The big news on the Sunday talk shows involved Harry Reid ‘going nuclear,’ or ‘choosing the nuclear option,’ which is Washington hyperbole for a relatively minor revision of Senate rules.  Now it’s going to be a little harder for the minority party to filibuster presidential appointees.  Or, as one of my friends put it, ‘the Constitution was hanging by a thread, and was saved by the Priesthood.’  (Harry Reid’s a Mormon High Priest).  I do think filibusters have a certain limited comedic appeal–I think they’re a silly annoyance for people trying to govern.  So good for Senator Reid.

A much more important story, of course, involved real actual nuclear weapons.  Secretary of State Kerry announced what’s basically a first-step agreement with Iran, in which the US would temporarily moderate economic sanctions in exchange for Iran putting a hold on its nuclear program and agreeing to nuclear inspections.  Foreign Ministers from China, Russia, the European Union, France and Iran joined Secretary Kerry in intensive negotiations, which led to the agreement over the past weekend.  This story in the Christian Science Monitor did, I thought, an excellent job describing the deal that was reached.

Not everyone’s happy with it.  Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu called it ‘an historic mistake,’ and promised to work with allies in the US Congress to scuttle it.  Predictably, some of those Congressional friends-of-Israel already started speaking up against it.  On the Sunday talk shows, Bill Kristol and Christianne Amanpour got into it a bit–Kristol, of course, has consistently argued for a US invasion of Iran, or at least, for the US to support an Israeli air strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.  The Saudis are also against it–they have their own Sunni concerns about the possible implications of a Shiite nuclear power in the region.

The US imposed economic sanctions against Iran during the Bush years, joined by many of the countries who had representatives at the table last weekend.  At the time sanctions were imposed, Iran has 160 nuclear centrifuges.  Today, they have around 11,000.  So it’s hard to say ‘we can’t stop sanctions; look how well they’ve worked.’  Import/Export bans have hurt the Iranian economy, and hurt everyday Iranians, but with an authoritarian regime in charge, it’s unclear how much that matters.

But there are several inconvenient facts regarding Iran’s nuclear program that nobody on the Sunday talk shows mentioned at all.

First of all, as my wife is fond of saying, how the heck is it any of our business?  Iran is a sovereign state.  If they want nuclear power, or if they want nuclear medical technology, don’t they have a right to pursue it? 99% of natural uranium ore is in isotope U-238.  Only U-235 is fissile, useful in reactors, useful medically . . . and useful in bombs.  Centrifuges can enrich uranium–turn U-238 to U-235–to around 3.5%.  That’s the level needed for nuclear reactors, and that’s the level most Iranian uranium is enriched to.  It can further be enriched to 20%–medically useful levels.  It needs to be enriched to over 90% to be used in a bomb.  And Iran hasn’t enriched past 20% at all. The fear is that they could.  But the Kerry deal calls for frequent and open inspections.  And the Iranians have agreed to inspections.

Second, countries that are way less stable than Iran have nuclear weapons, and really should be seen as a much bigger threat. Pakistan, for example, has seriously unstable leadership, a major problem with Islamist terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, and a long-time beef with another nuclear power.  Pakistan and India have a long history of violence and war.  And right now, even as we speak, both countries have nuclear weapons.  I’m opposed to nuclear proliferation too–why not start with Pakistan?  And to achieve disarmament, India would need to disarm too, which again, doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.  How ’bout we make those two countries a higher priority.

Third, in opinion poll after opinion poll, the Iranian people favor their country having a nuclear program, including nuclear weapons.  The main value of nukes is psychological–getting nukes is like a country getting to put on its big boy pants.  Iranians are every bit as patriotic about their country as Americans are about ours. And if Iran wants to embrace nuclear power internally, well, that would seem to be their choice.  And that’s the level all their centrifuges are enriching to: nearly all of them are at 3.5%.

