Tag: Isnt

Biden Isn’t the Only Official Who Could Pardon Trump

[ad_1]
State-level pardons
Let’s take the state level first. Each state has its own process for pardons and commutations, which differ from pardons in that they reduce the punishments for crimes rather than wiping them out altogether. Some states lodge those powers with their governor and some with a range of executive officials.
Trump currently faces actual or potential criminal charges in two states, New York and Georgia. He has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records under New York law. The only pertinent pardon power related to those charges
belongs to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who is unlikely to agree to pardon the former Republican president.
The second state-level investigation is ongoing in Fulton County, Ga., in connection with Trump’s infamous recorded call imploring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that “I just want to find 11,780 votes” to swing that state in his column. If district attorney Fani Willis produces an indictment, which she recently announced could be forthcoming this summer, Trump would have to turn to a five-member Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles for a pardon. Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has the power to appoint members, but they serve staggered, seven-year terms that are subject to confirmation by the state Senate. And unlike presidential pardons, which can be doled out arbitrarily with few legal constraints, Georgia’s pardon program has stringent eligibility requirements. Trump could only apply for a pardon in Georgia after he is indicted and convicted, and only after five additional years have passed since completion of his sentence.
In both New York and Georgia, therefore, a politically motivated pardon — which Trump himself embraced unabashedly by pardoning the likes of advisors Steven Bannon, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort (his 2016 campaign manager) — is not in the cards.
Federal pardons
But if a federal indictment issues, the law — and history — around the presidential pardon power are less clear.
Trump is currently embroiled in three criminal probes at the federal level. Attorney General Merrick Garland tasked Special Counsel Jack Smith with looking into the classified documents Trump unlawfully kept at Mar-a-Lago months after the FBI and the National Archives requested their return. A
second federal investigation involves the Securities and Exchange Commission plus a federal grand jury, which are considering whether his company, Trump Media, violated federal criminal laws in connection with its initial public offering for his social medial platform, Truth Social, as well as its reported receipt of $8 million in related loans wired from entities connected to an ally of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The third is Smith’s investigation of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, a probe that now reportedly includes possible wire fraud in connection with the massive fundraising that occurred over his false election claims.
If any of these produces an indictment, the question will inevitably arise: Should President Joe Biden pardon Trump? Given the precedent set by President Gerald Ford’s pardon of a disgraced former president, Richard Nixon, there will be considerable pressure on Biden to do so. (And given the nearly ubiquitous attacks on Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment decision, it’s fair to assume that such pardon pressure would come from both the right and the left.)
As a matter of historical precedent, Ford broke new ground by pardoning Nixon before any charges were brought, ushering in a modern norm of presidential unaccountability. Ford wrote in his pardon that “a trial of Richard Nixon, if it became necessary, could not fairly begin until a year or more has elapsed. In the meantime, the tranquility [of] this nation . . . could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The same logic could hold true for Trump: He is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, and a federal trial would likely stretch past the election.

