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By Attorney General William Barr
I deeply admire the American Presidency as a political and constitutional institution. I believe it is, one of the great, and remarkable innovations in our Constitution, and has been one of the most successful features of the Constitution in protecting the liberties of the American people. More than any other branch, it has fulfilled the expectations of the Framers.
Unfortunately, over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on Presidential authority by the other branches of government. This process I think has substantially weakened the functioning of the Executive Branch, to the detriment of the Nation. This evening, I would like to expand a bit on these themes.
First, let me say a little about what the Framers had in mind in establishing an independent Executive in Article II of the Constitution.
The Framers and the Executive Branch
The grammar school civics class version of our Revolution is that it was a rebellion against monarchial tyranny, and that, in framing our Constitution, one of the main preoccupations of the Founders was to keep the Executive weak. This is misguided. By the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1689, monarchical power was effectively neutered and had begun its steady decline. Parliamentary power was well on its way to supremacy and was effectively in the driver's seat. By the time of the American Revolution, the patriots well understood that their prime antagonist was an overweening Parliament. Indeed, British thinkers came to conceive of Parliament, rather than the people, as the seat of Sovereignty.
During the Revolutionary era, American thinkers who considered inaugurating a republican form of government tended to think of the Executive component as essentially an errand boy of a Supreme legislative branch. Often the Executive (sometimes constituted as a multi-member council) was conceived as a creature of the Legislature, dependent on and subservient to that body, whose sole function was carrying out the Legislative will. Under the Articles of Confederation, for example, there was no Executive separate from Congress.
Things changed by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. To my mind, the real "miracle" in Philadelphia that summer was the creation of a strong Executive, independent of, and coequal with, the other two branches of government.
The consensus for a strong, independent Executive arose from the Framers' experience in the Revolution and under the Articles of Confederation. They had seen that the War had almost been lost and was a bumbling enterprise because of the lack of strong Executive leadership. Under the Articles of Confederation, they had been mortified at the inability of the United States to protect itself against foreign impositions or to be taken seriously on the international stage. They had also seen that, after the Revolution, too many States had adopted constitutions with weak Executives overly subordinate to the Legislatures. Where this had been the case, state governments had proven incompetent and indeed tyrannical.
From these practical experiences, the Framers had come to appreciate that, to be successful, Republican government required the capacity to act with energy, consistency, and decisiveness. They had come to agree that those attributes could best be provided by making the Executive power independent of the divided counsels of the Legislative branch and vesting the Executive power in the hands of a solitary individual, regularly elected for a limited term by the Nation as a whole. As Jefferson put it, '[F]or the prompt, clear, and consistent action so necessary in an Executive, unity of person is necessary…."
While there may have been some differences among the Framers as to the precise scope of Executive power in particular areas, there was general agreement about its nature. Just as the great separation-of-powers theorists– Polybius, Montesquieu, Locke – had, the Framers thought of Executive power as a distinct species of power. To be sure, Executive power includes the responsibility for carrying into effect the laws passed by the Legislature – that is, applying the general rules to a particular situation. But the Framers understood that Executive power meant more than this.
It also entailed the power to handle essential sovereign functions – such as the conduct of foreign relations and the prosecution of war – which by their very nature cannot be directed by a pre-existing legal regime but rather demand speed, secrecy, unity of purpose, and prudent judgment to meet contingent circumstances. They agreed that – due to the very nature of the activities involved, and the kind of decision-making they require – the Constitution generally vested authority over these spheres in the Executive. For example, Jefferson, our first Secretary of State, described the conduct of foreign relations as "Executive altogether," subject only to the explicit exceptions defined in the Constitution, such as the Senate's power to ratify Treaties.
A related and third aspect of Executive power is the power to address exigent circumstances that demand quick action to protect the well-being of the Nation but on which the law is either silent or inadequate – such as dealing with a plague or natural disaster. This residual power to meet contingency is essentially the federative power discussed by Locke in his Second Treatise.
And, finally, there are the Executive's powers of internal management. These are the powers necessary for the President to superintend and control the Executive function, including the powers necessary to protect the independence of the Executive branch and the confidentiality of its internal deliberations. Some of these powers are express in the Constitution, such as the Appointment power, and others are implicit, such as the Removal power.
The Progressive Attack on the "Unitary Executive Theory"
One of the more amusing aspects of modern progressive polemic is their breathless attacks on the "unitary Executive theory." They portray this as some new-fangled "theory" to justify Executive power of sweeping scope. In reality, the idea of the unitary Executive does not go so much to the breadth of Presidential power. Rather, the idea is that, whatever the Executive powers may be, they must be exercised under the President's supervision. This is not "new," and it is not a "theory." It is a description of what the Framers unquestionably did in Article II of the Constitution.
After you decide to establish an Executive function independent of the Legislature, naturally the next question is, who will perform that function? The Framers had two potential models. They could insinuate "checks and balances" into the Executive branch itself by conferring Executive power on multiple individuals (a council) thus dividing the power. Alternatively, they could vest Executive power in a solitary individual. The Framers quite explicitly chose the latter model because they believed that vesting Executive authority in one person would imbue the Presidency with precisely the attributes necessary for energetic government.
Even Jefferson – usually seen as less of a hawk than Hamilton on Executive power – was insistent that Executive power be placed in "single hands," and he cited America's unitary Executive as a signal feature that distinguished America's success from France's failed republican experiment.
The implications of the Framers' decision are obvious. If Congress attempts to vest the power to execute the law in someone beyond the control of the President, it contravenes the Framers' clear intent to vest that power in a single person, the President. So much for this supposedly nefarious theory of the unitary Executive.
We all understand that the Framers expected that the three branches would be jostling and jousting with each other, as each threatened to encroach on the prerogatives of the others. They thought this was not only natural, but salutary, and they provisioned each branch with the wherewithal to fight and to defend itself in these interbranch struggles for power.
So let me turn now to how the Executive is presently faring in these interbranch battles. I am concerned that the deck has become stacked against the Executive. Since the mid-60s, there has been a steady grinding down of the Executive branch's authority, that accelerated after Watergate. More and more, the President's ability to act in areas in which he has discretion has become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches.
Contemporary Arguments for Eroding the Executive Branch
When these disputes arise, I think there are two aspects of contemporary thought that tend to operate to the disadvantage of the Executive.
The first is the notion that politics in a free republic is all about the Legislative and Judicial branches protecting liberty by imposing restrictions on the Executive. The premise is that the greatest danger of government becoming oppressive arises from the prospect of Executive excess. So, there is a knee-jerk tendency to see the Legislative and Judicial branches as the good guys protecting society from a rapacious would-be autocrat.
