populicio.us

By

Gail Russell Chaddock,

(CNN) — American officials from the president down tried Tuesday to downplay the leak of tens of thousands of documents about the war in Afghanistan, a disclosure experts are calling the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam.

Pentagon officials have not found anything top-secret among the documents, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.

“From what we have seen so far, the documents are at the ‘secret’ level,” Col. David Lapan said. That’s not a very high level of classification.

Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not looked at all of the more than 75,000 documents published on WikiLeaks.org on Sunday.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information” about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan but asserted that the documents don’t shed much new light on the issue.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, said Tuesday that the importance of the leak should not be overstated.

“I think it’s important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents,” Kerry told the committee.

But, he said, the leak “breaks the law, and equally importantly, it compromises the efforts of our troops, potentially, in the field and has the potential of putting people in harm’s way,” he said.

The top-ranking U.S. military officer, Adm. Michael Mullen, said he was “appalled” by the leak but questioned the current significance of the documents, which date from 2004 to 2009.

Video: Congressmen talk WikiLeaks and the war

Video: Pentagon responds to WikiLeaks

“Much has changed since 2009, particularly with respect to our focus, our new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Baghdad, Iraq. “A lot of it is focused on the past, and I am very focused on the future.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered the Foreign Ministry and National Security Council to study the vast cache of documents, Karzai’s office said Tuesday.

The documents are divided into more than 100 categories. Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan’s ties to the Taliban.

The “direct fire” category accounts for the largest number — at 16,293 reports — while “graffiti,” “mugging,” “narcotics” and “threat” each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website’s founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.

He said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that the firsthand accounts represent “the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years,” through the military’s own raw data: numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.

“We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks,” Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.

Assange said some events listed in the reports are “very suspicious,” such as reports of skirmishes in which “a lot of people are killed, but no people taken prisoner and no people left wounded.”

“In the end, it will take a court to really look at the full range of evidence to decide if a crime has occurred,” he said. But earlier, he noted, “This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban.”

CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon has denied that they are what WikiLeaks claims they are.

On Monday, the White House condemned the release of the documents as “a breach of federal law” but simultaneously dismissed them as old news.

“I don’t think that what is being reported hasn’t in many ways been publicly discussed — whether by you or by representatives of the U.S. government — for quite some time,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. But he said an investigation into the source of the leak had begun by last week.

“There is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security,” he said.

The reports tend to be filled with jargon, like this one that describes a border incident from September 4, 2005:

“The Pakistan LNO [liaison officer] reports that ANA [Afghan National Army] troops are massing and threatening the PAKMIL [Pakistani military] 12km NE of FB Lwara [Firebase Lwara, a U.S. military base] …”

And that’s not even the entire first sentence.

Assange said WikiLeaks withheld some documents that dealt with activity by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, “and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups.”

But he said the documents reveal the “squalor” of war, uncovering how a number of small incidents have added up to huge numbers of civilian deaths.

“What we haven’t seen previously is all those individual deaths,” he said. “We’ve seen just the number. And like Stalin said, ‘One man’s death is a tragedy; a million dead is a statistic.’ So, we’ve seen the statistic.”

The release of the documents is being called the biggest intelligence leak in history, drawing comparisons to the disclosure of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers.

“There hasn’t been an unauthorized disclosure of this magnitude in 39 years,” said Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime Pentagon official who leaked that multiple-volume secret history of the conflict.

Others disagreed with the comparison. Bruce Riedel, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, noted that the Pentagon Papers were part of a document prepared for U.S. leaders that analyzed how the United States got into Vietnam, “which assessed successes and failures in a comprehensive way.”

“This is really the raw material of the war — unassessed, raw, fragmentary data that I think in each case, you have to be very careful how much of a larger picture you can conclude from these fragments and snippets,” Riedel said.

And CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen said the Pentagon Papers revealed “a huge disconnect between what the American government was saying officially and internally.”