Ford’s move is widely believed to have cost him a second term. Biden just announced that he is running again. That decision changes any potential political calculus around pardoning Trump.
Naturally, clemency for the first indicted former president in American history would be measured against a long tradition of presidents issuing pardons in the name of amnesty — or in order to heal the nation after times of crisis. Long before Ford pardoned Nixon, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson both pardoned Confederate soldiers en masse after the Civil War, with Johnson explaining that his action would “renew and fully restore confidence and fraternal feeling among the whole people, and their respect for the attachment to the National Government, designed by its patriotic founders for the general good.”
On his first full day in office in 1977, Ford’s successor, President Jimmy Carter, granted an unconditional pardon to tens of thousands of Americans who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, many having immigrated to Canada in fear. The decision was controversial, angering veterans’ groups who opposed amnesty for draft-dodgers. Carter also drew criticism for excluding military deserters from the scope of Proclamation 4483, also known as the “Granting Pardon for Violations of the Selective Services Act,” because draft-evaders tended to be middle class and well-educated (including the likes of Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Trump), while military deserters were more likely to come from lower-income families. Like Ford before him, Carter lost his reelection bid, this time to President Ronald Reagan, a Republican.
If Biden is serious about four more years, he would be hard-pressed to preemptively exonerate the man who tried to seize power from the U.S. electorate in the last round. The country remains exceedingly polarized, with a political plurality of Americans (46 percent) believing that Trump has done something illegal, according to a March 2023 NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
A presidential self-pardon?
Finally, although it’s a highly speculative option, it’s possible that Trump could try to pardon himself with a “pocket pardon.” That is, Trump may have issued himself a self-pardon while he was president and squirreled it away in a desk drawer or storage closet for use in rebuffing possible federal charges down the line. If Trump issued a self-pardon while still president, his actions will have again pushed the constitutional envelope beyond any boundary this country has seen before.
No court has yet considered the question of whether presidents can pardon themselves, even for crimes committed in the Oval Office. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution states of impeachment, which is the most apparent remedy for presidential wrongdoing in office, that “the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.” Given that impeachments cannot be pardoned under Article II, the impeachment language — which makes former presidents subject to the criminal laws for impeachable conduct — could be read to suggest that crimes related to impeachments cannot be pardoned, either. Trump was impeached for his role in Jan. 6, with the House of Representatives charging him with “incitement of insurrection” against the U.S. government and “lawless action at the Capitol.” Arguably, then, any crimes arising from the same conduct would be immune from a self-pardon.
In addition, Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment holds that “[n]o person shall . . . hold any office, civil or military, under the United States . . . who, having previously taken an oath . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” If Smith’s grand jury indicts Trump under the section of federal sedition law which provides that “[w]hoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto . . . shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States,” a self-pardon would clash with the Supreme Court’s longstanding recognition, discussed below, that pardons cannot undermine other parts of the Constitution. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel also opined in August of 1975 — during Nixon’s presidency — that “[u]nder the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself.”
Constitutionally legitimizing a self-pardon for Jan. 6 should therefore be unthinkable. At least one would hope. At the very least, that debate could thrust the country into a much-needed discussion of whether the Article II pardon power’s susceptibility to abuse has outlived its benefits.
Still, many commentators widely assume that except in cases of impeachment, the president’s pardon power is unconstrained and may even extend to self-pardons, a perspective that likely traces back to the Supreme Court’s characterization of the power as “unlimited” in a post-Civil War case. But as a matter of history, theory and Supreme Court precedent, that understanding is overblown.
The U.S. president’s pardon power derives from medieval England, originating between 668 and 725 A.D. That history forms the backdrop for understanding the scope of the president’s power to pardon today. In 1833, the Supreme Court wrote of the English monarch’s power to pardon: “We . . . look into their books for the rules prescribing the manner in which it is to be used by the person who would avail himself of it.”
Yet a primary reason for the King’s nearly unlimited authority to pardon no longer applies. Under England’s early hereditary monarchy, the “law” as we understand it today — as a set of written rules that are supposed to apply to the general population even-handedly — did not exist. There were no police, so justice was the responsibility of local communities. Until the jury trial was established in 1215, accused persons in England often underwent an ordeal — by fire, which meant walking three paces holding a red-hot iron bar; by water, which meant being tied up and thrown into water; or by combat. If the accused survived, the verdict was not guilty. In this harsh environment, the royal “prerogative of mercy” operated, at least ostensibly, to achieve justice for especially worthy individuals. By contrast, there are elaborate rules governing the systems of criminal justice in modern American courts — including constitutional due process, the right against self-incrimination, and the right to a jury trial, among many others — so in theory, the need for an executive branch official to swoop in as a backstop for miscarriages of justice is less evident.
What’s more, the English monarch’s pardon power was not unlimited. By the time of the American Revolution, the power was shared with the Parliament and the Church of England. As early as 1389, for example, Parliament passed a law requiring that pardons “for murder, or for the death of a man slain by await, assault, or malice prepensed, treason or rape . . . be specified.” Unless the King listed the relevant crimes, in other words, his pardon was invalid as a matter of law.
The pardon power made its way into the U.S. Constitution after little debate, and it remains unclear how broadly it does — or should — extend. The Constitutional Convention produced a relatively short job description for presidents under Article II, which prominently includes an obligation that presidents “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” — hardly a sovereign-like power. Although ideas for limiting the pardon power were floated and rejected — such as banning pardons for treason, requiring Senate consent, or making an actual criminal conviction a prerequisite for eligibility — the sole constraints in the Constitution’s final text are that presidents can pardon only federal crimes and they cannot pardon “in Cases of Impeachment.”
The Supreme Court later recognized a number of constraints on the pardon power, however, including that pardons cannot “otherwise offend the Constitution.” A pardon cannot require the government to refund money “paid into the treasury” as part of a defendant’s sentence, for example, as only Congress has the power of the purse under the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause. Presidents cannot encroach on that prerogative via the pardon power even though no such limitation is explicit in the text of the Constitution. The Court could certainly see fit to justify additional limits, such as a ban on self-pardons, if it were presented with that question.
In justifying a broad pardon power for the president, Alexander Hamilton assuaged detractors in Federalist No. 69 that the president’s power would be “much inferior” to that of the despised King George III. “The person of the King of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable,” he explained, as “[t]here is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.”
Whether Hamilton was correct, or whether modern presidents have in fact become kings, is a question that Trump’s record of epic wrongdoing in office has forced the country to face head-on, once again.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article referred incorrectly to President George H.W. Bush.
[ad_2]
#Biden #Isnt #Official #Pardon #Trump
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

May 2, 2023
Torres: Biden’s age isn’t ideal but ‘best hope’ to win

[ad_1]

NEW YORK — Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday faulted Democrats for not doing more to cultivate the “next generation of leadership,” adding it wasn’t ideal that President Joe Biden was mounting a reelection bid at age 80.
“He has a powerful record on which to run for reelection,” Torres said at a Manhattan event hosted by the Association for a Better New York, a pro-business civic group. “But is it ideal that we have an 80-year-old running for president? No. But he’s the best hope we have for beating Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis.”
Torres has backed Biden’s reelection bid.
Biden, who is already the oldest person to be elected president, has had to confront difficult questions about whether he’s mentally fit for four more years of grueling schedules. If elected, Biden would turn 86 at the end of his second term.
Torres, 35, made the remarks as part of a wide-ranging conversation on his first term in Congress alongside colleagues who have gotten significantly older than they were decades prior.
“I’m like an embryo in Congress,” the Bronx Democrat joked.
He faulted Democrats for not setting term limits for committee chairs like their Republican counterparts, a setup he said emboldens lawmakers to “feel they have a right to die with their gavel.”

