Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Patrick Leahy’s call for a truth commission to investigate the crimes of the Bush Administration.  Obviously the events of the past couple days, with the release of OLC memos that really transformed the concept of democracy in the Bush era, is revitalizing this debate.

Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration did in the global campaign against terrorism.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, had underscored the need for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and testimony.

The OLC memos are still extraordinary, so horrifying in the picture they paint of executive power that the head of the OLC, Steven Bradbury, felt the need to disavow them near the end of the Bush regime.  It’s likely that he did so to take the heat off of himself.  But there ought to be no get-out-of-jail-free card for the actions taken as the result of these memos.  Glenn Greenwald looks at one of the documents.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens.  And it wasn’t only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls “domestic military operations” was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying — in secret and with no oversight — on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

As Harper’s Scott Horton says, “We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship.”   More on the memos from Jack Balkin and Anonymous Liberal.

Yoo, who is hiding out in Orange County at Chapman University, admitted in an interview to the OC Register only that his memos “lacked a certain polish,” in a profile more concerned with how he’s enjoying the beaches and Vietnamese food of Southern California rather than the “hippies, protesters and left-wing activists” of Berkeley.  Somehow, he’s still teaching law.  Jay Bybee, the other major player in the composition of these memos, is a 9th Circuit Appeals Judge in San Francisco.  Bruce Ackerman recommends impeachment.

Despite the calls of apologists to the contrary, we have to have a reckoning on this.  The previous President, aided by his allies, asserted broad executive powers far outside Constitutional strictures, and the results were illegal wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and a series of other crimes against the state and violations practically every amendment in the Bill of Rights as well as international law.  

But one member of the Judiciary Committee wasn’t at the truth commission hearing yesterday – Dianne Feinstein.  Through a spokesman, she sidestepped whether or not she supports a commission, saying she “hasn’t seen a proposal.”  But she is instituting a competing investigation, from her perch at the Senate Intelligence Committee, that is bound to be a whitewash:

The inquiry is aimed at uncovering new information on the origins of the programs as well as scrutinizing how they were executed — including the conditions at clandestine CIA prison sites and the interrogation regimens used to break Al Qaeda suspects, according to Senate aides familiar with the investigation plans.

Officials said the inquiry was not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws. “The purpose here is to do fact-finding in order to learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future,” said a senior Senate aide, who like others described the plan on condition of anonymity because it had not been made public […]

The senior aide said that the committee had no short-term plans to hold public hearings, and that it was not clear whether the panel would release its final report to the public […]

Senate aides declined to say whether the committee would seek new testimony from former CIA Director George J. Tenet or other former top officials who were involved in the creation and management of the programs.

The Senate investigation will examine whether the detention and interrogation operations were carried out in ways that were consistent with the authorities and instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.

The panel will also look at whether lawmakers were kept fully informed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the committee, and others have said that the Bush administration improperly withheld information from Congress on the CIA’s operations.

This is basically a turf war.  Feinstein wants control of the investigation process in her committee, over Patrick Leahy.  And she wants the hearings to be private as well as the final report.  Emptywheel writes:

Pat Leahy will have an investigation regardless of what DiFi says–and he’s going to start it now. So DiFi issues a vaguely formulated leak saying that she’s going to cover the CIA’s role in torture. And, voila! Now the CIA and DiFi can say try to circumscribe Leahy’s investigation. And of course, by doing an investigation that starts with the premise that it is “not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws,” even while admitting that CIA officers may have gone beyond the “instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks,” it ensures no accountability even for those who went beyond Cheney’s torture regime. And, finally, absolutely no current plans to make public the results, either through public hearings or by releaing a report.

Call DiFi at (202) 224-3841. Thank her for recognizing the importance of understanding the mistakes we made in the past. Remind her that even Pat Roberts’ investigation into CIA Iraq intelligence was released publicly. Demand that she meet at least the level of transparency adopted by her Republican predecessors as SSCI Chair.

Agreed.  This is too important for it to be done in the secret bowels of official Washington as a “fact-finding mission” yielding a white paper that will wind up collecting dust on a shelf.  Feinstein is trying to let criminals off the hook, plain and simple.  History tells us that the inevitable return of criminals like this will only be emboldened to go further as a result.

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Patrick Leahy’s call for a truth commission to investigate the crimes of the Bush Administration.  Obviously the events of the past couple days, with the release of OLC memos that really transformed the concept of democracy in the Bush era, is revitalizing this debate.

Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration did in the global campaign against terrorism.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, had underscored the need for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and testimony.

