Explanation of the Exercise
Sometime (hopefully) tonight you will give a speech defending the Politics-NSA disad.
In this hypothetical, you are giving a 2NC (or 1NR) speech that’s up to five mins in length. You can go under, but not over.
… give the speech as you would in a round – we understand that you are just getting back into the swing of things.
1NC Shell
Obama pushing but PC key to overcome opposition and thread political needle for
middle ground NSA reform
Feaver, 14 (peter, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy @ Duke, Director, Triangle Institute for Security Studies and
Director, Program in American Grand Strategy Foreign Policy,
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/17/obama_finally_joins_the_debate_he_called_for
Today President Barack Obama finally joins
the national debate he called for a long time ago but then abandoned:
the debate about how best to balance national security and civil liberty. As I outlined in NPR's scenesetter this morning, this debate is a tricky one for a president who wants to lead from behind.
The public's view shifts markedly in response to perceptions of the threat, so a political leader who is only following the public
mood will crisscross himself repeatedly. Changing one's mind and shifting the policy is not inherently a bad thing to do. There is no
absolute and timeless right answer, because this is about trading off different risks. The risk profile itself shifts in response to our
actions. When security is improving and the terrorist threat is receding, one set of trade-offs is appropriate. When security is
worsening and the terrorist threat is worsening, another might be. It
is likely, however, that the optimal answer is
not the one advocated by the most fringe position. A National Security Agency (NSA) hobbled to
the point that some on the far left (and, it must be conceded, the libertarian right) are demanding
would be a mistake that the country would regret every bit as much as we would regret
an NSA without any checks or balances or constraints. Getting this right will require inspired
and active political leadership. To date, Obama has preferred to stay far removed from the debate swirling around
the Snowden leaks. This president relishes opportunities to spend political capital on behalf
of policies that disturb Republicans, but, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates's memoir details, Obama has
been very reluctant to expend political capital on behalf of national security policies that disturb his base. Today Obama is
finally engaging. It will be interesting to see how he threads the political needle and,
just as importantly, how much political capital he is willing to spend in the months ahead to
defend his policies.
Navy MH370 search causes controversy – most expensive search ever
The Rakyat Post, 4-18-2014
http://www.therakyatpost.com/news/2014/04/18/mh370-search-cost-will-be-huge/ DA: 6/12/14
The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is set to be the most expensive in aviation history,
analysts say, as efforts to find the aircraft deep under the Indian Ocean show no signs of slowing. The Boeing 777 vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, after veering dramatically off
course en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and is believed to have crashed in the sea off Australia. Australia, which is leading the search in a remote patch of water described as “unknown to man”, has not
put a figure on spending, but Malaysia has warned that
costs will be “huge”. “When we look at salvaging (wreckage) at a depth of 4.5km, no military out there has the capacity to do
it,” AFP quoted Transport and Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein yesterday. “We have to look at contractors and the cost of that will be huge.” Ravikumar Madavaram, an aviation expert at Frost &
Sullivan Asia Pacific, said Malaysia, Australia and China, which had the most nationals onboard the flight, were the biggest spenders and estimated the total cost up to now at about US$100 million (RM324
million). “It’s difficult to say how much the cost of this operation is … but, yes, this is definitely the biggest operation ever (in aviation history). “In terms of costs this will be the highest.” In the first month of the
search, in which the South China Sea and Malacca Strait were also scoured by the US, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, the Pentagon said the US military had committed US$7.3 million to efforts to find the
Hopes
rest on a torpedo-shaped US Navy submersible, which is searching the ocean floor at depths of more than 4,500m in the vicinity of where four signals believed to have come
from black box recorders were detected. David Gleave, an aviation safety researcher at Britain’s Loughborough University, said the costs “will be in the order of a
hundred million dollars by the time we’re finished, if we have found it (the plane) now”. But he said the longer it took to find any wreckage, the
more costs would mount because scanning the vast ocean floor “will take a lot of money because you can only search about 50sq km a day”. Salvaging anything would also
plane. Meanwhile, the Indian Ocean search, in which assets have also been deployed by Australia, Britain, China, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand, has failed to find anything conclusive.
depend on how deep the ocean is at the crash point and how dispersed the wreckage, with weather and politics also complicating factors, he said. The fate of MH370 has drawn parallels with the hunt for Air
France Flight447 which plunged into the Atlantic in 2009. The two-year operation to recover its black box, which involved assets from France, Brazil and the US, has been estimated to have cost 80-100 million
euros, according to figures cited by France’s Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA). Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre says its main focus is still on finding flight MH370. “It is one of the most
difficult searches ever undertaken and could take some time,” JACC said in a statement.. “The cost of the search is significant. The exact figure has not yet been calculated. “The cost is being shared by our
international partners who have contributed their people and military and civilian assets to help with the search.” “As the search continues, all international partners are meeting their own costs. But governments
and militaries will need to consider the broader cost implications of the search down the track,” said Kym Bergmann, editor of Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter. “I don’t think that the Australians will be getting any
change at all out of A$1 million a day.” Bergman said it would likely be the most expensive aviation search given how long it had already dragged on. “It must be starting to worry military planners,” he said,
adding that any decision to scale back would cause heartache to the families involved. Madavaram, who is based in Malaysia, agreed, saying at present it was still “politically insensitive” to cut spending. “I think
they will continue one or two months irrespective of the costs,” he said. “But then if nothing is
found, it will become a wild goose chase, and people will start questioning it.”
