Objectively Pro-Rape

Al Franken went out deep on a limb and made his first amendment to face a roll-call vote to stop the practice of defense contractors essentially allowing consequence-free rape on their overseas bases:

On Tuesday night, the Minnesota Democrat got his first piece of legislation passed by the United States Senate via roll call vote. The amendment stopped federal funding for those defense contractors who used mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of assault the right to bring their case to court. It passed by a 68-30 margin with nine Republicans joining each voting Democrat. And in the immediate aftermath, Franken was granted the chance to revel, ever so slightly, in his victory.\

"The story came to my attention of Jamie Leigh Jones who, when she was 19, went to Iraq to work for [defense contractor] KBR and she was put in the barracks with 400 men and was sexually harassed," Franken told the Huffington Post in a brief interview shortly after the vote. "She complained. But they didn't do anything about it. She was drugged and gang raped and they locked her up in a shipping container. She tried to sue KBR and they said you have a mandatory arbitration clause in your contract. She tried to fight back and said this is ridiculous. She took it to court and they have been fighting her for three years."

"This bill would make it so that anybody in business with the Department of the Defense can't do this," he concluded emphatically. "They can't have mandatory arbitration on issues like assault and battery."

You'd think this kind of amendment wouldn't only get 100 votes, but somehow former Senators would storm the floor and demand that they too could offer their support for the legislation. Instead, in the culture we now have in Washington, 30 Republicans voted against this. I don't know how you characterize this other than saying that they think it's perfectly reasonable for women to be raped on Defense Department-funded American bases, left in shipping containers, and barred from bringing up charges subsequently. They actually called this a political attack aimed at Halliburton, even though the bill named no contractor specifically.

Um, what would you call the "Defund ACORN Act," exactly? And while I know that was the biggest scandal in the history of scandals, AFAIK ACORN has never protected their employees from raping someone and detaining them in a shipping container. Again, to the best of my knowledge.

These Republicans should be completely ashamed of themselves.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, while the Franken amendment was nice, the overall defense authorization bill includes lots of spending for the war in Afghanistan, and would ban the transfer of any detainee at Gitmo to the United States. As Franken would say, "Oy."

Still Lots Of Pork In The Defense Bill

I still consider it a big victory for Obama and those who want to eventually see the military-industrial complex neutered to see additional funding for the F-22 fighter struck from the defense appropriations bill. I'm glad the Pentagon took a stand. But the final House version of the bill still includes numerous weapons systems that the White House never called for.

The House approved a $636 billion defense spending bill Thursday after voting to strip money for the controversial F-22 fighter. However, it left funding in place for several other military programs that the Obama administration said it does not want [...]

The White House also hinted that a veto might occur if the bill included funding for the VH-71 presidential helicopter and for an alternative engine program for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But money for both programs remained, as did funding for other items the Pentagon does not want -- extra C-17 transport planes and F-18 jets, as well as the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a missile defense program.

(Good for the House, by the way, getting all of their appropriations bills done by the end of July. Majoritarian government is efficient government!)

This unwanted equipment totals almost $7 billion dollars at a time when we need to beg and scrape for $2 billion more for the wildly successful cash for clunkers program (just a side note on that, this Economist writer is relying on theory of the program offering little environmental benefit, and not the practice that fuel efficiency has shot up 69% in the cars traded in, saving consumers $187 million in gasoline and reducing carbon emissions by 655,000 metric tons).

Congress will be Congress, as they say. It's just difficult to get things out of the system once they become entrenched. And for every F-22 victory, there are billions of dollars in lesser-known projects that are just as useless and constrain our budgets. We still have a long way to go.

F-22 Vote In The Senate

The word from the White House was that they'd get this vote, so we'll see. Watching on C-SPAN now...

...I've heard a Lamar Alexander, Mark Warner and Ben Nelson Aye, with Maria Cantwell and Susan Collins no. It'll be close.

Bayh, aye!

Klobuchar, Harkin, Tim Johnson aye, and Bill Nelson as well. Blanche Lincoln gets an aye as well, with Wyden and Stabenow. Lieberman's a no.

I think some of the moderate Dems without a big stake in the F-22 are being at least a little honest about fiscal responsibility.

Udall of Colorado a no...

Bob Casey, aye... Udall of Colorado just changed his vote to aye! Pryor went aye as well, with Webb and Dorgan.

I think we might get this.

...Ensign went aye. I guess Judd Gregg and Mike Enzi did as well. And Coburn!

...I may not have added context. An aye vote would strike funding from the defense authorization bill for the F-22 fighter, a weapon of which the Pentagon and the Air Force don't want any more. If we're ever going to break the military-industrial complex, we have to win this kind of vote.

