In which I have emailed my congressional representatives and asked them pointblank questions, their answers to which I publish.
Today’s first easy question:
The presumptive president-elect has a contract with NBC to continue working on his reality show “Celebrity Apprentice” and intends to keep that contract.
Do you approve of this?
Jebus.
Of course, Celebrity Apprentice is actually a perfect way to describe the new administration.
Do you think that your elected officials pay attention to what you think?
For the prosecution, I submit into evidence Exhibit A:
Thank you for contacting me concerning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I appreciate hearing from you and am grateful for the opportunity to respond.
The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2012. I was deeply saddened and outraged to hear of the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Ambassador Stevens represented his country proudly and worked tirelessly so that Libyans may one day realize the freedoms and liberties that we enjoy and cherish as Americans. This tragedy should remind us all of the service of American civilians who work every day to advance the interests of the United States throughout the world.
I was disappointed by the conflicting reports coming from the Obama Administration in the days and weeks following the attacks. That is why I worked with Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) in writing three letters to then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton demanding that the State Department fully disclose all communications relevant to the security situation in Benghazi between the architects of the U.S. Mission to Libya and the State Department, including cables sent from Ambassador Stevens. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I am committed to ensuring that the administration is held accountable for its actions and response to the events surrounding the tragedy in Benghazi. I believe it is important to fully investigate attacks on U.S. diplomats or consular facilities and any security breaches that could potentially leave U.S. diplomatic missions exposed to further attacks. I am supportive of the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation and I am eager to see its final findings.
Secretary Clinton’s decision to delete all emails, including some possibly work related, from her personal server inhibits the Select Committee on Benghazi from administering a complete investigation into the events of the attack. Such disregard for transparency is alarming, particularly from individuals at the highest levels of government who should recognize the value of honest and open communication. It is the U.S. government’s responsibility to get to the bottom of this issue and to send a clear message to our Foreign Service officers and service members around the world that we will protect them in times of conflict. Further, I believe Secretary Clinton’s use of personal server to communicate about sensitive or classified operations raises very troubling security questions that are appropriately being investigated by federal law enforcement officials.
I believe it is important for Congress to provide these proper checks and balances to the Executive branch as envisioned by our founding fathers. Rest assured, I will keep your thoughts in mind as I work on these important matters.
Sincerely,
Johnny Isakson
United States Senator
(emphasis mine, for further discussion)
Jebus.
The easy question was, “Many of your colleagues have been quite vocal in their calls to investigate Hillary Clinton on the basis of “foreign donations” or “entanglements,” implying that the U.S. President should be above suspicion when it comes to money matters and foreign entities. Do you share their view, and do you intend to apply the same ethical standard to the presumptive president-elect’s business affairs?”
So not only did no one in Johnny Isakson’s office even read the email, his bot is sending out an incredibly outdated response to any email that has the magic shibboleth “Clinton” in it.
Because no matter what your opinion of the Great Satan Hillary Clinton might be, the bare facts on the ground are that both the Select Committee on Benghazi (the seventh or eighth of its name—I’ve lost count) and the FBI probe(s) into EmailGate have long since concluded their investigations. They both came up empty, not that this simple fact is important where the Clintons are concerned.
Johnny Isakson is smarter than this. Or at least he used to be.
Verdict: Johnny Isakson avoided the question with an incredibly stupid automated answer.
Yesterday I was at home when the pleasant-voiced Drew Robinson from Sen. David Perdue’s office called, and so I was able to chat with him directly about Perdue’s stance on waterboarding.
Drew wanted me to know that last summer Sen. John McCain (along with Dianne Feinstein, D-CA) submitted an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which expanded previous bans on torture. Whereas before the Department of Defense was forbidden to torture prisoners (under the Geneva Conventions as well as by U.S. law), that left a lot of wiggle room for other federal agencies. (Looking at you, CIA.) The McCain-Feinstein Amendment extended the ban to the entire federal government. Read more about it here.
