Federalist 70 and presidential secrecy

The NSA surveillance (issue? - can this be called a scandal?) along with the aggressive investigations of leakers, whistleblowers and the journalists who feed off them raises questions about secrecy, and what should and should not be revealed, not so much by the government - but specifically by the president.

Which takes us to the reasons why the executive branch is designed as it is - with one person at its top. A handful of Federalist Papers describe the reasons why it has this unitary design, the most important is generally held to be #70. In it Hamilton argues that part of the justification is that one person can keep a secret better than a multitude:

That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.

Worth perusing soon enough.

Secret Codes and the Founding Fathers

This could a fun read.

A History of the U.S. Tax System

I just stumbled across this.

CQ Update on Congress 6-8-10

Something to chew on today. Congressional Quarterly provides daily updates on major activity in Congress. This gives us some context for class discussion. You can sign up for these as well if you go to their site.

Today in Washington

The House considers minor bills and resolutions under suspension of the rules.

The Senate begins debate on a package extending various tax breaks and unemployment benefits, along with other expired programs.

The President meets with advisers; visits a Wheaton, Md., senior citizens’ center to tout improved Medicare drug benefits in a tele-town hall session with groups around the country; meets with Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D.; hosts congressional picnic dinner at the White House.

In Washington, the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis holds its conference and awards dinner, with appearances by Annie Lennox; Ashley Judd, Board of Directors, PSI; Michel Sidibe, Executive Director, UNAIDS. Keynote address by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. 7 p.m., Renaissance Washington Hotel, 999 9th St. NW.

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Top Stories

White House Orders Agencies To Pinpoint Least Important Programs The White House on Tuesday instructed federal agencies to compile a list of their least important programs that add up to at least five percent of their budgets as the administration begins preparing next year's budget. [Read More]

House Chairman Defends Unwanted Jet Engine as Job Creator The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee upped the ante Tuesday in the debate over an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter by tying the program to the need to create more jobs. [Read More]
Feinstein Calls for Inquiry Into Israeli Raid on Aid Flotilla In a significant departure from most colleagues, Sen. Dianne Feinstein called Tuesday for an "impartial inquiry" into the Israeli commando raid on a humanitarian flotilla carrying aid to the Gaza Strip that left nine activists dead, including one American. [Read More]

Health Science Experts Urge Stronger Food Safety Regulation The Food and Drug Administration needs more resources and a more focused, risk-based approach to safeguarding the nation's food supply, according to a report released Tuesday. [Read More]

Senate Democrats Seek To Restore Medicaid Funds, Hit Oil Industry Harder Senate Democrats unveiled their proposed changes to a tax and benefits bill on Tuesday and urged quick passage of the measure, which now carries a price tag of about $140.2 billion and would add about $77.5 billion to the federal deficit. [Read More]

Predicting the Behavior of Justices

it seems to be getting easier.

Implementing Health Care Reform

Details from the New York Times.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Sues Goldman-Sachs

The company is accused of packaging mortgage bonds they thought were likely to fail into a single portfolio, selling it to investors, and then betting against the portfolio. When the housing market collapsed, the investors lost money, but the company did very very well.

This is fraud.

More from the Huffington Post. They end their story by wondering whether the SEC will in fact punish the company. The agency looked the other way while it was going on, might it still? Has the SEC been captured by the financial industry?

For more info: Financial Regulatory Reform.

Net Neutrality Rules Struck Down

But an appellate court, so the SC has yet to rule. This limits the jurisdiction of the FCC, so file it under checks and balances.

Sunset Committee Set

From the Texas Tribune.

Texas Speaker Joe Straus has named members of the Texas Sunset Committee for 2010.

Texas Sunset Commission.

The DARPA Arm

While putting notes together for this week's 2302 review of contemporary executive branch issues (I want to look at health care) I stumbled across a feature on the VA Health Administration's website about the "Darpa Arm," an advanced prosthetic arm funded and developed by the agency.

Prosthetic research has been spurred by an unexpected result of improved battlefield medical care. Previously, soldiers with severe injuries which did not cause immediate death would often die of blood loss or infections. This is less the case, but it means that more soldiers survive with lost limbs. This can obviously create problems with their ability to fit back into society. Advanced research in prosthetics could make this transition easier.

I thought it might be appropriate to mention this agency since many of the current technological items we enjoy today (including the internet) originally developed as DARPA projects. Current research, which in addition to prosthetics includes robotics, advanced batteries and alternative energy, will certainly provide the basis for future mass market products.

- Website: DARPA.
- Wikipedia: DARPA.
- Wikipedia: DARPA Grand Challenge.
- VA Research Currents.
- WAPO Story.

The EPA and GreenHouse Gas Regulations

Not all policy is set by Congress. Once an executive agency is established, it has discretion -- within limits ultimately defined by the Supreme Court -- to set policy as well. Sometimes it does so when Congress refuses to act on a particular issue. Such seems to be the case with proposals to regulate greenhouse gases.

- NYT story.
- EPA proposes curbs on industrial greenhouse gases -- latimes.com
- Website: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- Wikipedia: EPA.
- Wikipedia: Rulemaking.


