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Worst Week inWashington
The Fix’s By Chris Cillizza Q
uick, name the head of the House ethics committee. Can’t do it? Don’t beat yourself up too much; the ethics committee (or the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, as the stuffed
shirts call it) is not only one of the least prominent committees on Capitol Hill but, if recent history is any indication, one of the most feckless, too. Still, every committee has a chair, and in this case it’s Rep. Zoe Lofgren,
a loyal lieutenant of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a fellow California Democrat. Lofgren’s low profile is about to be ruined by the congressional trial of
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) on allegations that he failed to report personal income and misused his office to aid companies to which he had ties. No Democrat wants such a trial to happen, but Lofgren has limited op-
tions: Unless Rangel cops to the charges (unlikely) or resigns (even less likely), then she is bound to push for a trial in Congress with a September start date. Lofgren follows a long line of lawmakers forced to investigate their own party in public. The list includes, but is not limited to, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who recommended the expulsion of Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) in the mid-1990s (Packwood resigned); Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who led the investi- gation into Sen. Bob Torricelli (D-N.J.) in 2002 and ultimately “severely admonished” him (Torricelli gave up his reelection bid); and Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), who presided over a simi- lar 2004 admonishment of then-House Major- ity Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). DeLay eventually resigned, but not before Hefley was ousted as ethics committee chairman by then-Speaker Denny Hastert (R-Ill.), a DeLay ally.
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KLMNO
SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010
To reform energy, let’s learn from health care
by Josh Freed and Matt Bennett W GETTY IMAGES
In a week when tens of thousands of Washington Nationals fans went home disappointed after phenom pitcher Stephen Strasburg was scratched moments before he was to take the mound, the competition for theWorst Week was tough. But like a narc (the Fix loved “21 Jump Street” back in the day) or a hall monitor, sometimes doing your job makes you the least popular kid in school. For the foreseeable future — or until Rangel cuts a deal, ending the prospect of a congressional trial — that role will be played by Lofgren, who had the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or something.
Have a candidate for the Worst Week in Washington? E-mail
chris.cillizza@
washingtonpost.com with your nominees.
ith the United States struggling to recover from a job-killing reces- sion, a Democratic presi- dent asks a Democratic
Congress to pass sweeping reform of a major sector of the economy. “We can no longer afford to continue to ignore what is wrong,” he explains. “We must fix this system, and it has to begin with congressional action.” The public, however, rejects this plea. The propos- al dies in Congress, and recriminations begin. Chastened and disappointed, advocates regroup and seek a new path forward. This is the story of President Bill
They’re still getting away with torture
by David Cole E
ight years ago today, two Jus- tice Department lawyers — John Yoo and Jay Bybee — put the finishing touches on a se- cret memo to White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales with the ano- dyne title “Standards of Conduct for In- terrogation under 18 U.S.C. § 2340- 2340A.” With this document, better known as the “torture memo,” and a sec- ond memo issued the same day approv- ing specific interrogation techniques, the United States officially authorized tor- ture for the first time in its history — in- cluding sleep deprivation for up to 11 days straight, confinement in cramped boxes, the use of painful stress positions for hours at a time and waterboarding. Today, Jay Bybee is a federal judge on
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Cir- cuit. John Yoo is a tenured law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. And no one responsible for authorizing these tactics has been held to account: not Yoo, not Bybee, not Daniel Levin and Ste- phen Bradbury, the Justice Department lawyers who succeeded them and contin- ued to authorize brutal techniques until President Obama took office, and not for- mer president George W. Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney, both of whom have, since leaving office, admitted in pub- lic statements to giving these tactics the green light. When asked about accountability for
torture, Obama has insisted that we should look forward, not back. But on this issue, we cannot move forward with- out looking back. Unless we acknowledge that what the United States did was not just a bad idea, but illegal, we risk treat- ing torture as simply another policy op- tion. As the new government in Britain has recently shown, it is possible to be re- sponsible about allegations of torture even when it means examining the sins of a prior administration. If another country’s leaders author- ized torture and got away with it, our State Department would condemn them in its annual reports on nations’ human rights records. And it would be entirely justified. The United Nations Convention Against Torture, a treaty that we played a central role in drafting, and that we rat- ified under President Ronald Reagan, prohibits torture and cruel treatment and compels criminal investigation of credible torture allegations. Torture is also a felony under U.S. law and a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The Justice Department is investigat- ing allegations of torture at the CIA’s se- cret prisons — but is considering only the actions of interrogators who are reported to have exceeded the brutality authorized by the Justice Department and Bush’s Cabinet. Why are the underlings being investigated, but not those who set the il- legal scheme in motion? The answer is politics. A torture in- vestigation that could implicate the for-
