Today, the Senate voted 60 to 39 in favor of cloture and effectively ended debate on the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill without considering an amendment proposed by Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) which sought to cut off financing for the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 survey unless it added a question about citizenship. Vitter, however, did not go down without a fight. In a final floor speech before the vote, Vitter denied criticism that his amendment was anti-immigrant and demanded an apology from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) for promoting inaccurate accusations:

It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me — some of the statements that have been made about it…the Majority Leader called my amendment “anti-immigrant”…Senator Reid said my effort is akin to the activities in the 1950s and 1960s to intimidate Black citizens and try to get them to stay away from voting in the voting booth. I take personal offense to that. I think there’s no reasonable comparison and I ask Senator Reid to apologize to me for that outrageous statement on the Senate floor…

It’s interesting in this debate that the other side has been flailing around for an argument against my amendment. It’s interesting that nobody’s argued — that I’ve heard — that reapportionment should be done counting citizens and non-citizens. That that’s more consistent with the notion of Congress being the representative body of citizens of the United States.

Watch it:

If Vitter were asking for nothing more than a “simple citizenship question,” as he repeatedly claimed throughout his floor speech, Reid’s remarks may have been out of line. However, Vitter consistently justified his amendment by claiming that states with many immigrants would steal the representatives of states with few immigrants if non-citizens aren’t excluded from congressional apportionment decisions. Considering the fact that Vitter’s amendment didn’t contain any language stipulating a change in the way representatives are apportioned, it can only be assumed that he was hoping to limit the enumeration of non-citizens by discouraging them from participating.

Deliberately discouraging non-citizens from participating in the Census and deterring African Americans from voting have one major aspect in common: the violation of the Constitution. The 14th Amendment made African American slaves citizens with voting rights and also stipulated that representatives would be apportioned according to “the whole number of persons in each State.” Along those lines, Vitter’s critics actually have suggested that “reapportionment should be done counting citizens and non-citizens” because the Constitution says so.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) called Vitter’s amendment a “transparent political stunt” that would’ve cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nearly every major U.S. plan for Afghanistan under serious consideration by the Obama administration as it deliberates its options involves some form of an expanded train-and-equip program for the Afghan security forces. General Stanley McChrystal’s leaked assessment calls for expanding the Afghan National Army to 240,000 and the Afghan National Police to 160,000. Influential lawmakers like Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) — respectively the chairs of the Senate’s Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — are skeptical of sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but agree with McChrystal that the United States must rapidly build Afghanistan’s security forces.

With an apparent consensus on the need to train more Afghan security personnel more rapidly, it’s instructive to take a look at the United States’ smaller scale efforts to build security forces elsewhere in the Middle East. On Tuesday, I attended an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Yezid Sayigh’s report on security sector reform in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen. Sayigh’s presentation made several interesting points that should have a direct impact on U.S. decision makers and the implementers, most likely in the military, as they prepare for a larger train-and-equip effort in Afghanistan.

First, Sayigh noted that U.S. and EU efforts tend to have competing priorities — in the cases of Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen, embedding security forces in a democratic rule of law framework versus building an effective counterterrorism force. In the cases he studied, Sayigh found that U.S. and EU efforts tend to focus on creating special counterterrorism units to the detriment of the rest of the security sector, and these new CT units are then prime targets for capture by political factions. Nicole Ball, a panelist at the event, later made the point that even solely CT-focused efforts wind up unsuccessful at achieving CT objective.

Second, success in building and reforming security sectors is possible when there is local ownership of the overall effort. As Sayigh told the attendees, “no amount of external coercion or bribery will work without local ownership.” He cites the relative success in reforming the Palestinian Authority’s security sector under Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad in 2007 and 2008.

These two main points have important implications for an expanded training effort in Afghanistan. The most important in my view is the need to get buy-in for the expanded effort from President Hamid Karzai and his new government, especially the defense ministry. Current Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak has long argued for a bigger Afghan army, and should he remain defense minister it’s likely he and his ministry will be on board with an expanded training mission. U.S. and NATO country diplomats should also work to make sure the opposition to Karzai, such as Abdullah Abdullah’s political faction, also support the new training program.

After buy-in is obtained, the United States will have to avoid Karzai politicizing the security sector. While Karzai has so far avoided overly politicizing Afghanistan’s national security forces, leaders with dubious legitimacy will always face the temptation to create regime protection forces loyal to themselves rather than professional security forces loyal to the state. U.S. and NATO diplomats and military trainers will have to work in tandem to ensure Karzai does not go down the path of security force politicization. Such politicization has occurred in Iraq, where former mayor Najim Abed al-Jabouri has stated entire divisions of the Iraqi army are beholden to the various political parties there. In addition, the United States needs to be careful to not let elite units like the ANA’s commando force become pawns in political jockeying in Kabul.

