And you thought John Kerry had taken an oath to uphold the US constitution
US Secretary of State John Kerry went on the US Sunday news magazines on Sunday to defend the Iranian nuclear sellout. The results have to make you question whether Kerry still believes that he took an oath to uphold the United States constitution when he became Secretary of State.
Say, what? The UN may have the right to vote but the US still provides 22% of the UN budget, still has a veto right in the UN and has the right to say that the UN will not hold a vote until the US has decided it's ready for the UN to have that vote.
Under the US constitution, this agreement should be going to the Senate as a treaty, where it would undoubtedly fail to gain the required two thirds margin.
Instead, Congress agreed to have a vote where it will be almost impossible for it to reject Hussein Obama's and FN Kerry's sellout.
Obama and Kerry could at least make sure the vote still has meaning.
They ought to be impeached, tried for treason and hung. As should have happened to Kerry 45 years ago.
Video: Matt Lee owns new State Department spokesperson John Kirby on Jerusalem
John Kirby just became State Department spokesperson last month and I can already tell you that he's no better than Marie Harf.
Watch him squirm as he tries to figure out US policy on Jerusalem while under questioning from @APDiploWriter Matt Lee about Monday's Supreme Court decision that Congress overstepped its bounds in trying to require the State Department to register Jewish children born in Jerusalem (like four of mine) as having been born in Israel.
Let's go to the videotape.
Keep making them feel uncomfortable Matt! They'll find a policy one of these days.
The court ruled 6-3 that Congress overstepped its bounds when it
approved the law in 2002. It would have forced the State Department to
alter its long-standing policy of not listing Israel as the birthplace
for Jerusalem-born Americans and listing only "Jerusalem."
The policy is part of the government's refusal to recognize any
nation's sovereignty over Jerusalem, until Israelis and Palestinians
resolve its status through negotiations.
Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion that the
president has the exclusive power to recognize foreign nations, and that
the power to determine what a passport says is part of this power.
"Recognition is a matter on which the nation must speak with one voice. That voice is the president's," Kennedy wrote.
The ruling ends a 12-year-old lawsuit by a Jerusalem-born American, Menachem Zivotofsky, and his U.S. citizen parents.
Justice Antonin Scalia read a summary of his dissent from the bench,
saying the Constitution "divides responsibility for foreign affairs
between Congress and the president." Chief Justice John Roberts and
Justice Samuel Alito joined the dissent.
Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the outcome of the case, but on narrower grounds.
If the Republicans win the White House, we will have some hope that this opinion becomes solely academic. But while this ruling was expected, it is certainly disappointing.
LA hotel won't exclude Israelis in compliance with academic boycott
As you might recall, the American Studies Association has implemented an academic boycott of Israelis. The group is holding its annual meeting at the Los Angeles Westin Bonaventure Hotel and the Washington Post reported last week that, in compliance with the group's wishes, the hotel planned to exclude Israelis from staying at the hotel during the meeting.
In early November, the American Studies Association will be having
its annual meeting at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Per
the ASA’s recently adopted policy, Israeli academics will be subject to
unique exclusionary restrictions based on their national origin.
The use of a public accommodation for such a discriminatory event has led a civil rights group to warn the hotel that hosting the conference could violate California’s civil rights laws.
The Unruh Civil Rights Act provides that “no business establishment of
any kind whatsoever shall discriminate against, boycott or blacklist, or
refuse to buy from, contract with, sell to, or trade with any person in
this state on account of” national origin and other characteristics. It
also extends liability to those who “aid or incite” a denial or rights
under the law.
I am not an expert on the application of
California’s anti-discrimination laws, but the notion that a public
accommodation cannot host an event that itself violates the law would at
least seem consistent with the text of the statute. I also happen to generally disfavor anti-discrimination laws
on, among other things, First Amendment (free association) grounds, but
unfortunately for the ASA, these arguments do not fare well in courts.
The
ASA’s argument that it does not bar Israelis, but only Israelis who
attend as representatives of their academic institutions, will not
likely help them much, as the normal way for academics to attend
academic conferences is as representatives of their institutions. In any
case, this argument amounts to saying the ACA is not discriminating as
much as they could have, which is not an advisable defense in
discrimination cases.
Professor Kontorovich’s blog post apparently got under the skin of
the ASA, as it wrote to Prof. Kontorovich claiming that there was no
boycott of any individuals whatsoever, as Prof. Kontorovich describes in
a follow up post, ASA pretends to partially drop Israel boycott:
The ASA’s executive director, John Stephens, wrote to me
demanding a correction, claiming that my description of their policy was
entirely “false.” Stephens claims that despite the boycott
Our conference is open to anyone, including Israeli
academics and non-academics. If someone were to register for the
conference as a representative of an Israeli institution, he or she
would not be turned away.
