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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (190559)	6/30/2006 8:06:54 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Democrats dare to dream of recapturing the Bush heartland.... From Kansas to South Carolina, Republican moderates are turning their backs on the neocons and defecting to the enemy Paul Harris in Topeka, Kansas Sunday June 25, 2006 The Observer The squat, bunker-like building in a south Topeka suburb does not look like a place to turn American politics on its head. Nor does Mark Parkinson, a tall, affable man, look too much like a revolutionary. But here, deep in the American heartland, are the warning signs of a political earthquake. The two-storey office block is Parkinson's campaign headquarters as he runs as Democrat candidate for deputy governor. So far, so normal. Except that only a few weeks ago Parkinson was a Republican. In fact, he was Kansas Republican party chairman. His defection to the Democrats sent shockwaves through a state deeply associated with the national Republican cause and the evangelical conservatives at its base. Nor was it just Parkinson's leave-taking that left Republicans spluttering with rage and talking of betrayal. It was that as he left Parkinson lambasted his former party's obsession with conservative and religious issues such as gay marriage, evolution and abortion. Sitting in his headquarters, the new Democrat is sticking to his guns. Republicans in Kansas, he says, have let down their own people. 'They were fixated on ideological issues that really don't matter to people's everyday lives. What matters is improving schools and creating jobs,' he said. 'I got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right.' This is music to Democratic ears and has profound potential implications for November's mid-term elections. Kansas has been an iconic state for the Republican right, a symbol for issues such as teaching creationism in schools and fighting abortion rights. The modern Republican party, masterminded by political guru Karl Rove, has harnessed fury over such topics to allow the Republicans to dominate US politics since 2000. This was the topic of Thomas Frank's hit book of the 2004 presidential election campaign entitled: What's The Matter With Kansas? It used the state's falling under the spell of conservative Republicanism to explain national American politics. But in a swath of heartland states such as Kansas, Democrats are seeing the first signs of their party's rebirth. Parkinson is not alone in switching sides. In Virginia, Jim Webb, a one-time Reagan official, is seeking to be a Democrat senator. In South Carolina, top Republican prosecutor Barney Giese has defected after a spat with conservatives. Back in Kansas another top Republican, Paul Morrison, also joined the Democrats and is challenging a Republican to be the state attorney-general. Democrats are hoping that the Republican party of President George W Bush has passed its high-water mark. That, faced with disaster in Iraq, a host of domestic troubles and terrible opinion poll ratings, they can start to retake power in November. From there they can start to take aim at the White House itself. They hope the powerful conservative movement born in states such as Kansas will also die there. An upbeat mood prevails at the monthly meeting of the Shawnee County Democratic party. The talk over iced tea in the dining room of the Topeka Ramada Hotel was of Iraq, family, friends and sports. It has never been easy being a Democrat in Kansas, but things are looking a little brighter. 'I know a lot of registered Republicans who no longer agree with what's going on,' said Charlie Snow, a real estate manager. Wearing a T-shirt with a picture of George Bush Senior and the slogan 'I should have pulled out', Snow is not a typical Kansas voter, but he and his fellow Shawnee County Democrats see unaccustomed prospects. 'We have always been the underdog, but recently actions of the President and the Republicans have made it a lot easier to be a Democrat in Kansas,' Snow said. One of the key reasons Kansas Democrats are in fighting mood is their governor, Kathleen Sibelius. Sibelius's vote represents an island of Democratic blue in a sea of Republican red on the political map, and she has impressed by reaching the middle-ground voters in a startlingly successful first term. Shunning the hot-button social issues, she has focused on education, jobs and health. This has earned her approval ratings touching 68 per cent in a state that was overwhelmingly pro-Bush in 2004. Sibelius has cracked the political holy grail: persuading heartland Republicans to vote Democrat. 'Her style works here, and then bringing over Parkinson to the Democrats has been the coup of all coups,' said Professor Bob Beatty, a political scientist at Washburn University near Topeka. As the Democrats enjoy a resurgence, the Republicans are in disarray. Parkinson's defection encouraged other moderates to abandon a party controlled by right-wing religious zealots. In political terms they are called Rinos, or Republicans in Name Only. If enough Rinos desert, the strict ideologues in the party are likely to drift further right. 