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DAVID S. BRODER

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Thursday, July 16, 2009 A23

DAVID IGNATIUS

Battle Lines — for Another Day

The combination of an over-rehearsed wit- ness and opposition senators fighting without much ammunition robbed the Sonia Soto- mayor confirmation hearings of their expected drama. Those who watched the proceedings were left only with the occasional reminder of past Supreme Court battles and the promise of more to come.

President Obama’s choice to succeed Jus- tice David Souter and become the first Hispan- ic on the Supreme Court has a compelling personal story, and she displayed a tough-minded intellect that will make her a force on the bench when she dons the black robe in September. But Sotomayor had been so prepped by the White House that she showed almost nothing of her personal philosophy or personality. Her expression rarely changed from a serious frown, and her busy note-taking on the senators’ questions masked any emotion.

During George W. Bush’s presidency, when Democrats had the chance to examine his Su- preme Court appointees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, they found plenty to question in the work those two had done for past Repub- lican administrations. Nothing in Sotomayor’s early career as a prosecutor and corporate law- yer provided comparable riches for the GOP.

E.J. DIONNE JR.

Our Silent Education Emergency

It’s the silent education crisis, the one we don’t talk about much because its existence undermines the story we like to tell about our country. The problems we face from kindergarten to 12th grade get regular, if still insufficient, attention. But we rarely confront how badly we’re faring when it comes to educating our people after high school. That silent education crisis belies our claim that no nation comes close to us in guaranteeing that any- one can work hard, get a great education and soar. Judge Sonia Sotomayor honored this national ar- ticle of faith in a lovely tribute to her mother at her confirmation hearings. “She taught us that the key to success in America is a good education,” Soto- mayor said. “And she set the example, studying alongside my brother and me at our kitchen table so that she could become a registered nurse.” In telling this story of intergenerational mobility,

Sotomayor was describing how our education sys- tem is supposed to work — and, inadvertently per- haps, pointed to how it’s failing so many now. College and law school got Sotomayor to where

she was this week, and we once did reasonably well in opening educational opportunities to people from modest backgrounds such as hers. In 1976, the year Sotomayor graduated from Princeton, federal Pell Grants for low-income stu- dents covered 72 percent of the average cost of a four-year state institution. An excellent education (if not necessarily at Princeton) was, in principle, within reach of most Americans. But by 2003, Pell Grants covered only 38 percent of the cost of at- tending a state university. Her mother’s quest to better her own and her family’s lot through more schooling was also classic, and we’re falling behind when it comes to opportunities of that sort, too. Today, the United States stands 10th in the per- centage of 25- to 34-year-olds who have earned a postsecondary degree. We’re behind Canada, Ja- pan, South Korea, New Zealand, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and France. The information I’ve just offered comes from an important article by Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University, published this spring in the New York Review of Books. Delbanco concludes that “a great many gifted and motivated young peo- ple are excluded from college for no other reason than their inability to pay, and we have failed seri- ously to confront the problem.” To bolster his point, Delbanco cites the remark- able finding of Donald E. Heller, the director of Penn State’s Center for the Study of Higher Educa- tion, that “the college-going rates of the highest- socioeconomic-status students with the lowest achievement levels is the same level as the poorest students with the highest achievement levels.” I added the italics to underscore the not-so-hidden in- juries of class. To read Delbanco’s article and hear Sotomayor’s personal story is to understand why President Oba- ma went to Michigan on Tuesday to announce a plan to spend $12 billion over 10 years to strength- en our community colleges and “help an additional 5 million Americans earn degrees and certificates in the next decade.” It was good to hear a president say that commu- nity colleges are “an undervalued asset in our coun- try . . . treated like the stepchild of the higher edu- cation system.” He was also correct to emphasize how much upward mobility still depends on educa- tion, since “jobs requiring at least an associate de- gree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs re- quiring no college experience.”

But his proposal should be seen only as a first step. It’s a $1.2 billion annual down payment to solve an enormous problem. The community col- leges are in crisis because they are being flooded with students who cannot afford four-year schools, as well as unemployed workers seeking training for new jobs. Moreover, many Americans will find secure and

well-paying employment not by way of a college de- gree but by receiving training after high school for what economists Harry Holzer and Robert Lerman call “middle-skill jobs.” In a report for the Workforce Alliance, Holzer and Lerman argued that both high-skill and service job openings will be outnumbered in coming years by middle-skill opportunities in health care, con- struction, installation, repair and many other fields. Asingle year of postsecondary education, especially in programs linked directly to employers’ needs, can do wonders to help job seekers gain their foot- ing on the mobility ladder.