* * *
Stephens went on to write that:
[The ASA] does not bar Israelis, it does not bar Israeli institutions. Prime Minister Netanyahu can attend if he wants to.
But their very own policy makes clear that it excludes Israeli
institutions and their “representatives,” as well as those of the
“Israeli government,” of which Netanyahu would be a prime example.
As Prof. Kontorovich further demonstrates, since the ACLJ letter, the ASA has added language to its policy (indicated by an asterisk):
Cabinet passes law aimed at stopping terrorist releases
Israel's Ministerial Legislation Committee has approved a bill to be presented by the coalition, which would pass a 'basic law' (allegedly cannot be overridden by the Supreme Court) that would bar the premature release of 'Palestinian' terrorists.
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said "the State of Israel is opening a
new page in the war against terror and its moral commitment to bereaved
families.
"Years of blackmail and wholesale release will stop when this bill
becomes law," Bennett added.
"The Bayit Yehudi will work in the upcoming
[Knesset] session to pass the law without delay."
Seven ministers, from Likud Beytenu and Bayit Yehudi, voted in favor and three Yesh Atid and Hatnua ministers opposed.
The proposed legislature
aims to allow the courts to use the heavy sentence, which blocks the
president’s ability to pardon criminals in special cases like terrorist
attacks, murder with nationalist motivations, or murder of children.
...
The bill was proposed by Bayit Yehudi faction chairwoman Ayelet
Shaked and MK David Tsur (Hatnua) and co-sponsored by coalition chairman
Yariv Levin (Likud Beytenu), MKs Robert Ilatov (Likud Beytenu), Orit
Struck (Bayit Yehudi), Shuli Moalem-Refaeli (Bayit Yehudi), Motti Yogev
(Bayit Yehudi) and Yisrael Hasson (Kadima).
Ilatov pointed out
that similar sentences exist in the US and that the bill, should it
become law, will not discriminate by religion, ethnicity or gender of
the murderer.
"The goal is to have more severe sentences, without
having the death penalty," he explained. "Whoever deprives the whole
world [by killing a person] will pay by losing his freedom."
The legislation is an amendment to Basic Law: The Presidency, which currently says the president may pardon any criminal.
If the change becomes law, it will allow judges to use their discretion
on whether a murder is a “special case” or not, meaning there is a
possibility that law may never be put to use even if it is passed.
I'm almost surprised that the Left didn't vote in favor. This law sounds like it could be used to prevent the release of alleged Rabin assassin Yigal Amir.
President Barack Obama could unilaterally unravel sanctions through several executive channels, according to former government officials and legal experts.
Executive orders grant the president significant leverage in the how
sanctions are implemented, meaning that Obama could choose to stop
enforcing many of the laws on the books, according to government
insiders.
Those familiar with the ins and outs of sanctions enforcement say
that the White House has long been lax with its enforcement of sanctions
regulations already on the books.
“It’s no secret that the president, with executive power, can
determine sanctions implementation, particularly with waivers and the
decision not to sanction certain entities,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a
former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department, which is
responsible for enforcing sanctions.
“The financial pressure has always been about closing loopholes and
identifying new ones to close,” Schanzer added. “If you stop that
process of constant gardening, you leave a backdoor open.”
Obama could also use executive waivers to “bypass restrictions
imposed by the law,” according to a report by Patrick Clawson, director
of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
The president has a lot of leverage when it comes to sanctions and could effectively “turn a blind eye” to Iranian infractions.
“In the case of Iran, such an approach could allow Washington to
reach a nuclear accord without Congress having to vote on rescinding,
even temporarily or conditionally, certain sanctions,” Clawson wrote.
“No matter how stiff and far-reaching sanctions may be as embodied in
U.S. law, they would have less bite if the administration stopped
enforcing them.”
One former senior government official said that President Obama’s
legal team has likely been investigating the issue for quite some time.
“I’d be shocked if they weren’t putting the various sanctions laws
under a microscope to see how they can waive them or work around them in
order to deliver to Iran sanctions relief without having to worry about
Congress standing in their way,” said Stephen Rademaker, who served as
deputy legal adviser to former President George H.W. Bush’s National
Security Council (NSC).
Executive branch lawyers are often tasked with finding ways to get around existing legislation, Rademaker said.
