Major Science study: Observations confirm “the short-term cloud feedback is likely positive” – Trenberth explains, “The work is sound and is a very useful contribution,” while Roy Spencer makes an unsound response.
Changes in clouds will amplify the warming of the planet due to human activities, according to a breakthrough study by a Texas A&M University researcher.
Andrew Dessler, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, says that warming due to increases in greenhouse gases will cause clouds to trap more heat, which will lead to additional warming. This process is known as the “cloud feedback” and is predicted to be responsible for a significant portion of the warming over the next century….
“I think we can be pretty confident that temperatures will rise by several degrees Celsius over the next century if we continue our present trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.”
A major new study in Science, “A Determination of the Cloud Feedback from Climate Variations over the Past Decade,” (subs. req’d) uses observations to answer what is probably the most important uncertainty in the climate models: What is the feedback from clouds?
Now we can be confident the feedback is likely positive, and exceedingly unlikely to be negative enough to counter the many other positive, amplifying feedbacks. In short, as Dessler says, “This work suggests that climate models are doing a pretty decent job simulating how clouds respond to changing climates.” Recent studies have come to a similar conclusion — see Journal of Climate: New cloud feedback results “provide support for the high end of current estimates of global climate sensitivity.”
Because this is such an important issue — and because this study should be the final nail in the coffin of the central denier myth that the climate has a low sensitivity to CO2 — this post includes two videos explaining the study, an exclusive comment on the study by one of the leading experts on the cloud feedback (NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth), and Dessler’s debunking of the laughable conspiracy-laden response by a discredited disinformer (Roy Spencer).
Perhaps the most important point about the study is that it is the first of its kind based on actual observation, as the Texas A&M news release quoted above explains:
Dessler used measurements from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument onboard NASA’s Terra satellite to calculate the amount of energy trapped by clouds as the climate varied over the last decade. He also used meteorological analyses provided by NASA’s Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) and by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
Here is Dessler explaining the study in a short video:
As Dessler notes of the cloud feedback issue, “There’s never been a measurement of that using observations.”
Dessler put together a more technical videos — with charts — explaining the study:
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is one of the leading experts on cloud modeling. He had been critical of some recent studies on the cloud feedback effect, so I asked for his thoughts on this study. He replied:
The work is sound and is a very useful contribution. It is a foil to some of the misleading work that Richard Lindzen has published (and which we have shown is wrong). Kudos to Andy Dessler for trying to do this and doing it as well as it can be done.
He also offered some advice for improving the study, which I passed on to Dessler, and made the point about “the preliminary nature of the result owing to the short data record and the weather noise.”
Lindzen has been pushing the “clouds are a negative feedback” theory with bad analysis for a long time — see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”; Trenberth: The flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got.”
Lindzen isn’t the only discredited disinformer desperately trying to push back against the tide of scientific analysis and observations. Science magazine’s story, “El Niño Lends More Confidence to Strong Global Warming,” notes:
[Dessler’s] result is “convincing evidence” that—at least on the scale of decades—clouds do not counter warming, says climate researcher Brian Soden of the University of Miami in Florida….
“This is a very important check of the models,” says climate researcher Qiang Fu of the University of Washington, Seattle. “It shows no evidence of a large negative cloud feedback.” But climate researcher Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, disagrees. He published one of the two papers finding evidence of a strongly negative cloud feedback. He finds in his own analyses signs that Dessler is seeing not only cloud changes caused by temperature changes but also temperature changes caused by natural cloud fluctuations. Such effects garble the true negative feedback beyond recognition, he says.
Spencer’s “interpretation is wrong,” says Soden, but even if Spencer were right that there’s a cause-and-effect problem, Dessler’s method of comparing observations and models “eliminates some possibilities, such as the models being egregiously wrong. It’s about as good as we can do with current data sets.”
Few of the climate science disinformers have been as wrong — dead wrong — as Spencer for as long. He famously made a bunch of analytical blunders and spent years pushing the now long-overturned notion that the satellite data didn’t show significant warming (see “Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?“). As RealClimate explained:
We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming , and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.
So after that history, we’re supposed to savor all Roy’s new cookery?
So I think the working assumption should be that when Spencer pushes some convoluted new analysis to justify his views, it’s more cookery — an assumption that has so far stood the test of time as Spencer’s claims have grown more absurd over time [see The Great Global Warming Blunder: Roy Spencer asserts (and Morano parrots), “I predict that the proposed cure for global warming – reducing greenhouse gas emissions – will someday seem as outdated as using leeches to cure human illnesses.” Uhh, guys, doctors still use medicinal leeches!]
Yet more outrageous charges can be found in Spencer’s latest blog, “The Dessler Cloud Feedback Paper in Science: A Step Backward for Climate Research.” Dessler easily swats aside the substance of what Spencer says in a new post on RC:
Dr. Spencer is arguing that clouds are causing ENSO [El Niño southern oscillation] cycles, so the direction of causality in my analysis is incorrect and my conclusions are in error.After reading this, I initiated a cordial and useful exchange of e-mails with Dr. Spencer (you can read the full e-mail exchange here). We ultimately agreed that the fundamental disagreement between us is over what causes ENSO. Short paraphrase:
Spencer: ENSO is caused by clouds. You cannot infer the response of clouds to surface temperature in such a situation.
Dessler: ENSO is not caused by clouds, but is driven by internal dynamics of the ocean-atmosphere system. Clouds may amplify the warming, and that’s the cloud feedback I’m trying to measure.
My position is the mainstream one, backed up by decades of research. This mainstream theory is quite successful at simulating almost all of the aspects of ENSO.
Dr. Spencer, on the other hand, is as far out of the mainstream when it comes to ENSO as he is when it comes to climate change. He is advancing here a completely new and untested theory of ENSO — based on just one figure in one of his papers (and, as I told him in one of our e-mails, there are other interpretations of those data that do not agree with his interpretation).
Thus, the burden of proof is Dr. Spencer to show that his theory of causality during ENSO is correct. He is, at present, far from meeting that burden. And until Dr. Spencer satisfies this burden, I don’t think anyone can take his criticisms seriously.