Obama is on the right track. But we’ll need to do much more than he’s proposing if we want the story of Sonia Sotomayor and her mom to define a real- istic aspiration for the next American generation.

ejdionne@washpost.com

BUZZ ALDRIN

Time to Boldly Go Once More

On the spring morning in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh set off alone across the Atlantic Ocean, only a handful of explorer- adventurers were capable of even attempting the feat. Many had tried before Lindbergh’s successful flight, but all had failed and many lost their lives in the process. Most people then thought transatlantic travel was an im- possible dream. But 40 years later, 20,000 people a day were safely flying the same route that the “Lone Eagle” had voyaged. Transatlantic flight had become routine. Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong,

Mike Collins and I began our quarter-million-mile journey through the blackness of space to reach the moon. Neil and I walked its dusty ancient soil, becom- ing the first humans to stand upon another world. Yet today, no na- tion — including our own — is capable of sending anyone beyond Earth’s orbit, much less deeper into space. For the past four years, NASA has been on a path to resume lunar explora- tion with people, dupli- cating (in a more compli- cated fashion) what Neil, Mike and our colleagues did four decades ago. But this approach — called the “Vision for Space Ex- ploration” — is not vi-

port from most Americans, we can boldly go, again. A race to the moon is a dead end. While the lunar surface can be used to develop ad- vanced technologies, it is a poor location for homesteading. The moon is a lifeless, barren world, its stark desolation matched by its hostility to all living things. And replaying the glory days of Apollo will not advance the cause of American space leadership or in- spire the support and enthusiasm of the pub- lic and the next generation of space explorers.

anew world.

Robotic exploration of Mars has yielded tantalizing clues about what was once a water-soaked planet. Deep beneath the soils of Mars may lie trapped frozen water, pos- sibly with traces of still-extant primitive life forms. Climate change on a vast scale has re- shaped Mars. With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution, human outposts on Mars could be a virtual laboratory to study these vast planetary changes. And the best way to study Mars is with the two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars and then on the Red Planet’s sur- face.

NASA/U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

A mosaic of Mars created from images taken by the 1975 Viking Orbiter 1.

sionary; nor will it ultimately be successful in restoring American space leadership. Like its Apollo predecessor, this plan will prove to be a dead end littered with broken space- craft, broken dreams and broken policies. Instead, I propose a new Unified Space Vi- sion, a plan to ensure American space leader- ship for the 21st century. It wouldn’t require building new rockets from scratch, as cur- rent plans do, and it would make maximum use of the capabilities we have without breaking the bank. It is a reasonable and af- fordable plan — if we again think in vision- ary terms.

On television and in movies, “Star Trek”

showed what could be achieved when we dared to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” In real life, I’ve traveled that path, and I know that with the right goal and sup-

Now, I am not suggesting that America abandon the moon entirely, only that it forgo a moon-focused race. As the moon should be for all mankind, we should return there as part of an internationally led coalition. Using the landers and heavy-lift boosters devel- oped by our partners, we could test on the moon the tools and equipment that we will need for our ultimate destination: home- steading Mars by way of its moons. Let the lunar surface be the ultimate glob- al commons while we focus on more distant and sustainable goals to revitalize our space program. Our next generation must think boldly in terms of a goal for the space pro- gram: Mars for America’s future. I am not suggesting a few visits to plant flags and do photo ops but a journey to make the first homestead in space: an American colony on

Mobilizing the space program to focus on a hu- man colony on Mars while at the same time helping our international partners explore the moon on their own would galvanize public support for space exploration and provide a cause to inspire America’s young stu- dents. Mars exploration would renew our space industry by opening up technology development to all players, not just the traditional big aerospace contractors. If we avoid- ed the pitfall of aiming solely for the moon, we could be on Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight.

Much has been said recently about the Vi- sion for Space Exploration and the future of the international space station. As we all re- flect upon our historic lunar journey and the future of the space program, I challenge America’s leaders to think boldly and look beyond the moon. Yes, my vision of “Mars for America” requires bold thinking. But as my friend and Gemini crewmate Jim Lovell has noted, our Apollo days were a time when we did bold things in space to achieve leader- ship. It is time we were bold again in space.

The writer was the second man to walk on the moon. He served as the Gemini 12 mission pilot in 1966, as well as the lunar module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. His book “Magnificent Desolation” was published last month.

BY MARIO TAMA — GETTY IMAGES

Judge Sonia Sotomayor at Tuesday’s hearing.

Instead, Republicans had to build a case against Sotomayor out of fragments of sen- tences from her many speeches. Some of them can be read as encouraging female and minor- ity judges to bring their special sensibilities to bear in their work on the bench.

But the Republicans found nothing in her hundreds of rulings in the federal courts in New York to suggest that Sotomayor gives free rein to impulses based on ethnicity or ideol- ogy. She has been as careful in her verdicts as in her facial expressions. With this first Obama nominee clearly tick- eted for confirmation, the Republicans used

the hearings to remind voters of Obama’s own history of partisanship in the treatment of judi- cial nominations. As a senator for Illinois, Oba- ma voted against both of Bush’s Supreme Court choices and joined in filibusters to block others named to the appellate courts. Republican Sens. Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch had a good time quoting Obama’s words back to him, including the many instances in which he said that senators are well justified in looking beyond the intellectual and profession- al qualifications of the nominated judges and examining “their broader vision of what Amer- ica should be.”

