As greenhouse pollution continues to build in the atmosphere, 2010 is entering the history books as the hottest year on record. A year of unprecedented extreme weather disasters, 2010 saw tens of thousands of people killed and millions affected by our increasingly dangerous climate. The year is ending with yet more climate disasters, from floods in Australia to winter tornadoes across America:

Parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee were on the lookout for more twisters after several touched down Friday — including one that killed three people in an Arkansas town. Two more people died in southern Missouri. Three people died in Cincinnati, a hamlet of about 100 residents about three miles from the Oklahoma border. An elderly couple died in their home, while a dairy farmer was killed while milking his cows.

The tornadoes are part of an “unusual” storm front fed by “warm, moist air in place over the region.” On the colder edge of the front, “the storm responsible for the deadly tornado is also bringing a dangerous winter storm to the West and Midwest,” with up to three feet of new snow from California to Idaho.

Meanwhile, Australia is being ravaged by unprecedented flooding, following tremendous rainfall for months, compounded by the Christmas Day landfall of Cyclone Tasha. Floods now cover an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced millions of dollars of relief funding as she described the record-breaking floods:

Some communities are seeing floodwaters higher than they’ve seen in decades, and for some communities floodwaters have never reached these levels before [in] the time that we have been recording floods. For many communities we haven’t even seen the peak of the floodwaters yet, that’s a number of days away.

“Some sections of coastal Queensland received over four feet of rain from September through November,” meteorologist Jeff Masters reports. The floods, which have wiped out crops, drowned livestock, and disrupted the largest coal ports in the world, are expected to cause at least $1 billion in damage.

“The science is cooked,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told Politico today. Unfortunately, the cold facts of science are that the planet itself is cooking.

Arguing for the need to develop greater missile defense against Iran, Cliff May, president of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gets a little nostalgic for the Cold War. “The Soviet Union,” he writes, “though an evil empire, was not an irrational one“:

Soviet rulers did not believe that martyrs for Communism would be greeted in Paradise by black-eyed virgins or that an apocalypse would summon the Mahdi (the Islamic messiah) from occultation.

The familiar claim here is that we can’t rely on deterrence with Iran because the country is run by suicidal jihadists. But as I’ve written before, there’s no evidence for the idea that Iran’s leaders desire martyrdom, or that Iran’s calculations are driven by a desire to immanentize the eschaton. As Andrew Grotto showed in an article last year for the Brown Journal of World Affairs, the “Iran as martyr state” argument rests upon claims from a few conservative op-eds and a comically shoddy report by a right-wing Israeli think tank, and has been bounced around the internet such that it now represents an article of faith for the “Bomb Iran” set.

As to May’s pining for the more rational strategic logic that obtained during the Cold War, this is, of course, precisely the opposite of what neoconservatives were saying about the Soviets at the time. As historian Gary Dorrien recounted in his book Imperial Designs, according to the neoconservative-dominated Team B report during the Carter administration, “Soviet leaders did not regard nuclear war as an unthinkable evil, and they were not deterred by a so-called balance of terror“:

Team B contended that the intelligence community overemphasized hard data about Soviet capabilities and ignored the Soviet objective of conquering the world.

[According to Team B]: “For unless we are prepared to acknowledge that our adversary is ‘different’ and unless we are willing to make the mental effort required to understand him on our own terms, we have no choice but to fall back on the only alternative position available, namely the postulate that his basic motivation resembles ours.” [...]

[Team B] asserted that while Americans used force only reluctantly as an occasionally necessary departure from normal life, Soviet leaders embraced and admired force: “The Soviet Union, to an extent inconceivable to the average Westerner, relies on force as a standard instrument of policy.”

In other words, neocons back then were saying exactly the same things about the Soviets as they’re saying now about Iran: They don’t think like us, so quaint ideas about “rationality” and “deterrence” don’t apply.

As Fred Kaplan wrote in 2004, “The Team B report (which has since been declassified) turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point.” Team B was wildly incorrect about both the nature and extent of the Soviet threat. This hasn’t stopped today’s neocons, however, from trying to rerun the exercise in regard to the Islamic threat — with predictably similar results. I think it’s pretty safe to say, though, that, now as then, the goal isn’t really to accurately assess the nature and extent of the threat to the United States, but rather to promote a conception of that threat that accords with and facilitates conservative domestic political objectives.

In a recent Newsweek interview, the Cordoba Initiative’s Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf shared what lessons he drew from the past summer’s controversy over the planned Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center:

We learned a number of lessons, the most important of which is this: the real battlefront is not between the West and the Muslim world. It’s between the moderates of all faith traditions and the extremists or radicals—and I include in that the agnostic and atheist community. The radicals are unwitting partners. They fuel each other.

Asked to respond to those who “argue that Cordoba House is a symbolic celebration of Muslim hegemony,” Rauf had this to say:

Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them.” We have said what we plan to do. We’re inviting people of all faiths to help us build this vision. Come and listen to us, learn about us, engage with us, talk about us, see if this is, in fact, Muslim hegemony. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but if we do not do this, the alternative is going to be disaster. We will go down the route of bin Laden and the pastor [in Florida who threatened to burn the Quran] and insulting cartoons. And we just can’t do that—we can’t do that anymore. We’ve got to put a stop to this insanity.

Speaking of insanity, here’s conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney on Fox News the other night, talking about Rauf:

Guys like Feisal Abdul Rauf who are prime practitioners of this stealth jihad tend to get a pass or worse yet are sometimes lionized as moderate Muslims who are the opponents of this Jihadism when in fact they are simply prosecuting it by different means. [...]

A mosque that is used to promote a seditious program, which is what Sharia is, as practiced by Feisal Rauf, as practiced by Osama bin Laden, as practiced by the Saudis, as practiced by the Iranians, and so many others, that is not a protected religious practice, that is in fact sedition.

