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Why Congress Must Vote on the United States' Role in Yemen's War |
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Friday, 02 March 2018 09:37 |
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Excerpt: "In Yemen, a child under the age of five dies of preventable causes every 10 minutes. That is just one startling fact from a country that has been torn by war for nearly three years."
Yemenis collect drinking water from a donated water pipe in the old quarter of Sanaa, Yemen. (photo: Yahya Arhab/Shutterstock)
Why Congress Must Vote on the United States' Role in Yemen's War
By Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee and Chris Murphy, The Washington Post
02 March 18
Mike Lee, a Republican, represents Utah in the Senate. Bernie Sanders, an independent, represents Vermont in the Senate. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, represents Connecticut in the Senate.
 n Yemen, a child under the age of five dies of preventable causes every 10 minutes. That is just one startling fact from a country that has been torn by war for nearly three years.
More than 10,000 civilians have died and over 40,000 have been wounded in this war. Fifteen million people can’t access clean water and sanitation. An estimated 17 million people – 60 percent of the total population – do not have reliable access to food and are at risk of starvation.
When tragedies such as the war in Yemen occur, the American people’s instinct is to help. Americans have so far provided more than $768 million in humanitarian aid to that country.
What few Americans know, however, is that the U.S. military is making the crisis worse by helping one side in the conflict bomb innocent civilians. The millions we have spent in humanitarian aid were necessitated, in part, by a U.S. government failure.
In order to understand this failure, we need to understand how the United States got involved in Yemen to begin with. In March 2015, a coalition of Arab forces led by Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention into Yemen.
The goal of this intervention was to support the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi against Houthi insurgents who had taken control of much of the country, including the capital city of Sanaa.
The Obama administration, without consulting Congress, quickly authorized U.S. military forces to provide “logistical and intelligence support” to the Saudi coalition. U.S. military support for this intervention continues to this day. U.S. forces are coordinating, refueling and targeting with the Saudi-led coalition, as confirmed last December by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis .
We believe that since Congress has not authorized military force for this conflict, the United States should play no role in it beyond providing desperately needed humanitarian aid.
That is why we are introducing a joint resolution that would force Congress to vote on the U.S. war in Yemen. If Congress does not authorize the war, our resolution would require U.S. involvement in Yemen to end.
The Framers gave the power to declare war to Congress, the branch most accountable to the people. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states in no uncertain terms that “Congress shall have power to . . . declare war.”
It is true that the president may order military operations in limited emergency situations, such as foreign invasions. But the far-off civil war in Yemen, while tragic, is not an emergency.
Under the War Powers Act of 1973, the assignment of a member of the United States armed forces to “command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany” another country’s military during a war constitutes the introduction of the United States into a conflict. Congress has not authorized these combat activities. Under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) issued after the 9/11 attacks, any U.S. military action in Yemen must be limited and only directed against groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS, also known as the Islamic State. Engaging in a war against Yemeni Houthi rebels does not qualify.
Indeed, U.S. involvement in the Yemen war has proven counterproductive to the effort against al-Qaeda’s affiliates. The State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism for 2016 found that the conflict between Saudi-led forces and the Houthi insurgents had helped AQAP and ISIS’s Yemen branch to “deepen their inroads across much of the country.” Furthermore, while Iran’s support for Houthi insurgents is of serious concern for all of us, the truth is that this war has increased, not decreased, the opportunities for Iranian troublemaking.
The most serious duty we have as U.S. senators is deciding whether and when to send our young women and men into harm’s way to defend our country. That is why we are proud to introduce this bipartisan resolution together. Since 9/11, politicians have become far too comfortable with American military interventions all over the world. It is time for Congress to play its constitutionally mandated oversight role with regard to war.
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Through the Looking Glass, a House of Horrors |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 01 March 2018 15:02 |
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Rosenblum writes: "While America's uncouth and unclothed emperor-wannabe fantasized about how he would rush unarmed at a homicidal shooter, China placed imperial robes on Xi Jinping. He is now the world's de facto chairman-for-life."
