Over the past couple of weeks, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has been trying to sell his and Sen. Robert Bennett’s (R-UT) amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill which would require the US Census Bureau to add a question about citizenship to its 2010 survey. Today, Vitter continued claiming that states with many immigrants would steal the representatives of states with few immigrants if noncitizens are not excluded from congressional apportionment decisions. However, there isn’t any language in the amendment stipulating any change in the way representatives are apportioned. And if there was, Vitter would be directly challenging the US Constitution.

Vitter’s argument is based on the misguided premise that the founding fathers always intended that only citizens should be counted by Census officials for the purposes of congressional apportionment:

I believe that when we use the Census for Congressional re-districting for determining how many US House seats each state gets, we should count citizens, but we should not count in that context, non-citizens — including illegal aliens…I don’t think the founding fathers set up a democracy — and in many ways the most important Democratic institution in history, the US Congress — to represent noncitizens. Why aren’t we adding in the entire population of France, or Belgium, or Brazil? For obvious reasons, because this is a democracy to represent citizens of the United States.

Watch it:

However, as Gabriel Winant of Salon points out, “the 18th century has something to say to the 21st.” Winant explains that the issue of counting noncitizens came up in the Three-fifths Compromise which stipulated that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment granted former slaves citizenship and established that representatives would be apportioned according to “the whole number of persons in each State.” It’s unlikely that our founding fathers and their predecessors naively overlooked a loophole in the 14th Amendment’s broad language that would allow noncitizens to be counted, as Vitter would like to think. Surely they weren’t blind to the fact that millions of immigrants from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and various regions of what would become Germany were rapidly emigrating to the US during the nation’s first era of mass immigration. Children, ex-felons, legal residents, and several other nonvoters are also included in the census apportionment data. These non-voters aren’t counted due to a mistake or oversight. Their presence is acknowledged because it helps paint an accurate portrait of a state’s demographic makeup and population density that’s key to effective and adequate representation.

Vitter’s amendment only seeks to compel the US Census to include a question on citizenship because changing congressional apportionment would be unconstitutional. The truth is, Vitter is probably aware of the fact that the question in itself will dissuade noncitizens from participating. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, explains, “Already the public fears that the Census is too intrusive.” Asking about a person’s citizenship “would raise more questions in the public mind about how confidential the Census is.”

Meanwhile, Vitter is supposedly arguing on behalf of many of the states that have benefited from a recent influx of undocumented immigrants in terms of population growth. Moreover, the non-participation of immigrants could lead to inaccurate demographic information and result in costly mistakes in infrastructure, education, and healthcare planning. Changing the census could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. For those reasons the Census Bureau, the Obama administration, and Senate leadership all adamantly oppose Vitter’s amendment. Last night, under pressure, Vitter at least dropped the language in his Amendment which would’ve required the US Census to ask participants about their immigration status.

Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser John Hannah cites unnamed “Iranian activists in Europe, including figures closely linked to the green movement’s leadership” who say that “Sanctions must be imposed, and in strong doses”:

A weak dose, or gradual approach, only allows the regime to adjust, they said. To be effective, sanctions must act like a shock, not a vaccine.

Similarly, prominent Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour told a Washington conference last month: “Whereas in the past [the leaders of Iran's opposition] were … unequivocally opposed to any type of punitive measures by the United States … that’s not the case anymore.”

Its a bit odd that these unnamed “figures closely linked to the green movement’s leadership” should directly contradict green movement leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Meir Hossein Mousavi, both of whom recently declared their opposition to sanctions. While it’s not unimaginable that Mousavi and Karroubi would oppose sanctions publicly while their comrades favor them privately, the fact that the messenger in this case is someone who has long favored more aggressive action against Iran — a February 2007 Washington Post article named Hannah among those Bush administration officials who “relish the notion of a direct confrontation” — is cause for skepticism.