mer president and vice president would be too divisive, some say. It would con- sume the nation’s attention and divert us from addressing other urgent problems, such as health care, the economy, global warming and immigration. But there is an even larger political ob- stacle: fear. The Democratic administra- tion is afraid of appearing more con- cerned about the rights of terrorism sus- pects than about the security of the nation. Cheney and his supporters have already accused the administration of not being tough enough on terrorists; Democrats fear that a torture inquiry might play into critics’ hands. Here Obama should take a page from
David Cameron, Britain’s new Conserva- tive prime minister. Cameron took office without garnering a majority vote and had to forge a political alliance with the Liberal Democrats. His political position could hardly be more tenuous. And the United Kingdom, in the midst of a severe economic crisis, faces at least as many grave problems as the United States does. Yet shortly after he took office, Cameron announced an official public inquiry into allegations of high-level British complic- ity in the torture of terrorism suspects, saying, “The longer these questions re- main unanswered, the bigger the stain on our reputation as a country that be- lieves in freedom, fairness and human rights grows.” Why was Cameron able to do what Obama was not? In some measure, it is because Britain has learned from its past. After early skirmishes with the Irish Re- publican Army in the 1970s, the British responded much as the Bush administra- tion did after Sept. 11, 2001. They in- terned hundreds of suspects without charges and interrogated them using tor- ture and brutality — including sleep dep- rivation, shackling and painful stress po- sitions. The tactics backfired. They creat- ed a public relations disaster for the nation and gave the IRA its most potent recruiting tool.
But Britain did not insist that it look
forward, not back. Instead, in 1971 Prime Minister Edward Heath appointed a commission, headed by Lord Parker, the former lord chief justice of England, to look into the practices. The next year, the Parker commission issued a report find- ing that the tactics violated domestic law. In the United Kingdom today, there is widespread public agreement that such tactics are never permissible. In the Unit- ed States, by contrast, polls consistently show division over whether torture may be justified. It was only by looking backward, in other words, that Britain moved forward. We must do the same. Fears of political division, or of being called soft on terror, cannot excuse us from acknowledging our legal — and moral — wrongs.
David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, is the author, most recently, of “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable.”
Clinton’s effort to pass health-care re- form in 1993. But it also describes this year’s attempt by President Obama and congressional Democrats to pass sweeping energy reform. The energy bill, with its centerpiece cap-and-trade policy, would have set a limit on green- house gas emissions throughout the economy and offered incentives for cleaner energy. That effort ended late last month when Senate Democratic leaders acknowledged what insiders already knew — they had come up around 10 votes short. It was a devastating setback for all of us who have worked on this issue. Just as many progressives believed they’d elected a president who would bring them health-care reform in 1993, en- ergy-reform advocates felt that Obama would immediately tackle climate change. When world leaders failed to achieve a breakthrough in climate talks in Copenhagen last December, we focused all of our efforts on Con- gress. Ironically, we had to wait until the new version of health-care reform cleared the decks. But as the health-care debate ex- tended into the new year and Sen. Scott Brown was elected in Massachu- setts, giving Republicans another vote, the prospects for energy reform dimmed. Sure, there had been some hints of progress. For instance, ad- vocates worked with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to muscle an energy reform bill through the House last year. But when the financial reform bill cut in line, the chances of a tired and depleted Senate turning to climate change seemed slim. When legislation dies, it is often with a whimper, not a bang. The final months of the cap-and-trade debate saw the air seep slowly from the bal- loon — strategy meetings we attended that once drew dozens were attracting just a handful. The bill quietly breathed its last on, fittingly, a swelter- ing July day. It wasn’t the first defeat. Cap-and-
trade had fallen short in three previ- ous sessions of Congress. But this one seemed different. George W. Bush was gone; Democrats controlled Congress. And reform proponents had made enormous strides. Once-hostile busi- nesses, including many big utilities and some oil companies, were on board. Environmental groups had come together behind a smart, well- funded public education campaign. Congressional Democrats across the spectrum, from Rep. Rick Boucher (Va.) to Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), were cutting deals and making progress.
KRISTIN LENZ
Americans supported the idea of cov- ering the uninsured; similarly, polls this year indicated broad support for action on climate change. But what the public supports and what it wants can be very different. Most people in 1993 had insurance; what they wanted were reduced costs and stable coverage. They turned against health-care re- form when opponents convinced them that they wouldn’t get either and that the benefits would flow elsewhere. Similarly, while people generally
support energy reform, their focus isn’t really on what the world will look and feel like in 2050. For most Amer- icans, the distant threat of global warming is not enough to prompt ac- tion.
