Here at PSA we’ve been working hard to create a program for Congressional staff that adds value in the oftentimes crowded programmatic environment of Washington, D.C. The PSA Congressional Fellowship Program aims to bring together House and Senate staffers from both parties to socialize, debate, and learn together with the goal of enhancing bipartisanship in their daily jobs. The most recent event with the Summer 2009 Fellows was a dinner with 9/11 Commission Chairman and former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, and Politico sent a reporter to cover the event. The resulting article, “Bipartisanship, in three courses”, published this morning, highlights many of the most important aspects of what we do at PSA.

“Whereas members of Congress at least have the opportunity to work together if they choose to do so,” the reporter writes, “staffers are rarely forced to remove their partisan blinders. Until now.” She quotes PSA Fellows Pablo Duran of Sen. Tom Udall’s (D-NM) office and Brandon Andrews of Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-OK) office lamenting the rarity of meeting staff from across the aisle. “‘I don’t know that anyone makes a concerted effort to not do it,’ Andrews said. ‘I just think it doesn’t happen, because people travel in different circles.’”

We will be visiting the White House to meet with President Obama’s chief national security speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, this week and going on a weekend Retreat after that. It’s been an exciting summer so far, and we appreciate Politico’s interest in the work we do here at PSA.

For those who are interested in applying to be a Fellow in the Fall 2009 session, information can be found on our website here.

PSA is excited to welcome a new class of Fellows to its Congressional Fellowship Program next week. The initial group of 27 Fellows includes highly motivated and accomplished staff from 14 Democratic and 13 Republican offices, with 16 from the House and 11 from the Senate. The Program, taking place from June to October 2009, will help these young leaders build relationships across the aisle and gain skills and knowledge necessary to bridge the partisan divide and build consensus on critical issues.

They bring impressive backgrounds to the Program, including active duty military service, legal practice, scientific research, political campaigns, community service, think tanks, and media. Building on these diverse backgrounds, Fellows will participate in critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy guided by former senior foreign policy officials. Following the completion of a series of five events geared toward enhancing effective bipartisan dialogue, Fellows will complete a Final Project aimed at resolving real world challenges on Capitol Hill. The full list of Fellows can be found on the PSA website.

The Congressional Fellowship Program will fill a crucial need on Capitol Hill for the promotion of bipartisanship in a long-term context. Too often, contacts between Members and staff from opposite parties are temporary, made on an issue-by-issue basis. We believe that relationships formed in the earlier stages of a career can help forge a more bipartisan atmosphere and process in Congress across the range of foreign policy challenges faced every session. No one party has a monopoly on wisdom, and by bringing together these Fellows now, they will be able to get to know each other and share ideas and experiences that will pay dividends in future policy debates. We look forward to working with the Fellows and to a great summer.

Obama and Shultz at the White House on May 19 (AP photo)

At a meeting Tuesday with former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), and former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, President Obama summed up the group’s deliberations on the goal of achieving a world without nuclear weapons:

“This is a reminder of the long tradition of bipartisan foreign policy that has been the hallmark of America at moments of greatest need, and that’s the kind of spirit that we hope will be reflected in our administration.”

It’s great to hear this from the President who also made “bipartisanship and openness” an official plank in his campaign platform, and now identifies it as a key to effective US national security and foreign policy for his Administration.

You might think Obama’s commitment to bipartisan consultation and cooperation on national security would win nothing but plaudits from a group of former leaders obviously assembled not just for their substantive expertise, but for their bipartisan credibility. So then what are we to make of George Shultz’s reply, in the role of spokesman for the elder statesmen? Not once, but twice, the former Reagan administration official remarked that President Obama was wrong about nuclear disarmament being a “bipartisan issue,” because:

“It’s really nonpartisan. This is a subject that ought to somehow get up above trying to get a partisan advantage. And it’s of such importance that we need to take it on its own merits. And that’s the way we’ve proceeded. And that’s the way, at least it seems to us, you’ve proceeded.”

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Just when the heat on the Obama presidency seemed to be peaking, Pennsylvania’s senior senator suddenly became a Democrat. It hasn’t been since Sen. Jim Jeffords’ switch gave Senate Democrats a majority in 2001 that a major defection has happened, and Republican soul searching has dominated the news cycle ever since.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum argues for a bigger GOP tent. Referring to the two Republican senators from Maine, Frum argues, “It ought to be obvious to any Republican why we need to make room for politicians like Snowe and Collins in our party. It’s not like we have so many votes that we can afford to throw them away.” Frum worries that while some Republicans are more concerned about the “quality” of Republican elected officials, “quantity” is required to govern. Meanwhile, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor has started a new group, the National Council for a New America, to lead the GOP to a new understanding with the American voter, and perhaps to electoral success.

