Global Governance Hits Sacramento (Advancing a Free Society, Hoover Institution) February 22, 2012
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.comments closed
If you would like to see how the global governance movement could impact theU.S., look no further thanCalifornia’s capital city,Sacramento. Mayor Kevin Johnson recently received a warning letter aboutSacramento’s drinking water and sanitation—not from a constituent or city councilmember, not even from a legislator across town—from the Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Yes, there is such a person and she believes she has some jurisdiction over you! Ms. Catarina de Albuquerque visitedSacramento“under [her] mandate,” where she met with a community of homeless people. She saw a “lack of access to adequate water and sanitation and adequate housing.” She also found that parks, with their public restrooms, were closed at night, and thatSacramento“criminalizes public urination and/or defecation.” All of this causes her to conclude that international human rights may be violated.
This is one of those classic cases where theU.S.signed, but did not ratify, an international treaty. But one little-known implication of that, under international law, is that the signer agrees not to do anything to defeat the object and purpose of the treaty pending a ratification decision. This is why President Bush “unsigned” the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, which President Clinton had signed but the Senate had not ratified. I think there’s plenty of room to argue here that Sacramento’s sanitation and water problems, while serious, are not defeating the treaty, but then the U.N. Human Rights Commission doesn’t usually worry a lot about possible limits on its jurisdiction.
Apparently it’s time to rewrite those American Government textbooks about federalism. Yes, some issues are still local, some state and some federal. But if you sign one of those treaties the global governance people are forever advancing, local issues can become global in scope. In the end, it seems clearly preferable to take your beating for not signing apparently inconsequential, feel-good treaties, rather than have the U.N. show up to inspect your toilets.
Please click here for a link to Advancing a Free Society: http://www.advancingafreesociety.org/
Vote of Confidence (Hoover Digest, 2011 No. 4) October 12, 2011
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.Tags: Presidential Elections
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Another presidential season, another attempted end run around the Electoral College. Let’s be careful. Even now, it has its uses.
While candidates are busy raising money and positioning themselves for the first primaries, one early maneuver in the 2012 presidential campaign is taking place in state legislatures: consideration of the National Popular Vote Bill. California recently became the eighth state to enact this legislation, which would form an interstate compact requiring member states to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote, effectively eliminating the Electoral College without the transparency and burden of amending the U.S. Constitution.
But those who are frustrated by the Electoral College—especially Democrats who feel Al Gore unfairly lost the presidency in 2000—overlook the real benefits it provides, as well as its importance to our federalist system. State legislatures should count the cost very carefully before overthrowing the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote.
For starters, a single national popular vote would alter the way presidential campaigns are conducted. Under the Constitution, there are really fifty-one separate state elections (plus the District of Columbia), and candidates compete aggressively in any state where they might win electoral votes. In the last week or two of a presidential campaign, candidates are likely to cross the country, seeking to win electoral votes in ten to fifteen key battleground states. This keeps the campaign alive in virtually every geographic region and in contested states both large and small. Candidates are forced to address regional issues and local voters as they seek to win the necessary electoral margin.
By contrast, a campaign that is based solely on the national popular vote would be conducted very differently. Candidates would concentrate their efforts in large metropolitan areas, where voters are highly concentrated, and the premium on impersonal media campaigning, whether through older media such as television or new media such as Facebook and Twitter, would greatly increase. Can one really argue that spending more money to capture digital media followers, and conducting more televised events in New York or Los Angeles, creates a better campaign for voters?
The problem of recounts, alone, should give a state legislator pause about voting for the National Popular Vote Bill. Votes must be counted and reported at some stage, and doing so at the state level means the extent of any recount is thereby limited. In 2000, for example, the Florida recount was difficult and lengthy, but nevertheless contained to one state. Imagine the likelihood, then, of a nationwide recount if state electoral votes were essentially irrelevant, as they would be under the National Popular Vote legislation. A national recount would certainly take many months to complete, creating uncertainty about identifying and seating a new president on a timely basis. Given the litigious nature of recent elections, such a prospect is hardly remote.
