Archive for April 19th, 2008
New York Times: Whose Privilege?
Whose Privilege?
The New York Times | Editorial
Friday 18 April 2008
In the name of fighting terrorism – and with a clear goal of avoiding accountability – the Bush administration has imposed a level of secrecy on its operations that has no place in a democracy.
One of its most disturbing tactics has been seeking early dismissal of lawsuits alleging serious government misconduct, claiming they would reveal national security secrets. The Senate is now considering a good bill that would rein in this misuse of the state secrets privilege and give victims fair access to the courts and the public a fuller understanding of their government’s actions.
In recent years, a number of important lawsuits have raised credible allegations of government abuses including torture, kidnapping, rendition and domestic eavesdropping. All too often, judges have blocked these suits without examining how and why going forward would compromise the nation’s security.
Congress has also been far too acquiescent, standing aside as the administration undermined individual rights and the constitutional system of checks and balances. It may finally be ready to act.
Next week, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on the State Secrets Protection Act. Introduced by Senators Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, it would make it harder for this or future administrations to use a flimsy state secrets claim to avoid exposure of illegal or embarrassing conduct.
Legitimate secrets need to be protected, and the bill includes important safeguards. But before judges rule on a state secrets claim, the bill would require them to first review the documents or evidence for which the privilege is invoked – rather than rely on government affidavits asserting that the evidence is too sensitive to be disclosed.
To allow cases to go forward, judges would also be given authority to order the government to produce unclassified or redacted versions of the evidence.
Not surprisingly, the administration is trying to defeat this essential reform. In a recent letter to the Senate, Attorney General Michael Mukasey raised the prospect of a veto and insisted that the president – and not the courts – must have the final say over when and whether the privilege applies. Incredibly, and with no legal basis, he also expressed doubt that Congress has the power to mandate closer review of state secrets claims.
Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, is also trying to undermine the act with a damaging amendment that would require judges reviewing state secrets claims to give “utmost deference” to the government, a standard intended to thwart meaningful judicial review.
That, of course, is the problem. The courts have deferred far too often to the president. Passing the Kennedy-Specter bill, without Mr. Kyl’s amendment, would go a long way toward restoring the balance and the accountability and openness that are essential for a democracy.
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Add comment April 19, 2008
Committee Probes Industry Influence on EPS Panels
Committee Probes Industry Influence on EPA Panels
By Suemedha Sood
The Washington Independent
Thursday 17 April 2008
Chemical trade investigation carries implications for children’s health.
A congressional investigation is trying to determine whether ties between the chemical industry and the Environmental Protection Agency put children’ health at risk. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is examining whether chemical companies influence EPA panels that review chemicals for safety. The committee’s concern is that panels may be stacked with industry scientists who downplay the real risks of toxic substances.
The House committee is focusing on the American Chemistry Council, the main lobbying group for the chemical industry. This is a landmark investigation, says the Environmental Working Group, a non-partisan policy organization, because Congress doesn’t usually put trade groups under the microscope.
(Matt Mahurin) But influence from industry could have significant consequences for children’s health. Some chemicals under review have added risks for children and infants and, according to lawmakers and environmental advocates, industry scientists deny the need to regulate use of those chemicals. Recent EPA actions to weaken safety standards for children have left the relationship between industry and the government agency open to scrutiny.
The Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigation is looking at several panels to find out whether industry bias played a role in weakening standards – especially dangerous to children, who are more vulnerable to toxic exposure. In the wake of this investigation, the EPA has convened yet another panel with scientists who have industry ties – a panel that is considering easing safeguards that protect children from carcinogens.
The congressional committee’s investigation was triggered by an EPA review panel on the fire retardant decabromodiphenyl ether, or deca, used in television casings, computer monitors and other electronics, which can be particularly harmful to children and infants. Reps. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee first took action on the Chemistry Council when a toxicologist, Dr. Deborah Rice, was removed from the deca review panel at the council’s request. The EPA removed Rice as panel chairwoman after receiving a letter from the chemical industry group saying she had the “appearance of bias.”
The EPA removed Rice as panel chairwoman after receiving a letter from the chemical industry group saying she had the ‘appearance of bias.’
The industry group had insisted Rice was biased because she had expressed concerns about the health risks of deca in the past. A toxicologist for the Maine Dept. of Health and Human Services, Rice had testified before Maine’s state Legislature on the dangers of the chemical. In a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, Dingell and Stupak wrote, “The ACC…seems to argue that scientific expertise with regard to a particular chemical and its health effects is a basis for disqualification from a peer review board. This does not seem sensible on its face.”
It especially doesn’t seem sensible when those same peer review boards include scientists with ties to the Chemistry Council. Three panels included people who received funding from the council to research the chemical they reviewed; another panel was chaired by an individual whose employer was under contract by the council to question a key children’s health study that found problems with the chemical being reviewed.
When Rice was removed, and the industry scientists were allowed to remain, red flags went up.
The American Chemistry Council did not respond to repeated questions.
Rice’s research shows that deca can affect brain development and interfere with thyroid hormones, causing problems in the learning and motor skills of young animals, including humans. Deca has also been found to contaminate breast milk, which could put nursing babies at risk.
The chemical’s risk to children is one concern of the Energy and Commerce Committee. “[S]ome scientists have raised concerns that deca has been linked to learning disabilities in children,” said Alex Haurek, spokesman for the committee. “Some research suggests that younger children have higher levels of deca in their bloodstream than older children.”
The manufacturers of the flame retardant found safe levels of exposure to be 57 times higher than the levels the EPA proposed. But, according to Rice, safe levels are 10 to 100 times lower than what the EPA suggested. In her testimony to the Maine legislature, Rice recommended banning deca altogether – which the state ultimately did.
The chemical industry has admitted an information gap regarding safe exposure levels for children, but left it at that, says Sonya Lunder, senior analyst for the Environmental Working Group.
”We know that kids could be exposed to [deca] many days of their lives,” said Lunder. “[The Chemistry Council] has said, we don’t know what safe levels for kids are. But there wasn’t any step to say, ‘Let’s fill that data gap.’”
Deca isn’t the only chemical being investigated that could be harmful to children. The Energy and Commerce Committee actually discovered Rice’s removal while looking into another chemical, Bisphenol A, and its use in products for infants and children. BPA is used to make plastic products, including baby bottles and the metal cans that hold baby formula.