“That stifles, I believe, the development of the next generation of leadership,” Torres said. “We have to be much more effective at building a bench rather than benching our young talent.”
[ad_2]
#Torres #Bidens #age #isnt #ideal #hope #win
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 26, 2023
Biden isn’t going into 2024 very strong. But Republicans are very weak | Moira Donegan

[ad_1]
It’s not surprising, but now it’s official: Joe Biden is running for re-election. In a video on Tuesday launching his bid for a second term, Biden cast his administration as standing for personal freedom, democracy and pluralism in contrast to what he called “Maga extremists”. The video emphasized abortion rights and contrasted Biden and the Democrats with unsettling images of the Capitol insurrectionists. Echoing a repeated line from his most recent State of the Union address, the president implored Americans: “Let’s finish the job.”
There will be no primary. True, Biden has disaffected some members of the Democratic party’s precariously large coalition, and he has failed to capture the hearts and imaginations of Americans the way that, say, Barack Obama did. In 2020, a basketball team’s worth of Democrats entered the presidential primary – partly out of perceptions of then president Trump’s weakness, but also partly because Biden seemed like such a poor fit to be the party’s standard-bearer.
He’s an old white man in a party that is predominantly female, increasingly non-white and very young. He is a moderate in a party with a resurgent left. And he is a bone-deep believer in the merits of compromise and bipartisanship, in an era where the Republican party has become anathema to cooperation, hostile to Democratic governance and committed to racial and gender hierarchies that are not worth compromising with. He seemed like a man out of time, responding to the political conditions of a different era; it was unclear, then, that he could see the country as it really was, unclear that he could confront the true threat.
As he announces his re-election campaign, four years after he threw his hat into the ring for 2020, Biden has quieted these fears, if not disproved them. The left, leaderless after Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 primary, has not formed a cohesive bloc, and their pressures on the Biden administration have been noble but sporadic. Congressional Republicans hamstrung most of Biden’s agenda, causing him to abandon, in particular, promises he made to help Americans get affordable childcare; but he still managed to pass a large infrastructure bill, as well as Covid relief.
The pandemic has largely receded, and both deaths and new infections are down. Inflation is slowing, and jobs numbers are encouraging. The economy, while not perfect, seems to be benefiting from the stability of Democratic leadership, with stock prices no longer beholden to wild fluctuations in the aftermath of an errant comment or impulsive tweet from Trump.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing horrific humanitarian catastrophes on the people there and endangering other European allies, a trap was laid that could have easily drawn the United States into war. Biden and his administration have deftly kept us out of it. The president who once seemed like an out-of-touch old man has been successfully rebranded as an affable grandfather whose gaffes are thoughtless but aggressively well-meaning.
Even major missteps do not seem to have meaningfully injured Biden. The administration was shockingly tone-deaf and ill-prepared following the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, having little in the way of policy proposals to reduce the humanitarian and dignity harms imposed on American women – and at one point, trying to appoint an anti-choice judge to a lifetime seat, before withdrawing the nomination under pressure.
Despite the primacy Tuesday’s campaign announcement gave abortion rights, Biden has generally seemed uncomfortable and incompetent on the issue, even as women face degradation and medical emergencies inflicted at the hands of conservative states; he has largely shied away from directly addressing abortion, and shunted it off to his unpopular, largely powerless vice-president, Kamala Harris – whose own marginalization within the administration is a signal of how little he values the issue.

Even since Dobbs, Biden has been entirely unwilling to confront the federal judiciary – a captured and unaccountable extremist rightwing body that will foil his whole agenda, and gradually eliminate both pluralist society and representative democracy, if it is not reformed. Yet the Republicans’ virulent misogyny and bald sadism on abortion seems poised to be a boon to Democrats anyway: it was mostly abortion that drove voters to give a worse-than-expected showing to Republicans in the 2022 midterms, and to allow Democrats to keep control of the Senate.
In that sense, the political fallout of the Dobbs decision may serve as a good model for the Democrats’ emerging 2024 strategy: they don’t need to be especially good, because the Republicans are so cruelly and chaotically worse. The Republican party is in shambles – internally divided; married to gruesome and unpopular policies, particularly on gender, that alienate voters; branded as violent, antisocial and creepy. There’s still a long way to go, but the Republican party seems only slightly less eager to anoint Trump as their nominee than the Democrats have been to appoint Biden.
It very well may wind up being a rematch of the 2020 election – only now, Trump is even weaker, even more marginal, even more disliked, linked forever the memory of the January 6 violence and devoid of what was once his novelty and comedy and reduced to a rambling catalogue of personal grievances. With an opponent like that, it might not matter much if all that Biden has to offer is a series of charming anachronisms, or grinning photo ops in his aviators.
All the Republicans have to offer is sex obsession and cheesy fraud, parading a series of candidates for state and federal office who talk like a collection of snake-oil salesmen and gun fetishists. Biden isn’t going into 2024 particularly strong. But right now, the Republicans are particularly weak.
[ad_2]
#Biden #isnt #strong #Republicans #weak #Moira #Donegan
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 25, 2023
Trump killed the ‘values voter’ wing of the GOP. It isn’t coming back in 2024.

[ad_1]
Unlike in Republican presidential primaries past, just two candidates — Pence, the former Catholic turned evangelical, and Scott, who speaks of finding a “God Solution” to the country’s racial divide — stand alone in making explicit appeals to Evangelical voters. Trump and DeSantis, meanwhile, are relying solely on their reputations as brute-force brawlers in the culture wars.

