Obama- An Oral History
Page 12
JON CARSON
Waxman-Markey passed through the House before health care.47 That was a transformational bill, and then it got stalled in the Senate . . . There just wasn’t the political infrastructure across the country to get it across the finish line through the Senate like we saw on health care. I think health-care advocates had done a better job over the years of building an on-the-ground infrastructure, so that when it was nearing the finish line, they got it across. That wasn’t there for Waxman-Markey—particularly when you were talking about needing sixty votes.
ROB ANDREWS
The Senate never voted on cap-and-trade, or at least it never passed the filibuster.48 It was important to House leadership and the president, and so we got it through the House. A lot of members suffered because of that. There’s no question about it.
MARY BONO
President Obama had worked really hard to court Republicans, and certainly centrist Republicans, to find—I don’t know if I should say “common ground”—but persuade them to support his agenda. So after cap-and-trade, which, I was one of six Republicans to vote for the climate-change legislation, he had a definite change of heart and approached the Congress differently, beginning with Obamacare.
MICHAEL STEEL
Press Secretary, House Republican Leader John Boehner (2008–2009)
Press Secretary, Speaker of the House John Boehner (2011–2015)
Press Secretary, Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan (2012)
The president’s promise of bipartisanship really fell apart within weeks of him taking office. The sort of original sin of the administration was their handling of the stimulus. They blocked Republicans out of consideration on the policy of the stimulus bill, which resulted in House Republicans unanimously voting against it, and they basically didn’t bother talking to us seriously again until we won the majority.
MARY BONO
It’s not unique to them. If you look back to when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House in ’95, the class that Sonny [Bono] was elected in, he, too, did not believe he needed the other side. It’s really typical of a new party in power to overplay their hand, but there was a certain hubris, and one thing that I was really frustrated with [was that,] as I was invited to the White House for a meeting, [there were] about ten or twelve of us, I hand delivered to Rahm and the president—but Rahm took it—a packet about the opioid epidemic. It was gonna hit us smack dab in the face in the worst possible way.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
Giving it to Rahm was basically like saying it’s going into a black hole.
MARY BONO
It was occurring in Southern California. It was occurring in Appalachia. I couldn’t convince anybody at that time, even in my party. Again, there are lots of different reasons people do what they do. Calculus everywhere. It’s just frustrating because, had we jumped on it then, we probably would have been a lot better off.
DR. HAROLD KOH
Also, and very important, by July of ’09 the president had said dozens of times he wanted to close Guantanamo. It was either going to happen early or it was going to bleed out and happen in a slow, painful process. In July 2009, I thought there was no chance it wouldn’t happen before eight years were up, but [after] our eight years [in office] were up, and we still had forty-five people in Guantanamo, it’s a very sad situation.
DAVID OGDEN
There was a process to figure out where the new facility would be and the whole issue of relocating people, either to the United States or to other countries. The administration was working hard to convince other countries to take some of these prisoners, the ones where the cases against them were weak or nonexistent. But we felt we needed to show that we would take some too. The Uyghurs were the plan for that, but that fell apart politically.
BEN LABOLT
There was the plan to bring the Uyghurs, one of the groups of detainees reviewed as nonthreatening, to Virginia. They’re from the western part of China, and, basically, they had an issue with the Chinese government, not with the American government. Frank Wolf had been viewed as an ally on the issue, but when he was notified of the plan, he went public and came out against it.
FRANK WOLF
R-Virginia, Tenth District, US House of Representatives (1981–2015)
They were going to move them to northern Virginia. They were going to be in the Seven Corners area. They were going to live close to the mosque that Anwar al-Awlaki went to,49 and Anwar al-Awlaki was the one who was radicalized. Major [Nidal] Hasan, who was involved in the shooting down in Fort Hood, had gone to that mosque. That mosque had been known for radicalization. So, to take people who had been arrested in Tora Bora, a training camp run by Osama bin Laden, then put them there in Guantanamo, where they were mixing with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and all the other guys, and then bring them here to the United States? They were going to release them. They were not moving them to a supermax.
BEN LABOLT
Some of the plans [included] bringing some detainees into a facility in the United States that resembled ADX Florence, where you never had somebody escape. Some states wanted to open a facility like that, like in Michigan and Illinois. It’s just the political climate changed after that moment with Wolf, and it became very difficult to get done.
FRANK WOLF
So you had an issue of closing Guantanamo, but you had an issue of Where do you bring them? They were released, and a number of very dangerous guys were sent back to Yemen, sent back to Saudi Arabia and some other places. You wouldn’t want to risk the opportunity of bringing a guy here within seven miles of the Pentagon and nine miles of the Capitol and nine miles of the White House and seven miles of the Chinese embassy. Particularly since we’ve had radicalization of people who were born and raised here in the United States.