Dingell says there is reason to believe that BPA presents risks to young children. “There is concern in the scientific community that this chemical, Bisphenol A, may be harmful, both to adults and children,” said Dingell, “Some retail stores in Canada have pulled products from their shelves because it may harm adults. It would seem obvious that we would try to protect babies and infants from chemicals that may be considered dangerous to adults.”
Dibutyl phthalate (DBP) is another such chemical, also used in plastics. As part of their investigation into the American Chemistry Council, Dingell and Stupak are looking at an EPA review panel that supported weakening regulations on DBP by a factor of three. The panel’s chair, Dr. Betty Anderson, is a chemical industry consultant whose employer, Exponent, was under contract by the American Chemistry Council to question a study finding health risks of DBP to baby boys. Exponent has defended the use of phthalates in children’s toys, backed by the Toy Industry Assn., according to the Environmental Working Group.
There have been other recent actions by the EPA to lower standards for child safety standards that could be cause for concern. Just after Dingell and Stupak launched their investigation, the EPA convened another panel with scientists who have industry ties. This panel is to review a controversial proposal that could weaken safeguards protecting children from carcinogens.
To protect children, EPA guidelines require the agency to strengthen health standards by a factor of 10 for chemicals likely to cause genetic mutations that can result in cancer. Now, an EPA panel is considering changing the rule so it applies only to chemicals that existing studies prove can cause cancer through genetic mutation. However, chemical manufacturers are not required to conduct such studies, so relatively few exist.
The panel’s chair, Bette Meek, works for the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a lobby group funded by chemical, drug and food companies. At ILSI, Meek sits on the same committee as several chemical companies – including Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, Bayer and CropScience – who could benefit from weaker carcinogen standards. The EPA panel also includes Jerry Rice (not related to Deborah Rice), a former consultant for the American Petroleum Institute on benzene – a carcinogen that can cause genetic mutations. Rice is currently a consultant for a law firm that represents chemical companies that would benefit from weaker carcinogen standards.
The EPA’s own spokeswoman, Suzanne Ackerman, sounded surprised to hear that a panel would consider weakening safety standards meant to protect children from getting cancer. “This is news to me,” Ackerman said. “EPA has always been ahead on carcinogenicity [and kids].”
The Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, which advises the EPA on regulations relevant to children, has already advised the agency not to support weaker standards. “We had written a letter to Administrator Johnson,” said the committee’s chair, Dr. Melanie Marty, “and felt it was not scientifically justifiable and going the wrong direction from a public health policy standpoint for protecting people from exposure to carcinogens early in life.”
If the Energy and Commerce Committee finds that ties between the EPA and chemical companies are affecting health standards, parents may indeed have something to worry about.
”Chairman Dingell believes that if industry has undue influence over the safety evaluation of chemicals, then the public safety is endangered,” said committee spokesman Haurek.
The Environmental Working Group says that government agencies endanger child safety by rolling back safeguards at the request of chemical companies. “The EPA must make decisions and implement policies without undue influence or pressure from the chemical industry by removing panelists with conflicts of interest from all advisory panels,” Lunder said in a statement. “Until this is done, the external peer review of EPA’s decisions cannot be considered a valid process.”
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Add comment April 19, 2008
Congress May Seek Criminal Probe of Altered Earmark
Congress May Seek Criminal Probe of Altered Earmark
By Paul Kane
The Washington Post
Thursday 17 April 2008
The Senate moved yesterday toward asking the Justice Department for a criminal investigation of a $10 million legislative earmark whose provisions were mysteriously altered after Congress gave final approval to a huge 2005 highway funding bill.
In what may become the first formal request from Congress for a criminal inquiry into one of its own special projects, top Senate Democrats and Republicans have endorsed taking action in connection with the earmark that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), former chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, inserted into the legislation.
”It’s very possible people ought to go to jail,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees highway funding.
Young’s staff acknowledged yesterday that aides “corrected” the earmark just before it went to the White House for President Bush’s signature, specifying that the money would go to a proposed highway interchange project on Interstate 75 near Naples, Fla. Young says the project was entirely worthy of an earmark and he welcomes any inquiry, a spokeswoman said.
”Congressman Young has always supported and welcomed an open earmark process. If Congress decides to take up the matter of this particular project, there will be no objection from Mr. Young,” said Meredith Kenny, his spokeswoman. Young also sponsored a $223 million measure to build the fabled “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, a project that was killed in 2005 after it sparked widespread outrage.
Young’s critics suggest that the motive for the I-75 provision was campaign contributions from real estate developers who own 4,000 acres of land near the proposed interchange. In February 2005, developer Daniel Aronoff hosted Young and Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) at a highway safety event at Florida Gulf Coast University, followed by a fundraiser that brought in about $40,000 for Young’s campaign.
The developers have been trying for several years to build on the land, whose value would increase if there were a nearby interchange for I-75, which runs east-west between the Naples area and Fort Lauderdale.
Reports about the Aronoff fundraiser for Young in the Naples News prompted inquiries from a local FBI office in 2006.
Local planning officials, who never requested money for the interchange, were outraged to learn after the highway bill became law that they were required to spend $10 million on a project they did not want. The Lee County Metropolitan Planning Organization, the recipient of the money, has rejected it three times in the past year.
Earmarks are requests to fund special projects, usually in a lawmaker’s home state or congressional district. They often are used for libraries, sewers and other infrastructure, and every five years a new highway bill brings with it billions of dollars in new earmarks.
The total number and dollar value of earmarks rose sharply in the final six years of Republican rule on Capitol Hill, becoming increasingly controversial as law enforcement authorities pursued several corruption cases centered on their use. Even as their numbers shrank last year, congressional earmarks accounted for $18 billion in the federal budget.
But lawmakers and aides on both sides of the aisle could not recall Congress ever asking for a criminal investigation of an earmark.
The version of the highway bill approved by the House and Senate in the summer of 2005 mentioned only “widening and improvements” for I-75 in Collier and Lee counties in South Florida. After final passage of the measure, but before it was sent to the White House, that line item was altered to specify that the money would go to “Coconut Rd. Interchange/Lee County.”
For months, no lawmaker stepped forward to say who had made the change.