“Here, all sorts of American government officials are saying the war is not going very well. No one is disagreeing with that,” Bergen said.

But Ellsberg said the documents, “low-level as they are,” raise the question of whether the United States has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and whether it should continue to pursue the war.

“They do give us the sense of the pattern of failure, of stalemate, and why we’re stalemated — civilian casualties that recruit for the Taliban … and raise the question of what we’re doing there,” he said.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks were carried out by the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda, which operated from bases in Afghanistan with the approval of the Taliban, the fundamentalist movement that ruled most of the country at the time.

The invasion swiftly toppled the Taliban, but al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped and remain at large. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is now battling its own Taliban insurgency as well.

Gary Berntsen, who led a CIA commando team in Afghanistan in the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said on CNN’s “Rick’s List” that the documents “probably are accurate.” But Berntsen, now a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, said the reports are likely to be a propaganda coup for the Taliban and “sap morale in the United States.”

“It does paint a bleak picture on this,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean this fight is less worth fighting and trying to make progress on.”

And Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put “in context” and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, “is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general.”

“There are American troops in harm’s way getting shot and killed,” Rieckhoff said. “If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back.”

Once the jargon of the report is pierced, the stories can be eye-opening.

In a February 5, 2008, incident, Task Force Helmand reported that an Afghan National Police officer — referred to as ANP — was in a public shower smoking hashish when two members of the Afghan National Army walked in.

“ANP felt threatened and a fire fight occurred,” the report says. “The ANP fled the scene and was later shot. ANP and ANA commanders held meetings to contain the incident.”

An October 15, 2007, incident describes an Afghan National Police highway officer’s shooting of another Afghan National Police officer in the shoulder and leg, not seriously. “The shooting was not accidental the policeman had been arguing with each other for a few days,” the report said.

In a March 19, 2005, incident, “FOB [Forward Operating Base] Cobra received a local national boy who had received a gunshot wound to his stomach,” another report said.

“He had been shot during a green-on-green [Afghans attacking Afghans] firefight in Jangalak Village. The boy and his older brother had heard shooting outside of their compound and went outside to check it out, at which point the boy was shot in the stomach. Another brother had also been shot and died at the compound. No adult males had accompanied the brothers, and only the older brother of the injured boy could provide information on the incident. The older brother explained that men in the village were having personal disputes with each other and had then began shooting at each ones’ compounds.”

Assange said the documents were “legitimate” but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.

“We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn’t mean the CIA is telling the truth,” he said.

He said his website is not campaigning against the war.

“WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. … It should continue in a just way if its to continue at all,” he said.

He declined to tell CNN where he got the documents and said the identities of his sources are less important than the authenticity of the documents they provide. And he denied that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger and said the documents’ publication will help people make informed decisions about whether to support the war.

Assange, an Australian, said the site is coming under “significant pressure” from authorities, including several recent “surveillance events.” But he said that due to the response the latest release has received, “It is not politically feasible to interfere with us at a high level.”

CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr and CNN’s Atika Shubert, Richard Allen Greene, David DeSola, Adam S. Levine and Atia Abawi contributed to this report.

Pentagon: Leaked Afghan reports are not top-secret

By

Brad Knickerbocker,

Washington (CNN) — The Obama administration will push for letting tax cuts for wealthy Americans expire while extending them for the rest of the nation, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said.

In interviews broadcast Sunday on ABC and NBC, Geithner called for a balanced approach as the economy recovers from the recession that started in 2008 while facing mounting federal debt.

That means pushing for measures designed to raise revenue, such as letting tax breaks from the Bush administration expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year while holding down spending and taking steps to encourage private sector job creation, Geithner said.

“We’re in a transition … from the extraordinary actions the government had to take to break the back of this financial crisis to a recovery led by private demand,” Geithner told the NBC program “Meet the Press”. “That transition is well under way. It’s going to continue and it’s going to strengthen.”

Along with letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire, the administration also wants to “leave in place tax cuts that are very important to incent businesses to hire new employees and to invest and expand in output,” Geithner said on the ABC program “This Week.”