MH370 search costs PC – no Congressional consensus on approach or spending
money
Trimble ‘14
Stephen Trimble, Flight Global DC correspondent, 3-24-2014 “MH370 disappearance spurs calls for action by US
lawmakers” http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/mh370-disappearance-spurs-calls-for-action-by-uslawmakers-397357/ DA: 6/12/14
lawmaker says he expects Congress to hold hearings on advancing technology that could have prevented the
Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER going missing on 8 March. Malaysian officials confirmed on 24 March that new satellite data indicates that Flight MH370
crashed in the South Indian Ocean, implying the aircraft traversed thousands of miles untracked from its intended destination in Beijing. The US Navy has
budgeted $4 million to devote search aircraft, including the Boeing P-8A Poseidon, and other equipment to the hunt for the wreckage.
“There’s a role for Congress here particularly when you consider the expense we’re going
through to find this plane,” says Rep Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. “I’d like – expect – to have the Congress hold
hearings with the NTSB and the FAA to find out what is the state of technology, how quickly are we moving to satellite
A US
transmissions,” says Schiff, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union talk show on 23 March. The disappearance of the aircraft has shocked many who believed that modern
airliners could not be lost with the existing state of communications and tracking technology. “It seems crazy, though, in this day that we can have a major civilian airliner
vanish in thin air and we’re down to a 30-day ping to find it,” Schiff says. Rep Patrick Meehan, a Republican from Pennsylvania, noted on earlier episode of the CNN show on
there
remains no consensus on how to address the lack of tracking technology, suggesting it could still be too expensive to
invest in fool-proof systems.
23 March that systems that monitor air traffic are not present over large bodies of water. As a member of the House aviation subcommittee, Meehan illustrated that
Independently, Obama PC key to stop major senate modifications - dooms political
support in House and gut NSA effectiveness even if it passes
Hattem, 5/24
Julian, Reporter @ The Hill covering tech policy, 5/24/14, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/207143-nsa-reform-to-be-senatefight-of-the-summer
NSA reform to be ‘fight of the summer’ Civil libertarians who say the House didn’t go
far enough to reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to
shift momentum in their direction. After compromises in the House bill, the NSA’s critics are
buckling down for a months-long fight in the Senate that they hope will lead to an end to government
snooping on Americans. “This is going to be the fight of the summer,” vowed Gabe Rottman, legislative
counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. If advocates are able to change the House bill’s language to prohibit NSA agents
from collecting large quantities of data, “then that’s a win,” he added. “The bill still is not ideal even with those changes, but that
would be an improvement,” Rottman said. The USA Freedom Act was introduced in both the House and Senate last autumn, after
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s operations captured headlines around the globe. Privacy advocates like the ACLU
rallied around the bill as the way to rein in the spy agency and more than 150 lawmakers signed on as cosponsors in the House. In
recent weeks, though, advocates worried that it was being progressively watered down. First, leaders
on the House
Judiciary Committee made changes in order to gain support from a broader cross-section of the
chamber. Then, after it sailed through both the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, additional changes were made behind
closed doors that caused many privacy groups and tech companies such as Microsoft and Apple to drop their support. When it
passed the House 303-121 last week, fully half of the bill’s original cosponsors voted against it. “We were of course very
disappointed at the weakening of the bill,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the New America Foundation’s Open
Technology Institute. “Right now we really are turning our attention to the Senate to make sure that doesn’t
happen again.” Instead of entirely blocking the government’s ability to collect bulk amounts of data, critics said that the new bill
could theoretically allow federal agents to gather information about an entire area code or region of the country. One
factor
working in the reformers’ favor is the strong support of Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick
Leahy (D-Vt.). Unlike House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who only came to support the bill after negotiations to
produce a manager’s amendment, Leahy was the lead Senate sponsor of the USA Freedom Act. The
fact that Leahy controls the committee gavel means he should be able to guide the bill through when it comes up for discussion next
month, advocates said. “The fact that he is the chairman and it’s his bill and this is an issue that he has been passionate about for
many years” is comforting, Greene said. “I think this is something he really wants to see get done. He wants to see it get done right.
And he wants to see that Americans are confident that their privacy is being adequately protected,” she added. Moments
after the House passed its bill, Leahy issued a statement praising the action but said he
was “disappointed” that some “meaningful reforms” were not included. Other
surveillance critics such as Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Richard Blumenthal
(D-Conn.) expressed similar dissatisfaction with the House effort. Their sentiments should
be buoyed by the swift outrage from civil liberties advocates on both sides of the aisle,
reformers hoped. One reason the House bill moved so far away from its early principles, lawmakers
and surveillance critics have claimed, was pressure from House leadership and the Obama
administration in the days ahead of the vote. In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is
pledging to let Leahy and Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) take the lead on how to move forward.
“I want Chairman Feinstein and Chairman Leahy to take a very close look at that and report to the Senate as to what they think
should be done,” he told reporters on Thursday. “I believe we must do something and I have no problem with the House having
acted, but I couldn’t pass a test on what’s in their bill. But I guarantee I’ll be able to after Feinstein and Leahy take a look at this,”
said Reid. Feinstein, who is also the
No. 2 Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, could pose the
biggest obstacle for Leahy’s efforts. She previously pushed for a much narrower reform
bill, but said late Thursday that she was “open to considering” the House-passed legislation.
House lawmakers, however, might not be too pleased if the two chambers end up with a
significantly different piece of legislation. After passing its bill on Thursday, Goodlatte warned
the Senate not to deviate too far from the compromise that he and his colleagues had put
together. “This has been very carefully negotiated here within the House but also with
the administration,” he said. “And it’s going to be very important that if the Senate does
something different that it is... better and not just different. “Because different can be worse
rather than better,” Goodlatte said.