”Somewhere along the way, something changed. Nobody knows for sure who did what,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who fought Young’s bridge project three years ago, said during yesterday’s debate.
Young’s office accepted responsibility yesterday for the change, insisting that campaign contributions were not the motive. Rather, presentations made by Florida Gulf Coast University officials and the developers proved the case for the project, aides said.
Kenny, Young’s spokeswoman, said the lawmaker always intended for the earmark to designate money to the interchange project, not generic highway improvements. So committee aides altered the bill to reflect that after the House and Senate had approved it.
”There was an error in the bill and so it was corrected,” she said.
Young, who is facing his most difficult reelection campaign since he first won office in 1972, has seen his name surface in connection with other investigations. One of his former aides at the transportation committee has pleaded guilty to accepting gifts from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. And a former Alaska energy services corporate executive, who pleaded guilty last year to bribery, testified in criminal trials that part of his job was to hold annual fundraisers for Young.
Mack has disavowed any association with the earmark request, and the Florida congressional delegation has worked to place language in “technical corrections” to the highway bill that would allow Lee County to spend the $10 million on general improvements.
The corrections bill is moving through the Senate this week, but Coburn said that is not enough. He is asking for a special House-Senate task force to investigate the origin of the earmark and how it was altered without congressional approval, which could lead to a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
”We ought to be able to investigate ourselves,” he said.
However, Boxer and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) have suggested that constitutional separation-of-powers issues would make it difficult for a Senate investigation of an action in the House. Instead, they have pushed for a resolution asking the Justice Department to investigate.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Add comment April 19, 2008
TSA Chief Kip Hawley Will Allow Air Marshall WBR’s to Speak With Lawmakers
Note:
As per The Lloyd-La Foliette Act, federal employees do not need permission or
any authority from their agency to speak to members or committees of Congress
By Chris Strohm
April 8, 2008
The head of the Transportation Security Administration Friday expressed complete confidence in the Federal Air Marshal Service and said he will let marshals speak freely to lawmakers.
“The air marshals are a critical part of the [Homeland Security] Department’s capability. We are well staffed to cover the critical flights we need,” TSA Administrator Kip Hawley said. “I feel highly confident — as confident as anything that I’ve been exposed to in the government — that this air marshal team is ready to go.”
Controversy over the service was recently renewed when current and former marshals told CNN that less than 1 percent of commercial flights are being protected.
The air marshal service disputes the figure, but says the exact number is classified. Rank-and-file marshals have feuded with the service’s leadership on and off since the service was expanded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A public battle was fought two years ago as air marshals clamored to relax their dress code. Responding to the recent flare-up, House Homeland Security Transportation Subcommittee Chairwoman Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, told Hawley this week she wants to meet with rank-and-file air marshals.
She said she wants Hawley to allow them to speak openly about their concerns. Hawley said Friday he would allow marshals to meet with lawmakers.
“Our folks are not shy,” he said. “I think it is great that members of Congress [are] taking the time to talk to our [transportation security officers] or our air marshals.”
Hawley said inaccurate estimates on how many flights are covered are either coming from former marshals or active marshals who are not aware of the actual statistics.
“If you got a former employee who’s anonymous with a bag over his head guessing at the statistics, I would say [he] is not really credible,” Hawley said.
He also defended the management of the service. “There has been a vast open-door policy that has really taken root in the last couple of years. There are people who were bitter from whatever experience somewhere along the line who maybe reflect an older picture.”
Hawley defended the practice of allowing airport Transportation Security Officers – formerly called screeners — to become air marshals.
Some air marshals criticize the practice, arguing that TSOs do not have the necessary law enforcement background. According to TSA, 36 screeners have become air marshals.
“Trust me, you do not want to mess with those guys,” Hawley said. “Anybody who messes with a flight having a TSO on it who is now an air marshal will be dead.”
Hawley added that the air marshal service has a 6 percent attrition rate, which he said is average for a law enforcement agency.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0408/041808cdpm1.htm
# # #
***********************************************************************************************************
Both Senator John Kerry and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee
are now reaching out to all current and former Federal Air Marshals
who have information about the state of affairs in the FAM Agency,
to come forward and contact their below listed congressional staffers.
The Office of Senator John Kerry
Contact:
Jeremy Marcus
Legislative Assistant – Transportation
(202) 224-2742
Jeremy_Marcus@Small-Bus.Senate.gov
The Office of Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee
Contact:
Yohanes Tsehai
Deputy Chief of Staff
(202) 225-3816
Add comment April 19, 2008
House Committee Asks Rove to Testify About Alabama Ex-Governor
House Committee Asks Rove to Testify About Ex-Alabama Governor
The Associated Press
Thursday 17 April 2008
Washington – The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday asked former White House adviser Karl Rove to testify about claims that he influenced a federal corruption case against former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama.
The panel also called on the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate allegations that political motivations drove the Siegelman case and several other federal prosecutions during the Bush administration.
Issuing a lengthy report on possible “selective prosecution,” the committee cited cases against Pennsylvania coroner Cyril Wecht and Wisconsin state procurement official Georgia Thompson as other examples that are ripe for review.
Like the Siegelman prosecution, both cases had political undercurrents, with critics saying they were engineered by White House-appointed prosecutors to hurt Democrats during election season. A judge recently declared a mistrial in the Wecht case, and a conviction against Thompson was overturned last year.
Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., accused Attorney General Michael Mukasey of not taking the allegations seriously and of blocking congressional requests for documents. Conyers said the evidence presented thus far threatens to undermine public faith in the judicial system.
”The Justice Department has simply not been forthcoming, and I feel the only way to move this investigation forward is to seek further independent investigation and testimony from Karl Rove, who appears to be the missing link in a chain from the White House to the Justice Department,” Conyers said in a statement.
Peter Carr, a Justice spokesman, said the department was reviewing the report.
”The attorney general, however, has made clear that the department has and carries out a duty to ensure that its investigations of public corruption are conducted without fear or favor, and utterly without regard to the political affiliation of a particular public official,” Carr said.
Rove, who was heavily involved in Alabama politics before directing President Bush’s White House campaigns, has denied any involvement in the Siegelman case. But calls for his testimony have grown louder since a Republican lawyer and campaign volunteer in Alabama said last year that she overheard conversations among top Republicans suggesting that Rove was pushing Justice officials in Washington to go after Siegelman.
Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, told MSNBC earlier this month that Rove would testify on the matter. But Luskin said in an interview Thursday that his comments were taken out of context and that the decision was the White House’s call, not Rove’s, because it involved questions of executive privilege and separation of powers.
The White House had no immediate comment. But administration lawyers so far have refused to allow such testimony – even under subpoena – in a related congressional investigation into whether Bush administration officials fired federal prosecutors who weren’t loyal Republicans.
A Judiciary Committee aide said Conyers “reserves the right” to subpoena if Rove denies the request to appear voluntarily.
Vince Kilborn, a Siegelman attorney, called Luskin’s argument a “smoke screen.”
”Executive privilege does not apply to political activity,” he said. “It’s not a White House decision. It’s his own decision.”
Siegelman served one term as governor but was later convicted in 2006 on bribery-related and obstruction of justice charges and sentenced to more than seven years in prison. Last month, a federal appeals court approved Siegelman’s release from prison while he appeals, saying the former governor had raised “substantial questions of fact and law.”
The prosecution stemmed from his appointment of former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy to an influential hospital regulatory board in exchange for Scrushy arranging contributions to Siegelman’s campaign for a state lottery.
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Add comment April 19, 2008
How the GOP Hijacked the Justice Dept. and Why
How Republicans Quietly Hijacked the Justice Department to Swing Elections
By Steven Rosenfeld
AlterNet
Tuesday 15 April 2008
The GOP may have committed massive vote fraud in plain sight by encouraging widespread voter purges and restricting registration campaigns.
The following is an excerpted chapter by Steve Rosenfeld from the new book “Loser Take All,” edited by Mark Crispin Miller (Ig Publishing, 2008).
Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the twenty-first century, instead of men in white robes or a barrel-chested sheriff menacingly patrolling voting precincts, we are more likely to see a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers and proposed legislation about “voter fraud” and other measures to supposedly protect the sanctity of the vote.
Since the 2004 election, activist lawyers with ties to the Republican Party and its presidential campaigns, Republican legislators, and even the Supreme Court – in a largely unnoticed ruling in 2006 – have been aggressively regulating most aspects of the voting process. Collectively, these efforts are undoing the gains of the civil rights era that brought voting rights to minorities and the poor, groups that tend to support Democrats.
In addition, the Department of Justice (DOJ), which for decades had fought to ensure that all eligible citizens could vote, now encourages states to take steps in the opposite direction. Political appointees who advocate for stringent requirements before ballots are cast and votes are counted have driven much of the DOJ’s Voting Section’s recent agenda. As a result, the Department has pushed states to purge voter lists, and to adopt newly restrictive voter ID and provisional ballot laws. In addition, during most of George W. Bush’s tenure, the DOJ has stopped enforcing federal laws designed to aid registration, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients the opportunity to register to vote.
The Department’s political appointees have also pressured federal prosecutors to pursue “voter fraud” cases again t the Bush administration’s perceived opponents, such as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which conduct mass registration drives among populations that tend to vote Democratic. Two former federal prosecutors have said they believe that they lost their positions for refusing to pursue these cases.
The proponents of this renewed impetus to police voters comes from a powerful and well-connected wing of the Republican Party that believes steps are needed to protect elections from Democratic-leaning groups that are fabricating voter registrations en masse and impersonating voters. Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, said in 2007 that is an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections.” While Masset himself didn’t agree with that assertion, he did believe “that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.”
While voter fraud and voter suppression have a long history in American politics, registration abuses and instances of people voting more than once are rare today, as federal officials convicted only twenty-four people of illegal voting between 2002 and 2005. Moreover, modern voter fraud, when it occurs, has involved partisans from both parties, although it is rarely on a scale that overturns elections. In contrast, new voter registration restrictions, such as requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID, are of a scale that can affect election outcomes.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School has found that 25% of adult African-Americans, 15% of adults earning below $35,000 annually, and 18% of seniors over sixty-five do not possess government-issued photo ID. While various studies – such as a 2006 Election Assistance Commission report by Tova Andrea Wang and Job Serebrov, and a 2007 study by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College – have found modern claims of a voter fraud “crisis” to be unfounded, that has not stopped states from adopting remedies that impose burdens across their electorate and on voter registration organizations. “Across the country, voter identification laws have become a partisan mess,” Loyola University Law Professor Richard Hasen said in an Oct. 24, 2006 Slate.com column, speaking of one such remedy. “Republican-dominated legislatures have been enacting voter identification laws in the name of preventing fraud, and Democrats have opposed such laws in the name of protecting potentially disenfranchised voters.”Hasen was commenting on a little-noticed 2006 Supreme Court ruling, Purcell v. Gonzales, which upheld Arizona’s new voter ID law. The court unanimously affirmed the state’s 2004 law, writing that, “Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”
Hasen said that while the ruling “seem[ed] reasonable enough” at first glance, it actually was deeply troubling, as the Court never investigated if there was evidence of widespread voter fraud, and never examined “how onerous are such [voter ID] laws.” Instead, it adopted the Republican rhetoric on the issue “without any proof whatsoever.” Hasen then quoted Harvard University History Professor Alexander Keyssar on the Court’s rationale. “FEEL disenfranchised? Is that the same as ‘being disenfranchised?’ So if I might ‘feel’ disenfranchised, I have a right to make it harder for you to vote? What on Earth is going on here?”
What on Earth is Going on Here?
”These things have become partisan,” Democratic California Representative Juanita Millender-McDonald replied at a March 2005 congressional field hearing when asked why she and others in Congress had come to Ohio to investigate the 2004 election. “Images are so critical, especially when the stakes are high and stakes are high in presidential elections,” the now-deceased congresswoman continued, referring to the lingeri g memory of thousands of African-Americans waiting for hours outside in a cold rain to vote the previous November in Ohio’s inner cities. Many elected Democrats and voting rights attorneys saw the delays as intentional voter suppression resulting from partisan election administration. To some, it stirred memories of the segregated south.
Cleveland Democratic Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who six weeks earlier had stood with California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer to contest Ohio’s 2004 Electoral College votes, was also present at the hearing, and had several testy exchanges with Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell over his administration of the election. One particular exchange concerned how Blackwell had spent millions of dollars for advertisements that neglected to tell Ohioans where else they could go to vote if they were delayed at their own polling place – a small but telling example of election administration with partisan implications:
Ms. Tubbs Jones: In this ad you said, “Vote your precinct,” but you never told them that if they couldn’t vote in precinct, they could go to the Board of Elections and vote. Did you, sir?
