"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc"

Sixty-six years ago today, Allied forces landed at Normandy, beginning the invasion of Europe. Twenty-six years ago today, President Reagan paid tribute:

Leaving Obamaland

At The Daily Beast, Dayo Olopade explains that some younger administration staffers are leaving, either out of frustration or because of a perceived need to get a graduate degree.

Just after the 2008 election, 26-year-old Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes explained his choice not to join the administration: “There was never any particular position or set of responsibilities that really excited me,” he said. “There’s a challenge in prioritization, there’s a challenge in working within constraints of the law, any political constraints that are there, to actually get good work done.”

“You can’t flip a switch and change the country,” adds Evans, now at the USDA. “We’re like a big, slow tanker—and I think a lot of folks are frustrated with that.”

There is also an achievement gap between more experienced staffers and those with only a BA to their name. Thirty-year-old Alejandra Campoverdi, also profiled in the Times, has a master's degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and now serves as an aide to deputy chief of staff Mona Sutphen. Joshua Dubois, the 27-year-old director of the White House faith office, graduated from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs. Jason Green, a 29-year-old associate in the Office of Legal Counsel, balanced previous campaign experience with a degree from Yale Law. But there is a ceiling for the younger staff.

Poll on Birthright Citizenship and Immigration

Rand Paul's recent comments have renewed attention to birthright citizenship. Commentator Michael Medved says:

The Fourteenth Amendment begins with plain language: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are Citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

There is no chance of altering this provision with a Constitutional Amendment that requires two-thirds votes in both the House and Senate, plus approval by 38 state legislatures! Raising the issue pointlessly provokes anger from millions of US-born immigrant children who can and do vote. Despite Dr. Paul’s wild speculation, it’s unthinkable to strip them of their current citizenship status due to their parents’ unauthorized entry before their birth.

Rasmussen reports:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say a child born to an illegal immigrant in this country should not automatically become a citizen of the United States, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Thirty-three percent (33%) disagree and say if a women enters the United States as an illegal alien and gives birth to a child here, that child should automatically be a U.S. citizen. That’s what the current law allows and many believe it would require a Constitutional Amendment to change the law.

Voter sentiments are basically unchanged from four years ago when the Senate was considering the immigration issue.

...

Still, there is a huge distinction in the minds of voters between dealing with illegal immigrants and overall immigration policy. Sixty percent (60%) of voters favor a welcoming immigrant policy that excludes only national security threats, criminals and those who would come here to live off our welfare system. Twenty-six percent (26%) disagree with such a policy, and 14% more are not sure.

These sentiments, too, have remained constant for years.

Elena Kagan and Executive Privilege

Elena Kagan, President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, has served in the executive branch. To what extent are documents from her service subject to executive privilege. At the Center for American Progress, Ian Millhiser explains two kinds of executive privilege. The strong form, presidential communications privilege, applies to communications made directly to the president or the president's immediate staff. Millhiser explains the other form:

The weaker form of executive privilege is known as the “deliberative process privilege,” which applies to discussions among executive branch officials that are part of the government’s decision-making process. This privilege can apply to executive branch officials outside of the president’s inner circle, but it is both more limited in scope and easier to overcome.

As Judge Patricia Wald explained in the seminal Espy case, “[t]he deliberative process privilege does not shield documents that simply state or explain a decision the government has already made or protect material that is purely factual, unless the material is so inextricably intertwined with the deliberative sections of documents that its disclosure would inevitably reveal the governments deliberations.”

General Kagan served as an attorney and policy advisor on President Clinton’s White House staff, and a substantial amount of the work she produced during that service will therefore be subject to the stronger presidential communications privilege. Documents related to her White House service are therefore unlike documents produced by Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Samuel Alito during their time at the Department of Justice—which, at best, could only be subject to the weaker deliberative process privilege. (The documents Roberts produced during his tenure in the Office of White House Counsel, of course, may be subject to the presidential communications privilege.)

Charities and Lobbying

Our text explains that charities organized under section 501(c)(3) of the internal revenue code may spend a small portion of their income on lobbying. We note that they may also have ties to 501(c)(4) groups that do focus on lobbying. In The Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney offers the example of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

In 2009, the Komen Foundation -- a 501(c)3 charity and thus limited in the percentage of its money it can spend on lobbying -- gave its single-largest "education" grant, $4.4 million, to the Komen Advocacy Alliance, its public policy and lobbying arm, which is covered by section 501(c)4 of the tax code and thus unrestricted in its lobbying. A Komen spokesman said the Advocacy Alliance uses that money for its non-lobbying advocacy, such as grass-roots education, and that actual lobbying money doesn't come from the 501(c)3. However, the Advocacy Alliance currently operates on a loan from the main Komen foundation (the 501(c)3). Unless you ignore the fungibility of money, supporting Komen means supporting its lobbying operation.

Our chapter also includes a photo essay on the Podesta family, which is prominent in Washington interest-group circles. Carney notes:

Heather Podesta, the most famous of Komen's K Street hired guns (and a leading Democratic Party fundraiser), reports that her firm lobbied on Komen's behalf for "support [for] H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act/H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as it relates to breast cancer prevention, screening, research, and treatment." In other words, Komen supported Obamacare insofar as it included provisions it supported. Komen spokesman Sean Tuffnell, however, told me that Komen "never did fully endorse the legislation."

Nevertheless, Carney argues that such activities pose a conflict for contributors who support the charity's overall aims but oppose specific measures for which it lobbies.

Speaker Pelosi on Religion and Politics

At a May 6 Catholic Community Conference on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described how religion matters to her:

They ask me all the time, ‘What is your favorite this? What is your favorite that? What is your favorite that?’ And one time, ‘What is your favorite word?’ And I said, ‘My favorite word? That is really easy. My favorite word is the Word, is the Word. And that is everything. It says it all for us. And you know the biblical reference, you know the Gospel reference of the Word.

James Madison, Unemployment, and Medicare

Roll Call reports:

The always-fractious relationship between House and Senate Democrats hit a dramatic low last week that resulted in Members leaving for the Memorial Day recess having failed to extend unemployment benefits or avert a pay cut for doctors under Medicare.

And while publicly, House and Senate leaders refused to assign blame, the behind-the-scenes story was far different.

The deadline for the benefits package had been looming for weeks. But all the advance warning was for naught as the lack of trust between the two chambers escalated and an anti-deficit-spending sentiment among rank-and-file moderates grew. House leaders were forced to strike about $80 billion from their bill, including COBRA health benefits for the unemployed and Medicaid assistance to states. But the bill only came together Thursday evening, and Senate leaders decided they had waited around long enough and headed for the exits.

Why is the House-Senate relationship always fractious? Because Madison meant it to be. As he explained in Federalist 51:

In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit.

The title of William F. Connelly Jr.'s new book says it all: James Madison Rules America.