It’s also worth noting that the picture I’m painting of our disagreement (and backed up by the e-mail exchange linked above) is quite different from the picture provided by Dr. Spencer on his blog. His blog is full of conspiracies and purposeful suppression of the truth. In particular, he accuses me of ignoring his work. But as you can see, I have not ignored it — I have dismissed it because I think it has no merit. That’s quite different.
Snap!
Spencer goes the full X-Files — hey, folks said I was using “jump the shark” too much — on his blog:
Dessler’s paper is being announced on probably THE best day for it to support the IPCC’s COP-16 meeting here in Cancun, and whatever agreement is announced tomorrow in the way of international climate policy.
I suspect – but have no proof of it – that Dessler was under pressure to get this paper published to blunt the negative impact our work has had on the IPCC’s efforts.
This is tinfoil-hat stuff.
No single scientific paper — not even a major one like this — could possibly influence the meeting in Cancun, which is the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), not IPCC! There are hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers that provide more than enough motivation to act — including more than three dozen in the last year alone, see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” and “Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world — which we may face in the 2060s!”
Dessler writes:
I would also like to respond to his accusation that the timing of the paper is somehow connected to the IPCC’s meeting in Cancun. I can assure everyone that no one pressured me in any aspect of the publication of this paper. As Dr. Spencer knows well, authors have no control over when a paper ultimately gets published.
In fact, the key phrase Spencer uses is one that pretty much sums up his entire body of work, especially his claims that the climate sensitivity is low: “I … have no proof of it.”
Related Post:
Major Science study: Observations confirm “the short-term cloud feedback is likely positive” – Trenberth explains, “The work is sound and is a very useful contribution,” while Roy Spencer makes an unsound response.
Changes in clouds will amplify the warming of the planet due to human activities, according to a breakthrough study by a Texas A&M University researcher.
Andrew Dessler, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, says that warming due to increases in greenhouse gases will cause clouds to trap more heat, which will lead to additional warming. This process is known as the “cloud feedback” and is predicted to be responsible for a significant portion of the warming over the next century….
“I think we can be pretty confident that temperatures will rise by several degrees Celsius over the next century if we continue our present trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.”
A major new study in Science, “A Determination of the Cloud Feedback from Climate Variations over the Past Decade,” (subs. req’d) uses observations to answer what is probably the most important uncertainty in the climate models: What is the feedback from clouds?
Now we can be confident the feedback is likely positive, and exceedingly unlikely to be negative enough to counter the many other positive, amplifying feedbacks. In short, as Dessler says, “This work suggests that climate models are doing a pretty decent job simulating how clouds respond to changing climates.” Recent studies have come to a similar conclusion — see Journal of Climate: New cloud feedback results “provide support for the high end of current estimates of global climate sensitivity.”
Because this is such an important issue — and because this study should be the final nail in the coffin of the central denier myth that the climate has a low sensitivity to CO2 — this post includes two videos explaining the study, an exclusive comment on the study by one of the leading experts on the cloud feedback (NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth), and Dessler’s debunking of the laughable conspiracy-laden response by a discredited disinformer (Roy Spencer).
Perhaps the most important point about the study is that it is the first of its kind based on actual observation, as the Texas A&M news release quoted above explains:
Dessler used measurements from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument onboard NASA’s Terra satellite to calculate the amount of energy trapped by clouds as the climate varied over the last decade. He also used meteorological analyses provided by NASA’s Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) and by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
Here is Dessler explaining the study in a short video:
As Dessler notes of the cloud feedback issue, “There’s never been a measurement of that using observations.”
Dessler put together a more technical videos — with charts — explaining the study:
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is one of the leading experts on cloud modeling. He had been critical of some recent studies on the cloud feedback effect, so I asked for his thoughts on this study. He replied:
The work is sound and is a very useful contribution. It is a foil to some of the misleading work that Richard Lindzen has published (and which we have shown is wrong). Kudos to Andy Dessler for trying to do this and doing it as well as it can be done.
He also offered some advice for improving the study, which I passed on to Dessler, and made the point about “the preliminary nature of the result owing to the short data record and the weather noise.”
Lindzen has been pushing the “clouds are a negative feedback” theory with bad analysis for a long time — see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”; Trenberth: The flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got.”
Lindzen isn’t the only discredited disinformer desperately trying to push back against the tide of scientific analysis and observations. Science magazine’s story, “El Niño Lends More Confidence to Strong Global Warming,” notes:
[Dessler’s] result is “convincing evidence” that—at least on the scale of decades—clouds do not counter warming, says climate researcher Brian Soden of the University of Miami in Florida….
“This is a very important check of the models,” says climate researcher Qiang Fu of the University of Washington, Seattle. “It shows no evidence of a large negative cloud feedback.” But climate researcher Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, disagrees. He published one of the two papers finding evidence of a strongly negative cloud feedback. He finds in his own analyses signs that Dessler is seeing not only cloud changes caused by temperature changes but also temperature changes caused by natural cloud fluctuations. Such effects garble the true negative feedback beyond recognition, he says.
Spencer’s “interpretation is wrong,” says Soden, but even if Spencer were right that there’s a cause-and-effect problem, Dessler’s method of comparing observations and models “eliminates some possibilities, such as the models being egregiously wrong. It’s about as good as we can do with current data sets.”
Few of the climate science disinformers have been as wrong — dead wrong — as Spencer for as long. He famously made a bunch of analytical blunders and spent years pushing the now long-overturned notion that the satellite data didn’t show significant warming (see “Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?“). As RealClimate explained:
We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming , and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.
So after that history, we’re supposed to savor all Roy’s new cookery?
So I think the working assumption should be that when Spencer pushes some convoluted new analysis to justify his views, it’s more cookery — an assumption that has so far stood the test of time as Spencer’s claims have grown more absurd over time [see The Great Global Warming Blunder: Roy Spencer asserts (and Morano parrots), “I predict that the proposed cure for global warming – reducing greenhouse gas emissions – will someday seem as outdated as using leeches to cure human illnesses.” Uhh, guys, doctors still use medicinal leeches!]
