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How to Stop a Rogue President from Ordering a Nuclear First Strike

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The “Baker” explosion, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear weapon test by the United States military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on 25 July 1946. [Source: Wikipedia]
On November 15, US Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and US Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) introduced  one of the shortest bills in the histories of their two parliamentary bodies. Shorn of the obligatory “be it enacted, blah, blah, blah” boilerplate, the bill’s content comes to 14 words: “It is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first.”

It’s a short bill and it’s a good bill, but it could be made both shorter and better by eliminating the word “first.”

What America needs is a “no use of nukes, period” policy, followed quickly by an “elimination of the nuclear arsenal” policy.

In July, 122 United Nations member countries endorsed a treaty  banning nuclear weapons altogether and providing for their elimination. The US abstained from the vote and won’t be signing the treaty. I’m not sure why, since the treaty wouldn’t really impose any new obligations and since unstated US doctrine is that only other countries, like Iran, should be expected to live up to their treaty obligations. The US is already formally committed to nuclear disarmament by virtue of its participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It’s just never taken that obligation seriously.

Congress recently took up the question of whether or not President Donald Trump can be trusted with the authority to order a nuclear strike. His personal temperament alarms them. That temperament may or may not truly be more prickly than that of past presidents, but in the age of Twitter it’s more openly alarming.

Unfortunately, Congress has ceded so much of its authority over foreign and military policy to the presidency since the end of World War Two — the last time the US entered a war by congressional declaration, as required by its Constitution — that trying to claw back just this one little bit of that authority is theater without substance.

Possession of the “nuclear football” is nine tenths of the law. To keep Donald Trump, or any other president, from using nuclear weapons wickedly (as if there were some other way to use them), Congress needs to get rid of the  nukes, not just tinker with the legal authority to use them.

Nuclear weapons have no legitimate military use. They are weapons of terror, not of war. It’s time that the first and only government to ever use them become the second (after South Africa) to voluntarily give them up, for its own sake and the world’s.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Impeachment Theater, 2017 Edition

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English: Floor proceedings of the U.S. Senate,...
English: Floor proceedings of the U.S. Senate, in session during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As US president Donald Trump returned to the White House after a 12-day trip to Asia, he might be forgiven for wishing he’d spent more time seeing the sights of the Far East. Back home he faces a Republican Party torn by scandalous allegations against its candidate for US Senate from Alabama, a likely bruising fight over tax “reform,” and more of the constant nipping at his heels by “Russiagate” special counsel Robert Mueller.

Oh, and Articles of Impeachment introduced in the US House of Representatives on November 15 by several Democrats.

The charges: Obstruction of justice, violation of the Constitution’s “domestic emoluments” and “foreign emoluments” clauses, abuse of power (by “undermining the independence of the federal judiciary and the rule of law”), and undermining the freedom of the press.

Whether or not he’s guilty of one or more of those things will be decided by the US Senate as jury (a vote of 2/3 required to convict; the president’s party holds a slim majority in that body), in a trial with the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court presiding.

Or, rather, it will be decided that way in the unlikely event that a simple majority of the House (the president’s party holds a less slim majority there) actually votes to impeach him.

If past performance an indicator of future results, performance — political theater — is really all we can expect here.

Two past presidents — Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton — have been impeached. Neither was convicted. A third, Richard Nixon, might have been, but he resigned before the House could vote on impeachment.

Johnson was impeached on — and acquitted of — ten counts relating to his dismissal of a cabinet official without the Senate’s blessing and one count of making speeches that Congress found disrespectful, but one suspects his chief sin was being a Democratic vice-president when a Republican president was assassinated.

Clinton was impeached on — and acquitted of — two counts (perjury and obstruction) of which he was clearly guilty, relating to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, but again his real offense was political: He was a Democrat who’d won re-election against a Republican.

As much as one might like to think of the presidency and Congress as temples to civic virtue or arenas in which issues of great weight are disputed, Washington is in truth a lot more like a “professional wrestling” ring. It’s two gangs of boastful peacocks putting on a tag-team show. Washington’s rivalries may be more real but they’re no more momentous.

I’m hard put to think of a president who never took actions meriting impeachment. But impeachment isn’t about facts or evidence. It’s about political party. Which means that, for now anyway, Trump’s presidency is safe.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Honest Ads Act: “Fundamental Rights,” Real and Imagined

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Ban Censorship (RGBStock)

Wikipedia defines “moral panic” as “a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society” and notes that A Dictionary of Sociology attributes the cultivation of moral panics to “moral entrepreneurs and the mass media.”

We’re well into the second year of a moral panic drummed up by Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans for the purpose of nullifying the outcome of the 2016 presidential election — removing US president Donald Trump from office, or making him a four-year de facto lame duck — by blaming his upset victory on “Russian meddling.”

But moral panics have multiple uses. As former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once said, “[y]ou never let a serious crisis go to waste. … it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” This is as true of an artificial crisis as of a real one. Perhaps even more so, since real crises need to be dealt with, not just manufactured and hyped.

Karen Hobert Flynn of The Daily Beast reports that US Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Mark Warner (D-VA) are pushing something called “The Honest Ads Act.” The prospective law would burden web sites and social media networks with unconstitutional identity disclosure and disclaimer requirements like those currently covering political ads on radio and television.

Their excuse? Moral panic. “The Russians” pushed some cheesy political memes over social media last year. Obviously, “Hillary vs. Jesus” is what swung the election. And, Hobert asserts, Americans have a “fundamental right to know who is trying to influence our votes and our views on public policy.”

Well, no. Americans — and Russians — have a fundamental right to say what they want to say, with or without their names attached to it.

“Who the Author of this Production is,” reads an old political pamphlet, “is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the Doctrine itself, not the Man.”

That old pamphlet is Common Sense, the manifesto of the American Revolution. We know its author’s name — Thomas Paine — now, but its first readers didn’t. From Cato’s Letters to The Federalist Papers, anonymous  and pseudonymous political speech defined early American free speech in  ideology and in practice.

There’s a right to speak. There’s a right to listen or not listen to what someone says. There’s a right to ask who’s saying it, and to condition one’s belief or non-belief on the answer. But that answer may be “none of your business,” and there’s no right to forcibly dictate otherwise.

Don’t let demagogues like McCain, Klobuchar, and Warner exploit the current moral panic to manufacture fake new rights at the expense of old real ones.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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