Mike Pence, a former Catholic turned evangelical, has spent nearly a half dozen of his Sundays in recent months speaking at churches around the country.
|
Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
Their success — and the difficulties Pence and Scott are having courting voters, according to recent polls — reflects a major change in the evangelical bloc of the GOP electorate in the Trump era. When five GOP presidential candidates take the stage at Iowa’s Faith & Freedom Coalition in Clive on Saturday, vowing to take on the woke left will likely mean more than reciting the Apostles’ Creed.
“Evangelicals have changed and have become more populist and more renegade and wanting to fight more and engage in Christian culture,” said David Brody, the chief political analyst for Christian Broadcasting Network, who wrote the “The Faith of Donald J. Trump.” “Trump has a following who wants to fight because they see culture going to hell in a handbasket, and that’s what’s winning the day in politics. And that’s why he is winning with them.”
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at evangelical Calvin University in Michigan and the author of “Jesus and John Wayne,” referenced DeSantis’ “God Made a Fighter” ad as an example of the shifting evangelical soil.
“That’s what evangelicals are looking for now — any personal testimony is kind of a bonus, but not necessary,” Du Mez said. “What matters to evangelicals is they are looking for the best candidate to further their agenda.”
In previous presidential campaigns, GOP candidates like George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson made explicit appeals to values voters. They regaled them with their personal testimonies and, in the case of Cruz, worked stages in the style of a megachurch pastor.
Though evangelicals were initially skeptical of Trump, he slowly gained their trust. His running mate in 2016, Pence, gave them permission to look past his crude remarks and reputation for philandering, among other concerns, and embrace Trump as an unlikely but effective champion of their top moral causes.

Tim Scott is making an explicit appeal to evangelical voters with his “Faith in America” tour.
|
Meg Kinnard/AP Photo
With Trump’s election as someone only glancingly familiar with the faith, evangelicals no longer rely on kicking a candidate’s theological tires.

“Evangelicals support Trump because of his policies. He doesn’t pretend to be pious, which is refreshing. He doesn’t pretend to be something he is not, but he has been the most pro-life, pro-religious liberty, pro-Israel president in history,” said Robert Jeffress, pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas and an evangelical ally of Trump who is in regular contact with the ex-president.
Trump has the critical Republican voting bloc of white evangelical Christians — about 14 percent of the voting population — to thank for propelling him to the White House in 2016. In 2020, eight of 10 evangelical voters cast a ballot for Trump.
And the church-going crowd is largely still standing with him, polling shows. A Monmouth University survey last month — in a four-way matchup between Trump, DeSantis, Pence and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — found Trump with 47 percent support among self-described evangelicals, compared to DeSantis with 35 percent. Pence and Haley registered in the single digits.
But Trump’s relationship with evangelical voters has largely been transactional. He promised to stack the Supreme Court with conservative judges who would topple Roe v. Wade and protect religious liberties — and it happened. After the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights, Trump lashed out at Christian leaders who weren’t automatically lining up for him in 2024.
“There’s great disloyalty in the world of politics, and that’s a sign of disloyalty because nobody … has ever done more for ‘right to life’ than Donald Trump,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Despite the occasional tensions between some evangelical leaders and Trump, Jeffress predicted that evangelical voters will coalesce around the former president again in 2024.
“I don’t see anyone who has announced so far who has a chance of capturing the vote of evangelicals other than Trump,” he said.
“No Republican can win the primary without self-identified evangelicals,” said Michael Wear, the former evangelical outreach adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and founder, CEO and president of the Center for Christianity & Public Life. “What Trump showed is that there are ways to get self-identified evangelicals that do not include directly Christian appeals, particularly the kind of the kind of extensive offering of one’s personal testimony that was so important to George W. Bush’s rise.”
Following Saturday’s forum, Pence will head south to Atlanta, where he’ll speak at The Church of The Apostles. He’s expected to release his second book later this year, which will center on his faith journey. For two decades as an elected official, he kept a copy of the Bible and Constitution on his desk and held prayer meetings while in the White House.
“Evangelical leaders appreciate him and his sincerity,” Du Mez said of Pence, “And at the same time, they would prefer him not to be in charge of the country.”
Scott regularly talks about his personal Bible studies — including in a video featured Wednesday on the Christian Broadcasting Network, a tribute to the late Rev. Charles Stanley, a giant of the Southern Baptist Convention. Scott advisers told POLITICO his strategy involves making a direct appeal to evangelical voters in Iowa.
Besides DeSantis, Haley is another notable name sitting out this weekend’s faith forum in Iowa. Rather than convening ministers and church groups, the former governor has instead organized meetings in Iowa with farmers and women’s groups, a sign that Haley is counting less on the evangelical vote.
Despite not making as overt an appeal to evangelicals, DeSantis and Haley are still being embraced by parts of the Christian right. Each has been tapped to give speeches at two of the country’s top evangelical colleges — DeSantis last week at a Liberty University convocation, and Haley early next month at Regent University’s convocation.
Bob Vander Plaats, Huckabee’s former 2008 campaign chair and president and CEO of The Family Leader, an influential conservative Christian organization in Iowa, said some of his constituents support DeSantis, who grew up in a Catholic family and writes in his memoir that it was “nonnegotiable that I would have my rear end in church every Sunday morning.”
“He’s very much your constitutional conservative who is a man of deep faith, but that’s not what he’s going to reference as he’s applying it to leadership,” Vander Plaats said. “He’s going to go back to basic conservative principles and constitutional foundations versus inserting a lot of Scripture.”
[ad_2]
#Trump #killed #values #voter #wing #GOP #isnt #coming
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 21, 2023
Tony Gonzales and a coalition of Hispanic Republicans are warning that a Judiciary border proposal isn’t ready for “prime time.”

