Tag: u s congress
Americans Support Tougher Action Against Jihadists

Americans Support Tougher Action Against Jihadists

Washington (AFP) — Americans and Congress have grown hawkish in their views of jihadists, according to a Tuesday poll and lawmakers who say President Barack Obama should take stronger military action against the Islamic State (IS).

The increasingly aggressive stance frames the backdrop of Obama’s upcoming speech to the nation Wednesday, when he will lay out what the White House says will be his “strategy for degrading and ultimately destroying the terrorist group.”

In the Washington Post/ABC News poll, Americans overwhelmingly favored taking tougher steps against IS, with 52 percent of respondents saying Obama has been “too cautious” in his approach to the extremist forces rampaging across parts of Iraq and Syria.

Eight percent said his approach was too aggressive, while 35 percent said it was about right.

Nine in 10 Americans declared IS a serious threat.

Respondents favored ongoing airstrikes against the group in Iraq by 71 percent to 23 percent, and they responded 65 to 28 percent in favor of expanding airstrikes into Syria, where the administration has shown reluctance in getting involved in the ongoing civil war.

In Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike are calling for more presidential resolve in bringing down IS.

Many lawmakers feel Obama already has authority under the War Powers Resolution to conduct military strikes on Iraq and Syria, but voices from both parties have called for a formal vote to authorize the use of force.

“I am looking for a strategy from the president that takes on this terrorist threat and defeats it,” House Speaker John Boehner told reporters.

Boehner and other congressional leaders were to be briefed by Obama later Tuesday.

Obama has sought to downplay the prospect of re-inserting US ground troops into Iraq, but Boehner declined to rule out the possibility of a role for US soldiers beyond their advisory or protective capacity.

Obama “needs to show that he can be a leader, that he can coalesce the Arab League partners in a way that he hasn’t in the past,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers told Fox News.

But Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger said lawmakers are ready to green-light presidential action now.

“If he chooses to come to Congress, I think it would pass overwhelmingly,” Kinzinger said.

Calls to intensify military action against IS go beyond the traditional circle of interventionists. Senator Rand Paul, who has been deeply skeptical of US overseas intervention, has recently joined calls to destroy IS.

According to Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, Obama has the authority to launch more airstrikes.

“The question is how long that lasts,” she said.

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan

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U.S. Lawmakers Want Ukraine Leader To Address Congress

U.S. Lawmakers Want Ukraine Leader To Address Congress

Washington (AFP) — Top U.S. senators on Monday pressed for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to address a joint session of Congress when he visits Washington on September 18.

Kiev’s government and military are facing pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and U.S. lawmakers want President Barack Obama’s administration to “extend a hand of friendship to the Ukrainian people.”

“We believe that it is critically important for every member of Congress to hear from Ukraine’s president at this defining moment for not only Ukraine, but for Russia and the post-Cold War international order,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez and its top Republican Senator Bob Corker said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner.

They said that Ukrainians had “surprised the world” by ousting a longtime leader widely accused of corruption.

“Today, with a newly elected democratic government in office, and having chosen for themselves the direction of their nation, Ukraine faces a renewed battle for its economic and political sovereignty,” the senators wrote.

Boehner’s office said Monday a final decision had yet to be made, but that such a joint session would “be difficult given the short notice and the legislative calendar.”

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye was the last foreign leader to address a joint meeting of Congress, on May 2013.

AFP Photo/Mykola Lazarenko

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Will The 113th Congress Be The Least Productive In History?

Will The 113th Congress Be The Least Productive In History?

Members of Congress returned to Capitol Hill after their August recess on Monday, and if they want to avoid being the least productive Congress in modern history, they have their work cut out for them. According to Govtrack.us, this Congress has enacted only 163 laws (including both bills and joint resolutions that have been enacted into law). That leaves it 121 laws behind the 112th Congress, which is currently the do-nothingest in modern congressional history.