This prejudice is wrong-headed and atavistic. It comes out of the early English Whig view of politics and English constitutional experience, where political evolution was precisely that. You started out with a King who holds all the cards; he holds all the power, including Legislative and Judicial. Political evolution involved a process by which the Legislative power gradually, over hundreds of years, reigned in the King, and extracted and established its own powers, as well as those of the Judiciary. A watershed in this evolution was, of course, the Glorious Revolution in 1689.
But by 1787, we had the exact opposite model in the United States. The Founders greatly admired how the British constitution had given rise to the principles of a balanced government. But they felt that the British constitution had achieved only an imperfect form of this model. They saw themselves as framing a more perfect version of separation of powers and a balanced constitution.
Part of their more perfect construction was a new kind of Executive. They created an office that was already the ideal Whig Executive. It already had built into it the limitations that Whig doctrine aspired to. It did not have the power to tax and spend; it was constrained by habeas corpus and by due process in enforcing the law against members of the body politic; it was elected for a limited term of office; and it was elected by the nation as a whole. That is a remarkable democratic institution – the only figure elected by the Nation as a whole. With the creation of the American Presidency, the Whig's obsessive focus on the dangers of monarchical rule lost relevance.
This fundamental shift in view was reflected in the Convention debates over the new frame of government. Their concerns were very different from those that weighed on 17th century English Whigs. It was not Executive power that was of so much concern to them; it was the danger of the legislative branch, which they viewed as the most dangerous branch to liberty. As Madison warned, the "legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex." And indeed, they viewed the Presidency as a check on the Legislative branch.
The second contemporary way of thinking that operates against the Executive is a notion that the Constitution does not sharply allocate powers among the three branches, but rather that the branches, especially the political branches, "share" powers. The idea at work here is that, because two branches both have a role to play in a particular area, we should see them as sharing power in that area and, it is not such a big deal if one branch expands its role within that sphere at the expense of the other.
This mushy thinking obscures what it means to say that powers are shared under the Constitution. Constitution generally assigns broad powers to each of the branches in defined areas. Thus, the Legislative power granted in the Constitution is granted to Congress. At the same time, the Constitution gives the Executive a specific power in the Legislative realm – the veto power. Thus, the Executive "shares" Legislative power only to the extent of the specific grant of veto power. The Executive does not get to interfere with the broader Legislative power assigned to Congress.
In recent years, both the Legislative and Judicial branches have been responsible for encroaching on the Presidency's constitutional authority. Let me first say something about the Legislature.
As I have said, the Framers fully expected intense pulling and hauling between the Congress and the President. Unfortunately, just in the past few years, we have seen these conflicts take on an entirely new character.
"The Resistance" and the Long-Term Damage It is Doing
Immediately after President Trump won the election, opponents inaugurated what they called "The Resistance," and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration.
Now, "resistance" is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous – indeed incendiary – notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the "loyal opposition," as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.
A prime example of this is the Senate's unprecedented abuse of the advice-and-consent process. The Senate is free to exercise that power to reject unqualified nominees, but that power was never intended to allow the Senate to systematically oppose and draw out the approval process for every appointee so as to prevent the President from building a functional government.
Yet that is precisely what the Senate minority has done from his very first days in office. As of September of this year, the Senate had been forced to invoke cloture on 236 Trump nominees — each of those representing its own massive consumption of legislative time meant only to delay an inevitable confirmation. How many times was cloture invoked on nominees during President Obama's first term? 17 times. The Second President Bush's first term? Four times. It is reasonable to wonder whether a future President will actually be able to form a functioning administration if his or her party does not hold the Senate.
"Oversight" and the Modern Administrative State
Congress has in recent years also largely abdicated its core function of legislating on the most pressing issues facing the national government. They either decline to legislate on major questions or, if they do, punt the most difficult and critical issues by making broad delegations to a modern administrative state that they increasingly seek to insulate from Presidential control. This phenomenon first arose in the wake of the Great Depression, as Congress created a number of so-called "independent agencies" and housed them, at least nominally, in the Executive Branch. More recently, the Dodd-Frank Act's creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Branch, a single-headed independent agency that functions like a junior varsity President for economic regulation, is just one of many examples.
Of course, Congress's effective withdrawal from the business of legislating leaves it with a lot of time for other pursuits. And the pursuit of choice, particularly for the opposition party, has been to drown the Executive Branch with "oversight" demands for testimony and documents. I do not deny that Congress has some implied authority to conduct oversight as an incident to its Legislative Power. But the sheer volume of what we see today – the pursuit of scores of parallel "investigations" through an avalanche of subpoenas – is plainly designed to incapacitate the Executive Branch, and indeed is touted as such.
The costs of this constant harassment are real. For example, we all understand that confidential communications and a private, internal deliberative process are essential for all of our branches of government to properly function. Congress and the Judiciary know this well, as both have taken great pains to shield their own internal communications from public inspection. There is no FOIA for Congress or the Courts. Yet Congress has happily created a regime that allows the public to seek whatever documents it wants from the Executive Branch at the same time that individual congressional committees spend their days trying to publicize the Executive's internal decisional process. That process cannot function properly if it is public, nor is it productive to have our government devoting enormous resources to squabbling about what becomes public and when rather than doing the work of the people.
In recent years, we have seen substantial encroachment by Congress in the area of Executive privilege. The Executive Branch and the Supreme Court have long recognized that the need for confidentiality in Executive Branch decision-making necessarily means that some communications must remain off-limits to Congress and the public. There was a time when Congress respected this important principle as well. But today, Congress is increasingly quick to dismiss good-faith attempts to protect Executive Branch equities, labeling such efforts "obstruction of Congress" and holding Cabinet Secretaries in contempt.
The Irony
One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this President constantly accuse this Administration of "shredding" constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law. When I ask my friends on the other side, what exactly are you referring to? I get vacuous stares, followed by sputtering about the Travel Ban or some such thing. While the President has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook, he was upfront about that beforehand, and the people voted for him. What I am talking about today are fundamental constitutional precepts. The fact is that this Administration's policy initiatives and proposed rules, including the Travel Ban, have transgressed neither constitutional, nor traditional, norms, and have been amply supported by the law and patiently litigated through the Court system to vindication.
Indeed, measures undertaken by this Administration seem a bit tame when compared to some of the unprecedented steps taken by the Obama Administration's aggressive exercises of Executive power – such as, under its DACA program, refusing to enforce broad swathes of immigration law.
The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of "Resistance" against this Administration, it is the Left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law. This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have always had in contesting the political issues of the day. It was adverted to by the old, curmudgeonly Federalist, Fisher Ames, in an essay during the early years of the Republic.
In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.