Segments like this are a great demonstration of why a recent study found Fox News viewers to be the most misinformed. Not only does Gaffney deploy his tendentious and unscholarly definition of sharia (the collective term for a scripturally-based code of Muslim conduct) to cast Rauf as an ally of Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda as an ally of Iran, he then goes on to assert that the religious practices of a certain class of Americans — sharia-observant American Muslims — are “seditious” and thus not deserving of constitutional protections. And host Eric Bolling can barely nod fast enough in agreement.

Gaffney specializes in these sorts of irresponsible accusations. Among his previous targets was Rashad Hussein, the Obama administration’s representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, whom Gaffney claimed represented a threat based on Hussein’s having memorized the Qur’an. Gaffney’s organization, the Center for Security Policy, also released a report in 2009 accusing key members of the Obama administration of working with “the Iran lobby.”

Hilariously, Bolling refers to Gaffney as “the expert on this [sharia],” but, as Gaffney himself admitted during the Murfreesboro trial, he’s no expert on sharia. But that doesn’t stop him from going on TV to pose as one, or Fox News and others from inviting him on to do it.

Our guest blogger is Elon Green, a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

During George W. Bush’s presidency, it was not uncommon for terrorism suspects to be tried, convicted and receive lengthy sentences in American courts. These numbers include Mohammed Jabarah, Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” Bryant Neal Vinas, Mohammed Junaid Babar and Shahawar Matin Siraj — all of whom will be imprisoned for decades.

It is therefore disappointing to see Rep. Lamar Smith, the incumbent chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, act as if trying terrorism cases on American soil is an idea devised by the Obama Administration. In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Smith suggests the conviction of Ahmed Ghailani is an unfortunate precedent and a reason to favor military tribunals over the courts:

HH: In terms of other oversight issues, Congressman Smith, with the border, with Gitmo not closing, and that fiasco we had in New York City, do you think your committee will be looking at stopping additional trials of terror suspects in the United States?

LS: Well, as you say, they tried a terrorist in New York City. That was supposed to be their best case, they had their best witnesses. That was the one that they were going to use as an example and say you know, here, yes we can conduct a trial of a terrorist in the United States. And even if they get some rights as citizens, we’re still going to be able to find them guilty on all counts. Well as you know, this individual was found guilty on one count of, I think, 254. And even though he was found guilty of building the explosives, he wasn’t found guilty of killing, I think, 254 innocent people who were killed, among them several dozen Americans. So in that situation, it clearly did not work as the administration had planned, and it kind of blew up in their face, and the judge didn’t allow some of the evidence and some of the testimony that would have been allowed if this individual had been tried at Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, the so-called Gitmo.

It’s certainly true that Judge Lewis Kaplan excluded evidence and testimony. Unmentioned by Rep. Smith — rather conveniently — is Judge Kaplan’s reason for doing so: the evidence was obtained after Ghailani was allegedly tortured, rendering it fruit of the poisonous tree.

Furthermore, the notion that the excluded evidence would have been admissible in a military tribunal setting is misguided. Experts across the political spectrum, including former Bush assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith, disagree.

Rep. Smith displays a similar lack of awareness of current court cases. In addition to the convictions listed above, New York has been awash in terrorism cases for some time. As the Daily News noted nearly a year ago:

Pending right now in the Southern District of New York is a list of terrorism cases from around the world: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, North Africa.

In fact, a week ago, Manhattan’s 2nd Circuit upheld the conviction of Hassan Abu-Jihaad, “a former member of the U.S. Navy of leaking classified ship movements to a jihadist organization.”

The Ghailani case was not “an example” for future terrorism trials; it was simply one of many.

Earlier this month, audio tapes from the Nixon White House were revealed to the public that captured a shocking exchange between Nixon and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the tapes, Kissinger responds to an appeal made by Israeli leader Golda Meir to Soviet leaders to allow the emigration of Russian Jews to her country. He tells Nixon that the “emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Since these comments were revealed to the public, there has been an uproar in the media, with the New York Times writing that the tapes showed that Kissinger was “brutally dismissive” of human rights concerns related to Soviet Jews.

The former secretary of state has gone on a media offensive, attempting to save his public image among the media furor. In an op-ed piece published Sunday, Kissinger wrote that he was sorry he “made that remark 37 years ago,” and argued that it was taken out of context. Curiously, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, while condemning the comments, also rose to Kissinger’s defense, saying, “I think what Kissinger said is horrendous, offensive, painful, but also I’m not willing to judge him. The atmosphere in the Nixon White House was one of bigotry, prejudice, anti-Semitism, the intimidation of the anti-Semitism, the stories, the bigotry.” David Harris of the American Jewish Committee offered a similar defense: “Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question of where his loyalties lay.”

But what both the press that is reporting about Kissinger’s comments and what his most passionate defenders are omitting is that these revealed remarks only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the former secretary of state’s complicity in human rights violations. The mentality revealed in his remarks about Soviet Jews are not an aberration but a major feature of his approach to foreign policy: disregarding human rights in pursuit of other strategic goals. Kissinger has a long history of complicity in major human rights abuses in every corner of the globe, one that is rarely reported on in the press in its reports on the former secretary of state. Here are just a few of these abuses:

- Bangladesh: In 1971, Bangladesh, which was at the time East Pakistan, declared its independence from Pakistan. The Pakistani military responded with a brutal military campaign that included massive killings and the estimated systematic raping of nearly 200,000 Bangladeshi women. When Daka Consul General Archer Blood and other American diplomatic staff began to protest the Pakistani army’s behavior to Washington, Nixon and Kissinger had him dismissed. During the height of the atrocities, Kissinger sent a message to Pakistan General Yahya Khan, congratulating him on his “delicacy and tact” in his military campaigns in Bangladesh. When Kissinger received word that massive famines were going to spring up in the country in 1971, he warned USAID to try to avoid helping, saying that Bangladesh was “not necessarily our basket case.” Soon after becoming secretary of state, Kissinger downgraded the American diplomatic staff who had signed onto a protest of Pakistani atrocities in 1971.