[ad_1]

The group warned they won’t let some of their conservative colleagues call the shots on their own.

[ad_2]
#Tony #Gonzales #coalition #Hispanic #Republicans #warning #Judiciary #border #proposal #isnt #ready #prime #time
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 18, 2023
Kangana reacts to old clip of KJo saying he isn’t ‘interested in working with her’

[ad_1]
Mumbai: Actress Kangana Ranaut has shared an old video of filmmaker Karan Johar talking about being tagged as a “movie mafia” by her and that he is not “interested in working with her”.
Kangana took to her Instagram story, in which she shared the 2017 video which has Karan’s comment and her reactions.
In the clip, Karan had said, “When she said ‘movie mafia’ what does she mean? What does she think we are doing? Sitting and not giving her work? Is that what makes us mafia? No, we do that by choice. I do that because maybe I am not interested in working with her.”

The edited clip also had a segment of Kangana saying: “He said I am jobless and looking for job from him or something like that. I mean look at my talent and look at your movies. I mean really?”
She captioned the clip: “Chacha Chaudhary thanks for these frivolous outbursts when I establish myself as a filmmaker and producer… Will rub these in your face…”
Kangana.(photo:Instagram)
Subscribe us on

[ad_2]
#Kangana #reacts #clip #KJo #isnt #interested #working

( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 15, 2023
Why Asa Hutchinson’s view of the world isn’t working for Republicans

[ad_1]

Speaking to a 70-person audience at the Nixon Presidential Library last week, Hutchinson made his case: It’s important to welcome refugees to the United States because they “love freedom and love America.” The U.S. should “assert global leadership.” Cooperation with allies is key to solving global issues. America can’t abandon international organizations because, otherwise, China and Russia fill the vacuum. And the future of U.S. foreign policy points not only to Asia, but also southward into Latin America.
At the end of his prepared remarks, delivered in front of a painting of the former president and two American flags, an elderly docent of the library turned to her neighbor and said “he makes a lot of sense.”
Hutchinson’s views are a sharp contrast to his rivals for the Republican nomination, who talk unabashedly about prioritizing homefront concerns and securing U.S. interests worldwide — regardless of what others want or who America partners with. For many of them, it’s America First or America Only.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis openly trashed the idea of supporting small-d democrats abroad: “Does the survival of American liberty depend on whether liberty succeeds in Djibouti?” he wrote in his book, The Courage to be Free. And in his first major statement on the war in Ukraine, DeSantis described it as a “territorial dispute” that wasn’t in the “vital” American interest to address, though he has since walked back the comments by calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.”
Nikki Haley, citing her experience as a U.N. ambassador, has said the U.S. will be “taking names” of countries, including allies, that don’t align with America’s foreign policy aims. Former President Donald Trump openly floated an “overhaul” of the U.S. national security bureaucracy and a reevaluation of “NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”
The concept of America doing what it wants, including among a neo-isolationist cohort, has grown inside the Republican Party for years. It’s come into sharp relief with the 2024 race for the nomination. Hutchinson argues he can be the one to reorient the GOP back to caring about the rules-based international order. He may instead represent the last gasp of a Republican internationalism that is less and less in favor within his party.
In short, there’s little room for a presidential candidate to espouse middle-of-the-road foreign policy views and expect to triumph.
Voters aren’t usually animated to pull the lever for a candidate based on their foreign policy views. But they do select someone who reflects them, and so far, Hutchinson isn’t resonating.

The Arkansan isn’t featured in polls of the top 11 Republican candidates for the nomination. His name recognition is nowhere near the levels of Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo. Even in solidly Republican areas, Hutchinson draws small crowds of like-minded people who typically skew older, with some saying they came to see him out of curiosity. During his speech at the Nixon Library, when he said he would decide on a bid for the presidency in April, most of the room erupted in surprise — not recognition — before clapping at the news.
The Hutchinson foreign policy vision is also losing. The most recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll, conducted last year, showed that 55 percent of Republicans want the U.S. to take an active role in the world — the lowest total in the survey’s 50-year history. Only 9 percent of Republicans said the most important foreign policy priority was “leading international cooperation on global problems.” By contrast, 48 percent of GOP respondents said “ensuring the physical defense of our country” was the top issue.
Hutchinson believes if he gets his message out there, he can move Republicans away from Trump’s vision and toward a Reagan-cum-Bush 2 worldview. The hope is his affable, “oh, shucks” southern charm endears him to people wistful for the era he represents — and encourages those pining after political comity to join his campaign.
“It’s really a post-Trump phenomenon that you have this wing of the party that is more isolationist, and that is dangerous for America, is dangerous for our freedoms and dangerous for stability and peace in the world,” he said, chowing on cereal during an interview in a hotel lobby before his library address.
“It makes sense to me for America to be part of a global discussion and sharing of information on matters that impact us,” Hutchinson added, suggesting the U.S. remain in the World Health Organization and learn lessons from the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “And we want to continue to invest in regions of the world that impact us.”
In this era, his old-schoolness feels like a creative solution in a field full of conservative internationalists and nationalists.
Whenever Hutchinson makes foreign policy proclamations, the governor claims the audience he attracts laps it up. “We need to have multiple voices in a 2024 race for ideas, but also so that we can better define what the GOP is, stands for, and how we’re going to solve problems for our country,” he said.
One of Hutchinson’s strengths in his not-yet-announced campaign is that he’s mainly alone in his foreign policy lane — and he knows it. But the problem for him is that others likely vying for the nomination might try to swerve into it.
“Isolationist policy isn’t going to do it,” former House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers asserted in an interview. “History has punished us for that policy.”
“If we surrender to the siren song of those in this country who argue that America has no interest in freedom’s cause, history teaches we may soon send our own into harm’s way to defend our freedom and the freedom of nations in our alliance,” Pence told an audience at the University of Texas in February.
Hutchinson argues his experience will see him climb up the rankings, pointing out that he’s the only one with an inclination to run who actually served in the Reagan administration. Later, under the younger Bush, he led the Drug Enforcement Administration and was the top border security official at the Department of Homeland Security — qualifications he expects will resonate with voters who care about immigration and fentanyl.
But where his views match up with the Republican mainstream, Hutchinson’s policy prescriptions don’t stand out from other candidates.
China is the big threat, he said, telling the Nixon Library audience that the U.S. may have no choice but to engage in a Cold War with the Asian power. The U.S. should help Ukraine “win quickly.” And it behooves any administration to label Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations so that more resources can be devoted to defeating them.
But it’s less about specificity and more about strategic orientation for Hutchinson. Unless and until his party returns to its Reaganesque roots with a cooperative global outlook, the United States will be less safe and the world less stable.
Over breakfast, he declared: “I don’t think what I’m outlining takes the party back. I think it moves the party forward.”