Conservatives, on the other hand, do not seek an earthly paradise. We are interested in preserving over the long run the proper balance of freedom and order necessary for healthy development of natural civil society and individual human flourishing. This means that we naturally test the propriety and wisdom of action under a "rule of law" standard. The essence of this standard is to ask what the overall impact on society over the long run if the action we are taking, or principle we are applying, in a given circumstance was universalized – that is, would it be good for society over the long haul if this was done in all like circumstances?
For these reasons, conservatives tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means. And this is as it should be, but there is no getting around the fact that this puts conservatives at a disadvantage when facing progressive holy far, especially when doing so under the weight of a hyper-partisan media.
Separation of Powers
Let me turn now to what I believe has been the prime source of the erosion of separation-of-power principles generally, and Executive Branch authority specifically. I am speaking of the Judicial Branch.
In recent years the Judiciary has been steadily encroaching on Executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the Presidency. The Courts have done this in essentially two ways: First, the Judiciary has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation of powers disputes between Congress and Executive, thus preempting the political process, which the Framers conceived as the primary check on interbranch rivalry. Second, the Judiciary has usurped Presidential authority for itself, either (a) by, under the rubric of "review," substituting its judgment for the Executive's in areas committed to the President's discretion, or (b) by assuming direct control over realms of decision-making that heretofore have been considered at the core of Presidential power.
The Framers did not envision that the Courts would play the role of arbiter of turf disputes between the political branches. As Madison explained in Federalist 51, "the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others." By giving each the Congress and the Presidency the tools to fend off the encroachments of the others, the Framers believed this would force compromise and political accommodation.
The "constitutional means" to "resist encroachment" that Madison described takes various forms. As Justice Scalia observed, the Constitution gives Congress and the President many "clubs with which to beat" each other. Conspicuously absent from the list is running to the courts to resolve their disputes.
Where is the Accountability to the People?
That omission makes sense. When the Judiciary purports to pronounce a conclusive resolution to constitutional disputes between the other two branches, it does not act as a co-equal. And, if the political branches believe the courts will resolve their constitutional disputes, they have no incentive to debate their differences through the democratic process — with input from and accountability to the people. And they will not even try to make the hard choices needed to forge compromise. The long experience of our country is that the political branches can work out their constitutional differences without resort to the courts.
In any event, the prospect that courts can meaningfully resolve interbranch disputes about the meaning of the Constitution is mostly a false promise. How is a court supposed to decide, for example, whether Congress's power to collect information in pursuit of its legislative function overrides the President's power to receive confidential advice in pursuit of his Executive function? Nothing in the Constitution provides a manageable standard for resolving such a question. It is thus no surprise that the courts have produced amorphous, unpredictable balancing tests like the Court's holding in Morrison v. Olson that Congress did not "disrupt the proper balance between the coordinate branches by preventing the Executive Branch from accomplishing its constitutionally assigned functions."
Apart from their overzealous role in interbranch disputes, the courts have increasingly engaged directly in usurping Presidential decision-making authority for themselves. One way courts have effectively done this is by expanding both the scope and the intensity of judicial review.
In recent years, we have lost sight of the fact that many critical decisions in life are not amenable to the model of judicial decision-making. They cannot be reduced to tidy evidentiary standards and specific quantum of proof in an adversarial process. They require what we used to call prudential judgment. They are decisions that frequently have to be made promptly, on incomplete and uncertain information and necessarily involve weighing a wide range of competing risks and making predictions about the future. Such decisions frequently call into play the "precautionary principle." This is the principle that when a decision-maker is accountable for discharging a certain obligation – such as protecting the public's safety – it is better, when assessing imperfect information, to be wrong and safe, than wrong and sorry.
It was once well recognized that such matters were largely unreviewable and that the courts should not be substituting their judgments for the prudential judgments reached by the accountable Executive officials. This outlook now seems to have gone by the boards. Courts are now willing, under the banner of judicial review, to substitute their judgment for the President's on matters that only a few decades ago would have been unimaginable – such as matters involving national security or foreign affairs.
The Travel Ban Example
The Travel Ban case is a good example. There the President made a decision under an explicit legislative grant of authority, as well as his Constitutional national security role, to temporarily suspend entry to aliens coming from a half dozen countries pending adoption of more effective vetting processes. The common denominator of the initial countries selected was that they were unquestionable hubs of terrorist activity, which lacked functional central government's and responsible law enforcement and intelligence services that could assist us in identifying security risks among their nationals seeking entry.
Despite the fact there were clearly justifiable security grounds for the measure, the district court in Hawaii and the Ninth Circuit blocked this public-safety measure for a year and a half on the theory that the President's motive for the order was religious bias against Muslims. This was just the first of many immigration measures based on good and sufficient security grounds that the courts have second-guessed since the beginning of the Trump Administration.
The Travel Ban case highlights an especially troubling aspect of the recent tendency to expand judicial review. The Supreme Court has traditionally refused, across a wide variety of contexts, to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. To take the classic example, if a police officer has probable cause to initiate a traffic stop, his subjective motivations are irrelevant. And just last term, the Supreme Court appropriately shut the door to claims that otherwise-lawful redistricting can violate the Constitution if the legislators who drew the lines were actually motivated by political partisanship.
What is true of police officers and gerrymanderers is equally true of the President and senior Executive officials. With very few exceptions, neither the Constitution nor the Administrative Procedure Act or any other relevant statute, calls for judicial review of Executive motive. They apply only to Executive action. Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an Executive official's "real motive" — often after ordering invasive discovery into the Executive Branch's privileged decision-making process — have no more foundation in the law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judge's real motive for issuing its decision. And courts' indulgence of such claims, even if they are ultimately rejected, represents a serious intrusion on the President's constitutional prerogatives.
The impact of these judicial intrusions on Executive responsibility has been hugely magnified by another judicial innovation – the nationwide injunction. First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, district courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during President Obama's first two years, district courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government. Both were vacated by the Ninth Circuit.
It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other President has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda.
The legal flaws underlying nationwide injunctions are myriad. Just to summarize briefly, nationwide injunctions have no foundation in courts' Article III jurisdiction or traditional equitable powers; they radically inflate the role of district judges, allowing any one of more than 600 individuals to singlehandedly freeze a policy nationwide, a power that no single appellate judge or Justice can accomplish; they foreclose percolation and reasoned debate among lower courts, often requiring the Supreme Court to decide complex legal issues in an emergency posture with limited briefing; they enable transparent forum shopping, which saps public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary; and they displace the settled mechanisms for aggregate litigation of genuinely nationwide claims, such as Rule 23 class actions.
Injunction Destruction
Of particular relevance to my topic, nationwide injunctions also disrupt the political process. There is no better example than the courts' handling of the rescission of DACA. As you recall, DACA was a discretionary policy of enforcement forbearance adopted by President Obama's administration. The Fifth Circuit concluded that the closely related DAPA policy (along with an expansion of DACA) was unlawful, and the Supreme Court affirmed that decision by an equally divided vote. Given that DACA was discretionary — and that four Justices apparently thought a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful —President Trump's administration understandably decided to rescind DACA.