Republicans say letting tax cuts expire for wealther Americans will hurt economic growth as the nation recovers from the recession. In particular, GOP critics say the $250,000-a-year threshold means many small business owners would be included in the group seeing their tax burdens increase when the cuts expire at the end of 2010.

“The safest thing for America would be to have a provision passed this fall that said no tax increase of any kind in 2011,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said on the “FOX News Sunday” program. “Everywhere I go — and I’ve been in 10 states in the last 14 days — business people say to me over and over again, ‘I will create no new jobs in this environment because the uncertainty is too frightening.’ “

Geithner said the plan is to extend the tax cuts for more than 95 percent of country while letting them expire for about 3 percent, which he called the “highest-earning Americans.”

Asked on the ABC show if letting any tax cuts expire would harm the recovery, Geithner said: “I do not believe it will have a negative effect on growth.”

“We think that’s the responsible thing to do,” Geithner said. “We need to make sure we can show the world that we’re willing as a country now to start to make some progress bringing down our long-term deficits.”

Video: Bush tax cuts: Time to expire?

Video: Have Dems’ econ policies failed?

Video: Obama’s economic plan

Overall, he said, the government was “making progress” in restoring private sector job growth.

“I think the most likely thing is you see an economy that gradually strengthens over the next year or two,” Geithner said on NBC. “You see job growth start to come back again; and again, investment expanding, manufacturing is getting a little stronger, exports better. Those are very encouraging signs. But we’ve got a long way to go still.”

President Barack Obama’s poll numbers for his handling of the economy have dropped into unfavorable territory, and Republicans have hammered the administration over continuing high unemployment despite last year’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill. Last week, the administration said it expects unemployment to remain above 9 percent through 2011.

Geithner said the government is moving from the emergency steps enacted to deal with the recession — such as bailing out big banks and automakers — to more long-term approaches for helping the private sector create jobs.

On NBC, he called completing projects under the stimulus bill and enacting proposals to help small businesses and teachers “sensible, good steps,” adding that the main goal is to “make this transition to a recovery led by private companies.”

“We have to make some choices, too, and we have to make sure we can continue to earn confidence around the world that we’re going to have the will as a country to bring these large inherited deficits down over time to a much more manageable level,” Geithner said.

Geithner: Let tax cuts for rich expire

(CNN) — A black former Agriculture Department official who resigned under pressure after a video clip surfaced of her discussing a white farmer said Wednesday the agency’s decision to review her case is “bittersweet,” but said she isn’t sure she would accept her job back if it is offered.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said early Wednesday that he will review the case of Shirley Sherrod, who resigned Monday after the video clip first appeared on a conservative website and later on Fox News.

In the video, Sherrod, the former USDA director of rural development for Georgia, seems to tell an audience at an NAACP function in March that she did not do her utmost to help a white farmer avoid foreclosure.

However, Sherrod later said the clip only shows part of her comments, and that she tells the story of her experience — from nearly a quarter century ago when she was not a federal employee — to illustrate the importance of moving beyond race.

“I am, of course, willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner,” Vilsack said in a statement.

The USDA’s decision is “bittersweet,” Sherrod told CNN’s “American Morning” on Wednesday.

“If they had just taken the time to — even without looking at the tape — to look at me, to look at what I’ve stood for, to look at what I’ve done since I’ve actually been at the department, I don’t think they would have been so quick to do what they did and so insistent,” she said. “… To now come back and say, ‘Well, we’re willing to look at this,’ it definitely is a little bittersweet.”

Video: ‘I worked for fairness’

Video: Farmer on Sherrod criticism

Video: NAACP pres. explains reaction

Video: Who asked Sherrod to resign?

At the department, Sherrod said, “I didn’t make a lot of noise. … I worked for fairness for everyone.”

