Empty Pockets, Angry Minds - New York TimesFebruary 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Empty Pockets, Angry Minds
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
MUMBAI, India
I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it.
To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity — and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced.
Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet — just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being — because your skin is so thin.
India is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, but the cartoon protests here, unlike those in Pakistan, have been largely peaceful. One reason for the difference is surely that Indian Muslims are empowered and live in a flourishing democracy. India's richest man is a Muslim software entrepreneur. But so many young Arabs and Muslims live in nations that have deprived them of any chance to realize their full potential.
The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that "the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world": 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.
While G.D.P. in the Middle East-North Africa region registered an annual increase of 5.5 percent from 1993 to 2003, productivity, the measure of how efficiently these resources were used, increased by only about 0.1 percent annually — better than only one region, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Arab world is the only area in the world where productivity did not increase with G.D.P. growth. That's because so much of the G.D.P. growth in this region was driven by oil revenues, not by educating workers to do new things with new technologies.
Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world — particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry — are not keeping pace.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum:
"Pakistan's public (and all but a handful of private) universities are intellectual rubble, their degrees of little consequence. ... According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistanis have succeeded in registering only eight patents internationally in 57 years. ...
"[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science — measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes — are marginal. ... The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed."
No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity. And no wonder backward religious leaders and dictators in places like Syria and Iran — who have miserably failed their youth — are so quick to turn their young people's anger against an insulting cartoon and away from themselves and the rot they have wrought.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Friday, February 24, 2006
Thursday, February 23, 2006
CBS 46 Atlanta - John Lewis: Unfinished Business
CBS 46 Atlanta - John Lewis: Unfinished BusinessJohn Lewis: Unfinished Business
Feb 20, 2006, 04:14 PM
ATLANTA (AP) -- Rep. John Lewis said he will officially launch his bid on Monday for an 11th term in Congress, kicking off his campaign on his birthday.
Lewis, who turns 66 on Monday, is a veteran civil rights activist and the longest-serving of Georgia's 13 House members. He has recently been pushing for congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Acts of 1965.
"We must make this world a little more peaceful and a little more orderly and re-establish America with a greater sense of respect and credibility," said Lewis, a Democrat.
State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, his longtime friend, said Lewis' announcement wasn't a surprise and that he should clearly be the favorite in the upcoming race.
"I've always thought he would stay until he could no longer serve. He's still relatively young," Brooks said.
Lewis served as an Atlanta City Council member until he was elected to Congress in 1986. He was a prominent participant in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965.
Friday, February 10, 2006
White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm - New York Times
White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm - New York TimesFebruary 10, 2006
The Inquiry
White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires."
Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.
The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.
"The real story is with this new structure," he said. "Why weren't more things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to do what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?"
Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had notified Mr. Brown that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the Homeland Security Department did with that information, or when the White House was told.
Missteps at All Levels
It has been known since the earliest days of the storm that all levels of government — from the White House to the Department of Homeland Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall — were unprepared, uncommunicative and phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination of the latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the key players involved in the important turning points: what they said, what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be written up in the committees' investigative reports.
Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were these:
¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.
¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.
¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no plans in place to do any of this."
¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.
¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.
¶Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.
"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."
One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.
Eyewitness to Devastation
As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in October, there was no mistaking what had happened: large sections of the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of the scene with a small camera.
"The situation is only going to get worse," he said he warned Mr. Brown, then the FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour.
"Thank you," he said Mr. Brown replied. "I am now going to call the White House."
Citing restrictions placed on him by his lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that call. White House aides have urged administration officials not to discuss any conversations with the president or his top advisors and declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush's senior advisors.
But investigators have found the e-mail message referring to Mr. Bahamonde's helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary of Mr. Bahamonde's observations that was issued at 10:30 p.m. and an 11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of homeland security. Each message describes in detail the extensive flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee collapse.
Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff stated in the days after the storm that the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the catastrophe that some had feared.
"The hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning the levee broke and the water started to flood into New Orleans," Mr. Chertoff said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sept. 4, the weekend after the hurricane hit.
Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were referring to official confirmation that the levee had broken, which they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday about whether a breach had occurred and noted that they were not alone in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe.
Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours," he said.
But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Mr. Brown's authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to the disaster may have been slowed as a result.
"Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Ms. Collins said in an interview.
Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday, he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on helicopter tours of the damage.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, said the government confusion reminded him of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Information was in different places, in that case prior to the attack," Mr. Lieberman said, "and it wasn't reaching the key decision makers in a coordinated way for them to take action."
Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr. Chertoff had been "intensely involved in monitoring the storm" he had not actually been told about the report of the levee breach until Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta.
"No one is satisfied with the response in the early days," Mr. Knocke said.
But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr. Chertoff was disengaged.
"He was not informed of it," Mr. Knocke said. "It is certainly a breakdown. And through an after-action process, that is something we will address."
The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars.
Focus on Highway Plan
Mr. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal government.
In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost in hospitals and nursing homes.
One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department official told investigators.
Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a water rescue effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his small team spent much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who themselves were trapped by rising water.
The investigators also determined that the federal Department of Transportation was not asked until Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees sat there for perhaps two more days longer than necessary.
Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the Department of Defense. It was not until the middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice.
"In hindsight I should have done it right then," Mr. Brown told the House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.
The Inquiry
White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires."
Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.
The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.
"The real story is with this new structure," he said. "Why weren't more things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to do what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?"
Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had notified Mr. Brown that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the Homeland Security Department did with that information, or when the White House was told.
Missteps at All Levels
It has been known since the earliest days of the storm that all levels of government — from the White House to the Department of Homeland Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall — were unprepared, uncommunicative and phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination of the latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the key players involved in the important turning points: what they said, what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be written up in the committees' investigative reports.
Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were these:
¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.
¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.
¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no plans in place to do any of this."
¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.
¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.
¶Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.
"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."
One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.
Eyewitness to Devastation
As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in October, there was no mistaking what had happened: large sections of the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of the scene with a small camera.
"The situation is only going to get worse," he said he warned Mr. Brown, then the FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour.
"Thank you," he said Mr. Brown replied. "I am now going to call the White House."
Citing restrictions placed on him by his lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that call. White House aides have urged administration officials not to discuss any conversations with the president or his top advisors and declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush's senior advisors.
But investigators have found the e-mail message referring to Mr. Bahamonde's helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary of Mr. Bahamonde's observations that was issued at 10:30 p.m. and an 11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of homeland security. Each message describes in detail the extensive flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee collapse.
Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff stated in the days after the storm that the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the catastrophe that some had feared.
"The hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning the levee broke and the water started to flood into New Orleans," Mr. Chertoff said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sept. 4, the weekend after the hurricane hit.
Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were referring to official confirmation that the levee had broken, which they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday about whether a breach had occurred and noted that they were not alone in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe.
Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours," he said.
But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Mr. Brown's authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to the disaster may have been slowed as a result.
"Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Ms. Collins said in an interview.
Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday, he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on helicopter tours of the damage.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, said the government confusion reminded him of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Information was in different places, in that case prior to the attack," Mr. Lieberman said, "and it wasn't reaching the key decision makers in a coordinated way for them to take action."
Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr. Chertoff had been "intensely involved in monitoring the storm" he had not actually been told about the report of the levee breach until Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta.
"No one is satisfied with the response in the early days," Mr. Knocke said.
But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr. Chertoff was disengaged.
"He was not informed of it," Mr. Knocke said. "It is certainly a breakdown. And through an after-action process, that is something we will address."
The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars.
Focus on Highway Plan
Mr. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal government.
In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost in hospitals and nursing homes.
One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department official told investigators.
Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a water rescue effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his small team spent much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who themselves were trapped by rising water.
The investigators also determined that the federal Department of Transportation was not asked until Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees sat there for perhaps two more days longer than necessary.
Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the Department of Defense. It was not until the middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice.
"In hindsight I should have done it right then," Mr. Brown told the House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
CBS 46 Atlanta - Atlantans Pay Their Respects to Coretta Scott King
CBS 46 Atlanta - Atlantans Pay Their Respects to Coretta Scott KingAtlantans Pay Their Respects to Coretta Scott King
Feb 4, 2006, 05:40 PM
Dexter King, Martin Luther King III, Yolanda King, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, Georgia first lady Mary Perdue and Gov. Sonny Perdue look on as the casket of Coretta Scott King is carried up the steps of the Capitol. (AP photo)
Dexter King, Martin Luther King III, Yolanda King, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, Georgia first lady Mary Perdue and Gov. Sonny Perdue look on as the casket of Coretta Scott King is carried up the steps of the Capitol. (AP photo)
ATLANTA (AP) -- 14-hundred people lined up outside the state Capitol to pay their respects to Coretta Scott King.
Jeenie Coston, a 48-year-old from Marietta, says she waited for more than five hours for her chance to pay tribute to the first woman and the first black person to lie in honor at the Capitol's Rotunda.
Coston says she was six years old when Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated and still remembers it.
She says if the Kings had not done what they did, she does not know where the civil rights movement would be today.
Some people threw roses at King's casket as it made its way through Atlanta's streets this morning in a horse-drawn carriage. Others shared tissue to blot their tears. One man held a portrait of Martin Luther King.
Fifty-year-old Chris Thomas flew down from Connecticut with a friend to pay his respects.
Thomas says he want to show his gratitude to a woman who was so important for the peace movement.
Feb 4, 2006, 05:40 PM
Dexter King, Martin Luther King III, Yolanda King, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, Georgia first lady Mary Perdue and Gov. Sonny Perdue look on as the casket of Coretta Scott King is carried up the steps of the Capitol. (AP photo)
Dexter King, Martin Luther King III, Yolanda King, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, Georgia first lady Mary Perdue and Gov. Sonny Perdue look on as the casket of Coretta Scott King is carried up the steps of the Capitol. (AP photo)
ATLANTA (AP) -- 14-hundred people lined up outside the state Capitol to pay their respects to Coretta Scott King.
Jeenie Coston, a 48-year-old from Marietta, says she waited for more than five hours for her chance to pay tribute to the first woman and the first black person to lie in honor at the Capitol's Rotunda.
Coston says she was six years old when Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated and still remembers it.
She says if the Kings had not done what they did, she does not know where the civil rights movement would be today.
Some people threw roses at King's casket as it made its way through Atlanta's streets this morning in a horse-drawn carriage. Others shared tissue to blot their tears. One man held a portrait of Martin Luther King.
Fifty-year-old Chris Thomas flew down from Connecticut with a friend to pay his respects.
Thomas says he want to show his gratitude to a woman who was so important for the peace movement.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying - New York Times
Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying - New York TimesFebruary 2, 2006
Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush's domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.
The Justice Department is balking at the request so far, administration officials said, arguing that the legal opinions would add little to the public debate because the administration has already laid out its legal defense at length in several public settings.
But the legality of the program is known to have produced serious concerns within the Justice Department in 2004, at a time when one of the legal opinions was drafted. Democrats say they want to review the internal opinions to assess how legal thinking on the program evolved and whether lawyers in the department saw any concrete limits to the president's powers in fighting terrorism.
With the committee scheduled to hold the first public hearing on the eavesdropping program on Monday, the Justice Department's stance could provoke another clash between Congress and the executive branch over access to classified internal documents. The administration has already drawn fire from Democrats in the last week for refusing to release internal documents on Hurricane Katrina as well as material related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Several Democrats and at least one Republican have pressed the Justice Department in recent days to give them access, even in a closed setting, to the internal documents that formed the legal foundation of the surveillance program. But when asked whether the classified legal opinions would be made available to Congress, a senior Justice Department official said Wednesday, "I don't think they're coming out."
The official said the administration's legal arguments had already been aired, most prominently in a 42-page "white paper" issued last month. "Everything that's in those memos was in the white paper," said the official, who, like other administration and Congressional officials, was granted anonymity because classified material was involved.