Importantly, however, the President coupled that rescission with negotiations over legislation that would create a lawful and better alternative as part of a broader immigration compromise. In the middle of those negotiations — indeed, on the same day the President invited cameras into the Cabinet Room to broadcast his negotiations with bipartisan leaders from both Houses of Congress — a district judge in the Northern District of California enjoined the rescission of DACA nationwide.
Unsurprisingly, the negotiations over immigration legislation collapsed after one side achieved its preferred outcome through judicial means. A humanitarian crisis at the southern border ensued. And just this week, the Supreme Court finally heard an argument on the legality of the DACA rescission.
The Court will not likely decide the case until next summer, meaning that President Trump will have spent almost his entire first term enforcing President Obama's signature immigration policy, even though that policy is discretionary and half the Supreme Court concluded that a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful. That is not how our democratic system is supposed to work.
To my mind, the most blatant and consequential usurpation of Executive power in our history was played out during the Administration of President George W. Bush, when the Supreme Court, in a series of cases, set itself up as the ultimate arbiter and superintendent of military decisions inherent in prosecuting a military conflict – decisions that lie at the very core of the President's discretion as Commander in Chief.
The Boumediene Debacle
This usurpation climaxed with the Court's 2008 decision in Boumediene. There, the Supreme Court overturned hundreds of years of American, and earlier British, law and practice, which had always considered decisions as to whether to detain foreign combatants to be purely military judgments which civilian judges had no power to review. For the first time, the Court ruled that foreign persons who had no connection with the United States other than being confronted by our military on the battlefield had "due process" rights and thus have the right to habeas corpus to obtain judicial review of whether the military has a sufficient evidentiary basis to hold them.
In essence, the Court has taken the rules that govern our domestic criminal justice process and carried them over and superimposed them on the Nation's activities when it is engaged in armed conflict with foreign enemies. This rides roughshod over a fundamental distinction that is integral to the Constitution and integral to the role played by the President in our system.
As the Preamble suggests, governments are established for two different security reasons – to secure domestic tranquility and to provide for defense against external dangers. These are two very different realms of government action.
In a nutshell, under the Constitution, when the government is using its law enforcement powers domestically to discipline an errant member of the community for a violation of law, then protecting the liberty of the American people requires that we sharply curtail the government's power so it does not itself threaten the liberties of the people. Thus, the Constitution in this arena deliberately sacrifices efficiency; invests the accused with rights that that essentially create a level playing field between the collective interests of community and those of the individual; and dilutes the government's power by dividing it and turning it on itself as a check, at each stage the Judiciary is expressly empowered to serve as a check and neutral arbiter.
None of these considerations are applicable when the government is defending the country against armed attacks from foreign enemies. In this realm, the Constitution is concerned with one thing – preserving the freedom of our political community by destroying the external threat. Here, the Constitution is not concerned with handicapping the government to preserve other values. The Constitution does not confer "rights" on foreign enemies. Rather the Constitution is designed to maximize the government's efficiency to achieve victory – even at the cost of "collateral damage" that would be unacceptable in the domestic realm. The idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane.
The impact of Boumediene has been extremely consequential. For the first time in American history, our armed forces are incapable of taking prisoners. We are now in a crazy position that, if we identify a terrorist enemy on the battlefield, such as ISIS, we can kill them with a drone or any other weapon. But if we capture them and want to hold them at Guantanamo or in the United States, the military is tied down in developing evidence for an adversarial process and must spend resources in interminable litigation.
A Hope for this Partisan Age
The fact that our courts are now willing to invade and muck about in these core areas of Presidential responsibility illustrates how far the doctrine of Separation of Powers has been eroded.
In this partisan age, we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure. As we look back over the sweep of American history, it has been the American Presidency that has best fulfilled the vision of the Founders. It has brought to our Republic a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked.
At every critical juncture where the country has faced a great challenge –
– whether it be in our earliest years as the weak, nascent country combating regional rebellions and maneuvering for survival in a world of far stronger nations;
– whether it be during our period of continental expansion, with the Louisiana Purchase, and the acquisition of Mexican territory;
– whether it be the Civil War, the epic test of the Nation;
– World War II and the struggle against Fascism;
– the Cold War and the challenge of Communism;
– the struggle against racial discrimination;
– and most recently, the fight against Islamist Fascism and international terrorism.
One would have to say that it has been the Presidency that has stepped to the fore and provided the leadership, consistency, energy, and perseverance that allowed us to surmount the challenge and brought us success.
In so many areas, it is critical to our Nation's future that we restore and preserve in their full vigor our Founding principles. Not the least of these is the Framers' vision of a strong, independent Executive, chosen by the country as a whole.
Via BadBlue News, my replacement for Drudge.


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I write these words from Milan, Italy, where I am with my Word on Fire team filming new episodes for our Pivotal Players series. I've seen lots of marvelous things on this trip, including the ruins of the ancient baptistery under the Milan Cathedral where, in the spring of 387, St. Augustine was baptized by St. Ambrose. But the most fascinating sight I've taken in is the vested and mitered skeleton of that same Ambrose, which rests in the basilica that bears his name, not far from the Cathedral.
Behind a grille, just under the main altar, lie the skeletal remains of Ambrose and two martyr saints, Gervasius and Protasius, whose bodies were recovered during his lifetime. With the aid of some pretty high-powered camera lenses, I was able to see the skull of the great bishop of Milan in extraordinary detail. What struck me especially was the size and solidity of his teeth, still formidable after 1,600 years. I'll confess that when I examined those ancient teeth, I couldn't help but think of the lips that once covered them, for Augustine, in his Confessions, famously reported his amazement at seeing Ambrose read without moving his lips—something quite unusual at the time.
However, after I posted detailed photos of Ambrose's skull on our Facebook page, the reaction has been rather…interesting. Many, many people expressed their pleasure and excitement at seeing the pictures, but many others, I must say, were a bit put off. From a number of strongly Protestant and evangelical commentators came the charge that I was encouraging the worship of dead bodies! Well, that's just silly. This has, of course, nothing to do with worshipping Ambrose but rather honoring him. But most of those, both Protestant and Catholic, who had objections to the pictures said something along these lines: "Well, it's just kind of creepy, isn't it?" and "Why don't they just bury the poor man?" or "Isn't this frightening to children?" Regarding that last question, I can testify that, when I was visiting Ambrose's sarcophagus, a gaggle of little kids was looking through the grille with rapt attention. They seemed far more fascinated than frightened.