Yet more outrageous charges can be found in Spencer’s latest blog, “The Dessler Cloud Feedback Paper in Science: A Step Backward for Climate Research.” Dessler easily swats aside the substance of what Spencer says in a new post on RC:
Dr. Spencer is arguing that clouds are causing ENSO [El Niño southern oscillation] cycles, so the direction of causality in my analysis is incorrect and my conclusions are in error.After reading this, I initiated a cordial and useful exchange of e-mails with Dr. Spencer (you can read the full e-mail exchange here). We ultimately agreed that the fundamental disagreement between us is over what causes ENSO. Short paraphrase:
Spencer: ENSO is caused by clouds. You cannot infer the response of clouds to surface temperature in such a situation.
Dessler: ENSO is not caused by clouds, but is driven by internal dynamics of the ocean-atmosphere system. Clouds may amplify the warming, and that’s the cloud feedback I’m trying to measure.
My position is the mainstream one, backed up by decades of research. This mainstream theory is quite successful at simulating almost all of the aspects of ENSO.
Dr. Spencer, on the other hand, is as far out of the mainstream when it comes to ENSO as he is when it comes to climate change. He is advancing here a completely new and untested theory of ENSO — based on just one figure in one of his papers (and, as I told him in one of our e-mails, there are other interpretations of those data that do not agree with his interpretation).
Thus, the burden of proof is Dr. Spencer to show that his theory of causality during ENSO is correct. He is, at present, far from meeting that burden. And until Dr. Spencer satisfies this burden, I don’t think anyone can take his criticisms seriously.
It’s also worth noting that the picture I’m painting of our disagreement (and backed up by the e-mail exchange linked above) is quite different from the picture provided by Dr. Spencer on his blog. His blog is full of conspiracies and purposeful suppression of the truth. In particular, he accuses me of ignoring his work. But as you can see, I have not ignored it — I have dismissed it because I think it has no merit. That’s quite different.
Snap!
Spencer goes the full X-Files — hey, folks said I was using “jump the shark” too much — on his blog:
Dessler’s paper is being announced on probably THE best day for it to support the IPCC’s COP-16 meeting here in Cancun, and whatever agreement is announced tomorrow in the way of international climate policy.
I suspect – but have no proof of it – that Dessler was under pressure to get this paper published to blunt the negative impact our work has had on the IPCC’s efforts.
This is tinfoil-hat stuff.
No single scientific paper — not even a major one like this — could possibly influence the meeting in Cancun, which is the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), not IPCC! There are hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers that provide more than enough motivation to act — including more than three dozen in the last year alone, see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” and “Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world — which we may face in the 2060s!”
Dessler writes:
I would also like to respond to his accusation that the timing of the paper is somehow connected to the IPCC’s meeting in Cancun. I can assure everyone that no one pressured me in any aspect of the publication of this paper. As Dr. Spencer knows well, authors have no control over when a paper ultimately gets published.
In fact, the key phrase Spencer uses is one that pretty much sums up his entire body of work, especially his claims that the climate sensitivity is low: “I … have no proof of it.”
Related Post:
Response to Will Wilkinson
While Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson fault me for paying too little attention to hyper-concentration at the top of the income distribution, Will Wilkinson argues that “inequality is a distraction and the real issue is that of improving the welfare and opportunity of the poor.” He argues that the policies favored by poor people themselves may not serve their economic interests, in which case the unresponsiveness of the political system to their preferences may be “a feature, not a bug.”
Whether the point of a democratic system should be to reflect citizens’ preferences or their interests is one of the biggest and most vexed issues in democratic theory. Unlike many economists, Wilkinson is refreshingly willing to entertain the possibility that citizens do not know what is good for them. And when they don’t, he comes down firmly on the side of “improving the welfare and opportunity of the poor” rather than attempting to “equalize political voice” for its own sake.
My own position on this issue is closer to Wilkinson’s than he seems to suppose.
Having spent much of my career studying public opinion, I have become increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of making citizens’ preferences the basis of a coherent theory of democracy, much less a substantively attractive one. That is not to suggest, as Hacker and Pierson claim I do, that “voters don’t really have views at all.” In an essay on “Democracy with Attitudes” I attempted to specify how citizens’ views, or attitudes, differ from the preferences underlying traditional liberal democratic theory. I urged political philosophers and political scientists to clarify how a psychologically realistic account of attitudes might provide a basis for judgments of democratic legitimacy-a basis transcending Wilkinson’s assessments, or mine, about which policies will maximize the welfare of which citizens. (So far, the urging has not been notably efficacious.)
Despite these qualms, I consider the responsiveness or unresponsiveness of a government to its citizens to be a very important social fact. After all, for many people responsiveness is a hallmark of democracy, and they deserve to know how much reality there is behind the mythology. Moreover, equal responsiveness could (and, I think, should) be viewed as intrinsically valuable, even if it results in policies that are less than optimal from a narrowly utilitarian perspective, because it connotes respect for the equal dignity and worth of all citizens.
Wilkinson focuses on political ignorance and disengagement as threats to the ability of low-income citizens, specifically, to protect their own economic and political interests. “It would be ideal,” he writes, “were each and every citizen to have the income and education typical of well-informed, motivated voters.” This seems to me to overstate both the strength of the correlation between income and political information and the ability of well-informed citizens to make sensible political decisions. For example, my analysis suggests that affluent voters are, if anything, more likely than low-income voters to engage in myopic retrospection (table 4.4), and that increasing political attentiveness sometimes makes people more likely to deny uncongenial facts (figure 5.2). Many other scholars have produced many similar examples. Findings like these have cured me, at least, of the notion that the views of well-informed people might provide a reliable basis for assessing the “enlightened preferences” of less-well-informed democratic citizens (see here), much less an acceptable substitute for them.
Finally, Wilkinson complains that I offer “surprisingly little discussion of the way specific policy initiatives might help or harm the poor and middle classes.” I agree that “we need policies that will actually work”-and that affluent voters (and politicians!) may be “more interested in signaling concern for the welfare of the poor … than in actually getting down to the business of finding out what would really improve it.” But alas, I am not a policy analyst, and determining what policies will actually work is not my comparative advantage.