Ironically, one of the arguments in favor of the National Popular Vote Bill is that it would make every vote count and, in that sense, be fairer than the present system. But in the end, the new approach essentially trades one kind of fairness for another. Imagine, for example, a Virginia voter who is a Democrat and her state is carried by the candidate of her party. But if the Republican candidate wins the national popular vote, the elector in her state will actually cast “her” vote in favor of the Republican. What is fair, or even representative, about that? Such are the vagaries of tinkering with the two-hundred-year-old electoral system.
In a larger sense, this end run around the Electoral College would also kick down an important pillar of our system of federalism. The U.S. Constitution does not establish a pure democracy, but rather a federal republic. The genius of a republic is that while not every element is purely democratic, several checks and balances, as well as intentional balances of power, work together to make certain that the “cool deliberate sense of the community” is carried out, as it says in Federalist No. 63. Roles are assigned to both the people and the states. For example, the U.S. House of Representatives is based upon population and is referred to as “the people’s House,” but the U.S. Senate is based upon state representation. Similarly, in electing a president, there is a role for the people (the popular vote) and a role for states (the electoral vote). These checks and balances of constitutional federalism should not be easily bargained away by means of an interstate compact.
Indeed, those who feel the present system of voting is unfair have two constitutionally proper remedies, both of which are superior to the end run of the National Popular Vote Bill. First, they can amend the Constitution and eliminate the electoral system in a straightforward and transparent way. Of course, this would require an affirmative vote of two-thirds of each house of Congress and approval by three-fourths of the state legislatures, an intentionally difficult bar to reach.
A second, more readily available alternative is to encourage states to move away from their winner-takes-all method of allocating electoral votes. Under the Constitution, states are free to decide how to allocate their electoral votes, according to their popular vote. All but two states allow the winner of their popular vote to receive all the state’s electoral votes; the remaining two, Maine and Nebraska, allocate electoral votes according to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district. This would address a primary concern of some who seek reform by making presidential elections more competitive in states where one party dominates electoral politics. For example, in California, a state rich in electoral votes but dominated by one party, allocating electoral votes by congressional district would create competition in many regions of the state and attract candidates to come more frequently and campaign. If electoral reform is needed, this would be preferable from almost any point of view.
The National Popular Vote Bill is gaining some bipartisan momentum by concentrating on the superficial fairness of a popular vote and by ignoring the practical advantages of the Electoral College and the deep and longstanding values of the federalist system. When states having enough electoral votes to win an election (270) have signed, the compact goes into effect. The bill raises sufficient constitutional questions that it will doubtless be challenged if and when it becomes effective. In the meantime, one can only hope that enough state governors and legislators will see through the superficial appeal of the bill and, as Benjamin Franklin urged, keep the republic.
To link to the article in the Hoover Digest, 2011 No. 4 please click here: http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/95536
Governor could improve voters’ trust in government w/Lenny Mendonca (San Francisco Chronicle) September 28, 2011
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Gov. Jerry Brown says he has 600 bills on his desk, but many he will not sign because “there’s not 600 problems that we need those solutions for.” We suggest he locate and sign two bills, SB14 and SB15, that help solve two of his biggest problems: the annual budget mess and the lack of public trust in Sacramento’s leadership, which voters say are closely linked.
Performance-based budgeting, the focus of SB14, has been recommended in California by independent commissions for years. It requires the state to identify program objectives when it spends money, as well as how much meeting those objectives should cost, and requires analysis of whether these goals are met. This approach is not fancy or complicated – in fact, it’s Budgeting 101 in the private sector, and 25 states already use it in some form.
SB15 focuses on another big problem by requiring multiyear planning for budget revenues and expenses. The state needs tools to get a handle on its damaging boom-or-bust tax and spending cycles, and this is a good start. Again, you’d be hard-pressed to find major entities, public or private, that don’t do this, and it is high time it be required in California.