President Donald Trump spoke with lawmakers at the White House on the topic of gun control. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Through the Looking Glass, a House of Horrors
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
01 March 18
 hile America's uncouth and unclothed emperor-wannabe fantasized about how he would rush unarmed at a homicidal shooter, China placed imperial robes on Xi Jinping. He is now the world's de facto chairman-for-life.
Vladimir Putin, meantime, flips America the finger. He is helping Bashar al-Assad rain death on women and children. Pleased to see useful idiots in the White House and Congress, he doubles down on skewing elections.
North Korea, undeterred by empty threats, is shipping chemical-weapon components to Syria, U.N. investigators report. For other crises percolating toward long-term calamity, spin a globe and point pretty much anywhere.
Hans Christian Anderson's beloved tale, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” seems apt for the moment. But more, think Lewis Carroll. America today is loonier than anything he imagined down Alice's rabbit hole.
As the nation recoils in shock from the Florida school massacre, a tone-deaf Donald Trump dined with the devil. He emerged from lunch with NRA leaders to tell us not to worry: “They are on our side.”
You can't make this shit up.
Jared Kushner, Trump's point man on vital foreign affairs, lost his top-secret clearance. He posed with Benjamin Netanyahu, saying America has never been so close to Israel, as the hard-line prime minister is charged with massive corruption.
Donald, Jr., flits about the world cutting shady deals to shore up the family's holdings. Robert Mueller's bloodhounds sniff outside the Oval Office. Rather than help them seek truth, Trump's response is, “No collusion.” It is all about him.
Hope Hicks resigned as communications director after saying she told white lies for the president. Stephen Colbert jumped on that: “Telling lies to white people is what got Trump elected.” Now, he added, the administration is truly hopeless.
The list is long, but China towers above it all. I am no expert on the opaque Middle Kingdom, and neither is anyone with clout in the Trump Administration. I listen to colleagues who have covered Beijing over the decades.
James Pringle, for instance, says nothing can now stop Xi's control of the South China Sea through which $5 trillion in trade transit each year. He sees in Xi a better-packaged Mao Zedong, and he fears a more sophisticated resurgence of the dreaded Red Guards.
Mao could sound reasonable. Remember, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”? Or, “Women hold up half the sky”? But don't forget the big one: “Political power comes out of the barrel of the gun.”
“'Emperor' Xi must be laughing up his sleeve,” Pringle wrote to friends. “He has said what he will do, but people don't want to believe him…Islands to the south of China will all belong to Xi and his cronies and, before we know it, American ships will not be allowed to get past on danger of attack. One waits to see what the Japanese will do. It will come slowly but the kindling for a new war is there. Probably Japan is on the way to nuclear weapons.”
In 1971, Pringle replaced a Reuters correspondent who spent more than two years under house arrest. “During the height of the Cultural Revolution,” he wrote in a 2009 New York Times op-ed, “Red Guards had broken into his home, pinioned his arms behind him, and strangled his pet kitten inches from his eyes.”
During the 1989 uprising at Tiananmen Square, Pringle found Deng Xiaoping eager to let the world know what to expect from violent protests.
“Deng said that to get rich was glorious,” he wrote. “But what happens when dreams of wealth stagnate? For a Communist Party that brought China the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the brutal suppression of 1989, providing a decent life for the ordinary people of China has become essential. Without it, a regime that has so often discredited itself will lose the mandate of heaven.”
Xi has taken China out of poverty. Big time. Everyone on the Forbes 400 for China is a billionaire. A real estate magnate is worth $42.5 billion, and Jack Ma of Alibaba is closing in fast. Life is hard at the bottom, but enough wealth trickles down to mollify the masses. Expect no revolution.
China is working on a hypersonic jet that reaches Mach 7 — 5,371 miles an hour. That could carry passengers, or worse, from Beijing to New York in two hours. It pushes every area, from artificial intelligence to the ocean floor to deep space.
Despite all of China's advances, Pringle told me in an email, echoes from the past are unmistakable. Xi is now called Lingxiu — Leader — an honorific not used since Mao. His portrait is displayed in Beijing where Mao's used to be.