BARBARA LEE
What members of Congress could not come to grips with was that we’re in more danger by allowing these types of prisons to continue. Not closing Gitmo gave rise to more anger and made our national security more at risk, not less. It was Democrats and Republicans.
DAVID OGDEN
From both sides of the aisle, yeah, [and] you had high-security prisons that would handle the worst of the worst forever and we never had an issue with it, including very serious terrorists who were held in the highest-security federal prisons. It was never an issue of any kind and never would be.
DR. HAROLD KOH
Supermax prisons cost $80,000 a person and nobody ever escaped them. So, even if you were positing that they’re equally dangerous as supermax inmates, there’s a place to hold these people onshore. Why invest in detention offshore at $1 million per person? I think the original reason for the Bush people to hold them offshore at Guantanamo was the thought that they couldn’t have any rights to assert, but then the Supreme Court held that they did.50 Whatever value there was in having an offshore prison camp was negated. You had might as well bring them onshore and let them contest their detention.
BEN LABOLT
My understanding was that one of the things that delayed [closing Gitmo] was that the administration expected that the detainee files left over from the Bush administration would be in better shape to bring to court, and bring swift justice in the process. They needed to spend time getting the detention cases up to date, and also making sure we had a military-tribunal process that passed constitutional muster.
MATTHEW MILLER
Bush let more people out of Gitmo than Obama ever did.51 But every time we did it, the Republican Party decided they would win politics going forward by never letting us be equal to them on terrorism. So if we would move their direction, they would keep going to the right.
MARY BONO
It seemed that [the Obama administration] really felt that they were just riding on a wave of popularity, and that they did not need us. I clearly remember sitting on the floor of the House on the Democrats’ side to try to talk to the Blue Dogs about finding common ground on health-care reform. And one of the Blue Dogs’
exact answers to me was “Are you kidding? If Nancy Pelosi knew we were talking to Republicans, she would shoot us.” They had been given a mandate that, with the president in the White House and Speaker Pelosi, it was going to be their way and their way only.
BEN NELSON
Governor of Nebraska (D) (1991–1999)
D-Nebraska, US Senate (2001–2013)
I’m not taking sides in saying the Democrats continued to try to reach out. I think they gave up. Just before the August break, both sides were legislating in the [Senate] Finance Committee. Olympia Snowe had a number of amendments that were accepted. Others had amendments accepted.
DAVID BOWEN
There was a long process during which Senator Baucus, the chair of the Finance Committee, was trying to find bipartisan compromise to allow a bipartisan markup in the Finance Committee. And so that dragged on through the summer.
CHRIS DODD
Max Baucus’s dog bit Orrin Hatch’s leg. Orrin Hatch didn’t think it was terribly amusing, but everyone else thought it was rather funny that the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s dog went after the ranking Republican’s leg in the process.
BILL DAUSTER
Senator Baucus’s dog bit a number of people . . . Throughout most of those sixty hours of meetings on multiple days over the summer, everybody worked together, and the difficulty came at the end of the summer when we tried to bring it to a conclusion. It became evident that Senator McConnell and [Republican whip] Senator Kyl were working hard to prevent any of the Republicans in the group from agreeing to anything. [Republican Senator Mike] Enzi begged off and then Grassley said, “Well I can’t be just the only one. I need cover,” and Snowe’s being there was not enough, because she was too moderate.
CHRIS DODD
Max, I think, was so determined to get Olympia Snowe or Chuck Grassley on the bill, that I felt we made a mistake. We should have just finished and marked up the Finance Committee bill in July and then used August to start melding the two [Senate] bills, which we ended up doing in the fall. By the time we came back after the August break, the damage had been done.
BEN NELSON
When we went home for the recess, they encountered the Tea Party. Republicans were being skewered by anxiety-ridden conservatives about what was going on in Washington. Basically, when they came back, it became a one-party process. All cooperation across the aisle just stopped.
CHRIS DODD
“Death panels” and all those other silly words were being bandied about as part of the lexicon in describing the bill, and we never really regained our footing.
BARNEY FRANK
They waited too long and played with Grassley and Olympia Snowe, and, in the end, got nothing for it.
VALERIE JARRETT
We were trying very hard to get the Affordable Care Act passed, and . . . one offhanded comment was hijacking headlines every day.
ROY AUSTIN JR.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, US Department of Justice (2010–2014)
Deputy Assistant to the President for the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice, and Opportunity, Domestic Policy Counsel, White House (2014–2017)
The president’s comments with respect to Henry Louis Gates created this false narrative that the administration was anti-police.
