Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- Under the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriages even in states that have legalized it. This week, the Supreme Court ruled DOMA unconstitutional. There are two possible grounds, distinct and in some ways contradictory, for doing so. The curious thing about the court's DOMA decision is that it contains both rationales. The first is federalism. Marriage is the province of the states. Each state decides who is married and who is not. The federal government may not intrude. It must therefore recognize gay marriage where it has been legalized.
The war in Syria, started by locals, is now a regional conflict, the meeting ground of two warring blocs. ... President Obama's dodge was his chemical-weapons red line. In a conflict requiring serious statecraft, Obama chose to practice forensics instead, earnestly agonizing over whether reported poison gas attacks reached the evidentiary standards of "CSI: Miami." ... Obama is learning very late that, for a superpower, inaction is a form of action. You can abdicate, but you really can't hide. History will find you.
WASHINGTON -- Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts ruled that the Postal Service may record "mail cover," i.e., what's written on the outside of an envelope -- the addresses of sender and receiver. The National Security Agency's recording of U.S. phone data does basically that with the telephone. It records who is calling whom -- the outside of the envelope, as it were. The content of the conversation, however, is like the letter inside the envelope. It may not be opened without a court order.
WASHINGTON -- On Wednesday, Qusair fell to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad's Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base. It's a major strategic shift. Assad's forces can now advance on rebel-dominated areas in central and northern Syria, including Aleppo. For the rebels, it's a devastating loss of territory, morale and their supply corridor to Lebanon. No one knows if this reversal of fortune will be the last, but everyone knows that Assad now has the upper hand.
"This war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises ..." -- Barack Obama, May 23 WASHINGTON -- Nice thought. But much as Obama would like to close his eyes, click his heels three times and declare the war on terror over, war is a two-way street. That's what history advises: Two sides to fight it, two to end it. By surrender (World War II), by armistice (Korea and Vietnam) or when the enemy simply disappears from the field (the Cold War).
WASHINGTON -- "Horrible customer service." That's what the newly fired IRS commissioner averred was the agency's only sin in singling out conservative political groups for discriminatory treatment. In such grim proceedings one should be grateful for unintended humor. Horrible customer service is when every patron in a restaurant finds a fly in his soup. But when the maitre d' screens patrons for their politics and only conservatives find flies paddle-wheeling through their consomme, the problem is not poor service. It is harassment and invidious discrimination. And yet both the acting and the previous IRS commissioners insisted that the singling out of groups according to politics was in no way politically motivated. More hilarity. It's definitional: If you discriminate according to politics, your discrimination is political. It's a tautology, for God's sake.
WASHINGTON -- Note to GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don't know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn't meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics. Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks, the honorable, apolitical second-in-command that night in Libya, movingly and grippingly demolish the president's Benghazi mantra that "what I have always tried to do is just get all the facts" and "every piece of information that we got, as we got it, we laid it out for the American people."
WASHINGTON -- You know you're in trouble when you can't even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama's fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to The New York Times that Obama's initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted and therefore unserious. The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: "Red line" was intended and deliberate. Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough, sound like a real world leader, never expecting that Syria would do something so crazy. He would have it both ways: sound decisive but never have to deliver.
WASHINGTON -- Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road to domination. And where Barack Obama, already naturally inclined to believe his own loftiness, graciously accepted the kingly crown and proceeded to ride his re-election success to a crushing victory over the GOP at the fiscal cliff, leaving a humiliated John Boehner & Co. with nothing but naked tax hikes.
WASHINGTON -- Clare Boothe Luce liked to say that "a great man is one sentence." Presidents, in particular. The most common "one sentence" for George W. Bush (whose legacy is being reassessed as his presidential library opens) is: "He kept us safe." Not quite right. He did not just keep us safe. He created the entire anti-terror infrastructure that continues to keep us safe. That homage was paid, wordlessly, by Barack Obama, who vilified Bush's anti-terror policies as a candidate, then continued them as president: indefinite detention, rendition, warrantless wiretaps, special forces and drone warfare and, most notoriously, Guantanamo, which Obama so ostentatiously denounced -- until he found it indispensable.
WASHINGTON -- Terrorism is speech -- speech that gathers its audience by killing innocents as theatrically as possible. The 19th-century anarchist Paul Brousse called it "propaganda by deed." Accordingly, the Boston Marathon attack, the first successful terror bombing in the U.S. since 9/11, was designed for maximum effect. At the finish line there would be not only news cameras but also hundreds of personal videos to amplify the message. But what message? There was no claim of responsibility, no explanatory propaganda. Indeed, was it terrorism at all? There was much ado about President Obama's nonuse of the word "terrorism" in his first statement to the nation after the bombing. Indeed, the very next morning, he took to the White House briefing room for no other reason than to pronounce the event an "act of terrorism."
WASHINGTON -- Well, at least we're starting to get the procedure right. Washington has rediscovered the beauty of the boring. It's called "regular order," using the normal, routine, constitutional process to arrive at, for example, a budget. Normal had disappeared during the Obama years. Republicans duly submitted annual budgets, which the president then used for target practice, most famously demagoguing Paul Ryan's 2011 budget as un-American. Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Senate simply stopped producing budgets for four years. And the ones the White House put out were so preposterous that, for example, the 2011 version was rejected by the Senate 97-0.
