The Glade 4.0

Interesting, I didn't know you could do that...

THE US House of Representatives has voted 225-201 to sue President Barack Obama for exceeding his executive authority, launching an unprecedented legal challenge by a congressional body against a president.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/la ... 7008292497

Lydiaa:

Your newspaper, the American media, and in particular the White House's press people are very bad at history. The U.S. Government suit against Richard Nixon independently of his impeachment over Watergate about a few executive orders he signed. In U.S. v Nixon, it was found not only was the President able to be sued by other parts of the U.S. government without an impeachment proceeding, but also that the executive orders of the president and the executive actions he takes in enforcing law through his subordinate agencies are subject to judicial review.

In fact, U.S. v. Nixon pretty much disabused our government of the notion of an imperial or monarchist executive pretty handily. Nixon's impeachment proceedings had not been concluded at the time. The decision was 8-0 (unanimous, as Rehnquist recused himself from the proceedings). It indicated that all executive orders and actions were subject to judicial and defined the scope of those individuals and entities who could name the President as the defendant party in a suit. It likewise severely limited Presidential powers.

Were Obama the professor of Constitutional Law he claimed to have been in the past, he'd know this, as is truly is the last landmark case in the evolution of Judicial Review in the United States.

TL:DR -- Obama, the "professor of Constitutional Law", doesn't enough about the topic to know this isn't the first time an American president has been charged or sued independently of an impeachment process.

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I don't know what they're hoping to accomplish. Even if they win, by the time they get a judgment the mandate will be in effect. So what can the court do at that point, since specific performance is out? Are they going to mandate every business in the country pay out what they would have had to pay had the mandate not been delayed? Because that absolutely wouldn't be a catastrophe.

Second, he's delaying the mandate via selective enforcement. Basically, he's just saying he won't prosecute any company that violates that specific part of the law. How, exactly, is this different from Bush's morality crusade that he accomplished via selective enforcement of the obscenity statutes? Yeah, healthcare is a much bigger target but if you're going for a Constitutional challenge, that's irrelevant.

It may at least prevent the next President from enforcing it in whatever fashion happens to be politically convenient at the moment. That said, I really don't have high hopes for it, and I think the Republicans are alienating themselves from the voters.. although public confidence in Congress is already so low that I don't think it can meaningfully be damaged further.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Xequecal:

There's a traitor running the White House. We should all want what the House is trying to accomplish -- his removal from office and prosecution of his crimes.

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Somebody give me odds on Kagan and Sotomayor recusing on the same grounds.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

How does this lawsuit do that? The court can't order him to step down. In fact I have no idea what the court actually could do that would hurt Obama in any way, assuming the mandate is in effect by the time it has made its way through the courts. Honestly, if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, the issue won't be resolved until Obama is already out of office. This probably will happen as the Republicans can just file the lawsuit with a conservative judge in the 2nd Circuit for two easy wins on trial and appeal.

/ugh /groan /sigh

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

Nope.

Arathain:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... crets.html

That was treason in 2011.

It's still treason now.

Giving away U.S. maintained military secrets about NATO states is not only an open violation of the NATO treaties we've signed over the year, it is in fact providing material aid to the very nation that NATO was formed to contain.

We have a traitor in the White House.

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Ah, so even if it's in the best interest of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief cannot make a judgement call to offer Aide and Comfort as a strategic decision? And for the record, Russia isn't the 'Enemy' -- just another foreign power.

And NATO was formed to oppose the Warsaw Pact and the USSR, not Russia.


This is a dumb argument Khross, and you know it. The President has the authority to make tactical decisions regarding secret/classified information. For that matter, the President can chose to reclassify information's secrecy level.

Look, Obama has exceeded his authority in a number of circumstances, I don't like a lot of his foreign policy & military decisions, I don't like the handling of a lot of issues for that matter. But this 'traitor in the White House' argument is beyond silly. The arguments about Benghazi are silly as well, so please don't even go there. The military commanders in the field also felt there was nothing that could be done.

