideast wars. But the documented use of chemical weapons on
the part of Assad forced Obama’s hand, having draw a bright line for some
action in that event. Now to be
seen: whether the slope of intervention
is as slippery as the many precedents would suggest.
The month ended with a trio of Supreme Court decisions that illustrate
the Roberts’ Court’s nimbleness, if nothing else, in crafting opinions that
accomplish the intended objectives of the Chief: to give a bit today in the
hopes of winning even bigger tomorrow, or the next decade. Obama’s time to burnish his legacy is growing
short, but Roberts has 20+ years with which to work.
- The Court ruled that
affirmative action can stay, but the standards for using race as a
defining variable must be stricter, and sent the case back to a lower
court to re-adjudicate against that direction.
- Then the Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 also can stay, but in virtually denuded form, as they proclaimed Section 4 unconstitutional, thereby rendering Section 5, the enforcement provision, to be unenforceable. Section 4 was the portion that determined which states or counties must submit any potential voting changes to the Justice Department for review. The Court ruled that though Congress had extended the law by 25 years in 2006, they relied on simply continuing the use of 40-year old data to make those determinations, and that part was unconstitutional. This allowed Roberts to say the ball was in Congress’s court to redress the data issue, knowing full well that ice cubes have better chances of surviving July 4th than Congress does of agreeing to the required revisions. I love Ruth Bader Ginsberg's line as she took the unusual step of reading her strong dissent from the bench: “Throwing out the preclearance when it was worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
- Finally, the Court decided the two gay marriage cases in non-surprising ways, throwing out the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which denied federal marriage benefits to gay couples, even those legally married (now these couples can indeed get those benefits), and refusing on a technicality to consider Prop 8 in California, which had the effect of legalizing gay marriage in California yet again. The Court thus refused to get either ahead or behind on this issue by not pronouncing on the constitutionality of gay marriage, and instead letting the remaining 37 states decide its legality on their own.
And then
there was some election news:
- Chris Christie attempted to
thread a narrow needle in making a very public decision on the timing of
the special election required to fill the seat of the recently deceased
Democratic Senator from
- And Ed
Markey won the special election to fill John Kerry’s Senate seat in
It has been
quite a month, indeed. I’ll be back next
week with a look at the political implications) of all this (that is, the
numbers). Comments welcome!
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