Nelson Mandela and George Washington

George Washington was a great president not just because of what he did, but because of what he refrained from doing.  He did not assume dictatorial power, did not seek revenge against enemies, and did not attempt to hang on to office.  When his two terms were over, he simply went home.  At Commentary, Max Boot writes of other insurgents:

This is not, needless to say, the norm. Much more common are insurgents like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, Kim Il Sung, and (fill in the blank) who, while posturing as freedom fighters battling an evil dictatorship, swiftly become dictators in turn as soon as they seize power. The exceptions to that rule are some of the greatest figures of modern history–the likes of George Washington, Michael Collins, David Ben-Gurion, and, most recently, Nelson Mandela.

I can remember growing up in the 1980s when there was widespread suspicion among conservatives in the U.S.–including many in the Reagan administration–that if the African National Congress were to take over, South Africa would be transformed into another dysfunctional dictatorship like the rest of the continent. That this did not come to pass was due to many reasons including F.W. de Klerk’s wisdom in giving up power without a fight.

But the largest part of the explanation for why South Africa is light years ahead of most African nations–why, for all its struggles with high unemployment, crime, corruption, and other woes, it is freer and more prosperous than most of its neighbors–is the character of Nelson Mandela. Had he turned out to be another Mugabe, there is every likelihood that South Africa would now be on the same road to ruin as Zimbabwe. But that did not happen because Mandela turned out to be, quite simply, a great man–someone who could spend 27 years in jail and emerge with no evident bitterness to make a deal with his jailers that allowed them to give up power peacefully and to avoid persecution.

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His example should dispel any illusions, so popular in the historical profession, that history is made by impersonal forces. Mandela’s example is a ringing endorsement of what is derisively known as the “great man school of history”–the notion that influential individuals make a huge difference in how events turn out. He certainly made a difference, and for the better. He will go down as one of the giants of the second half of the twentieth century along with Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lech Walesa, and Pope John Paul II.

Public Opinion, America, and the World

The Pew Research Center reports:

The survey of the general public, conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 6 among 2,003 adults, finds that views of U.S. global importance and power have passed a key milestone. For the first time in surveys dating back nearly 40 years, a majority (53%) says the United States plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did a decade ago. The share saying the U.S. is less powerful has increased 12 points since 2009 and has more than doubled – from just 20% – since 2004.

An even larger majority says the U.S. is losing respect internationally. Fully 70% say the United States is less respected than in the past, which nearly matches the level reached late in former President George W. Bush’s second term (71% in May 2008). Early last year, fewer Americans (56%) thought that the U.S. had become less respected globally.

Foreign policy, once a relative strength for President Obama, has become a target of substantial criticism. By a 56% to 34% margin more disapprove than approve of his handling of foreign policy. The public also disapproves of his handling of Syria, Iran, China and Afghanistan by wide margins. On terrorism, however, more approve than disapprove of Obama’s job performance (by 51% to 44%).

The public’s skepticism about U.S. international engagement – evident in America’s Place in the World surveys four and eight years ago – has increased. Currently, 52% say the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” Just 38% disagree with the statement. This is the most lopsided balance in favor of the U.S. “minding its own business” in the nearly 50-year history of the measure.

After the recent near-miss with U.S. military action against Syria, the NATO mission in Libya and lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, about half of Americans (51%) say the United States does too much in helping solve world problems, while just 17% say it does too little and 28% think it does the right amount. When those who say the U.S. does “too much” internationally are asked to describe in their own words why they feel this way, nearly half (47%) say problems at home, including the economy, should get more attention.

Madison and Obama

A recent hearing of the House Judiciary Committee examined President Obama's decisions to waive or suspend the enforcement of laws.  George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley had this exchange with Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA):

REP. BOB GOODLATTE (R-VA): Professor Turley, the constitution, the system of separated powers is not simply about stopping one branch of government from usurping another. It's about protecting the liberty of Americans from the dangers of concentrated government power. How does the president's unilateral modification of act of Congress affect both the balance of power between the political branches and the liberty interests of the American people?

JONATHAN TURLEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power in every single branch.

This Newtonian orbit that the three branches exist in is a delicate one but it is designed to prevent this type of concentration. There is two trends going on which should be of equal concern to all members of Congress. One is that we have had the radical expansion of presidential powers under both President Bush and President Obama. We have what many once called an imperial presidency model of largely unchecked authority. And with that trend we also have the continued rise of this fourth branch. We have agencies that are quite large that issue regulations. The Supreme Court said recently that agencies could actually define their own or interpret their own jurisdiction.