But I want to respond to these more serious concerns, for they allow me to throw light on some pretty basic issues in Catholic theology and spirituality. I might begin with John Henry Newman. When Newman was a young man, he made a pilgrimage to Italy with a couple of likeminded friends. He took in many elements of Catholic life that deeply appealed to him, for they were redolent of the ancient Church that Newman loved. However, other practices, which seemed more superstitious and redolent of folk religion, repelled him. Among these were what he took to be the worship of Mary and the saints and, particularly, the devotion to relics. A purified and Biblical Christianity, he felt, must be rid of such things.
However, some years later, when Newman had made the transition to Catholicism, he saw these practices in an entirely new light. He had come to appreciate, first, that the veneration of relics and the bodies of the saints was an ancient custom in the Christian community. How often, he said, we hear stories of believers placing napkins and cloths at the feet of martyrs to catch some of their blood, or of the reverence paid to the bones of the heroic dead in the catacombs, or of relics of saints working miracles. Secondly, and more importantly, he had come to understand such pious gestures as a logical development of the doctrine of the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ, the Word of God truly became flesh. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity took to himself a human mind and will and imagination, but also feet, hands, internal organs, muscles, veins, and bones. He lived, died, and rose in a real human body. Subsequently, in the mystical body of the Church, the Incarnation is extended through space and time, the Spirit of Jesus coming to dwell in the humanity of all the baptized and in a privileged way in the humanity of the saints. Paul acknowledged this truth when he cried exultantly, "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." How wonderful, too, that this Christ-life is placed in the bodies of the faithful through the materiality of the sacraments: water, oil, imposed hands, transfigured bread and wine, etc. And this, Newman realized, is why the Church has, from the beginning, reverenced the bodies of the saints and treasured their relics. She has known that, as Paul put it, our bodies become temples of the Holy Spirit, dwelling places of Christ.
And thus, we clothe the skeleton of St. Ambrose in stately liturgical robes and we crown his skull with a bishop's miter, not to be macabre or "creepy," but because we reverence his body as a place where Christ had come to dwell. One of the oldest and most enduring heresies is Gnosticism, and perhaps the principal mark of this ancient distortion of Christianity is a suspicion of the body. For the Gnostics, the creator God is a fallen, compromised deity, and the whole purpose of the religious life is to escape from grubby matter. Authentic Christianity has always stood against such dualistic nonsense—and one sign of that resistance is the unapologetic showing of the impressive teeth of St. Ambrose!

subset: commoncrawl


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The Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) recently produced a public service announcement aimed at encouraging Jamaicans to unconditionally accept members of their families who are homosexual. The organisation hoped to have had the spot broadcast on national television in August – but as a new month begins, the Jamaican media still appear to be firm in its stance that it will not air the advertisement, which features former Miss Jamaica World and Miss Jamaica Universe Christine Straw and her gay brother, Matthew, sharing their personal story.
Public service announcements are typically aired free of cost in Jamaica, but in discussions, media heads have apparently said that even if it were a paid ad they still would not broadcast it because they reserve the right to decide on content.
The issue has sparked controversy in Jamaica, a country that is widely perceived as being homophobic, thanks in part to this and this. Much of the debate appears to be taking place through mainstream media – either via the comments section of online newspapers, letters to the editor and talk shows. There has been some discussion on Twitter, and a few bloggers have commented on the issue, making sure to upload the video of the PSA to their blogs.
To examine the controversy more closely, I asked Annie Paul, who lives in Jamaica, and two diaspora bloggers, Kathy Stanley (whose cousin, a prominent gay rights activist in Jamaica, was murdered in June 2004) and Kei Miller (who has written extensively on homophobia in Jamaica), to share their thoughts.
Annie is the Publications Officer at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus and a founding editor of the journal Small Axe.
Kei is an author and educator whose collection of short stories exploring the issue of Jamaican homophobia was shortlisted in 2007 for a Commonwealth Writer's Prize. He currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
Kathy is a writer and poet who is also passionate about environmental preservation. She is about to begin her Master's Degree.
The PSA and the media
Global Voices: To what extent has the media influenced public attitudes toward the PSA (although the spot is available for viewing online) by characterising it as "pro-gay" rather than "pro-tolerance"?
Annie Paul (AP): It's been on YouTube so the digitally connected have seen it for the most part. There's such an anti-gay sentiment generally that I don't think the media would need to do much to further prejudice public opinion.
Kei Miller (KM): I have to confess I can't speak with any absolute conviction about what happened in Jamaica and how it happened since I've actually been in Scotland while this whole thing has been played out. Strangely enough, Scotland is where Matthew (who is at the centre of this controversial ad) lives, and I've invited him to dinner to hear his side, but we haven't met yet. To speak quite frankly, the Observer recently hasn't seemed to me to be most responsible paper and this kind of sloppy journalism that isn't interested in nuance but in the most controversial headlines that might stir up trouble and attract a wider and more incensed readership is typical. But in all fairness, I also can't imagine that subtlety would matter much in Jamaica – 'pro-gay' rather than 'pro-tolerance'. You see, once it got out that there was an ad addressing the topic of homosexuality, and that the ad was not hitting out against it, it was going to be characterized as a pro-gay ad. That seems to me an inevitability.
GV: I understand that one of the dailies has published a pro-gay-rights editorial. Do you think that some segments of the Jamaican media are more progressive on this topic than others?
AP: Oh yes! It's not a universal response by any means. Nationwide Radio stayed on the subject for two or three days playing the audio from the PSA and trying to find out what the objections were. Dionne Jackson-Miller who works for RJR also focused on it though her own station didn't allow her to play any part of the PSA. On Double Standards, which is a Newstalk 93 radio programme hosted by Yvette Rowe and myself, we've recorded an edition which will air next month where we discussed reactions to the PSA with the executive director of JFLAG for an hour. Interestingly he told us that one of the two main TV stations, CVM, had told JFLAG that they wouldn't be averse to playing it if TVJ agree to air it.
KM: Yes I do think so. The Gleaner at least seems to me to invite a more open discussion on the topic. Their editorials, their columnists and some of the letters to the editor that have been published have really dared to challenge Jamaica's homophobia. Other newspapers (including the Gleaner's own sister paper, The Star!) seem interested in titillation more than discussion. Sometimes this easy urge to stir up controversy and outrage and hatred seems irresponsible to me. The topic of gayness is always a sure fire way to get Jamaicans talking without listening, and incensed.
GV: What do you gather is the principal reason for the stations' refusal to air the ad? Are broadcasters afraid of retaliation somehow, either unlawful (homophobes who may take extreme action) or "lawful" (the government or corporate Jamaica pulling advertising or viewers boycotting the station)?
