WarSclerotic

Fury of left falls on Schumer | TheHill.

Liberals are livid at Sen. Charles Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) decision to oppose the White House’s nuclear deal with Iran, and have threatened to launch a full-scale war as retribution. 

Activists and former top officials within the Obama administration are openly contemplating whether Schumer’s stance disqualifies him from serving as the next Senate Democratic leader — which he is primed to do — and seeking to temporarily cut off money to Democrats in the upper chamber.

It’s unclear whether Schumer’s announcement will have a devastating effect on the White House’s efforts to prevent Democrats from killing the deal when it comes up for a vote in Congress next month.

But it’s clear that he will be Public Enemy No. 1 for liberal activists throughout the August recess, as they aim to rally support from Democrats on the agreement.

“This is a real and serious backlash, one that comes from deep within the Democratic Party’s base, and I think we’re only going to see it grow,” said Becky Bond, the political director for Credo Action.

Liberal groups including Credo, MoveOn.org and Democracy for America are rallying supporters to flood congressional mailboxes and town halls over the course of the next month to demand lawmakers support the agreement. On Friday, they launched a new website, 60DaysToStopAWar.com, to list upcoming town halls and aid in the push. 

Late on Thursday evening, Schumer upended the congressional debate over the Iran agreement by announcing in a lengthy statement that he “must oppose the agreement” and “will vote yes on a motion of disapproval” when it comes up for a vote in September.

He also will vote to override President Obama’s veto of legislation to kill the deal, Schumer’s office confirmed.

The move puts Schumer at odds on the most significant foreign policy issue of the year with both Obama and Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That left many liberals furious, and stunned at how the presumptive next Senate Democratic leader could break with virtually every other leader of their party.

Even though the No. 3 Senate Democrat released his statement in the middle of the first GOP presidential debate — practically ensuring it would be buried in the media — activist groups including MoveOn and Credo pounced within moments. 

“No real Democratic leader does this,” MoveOn.org political action executive director Ilya Sheyman declared less than 30 minutes after Schumer’s statement was posted online. “If this is what counts as ‘leadership’ among Democrats in the Senate, Senate Democrats should be prepared to find a new leader or few followers.” 

In retaliation, Sheyman called for MoveOn.org’s 8 million supporters to cease donating money to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and any Democratic candidate who opposes the deal.

Bloggers at the liberal website Daily Kos called Schumer a “warmonger” who would “be a disaster” as the top Senate Democrat. 

Ex-Obama aides including Dan Pfeiffer, Tommy Vietor and Ben LaBolt similarly condemned the stance, questioning whether Schumer would be able to lead Democrats in the upper chamber after so publicly breaking with the leader of their party.

“Chuck Schumer, who said it was a mistake to pass Obamacare, now comes out again the Iran Deal,” tweeted former White House speechwriter Jon Favreau. “This is our next Senate leader?”

In their outrage, multiple defenders of the deal referenced Schumer’s claim in December that Congress was focusing on the “wrong problem” in passing ObamaCare in 2009, as well as his 2002 support for the invasion in Iraq.

For some, the biggest sting appeared to be less about Schumer’s position than about his timing.

The New York Democrat had long been critical about the Iran deal, and few people watching the congressional debate were surprised that he ultimately came out against it.

But many expected him to wait for weeks, so that other Democrats would already have made their decision and would not be influenced by his call. 

James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, who is liberal, said on Twitter that he “can understand” why Schumer would oppose the deal.

“But if he lifts a finger” to convince other Democrats to oppose the agreement, the “party should oppose him as Senate leader,” Fallow tweeted. 

Obama and Hillary Clinton, he added, “should join in.”

White House spokesman Eric Schultz retweeted a part of Fallows’s message, seemingly endorsing the message.

On Thursday, Schumer confirmed that he will “try to persuade [fellow lawmakers] that the vote to disapprove is the right one,” but rejected the idea that he would be able to force any Democrats to follow his lead.

It’s unlikely that the debate will substantively diminish Schumer’s chances at taking the reins of the Senate Democratic caucus next year, though liberals insist that the bitter taste in their mouth isn’t going away any time soon.

“You can imagine a scenario where, let’s say Republicans win the presidency and Democrats are not only in the minority but there’s a Republican in the White House, and who will the Democratic Party want to lead them?” asked Bond, the Credo Action political director. “The guy that said ObamaCare was a mistake? A guy that championed the first Iraq war? A guy that helped Republicans take us into, if successful, a new war of choice in the Middle East? That’s not going to be the guy the Democrats need to lead.”