The OLC memos are still extraordinary, so horrifying in the picture they paint of executive power that the head of the OLC, Steven Bradbury, felt the need to disavow them near the end of the Bush regime.  It’s likely that he did so to take the heat off of himself.  But there ought to be no get-out-of-jail-free card for the actions taken as the result of these memos.  Glenn Greenwald looks at one of the documents.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens.  And it wasn’t only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls “domestic military operations” was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying — in secret and with no oversight — on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

As Harper’s Scott Horton says, “We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship.”   More on the memos from Jack Balkin and Anonymous Liberal.

Yoo, who is hiding out in Orange County at Chapman University, admitted in an interview to the OC Register only that his memos “lacked a certain polish,” in a profile more concerned with how he’s enjoying the beaches and Vietnamese food of Southern California rather than the “hippies, protesters and left-wing activists” of Berkeley.  Somehow, he’s still teaching law.  Jay Bybee, the other major player in the composition of these memos, is a 9th Circuit Appeals Judge in San Francisco.  Bruce Ackerman recommends impeachment.

Despite the calls of apologists to the contrary, we have to have a reckoning on this.  The previous President, aided by his allies, asserted broad executive powers far outside Constitutional strictures, and the results were illegal wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and a series of other crimes against the state and violations practically every amendment in the Bill of Rights as well as international law.  

But one member of the Judiciary Committee wasn’t at the truth commission hearing yesterday – Dianne Feinstein.  Through a spokesman, she sidestepped whether or not she supports a commission, saying she “hasn’t seen a proposal.”  But she is instituting a competing investigation, from her perch at the Senate Intelligence Committee, that is bound to be a whitewash:

The inquiry is aimed at uncovering new information on the origins of the programs as well as scrutinizing how they were executed — including the conditions at clandestine CIA prison sites and the interrogation regimens used to break Al Qaeda suspects, according to Senate aides familiar with the investigation plans.

Officials said the inquiry was not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws. “The purpose here is to do fact-finding in order to learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future,” said a senior Senate aide, who like others described the plan on condition of anonymity because it had not been made public […]

The senior aide said that the committee had no short-term plans to hold public hearings, and that it was not clear whether the panel would release its final report to the public […]

Senate aides declined to say whether the committee would seek new testimony from former CIA Director George J. Tenet or other former top officials who were involved in the creation and management of the programs.

The Senate investigation will examine whether the detention and interrogation operations were carried out in ways that were consistent with the authorities and instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.

The panel will also look at whether lawmakers were kept fully informed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the committee, and others have said that the Bush administration improperly withheld information from Congress on the CIA’s operations.

This is basically a turf war.  Feinstein wants control of the investigation process in her committee, over Patrick Leahy.  And she wants the hearings to be private as well as the final report.  Emptywheel writes:

Pat Leahy will have an investigation regardless of what DiFi says–and he’s going to start it now. So DiFi issues a vaguely formulated leak saying that she’s going to cover the CIA’s role in torture. And, voila! Now the CIA and DiFi can say try to circumscribe Leahy’s investigation. And of course, by doing an investigation that starts with the premise that it is “not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws,” even while admitting that CIA officers may have gone beyond the “instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks,” it ensures no accountability even for those who went beyond Cheney’s torture regime. And, finally, absolutely no current plans to make public the results, either through public hearings or by releaing a report.

Call DiFi at (202) 224-3841. Thank her for recognizing the importance of understanding the mistakes we made in the past. Remind her that even Pat Roberts’ investigation into CIA Iraq intelligence was released publicly. Demand that she meet at least the level of transparency adopted by her Republican predecessors as SSCI Chair.

Agreed.  This is too important for it to be done in the secret bowels of official Washington as a “fact-finding mission” yielding a white paper that will wind up collecting dust on a shelf.  Feinstein is trying to let criminals off the hook, plain and simple.  History tells us that the inevitable return of criminals like this will only be emboldened to go further as a result.

A generous sampling from around the state…

• Newt Gingrich, who for some reason the media finds still relevant, has discovered the Twitter thing that all “the kids” are using.  On it, he blatantly lied that there has been no oil spills off the coast of Santa Barbara since 1969, and was called on it by Media Matters and Keith Olbermann.  He didn’t like that much, so he called upon his pals at the American Enterprise Institute to bail him out.  Needless to say, they lied too.

• This conversation between Greg Lucas of California’s Capitol and Bill Lockyer is well worth reading.  His main point is that hijackings like Abel Maldonado throwing Constitutional amendments into the budget process are just going to embolden obstructionists in the Yacht Party in the future.  “The antes will only keep going up.”  That calamitous Valentine’s Day massacre might only be the beginning if we don’t get serious budget reform.

• Dan Weintraub calms the fever dreams of the antitax crowd and notes that most temporary taxes indeed end on time, with the one recent exception being when voters chose to extend it.