- Cambodia: Kissinger was one of the chief masterminds of the Nixon administration’s secret and illegal bombing campaign of Cambodia — he wanted the bombing of “anything that flies, on anything that moves” and warned that it must be secretly done to avoid congressional scrutiny — the extent of which was not discovered until President Bill Clinton declassified related documents in 2000. By the end of the American bombing campaign of Cambodia, the country was perhaps the “most heavily bombed country in history.” The bombings killed more than a half a million people, and were a major factor in the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

- Chile: In 1973, Kissinger aided and abetted a right-wing military faction that deposed the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The faction then installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to torture and/or murder tens of thousands of peaceful dissidents in the country. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” Kissinger said in rationalizing his actions, falsely accusing Allende of being a communist and essentially declaring that the United States should have the power to decide Chile’s government. Due to his complicity in bringing Pinochet to power, Kissinger was summoned for questioning and has arrest warrants out in his name in Chile, Argentina, and France. Since the warrants were issued he has not returned to any of those three countries.

- Indonesia and East Timor: In 1975, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger met with Indonesian’s leader, General Suharto. During the meeting, Ford and Kissinger essentially gave “full approval” to Suharto to invade neighboring East Timor. In the resulting invasion, hundreds of thousands of Timorese civilians were massacred. Kissinger repeatedly denied that he had such conversations with Suharto, but these denials were found to be false after the declassification of government documents in 2001.

- Iraq: In 1975 Kissinger both encouraged a Kurdish revolt against Saddam Hussein and then abandoned the rebels to be killed following invocations from the Shah of Iran. Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial revealed that Kissinger was a major Iraq policy advisor to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. He warned Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson of the same analogy he used during the Vietnam years, that troop withdrawals would be like “salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Woodward writes that when Gerson asked Kissinger why he supported the war, he replied, “Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,’ … In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. ‘And we need to humiliate them’ … In Manhattan, this position got him into trouble, particularly at cocktail parties, he noted with a smile.”

- Vietnam: Kissinger, in a possible violation of the Logan Act, helped scuttle peace talks in 1968, prolonging the Vietnam War to advantage Richard Nixon in the presidential election. This extension of the war cost thousands of American lives and those of more than a million people in Indochina.

Viewed with the context of Kissinger’s actions while he was a senior official in multiple American administrations, his comments about Soviet Jews are hardly surprising. Unfortunately, most of the major media’s reporting about Kissinger’s comments does not include this history of complicity in human rights abuses.

In fact, despite his complicity in these abuses, the former secretary of state continues to be a lauded public figure in the United States. He is regularly uncritically featured on major news programs, was recently honored at the State Department, and was even cast as a cartoon character’s voice on a children’s TV show. If history is any judge, this latest revelation about Kissinger will soon be forgotten by major media and elites in the public sphere. But that does not change the actual facts and Kissinger’s long, sordid history of human rights abuses.

The hard-right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war.

Heritage fellows held event after event, wrote article after article, report after report, blog post after blog post, attacking the treaty. Heritage Fellow James Carafano, in columns for the Daily Caller, urged the Tea Party “tackle defense issues.” This summer, it launched a 501(c)(4) entity called Heritage Action for America and chose two issues to focus on: spending and stopping START. Josh Rogin reported in July:

Heritage Action for America was established as 501c4 organization, which means it can do direct lobbying on the Hill and broad grassroots lobbying around the country. Killing START is one of the group’s two keystone efforts, along with a drive to push a repeal of the new health-care bill in the House. The organization is now circulating a petition to its 671,000 dues-paying members featuring a video of Romney criticizing the treaty… And Heritage Action is not stopping there. The group has a detailed plan to target lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and persuading wavering senators to oppose the treaty. Votes up for grabs include moderate Republicans like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, but also conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, D-NE, and Evan Bayh, D-IN.

Heritage even produced a video that warned that, if START passed, it would lead to a nuclear attack in 2018.

Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.

Cross-posted at the Wonk Room.

The hard right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war.

Heritage fellows held event after event, wrote article after article, report after report, blog post after blog post, attacking the treaty. Heritage Fellow James Carafano in columns for the Daily Caller urged the Tea Party “tackle defense issues.” This summer it launched a 501c4 called Heritage Action for America and chose two issues to focus on: spending and stopping START. Josh Rogin reported in July:

Heritage Action for America was established as 501c4 organization, which means it can do direct lobbying on the Hill and broad grassroots lobbying around the country. Killing START is one of the group’s two keystone efforts, along with a drive to push a repeal of the new health-care bill in the House. The organization is now circulating a petition to its 671,000 dues-paying members featuring a video of Romney criticizing the treaty… And Heritage Action is not stopping there. The group has a detailed plan to target lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and persuading wavering senators to oppose the treaty. Votes up for grabs include moderate Republicans like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, but also conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, D-NE, and Evan Bayh, D-IN.

Heritage even produced a video that warned that if START passed it would lead to a nuclear attack in 2018.

Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.

The Washington Post reports that four prominent Republicans — former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani, former Bush administration homeland security adviser Fran Townsend, former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey — told “a forum of cheering Iranian exiles” in Paris “that President Obama’s policy toward Iran amounts to futile appeasement that will never persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear projects.”

The four “demanded that Obama instead take the controversial Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK) opposition group off the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations and incorporate it into efforts to overturn the mullah-led government in Tehran”:

“Appeasement of dictators leads to war, destruction and the loss of human lives,” Giuliani declared. “For your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just really a disgrace.”

The four GOP figures appeared at a rally organized by the French Committee for a Democratic Iran, a pressure group formed to support MEK.