That is, they pointed out, a political test, and for those who would like to believe that politics stops at the courthouse door, it is a no- no.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, more realistic, told Sotomayor that he knew that “no Republican [president] would have chosen you” — but still could imagine voting for Obama’s choice himself. By making the best of their meager case against Sotomayor, the Republicans signaled to Obama that they are ready to fight harder if he names to the bench other liberals less ar- mored by their personal histories. But the Democrats are clearly ready for that

fight, fueled by their resentment of the two Bush appointees who have already moved the Supreme Court in a markedly more conserva- tive direction. Chief Justice Roberts won 22 Democratic confirmation votes, not only with his obvious legal credentials but his bland as- surances that he saw the job of a justice as akin to that of a baseball umpire — enforcing the rules, not rewriting the rulebook. One after another, Judiciary Committee Democrats told the Republicans: You fooled us once, but never again. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, for one, pointed to the long list of significant decisions on which Roberts and Ali- to have led or joined a 5-4 majority, overruling precedent and narrowing individual rights. “I do not believe that Supreme Court justices are merely umpires calling balls and strikes,” Fein- stein said. “I believe that they make the deci- sions of individuals who bring to the court their own experiences and philosophies” — the very thing that Republicans say they worry about in Sotomayor’s speeches. Strip away all the rhetoric, and what you

have left is a certainty that partisanship and deeply felt battles will continue to rage every time there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

davidbroder@washpost.com

Kicking The CIA (Again)

As other countries watch the Unit- ed States lacerate its intelligence serv- ice — for activities already investigat- ed or never undertaken — perhaps they admire America’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law. More likely, I fear, they conclude that we are just plain nuts. The latest “scandals” involving the Central Intelligence Agency are genu- inely hard to understand, other than in terms of political payback. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate criminal actions by CIA officers in- volved in the harsh interrogation of al- Qaeda prisoners. But the internal CIA report on which he’s said to be basing this decision was referred five years ago to the Justice Department, where attorneys concluded that no prosecu- tion was warranted. Meanwhile, Democrats in Con- gress are indignant that they were never briefed about a program to as- sassinate al-Qaeda operatives in friendly countries. Never mind that the program wasn’t implemented, or that the United States is routinely as- sassinating al-Qaeda operatives using unmanned drones. And never mind that Leon Panetta, the new CIA direc- tor — fearing a potential flap — briefed Congress about the program soon after he became aware of it. There was a flap anyway — with a new hemorrhage of secrets and a new shudder from America’s intelligence partners around the world. Oversight of these secret activities is necessary. But turning the CIA into a political football, as both Repub- licans and Democrats have done in re- cent years, defeats the purpose of oversight. That was true when Repub- licans were bashing the agency for supposedly obstructing the Bush ad- ministration’s policies, and it’s true now when Democrats are scrounging for evidence to prove that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right when she accused the agency of lying about its activities.

President Obama has tried to end this “gotcha” culture — to start look- ing forward, rather than backward, as he put it — from his first day in office. He said it plainly in his inaugural address: “On this day, we come to pro- claim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” Obama said it again when he

visited the CIA on April 20. Against the advice of Panetta and other intelli- gence professionals, he had decided to release the text of Justice Depart- ment legal memos on interrogation, which showed in ugly detail that the agency had been given legal authority to torture al-Qaeda captives. But he offered agency officials a grand bar- gain. The facts about interrogation would be disclosed, but CIA officers who relied on the Justice Depart- ment’s advice wouldn’t face prosecu- tion.

GEORGE F. WILL

Labor in the Driver’s Seat

How does the Obama administration love organized labor? Let us count the ways it uses power to repay unions for helping to put it in power.

It has given the United Auto Workers ma-

jority ownership of Chrysler. It has sent $135 billion of supposed stimulus money to state governments to protect unionized pub- lic-sector employees from layoffs and other sacrifices that private-sector workers are making. It has sedated the Labor Depart- ment’s Office of Labor-Management Stan- dards, which protects workers against misbe- havior by union leaders. Cap-and-trade legis- lation might please unions with protectionism — tariffs on imports from countries not foolish enough to similarly bur- den their manufacturers. If Congress, seeking money for more socialized medicine, decides that some employer-paid health insurance should be taxed as employees’ compensation — which it obviously is — generous union- negotiated benefits might be exempted. Now it is the Teamsters’ turn at the trough. Congress might change labor law to assist UPS, a Teamsters stronghold, by hindering its principal competitor, FedEx. At 2 a.m. in Memphis, where FedEx is headquartered, the airport is humming as FedEx sorts and dispatches many of the 3.4 million packages — 10 million pounds of freight — it ships daily, mostly with its fleet of 654 aircraft. Eighty-five percent of FedEx packages go by air; 85 percent of UPS’s go only by truck. This matters because: The growth of railroads had put America’s increasingly integrated economy at the mercy of local strikes. “Brakemen in Altoona, signal-