AP: Kay Osborne, head of TVJ, indicated in a Sunday Observer article that the reason behind TVJ's decision not to broadcast the PSA was that "the culture of "good, moral and ethical Jamaicans, does not support homosexuality at this time." At the same time she called on Jamaicans to be more open to dialogue on such matters which seemed more than a little contradictory. But yes, it seems to be an irrational fear of advertising dollars being pulled and the generally risk-averse nature of the media here.
KM: Cowardice. Ms Osbourne's comment seemed to me a strange attempt to have her cake and eat it – condemning the discrimination of the Jamaican public while affirming the station's position to play into that discrimination.
GV: You see this stance by the Jamaican media as just another example of their spinelessness. Can you elaborate?
AP: Yes, I do find Jamaican media too willing to 'plead the fifth' (to use an Americanism) rather than expose the truth in too many instances. This is especially true when dealing with those who have wealth – and hence power – in this society. I'm dismayed at how quick Jamaican media are to use the admittedly Draconian libel laws here to gag themselves, in the same way that they were only too willing to use the excuse of the buggery laws to keep from airing what is clearly an unpopular message.
Look at how long the media refrained from naming the suspect in the X6 killing recently, on the grounds that the police hadn't released his name! In the UK the police didn't release News of the World Editor Rebekah Brooks's name when they arrested her, referring to her instead as a '44-year old female'. Did this prevent the media there from splashing her name all over their front pages? No! Because any media house worth its salt has the investigative capacity to uncover the truth and publish it without benefit of a PR announcement from the police.
But this would never have happened in Jamaica. Brooks's identity would still have been shrouded in secrecy to this day had her arrest happened in Jamaica. On the other hand, those without power or money are treated outrageously—Dog Paw's name and image were flashed all over the media with assertions that he had ordered various killings and the case hasn't yet come to trial.
Religious influence
GV: It appears as if certain religious groups have been very outspoken about the issue. In the words of the Observer article, why would "the reactions of pastors" be considered such a significant part of public opinion and have such an impact upon whether or not to air the spot?
AP: Oh you don't know Jamaica! This is a vociferously 'Christian' society with Churches of various denomination holding an inordinate amount of influence. On the other hand Pastors, Priests and Clerics railed and ranted about the nude weddings at Hedonism years ago and about the nude couple who make up the Emancipation Monument but didn't gain much traction. Their protests were pretty much ignored and there was no significant fallout so it's not clear why in this case their opinion seems to count for more.
KM: Pastor Reaction would be considered a significant part of public opinion because it really is. I've been writing about this recently in a more academic context, about how the public sphere in Jamaica is constructed. And religion is a huge part of that space. It would be a mistake to think of fundamentalist religious opinion as something separate from the public sphere and that only a small subsection of society buys into that discourse. But of course the public sphere is always a space for discussion and contestation and what we must object to is this feeling that some ideas can't even be discussed, challenged or debated.
Diaspora blogger Kathy Stanley had a slightly different take:
Kathy Stanley (KS): It is incomprehensible to me why pastors, who are unfortunately very lacking in real knowledge about homosexuality, are held up as wise men to be consulted for their reactions. Sadly, they tout ridiculous beliefs that homosexuality is a "lifestyle choice." And that if you accept gays then it means they will take over society. These views are almost laughable if it wasn't so deadly serious and if it didn't cause people to get killed. Homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice. That is a widely known fact. To say otherwise is to prove your ignorance in this issue. These types of backward and uninformed opinions are partly the reason that there is still so much serious misinformation and so much intolerance…unfortunately the pastors do have influence. As do the appalling musicians who tout anti-gay lyrics in their music. There is a systemic lack of information driving the intolerance.
The battle for equal rights
GV: Is it a losing battle to be fighting for equal rights for homosexuals in the Jamaican context, or do you think these are the opinions of the vocal few?
AP: It's going to be a long, uphill struggle, JFLAG would be fooling itself if it thought otherwise but things ARE slowly changing. When we interviewed Dane Lewis, Executive Director of JFLAG, on Double Standards he acknowledged that 10 years ago radio stations wouldn't even have agreed to air any discussion on the matter in the way that they have today. The Observer has devoted quite a lot of column space to these debates even carrying stories that highlight the plight of homeless homosexual men.
KM: No I don't think it's the vocal few at all. You know – sometimes you think things aren't so bad in Jamaica. It matters where in the country you are – what circles you move in. If you are part of some university circles for instance it's easy to think that Jamaica's attitudes are changing and becoming more nuanced, but it takes a situation like this to remember what the overwhelming and prevailing feeling is, the lack of thought that is out there, and why there is still need for activism.
KS: I think that regardless of the battle, one must always stand up for human rights. Because that is what this fight is for. It's a human rights issue. We don't give up on other battles for human rights.
GV: It seems as if people are confusing homosexuality and buggery, homosexuality and paedophilia, homosexuality and criminality. Thoughts?
AP: Yes, that is routine here. The problem is that because of the buggery laws, anyone who is an acknowledged homosexual is viewed as a lawbreaker. And unfortunately, in most societies the rape of a young boy is considered far worse than the rape of a young girl—it's a double standard. Then again, Jamaican society is quite tolerant of rampant criminality, so again, it's not clear why people here feel so strongly about consensual anal sex between adults—even if it's a crime on the books—when they love Buju Banton, Jah Cure, Dudus and others who have been found guilty of or charged with far more serious crimes.
KS: Lack of knowledge is pervasive. Yes, they are confusing homosexuality with criminality. But Jamaica's buggery laws and government have not helped. The Prime Minister famously said that he would not have gay people in his government. How does he know who is gay and who is not? The Government of Jamaica and its own intolerance and unwillingness to deal with the antiquated and backward laws is part of the problem here.
GV: Annie said in this post that "the status and well-being of its homosexual citizens continues to evolve in a one step forward-two steps backward manner." The issue of homosexuality in the Jamaican context is so interesting and complex: How does an organisation like J-FLAG advance? How do gay Jamaicans function within this oppressive and complicated structure?
KM: Oh I don't know about J-FLAG and I would actually really like to meet some of the activists there to get a better sense of their history, and their past and present fights, and if they have a sense of moving forward or backward. Gay Jamaicans function within the society in the way that I imagine all oppressed groups function – by subterfuge, by inventing their own language, by finding those miraculous ways of being simultaneously visible and invisible, flamboyant and camouflaged, loud and silent. So sometimes you see it in the oddest of places – in the church choir, or in parts of folk culture like Jonkanoo, and you think how incredible.
AP: I actually think that Jamaica's bark is far worse than its bite. IF you examine the actual number of people killed here JUST because they were gay or different, the numbers wouldn't add up, especially in relation to the general murder rate. At the same time, it is unnerving to live with a dog that is constantly showing its teeth, growling and barking even if it only occasionally actually bites anyone.