I chose the specific policies I focused on-the Bush tax cuts, estate tax repeal, and the minimum wage-in part because their implications for “the welfare of the poor” seem comparatively straightforward. Armies of economists have spent decades studying the effects of minimum wage laws. My reading of the evidence suggests that, for politically relevant wage levels, the negative effects on employment are small and the positive effects on the incomes of the working poor are substantial. Of course, the work I cited to that effect by David Card and Alan Krueger and David Lee may be unpersuasive to Wilkinson; but in that case, how likely is it that “some evidence” of my own would convince him “that the minimum wage actually helps”?
The economic literature on the effects of taxes is equally voluminous, and here too I have had to leave the heavy lifting to others. In any case, not even enthusiastic proponents of estate tax repeal pretend that it would bolster the well-being of the poor; rather, they argue that restricting the liberty of rich kids to inherit their parents’ millions would be fundamentally unjust.
Of course, I agree with Wilkinson that much government spending does little or nothing specifically for poor people. But would a trillion dollars in tax revenue really help disadvantaged families in Chicago and Miami? In a country where “fiscal responsibility” means paying for new nutrition programs by cutting the budget for food stamps, I’ll go with “yes.”
Response to Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker
Inequality is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s critique of Unequal Democracy seems to hinge in large part on a simple disagreement about which aspects of that phenomenon are most worthy of study. They write, “to us the critical rise in inequality is mostly at the top of the income distribution (where the top 1% has pulled sharply away from everyone else).” This is “the biggest fact about American inequality,” they say, the “crucial” trend; but my book “has very little to say about the spectacular rise of high-end incomes.” In their contribution to a recent special issue of Politics & Society, which expands on several of the points they make more briefly here, they complain about the “misplaced focus” of economic and political accounts, including mine, that emphasize “the broad spreading out of the income distribution, rather than the hyperconcentration of income at the top.”
To Hacker and Pierson, “Bartels’s argument about partisanship boils down to the claim that those on the bottom portions of the income ladder do much worse under Republicans than under Democrats.” Perhaps their diligent attention to the rarified realm of the top 1% has warped their sense of what it means to be “on the bottom portions of the income ladder.”
My tabulations showed that, since the late 1940s, the real incomes of families at the 80th percentile of the income distribution have grown 70% faster under Democratic presidents than they have under Republican presidents. The real incomes of families at the 60th percentile have grown more than twice as fast under Democrats. Families at the 40th percentile have experienced three times as much real income growth under Democrats.
These differences are enormous, and surprisingly robust given the limitations of the available data. Hacker and Pierson seem to want to dismiss them, asserting that “in his regressions, Bartels never finds statistically significant partisan differences in income growth above the 40th percentile.” That is a simple but rather crucial misreading; the t-statistics for partisan effects in my key table (2.3) are 2.9 for families at the 40th and 60th percentiles and 2.4 for families at the 80th percentile, all well beyond any reasonable threshold for “statistical significance.”
Cumulated over more than half a century, these partisan differences have been hugely consequential for the economic well-being of the broad American middle class. The partisan differences in income growth for families who really are near “the bottom portions of the income ladder” have been even larger in percentage terms-and even more consequential in human terms. To think of all this as a sort of sideshow to the real story of hyper-concentration of income going to the top 1 percent strikes me as an instance of “misplaced focus,” to borrow Hacker and Pierson’s phrase.
A second major theme in Hacker and Pierson’s critique is that my analysis is unduly focused on voters and elections-as they put it in their longer essay, on “politics as electoral spectacle” rather than “politics as organized combat.” This is a very plausible complaint, given the inevitable limitations of my own expertise. However, I think they push their point too far when they suggest that Unequal Democracy “tells us that voters are not driving policy outcomes, but it does not tell us who is.”
For one thing, there is ample evidence in the book that voters are often driving policy outcomes-by electing Democratic or Republican policy-makers. The movement to repeal the estate tax involved arduous effort by organized interests, but it is no coincidence that that effort only began in earnest when Republicans won the House in 1994, and achieved (temporary) victory within months of the election of a Republican president in 2000. Similarly, the Bush tax cuts were championed by powerful interest groups, but they never would have seen the light of day if a thousand more voters in Palm Beach had succeeded in voting for Al Gore.
In both these cases, it seems unhelpful to think of “politics as electoral spectacle” and “politics as organized combat” as mutually exclusive alternatives. The interplay of these factors is even clearer in my chapter on the eroding minimum wage. As Hacker and Pierson note, my analysis of minimum wage policy-making assigns a major role to the declining clout of labor unions. But partisan control of the White House and Congress also mattered substantially. Moreover, the terms of “organized combat” seem to have been significantly shaped by partisan politics: the estimated impact of labor union strength was almost twice as great under Democratic presidents as it was under Republicans, and the estimated impact of the partisan composition of Congress was three times as great under Democratic presidents as it was under Republicans.
There is, of course, much more to be learned about the role of labor unions, businesses, and other powerful organized interests in the politics of inequality, and in contemporary American politics more broadly. Thus, I enthusiastically second Hacker and Pierson’s closing call to “look more closely” at “the organized combat that is taking place in the trenches of American politics on a daily basis.” The primary reason why I haven’t done more of that myself is that it is tremendously difficult; the inferential challenges involved in using observations of “politics as organized combat” to “tell us who is” driving policy outcomes-and how those policy outcomes matter-are enormous. Fortunately, Hacker and Pierson’s own terrific new book, Winner-Take-All Politics, provides an excellent full-scale model of the sort of analysis they advocate, and an excellent sense of how richly analyses of this sort can contribute to our understanding of the political process.
White House Response to Gitmo “Recidivism” — Another Q for O’s WH – 12/8/2010
TAPPER: I just wanted to ask about the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that came out, I believe, yesterday — it was sometime this week — stating that it’s the judgment of the intelligence community that five detainees released or transferred from Guantanamo under President Obama, under this new revised system — two of them are confirmed returned to terrorism. Three of them are suspected.