While the administration has spent much of the last two weeks defending the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, the Judiciary Committee session will be the first Congressional hearing on it. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the panel, said Wednesday that he had "a lot of questions" the administration had not yet adequately answered about the program's legal rationale.
Mr. Specter would not address the committee's request for the classified legal opinions, except to say, "that's not a closed matter — we're still working on that."
Several Democrats on the panel have made formal requests for the legal opinions, including Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.
In the interview, Mr. Specter said that he wanted a fuller explanation as to how the Justice Department asserts that the eavesdropping operation does not conflict with the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set strict and "exclusive" guidelines for intelligence wiretaps.
The operation was approved by President Bush, to allow the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps on Americans' international communications without a court warrant. Mr. Specter said his view was that the operation "violates FISA — there's no doubt about that."
He also questioned why the administration did not go to Congress or the intelligence court to seek changes in the process before moving ahead on its own with the classified program after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Representative Jane Harman, the California Democrat who was one of the few members of the Congress briefed on the operation, echoed that same theme in a letter sent Wednesday to President Bush.
She said in the letter that with changes made to the foreign intelligence law after the Sept. 11 attacks, the eavesdropping operations of the N.S.A. "can and should" be covered by court-approved warrants, "without circumventing" the process.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will be the lone witness at next week's hearing, and his aides said he was entering it with confidence about the program's legal footing, based on both the president's inherent constitutional authority and a Congressional authorization after the Sept. 11 attacks to use military force against terrorists. But both Republicans and Democrats said Wednesday that they planned to question Mr. Gonzales about those assertions.
While the administration has laid out its legal defense repeatedly in the last two weeks, the formal legal opinions developed at the Justice Department to justify the program remain classified. The administration has refused even to publicly acknowledge the existence of the memorandums, but The New York Times has reported that two sets of legal opinions by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel asserted the president's broad power to order wiretaps without warrants in protecting national security.
The first Justice Department opinion is thought to have been written in late 2001 or early 2002 by John Yoo, a strong proponent of expanded presidential powers in wartime. The second opinion, officials said, was drafted by Jack Goldsmith, another senior department official who later left to teach at Harvard. It came in 2004 at a time some senior officials at the Justice Department were voicing concerns about the program's legal foundation and refusing to sign off on its reauthorization.
Those concerns led in part to the suspension of the surveillance program for several months and also appear to have led Mr. Goldsmith and other Justice Department lawyers to revisit the question of its legal underpinnings in order to satisfy those concerns.
Members of the Judiciary Committee have sought access to the memorandums, officials said. Some Democrats speculate that the classified memos may contain far-reaching and potentially explosive legal theories similar to those advocated by Mr. Yoo and others, and later disavowed by the Justice Department, regarding policies on torture.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Mr. Gonzales, Mrs. Feinstein said the legal opinions and other internal documents were needed for Congress to assess whether the president "has the inherent authority to authorize this surveillance."
With two additional hearings scheduled on the program after Mr. Gonzales's appearance, Mr. Specter said he was also considering seeking testimony from former Justice Department officials, and perhaps even input from the FISA court itself.
But Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who also serves on the Judiciary Committee, said the panel should consider issuing subpoenas if the administration is not more forthcoming in providing documents and witnesses.
"Without the Justice Department memos and without more witnesses, it's hard to se how anything other than a rehashing of the administration line is going to happen," Mr. Schumer said Wednesday. "I am worried that these hearings could end up telling us very little when the American people are thirsty to find out what happened here."
Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush's domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.
The Justice Department is balking at the request so far, administration officials said, arguing that the legal opinions would add little to the public debate because the administration has already laid out its legal defense at length in several public settings.
But the legality of the program is known to have produced serious concerns within the Justice Department in 2004, at a time when one of the legal opinions was drafted. Democrats say they want to review the internal opinions to assess how legal thinking on the program evolved and whether lawyers in the department saw any concrete limits to the president's powers in fighting terrorism.
With the committee scheduled to hold the first public hearing on the eavesdropping program on Monday, the Justice Department's stance could provoke another clash between Congress and the executive branch over access to classified internal documents. The administration has already drawn fire from Democrats in the last week for refusing to release internal documents on Hurricane Katrina as well as material related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Several Democrats and at least one Republican have pressed the Justice Department in recent days to give them access, even in a closed setting, to the internal documents that formed the legal foundation of the surveillance program. But when asked whether the classified legal opinions would be made available to Congress, a senior Justice Department official said Wednesday, "I don't think they're coming out."
The official said the administration's legal arguments had already been aired, most prominently in a 42-page "white paper" issued last month. "Everything that's in those memos was in the white paper," said the official, who, like other administration and Congressional officials, was granted anonymity because classified material was involved.
While the administration has spent much of the last two weeks defending the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, the Judiciary Committee session will be the first Congressional hearing on it. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the panel, said Wednesday that he had "a lot of questions" the administration had not yet adequately answered about the program's legal rationale.
Mr. Specter would not address the committee's request for the classified legal opinions, except to say, "that's not a closed matter — we're still working on that."
Several Democrats on the panel have made formal requests for the legal opinions, including Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.
In the interview, Mr. Specter said that he wanted a fuller explanation as to how the Justice Department asserts that the eavesdropping operation does not conflict with the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set strict and "exclusive" guidelines for intelligence wiretaps.
The operation was approved by President Bush, to allow the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps on Americans' international communications without a court warrant. Mr. Specter said his view was that the operation "violates FISA — there's no doubt about that."
He also questioned why the administration did not go to Congress or the intelligence court to seek changes in the process before moving ahead on its own with the classified program after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Representative Jane Harman, the California Democrat who was one of the few members of the Congress briefed on the operation, echoed that same theme in a letter sent Wednesday to President Bush.
She said in the letter that with changes made to the foreign intelligence law after the Sept. 11 attacks, the eavesdropping operations of the N.S.A. "can and should" be covered by court-approved warrants, "without circumventing" the process.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will be the lone witness at next week's hearing, and his aides said he was entering it with confidence about the program's legal footing, based on both the president's inherent constitutional authority and a Congressional authorization after the Sept. 11 attacks to use military force against terrorists. But both Republicans and Democrats said Wednesday that they planned to question Mr. Gonzales about those assertions.
While the administration has laid out its legal defense repeatedly in the last two weeks, the formal legal opinions developed at the Justice Department to justify the program remain classified. The administration has refused even to publicly acknowledge the existence of the memorandums, but The New York Times has reported that two sets of legal opinions by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel asserted the president's broad power to order wiretaps without warrants in protecting national security.
The first Justice Department opinion is thought to have been written in late 2001 or early 2002 by John Yoo, a strong proponent of expanded presidential powers in wartime. The second opinion, officials said, was drafted by Jack Goldsmith, another senior department official who later left to teach at Harvard. It came in 2004 at a time some senior officials at the Justice Department were voicing concerns about the program's legal foundation and refusing to sign off on its reauthorization.
Those concerns led in part to the suspension of the surveillance program for several months and also appear to have led Mr. Goldsmith and other Justice Department lawyers to revisit the question of its legal underpinnings in order to satisfy those concerns.
Members of the Judiciary Committee have sought access to the memorandums, officials said. Some Democrats speculate that the classified memos may contain far-reaching and potentially explosive legal theories similar to those advocated by Mr. Yoo and others, and later disavowed by the Justice Department, regarding policies on torture.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Mr. Gonzales, Mrs. Feinstein said the legal opinions and other internal documents were needed for Congress to assess whether the president "has the inherent authority to authorize this surveillance."
With two additional hearings scheduled on the program after Mr. Gonzales's appearance, Mr. Specter said he was also considering seeking testimony from former Justice Department officials, and perhaps even input from the FISA court itself.
But Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who also serves on the Judiciary Committee, said the panel should consider issuing subpoenas if the administration is not more forthcoming in providing documents and witnesses.
"Without the Justice Department memos and without more witnesses, it's hard to se how anything other than a rehashing of the administration line is going to happen," Mr. Schumer said Wednesday. "I am worried that these hearings could end up telling us very little when the American people are thirsty to find out what happened here."
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
NPR : The Legacy of Coretta Scott King
NPR : The Legacy of Coretta Scott KingRemembrances
The Legacy of Coretta Scott King
Listen to this story...
News & Notes with Ed Gordon, January 31, 2006 · Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights pioneer the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has died. Ed Gordon remembers the civil rights activist with his guests: Dick Gregory, an author and activist; Mary Frances Berry, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania; and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young.
The Legacy of Coretta Scott King
Listen to this story...
News & Notes with Ed Gordon, January 31, 2006 · Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights pioneer the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has died. Ed Gordon remembers the civil rights activist with his guests: Dick Gregory, an author and activist; Mary Frances Berry, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania; and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young.
NPR : Senate Confirms Alito as Supreme Court Justice
NPR : Senate Confirms Alito as Supreme Court JusticeSenate Confirms Alito as Supreme Court Justice
Samuel Alito poses on Capitol Hill in Washington Jan. 30.
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NPR.org, January 31, 2006 · WASHINGTON (AP) -- Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. became the nation's 110th Supreme Court justice on Tuesday, confirmed with the most partisan victory in modern history after a fierce battle over the future direction of the high court.
The Senate voted 58-42 to confirm Alito -- a former federal appellate judge, U.S. attorney, and conservative lawyer for the Reagan administration from New Jersey -- as the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has been a moderate swing vote on the court.
All but one of the Senate's majority Republicans voted for his confirmation, while all but four of the Democrats voted against Alito.
That is the smallest number of senators in the president's opposing party to support a Supreme Court justice in modern history. Chief Justice John Roberts got 22 Democratic votes last year, and Justice Clarence Thomas -- who was confirmed in 1991 on a 52-48 vote -- got 11 Democratic votes.
Alito watched the final vote from the White House's Roosevelt Room with his family. He was to be sworn in by Roberts at the Supreme Court in a private ceremony later in the day, in plenty of time for him to appear with President Bush at the State of the Union speech Tuesday evening.
Alito will be ceremonially sworn in a second time at a White House East Room appearance on Wednesday.
With the confirmation vote, O'Connor's resignation became official. She resigned in July but agreed to remain until her successor was confirmed. She was in Arizona Tuesday teaching a class at the University of Arizona law school.
Underscoring the rarity of a Supreme Court justice confirmation, senators answered the roll by standing one by one at their desks as their names were called, instead of voting and leaving the chamber.
Alito and Roberts are the first two new members of the Supreme Court since 1994.
Alito is a longtime federal appeals judge, having been confirmed by the Senate by unanimous consent on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on April 27, 1990. Before that, he worked as New Jersey's U.S. attorney and as a lawyer in the Justice Department for the conservative Reagan administration.
It was his Reagan-era work that caused the most controversy during his three-month candidacy for the high court.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Kerry Gets Cool Response to Call to Filibuster Alito - New York Times
Kerry Gets Cool Response to Call to Filibuster Alito - New York TimesJanuary 27, 2006
Kerry Gets Cool Response to Call to Filibuster Alito
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON, Jan 27 — Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts could not attend the Senate debate on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Thursday. He was in Davos, Switzerland, mingling with international business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum.
But late Thursday afternoon, Mr. Kerry began calling fellow Democratic senators in a quixotic, last-minute effort for a filibuster to stop the nomination.
Democrats cringed and Republicans jeered at the awkwardness of his gesture, which almost no one in the Senate expects to succeed.
"God bless John Kerry," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican on the Judiciary Committee. "He just cinched this whole nomination. With Senator Kerry, it is Christmas every day."
Steve Schmidt, a White House spokesman working on the nomination, said Mr. Kerry's move "says a lot less about Alito than it does about the Iowa primary in 2008," suggesting that Mr. Kerry, who lost the presidential race in 2004, was playing to his party's liberal base in a bid to recapture its nomination.
Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, sounded almost apologetic about Mr. Kerry's statements.
"No one can complain on this matter that there hasn't been sufficient time to talk about Judge Alito, pro and con," Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. "I hope that this matter will be resolved without too much more talking."
And on Friday, Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee who voted against Mr. Alito there, said he would not support a filibuster and doubted one would happen.
Speaking in a televised interview on CNN, Mr. Biden said that he thought the Republicans would inevitably force a decision, so Democrats should use their votes to "make a statement" without seeking a delay.
Mr. Kerry's call for a filibuster, an effort to stop confirmation by refusing to close debate and hold a vote, was joined by his fellow Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy.
Under Senate procedures, their objections blocked the Senate Democratic and Republican leaders from setting Tuesday as the date for a vote on confirmation.
Instead, the Senate will vote Monday on whether to close debate. Sixty votes are required for a full Senate vote on Judge Alito. More than 60 senators have already pledged to support him, and the leaders of both parties said they expected to hold the full vote on Tuesday.
Mr. Kerry offered an explanation for his position in a post on a liberal blog, the Daily Kos.
"People can say all they want that 'elections have consequences,' " he wrote. "Trust me, more than anyone I understand that. But that seems like an awfully convoluted rationale for me to stay silent about Judge Alito's nomination."
Mr. Kerry was celebrated by leaders of the coalition of liberal groups opposing Judge Alito's nomination.
"Senator John Kerry has called for a filibuster of the Alito nomination, heeding your calls to do everything possible to defeat it," People for the American Way cheered in an e-mail message to its supporters.
Mr. Kennedy said a filibuster might help focus attention on the nomination and give its opponents a last chance to sway the public and the Senate.
He acknowledged some "divisions in the caucus" over the advisability of a filibuster, but he said the effort had the support of a few others, including Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip.
A spokesman for Mr. Durbin confirmed that he would vote against closing debate.
"It is an uphill climb at this point," Mr. Kennedy said of a filibuster. "But it is achievable."
Asked if Mr. Kerry's absence from the Senate would hinder their efforts, Mr. Kennedy said, "We'll do the best we can and make a good fight of it."
Mr. Kerry has been rallying his supporters against the nomination for weeks in mass e-mail messages and on his Web site.
And when the Democratic caucus met Wednesday to discuss the nomination, he gave an impassioned plea that the party should try to stage a filibuster even if it failed, people present said, speaking only if granted anonymity because the meeting was private. Some senators at the meeting said an unsuccessful filibuster would leave the party weakened for future battles.
Some said a messy and unsuccessful filibuster fight would distract from the Democratic focus on other issues like corruption in government and wiretapping by the Bush administration.
In the end the party leaders were not persuaded by Mr. Kerry's appeal.
Judge Alito's confirmation was looking increasingly certain Thursday. Two more Democrats, Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, said they would break party ranks to vote for confirmation.
Mr. Byrd said his constituents had told him they were "appalled" by the harsh questioning Judge Alito received from the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearings, calling them "an outrage and a disgrace."
With Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Byrd bring the number of Democrats pledging support for Judge Alito to three. The vote on confirmation is expected to hew closely to party lines. No Republicans have said they will vote against him.
Two Republican supporters of abortion rights, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, have not declared how they will vote.
Shortly after 7 p.m., Mr. Kerry issued a statement saying, "Judge Alito's confirmation would be an ideological coup on the Supreme Court."
"The president has every right to nominate Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court," Mr. Kerry said. "It's our right and our responsibility to oppose him vigorously."
A few moments later, April Boyd, a spokeswoman for Mr. Kerry, sent a postscript saying that "as things played out over the course of the day today" he had decided to fly home. "Kerry will be back in Washington tomorrow," Ms. Boyd said.
.
Kerry Gets Cool Response to Call to Filibuster Alito
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON, Jan 27 — Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts could not attend the Senate debate on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Thursday. He was in Davos, Switzerland, mingling with international business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum.
But late Thursday afternoon, Mr. Kerry began calling fellow Democratic senators in a quixotic, last-minute effort for a filibuster to stop the nomination.
Democrats cringed and Republicans jeered at the awkwardness of his gesture, which almost no one in the Senate expects to succeed.
"God bless John Kerry," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican on the Judiciary Committee. "He just cinched this whole nomination. With Senator Kerry, it is Christmas every day."
Steve Schmidt, a White House spokesman working on the nomination, said Mr. Kerry's move "says a lot less about Alito than it does about the Iowa primary in 2008," suggesting that Mr. Kerry, who lost the presidential race in 2004, was playing to his party's liberal base in a bid to recapture its nomination.
Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, sounded almost apologetic about Mr. Kerry's statements.
"No one can complain on this matter that there hasn't been sufficient time to talk about Judge Alito, pro and con," Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. "I hope that this matter will be resolved without too much more talking."
And on Friday, Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee who voted against Mr. Alito there, said he would not support a filibuster and doubted one would happen.
Speaking in a televised interview on CNN, Mr. Biden said that he thought the Republicans would inevitably force a decision, so Democrats should use their votes to "make a statement" without seeking a delay.
Mr. Kerry's call for a filibuster, an effort to stop confirmation by refusing to close debate and hold a vote, was joined by his fellow Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy.
Under Senate procedures, their objections blocked the Senate Democratic and Republican leaders from setting Tuesday as the date for a vote on confirmation.
Instead, the Senate will vote Monday on whether to close debate. Sixty votes are required for a full Senate vote on Judge Alito. More than 60 senators have already pledged to support him, and the leaders of both parties said they expected to hold the full vote on Tuesday.
Mr. Kerry offered an explanation for his position in a post on a liberal blog, the Daily Kos.
"People can say all they want that 'elections have consequences,' " he wrote. "Trust me, more than anyone I understand that. But that seems like an awfully convoluted rationale for me to stay silent about Judge Alito's nomination."
Mr. Kerry was celebrated by leaders of the coalition of liberal groups opposing Judge Alito's nomination.
"Senator John Kerry has called for a filibuster of the Alito nomination, heeding your calls to do everything possible to defeat it," People for the American Way cheered in an e-mail message to its supporters.
Mr. Kennedy said a filibuster might help focus attention on the nomination and give its opponents a last chance to sway the public and the Senate.
He acknowledged some "divisions in the caucus" over the advisability of a filibuster, but he said the effort had the support of a few others, including Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip.
A spokesman for Mr. Durbin confirmed that he would vote against closing debate.
"It is an uphill climb at this point," Mr. Kennedy said of a filibuster. "But it is achievable."
Asked if Mr. Kerry's absence from the Senate would hinder their efforts, Mr. Kennedy said, "We'll do the best we can and make a good fight of it."
Mr. Kerry has been rallying his supporters against the nomination for weeks in mass e-mail messages and on his Web site.
And when the Democratic caucus met Wednesday to discuss the nomination, he gave an impassioned plea that the party should try to stage a filibuster even if it failed, people present said, speaking only if granted anonymity because the meeting was private. Some senators at the meeting said an unsuccessful filibuster would leave the party weakened for future battles.
Some said a messy and unsuccessful filibuster fight would distract from the Democratic focus on other issues like corruption in government and wiretapping by the Bush administration.
In the end the party leaders were not persuaded by Mr. Kerry's appeal.
Judge Alito's confirmation was looking increasingly certain Thursday. Two more Democrats, Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, said they would break party ranks to vote for confirmation.
Mr. Byrd said his constituents had told him they were "appalled" by the harsh questioning Judge Alito received from the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearings, calling them "an outrage and a disgrace."
With Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Byrd bring the number of Democrats pledging support for Judge Alito to three. The vote on confirmation is expected to hew closely to party lines. No Republicans have said they will vote against him.
Two Republican supporters of abortion rights, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, have not declared how they will vote.
Shortly after 7 p.m., Mr. Kerry issued a statement saying, "Judge Alito's confirmation would be an ideological coup on the Supreme Court."
"The president has every right to nominate Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court," Mr. Kerry said. "It's our right and our responsibility to oppose him vigorously."
A few moments later, April Boyd, a spokeswoman for Mr. Kerry, sent a postscript saying that "as things played out over the course of the day today" he had decided to fly home. "Kerry will be back in Washington tomorrow," Ms. Boyd said.
.
Study Says 80% of New Orleans Blacks May Not Return - New York Times
Study Says 80% of New Orleans Blacks May Not Return - New York TimesJanuary 27, 2006
Study Says 80% of New Orleans Blacks May Not Return
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 — New Orleans could lose as much as 80 percent of its black population if its most damaged neighborhoods are not rebuilt and if there is not significant government assistance to help poor people return, a detailed analysis by Brown University has concluded.
Combining data from the 2000 census with federal damage assessment maps, the study provides a new level of specificity about Hurricane Katrina's effect on the city's worst-flooded areas, which were heavily populated by low-income black people.
Of the 354,000 people who lived in New Orleans neighborhoods where the subsequent damage was moderate to severe, 75 percent were black, 29 percent lived below the poverty line, more than 10 percent were unemployed, and more than half were renters, the study found.
The report's author, John R. Logan, concluded that as much as 80 percent of the city's black population might not return for several reasons: their neighborhoods would not be rebuilt, they would be unable to afford the relocation costs, or they would put down roots in other cities.
For similar reasons, as much as half of the city's white population might not return, Dr. Logan concluded.
"The continuing question about the hurricane is this: Whose city will be rebuilt?" Dr. Logan, a professor of sociology, writes in the report.
If the projections are realized, the New Orleans population will shrink to about 140,000 from its prehurricane level of 484,000, and the city, nearly 70 percent black before the storm, will become majority white.
The study, financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, was released Thursday, 10 days after the mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, who is black, told an audience that "this city will be a majority African-American city; it's the way God wants it to be."
Mr. Nagin's remark was widely viewed as an effort to address criticism of a proposal by his own rebuilding panel, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, that calls for a four-month building moratorium in heavily damaged areas. He said later that he had not meant to suggest that white people would not be encouraged to return.
"Certainly Mayor Nagin's comments reflected a concern on the ground about the future of the city," Dr. Logan said. "My report shows that there is a basis for that concern."
The study coincides with growing uncertainty about what government assistance will be available for property owners and renters. Louisiana will receive $6.2 billion in federal block grants under an aid package approved by Congress in December, part of which will be used to help homeowners. But that will not be enough money to help all property owners in storm-damaged areas, Louisiana officials say.
Those officials have urged Congress to enact legislation proposed by Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, creating a corporation that would use bond proceeds to reimburse property owners for part of their mortgages, then redevelop the property. But the Bush administration has said it opposes the bill, out of concerns that it would be too expensive and would create a new government bureaucracy.
Asked Thursday about his opposition to the measure, President Bush told reporters that the $85 billion already allocated for Gulf Coast restoration was "a good start." He added that he was concerned that Louisiana did not have a clear recovery plan in place.
But Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat who has clashed frequently with the White House, said Mr. Baker's bill provided a clear plan.
"Administration officials do not understand the suffering of the people of Louisiana," Ms. Blanco said in a statement.
Demographers are divided over the likelihood of a drastic shift in New Orleans's population. William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who has studied the hurricane's impact on the city, called Dr. Logan's projections "a worst-case scenario that will come about only if these evacuees see that they have no voice in what is going on."
But Dr. Frey also said low-income evacuees might indeed begin to put down roots in cities like Houston or Dallas if they did not see movement toward reconstruction in the next six months.
Elliott B. Stonecipher, a political consultant and demographer from Shreveport, La., said that unless New Orleans built housing in flood-protected areas for low-income residents, and also provided support for poor people to relocate, chances were good that many low-income blacks would not return.