George Voinovich and Jeff Merkley went aye. And Kit Bond! Wow, lots of Republicans voting for this. Richard Shelby, too.

...Conrad and Landrieu are aye votes. McCaskill went aye. And John Kerry. No for Mark Begich, I think this is an Alaska-Hawaii alliance, as both Hawaii Senators went no as well. That happens fairly often in the Senate.

Lindsey Graham and Lisa Murkowski go no, with Jon Tester (damn). Baucus goes no.

Lindsey Graham just changed his vote to aye!

...The final vote is 58-40! Amendment approved! That's a huge victory for the President and transforming defense spending.

...Obama comments on the passage of stripping F-22 funding. "I reject the notion that we have to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on unnecessary weapons... that's why I'm grateful that the Senate just voted not to spend $1.75 billion on F-22 funding that we don't need. Our budget is a zero-sum game, and if more money goes to F-22's, it is our troops and our citizens who lose."

Gates on the F-22

Remember, this is Robert Gates, who served under a Republican President both at the CIA and the Defense Department, arguing in the most explicit language I've seen from a public official against the dictates of the military-industrial complex:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made an impassioned case Thursday for terminating the F-22 program after production of 187 planes, as the Obama administration sought to blunt a bipartisan push to add money to the defense budget for the fighter jet.

"If we can't bring ourselves to make this tough but straightforward decision -- reflecting the judgment of two very different presidents, two different secretaries of defense, two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the current Air Force secretary and chief of staff -- where do we draw the line?" he said in a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago. "If we can't get this right, what on earth can we get right?" [...]

The normally staid Gates became especially animated Thursday describing his frustration with lawmakers' efforts to keep building F-22s. "The more they buy of stuff we don't need, the less we have available for the stuff we do need," he told reporters, his voice rising. "It is just as simple as that. It ain't a complicated problem."

Even if Congress acquiesces on the F-22, Gates warned, the Pentagon has to do a better job of setting realistic goals for its weapons programs.

"We must break the old habit of adding layer upon layer of cost, complexity and delay to systems that are so expensive and so elaborate that only a small number can be built and are usable in only a narrow range of low-probability scenarios," he said.

Jack Murtha seems to think there won't be a veto. I actually hope that the White House doesn't compromise on this. If they do, there will be no political will to go up against the MIC again, at least for a while. However, now that the defense bill has become a legislative vehicle for the bill expanding hate crimes legislation to sexual orientation, which passed the Senate with 63 votes yesterday, it does need to go through. But the President has the upper hand here - the defense bill is must-pass, and Congress doesn't exactly inspire fear in anyone.

Hopefully the Senate can vote this out of the bill next week. It'll be close.

F-22 Intrigue

The debate in the Senate over additional funding for the F-22 (even if this funding is cut, we'll have 187 of the fighters available) took a turn last night.

Senator Levin for some reason withdraws his amendment to strike funding for the F-22 fighter that the President wants discontinued and over which he threatens a veto of the bill. And hate crimes legislation finally finds a legislative vehicle to be attached to. Only it's... the bill the President threatens to veto if the F-22 money isn't struck. That ain't gonna go over well, if anyone's looking. I don't know if there's any other effort underway besides Levin's to strike that F-22 funding. We'll see. Meanwhile, Senator Reid has done what needs doing to clear the decks for a vote on the hate crimes amendment. He's filled the amendment tree and filed for cloture [...]

I'd hate to see them stay until one in the morning on Friday to get this done, only to attach it to a doomed bill. But maybe it's not so doomed if this is attached. Maybe that's the thinking. To trade the president the hate crimes salve he promised the LGBT community after the DOMA brief fiasco in exchange for his letting the F-22 authorization escape the veto. Slick!

The White House appears serious enough about removing the additional F-22 funding that I suspect the amendment will return in some form, if not in conference committee. Peter Orszag also objects to $438.9 million in funding for a new engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, which has a perfectly good engine already. And the F-22 funding is being assailed in print media, both in this NYT op-ed:

The plane, the most expensive jet fighter ever built, was designed for cold war aerial combat. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has repeatedly argued that the Pentagon needs to phase out such high-cost, outdated programs so it can buy the kinds of weapons that American troops desperately need to complete their mission in Iraq and defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The F-22 has not been used in either war. Buying more would only make it harder for the Air Force to shift money into aircraft like unmanned intelligence drones and the more adaptable, cheaper-to-fly F-35 fighter, which is set to begin production in 2012 [...]

Providing for America’s real defense needs is expensive enough without making the military budget double as a make-work jobs program. Capping the F-22 program at 187, as the Pentagon wants, would keep production lines intact for years to come, well beyond the immediate need for stimulus-related job creation.