In one sense, these bills represent basic blocking and tackling, fiscal reforms that the state sorely needs. But at a broader level, signing them sends a message to frustrated Californians that Sacramento will get its fiscal house in order and begin to rebuild trust with the people. We co-chaired California’s first-ever statewide deliberative poll this summer, in which a scientifically selected, random sample of 412 Californians was given an in-depth opportunity to deliberate on the state’s problems and potential solutions. It wasn’t a pretty picture on the problem side:
– More than 2 out of 3 California voters question whether the Legislature can “get important things done.”
– Nine out of 10 voters don’t trust the Legislature to make difficult budgeting decisions without showing exactly how major new programs or tax cuts will be paid for.
– Voters believe 39 cents of every new tax $1 will be wasted.
Still, these weekend deliberators said, they have faith that things can be changed and improved, calling for precisely the kind of measures now on the governor’s desk, and then some:
– 83 percent said each annual budget should be accompanied by a long-term plan for revenue and expenses (as called for in SB15).
– 88 percent would require legislators to say how they will pay for new programs or tax cuts of $25 million or more.
– 84 percent would limit one-time revenue “spikes” to one-time expenditures, such as paying down debt or filling the state rainy-day fund.
In effect, Californians were saying to their Legislature: We want to trust but verify good fiscal practices. And, by the way, with greater transparency and controls of these kinds, the people said they were optimistic that many of the state’s problems could begin to be solved.
Perhaps California has embarked on a season of reform – beginning with redistricting and open primaries on the political side, and now with an opportunity to enact performance-based budgeting and long-term financial forecasting on the fiscal side. These small steps could be the tugboats that move our ship of state in a new direction, and begin restoring people’s trust and confidence in California governance.
David Davenport, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Lenny Mendonca, a director of McKinsey and Company, co-chaired the bipartisan California Deliberative Poll project (www.nextca.org).
This article appeared on page A – 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Gov. Jerry Brown has bills to sign but does he have the right bills? Hector Amezcua / AP
Palestinians eye a can of courtroom worms (The Washington Times) September 22, 2011
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.Tags: International Law
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One interesting question raised by the Palestinian statehood initiative at the 
United Nations is how this will affect the role of the International Crimical Court (ICC) in skirmishes between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza and in other conflict zones. Some assert that triggering ICC prosecutions of Israeli soldiers and government officials for war crimes is a primary motive behind Palestine’s push for statehood. But as is often the case in the Middle East, things are more complicated than they appear.
The Palestinian Authority has been pounding on the ICC prosecutors door since January 2009, trying in vain to trigger an investigation into Israel’s alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during “Operation Cast Lead” in December 2008. The prosecutor of the ICC initially responded that, because Israel is not a party to the court and the Palestinian Authority is not a state, he had no jurisdiction to investigate. But a few weeks later, he reconsidered, and said he would look more carefully at whether the PA might have enough earmarks of a state to bring an ICC claim.
Following an almost bizarre process, the prosecutor has now been thinking about this question for more than 2 1/2 years. He invited briefs and memoranda on the question, many of which he posted online; he held a forum in which the matter was debated (what prosecutor hosts in-house salons to decide whether to bring a case?); and still no decision. What does that tell us? It may tell us this presents complex policy questions but as a legal matter, his first impression that there is no jurisdiction seems obviously right. More likely it tells us this is a political can of worms that he would like to kick down the road until his term ends next year.
Criminal courts are not proper venues to sort out thorny political, diplomatic, military and strategic questions that characterize the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and other conflict zones. Criminal judges simply do not have the background and expertise to handle such questions, and empowering an independent prosecutor to run around the world turning conflicts into criminal charges does not serve anyone.
Meanwhile, back at the U.N., it appears the United States is prepared to veto actual statehood for the Palestinians at the Security Council, so that “observer statehood” from the General Assembly is the most likely outcome. Can an “observer state” of the U.N. accede to the Treaty of Rome, which created the ICC, and therefore bring a matter before the prosecutor for investigation? And who decides that? These questions are more difficult than they may seem.