These largely political issues need to be considered by decision-makers here in Washington and implementers in the military as they embark on an expanded training effort. The key takeaway from our much smaller-scale efforts in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen is that these political issues can make or break a training effort, and are therefore integral to success. Fortunately, Afghans regard the ANP and ANA generally positively, and Karzai has shown little inclination toward politicizing them so far. The key for the United States is to keep its eyes open for signs of politicization and make sure Karzai and other Afghan government and political figures stay bought-in to the expanded training program. This task may be difficult, but it’s not insurmountable.

In the midst of a profile of Secretary of State Clinton, Joe Klein drops a pretty shocking tidbit:

The Palestinians are weak and divided. The Israelis have been difficult, as always: whenever Mitchell raises East Jerusalem in talks with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli stands up and walks out of the room. Despite Netanyahu’s momentary, tactical enthusiasm for peace talks, his Likud Party has always favored the de facto incorporation of Palestinian lands into the state of Israel.

This is how Israel treats the guarantor of its security? It seems to me that if Prime Minister Netanyahu was actually serious about getting the U.S. to move with greater urgency on Iran — instead of just using the Iran threat (and the Goldstone Report, and whatever else is at hand at any given moment) to forestall serious 2-state negotiations — he might instruct his foreign minister not to behave this way toward the president’s special envoy. That he does not tells you a lot about what the current Israeli government’s actual priorities are.

Klein’s point about the Likud Party’s policy toward the taking of Palestinian lands is also important, and far too little reported. The Likud Party constitution states that “The government headed by the Likud will keep Jerusalem the unified capital of Israel under Israeli sovereignty.” Understanding the importance of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, saying that Netanyahu supports a negotiated solution but won’t allow for Palestinian sovereignty of Palestinian areas of Jerusalem is like saying that Abbas supports a Jewish state as long as it’s in Burma. It’s a non-starter.

In the face of protests by the United States and the international community, under Netanyahu the Israelis have in fact been ramping up efforts to preclude any division of Jerusalem by strengthening the Jewish presence in Palestinian areas. A new study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that, since 1967, “Israel has expropriated some 35 per cent of East Jerusalem’s territory, over 24,000 dunums of land, from its Palestinian owners”:

The study by the Germany-based organisation examined the building policies in Jerusalem intended to change the facts on the ground and ensure a solid Jewish majority in the city, said a statement e-mailed to The Jordan Times yesterday.

“The study highlights that since 1967, Israeli governments developed building and planning policies that were designed primarily according to the current struggle occurring in Jerusalem. The central tool used by the Israeli governments was the expropriation of land from private hands,” the press release said, adding: “Since 1967, Israel has expropriated over 24,000 dunums, mostly from their Palestinian owners.”

The report, which was prepared in partnership with the Macro Centre for Political Economics, indicated that about 50,000 housing units were built exclusively for the Jewish Israeli population within the framework of new neighbourhoods/settlements, while for the Palestinian population, Israel has built fewer than 600 housing units since 1967 in the scope of government assistance, the most recent of which was built over 30 years ago.

To be fair, this isn’t just a problem of the Likud. All Israeli governments since 1967 are implicated in the attempt to change the demographic character of Jerusalem in order to diminish the Palestinian’s claim to it. The latest report only confirms work done by other organizations like Israel’s B’Tselem, who report that “the government of Israel’s primary goal in Jerusalem has been to create a demographic and geographic situation that will thwart any future attempt to challenge Israeli sovereignty over the city.” Israel’s policy, according to B’Tselem, “gravely infringes the rights of residents of East Jerusalem and flagrantly breaches international law.”

In March, an EU report accused the Israeli government “of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of ‘actively pursuing the illegal annexation’ of East Jerusalem.”

The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority’s credibility and weakening support for peace talks. “Israel’s actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making,” says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.

Probably shouldn’t hold your breath for Congress to jump on this. On a GOP delegation to Israel in August, Rep. Eric Cantor spoke out strongly in favor of Israel’s right to evict Palestinian families to make way for Jewish settlers.

Americans for Peace Now’s Noam Shelef writes “Rising tensions in Jerusalem can be a matter of life and death. Past Israeli actions that were perceived as efforts to change the status quo in the Old City — such as the opening of the Hasmonean Tunnel in 1996 or the visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon in 2000 — triggered riots that caused many casualties.” In the event that continuing Israeli provocations in East Jerusalem result in a violent Palestinian response — as many increasingly fear they might — you can bet Congress will hop to it to sign another AIPAC-penned resolution blaming the Palestinians for everything.