'A number of conservatives are actually pleased that the moderates are leaving the Republican party. That really could spell trouble,' Beatty said. There is a long way to go. Larry Gates, chairman of the Kansas Democratic party, says his side is still vastly outgunned, but he is optimistic. 'The Republican party is just controlled by the neocons. They are not flexible. But in Kansas it is an issue like education that is foremost in people's minds,' he said. The Democrats bypass abortion and evolution to focus on jobs, schools and health. The Democrats' local slogan for 2006 sums up the mood: 'Hope in the Heartland.' The issues in Kansas mirror those in Washington, and could decide November's election as well as shaping presidential politics for years to come. Nationally, the Democratic party is deeply split. It has not yet decided on a unified course of action for November or the presidential race of 2008. The defections across the country have been spurred mostly by a reaction to the extremism of the right. The future, as Kansas predicts it, lies in the middle ground for the first party to stake a claim to it. 'That is the absolute lesson. No party is going to win an election by being on the edges. The first to go to the middle ground will win,' Gates said. For the 2008 race, the Democratic frontrunner is Hillary Clinton. Though she has steadily shifted rightwards, she is still portrayed as a liberal and is seen as having little appeal in Middle America. The Rinos of Kansas and elsewhere are unlikely to respond well to Clinton. Other senior Democrats, especially those from the north-east, do not go down well in Kansas. Such names as John Kerry and Senator Ted Kennedy have little appeal. So it could mean the centrist card is the Democrat lesson for 2008, electing someone from a southern or midwestern state who already occupies middle ground - candidates such as Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, Tom Vilsack, governor of Iowa, and Evan Bayh, a senator from Indiana. If Democrats want to become the dominant party again, the revolution must begin in such places as Kansas. And Democrats in Kansas, deep in reddest America, are dreaming of a time when the whole country turns blue. observer.guardian.co.uk

To: geode00 who wrote (190559)	6/30/2006 8:14:22 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The '06 Stakes Just Got Raised ________________________________________________________ By Robert Parry* June 30, 2006 consortiumnews.com The narrow margin of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rebuke to George W. Bush on military tribunals highlights the stakes on the table for the November 2006 congressional elections – nothing short of the survival of a meaningful constitutional system in the United States. The majority opinion, which stopped Bush from proceeding with a kangaroo court that stripped Guantanamo Bay detainees of basic legal protections and mocked the Geneva Conventions, carried a profound secondary message – that the Court was not prepared to endorse Bush’s vision of his “war powers” as limitless and beyond challenge. But it was equally noteworthy that only five of the nine justices believed that the rule of law and constitutional limits on Bush’s powers should prevail. Four justices – Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts – have made clear that they are prepared to rubber-stamp any judgment that Bush makes. In dissenting opinions on the tribunal case, Scalia, Thomas and Alito embraced legal arguments that bowed before Bush’s imperial presidency. Chief Justice Roberts would surely have joined them, except that he had already ruled in Bush’s favor in the case while sitting on the U.S. Appeals Court and thus was forced to recuse himself. The one-vote fragility of the Supreme Court’s embrace of constitutional principles over one-man rule was further underscored by the fact that the landmark ruling was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, a decorated World War II veteran who is now 86. Another justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is known to have battled health problems. It is a strong possibility that if the Republicans retain control of the U.S. Congress in the November 2006 elections, Bush will get to fill at least one more Supreme Court vacancy with the likes of Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts. Then, the court’s majority will flip in the opposite direction, granting Bush the authoritarian powers he so covets. Even now, the court balance is being maintained by the swing vote of Republican Anthony Kennedy, the author of the infamous Bush v. Gore decision in December 2000 that prevented a full counting of votes in Florida and handed Bush the presidency. But, at least in the near term, the Court’s ruling means that Bush will be forced to negotiate with Congress over creating new standards for the tribunals that will try some of the 450 detainees now held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Rebuffing