Executive Orders Under Cover of Fire

With all the media attention being paid to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress today, now is a perfect time for an American president to launch some pet policy that would not fare scrutiny well. Thus, White House spokesman Josh Earnest seized the opportunity Monday to announce that President Barack Obama is “very interested” in the idea of raising taxes through executive action.

Whether he was joshing or in earnest was hard to say, as always, but the White House spokesman was quick to add “Now I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there is some imminent announcement, there is not, at least that I know.” This was unsettling enough, even before he further added that “the president has asked his team to examine the array of executive authorities that are available to him to try to make progress on his goals.” All this came in response to a question about a proposal from self-proclaimed Socialist and Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders to raise up to $100 billion dollars by closing various corporate tax loopholes through executive action, which we expect the president would find very interesting, and as Earnest himself admitted, “The president has certainly not indicated any reticence in using his executive authority to try and advance an agenda that benefits middle class Americans,” so we take it as more or less a policy statement.

Nit-picky conservative types will note that the Constitution is rather explicit about the legislative branch having the sole authority to levy taxes, but it says the same sort of old-fashioned blather about immigration law and carbon regulations and any number of other things that no one seems to care much about these days, and lately all that Constitution stuff doesn’t seem to matter much. Some insufficiently-lobbied corporation or another will surely find it cost efficient to challenge any executive ordered tax increases in court, and the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress might yet find some means of resistance, but the past many decades of congressional delegation to the executive bureaucracy provide enough legal precedent to stretch the case out over many years, and it will likely take even longer than that for the Republican leadership to stiffen its spine. If corporate tax increases are so written by the all-powerful president, so it likely will be done.

How a hefty $100 billion corporate tax hike would “advance an agenda that benefits middle class Americans” will of course go unexplained. Many middle class Americans work for corporations, and are unlikely to benefit from new taxes that hinder their employers’ international competitiveness at a time when the American economy is already suffering from the world’s highest corporate tax rates, and every last one of us buys something or another from a corporation, so we’ll be paying the taxes that corporations will merely be charged with collecting. Some additional revenues will be raised, we suppose, and assurances will surely be offered that the money will be spent wisely, but the most likely argument we can surmise is that not only those darned corporations but all the people who work for them and anyone who occasionally buys something from them must be punished.

Somehow or another this should advance the agenda of the president’s party, which every leap year always seems to find a majority of Americans who will fall for this sort of thing. When the corporate employees get their pink slips, and the corporate customers notice increased prices, they’ll be all the more eager to punish those hated corporations. If that pesky Netanyahu is still grousing about such minor matters as Iran getting nuclear weapons, it will be all the easier.

— Bud Norman

Foul Language and Fouler Policies

The vulgar language an unnamed senior White House official used to describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is getting all the attention, but The Atlantic Monthly story headlined “The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations is Officially Here” is full of far more disturbing revelations. Even a crisis in America’s relationship with its most important Middle East ally might not be the worst of it.

Not that the vulgarity isn’t worth noting. The unnamed senior White House official used a barnyard epithet commonly understood to mean coward, which is a most peculiar slander against a former special forces soldier who fought with distinction in two wars and a series of daring missions and as Prime Minister has led his country through existential wars, and odder yet coming from an official speaking on behalf of a former community organizer who will never be mistaken for Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and has long made clear that he considers Netanyahu all too inclined to fight. Senior White House officials astute enough to remain unnamed are not likely to have let such a phrase slip out accidentally, so one can only assume that the insult was carefully chosen.

What renders the insult completely absurd, however, is that the official was accusing Netanyahu of cowardice for failing to launch a war against Iran that the United States government has exerted great effort to prevent. The unnamed senior White House official even boasts that Israel’s failure to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons program “was a combination of our pressure and (Netanyahu’s) own unwillingness to do anything dramatic.” So the administration will deliberately insult a key ally as a coward for not doing something they had pressured him not to do, a mindset far more worrisome than the juvenile language used to express it. Netanyahu is also faulted for failing to “reach an accommodation with the Palestinians and Sunni Arab states,” as if a Palestinian government that lobs rockets at Israeli civilians and proudly proclaims its desire to destroy the Jewish state has any interest in making peace, and as if the Sunni Arab states aren’t currently more worried about the nuclear program in Shiite and Persian Iran that the United States has restrained Israel from destroying, so there’s no mistaking that America is pursuing a Middle Eastern policy based on false assumptions.

The historically crucial relationship between Israel and the United States can be repaired by a new administration in this country, and Netanyahu has proved himself brave enough to continue the defense of his country no matter what unnamed senior White House officials might think of it, but the article hints at possibilities that will be harder for future presidents to deal with. Written by a noted sycophant for the White House and clearly intended to convey its sneering contempt for a key ally, the article credits the administration’s cunning use of an Israeli for “what turned out to be an effective sanctions regime,” but it fails to mention that the sanctions have been weakened and the nuclear program continues and doesn’t seem to notice that unnamed senior White House official seems mostly relieved that it’s “Now too late” for a military strike that would end it. That pressure that the official boasts about was achieved largely with promises that America will never allow Iran to gain a nuclear weapon, but at this point even a sycophantic article in The Atlantic Monthly leaves an unmistakeable impression that was just another promise never intended to be kept. No one named or unnamed in the administration speaks as harshly of Iran’s brutal theocratic rulers as they do about the leader of the one humane and democratic nation in the region, the White House has kept its “open hand” policy intact despite the worries it causes those Sunni Arab nations that Israel is expected to accommodate, further overtures to the Iranians have been made in the futile hope they will help in our desultory efforts to fight the Islamic State terror gang that continues to gain territory in Iraq, and an Iranian bomb now seems a fait accompli.

Senior White House officials can be expected to deliver on-the-record speeches about containment and moral equivalence and deterrence and other reasons not to be worried about a nuclear bomb in the hands of a government that routinely shouts “Death to America,” but we will not be reassured. Cold War analogies are always suspect coming from a party that advised surrender in that conflict starting with the McGovern campaign and continues to decrease America’s nuclear defenses, and the mutually assured destruction that worked with an officially atheist communist government might not work out as well with an apocalyptic suicide cult hoping to bring about the arrival of the twelfth mahdi and the prophesied end times. Those Sunni Arab states that the administration wants the Israelis to appease will probably seek their accommodations with Pakistan-provided nuclear weapons of their own when their mortal enemy acquires one, especially when it has been made so clear that America’s protection cannot be counted on, and a nuclear arms race in a region so riven with ancient hatreds and fanaticism is unlikely to end well. At that point, even the most vulgar language will be required to describe the outcome.

— Bud Norman