• Here’s Judy Chu talking about her campaign for Congress in CA-32.  We should have more on this race once a date for the election is set.  Gil Cedillo is set to make a big endorsement announcement this weekend.

• Is GOP Congressional backbencher George Radanovich going to get a primary challenger?

• David Leonhardt’s panoramic NYT piece on the Great Recession calls El Centro, in the Imperial Valley, the “capital city” of the downturn.  Unemployment there is up to 22.6 percent.

Links a-plenty:

• Carly Fiorina has been diagnosed with breast cancer.  I know she was considering a 2010 Senate run against Barbara Boxer.  I agree with approximately none of her policy prescriptions for the country, but I wish her the best.

• It’s considered a great victory that the members of the California Congressional delegation are sitting down to a meeting together.  That’s because it’s the first one in two years.  Maybe they can talk about that proposal to split the state in two, therefore ending the need to have such meetings!

• This is truly incredible.  You may remember that Duf Sundheim, a former chair of the Yacht Party, started a group called “California Republicans Aligned for Tomorrow” (CRAFT, a synonym for yacht) designed to recruit moderate candidates and take back California for Christ the Republicans.  Calitics had some fun with it when it launched.  Well, it turns out that Sundheim took $900,000 in salary and benefits for the gig, without, to my knowledge, recruiting one candidate or doing much of anything.  When questioned, Sundheim couldn’t name one candidate CRAFT is recruiting, saying that “the group has decided to stay low-profile”.  Far be it from me to quote Jon Fleischman, but he said, “Most party chairmen do their time, do their service and move on… It would appear from these filings that the sole purpose of CRAFT is to pay Sundheim’s salary.”  Ah, schadenfreude.

• The California DMV has amended its medical marijuana policies to allow physician-approved patients to operate motor vehicles in the same way anyone else on prescription drugs would.  There is a slow retrenchment of demonizing and unfair drug policies in the state.

• High speed rail by 2015 in the Central Valley?  With Merced to Bakersfield the likely first route?

• Property crime is soaring in Bakersfield, Modesto and Stockton, at rates far higher than New York City or Los Angeles.  This is an offshoot of runaway unemployment and foreclosures.

Some more:

• Over 15,000 teachers have received pink slips throughout the state as a cause of budget cuts.  I’m thinking someone should do the math and measure their salaries against the $1 billion dollar tax cut for multinational corporations in the plan.  If the laid-off teachers made an average $50,000 a year, that would be less (roughly $750 million).  And that’s probably high for who was fired (those early in their careers).

• In addition to trying to make people homeless, Ellen Tauscher today introduced legislation to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  That is I guess known as “balance.”

• Tales of California’s Republican Congressional delegation behaving badly: first they demagogue a line item in the omnibus spending billfor including $200,000 for “tattoo removal” when it’s an effective anti-crime program to reintegrate gang members into society run out of the San Fernando Valley.  Then, Buck McKeon lashed out at the proposal in the President’s federal budget to end the needless and inefficient privatization of the student loan program, mainly because of all the crony cash it generates for middleman groups that support him.

• Jim Boren has some conditions for repealing the 2/3 budget majority.  I have some conditions for reading Jim Boren: don’t expect it to make any sense.  Most of his conditions come down to stamping out waste, which is a loaded term (“waste” often means “food for poor people”) but which a new Assembly committee is already tasked with doing.

• With the drought emergency called for, competing water bonds have returned to the front burner.  This took up a great deal of the legislature’s time last year, with no results.

• Dan Walters thinks he has a scoop when he cites a Pew report stating that California “isn’t the toughest in imprisonment” in the nation, using statistics showing the state below the national average in numbers of people behind bars or under parole or probation supervision for crimes.  Uh, Dan: We have the highest recidivism rate in the nation. We don’t have as many people per capita in the parole system because far too many of them go back to prison. Making it costlier than most states.  And California didn’t even deliver its statistics on cost, even though they spend more than half as much as the 34 states who did provide data, COMBINED.  There’s a reason the system is under a federal receivership.

The best of the rest:

• Former Assemblywoman Nell Soto passed away after a long illness that included much of the 2008 legislative session.  She had been active in state and local politics since the late 1940s.  RIP.

• This is a major ruling from the California Supreme Court on whistleblower protections.  The case involved a low-level employee who reported her superior for violating regulations.  Employees will no longer be subject to retaliation (as the whistleblower in question was) without further sanctions.

• Did you know that the first gubernatorial forum on the Democratic side, kind of, happened this week in Northridge?

• The current Governor has declared a state of emergency due to three years of drought conditions and reservoirs operating at 1/3 capacity.  One solution is to have that octopus that flooded the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium to tour the state.  OK, enough jokes, this is really serious.  Hopefully, the proclamation will lead to conservation actions and increased water management throughout the state.