“There’s a lot of time between now and that vote, and the progressive base is pushing back hard,” she told The Hill.

While nominally directed at Schumer, the anger could also be read as a thinly veiled message to other Democrats who are currently on the fence about the deal, including Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.).

That message: Schumer doesn’t give you cover.

Schumer’s Thursday evening bombshell flipped the script on the congressional narrative surrounding the deal, which has been gaining support from voices such as Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Schumer’s own New York colleague, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

Opponents still have a steep hill to climb to tear away the 44 Democrats in the House and 13 in the Senate needed to not only advance legislation to kill the Iran deal but also override Obama’s veto. 

“We’re going to get the Iran deal done with or without Sen. Schumer or anyone else who insists on being trapped in the past when it comes to conflict resolution in the Middle East,” said Charles Chamberlain, the executive director of Democracy for America, in a statement to The Hill.

“Senator Schumer was wrong when he voted to back the war with Iraq and he’s wrong to work with Republicans to kill this nuclear deal with Iran, period,” he added.

Schumer was a big win for opponents, but they appear to still be far from the magic number.

“I think the impact is that now the hope of killing a resolution of disapproval on an initial vote with 41 Democratic votes against is now gone,” added another person who is following the vote.

“But I still think 34 Democratic votes upholding the presidential veto is more likely than not.”

▶ Caroline Glick: The Iran Deal – Implications for International Security – YouTube.

( Thank you, Peter… – JW )

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Report: Israel Refusing US Invite to Joint Military Exercises

By: JNi.Media

Published: August 7th, 2015

via The Jewish Press » » Report: Israel Refusing US Invite to Joint Military Exercises.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Boogie Yaalon (R) hugs with U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter before departing at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on July 21, 2015
Photo Credit: David Azagury/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv

(JNi.media) The first operational consequences of the bitter dispute between Israel and the White House on the Iran agreement have begun to pop their ugly heads, as Israel is refusing extensive US offers of military and security cooperation, IsraelDefense and Makor Rishon columnist Amir Rapaport reported.

At this point, Israel is refusing to participate in a massive joint training exercise with the US military, scheduled for 2016.

The exercise, code-named Juniper Cobra 2016, was expected to include a long list of cooperative activities, and to include the US-financed Israeli missile defense system, which is partially based on American capabilities.

Over the past few weeks, Rapaport says Israel, in an unprecedented manner, has been doubtful as to its willingness to participate—compared to previous times, when the IDF went out of its way to take part in joint exercises, and, in 2012, complained bitterly that it was being kept out of a key NATO summit meeting in Chicago because of Turkey’s objection.

Now, paradoxically, according to Rapapaort, the Americans are all too eager to cooperate with Israel, while the Israeli political leadership has decided that the IDF will not cooperate with the Americans.

“This has given rise to the absurd situation where the Americans are willing to offer us more than we want to receive,” Rapaport writes.

Last month, immediately following the signing of the Iran deal, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter visited Israel to discuss a security compensation package the Americans were offering. But Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon politely declined. That was the first hint the Israelis considered the White House’s betrayal too fundamental to be paved over with dollar bills.

But the seeds of rancor were sown even earlier, according to Rapaport, when, during the 2014 Protective Edge operation in Gaza, the White House decided against sending Israel urgently needed supply of arms and ammunition which were vital to the IDF because of the unexpected length of the war (it ended up lasting 51 days).

That decision was nothing short of traumatic to the Israeli defense apparatus, states Rapaport, and that wound is yet to heal, even a year later.

One of the immediate results of that American military embargo (which extended to the UK, as well) was an Israeli decision to keep its ammunition production in local Israeli manufacturing plants, even when it is a project involving cooperation with the US, to prevent such an embargo from ever happening again.

Rapaport believes much depends on the outcome of the Iran deal vote—veto—override process in the US Congress. If the deal fails, recovery of the relationship between the Pentagon and the IDF will come sooner. Which means that, in typical Israeli fashion, this thing will remain unresolved until “after the holidays.”

Israel Hayom | A high-impact collision.

Mr. Obama, your Iran deal will fall apart: Alan Dershowitz.

Without a congressional majority vote and public backing, next president can just abandon it.

