USNEWS & WORLD REPORT—THOMAS JEFFERSON STREET BLOG

Ever since the Republicans gained control of Congress in November, they have proceeded to box themselves into untenable positions – a veritable straight jacket.

The decision to link the Department of Homeland Security funding to an attack on the president’s immigration executive order was tantamount to issuing a threat that is impossible to deliver on without harming both our nation’s security and the Republican brand. After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected future Republican government shutdowns, the decision to hold Homeland Security funding hostage at a time of cyberattacks and heightened concern for terrorism takes the country right back down the shutdown road. Now Republicans have to figure out how to get themselves out of the mess they created.

Then, somehow, many Republicans followed the Michele Bachmann path of criticizing vaccines, or at least government involvement, just at the time of a measles outbreak – and following the Ebola scare. Presidential candidates are trying desperately to untangle themselves from past rhetoric and a desire to please the libertarian crowd, who seem to despise any sort of government regulation or intervention, even in the health care field.

[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on the Republican Party]

Do they have no memory of polio or smallpox or diphtheria or tetanus or the host of other diseases that vaccines have nearly wiped out in the United States? Is this really a smart policy position on which to invoke “individual liberty” – to allow parents not to immunize their children against deadly diseases? Why would a politician argue that it is not a good thing to use modern science to help eliminate historically devastating illnesses? Beats me.

Then we see House Speaker John Boehner engaging in a bit of unprecedented private diplomacy, as he invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress just over one month before an election in Israel, without consulting with the White House, the State Department or others in the Democratic leadership. This was a Lone Ranger move if there ever was one, designed to give Netanyahu a political boost back home. Boehner created controversy and caused himself untold problems for no reason.

In addition, the Republican leadership has to untangle itself from legislation that involves controversial language on rape and its reporting, and on whether or not climate change exists and who is responsible if it does. And all of this is in addition to holding more votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act without offering any positive solutions in return.

[OPINION: Don’t Make Vaccines a Partisan Issue After Christie Remarks]

There also seems to be a clear Republican strategy of offering legislation that they know will result in a presidential veto, thereby furthering the public’s impression that congress gets nothing done and is increasingly engaged in partisan gridlock. For a president who has vetoed a grand total of two bills in six years, Barack Obama is not exactly known as fast on the trigger with a veto pen.

So the bottom line seems to be that the first few months of the Republican takeover have not been exactly productive, for the country or for the Republicans. They seem to find themselves in a self-imposed straightjacket they are having trouble removing.

“There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.” President Harry S. Truman wrote those words in an op-ed for the Washington Post on Dec.22, 1963, entitled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.”

This was exactly one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and a bit more than 10 years before the formation of the Church Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, to study abuses in the intelligence committee (which was a precursor to today’s permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence). Now, more than 50 years after Truman’s op-ed, the intelligence committee has released a report investigating the CIA’s use of torture in the years after 9/11.

[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on 2014 Congressional Elections]

In his Post piece, Truman argued that the CIA had been “diverted from its original assignment” (intelligence collection and analysis) and had “become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.” It is now long past time to heed Truman’s words. There have been many calls over many decades to rein in the CIA and our intelligence agencies.

But, sadly, we seem to slip back into the same old patterns where the executive gives an order, or a wink and a nod, and the CIA goes off in secret to “do its thing.” Whether it was overthrowing governments beginning in the 1950s, the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro in the 1960s or creating secret prisons for torture in the 2000s, the pattern is truly disturbing; in some cases, it was so disturbing that the CIA conducted internal reviews of its own actions.

[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on Torture and the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques]

Before the Church Committee investigated assassination plots, spying on American citizens, drug testing at home and coup attempts abroad, former CIA directors James Schlesinger and William Colby had pulled together a study known as the Family Jewels. This attempted to lay out those areas where the agency had gone beyond its mandate and ventured into areas that were very likely illegal but, in any case, did not live up to the ethical and moral standards of the United States.

Nearly 40 years later, the CIA looked at its enhanced interrogation techniques (aka torture) and secret prisons in the still-classified Panetta Review. Just as with the Family Jewels, this study illustrates how the CIA under general orders from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney “led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas,” as Truman wrote presciently so many years ago.

After the Church Committee investigation in 1975, our intelligence agencies were prohibited from assassinating foreign leaders and illegally spying on Americans, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was created to further ensure prevention of unreasonable searches and seizures. In addition, permanent congressional oversight committees were established to do just what Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s, D-Calif., committee did last year to investigate the CIA on torture.