men in Wichita,” says Fred Smith, could crip- ple the transportation network. Smith, Fed- Ex’s founder and chief executive, says that in 1926, to protect the arteries of commerce, Congress passed the Railway Labor Act (RLA). It ensured that any bargaining unit for workers must be systemwide so that no local unit could hold the railroads hostage. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act

(Wagner Act), which covered everyone ex- cept railway workers, allowed organizing and bargaining based on localities. The path to unionization is steeper under the RLA, which requires a nationwide vote by all workers. In 1936, airlines were brought under the

RLA. FedEx, which began as an air freight company and created the modern express business, is precisely the sort of integrated system for which the RLA was written. This matters: 53 percent of all U.S. exports by val- ue travel by air, and virtually all priority and express U.S. mail is carried by FedEx. In 1981, UPS began air services, and in the 1990s it tried, legislatively and judicially, to be put under the RLA. In 1993 UPS said all of its operations, “including ground operations,” are properly subject to the RLA “because the ground operations are part of the air service.” FedEx supported UPS’s efforts, even though the vast majority of UPS parcels never go on an airplane, whereas FedEx’s trucking opera- tions exist to feed its air fleet and distribute what it carries. FedEx characterizes itself as the “world’s most effective airline” and UPS as “a 100-year- old trucking company.” FedEx, Smith insists, is not anti-union; its pilots are unionized. He says that the pay and benefits for its drivers

are, on average, higher than those of UPS drivers and that new FedEx drivers must wait only three months to be eligible for benefits whereas UPS drivers must wait a year. Never- theless, today’s Democratic majority in Con- gress, with UPS now aligned with the Team- sters, wants to put FedEx’s ground pickup and delivery operations under the NLRA, thereby making FedEx’s entire integrated sys- tem susceptible to disruption by local disputes.

“Bailout” is now both a noun and a verb,

and FedEx characterizes what Congress might do for UPS as the “Brown Bailout.” But properly used, “bailout” denotes a rescue of an economic entity from financial distress. Al- though UPS is suffering from the recession, so is FedEx. Furthermore, UPS, whose rev- enue is 36 percent larger than FedEx’s, began advocating this injury to FedEx long before this recession.

What UPS is doing is called rent-seeking — bending public power for private advantage by hindering a competitor. This practice, which expands exponentially as government expands arithmetically, is banal but can have entertaining ricochets: If Congress makes FedEx’s operations more precarious by changing the law to make it easier for local disputes to cripple its opera- tions, Smith says a multibillion-dollar order for 15 Boeing 777s will be automatically canceled. One of the unions lobbying on be- half of UPS and the Teamsters is the Interna- tional Association of Machinists and Aero- space Workers, whose members make 777s.

georgewill@washpost.com

CIA veterans were skeptical about Obama’s promise, especially when the president said the next day that Holder would make the final decision. But lawyers who studied the case thought Holder would decide against a prosecutor because he almost cer- tainly couldn’t get convictions. It would be impossible to prove “crimi- nal intent” for CIA interrogators who operated within the framework of the Justice Department’s guidance. And as for “unauthorized practices” out- side the guidelines — such as kicks, threats and other abuse — that were revealed in a 2004 report by the CIA’s inspector general, Justice Depart- ment attorneys had already concluded that these actions didn’t warrant criminal prosecution. Holder is said to have been sick- ened by what he read about the in- terrogations. And who wouldn’t be? It was a dark chapter in American his- tory that should never be repeated, and Obama has rightly changed the rules. But what would be accom- plished by the appointment of a pros- ecutor in a case where criminal intent would be so hard to prove? The only certainty is that the process would damage careers and morale at the CIA.

“Will anyone go to jail? Probably not. But you will leave a trail of de- stroyed officers,” predicts one CIA veteran. Meanwhile, I fear, CIA employees will steer away from areas such as counterterrorism, where the political winds may change. Obama understands that the coun- try needs a better and stronger intelli- gence agency. He wants more infor- mation than he gets in his daily intelli- gence briefings, and he has discussed with Panetta the challenge of building a tougher, smarter, more aggressive CIA. That’s a righteous goal, but it be- gins with depoliticizing the agency and ending the culture of permanent scandal.

If Obama means what he has said about looking forward rather than backward, then he should stick to his guns — and hope that the attorney general and House speaker agree that it’s time to stop kicking this football.

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