"If they didn't have enough resources to get out before the storm," Mr. Stonecipher said, "how can we expect them to have the wherewithal to return?"
Study Says 80% of New Orleans Blacks May Not Return
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 — New Orleans could lose as much as 80 percent of its black population if its most damaged neighborhoods are not rebuilt and if there is not significant government assistance to help poor people return, a detailed analysis by Brown University has concluded.
Combining data from the 2000 census with federal damage assessment maps, the study provides a new level of specificity about Hurricane Katrina's effect on the city's worst-flooded areas, which were heavily populated by low-income black people.
Of the 354,000 people who lived in New Orleans neighborhoods where the subsequent damage was moderate to severe, 75 percent were black, 29 percent lived below the poverty line, more than 10 percent were unemployed, and more than half were renters, the study found.
The report's author, John R. Logan, concluded that as much as 80 percent of the city's black population might not return for several reasons: their neighborhoods would not be rebuilt, they would be unable to afford the relocation costs, or they would put down roots in other cities.
For similar reasons, as much as half of the city's white population might not return, Dr. Logan concluded.
"The continuing question about the hurricane is this: Whose city will be rebuilt?" Dr. Logan, a professor of sociology, writes in the report.
If the projections are realized, the New Orleans population will shrink to about 140,000 from its prehurricane level of 484,000, and the city, nearly 70 percent black before the storm, will become majority white.
The study, financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, was released Thursday, 10 days after the mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, who is black, told an audience that "this city will be a majority African-American city; it's the way God wants it to be."
Mr. Nagin's remark was widely viewed as an effort to address criticism of a proposal by his own rebuilding panel, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, that calls for a four-month building moratorium in heavily damaged areas. He said later that he had not meant to suggest that white people would not be encouraged to return.
"Certainly Mayor Nagin's comments reflected a concern on the ground about the future of the city," Dr. Logan said. "My report shows that there is a basis for that concern."
The study coincides with growing uncertainty about what government assistance will be available for property owners and renters. Louisiana will receive $6.2 billion in federal block grants under an aid package approved by Congress in December, part of which will be used to help homeowners. But that will not be enough money to help all property owners in storm-damaged areas, Louisiana officials say.
Those officials have urged Congress to enact legislation proposed by Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, creating a corporation that would use bond proceeds to reimburse property owners for part of their mortgages, then redevelop the property. But the Bush administration has said it opposes the bill, out of concerns that it would be too expensive and would create a new government bureaucracy.
Asked Thursday about his opposition to the measure, President Bush told reporters that the $85 billion already allocated for Gulf Coast restoration was "a good start." He added that he was concerned that Louisiana did not have a clear recovery plan in place.
But Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat who has clashed frequently with the White House, said Mr. Baker's bill provided a clear plan.
"Administration officials do not understand the suffering of the people of Louisiana," Ms. Blanco said in a statement.
Demographers are divided over the likelihood of a drastic shift in New Orleans's population. William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who has studied the hurricane's impact on the city, called Dr. Logan's projections "a worst-case scenario that will come about only if these evacuees see that they have no voice in what is going on."
But Dr. Frey also said low-income evacuees might indeed begin to put down roots in cities like Houston or Dallas if they did not see movement toward reconstruction in the next six months.
Elliott B. Stonecipher, a political consultant and demographer from Shreveport, La., said that unless New Orleans built housing in flood-protected areas for low-income residents, and also provided support for poor people to relocate, chances were good that many low-income blacks would not return.
"If they didn't have enough resources to get out before the storm," Mr. Stonecipher said, "how can we expect them to have the wherewithal to return?"
New Poll Finds Mixed Support for Wiretaps - New York Times
New Poll Finds Mixed Support for Wiretaps - New York TimesJanuary 27, 2006
New Poll Finds Mixed Support for Wiretaps
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER
Americans are willing to tolerate eavesdropping without warrants to fight terrorism, but are concerned that the aggressive antiterrorism programs championed by the Bush administration are encroaching on civil liberties, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
In a sign that public opinion about the trade-offs between national security and individual rights is nuanced and remains highly unresolved, responses to questions about the administration's eavesdropping program varied significantly depending on how the questions were worded, underlining the importance of the effort by the White House this week to define the issue on its terms.
The poll, conducted as President Bush defended his surveillance program in the face of criticism from Democrats and some Republicans that it is illegal, found that Americans were willing to give the administration some latitude for its surveillance program if they believed it was intended to protect them. Fifty-three percent of the respondents said they supported eavesdropping without warrants "in order to reduce the threat of terrorism."
The results suggest that Americans' view of the program depends in large part on whether they perceive it as a bulwark in the fight against terrorism, as Mr. Bush has sought to cast it, or as an unnecessary and unwarranted infringement on civil liberties, as critics have said.
In one striking finding, respondents overwhelmingly supported e-mail and telephone monitoring directed at "Americans that the government is suspicious of;" they overwhelmingly opposed the same kind of surveillance if it was aimed at "ordinary Americans."
Mr. Bush, at a White House press conference yesterday, twice used the phrase "terrorist surveillance program" to describe an operation in which the administration has eavesdropped on telephone calls and other communications like e-mail that it says could involve operatives of Al Qaeda overseas talking to Americans. Critics say the administration could conduct such surveillance while still getting prior court approval, as spelled out in a 1978 law intended to guard against governmental abuses.
The findings came in a poll conducted as Mr. Bush prepares to deliver his fifth State of the Union address on Tuesday. It found that Mr. Bush will face a nation that has grown sour on Washington and skeptical that he will be able to achieve significant progress in health care, the economy, the Iraq war and the cost of prescription drugs for older patients before he leaves office in three years.
The poll also signaled concern for Republicans as they prepare to defend their control of the House and the Senate in midterm elections this November. Investigations into Congressional corruption are taking a toll as the elections approach: 61 percent of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Congress, the highest in 10 years.
This finding holds particular peril for Republicans as the party that has been in charge. More than half of the respondents said they believed that most members of Congress would exchange votes for money or favors.
Republicans were seen as more likely to be unduly influenced by lobbyists. And the Republican Party is now viewed unfavorably by 51 percent of the nation, its worst rating since Mr. Bush took office. By contrast, 53 percent said they held a favorable view of Democrats.
The telephone poll was conducted with 1,229 adults, starting Friday and ending Wednesday. Its margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll found that Americans were to a large extent perplexed as they weighed conflicting forces: the need presented by Mr. Bush to take extraordinary action to fight terrorism, and a historical aversion to an overly intrusive government.
The poll found that 53 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush's authorizing eavesdropping without prior court approval "in order to reduce the threat of terrorism"; 46 percent disapproved. When the question was asked stripped of any mention of terrorism, 46 percent of those respondents approved, and 50 percent said they disapproved.
At the same time, 64 percent said they were very or somewhat concerned about losing civil liberties as a result of antiterrorism measures put in place by Mr. Bush since the attacks of Sept. 11. And respondents were more likely to be concerned that the government would enact strong antiterrorism laws that excessively restrict civil liberties than they were that the government would fail to enact antiterrorism laws.
The poll was conducted just as the White House commenced an elaborate campaign to defend the surveillance program, and thus may have been too early to offer a full measure of that campaign's effectiveness. There were no measurable changes in the poll findings from one day to the next.
The findings, and follow-up interviews with some participants, clearly suggest that Mr. Bush has an opportunity to make the dispute over the program play to his political advantage. He has been pointing to the threat of another terrorist attack to justify the eavesdropping program and is trying, for the third election in a row, to suggest that he and his party are more aggressive about protecting the nation than are Democrats.
"Say they're targeting someone in Al Qaeda outside the country, and that person then calls someone in the United States about a plot or something really bad: I don't have a problem with that phone being monitored," Debbie Viebranz, 51, a Republican from Ohio, said in a follow-up interview. "But I don't think they should do it for no reason."
Donnis Wells, 69, a Republican from Florence, Miss., said: "I don't think civil liberties are the more important thing we need to handle right now. I think we need to protect our people."
Still, interviews reflected clear apprehension about the program. "If there is a warrant and done by the courts, I would agree," said Robert Ray, 54, an independent from Kentucky. "But they're trying to do it without using the courts. I just don't trust them."
In the poll, 70 percent of respondents said they would not be willing to support governmental monitoring of the communications of "ordinary Americans"; 68 percent said they would be willing to support such monitoring of "Americans the government is suspicious of."
Beyond surveillance, the poll found that Americans hold unfavorable views of the president and the Republican-controlled Congress as Mr. Bush prepares to give his State of the Union speech. Americans, while declaring themselves generally optimistic about the next three years under Mr. Bush, do not expect him to accomplish very much in that time.
When Mr. Bush leaves office, respondents said, the deficit will be larger than it is today, the elderly will be being paying more for prescription drugs, and the economy and the health care system will be the same as today, or worse.
Mr. Bush is viewed favorably by 42 percent of the respondents, statistically the same as in the last Times/CBS News poll, in early December, a lackluster rating that could hamper his ability to rally public opinion behind his agenda and push legislation through a divided Congress. Beyond that, nearly two-thirds of the country thinks the nation is on the wrong track, a level that has historically proved to be a matter of concern for a party in power.
A majority said they were dissatisfied with the way Mr. Bush was managing the economy and the war in Iraq. Public approval for his handling of the campaign against terrorism, once one of his greatest political strengths, has rebounded somewhat from last fall, but remains well below where it was for the first two years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Most strikingly, the poll found abundant evidence of public unhappiness with Congress. While it is risky to draw conclusions about Congressional elections from national measurements of discontent — for example, more than half of all Americans said they were satisfied with the job their member of Congress was doing — the findings underscored the tough electoral environment that has led some analysts to predict significant Republican losses this fall.
The corruption investigations appear to account for a lot of the dissatisfaction. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said that the kind of influence-peddling revelations that have emerged in the investigation of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff reflected the "way things work in Congress" and were not isolated incidents. More than 50 percent said most members of Congress "accept bribes or gifts that affect their votes."
"It seems like the integrity of Congress members in the last few years has just gone to pot," said Donald Pertuis, 54, an independent voter from Hot Springs, Ark. Mr. Pertuis added: "In the last 20 years, greed has accelerated. People expect more, I suppose, and want to work less."
Marjorie Connelly, Marina Stefan and Megan Thee contributed reporting for this article.
New Poll Finds Mixed Support for Wiretaps
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER
Americans are willing to tolerate eavesdropping without warrants to fight terrorism, but are concerned that the aggressive antiterrorism programs championed by the Bush administration are encroaching on civil liberties, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
In a sign that public opinion about the trade-offs between national security and individual rights is nuanced and remains highly unresolved, responses to questions about the administration's eavesdropping program varied significantly depending on how the questions were worded, underlining the importance of the effort by the White House this week to define the issue on its terms.
The poll, conducted as President Bush defended his surveillance program in the face of criticism from Democrats and some Republicans that it is illegal, found that Americans were willing to give the administration some latitude for its surveillance program if they believed it was intended to protect them. Fifty-three percent of the respondents said they supported eavesdropping without warrants "in order to reduce the threat of terrorism."
The results suggest that Americans' view of the program depends in large part on whether they perceive it as a bulwark in the fight against terrorism, as Mr. Bush has sought to cast it, or as an unnecessary and unwarranted infringement on civil liberties, as critics have said.
In one striking finding, respondents overwhelmingly supported e-mail and telephone monitoring directed at "Americans that the government is suspicious of;" they overwhelmingly opposed the same kind of surveillance if it was aimed at "ordinary Americans."
Mr. Bush, at a White House press conference yesterday, twice used the phrase "terrorist surveillance program" to describe an operation in which the administration has eavesdropped on telephone calls and other communications like e-mail that it says could involve operatives of Al Qaeda overseas talking to Americans. Critics say the administration could conduct such surveillance while still getting prior court approval, as spelled out in a 1978 law intended to guard against governmental abuses.