VAN JONES
When Obama said that the police officer had behaved “stupidly,” my heart stopped for a second. I was so proud. I was shocked to hear a president of the United States say something that forthright and commonsensical. Don’t forget, at that point, Skip Gates was by far the most famous professor at Harvard, and he was arrested in his home for being in his home.52 He wasn’t brandishing a knife. He wasn’t carrying an AK-47. He didn’t have a hostage. But there’s this unspoken rule about any kind of abuse against black people. Black people can’t say anything about it or we’re somehow the problem. And for the president to break, that was great. Then, a week later, he had to sit down with an arguably racist white beat cop, chaperoned by Joe Biden. I thought it was the low point in his presidency.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
Obama had to invite the white guy to have a beer and everything. What was he apologizing for? Because he said the cop shouldn’t have been targeting that black professor?53 I mean, come on.
VAN JONES
It just sent the signal. Even if you’re the president of the United States, you couldn’t tell the truth about transparently obvious acts of at least racial foolishness, if not antagonism. I thought it opened the door for a whole bunch of other problems.
VALERIE JARRETT
My lesson there was not what Van concluded at all. The voice of the president of the United States carries a weight, and on issues where there is history of sensitivity, people are hypersensitive. That’s just human nature, and it took a while for me to appreciate how people hung on his every word and blew things way out of proportion from his intent. That comment was at the end of a very long press conference about the Affordable Care Act, and it was the last question from [Chicago Sun-Times columnist] Lynn Sweet . . . From the perspective of members of law enforcement, they thought that he was not being supportive of them, and I think what he was wise to recognize was that, as president, you couldn’t afford to alienate our nation’s men and women in blue who were putting their lives at stake each and every day for our country.
ROY AUSTIN JR.
The police unions, in particular, kept driving at how the president commented on that matter—despite the fact that [over the years] we gave more money to law enforcement through the COPS program, through the Office of Justice programs, despite the fact I couldn’t even tell you how many meetings I had in the White House with the law-enforcement organizations.
VALERIE JARRETT
There were people who thought somehow he was retreating by inviting the officer and Skip Gates [to the White House]—he wasn’t doing that. He was saying that, when these things happen, the best thing to do is bring people together. And he had said since, “I have to watch my words, because I’m the president of the United States.” But he could have easily said that if it had been in a totally different context, which was why I think Van read too much into it.
ROY AUSTIN JR.
But that one incident where the president spoke his mind on what had happened colored our relationship with law enforcement, sadly, in a way that we were never able to fully get out from under.
* * *
11 Timothy Geithner, US Secretary of the Treasury; Larry Summers, Director, National Economic Council; Christina Romer, Chair, White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Peter Orszag, Director, White House Office of Management and Budget.
12 President-Elect Obama retained US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover from the previous administration who had been nominated by President Bush in 2006. Gates served in Obama’s cabinet through 2011; Ray LaHood served the Eighteenth District of Illinois for fourteen years before the Republican moderate became Obama’s US Secretary of Transportation from 2009 to 2013.
13 The fifty-seven-page internal memo that Larry Summers submitted to the president-elect proposed a stimulus ranging from $550 to $890 billion in spending and tax cuts; earlier drafts recommended figures as high as $1.7 and $1.8 trillion, which Summers deemed “nonplanetary.” (The memo was eventually leaked to the press and published in 2012.) The Bernstein-Romer paper, intentionally distributed to media in January 2009, proposed a “package just slightly over the $775 billion” mark.
14 President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine; King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein of Jordan; President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel.
15 Receptionist of the United States.
16 Uniformed Division of the Secret Service.
17 Also in attendance at the dinner: John Ensign, senator from Nevada; Bob Corker, senator from Tennessee; Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard; and pollster Frank Luntz.
18 1995 to 1997, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingr
ich.
19 In 2009, the Obama Justice Department argued state-secrets privilege to bat away civil lawsuits, backed by the ACLU, related to the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, i.e., the alleged transferring of prisoners to overseas detention centers, where they were tortured. The state-secrets-privilege argument was used by the Bush administration, which candidate Obama criticized during his campaign. “It is vital that we protect information,” Miller wrote in 2009, “that, if released, could jeopardize national security.”
20 Executive Order 13493, signed by President Obama on January 22, 2009, called for “a comprehensive review of the lawful options available to the Federal Government with respect to the apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations, and to identify such options as are consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice.”
21 “Yes, I would close Guantanamo Bay, and I would move those prisoners to Fort Leavenworth. And I would proceed with the tribunals . . . Whether we deserve it or not, the reality is Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib have harmed our reputation in the world, thereby harming our ability to win the psychological part of the war against radical Islamic extremism.” —John McCain to 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley, April 6, 2007.
22 The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was formed in 1967 by founding members Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, and had since expanded to include Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
23 February 24, 2009.
24 March 25, 2009.
25 November 24, 2009.
26 The Group of Two (G2) proposal gained traction among Washington think tanks during the Bush years. Its broad concept—to forge an unofficial partnership between the United States and China—would use a trade agreement as the pretext to prompt the world’s two largest economies in solving issues related to financial crises, climate change, and global security, among others. A G3, also discussed, would have included the European Union.