TheRiov:

No, the President does not have the authority to release that information to Russia, especially since Russia assumed the signatory responsibilities of the USSR for almost all of the anti-proliferation treaties. Obama broke the law and provided material aid to a country that can use that information to harm both the United States its allies.

It's treason. It was treason then; it's treason now; and he should have been prosecuted for it. And, Obama ultimately gave away that information for free: Russia didn't sign the new treaty and is yet again in violation of another anti-proliferation treaty.

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Wait, so your argument is that the Commander and Chief/Executive branch cannot declassify information? Obviously they can and what gets declassified is left to a judgement about what is in the nation's best interest. (not saying anything about if that's a good judgement call or not, just that it can be done)

I mean mechanically, couldn't the CIC just declassify the documents for 5 minutes, hand them over to anyone, and reclassify it back at Top Secret? How would the result be any different?

The release of nuclear secrets is pretty damning, honestly. Obama's only out here is it's not clear if Russia can really be considered "the enemy."

TheRiov:

Barack Obama is not a NATO Official, nor is the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces. It is NOT his duty or responsibility to release NATO nuclear secrets, especially since those secrets can be used to reverse engineer data about our own Trident stockpiles.

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We went over this at the time. It is not treason; Russia is not an enemy country, and is not the nation NATO was created to contain. Even if it were, the lack of an actual war with the Soviets would have called into question using 'enemy' status for them in regards to treason.

You could certainly classify it as a violation of the law, as in treaties being law, and make the claim that it;s technical gounds for impeachment, but the idea that it's treason is untenable.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

In this case, he did it with another nation's documents, which he doesn't have authority to declassify. He's the President, not the NATO Secretary-General (who, incidentally, is always European just like SACEUR is always American).

Khross is correct that Obama violated the treaty and his view of the events is accurate. It's solely his calling it treason that doesn't make sense.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The breakup of the USSR was not Southwestern Bell splitting into smaller companies to avoid antitrust lawsuits. The USSR broke up because Russia could no longer maintain their control over the entire empire.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You know, the Rosenbergs gave the USSR less information than Obama gave Putin, and amusingly the bit of the US Legal Code under which they were tried still stands, although it's now part of the general criminal code of the Federal government and not specifically under the War Code that existed back in the day. American Citizens, of which the President most certainly is one, are still prohibited by law from providing any information to a foreign power that can be used to compromise the national security of the United States. Irving Kaufman called the Rosenbergs traitors in their sentencing.

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No one is arguing that Russia is not the successor to the USSR government, but it is still not "the same country", and there was no war going on. The lack of a declared war, or even simply a hot war, calls into question the legitimacy of the "enemy" classification. Pretty much any non-NATO country could be called an enemy without those criteria. If it were the government accusing someone else of treason on that criteria, you'd be singing a different tune.

You might want to just let Khross talk as he obviously has a complete grasp of the facts, even if there's disagreement on the implications.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't know any such thing. Demonstrate this.



The President is permitted to make decisions in regard to classified information that other citizens are not. Your argument is based on the fact that it was UK information that was provided, and compromised their security.

I don't totally disagree with what you're saying here, just with the degree to which you claim that it's Constitutionally problematic. You're going to need to defend all of these bare assertions. It may be possible to do so, but presently I am not convinced.. and trust me, I would LOVE to believe Obama is guilty of treason.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

There is a pertinent element to Coro's post. This discussion requires a fairly broad understand of empire. And empire is something I've made a large part of my life's study. Empire is not limited to the specific historical empires we name and commodify in written and educational narratives. Russian did inherit the majority of the former Soviet empire's material and intellectual wealth. While other former Soviet states have certain prospered to lesser or greater relative degrees, that Soviet empire's shadow is still very significant in the current geopolitical climate.