Washington Post chart

As this chart from TheWashington Post shows, it is common practice for as much as 50 percent of laws enacted by Congress to come in the last quarter of the session. But even taking Congress’ tendency to procrastinate into account, the 113th Congress will have to cover a lot of ground in the next few weeks if it wants to enact more laws than its predecessor. This is because of November’s elections: According to the Associated Press, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to adjourn the Senate by September 23 to allow members to campaign.

The most pressing issue is keeping the government funded. Legislators will need to come up with a short-term spending bill to fund the government through the end of 2014, and they will need to do so by September 30. With negotiations over the budget absorbing so much time and focus in the coming weeks, the question will be whether Congress can accomplish much else before being adjourned until after the elections.

If its track record is any indication, then the answer looks grim. While the number of laws that a Congress enacts is not the only way to judge its productivity, even small-government conservatives will find this dearth of legislation to be a problem, since it does take a law to repeal a law.

Even when Congress has been able to pass legislation, like The Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and the Veterans Access Choice and Accountability Act (which reformed the VA), it has sunk back into inefficiency by following it up with partisan bills that stand little chance of becoming law. On the day before the August recess, for example, the House passed bills authorizing a lawsuit against President Obama and curtailing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — neither of which the Democratic-controlled Senate will seriously consider.

If this Congress really wants to improve its productivity, its members will need to compromise and pass bills that are not solely designed to position themselves favorably for re-election.

AFP Photo/Jewel Samad

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Watch Out Hill Staffers, @congressedits Is Tweeting All Of Your Wikipedia Edits

Watch Out Hill Staffers, @congressedits Is Tweeting All Of Your Wikipedia Edits

Congressional staffers can no longer edit Wikipedia pages in their spare time at work without their changes being tweeted to the world. A new Twitter bot, @congressedits, tracks all anonymous edits to Wikipedia made from congressional IP addresses. So far, the bot has tweeted 97 times and has over 21,000 followers.

Web developer Ed Summers was inspired to create @congressedits after learning about Parliament WikiEdits, which tracks edits coming from the British Parliament.

“The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool,” Summers wrote on his blog.

Summers posted the code for the Twitter bot to GitHub so others could create similar bots, all in the spirit of transparency and community.

“The truth is, @congressedits has only announced a handful of edits, and some of them are pretty banal. But can’t a staffer or politician make a grammatical change, or update an article about a movie? Is it really news that they are human, just like the rest of us?” he wrote. “I created @congressedits because I hoped it could engender more, better ideas and tools like it. More thought experiments. More care for our communities and peoples. More understanding, and willingness to talk to each other. More humor. More human.”

So far, @congressedits hasn’t caught anything particularly controversial (maybe because staffers now know that the bot exists). The edits range from pop culture pages (like those of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Step Up 3D) to pages about journalists (BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith is a Smirnoff ice enthusiast!) to JFK conspiracy theories.

Someone on the Hill called former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld an alien lizard.

Rumsfeld

A staffer added this entire paragraph to Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS)’s page, “Congressman Huelskamp has become an independent, national conservative leader in Congress for his unwavering commitment to Constitutional government, reduced spending and over-regulation, fighting waste and corruption, defending traditional values and civil liberties, stopping ObamaCare, and ensuring accountability and transparency in Congress.”

Huelskamp

And someone found it incredibly important to mention that The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling bred “rare long haired cats” as a child.

darling

This isn’t the first time that the public has tracked the Hill’s activity on Wikipedia. In 2012, BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski did a search of the House of Representatives’ IP address on Wikipedia, and found a few hilarious edits.

The staff of Allen West, a Republican representing Florida at the time, removed a mention of the time that he called the entire Progressive Caucus “Communists.” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS)’s office got rid of his entire “controversies” section. And Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS)’s staff deleted any mention of the time he said he “hunted liberal, tree-hugging Democrats.”

As more Twitter bots are created, they’ll start to play an important role in holding politicians accountable. It’s already happened in Russia. @RuGovEdits, a bot launched to monitor the Russian government, caught that someone edited a Wikipedia page about plane accidents. The page had originally said that the Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 was shot down “by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation.” The editor changed it to say that the plane “was shot down by Ukranian soldiers.”

Screenshot: Twitter

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