Political Punch
Response to Lane Kenworthy
As a regular reader of The Monkey Cage, I am delighted to help launch what I hope will be a vibrant series of discussions of new and old books by political scientists. And as the author of Unequal Democracy, I am very grateful to John Sides and Henry Farrell for recruiting such a smart and stimulating set of commentators to share some of their thoughts about my book. I will attempt here to respond to just a few of their points, trusting that they and others will continue the conversation.
Lane Kenworthy seems to be working his way chapter-by-chapter through Unequal Democracy, and by the time he gets to the end the book will be much improved. Having produced the best critique I have seen of the analysis of partisan income effects in chapter 2, Kenworthy turns here to class politics (chapter 3) and myopic retrospection (chapter 4). He asks why support for Democratic presidential candidates among low-income white voters was “never particularly high,” and answers “that voters are myopic, and Democratic presidents have been less likely than Republican ones to produce healthy income growth in election years.”
Kenworthy extends this argument by suggesting (1) that shifts in party identification may also reflect differential income growth, but with less myopia than we observe in voting behavior, and (2) that the distinctive partisan politics of the post-war South may reflect distinctive regional patterns of differential income growth. I am sympathetic to both suggestions, and intrigued by the preliminary evidence he has adduced in support of them.
In much the same spirit, Chris Achen and I have attempted to reinterpret the New Deal realignment as largely a matter of myopic retrospection rather than ideological conversion (see here). FDR’s electoral gains in 1936 came mostly in states where income growth in 1936 (but not in 1934 or 1935) was especially robust-not in states that otherwise displayed any particular affinity for progressive economic policies. Voters in a variety of other democracies hard hit by the Great Depression demonstrated an impressive willingness to replace “ins” of every ideological complexion with an equally varied cast of “outs,” including conservatives (in Britain and Australia), nationalists (in Ireland), Nazis (in Germany), social democrats (in Sweden), socialists (in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan), and followers of a funny-money radio preacher (in the adjacent prairie province of Alberta).
In every one of these cases, the party that happened to be in power when the economy rebounded went on to dominate politics for a decade or more. Although we lack survey data on party identification from the New Deal era, our analysis of congressional voting provides some evidence that they did so, at least in part, because myopic retrospections got solidified into partisan loyalties. Pooling data from non-southern congressional districts in the elections of 1936, 1938, and 1940, Achen and I estimated that election-year income growth (measured at the state level) had a fairly strong positive effect on Democratic vote shares (.23). Income growth in the previous election year, two years earlier, also had a significant effect (.17). Was that because voters employed a relatively long time horizon in assessing the Democratic Party’s performance? We think not, since income growth in the intervening (odd-numbered) years had a noticeably smaller effect (.11). Our interpretation is that voters made their assessments of party performance at election time, with a good deal of myopia, then updated their party identification accordingly and carried it forward to the next election (see here).
The idea that party identification reflects an accumulation of short-term retrospections is consistent with the Bayesian model of partisanship developed by Achen and others. However, the “saw-tooth” pattern discernible in congressional election results in the New Deal era suggests that the “running tally” of party identification (in Morris Fiorina’s felicitous phrase) may be something more like a limping tally, incorporating economic experience primarily in even-numbered years, when American voters happen to go to the polls.
Of course, aggregated congressional voting data shed only very indirect light on the evolution of partisanship, and our statistical results from the New Deal era are no more than suggestive. Why not examine party identification directly? One way to do this would be to look for evidence of election-related retrospection in aggregated time-series of “macropartisanship.” Another would be to harness more than half a century of high-quality individual-level survey data gathered by the American National Election Studies. I once attempted something like the latter in a paper focusing on the development of party identification over the life cycle; the results were not pretty, but they may help inspire Kenworthy or someone else to produce a more tractable and comprehensive analysis of partisan updating.
Kenworthy’s interest in class politics adds some additional complexities. Most notably, in the case of the postwar South, his focus on low-income whites leaves unaddressed the partisanship and voting behavior of middle- and high-income whites. Unlike low-income white southerners, more affluent white southerners have abandoned the Democratic Party in droves over the past half-century, producing class polarization in voting behavior well beyond the levels observed in other parts of the country. For their behavior to fit Kenworthy’s story would seem to require that their experience of income growth (or their response to income growth) under Democratic and Republican presidents was quite distinct from that of low-income white southerners, and of middle- and high-income whites in the rest of the country. If that turns out to be the case, then Kenworthy’s account (which he modestly refers to as “the Bartels theory”) will look even more promising.
State power and the response to Wikileaks
The US response to Wikileaks has been an interesting illustration of both the limits and extent of state power in an age of transnational information flows. The problem for the US has been quite straightforward. The Internet makes it more difficult for states (even powerful ones such as the US) to control information flows across their own borders and others. It is much easier than it used to be for actors to hop jurisdictions by e.g. moving a particular Internet based service from one country to another, while still making it possible for people across many countries to access the service. This makes it much harder for the US and other actors to use the traditional tools of statecraft – their jurisdiction does not extend far enough to stop the actors who they would like to stop.
However, there is a set of tools that states can use to greater effect. The Internet and other networks provide some private actors with a great deal of effective transnational power. Banks that operate across multiple jurisdictions can shape financial flows between these jurisdictions. Information companies may be able to reshape flows of information in ways that advantage or disadvantage particular actors. These private actors are often large, relatively immobile, and partially dependent on state approval for their actions. They thus provide a crucial resource for states. Even if states cannot directly regulate small agile actors outside their jurisdiction, they can indirectly regulate them by pressganging big private actors with cross-jurisdictional reach. A few years ago, the US found itself unable to regulate Internet gambling firms which were based in Antigua and selling their services to US customers. But the US was able to tell its banks that they would suffer legal and political consequences if they allowed transactions between US customers and Antiguan gambling firms, helping to drive the latter out of existence.