“I’m sure pretty early in the negotiating process they developed a
roadmap” to ensure the president has the authority to promise Iran
significant relief from sanctions, said Rademaker, who also served as
chief council for the House Committee on International Relations. “I’m
sure they’ve come up with an in depth analysis of what they can do
relying exclusively on the president’s legal authority.”
The White House has been known to disregard portions of the sanctions laws that it disagrees with, according to Schanzer.
“Just about every time there has been new sanctions legislation, the
White House has watered it down in one way or another for various
reasons,” he said. “The implementation is always an imperfect
implementation of what Congress wants.”
When asked if Obama was planning to circumvent Congress, a White House spokesperson referred the Free Beacon to its previous comment about Iran sanctions and declined to comment further.
If Obama actually does this, I suspect we'll see a drive to impeach him in his last two years in office. The House would easily vote out articles of impeachment, and if the Republicans gain control of the Senate. But by then, the damage will be done. In fact, a lot of it has been done already.
In accepting the gay group's appeal from a magistrate's court ruling, the district court found that Makor Rishon reneged on an agreement to run the ad, and did not make clear that the ad's running was conditioned upon the editor's approving the final copy. So far, so good - if that had been the entire ruling, I wouldn't be writing this post.
The problem is that the court also found that a privately run newspaper is a public service, and therefore refusing an ad is a violation of the Law Against Discrimination in Products, Services, and Entrance to Places of Entertainment and to Public Places. Huh?
I can see every Haredi newspaper in the country being shut down if this ruling is enforced, because if they are forced to run ads for groups like this one - with the name Individual Privacy Protection Association (Gay Community) - they will shut down rather than run those ads.
Will Makor Rishon appeal to the Supreme Court? Maybe we need a constitution with a commerce clause?
One of the high points of the Watergate scandal nearly 40 years ago was the resignations of Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus for refusing to defend President Nixon. But in Israel, we have a 'better' idea. In Israel, an attorney general decide not to defend the government he serves and yet not be required to resign. He becomes yet another hurdle on the way to having a law declared constitutional... except that we don't have a constitution except in the minds of the Supreme Court Justices.
Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein on Tuesday warned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he would not be able to legally defend bills restricting foreign funding of NGOs.
Weinstein said in a letter to Netanyahu, obtained by Israeli media on Tuesday, that the proposed legislation was unconstitutional.
"The bills severely damage a number of constitutional rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to equality."
Weinstein added in the letter that the passage of the laws would put Israel in a category with pariah states that have taken similar action.
Sorry, but the attorney general is a government servant and if he cannot serve the government, he ought to be fired. And substantively he's also wrong. No one is trying to shut down these NGO's - only to cut off their foreign governmental funding.
As I reported last week, the US Supreme Court has granted certiorari (the right to a hearing) to 9-year old Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky, who would like his American birth certificate and passport to say that he was born in Jerusalem, Israel.
The facts in the case are well-known and are not - as far as I am aware - in dispute. Menachem was born in Jerusalem in 2002 seventeen days after the US Senate unanimously tacked a provision onto an appropriations bill that required the State Department to register Jerusalem births as "Jerusalem, Israel" if the parents so desired.
But when President George W. Bush signed the bill - passed by a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate - he issued a signing statement saying that he would not abide by the Jerusalem provision, arguing that it impermissibly infringed upon the President's power to recognize foreign sovereigns, a power that he argued derives from the Constitution's granting the President power to "receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers."
Both the Bush and the Obama administrations have attempted to deny young Master Zivotofsky his day in court, arguing that the case presents a political question with respect to which the US Supreme Court (unlike the Israeli one) is required to stand down.
But what is the issue? Is it Jerusalem? Is it signing statements? Is it the President's constitutional prerogatives? Is it the political question doctrine? Or is it perhaps something else? The New York Sun reports that Zivotofsky's lawyer - Nathan Lewin - won cert (as lawyers call it) by minimizing the issue at hand.
One of the ironies in the case is that the lawyer for Master Zivotofsky, Nathan Lewin, a legendary practitioner at the constitutional bar, won certiorari in the case by arguing, in effect, that it was much less of a big deal than Mrs. Clinton is making it out to be. On its face his petition for a hearing doesn’t ask the Supreme Court to sort out who owns Jerusalem or who gets to decide the question or who runs foreign policy of the United States. Congress, after all, passes laws in respect of all kinds of things that affect foreign policy. What he does suggest is that the Congress has enough power to write the rules for issuing certificates of birth abroad and to require the government to accede to parents’ wishes on the matter.
That may have been Lewin's argument, but it's not how the Supreme Court saw it.