It should be obvious that describing Obama’s Iran policy — which includes a new set of both multilateral and unilateral sanctions — as “appeasement” indicates either a misunderstanding of the policy, or a misunderstanding of what constitutes “appeasement.” (Though, to be fair, conservatives tend to use “appeasement” loosely as a general term for “foreign policy I don’t like.”)

As for the MEK, after the GOP’s victory in November I predicted that we’d be seeing more efforts by pro-war conservatives to set the group up as an Iranian version of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Very much like the INC, the MEK has no genuine base of support in their own country — its real base is found among American neoconservatives.

Daniel Luban profiled the MEK last November:

Founded as a militant group with an ideology combining aspects of Islam and Marxism, the group is frequently described today as “cult-like,” built around a personality cult centered on leader Maryam Rajavi. [...]

The group’s hatred of the Islamic Republic led it to ally with Saddam Hussein, and it fought on the Iraqi side of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Following the Gulf War, “the group reportedly assisted in the Iraqi Republican Guard’s bloody crackdown on Iraqi Shia and Kurds who rose up against Saddam Hussein’s regime; press reports cite MEK leader Maryam Rajavi encouraging MEK members to ‘take the Kurds under your tanks,’” according to the State Department. The group’s alliance with Saddam made it widely despised among the Iranian community at large, as it remains to this day

Luban notes that the MEK’s “militant anti-Iranian stance has made it a favorite of hawks in Washington”:

The MEK’s neoconservative supporters continue to push for it to be taken off the State Department terror list, which it has been on since 1997. One of the many ironies about the MEK is that, for all the groundless allegations that hawks made about Saddam Hussein’s connections to terrorist groups during the runup to the Iraq war, the terrorist group with perhaps the closest links to Saddam was one that the hawks themselves supported.

Human Rights Watch also released a report in 2005 detailing the group’s record of subjecting dissident members to torture and solitary confinement.

Leaving aside the spectacle of prominent conservatives going abroad to criticize the administration’s foreign policy on behalf of an Iranian exile group largely despised by Iranians, there’s actually a real question here of whether Giuliani, Townsend, Ridge, and Mukasey have violated U.S. law in regard to “material support” for terrorism.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project that “the First Amendment does not protect humanitarian groups or others who advise foreign terrorist organizations, even if the support is aimed at legal activities or peaceful settlement of dispute”:

In a case that weighed free speech against national security, the court voted 6 to 3 to uphold a federal law banning “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations. That ban holds, the court said, even when the offerings are not money or weapons but things such as “expert advice or assistance” or “training” intended to instruct in international law or appeals to the United Nations.

Over to you, Attorney General Holder.

President Obama became the first Democratic President in history today to have an arms-control treaty ratified on his watch. The New START Treaty was approved in the Senate by a vote of 71-26. Thirteen Republicans, a quarter of the Republican caucus, broke with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). This is the first time an arms control treaty has ever passed without the support of the minority leader. As Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said yesterday, “In today’s Senate, 70 votes is yesterday’s 95.”

A year ago, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his vision of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons. The ratification of the START treaty is a small but important step toward this goal. It ensures that nuclear stability is maintained and lays the groundwork for future negotiations with Russia, paving the way for deeper cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. While the START treaty has been called a modest treaty, the implications of its failure would have been anything but and would have caused dangerous upheaval in the post-Cold War nuclear order.

Republican opposition looked increasingly petty toward the end of the START debate, with most complaints relating to Senate process. Leslie Gelb, president-emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that opposition to New START “seriously damages [Republican] credibility on national security.”

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Managing Director of the National Security and International Policy Program at the Center for American Progress.

The Obama administration’s forthcoming executive order on detention will establish a meaningful review process for Guantanamo detainees held in law of war detention. This type of detention has been endorsed by the Supreme Court and has been consistently upheld by lower courts in the ongoing habeas corpus cases. More importantly, this move will allow the Obama administration to regain some of the initiative on detention policy that has been dominated by Congress for much of the last 18 months.

Legal authority for the detention of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan comes from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on September 18, 2001. The Supreme Court endorsed this detention authority in 2004 in Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, and lower courts have further refined this authority in the numerous habeas proceedings brought by Guantanamo detainees. It is incorrect to claim that this type of detention is unlawful or unconstitutional.

The Obama administration’s extensive review of the cases of Guantanamo detainees it inherited from its predecessor determined that 48 detainees would be held in this type of law of war detention. This Executive Order is a significant improvement on the process, such as it was, created by the Bush administration and in fact goes well beyond what is required by the Geneva Conventions.

Detainees will be represented by attorneys, the review will be conducted by a broad group of agencies — not just the military, and the review board will be separated from those who made previous decisions on that detainee’s detention. This is a real adversarial process that the American people can have confidence will come to the best possible determination about the necessity of each individual detainee’s continued detention.

Make no mistake: Guantanamo is a stain on America, one that seriously weakens our overall counterterrorism strategy. America’s military and intelligence agencies all conclude that Guantanamo provides our terrorist enemies significant propaganda victories and boosts their recruitment, creating more terrorists than it has ever detained. Closing it is a national security imperative and the Obama administration is absolutely correct to continue its push to do that.

Unfortunately, many in Congress have chosen the politics of fear, and tried to tie President Obama’s hands and prevent the closure of Guantanamo. Up to this point, the administration had not found a way to effectively push back. The most important aspect of this Executive Order is that it can be the start of that effort. It will only get more difficult in the next Congress and the Obama administration needs to take back some of the initiative on detention policy, or it risks being forced to return to the disastrous detention policies of the Bush administration.

The process for law of war detention contained in the new executive order is confined to the legacy cases at Guantanamo the Obama administration inherited from its predecessor. It is a genuine effort to establish a workable system out of the chaos of the Bush era that protects both the security of the American people and the rights of those detained at Guantanamo, all in an incredibly hostile political environment. This move should provide the Obama administration the platform from which to hold its ground against a new Congress that appears determined to use U.S. counterterrorism policy for political gain.