Both are bad - lack of reform bill collapses the whole program - Congress would
easily reject all NSA surveillance – but passage of senate modifications hamstring
effective operations
Sasso, 14
Brendan Sasso, National Journal, 3/25/14, Why Obama and His NSA Defenders Changed Their Minds,
www.nationaljournal.com/tech/why-obama-and-his-nsa-defenders-changed-their-minds-20140325
It was only months ago that President Obama, with bipartisan backing from the heads of
Congress's Intelligence committees, was insisting that the National Security Agency's mass
surveillance program was key to keeping Americans safe from the next major terrorist attack. They were also
dismissing privacy concerns, saying the program was perfectly legal and insisting the necessary safeguards were already in place.
But now, Obama's full-speed ahead has turned into a hasty retreat: The president and the NSA's top supporters in Congress are all
pushing proposals to end the NSA's bulk collection of phone records. And civil-liberties groups—awash in their newly won clout—
are declaring victory. The question is no longer whether to change the program, but how dramatically to overhaul it. So what
changed? It's not that Obama and his Hill allies suddenly saw the error of their ways and became born-again privacy
advocates. Instead, with a critical section of the Patriot Act set to expire next year, they realized they had no choice
but to negotiate. If Congress fails to reauthorize that provision—Section 215—by June 1, 2015, then
the NSA's collection of U.S. records would have to end entirely. And the growing outrage
prompted by the Snowden leaks means that the NSA's supporters would almost
certainly lose an up-or-down vote on the program. Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democratic member of the House
Intelligence Committee, said that looming sunset is what forced lawmakers to the bargaining table. "I
think what has changed is the growing realization that the votes are simply not there for reauthorization,"
he said in an interview. "I think that more than anything else, that is galvanizing us into action."
Obama and the House Intelligence Committee leaders believe their proposals are now the NSA's
best bet to retain some power to mine U.S. phone records for possible terror plots. Senate
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, another leading NSA defender, also indicated she is on
board with the changes, saying the president's proposal is a "worthy effort." And though the Hill's NSA allies are now
proposing reforms to the agency, they don't seem particularly excited about it. At a Capitol Hill press conference Tuesday, Rep.
Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the panel's top
Democrat, often sounded like they were arguing against their own bill that they were unveiling. "I passionately believe this
program has saved American lives," Rogers said. Ruppersberger said if the program had been in place in 2001, it may have
prevented the Sept. 11 attacks. But the lawmakers
acknowledged there is broad "discomfort" with
the program as it is currently structured. "We need to do something about bulk collection because of the
perception of our constituents," Ruppersberger admitted. Under their legislation, the vast database of phone records would stay in
the hands of the phone companies. The NSA could force the phone companies to turn over particular records, and the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court would review the NSA orders after the fact. But Rogers rejected a reporter's suggestion that the NSA
should have never had control of the massive database of phone records in the first place. "There was no abuse, no illegality, no
unconstitutionality," he said. For
all their hesitance, however, Rogers and company much prefer their
version to a competing proposal to change the way the government gathers information. That would be
the USA Freedom Act, a proposal from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Rep. Jim
Sensenbrenner that Rogers and his ilk fear would go too far in hamstringing the NSA. The USA
Freedom Act would require the NSA to meet a tougher standard for the data searches
and would limit other NSA programs, such as Internet surveillance of people overseas.
Additionally, President Obama is expected to unveil his own plan to reform the controversial phone data collection program this
week. According to The New York Times, Obama's
proposal would also keep the database in the
hands of the phone companies. His plan would have tougher judicial oversight than the
House bill by requiring pre-approval from the court for every targeted phone number, the newspaper reported. But though
the momentum has shifted and officials seem to be coalescing around a framework for
overhauling the NSA program, the question is far from settled. Leahy and Sensenbrenner are
not backing off from their USA Freedom Act, and outside groups will continue their policy push as
well.
Intelligence is foundational to counterterror—NSA program rollback decks it
Yoo, 13
John Yoo, 8/16/13, Ending NSA Surveillance is not the answer, www.nationalreview.com/corner/356027/ending-nsa-surveillancenot-answer-john-yoo
We should be careful not to put the NSA in an impossible position. Of course, we should be
vigilant against the administrative state in all of its tangled tendrils, especially its collection of taxes (the IRS scandal) and
enforcement of the laws (Obama’s refusal to enforce Obamacare and immigration law). The
problem here, however, is that
we are placing these kinds of domestic law-enforcement standards on a foreign intelligence
function. With domestic law enforcement, we want the Justice Department to monitor one identified target (identified because
other evidence gives probable cause that he or she has already committed a crime) and to carefully minimize any surveillance so as
not to intrude on privacy interests. Once
we impose those standards on the military and intelligence
agencies, however, we are either guaranteeing failure or we must accept a certain level of
error. If the military and intelligence agencies had to follow law-enforcement standards,
their mission would fail because they would not give us any improvement over what the FBI could achieve anyway. If
the intelligence community is to detect future terrorist attacks through analyzing
electronic communications, we are asking them to search through a vast sea of e-mails
and phone-call patterns to find those few which, on the surface, look innocent but are
actually covert terrorist messages. If we give them broader authority, we would have to accept a level of error that
is inherent in any human activity. No intelligence agency could perform its mission of protecting the nation’s security without
making a few of these kinds of mistakes. The question is whether there are too many, not whether there will be any at all. Domestic
law enforcement makes these errors too. Police seek warrants for the wrong guy, execute a search in the wrong house, arrest the
wrong suspect, and even shoot unarmed suspects. We accept these mistakes because we understand that no law-enforcement
system can successfully protect our communities from crime with perfection. The question is the error rate, how much it would cost
to reduce it, the impact on the effectiveness of the program, and the remedies we have for mistakes. Consider those questions in
the context of the NSA surveillance program. The more important question is not the top of the fraction but the
bottom — not just how many mistakes occurred, but how many records were searched overall. If there were 2,000 or so mistakes, as
the Washington Post suggests, but involving billions of communications, the error rate is well less than 1 percent. Without looking
at the latest figures, I suspect that is a far lower error rate than those turned in by domestic police on searches and arrests. To
end the NSA’s efforts to intercept terrorist communications would be to willfully blind
ourselves to the most valuable intelligence sources on al-Qaeda (now that the president won’t allow
the capture and interrogation of al-Qaeda leaders). The more useful question is whether there is a cost-effective way to reduce the
error rate without detracting from the effectiveness of the program, which, by General Keith Alexander’s accounting, has been high.