With the unemployment rate soaring to double digits and less revenue flowing to the state, it was clear that some taxes would have to be raised in the last budget.  To the extent I have criticized those taxes, it’s because they are flat or regressive, increasing burdens on those with the least ability to pay.  Via California Budget Bites, it turns out that it’s even worse than I thought:

One of the last-minute changes to the budget agreement substituted a 0.25 percentage point increase in each of the state’s basic income tax rates in place of a 5.0 percent income tax surtax. The enacted change would increase each of the tax rates for two or four years, depending on whether the spending cap that will appear on the May special election ballot is approved by the voters. For example, the 4 percent tax rate would be 4.25 percent under the new law and the 9.3 percent rate would go to 9.55 percent. As discussed in yesterday’s blog post, the increase would be cut in half – to 0.125 percentage points – if the Treasurer and Director of Finance certify that the state will receive at least $10.0 billion in “flexible” funds from the federal economic recovery bill. In contrast, the proposal under consideration until the final night of budget negotiations would have required all personal income taxpayers to add an amount equal to 5.0 percent of their tax liability for the two- or four-year period.

Because of this seemingly minor change, lower-income households will experience a much larger tax increase than under the previously considered proposal. The tax liability of a married couple with a taxable income of $40,000 will rise by 12.9 percent under the enacted policy, as opposed to 5.0 percent under the proposal previously under consideration. In contrast, the tax liability of a married couple with a taxable income of $150,000 will rise by 4.0 percent under the final agreement, instead of 5.0 percent under the original surcharge proposal. High-income earners will experience the most significant change – their tax liability will only rise by 2.9 percent under the enacted policy.

It is somewhat likely that the stimulus trigger will be reached – we will know around April 1 when the Governor’s Finance Director and Treasurer Lockyer make the decision.  Still, this is an outrageous undermining of the public trust.  We are essentially reacting to a yawning budget gap with taxes that mostly hit the middle class and below.  That’s true of the penny increase in the sales tax (which will now reach close to 10% in LA County) and it’s true of this income tax increase.  This is the conservative veto in action, folks.  And it’s not going to change until it’s eliminated.

Time for what you’ve all been waiting for – links.

• Check out Van Jones’ testimony before Congress on how to increase national service.  Very good stuff.

• Yesterday’s open thread included a link that said “Would you believe Congressman Foggo.”  It wasn’t made clear that Dusty Foggo, the former #3 at the CIA, had considered running for Congress in the past before being arrested on various corruption charges.  He’s clearly not going to be in any campaign at this point, and today he was sentenced to three years in prison for steering CIA contracts to lobbyist pals.

• There is an election next Tuesday in Los Angeles, for Mayor, some City Council seats and a variety of other offices, including City Attorney.  Jack Weiss is favored, but Republican Carmen Trutanich is getting a lot of press – even the LA Times endorsement – despite his record as a mouthpiece for polluters.

• The New York Times has an article on Eagle Rock, the one-time working-class community on the Eastside of Los Angeles, once thought to be the next wave of gentrifying hipster enclaves, now fallen on tough times due to the recession.

• Santa Monica, the “home of the homeless,” is experiencing some tangible progress in managing the problem, with an 8% drop in the street population in 2008.  This is mainly happening through an innovative program to find and provide housing and services to the population.

• According to the Sacramento Bee, a state superior court judge has issued a tentative ruling that state workers’ pay can be cut to the federal minimum wage when lawmakers miss California’s annual budget deadline.  Excellent.  Another incentive for the Zombie Death Cult to hold up the budget, and still more leverage to extort concessions when they do.  They won’t be happy until everyone who isn’t rich is basically a day laborer.  

You will be graded on this and the results will go on your permanent record.

• The Merced Sun-Star managed to come up with 6 budget reforms without managing to mention the repeal of 2/3 and the restoration of democracy.  The traditional media is still in love with half-solutions that offer no fix.

• 25 all-electric trucks rolled off the assembly line and into the Port of Los Angeles for use in their Green Trucks program.  Between this and PG&E’s deal to add 500 megawatts of solar power by 2015, it’s clear that we have all the tools necessary to reach our renewable energy goals, and all that’s needed is proper pressure and political will.  A recent report showed that the current renewable standard is totally feasible.

• John Chiang released a report showing that long-term health care spending for public employees is unsustainable, and will require better long-term budgeting to manage.  Of course, sweeping health care reform like what is being planned at the federal level may control costs and change the equation quite a bit.

• The Mayor of Los Alamitos is a straight-up racist.  He really sent out the “growing watermelons in the front yard of the White House” joke?  Really?  Slick.

• CA-50: Would you believe Congressman Foggo?