Yesterday, the Census Bureau released a new congressional apportionment map which gives more Congressional seats to the South and the West at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest. One of the states that will lose a congressional seat is Louisiana.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) released a statement yesterday expressing his outrage. According to Vitter, undocumented immigrants are to blame for Louisiana’s loss of a congressional seat:

“Even though we’ve been expecting this, the confirmation that Louisiana will lose a congressional seat is frustrating. Last year, I tried to prevent this from happening with my amendment to require a citizenship question on the census and to prevent the counting of illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment,” said Vitter.

“Now, Louisiana stands to lose clout in Congress, while states that welcome illegal immigrants stand to unfairly benefit from artificially inflated population totals.”

As Vitter notes, last year, he and Robert Bennett (R-UT) attempted to add an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill that would require the U.S. Census Bureau to add a question about immigration status to its 2010 survey. According to Vitter, undocumented immigrants should be specifically identified and cut out of congressional reapportionment decisions because they “dilute” the voting power of the rest of the population.

The Fourteenth Amendment clearly stipulates that representation should be determined by “counting the whole number of persons in each State.” Asking a citizenship question would’ve likely dissuaded undocumented immigrants from participating in the Census in the first place. Widespread non-participation would have lead to inaccurate demographic information and costly mistakes in infrastructure, education, and health care planning. That’s why children, ex-felons, legal residents, and several other nonvoters are also included in the census apportionment data.

For those reasons, Vitter’s proposal fell flat on its face. The census questionnaire didn’t include a single question on immigration status. So, it’s odd that Vitter is now complaining that “states that welcome illegal immigrants” are going to benefit at Louisiana’s expense when he doesn’t even have any census data to base that on.

What the new census data does show is that the Latino population is rapidly expanding across the country and will nearly triple to about 130 million by mid-century. Of course, not all Latinos are immigrants and they’re certainly not all undocumented. Yet if Vitter’s race-baiting campaign ads are any indication, the senator of Louisiana has a hard time distinguishing between the two.

Vitter has also failed to acknowledge that migrants — many of them undocumented — have given Louisiana a much-needed population boost and helped rebuild its infrastructure following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Demographers point to the state’s sluggish growth over the past decade that put it “on track to lose a seat in the House of Representatives and one of its nine electoral votes anyway.”

The ratification of the New START treaty is a huge victory for President Obama and huge blow to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and the Republican Senate leadership. START also confirms what progressives have been saying on other issues — namely, that when the White House stands and fights and refuses to give ground it can win.

The treaty fight turned into a game of chicken in the last six weeks in which Kyl was determined to delay, and Democrats were determined to hold a vote. The question was always who would swerve. Kyl seemed supremely confident that the White House would lose its nerve, but it didn’t and pressed on. What makes this an even more humiliating defeat for Kyl is that he didn’t swerve — he, with Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and at the end Lindsey Graham (R-SC), pressed for delay up until the very end — instead he drove head on. But in the collision, we discovered he was driving a smart car and START supporters were driving a tank. He just got run over and embarrassingly for him, before the impact, many of his colleagues jumped out of the car.

That turned this into a stinging defeat for Senators Jon Kyl and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (as well as the Heritage foundation). They were thoroughly repudiated by more than a quarter of the Republican caucus — a shocking display of disunity after two years of almost uniform obstruction. It was indeed an epic collapse and in the end made the Senate leadership incredibly irrelevant.

Kyl was driven by radicalism not just politics. Fred Kaplan and Adam Serwer have penned excellent analyses where they argue that choosing to fight over a modest treaty was a huge mistake for Senate Republicans, since by doing so made it a much bigger victory than it would have been if they just all supported the treaty. That is no doubt correct from a political perspective. But it misses the fact that Senator Kyl and many Senate Republicans actually have extremely radical views on nuclear weapons policy.

While Kyl called the START treaty “benign” in the summer, he has doggedly pursued nuclear weapons modernization. And while he got increased funding commitments the issue that he fought hard for over the last decade was the building of an entirely new nuclear warhead, which was defeated by past Democratic congresses. If START had been delayed into the new year, it is clear that Kyl’s cost for supporting the treaty would have gone up significantly and likely would have been the Reliable Replacement Warhead that Kyl so fervently craved. So in the end it was a bad political move by Kyl to oppose the treaty, but he was driven by a far right nuclear radicalism, not just a desire to defeat the President.

The White House and John Kerry threw down and caused political pain for Republicans. Over the past year, the White House and Senator John Kerry desperately tried to enlist the support of Senator Kyl. They made a massive preemptive concession by budgeting $80 billion to the nuclear weapons complex and they bent over backwards to get him on board – even flying people out to Arizona to meet with him. Kerry also did everything he could to head of process complaints. He held a huge number of hearings – with more Republican witnesses than Democrats. He delayed the committee vote until after the August recess in response to Republican demands. I worried at the time that this would just make it easier for Kyl to delay further.

But after Senator Kyl blindsided the White House and Kerry in November and said he would oppose a vote this year, they went on the offensive. Many expected the administration to relent and allow the treaty to be delayed until next year where its likelihood of passage would narrow significantly. Indeed, many reporters were already writing START’s obituary following Kyl’s statement. But the White House came out swinging and drew the line in the sand, saying no matter what a vote was going to happen this year. Case in point was Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ statement last week eviscerating Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) for demanding to read the entire treaty. DeMint quickly caved.

In other words, the Administration refused to back down and used the bully pulpit to make the case for the treaty. It hosted Colin Powell and demonstrated a show of force by bringing Henry Kissinger and others to the White House. This put Republicans on the defensive and led to a public backlash. More than 50 newspaper editorial boards came out to support the treaty eviscerating Kyl for putting politics ahead of national security. Senate Democrats took to the airwaves to attack Kyl and Republicans were seen as being irresponsible on national security. This heat on Republicans was critical to the collapse of opposition to the treaty.