Agencies are granted rulemaking authority which gives them a degree of discretion in how they implement the law passed by Congress and given to them to implement. Their doing so is actually advantageous to members of Congress because it allows them to avoid making unpopular, but potentially necessary, decisions.

The Council of Economic Advisers

For 2302, some info about presidential advising as we wade into the executive branch:

- Measures may have staved off collapse
- 'Mr. President, This Is Your Holy S*** Moment'
- How to spin the stimulus

Judicial Vacancies in Texas

Charles Kuffner updates us on a conflict between the Obama White House and our Texas Senators regarding two federal judicial vacancies in the state:

As we know, there are vacancies in the US Attorney's offices in the Southern and Western district offices in Texas, which will be filled by Presidential appointment. Normally, when the President is of one party and both of a given state's Senators are of the other party, "the primary role in recommending candidates for district court judgeships is assumed by officials in the state who are of the President's party." That's from a report last year by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. Except that as Steve Benen noted, Texas' Republican Senators have refused to honor this practice, and instead have insisted on sending to Obama candidates who have been screened by the committee he and Hutchison have always used for making nominations -- a committee he admits is "heavily stacked with Republican lawyers." Because, you know, it's different when Democrats are in charge.

Read on ....

What Can a President Really Do?

Charlie Cook says, not as much as you think, and its best to think small. The problem is that there's lots that needs doing:

A breathtaking array of problems will immediately demand the attention of the next president.

One of the smartest guys in Washington is political economist Tom Gallagher, who monitors the intersection of economics, policy, and politics for the ISI Group, a Wall Street advisory firm. On the subject of budget deficits,

Gallagher is fond of quoting the late economist Herb Stein, who said that the problem isn't that wolves are at the door, it's that termites are in the foundation. Some of our country's problems are termites, not wolves. Unfortunately, as Gallagher warns, our system is geared more toward dealing with wolves.

Many of the problems gnawing away at the United States are rooted in our "$53 trillion 'real' national debt," the term coined by former Commerce Secretary Peter Peterson and former Comptroller General David Walker to describe our actual national debt, including unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. Exacerbating these problems is a gradually retiring Baby Boom Generation twice the size of the current senior population. The crush of debt being passed on to future taxpayers is unconscionable, prompting Peterson, now chairman of the Blackstone Group, to hire Walker and commit $1 billion of his fortune to raising public awareness and prodding policy makers to find solutions.

Beyond Medicare, the constellation of health care problems includes funding Medicaid, covering the uninsured, and dealing with rising insurance costs that are increasingly hurting U.S. competitiveness.

Then there is energy--its cost and availability, and the implications of our dependence on foreign oil. Closely related is the need to shift to renewable-energy sources that don't exacerbate global warming or ravage the environment.

Both political parties are playing ostrich. Many Democrats are dragging their feet on responsible offshore drilling and on nuclear power. Republicans are resisting tougher fuel-efficiency standards and, in some cases, development of alternative-energy sources. Until we acknowledge that the solution to our energy problems is all of the above, we are unlikely to get out of the current mess.

Next on the list are the mounting U.S. trade imbalance, our lack of competitiveness, and our dependence on foreign investment to prop up our credit markets. Even as our global interdependence grows, schools continue to turn out too many students who are ill-equipped to compete in the international economy. And don't forget the entrenched underclass, enslaved in a cycle of poverty from which few escape, and immigration policies that bar some of the brightest minds in the world from American graduate schools.

This month's one-year anniversary of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis is a reminder of our national infrastructure crisis. In a recent meeting with editors and reporters at National Journal, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that his city's officials are afraid to shut off the water to allow close inspection of some fragile pipes because the water pressure might be the only thing keeping them from collapsing.

The list of national woes wouldn't be complete without mentioning the home mortgage debacle and the related credit crisis. These problems--which will take years to fix--are choking off the ability of businesses large and small to obtain credit to expand or hire workers, and they are making it difficult for people to buy homes and cars. When a credit-driven economy reduces access to credit, that is a real crisis.

A common denominator of many of these problems is government revenue, with the day growing closer when we will need to shift to some form of consumption tax, perhaps as a replacement for the personal and corporate income-tax structure. A consumption tax is a more efficient method of tax collection, and it would boost our trade competitiveness.

Finally, in the area of foreign policy, the United States faces threats posed by terrorism, a nuclear-armed Iran, and an increasingly belligerent Russia.

Clearly, a host of complex challenges will demand our next chief executive's time. But another of the really smart folks in Washington, ViaNovo lobbyist and policy strategist Billy Moore, argues, "History shows that new presidents can usually only accomplish three or four big things in their first term, and that reaching beyond this number results in fewer, not more, achievements."

So, John McCain and Barack Obama, don't say we didn't warn you.

Pardons: Is It's Necessary to Find Out the Truth About Torture?