It appears that U.N. officials are already running for cover when such questions are asked. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has declined to state his position on the matter, though there are unconfirmed reports that he has sought a legal opinion that he would not need to make that decision. Another U.N. official has reportedly said that the secretary-general should accept a request from an “observer state” to join a treaty on file with the U.N., assuming the Palestinians will surely make one. If it takes a prosecutor two or three years to decide whether a nonstate might have jurisdiction to bring a complaint to the ICC, imagine how long this U.N. dance might go on.
Further, the Treaty of Rome is clear that the court does not have retroactive jurisdiction, so a new state party could not bring a matter from the past (Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09) before the court. So even joining the ICC would not enable the Palestinians to bring a matter to the court immediately. And then there are still very difficult territorial questions that would should be resolved – for example, who actually “controls” Gaza? Further complicating matters, the U.N. Security Council has the power both to initiate and to halt an ICC case. Would the United States try to protect Israel from ICC prosecution through the Security Council? Could it get a majority of council votes to accomplish that? As a new party to the court, would the Palestinians investigate their own alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity?
All this underscores the importance of settling statehood through a diplomatic process, not through appeals to U.N. bureaucrats and criminal courts, where the end result is unanswered questions and unintended consequences.
To view the article please click: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/22/palestinians-eye-a-can-of-courtroom-worms/
Republicans’ Primary Choice: The Constitution or the Money (Washington Times) May 17, 2011
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.Tags: Education Policy
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Perhaps no issue better reveals one of the growing divisions in the Republican Party than education policy. It wasn’t that long ago – 1996, in fact – that the party platform called for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education in favor of a smaller federal government and greater power for states. But in the past decade, beginning with President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, Republicans have seemed to be challenging Democrats to see who can win the misguided race to federalize education…
Full article available at http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/16/republicans-primary-choice-the-constitution-or-the/
How to Lose the Republic w/Gordon Lloyd (San Francisco Chronicle) April 12, 2011
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.Tags: Public Policy
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When Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the newly signed Constitution established, he responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The National Popular Vote bill, recently introduced in the California Legislature, is a poster child for how to lose the republic.
The genius of a republic is that it combines checks and balances along with structures of stability to temper pure democracy. Specific elements – such as the composition of the U.S. Senate or the functioning of the Electoral College or assigning roles to states as well as to the federal government – may seem obstructionist or even anti-democratic on their own, but they function together to assure that the deliberate sense of the people is carried out in a stable, orderly way. But with 2012 presidential politics already in the air, those who fear the Electoral College seek to circumvent it through a bill that would require state electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote.
This is a clever attempt to eliminate the role of electors – required by Article II of the Constitution – and even the role of states in national elections without the difficult and more deliberative (and transparent) process of amending the Constitution.
Because we are a nation of states as well as people, the Constitution provides a role for both in the election of a president, a national popular vote and a state electoral vote. Before we effectively do away with the electoral vote system, we should consider several practical benefits it provides even today:
– It alters the way candidates campaign, requiring them to seek electoral votes all over the country, rather than concentrate on a few large population centers.
– It limits the uncertainty of any recount to one or two states, rather than the national recount we would otherwise see.
– It also makes more difficult the proliferation of candidates many countries experience in a national popular vote.
So why have a Republican and a Democrat joined to introduce the national popular vote bill in California? Their primary concern seems to be that California get more attention in presidential campaigns – presumably more candidate visits and television commercials (the latter a mixed blessing in hotly contested states, we hear). Then, in a year when the election may be close, there are fears of a repeat of 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote, but George W. Bush won the presidency. This has happened, by the way, only four times in our history, leaving a “success rate” of over 90 percent.
Is that a sufficient case to allow an end-run around the Constitution and the erosion of the republic? We think not.
If there is to be electoral reform, then let states consider assigning electoral votes by congressional districts, rather than winner-take-all, as Nebraska and Maine now do. Or let them challenge the Constitutional system directly through the amendment process. In the meantime, let’s follow Benjamin Franklin’s admonition and keep the republic.
David Davenport is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Gordon Lloyd is a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University.