The findings came in a poll conducted as Mr. Bush prepares to deliver his fifth State of the Union address on Tuesday. It found that Mr. Bush will face a nation that has grown sour on Washington and skeptical that he will be able to achieve significant progress in health care, the economy, the Iraq war and the cost of prescription drugs for older patients before he leaves office in three years.
The poll also signaled concern for Republicans as they prepare to defend their control of the House and the Senate in midterm elections this November. Investigations into Congressional corruption are taking a toll as the elections approach: 61 percent of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Congress, the highest in 10 years.
This finding holds particular peril for Republicans as the party that has been in charge. More than half of the respondents said they believed that most members of Congress would exchange votes for money or favors.
Republicans were seen as more likely to be unduly influenced by lobbyists. And the Republican Party is now viewed unfavorably by 51 percent of the nation, its worst rating since Mr. Bush took office. By contrast, 53 percent said they held a favorable view of Democrats.
The telephone poll was conducted with 1,229 adults, starting Friday and ending Wednesday. Its margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll found that Americans were to a large extent perplexed as they weighed conflicting forces: the need presented by Mr. Bush to take extraordinary action to fight terrorism, and a historical aversion to an overly intrusive government.
The poll found that 53 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush's authorizing eavesdropping without prior court approval "in order to reduce the threat of terrorism"; 46 percent disapproved. When the question was asked stripped of any mention of terrorism, 46 percent of those respondents approved, and 50 percent said they disapproved.
At the same time, 64 percent said they were very or somewhat concerned about losing civil liberties as a result of antiterrorism measures put in place by Mr. Bush since the attacks of Sept. 11. And respondents were more likely to be concerned that the government would enact strong antiterrorism laws that excessively restrict civil liberties than they were that the government would fail to enact antiterrorism laws.
The poll was conducted just as the White House commenced an elaborate campaign to defend the surveillance program, and thus may have been too early to offer a full measure of that campaign's effectiveness. There were no measurable changes in the poll findings from one day to the next.
The findings, and follow-up interviews with some participants, clearly suggest that Mr. Bush has an opportunity to make the dispute over the program play to his political advantage. He has been pointing to the threat of another terrorist attack to justify the eavesdropping program and is trying, for the third election in a row, to suggest that he and his party are more aggressive about protecting the nation than are Democrats.
"Say they're targeting someone in Al Qaeda outside the country, and that person then calls someone in the United States about a plot or something really bad: I don't have a problem with that phone being monitored," Debbie Viebranz, 51, a Republican from Ohio, said in a follow-up interview. "But I don't think they should do it for no reason."
Donnis Wells, 69, a Republican from Florence, Miss., said: "I don't think civil liberties are the more important thing we need to handle right now. I think we need to protect our people."
Still, interviews reflected clear apprehension about the program. "If there is a warrant and done by the courts, I would agree," said Robert Ray, 54, an independent from Kentucky. "But they're trying to do it without using the courts. I just don't trust them."
In the poll, 70 percent of respondents said they would not be willing to support governmental monitoring of the communications of "ordinary Americans"; 68 percent said they would be willing to support such monitoring of "Americans the government is suspicious of."
Beyond surveillance, the poll found that Americans hold unfavorable views of the president and the Republican-controlled Congress as Mr. Bush prepares to give his State of the Union speech. Americans, while declaring themselves generally optimistic about the next three years under Mr. Bush, do not expect him to accomplish very much in that time.
When Mr. Bush leaves office, respondents said, the deficit will be larger than it is today, the elderly will be being paying more for prescription drugs, and the economy and the health care system will be the same as today, or worse.
Mr. Bush is viewed favorably by 42 percent of the respondents, statistically the same as in the last Times/CBS News poll, in early December, a lackluster rating that could hamper his ability to rally public opinion behind his agenda and push legislation through a divided Congress. Beyond that, nearly two-thirds of the country thinks the nation is on the wrong track, a level that has historically proved to be a matter of concern for a party in power.
A majority said they were dissatisfied with the way Mr. Bush was managing the economy and the war in Iraq. Public approval for his handling of the campaign against terrorism, once one of his greatest political strengths, has rebounded somewhat from last fall, but remains well below where it was for the first two years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Most strikingly, the poll found abundant evidence of public unhappiness with Congress. While it is risky to draw conclusions about Congressional elections from national measurements of discontent — for example, more than half of all Americans said they were satisfied with the job their member of Congress was doing — the findings underscored the tough electoral environment that has led some analysts to predict significant Republican losses this fall.
The corruption investigations appear to account for a lot of the dissatisfaction. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said that the kind of influence-peddling revelations that have emerged in the investigation of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff reflected the "way things work in Congress" and were not isolated incidents. More than 50 percent said most members of Congress "accept bribes or gifts that affect their votes."
"It seems like the integrity of Congress members in the last few years has just gone to pot," said Donald Pertuis, 54, an independent voter from Hot Springs, Ark. Mr. Pertuis added: "In the last 20 years, greed has accelerated. People expect more, I suppose, and want to work less."
Marjorie Connelly, Marina Stefan and Megan Thee contributed reporting for this article.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
The Plank
The PlankDARK CHOCOLATE, WHITE MILK:
Wow, Ray Nagin is the gift that keeps on giving. Following up on his MLK Day speech, in which (as I inexcusably failed to note in this post) he proclaimed that God wanted New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city, today Nagin had this to say:
"How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about. . . . New Orleans was a chocolate city before Katrina. It is going to be a chocolate city after. How is that divisive? It is white and black working together, coming together and making something special."
Maybe "mocha city" would have been the better phrase. All joking aside, however, Nagin is, in his own blundering way, making a worthwhile point. While he was certainly dumb to say that God wanted New Orleans to remain a majority-black city, the issue of how the city is rebuilt--and whether, in the process, it gets intentionally whitened--is a serious one. And Nagin, and other black New Orlineans, aren't being paranoid when they worry that some white people in the city are secretly, and not so secretly, hoping that a rebuilt New Orleans is decidedly more vanilla, or, to use Nagin's terminology, white milk-like. Of course, the most important thing is that the city be rebuilt in a way that not only allows its black residents to return there, if they so choose, but also allows them to return to neighborhoods that are not squalid and dysfunctional and impoverished in the way they were before Katrina. I don't know if Nagin has any sort of gastronomic analogies to make that point, but I'd love to hear them.
--Jason Zengerle
Wow, Ray Nagin is the gift that keeps on giving. Following up on his MLK Day speech, in which (as I inexcusably failed to note in this post) he proclaimed that God wanted New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city, today Nagin had this to say:
"How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about. . . . New Orleans was a chocolate city before Katrina. It is going to be a chocolate city after. How is that divisive? It is white and black working together, coming together and making something special."
Maybe "mocha city" would have been the better phrase. All joking aside, however, Nagin is, in his own blundering way, making a worthwhile point. While he was certainly dumb to say that God wanted New Orleans to remain a majority-black city, the issue of how the city is rebuilt--and whether, in the process, it gets intentionally whitened--is a serious one. And Nagin, and other black New Orlineans, aren't being paranoid when they worry that some white people in the city are secretly, and not so secretly, hoping that a rebuilt New Orleans is decidedly more vanilla, or, to use Nagin's terminology, white milk-like. Of course, the most important thing is that the city be rebuilt in a way that not only allows its black residents to return there, if they so choose, but also allows them to return to neighborhoods that are not squalid and dysfunctional and impoverished in the way they were before Katrina. I don't know if Nagin has any sort of gastronomic analogies to make that point, but I'd love to hear them.
--Jason Zengerle
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Post from Morehouse Entertainment Law Student Brian Henry
Afternoon Professor Armwood:
I just wanted to forward you this infromation from the NAACP, in regards to Alito's nomination. See you in entertainment law class on Weds.
Thanks,
Brian D. Henry
Morehouse College NAACP, President
Economics Major
443.621.4476 (c)
brian.henry@yahoo.com
WASHINGTON BUREAU · NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE
1156 15th Street, NW Suite 915 · Washington, DC 20005 · P (202)463-2940 · F (202)463-2953
E-MAIL:mailto:washingtonbureau@naacpnet.org · WEB ADDRESS http://www.naacp.org/
ACTION ALERT
DATE: January 13, 2006
TO: Concerned Parties
FROM: Bruce Gordon, NAACP President & CEO
Hilary O. Shelton, Director, Washington Bureau
AFTER ALMOST 700 QUESTIONS, SAMUEL ALITO EVEN MORE TROUBLING ON CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUES
NAACP CALLS ON THE ADMINISTRATION TO SUBMIT A NEW NOMINEE
THE ISSUE:
After three days of hearings in which almost 700 questions were asked over a period of 18 hours, the concerns raised by the NAACP in December on Samuel Alito's record on civil rights issues remain unanswered. In fact, the hearings only heightened the NAACP's concerns over the nominee, with his inability to adequately defend his membership in a group that sought to limit the enrollment of women and minorities at Princeton, his alma mater.
During the Senate Judiciary Confirmation hearings, Judge Alito's responses to many of the key questions posed to him were vague and unfulfilling. Specifically, he did not back away from, nor did he fully explain, his written criticism of the concept of "one man, one vote." Nor did he explain why, in case after case, he appears to have bent over backwards and twisted his interpretation of the law to always come out on the side of the wealthy and powerful. Lastly, for a man who was praised by multiple witnesses as having an unfailing memory and an ability to recall even the most arcane detail, the NAACP was left particularly concerned by his claims that he does not recall why he joined the Concerned Alumni
of Princeton (CAP), a group that at the time espoused especially offensive and bigoted goals, or his claim that he cannot recall why he felt that such membership would enhance his job application with the Reagan White House.
The hearings made only one thing clear to the NAACP: Samuel Alito remains indifferent to the impact race and racism still have on our society today, and he has no intention of recognizing them if he is confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. A brief overview of his career to date bears this fact out, and it is a career for which he did not adequately answer during the Senate Committee hearings. Specific areas of concern that remain unanswered include:
· In 1985 Judge Alito disagreed in writing with the concept of "one man, one vote";
· In 2000 he voted to uphold an anti-affirmative action decision of a lower court;
· In 1997 he strongly disagreed with a Third Circuit ruling and made it clear that he
supports impossibly high barriers for victims of discrimination to have their cases heard;
· In 1997, he ruled that striking all African Americans from the jury of a case involving
an African American man and the death penalty was irrelevant and likened it to a recent
study showing that a disproportionate number of recent Presidents have been left-handed.
Thus the NAACP remains opposed to the nomination and strongly urges the Senate to reject confirmation. If and when this occurs, the NAACP urges the Administration to nominate an individual who is more concerned with the law and with fairness than the current nominee.
THE ACTION WE NEED YOU TO TAKE:
Contact both your Senators and URGE THEM TO OPPOSE THE NOMINATION OF JUDGE SAMUEL ALITO TO THE SUPREME COURT . To contact your Senators you may:
o Make a Phone Call
Call your Senators in Washington by dialing the Capitol Switchboard and asking to be transferred to your Senators' offices. The switchboard phone number is (202) 224-3121 (see message section, below).
o Write a Letter
To write letters to your Senators, send them to:
The Honorable (name of Senator)
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
o Send a Fax
If you would like to send a fax, call your Senators' offices (through the Capitol switchboard) and ask for their fax numbers (you can use either the attached sample
letter or the message box, below).
o Send an E-Mail
To send an e-mail to your Senators, simply go to www.senate.gov, and click on "Contacting the Senate"; you can look your Senators up either alphabetically or by state. Unfortunately, not all Members of Congress have e-mail addresses.
REMEMBER TO CONTACT BOTH YOUR SENATORS!!!!