This is the topic of my least cited article evah (PDF), where I argue that:
states are not limited to direct regulation; they can use indirect means, pressing Internet service providers (ISPs) or other actors to implement state policy. For example, states might require ISPs to block their users from having access to a particular site, or to take down sites with certain kinds of content. More generally … a small group of privileged private actors can become “points of control”-states can use them to exert control over a much broader group of other private actors. This is because the former private actors control chokepoints in the information infrastructure or in other key networks of resources. They can block or control flows of data or of other valuable resources among a wide variety of other private actors. Thus, it is not always necessary for a state to exercise direct control over all the relevant private actors in a given issue area in order to be a successful regulator.
And this is exactly what the US is doing in response to Wikileaks. US political pressure caused Amazon to stop hosting Wikileaks, EveryDNS to break Wikileaks.org’s domain name, eBay/Paypal to stop facilitating financial transactions, Swiss Post to freeze a Wikileaks bank account (in perhaps the first instance in recorded history of a Swiss bank taking residency requirements seriously), and Mastercard and Visa to cease relations with it. This is unlikely to affect the availability of the information that Wikileaks has already leaked. But it may plausibly affect the medium and long run viability of Wikileaks as an organization. This will be a very interesting battle to watch.
The TSA’s Response to the Breast Milk Incident
(Jonathan H. Adler)
Last week, I posted a link to this video of one woman’s experience with airport security after asking to have her breast milk visually screened instead of x-rayed (as TSA procedures allow). At the time, I said I’d like to hear the TSA’s side of the incident, as the video appears to show TSA employees engaged in fairly egregious conduct. I also contacted the TSA directly seeking their response to the incident and associated allegations.
The TSA has now responded on the TSA blog — and the response is not particularly reassuring. Rather than provide any detail or clarification of the events on the video, the post acknowledges the woman in question was unhappy with her “screening experience” and “experienced an out of the ordinary delay,” claims the TSA investigated the incident, and reports that “the officers received refresher training for the visual inspection of breast milk.” Really? That’s it? What’s offensive about the video is not the officers’ apparent lack of familiarity with the protocol for visual inspection of breast milk, but the apparent retaliation against a traveler who sought to avail herself of established TSA procedures.
If the TSA really has investigated this incident, it should, at the very least, make the investigation’s conclusions public and report on any disciplinary measures taken (or provide an explanation for the failure to discipline those involved). If, as the TSA claims, it is official TSA policy to “strive to provide the highest level of customer service to all who pass through our security checkpoints” and its “policies and procedures focus on ensuring that all passengers are treated with dignity, respect, and courtesy,” then it should be more forthcoming about incidents like this.
The TSA’s Response to the Breast Milk Incident
(Jonathan H. Adler)
Last week, I posted a link to this video of one woman’s experience with airport security after asking to have her breast milk visually screened instead of x-rayed (as TSA procedures allow). At the time, I said I’d like to hear the TSA’s side of the incident, as the video appears to show TSA employees engaged in fairly egregious conduct. I also contacted the TSA directly seeking their response to the incident and associated allegations.
The TSA has now responded on the TSA blog — and the response is not particularly reassuring. Rather than provide any detail or clarification of the events on the video, the post acknowledges the woman in question was unhappy with her “screening experience” and “experienced an out of the ordinary delay,” claims the TSA investigated the incident, and reports that “the officers received refresher training for the visual inspection of breast milk.” Really? That’s it? What’s offensive about the video is not the officers’ apparent lack of familiarity with the protocol for visual inspection of breast milk, but the apparent retaliation against a traveler who sought to avail herself of established TSA procedures.
If the TSA really has investigated this incident, it should, at the very least, make the investigation’s conclusions public and report on any disciplinary measures taken (or provide an explanation for the failure to discipline those involved). If, as the TSA claims, it is official TSA policy to “strive to provide the highest level of customer service to all who pass through our security checkpoints” and its “policies and procedures focus on ensuring that all passengers are treated with dignity, respect, and courtesy,” then it should be more forthcoming about incidents like this.
“Kerr’s Inconsistent Positivism”: A Response to Sandefur
(Orin Kerr)
Over at Freespace, former VC guest-blogger Tim Sandefur argues that I am guilty of “inconsistent positivism” in two series of posts I have written. In the first set of posts, I argued that existing commerce clause doctrine can be used to support the constitutionality of the individual mandate. In the second series of posts, I argued that the Virginia traffic law on passing a stopped school bus should be read as prohibiting passing a stopped school bus instead of failing to stop a stopped school bus.
Why are the two posts inconsistent? When I interpreted the Virginia traffic law, I invoked the doctrine that statutes should be read to avoid absurdity. According to Sandefur, that is a normative preference I have imposed on the Virginia traffic law. But I am being inconsistent by not imposing my normative preference on the individual mandate, too: When it comes to the individual mandate, I am not imposing any normative preferences at all. Indeed, when it comes to the individual mandate, I am suggesting that current caselaw could be read to include the absurd result that there are few limits on Congress’s power. Thus I am being inconsistent in when I decide to impose my normative preferences in answering legal questions: In one case I avoid absurd results, in the other, I don’t.
I appreciate the close reading of my posts. At the same time, I don’t think I’m being inconsistent. Here’s why:
1) The notion that a statute should be read to avoid absurdity is not my personal normative preference. It’s not like I have deeply felt commitments to rationality that I am personally imposing on the statute. Rather, it is a canon of interpretation adopted by the Supreme Court of Virginia. See, e.g., Syed v. ZH Techs., Inc., 280 Va. 58, 69, 694 S.E.2d 625, 631 (2010) (“Statutory interpretation is a question of law which we review de novo, and we determine the legislative intent from the words used in the statute, applying the plain meaning of the words unless they are ambiguous or would lead to an absurd result.”). If the Supreme Court of Virginia instead adopted the canon that statutes must be read to encourage absurdity, then I would change my interpretation of the statute accordingly.
2) Statutory interpretation is a different legal exercise than determining if a statute is consistent or inconsistent with a body of constitutional precedents. Statutory interpretation without any cases to interpret the key words is an exercise of reading text and giving it meaning based on canons of interpretation. In contrast, determining if a statute is consistent or inconsistent with a body of precedents is a comparative exercise: It requires comparing a set body of law with a statute and seeing how they fit. Those are two different tasks, and should be approached in different ways. If the body of constitutional law is itself absurd, by whatever standard, then answers as to what statutes are constitutional according to that law should be absurd, too. In that case, results that seem absurd don’t suggest that the cases aren’t fairly read that way: They just suggest that the cases are themselves absurd.