In his prepared statement, Turley elaborated.  He discussed signing statements, nonenforcement orders, and nondefense orders, which arise when presidents decide that their administrations will not defend a challenged law in court.

It is often difficult to separate the merits of the underlying policies from the means used to achieve them. It so happens that I agree with many of the goals of the Administration in the various areas where the President has circumvented Congress. However, in the Madisonian system, it is often more important how you do things than what you do.
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There is ample room given to a president in setting priorities in the enforcement of laws. A president is not required to enforce all laws equally or dedicate the same resources to every federal program. Even with this ample allowance, however, I believe that President Barack Obama has crossed the constitutional line between discretionary enforcement and defiance of federal law. Congress is given the defining function of creating and amending federal law. This is more than a turf fight between politicians. The division of governmental powers is designed to protect liberty by preventing the abusive concentration of power. All citizens –Democratic or Republican or Independent – should consider the inherent danger presented by a President who can unilaterally suspend laws as a matter of presidential license.

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One of the greatest dangers of nonenforcement orders is not what it introduces to the tripartite system but what it takes away. The Framers created three “equal” branches but the legislative branch is the thumping heart of the Madisonian system. It is the bicameral system of Congress that serves to convert disparate factional interests into majoritarian compromises. In this sense, Congress is meant to be a transformative institution where raw, often competing interests are converted by compromise and consensus. One of the most striking aspects of the recent controversies involving presidential nonenforcement is that they involved matters that were either previously before Congress or actually under consideration when President Obama acted unilaterally.

The role of the legislative process in stabilizing the political system is key to the success of the American system. Madison saw the vulnerability of past governmental systems in the failure to address the corrosive effects of factions within a population. The factional pressures in a pluralistic nation like the United States would be unparalleled and Madison understood that these factions were the expression of important political, and social, and economic interests. As Madison explained, “liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an ailment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.” Congress is where these factional interests coalesce and convert in an open and deliberative process.

The point of this background discussion is that the loss caused by the circumvention of the legislative branch is not simply one branch usurping another. Rather, it is the loss of the most important function of the tripartite system in channeling factional interests and reaching resolutions on matters of great public importance.

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy

Our chapter on national security and foreign policy notes that idealism has influenced America's relations with the world.  That strain of thought is in eclipse, as the Pew Research Center reports:

U.S. political leaders have long spoken of America’s democracy as pivotal to its role in the world, whether it was Woodrow Wilson declaring in 1917 that the U.S. must enter World War I to make the world “safe for democracy,” or George W. Bush saying, on his re-election in 2004, that “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.”

But promoting democracy in other nations in recent decades has not been a top priority for the American public. A new Pew Research Center survey on “America’s Place in the World” found that just 18% of those surveyed cited this as a topforeign policy objective, putting it at the bottom of a list of priorities. Since 1993, the share of Americans saying promotion of democracy was a top priority has never topped 29%.

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This sentiment has become particularly pointed when it comes to the situation in the Middle East and North Africa after the Arab Spring uprisings beginning in 2010 against authoritarian regimes gave way to turmoil in many of the affected countries.

A survey conducted in Oct. 2012 pointed to the disillusion that had set in. Those believing the Arab Spring would lead to lasting improvements dropped from 42% in April 2011 to 25%, and along with that change, the U.S. public began putting less importance on democracy in the region than in having stable governments. That view is even more pronounced in the latest survey than it was last year: 63% now put more importance on stable governments while 28% see democracy as a priority.

Technical and Legal Obamacare Woes

Sarah Kliff writes at The Washington Post:

Around 10 a.m. Monday morning, the Obama administration began using queuing software to meter entry into the HealthCare.gov Web site. At the time, the site had fewer than 40,000 users, somewhere in the "mid-30,000" range, as Medicare spokeswoman Julie Bataille put it.

"As we looked at error rates, that was the team's determination," Bataille said.

Most notably, the queuing system went up before HealthCare.gov hit its planned target of handling 50,000 concurrent users. When pressed on this point, Bataille referred to a separate metric that the administration has used to measure success: that 800,000 people be able to use the Web site in a single day.

Also at The Washington Post, Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin write:

The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance marketplace contain errors — generated by the computer system — that mean they might not get the coverage they’re expecting next month.

The errors cumulatively have affected roughly one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1, according to two government and health-care industry officials. The White House disputed the figure but declined to provide its own.