Increasing judicial oversight might reduce errors — though I am dubious — but in a way that would seriously slow down the speed
of the program, which is all-important if the mission is to stop terrorists. And perhaps Congress should think about ways to remedy
any privacy violations in the future. But to
end the program because it does not have an error rate of
zero is to impose a demand on the NSA that no other government program, foreign or
domestic, military or civilian, could survive.
Extinction
Hellman 8 (Martin E. Hellman, emeritus prof of engineering @ Stanford, “Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence” SPRING 2008
THE BENT OF TAU BETA PI, http://www.nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf)
The threat of nuclear terrorism looms much larger in the public’s mind than the threat of a full-scale nuclear war, yet this article
focuses primarily on the latter. An explanation is therefore in order before proceeding. A terrorist attack involving a nuclear
weapon would be a catastrophe of immense proportions: “A 10-kiloton bomb detonated at Grand Central Station on a typical work
day would likely kill some half a million people, and inflict over a trillion dollars in direct economic damage. America and its way
of life would be changed forever.” [Bunn 2003, pages viii-ix]. The likelihood of such an attack is also significant. Former Secretary of
Defense William Perry has estimated the chance of a nuclear terrorist incident within the next decade to be roughly 50 percent
[Bunn 2007, page 15]. David Albright, a former weapons inspector in Iraq, estimates those odds at less than one percent, but notes,
“We would never accept a situation where the chance of a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl would be anywhere near 1% .... A
nuclear terrorism attack is a low-probability event, but we can’t live in a world where it’s anything but extremely low-probability.”
[Hegland 2005]. In a survey of 85 national security experts, Senator Richard Lugar found a median estimate of 20 percent for the
“probability of an attack involving a nuclear explosion occurring somewhere in the world in the next 10 years,” with 79 percent of
the respondents believing “it more likely to be carried out by terrorists” than by a government [Lugar 2005, pp. 14-15]. I support
increased efforts to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism, but that is not inconsistent with the approach of this article. Because
terrorism is one of the potential trigger mechanisms for a full-scale nuclear war, the risk analyses proposed herein will include
estimating the risk of nuclear terrorism as one component of the overall risk. If that risk, the overall risk, or both are found to be
unacceptable, then the proposed remedies would be directed to reduce which- ever risk(s) warrant attention. Similar remarks apply
to a number of other threats (e.g., nuclear war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan). his article would be incomplete if it only
dealt with the threat of nuclear terrorism and neglected the threat of full- scale nuclear war. If both risks are unacceptable, an effort
to reduce only the terrorist component would leave humanity in great peril. In fact, society’s almost total neglect of the threat of
full-scale nuclear war makes studying that risk all the more important. The cosT of World War iii The danger associated with
nuclear deterrence depends on both the cost of a failure and the failure rate.3 This section explores the cost of a failure of nuclear
deterrence, and the next section is concerned with the failure rate. While other definitions are possible, this article defines a failure
of deterrence to mean a full-scale exchange of all nuclear weapons available to the U.S. and Russia, an event that will be termed
World War III. Approximately 20 million people died as a result of the first World War. World War II’s fatalities were double or
triple that number—chaos prevented a more precise deter- mination. In both cases humanity recovered, and the world today bears
few scars that attest to the horror of those two wars. Many people therefore implicitly believe that a third World War would be
horrible but survivable, an extrapola- tion of the effects of the first two global wars. In that view, World War III, while horrible, is
something that humanity may just have to face and from which it will then have to recover. In contrast, some of those most
qualified to assess the situation hold a very different view. In a 1961 speech to a joint session of the Philippine Con- gress, General
Douglas MacArthur, stated, “Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. … If you lose, you are annihilated. If you
win, you stand only to lose. No longer does it possess even the chance of the winner of a duel. It contains now only the germs of
double suicide.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ex- pressed a similar view: “If deterrence fails and conflict
develops, the present U.S. and NATO strategy carries with it a high risk that Western civilization will be destroyed” [McNamara
1986, page 6]. More recently, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn4 echoed those concerns when they
quoted President Reagan’s belief that nuclear weapons were “totally irrational, totally inhu- mane, good for nothing but killing,
possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.” [Shultz 2007] Official studies, while couched in less emotional terms, still
convey the horrendous toll that World War III would exact: “The resulting deaths would be far beyond any precedent. Executive
branch calculations show a range of U.S. deaths from 35 to 77 percent (i.e., 79-160 million dead) … a change in targeting could kill
somewhere between 20 million and 30 million additional people on each side .... These calculations reflect only deaths during the
first 30 days. Additional millions would be injured, and many would eventually die from lack of adequate medical care … millions
of people might starve or freeze during the follow- ing winter, but it is not possible to estimate how many. … further millions …
might eventually die of latent radiation effects.” [OTA 1979, page 8] This OTA report also noted the possibility of serious ecological
damage [OTA 1979, page 9], a concern that as- sumed a new potentiality when the TTAPS report [TTAPS 1983] proposed that the
ash and dust from so many nearly simultaneous nuclear explosions and their resultant fire- storms could usher in a nuclear winter
that might erase homo sapiens from the face of the earth, much as many scientists now believe the K-T Extinction that wiped out the
dinosaurs resulted from an impact winter caused by ash and dust from a large asteroid or comet striking Earth. The TTAPS report
produced a heated debate, and there is still no scientific consensus on whether a nuclear winter would follow a full-scale nuclear
war. Recent work [Robock 2007, Toon 2007] suggests that even a limited nuclear exchange or one between newer nuclear-weapon
states, such as India and Pakistan, could have devastating long-lasting climatic consequences due to the large volumes of smoke
that would be generated by fires in modern megacities. While it is uncertain how destructive World War III would be, prudence
dictates that we apply the same engi- neering conservatism that saved the Golden Gate Bridge from collapsing on its 50th
anniversary and assume that preventing World War III is a necessity—not an option.