Fourth, if we really want to get rid of nuclear weapons internationally, why don’t we Americans set the example?  Why do we need a nuclear arsenal?  Especially since the US nuclear arsenal may well be degrading past the point of working.

I understand that the Israelis see a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to Israel’s very existence.  I get that. And we Americans tend to side with Israel, even when it doesn’t make sense.  This is, however, one of those times when it doesn’t make sense.

Let the process work.  This is a good preliminary deal, and it sets up better deals in the future.  Well done, Secretary Kerry.

 

 

One of the first events from my childhood that I still remember in some detail is the Kennedy assassination.  Thinking about it, I posted this on Facebook:

My 2nd grade teacher was Miss Smith, and she was young and beautiful and loved every one of us, and loved great books and little boys who would rather read than play. And then one day, the principal came to the door of her classroom, and Miss Smith went to talk to her, and when she came back, she was crying. And that was shocking, because Miss Smith always, always smiled. And she said someone had shot the President, and we were to go home early.
And on my way home, my Dad saw me walking and picked me up, and he looked like he’d been crying too. And my Dad never cried.
And when the afternoon newspaper arrived, with the huge headlines, I read the story, all of it, the first time I’d read a newspaper story, and I only had to ask my Mom twice what the big words meant. And one of those big words was ‘assassinated.’ And everything in the world felt different.

Jackie Kennedy did not want the President to go to Texas.  She certainly didn’t want to go with him.  Nor did Kennedy think the Texas trip would accomplish much.  Texas Democratic infighting was, in the Presidents’ mind, more the province of Lyndon Johnson.  But he was committed to getting a major civil rights bill passed, and he wanted to see for himself how people might react to it. Kennedy was an excellent public speaker, but more than that, he was extraordinarily sensitive to audiences–he could read a crowd better than most public individuals. I think he wanted to see how Southerners responded to a civil rights initiative.

And Jackie wanted to come with him. Their marriage, always rocky, was probably happier in November 1963 than ever before.  The tragic death of their infant son, Patrick, seems to have caused Kennedy to reassess his relationship with his wife.  He’d distanced himself from several of his mistresses, including White House intern Mimi Alford, and Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s appointments secretary. But he’d dropped Turnure, and was no longer seeing Alford. He and Jackie were seen holding hands in public.  She went to Dallas because he asked her to.

So, how effective was his Presidency?  Dylan Matthews, on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, published this takedown today, making six arguments for why Kennedy shouldn’t be considered a great president.  Let me respond:

1) The Cuban Missile Crisis was his fault.

This argument displays historical ignorance of the first order.  It doesn’t matter that the Soviets had nuclear submarines, and could get missiles closer to the US than Cuba was.  That’s irrelevant, in the context of the Cold War. For Khrushchev to place Soviet missiles in Cuba was a deliberately provocative act. Matthews suggests that the Soviets put missiles there to forestall an American invasion.  Matthews cites John Lewis Gaddis, suggesting that Kennedy misunderstood the placement of the Cuban missiles as an attempt to give the Soviets an edge in a nuclear exchange; really, Khrushchev was just helping Castro out.  Sorry, but if Kennedy thought Cuban missiles off the coast of Florida was outrageous, he was joined by basically everyone else, here and abroad. And after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy wasn’t about to invade Cuba again.  In fact, Matthews ignores the very real peace negotiations that Kennedy had opened up with Castro throughout September and October of 1963.

2) The Bay of Pigs invasion was Kennedy’s fault.

Kennedy took full blame for it, too.  But it was an ill-planned left-over from the Eisenhower administration.  Kennedy was always skeptical about its chance for success, as was most of his administration.  But the military establishment was enthusiastic, and he didn’t think he could begin his Presidency by ignoring their advice.

3) He escalated in Vietnam.

