We just happened to have a #MA3 Congressional candidate foreign policy and national security candidate debate earlier this week, and then we had the latest in tariff escalations, the G7 meeting, and all that both signify.
Building on what I said at the debate and the events of the last few days, I want to emphasize why I say we can’t afford to wait until 2020 to curb the Administration’s recklessness abroad, especially the President. It must start in 2018, and it’s why we need more members of Congress with career national security expertise.
The President is undermining our best alliances- with allies who fought and died with us from WWI to Afghanistan – with tariffs to score political points. He is transparently refusing to sign off on documents based on Twitter-pique— after the Administration had nearly rejected them because of objection to the phrase “rules-based international order”. Which we built with those allies after WWII. And in parallel with all this- he courts Russia to return to a G8, days after a report concluding Russian forces did shoot down Malaysian Air flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, murdering hundreds of Allied citizens.
Some say there is little that Congress can do about this, or little or nothing that one Member of Congress can do, especially a new Member. Unacceptable. Fatalism and Congress not wanting to be involved in the messy business of war and peace when high dollar fundraisers are calling is how we have come to this. For my part, I’m going to Congress to serve, not to pass the buck or to collect bucks in the form of checks.
Prosperity at home for working and middle-class people requires peace and security abroad, and that requires action.
Congress can and must block the Administration on further tariff action, reclaiming trade powers they ceded in 1962 legislation. Congress can and must tear up the Administration’s blank check for military action by repealing the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force and replacing it with new legislation and an updated War Powers Act. Congress can and must make it illegal for any President to launch a nuclear first strike. Congress can and must block Administration arms deals that will fuel humanitarian disasters. Congress can and must use the intel, foreign affairs and armed services oversight committees to compel the Administration to keep our alliances intact at the working level— while in parallel Congress must keep up parliamentary contacts with our allies, too, to preserve some goodwill and American soft power at the political level. Congress must reclaim all the national security powers it has ceded in recent decades, along with a real sense of shared responsibility — not just in the oversight committees or on patriotic holidays— about our place in the world.
Others can ignore this, procrastinate, or despair. Not me. I’ll be ready on day one in Congress to be both a workhorse who will offer my expertise, and a leader to bring others together as equal partners in the cause, across parties if I can, and I will get as much of all this as I can done in Congress.
As always, I welcome your comments, feedback, or questions on this topic or any other. Apologies in advance if it takes a little time to respond– I write these posts and follow-up comments myself without the help of staff, and there are only so many hours in the day!
This article is an example of why I am working to get Alexandra Chandler elected to Congress.
As usual, Chandler goes beyond mere political rhetoric and provides detailed policy recommendations that are based in deep knowledge and experience in the foreign policy and national security arenas.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that her paragraph listing specific actions that Congress can and must take, is perhaps the most comprehensive listing that I have yet seen of policy remedies that should be enacted legislatively to rebalance power between Congress and the executive in the area of foreign policy.
This is not an easy area in which to legislate, because constitutionally, foreign policy is largely the province of the Executive Branch. Yet she has identified precisely the areas that have long needed revisiting, such as the war powers, but also identified an area of statutory law – the law of tariffs and trade – that are suddenly urgent because of the glaring derilictionn of duty to maintain the alliances made sacred by the sacrifices of our soldiers in World War II.
She is not content to accept the status quo assumptions about Congress’s hand being tied in the area of foreign policy, and she USC right.
Alexandra Chandler is ready to go.
I think this obvious readiness may explain her remarkably strong showing in the polls, despite being outraised up to 25:1.
She has put in the shoe-leather, and was just endorsed by Keith St. John, who knows all 11 candidates well. They are a remarkable group of truly gifted Democrats, but he has endorsed Alexandra Chandler.
“alliances made sacred by the sacrifices of our soldiers”
Really? This is propaganda wrapped in bacon and the bible. Just like Trump would do it.
Dems need to reject everything that Chandler and Trump stand for. Yes, they both want the same thing:
http://bluemassgroup.com/2018/06/dems-must-abandon-alexandra-chandler-and-neoliberalism-in-general/
Someone sent me a link to this piece from the Cato Institute, a Libertarian group. In my experience Libertarians are neither reliable nor clear-eyed critics of Capitalism, but they sure seem to have 20-20 vision when it comes to the defects of (Neo)Liberalism. In this piece the author argues many of the same points I tried to make in a piece I posted here today, but he goes into great detail to show why we should not be so quick to restore the world order to the one that Bush & Cheney, or Obama and Clinton forced on the world. Or the one Alexandra Chandler seems so enamored with:
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/world-imagined-nostalgia-liberal-order#full
The author, in fact, argues convincingly that Trump’s polices and inclinations are simply simple-minded exaggerations of the old realpolitik long practiced by Kissinger, Albright, Kerry, Clinton, and their evil friends in the national security establishment. Friends like Alexandra Chandler.