Asked whether she would accept her job back if the USDA offered it, she said, “You know, I’m just not so sure at this point. I really wonder, in light of how I was treated over the last two days, just what that relationship would be like for the future. Can they move beyond this?”

In the video, Sherrod can be heard telling an audience at a March 27, 2010, appearance before a local chapter of the NAACP that she had not given a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” to help him save the family farm.

But later in the tape, in the portion not originally posted, Sherrod says, “working with (the farmer) made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who have not. They could be black. They could be white. They could be Hispanic.”

The video initially brought condemnation from the NAACP, which later retracted its statement and apologized to Sherrod after the context of the clip became clear. Also, the farmer and his wife Sherrod was discussing, Roger and Eloise Spooner, came forward Tuesday, saying they credited Sherrod with helping them save their farm and that she did not discriminate against them.

The NAACP, which initially called Sherrod’s statements “shameful,” said in a statement Tuesday that it was “snookered by Fox News” and conservative website publisher Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart originally posted the video, which was quickly picked up by Fox News.

“Having reviewed the full tape by Shirley Sherrod, who is the woman who was fired by the Department of Agriculture, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe that the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans,” the statement from NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said.

The organization had also urged Vilsack to reconsider Sherrod’s resignation from her post.

Sherrod said Wednesday she accepted the NAACP apology and is “ready to move on.”

Conservative media outlets tied the video to the NAACP’s recent resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to repudiate racist elements within it that have displayed such items as images of President Barack Obama with a bone through his nose and the White House with a lawn full of watermelons. The controversy has led one Tea Party umbrella group to oust another because of a blog posting by the second group’s leader.

Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams posted on his blog a faux letter from Jealous to President Abraham Lincoln in which Williams ridicules the organization’s use of “colored” in its historic name and uses multiple stereotypes to bolster his point. The National Tea Party Foundation expelled Williams’ organization from its coalition as a result.

Breitbart told CNN’s “John King USA” on Tuesday that releasing the video was “not about Shirley Sherrod.”

“This was about the NAACP attacking the Tea Party, and this is showing racism at an NAACP event,” he said. “I did not ask for Shirley Sherrod to be fired.”

Sherrod said Tuesday that she “went all out” to help the Spooners keep their farm in the 1986 incident, which occurred before she started working for USDA and was at the nonprofit Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund. She said she resigned after receiving four phone calls Monday telling her the White House wanted her to step down.

“They asked me to resign, and in fact they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday,” she said. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and do it [resign],” she said.

However, Vilsack told CNN on Tuesday that he “didn’t speak to anyone at the White House. … I made this decision, it’s my decision. Nobody from the White House contacted me about this at all.”

A White House official also told CNN that “the White House did not pressure her or the USDA over the resignation. It was the secretary’s decision, as he has said.”

Obama was briefed on the situation after Vilsack decided to seek Sherrod’s resignation, according to a White House official, who said the president fully supports the decision.

“I don’t know what brought up the racist mess,” Roger Spooner told CNN’s “Rick’s List” on Tuesday. “They just want to stir up some trouble, it sounds to me in my opinion.”

Spooner says Sherrod accompanied him and his wife to a lawyer in Americus, Georgia, who was able to help them file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which ultimately saved their farm.

“If it hadn’t been for her, we would’ve never known who to see or what to do,” he said. “She led us right to our success.”

Eloise Spooner remembered Sherrod as “nice-mannered, thoughtful, friendly; a good person.”

She said that when she saw the story of the tape and Sherrod’s resignation on television, “I said, ‘That ain’t right. They have not treated her right.’ “

The poor-quality video shows Sherrod telling her audience that the farmer she was working with “took a long time … trying to show me he was superior to me.” As a result, she said, she “didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

To prove she had done her job, she said, she took him to a white lawyer. “I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him,” she said.

But that lawyer failed to help, she said Tuesday. “I did not discriminate against [the farmer]. And, in fact, I went all out to frantically look for a lawyer at the last minute because the first lawyer we went to was not doing anything to really help him. In fact, that (first) lawyer suggested they should just let the farm go.”