[ad_2]
#Asa #Hutchinsons #view #world #isnt #working #Republicans
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 30, 2023
Bullet train ‘feasible’ but metro for Hyderabad isn’t: Owaisi slams centre

[ad_1]
Hyderabad: AIMIM chief and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Wednesday slammed the BJP-led centre for calling the proposed second phase of the Hyderabad metro rail ‘unfeasible’.
The proposed second phase of metro rail for building the 26 km Rs 8,453 crore elevated metro rail corridor from Lakdikapul to BHEL and extension of phase one metro rail project of 5 km from Nagole to LB Nagar is “not feasible at this juncture considering the proposed ridership and Passengers per Hour Per Direction (PHPD) is very less”
The Centre in an official communication to the Telangana government has suggested it to take up ‘other modes’ of transport or provide a ‘feeder system’. It also asked for a roadmap for the densification of proposed transit stations for enhancing ridership and furnishing the Transit Oriented Development (TOD) policy.
“Absolutely condemnable decision by Modi govt For Modi wasteful expenditure like Bullet Train is “feasible” just to show off to foreigners. But metro for Hyderabadis isn’t feasible! Govt must reverse this decision & should also fund MGBS-Falaknuma line,” he tweeted.
Absolutely condemnable decision by Modi govt For Modi wasteful expenditure like Bullet Train is “feasible” just to show off to foreigners. But metro for Hyderabadis isn’t feasible! Govt must reverse this decision & should also fund MGBS-Falaknuma line https://t.co/bF3NODXxu6
— Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) March 29, 2023
Taking a strong objection to the centre’s call, Telangana minister KT Rama Rao had written a letter to the Union minister for Housing & Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri to reconsider the Centre’s decision.
KTR said that it was strange that the Government of India which had sanctioned metro projects to many cities with less traffic had felt that Hyderabad does not qualify for a Metro Rail project.
The minister said that it was nothing but ‘blatant discrimination’ against Telangana. “If the traffic of Hyderabad’s high-density corridors does not qualify for a Metro Rail project, I wonder how a number of small cities of UP like Lucknow, Varanasi, Kanpur, Agra, Prayag Raj, Meerut and cities located in some of their favoured states get qualified. This is nothing but pure discrimination and step-motherly treatment to Hyderabad and Telangana,” minister KTR said.
The minister pointed out that his multiple attempts to meet Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri to explain the importance of Hyderabad Metro Phase II ‘went in vain’. “Given your professional background, I had hoped that you would ensure the fair and objective treatment to our infrastructure development proposals without any bias or prejudice,” the minister mentioned in his letter to Puri.

[ad_2]
#Bullet #train #feasible #metro #Hyderabad #isnt #Owaisi #slams #centre
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 29, 2023
ISIS Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Detained.