But unlike with health-care reform,
the Earth cannot wait 17 more years for us to match our arguments to the pub- lic mood. Just last week, scientists de- termined that the past decade was the Earth’s warmest on record. If we pro- ceed with business as usual, there is scientific consensus that global warm- ing will tip into an unstoppable spiral that will have a devastating impact on the planet. In the midst of a downturn, it is clear that advocates have to focus pub-
Unlike with health-care reform, the Earth cannot wait 17 more years for us to match our arguments to the public mood.
The finish line was finally in sight. But we didn’t get across. And the an-
ger is real. One environmental organi- zation staffer told us that members of his group contorted themselves to ac- commodate everyone, and got left knotted up and empty-handed. Others are grumbling that, after spending $100 million to build public support for energy reform, they were left at the altar by Congress and the administra- tion. And no one is madder than some House Democrats from places such as Virginia, Ohio and Missouri who cast a tough vote for a cap-and-trade bill that didn’t even make it to the floor of the Senate. Most of the anger is properly direct-
ed at Republicans, who, but for a few brave House members, put their party ahead of their country’s economic, se- curity and environmental interests. But fury at the other side has never stopped progressives from circling up a firing squad.
All of this is depressingly familiar to those of us who were around for the Clinton health-care fight. In both cases, advocates badly misread the public mood. When the health-care de- bate began in 1993, 64 percent of
lic attention on the economic benefits of shifting to clean energy, as well as the risks of doing nothing. The global race is on, and, just as the tech boom of the 1990s did for the United States, clean energy will create good jobs and huge economic growth for the winner. The question is who that will be. Right now, it’s not us. China, South
Korea, Germany, Spain and France are already transitioning to clean energy, investing billions in research and cre- ating robust domestic markets. On the very day that the Senate bill was de- clared dead, China announced that it is making $740 billion in new clean- energy investments, according to Chi- na Daily, the state-run English-lan- guage newspaper. China also an- nounced that it is imposing a domestic price on carbon — essentially adding a fee to fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas that produce carbon pollu- tion.
Such moves are not motivated solely
by environmental altruism. The mar- ket for clean-energy technology is ex- pected to double to $2.7 trillion by 2020, and it is estimated that the clean-energy sector will employ 20 million people by 2030. If we don’t act
now, we’re going to be buying clean- energy products from China rather than building them here and selling them to the rest of the world. In fact, we already are. America has a trade deficit in clean-energy technology. For the United States to get back in the lead in this energy race, we must put a price on carbon, though with a mechanism that is less complex than what cap-and-trade has become. This price will encourage industries to move to cleaner energy and will gener- ate the revenue that the United States needs to invest in innovation in this field. With the right incentives, we can develop clean-energy technologies that are as affordable as coal and oil, creating jobs and new industries. Reform advocates long ago began to understand the power of this message. Prominent activists — including Al Gore — started talking less about sav- ing the planet and more about spur- ring economic growth, improving na- tional security and ending pollution disasters such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. So why did we come up short? Partly, it was lousy timing. Reform opponents were able to argue that any increase in energy costs, no matter how small, would be an unsustainable burden during a period of extreme eco- nomic distress. But we also handed them some ammunition. As the bill got bigger and more complex, opponents were able to distort the cap-and-trade idea to argue that it was a giveaway to unpopular businesses. Both Clinton’s health-care reform
experience and today’s cap-and-trade defeat contain lessons for the next en- ergy reform effort. They were each based on good ideas and sound pol- icies, but they became too opaque and filled with special pleadings to sustain public support. They made complexity a virtue to try to mask relatively mod- est cost increases for the middle class, and neither did an adequate job of ex- plaining the benefits to average Amer- icans. And both withered under fierce opposition.
Obama passed health-care reform by pivoting away from talk of universal coverage and convincing enough of the public that the bill would address fun- damental middle-class concerns and bring stability and security to those who already had insurance. True, health-care reform barely limped over the finish line. But that is how big change happens. In 2011, energy re- form advocates should take a page from the health-care playbook and make the same kind of changes if we are to achieve similar results.
Josh Freed is the director of the Clean
Energy Program at Third Way, and Matt Bennett is a vice president and co-founder of Third Way, a progressive think tank. 5 myths on green energy
Outlook’s editors welcome comments and suggestions. Write to us at
outlook@washpost.com.
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