THE MESSAGE
o Throughout his career, Judge Alito has made statements and issued opinions in direct opposition to the core beliefs and goals of the NAACP.
o During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Judge Alito did not address these concerns, and in fact his reluctance to answer questions about his membership in a group whose goal was to exclude women and minorities from Princeton, his alma mater, only solidified the NAACP opposition to the nomination.
o The NAACP's opposition is based on a thorough investigation into his past writings and actions first as an attorney with the Reagan Administration then as a Circuit Court judge.
o During his career Judge Alito has spoken or written against such core NAACP values as voting rights, affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws and police brutality.
o The importance of the seat Judge Alito has been nominated for cannot be understated; this is a lifetime position to fill a vacancy created by a judge who is often considered the "swing vote" on many issues important to racial and ethnic minorities.
(Sample Letter)
(date)
The Honorable ___________________________
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
RE: OPPOSE THE NOMINATION OF SAMUEL ALITO TO
ASSOCIATE JUSTICE ON THE US SUPREME COURT
Dear Senator _______________________________;
As your constituent, I urge you, in the strongest terms possible, to oppose the nomination of Samuel Alito to serve as Associate Justice to the US Supreme Court. During his career Judge Alito has spoken or written against such core values as voting rights, affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws and police brutality. Furthermore, he did not adequately address these concerns during the confirmation hearings, and was particularly vague when it came to these issues.
Should he be confirmed to the US Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O' Conner, I also have strong concerns that Judge Alito will dramatically shift the balance of the court away from the middle and much more to the conservative end of the spectrum. I am certain that a careful review of his record, and of the written and oral statements and judicial decisions of the past will clearly lead you to determine, as I have, that Judge Alito is an inappropriate nominee for our Nation's highest court.
It is vitally important that the justices of the US Supreme Court be willing to interpret the Constitution in a manner that is fair and respectful of the rights of all Americans. Furthermore, it is your duty as my elected representative and as my voice in the United States Senate to insure that every Supreme Court nominee uphold my basic civil rights and civil liberties.
Thus, I am urging you again to oppose this nomination. Please contact me in the very near future to let me know what you are going to do on this matter and what I can do to help you make certain that the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans are protected.
Sincerely,
(sign and print your name and
remember to include your address)
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS IMPORTANT MATTER!!!
If you have any questions, call Hilary Shelton at the Washington Bureau at (202) 463-2940.
MEMBERSHIP IS POWER! JOIN THE NAACP TODAY.
For more information, call your local NAACP branch or visit http://www.naacp.org/
1156 15th Street, Suite 915, Washington, DC 20005
I just wanted to forward you this infromation from the NAACP, in regards to Alito's nomination. See you in entertainment law class on Weds.
Thanks,
Brian D. Henry
Morehouse College NAACP, President
Economics Major
443.621.4476 (c)
brian.henry@yahoo.com
WASHINGTON BUREAU · NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE
1156 15th Street, NW Suite 915 · Washington, DC 20005 · P (202)463-2940 · F (202)463-2953
E-MAIL:mailto:washingtonbureau@naacpnet.org · WEB ADDRESS http://www.naacp.org/
ACTION ALERT
DATE: January 13, 2006
TO: Concerned Parties
FROM: Bruce Gordon, NAACP President & CEO
Hilary O. Shelton, Director, Washington Bureau
AFTER ALMOST 700 QUESTIONS, SAMUEL ALITO EVEN MORE TROUBLING ON CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUES
NAACP CALLS ON THE ADMINISTRATION TO SUBMIT A NEW NOMINEE
THE ISSUE:
After three days of hearings in which almost 700 questions were asked over a period of 18 hours, the concerns raised by the NAACP in December on Samuel Alito's record on civil rights issues remain unanswered. In fact, the hearings only heightened the NAACP's concerns over the nominee, with his inability to adequately defend his membership in a group that sought to limit the enrollment of women and minorities at Princeton, his alma mater.
During the Senate Judiciary Confirmation hearings, Judge Alito's responses to many of the key questions posed to him were vague and unfulfilling. Specifically, he did not back away from, nor did he fully explain, his written criticism of the concept of "one man, one vote." Nor did he explain why, in case after case, he appears to have bent over backwards and twisted his interpretation of the law to always come out on the side of the wealthy and powerful. Lastly, for a man who was praised by multiple witnesses as having an unfailing memory and an ability to recall even the most arcane detail, the NAACP was left particularly concerned by his claims that he does not recall why he joined the Concerned Alumni
of Princeton (CAP), a group that at the time espoused especially offensive and bigoted goals, or his claim that he cannot recall why he felt that such membership would enhance his job application with the Reagan White House.
The hearings made only one thing clear to the NAACP: Samuel Alito remains indifferent to the impact race and racism still have on our society today, and he has no intention of recognizing them if he is confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. A brief overview of his career to date bears this fact out, and it is a career for which he did not adequately answer during the Senate Committee hearings. Specific areas of concern that remain unanswered include:
· In 1985 Judge Alito disagreed in writing with the concept of "one man, one vote";
· In 2000 he voted to uphold an anti-affirmative action decision of a lower court;
· In 1997 he strongly disagreed with a Third Circuit ruling and made it clear that he
supports impossibly high barriers for victims of discrimination to have their cases heard;
· In 1997, he ruled that striking all African Americans from the jury of a case involving
an African American man and the death penalty was irrelevant and likened it to a recent
study showing that a disproportionate number of recent Presidents have been left-handed.
Thus the NAACP remains opposed to the nomination and strongly urges the Senate to reject confirmation. If and when this occurs, the NAACP urges the Administration to nominate an individual who is more concerned with the law and with fairness than the current nominee.
THE ACTION WE NEED YOU TO TAKE:
Contact both your Senators and URGE THEM TO OPPOSE THE NOMINATION OF JUDGE SAMUEL ALITO TO THE SUPREME COURT . To contact your Senators you may:
o Make a Phone Call
Call your Senators in Washington by dialing the Capitol Switchboard and asking to be transferred to your Senators' offices. The switchboard phone number is (202) 224-3121 (see message section, below).
o Write a Letter
To write letters to your Senators, send them to:
The Honorable (name of Senator)
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
o Send a Fax
If you would like to send a fax, call your Senators' offices (through the Capitol switchboard) and ask for their fax numbers (you can use either the attached sample
letter or the message box, below).
o Send an E-Mail
To send an e-mail to your Senators, simply go to www.senate.gov, and click on "Contacting the Senate"; you can look your Senators up either alphabetically or by state. Unfortunately, not all Members of Congress have e-mail addresses.
REMEMBER TO CONTACT BOTH YOUR SENATORS!!!!
THE MESSAGE
o Throughout his career, Judge Alito has made statements and issued opinions in direct opposition to the core beliefs and goals of the NAACP.
o During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Judge Alito did not address these concerns, and in fact his reluctance to answer questions about his membership in a group whose goal was to exclude women and minorities from Princeton, his alma mater, only solidified the NAACP opposition to the nomination.
o The NAACP's opposition is based on a thorough investigation into his past writings and actions first as an attorney with the Reagan Administration then as a Circuit Court judge.
o During his career Judge Alito has spoken or written against such core NAACP values as voting rights, affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws and police brutality.
o The importance of the seat Judge Alito has been nominated for cannot be understated; this is a lifetime position to fill a vacancy created by a judge who is often considered the "swing vote" on many issues important to racial and ethnic minorities.
(Sample Letter)
(date)
The Honorable ___________________________
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
RE: OPPOSE THE NOMINATION OF SAMUEL ALITO TO
ASSOCIATE JUSTICE ON THE US SUPREME COURT
Dear Senator _______________________________;
As your constituent, I urge you, in the strongest terms possible, to oppose the nomination of Samuel Alito to serve as Associate Justice to the US Supreme Court. During his career Judge Alito has spoken or written against such core values as voting rights, affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws and police brutality. Furthermore, he did not adequately address these concerns during the confirmation hearings, and was particularly vague when it came to these issues.
Should he be confirmed to the US Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O' Conner, I also have strong concerns that Judge Alito will dramatically shift the balance of the court away from the middle and much more to the conservative end of the spectrum. I am certain that a careful review of his record, and of the written and oral statements and judicial decisions of the past will clearly lead you to determine, as I have, that Judge Alito is an inappropriate nominee for our Nation's highest court.
It is vitally important that the justices of the US Supreme Court be willing to interpret the Constitution in a manner that is fair and respectful of the rights of all Americans. Furthermore, it is your duty as my elected representative and as my voice in the United States Senate to insure that every Supreme Court nominee uphold my basic civil rights and civil liberties.
Thus, I am urging you again to oppose this nomination. Please contact me in the very near future to let me know what you are going to do on this matter and what I can do to help you make certain that the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans are protected.
Sincerely,
(sign and print your name and
remember to include your address)
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS IMPORTANT MATTER!!!
If you have any questions, call Hilary Shelton at the Washington Bureau at (202) 463-2940.
MEMBERSHIP IS POWER! JOIN THE NAACP TODAY.
For more information, call your local NAACP branch or visit http://www.naacp.org/
1156 15th Street, Suite 915, Washington, DC 20005
Friday, January 13, 2006
Few Glimmers of How Conservative Judge Alito Is - New York Times
Few Glimmers of How Conservative Judge Alito Is - New York TimesJanuary 13, 2006
News Analysis
Few Glimmers of How Conservative Judge Alito Is
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - In over 18 hours responding to some 700 questions at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. mostly described a methodical and incremental approach to the law rooted in no particular theory.
But to the extent Judge Alito claimed a judicial philosophy, it aligned him with the court's two most conservative members, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Judge Alito completed his testimony Thursday amid substantial opposition from Democrats, who indicated they would not support him, but saw little chance of blocking his confirmation.
On one of the few occasions Judge Alito spoke about his general approach to the law, he embraced a mode of constitutional interpretation, originalism, often associated with Justices Scalia and Thomas.
"In interpreting the Constitution," Judge Alito said Wednesday, "I think we should look to the text of the Constitution, and we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption."
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., by contrast, described a more eclectic and dynamic approach to constitutional interpretation at his confirmation hearings in September. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom Judge Alito will replace if he is confirmed, has also embraced a variety of approaches.
"Judge Alito sounded less amenable to constitutional evolution than Roberts," said Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago who studied Judge Alito's dissenting opinions at the request of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, but has taken no position on the nomination. "He is someone who is more likely to vote with Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas than Justice O'Connor."
On more specific constitutional issues, Judge Alito affirmed what Jack M. Balkin, a law professor at Yale, calls the modern catechism necessary for confirmation. Judge Alito said that Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 school desegregation case, was correctly decided. He said the Constitution protected privacy in at least some aspects of procreation, endorsing two decisions giving constitutional protection to the use of contraceptives. And he said the principle of one person one vote is required by the Constitution.
Having agreed with those cases and propositions, though, Judge Alito largely drew the line at saying more, notably about abortion. He justified his approach by saying the first set of cases were unlikely to come before the Supreme Court and that other cases might well be revisited by it.
But he did provide some hints on an array of other issues. He rejected, for instance, the use of foreign legal materials in interpreting the Constitution. He said he had favored allowing cameras in the courtroom in his own court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia.
On Thursday, he said he "can't think of a reason why" Congress could not outlaw employment discrimination against gay men and lesbians. And he said that a diverse student body was an important value in education.
It was the topics Judge Alito failed to discuss that concerned some scholars the most. Some questioned whether he had really drawn a principled line between the cases he viewed as finally settled, and so could discuss, and those he considered still to be in play.
Some of the cases and principles Judge Alito would discuss, said Vikram Amar, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, could "very easily come up over the next decade in the court, let alone the next three decades." Among the examples Mr. Amar gave were the use of foreign legal materials, a 1952 opinion on presidential power and diversity in education.
What Judge Alito would and would not discuss was telling, said Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Georgetown.