Sen. Perdue was one of 78 senators who voted to pass the amendment. Although the bill passed both chambers, it was vetoed by President Obama for its budget shenanigans, i.e., moving routine defense spending which was above the limit set by the budget into the “let’s just charge this war on our credit card” funding stream. (Other details available at the link.)
So while the bill (and the McCain-Feinstein Amendment) didn’t pass, I’m going to give Sen. Perdue the benefit of the doubt on this one and record that he is, unlike the PPE, opposed to waterboarding.
Since this was my first time speaking with an actual congressional aide, I was polite and complimentary, but I also neglected to ask whether Sen. Perdue’s opposition would continue into the next administration. I’m still developing my craft here.
For those who are keeping track, that’s three responses from Sen. Perdue, and zero from Sen. Isakson.
In our continuing curiosity about how our elected officials feel about the presumptive president-elect [PPE], we have a new entry in our Easy Answers series.
Today I emailed my senators:
On 60 Minutes this past Sunday, in reference to the presumptive president-elect’s tweet that “millions of people voted illegally,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said, “It doesn’t matter to me.”
Does it matter to you that the presumptive president-elect tweeted an obvious lie?
(N.B.: it is an obvious lie. Any references to the Pew Study will be disregarded, since 1) the author of the study has repudiated any validation of this lie; and 2) the study was performed in 2012, not for this election.)
Also, Kellyann Conway made the astounding claim that because he is the presumptive president-elect, any such tweets were de facto “presidential behavior.”
Do you agree that the presumptive president-elect’s behavior is “presidential”?
One of the easy questions I recently asked of my senators was whether they agreed with the PPE’s tweet that people who burned the flag should be “stripped of their citizenship,” and whether they would vote for legislation that mandated that. (Spoiler alert: there is no mechanism for “stripping” a U.S. citizen of his citizenship.)
Sen. David Perdue (R) responded via email:
Thank you for contacting me to express concern over desecration of the American flag. I always appreciate the opportunity to hear from my fellow Georgians.
Like most Georgians, I find desecration of the American flag to be personally offensive, but unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled in the 1989 case of Texas v. Johnson that flag desecration is protected speech under the First Amendment. A year later, in the 1990 case of United States v. Eichman, the Supreme Court struck down the Flag Protection Act as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s protections on free speech.
In light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Johnson and Eichman, the only option available to Congress to prohibit desecration of the American flag is the passage of an anti-flag desecration amendment to the Constitution. This would require the support of a two-thirds majority of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the States. I will support the passage of such an amendment if it is proposed during my time in Senate.
Well. Number one, as I replied to the senator, my concern was not over the “desecration” of the American flag; my concern was protecting free speech. The idea that the U.S. flag is sacred is ridiculous. That would imply it is part of some kind of state-sponsored religion, one that worships the state in fact, and we all know that is not the case.
Number two, he (once again) did not answer my question. But I’m going to presume that yes, he does support passing legislation to “strip” a U.S. citizen of his citizenship if that citizen exercises his right to free speech.
note to Sen. Perdue and/or staff: I welcome any clarifications or corrections
When I got home from the theatre yesterday, there was a message on the phone. It was from a Drew Robinson, a pleasantly-voiced man, letting me know that Sen. David Perdue’s office had gotten my email about waterboarding (the PPE and several of his surrogates had suggested it was dandy).
This was just prior to my deciding to make this a blog series so I don’t have the exact wording of my email, but I essentially asked if my elected officials if they were down with the U.S. torturing prisoners in contravention of international law.
Mr. Robinson’s message, and I paraphrase, was to assure me they would be passing it along to the senator that I opposed the reintroduction of waterboarding in the Executive Branch.
You, being the astute reader that you are, will already have noticed that this is not really an answer to my question. I appreciate that they’re not going to keep my opinion from the senator, but my question was whether David Perdue agreed with the PPE that we should be waterboarding.