Finally, I realize that some readers abhor the idea of reading cases and analyzing what the cases say without imposing one’s personal preferences on them to generate the desired result. To many readers, when I say what the law is, I should really mix my own preferences into the mix to make sure the result is one I like. I think it’s fine if people want that. But I personally like to keep the normative and the descriptive separate. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my own theory of constitutional interpretation. I do: It’s called the Edsel X62 HutHut 1 Theory, and it puts the other theories of interpretation to shame. It generates totally awesome results every time. But I generally don’t blog about the Edsel X62 HutHut 1 because I worry its use could fall into the wrong hands.
Syria’s Nuclear Program Requires Stronger International Response
Although Iran and North Korea have received far more attention, Syria is belatedly becoming a prime focus of international concern over nuclear proliferation.
On December 1, the Institute for Science and International Security released satellite photos of suspected Syrian nuclear sites linked to the covert Al-Kibar nuclear reactor that Israeli warplanes bombed in 2007, shortly before it could begin operations. The CIA later confirmed that the site contained a North Korean–designed nuclear reactor that would have been capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Syria blocked inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from investigating the suspected nuclear facility until after it had cleaned up the bombed site to remove incriminating evidence. Under strong international pressure, it reluctantly permitted IAEA inspectors a brief visit in 2008 but since then has stonewalled IAEA efforts to investigate its nuclear program.
On Thursday, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said that he sent a letter to Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem formally requesting access to suspected nuclear sites. If Syria continues to block the IAEA investigation, its failure to comply with its nonproliferation commitments can be referred to the United Nations Security Council for further action. Similar nuclear defiance by Iran led to an escalating series of U.N. sanctions.
Iran is suspected of financing the covert Syrian reactor in an end run to acquire plutonium for nuclear weapons without risking the discovery of additional nuclear facilities on its own territory. Syria, which has little oil, does not have the economic resources or technological infrastructure to independently build an expensive nuclear weapons program. The tyrannical Syrian and Iranian regimes are close allies that have developed strong ties with North Korea, an outlaw nuclear power that has provided important military and nuclear assistance to both.
In February, Western officials leaked the fact that before Israel destroyed the Syrian reactor in September 2007, North Korea had delivered 45 tons of un-enriched uranium “yellow cake” to Syria and subsequently moved it to Iran via Turkey after the Israeli strike.
Despite U.N. sanctions, North Korea has continued to provide both Iran and Syria with missiles, components, and technology, and the recently revealed North Korean uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon poses an additional proliferation risk. The Yongbyon facility appears to have a design similar to Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. North Korea may have obtained Iranian help on uranium enrichment in exchange for its extensive assistance for Iran’s ballistic missile force, which is largely based on North Korean missile technology. Or there may have been a nuclear quid pro quo in the form of a transfer of its nuclear technology or plutonium to Iran.
Whatever the arrangement is, it is clear that Tehran and Pyongyang have secretively undertaken extensive nuclear cooperation. According to a senior North Korean defector: “The nuclear power and missile research institutes in the North and Iran are effectively one body. North Korean nuclear and missile scientists are in Iran and Iranian scientists are working in the North. They share everything.”
While Iran and North Korea have been forced by sanctions to pay a growing price for their nuclear defiance, Syria has so far escaped any consequences. This should be rectified as soon as possible. Polite letters from the IAEA will have little effect unless they are strongly backed by an international coalition determined to punish Damascus if it continues to drag its feet on its nonproliferation obligations. This requires firm American leadership.
The Obama Administration could start by abandoning its diplomatic wooing of Syria and taking a harder line on Syria’s nuclear violations. A bipartisan group of eight congressional leaders wrote a December 2 letter to President Obama urging him to take stronger action against Syria’s nuclear program. The signers included Representatives Jeff Fortenberry (R–NE), Edward Markey (D–MA), Ed Royce (R–CA), and Brad Sherman (D–CA) and Senators John Ensign (R–NV), Kirsten Gillibrand (D–NY), Jon Kyl (R–AZ), and Joseph Lieberman (I-D–CT).
If the Obama Administration fails to provide the strong leadership needed to ensure more effective action at the IAEA and the U.N. Security Council, then Syria, a junior partner in the nuclear axis of evil, will continue to advance its illicit nuclear program with impunity.
The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.
Ten Case Studies of Radical Islamists Infiltrating the U.S. Government: Where’s the Shock and Response?
By Barry Rubin
There is a very important—one might say, life-and-death—distinction that should be made in considering U.S. counterterrorism policy. Certainly, U.S. forces have had many successes in stopping intended terrorist attacks against the United States. Yet there have also been a number of failures in the war against terrorism or al-Qaida or whatever you want to call it. How to distinguish what made the difference?
Successes in the post-September 11 era have come when the techniques of police work or intelligence-gathering were used against full-time terrorists (or the authorities got a lucky tip-off). When it comes to organizations planning attacks this works very well. But when the threat involves individuals or small groups being radicalized and perhaps joining or supporting terrorist groups the record is much worse.
The weakness is in analysis, profiling, decision-making, and understanding the nature of the enemy ideology. As a result, there have been a number of smaller attacks, including some not counted at all by a government that wants to keep its batting average high, and some near-misses averted more due to luck than to skill.
In addition a huge amount of money has been wasted and effort misdirected, as many are coming to see regarding the current methods of airport security.
In understanding these vital issues one can read no better work than Patrick Poole’s, “Failures of the U.S. Government on the Domestic Islamist Threat.” He provides ten case studies, each of which is hair-raising and none of which, arguably, has led to major corrective action. At the root of each one is a failure or refusal to comprehend revolutionary Islamism or the bureaucratic fear of taking on the enemy. Moreover, some cases show how the other side has even gained political influence in America.