Essentially every major historian who has studied the Kennedy administration agrees; Kennedy knew that Vietnam was a loser, and that the domino theory justifying our involvement there was nonsense.  Matthews says that Kennedy was ‘influenced’ by Maxwell Taylor, who was urging escalation.  But what this ignores is what seems to me an essential point: Kennedy had served in the military. He was a genuine war hero.  And he was perfectly aware that the orders that had sent his PT boat into battle against overwhelming odds were idiotic. And the Bay of Pigs confirmed his already low opinion of his own military commanders. He did not glamorize generals, or take their advice all that seriously, unlike Lyndon Johnson, who was all too aware of his own lack of military service, and seriously unwilling to ignore the advice his commanders gave him. Kennedy had been to Vietnam with Bobby before his election. Every indication suggests that Kennedy would have figured out how to pull out of Vietnam after being re-elected in ’64.  He just couldn’t say so, and risk being painted as ‘soft on communism’ before the election.

4) He backed an ill-advised coup in Iran.

Yep.  Guilty as charged.  The Cold War warped leaders in strange ways; even someone as self-aware and ironic as Jack Kennedy.  It didn’t happen on his watch, but he did support the overthrow of Mohammed Mossedegh.  And he shouldn’t have.

5) He went way too slowly on civil rights.

Well, he did more for civil rights than any previous president.  He faced intractable opposition among Senate Dixiecrats, but he still pushed for the Civil Rights bill that Lyndon Johnson eventually got through.  And LBJ’s main selling point was ‘Jack wanted it.’  Which no one really argued with.  Kennedy was aware that he’d moved too slowly on civil rights.  He also knew he’d be able to do more after winning re-election in ’64.

6) He passed no domestic legislation of any consequence.

Well, let’s see.  There’s the Equal Pay Act of ’63, the first major legislation intended to end pay inequity by gender.  The Space program was obviously a huge goal and achievement.  He passed a major tax cut, a Keynesian stimulus bill that led to significant economic growth.  (Remember, the top tax bracket previously was 91%).  He increased Social Security benefits, and increased welfare spending.

And what Matthews ignores is probably the greatest speech of Kennedy’s presidency: his American University speech.  It was a clarion call for peace, for a negotiated end to nuclear weapons. And Kennedy’s actions matched his words, negotiating a test ban treaty with Khrushchev, and then getting the Senate to ratify it.  Granted, that first treaty was only the first step in a long process of arms reduction that continues today, but it was the first step, and Kennedy fully intended to follow it up.

All this suggests to me that Kennedy’s second term would have been remarkable, as positive as Lyndon Johnson’s, but unmarred by Vietnam. Two things may have stopped him.  First, Kennedy’s health was never good, and he lied about it.  Bright’s disease could well have killed him before he could complete a second term.

But anyone today assessing Kennedy’s presidency has to take into account his womanizing.  The establishment press agreed to a conspiracy of silence regarding his affairs, but in ’63, the first cracks in that wall had started to appear.  The Bobby Baker scandal had begun to rock the Washington political world even as Kennedy flew to Dallas.  Baker was a political operative, a Democratic shaker and mover, a lobbyist who started the Quorum Club just off the Senate office building, a convivial place where lobbyists, businessmen and Congresspeople could meet.  And Baker was the man who introduced Kennedy to Ellen Rometsch, a German woman who was, quite probably, an East German spy.  He was also the middle-man in the relationship between Kennedy and Judith Exner, who was also the mistress of mob boss Sam Giancana.  Baker was, in short, someone who knew everything.  And he was under investigation in 1963, by the FBI and, worse, the press.

So who knows.  It’s quite possible that Kennedy, if he had won a second term, could have enjoyed a transformative Presidency.  It’s also possible that his almost incredible personal recklessness and moral laxity could have destroyed his Presidency.  We’ll never know.

What we do know is that Jack Kennedy’s Presidency was unfinished, a work in progress, and that the last 90 days of it reveal a greater potential for true greatness than the blunders of his first 90 days would seem to suggest.  And that the life and work of this extraordinary man was ended by a smirking, cowardly, miserable, abusive nullity of a man, Lee Harvey Oswald. That tragedy has scarred our nation for fifty years.  Let’s hope it never happens again.