The justices of the Supreme Court, in their order saying they’d take the case, signaled that they see the standoff between the Congress and the presidency as a central issue. The editor of the Sun, writing about the case in the Wall Street Journal, quoted the Supreme Court’s order, as specifically instructing the lawyers to focus on whether the law “impermissibly infringes the President’s power to recognize foreign sovereigns.” The power to which the Court refers stems from language in Article II of the Constitution, which is the article that creates the presidency and states that the president “shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers.”
But which foreign sovereign is being recognized (or not) based on whether Menachem Zivotofsky's passport says "Jerusalem" or "Jerusalem, Israel"? Yisrael Medad made a comment at the Sun's website (reproduced here as part of a lengthy post on the case) that sheds some light on that question:
There is a flip side to this coin: at present State Dept. regulations instruct, as a first choice, that a child of an American citzen born outside of the Green Line but within the area currently administered by Israel, - for example, a Jewish woman in Shiloh or Efrat or an Arab woman in Ramallah or Bil'in - shall have his birth place registered as "_____, West Bank" (only if the parents object, then just the city will be noted, like in the case of Jerusalem).
In other words, State Dept. clerks have created a 'state' called the West Bank but refuse to recognize Israel viv a vis Jerusalem even though, it should be recalled, the geographical terms "Judea" and "Samaria" appear in the UN's 181 decision in the section delineating the borders. Why not Shiloh, Samaria or Bethlehem, Judea?
Obviously it is not law involved but diplomacy and political policy and despite my lack of professional constitutional law grounding, I would suggest that law (Congress) aslways takes primacy over policy (State Dept.).
So has the Supreme Court presented the issue as whether it is in the exclusive power of the President to determine what states to recognize, including an Arab 'Palestinian' state on the 'West Bank'? After all, Harry Truman decided by himself - against the advice of the State Department - to recognize Israel.
And on that note, let's turn for a minute to Seth Lipsky's Wall Street Journal article on the Zivotofsky case (for those who don't have a Wall Street Journal subscription, the full article is available here).
Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin used to warn against deciding the political status of Jerusalem in the U.S. Congress.
I'm kind of surprised at that quote, because for most of the last 63 years (and even before), Israel got a far more sympathetic hearing from Congress than it did from the Executive branch (and particularly from the State Department). In fact, Begin himself had an often tense relationship with Jimmy Carter during their overlapping terms in office.
Can a president, in signing a piece of legislation, announce that he doesn't agree with part of it and doesn't intend to enforce the law?
The answer to that question ought to be no. In the American system, Presidents for years have sought and have failed to receive a 'line item veto' in the government budgetary process. If they can't have such a veto when it comes to spending, why should they have it anyplace else? (Not to mention that the legislation that included the Jerusalem provision was an appropriations bill).
In the fight over whether the Supreme Court would take the case, Mrs. Clinton echoed Mr. Bush's concerns, citing her department's view that "any unilateral action by the United States that would signal, symbolically or concretely, that it recognizes that Jerusalem is a city that is located within the sovereign territory of Israel would critically compromise the ability of the United States to work with Israelis, Palestinians and others in the region to further the peace process."
Actually, one could argue that it shows nothing of the sort. All of the hospitals in Jerusalem in which Jewish children are born are located in 'west' Jerusalem with the exception of Hadassah Mount Scopus, which is located in an area that was nevertheless under Israeli control between 1949-67. By refusing to recognize Menachem's birth as being in Jerusalem, Israel, the Obama administration is saying that it doesn't recognize any part of Jerusalem as being part of Israel. Yes, I know, that has officially been the US position since before 1967, but most Americans don't understand that, and do at least - along with their elected representatives - recognize Israeli sovereignty in 'west' Jerusalem.
So far, lower courts have agreed with Mrs. Clinton that this matter is a "political question" and not justiciable. But the young Mr. Zivotofsky's lawyer, Nathan Lewin, was able to convince the Supreme Court to hear the case by arguing, in part, that this matter is no longer a "political question" precisely because Congress has already acted.
Given all the other foreign affairs and political disputes in which Congress does act—from foreign aid to the United Nations to the Senate's ratification of treaties—it's illogical to suggest that the terms for issuing certificates of birth abroad are beyond the reach of the elected legislature.
Actually, there's a tension built into American foreign relations by the contradictory grants of the power of the purse and the power to declare war to Congress, while the President is the Commander in Chief of the army and therefore is the ultimate framer of orders to the American military.
All in all it's a fascinating case, and one I hope that Menachem and his parents - Ari and Naomi - win (yes, we know them). But couldn't you guys at least have an easier to spell last name? I just discovered I've been spelling it wrong for years (Zivotovsky rather than Zivotofsky).
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