[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on Barack Obama]

The problem now is that Congress and President Barack Obama are reluctant to put in force serious remedies that will prevent systematic torture from ever happening again. There is an effort by Feinstein to introduce legislation, but without strong backing by Obama and with a Republican-controlled Congress, there is little likelihood for its passage. It is also doubtful that we will be holding the perpetrators accountable or releasing the Panetta report anytime soon.

We need a new Church Committee or serious presidential commission with staff and subpoena power to examine the roles and responsibilities of the various intelligence agencies and to propose reforms and updated legal remedies. The new world in which we live, one that involves growing terror threats, a sophisticated and unprecedented ability to monitor communications and collect data and the commitment of vast resources to intelligence, demands far greater oversight.

Truman had it right so many years ago when he called for an examination of the CIA’s role. Our modern world makes this even more necessary for all our intelligence agencies. The bottom line is if Congress and Obama continue with politics as usual, Cheney may have the last word when it comes to torture and other actions: “I’d do it again in a minute.”

The Republicans are railing against President Barack Obama for not having a high level U.S. official marching in solidarity with the French this past weekend. OK, that was a mistake on Obama’s part, but this from the Republican crowd that was so anti-France it wanted to change the name of “French fries” in the House of Representatives cafeteria to “Freedom fries”? This from the crowd who will vote tomorrow to approve a Homeland Security Bill totaling $39.7 billion only if it guts our immigration system and refuses to fund the Dream Act, deporting hundreds of thousands of children as well as parents? This from the Republicans who refused to act for a year and a half on a bipartisan Senate bill on immigration that passed with over two-thirds of the vote?

[SEE: 2014: The Year in Cartoons]

Does Speaker John Boehner really want to put in jeopardy the funding for Homeland Security, especially after the attacks in France and the raised threat level? I doubt it. But the speaker needs to throw his sizable right-wing caucus a bone and let them vote to defund Obama’s immigration plans. He then prays that the Senate saves him, doesn’t pass this absurd piece of legislation, so then they can end up passing a clean bill funding Homeland Security before the end of February when funding runs out. Or if the president is forced to veto the bill, he figures that somehow some fig leaf can be created to allow him to basically bring up a clean funding bill.

This strategy, negotiated with the extremist members of the House of Representatives, was lunacy in December; it is akin to a Kamikaze mission for Republicans now.

In fact, it is a double whammy. It convinces voters that Republicans are the anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant party, and that they are more than willing to sacrifice our nation’s security to prove how intolerant they are as a party.

[SEE: Political Cartoons on the Republican Party]

My guess is that the reason Boehner wants a vote on Wednesday is to get it out of the way, to give the extremists their say and then avoid a last minute crisis over Homeland Security funding. One day of a “shutdown” of those critical agencies is one day too many.

It will be interesting to see how many of these strategic blunders the Republicans make over the course of the next two years. The House, of course, can pass whatever it wants, but if the GOP puts forth bills as unrealistic and unhelpful as this effort, it will certainly pay the price at the ballot box. It will be their own job security that will be put in peril.

USNEWS & WORLD REPORT — THOMAS JEFFERSON ST. BLOG

“Selma” was an excellent movie. Captivating. Dramatic. Well acted. It is an important window on one of the most telling episodes in American history and the still ongoing struggle for civil rights.

The film paid a lot of attention to detail, not only to the unfolding of the Selma to Montgomery march and the events leading up to it, but to the struggles and personalities within the movement. It also paid attention to the little details. For instance, Sunday’s New York Times had a photo from the movie of the actors playing Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in their kitchen. The phone she was talking on was vintage 1960s, as were the metal kitchen table and chairs, the clock on the wall, the small portable TV, the linoleum floor tiles, and the sweater and dress the actors wore. Throughout the movie we saw life as it was during that era, and great efforts were clearly made to get the key elements of the story right.

That is why it is so unfortunate, as so many have pointed out (including King-aide and later Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young), that the protrayal of President Lyndon Johnson was so far off base. Johnson was portrayed by the film’s director, Ava DuVernay, and the writers in a highly negative light, opposing King and what he was trying to achieve.

In fact, LBJ was supportive of focusing attention on voting rights and urged King in a recorded telephone conversation to “find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana or South Carolina … and get it on radio, get it on television, get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it everyplace you can. And if we do that we will break through. It will be the greatest breakthrough of anything, not even excepting this ’64 (Civil Rights) Act, I think the greatest achievement of my administration.”