To view the article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/12/EDNJ1IUBJ2.DTL
Federal-state tug of war on Constitution Day (San Francisco Chronicle) September 17, 2010
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.Tags: Constitution
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Today marks the 223rd birthday of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, recognized as the oldest national constitution still in operation. If I were its physician, an annual checkup would conclude that, while still alive and kicking, the health of the Constitution faces several clear vulnerabilities.
Most notably, Washington has grown federal powers well beyond those listed or even contemplated in Article I of the Constitution, while state powers preserved by the 10th Amendment are in steady decline. In medical terms, the federal government is obese, while the states are starving. Many prominent court cases today – raising questions about health care, immigration and same-sex marriage – are fundamentally asking federal judges to referee a historic federal-state tug of war.
Take health care reform, for example, which was in federal court again this week. Health and welfare have long been considered the purview of states, but the health care reform legislation moved the federal government into the driver’s seat. Constitutional challenges question Washington’s power to do this on several grounds: Can the federal government create more unfunded mandates for states? Where does the federal government get the power to require states to change their Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California) laws? And most interesting, how can the federal government mandate the individual purchase of health insurance, either as a tax (which looks more like a penalty) or as interstate commerce (when it’s really not commerce)?
The Arizona immigration law is also working its way toward the Supreme Court, raising a different federal-state question. Frustrated that the federal government wasn’t carrying out its duties to police the borders, Arizona enacted a law to step up state enforcement. The U.S. Department of Justice challenged the law primarily as a violation of federal supremacy over immigration. Yet both federal and state immigration laws recognize that complementary federal-state action is needed. Similar questions arise when states enact clean-air standards that are more stringent than federal law.
Cases on same-sex marriage are also moving from federal courts in Massachusetts and California toward higher courts. In Boston, a federal judge concluded that marriage is a question of state law, finding the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. Is there room for 50 different definitions of marriage? And would states have to give “full faith and credit” to a marriage performed under a different state law? Similar questions arise in elections this fall about medical marijuana: If California wants to allow it and other states do not, should the federal government mandate uniformity and, if so, by what Constitutional power?
One reason so many of these federal-state questions are in court just now is that we have a president and Congress from the same political party, who took office with some electoral mandate to address a crisis. So the federal agenda grows: health care, education reform, stimulus bills and the like. But ultimately our Constitution asks: By what right does the federal government take the lead on these matters? President Franklin Roosevelt faced a similar challenge when the Supreme Court blocked much of his early New Deal legislation as an unconstitutional expansion of federal power, leading him to propose his controversial and unsuccessful court-packing plan.
Ultimately the courts and the Constitution are the check against federal power grabs by Congress and the president. If states are no longer really in charge of education, health and welfare, or social questions such as the family, why have states at all? I will venture a guess that in at least one of these cases, the federal courts will tell Congress and the president that we aren’t ready to turn everything over to Washington just yet.
David Davenport is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
This article appeared on page A – 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/16/EDG61FENQF.DTL#ixzz0znsNKHYE
Health Care: The Prognosis June 1, 2010
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.comments closed
David Davenport
The core issue will be the unprecedented requirement that individuals purchase health insurance or pay a fine. The government will argue that this mandate is allowed because it significantly affects interstate commerce. But if my healthy twenty-year-old child decides not to buy health insurance, there’s no commerce involved. The government may also claim that this requirement falls under its power to tax, but no matter how you label it, the payment by the insurance holdouts is really a penalty.
In addition, the states have a strong argument under the Tenth Amendment, which provides that all powers not given to the federal government be reserved to the states or the people. Nothing in the Constitution gives the federal government power over health care, which has traditionally been a state matter. Nor would Congress find constitutional support to create unfunded mandates or require states to rewrite their Medicare laws, as this law will do.
Ultimately, if the interstate-commerce clause allows the federal government to require people to enter into private health care contracts, what power does it not have? What is left for states? These are serious, if inconvenient, questions that the courts will need to answer.
David Davenport is counselor to the director and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He wrote this essay for the Hoover Digest.