Sherrod, who was appointed to the USDA position in 2009, said she first heard of the possible controversy when someone e-mailed her Thursday to taunt her about her comments. She immediately forwarded the e-mail to the USDA so the agency would be aware. She was told that someone would look into it.

She said it wasn’t until Monday that she heard back, and by then, she was being asked for her resignation.

Asked if she felt she had an opportunity to explain, Sherrod said, “No, I didn’t. The administration, they were not interested in hearing the truth. No one wanted to hear the truth.”

Vilsack said Tuesday that the controversy, regardless of the context of her comments, “compromises the director’s ability to do her job.”

“This isn’t a situation where we are necessarily judgmental about the content of the statement, that’s not the issue here. I don’t believe this woman is a racist at all,” he said. “She’s a political appointee, and her job is basically to focus on job growth in Georgia, and I have deep concern about her ability to do her job without her judgments being second-guessed.”

Ralph Paige, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, told CNN on Tuesday that Sherrod had garnered only praise during her time there and there were never any claims of discrimination against her.

“I can’t praise Shirley enough,” he said. “She holds no malice in her heart.”

Vilsack said in a statement Monday he had accepted Sherrod’s resignation, noting a “zero tolerance” policy for discrimination at the USDA. “I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person,” he said.

The first statement that the NAACP issued late Monday backed Vilsack’s decision.

“Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race,” Jealous said. “We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.”

But Tuesday evening, the NAACP said in another statement, “(Sherrod) was sharing this account as part of a story of transformation and redemption. In the full video, Ms. Sherrod says she realized that the dislocation of farmers is about ‘haves and have nots.’ ‘It’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,’ says Sherrod in the speech. ‘We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn’t matter.’ “

Earlier Tuesday, Sherrod called the NAACP “the reason why this happened. They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that.”

“When you spend your life helping others and see people try to turn that around to try to make it look like you’re a racist when that’s not been what your life has been about — that doesn’t feel good,” she said.

Sherrod and her family were part of a lawsuit filed in 1997 against the Agriculture Department that charged it discriminated against black farmers by denying them timely loans or debt restructuring. Complaints of discrimination began piling up after the Reagan administration shut down the department’s civil rights division in 1983, and the lawsuit covered the years between 1983 and 1997.

A district court judge eventually combined two such lawsuits into a class action, and the two sides reached a settlement in 1999. The agreement gave each plaintiff $50,000 plus loan forgiveness and tax offsets, provided the plaintiff met certain criteria (Track A), or the possibility of a larger amount by showing evidence of greater damages (Track B).

More than 22,000 farmers applied — far more than the 2,000 expected — and more than 13,000 were approved for the $50,000 award. Fewer than 200 farmers opted for the Track B process.

Sherrod and her husband were part of the lawsuit because of the land trust they started in the 1960s along with several other black families. Ultimately, their land trust — New Communities — was awarded $13 million, mostly for loss of land and loss of income and including $300,000 for the Sherrods, according to the Rural Development Leadership Network.

Vilsack, who is now the defendant in the lawsuit — Pigford vs. Vilsack — as final details are worked out, referred to the discrimination lawsuit and other similar suits in a statement announcing that he had accepted Sherrod’s resignation.

“We have been working hard through the past 18 months to reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department and take the issue of fairness and equality very seriously,” Vilsack said.

Vilsack to review ouster of USDA official

By

Warren Richey,

(CNN) — Anti-establishment candidates are capitalizing on widespread anti-incumbent fervor and proposing term limits as a way to bring the power back to the people.

As political hopefuls try to persuade voters to send them to Congress, they’re also promising they won’t be there long.

Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul said that if elected, he can’t see himself serving more than two terms. In Rhode Island, Democratic congressional hopeful Bill Lynch has proposed a 12-year cap in the House and Senate. And in Maryland, Republican Andy Harris has assured voters that, should he go to the U.S. House, he’ll be out of there by 2023.