It is certainly amusing to many Democrats to watch the Republican hand wringing. “I wonder if this is how Republicans felt all those years,” some must wonder, recalling the Democratic Party’s own recent periods of strategic chaos, when Karl Rove’s claims of an enduring Republican majority seemed just a little too plausible. David Brooks calls the jubilation among Democrats “the joy of pulverization,” of scoring another touchdown when you’re already up by four. For Republicans, he calls it “demoralization piled on top of demoralization.”

Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who had a famously unhappy tenure as President Bush’s EPA Administrator, penned a New York Times column lamenting one-party control of Washington.

To the extent we lose more members of the Republican Party, we lose what ability we have left to affect policy, and that is going to be devastating to our nation. Our democracy desperately needs two vibrant parties.

This is about much more than the switch of one senator or even than the potential 60-vote supermajority Democrats may now soon achieve. After all, power is fleeting and the political winds fickle; laws enacted by one Congress can be overturned by the next. As Whitman wondered in her column, what will happen when one party holds such sway over the two political branches of our federal government? While it is easy to see why this is a bad development for Republicans, Democrats may find that Specter’s switch raises as many questions for them as it answers.

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Yes, that’s me, the sinister looking guy on the left side of the screen.  And yes, it’s a real beard.  About a year ago, when Kevin MacDonald and his crew were in DC filming the movie “State of Play,” my wife and I showed up at an open casting call for extras.  We got called back to do a scene set in a Congressional committee hearing room (actually the old EPA building on Constitution Ave, NW), where Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) grills the CEO of PointCorp (a.k.a. Blackwater) about private contractor abuses in Iraq.  For no especially good reason, I got yanked from the crowd to sit in as the CEO’s lawyer, and the rest is, as they say, on the silver screen.

Why am I writing about a Hollywood movie here, on PSA’s bipartisan foreign policy blog?  Well, for one thing, I’m in it, and I think it’s worth seeing despite that.  It’s a pretty good film, and the twist at the end is better than I expected.  But there’s more than that.  For those of us who spend our professional lives thinking about good government policy and how it is—or isn’t—made, I think this movie holds an important lesson.

Without spoiling the plot, I can say that the young, idealistic Congressman’s investigation of the shadowy, powerful, paramilitary corporation is very far from a made up scenario.  It’s based, of course, on real investigations of waste, fraud, abuse, and even war crimes committed by private citizens whose salaries have been paid by the US government.  For more on that, see my fellow Across the Aisle blogger David Isenberg’s recent piece.  What’s worse is that in the movie, as in real life, the bad guys don’t get caught, partly because their high-level political connections immunize them from meaningful scrutiny, but much more importantly, because our system for oversight of government action by Congress is fundamentally broken.

With trillions of dollars in new government spending already swelling the coffers of the Executive Branch and two ongoing wars, it is time to get serious about oversight.  The President’s appointment of Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney to lead a stimulus oversight team was a fine gesture, but an Executive appointee monitoring Executive spending is like a fox guarding a henhouse.  Truly effective oversight will depend on Congress’s willingness to flex some of its Constitutional muscle. (more…)

Last Friday President Obama announced his plan for withdrawing U.S. military forces from Iraq. The planned withdrawal, if not graceful, will certainly be overdue, at least to most of his political base, if not to the military itself.

But the devil is always in the details so let’s examine a few. First, announcing a goal is easy, implementing it is difficult. For the military, which never goes anywhere without literally immense amounts of baggage, this means logistics, logistics, logistics.

As this post in Wired’s Danger Room blog notes, “How do you remove from the country in a year and a half 90,000 or so troops, 40,000 aircraft and vehicles, and 80,000 containers (not to mention 100,000 contractors) spread across more than 280 installations in anything approaching an orderly way?”

See also this 2007 article by veteran military reporter David Wood for details.

This is not to say it is impossible. After all U.S. forces withdrew the bulk of its half a million plus forces in a matter of months after Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But back then the U.S. had not constructed numerous huge military bases. Still, if the U.S. really wants to keep the timetable it better kick planning into high gear now.

It is not just a matter of packing up. Assumptions need to be rethought. Consider the February 12 testimony of Janet St. Laurent Managing Director, Defense Capabilities and Management United States Government Accountability Office to the House Armed Services Committee. She said, “with regard to an Iraq drawdown, DOD’s plans will need to consider the fact that some early planning assumptions about the conditions and timing of redeployments may no longer be applicable in light of the SOFA and evolving U.S. strategy.”

Evolving U.S. strategy is code for send more troops to Afghanistan. But if troops are delayed leaving Iraq it will mean delays, perhaps, not immediately, but certainly in the long run, in deploying troops to Afghanistan, due to the need to rotate troops.