To read the entire article: http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/34831
Kagan nomination shows process trumps experience (San Francisco Chronicle) May 16, 2010
Posted by daviddavenport in Newspaper Columns/Essays.Tags: Supreme Court
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Photo: Evan Vucci / AP
Washington, we’ve got a problem. Does anyone really think a young law school administrator, with little courtroom and no judicial experience, is the best possible candidate for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court? Unfortunately that’s what we get when selecting a stealth candidate who can survive the confirmation process trumps nominating a seasoned expert who will excel on the bench.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/15/IN1F1DDU84.DTL#ixzz0oOAj0xhq
Hard Questions for Holder (Washington Times) March 19, 2010
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It’s been a rough few months for Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and he should face more tough questioning when he reports for the Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Tuesday.
In the legal war on terror alone, he has been under fire for scheduling the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in civil court in New York rather than in a military tribunal; for Mirandizing the Christmas Day bomber suspect; for trying to relocate Guantanamo detainees where people don’t want them; for dragging his feet before finally revealing at least nine lawyers in his department who formerly represented terrorist detainees; and, most recently, for reporting that he failed to disclose in his confirmation hearings seven briefs in which he participated as a lawyer, including ones involving the war on terror.
Even with health care and the economy as the front-burner issues in Mr. Obama’s first year, no Cabinet officer’s department has generated more smoke than Mr. Holder’s. Senators – even the president himself – should be examining these several problems and asking whether Mr. Holder is really up to the job or, perhaps worse, whether these issues add up to an agenda to tip the legal scale sharply in favor of detainee rights and away from national security concerns.
Let’s start with the latest flaps because, taken together, they seem to raise questions of legal philosophy at the Department of Justice. In November, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, asked Mr. Holder to identify department lawyers who may have conflicts of interest for having represented detainees. In a surprisingly cool response, Mr. Holder said he’d consider it and then sat on it for three months. Finally, last month, he provided an incomplete answer, admitting there were at least nine department lawyers who had represented detainees, identifying just two of them.
Then the department acknowledged this week that Mr. Holder had failed to disclose some of his own work on several briefs, including one on behalf of enemy combatant Jose Padilla, during his confirmation hearings as attorney general, calling it an oversight. A case that went all the way to the Supreme Court would seem to be difficult to forget or overlook.
It does seem to be a fair concern why Mr. Holder, who works for a president promising the most transparent administration in history, would stonewall the Senate and even now fail to provide a complete response on who in his department represented detainees and their current responsibilities. Those who questioned his response, however, prompted quite a sideshow as several prominent lawyers came forward to defend the obligation of an attorney to represent unpopular causes. This neatly sidesteps the real question, which is not whether these lawyers acted properly before they came to Justice, but rather, why Mr. Holder chose to hire so many of them and what they are doing now. Believe me, had the Securities and Exchange Commission hired a suite of Fortune 100 general counsels to enforce securities laws or the Environmental Protection Agency a table full of lawyers from oil companies, such questions would be asked.
Other hard questions Mr. Holder should have to answer include why he feels a lawyer with no prosecutorial experience – who as a human rights advocate referred to military commissions as “kangaroo courts” and said freeing terrorists is a legal “assumption of risk” we must be prepared to take – is qualified to represent the department on detainee matters. Or, for that matter, what Mr. Holder’s hiring of these nine lawyers or his signing of Padilla’s brief might tell us about his own view of detainee rights. After all, because some of those briefs were not produced for his confirmation, that was a conversation the senators did not have with him when it counted.
There are two schools of thought about the legal war on terror. One essentially starts from the premise that terrorist suspects, enemy combatants and detainees should not be tried as “criminals” and are not entitled to the full panoply of constitutional rights afforded to U.S. citizens. Instead, they should be tried in military tribunals, with more limited rights. A very different view, held by many human rights advocates, is that terrorist suspects should be treated as one of our own citizens, even at the risk of returning enemy combatants to the field to attack again.
The U.S. Senate, and the American people, have every right to know who is setting policy for the legal war on terror and in which of these directions they are headed. Mr. Holder would do well to bring less foot-dragging and more forthright answers to these legitimate questions when he comes before the Judiciary Committee next week.
To view the article: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/19/hard-questions-for-holder/