WASHINGTON -- Is a bipartisan immigration deal at hand? It's close. Last week, the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce worked out a guest-worker compromise that allows in foreign workers on a sliding scale of 20,000 to 200,000, depending on the strength of the economy. Nice deal. As are the other elements of the Senate's bipartisan Gang of Eight plan -- the expansion of H-1B visas for skilled immigrants, serious tracking of visa overstayers and, most important, a universal E-Verify system that would make it very risky for any employer to hire an illegal immigrant. But there's a rub. It's the perennial rub. Are Democrats serious about border enforcement? It's supposed to be the trigger that would allow illegal immigrants to start on the path to citizenship.
"I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those [Palestinian] kids, they'd say I want these kids to succeed." -- Barack Obama, in Jerusalem, March 21 WASHINGTON -- Very true. But how does the other side feel about Israeli kids? Consider that the most revered parent in Palestinian society is Mariam Farhat of Gaza. Her distinction? Three of her sons died in various stages of trying to kill Israelis -- one in a suicide attack, shooting up and hurling grenades in a room full of Jewish students. She gloried in her "martyr" sons, wishing only that she had 100 boys like her schoolroom suicide attacker to "sacrifice ... for the sake of God." And for that she was venerated as "mother of the struggle," elected to parliament and widely mourned upon her recent passing.
WASHINGTON -- The proposition that entitlement curbs are the key to maintaining national solvency is widely accepted, though not by many congressional Democrats. President Obama, however, has endorsed it on various occasions. And he could make it happen. If he wants. I remain skeptical that he does. But national solvency is important enough to test this proposition at least once more. The obstacle is Obama's current position that entitlement cuts must be "balanced" with new revenue from closing loopholes. Republicans are adamantly opposed. No more revenues, Mr. President. You got your tax hike on Jan. 1. Is there a solution? Yes: tax reform with a twist.
WASHINGTON -- In choice of both topic and foil, Rand Paul's now legendary Senate filibuster was a stroke of political genius. The topic was, ostensibly, very narrow: Does the president have the constitutional authority to put a drone-launched Hellfire missile through your kitchen -- you, a good citizen of Topeka to whom POTUS might have taken a dislike -- while you're cooking up a pot roast? The constituency of those who could not give this question a straight answer is exceedingly small. Unfortunately, among them is Attorney General Eric Holder. Enter the foil. He told a Senate hearing that such an execution would not be "appropriate." Appropriate being a bureaucratic word meaning nothing, Holder's answer was a PR disaster. The correct response, of course, is: Absent an active civil war on U.S. soil (of the kind not seen in 150 years) or a jihadist invasion from Saskatchewan led by the Topeka pot roaster, the answer is no.
WASHINGTON -- Sequestration is not the best time to be doling out foreign aid, surely the most unpopular item in the federal budget. Especially when the recipient is President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt. Morsi is intent on getting the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheik), serving a life sentence for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center attack that killed six and wounded more than a thousand. Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood is openly anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and otherwise prolifically intolerant. Just three years ago, Morsi called on Egyptians to nurse their children and grandchildren on hatred for Jews, whom he has called "the descendants of apes and pigs."
WASHINGTON -- "The worst-case scenario for us," a leading anti-budget-cuts lobbyist told The Washington Post, "is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens." Think about that. Worst case? That a government drowning in debt should cut back by 2.2 percent -- and the country survives. That a government now borrowing 35 cents of every dollar it spends reduces that borrowing by two cents "and nothing bad really happens." Oh, the humanity! A normal citizen might think this a good thing. For reactionary liberalism, however, whatever sum our ever-inflating government happens to spend today (now double what Bill Clinton spent in his last year) is the Platonic ideal -- the reduction of which, however minuscule, is a national calamity.
WASHINGTON -- The president suggested he would hold off introducing his own immigration bill as long as bipartisan Senate negotiations were proceeding apace -- until his own immigration bill mysteriously leaked precisely as bipartisan Senate negotiations were proceeding apace. A naked political maneuver and a blunt warning to Republicans: Finish that immigration deal in Congress or I'll propose something I know you can't accept -- and flog the issue mercilessly next year to win back the House. John McCain responded (correctly) that President Obama was creating a "cudgel" to gain "political advantage in the next election." Marco Rubio, a chief architect of the Senate bill, called Obama's alternative dead on arrival.
WASHINGTON -- The nation's vexation over the morality and legality of President Obama's drone war has produced a salutary but hopelessly confused debate. Three categories of questions are being asked. They must be separated to be clearly understood. *1. By what right does the president order the killing by drone of enemies abroad? What criteria justify assassination?* Answer: (a) imminent threat, under the doctrine of self-defense, and (b) affiliation with al-Qaeda, under the laws of war. Imminent threat is obvious. If we know a freelance jihadist cell in Yemen is actively plotting an attack, we don't have to wait until after the fact. Elementary self-defense justifies attacking first.