And while you may be able to send more troops to Afghanistan in the near term, providing them with all the necessary equipment may be problematic. St. Laurent said:

the availability of equipment may be limited because the Army and Marine Corps have already deployed much of their equipment to Iraq and much of their prepositioned assets also have been withdrawn to support ongoing operations. Similarly, DOD will need to assess its requirements for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to support increased force levels in Afghanistan, given its current allocation of assets to support ongoing operations in Iraq.

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After the House passed the stimulus bill without a single Republican vote last month, many declared the age of bipartisanship under the Obama Administration over.  How quickly the pundits and the talking heads who hailed the bipartisanship of the new President trumpeted its demise.

So, is President Obama bipartisan or isn’t he?  Everyone wants the answer and they want it now.  The media is tracking bipartisanship as if it can be quantified issue by issue and moment to moment.  This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what bipartisanship is and why it is important.

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We at PSA love Google.  We use Gmail for our mail client, we’ve subscribed to Google Adwords to publicize our work, and we’re all signed up for Google News alerts on various terms revolving around “bipartisanship” and “foreign policy.”  There was a time, not long ago, when those news alerts were manageable.  We’d get perhaps one new story a day, maybe a few each week, and try to bring them to our supporters through occasional links in our e-mail updates, and on the PSA homepage.  For the past month, we’ve been practically buried under a landslide of news articles, editorials and analyses triggered by the Obama Administration’s strong focus on bipartisanship.  That should be great news for PSA, and for all of us who support the call for a renewed bipartisan center in US foreign policy.

Well, I’m sorry to say that so far, the news is not so good.  First, the stories aren’t, for the most part, dealing with national security and foreign policy, the areas where we believe bipartisan cooperation is most appropriate and most desperately needed.  Alright, that’s quite understandable and forgivable, since the Administration must deal with the massive economic crisis foremost on everyone’s mind, which of course has major national security and foreign policy implications I won’t get into now.  But the other not so good part of the news deluge is that bipartisanship doesn’t seem to actually be happening, at least not the way both we and our new President (apparently) hoped that it would.

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The Bush Administration has done a shocking amount of damage to the United States’ economy and global credibility.  Bush’s shenanigans – implementing tax cuts benefiting only the richest Americans, torturing people when seemingly convenient, ignoring the Geneva conventions, and invading Iraq on the basis of deliberately manipulated intelligence – have greatly dishonored the United States.  But what many people overlook, surely without malice, is that these shenanigans were made possible by the very architecture of the Constitution.  For that document, dear friends, only says what a president may do, leaving woefully indeterminate what a president may not do.  Hence the Bush Administration’s insistence on so many occasions that it is at liberty to do whatever it pleases in the name of national security.

The idea that the chief executive of the United States enjoys a range of powers not specifically granted by the Constitution has a long and storied pedigree.  The idea begins with the Framers themselves, learned men who, while taking great care to restrict the powers granted to the Congress in Article I, section 8, decided that the powers assigned to the president should be articulated with considerable economy – which is a gentle way of saying that the Framers didn’t limit the president’s powers in the way they should have.

Consider Article II of the Constitution.  It simply says that the president has the authority to:  (1) compel members of his own cabinet to render their opinions in writing, (2) convene special sessions of Congress, (3) set adjournment dates if the two houses of Congress cannot agree on one, (4) receive ambassadors, (5) act as the commander in chief of the armed forces, (6) veto legislation (which Congress may at its discretion override), and (7) pardon individuals convicted of crimes.  The president also shares with Congress the power to make treaties and appoint federal judges.

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Let’s return to Afghanistan. We might as well, because no matter who wins the election we are going to be hearing lots more about events there.

There has not been a lot to cheer about lately. Consider that on Wednesday Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the mission to stabilize Afghanistan had shown significant gaps in the ability of the United States and NATO to integrate their civilian and military efforts, and he warned that it “remains to be seen” whether the allies could better coordinate their work.

“These efforts today – however well intentioned and even heroic – add up to less than the sum of the parts,” he said.

In a speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Gates said the security of the American people will depend increasingly on an ability to head off the next insurgency or stop the collapse of another failing state. He focused specifically on Afghanistan.

Meanwhile Superman, known to us mere Earthlings as Gen. David Petraeus, now head of the U.S. Central Command, has warned that the lack of development and the spiraling violence in Afghanistan will likely make it “the longest campaign of the long war.”

Thus next month he is launching a 100-day assessment of U.S. strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region. Reportedly he will focus on government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the leveraging of diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war.

It does make you wonder, should Sen. MCain win election, if Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai or Gen. Petraeus can expect to be rebuked by President McCain for talking to the enemy without preconditions. (more…)