[ad_1]
While the U.S. troop presence exists explicitly and only to combat ISIS, during my visit the constant threat of attack by Iranian-sponsored militias was palpable. Forces dedicated to coordinating U.S. drones flying over Syrian skies and to radar and air defense systems deployed in U.S. bases in Syria were laser-focused on the array of Iranian-produced drones known to have been used for kamikaze-style attacks on U.S. forces in the region. As CENTCOM has made clear, countering ISIS and preventing its resurgence is the second most vital U.S. priority in the Middle East, but the first is facing down the threats posed by a hostile Iran.
While an ISIS attack during our visit underlined the terror group’s persistent threat, the reason for such a heightened awareness of Iranian threats was revealed on March 23, when an Iranian suicide drone hit a U.S. base in eastern Syria, killing a contractor and wounding five U.S. servicemembers. Such tit-for-tat incidents are far from new — this was the 79th Iranian attack on U.S. forces in Syria since January 2021 — but the deadly nature of the attack was extremely rare. The U.S. has not suffered a combat fatality in Syria for years. Retaliatory U.S. airstrikes on Iran-linked positions in the area followed just hours later, but it is unclear if they would be sufficient to deter further attacks. That Russia has markedly escalated its flight of fighter jets into U.S.-controlled airspace in northeastern Syria has complicated things further. One such ‘overflight’ occurred during our visit to the area — no coincidence given the presence of CENTCOM’s leadership.
Yet despite the challenges from malign states, the fight against ISIS remains the utmost priority. Since late 2019, three successive ISIS leaders have been killed on Syrian soil, along with dozens of senior and mid-level commanders. In terms of counterterrorism, we are unquestionably degrading ISIS. However, the terror group has one invaluable advantage on its side: the remnants of its “state” in the former of its former residents. In the final days of the fateful battle against ISIS’s last stand at al-Baghuz in March 2019, streams of ISIS fighters and family members were captured. Today, more than 10,000 battle-hardened ISIS militants languish in 26 makeshift SDF prisons and a further 54,000 women and children reside in secured camps.
This detainee crisis represents a humanitarian and security challenge the likes of which we have never faced before. On the ground, the scale is staggering, as is the profound security threats associated with it. “When you speak with residents, when you speak with the SDF securing the sites, when you speak with camp administration officials, you get a real sense of looming danger,” CENTCOM’s Kurilla told me after Blackhawk helicopters took us to the largest of the camps, al-Hol. “We have to have a real sense of urgency to address this problem through repatriation, rehabilitation, and reintegration,” Kurilla told me. “This requires all arms of the U.S. government; it requires the international community.”
The scale of this detainee crisis is unprecedented. Twenty-one years ago, 780 terrorism suspects were rendered to Guantanamo Bay, a self-contained detention facility on an isolated island thousands of miles from active conflict. Twenty-one years later, 31 remain there, despite concerted efforts by successive U.S. administrations to prosecute and repatriate prisoners. The ISIS fighters alone, numbering 10,000, would fill 13 Guantanamos at its original capacity. In northeast Syria, by contrast, we are dealing with a total of nearly 65,000 people from at least 55 countries, held in makeshift prisons and vast camps, amid ongoing civil conflict and an ISIS insurgency.
It is hard to understate the mammoth challenge associated with anything close to a resolution here. ISIS literally has an army in prisons — 10,000 in Syria and 20,000 next door in Iraq. At least 5,000 of ISIS’s most dangerous and committed fighters currently reside in Ghweiran prison in Hasakah, northeastern Syria. The facility, a former school, is administered by our SDF partners and its defenses paid for by the U.S. and coalition allies. During a visit to the prison, I heard of a just-foiled ISIS prison break coordinated by an Iraqi leader inside and operatives outside.
Prison breaks are part of ISIS’s DNA. They were the key to its dramatic resurgence in 2014. In January 2022, ISIS launched a massive attack on Ghweiran prison, ramming several vehicles rigged with explosives into exterior walls, then driving pick-up trucks full of weapons into the facility to arm prisoners. The assault had been coordinated by inmates and ISIS operatives on the outside. Some local prison guards had almost certainly been coerced into facilitating the initial attack. Ultimately, the incident triggered a 10-day battle that drew in U.S. and U.K. special forces and left more than 500 people dead. British government money has since reinforced the prison’s defenses, but ISIS is clearly not deterred.
But ISIS is not only interested in freeing its fighters — it is also determined to free the 50,000 women and children held in al-Hol camp, 40 kilometers away. Multiple major ISIS plots to attack al-Hol have been foiled in recent months. As we learned, SDF guards there have begun receiving ISIS threats by cell phone and now only enter the camp in U.S.-provided Bearcat armored vehicles. During a brief foray into the camp, we were flanked by multiple teams of U.S. special forces, American-operated Bradley fighting vehicles stood at every corner and U.S. drones and helicopters were in the sky above us.

The only resolution to this detainee crisis is returning the men, women and children to their countries of origin for prosecution or rehabilitation and reintegration.
|
Baderkhan Ahmad/AP Photo
The presence of more than 25,000 children in al-Hol is a humanitarian travesty and a ticking time bomb. In September, the SDF completed a weeks-long clearing operation in al-Hol that captured 300 ISIS operatives who had been living among the women and children along with weapons and explosives. A rocket-propelled grenade attack within the camp killed two SDF personnel, but equally concerning was the discovery of several “ISIS schools,” along with photo and video footage showing young children being taught ISIS’s ideology and support for violence and terrorism. The evidence we were shown from within the camp was similar to that created by ISIS’s propaganda outfits at the height of the terror group’s power. For CENTCOM, this is ISIS’s “next generation,” to complement its “army in detention.”
The only resolution to this detainee crisis is returning the men, women and children to their countries of origin for prosecution or rehabilitation and reintegration. Logistically, the challenge here is daunting. The vast majority of the nearly 50,000 women and children are from Iraq and Syria. To date, Iraq has engaged in an impressive returns process, but even so, it will take at least six years to complete. Of the roughly 12,000 Syrians, almost all are from regime-controlled areas, which precludes returns altogether. Following a concerted U.S. diplomatic push, repatriation of third country nationals achieved considerable momentum in 2022, but even so, only 1 percent were actually transferred home. It can take as long as a year to complete a single repatriation case and when it comes to the 10,000 male prisoners, there is no international willingness to repatriate at all.
If the situation remains the same, it will take at least 30 years to return the women and children alone. But U.S. troops, key to containing ISIS and securing the facilities, will almost certainly not be in Syria anywhere near that long due to slowly building pressures at home to disengage from conflicts in the region. Whenever the troops do leave, all hell will break loose. The Syrian regime has an unspeakable track record when it comes to ISIS, having all-but-ignored its rise since 2011. Even earlier, from 2003 to 2010, Assad’s regime actively supported ISIS’s insurgency against U.S. and allied forces in Iraq, providing training, intelligence and financial support, as well as facilitating the arrival of more than 90 percent of its suicide bombers across Syrian territory.
Failing to deal with this detainee crisis is a dream scenario for ISIS. This is a priority for the U.S., with the State Department now convening an inter-agency working group dedicated to the issue. But this is not nearly enough. A major international diplomatic mobilization is required to elevate the response to this challenge to the level required.
When ISIS marched into Mosul and across Iraq and Syria in 2014, the biggest international coalition in modern history took form to intervene. A similar effort is required now. If not, a catastrophic ISIS resurgence is just a matter of time.
[ad_2]
#ISIS #Isnt #Dead #Detained
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 27, 2023
What the Biden administration isn’t telling Congress about spy balloons

