Jonathan Turley Criticizes Eric Holder for being Politically Motivated

Eric Holder has resigned as attorney general. Like Barack Obama, he has spent his entire term engaged in partisan battles. Jonathan Turley writes that Holder was too political, that he should have paid more attention to the Constitution. This is good advice if you make a living speaking about the Constitution and arguing cases based on Constitutional law. It's not such good advice for someone in the political maelstrom of Washington.

Turley chastises Holder for not bringing charges against Bush and Cheney for violations of international treaties, in particular the Geneva Convention against Torture. Obama already stated that he considered waterboarding to be torture and ordered that it not be used. The Bush administration had withdrawn the documents (written by John Yoo) that justified torture. The goal, therefore, of outlawing torture had already been achieved.

Turley, and many others, wanted more: an indictment and trial of top Bush administration officials for their violation of international law. Turley does not state the major impediment to this plan, namely the high cost in time and treasure to pursue it. Obama understood at the beginning of his first term that he would have only two years to pass his agenda. He had to make some hard choices and chose to work on health care reform.

Obama and Holder could have worked on trying members of the Bush administration for war crimes. The Geneva Convention specifies that the country whose leadership had committed the crimes should try them. But Obama would have required a strong mandate of the people to get a conviction, and he did not have one. The majority of the population still believed that waterboarding was not torture and that Bush had not involved the country in a war of aggression. All the defendants in such a suit would be wealthy men who could afford high-priced lawyers. The trial would take years and the appeals might take decades.

In addition to all the other problems with a war crimes trial, all the lower level employees of the CIA could claim that the government's lawyers had advised them that waterboarding was legal. Only upper-level government attorneys could be indicted for falsely declaring that torture was legal. Obama decided not to indict John Yoo and William Buzbee, the two Justice Department Lawyers who acted as shills for Vice-President Cheney. Their conviction would have led to indictment of many CIA agents, and Obama made it his mission to heal the agency after it had been demoralized by the war.

Turley called for Holder to be "fired" when he claimed that Holder's primary offense was not being ethical enough to follow the Constitution instead of following his boss's orders. Holder did not break any laws, since the actions he took to find whistle-blowers were sanctioned under the Espionage Act of 1917. Turley has arguments about the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, but Holder broke no laws when he subpoenaed journalists' records to find leaks in the Justice Department.

Turley believes that Holder should have ignored the political consequences of such an agenda, as well as the orders of his boss, the President. This would not have been possible for anyone to do, even though Turley believes the Constitution required it. The Constitution has no power to enforce itself; it is a scrap of paper. The executive can ignore it with impunity. His subordinates must obey or resign, but if they resign they lose any opportunity they may have to do good for the community.

Holder may have made mistakes, but they were the kind that only office-holders can make. As a professor and lecturer, Turley can afford to be ethical and condemn others for their lack of ethics. As an office-holder, Holder cannot.

David Koch and ALEC: Dancing With the Devil and the 40-Foot Dump

“David Koch has donated generously and without fanfare to [us] for many years.”--Julie Stewart, President and Founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums

Everyone knows, or should know, that deals with the devil never work out the way you think they will. The same is true for deals made with ultra-rich, ultra-immoral benefactors like David Koch.

David Koch is one of the wealthiest men in the world. His investment interests are mainly in “outlaw industries”--industries that many people believe are harmful in some way: oil, lumber, and commodities trading. His political contributions show that he solidly endorses the one-percent solution, in which the richest one percent continue to hold vast fortunes and fight against paying their fair share of taxes while they force working Americans to pay higher taxes for basic government services.

Koch is well known for giving financial support to Republican politicians and climate deniers. He has recently become more prominent in the media, due partly to attacks by Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and ThinkProgress.org. In the past, he has been a shadowy figure who contributed without fanfare to conservative organizations like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF), Cato Foundation (a libertarian think tank), Republican Governors Association, and Heritage Foundation (formerly a think tank, now a propaganda mill headed by Republican ex-Senator Jim DeMint).

Union supporters know Koch as the man who bankrolled Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's recall election, when Unions and progressives tried to throw Walker from office. Thanks to Koch (who admits making a $700,000 contribution), Walker is still able to pass anti-labor legislation while his subordinates continue to rob veteran organizations and raise campaign funds while drawing state paychecks.

Koch Carbon, one of Koch's privately owned companies, recently dropped a 40-foot pile of petroleum coke (petcoke) on Detroit's waterfront. The company did not ask for a permit or bother to protect the fine powder from the wind. The petcoke accumulated in the homes of nearby residents. One day a storm came up and blew a great cloud of it over to Windsor, Ontario. Koch Carbon promised to move the pile to Ohio after Canadians protested.