Not to mention this reported piece in WaPo (h/t Hilzoy why the hell are you leaving blogging!!!), detailing all the failures of the F-22 as a vehicle:

"The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show. (...)

"It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure" that jeopardizes success of the aircraft's mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record. Other skeptics inside the Pentagon note that the planes, designed 30 years ago to combat a Cold War adversary, have cost an average of $350 million apiece and say they are not a priority in the age of small wars and terrorist threats.

The plane is literally "vulnerable to rain." And we spend $1.7 billion a piece for them.

So I think the F-22 funding will come out, by hook or by crook. But here's the really interesting part of the defense bill:

The Obama administration has objected to a provision in the 2010 defense funding bill currently before the Senate that would bar the military's use of contractors to interrogate detainees.

The provision, strongly backed by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), describes interrogations as an "inherently governmental function" that "cannot be transferred to contractor personnel." It would give the Defense Department one year from the bill's enactment to ensure that the military had the resources to comply with it.

A White House policy statement yesterday signaled "many areas of agreement" with the bill that emerged from Levin's committee late last month but said the administration has "serious concerns" about some provisions. The statement repeated Obama's threat to veto the $680 billion bill unless $1.75 billion to fund an additional seven F-22 fighter aircraft is removed.

The more that we privatize interrogation, the more likelihood that those less accountable contractors sully America through torture. We can absolutely meet the needs of intelligence gathering without using CACI or other contractors, and it's sad to see the Obama Administration fight this provision.

Basically, there's a whole lot tied up in this bill at the moment. I could see nothing passing and defense funded under last year's agreement. Which would be a net loss and a missed opportunity at reform, not to mention a loss for the hate crimes bill.

The Routine Giveaways

Everyone furrowing their brows over $700 billion dollars to the rich and greedy should be advised that the Congress did that last week.

WASHINGTON - Automakers gained $25 billion in taxpayer-subsidized loans and oil companies won elimination of a long-standing ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as the Senate passed a sprawling spending bill Saturday.

The 78-12 vote sent the $634 billion measure to President Bush, who was expected to sign it even though it spends more money and contains more pet projects than he would have liked [...]

The Pentagon is in line for a record budget. In addition to $70 billion approved this summer for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department would receive $488 billion, a 6 percent increase. The spending bill also offers aid to victims of flooding in the Midwest and recent hurricanes across the Gulf Coast.

Such a huge bill usually would dominate the end-of-session agenda on Capitol Hill. But it went below the radar screen because attention focused on the congressional bailout of Wall Street.

$700 billion on the investor class and to keep banks lending, non! $560 dollars on the most wasteful and bloated weapons systems in the world and the continued slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan, si! And actually, it's more than that, as Robert Borosage notes.

Most Americans have no sense of the cost and scope of America’s role as globocop. We sustain what Chalmers Johnson calls an “empire of bases” across the globe – over 700 active bases in more than 30 countries. Our navy polices the world’s oceans. We task our military to maintain “dominance” not only in our own hemisphere, but in Europe, the Persian Gulf and Asia. Our intelligence “plumbing in place” engages in covert activities throughout the globe. We are the only nation with the capacity to airlift expeditionary forces rapidly and in large numbers across the globe. We are now devoting some $12 billion a month to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush has declared a “Global War on Terror,” a so-called “long war,” without limits or exits. Our Defense Secretary complains that the military is displacing the desiccated State Department as America’s representatives across the world.

The cost of sustaining this commitment is staggering. The Pentagon’s budget itself represents more than half of all discretionary spending—everything the government does, outside of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and interest on the national debt. At $700 billion, it is about equal to that spent by the rest of the world combined on the military. But the actual cost of our military is strewn throughout the budget. Add in the cost of our veterans, the arms aid in the State Department budget, Homeland Security, and more—and actual spending climbs over $1 trillion a year.

Puts that bailout in a little perspective, eh? Especially when 21st-century challenges in protecting America from extremism has no military solution whatsoever.

The problem, folks, is that the largest sector of the private economy is financial services, in other words people pushing paper to other people, while manufacturing is at its lowest level in decades (and much of that is guns, warplanes and missiles). That is historically unsustainable and impossible, and invites crises like this, and no amount of figuring out a creative accounting fix and some kind of bailout on the cheap is going to change that. Only by creating a new energy economy, allowing for 5 million new green-collar jobs, and building a manufacturing base again to match the knowledge economy will we ever have an economic system in any kind of balance. Yet only the Senate bribery bill even brooches that subject.

Looks like a big rondelet of failure from where I'm standing.

The Big Non-Furor In Congress

This is kind of interesting. The House gave in to Bush's demands and passed a defense authorization bill which fixes the one stated reason for veto in the first place, the opportunity for Americans to sue foreign governments for reparations in state-sponsored abuse. As far as I can tell they didn't change anything else in the bill, other than making the soldier's pay raise retroactive to January 1.