[ad_1]

The administration has been slow to respond in part because officials are still reviewing the historical data on the unidentified aerial phenomena, also known as UAPS, and are running into problems trying to retroactively determine whether past sightings were surveillance tools or other objects such as academic weather balloons, according to the official. The information officials are using for their analysis is at times dated and incomplete.
The delay by the administration on releasing information about the Chinese balloon and the other objects shot down last month raises questions about the extent to which the U.S. fully understands what intelligence foreign governments may be collecting without Washington’s knowledge.
“What is our capability to observe what’s in our airspace? There’s holes in it. We should understand what we can and cannot observe and understand what we need to do to be able to fill those gaps,” said Tim Gallaudet, the former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The balloon surprising us — it was a big wake up call.”
Members of Congress say they are pushing the administration to improve the way it collects and analyzes UAP data.
“We can’t tell based on the data we have – based on the photographs or the video or the radar we have – whether it was a drone or a balloon, whether it was an aircraft,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) of difficulty in identifying some of the previously detected unidentified aerial objects. Gillibrand wrote legislation to help fund better investigations of these objects.
The National Security Council and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence declined to comment. A second senior U.S. official presented the administration’s stance, arguing that it has a good sense of how foreign governments are trying to surveil from the air but that it is still trying to determine whether hundreds of UAPs are spy tools or benign objects. The administration has shared with Congress in recent weeks a policy plan that will guide how it responds to aerial objects in the future, the official said.
When the Chinese balloon appeared over the U.S. in late January, officials described it as a surveillance device and said it had lingered over sensitive military sites, forcing the administration to shoot it down a week later. Officials also said that Chinese surveillance balloons had transited the U.S. at least three times during the Trump administration.
In the days that followed, three other aerial objects appeared over North America and the administration shot those down, too, even though officials said they posed no security threats.

Lawmakers say the administration has not made clear to Congress why it decided to start downing the UAPs.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said he was not surprised that China used a balloon to spy on America. What was frustrating, he said, was that when it came to the Chinese spy balloon, it appeared “we didn’t have, at that point, a clear policy on what to do.”
Journalists and lawmakers pressed the administration for answers: Why did this particular Chinese balloon require a public response? And if the U.S. was worried about this one balloon, how many others have potentially already obtained imagery and other sensitive details about American military installations?
Officials at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which shot down the Chinese surveillance balloon, have said that there was a “domain awareness gap” when it came to the office’s detection of balloons during the Trump administration and the early days of the Biden administration.
And in a congressional hearing March 8, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of NORAD, said the three objects shot down in the days following the emergence of the Chinese spy balloon “clearly demonstrated the challenges associated with detecting and identifying unmanned objects in U.S. airspace.”
“I commit to you that this event has already generated critical lessons learned for my commands and our mission partners,” he said.
But officials have so far not provided details about current U.S. gaps in detection. Lawmakers want to know, for example, whether the radar and sensors the U.S. had in place prior to the shooting down of the Chinese surveillance balloon allowed for officials to see the full-range of objects floating above commercial airspace.
Susan Gough, a spokesperson for the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — the team that investigates unidentified flying objects and other phenomena in the air — said the office is “reviewing the associated data of all past cases” in a “newly developed analytic framework.” Gough declined to provide details on the specifications of that framework but said AARO is working to “fill existing gaps.”
“UAP are objects that cannot be immediately identified and may exhibit anomalous behavior. Anomalous behavior means that DoD operators or sensors cannot make immediate sense of collected data, actions or activities,” Gough said.
An unclassified report from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence from last year said that there are at least 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports.”
Many of the UAP reports came from Navy and the Air Force pilots who witnessed the aerial objects while flying, the report said. The U.S. also uses radar to detect the objects, but that often doesn’t provide enough detail to identify clearly what type of object it is.
It’s not clear whether the problem is simply about the limits of technology, or also about how the Pentagon and other agencies have decided to prioritize and parse data.
Gillibrand said there is a push among some officials and lawmakers to have “longer-term, more persistent awareness” of the area above commercial airspace to better track drone and balloon technology.
However, the administration has yet to decide how and whether to rejigger its approach to tracking and shooting down the objects, including whether it wants to set new thresholds in its systems that would allow for officials to more easily detect a larger number of UAPs at any given time. Those discussions have been viewed internally as slowing down the analysis of historical UAP data, the official said.
Lawmakers are actively pushing for more information from the administration. The Senate plans to hold a public hearing on the topic in April.
It’s unclear how forthright the administration will be in its conversations with Congress about its investigative work. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on March 7 that “there might be very little at all” that the administration can reveal about the Chinese balloon debris collection efforts. “I’ve set no expectation that there’s going to be some big public rollout of what we’ve learned,” he said.
[ad_2]
#Biden #administration #isnt #telling #Congress #spy #balloons
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 21, 2023