And so back we go:
I had a voice mail on my machine yesterday from Drew Robinson from your office, assuring me that they would pass along to you my opposition to the U.S. waterboarding in contravention of international law (“in the Executive Branch,” as Mr. Robinson phrased it). I appreciate the contact, but my question remains:
Do you agree with the presumptive president-elect’s position that the U.S. should waterboard its prisoners?
Astute readers will also have noticed that Mr. Robinson (presumably following office protocol) did not call the PPE by name.
Oh my. Our PPE certainly has some rather —what’s the word I’m looking for?— ignorant suppositions about U.S. citizenship and protest.
(There are those who are beginning to posit that whenever he does something dumb as shit like this, he’s just squid-inking to keep us from being even more outraged at his real problems. I am not discounting the proposition.)
And so off we go to our elected officials:
The presumptive president-elect has tweeted: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”
Do you agree with his statement? Would you vote for legislation which stripped an American of citizenship for participating in an unpopular form of protest?
This is another in our Easy Answer series, in which I ask my congressional representatives a pretty easy question to answer and await their response.
This time my concerns spring from the probable hypocritical stance taken by our Republicker friends in regards to the presumptive president-elect (PPE) and his business dealings with foreign sources. My trigger was this article from the WaPo. It’s worth a read.
For real, the howler monkeys have been shrieking and flinging poo about Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” in taking money from foreign governments, etc., to fund the Clinton Foundation, the non-profit her family runs to “convene businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for women and girls, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change.” Much was made of its diabolical nature during the campaign, despite its consistent high ratings from independent organizations like Charity Navigator.
Likewise, the Republickers cranked up that smoke machine and did their best to make the Foundation look as if it were some kind of money funnel to the Clintons themselves, which of course it isn’t. One claim I read was that you could tell it was corrupt because only 3% of its funding was dispersed in donations. This was of course a deliberate lie and not an easy one for the regular voter to see through: since the Foundation runs its own programs, little of its funding goes to other organizations. Let me repeat that for the hard-of-thinking: because the Clinton Foundation runs its own programs, it uses its funding to do that rather than pay someone else to do that.
So with such high dudgeon and general fantods on the part of the Republickers, you might very well think it was because of their high moral and ethical standards. You might think that now that the PPE is heading their way, they’d be clutching their pearls and staffing their investigative committees to root out all potential corruption from the PPE and his foreign business issues. You might think that, but then again you might be A Idiot.
Today’s email:
Many of your colleagues have been quite vocal in their calls to investigate Hillary Clinton on the basis of “foreign donations” or “entanglements,” implying that the U.S. President should be above suspicion when it comes to money matters and foreign entities.
Do you share their view, and do you intend to apply the same ethical standard to the presumptive president-elect’s business affairs?
As usual, I concluded with, “As a matter of course I will publish my question to you and your response both on my blog and on social media.”
Already, we have a second post in our new Easy Answers series.
The presumptive president-elect [PPE] has selected Betsy DeVos to be his nominee for Secretary of Education. The short version is that this woman has spent most of her adult life attempting to dismantle public education wherever she can: vouchers (of course); for-profit charter schools; no regulation for charter schools; characterization of “government schools” as “failing”; characterization of teachers as “the problem”; etc.
Here’s the first round of news articles on this piece of work:
And that’s just the legitimate news outlets. You should hear what education organizations are saying.
edited to add: RawStory gives us the gory historical details in a story they’ve republished from five years ago. This article is a must-read.
So here’s today’s email:
The presumptive president-elect has chosen Betsy DeVos as his nominee for Secretary of Education. She refers to the public school system as “government schools,” usually categorizing them as “failing,” and has spent millions of her family’s fortune on promoting the diversion of tax dollars into private entrepreneurial schools while discouraging any kind of oversight of these institutions.
Do you share her values, and do you plan to vote to confirm her?
I’ll keep you posted.