2AC Answers
2AC
( ) Not unique – Senate will modify bill now
Hattem, 5/24
Julian, Reporter @ The Hill covering tech policy, 5/24/14, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/207143-nsa-reform-to-be-senatefight-of-the-summer
NSA reform to be ‘fight of the summer’ Civil
libertarians who say the House didn’t go far enough to
reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to shift momentum in their
direction. After compromises in the House bill, the NSA’s critics are buckling down for a months-long fight in the Senate that they
hope will lead to an end to government snooping on Americans. “This is going to be the fight of the summer,” vowed Gabe
Rottman, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. If advocates are able to change the House bill’s language to
prohibit NSA agents from collecting large quantities of data, “then that’s a win,” he added. “The bill still is not ideal even with those
changes, but that would be an improvement,” Rottman said. The USA Freedom Act was introduced in both the House and Senate
last autumn, after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s operations captured headlines around the globe. Privacy
advocates like the ACLU rallied around the bill as the way to rein in the spy agency and more than 150 lawmakers signed on as
cosponsors in the House. In recent weeks, though, advocates worried that it was being progressively watered down. First, leaders
on the House Judiciary Committee made changes in order to gain support from a broader cross-section of the chamber. Then, after
it sailed through both the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, additional
changes were made behind closed doors that
caused many privacy groups and tech companies such as Microsoft and Apple to drop their
support. When it passed the House 303-121 last week, fully half of the bill’s original cosponsors voted against it. “We were of
course very disappointed at the weakening of the bill,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the New America Foundation’s Open
Technology Institute. “Right now we really are turning our attention to the Senate to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” Instead
of entirely blocking the government’s ability to collect bulk amounts of data, critics said that the new bill could theoretically allow
federal agents to gather information about an entire area code or region of the country. One
factor working in the
reformers’ favor is the strong support of Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Unlike
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who only came to support the bill after negotiations to produce a manager’s
amendment, Leahy
was the lead Senate sponsor of the USA Freedom Act. The fact that
Leahy controls the committee gavel means he should be able to guide the bill through
when it comes up for discussion next month, advocates said. “The fact that he is the chairman and
it’s his bill and this is an issue that he has been passionate about for many years” is
comforting, Greene said. “I think this is something he really wants to see get done. He wants to see it get done right. And he
wants to see that Americans are confident that their privacy is being adequately protected,” she added. Moments after the
House passed its bill, Leahy issued a statement praising the action but said he was “disappointed”
that some “meaningful reforms” were not included. Other surveillance critics such as Sens.
Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) expressed similar
dissatisfaction with the House effort. Their sentiments should be buoyed by the swift
outrage from civil liberties advocates on both sides of the aisle, reformers hoped.
( ) Regardless of details – passage of some NSA reform bill is inevitable
Jakes, 14
(Lara, senior national security and diplomatic affairs writer for AP, former foreign correspondent and chief of bureau
in Baghdad, Bloomberg Business News, 1/18, http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2014-01-18/obama-fuels-reform-on-some-butnot-all-nsa-spying)
Obama fuels reform on some but not all NSA spying President Barack Obama's orders to change some U.S. surveillance practices
put the burden on Congress to deal with a national security controversy that has alarmed Americans and outraged foreign allies.
Yet he avoided major action on the practice of sweeping up billions of phone, email and text messages from across the globe. In a
speech at the Justice Department on Friday, Obama
said he was placing new limits on the way
intelligence officials access phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans — and was moving toward
eventually stripping the massive data collection from the government's hands. His
promises to end government storage of its
collection of data on Americans' telephone calls — and require judicial review to examine the data — were met with
skepticism from privacy advocates and some lawmakers. But Obama has made it nearly
impossible for reluctant leaders in Congress to avoid making some changes in the
U.S. phone surveillance they have supported for years. Obama admitted that he has
been torn between how to protect privacy rights and how to protect the U.S. from terror attacks — what officials have called
the main purpose of the spy programs. "The challenge is getting the details right, and that is not simple," he said. His speech had
been anticipated since former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden made off with an estimated 1.7 million
documents related to surveillance and other NSA operations and gave them to several journalists around the world. The revelations
in the documents touched off a public debate about whether Americans wanted to give up some privacy in exchange for
intelligence-gathering on terror suspects. The president said his proposals "should give the American people greater confidence that
their rights are being protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies maintain the tools they need to keep us safe."
Obama acknowledged more needs to be done, but he largely left it to Congress to work out the details. The NSA says it does not
listen in on the phone calls or read the Internet messages without specific court orders on a case-by-case basis. But intelligence
officials do collect specific information about the calls and messages, such as how long they lasted, to try to track communications of
suspected terrorists. Plans
to end the sweep of phone records have been building momentum
in Congress among both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
( ) Not-unique – Attention on Obama scandals crushes his political capital now.