To some degree, Russia has been out maneuvering NATO and U.S. diplomatic endeavors in Ukraine and eastern, former-Soviet territories. Annexing Crimea is particularly problematic, given the fact that it was not until Yanukovich became the Ukrainian president that their drive to join NATO through a special supervisory process stopped. Some level of mutual defense obligation was owed to Ukraine by NATO at the time.

I must stress that I am not speculating the missile data in question contributed to Russian decisions at all, mind you. That just serves as an illustration of the geopolitical capital and gamesmanship going on that moment concerning Russia and NATO's expanding membership.

That said, Putin is very much an old guard Soviet apparatchik who knows what to do with power and how to be efficient, if not exactly ethical in his governance. He's better equipped for the global brinkmanship going on right now. 2011 is not so far in the past and that data is incredibly useful. We have to remember that the Russian population has produced some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th Century and certain traditions and monolithic institutions still exist. While it is getting increasingly harder to contain information, the Russians are certainly better equipped to keep their research quiet than we are at the moment. The total number of American made Trident missiles in circulation is a very large number of missiles. Revealing specific distributions and perhaps more information, gives Russian a significant increase in the accuracy of their projections and estimation of NATO nuclear capabilities by member states. It assists in the strategic and tactical development to a high degree, as you no doubt know.

Compromising NATO compromises the United States because of information held by actors and agents in NATO installations and organizations from military and fulfillment of our obligations to the organization. Beyond, we have significant resources both human and material in those installations that we use to contain or at least pressure those nations or entities we truly do feel are threats. Relations with Russian are prickly at the very best right now.

There are massive military knowledge benefits with this information, and I'm not going to speculate on any specifics or even more detailed generalities in that regard you would understand more than me. The point is, it's a material military and strategic gain for the Russians in an extremely tense and complicated, near Cold War situation.

The Middle East further complicates the matter because it elevates Russia's significance in Europe for energy and fuel purposes, particularly as Crimea gives them further control over shipping lanes and pipeline destinations. The economic pressures coinciding with military expansion points to wide spread economic separation in the broader geopolitical regions. Eastern Europe is still hemorrhaging cash in a lot of ways, and intellectual flight is only now slowing down, but not exactly receding fast enough that the area is going to stop being vulnerable to Russian economic suppression. They learned a lot from the last 120 years of US Economic Supremacy.

So, the Rosenbergs ostensibly provided drawings and sketches cribbed from documents viewed while Ethel's brother had access to Los Alamos. They were found guilty of actively spying for the Soviets and much of their actual communications with the Russians are redacted. The evidence, however, was damning by and large. If the detonation mechanisms were revealed to the Soviets, as simple as they were (in relative terms), Judge Kaufman's characterization of their contribution to Soviet nuclear development is only a bit over-stated, particularly given the outcome of the Space Race in the 60s.

Comparatively speaking, given contemporary Russia, the party largely responsible for adhering to and enforcing the former Soviet obligations in various treaties and arms reduction agreements, now knows exactly how far it has to comply or not comply as needed. With wide spread civil unrest and discord within range of their most portable and potentially disruptive small and medium range weapons, that information is particularly valuable in my estimation. Indeed, Russian ultimately shunned the START agreement.

Putin may be banking on the fact that Obama is a paper tiger. He can force our hand by throwing in with Iran or Syria against Israel. Granted, that's just a low probability potentiality, but the information can be used to exploit our defense obligations against us.

Nevertheless, the biggest problem is that Obama disclosed BRITISH information to the Soviets. That information was beyond classified and compromised the integrity of our relations with the United Kingdom. The amount of information revealed could be potentially staggering in consequences. We have treaties and agreements and obligations to the UK far beyond NATO obligations. Revealing their information seriously compromises the integrity of our joint intelligence and defense development projects the world over. Those strategic implications are beyond unfathomable in my opinion.

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Coro's post is pertinent only in that it states the perfectly obvious. No one is making the case that Russia is not a successor to the Soviet Union. However, them both being "empires" of one sort or another does not mean they are the same country. By this reasoning, the inclusion of Germany in NATO would make us allies with the same country that lead the Axis.