This is not about artistic license. It is not about historical interpretation. It is not just an unimportant “detail” in such a movie. It is definitely not just about, as a Washington Post reporter called it, “fact-checking.” It is integral to the story, a key element of the narrative, and involves the actions and attitude of a key player: the president of the United States.

This movie does not claim to be “based on a true story.” It claims to be history. This movie does not simply combine events or create dialogue, which viewers understand, but misrepresents one aspect of the history. As we still struggle with racial politics in America, as we still try to make sense of senseless killings, as we find such a wide divergence in how whites and blacks perceive civil rights, this movie has created a bit of a firestorm, and at the very least a sense of mistrust.

We will never know all that LBJ was thinking nor have a true sense of the complexity of the relationship between King and Johnson, but we do know that LBJ did not order then FBI head J. Edgar Hoover to undermine King. We do know that LBJ led the politically risky fight in 1957 as majority leader of the Senate for a civil rights bill and again as president for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We know that Johnson was integral to the strategy to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

There were plenty of villains in the 1960s who committed horrible acts or vehemently fought equal rights or stood by and did nothing in the face of hatred and discrimination. Johnson was not one of those people. Was he perfect? No. Did he exhibit his southern heritage? By all accounts, yes. Was he balancing “101 problems” as the movie suggests? Yes. But LBJ was there in the trenches.

And, fundamentally, could the United States have passed civil rights legislation in the 1960s without the leadership, activism and non-violent movement led by King? Nope. Did King push the people, the Congress and the president into action? Absolutely. Was his role front and center? No question.

At the end of the day, progress happens when people come together. And this was what happened in 1964 and 1965.

Maybe the lesson we need to learn from “Selma” and from the debate and discussion about the movie is that our country should confront the wide gulf that still exists between black and white. Just as South Africa created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at the urging of Nelson Mandela, maybe America could use a comprehensive look at race and attitudes about equal opportunity, as well as issues of poverty, policing, education and incarceration.

President Barack Obama could act to create such a commission with a mandate to look at where we have come since 1965 and where we need to go to fulfill the dream that Martin Luther King and LBJ fought so hard for so many years ago.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture makes for painful reading for those of us who thought that our intelligence agencies had been brought under control decades ago. We should have been so hopeful!

It has been nearly 40 years since I was a young staff member on the Senate Select Committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, that was charged with investigating our intelligence agencies. We uncovered secret spying on Americans, we investigated coups against foreign governments, we looked into assassination plots against foreign leaders, and we blew the whistle on the FBI’s bugs of Martin Luther King and its efforts to get him to commit suicide. The scary and sickening period in our history needed to be examined so that it would never be repeated.

[VIEWS YOU CAN USE: The CIA Torture Report Goes Public]

Well, sadly, as Yogi Berra put it, here we are, deja vu all over again.

There are a number of reasons I am not surprised by what was revealed in the report. As my old boss Church pointed out so many years ago, the CIA often acts as a “rogue elephant.” Presidents often give consent to broad policy guidelines, then stay out of the details. This provides some sense of “plausible deniability” for the chief executive. It is clear that President George W. Bush (or Secretary of State Colin Powell or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) did not get the details of what was occurring. When Bush found out about prisoners hanging from the ceiling in diapers, he was clearly not pleased, according to the report.

Another reason I am not surprised goes back 40 years to when I went to the White House with members of the Church Committee and other staff to meet with then-President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on the issue of assassinations. (I think I probably went because I was driving the car!) Several of us were naturally kept in the waiting room, but there was one individual who I can’t forget going in and out: future Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney was chief of staff to Ford from 1975 to 1977 and held the Church Committee and the role of Congress in investigating the intelligence agencies in total contempt. From those early days and meetings, it was clear to many of us that Cheney would not condone “interference” and held the view that we were out to destroy the CIA, not to save it. His views only hardened and his contempt for Congress only deepened in his years as vice president.

[READ: In 2016, GOP Must Move Past Bush and Obama’s National Security Failures]

And one more thing hasn’t changed: We were lied to when we first investigated the intelligence agencies back in the 1970s, and once again the Cheneys and the Michael Haydens lied before Congress and to the American people.

This period of black sites and torture and out-of-control operatives has not enhanced our nation’s security, it has undermined it, much as the activities of our intelligence agencies did over four decades ago. We investigated them then, and the light of day has been shown on them now.

Courageous senators such as Colorado Democrat Mark Udall and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein would not give up or give in. Nor would the hardworking staff of the current Senate Intelligence Committee when confronted with CIA intimidation. Without strong congressional oversight, the “rogue elephants” will return again and again. The question, of course, is when will we ever learn?