Petcoke is a byproduct of the tar sands mined in Alberta. It contains 60% of the carbon from bitumen, the oil source. The Kochs regularly sell the stuff to China as fuel, despite the enormous amount of greenhouse gases it puts into the earth's atmosphere when burned.  

David Koch has said that humans are not the cause of global warming but that global warming will be good for the planet because growing seasons will be longer and the earth will be able to support more people. No climate study agrees with Koch. Most climate scientists believe that large populations will be displaced as currently populous areas become uninhabitable due to extreme heat and drought. When Obama gave a major speech on global warming in 2008, the Koch-funded Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to attack him.

Koch's primary political-advocacy group these days is Americans for Prosperity Foundation. AFPF is the engine that drives the Tea Party, according to memos from the Romney campaign. AFPF lobbied fiercely against health care and financial regulation. In 2012, AFPF spent $3 million on TV ads attacking Obama and another $9 million on ads attacking Obama's health care law.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums(FAMM)

Julie Stewart, President of FAMM, recently wrote an article praising ALEC and its long-time benefactor, David Koch. She said that ALEC and Koch had embraced bold sentencing reform. I don't see how anyone could call the Justice Safety Valve Act (S.B. 619) “bold”. The bill would leave the entire mandatory sentencing law completely untouched, along with its extraordinarily high sentencing guidelines for drug-related crimes. All S.B. 619 would do is give judges some flexibility in sentencing some defendants—but only if the defendants met conditions already written into the law. Furthermore, it would affect only federal laws, not state laws, where 80% of drug cases are tried.

The mandatory sentencing laws are a travesty of justice, as Stewart well knows. They have filled our prisons with non-violent petty criminals while failing to reach the drug kingpins and money-laundering banks that make the really big money and commit the really big crimes. ALEC wrote these laws specifically to benefit private prison corporations, for whom having more prisoners means more profits.  

Recently, Attorney General Holder gutted the federal version of those laws by instructing his agents not to list the amounts of drugs recovered in their reports. By this single act, Holder returned all the sentencing power to judges. Holder is trying to correct injustice; Koch is trying to preserve it.

While David Koch has been funding FAMM, he has also been funding ALEC, the right-wing organization that wrote state and federal mandatory sentencing laws in the first place. Those laws have failed utterly to win the war on drugs, but ALEC would like to keep them in place with just a few cosmetic changes. This approach is nonsense. The laws should be repealed and those inmates who were sentenced under them should have their sentences reviewed and reduced, or possibly revoked.

ALEC strongly supports the right of vigilante gunmen to carry arms and murder innocent people--ALEC wrote the “stand your ground” laws. Yet ALEC is also responsible for adding five years or more to the sentence of any non-violent drug offender if there is a gun found in their home. To ALEC and its supporters, gun ownership is an inviolable constitutional right—unless the gun owner has a small amount of marijuana in his pocket.

The racist stench of these laws is nauseating. Two laws, one for the white population, another for the brown population; whites can carry guns, African-Americans can't carry a matchbox of marijuana. ALEC and its oh-so-genial backer, David Koch, approve this division of society into unequal parts. Stewart should not be supporting this bill. She should be advocating repeal of this odious law. But she can't, because she's funded by David Koch, and he tells her what to do now.

David Koch is a likeable man. The devil is always likeable, otherwise he couldn't do his job. But when you shake hands with David Koch, you've shaken hands with the devil.

Three straws in the wind

Barack Obama swept into the Presidency with the promise of hope and change.

Change was certainly long overdue. George Bush and his supporters preached intolerance of anyone whose views were out of step with their own. Corporate America moved millions of jobs overseas. Bush sent a man who despised international law to the United Nations as his ambassador. Bush started two new wars to satisfy the militarists and the war profiteers. Bush deregulated the financial industry and precipitated the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Sometimes, however, a flame burns brightest just before it burns out. Perhaps the suffering of our fellow Americans under the corporate boot is about to end.

The American cultural revolution occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Large numbers of people began to question the received culture of the 1950s. They questioned the U.S. military role in the world. They questioned whether the heterosexual marriage should be the only accepted form of intimacy. They questioned whether marijuana, a relatively harmless drug, should be outlawed while more harmful drugs, such as alcohol, were tolerated by society. They questioned why radio stations played Sinatra and Peggy Lee instead of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Worst of all, from the standpoint of traditional society, they questioned why anyone should go hungry in a country where farmers were paid not to grow food.