The Soviet Union, as an assemblage of Soviet Republics, as they were called, was not simply some mechanism for Russia to control the various smaller republics; it essentially inherited control of them from Imperial Russia.



That's actually the problem. Ukraine wasn't part of NATO; rather they were talked into giving up their nuclear weapons in return dor "Some level" of protection.. which ended up being none. Ukraine bought into a bad deal, but they were as much responsible for buying into "nonproliferation uber alles" and this modern fantasy that we're at some point where serious conflict is all behind us, and were insisting within their own Defense Ministry as recently as 2011 that no one would ever attack them, and they needed the army only for internal security.



Putin's character is well known and I don't think there is much dispute over his mentality. Putin is far more calculating and savvy at exploiting international political conventions, and using the right buzzwords than his Soviet predecessors ever were. As to the numbers of missiles available to the UK, that information is not as significant as it might seem because the UK is well known to possess only 4 Vanguard class subs, and their missile capacity is well known. Their rate of operational readiness is not hard to determine either.



Ostensibly yes, but on the other hand NATO is presently funded 75% by the U.S. and some case can be made that NATO is beholden to it's members' willingness to shove the bill off onto this country. The U.K. is one of the worst offenders in terms of excessive defense cuts in order to fund almost anything else.



It is a gain, but the information regarding the specific serial numbers of Tridents passed to the UK is more a matter of confirming things Russia already had a pretty good idea of. There's also the simple fact that the U.K. decided to go with a U.S. system, and not one completely under its own control - not just in that it purchased Trident, but in that the entire loading and unloading procedure uses U.S. facilities in King's Bay, and the missiles are "pooled" with American missiles and exchanged as needed for maintenance. While this does not excuse Obama, it does greatly compromise the UK in that their defense secrets really aren't entirely their own.



While true, this doesn't really speak to the issue of treason.



Which I think makes it hard to claim that the information Obama provided regarding the UK deterrent was anywhere near the significance of what the Rosenbergs passed. In truth, the limiting factor on the Soviet deterrent was making their long range missiles effective and reliable (the booster used for Yuri Gagarin's flight, used as the SS-6 was utterly impractical, requiring 20 hours refueling on an open launch pad, and the SS-7 was plagued with technical problems and still incredibly vulnerable). That problem was not really resolved until the mid-late 1960s; up to that point it was actually reasonable to state that (ironically, in context of this discussion) that most Russian weapons would be destroyed by the RAF before SAC even got there.



Which really should have surprised no one - this speaks to the INF issues of the other thread. Russia has a fundamentally different view of nuclear weapons than we do, and that is driven by its different geographic situation, not to mention its history of getting disastrously invaded. The Great Patriotic War forms a very different image in Russian culture than WWII does in the U.S., and despite jokes about Americans thinking they won the war all by themsevles, Russians are far worse. I know a man whose wife grew up in Poland in the 1980s and she was not even aware that there was a Pacific Theater, or of the Normandy invasion until well after she came to this country.

The upshot of this is that we tend to assume Russia is the mirror image of us, and just wants to reduce the risk of nuclear war and the cost of maintaining a deterrent, when for Russia the need to avoid nuclear war is subordinated to the need to avoid losing. The Societs never really agreed with the idea that a nuclear war was unwinnable, and that has carried forward- ironically reinforced by the realities of small deterrents versus large. A case could be made that regarding nuclear war as winnable or unwinnable is a self-fulfilling prophecy in either direction.



I believe he's already done that. The existence of the post-Warsaw Pact Russian defensive alliance gets little play, as it would undermine the narrative of the press and almost everyone in government that NATO is a pro-forma defense, just in case, without immediate threat. Bringing Iran into this alliance is something continuously flirted with, and Iran has the size, economic power, and technological advancement to become the equivalent of the UK to Russia. Afghanistan and Serbia are observer members, making the potential future of this organization a parade of the disgruntled.



