Keeping the Republic Blog

Cartoons, Hunting and U.S. Port Security -- 2/22/06

Sorry for the long time between posts. We were traveling and then dealing with a very sick dog.

While a number of events have taken place in the last two weeks, the three that have gotten the most air time by far are the worldwide protests about the Danish printing of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, the Cheney hunting accident and, most recently, the hullabaloo over the transfer of the control of six American ports from a British owned company to a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates.

The Danish cartoon story is a complex one, and it doesn’t really have to do with American domestic politics so I won’t cover it in any depth. It’s a good way to understand the concept of political culture we discuss in Chapter 2, however, (especially the clash between procedural societies in the west and more substantive cultures in the Arab world) and it illuminates some of what’s at stake in the melting pot versus crazy salad controversy. It also may help us think about a few issues that arise in Chapter 5 on civil liberties. One is freedom of religion. We see in the chapter (pp. 165-172) how Americans have struggled to find a balance between allowing religious freedom, but not permitting the state to establish or endorse a religion. A variation of that conundrum arises in the Danish cartoon case. Does religious freedom, with the toleration and respect that that implies, require all people to observe the strongly held religious norms and proscriptions of each religion? Another issue is freedom of the press. Does the fact that the press can print what it likes mean there are no limits on what it should print? This may not be a constitutional question, but an ethical one, that is, it raises issues not of what is legal, but of what is right. This ties into a third civil liberties issue that the Danish cartoon story raises – what is the role of self censorship in a democratic world? Revisit the discussion of free speech on campus (pp. 180-181) and ask yourself if there are any parallels between the political correctness issues raised there and the issues being debated with respect to the Danish cartoons.

About Cheney, I want to say only this. What is interesting to me from a political scientist’s perspective is the way the story developed “legs” and refused to go away despite the Vice President’s best efforts to make it do so. Lots of important stories fizzle for lack of public and media interest, and lots of trivial ones stick around forever. How come? The best analyses of this I have seen argue that it is not because what happened was of such earth-shaking importance (except, of course, to the people involved) but rather that it fit so well with the views many people already held about the Vice President, what political scientist Larry Sabato, who has studied the anatomy of such scandals, calls playing into the “subtext.” People already thought that Cheney was secretive and that he set his own rules, so his behavior over the hunting accident only reinforced that. Other than to weaken his own popularity ratings, however, there is probably minimal fallout from what Sabato calls the “feeding frenzy.”

Finally, this morning all the papers are abuzz with Bush’s declaration that he would veto any congressional legislation to halt the deal his administration has made to turn over control of 6 U.S. ports to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. (David E. Sanger and Eric Lipton, NYT Bush Would Veto Any Bill Halting Dubai Port Deal, 2/22/06.)

Not only Democrats but many Republicans including House Speaker Denny Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist are calling on Bush to stop the deal since they fear it will endanger U.S. security to have our ports out of our control. Bush, who has not yet vetoed a bill (KTR, pp. 334-335) says he will veto one interfering with this deal and argues that Congress and the American people should trust him.

An editorial in the Washington Post (Port Security Humbug, 2/22/06) takes Bush’s side here, pointing out that the ports are already managed by a foreign-owned company (in Great Britain), that the UAE are allies, and that port security is currently and will continue to be controlled by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Nonetheless, Bush is getting clobbered by liberals and conservatives alike on this one, and in that sense he is probably reaping what he has sown. Since 9/11 he has emphasized that national security should take precedence over even such essentials to the American system as civil liberties and checks and balances. His detractors are simply using the same issue frame (a term borrowed from the media chapter, KTR p. 659) that the administration has polished over the years. He has yet to make a convincing case to the public that the port control issue does not present a case of “business as usual” trumping security concerns.

Budget Time -- 2/7/06

It's budget time. You can find coverage in all the morning papers of the $2.77 trillion budget Bush submitted to Congress yesterday. (See, for instance, David E. Sanger, Bush Budget Plan for $2.77 Trillion Stresses Security, NYT, 2/7/06.) While $2.77 trillion sounds like a lot of money, a closer look shows that the administration plans to cut a lot of domestic programs -- education, agricultural, and social -- and the budget doesn't even include spending for rebuilding New Orleans or maintaining the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it does do is to expand spending on national security and the military and it makes President Bush's tax cuts permanent. Because of that, we will continue to spend far more money than we bring in, increasing the national debt. (See Figure 18.3 in KTR, p. 783.)

Very few politicians this morning indicate that the budget will be passed as it is. Members of Congress of both parties who face reelection this year are wary of cuts to programs that their constituents value and conservative Republicans are concerned that Bush is unable to rein in spending and practice the fiscal conservativism he likes to preach. There is excellent coverage of this in the Wall Street Journal, but unless you have a subscription, you cannot access the site. The paper points out that the decisions are so tough that Congress may not be able to act on some of them until after the November election.

We explain the politics of the budget process on pp. 781-789 of KTR. It is a complex process, but, basically, budgets are asked to do a lot of work in a democratic system. They are tools for helping to maintain economic stability through the use of taxing and spending (called fiscal policy) but since the lawmakers who propose and approve budgets are elected officials, they are subject to all sorts of demands from the people who put them in office. But at the end of the day, government policy makers face the same economic laws the rest of us do when we make spending decisions. If we spend more than we bring in, we run into debt. What is not paid for today must be paid for with interest tomorrow. We can practice all kinds of fiscal gymnastics or make rosy assumptions about the future to hide that fact from ourselves, but it's ultimately a matter of money in and money out.

