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U.S. Senator Coons Says He Will Support Iran Nuclear Deal: Washington Post

U.S. Senator Coons Says He Will Support Iran Nuclear Deal: Washington Post

(Reuters) — Democratic U.S. Senator Chris Coons said on Tuesday he will support the Iran nuclear deal, the Washington Post said, leaving the list of senators backing the agreement just one shy of the 34 needed to ensure it will survive congressional review.

Coons, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, holds the Delaware U.S. Senate seat once held by Vice President Joe Biden. He was due to discuss his position on the Iran deal on Tuesday at the University of Delaware.

To date, 31 Senate Democrats and two independents who vote with the Democrats have said they would back the agreement.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Bill Trott and Emily Stephenson)

Photo: Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), official portrait.

A Senator’s Faith — And Humility

A Senator’s Faith — And Humility

WASHINGTON — There are few moments of grace in our politics these days, especially where conflicts over religion are concerned. Last week, I witnessed one. Perhaps it was a mere drop in an ocean of suspicion and mistrust, but it was instructive and even encouraging.

The venue, in a small meeting room at a Holiday Inn not far from the Capitol, was a gathering of members of the Secular Coalition for America whose mission is “to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States.” One cause of the contentiousness of our politics is that both secular and very religious Americans feel misunderstood and under assault.

Enter Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE).

The Secular Coalition invited Coons to speak because, as he said of himself last Thursday night, he is “dedicated to the separation of church and state and to the equal protection under the Constitution which I swore to uphold, whether you are religious or secular.”

More than that, Coons told the crowd that he is uneasy with “rigid certainty” on religious questions. He understands that many are skeptical of faith, both because “religion [has] come to be so closely associated with right-wing politics” and because the Bible “has been used as a document, as a foundation, to justify discrimination.” The revered text is, to some, “the basis of intolerance, based on outdated teachings and moral codes and has been a source of pain and distance and discomfort for many.”

If Coons had left it at that, this would have been another in a long series of Washington speeches in which a politician tells his allies how much he agrees with them. But as “a practicing Christian and a devout Presbyterian,” Coons had a second message.

Early on, he quoted the very Bible others find offensive, noting that Jesus’ command in Matthew 25 to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the imprisoned had “driven” him throughout his life. As a young man, he spent time in Kenya and South Africa working with the poor and with leaders of the South African Council of Churches, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

And then he told a story. As a Yale Law School student, he decided to pursue a separate degree from the university’s divinity school, and what he encountered was a long way from tolerance and open-mindedness.

“I was very active in the progressive community in my law school and most of my friends were politically active progressives,” he said. “But I was unprepared for their response when word started filtering out that I had enrolled in divinity school. Some of them literally disowned me; my own roommates moved out. Several folks literally stopped speaking to me, and acted as if I had lost my mind.”

His own background was thrown in his face, with friends saying: “Chris, you’re a scientist, you’re a chemist, you trained as a chemist as an undergraduate, how could you possibly believe this insane stuff?”

What he experienced, Coons said, was “real bigotry.”

“Frankly, we were a group of progressives who were really proud of how welcoming and open we were and how virtually any possible lifestyle or worldview or attitude was something we would embrace — right up until the moment when I said I believed in God.” For many progressives, “accepting someone of expressed faith was one of the hardest moments of tolerance and inclusion for them.”

Believers among you are probably cheering Coons at this point. But ever the peacemaker, he didn’t stop here. The other lesson he learned was that many nonbelievers “had personal experiences of deep pain and of alienation … that had driven a big wedge between them and religion.”

And he offered this: “When I think about this country’s founding, the central tenet of secular governance, I also think about the importance of doubt and of humility. As a person of faith, I think it’s foundational to our country that if we allow people to choose their path of faith, they must of course be also free, welcomed, celebrated, to choose not to have faith in a supreme being.”

It’s to the credit of the Secular Coalition crowd that they cheered a speech that was as challenging as it was affirming. Coons’ message was deceptively simple: that we must find ways of “getting past some of our misunderstandings of each other.” The problem: Respecting each other on matters of faith and politics seems beyond our current capacities.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. 

Photo: Wyoming_Jackrabbit via Flickr

In U.S., Calls Mount For Major Scale-Up To Ebola Crisis

In U.S., Calls Mount For Major Scale-Up To Ebola Crisis

Washington (AFP) – The world response to the deadly Ebola crisis in West Africa needs a major scale-up that should include military flights for delivering supplies, U.S. lawmakers and leading doctors said Thursday.

The calls came amid new warnings from the World Health Organization that the viral outbreak is accelerating out of control, with 2,296 dead and 4,293 infected in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria since the start of this year.

“The problem is that unless we have a massive scale-up of resources in the form of hospital beds, personnel, equipment, we are not going to be able to control this,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease.

“We need to do something at a much higher scale that we are doing now,” he said in an interview with AFP.