"You can infer from the areas in which he is willing to talk and not willing to talk," said Mr. Tushnet, who opposes Judge Alito's confirmation. "The only inference you can draw is that he doesn't agree with the abortion decisions."
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, asked Judge Alito on Thursday whether he shared the aggressive views of executive power discussed in a recent book by John Yoo, an architect and forceful advocate of the Bush administration's legal strategy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Judge Alito said he had not read the book, "The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11." But some of Judge Alito's answers suggested that he would not take as hard a line as Professor Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley.
Notably, Judge Alito endorsed a 1952 concurring opinion by Justice Robert H. Jackson rejecting President Harry S. Truman's assertion that he had the inherent constitutional authority to seize steel mills during the Korean War. The opinion, in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer, set out a three-part sliding scale for considering clashes between presidential power and Congressional authority.
The president's power is at its "lowest ebb," Justice Jackson wrote, when Congress has forbidden a particular action. The administration has conceded that its domestic surveillance program violated the terms of a 1978 law requiring court approval for some intelligence gathering, arguing that it had authority to conduct the surveillance without warrants under both the Constitution and a Sept. 18, 2001, Congressional authorization to use military force.
In an interview Thursday, Professor Yoo said the balancing called for by the Jackson concurrence did not apply to the surveillance program.
"The Jackson concurrence applies to domestic matters which are outside the theater of combat," he said. The surveillance program, by contrast, is partly international, he said, and the theater of combat after the Sept. 11 attacks encompasses the United States.
Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University, said the differing interpretations of the applicability of the Jackson concurrence were significant.
"It's very striking," Professor Feldman said, "that both Judge Alito and Chief Justice Roberts said they would apply Justice Jackson's concurrence in the steel seizure case, because it reflects a view of presidential power that is not unbounded and is not the strongest version of the unitary executive theory. If you were truly to follow Youngstown, you can't embrace the strongest version of the unitary executive theory."
Judge Alito endorsed a version of the unitary executive theory in a 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. The theory can mean, in its weaker form, that the president has full authority over the executive branch. In its stronger form, the theory means that there are areas of executive power into which Congress and the courts are powerless to intrude.
Professor Yoo said that what he called "the robust version" of the theory could conclusively answer the legal controversy over the surveillance program. "If gathering intelligence about the enemy is executive, then it can't be taken away" by Congress or the courts, he said.
At the hearings, Judge Alito embraced the weaker version. For Judge Alito, said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine who served in the Justice Department in the Reagan administration, the unitary executive theory "goes more to the direction of fully executive subordinates than any type of claim of executive supremacy, which Alito has rightly denied."
If anything, Professor Kmiec continued, Judge Alito "has an understanding of executive power that is so well within the mainstream that Alexander Hamilton might think it timid."
Judith Resnik, a law professor at Yale, disagreed.
"He's fabulous at tautology," Professor Resnik said of Judge Alito. "He says the president is not above the law. He says the president can only do what the Constitution allows him to do. But he doesn't say what the Constitution allows."
"One of the absolutely essential questions of American law at the moment is the ability of any human being to call the executive branch to account before the courts," she added, noting that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had affirmed that principle in a 2004 opinion allowing an American citizen to challenge his detention by the military. "That possibility must be available. What we have not heard from Judge Alito is a commitment to that point of view."
Judge Alito did indicate that he would take a relatively deferential view of Congressional power. "I would certainly approach the question of determining whether an act of Congress is constitutional with a heavy presumption in favor of the constitutionality of what Congress has done," he said on Thursday.
In the end, Judge Alito drew the line in what he would discuss almost exactly where Chief Justice Roberts had in his confirmation hearings in September. The similarity of the two men's positions should not be surprising, Professor Yoo said, as they were both government lawyers when Edwin Meese III served in the White House and the Justice Department in the Reagan administration.
"It shows the fruition," Professor Yoo said, "of the Reagan-Meese approach of grooming young lawyers in the 1980's who could do well at hearings 20 years later."
News Analysis
Few Glimmers of How Conservative Judge Alito Is
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - In over 18 hours responding to some 700 questions at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. mostly described a methodical and incremental approach to the law rooted in no particular theory.
But to the extent Judge Alito claimed a judicial philosophy, it aligned him with the court's two most conservative members, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Judge Alito completed his testimony Thursday amid substantial opposition from Democrats, who indicated they would not support him, but saw little chance of blocking his confirmation.
On one of the few occasions Judge Alito spoke about his general approach to the law, he embraced a mode of constitutional interpretation, originalism, often associated with Justices Scalia and Thomas.
"In interpreting the Constitution," Judge Alito said Wednesday, "I think we should look to the text of the Constitution, and we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption."
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., by contrast, described a more eclectic and dynamic approach to constitutional interpretation at his confirmation hearings in September. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom Judge Alito will replace if he is confirmed, has also embraced a variety of approaches.
"Judge Alito sounded less amenable to constitutional evolution than Roberts," said Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago who studied Judge Alito's dissenting opinions at the request of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, but has taken no position on the nomination. "He is someone who is more likely to vote with Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas than Justice O'Connor."
On more specific constitutional issues, Judge Alito affirmed what Jack M. Balkin, a law professor at Yale, calls the modern catechism necessary for confirmation. Judge Alito said that Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 school desegregation case, was correctly decided. He said the Constitution protected privacy in at least some aspects of procreation, endorsing two decisions giving constitutional protection to the use of contraceptives. And he said the principle of one person one vote is required by the Constitution.
Having agreed with those cases and propositions, though, Judge Alito largely drew the line at saying more, notably about abortion. He justified his approach by saying the first set of cases were unlikely to come before the Supreme Court and that other cases might well be revisited by it.
But he did provide some hints on an array of other issues. He rejected, for instance, the use of foreign legal materials in interpreting the Constitution. He said he had favored allowing cameras in the courtroom in his own court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia.
On Thursday, he said he "can't think of a reason why" Congress could not outlaw employment discrimination against gay men and lesbians. And he said that a diverse student body was an important value in education.
It was the topics Judge Alito failed to discuss that concerned some scholars the most. Some questioned whether he had really drawn a principled line between the cases he viewed as finally settled, and so could discuss, and those he considered still to be in play.
Some of the cases and principles Judge Alito would discuss, said Vikram Amar, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, could "very easily come up over the next decade in the court, let alone the next three decades." Among the examples Mr. Amar gave were the use of foreign legal materials, a 1952 opinion on presidential power and diversity in education.
What Judge Alito would and would not discuss was telling, said Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Georgetown.
"You can infer from the areas in which he is willing to talk and not willing to talk," said Mr. Tushnet, who opposes Judge Alito's confirmation. "The only inference you can draw is that he doesn't agree with the abortion decisions."
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, asked Judge Alito on Thursday whether he shared the aggressive views of executive power discussed in a recent book by John Yoo, an architect and forceful advocate of the Bush administration's legal strategy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Judge Alito said he had not read the book, "The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11." But some of Judge Alito's answers suggested that he would not take as hard a line as Professor Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley.
Notably, Judge Alito endorsed a 1952 concurring opinion by Justice Robert H. Jackson rejecting President Harry S. Truman's assertion that he had the inherent constitutional authority to seize steel mills during the Korean War. The opinion, in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer, set out a three-part sliding scale for considering clashes between presidential power and Congressional authority.
The president's power is at its "lowest ebb," Justice Jackson wrote, when Congress has forbidden a particular action. The administration has conceded that its domestic surveillance program violated the terms of a 1978 law requiring court approval for some intelligence gathering, arguing that it had authority to conduct the surveillance without warrants under both the Constitution and a Sept. 18, 2001, Congressional authorization to use military force.
In an interview Thursday, Professor Yoo said the balancing called for by the Jackson concurrence did not apply to the surveillance program.
"The Jackson concurrence applies to domestic matters which are outside the theater of combat," he said. The surveillance program, by contrast, is partly international, he said, and the theater of combat after the Sept. 11 attacks encompasses the United States.
Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University, said the differing interpretations of the applicability of the Jackson concurrence were significant.
"It's very striking," Professor Feldman said, "that both Judge Alito and Chief Justice Roberts said they would apply Justice Jackson's concurrence in the steel seizure case, because it reflects a view of presidential power that is not unbounded and is not the strongest version of the unitary executive theory. If you were truly to follow Youngstown, you can't embrace the strongest version of the unitary executive theory."
Judge Alito endorsed a version of the unitary executive theory in a 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. The theory can mean, in its weaker form, that the president has full authority over the executive branch. In its stronger form, the theory means that there are areas of executive power into which Congress and the courts are powerless to intrude.
Professor Yoo said that what he called "the robust version" of the theory could conclusively answer the legal controversy over the surveillance program. "If gathering intelligence about the enemy is executive, then it can't be taken away" by Congress or the courts, he said.
At the hearings, Judge Alito embraced the weaker version. For Judge Alito, said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine who served in the Justice Department in the Reagan administration, the unitary executive theory "goes more to the direction of fully executive subordinates than any type of claim of executive supremacy, which Alito has rightly denied."
If anything, Professor Kmiec continued, Judge Alito "has an understanding of executive power that is so well within the mainstream that Alexander Hamilton might think it timid."
Judith Resnik, a law professor at Yale, disagreed.
"He's fabulous at tautology," Professor Resnik said of Judge Alito. "He says the president is not above the law. He says the president can only do what the Constitution allows him to do. But he doesn't say what the Constitution allows."
"One of the absolutely essential questions of American law at the moment is the ability of any human being to call the executive branch to account before the courts," she added, noting that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had affirmed that principle in a 2004 opinion allowing an American citizen to challenge his detention by the military. "That possibility must be available. What we have not heard from Judge Alito is a commitment to that point of view."
Judge Alito did indicate that he would take a relatively deferential view of Congressional power. "I would certainly approach the question of determining whether an act of Congress is constitutional with a heavy presumption in favor of the constitutionality of what Congress has done," he said on Thursday.
In the end, Judge Alito drew the line in what he would discuss almost exactly where Chief Justice Roberts had in his confirmation hearings in September. The similarity of the two men's positions should not be surprising, Professor Yoo said, as they were both government lawyers when Edwin Meese III served in the White House and the Justice Department in the Reagan administration.
"It shows the fruition," Professor Yoo said, "of the Reagan-Meese approach of grooming young lawyers in the 1980's who could do well at hearings 20 years later."
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Presidential Power Has Limits, Alito Tells Senators - New York Times
Presidential Power Has Limits, Alito Tells Senators - New York TimesJanuary 10, 2006
Presidential Power Has Limits, Alito Tells Senators
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. said today that he agreed with the principle that a president does not have "a blank check" in terms of power, especially during wartime.
"The Constitution applies in times of peace and war," President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court said in the first round of questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The Bill of Rights applies at all times."
In the second day of hearings on his nomination to the United States Supreme Court, Judge Alito said preservation of individual rights is particularly important in wartime because that is when the temptation to abuse liberties in the name of national security is most dangerous.
Declaring that the Constitution "protects the rights of Americans in all circumstances," Judge Alito was addressing an issue that his critics have called very troubling: whether he would too easily embrace the concept of far-reaching executive power, as his critics say the judge's paper trail seems to indicate.
In agreeing that the president does not have "a blank check" in terms of power, even in wartime emergencies, Judge Alito embraced the language of the justice he would succeed, Sandra Day O'Connor, who so wrote in a decision that upheld the right of a prisoner held as an "enemy combatant" to use the courts to challenge the basis of his confinement.
The judge also testified that he would approach abortion-related cases with an open mind, that the Constitution is "a living thing in the sense that matters" in that its underlying principles do not change even as time and circumstances do, and that the views he espoused as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan - "a line attorney," as he put it - are by no means a preview of how he would rule as a justice.