Bush's budget involves reducing permanently the money we bring in (through tax cuts) while spending increasing amounts of money for national security and the military -- goals that may not be compatible, as the WaPo's Jonathan Weisman points out. (Budget Plan Assumes Too Much, Demands Too Little, 2/7/06.)

Also in the papers this morning is coverage of the Senate Judiciary hearings into the warrantless spying by the NSA. Charles Babbington, of the Post, shows that this is not a simple partisan issue. While Democrats are mostly opposed to Bush's assumption of executive authority here, even many Republicans are worried about the implications of stregthening the presidency to that degree. (Activists on Right, GOP Lawmakers Divided on Spying, 2/7/06.)

Religious Protests, Congressional Elections, and Presidential Power -- 2/6/06

Good morning. No big events over the weekend but a couple of good pieces to think about.

One, from Sunday's NY Times, (Craig Smith, Adding Newsprint to the Fire, 2/5/06) does a fine job of outlining some of the issues at stake in the demonstrations by Muslims against a Danish newspaper's printing of cartoonists' images of the Prophet Muhammed (Islamic law forbids any imagery of him whatsoever). Consider the issues involved from the point of view of the political culture discussion in Chapter 2 (especially along the procedural/substantive political dimension) and the discussion of religious freedom and toleration in Chapter 5.

This morning's Washington Post has an article about the upcoming congressional elections in November (Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza, Handful of Races May Tip Control of Congress, 2/6/06). While it is way too early to make predictions (and the article doesn’t, in fact, make any) it does do a good job of laying out what are the electoral stakes in the 2006 midterm elections (which seats are vulnerable, what it will take to switch party control in each house, etc.) and putting them into recent historical context. For a close examination of the issues involved in the upcoming elections, (and a spiffy elections map) see CQPolitics.com.

Finally, see the LA Times for a good discussion of what's at stake in Bush's claim to inherent powers to act during wartime as the Senate begins hearings into the latest concrete instance of that claim -- Bush's order authorizing the NSA to eavesdrop on domestic phone calls (David G. Savage, The Power of the President, 2/6/06).  I've posted on the issues involved here, here, and here several times in the last month or so. Remember to refer to the What's at Stake in Chapter 8, and to consider how Bush's views of presidential power affect the checks and balances in the Constitution.

Boehner Elected as House Majority Leader -- 2/3/06

A couple of last items in a busy news week. As we noted earlier, the House Republicans held their elections Thursday to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. You can see the previous leadership in the chart on p. 295 of KTR. The leading candidate for the slot was Roy Blunt but he was beaten yesterday after two ballots by John Boehner (which, as all the papers tell you, is unexpectedly pronounced -- "BAY-ner").

The papers generally see this result as a) surprising, since Blunt was DeLay's protégé and had been telling everyone that he had the votes to win and b) a sign that Republicans are spooked by the scandals that have plagued them of late and wanted a candidate not associated with them. However, Boehner, while not part of these particular scandals, has a history of his own, when he was a part of the leadership structure under former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (see the profile in Ch. 3). And, even now, his relationship with lobbyists is, as he puts it, "cozy" but not "unethical." He seems to have been a compromise between Blunt, who promised business as usual, and a more genuinely reform candidate, John Shaddeg, who lost early on. Everybody covers this, but the two best analyses are in the WaPo, which has lots of insider details (Jim VandeHei and Shailagh Murray, Post-Abramoff Mood Shaped Vote for DeLay's Successor, 2/3/06) and the NYT (Adam Nagourney, A Cry of Concern by Republicans at Voter Unease, 2/3/06).

Also, all the papers note that the Bush administration has asked for $120 billion more for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, $70 billion of that through 2006. That figure is not part of the $439.3 billion Defense Department budget they are requesting for 2007, a five percent increase over the previous budget; the war expenditures are funded independently. See, for example, David Cloud, $70 Billion More is Sought for Military in War Zones (NYT, 2/3/06).

Alito Confirmed and SOTU Addressed -- 2/1/06

As all the papers indicate today, Samuel Alito was confirmed yesterday as expected, pretty much along a party line vote (four Democrats voted for, one Republican voted against). The NYT has a piece on how that may shape cases coming up this year. (Adam Liptak, Alito Vote May Be Decisive in Marquee Cases This Term, 2/1/06.)

By the way, a few days ago Dahlia Lithwick, the legal analyst for Slate had an excellent piece on the impact of the presidential signing statement that Alito supported in his Reagan days. She tends to be on the liberal side, but her analysis is pretty sound regardless of ideology. I noticed that Andrew Sullivan is promoting it on his blog (andrewsullivan.com) and he is generally a conservative libertarian. Anyway, Lithwick's piece is well worth reading and thinking about. (Dahlia Lithwick, Sign Here, Slate, 1/30/06.)

Also yesterday (or last night) was Bush's State of the Union Address. Most of the papers this morning seem to suggest that it was not a path breaking speech. He stuck to defending his foreign policy in Iraq and his NSA wiretapping, and launched a few domestic initiatives -- the tax incentives for medical savings accounts we mentioned the other day, and a modest plan to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. The WaPo has a good article on why Bush has little political capital to spend this year. (Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei, Lowered Expectations Reflect Political and Fiscal Realities, 2/1/06, and Ron Brownstein, in the LAT, also has a good analysis of what the president proposes to do, and why his goals were modest. (To Still Midterm Waters, Bush's Agenda Is Cautious, 2/1/06.) 

If you missed it, you can read the speech here. The LAT fact checks it here: Peter Wallsten and Maura Reynolds, Bush Stretches to Defend Surveillance, 2/1/06.

Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia, gave the Democratic Response after the speech. (Michael Shear, Va.'s Kaine Assails "Poor Choices, Bad Management," WaPo, 2/1/06.)