Consider Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who Poole rightly calls, “The most prominent Islamic activist leader in America at the time, he had infiltrated the highest levels of political power.” He was the Muslim leader most frequently in the Clinton White House, asked:
“by the Defense Department to establish the military’s Muslim chaplain corps, and appointed by the State Department to serve as a civilian ambassador, taking six taxpayer-funded trips to the Middle East….. Just days after the 9/11 attacks, he appeared with President Bush and other Muslim leaders at a press conference at the Islamic Center of Washington D.C. despite his public comments a year earlier at a rally just steps from the White House identifying himself as a supporter of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations.”
But “in July 2005 the Treasury Department revealed that Alamoudi had been: “one of Al-Qaeda’s top fundraisers.”
Go back and reread the last two paragraphs. Shouldn’t this experience create great skepticism about proclaiming Muslim leaders as moderate without critically examining their record? Instead, the opposite has happened.
Then there was Ali Mohamed, a man who trained American soldiers on Arab culture and worked in the U.S. army’s training program for intelligence officers in the Middle East while simultaneously teaching Islamist militants in the United States—including the cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—how to shoot and blow things up. Later, he became al-Qaida’s chief military expert.
How might the army have known to distrust this man? Well, he had been expelled from the Egyptian army because of his terrorist sympathies and Egypt warned the United States about him.
We’ve heard a lot lately about al-Qaida’s new star, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been behind many of the recent terrorist attacks on America. But did you know, as Poole writes:
“Despite being subject to a FBI investigation initiated in 1999, and having been interviewed by the FBI at least four times after 9/11 for his contacts with two of the hijackers, Al-Awlaki was leading prayers for congressional Muslim staffers inside the U.S. Capitol…. al-Awlaki was also feted at a luncheon inside the still-smoldering Pentagon following the 9/11 attacks….”
Then there’s still “Anwar Hajjaj, a local Islamic cleric who still leads prayers for the Congressional Muslim Staff Association. Hajjaj headed the Taibah International Aid Association, which was designated a global terrorist organization by the Treasury Department in May 2004.”
Or what about lobbyist Faisal Gill, “a former aide to Al-Qaeda fundraiser
Abdurahman Alamoudi” appointed to a senior post in the Department of Homeland Security. Gill “had omitted his previous employment as director of government relations for Alamoudi’s American Muslim Council on the Standard Form 86 required for Gill’s security clearance. Gill had been at the forefront of AMC’s political efforts to end the use of secret evidence in terrorism deportation proceedings. In his position in the Homeland Security Intelligence division, he had access to a wide range of top-secret information, including vulnerabilities of national critical infrastructure.”
He was investigated and cleared at the time, despite the fact that he had lied.
Hesham Islam has been an especially powerful figure, senior advisor for international affairs for Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and the Pentagon’s point-man for Muslim outreach. When one officer wrote a good study of revolutionary Islamist ideology, Islam campaigned to get him fired Other officials told me that Islam tried to push them out also.
Islam’s autobiography on a Defense Department site contained clear contradictions and omissions while his own academic work was rather shockingly radical. His father had worked for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, while Islam claimed that he had survived a ship sinking that apparently never happened
This study doesn’t include many other cases, most notably that of Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood terrorist, where the army’s negligence was responsible for the tragedy. At the time, I called Hassan the first terrorist to give an academic lecture with Power Point—to an army audience—explaining his intention to commit a terrorist attack. Since then, things haven’t improved, including the army’s report that didn’t even dare to talk about jihad.
This is the kind of thing that’s been happening. Let’s be clear. There should be no witch-hunt of people because they are Muslim, yet there should be the same kind of scrutiny that applies to anyone else. The truth is that bureaucrats are afraid to follow clear leads and point out obvious problems lest their careers be injured by accusations of Islamophobia.
During the 1930s, it was regarded as impolite to look into whether there were Soviet agents in the U.S. government. Despite the lies and exaggerations of certain people later, there was a very serious Communist infiltration that damaged U.S. interests.
There is clearly a parallel effort—no matter how uncoordinated and individual in nature—today. Read Poole’s study, watch his lecture about it and then demand better media coverage and government response to this problem.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are Lebanon: Liberation, Conflict, and Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan), Conflict and Insurgency in the Contemporary Middle Eastand editor of the (seventh edition) (Viking-Penguin), The Israel-Arab Reader the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria(Palgrave-Macmillan), A Chronological History of Terrorism (Sharpe), and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).
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Krauthammer on the government’s wishy-washy response to the Wikileaks scandal
Far more damaging than simple embarrassment at the revelations.
American Thinker Blog
Democrat Response to the Elections: We Just Need More Illegal Voters
This past election cycle, the American people marched to the polls with a clear-cut message for their officials in Washington – stop. Stop the rise of massive government. Stop developing policy behind closed doors, through backroom deals. And stop this anti-American agenda. The results were a ‘shellacking’ for the party in power.
Despite the clarity of voice with which the people spoke on November 2nd, the Democrat response indicates that they did not get the message. Despite troubling job uncertainty, and an extension of the Bush tax cuts on the table, Democrats are pushing what would seemingly be a low-priority issue – immigration legislation.
President Obama recently met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, discussing passage of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors). The Act, which Investor’s Business Daily describes quite simply as ‘an amnesty bill,’ would open a path to citizenship for illegal immigrant students depending on certain criteria. Worse, the Act is being viewed as a ‘down payment’ to more widespread amnesty measures.
But why would Harry Reid and his progressive cohorts push such legislation during a lame duck session? Because the public is clamoring for illegal alien amnesty? No. Because they intend to spit in the face of the American people once again? Yes.
The Democrats have no choice but to respond to the election results with force. Rather than responding by actually listening to the message of the American people, they have decided the appropriate response is to add millions of voters who won’t vote the same way.
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin refers to the DREAM Act as “a 2.1 million future Democrat voter recruitment drive” and just another part of the progressive plan to “redraw the political map and secure a permanent ruling majority.” But that number could easily expand upwards of 6 million over the next decade according to a GOP report.
Sound a little too conspiratorial? Not so much…