For anyone interested in more nuanced readings of Jamaica's much vaunted homophobia I recommend Kei Miller's blog Under the Saltire Flag and posts such as Contradictory Instructions: Elephant Man's 2001 hit 'Log On' or On Effeminacy.
I also highly recommend his latest book of poetry A Light Song of Light, and in particular, the prose poem A Smaller Song, which directly addresses the way gay Jamaicans not only get by here but also enjoy their lives.
There is also Fiyu Pikni, who runs the blog Gay Jamaicans United. He has written several illuminating pieces on the subject.
The role of social media
GV: Can Jamaica's big problems (in this case, homophobia) really be solved without the media as a responsible partner? And what role does social media have to play?
AP: No, I don't think without the media's help we will make much headway. Jamaican TV stations' reluctance to support what is indisputably a worthy cause makes a hard task that much more difficult. You don't kowtow to iniquitous, outdated laws and inhumane customs in the name of some dubious public morality or local tradition–if changing a situation requires that you break an absurd law whose expiry date passed over a hundred years ago, then you follow the example of the legion of great women and men throughout history who have shown us how to do that–Rosa Parks; Marcus Garvey; Mahatma Gandhi; Nelson Mandela to name merely a handful–they all went against the culture of their times, and rebelled against what was considered "good, moral and ethical" in systems we consider unethical and inhumane today.
The funny thing is that many of the talking heads on TV and radio, in the print media even, ARE gay but they dare not admit it. I also don't think anything can really change until powerful homosexuals take their courage in their hands and step out of the closet. Right now, it is poor young homosexuals who refuse to remain covert who are subjected to abuse. That's not fair.
Social media provides excellent opportunities for launching educational campaigns and clever advertorials, but I'm not sure these are being fully utilized.
KS: I think social media does have a vital role to play. The comments I have seen on Twitter have all been disparaging towards TVJ for not airing the ad and have been supportive of gay people. Citizen journalism is very important here and moves the culture and public opinion forward even while the mainstream media fails. We see this in issues of human rights across the globe.
External influence
GV: Something that's striking is the idea, explicit or implied, that "outsiders" don't have the right to express an opinion or take any action when it comes to homophobia in Jamaica. It often gets compared to neocolonialism. What's your take on this?
AP: Well, I do think that some outsiders have been insensitive to the realities on the ground here and insufficiently attentive to the particularities of Jamaica. There is a tendency to self-righteousness, and an arrogant assumption that they know the right way in the same way that missionaries two hundred years ago felt so certain about their 'rescue missions' in relation to various so-called 'heathen' populations. Kei captured the problem superbly on his blog recently.
KM: I have a complicated take on this. I mostly agree with 'outsider's' take on it, but I don't generally find it helpful. I've written about this before, and it's about attitude. I think too often the attitude of outsiders comes across as a kind of self-righteousness – as a validation of their own morality and I guess the savagery or backwardness of Jamaicans. And when Jamaicans pick up on that contempt we react in a really unfortunate way. We affirm our right to homophobia and so I think it ends up fortifying our hatred rather than challenging it in a helpful way.
KS: Sometimes it takes a light being shone on an issue from the outside for some change to come. Was it neocolonialism when the Allies took it upon themselves to rescue Jews and Europe from Nazism? Is it neocolonialism for Western writers and human rights organizations to speak out and advocate on behalf of prisoners of torture, Chinese dissidents, Tibetan people who are occupied? Was it neocolonialism when the West spoke out against apartheid in South Africa? Is it neocolonialism for human rights advocates to be speaking out against corporations like Shell who are large polluters in Africa? All around the world, people speak out for others who are disadvantaged, disenfranchised and persecuted. We are all human beings and our hearts open to those who are suffering. Jamaicans can take all the time they want, debating it and fussing about what to do or what not to do, but the world has left them on this issue. It is a human rights issue. As a Jamaican and someone who lost a dear family member due to this hatred and intolerance, I am proud of JFLAG and other Jamaicans who are taking a stand.
Race and class
GV: Finally, when it comes to the ad itself, do you think the ethnicity of the Straws (mixed race but clearly light-skinned) has anything to do with the way people have reacted, given the line of rhetoric in some parts of the Caribbean that portrays homosexuality as a "foreign" thing or a perversion of the upper classes?
AP: Of course that is also playing into all this. But matters of race and colour are taboo in the Jamaican public sphere so no one has so much as mentioned it, but of course in private these must be bones of contention as well.
In relation to the view that there has been an 'invasion' of the Jamaican body politic by 'foreign' interests, there is a way in which the ravages of globalization are mapped onto the body of the homosexual. There is much talk of 'the gay agenda' that supposedly underlies initiatives such as the PSA we're discussing. This comes from the fact that relations with the 'developed world', on whom countries such as Jamaica depend for aid and other kinds of assistance, are now contingent on accepting a hegemonic human rights discourse that is viewed as being antithetical to Jamaican culture. The cultural changes that forces of globalization engender sometimes provoke intense resentment and anxiety, and ironically are perhaps perceived as a violation as traumatic as being buggered–I don't know, this is just a theory—maybe this is why the unfortunate connection is made to male homosexuality? I don't know, I do know that until that reflex association with the evils of globalization is broken it will be hard for homosexuals in Jamaica to find this a hospitable place to be. This is why this is a battle that has to be fought here–on home ground–by Jamaicans, for Jamaicans, without any overt external pressures or interference.
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[…] it came to digital activism. The rest of the Caribbean meanwhile, grappled with everything from homophobia to states of emergency, weathered hurricanes and questioned the boundaries of online privacy, […]
[…] especialment en activisme digital. Mentrestant, la resta del Carib ha bregat amb tot coses, de l'homofòbia a estats d'emergència, han resistit els huracans i s'hi han qüestionat els límits de la […]
[…] that the problem was real, they didn't have to look too hard. Just over a year ago, there was the media block on a public service announcement aimed at encouraging Jamaicans to unconditionally accept members of their families who are […]
[…] which essentially makes consensual homosexual relations against the law. There is strong social disapproval of the homosexual lifestyle, much of which is rooted in religious fervour. Sometimes the tide […]
[…] narażone są na szykany a ich obrońcy są uciszani (ang.), zaś religijne doktryny, normy kulturowe (ang.) i archaiczne prawo używane są w celu usprawiedliwiania ostracyzmu wobec […]


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Two candidates are seeking the New Democratic Party nomination to run in the Calgary-Greenway provincial by-election, which will need to be called before the end of May 2016. The NDP nomination meeting will be held on Feb. 20, 2016.
- Roop Rai is known in northeast Calgary from her time as a host of the Roshni program on Red FM radio station. She is now constituency assistant for MLA Irfan Sabir in the neighbouring Calgary-McCall constituency.