“Unbelievably,” he concluded, “it is all starting again, not just about to start — but already started.”
Meanwhile, back in America, a sizeable percentage of voters seem not to notice, or care, and believe that plainly observable facts are propaganda to discredit America's greatest president since Lincoln, who is already running for reelection.
Two weeks after the Parkland massacre, newscasts focus on little else. Trump's 2016 campaign received more than $30 million from the NRA. His hardcore resists even minimum age limits for buying weapons of mass murder.
And so Trump reminisces aloud about the good old days when if you thought someone might be a deranged threat to society you just lock him away in a mental institution. If he read, he would recognize that as a favorite ploy in the Soviet Union.
Our American rabbit hole is eerie beyond description. But small vignettes suggest how badly our society is now skewed.
The other day at Walgreens, I asked a cashier about large warning signs over the cigarette rack. Anyone under 40 is asked for ID. If he sells to anyone under 18, he told me, the store is heavily fined; he is fired and might even end up in prison.
He wouldn't go to jail. But he was scared, nonetheless. A state bill raising the age limit to 21 — even for e-cigarettes, failed last year, but some towns have done that on their own. Tobacco kills. It is far easier to buy a military-grade arsenal.
Obsessed with ourselves, we ignore real danger until it looms into our line of sight. Then we can only adapt to fait accompli. If we can't do better than a draft-dodger president with hero fantasies, we should probably start learning Chinese.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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How Trump's Saturday Night Massacre Might Start With Jeff Sessions |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Thursday, 01 March 2018 14:59 |
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Chait writes: "President Trump has spent nearly a year attempting to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the crime of following clear professional ethics by recusing himself from an investigation in which he is personally entangled."
Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: Mueller Investigation Examining Trump's
Apparent Efforts to Oust Jeff Sessions in July
How Trump's Saturday Night Massacre Might Start With Jeff Sessions
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
01 March 18
 resident Trump has spent nearly a year attempting to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the crime of following clear professional ethics by recusing himself from an investigation in which he is personally entangled. Trump has not yet followed through. One of the deep comic ironies of this presidency is that a man who built a national reputation as a managerial genius through his ability to memorably declare “You’re fired!” is unable to fire anybody. Instead, he attempts to demoralize his targets into resigning, through a combination of public and private abuse.
But the fact that something has come close to happening repeatedly without happening does not mean it will never happen. White House sources tell Axios that “today feels different than Trump’s usual rages. Sessions’ allies are deeply concerned and Trump is totally fed up with his AG.” Sessions had dinner last night with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, another Trump target, further enraging the president. Trump’s notion that Sessions is a traitor is beginning to filter down to his loyalists. “@USAGSessions must be part of the Bush/Romney/McCain Republican Establishment,” wrote Jerry Falwell Jr. on Twitter. “He probably supported @realDonaldTrump early in campaign to hide who he really is. Or he could just be a coward.” The latest eruption may pass over like a summer storm, or Trump may finally carry through on his extraordinary intimations.
There are many good reasons why Sessions should not be attorney general, but Trump is motivated entirely by bad ones. He believes that the Justice Department should operate for his personal and political benefit, bringing charges against the opposing party while immunizing the president and his allies from prosecution. The attorney general should serve as “my Roy Cohn,” he has said, and has held up what he describes as corrupt cover-ups of illegal behavior by previous attorneys general as his model of proper behavior in the role.
Justice, of course, is supposed to be blind. (Hence the famous statue.) Trump has derided Sessions as “Mr. Magoo,” a coinage that very tellingly transforms Sessions’s insistence on upholding the main ethos of his department, blindness, into an insult. Trump’s periodically renewed determination to replace Sessions is of a piece with his firing of James Comey and as yet unconsummated desire to fire Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein. All these demands are the same demand, that Trump run federal law enforcement as a personal security force.