Stuart Taylor, writing for Newsweek says so:

President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers. (It would be unseemly for Bush to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney or himself, but the next president wouldn't allow them to be prosecuted anyway—galling as that may be to critics.) The reason for pardons is simple: what this country needs most is a full and true accounting of what took place. The incoming president should convene a truth commission, with subpoena power, to explore every possible misdeed and derive lessons from it. But this should not be a criminal investigation, which would only force officials to hire lawyers and batten down the hatches.

Pardons would further a truth commission's most important goals: to uncover all important facts, identify innocent victims to be compensated, foster a serious conversation about what U.S. interrogation rules should be, recommend legal reforms, pave the way for appropriate apologies and restore America's good name. The goals should not include wrecking the lives of men and women who made grievous mistakes while doing dirty work—work they had been advised by administration lawyers was legal, and which they believed was necessary to prevent terrorist mass murder.

A criminal investigation would only hinder efforts to determine the truth, and preclude any apologies. It would spur those who know the most to take the Fifth. Any prosecutions would also touch off years of partisan warfare. The lesson for occupants of the toughest government jobs—if the next administration could find people willing to fill them—would be that saving innocent lives is less important than covering their posteriors. Any hope of a civil conversation about lessons we need to learn would be dead.

The need for truth outweighs the prosecution of criminal behavior. Ring true? Or does this simply allow an out for any administration to claim it is above the law and do as it chooses when in charge?

Trouble to Come?

It may well be that lending isn't just tight, it's non existent:

The desperate worry over the health of huge financial institutions with country cousin names — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — reflects a reality that has reshaped major spheres of American life: the government has in recent months taken on an increasingly dominant role in assuring that Americans can buy a home or attend college.

Much of the private money that once surged into the mortgage industry has fled in a panicked horde, leaving most of the responsibility for financing American homes to the government-sponsored Fannie and Freddie.

Two years ago, when commercial banks were still jostling for fatter slices of the housing market, the share of outstanding mortgages Fannie and Freddie owned and guaranteed dipped below 40 percent, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Moody’s Economy.com. By the first three months of this year, Fannie and Freddie were buying more than two-thirds of all new residential mortgages.

A similar trend is playing out in the realm of student loans. As commercial banks concluded that the business of lending to college students was no longer quite so profitable, the Bush administration promised in May to buy their federally guaranteed student loans, giving the banks capital to continue lending.

In short, in a nation that holds itself up as a citadel of free enterprise, the government has transformed from a reliable guarantor into effectively the only lender for millions of Americans engaged in the largest transactions of their lives.

Emails and History

Technology may be unkind to history, or our ability to hold onto it. From an NYT editorial:

After watching wholesale lots of the Bush administration’s most important e-mails go mysteriously missing, Congress is trying to legislate against any further damage to history. The secrecy-obsessed White House is, of course, threatening a veto — one more effort to deny Americans their rightful access to the truth about how their leaders govern or misgovern.

The House approved a measure last week that would require the National Archives to issue stronger standards for preserving e-mails and to aggressively inspect whether an administration is in compliance. The Archives needs spine stiffening. Congressional investigators found that its staff backed off from inspections of e-mail storage after the Bush administration took office.

We fear we may never find out all that has gone missing in this administration, although we urge Congressional investigators to keep trying. What we do know is that the Bush gaps of missing e-mails run into hundreds of thousands during some of the most sensitive political moments. Key gaps coincide with the lead-up to the Iraq war — and the White House’s manipulation of intelligence — as well as the destruction of videotapes of C.I.A. interrogations and the outing of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

Missing e-mails include entire blank days at the offices of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Also mysteriously wiped from the record are e-mails from Karl Rove, the president’s political guru, and dozens of other White House workers who improperly conducted government business on Republican Party e-mail accounts. The White House now claims that nothing has been lost, though officials previously acknowledged large-scale purging, claiming they were accidental.

An administration with nothing to fear from the truth would be in the forefront of protecting the historical record. The Senate must stand with the House and ensure that at least future administrations are stopped from doing wholesale damage to history.

I've always thought that one of the great unspoken tragedies of Watergate was the fact that no future president--in his or her right mind--would ever tape record what happened in the Oval Office. We know things about the internal workings of the Johnson and Nixon White House that we will never know about any other because no one wants that type of evidence on hand.

Dont Speak Truth to Power

Here is a link to the Esquire story that led to the resignation of the U.S. Central Command, Admiral William Fox. While discussing the executive branch we touched on the conflict that exists between the White House and the civil service. This is an example.

SOTUS 2008

Before too much time elapses, here are links to comments on the President's Final State of the Union Speech.

Q & A's from the Washington Post.
The Concord Monitor was not Impressed.
Democrats Liked it, says the NYT.
A Post Mortem from The Atlantic.

Executive Action on the Economy

After watching stocks tank around the world yesterday, while the markets took a day off due to MLK Day, the Federal Reserve attempted to to avert a similar downturn by drastically cutting interest rates 3/4 of a point.

This is what a singular exectuive is designed to do, respond quickly to crises. Recall that the president has also stated that he wants to create tax incentives, but this requires congressional approval which takes time. The question now is whether the rate cut will make a difference.