Secretary Blackwell: I sure didn’t.
Ms. Tubbs Jones: Excuse me?
Secretary Blackwell: Can’t you hear? I said I sure didn’t.
But while Democrats like Tubbs Jones were looking back at 2004, Republicans were looking ahead at shaping the future electorate to their advantage. The hearing was notable because it signaled the start of a renewed Republican campaign to highlight “voter fraud” as an issue needing legislative redress. The assertions and responses that unfolded that day would be heard in many states in 2005 and 2006 as GOP-majority legislatures “dealt” with the issue. Ohio Republican Representative Kevin DeWine spoke of a proposed voter ID law – which would later pass – and suggested that the Legislature’s concern was not whether the law would pass, but how tough it should be. The state also added strict new rules for mass voter registration drives early in 2005, which were overturned in federal court in February 2008, and later passed a bill facilitating Election Day challenges to individual voters. Ohio Republican State Senator Jeff Jacobson said that these laws were needed to stop “fraudulent registrations” because natinal groups “are paid to come in and end up registering Mickey Mouse …. The millions of dollars that poured in, in an attempt to influence Ohio, is not normal.”
What Jacobson said was true, though lacking in context. Groups like ACORN and Americans Coming Together had registered millions of new voters in battleground states before the 2004 election, and some of ACORN’s staff – i.e. temporary workers – had filed a handful of registration forms with fabricated names. ACORN discovered the error, alerted the authorities and prosecutions ensued. While those mistakes were cited by politicians like Jacobson as evidence of a national voter fraud crisis, others, such as Norman Robbins, a Case Western University professor and co-coordinator of the Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, urged the House panel to look at the facts and keep the issue in perspective:
“We desperately need research on all of the issues raised today,” he said. “For instance, what are the real causes and effects of the long lines? How many voters were actually disenfranchised? How long did they take to vote? That would be one set of questions. Does showing an ID increase the reliability of the vote or does it disenfranchise people? Those are answerable questions. How many people truly have been convicted of election fraud? What do we really know about this in terms of cases and conditions.”
To answer those questions, the committee chairman, Republican Bob Ney – who has since been convicted and jailed on bribery charges – turned to a long-time Republican operative, Mark “Thor” Hearne, who introduced himself as an “advocate of voter rights and an attorney experienced in election law.” Hearne, a lawyer based in t. Louis, certainly was experienced. In 2000, he had worked for the Bush campaign in Florida during the presidential recount. He was also the Vice President of Election Education for the Republican National Lawyers Association, which helps the party train partisan poll monitors. In 2004, he became counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, where he “worked with White House presidential advisor Karl Rove and the Republican National Committee to identify potential voting fraud in battleground states … and oversaw more than 65 different lawsuits that concerned the outcome of the election.”8 After 2004, “with encouragement from Rove and the White House, Hearne founded the American Center for Voing Rights (ACVR), which represented itself as a nonpartisan watchdog group looking for voting fraud.” The group would go on to urge federal and state officials to prosecute voter fraud, adopt tougher voter ID laws and purge voter rolls. It would also file legal briefs in voter ID cases, urging tighter regulations.
Hearne presented the panel with a report suggesting that fraudulent registrations were threatening U.S. elections. The report listed problems in Ohio cities with sizeable African-American populations – the state’s Democratic strongholds. Nationally, ACVR would use the same approach to identify other voter fraud “hot spots.”
A National Pattern
Though the facts were slim, Republicans across the country acted as if a voter fraud crisis was rampant. As a result, Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin passed new voter ID requirements after the 2004 election, although gubernatorial vetoes or court orders nullified these laws in every state except for Indiana. (In January 2008, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Indiana’s voter ID law.) Meanwhile, two states with Republican-majority legislatures – Florida and Ohio – made voter registration drives more difficult by raising penalties for errors on registration forms, as well as shortening the timeline for organizers to submit these forms – which prevents these groups from checking the registrations for accuracy and completeness. Litigation and court rulings reversed those laws before the 2006 election, but not before the League of Women Voters was forced to halt registration drives in Florida for the first time in the group’s 75-year history. I Ohio, where ACORN was registering approximately 5,000 new voters per week, those efforts were suspended during the litigation, meaning an estimated 30,000 people were not given the opportunity to register.
Since 2004, five other states have imposed new restrictions on voter registration drives – Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico and Missouri – according to research by Project Vote, which has worked with the Brennan Center for Justice to challenge these laws. To date, these laws still remain on the books in Missouri and New Mexico. “It’s no secret who these restrictions affect,” wrote Michael Slater, Project Vote’s deputy director, in the October 2007 issue of The National Voter, a publication of the League of Women Voters. “In 2004, 15 percent of all African-American and Latino voters were registered to vote as a result of an organized drive; an African-American or Latino voter was 65 percent more likely to have been registered to vote by an organized drive than a White voter. In the final analysis, spurious allegations of voter fraud give rise to yet more roadblocks on the path to full participation in political life for historically disadvantaged Americans.”
These state-level responses to voter fraud did not occur in a vacuum. Since the creation of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department a half-century ago, the federal government has had great power and influence over how states implement voting rights. But by early 2005, the same mindset shared by GOP legislators in Ohio and other states, and by vote fraud activists like Hearne, could also be found among the Bush administration’s senior appointees overseeing voting rights at the DOJ.
Just four da s before the 2004 election, the Department’s civil rights chief, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta, wrote to a federal judge in Cincinnati who was deciding whether to allow the Ohio Republican Party to challenge the credentials of 23,000 mostly African-American voters. Acosta supported the voter challenges, saying an order to block them could undermine the enforcement of state and federal voting laws. The challenges, Acosta wrote, “help strike a balance between ballot access and ballot integrity.” The voter challenges were allowed to go forward, although the final judicial ruling came too late for Ohio’s Republican Party to deploy thousands of party members to local precincts to challenge voter credentials.
