by hilzoy

I have read a number of blog posts, diaries, etc. recently that ask: what has Obama/Clinton actually accomplished? So I decided to make it easier for people to answer that question for themselves, and to compare the legislative records of the two. Other people have compared their voting histories -- see, for instance, here -- so I thought it would be interesting to ask: what legislation have each of the candidates actually gotten passed? I thought this would be worth knowing for two reasons: first, it's an indication of their priorities, and second, it helps us to assess their effectiveness as legislators.

So I went through and compiled a list, in three parts.

In Lindsey Graham's floor speech about his amendment to deprive Guantanamo detainees of the right to habeas corpus, one of the things he mentioned, as what he called "legal abuse by prisoners", was the fact that detainees had filed two medical malpractice cases. I tracked down one of these, and posted copies of some of the motions concerning it at Obsidian Wings. Here are some details of the kinds of motions Graham thinks are frivolous.

Short version: the motion was filed by someone who had already been determined not to be an enemy combatant. He had been beaten so badly that two of his vertebrae had been broken. And he claimed that he was being denied an operation that he needed if he was to become permanently paralyzed. There are other allegations of malpractice in the motion, which I've also detailed below the fold.

None of this information would have come to light had Graham's amendment been in force. We can still block it. Call your Senators and ask them to support Bingaman's amendment, which would remove the jurisdiction-stripping parts of Graham's amendment. And read on for the details.

As Gillon noted in an earlier diary, the Graham Amendment passed yesterday. It strips all Guantanamo detainees of the right to habeas corpus. It does allow the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to hear claims from them, but those claims are very, very limited.

Specifically: all the court gets to consider is whether or not the Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for the detainee in question met the standards set out for such hearings by the Secretary of Defense. It does not get to consider such issues as: whether those standards are themselves legal or Constitutional. Nor does it allow a detainee who has been determined to be innocent, but who has not been released, to ask the Court to order that he be set free: if the CSRT that found him innocent acted in accordance with its own standards, then the Court cannot consider such further details as whether he has in fact set free. And don't think this can't happen: there are detainees in Guantanamo who have been cleared, but who are still in custody. An example is described here.

But the good news is: We can still do something about this.

Just in case anyone feels like getting into details, I wrote a longish account of all the ways in which it has traditionally been possible for Senators to block a judicial nominee here. The key points:

According to the Judiciary Committee Rules, a nomination cannot be reported out of the Committee without at least one affirmative vote by a member of the minority party. So if the minority unanimously opposes a nominee, it dies. However, Orrin Hatch overrode this rule early in 2003. A good statement on the topic from Senator Leahy is here; it includes quotes in which Hatch expresses support for this rule before 2003.

Also, Hatch tossed out the policy according to which any Senator from the home state of a nominee could veto that nominee in 2001, and started allowing nominations to go forward even if both of the home state Senators were opposed in 2003.

Dianne Feinstein is circulating a petition asking President Bush to make federal funding available for research on more embryonic stem cell lines. For those of you who don't remember his policy, Bush decided that federal funds could be used to do research on any stem cell lines available as of the day he announced his policy. He claimed at the time that there were over 60 such lines (to the amazement of people I know in the field); in fact, only a handful were usable at that time, and even now only 21 lines are available.

Why does this matter, you might ask? Well: cell lines are not all alike. Some are more robust than others, some have weaknesses where others have strengths, and so forth. In order either to do research or to develop therapies, it's important to have a line whose individual characteristics are suited to your needs. (It's like hiring a person for a complicated job: the bigger your applicant pool, the more likely you are to find a really good candidate.) Besides, scientific advances since Bush announced his policy mean that stem cell lines derived now are safer than any of the lines on which federally funded research can be done, but scientists can't use federal funds to do research with these safer lines. (This will become important when researchers start trying to develop therapies: if Bush's policy is still in effect, federally funded research will be required to use the earlier, less safe stem cell lines, and any therapies that result will expose patients to unnecessary risks.)

Feinstein's petition is a good one. You can sign it here: http://feinstein.senate.gov/stemcell.html

For ages now I have been depressed about Iraq, thinking: it couldn't possibly get worse that THIS. And then it does. The decision to go after al Sadr and Fallujah in the same week; fighting near the holy shrines; abu Ghraib; indications that abu Ghraib was not an isolated episode; and now the news that we may have been used by Iran to finally defeat their enemy in the Iran/Iraq war. Once again, I can't see how it could possibly get worse. But I've thought this before, and it always has, so I expect that some horrible and unexpected new revelation will come zinging in from left field and prove me wrong.

So: does anyone have any ideas about what the next unexpected and dreadful development in Iraq will be?

Can be found here: http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact .

Sorry if this has already been posted; I did check.

The article alleges that the torture at Abu Ghraib was the result of a covert program that was originally used against high-value al Qaeda suspects, and was then greatly expanded and got completely out of control.

Hi. This is my first diary entry, so be gentle. I'm writing this in response to various posts that people have made to the effect that no one who doesn't accept matching funds can win. I should say at the outset that I hate the idea that we now have to defend the idea of abiding by campaign spending limits. Nonetheless, I want a Democrat to win as much as anyone, so I am playing to win. So here goes.

First, and most obviously, everyone here already recognizes that whatever happens, no Democratic candidate can raise as much as George W. Bush. So we will be outspent regardless.

Second, there are 527s and their ilk. I will leave it to others to sort out what they can and cannot do to help, but I assume it's not nothing.

Third -- and this is really the reason I am writing -- I think that the spending caps are much less damaging to Clark than they are to other candidates, for a simple reason: he got in later. By Sept. 31, Dean and Kerry had spent around $13 million, and Edwards had spent almost $10 million. Clark, by contrast, had spent a little over $100,000. (Figures from OpenSecrets.org.) I'm sure Clark has been spending money as fast as anyone (with the possible exception of Dean) since then, but the fact remains that every other candidate had already spent quite a lot of money before he spent any at all. In addition, whatever you make of his decision to skip Iowa, it clearly saved him several million additional dollars, which are therefore freed up for other spending, whether during or after the primaries.

This means that if those candidates other than Dean and Kerry spend money at the same rate as Clark, they will reach the spending caps when he still has millions of dollars left to legally spend. And this in turn means, first, that insofar as money makes the difference in the primaries, it's likely to be the money Clark can raise, as opposed to the spending caps; and second, that he can legally spend ten million more dollars in the period between Sept. 31 and the convention than Edwards, and third, that the likelihood that he will actually raise enough to bring the caps into play is smaller than it would be for the other candidates, since less of it was raised (and spent) earlier. The downside of this, of course, was that Clark missed out on whatever opportunities there were to gain support before last September, but this does not seem to have crippled him.

If you want to compare Kerry to Clark, then, I think you need to factor this into the mix, and also ask yourself how likely it is that Kerry will raise enough money to blow the spending caps. I mean: the reason Dean declined matching funds was because he had enough money to do so, but Kerry's reason seems to have been that he couldn't maintain his campaign without mortgaging his house, and therefore had to violate the rule against giving your own campaign more than $50,000. So it is unlikely that he actually has in hand enough money blow the spending caps. And the fact that he has declined matching funds makes this problem worse, not better. By going for Kerry for this reason, you'd have to gamble that he turns into a fundraising powerhouse. I'm not sure I see that happening. Your mileage may vary, of course; and I'd be interested to see whether or not anyone else thinks this view holds water.