How would a Sessions firing accomplish this? It would presumably be extremely difficult for the president to implant a loyalist into the position. Republicans have only 51 senators. Any two could join with Democrats to block an unacceptable successor, and there are a number of potential Republican senators — John McCain, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Bob Corker, among others — who would be inclined to do so if Trump nominates the kind of AG he obviously craves.
But Trump might be able to fire Sessions and appoint a temporary replacement. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows the president to install, for 210 days, any official who has been confirmed by the Senate for any position. One name that has been floated for such a maneuver is Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt, who might have the requisite combination of personal corruption and ideological fanaticism to carry out Trump’s bidding.
As Steve Vladeck explained last year, it is legally uncertain whether Trump could make this stick; the Federal Vacancies Reform Act may not apply to a scenario where the head of the agency has been fired. Instead, the Department of Justice might be required to follow its line of succession, and replace a fired Sessions with the next-in-line figure, which happens to be the hated Rosenstein. Trump could definitely do this if Sessions resigns, which might explain why he has gone to such lengths to humiliate Sessions into resigning rather than firing him openly. If Sessions quits, Trump can put any Cabinet-confirmed person into the role. If he has to fire Sessions, then he has a court case on his hands.
An appointment of a Pruitt, or some other Senate-confirmed Trump loyalist, would only last for 210 days. But that might be long enough for a sufficiently craven attorney general to fire independent staff at the Department of Justice and the FBI and quash the Mueller probe. Trump is not subtle about his desires, and what he wants is to replace Mr. Magoo with a justice that is not blind.
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Hope Is Leaving: The Loneliest Man in Washington Just Got Lonelier |
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Thursday, 01 March 2018 14:56 |
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Dovere writes: "The Senate Intelligence Committee has found that a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee leaked to Fox News text messages sent by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), according to a new report."
The former White House communications director Hope Hicks. (photo: AP)
Hope Is Leaving: The Loneliest Man in Washington Just Got Lonelier
By Edward-Isaac Dovere, Politico
01 March 18
With the departure of Hope Hicks, President Trump loses one of his closest aides.
 ven Richard Nixon had Bebe Rebozo.
And by the end, he was still pacing the halls, talking to the paintings.
Donald Trump is close to having no one.
He’s got his literal family—though his son-in-law is reeling from the controversy over his security clearance, there have been enough off moments in public to feed speculation about the state of his relationship with the first lady, and Donald Trump Jr. said in India last week that given all the president is dealing with, he feels “it’s almost trite to call him just to say hello.”
With Hope Hicks leaving the White House, longtime body man Keith Schiller long gone, there is no metaphorical family, no core group of aides who’ve been through the ringer together, come out beaten but bound forever, trusting each other, trusting the president and having him trust them.
Every president gets lonely. It’s a lonely job. But the president who spent his life desperately seeking attention and getting all of it anyone could ever want might be the loneliest one ever.
He’s about to get lonelier.
Hicks, one of the diminishing group of “originals” who’s been with him from the very beginning, isn’t just the fifth White House communications director to go in the last year—compare that to five communications directors in all eight years of Barack Obama’s White House—she’s the latest in a long and never-ending race of people elbowing each other in the face as they head to the door. Hicks’s announcement on Wednesday didn’t even make her the only high-profile aide to leave this week. Josh Raffel, who’d expanded his portfolio from battling for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in the press to a wider strategic role in a strapped West Wing, made known he was leaving on Tuesday.
Through it all, people who know him say, Trump rages, often alone in the residence on the top floor of the White House. It’s easy to forget in another day of new, hourly news cycles, but Trump started his Wednesday by calling his attorney general “DISGRACEFUL!” and getting a rare brushback from Jeff Sessions, the man who used to be his only friend in Washington, insisting that he wasn’t going anywhere and wasn’t much concerned with what the president had to say to him.
He tweets at his TV. He wonders why his chief of staff, John Kelly, keeps him from calling his friends. A circle of old advisers stays in touch, making phone calls to offer advice and a little companionship.
