excitable honky

Branko Marcetic:

When George W. Bush was in power and set about creating this vast system and asserting the right to ever more extreme unilateral powers in the name of national security, Democrats were outraged, decrying these measures as an attempt to create an “imperial presidency.”

Seven years later, as one of their own was handed the reins to this extraordinary power, this outrage melted away. Rather than use Obama’s election to dismantle the national security state they had once railed against, Democrats allowed it to expand under Obama’s virtuous hand.

As Democratic leaders and liberal pundits ignored issues of civil liberties and presidential excess, relegating what was once a central critique of Bush into a niche issue, various commentators sounded the alarm over entrusting Obama with such expansive powers. In 2012, speaking about the Obama administration’s drone program, the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi stated:

Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.

A year later, the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf wrote about the broad national security powers claimed by Bush and Obama, warning that such tools could eventually be misused by a tyrant:

Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck. We’re not special. Our voters won’t always pick good men and women to represent us. Some good women will be corrupted by power, and some bad men will slip through.

As Jeremy Scahill said earlier this year, before Trump had even become the Republian nominee, “It will be very interesting to see, if a Republican wins, how many of the MSNBC pundits and other, you know, so-called liberals — what their position will be on these very same policies.”

The basic argument civil libertarians stressed again and again was simple: You might like the current president. You might even trust him or her. But all leaders eventually transfer power to someone else — someone not likely to share your political beliefs or party affiliation.

As Glenn Greenwald suggested when he questioned if liberals would trust figures like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich with such powers, the alarm over the latest field of unhinged GOP nominees that comes around every four years should have made progressives particularly attuned to this fact.

Some were. After all, back in 2012, when the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president was looming, the Obama administration rushed to establish rules around its totally lawless and oversight-free drone program in case he won. After Romney lost the election, these efforts again took a back seat.

David Remnick:

Qualified death penalty lawyers don’t grow on trees:

In response to The San Francisco Chronicle’s recent editorial “Fight crime, not futility: Abolish the death penalty,” a thorough evisceration of Proposition 66 – the Grim Reaper ballot initiative seeking to speed-up state-sponsored executions – Sacramento D.A. Anne Marie Schubert promised California voters that, “[t]he overall changes” needed to repair the state’s discriminatory and horribly dysfunctional death penalty are, “easy fixes.”

To anybody who believes that: Not only do I have a snazzy bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, I’ll throw in a bridge to nowhere too.

The Chronicle, which published Schubert’s glib and disjointed talking points under the header “dissenting view,” was also clearly unimpressed. It excerpted just one devastating paragraph from its prior full-length blistering editorial to run beneath Schubert’s superficial response.

The Chronicle reminded Californians it urges a “No” vote on Proposition 66, and a “Yes” vote on the counter-initiative, Proposition 62, which would end capital punishment forever in California: “Prop. 62 offers a straightforward and certain solution: abolish the death penalty, and replace it with a punishment of life without the possibility of parole. The other [ballot initiative], Prop. 66, proposes a highly complex, probably very expensive and constitutionally questionable scheme for streamlining the appeals process in hopes of shaving years off the timeline between conviction and execution. Even the most ardent advocates of capital punishment should be wary of the promises in Prop. 66.”

Perhaps the biggest of the false promises made by Prop. 66  that The Chronicle alludes to – one that all Californians should be wary of – is Prop. 66 proponents’ claim (led by Schubert), that “Prop. 66 would expand the pool of qualified lawyers to deal with [capital] cases.” Again and again, this mantra has been repeated in their op-eds and public statements campaigning for more and quicker state-sanctioned death. I guess they figure if they keep repeating this claim – without a shred of evidence to back it up – that this canard of Prop. 66 will be plum overlooked by California voters. It won’t be.

As explained in “Proposition 66, The ‘Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016,’ is Fool’s Gold for Californians” qualified death penalty lawyers don’t grow on trees. Nor will a gigantic stork suddenly deliver them on November 9. There simply“are not enough willing and qualified lawyers in California to take these kinds of cases – the most difficult, emotional, time-sensitive, resource-draining cases our legal system has.”

Prop. 66’s “easy fix” for this catastrophic flaw in the death penalty system is, by its express language, to: (1) pressure defense attorneys who don’t currently handle death penalty cases to start doing so, or risk their livelihood, because if they refuse, they won’t be eligible for court appointments at all, and (2) handicap the quality of capital defense representation in California by decimating the independence and the leadership of California’s Habeas Corpus Resource Center (an agency which has been zealously and competently representing death row inmates in the state for decades).