Another sign of the Department’s shift from its historic mission of enfranchising voters to a new “selective enforcement” mindset could also be seen by 2005 when a coalition of voting rights groups failed to convince the Department to enforce the law that requiring states to offer welfare recipients the opportunity to register to vote. “In January 2005, we had a 10-year report, which documented the 59 percent decline [in registrations] from 1995 through 2004,” said Scott Novakowski of the center-left think tank Demos. He added that many states, including Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, were ignoring the registration requirements for welfare recipients. “John Conyers [now the House Judiciary Committee chairman] and 29 other representatives asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to look into this, and there was no response.”
The political stakes in registering low-income voters are enormous. The Election Assistance Commission’s biennial voter registration report for 2005-2006 found that while 16.6 million new registration applications were received by state motor vehicles agencies, only 527,752 applications came from public assistance offices – a 50 percent drop from 2003-2004. As a result, in early 2005, voting rights groups met with the DOJ’s top Voting Section officials – including Hans Von Spakovsky, counsel to the assistant attorney general overseeing the Voting Section, and Voting Section Chief Joseph Rich – to discuss enforcing the public assistance requirement. Von Spakovsky, like ACVR’s Hearne, had worked for Bush in Florida during the 2000 recount and was among a handful of GOP appointees who were established “vote fraud” activists.
Rich, a Civil Rights Division attorney for thirty-seven years, had been chief of the Voting Section for six years when he resigned in April 2005, citing politicization of voting rights enforcement. Rich recalled the meeting about the voter registration requirements, saying that Von Spakovsky – who had become his de facto boss – decided to ignore that part of the law, and instead focus on one line in the statute that allowed the Justice Department to pressure states to purge voter rolls. “Four months before I left, in 2005, Von Spakovsky held a meeting where he said he wanted to start an initiative for states we want to purge … Their priority was to purge, not to register voters … To me, it was a very clear view of the Republican agenda … to make it harder to vote: purge voters and don’t register voters.”
The Bush Administration Voting Section
Rich was one of a number of career attorneys at the DOJ Voting Section who resigned because pressure from the Bush administration had altered the agency’s historic civil rights mission. Between 2005 and 2007, 55 percent of the attorneys in the Voting Section left, according to a report by NYU’s Brennan Center and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which cited, among other things, a “partisan hiring process,” “altered performance evaluations” and “political retaliation on the job.” The shift in enforcement philosophy did not go unnoticed. In July 2006, The Boston Globe reported that the Civil Rights Division had turned away from hiring lawyers with civil rights movement backgrounds. Of the nineteen attorneys hired since 2003, The Globe reported, eleven were members of the conservative Federalist Society, Republican National Lawyers Association, or had volunteered for Bush-Cheney campaigns. Moreover, the Voting Section had virtually stopped filing suits on behalf of minority voters. Wade Hendeson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, told the House Judiciary Committee on March 22, 2007 that, “The Voting Section did not file any cases on behalf of African-American voters during a five-year period between 2001 and 2006,” adding that, “no cases have been brought on behalf of Native American voters for the entire administration.” While the Justice Department had all but stopped filing lawsuits on behalf of Native and African-Americans, the Voting Section had more than doubled the number of lawsuits seeking to enforce the providing of bilingual ballots and election materials in Latino and Asian communities, constituencies that were seen as likely Republican swing votes, particularly after the GOP made electoral gains among Latinos in 2004.
That the administration’s appointees overseeing voting rights would politicize the Voting Section should have surprised no one.
Early in Bush’s first term, conservative publications like the National Journal were clamoring for wholesale changes in the Civil Rights Division. “There may be no part of the federal government where liberalism is more deeply entrenched,” the Journal’s John Miller wrote on May 6, 2002. “Keeping ineligible voters off registration lists is the first step in limiting fraud,” wrote Von Spakovsky in a 1997 Georgia Public Policy Foundation article, where he described various scenarios where he believed Democratic partisans were “sending imposters to vote, to request absentee ballots, or to otherwise generate fraudulent votes.” In July 2001, Von Spakovsky began his testimony on “election reform” before the Senate Rules Committee by stating that, “One of the biggest threats to voter rights and election integrity today is the condition of our voter registration rolls. Many jurisdictions now have more registered names on their voter rolls than they have voting age population within their borders. This is an invitatin to fraud and chaos since the many invalid and multiple registrations that exist can serve as a source pool for fraud.”
According to a Brennan Center and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law report, there were four “connected pieces of strategy” to politicize the enforcement of voting rights by the Department of Justice from 2004 through 2007: “fomenting fear of voter fraud;” “dismantling the infrastructure of Justice;” “restricting registration and voting;” and “politically motivated prosecutions.” According to the report, from 2003 to 2005, the Voting Rights Section:
· Sent Maryland a letter before the 2004 presidential election saying that the state could reject voter registrations that did not match information on other state databases. That “no-vote, no-match” standard has been criticized as being too strict, due to typos and data-entry errors.
· Pre-cleared congressional redistricting in Texas in mid-decade, instead of waiting for the once-a-decade census report, as has been the standard practice. The Department must approve election law changes in states and counties under jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act. The Texas redistricting case was seen as leading to the election of four Republican House candidates in 2004. In 2006, the Supreme Court issued a decision upholding parts of that redistricting plan.
· Argued that individual citizens have no right to private action – or the ability to sue to seek redress-under HAVA. That right has been a key component of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, leading citizens to file numerous suits such as one in 2006 by African-American voters in Columbus, Ohio, whose precincts did not receive the same per capita number of voting machines as nearby white suburbs.
· Pre-cleared a new Georgia photo ID law, even though the section’s career attorneys recommended rejecting it. The c urts later nullified the law, comparing it to imposing a “poll tax” due to costs associated with obtaining the required government photo ID. The state has since modified the law, relaxing the ID standard.
· Issued an opinion saying provisional ballots could not be given to people who lacked ID. The ballots were created by HAVA to ensure that people who are not on voter rolls could vote, though registrations of those voters must be verified before counting the ballots. The section also said it was okay to cast but not count provisional ballots.
· Tried to pressure the Election Assistance Commission to change its decision on Arizona’s voter ID law, which requires residents to provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. Arizona wanted the EAC to add the citizenship requirement to a national voter registration form. The EAC did not grant Arizona’s request, despite supporting emails from Von Spakofsky.