It’s a message that polls well and gets applause at campaign rallies, but David King, director of Harvard’s program for Newly Elected Members of the U.S. Congress, said term limits do more harm than good.

“It’s political junk food. It tastes good but hurts the body politic in the long run,” he said.

Advocates and opponents of term limits are after the same thing: keeping the power out of the hands of lobbyists and special interests.

King says term limits do the opposite by taking the business of lawmaking away from elected representatives and giving it to professional staff and lobbyists.

Instead, the elections process needs better campaign finance laws and a more engaged electorate, he said.

“That leads to a situation in which we reward politicians or statesmen or stateswoman who have been around for a long time and are terrific, while at the same time being able to get rid of the low-quality legislators at all levels,” King said.

But Philip Blumel, president of U.S. Term Limits, points to the high re-election rates as evidence of the need for term limits.

Re-election rates have hovered around 96 percent in the House and 85 percent in the Senate over the past 10 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The average length of service for lawmakers in the current session of Congress is 5.5 terms in the House and 2.2 terms in the Senate, according to the Congressional Research Service.

“You have a situation where you have a long-standing relationship between special interests and an incumbent who can’t lose, and that is a toxic combination, and that’s most of the Congress,” Blumel said. “Term limits ensure regular, competitive elections. They permit change.”

It’s a debate as old as the Constitution that term-limit supporters hope to amend.

Alexander Hamilton spoke against limits, writing in Federalist Paper No. 72 that, “Nothing appears more plausible at first sight, nor more ill-founded upon close inspection.”

Thomas Jefferson, however, said term limitation, at least of the president, was necessary “to prevent every danger which might arise to American freedom from continuing too long in office.”

After the Constitution was drafted, Jefferson said one aspect he disliked was “the abandonment in every instance of the necessity of rotation in office, and most particularly in the case of the President.”

“If you value rotation in office, like the founders did, we need some kind of codified term limits,” Blumel said.

Fifteen states have term limits for state lawmakers. Another six states have agreed to term limits in the past, but the limits were repealed by the legislature or overturned by the courts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Most of the states with term limits got them through a ballot initiative, a process that only 24 states have.

Jennie Bowser, who tracks term limits for the NCSL, said that while voters are generally supportive of term limits, some studies have shown negative effects that aren’t obvious to the average voter, such as a loss of influence in the legislature to the executive branch and a loss of policy champions who spend years building expertise in certain subjects.

“They’re sort of inside the legislature, under-the-dome kind of things that people who are close to the legislature notice … but no legislature has had to go out of business because term limits wrecked them, so it’s not stuff that is visible to voters,” she said.

The new wave of calls for term limits is reminiscent of the lead-up to the 1994 elections. Armed with a legislative agenda called the “Contract with America,” Republicans put forth a message with an emphasis on term limits.

The GOP took back control of the House and Senate for the first time in nearly 50 years, and, for the first time ever, the House voted on legislation that would limit representatives to six two-year terms and senators to two six-year terms.

The vote was 227–204 — a simple majority, but not the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment.

At the time, 23 states had passed laws imposing term limits on their federal lawmakers, but in May of 1995, two months after the House vote, the Supreme Court ruled that doing so was unconstitutional.

“Allowing individual States to adopt their own qualifications for congressional service would be inconsistent with the Framers’ vision of a uniform National Legislature representing the people of the United States. If the qualifications set forth in the text of the Constitution are to be changed, that text must be amended,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

In order to pass a constitutional amendment on term limits, the House and Senate would have to pass legislation with a two-thirds majority, and then three-fourths of the state legislatures would have to ratify it.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint introduced a bill to limit lawmakers to six years in the House and 12 years in the Senate.

DeMint’s bill has yet to come up for a vote, but for Blumel, the outlook is good.

“There are periods in history where term limits are at the fore, and if the people of the country want them and demand them now, we have as good a chance as any that we ever had to have them. So it’s an exciting time,” he said.