 

 

From time to time, I find myself having one of those utterly pointless arguments on-line with one or another of my Tea Party Constitutionalist friends, usually over Obamacare and its presumed unconstitutionality.  The arguments and counter-arguments are as predictable and compulsory as the steps of a quadrille.  My esteemed adversary starts with Article One Section Eight of the Constitution, which enumerates 17 duties of Congress, none of which involves regulating health care.  That means that health care falls under the 10th Amendment; it’s a state duty, something the federal government is prohibited from dealing with.  There are two possible responses.  The first is that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed by the House and the Senate, signed into law by the President, and found constitutional by the Supreme Court.  Ipso facto: it’s constitutional. That’s actually the only argument that matters.  But we can engage him on his own turf if we want to: Article One Section Eight begins by stating “The Congress shall have power  to . . . provide for the general welfare.”  The seventeen enumerated duties are best understood as suggestions, as describing the kinds of things Congress can and should do.  Plus, one of the enumerated duties is “regulate interstate commerce,” which health care absolutely is–commerce, which crosses state lines.  So it’s constitutional.

And then we shout at each other for awhile.  “Emumerated duties!  Tenth Amendment!” “General Welfare clause! Fourteenth Amendment!”  Very entertaining.  Not.

I mean, look, it’s great that people are reading the Constitution.  But governing in the 21st century should involve a lot more than a knack for parsing eighteenth century texts.  It’s quite true that the Framers didn’t say anything about health care in the Constitution. Neither did they say a word about regulating television stations, air traffic control, or gene splicing.  Imagine it: “Congress shall have power to regulate health care, if, in future, the practice of medicine improves to the point that doctors can actually make sick people better.”

The Constitution was written in intentionally spare prose, laying out general principles of governance, without tying down future generations with overly prescriptive specifics.  Tea Party Constitutionalists try to impose on the Constitutional text a sort of fundamentalist reading, just as Christian fundamentalists try to impose a literalist reading onto the Bible.  Even when it doesn’t make sense.  And it doesn’t mostly, in either case.

The Constitution isn’t just a document, it’s history, tradition, practice.  It’s a series of ideas that become constituted into our political culture. It’s not a straitjacket, binding us; it’s liberating, empowering.  It’s never meant to prevent Americans from doing essential things that need to be done.

Case in point: Thomas Jefferson, in 1803.  In Washington’s Farewell address, he had said “it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”  Jefferson, in his Inaugural Address in 1801, put it more strongly, calling for “honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”  A nice sentiment, but Europe was plenty entangled, engaged in a massive war, with basically all European nations either allied with or against Napoleonic France.  A despot, a tyrant, a power-mad dictator, Napoleon, intent on world conquest, and against him, really just England, comparatively democratic, but only comparatively, and a nation from whom we had just freed ourselves.  And Napoleon was making noises about expanding his empire to the New World.  France had acquired, in 1800, vast amounts of American territory–what was then called ‘Louisiana’, but extending all the way to Oregon–from Spain.  Haiti, just off the American coast, was convulsed in a slave rebellion, led by one of the most remarkable and tragic figures of the period, the extraordinary Toussaint L’Ouverture; Napoleon had sent twenty thousand troops to overthrow him, and was assembling a huge fleet to support that effort.  Could he send another army to Louisiana?  If so, would he attempt to overthrow the US?  Jefferson sent James Monroe to France to see what diplomacy could accomplish.

A lot, it turned out.  France’s Haitian adventure had ended in disaster, with yellow fever wiping out most of Napoleon’s army.  His navy was iced in off the coast of Holland.  Napoleon was in the mood to deal, and he needed cash.  We could buy Louisiana for $15 million.