“We are going to need thousands of more people, thousands of more beds,” Fauci said.

“We probably will need some sort of military presence — not with guns — but military that have logistic capabilities of flying equipment in and out, this kind of thing.”

Fauci said discussions are under way among top officials worldwide regarding how to contain the epidemic, which has fast become the largest Ebola outbreak in history.

The WHO has pledged $100 million to combat the Ebola spread, while the World Bank vowed $200 million, the European Commission $181 million, and the United States $75 million to combat.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation this week also committed $50 million to UN agencies and international organization involved in the emergency efforts.

“Ebola most likely will not become a global health threat,” wrote doctors Annette Rid of King’s College London and Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania, in the journal of the American Medical Association.

The virus only spreads among people in close contact with the bodily fluids of those infected, and most developed nations can sufficiently isolate the sick in order to ward off Ebola’s spread.

However, high-income countries have “three compelling reasons to help,” they urged, citing humanitarianism, global justice and the ethics of sharing benefits from research.

In the U.S. Senate, Christopher Coons, chairman of the subcommittee on African Affairs, called on President Barack Obama to designate a point-person for managing the U.S. response.

“We must begin to deploy United States military support to the maximum extent possible,” he added.

He praised the announcement earlier this week that the United States would be establishing a new hospital facility in Liberia.

“But I’ll admit, I’m concerned it will take weeks to deploy, Coons, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor.

“This is not everything we can and should be doing. We need to build more field hospitals, for civilians in Liberia and beyond, so that there are facilities for health workers and civilians fighting the disease.”

Coons also called on private citizens and international organizations to give whatever they could to the response effort.

AFP Photo/Inaki Gomez

Adegbile’s Denied Confirmation Is Affront To Our Principles

Adegbile’s Denied Confirmation Is Affront To Our Principles

Last week, the floor of the U.S. Senate was the scene of a bipartisan travesty, an affront to the principles of the Constitution, an assault on the notion of American exceptionalism. With the help of several Democrats, Republicans refused to confirm Debo P. Adegbile, President Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.

The GOP’s resistance was expected since its senators oppose every nominee the president puts forward. But this time, Adegbile’s new job was torpedoed because a handful of Democrats stepped forward to help launch the explosives. They found objections in Adegbile’s résumé, despite his impeccable credentials, sterling reputation and years of advocacy in the causes associated with civil rights.

Indeed, it is precisely that advocacy that led to the assault on his qualifications. His alleged misstep? Adegbile, a lawyer, was tangentially involved in filing a court challenge on behalf of a former Black Panther named Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. Adegbile was litigation director for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund when it filed a brief contesting the jury-sentencing instructions, an argument which resulted in commutation of Abu-Jamal’s sentence from death to life in prison in 2012.

That process is embedded in decades of case law. Defense attorneys are supposed to vigorously represent accused criminals — no matter the crimes with which they have been charged, no matter their guilt or innocence, no matter how radical their demeanor or vile their behavior — especially in capital cases.

Among the people who ought to understand that is Pennsylvania’s senior Democratic senator, Bob Casey. If he had any decency, any gumption, any courage, Casey would have helped to smooth Adegbile’s path.

He would have noted that American justice rests on the idea that each person stands equally before the bar, a credo that cannot be upheld without defense attorneys for the accused. The senator might have pointed out that in the U.S. armed forces, even the most heinous criminals are represented by competent defense counsel. And he might have reminded Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police that Adegbile did not spare Abu-Jamal’s life. A federal court did so because it agreed that instructions to the jury were unconstitutional.

Instead, Casey led the Democratic opposition. He explained his refusal to support the nominee with this statement:

“I respect that our system of law ensures the right of all citizens to legal representation no matter how heinous the crime. (But) it is important … citizens … have full confidence in their public representatives — both elected and appointed. The vicious murder of Officer Faulkner in the line of duty and the events that followed in the 30 years since his death have left open wounds for Maureen Faulkner and her family as well as the city of Philadelphia.”

That statement is confusing, contradictory and just plain dumb. Casey will ignore the system of law because of the awful grief borne by Maureen Faulkner? I cannot begin to imagine what her family has endured since her husband was gunned down shortly before his 26th birthday, but we don’t allow the anguish of families to dictate justice. If we did, they could serve as jurors, judges and executioners. But that wouldn’t be any different from a lynch mob, would it?

Similarly, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) explained his stick-in-the eye to Adegbile by speaking of the pain endured by the Faulkner family, even while acknowledging that “an attorney is not responsible for the actions of their client.” That wasn’t as outlandish as the rhetoric from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who claimed that Adegbile was “seeking to glorify an unrepentant cop-killer,” but it was a non sequitur.

In this shameful episode, the person who best represented American values was Adegbile, the son of a Nigerian father and an Irish immigrant mother. He clearly puts more faith in the fundamental principles of his homeland than the 52 senators who voted against him.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: Scott* via Flickr