"My general philosophy is that the judiciary has a very important role to play," Judge Alito said, adding that he saw it as "a limited role" that should never encroach on the duties of lawmakers.
Some of the sharpest questions about the limits of presidential power came from Senators Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the panel's ranking Democrat, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.
Mr. Leahy asked the nominee whether he agreed with President Bush's interpretation of the powers conferred on him by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Judge Alito replied cautiously, asserting that "difficult and important and complex questions" attend the issue.
But, the nominee said: "No person in this country is above the law. That includes the president and the Supreme Court."
Mr. Leahy was probing the judge's views on the electronic surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Apparently not satisfied with the nominee's replies, Mr. Leahy said half-jokingly, "Let's take an easy one." Could the president authorize someone to murder a person, the senator asked.
Of course not, Judge Alito said. "The president has to follow the Constitution and the laws," he said.
Judge Alito, who has sat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, for 15 years, said repeatedly that precedent in the law deserves great respect, and should be overturned only with great care. He was responding to questions from Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the panel, who is an abortion-rights supporter and has expressed concerns that the Supreme Court might one day consider undoing its 1973 ruling that established a woman's right to choose.
Precedent is "not an inexorable command," but it deserves great respect, Judge Alito said. He was referring not just to abortion issues but to a defendant's protection against police interrogations, as set forth in the 1966 Miranda ruling.
Senator Kennedy was skeptical about the nominee's dedication to the rights of ordinary citizens. "Time and again, even in routine matters involving average Americans, you give enormous, almost total deference to the exercise of governmental power," Mr. Kennedy said, citing a case in which the judge upheld the validity of a warrant in which a 10-year-old girl was strip searched.
Judge Alito answered in a calm, precise tone. "Senator, I wasn't happy that a 10-year-old girl was searched," he said, emphasizing that he had felt compelled to rule as he did, on a highly technical issue, because he felt the law required him to do so.
A bit later, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, offered the nominee a chance to express himself. "Judge Alito, would you have any difficulty ruling against the executive branch of the federal government if it were to overstep its authority in the Constitution?" Mr. Grassley asked.
"I would not, Senator," the judge replied. "I would judge the cases as they come up."
Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, asked him if he still agreed that Judge Robert H. Bork, who was rejected by the Senate in 1987, was an outstanding nominee, as he wrote at the time. "He was and is an accomplished scholar," Judge Alito said of Judge Bork, emphasizing that he still does not agree with him on everything.
Judge Alito, who as a Reagan administration lawyer wrote that he disagreed with some of the Supreme Court rulings during the time of Chief Justice Earl Warren, indicated that he agreed with what was perhaps the most important decision of all: the 1954 ruling that outlawed public school segregation. The judge said that ruling corrected an erroneous interpretation of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause that had persisted for more than a half-century.
Mr. Kohl was openly skeptical when the nominee said he could not say whether the Supreme Court was right to take the case of Bush v. Gore, in which it effectively handed the 2000 election to George Bush. "I really don't know," Judge Alito said, insisting that he had not studied the case as carefully as he would have if he had had to consider it.
"That was a huge case," Mr. Kohl said with a smile, adding that he found it hard to believe that the judge had not thought about the case a good deal.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, told Judge Alito his nomination to succeed Justice O'Connor "goes beyond you."
"It goes to whether or not your taking her seat will alter the constitutional framework of this country by shifting the balance, 5 to 4, 4 to 5, one way or another," the senator said, alluding to Justice O'Connor's role as a swing vote over the years.
The early assessment of the nominee's performance was split along party lines.
Three of the committee's 10 Republicans commented during a recess that the nominee had acquitted himself well. "It's clear to me that he is willing to be very forthright, that he appears to view his role as a judge very seriously and totally different from his position as a lawyer, divorcing any of his own personal views," said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, who was joined by Senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama and John Cornyn of Texas.
But Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat on the committee, disagreed. "I don't think we've heard anything from the nominee except statements that every nominee would make," Mr. Schumer said, adding that he hopes the judge will be more specific.
Senators Leahy and Kohl and Senator Russell D. Feingold, also of Wisconsin, were the three Democrats who voted for the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr., who won the committee's approval by 13 to 5 on his way to easy confirmation as chief justice.
Senator Leahy seemed concerned today about Judge Alito's membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, an organization that the senator said had resisted the admission of women and members of minority groups to the elite Ivy League institution. The nominee cited his membership in the group when he was applying for a promotion in the Reagan administration in 1985.
"Why in heaven's name, judge?" Mr. Leahy asked, seemingly incredulous that a man with Judge Alito's immigrant heritage and working-class background could have belonged to such a group.
The judge said that he had never active in the group's activities and that he had belonged chiefly because he disagreed with campus hostility to the Reserve Officers Training Corps in that Vietnam War era.
That back and forth afforded Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, a chance to serve up a friendly question. The senator asked the nominee whether he was against women and minority groups in college.
"Absolutely not, senator, no," the judge replied.
"Tough question, Orrin," Senator Leahy interjected with a chuckle. "Tough question."
"Good question, though," Mr. Hatch retorted.
Presidential Power Has Limits, Alito Tells Senators
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. said today that he agreed with the principle that a president does not have "a blank check" in terms of power, especially during wartime.
"The Constitution applies in times of peace and war," President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court said in the first round of questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The Bill of Rights applies at all times."
In the second day of hearings on his nomination to the United States Supreme Court, Judge Alito said preservation of individual rights is particularly important in wartime because that is when the temptation to abuse liberties in the name of national security is most dangerous.
Declaring that the Constitution "protects the rights of Americans in all circumstances," Judge Alito was addressing an issue that his critics have called very troubling: whether he would too easily embrace the concept of far-reaching executive power, as his critics say the judge's paper trail seems to indicate.
In agreeing that the president does not have "a blank check" in terms of power, even in wartime emergencies, Judge Alito embraced the language of the justice he would succeed, Sandra Day O'Connor, who so wrote in a decision that upheld the right of a prisoner held as an "enemy combatant" to use the courts to challenge the basis of his confinement.
The judge also testified that he would approach abortion-related cases with an open mind, that the Constitution is "a living thing in the sense that matters" in that its underlying principles do not change even as time and circumstances do, and that the views he espoused as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan - "a line attorney," as he put it - are by no means a preview of how he would rule as a justice.
"My general philosophy is that the judiciary has a very important role to play," Judge Alito said, adding that he saw it as "a limited role" that should never encroach on the duties of lawmakers.
Some of the sharpest questions about the limits of presidential power came from Senators Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the panel's ranking Democrat, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.
Mr. Leahy asked the nominee whether he agreed with President Bush's interpretation of the powers conferred on him by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Judge Alito replied cautiously, asserting that "difficult and important and complex questions" attend the issue.
But, the nominee said: "No person in this country is above the law. That includes the president and the Supreme Court."
Mr. Leahy was probing the judge's views on the electronic surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Apparently not satisfied with the nominee's replies, Mr. Leahy said half-jokingly, "Let's take an easy one." Could the president authorize someone to murder a person, the senator asked.
Of course not, Judge Alito said. "The president has to follow the Constitution and the laws," he said.
Judge Alito, who has sat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, for 15 years, said repeatedly that precedent in the law deserves great respect, and should be overturned only with great care. He was responding to questions from Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the panel, who is an abortion-rights supporter and has expressed concerns that the Supreme Court might one day consider undoing its 1973 ruling that established a woman's right to choose.
Precedent is "not an inexorable command," but it deserves great respect, Judge Alito said. He was referring not just to abortion issues but to a defendant's protection against police interrogations, as set forth in the 1966 Miranda ruling.
Senator Kennedy was skeptical about the nominee's dedication to the rights of ordinary citizens. "Time and again, even in routine matters involving average Americans, you give enormous, almost total deference to the exercise of governmental power," Mr. Kennedy said, citing a case in which the judge upheld the validity of a warrant in which a 10-year-old girl was strip searched.
Judge Alito answered in a calm, precise tone. "Senator, I wasn't happy that a 10-year-old girl was searched," he said, emphasizing that he had felt compelled to rule as he did, on a highly technical issue, because he felt the law required him to do so.
A bit later, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, offered the nominee a chance to express himself. "Judge Alito, would you have any difficulty ruling against the executive branch of the federal government if it were to overstep its authority in the Constitution?" Mr. Grassley asked.
"I would not, Senator," the judge replied. "I would judge the cases as they come up."
Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, asked him if he still agreed that Judge Robert H. Bork, who was rejected by the Senate in 1987, was an outstanding nominee, as he wrote at the time. "He was and is an accomplished scholar," Judge Alito said of Judge Bork, emphasizing that he still does not agree with him on everything.
Judge Alito, who as a Reagan administration lawyer wrote that he disagreed with some of the Supreme Court rulings during the time of Chief Justice Earl Warren, indicated that he agreed with what was perhaps the most important decision of all: the 1954 ruling that outlawed public school segregation. The judge said that ruling corrected an erroneous interpretation of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause that had persisted for more than a half-century.
Mr. Kohl was openly skeptical when the nominee said he could not say whether the Supreme Court was right to take the case of Bush v. Gore, in which it effectively handed the 2000 election to George Bush. "I really don't know," Judge Alito said, insisting that he had not studied the case as carefully as he would have if he had had to consider it.
"That was a huge case," Mr. Kohl said with a smile, adding that he found it hard to believe that the judge had not thought about the case a good deal.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, told Judge Alito his nomination to succeed Justice O'Connor "goes beyond you."
"It goes to whether or not your taking her seat will alter the constitutional framework of this country by shifting the balance, 5 to 4, 4 to 5, one way or another," the senator said, alluding to Justice O'Connor's role as a swing vote over the years.
The early assessment of the nominee's performance was split along party lines.
Three of the committee's 10 Republicans commented during a recess that the nominee had acquitted himself well. "It's clear to me that he is willing to be very forthright, that he appears to view his role as a judge very seriously and totally different from his position as a lawyer, divorcing any of his own personal views," said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, who was joined by Senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama and John Cornyn of Texas.
But Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat on the committee, disagreed. "I don't think we've heard anything from the nominee except statements that every nominee would make," Mr. Schumer said, adding that he hopes the judge will be more specific.
Senators Leahy and Kohl and Senator Russell D. Feingold, also of Wisconsin, were the three Democrats who voted for the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr., who won the committee's approval by 13 to 5 on his way to easy confirmation as chief justice.
Senator Leahy seemed concerned today about Judge Alito's membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, an organization that the senator said had resisted the admission of women and members of minority groups to the elite Ivy League institution. The nominee cited his membership in the group when he was applying for a promotion in the Reagan administration in 1985.
"Why in heaven's name, judge?" Mr. Leahy asked, seemingly incredulous that a man with Judge Alito's immigrant heritage and working-class background could have belonged to such a group.
The judge said that he had never active in the group's activities and that he had belonged chiefly because he disagreed with campus hostility to the Reserve Officers Training Corps in that Vietnam War era.
That back and forth afforded Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, a chance to serve up a friendly question. The senator asked the nominee whether he was against women and minority groups in college.
"Absolutely not, senator, no," the judge replied.
"Tough question, Orrin," Senator Leahy interjected with a chuckle. "Tough question."
"Good question, though," Mr. Hatch retorted.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
NPR : History as a Guide to Alito's Nomination Hearings
NPR : History as a Guide to Alito's Nomination HearingsHistory as a Guide to Alito's Nomination Hearings
Listen to this story... by Nina Totenberg
All Things Considered, January 2, 2006 · On the eve of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, Nina Totenberg looks back at past hearings, including the recent hearings for Chief Justice John Roberts.
Listen to this story... by Nina Totenberg
All Things Considered, January 2, 2006 · On the eve of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, Nina Totenberg looks back at past hearings, including the recent hearings for Chief Justice John Roberts.
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