Stevens ‘14
Internally quoting – Rhodes Cook, a political analyst, contributor to Politico, and publisher of the bimonthly political
newsletter “The Rhodes Cook Letter.” Matt Stevens is an Editorial writer for Republican-American. He holds a B.A.
in political science and an M.A. in print journalism and public affairs. ‘Will Obama ever be popular again?’ –
Republican American – June 9th, 2014 – http://blogs.rep-am.com/worth_reading/2014/06/09/will-obama-ever-bepopular-again/
Mr. Cook
pinned the president’s popularity woes on lingering economic problems, distaste for the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the scandals that have dogged the Obama administration. He
declared it is not impossible, but unlikely Mr. Obama will be able to stage a comeback. Read about it
all here. I think Mr. Cook’s intuition is right on the money. If something happens to erode confidence in a
president early in his second term, the lame-duck nature of Round 2 makes it difficult to
climb out of the hole. In Mr. Obama’s case, not long after he was re-elected in 2012, many Americans came to
see his administration as an incompetent group of political tricksters, because of the
aforementioned debacles. Given that the resulting approval-ratings slump hasn’t reversed itself, it seems this narrative
is set in stone. Since Mr. Obama’s political capital diminishes by the day, it seems there is little he can do
to change – no pun intended – things. Indeed, his second-term situation is analogous to that of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
( ) Turn – Plan Resurrects the 370 story. That successfully distracts media focus on
Obama’s scandals.
TYT’ 14
TYT Network, “The Young Turks” Network, is a Multi-Channel Network of online video talk shows, consisting
mostly of TYT owned-and-operated shows and a select group of outside partners. The network generates over 68
million views per month. “MH370 Obama Connection Found (By Fox News)” – March 25th, 2014 –
http://liberalvideo.com/2014/03/25/mh370-obama-connection-found-by-fox-news/
Now Bill O’Reilly
is sounding desperate. How many times now since the start of the Malaysia
Airlines story has he devoted a segment to hammering the media — mainly CNN — for
obsessing over the missing jetliner? We’re starting to lose count. In any case, O’Reilly’s answer to
CNN’s wall-to-wall reporting on the story is wall-to-wall whining about its coverage of the story. Backed up by a nice helping of
sanctimony, that is: In last night’s sermon, O’Reilly
slighted the networks for steering clear of
Benghazi, Libya, and the IRS in favor of the more neutral MH370.
( ) No link – plan wouldn’t cost political capital in the Senate. Senate is majority
Democrats – but their link assumes fiscal conservatives who don’t want to spend big
bucks on the plan.
( ) Political capital doesn’t exist and isn’t key to their DA. Winners Win is more true.
Michael Hirsch, chief correspondent for National Journal. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Hirsh previously
served as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek, based in its Washington bureau. He
was also Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from
Washington.” Earlier on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September
11 attacks and the war on terror. He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around
the world, and served as the Tokyo-based Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207
On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes, he will lay out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and
pundits will do what they always do
talk about
how much political capital Obama possesses to push his program through
this talk will have no bearing on what actually happens
Three months
ago
if someone had talked about
capital to oversee
both
immigration and gun-control
this
person would have been called crazy
In his first term
Obama
didn’t dare to even bring up gun control
And yet, for reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s
political capital chances are fair that both will now happen What changed In the
case of gun control
Newtown
debt reduction. In response, the
this time of year: They will
informed by sagacious reckonings of
“
how unrealistic most of the proposals are, discussions often
”
.
Most of
over the next four years. Consider this:
, just before the November election,
seriously
reform
Obama having enough political
passage of
legislation at the beginning of his second term—even after winning the election by 4 percentage points and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)—
and stripped of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.)
, in a starkly polarized country, the
president had been so frustrated by GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to work without fear of deportation for at least two years.
, a Democratic “third rail” that has cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s
health care law.
personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a
“mandate” or “
”—
.
, of course, it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the 20 first-graders who were slaughtered in
?
, Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled
with bullets from a high-capacity assault weapon seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point in the national conscience. One thing changed after another. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon
after the massacre. The pro-gun lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables and crazies. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot in the head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her
husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners. Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers: “Be bold.” As a result, momentum has appeared to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most
dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun laws. But one thing is clear: The political
tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago.
Meanwhile
, the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit of
immigration
turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal influence
It has
almost entirely to do with
the
Hispanic vote
movement
on immigration has come out of the Republican Party’s introspection
compromise on
reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this
—his political mandate, as it were.
just two numbers: 71 and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney,
breakdown of the
in the 2012 presidential
election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29 at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the
mainly
recent
, and the realization by its more thoughtful
members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing demographic death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority. It’s
got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for “mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever
elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on the country’s mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor
at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity
the idea of political capita
presidents and pundits often get it wrong.
and some momentum on your side.” The real problem is that
l—or mandates, or momentum—
is so poorly defined that
“Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “The best kind of political
capital
conveys that we know more than we really do about ever-elusive
unforeseen events can suddenly change everything
capital—some sense of an electoral mandate to do something—is very rare. It almost never happens. In 1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason, political
It
and it discounts the way
the idea
the
is a concept that misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary.
concept of
political power
,
. Instead, it suggests, erroneously, that a political figure has a concrete amount of
political capital to invest, just as someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank his gains, and the size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history. Naturally, any president has practical and electoral
limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama has neither at present. And unless a surge in the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is
inevitable that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will increasingly avoid any concessions that make him (and the Democrats) stronger. But the abrupt emergence of the immigration
and gun-control issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in mood can occur and how political interests can align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the pseudo-concept of political capital masks a larger truth about Washington that is kindergarten simple: You just
depending on Obama’s handling of any
issue, even in a polarized time he could still deliver on his second-term goals
depending on
the breaks
political capital is, at best, an empty
concept that almost nothing in the academic literature successfully quantifies or even
defines it.