The Framers of our constitution probably would have regarded the nuclear deal with Iran as a “treaty,” subject to a two thirds ratification by the Senate. At the very least they would have required Congress to approve the agreement by a majority vote. It is unlikely that it would have allowed the President alone to make so important and enduring an international agreement.

If President Obama doesn’t treat the Iran agreement with more respect, all his arguments today are beside the point. The agreement won’t have the force of law.

Article II, section two of the Constitution states that the president “shall have the power, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the senators present concur…”  Although the Constitution did not provide a clear description of the types of international agreements the Framers viewed as “treaties,” there is evidence that they included significant and long-term commitments with foreign countries. Some early versions of the Constitution allocated treaty-making powers solely to the Senate, but Alexander Hamilton argued that “joint possession of the power in question, by the President and Senate, would afford greater prospect of security, than the separate possession of that by either of them.” He thought it unwise to give a single person all the power to shape the country’s relationship to the rest of the world. He believed that the public is much better protected from abuse under the Constitution than it was under the Articles of Confederation, which rested the power solely in the hands of Congress.

In Federalist Paper 69, Hamilton specifically contrasted the treaty-making power of the British sovereign, with the Constitution that afforded the executive treaty making authority only with the advice and consent of the Senate.

When the Constitution was adopted, the leading authority in the world on such issues was Emerich de Vattel who was the author of the most influential treatise on international law.  Benjamin Franklin noted that his treatise was “continually in the hands of the members of our congress now sitting.”  Vattel defined a treaty as an agreement made “for perpetuity or for a considerable period of time” as distinguished from “having temporary matters for their object.”

In the two and a quarter centuries since the ratification of the Constitution, the power of the executive has expanded considerably, but the Framers would be shocked by the current situation in which the president alone gets to make an important and enduring international agreement that can be overridden only by two thirds plus one of both the senate and the house.  At the very least, this important and enduring deal should have required a majority vote of Congress.  Although the Constitution does not provide for such a hybrid agreement, in practice there have been numerous “executive-congressional” agreements that have been negotiated by the president and agreed to by a majority vote of Congress. Basic principles of democracy as well as our constitutional system of checks and balances would seem to require more than a presidential decision supported by one third of both the house and senate.

While a majority of the House and the Senate voted for this exceptional set of rules for approving the Iran agreement, it was only to assure themselves that they would have any say at all in the matter. President Obama’s position was that he could make the “executive” agreement without Congressional approval.

The Supreme Court has rarely spoken on the distinction between treaties and other forms of agreement, but when it has, it has raised serious questions about the president’s power to enter into long-term deals with foreign powers without the consent of Congress. Here is what it said in Gibbons v. Ogden, “[G]eneral and permanent commercial regulations with foreign powers must be made by treaty, but … the particular and temporary regulations of commerce may be made by an agreement of a state with another, or with a foreign power, by the consent of Congress.” Although the Gibbons case dealt with the relationship between the federal government and the States, its language suggests that the president alone may not have the power to avoid congressional oversight by simply declaring an important deal with foreign powers to be an executive agreement rather than a treaty.

With regard to the deal with Iran, the stakes are so high, and the deal so central to the  continuing security of the free world, that it should — as a matter of democratic governance — require more than a presidential agreement and one third plus one of both houses of Congress.  This is especially true where there is no clear consensus in favor of the deal among the American people.  Though we do not govern by polls, it seems fairly clear that a majority of Americans now oppose the deal.

Let us never forget that America is a democracy where the people ultimately rule, and if the majority of Americans continue to oppose the deal, it will ultimately be rejected, if not by this administration, than by the next. An agreement, as distinguished from a treaty does not have the force of law. It can simply be abrogated by any future president. In the end, the court of public opinion decides important policy decisions that may affect us all. And it is difficult to imagine a decision with higher stakes than whether to accept or reject this deal.

Alan Dershowitz is an emeritus professor of law at Harvard Law School. His new e-book, The Case Against the Iran Deal: How Can We Now Stop Iran From Getting Nukes?, is now available.

Israel Hayom | In a blow to Obama, top Democrats say they will oppose Iran nuclear deal.

No. 3 Democrat in the Senate Chuck Schumer and Congressman Eliot Engel announce they will vote against nuclear agreement in Congress • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell slams U.S. President Barack Obama: Stop demonizing opponents of the Iran deal.