· Filed the first of a half-dozen lawsuits forcing states to purge voter rolls. Only Missouri fought the suit, which it later won, though the Justice Department is appealing that ruling. U.S. District Court Judge Nanette K. Laughrey wrote in her decision that, “It is … telling that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of the deficiencies alleged by the United States. Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.” New Jersey, Indiana, and Maine were also sued by the Department and reached consent decrees – settlements – that included voter purges.
These actions were all part of a growing crescendo of enforcement actions with political overtones leading up to the 2006 election.
Turning Toward 2008
As the country approaches the 2008 election, it is an open question how the GOP’s ballot security strategies will affect voting in the battleground states. As in any election, there are a handful of unknowns that could have a major impact. The Supreme Court, for example, will decide whether Indiana’s voter ID law, seen as one of the country’s toughest, places an unconstitutional burden on low-income people and minority voters. Meanwhile, in states where immigration is a hot-button issue, Arizona’s efforts to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the national voter registration form will be closely watched. Under that state’s Proposition 200, which passed in 2004, residents must show proof of citizenship before registering to vote or receiving public assistance. Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, is now rejecting 30 percent of all new registrations due to inadequate proof of citizenship, according to Jeff Blum of USAction. Since Proposition 200 was implemented in 2005, more than 32,000 voter regitrations have been rejected. Meanwhile, in January 2008, the Texas Legislature began consideration of a new voter ID law.
Similarly, efforts by states to comply with HAVA by creating statewide voter lists pose an entirely new set of election administration issues. Since 2000, most states have been struggling to transition to a new generation of electronic voting systems. These paperless systems have been criticized for being unreliable, potentially inaccurate, and accessible to hackers. While some states have moved to restrict the use of these machines, the creation of statewide voter databases – a part of these systems – has not been as widely scrutinized. In some states, officials have instituted strict name-matching requirements to verify the accuracy of voter registrations. Whether typos or other data entry errors will mistakenly remove legal voters – as was the case in California in 2005 – remains to be seen, although Florida recently joined a handful of states, including Washington, where litigation rolled back strict name-matching standards that were disenfranchising legal voters.
Another large unknown concerns voter purges. In April 2007, the Justice Department sent letters to the top election administrators in ten states – Iowa, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, North C rolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Vermont – to pressure them to purge their voter rolls. Former Voting Section attorneys and others said the statistics cited by the Justice Department in the purge letter were flawed and did not confirm that those states had more voter registrations than eligible voters, as the department alleged. “That data does not say what they purport it says,” said David Becker, senior voting rights counsel for People for the American Way and a former Voting Section senior trial attorney, after reviewing the data cited in the Justice Department’s letter. “This stuff disenfranchises voters …. There are eligible voters who will be removed. There is no evidence that rolls need to be cleaned up to this degree. This will make things more chaotic on Election Day. People will e given provisional ballots that won’t get counted.”
Looking toward the 2008 election, it appears the purges – as well as the new voter ID laws, restrictions on registration drives and stricter rules for counting provisional ballots – could be a new and legal way to accomplish a longstanding GOP electoral tactic: thinning the ranks of likely Democratic voters. In numerous elections dating back to the 1960s, the Republican Party has tried to challenge new voter registrations to accomplish this goal, although since 1981 federal courts have blocked some of those efforts as illegal electioneering.
”Until the mid-1960s, the political entity most closely associated with efforts to disenfranchise people of color was the southern wing of the Democratic Party,” wrote Rice University Sociology Professor Chandler Davidson and several graduate students in a paper titled, “Republican Ballot Security Programs: Vote Protection or Minority Voter Suppression – Or Both?” However, the passage of civil rights laws in the early 1960s prompted some Republicans to appeal to southern Democrats who supported the Jim Crow system. Part of that political sea change was that the Republican Party adopted some of the voter suppression tactics used by southern Democrats. Indeed, the debate and remedies framed by the GOP’s contemporary “voter fraud” activists comes from this same political lineage:
“There are several noteworthy characteristics of these programs. They focus on minority precincts almost exclusively. There is often only the flimsiest evidence that voter fraud is likely to be perpetrated in such precincts.
In addition to encouraging the presence of sometimes intimidating Republican poll watchers or challengers who may slow down voting lines and embarrass potential voters by asking them humiliating questions, these programs have sometimes posted people in official-looking uniforms with badges and side arms who question voters about their citizenship or their registration. In addition, warning signs may be posted near the polls, or radio ads may be targeted to minority listeners containing dire threats of prison terms for people who are not properly registered – messages that seem designed to put minority voters on the defensive.”
Will this history of vote suppression tactics repeat itself during the 2008 presidential election? While the Democrats are not saints when it comes to voter suppression – recall how John Kerry’s supporters disqualified signatories to Ralph Nader’s presidential petitions in 2004 – they do not have the same kind of vote suppression apparatus in place as the Republicans do. Indeed, it appears that Republicans are already following Chandler Davidson’s inventory by seeking to regulate the voting process well before the 2008 election. The tactics that can be implemented well before the voting begins – stricter voter ID laws, voter purges, registration drive curbs, tougher provisional ballot laws and easing rulefor voter challenges – are already underway in several states.
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Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of “What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election,” with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).
Add comment April 19, 2008
Bill Moyers Speaks on Journalists as Truth Tellers
Journalists as Truth-Tellers
By Bill Moyers
The Nation
Monday 07 April 2008
Note: Bill Moyers delivered these remarks in Washington, DC, April 3 at the fifth annual Ridenhour Prize awards ceremony, sponsored by The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation. Moyers received the Courage Prize; author James D. Scurlock, received the Book Prize, and former Navy JAG officer Matthew Diaz received the Prize for Truth-Telling. The text of his speech appears here as part of the ongoing Moral Compass series, highlighting the spoken word.
Thank you very much, Sissy Farenthold, for those very generous words, spoken like one Texan to another – extravagantly. Thank you for the spirit of kinship. I could swear that I sensed our good Molly Ivins standing there beside you.
I am as surprised to be here as I am grateful. I never thought of myself as courageous, and still don’t. Ron Ridenhour was courageous. To get the story out, he had to defy the whole might and power of the United States government, including its war machine. I was then publisher of Newsday, having left the White House some two years earlier. Our editor Bill McIlwain played the My Lai story big, as he should, much to the chagrin of the owner who couldn’t believe Americans were capable of such atrocities. Our readers couldn’t believe it either. Some of them picketed outside my office for days, their signs accusing the paper of being anti-American for publishing repugnant news about our troops. Some things never change.