Winning on one issue often changes the calculation for the next
issue; there is never any known amount of capital
Ornstein says. “If they think he’s going to win, they may
change positions to get on the winning side. It’s a bandwagon effect.”¶
¶
don’t know what you can do until you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “Winning wins.” In theory, and in practice,
particular
,
his skill and
a lot of
,
. Unforeseen catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can dawn, such as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to the huge disparity in the
Hispanic vote. Some political scientists who study the elusive calculus of how to pass legislation and run successful presidencies say that
, and
“It can refer to a very abstract thing, like a president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the
calculus is far more complex than the term suggests.
. “The idea here is, if an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he
wants, and he gets it, then each time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors”
ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ
Sometimes, a clever
practitioner of power can get more done just because he’s aggressive and knows the hallways of Congress well. Texas A&M’s Edwards is right to say that the outcome of t he 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, was one of the
few that conveyed a mandate. But one of the main reasons for that mandate (in addition to Goldwater’s ineptitude as a candidate) was President Johnson’s masterful use of power leading up to that election, and his ability to get far more done than anyone thought
possible, given his limited political capital. In the newest volume in his exhaustive study of LBJ, The Passage of Power, historian Robert Caro recalls Johnson getting cautionary advice after he assumed the presidency from the assassinated John F. Kennedy in late
1963. Don’t focus on a long-stalled civil-rights bill, advisers told him, because it might jeopardize Southern lawmakers’ support for a tax cut and appropriations bills the president needed. “One of the wise, practical people around the table [said that] the presidency
has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” Caro writes. (Coinage, of course, was what political capital was called in those days.) Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson didn’t worry about
coinage, and he got the Civil Rights Act enacted, along with much else: Medicare, a tax cut, antipoverty programs. He appeared to understand not just the ways of Congress but also the way to maximize the momentum he possessed in the lingering mood of
national grief and determination by picking the right issues, as Caro records. “Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” LBJ said. “It is a controllable fact of political life.” Johnson had the skill and wherewithal to realize that, at that moment of history, he could
have unlimited coinage if he handled the politics right. He did. (At least until Vietnam, that is.) And then there are the presidents who get the politics, and the issues, wrong. It was the last president before Obama who was just starting a second term, George W.
Bush, who really revived the claim of political capital, which he was very fond of wielding. Then Bush promptly demonstrated that he didn’t fully understand the concept either. At his first news conference after his 2004 victory, a confident-sounding Bush
declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. That’s my style.” The 43rd president threw all of his political capital at an overriding passion: the partial privatization of Social Security. He mounted a full-bore publicrelations campaign that included town-hall meetings across the country. Bush failed utterly, of course. But the problem was not that he didn’t have enough political capital. Yes, he may have overestimated his standing. Bush’s margin over John Kerry was thin—
helped along by a bumbling Kerry campaign that was almost the mirror image of Romney’s gaffe-filled failure this time—but that was not the real mistake. The problem was that whatever credibility or stature Bush thought he had earned as a newly reelected
president did nothing to make Social Security privatization a better idea in most people’s eyes. Voters didn’t trust the plan, and four years later, at the end of Bush’s term, the stock-market collapse bore out the public’s skepticism. Privatization just didn’t have any
momentum behind it, no matter who was pushing it or how much capital Bush spent to sell it. The mistake that Bush made with Social Security, says John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-followed
political blogger, “was that just because he won an election, he thought he had a green light. But there was no sense of any kind of public urgency on Social Security reform. It’s like he went into the garage where various Republican policy ideas were hanging up
and picked one. I don’t think Obama’s going to make that mistake.… Bush decided he wanted to push a rock up a hill. He didn’t understand how steep the hill was. I think Obama has more momentum on his side because of the Republican Party’s concerns about
Obama may get his way
not because of his reelection,
but
because Republicans are beginning to doubt whether taking a hard line on fiscal policy
is a good idea
¶
¶
the Latino vote and the shooting at Newtown.”
also
,” as the party suffers in the polls.
THE REAL LIMITS ON POWER
on the debt ceiling,
Sides says, “
Presidents are limited in what they can do by time and attention span, of course, just as much as they are by electoral balances in the House and Senate.
But this, too, has nothing to do with political capital. Another well-worn meme of recent years was that Obama used up too much political capital passing the health care law in his first term. But the real problem was that the plan was unpopular, the economy was
bad, and the president didn’t realize that the national mood (yes, again, the national mood) was at a tipping point against big-government intervention, with the tea-party revolt about to burst on the scene. For Americans in 2009 and 2010—haunted by too many
rounds of layoffs, appalled by the Wall Street bailout, aghast at the amount of federal spending that never seemed to find its way into their pockets—government-imposed health care coverage was simply an intervention too far. So was the idea of another economic
stimulus. Cue the tea party and what ensued: two titanic fights over the debt ceiling. Obama, like Bush, had settled on pushing an issue that was out of sync with the country’s mood. Unlike Bush, Obama did ultimately get his idea passed. But the big ger political
problem with health care reform was that it distracted the government’s attention from other issues that people cared about more urgently, such as the need to jump-start the economy and financial reform. Various congressional staffers told me at the time that their
bosses didn’t really have the time to understand how the Wall Street lobby was riddling the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation with loopholes. Health care was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, the aides said. Weighing the imponderables of momentum,
the often-mystical calculations about when the historic moment is ripe for an issue, will never be a science. It is mainly intuition, and its best practitioners have a long history in American politics. This is a tale told well in Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Lincoln. Daniel
Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln attempts a lot of behind-the-scenes vote-buying to win passage of the 13th Amendment, banning slavery, along with eloquent attempts to move people’s hearts and minds. He appears to be using the political capital of his reelection
and the turning of the tide in the Civil War. But it’s clear that a surge of conscience, a sense of the changing times, has as much to do with the final vote as all the backroom horse-trading. “The reason I think the idea of political capital is kind of distorting is that it
implies you have chits you can give out to people. It really oversimplifies why you elect politicians, or why they can do what Lincoln did,” says Tommy Bruce, a former political consultant in Washington. Consider, as another example, the storied political career of
President Franklin Roosevelt. Because the mood was ripe for dramatic change in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR was able to push an astonishing array of New Deal programs through a largely compliant Congress, assuming what some described as neardictatorial powers. But in his second term, full of confidence because of a landslide victory in 1936 that brought in unprecedented Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Roosevelt overreached with his infamous Court-packing proposal. All of a sudden, the
political capital that experts thought was limitless disappeared. FDR’s plan to expand the Supreme Court by putting in his judicial allies abruptly created an unanticipated wall of opposition from newly reunited Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats.