But King says that even if the idea had the support of the president and Congress, he is confident that the American public would reject it.

“The evidence after 20 years of this in state legislatures is crystal clear: term limits empower special interests, lobbyists and long-time staffers and they work against the interests of the American people,” he said.

The reason the issue polls well, King said, is because there hasn’t been a vigorous dialogue about it.

“People are reacting by their instinct and anger, which is understandable. But sometimes instinct and anger take us in the wrong direction,” he said.

Term limits like ‘political junk food’

(CNN) — President Obama and his family arrived Friday for a weekend getaway in Maine, but along with a little rest and relaxation comes criticism that the president is taking it easy with the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis in a critical phase.

The Obamas plan to spend the weekend on Mount Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park. The trip marks the president’s third weekend vacation since the oil disaster began in April.

The Republican National Committee launched a website blasting what it considers Obama’s “leisure activities or missteps” during the oil disaster, like playing golf, attending concerts and vacationing in Asheville, North Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and now Maine.

Obama has also faced criticism for scheduling a trip up north, instead of vacationing in the Gulf, as he advised other Americans to do.

“Presidents are certainly entitled to vacation, just like everybody else, but there is a fine line as to when presidents should do it, what they should and where they should do it,” said Brad Blakeman, a former member of President George W. Bush’s senior staff and the deputy assistant for appointments and scheduling.

Video: Obama’s ‘good news’ on oil spill

“Presidents have to be cognizant of the fact that everything they do is going to be scrutinized,” said Blakeman, who also is a professor for Georgetown University’s Semester in Washington program.

Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said the Republican criticism is “galling,” considering Bush’s frequent trips to Camp David and his home in Crawford, Texas.

“Barack Obama is working as hard as any president that we’ve had in recent history and certainly harder than the most immediate previous president,” he said.

CBS’s Mark Knoller, who keeps track of presidents’ comings and goings, calculated that Bush spent all or part of 977 days at Camp David or in Texas during his two terms.

Blakeman noted that visits to those locations were working trips and not getaways. Bush’s staff would travel with him, and work would continue as usual. The Crawford ranch was known as the “Western White House” because of the infrastructure there.

As for calls that Obama should vacation in the Gulf, Simmons said, “Where he chooses to take his days off should really be up to him. We don’t want to get into a situation where the president is making familial vacation decisions based upon polling or political maneuvers.”

Scott Stanzel, Bush’s deputy press secretary who often traveled with the president when he was away from the White House, said that changing locations provided a good opportunity to escape the hustle and bustle of Washington.

“President Bush, on the weekends, would often go to Camp David because the size of the bubble you are in expands, so you can go out for a walk or bike ride without having to arrange security detail,” he said.

Stanzel was in Crawford with Bush for a number of crises that could not have been planned for, like the conviction of Saddam Hussein, the death of President Ford and the assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto.

Bush was notified of Bhutto’s death immediately and delivered a statement to the press pool. “It would have almost been like we were at the White House in terms of the teams that would convene and talk about the issues surrounding that assassination,” Stanzel said.

The problem for Obama, Stanzel said, is the visuals that could come out of his trip. A picture of Obama playing golf alongside images from the Gulf could send a negative message.

Paul Begala, a CNN contributor and former adviser to President Clinton, said that vacationing or not, “The president is the president wherever he is.

“I thought it was silly when people attacked Bush for going on vacation, so I’ll be consistent and say it’s silly when people attack President Obama for going on vacation,” he said.

“Of all of the concerns that Americans may have, they do not need to worry whether President Obama is a hard-working man. They may agree or disagree with his policies, but there is just no doubt that the guy is busting his rear end.”

Obama vacation brings rest, relaxation and rebuke

By

Gail Russell Chaddock,

Washington (CNN) — The National Oil Commission, just beginning its investigation into the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, faces a daunting task: Collect information, process it and within six-months make recommendations to President Obama.

And unlike presidential commissions examining the September 11, 2001, attacks, the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident, this one is unique: The disaster is still going on.