The counterculture, as it came to be called, took hold of the imagination of the young. People stopped looking to New York fashion designers for clothes and instead decorated their own clothes with beads and brightly colored thread. The counterculture had its own heroes, like Elvis and John Lennon, Dylan and Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Those of us who welcomed the counterculture believed that the country had turned the corner. We believed the elite would stop discriminating against African Americans and women, since discrimination was now against the law, or at least against the Constitution.

The counterculture forced the U.S. to end the Vietnam War. Under their influence, the government passed Civil Rights and Voting Rights. The counterculture believed that the establishment would just step aside and let the rest of us start living a better life based in liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

Then something completely predictable happened. Traditional society fought back. Ronald Reagan, who had been a pitch man for General Electric in the 1950s, led them. George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to stop integration in 1963. Reagan called out the national guard to stop protesters in Berkeley in 1969. George Wallace was stopped by President Kennedy, who took over command of the National Guard, and integration proceeded peacefully, for the moment. Reagan called out the Sheriff's deputies of Alameda County and told them to use whatever means necessary to stop a peaceful protest of college students and Berkeley residents. This time President Richard Nixon failed to take over the National Guard and violence ensued.

Reagan became extremely popular with those who hated college students, integrationists, and peace lovers. He was elected President in 1980 and started up the American war machine again. He appointed Supreme Court Judges who believed that African Americans were a privileged special interest group that needed to be suppressed. The world grew bloodier as the U.S. ignored U.N. agreements and sent troops to Grenada, aided insurgents in Afghanistan and Honduras, and bombed Libya.

Reagan became the first president since World War II to start a war to raise his political popularity. Republican President G. W. Bush used the same tactic. Such wars violate customary international law.

Compounding the social and foreign policy problems with G. W. Bush's term, the economy collapsed in 2007.

Progressives were disappointed with Obama's performance during his first term, although they had to admit his failures were not entirely his own fault. Now, however, a new wind is blowing through Washington and the rest of the country. Obama has contributed by ordering his ICE agents to stop deporting “dreamers”, immigrants whose parents brought them here illegally. 

Obama apparently is no longer concerned about what Republicans think of his policies, though he could have gone further and extended the same privileges to all immigrants. He could also transfer some of the funds for “securing our borders” to other areas, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Consumer Protection Agency. But any sign of movement is better than none.

Attorney General Stephen Holder has also been a disappointment to progressives, primarily for failing to prosecute Wall Street for abuses that sent the economy into a tail spin. But Holder, too, showed signs of progressivism when he ordered federal officers not to list the amounts of drugs on indictments against drug offenders. These amounts trigger automatic sentencing guidelines that have turned the American prison system into a Gulag of Soviet proportions. Holder has always known that drug laws are aimed squarely at African American young men, because those are the people who get sent to prison.

Holder's action, if continued by his successors, could end the War on Drugs altogether. For decades, a prison industry has grown up relying on the War on Drugs to fill its cells. Prison Guards have joined together in powerful unions with but one goal, to keep the prisons full and preserve their well-paying jobs. Police departments have spent time and money chasing drug offenders because they could seize the assets of drug offenders. The departments have grown wealthy, with ever fancier helicopters and planes and drug detecting equipment. The people who profit from prisons and drug busts spend millions influencing elections.

This one action of Holder's may break the cycle of corruption. Without prisoners, there will be no need for prisons. Prison Guards will have to find other work. Policemen can go back investigating political corruption and corporate crime. The War on Drugs will end.

Finally, from New York comes the astonishing tale of a judge who said "no!". Judge Schira Scheindlin ruled that NYC's stop-and-frisk rules are unconstitutional because they use racial profiling to target African Americans and Latinos. NYC Mayor Bloomberg howled out loud about this ruling, claiming the Judge “knows nothing” about law enforcement. Scheindlin issued a 192-page opinion in Floyd v. City of New York that proves she knows a great deal about racial profiling and police harassment.

Scheindlin's conclusions come as no surprise to the black and brown residents of NYC, who have complained loudly about being stopped for no reason. This constant harassment made some of them afraid to leave their houses to go to the store or to work. The fear they felt is the fear inspired by a police state, where justice has become comatose by command of the government. This is the same fear that Trayvon Martin felt when he was chased by a neighborhood watchman who assumed, mistakenly and with bloody consequences, that Martin was up to no good. What is amazing to the black and brown residents subjected to Bloomberg's reign of terror is that an honest federal judge agrees with them.

So here they are, three straws in the wind. These actions are not subject to review by our completely broken Congress, nor can these three courageous people, Obama, Holder, and Scheindlin, be subjected to ridicule by a barrage of defamatory campaign ads, because none of them needs to run for office. What remains to be seen is whether these straws can predict which way the wind blows. We should all hope that they do.