A few years later, I gave the commencement at a nearby university, and when I finished the speech, a woman who had just been graduated came up to me and said, “Mr. Moyers, you’ve been in both government and journalism; that makes everything you say twice as hard to believe.” She was on to something.
After my government experience, it took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality. Over the last forty years, I would find that reality in assignment after assignment, from covering famine in Africa and war in Central America to inner-city families trapped in urban ghettos and middle-class families struggling to survive in an era of downsizing across the heartland. I also had to learn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.
Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be – corporate and political and sometimes journalistic – there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government’s lies and contradictions, “I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested.” Journalism 101.
So it wasn’t courage I counted on; it was exhilaration and good luck. When the road forked, I somehow stumbled into the right path, thanks to mentors like Eric Sevareid, Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and scores of producers, researchers and editors who lifted me to see further than one can see unless one is standing on the shoulders of others.
The quintessential lesson of my life came from another Texan named John Henry Faulk. He was a graduate, as am I, of the University of Texas. He served in the Merchant Marines, the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army during World War II, and came home to become a celebrated raconteur and popular national radio host whose career was shattered when right-wingers inspired by Joseph McCarthy smeared him as a communist. He lost his sponsors and was fired. But he fought back with a lawsuit that lasted five years and cost him every penny he owned. Financial help from Edward R. Murrow and a few others helped him to hang on. In the end, John Henry Faulk won, and his courage helped to end the Hollywood era of blacklisting. You should read his book, Fear on Trial, and see the movie starring George C. Scott. John Henry’s courage was contagious.
Before his death I produced a documentary about him, and during our interview he told me the story of how he and his friend, Boots Cooper, were playing in the chicken house there in central Texas when they were about twelve years old. They spotted a chicken snake in the top tier of the nest, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it, “All of our frontier courage drained out of our heels. Actually, it trickled down our overall legs. And Boots and I made a new door through the hen house.” His momma came out to see what all of the fuss was about, and she said to Boots and John Henry, “Don’t you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can’t hurt you.” Rubbing his forehead and his behind at the same time, Boots said, “Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you so bad you’ll hurt yourself.”
John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson. I’m always ashamed when I do. Temptation to co-option is the original sin of journalism, and we’re always finding fig leaves to cover it: economics, ideology, awe of authority, secrecy, the claims of empire. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were reminded of what the late great reporter A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press is “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” The slat broke after the invasion and some strange bedfellows fell to the floor: establishment journalists, neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits, right-wing warmongers flying the skull and bones of the “balanced and fair brigade,” administration flacks whose classified leaks were manufactured lies – all romping on the same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.
Five years, thousands of casualties, and hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the media co-conspirators caught in flagrante delicto are still prominent, still celebrated, and still holding forth with no more contrition than a weathercaster who made a wrong prediction as to the next day’s temperature. The biblical injunction, “Go and sin no more,” is the one we most frequently forget in the press. Collectively, we don’t seem to learn that all it takes to transform an ordinary politician and a braying ass into the modern incarnation of Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on the Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the invocation of national security.
There are, fortunately, always exceptions to whatever our latest dismal collective performance yields. America produces some world-class journalism, including coverage of the Iraq War by men and women as brave as Ernie Pyle. But I still wish we had a professional Hippocratic Oath of our own that might stir us in the night when we stray from our mission. And yes, I believe journalism has a mission.
Walter Lippman was prescient on this long before most of you were born. Lippman, who became the ultimate Washington insider – someone to whom I regularly leaked – acknowledged that while the press may be a weak reed to lean on, it is the indispensable support for freedom. He wrote, “The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism. Everywhere men and women are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly, they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. All the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster must come to any people denied an assured access to the facts.”
So for all the blunders for which we are culpable; for all the disillusionment that has set in among journalists with every fresh report of job cuts and disappearing news space; for all the barons and buccaneers turning the press into a karaoke of power; for all the desecration visited on broadcast journalism by the corporate networks; for all the nonsense to which so many aspiring young journalists are consigned; and for all the fears about the eroding quality of the craft, I still answer emphatically when young people ask me, “Should I go into journalism today?” Sometimes it is difficult to urge them on, especially when serious questions are being asked about how loyal our society is to the reality as well as to the idea of an independent and free press. But I almost always answer, “Yes, if you have a fire in your belly, you can still make a difference.” I remind them of how often investigative reporting has played a crucial role in making the crooked straight. I remind them how news bureaus abroad are a form of national security that can tell us what our government won’t. I remind them that as America grows more diverse, it’s essential to have reporters, editors, producers and writers who reflect these new rising voices and concerns. And I remind them that facts can still drive the argument and tug us in the direction of greater equality and a more democratic society. Journalism still matters.
But I also tell them there is something more important than journalism, and that is the truth. They aren’t necessarily one and the same because the truth is often obscured in the news. In his new novel, The Appeal, John Grisham tells us more about corporate, political and legal jihads than most newspapers or network news ever will; more about Wall Street shenanigans than all the cable business channels combined; more about Manchurian candidates than you will ever hear on the Sunday morning talk shows.
For that matter, you will learn more about who wins and who loses in the real business of politics, which is governance, from the public interest truth-tellers of Washington than you will from an established press tethered to official sources. The Government Accountability Project, POGO, the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center for Responsible Politics, the National Security Archive, CREW, the Center for Public Integrity, just to name a few – and from whistleblowers of all sorts who never went to journalism school, never flashed a press pass, and never attended a gridiron dinner.
Ron Ridenhour was not a journalist when he came upon the truth of My Lai. He was in the Army. He later became a pioneering investigative reporter and – this is the irony – had trouble making a living in a calling where truth-telling can be a liability to the bottom line. Matthew Diaz and James Scurlock, whom you honored today, are truth-tellers without a license, reminding us that the most important credential of all is a conscience that cannot be purchased or silenced. So I tell inquisitive and inquiring young people: “Journalism still makes a difference, but the truth matters more. And if you can’t get to the truth through journalism, there are other ways to go.”
To The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation, to the Ridenhour judges and to all of you, thank you again for this moment and, above all, for the courage of your own convictions.
Add comment April 19, 2008
