WaPo:
Britain, Denmark and Belgium join air campaign against Islamic State in Iraq
NY Times:
“In military terms, the [Parliament] vote [in support of Iraq bombing] has no significance whatsoever, but politically it has more importance,” said James Strong, a foreign policy expert at the London School of Economics, of the British vote. “There is a sense in the United States that if even Britain thinks it is a bad idea, then it probably is.”
Bruce Ackerman:
PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.
Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written.
Matthew Dickinson:
But Ackerman’s legal objections miss the point. The question is not whether a close textual reading of the 2001 or 2002 congressional resolutions support their use as the legal basis for airstrikes against ISIS – it is whether the Obama administration has the political support to make the case that they do. In short, the debate is over whether the public, as channeled through their elected representatives, supports Obama’s course of action – bombing ISIS – and not as Ackerman would have it, over Obama’s justification for his course of action. And this is exactly Corwin’s point. In a constitutional system in which foreign policy powers are shared, the relative effective influence exercised by the President and Congress in the foreign policy domain depends on how well each can enlist public support, as channeled through elected officials, for their preferred course of action. The Constitution, and subsequent statutes, only sets the parameters of this debate – it doesn’t determine the winner. This is why the Courts historically have refused to adjudicate conflicts between the two branches regarding the extent of the President’s war making powers, and why the War Powers resolution – beyond its notification requirements – has been of little help in resolving these disputes. Historically, Congress and presidents have differed over when, and whether, the War Powers resolution is applicable but neither side has so far been willing to precipitate a constitutional crisis by pushing their interpretation to the limit.
In determining who has the stronger case, then, regarding whether Obama can unilaterally authorize bombing ISIS, we would do well to spend less time parsing the wording of the Constitution and related texts, and focus instead on the politics of the matter. And politically, at this point, the evidence suggests that Obama’s interpretation will prevail – at least for now. This is because in the wake of the highly-publicized beheadings by ISIS of journalists, opinion polls show broad public support among Democrats, Republicans and Independents for targeted air strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Given prevailing public opinion, it is unlikely that many members of Congress who are facing midterm elections in November are going to want an immediate debate regarding Obama’s authority to conduct airstrikes. Indeed, most Republicans who object to Obama’s strategy do so not because they oppose air strikes, but because they believe air strikes alone are not likely to achieve Obama’s stated objectives. Yes, there is some background grumbling among legislators regarding Obama’s willingness to act alone, but that grumbling is likely to remain muted until the results of the midterms are known.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Timothy Egan:
But look ahead, with optimism, and you can see a design for long-term peace behind the president’s plan to simultaneously kill fanatics and force a religion to confront the sources of that fanaticism. With his blunt speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, Obama put on notice the Sunni Muslim nations that have allowed Sunni barbarians to spread.
He made it clear that it is a warped religious ideology — “the cancer of violent extremism” — that is behind the slaughtering of innocents, raping of young girls, beheading of aid workers and tourists. Yes, it was a lecture, with finger-pointing. It’s time for the duplicitous Saudis, the look-the-other-way Qataris, “those who accumulate wealth through the global economy and then siphon funds to those who teach children to tear it down,” to stop trying to have it both ways. He called out their “hypocrisy,” without naming names, because everyone knows who they are.
Roger Parloff:
The attorney general secured no big-name convictions from the financial crisis. Can his reputation overcome that?
“That area of his record is terrible,” says Robert Weissman, president of the progressive nonprofit, Public Citizen.
Weissman is criticizing U.S. attorney general Eric Holder for his “utter failure to prosecute any [major] institution or person for the events that led to the financial crisis and all the ensuing social devastation.”
David Nather:
For someone who has been such a punching bag while in office, Attorney General Eric Holder is leaving on a more successful note: his response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, that may serve as a capstone for a civil rights legacy that could outlast the controversies of his tenure.
Holder’s visit to Ferguson last month after the police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager — and the Justice Department’s promise to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of all of the Ferguson Police Department’s practices — will help solidify what allies see as his lasting legacy: a commitment to equal justice for all Americans.
Andrew Kohut:
By this point in the campaign season, the projected outcome of the midterm elections has been hashed and rehashed and even inspired some wonk-on-wonk fights along the way. The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is a Republican year—the GOP will keep the House and may well win the Senate. But surprisingly, as the elections approaches, the latest round of polling suggests that Republicans might not do as well in the popular vote for the House as expected. And that, in turn, means there might not be enough of a GOP tide to give Republicans an edge in the key Senate races they need to win a majority of seats in the upper chamber.
Alex Roarty:
A restless electorate and a target-rich map have the GOP on the cusp of winning the Senate majority. But with fewer than 40 days until November, Republican campaigns are suddenly confronting a problem that undermines high hopes of victory: a sudden and serious lack of cash.
GOP campaigns, political committees, and—above all—the party's outside groups are scrambling to raise money, worried that Democrats and their allied groups are poised to heavily outspend them on TV ads in the final weeks before Election Day. Concerns run deepest about October, when Democratic groups are on track to pour millions of dollars into a handful of races that will determine which party controls the Senate. In some of those same races, Republicans have reserved little or no airtime.
The disparity has led to mounting frustration among political operatives running Republican campaigns. And they are issuing a blunt warning: In a year with a half-dozen tight Senate contests, the party could easily squander most of them.
Nate Cohn:
If there is any state where the Democrats are defying expectations — and where Republicans should be kicking themselves — it’s North Carolina.
This spring, North Carolina looked like the obvious sixth pickup state for the Republicans, just enough to take the Senate. The state is competitive only in presidential elections when turnout rises, especially among young and nonwhite voters. The Democratic incumbent, Kay Hagan, needed to compensate with big inroads among conservative white voters. But the polls showed her poorly positioned to do so. Her approval ratings were low; she was stuck in the low 40s among registered voters against Republican candidates who had yet to win their party’s nomination.
It couldn’t look more different today. If the Democrats assemble a firewall in defense of the Senate, the polling suggests North Carolina will be its bulwark. Ms. Hagan leads her Republican challenger, Thom Tillis, in nearly every survey over the last month by an average of more than three percentage points.
Jill Lawrence:
Two women in particular are making me nervous this year: Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, running for governor, and D.C. Council member Muriel Bowser, running for mayor.
Bowser assembled a coalition large enough to win a primary last spring against Mayor Vincent Gray, who was enmeshed in ethics troubles, and all the other Democrats who were trying to topple him. At the time, The Washington Post called her "low-key but canny." But since then she has said little about what she would do in office and has not come across as particularly dynamic, raising questions about her leadership ability.
Emily's List, a powerful advocacy group that raises and spends millions to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, has endorsed Bowser. But should Washingtonians like myself also take a serious look at independent David Catania, whose strengths and weaknesses (he's assertive but undiplomatic, says Post columnist Colbert King) are mirror images of Bowser's?
Coakley, another Emily's List pick, is an even more complicated case. She is, you may recall, the one who lost a special Senate election to Republican Scott Brown early in 2010. Not only did she lose the seat that had been held by Sen. Edward Kennedy until his death but lost the seat that had given Democrats a Senate majority of 60 votes — the number needed to cut off filibusters.
"The magnitude of that loss was huge," Coakley acknowledged this year, talking about the Massachusetts activists who had worked so hard for her and suffered such a painful defeat. Yet that doesn't begin to get into the real magnitude of the loss, which traumatized national Democrats and all but crippled their ability to function in the Senate.