Indeed. The problem lies in classifying this as treason. What exactly is the criteria for being an "enemy"? While Russia is not the kitten many people would like to believe, they are also hardly the picture of Stalinist belligerence of the 1950s when the Rosenbergs were spying for them. Even then, the lack of active conflict calls into question the categorization as an "enemy". In some respects, it's easier to classify China as an enemym and was throughout the Cold War given their active participation in the Korean War.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

To be honest, what happened to the Rosenbergs is not really relevant to today. What people consider to be treason has changed a lot in the intervening period. Take, for example, this poster:



This is pretty laughable when you look at it today, right?

Another example would be Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was shot down over the USSR and captured. He did years in the Soviet gulag, but despite this, when he returned to the US he was considered an abominable traitor for failing to kill himself rather than surrender and be captured. Contrast that to today, where soldiers that surrender/were captured in Iraq and "suffered" in an Iraqi hospital for only months get parades, accolades, and praise for enduring the struggle. Anyone remember Jessica Lynch?

This is nice and all for a "devil's advocate" kind of debate, but in reality, it's a complete non-starter to argue that it constitutes treason when a President discloses classified information as a tactic in an arms negotiation with the intent to improve the US strategic position. Under long-standing treason doctrines, Russia isn't an "enemy", and there was no specific intent to aid Russia or harm the US. End of discussion as a legal matter.

Also, Khross - you've badly mischaracterized US v. Nixon in order to make it sound like the current Congressional lawsuit is nothing new. US v. Nixon involved an intra-branch dispute between the President and an officer of the Executive Branch - namely, the special prosecutor appointed by the AG to investigate Watergate - and the issue was whether, in a criminal trial of a third party, Presidential communications could be subpoenaed for production in camera as evidence relevant to that criminal trial. The Court was asked to address whether "executive privilege" provided an absolute, blanket immunity to subpoena for Presidential communications and, if not, whether a subpoena for in camera production in a criminal trial was sufficient to trump whatever privilege there was. The Court held that in that context, and given that the communications weren't about national security, due process concerns outweighed executive privilege, so the subpoena stood. It was not, as in the current matter, a lawsuit brought by a house of Congress, and the question before the Court was not about faithful execution of the laws. In short, US v Nixon was hugely different than the current lawsuit.

RangerDave:

The President of the United States disclosed the state secrets of an allied nation without their consent and in contravention of other existing obligations to the United Kingdom. More to the point, the President does not receive special exemption from the laws of the land. The information he gave Russians violates the very statute under which the Rosenbergs were prosecuted, convicted, and executed. That these were British state secrets simply compounds the matter. We can argue whether or not President Obama's actions constitute treason; there's no argument to counter the criminality of that disclosure. Incidentally, the information in question is beyond classified and of far more strategic value than anything the United States received in return for this egregious abrogation of responsibility to our allied nations (we received nothing, in case you don't know).

Likewise, there's a huge difference between negotiating with our secrets and classified information and negotiating with information about far more immediate military targets with which we have mutual defense obligations. The United Kingdom's Trident Stockpile is not our secret to disclose. We know what we sold them; we know how to track what we sold; and given the level of intelligence out there about these missiles, those serial numbers give Russia the ability to track and locate what we sold the United Kingdom. That's not Barack Obama's call to make; that's the Queen's; that's the NATO Secretary General's. And for another pertinent little history lesson ...

Pearl Harbor was payback for the last time we very publically and very openly traded someone else's military secrets for our political gain while excluding that country from ongoing Versailles talks.

That said, I have not mischaracterized U.S. v. Nixon at all. Go read the decision, because it very clearly states that the President is subject to judicial review. I did not claim that U.S. v Nixon was a Congressional law suit; I pointed out it was not the first time a sitting president has been sued independently of the impeachment process and that the action was given standing. The mischaracterizations here are the White House's, the media's, and the President's. He's not immune to the legal system.

Obama walked off the reservation and refuses to play by the rules that govern his office. The only thing protecting him from the fury of the American population and the Department of Justice is political correctness and victim politics.

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