So, does this mean that the part of the bill banning funding for permanent military bases in Iraq is intact? And if so, how can a permanent status of forces agreement be funded?

In addition, let me say that it's an old story to call the Democrats weak and soft and unwilling to stand up to an unpopular President, but this is ridiculous. The President didn't even veto the bill properly. But instead of taking the opportunity to discuss a commander-in-chief vetoing a pay raise for men and women in battle, they just cede to his wishes as quickly as possible. Not only that, they're going to not raise a finger about billions in arms sales to the Saudis, including precision-guided bombs, as an opportunity to rake back in cash for the defense industry. You really have to believe that the Democrats aren't afraid of scary Bush, but think they're going to win by a mile this year, and just don't want to make waves. That, and that this leadership by and large shares the same goals of global hegemony as the Republicans.

UPDATE: In addition this absolves a torturer like Saddam Hussein for his crimes, which might be a nice thing to bring up if you ever get into an argument about "removing that brutal dictator".

Invisible Congress

So the Senate is still gaveling those pro forma sessions, even though late Friday the President politely informed them that they don't exist.

Because the bill has so much in it for veterans and active members of the Armed Forces, Bush apparently doesn't dare sign an affirmative veto. Instead, he'll pretend it... just went away on its own.

But this bill was presented to the president for his signature on December 19th. It's been eight days since then, not counting Sundays as the Constitution outlines. Seven if you give an extra day for Christmas. Hasn't been ten days yet.

Not only that, but you may recall that the Senate has remained in session all this time explicitly to prevent trickery like this. The most oft-cited reason was to prevent recess appointments, but the pro forma sessions -- the most recent of which was held today, yes, the very day Bush claimed there was no session -- also serve to avoid adjournment, and therefore the pocket veto.

But not in Bushworld. In Bushworld, these sessions don't count. Because he says so.

And if Bush thinks the Senate's sessions don't count, what's stopping him from making recess appointments?

How much more abuse can this Congress stand?

There was some confusion about whether or not this was a legitimate use of the pocket veto, since the House created the spending bill, and technically they weren't in session. It depends on how the Constitution is interpreted. It may not surprise you to know that I'm not going with the reading from the guys who think Article II allows them to torture.

Constitutional questions aside, Bush is vetoing the defense bill. And while the cover story is that he's doing it to save Iraqi government assets from claims of reparations dating back to the Saddam regime (not "pork," as a commenter here claimed), it could be for any number of reasons (provisions conditioning funding for missile defense, Congressional requests for intelligence assessments, etc).

But regardless, we know how this should be handled politically, right? Bush is vetoing a bill that includes a pay raise for soldiers and increased medical care for veterans. That should really be the only discussion of the bill from national Democrats. Your President just took the troops' pay raise away. Any reference to the President should include the phrase "who just vetoed a pay raise for the troops." Any reference to REPUBLICANS should include the phrase "whose leader just vetoed a pay raise for the troops." It should be made absolutely radioactive.

Of course, I expect none of that.

Doh!

So the Democrats gave and gave and gave to get the defense authorization bill passed with what amounts to a blank check for Iraq. But now George Bush wants them to give some more.

At the behest of the Iraqi government, President Bush will veto the annual defense authorization bill, saying an obscure provision in the legislation could make Iraqi assets held in U.S. banks vulnerable to lawsuits.

The veto threat startled Democratic congressional leaders, who believe Bush is bowing to pressure from the Iraqi government over a technical provision in the bill. The veto is unexpected because there was no veto threat and the legislation passed both chambers of Congress overwhelmingly.

Democratic leaders say the provision in question could easily be worked out, but in vetoing the massive defense policy bill, military pay raises may be on hold, as well as dozens of other programs.

Steve Benen notes later in this post that Iraqi assets are probably immune to US lawsuits anyway, regardless of what this bill says. And the Democrats have a pathetic "you didn't tell us what to cave on!" plea at their website.

Why would that be the first statement out of the gate? Look what the President is vetoing here.

Keep in mind, the veto of the defense authorization bill puts a variety of key spending measures in limbo, including a pay raise for the troops, VA care for wounded veterans, a new "Truman Commission" to fight fraud and waste by military contractors, and expanded job protections for family members of severely wounded troops.

If Democrats can't make hay out of Bush vetoing a pay raise for the troops, they're useless. Plus, this bill passed with SWEEPING margins, like 400-6 kind of margins, in both houses. There's something unsaid here, and I think it's to do with the missile defense restrictions. Old Reagan-era habits die hard. But this should be used to pummel Bush for the next three months. And there's no need to pass any new bill. Not that the leading Dems will listen to me, of course.