As to the Karim Sadjadpour quote that Hannah deploys to support this view, there’s obviously a rather large chasm between Iranian opposition leaders no longer being “unequivocally opposed to any type of punitive measures by the United States” and their being in favor of the sort of punishment that Hannah favors. And if the “Washington conference” to which Hannah refers is the Foreign Policy Initiative event that I reported here — which I strongly suspect it may be, as both Hannah and Harold Rhode were sitting behind me grumbling to each other about the pro-engagement bent of Sadjadpour’s panel — then it’s probably worth pointing out as well that Sadjadpour expressed strong skepticism toward sanctions, noting that Iran’s “regime never placed high priority on its peoples’ economic well-being.” (I’ve sent an email to Karim for clarification on this.) Read more

This morning on ABC’s Good Morning America, former Bush adviser Karl Rove advised President Obama to “pay very close attention to the people you have put in command of the operation in Afghanistan” for their recommendations on strategy. Host Diane Sawyer than pointed out that if we’re listening to Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, they’re saying that “the reason we’re in the situation we’re in now is that this war was under-resourced, including during the Bush administration years.”

Rove quickly disputed those comments, saying, “I don’t believe that at the time, the military was saying we need significantly more. If there had been that cry, I suspect the previous administration would have been very responsive to it.” When Sawyer asked him if he was blaming the generals for not asking for more troops, Rove replied:

ROVE: No, I’m not. No. No. No. I’m saying that the United States had what, at the time, the military felt was an appropriate level of resources, and in retrospect, everybody now, says, I suspect, I wish we would have been doing more because the enemy, particularly as Iraq got better, the jihadists and al Qaeda needed a place to go, and they went to the Horn of Africa and they went to Pakistan and began to revitalize the efforts to attack Afghanistan.

As that grew, additional resources were sent by this administration and the previous administration to Afghanistan. But in retrospect, I think a lot of military experts say, we wish we would have been doing more. But that wasn’t what was going on at the time.

Watch it:

In 2008, Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul, specifically asked the Bush administration for more troops for Afghanistan, but was rebuffed:

“There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in his first interview since being fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.” By late last summer, he decided to tell George W. Bush’s White House what he knew it did not want to hear: He needed 30,000 more troops. He wanted to send some to the country’s east to bolster other U.S. forces, and some to the south to assist overwhelmed British and Canadian units in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Bush administration opted not to act on McKiernan’s request and instead set out to persuade NATO allies to contribute more troops.

The war in Iraq was the main reason that Afghanistan was under-resourced. In July 2008, Mullen said, “I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq.” Military officials have said that the Taliban was pretty much gone in 2002, but regrouped when the Bush administration decided to shift resources and invade Iraq.

Transcript: Read more

Last week, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio cited a federal law which allows him to determine if someone is an “illegal” based on their clothing, speech, and conduct. However, Matt Bunk of the Arizona Capitol Times points out that no such language exists in any federal immigration law and that the document that Arpaio continuously referenced and passed out at a press conference is actually a legal analysis published by a designated hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is conducting an investigation into allegations of racial profiling and civil rights abuses on behalf of Arpaio’s deputies who have been empowered to enforce immigration law on the streets of Maricopa County by virtue of the 287(g) agreement they have with federal immigration authorities. When the Department of Homeland Security handed Arpaio a new contract that will only allow his agency to check the immigration status of jail inmates, Arpaio defiantly pledged to continue going after immigrants just as he’s always done and cited a federal law which he claimed justified the controversial tactics his deputies employ.

But Bunk was puzzled when Arpaio passed out a copy of Section 8, USC 1324 which stated that “evasive, nervous, or erratic behavior; dress or speech indicating foreign citizenship; and presence in an area known to contain a concentration of illegal aliens” should help officers determine whether a person is in the country illegally. However, there isn’t any citation of that text in the actual US federal code. The language Arpaio cites is present in a document posted by a hate group which explicitly warns that it is only an analysis of federal law and should not be used as a substitute for legal advice.

Arpaio initially told Bunk that the document he disseminated was an actual copy of US code which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had confirmed as valid. When pressed, Arpaio admitted that the document might not be part of federal law. Nonetheless, he insisted that it doesn’t make a difference whether the text he cites is law or analysis:

“I thought it was a law. I don’t know what you call it. I still think there’s a federal law out there that gives me the authority to do this, I might not have the right one, but there is one out there. When they [ICE] won’t take them, I’ll take them to Border Patrol. So let’s see what happens now. How can you tell Border Patrol that you can’t take them? If mine are illegal and they don’t take them, are they going to take the other ones that they find?”

Arpaio still believes there’s a law somewhere out there that allows him to “detain an individual for a brief warrantless interrogation.” His next immigrant “crime sweep” is scheduled for later this week.