The Constitution does not permit the President of the United States to acquire territory via purchase.  It does not specifically permit Congress to do it either.  And Jefferson believed in limited government, and in a strict construction of the Constitutional text.  In fact, he’d been elected President on just such a platform. So his first thought was to pursue a Constitutional amendment.  But amendments take awhile, and this deal was on the table now.  And Napoleon was not a man known for patience and forbearance, and he continued to have ambitions in our hemisphere. (In fact, after Waterloo, in exile, Napoleon continued to scheme; if he could raise another army, he’d take French Canada, and from there, the United States.  Dangerous dude).

So what to do?  On the one hand, the Constitution did not allow the purchase. On the other hand, Louisiana was huge, and immensely valuable, and available at a very reasonable price.  So Jefferson did it.  Here’s his reasoning:

To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life liberty, property and all of those who are enjoying them with us: thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.

Sophistry?  Maybe.  But what do we know Jefferson’s Presidency for?  First and foremost, the Louisiana Purchase.  I might note that Jefferson bought it from France, without consulting with the various native peoples who actually lived there.  Still, it made our country.  It was huge.

And his speech, justifying it?  Lincoln loved that speech.  He expanded on the thought thus:

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or can not, so well do,  for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.

Such as, for example, one of the great Lincoln innovations, the Homestead Act.  Property redistribution is not, as it happens, specified as an enumerated duty in Article One Section Eight.  (Like expanding health care coverage to everyone). Lincoln did it anyway, because it was a good idea, well worth implementing.

Another example: the First Amendment.  “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”  Clear enough: Congress can’t restrict free speech.  Well, all right, what about the President?  If Congress can’t restrict free speech, can the executive branch?  What about governors?  What about state legislatures?  What about city mayors?  The Constitution doesn’t say one word about mayors.

Specifically, let’s suppose the mayor of Provo, where I live, got the City Council to pass a city ordinance that prohibited billboards, yard signs, or any other advertising for any other candidates for mayor?  What if he prohibited the local newspaper from publishing unflattering stories about his actions as mayor? Or public speakers–what if they weren’t allowed to speak out against him, at all, ever?  (Let me hasten to add that our current mayor would never do anything of the kind).  Would that be legal?  Would it be constitutional?

Of course not.  It doesn’t matter that the Constitution says ‘Congress shall make no laws. . . .” When the Framers wrote that, they asserted that freedom of speech, especially political speech, is a central American value.  No one in government, at any level, can abridge it.  (We should point out that an actual Founder Father DID try to abridge when he became President, when John Adams got Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.  And that we today consider it the biggest blunder of his Presidency).

But let’s suppose that our fictional Mayor was troubled by some group that put up billboards using offensively racist language, arguing that African Americans be lynched.  Let’s suppose that he ordered city police to tear that billboard down.  Would he be justified?  The text of the Constitution doesn’t help us out here; it just says that ‘Congress’ can’t abridge the ‘freedom of speech.’

But we have centuries of tradition and precedent going on here.  A public billboard can’t be used for inflammatory speech calculated to disturb the peace.  Precedent and tradition says the Mayor could declare that billboard a public nuisance; that some speech is not constitutionally protected; shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, for example.

And when we talk about ‘freedom of speech,’ we think of it as part of ‘the Constitution.’  And we’re right to do so, because in addition to the text of the Constitution is our tradition with it, our practice with it, the way it informs our everyday discourse, the way it interacts with our culture.  It doesn’t matter that the phrase separation of Church and State’ isn’t found in the Constitution–that phrase describes the way the First Amendment actually functions in American society.  It’s constituted in our institutions, it’s constituted in our practices, it’s constituted in our hearts.

That’s the glory of the Constitution, not a narrow parsing of its deliberately (at times) ambiguous text, but the way it really, actually works.  We use the constitution, the way a carpenter uses a really good tool. And that’s why Obamacare’s constitutional.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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