“In some ways, it really doesn’t make much sense because the importance of commissions is that they have data that no one else has,” said Stephen Hess, a presidential historian and scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

Obama signed an executive order on May 22 creating the seven-member commission, tasked with investigating the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf and the subsequent oil spill that has become the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history.

The commission is tasked with three things: determine why the oil rig exploded; make recommendations about preventing similar disasters; and determine whether offshore oil and gas drilling should continue.

“We will look at all aspects of the cause. … We should go well beyond April 20 to see whether there were decisions made or even a culture that was established that may have contributed to the series of problems and the faulty decisions that were made,” committee co-chairman William Reilly said.

Reilly, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency during President H.W. Bush’s administration, is leading the committee with former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham of Florida.

Is the six-month time frame feasible?

“It’s a much tighter time frame than that which characterized earlier commissions like the 9/11 commission,” Reilly said.

The 9/11 Commission began its work in November of 2002. Its final report was released two years later in July 2004. The Challenger commission, though, had a relatively quick investigation. It first met in early February of 1986, just days after the explosion, and published its report in June that year.

Reilly is confident the commission will complete two of its three tasks: make recommendations about preventing similar disasters; and determine whether offshore oil and gas drilling should continue.

Read more about the oil commission

As for the third task, the precise determination of the causes, Reilly said the group will do its best. He acknowledged that the commission is also fighting for information as other commissions and the Department of Justice are running concurrent investigations.

While the road ahead is daunting for the commission, Hess said they have some advantages: the backing of the president, the immediate attention of the American public, and the anger and frustration of Gulf Coast residents.

Hess said the residents and environmentalists are using the open hearings held by the commission as a way to vent their frustration.

“That defines this sort of commission,” he said. “A lot of commissions don’t hold open hearings. … When they hold open hearings they know exactly why they are doing it: to let people give their emotional pitches.”

A woman shouting about dispersants in the water interrupted the first commission hearings on Monday. BP is blocking LSU scientists from doing tests, she said, adding, “Everybody’s got to get upset about this.”

Tight mandates make for successful commissions, said Reilly.

“If [commissions] can be very specific and they can be very focused — and of course get a lot of attention — they can be useful.” He said the oil commission has some of those qualities.

Many recommendations from the Challenger and Three Mile Island commissions resulted in changes to operating procedures, stricter safety measures and stronger oversight.

But the oil commission also faces criticism, especially Republicans who charge that the makeup of the commission is unbalanced.

Several Republican senators, including John Barrasso of Wyoming and Robert Bennett of Utah, have criticized the lack of oil and gas experts on the commission and the use of what they call pro-environmental members.

And an editorial in New Orleans’ largest newspaper on Sunday questioned the makeup of the commission.

“The president weighted the group with experts who appear more qualified to deal with the spill’s effects than with its causes,” according to the Times-Picayune editorial. “We’re concerned commission members who have been environmental advocates may put their own agenda first, ignoring the nation’s energy needs and the livelihood of Louisianans.”

The editors went on to say that the president’s commission needs to keep an open mind and “make a balanced assessment of our need for oil and of ways to mitigate the risks.”

Advocates for the commission point out commission chief Reilly, a Republican, has ties to the energy industry, having served on the board at Conoco-Phillips. The Obama administration said the commission is full of well-qualified and unbiased scientists and experts.

“The 9/11 commission had certain advantages because you didn’t have to put any terrorists on it,” Hess said. “There was one American point of view. But with the oil commission, we see there [is] more than one point of view.”

But even the 9/11 commission had trouble implementing some recommendations.

The 9/11 commission’s heads discussed their frustration in May, saying several of their recommendations had not been properly implemented.

All of the problems are bureaucratic in nature, but threaten public security, said former commission Chairman Thomas Kean and Deputy Chairman Lee Hamilton.

CNN’s Mike Ahlers and Shelby Lin Erdman contributed to this report.

Oil commission faces unique challenges