Bush In that ruling on June 29, the Supreme Court majority rejected Bush’s long-held contention that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees in the “war on terror.” The justices also repudiated Bush’s tribunal rules that allowed a defendant to be excluded from his own trial and permitted hearsay evidence, unsworn testimony and evidence secured through coercive means. “The Executive is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails in this jurisdiction,” Stevens wrote in the majority opinion. “The Court’s conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground,” added Justice Stephen Breyer. “Congress has not issued the Executive a blank check.” Implicitly the Court’s slim majority was saying, too, that the Constitution does not countenance the notion that the President as Commander in Chief can assert “plenary” – or unlimited – powers indefinitely, any way he sees fit. Since the 9/11 terror attacks, Bush has maintained that he possesses virtually all the legal power of the U.S. government; that he can decide which laws will be enforced and which ones ignored; that he can take the nation to war without congressional consent; that he can order torture and assassination; and that he gets to parcel out constitutional protections to Americans, overriding such guarantees as the habeas corpus right to a fair trial and the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. By asserting that the “war on terror” exists everywhere, Bush has claimed powers that know no bounds and no boundaries, reaching from the farthest corners of the earth to the corner of Main Street and Elm. In effect, Bush has negated the fundamental American concept of “unalienable rights,” heralded by the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Today, under Bush’s legal theories, Americans have rights only at his forbearance. Bush’s vision of his unlimited powers also would obliterate the constitutional “checks and balances” by subordinating the Legislature and Judiciary to the Executive. Bush implemented these radical changes to the American political system by combining what his legal advisers call the “plenary” powers of the Commander in Chief with the concept of a “unitary executive” in control of all laws and regulations. One of the legal theorists who developed these concepts of an all-powerful Executive was Samuel Alito, who became Bush’s second appointee to the Supreme Court, after Chief Justice Roberts. Rights As ‘History’ Yet, maybe because Bush’s assertion of power has been so extraordinary, almost no one has dared connect the dots. After a 230-year run, the “unalienable rights” – as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the other Founders – were history. The Justice Department spelled out Bush’s rationale for his powers on Jan. 19, 2006, in a 42-page legal analysis defending Bush’s right to wiretap Americans without a warrant. Bush’s lawyers said the congressional authorization to use force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “places the President at the zenith of his powers” and lets him use that authority domestically as well as overseas. [NYT, Jan. 20, 2006] According to the analysis, the “zenith of his powers” allows Bush to override both the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against searches and seizures without court orders, and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a special secret court to approve spying warrants inside the United States. In its legal analysis, the Justice Department added, “The President has made clear that he will exercise all authority available to him, consistent with the Constitution, to protect the people of the United States.” While the phrase “consistent with the Constitution” sounded reassuring to many Americans, what it meant in this case was that Bush believes he has unlimited powers as Commander in Chief to do whatever he deems necessary in the “war on terror.” Yet, since the “war on terror” is a vague concept – unlike other wars fought by the United States – there also is no expectation that Bush’s usurpation of traditional American freedoms is just a short-term necessity. Instead it is a framework for future governance. It was this historic and unprecedented assertion of presidential power that was the real backdrop for the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Guantanamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was accused of conspiracy because of his alleged work as a driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In demanding reasonable legal safeguards for Hamdan and other Guantanamo detainees, the Supreme Court majority also was declaring that Bush’s powers are not without limit. The Court was asserting that other human beings who share the planet with Bush have rights, too. Election 2006, however, may well decide whether the future of the United States will be as a nation of laws with citizens who continue to possess “unalienable rights” – or whether Bush becomes a modern-day king and all other Americans become his subjects. *Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'