Finally, this victory shows progressives can fight and win on national security issues and on nuclear policy. Republicans made all the standard arguments on missile defense, not trusting Russia, and on disarmament, but still lost. Granted progressives had the high ground when fighting on START, but progressives did not run when facing Republican attacks.

It is hard for many observers and activists to realize this, but there is no longer a post-Vietnam hang over for Democrats on foreign policy. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that Republicans have a post-Iraq credibility problem. The START victory shows that Democrats have nothing to lose politically, and in fact have much to gain, when debating and fighting with Republicans on foreign policy.

The Senate just voted 67-28 for cloture on New START. This ends debate on the treaty and means a final vote is likely tomorrow. 11 Republicans voted for cloture and in a press conference after the vote, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) said three other senators Judd Gregg (R-NH), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) are all for the treaty. Senator Kerry remarked, “In today’s Senate, 70 votes is yesterday’s 95.”

With the support of Senator Gregg that would mean 12 Republicans look set to vote for the treaty. This means more than a quarter of the Republican caucus broke with the Senate Republican leadership, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ), both of whom came out strongly against the treaty this past Sunday. The vote is a big blow to the leadership, especially to Senator Kyl, who was long seen as the Republican point man on the treaty. Kyl even held a desperate press conference today in one last attempt to whip his own party, prompting Josh Rogin to report:

Everyone here on Capitol Hill is beginning to see the ratification of New START as increasingly inevitable — everyone, that is, except for Sen. Jon Kyl.

Senator Lindsey Graham was so outraged that Republican Senators would side with Richard Lugar (R-IN), instead of Kyl, that in a press conference today, Graham actually apologized to Kyl on behalf of his Republican colleagues:

To Senator Kyl, I want to apologize to you for the way you’ve been treated by your colleagues.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post rebuked Graham:

Senators who are voting to ratify New START because they believe it’s the right thing to do should feel apologetic to Kyl for defying his wishes, even though the evidence is overwhelming that Kyl’s objections have been thoroughly addressed? Yeah, right: It’s an absolute outrage that these Senators are prioritizing their own sense of what’s right for the country and the world, over the influence, standing and fragile ego of a single fellow Senator.

Back in 2003, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) sponsored S.1545 — the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. Back then, the bill attracted co-sponsors like Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John McCain (R-AZ), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Sam Brownback (R-KS). All of those Republican senators voted against a more conservative version of the same bill this past Saturday. Hatch simply didn’t bother to show up.

Yet, Hatch couldn’t just leave it at that. The Deseret News reports:

Sen. Orrin Hatch said he skipped a vote on the failed DREAM Act over the weekend because it was a “cynical exercise in political charades” by the Senate’s Democratic leadership. [...]

“The American people sent a clear message in the November elections that they want Congress to focus on getting the economy moving,” he said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, Senate majority leaders have opted instead to move ahead with show votes aimed at currying favor with their far left political constituencies.”

The Deseret News also notes that, as recently as this past summer, Hatch was singing a much different tune. On July 7, the senator expressed his support of the DREAM Act at a town hall meeting, saying, “A lot of these kids are brought in as infants. They don’t even know that they’re not citizens until they graduate from high school…If they’ve lived good lives and they’ve done good things, why would we penalize them and not let them at least go to school?”

Hatch now claims his remarks were taken out of context.

Hatch’s flip-flop may have something to do with the fact that he’s up for reelection in 2012 and has already been identified as the tea party’s next target.

The other Republican senator from Utah, Bob Bennett, was one of three Republicans who voted in support of the DREAM Act on Saturday. He will be leaving the Senate after being stripped of his party’s nomination earlier this year by a tea party candidate.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the third highest ranking Republican, stated on the floor of the Senate this morning that he would vote to ratify the New START treaty. In supporting START, Alexander did not just issue a one-line statement. Instead, he fully justified his vote and in doing so obliterated many of the GOP talking points used against the treaty.

I will vote to ratify the New START treaty…because it leaves our country with enough nuclear warheads to blow any attacker to kingdom come. … I will vote for the treaty because it allows for inspection of Russian warheads and because our military leaders say there is nothing to interfere with the development of a missile defense system. I will vote for the treaty because the last six Republican Secretaries of State support its ratification. In short, I am convinced that Americans are safer and more secure with the New START treaty than without it.

Watch it:

Alexander’s decision to support New START should ensure that there are at least nine Republican votes for the treaty, therefore guaranteeing ratification. The vote may come later this afternoon.

His endorsement is quite a blow to Senate GOP leaders Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, who both came out strongly in opposition to the treaty on Sunday. The statements of McConnell and Kyl led to a wave of pessimism about START’s prospects, as no arms control treaty has passed without the support of the minority leader. Yet just 24 hours later, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) said he would support the treaty and Sens. Judd Gregg (R-NH), Thad Cochran (R-MS), and Bob Corker (R-TN), who voted for the treaty in committee, indicated they were likely to vote for START.

Rich Lowry of the National Review writes, “Republican opposition to New START is collapsing. One Senate source just told me the vote for ratification could go as high as 75… This is a dismaying rout.”

This past Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) railed against Democrats for using the lame duck session simply to make Republicans “look bad.” More specifically, Graham announced on CBS’ Face the Nation that Democrats pushed the DREAM Act simply to hurt the GOP’s reputation amongst Latinos:

The last two weeks have been an absolutely excruciating exercise — Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — a controversial topic. Some say the civil rights issue of our generation, others say battlefield effectiveness was passed in the lame-duck session without one amendment being offered. The DREAM Act we’ve had two votes on the DREAM Act. Controversial immigration, there was no efforts to find a common ground there, passed without the ability to amend to try to make Republicans look bad with Hispanics.

