The New York Times wants transparency in the Syrian aid vote:
It’s bad enough that Congress — instead of doing its job by passing appropriations bills to finance government operations for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 is, once again, relying on a stopgap spending bill that will keep the lights on only through mid-December. But it’s far worse that House leaders — at the urging of the White House — are using that bill as the vehicle for a major foreign policy decision: arming and training Syrian rebels to fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the extremist Sunni group known as ISIS. […]
If the resolution doesn’t pass, the government will shut down at the end of this month, which neither party wants to happen before midterm elections. But, by including the assistance to the rebels as an amendment to the spending bill, as Republicans are planning to do, lawmakers will have to choose between paying for the rebels and shutting down the government.
That may put House members on the record on Syrian aid, but the amendment would probably not require its own vote in the Senate. Voters need to know whether all of their representatives supported the aid on principle or out of necessity. The vote on the Syrian aid should be entirely separate from the spending bill.
Meanwhile,
The Denver Post demands that Congress should have its say in how to tackle the Islamic State:
When one nation declares its intention to destroy a politico- military force that controls a land mass that is equivalent, by some reports, to the size of Britain, it has effectively declared war. And that means Congress must have a say in the matter.
Unfortunately, Congress apparently has no intention of taking up the matter until after the midterm elections, still seven weeks away. And even then it's not certain that a broad debate will ensue.
For the time being, House Republicans are proposing a narrow measure to authorize a U.S. mission to aid moderate Syrian rebels. That measure would include a prohibition of U.S. ground forces to fight the Islamic State. And while that's better than nothing, it still allows the president to set the terms of engagement since he's said all along he has no intention of deploying combat troops.
More analysis of the morning's top stories below the fold.
Jay Bookman analyzes the latest Hillary Clinton 2016 buzz:
Clinton is clearly trying to raise issues of economic inequality while avoiding what Republicans would call “the politics of envy.” Talking of “shared prosperity and shared opportunity” merely implies that someone might be taking more than their share, but implication is as far as she goes. […]
Republican candidates will of course hit on similar themes — declining median household incomes and the sense of a dimmer future that they inspire will be the single most important reality of the 2016 presidential campaign. And we know what their argument will be as well. The GOP explanation for our economic challenges won’t focus on technological transformation or on structural changes in the global economy — for the most part, they don’t even acknowledge the existence of such factors.
Instead, their version of the domestic-policy agenda allows for only villain, which is government, and only one solution, which is less government. In that sense, at least, the GOP is easily the more government-centric of the two major parties. And while such monocausal explanations to complex phenomena don’t offer much useful guidance in making policy, they do have the benefit of simplicity.
Eugene Robinson adds his perspective:
The election of the first woman as president would be a great milestone, but a glance at the headlines — economic and social dislocation at home, terrorism and war abroad — suggests that voters will not likely be in the mood for symbolic gestures. To win the nomination, let alone the general election, Clinton will have to lay out her vision of the way forward.
The New York Times editors also take on "electoral chaos" in Wisconsin:
It is difficult to understand the reasoning of the federal appeals court panel that permitted Wisconsin officials to enforce a controversial voter ID law less than two months before Election Day. That’s partly because the panel’s five-paragraph order, issued late Friday only hours after oral arguments, offered the barest rationale for lifting the stay that Judge Lynn Adelman of the federal district court had placed on the law in April. […]
Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, called the panel’s decision “a big, big mistake” on his blog. He added: “It is hard enough to administer an election with set rules — much less to change the rules midstream.”
Donald P. Gregg, writing over at CNN, says it's time for the U.S. to finally ban torture:
I worked as a CIA operations officer and station chief during the Cold War years. In the gray world of espionage, there was a clear distinction, at least in my mind, between the CIA and our opponents: They tortured their prisoners, we did not. […] Now, as the Senate Intelligence Committee prepares to make public some of the findings of its investigation into CIA torture after 9/11, let's hope we can start a much needed public reckoning over a tragic mistake that has undermined the very principles I and many others felt we stood for.
Our resorting to torture after 9/11 has cost us dearly -- we can no longer assert that we do not torture our enemies, leaving us in a much weaker position when urging our allies or our opponents to eschew such tactics. Now any American, civilian or military, who falls into the hands of our fundamentalist enemies is in even greater danger of being tortured or killed.
Alan Dershowitz, meanwhile, adds his take on detention of terror suspects, and specifically, pre-trial preventative detention:
HOW SHOULD a nation committed to the rule of law deal with captured terrorists who are believed to be dangerous but who cannot realistically be brought to trial? This issue has arisen in the context of the debate over whether to close the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, which candidate Barack Obama promised to do, but President Obama has not yet done.
[…] the least worst solution to this conundrum may be to require checks and balances, under which all three branches must agree before a person can be detained as a dangerous terrorist. The legislative branch should enact a narrow preventive detention law, with specific criteria and as many rights as are consistent with security. The executive branch should exercise care in deciding who to detain. And the judiciary should serve as a final check on abuses.
This will not eliminate all injustices but will come as close as reasonably possible to complying with the rule of law without exposing innocent people to undue risks of preventable terrorist acts. That may be all that can be expected from a democracy challenged by terrorism.
Leonard Pitts Jr.:
[O]ne imagines that as he wrestled with Wednesday's decision, this president who came to office vowing to end the Iraq War felt not unlike Michael Corleone in "The Godfather Part III:" "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"
Granted, Obama's predicament is hardly unique. President Abraham Lincoln had to fight the war that his predecessor's dithering made inevitable. Franklin D. Roosevelt had to fix the economy whose collapse President Herbert Hoover had placidly watched. George Washington was probably the last president who didn't have to clean up his predecessor's mess.
So once more unto the breach. What other choice do we have? With stunning speed that has alarmed the world, the Islamic State has seized large swaths of Iraq and its civil war-wracked neighbor, Syria, marching toward its stated goal of establishing a caliphate. In the process, it has committed acts of genocide and atrocity, including the beheading of two brave American journalists. We can hardly stand by and do nothing. In opting for air strikes, the president has probably chosen the least bad from a palette of unattractive options.
Over at The Baltimore Sun,
David Horsey reminds rural conservatives that they hold great sway in Congress:
Folks in the hinterlands who complain that they want their country back should stop whining. They have a lock on the House of Representatives and a good shot at owning the Senate, too. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans who live in cities and suburbs are stuck with having their government tilted in favor of the rural minority.
That may be hard for aging conservatives out in the cornfields and cow pastures to believe, but the numbers show it is true. Demographically, the United States is changing rapidly -- the numbers of nonwhite voters are steadily increasing and younger citizens of all races do not share their elders' fears of gay marriage, secularism and dark-skinned newcomers -- yet the Republican advantage in the House of Representatives has actually gotten bigger.
Finally, here's a really important piece by
Catherine Rampell on millenials:
We want to move out. We want to own our home. We want to marry. We want to work.
The problem is, many of us can’t.
America’s young adults have gotten a lot of flak for missing many of the milestones that earlier generations checked off with ease.
We aren’t getting even entry-level jobs, which could enable us to pay our own bills. Not only are we not buying houses, many of us aren’t renting, either: About a third of millennials still live with their parents, earning us the irksome epithet “boomerang generation” — a play on “boomer generation,” the presumed victim here.