FDR thus inadvertently handed back to Congress, especially to the Senate, the power and influence he had seized in his first term. Sure, Roosevelt had loads of popularity and momentum in 1937. He seemed to have a bank vault full of political capital. But, once
again, a president simply chose to take on the wrong issue at the wrong time; this time, instead of most of the political interests in the country aligning his way, they opposed him. Roosevelt didn’t fully recover until World War II, despite two more election victories.
In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these shifting tides of momentum and political calculation mean is this: Anything goes. Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate
if he picks issues
win far more victories than
there is no reason to think he can’t
careful calculators of political capital believe is possible
If
he can get some early wins
that will create momentum, and
one win may well lead to others. “Winning wins
after 2014. But
that the country’s mood will support—such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control—
any of the
now
,
including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction. Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt, a new, more mature Obama seems to be emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly.
—as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-income tax increase—
.” Obama himself learned some hard lessons over the past four years about the falsity of the political-capital concept.
Despite his decisive victory over John McCain in 2008, he fumbled the selling of his $787 billion stimulus plan by portraying himself naively as a “post-partisan” president who somehow had been given the electoral mandate to be all things to all people. So Obama
tried to sell his stimulus as a long-term restructuring plan that would “lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.” The president thus fed GOP suspicions that he was just another big-government liberal. Had he understood better that the country was
digging in against yet more government intervention and had sold the stimulus as what it mainly was—a giant shot of adrenalin to an economy with a stopped heart, a pure emergency measure—he might well have escaped the worst of the backlash. But by laying
on ambitious programs, and following up quickly with his health care plan, he only sealed his reputation on the right as a closet socialist. After that, Obama’s public posturing provoked automatic opposition from the GOP, no matter what he said. If the president
put his personal imprimatur on any plan—from deficit reduction, to health care, to immigration reform—Republicans were virtually guaranteed to come out against it. But this year, when he sought to exploit the chastened GOP’s newfound willingness to
compromise on immigration, his approach was different. He seemed to understand that the Republicans needed to reclaim immigration reform as their own issue, and he was willing to let them have some credit. Whe n he mounted his bully pulpit in Nevada, he
delivered another new message as well: You Republicans don’t have to listen to what I say anymore. And don’t worry about who’s got the political capital. Just take a hard look at where I’m saying this: in a state you were supposed to have won but lost because of
the rising Hispanic vote. Obama was cleverly pointing the GOP toward conclusions that he knows it is already reaching on its own: If you, the Republicans, want to have any kind of a future in a vastly changed electoral map, you have no choice but to move. It’s
your choice.
( ) Not intrinsic – a logical policy maker could do both the plan and reform the NSA in
the manner the neg describes.
( ) PC not real- it’s a myth- vote based on ideology
Moraes ‘13
Frank Moraes is a freelance writer with broad interests. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has
worked in climate science, remote sensing, and throughout the computer industry. And he has taught physics. 1-8-2013 http://thereaction.blogspot.com/2013/01/political-capital-is-myth.html
Yesterday, Jonathan Chait metaphorically scratched his head: "Nominating Hagel Most Un-Obama Thing Ever." He can't understand this nomination
given that (1) Hagel will be a hard sell and (2) Obama doesn't much listen to his advisers anyway. It is interesting speculation, but I wouldn't have
Why waste political capital picking a fight that isn't essential
even thought about it had he not written, "
to
any policy goals?"¶ This brought to mind something that has been on my mind for a while, as in posts like "Bipartisan Consensus Can Bite Me." I'm
just like Santa Claus and most conceptions of God, "Political Capital" is a myth. I think it is
just an idea that Villagers find comforting. It is a neat narrative in which one can straightjacket a political
fight. Otherwise, it is just bullshit.¶ Let's go back to late 2004, after Bush Jr was re-elected. He said, "I earned
capital in the political campaign and I intend to spend it." What was this thing that Bush intended to spend? It is
afraid that
usually said that political capital is some kind of mandate from the masses. But that is clearly not what Bush meant. He got a mandate to fuck the poor
and kill the gays. But he used his political capital to privatize Social Security. One could say that this proves the point, but does anyone really think if
Bush had decided to use his political capital destroying food stamps and Medicaid that he would have succeeded any better? The truth was that Bush's
Let's look at more recent events: the Fiscal Cliff. Obama didn't win that fight because
people who voted for him demanded it. He won it because everyone knew that in the new year he would still
be president. Tax rates were going up. Boehner took the Fiscal Cliff deal because it was the best
deal that he felt he could get. He didn't fold because of some magic political capital that
political capital didn't exist.¶
the
Obama could wave over him.¶ There is no doubt that public opinion does affect how politicians act. Even politicians in small safe districts have to
they really don't
care. If they did, then everyone in the House would now be a Democrat: after all, Obama won a mandate and the associated political
capital. But they don't, because presidential elections have consequences -- for who's in the White House. They don't have much
consequence for the representative from the Third District of California.
worry that larger political trends may end up making them look stupid, out of touch, or just cruel. But beyond that,
*** Let’s assume the Aff read 1 card that “terrorism is unlikely” and that the card was
decent on this point.