Watch it:

It’s impossible to deny that some sort of political calculation was made by Democratic leadership when the DREAM Act was brought up for a vote. However, when it comes to Republicans looking bad with Latinos, that is largely the GOP’s own doing.

“I want to hear Republican leaders stand up and say, ‘The Republican Party absolutely loves the Hispanic-American community; we resonate with your values; we are the party for you,’” the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, recently told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “Instead, I’m just hearing xenophobia and racism. If they keep it up, all I can say is good luck in an increasingly diverse, multicultural America.”

Meg Whitman’s former lead spokesman Rob Stutzman similarly told the Los Angeles Times, “They [Republicans] sit around at cocktail parties and they [Latinos] listen on talk shows and hear their parents referred to as ‘illegals.’ And we wonder why these people [Latinos] don’t want to register as Republicans.”

Even if Democrats were out to merely tarnish the GOP’s reputation by bringing up the DREAM Act (which it doesn’t appear they were), Republicans eagerly took the bait. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) called the bill a “nightmare for the American people.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) claimed it contained loopholes for terrorists. Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) stated that it was “sacrilegious” and “disrespectful” to ask the Senate to vote on anything so close to Christmas.

Perhaps the most stinging remarks came from Graham himself. Minutes before the DREAM Act failed, Graham took the senate floor to tell all the young undocumented immigrants who visited his office that they were “wasting their time.”

Jose Delgado, op-ed contributor at the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, has never shied away from attacking Democrats. Today, he wrote in La Opinión:

When Senator Harry Reid mentioned that not a single Hispanic should vote for the Republican Party, he did it for political reasons. And though Reid said that out of convenience, today, all Hispanics that hope for our community to become a vibrant element of American society should consider this possibility. [...]

Where is “compassionate conservatism,” where are the “family values?”

A couple of recent reports provide important information on the reality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and highlight again the imperative of ending that occupation. The first, Unsafe Space: Israeli Authorities’ Failure to Protect Human Rights amid Settlements in East Jerusalem, was published by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), and “draws attention to an alarming reality that is taking hold in East Jerusalem“:

The authorities have sided with well-organized political groups, whose purpose is to “Judaize” Palestinian areas of Jerusalem and especially the Old City and its environs. The result is that Palestinian residents of the city are increasingly subject to hostility and violence, and their rights and needs are disregarded and violated.

Last year, a report from the European Union similarly “accused both the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality of working deliberately to alter the city’s demographic balance and sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank.”

Last year, when the Obama administration showed some moral leadership and reprimanded Israel for its evictions of Palestinian families to make way for Jewish settlers, a Congressional delegation led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) went to Jerusalem — and backed the evictions.

The second, more recent report is from Human Rights Watch. Entitled “Separate and Unequal“, it shows that “Israeli policies in the West Bank harshly discriminate against Palestinian residents, depriving them of basic necessities while providing lavish amenities for Jewish settlements“:

The report identifies discriminatory practices that have no legitimate security or other justification and calls on Israel, in addition to abiding by its international legal obligation to withdraw the settlements, to end these violations of Palestinians’ rights. [...]

Israel operates a two-tier system for the two populations of the West Bank in the large areas where it exercises exclusive control. The report is based on case studies comparing Israel’s starkly different treatment of settlements and next-door Palestinian communities in these areas. It calls on the US and EU member states and on businesses with operations in settlement areas to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and that violate international law.

Predictably, NGO Monitor (an organization created to attack anyone who thinks countries should honor their humanitarian commitments when the country in question is Israel) criticized the HRW report without actually challenging any of its claims, complaining that it “strips away the context of Arab terror.” This suggests that Palestinian violence provides necessary context for Israel denying Palestinians equal access to water and electricity in territory it occupies. But I would suggest that the reverse is true: The systematic denial of equal access to water, electricity, and other basic services by the Israeli occupation provides necessary context for understanding Palestinian violence.

It’s also worth noting that when Palestinians relinquish violence and seek relief through international legal means, they get attacked by NGO Monitor and other right-wing groups for “legal lawfare.” It’s almost like it’s a rigged game or something.

Obviously the best way to deal with this problem would be for Israel to end the occupation and stop ruling over Palestinian subjects for whose well-being it feels no responsibility. But, given his ongoing efforts to both further entrench the Israeli presence in the West Bank and poison negotiations by conditioning them on complete Palestinian acceptance, in advance, of Israel’s “security concept,” this doesn’t seem to be part of Netanyahu’s vision for peace.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) confronted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) immediately after he spoke on ratification of the New START treaty this morning. McConnell’s complaints about the process being rushed were too much for Kerry, who had overseen the treaty’s ratification and has frequently bent over backwards to appease Republican concerns. Kerry ripped McConnell:

I would say to my friend from Kentucky: Just because you say it, doesn’t make it true. Our friends on the other side of the aisle have a habit of repeating things that have been completely refuted by every fact there is. … The facts are that this treaty is not being rushed.

This treaty has been delayed at the request of Republicans. It was delayed 13 times… to have more time to deal with the modernization issue, which the administration has completely, totally, thoroughly dealt with in good faith. I’d like to know where the good faith comes from on the other side. They [the administration] put extra money in, they sat and negotiated, they sent people to Arizona to brief Senator Kyl personally. For weeks we delayed the process of moving forward on this treaty in order accommodate our friends on the other side of the aisle. And now fully accommodated, with their requests entirely met, they come back and say ‘oh its being rushed.’ Well Mr. President today marks our sixth day of debate on the New START treaty. That’s a fact. … I mean is there no shame.

Watch it:

The primary complaint of Senate Republicans in regards to the New START treaty has centered on Senate process. But as Kerry’s remarks indicate these complaints are entirely unfounded. Instead, it was Senate Republicans who constantly advocated delay. In fact, prior to the election, Senate Republicans even suggested that the lame duck period was the appropriate time to have a vote. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) was for a lame duck vote on the treaty in August before turning against it.

Yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) complained that the Democrats’ decision to force a vote on DADT repeal and the DREAM Act this weekend had “poisoned” the Senate and that he would now consider voting against START merely some sort of protest.

As Major Garrett, the former Fox Correspondent said this morning, “When you can’t argue substance, you argue procedure.”

Max Blumenthal has a deeply reported new piece, The Great Islamophobic Crusade, tracking the growth of the network of think tanks and front groups cultivating and exploiting hostility toward Muslims and Islam for conservative political gain:

Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.

This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.

Meanwhile, Adam Serwer flags a Washington Post story noting that members of this network have been advising U.S. law enforcement on Islam:

Walid Shoebat, a onetime Muslim who converted to Christianity, also lectures to local police. He too believes that most Muslims seek to impose sharia law in the United States. To prevent this, he said in an interview, he warns officers that “you need to look at the entire pool of Muslims in a community.”

When Shoebat spoke to the first annual South Dakota Fusion Center Conference in Sioux Falls this June, he told them to monitor Muslim student groups and local mosques and, if possible, tap their phones. “You can find out a lot of information that way,” he said.

As Blumenthal’s piece notes, Shoebat markets himself quite profitably as an ex-terrorist, speaking before conservative Christian and Jewish audiences to condemn Islam as a “satanic cult.” Numerous people have challenged Shoebat’s stories of his extremist past, and he’s widely regarded as a fraud.

It gets better, though. The article reports that Frank Gaffney, yes Frank Gaffney, “said his team” — that would be the team that wrote CSP’s “Shariah: The Threat to America” report — “has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums“:

“Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units and the like,” Gaffney said. “We’re seeing a considerable ramping-up of interest in getting this kind of training.”

Government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center’s book inaccurate and counterproductive. They say the DHS should increase its training of local police, using teachers who have evidence-based viewpoints.

Using teachers who have evidence-based viewpoints would be hugely beneficial to U.S. homeland security. This would, one expects, disqualify people who think that Obama is a Muslim, question whether Obama is an American citizen, or believe that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s new logo is a sign of the president’s “submission to sharia.”

News over the weekend that the leadership of the GOP in the Senate, Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will both oppose the treaty was only notable if you weren’t paying attention. No one ever counted on the support of Kyl and McConnell and it merely confirms that the White House and Senate Democrats made the right decision to push ahead and hold a vote now, since the promise from Senator Kyl for a vote in January or February was clearly a false one. Meanwhile, START still has enough support for ratification.

The primary complaint from most persuadable Republican Senators now seems to have little to do with the treaty and everything to do with process. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) echoed those comments when he said that the lame duck had been “poisoned” because he was forced to vote on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the DREAM Act. This may be a new low for process petulance.

Complaining that you can’t vote for nuclear arms treaty that the US military wanted ratified yesterday, because you found it distasteful that you had to vote on unrelated legislation you didn’t like is child like petulance. Seriously, suck it up — and make a judgment on the treaty based on the treaty not on superfluous other issues. As Major Garrett, former Fox correspondent, said on MSNBC this morning “When you can’t argue substance, you argue procedure.”

But that being said, there is also a reason to believe that the process whining is just disguising the real Republican fear that ratification of New START would be another win for the White House. That reason is because in fact nothing about the ratification process has been unusual.

First, more days of floor time will be devoted to New START than the original START treaty. When the Senate finally votes on New START it will have devoted seven or more days — exactly the number of days Senate Republicans demanded and two more days than START I. That treaty was not just more complex because there were more nuclear weapons and it was the first of its kind, but because it was between multiple countries (US, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan) and was ratified just after the break up of the Soviet Union. In fact, the original negotiating partner, the USSR, no longer existed when the Senate voted on ratification. As Senator John Kerry (D-MA) noted:

We have now spent 5 days having a very good debate on New START and proposed amendments. That is as much time as the Senate spent on START I, and more than it spent on START II and the Moscow Treaty combined, but we are looking forward to continuing the debate this week.

Second, switching from executive session to legislative session is expressly permitted under Senate rules and is commonly done when dealing with treaties. Republicans complain that this has allowed Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to get around their delay tactics. For instance, when a cloture motion is filed it takes 30 hour to “ripen” in a sense nothing can then happen on legislative issues. But by switching to executive session, Reid has prevented Republicans from keeping the Senate idle and has allowed for ample floor time for the START treaty. Reid has not done anything out of bounds and has stayed within the rules of the Senate. Yet Republicans who have stretched the limits of Senate rules and who have used kinks in senate process to obstruct and delay all kinds of legislation, seem to insist that a different more strict set of unwritten rules apply to Democrats and this treaty.

Third, complaints about the treaty being rushed are total nonsense. The treaty has been in front of the Senate for eight months. Moreover, leading Senators on arms control, including Senator Kyl, were involved in the negotiations and even traveled to Geneva to confer with the negotiating team. The Senate committees held more than 20 hearings, featuring a disproportionate number of Republican witnesses. More than 1,000 questions were asked of the administration, all of which have been answered. The vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was even delayed in the summer by Senator Kerry, over the objections of Senator Richard Lugar, until after the August recess in order to appease Republican demands. When the treaty was voted out of committee, Democrats did not bring the treaty to the floor, because Republicans warned that a treaty could not be voted on before an election – no matter this was the case with the original START treaty.

Finally, Republicans said that the lame duck time was an appropriate time to get the treaty done. This summer Kyl spoke to Reuters who paraphrased:

It could be difficult to satisfy his [Kyl's] demands before November and thus the vote on New START might need to take place during the lame duck session if the Senate wants to vote on the treaty this year.

Additionally, a number of significant legislative items have been accomplished in past lame duck sessions, such as the impeachment of President Clinton.