Several people in that informal circle responded to the news of Hicks’ departure by quietly seeding the thinking that Kelly’s about to get dumped himself. Kushner’s been stripped of his access to Top Secret intelligence, which many people worry he was using to improperly access the nation’s crown jewels, but his big concern this week has been a paranoid hunt for who’s leaking secrets about him.
People in and around this White House are well past being worried that no one good is going to want to take Hicks’ job or any of the others. And if you ask people who’ve worked in other White Houses, they’ll tell you that working at 1600 Pennsylvania is draining and overwhelming on the good days.
Trump’s White House isn’t like any other White House, though, and there haven’t been a lot of good days. Everyone who’s there is living with the pressure of the investigations, the secrecy, the backstabbing, knowing that anyone could leak anything at any moment. Then they’re living with the reality of the investigations, which they puff up and pass off in public, but that are always there, lurking in every conversation.
For what? A conservative estimate for Hicks’s legal bills from her nine hours of testimony to Congress on Tuesday puts it at tens of thousands. Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, could get a walk-on at the Emmys, but he still hasn’t landed a job. Kelly, who reportedly helped nudge Hicks out, tells people he knows he hasn’t done enough to bring people in. He still hasn’t named a deputy chief of staff. He hasn’t laid out any of the departures as part of a plan or a clear strategy, as when George W. Bush brought in Tony Snow and Kevin Sullivan to reboot his communications team in his second term in a conscious effort to recruit fresh but known faces. This is fire first, figure out what to do next—well, maybe sometime, maybe never. Chaos over calculation.
A grim joke went around a few Obama staffers in their final days in the West Wing—at some point, there was going to be a fistfight in the Oval Office once Trump took over. It’s a small room, always high pressure. Those personalities, this president, no one knowing each other ... someone was going to take a swing. At least a shove.
So far, that doesn’t seem to have happened—at least not literally.
But compare Trump’s White House to the fraternities for life around other presidents, the kind that brought hundreds to Little Rock in November for a Bill Clinton 25th anniversary celebration, that has many of George W. Bush’s aides still too loyal to the former president to criticize Trump on the record at the risk of embarrassing their old boss, that has Obama’s staff keeping in touch in emails and conference calls about how to protect his legacy and one another.
“You kind of work together like brothers and sisters. You can fight internally, but if somebody tries to fight you from the outside, you all band together,” said Jen Psaki, Obama’s last White House communications director. “That’s not how this White House works.”
Hicks could channel Trump and was the rare person who could tell him what to do in a way he’d listen to. Find another person in the White House who could write on a card “I hear you,” and make him say it to the survivors of a school shooting.
Without her, the pressure will mount on everyone else.
“She was obviously one of the people who was shielding people emotionally from the roller coaster that is Donald Trump,” Psaki said.
People who know Trump worry what all this will do to him. Look at what happened two weeks ago, when staffers convinced him that going golfing in Florida a couple of miles from and just a few days after the Parkland shooting would be in bad taste. He fumed. He got antsy. He got himself into trouble with a weekend Twitter rampage, endorsing conspiracy theories about the White House, calling House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) the “leakin’ monster of no control,” suggesting the FBI’s Russia investigation was responsible for the massacre of 17 high school kids. He was on about Obama again.
During the darkest days in the impeachment crisis, Clinton had people who huddled with him in the White House, all but moved in. Bush always had a circle of friends who talked to him when pretty much no one else wanted to. The Obama maxim from as soon as he launched was “no new friends,” and he mostly kept to it, but the friends he already had stayed close, even when they lingered back in Chicago or moved across the country. He bounced ideas off them. He traded emails with the couple dozen people who could contact him on his special NSA-approved BlackBerry.
Everyone who works for Trump is under investigation. Many members of his family are under investigation. Democrats look like they’re on the rise. Millions of Republican dollars are being spent to hold onto a House district in Pennsylvania Trump won by 20 percent. The problems keep piling up.
Not to worry, said Anthony Scaramucci, who did an 11-day stint as Hicks’ predecessor before Kelly fired him.
“The best is yet to come,” he tweeted Wednesday night.
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s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High reopens its doors, national support for gun control has reached its 