ABC News reports:

Bob Shlora of Alpharetta, Ga., was supposed to be a belated Obamacare success story. After weeks of trying, the 61-year-old told ABC News he fully enrolled in a new health insurance plan through the federal marketplace over the weekend, and received a Humana policy ID number to prove it.

But two days later, his insurer has no record of the transaction, Shlora said, even though his account on the government website indicates that he has a plan.

“I feel like this: My application was taken … by a bureaucrat, it was put on a conveyor belt and it’s still going around, and it’s never going to leave the building,” he said. “I’ve lost hope. If it happens, great.”

Obama administration officials acknowledged today [December 2] that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are.

CNBC reports:

It could take a year to secure the risk of "high exposures" of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday [November 25].

"When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time," said David Kennedy, a so-called "white hat" hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week.

"It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it," said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec. "We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports at The New York Times:

More than a year after the Supreme Court upheld the central provision of President Obama’s health care overhaul, a fresh wave of legal challenges to the law is playing out in courtrooms as conservative critics — joined by their Republican allies on Capitol Hill — make the case that Mr. Obama has overstepped his authority in applying it.

A federal judge in the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in one of several cases brought by states including Indiana and Oklahoma, along with business owners and individual consumers, who say that the law does not grant the Internal Revenue Service authority to provide tax credits or subsidies to people who buy insurance through the federal exchange.

At the same time, the House Judiciary Committee will convene a hearing to examine whether Mr. Obama is “rewriting his own law” by using his executive powers to alter it or delay certain provisions. The panel also will examine the legal theory behind the subsidy cases: that the I.R.S., and by extension, Mr. Obama, ignored the will of Congress, which explicitly allowed tax credits and subsidies only for those buying coverage through state exchanges.

“We have agencies under this administration having an attitude that they can fix a statute, that they can improve upon a statute, that they can look at a statute’s clear language and disregard it,” Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, who is bringing one of the cases, said in an interview Monday. “The president himself has said on more than one occasion, ‘I can’t wait on Congress.’ In our system of government, he has to.”

Healthcare.gov Problems Persist

The New York Times reports:

Weeks of frantic technical work appear to have made the government’s health care website easier for consumers to use. But that does not mean everyone who signs up for insurance can enroll in a health plan.

The problem is that so-called back end systems, which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers, still have not been fixed. And with coverage for many people scheduled to begin in just 30 days, insurers are worried the repairs may not be completed in time.
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Jeffrey D. Zients, the presidential adviser leading the repair effort, said he had shaken up management of the website so the team was now “working with the velocity and discipline of a high-performing private sector company.”

Mr. Zients said 50,000 people could use the website at the same time and that the error rate, reflecting the failure of web pages to load properly, was consistently less than 1 percent, down from 6 percent before the overhaul.
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But neither Mr. Zients nor the Department of Health and Human Services indicated how many people were completing all the steps required to enroll in a health plan through the federal site, which serves residents of 36 states.

And unless enrollments are completed correctly, coverage may be in doubt.

Is the Obamacare Site Working?

USA Today reports:

The White House announced Sunday it has met its goal to make the Healthcare.gov website operate smoothly for most users.

"The bottom line is health care.gov on December first is night and day from where it was October first," said Jeffrey Zients, the president's appointee to fix the website's problems. "The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity at greatly improved performance."

At the beginning of November, Zients said the site had an "up time" of just 43%. As of Nov. 30, the site's up time was 95%.

"We have a much more stable system that's reliably open for business," Zients said.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

But the performance of the troubled HealthCare.gov website, which consumers in 36 states are supposed to be able to use to sign up for health coverage, still falls well short of basic standards for Internet-based commerce.

Errors on Web pages and unscheduled outages remain far more common than on commercial sites. Some consumers still run into dead ends when navigating deep into the application and enrollment process, say advocates who work with the site to enroll uninsured Americans.

Moreover, while parts of the site that consumers use function much better, the complex systems necessary for processing applications and sending consumer information to insurance companies still don't function properly, insurance industry officials say.

Ironically, improvements to parts of the website used by consumers could exacerbate these "back-end" problems. Many companies are nervous about being deluged by bad data if consumers flood the website in coming weeks to get coverage by Jan. 1.

"It's a significant concern," said Wayne Powell, vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City. "If we get a deluge, assuming the website pipeline opens up, it's going to be very challenging."

In all, it is still unclear whether the improvements in the website have fulfilled the president's pledge to get the primary gateway to the Affordable Care Act working smoothly for the "vast majority" of users by the administration's self-imposed Saturday deadline.