We paid two armchair psychologists $81 million to devise torture techniques that, if they read any studies over the past 100 years, they would know don’t work. Not only is torture immoral, but it is ineffective. This was the gang that couldn’t shoot straight – it had no background in terrorism, no knowledge of al-Qaida, and was clearly making it up as it went along. This is all a bad made-for-TV movie.

[READ: FBI and NSA Tactics Threaten to Make Us Less Safe]

The problem, of course, is it undermines who we are as Americans, or who we think we are. As Church, put it, “beware of adopting the methods of your enemies, you will become more like them.”

If we as Americans truly believe that it is imperative for us to hold up the moral high ground, our actions must befit our words. To deny torture and simply use phrases like “enhanced interrogation techniques” is not only duplicitous but undermines that moral authority.

Now, as 40 years ago, it is time to correct our mistakes and acknowledge our own wrongdoing. That makes America stronger, not weaker.

There are three reasons that the Republicans pursue gridlock: ideological purity, hatred of President Barack Obama and because it helps them win elections. The first two they may be able to get over, but not the third.

Republicans discovered in 2010 that by opposing anything and everything of any consequence that Obama proposed, gridlock would ensue and the public’s anger and cynicism toward Washington would grow. Rallying around the tea party’s themes and the deep economic frustrations from the near depression, they swept out incumbent Democrats by the score.

Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell made it known that his number one goal was the defeat of Obama in 2012. That did not work out so well, but the Republicans quickly pivoted to 2014, where there was clearly fertile ground to elect more of their party. Part and parcel of this strategy was to not pass any meaningful legislation on immigration reform, job creation, education, tax reform or to improve America’s infrastructure and, finally, doing their very best to rally the base against anything having to do with government. The growing anger towards Washington and the party in control of the presidency – the Democrats – provided another windfall.

The difference now is that the anger which pollsters determined in 2010 created a majority for “standing up for principle” has now shifted to “it’s time to compromise, to get things done.” In short, voters want government to work and are sick and tired of the obstruction and gridlock.

Despite their efforts to shift blame, the Republicans now are boxed in, because it is pretty clear that they are the problem, not the party proposing solutions. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, respected political analysts, have laid this out very clearly in their writings, including the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” So even if Republicans decide that the “shut the government” caucus led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz should be hidden away in the basement of the Capitol, they are still confronted with many political players who believe they were elected by being obstructionists.

The goal of the Democrats, then, should be to revise and reinvigorate the plans to legislate and solve America’s problems and convince the voters that the Congress, controlled by Republicans, is once again blocking progress. When the Republican leadership is convinced that gridlock is now a losing game politically, they may actually change their behavior. Their rigid ideology and their hatred for Obama will give way to a new political reality – the public is on to them and, much like President Harry Truman in 1948, the “do-nothing Congress” label will be laid at their feet.

The Republicans have to confront these past six years and change their behavior. They will only do so only if it becomes crystal clear that the public understands and is sick and tired of their embracing of Washington gridlock.

Despite the conclusion tonight of this year’s expensive and long campaign, to many Americans this is the “Seinfeld” election – the campaign about nothing. There has been no overriding theme or message, no Contract with America from the Republicans and no battle plan for the middle class from Democrats.

The Republicans have had very little to say except “Obama bad,” as some have noted.

The Democrats, despite a steadily improving economy, growth rates hitting 3.5 percent and unemployment falling to 5.9 percent, aren’t making the argument that they are the party to help middle class families raise their wages, send their kids to college and ensure a stable financial future.

In a sense, this is not just a campaign about nothing, it is also a campaign about everything – lurching from one so-called crisis to another: from endless investigations about Benghazi or the IRS or the Secret Service to the Ukraine to Syria to the Islamic State group to Ebola.

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that Americans are seriously concerned about two things, jobs and the economy and breaking the partisan gridlock in Washington to get things done – both lead with 23 percent as the top problem.

It is almost as if Washington and the people are living on distant planets.

If this year’s $4 billion election should tell the Congress – especially the Republicans – one thing, it is enough with useless investigations, enough with wasting time on repealing Obamacare, enough with the politics of “no.” The public wants action, they want both parties to work together, to cross the aisle and to solve their problems.

In 2010, the tea party anger about the economy created a desire for intransigence for many: Stand your ground, don’t compromise. In 2014, the public is crying out for compromise and an end to the partisan gridlock in Washington.

That is why it is so sad that this campaign has been the Seinfeld election. Just when voters want answers, or at least proposals, they get negative attacks and all anti-Obama, all the time.