Mattie McMillan is the manager of MLA Ricardo Miranda's constituency office in the neighbouring of Calgary-Cross. McMillan is a former vice-president external of the University of Calgary Students' Union and, according to his linkedin profile, a Reserve Officer in the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets. McMillan sought the NDP nomination to run in the Calgary-Centre federal by-election in 2012.I am now told that McMillan is no longer a candidate in the nomination race.- I am told that John Phillips, a Calgary lawyer, has now entered the nomination contest.
According to the Calgary Herald, 2015 candidate Devinder Toor will challenge Robin Martin for the March 5, 2016 Wildrose Party nomination. Mr. Toor placed third and earned 20 percent of the vote in the May 2015 election.
Dan Sidhu, Jamie Lall, Prabhdeep Gill and Tushar Yadav are seeking the Progressive Conservative nomination, which is scheduled to take place on Feb. 27, 2016.
Two candidates are contesting the Liberal Party nomination, which is scheduled to take place on Feb. 29, 2016.
- Saima Jamal is a social activist and a founding member of the Syrian Refugee Support Group in Calgary. She also has the endorsement of interim party leader David Swann.
- Khalil Karbani briefly contested the Wildrose nomination in Calgary-McCall in 2011 before being disqualified. He is the president of the Taradale Community Association.
A full list of nomination candidates and their social media links can be found here.
(Post edited on Jan. 25, 2022)


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Re-Imagine Europe
Re-Imagine Europe is a four-year project presented by ten cultural organisations from across Europe, with an aim to respond to the social and political challenges that we are currently facing. Rising nationalism, climate change and migration are drawing European countries apart, while technological advances continue to change the ways that we interact, urging us to explore new modes of operation. Funded by Creative Europe, the project involves artistic residencies, commissions, workshops and symposia, using art to empower a young generation of digitally connected Europeans to explore new ideas. Re-Imagine Europe is initiated by Sonic Acts (NL) and coordinated by Paradiso (NL) in collaboration with Elevate Festival (AT), Lighthouse (UK), Ina GRM (FR), KONTEJNER (HR), Landmark / Bergen Kunsthall (NO), A4 (SK), Disruption Network Lab (DE) and Ràdio Web MACBA (ES).


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EAGLE - Action Group on Land monitoring in Europe of the European environment information and observation network (Eionet).
Since 2008, the EAGLE Group has been developing a solution and proof of concept to support the semantic and technical framework of a European harmonised information management capacity for land monitoring.
The EAGLE Group is a self-initiated and open group of land monitoring experts from different European Environment Agency (EEA) member countries, mostly – but not only – in their roles as Eionet members. Thus, the EAGLE Group brings together knowledge and experiences from existing land cover (LC) and land use (LU) classification approaches and initiatives, in a bottom-up approach.
EAGLE is acknowledged by the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) as an instrumental and crucial component to support a general shift of focus from classification to characterisation, which led to EAGLE compliance being enforced in new CLMS products.
The EAGLE concept is explicitly mentioned in the Copernicus Work Programmes as an essential pillar to support the challenging new use cases of the 2nd generation of CORINE Land Cover (CLC), also known as CLC+. The EAGLE concept is now operationally implemented as a central component of the CLC+ implementation, to guarantee a standardized integration approach for different LC/LU products.


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Roger Pielke Sr. (Colorado State) has a blog (Climate Science) that gives his personal perspective on climate change issues. In it, he has made clear that he feels that apart from greenhouse gases, other climate forcings (the changes that affect the energy balance of the planet) are being neglected in the scientific discussion. Specifically, he feels that many of these other forcings have sufficient 'first-order' effects to prevent a clear attribution of recent climate change to greenhouse gases.
In general, I heartily agree – other forcings are important, even essential, for understanding observed climate variability and, as a community, we are only just starting to get to grips with some of the more complicated effects. Obviously, though, not all forcings are of the same magnitude (either globally or regionally) and so it is useful to separate the 'first-order' forcings from those that are relatively minor. But what exactly is 'first-order' and what is not?
It is helpful to distinguish forcings that are important in the global mean, from those which might be important locally but not have much impact for 'global warming'. A good metric for the importance of a global forcing is the radiative forcing (i.e. the global mean radiation impact at the tropopause for an instantaneous change – the so-called "instantaneous forcing"). There are other definitions (e.g. the "adjusted forcing" where stratospheric temperatures are allowed to adjust), but for the purpose of this article these differences are not that important (for those who are interested there is a good discussion of the different forcing definitions in Hansen et al (2005, JGR)).
While the definition of a forcing may appear a little arbitrary, the reason why radiative forcing is used is because it (conveniently) gives quite good predictions of what happens in models to the global mean temperature once the climate system has fully responded to the change. Thus the forcing can be used as a shorthand for the climate response without having to do the experiment.
Of course, the global mean temperature isn't the only useful metric of climate change – regional temperatures and precipitation are arguably much more societally relevant – but it does have a good signal-to-noise ratio. That is, changes to the system are more clearly discerned in the global mean temperature than at a regional level, mainly because the noisy 'weather' component increases as you go to smaller scales.
Figure 1: Two breakdowns of the global mean forcings since the pre-industrial. Factors causing warming are red, cooling factors, blue. The top panel shows the direct effects of the individual components, while the second panel attributes various indirect factors (associated with atmospheric chemistry, aerosol cloud interactions and albedo effects) and includes a model estimate of the 'efficacy' of the forcing that depends on its spatial distribution. (From Hansen et al (2005, JGR)). Subjective uncertainties associated with the well-mixed GHGs are around ~0.15 W/m2, for ozone ~0.07 W/m2, tropospheric aerosols around ~1 W/m2 and solar ~0.3 W/m2.
The figure here gives one estimate for how many of those forcings have changed over the industrial period (1750-2000). This assessment is from my own lab and so I may be a little biased, but although there are significant uncertainties (particular for the aerosol indirect effects), it probably gives a reasonable idea of the current thinking. The forcings illustrated here are from the well mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs) (CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs), tropospheric and stratospheric O3, direct aerosol effects (from sulphates, nitrates, organic and black carbon), land use change, solar irradiance, volcanic aerosols, and various indirect effects (on clouds, stratospheric water vapour, snow albedo etc.). Reasonable estimates of these 16 different effects (and counting…) were included in the GISS simulations for the upcoming IPCC assessment.
The land use change used in the figure is related to the deforestation dataset of Ramankutty and Foley (1999) and includes the effects of albedo and vegetation type change, but not the impacts of increased irrigation or the 'greening' of the high latitudes (due to climate changes and possible CO2 fertilisation effects) . These latter two effects are expected to lead to slight warming, but the overall impact of land use changes is expected to be negative (i.e. a cooling) (Myhre and Myhre, 2003), although the uncertainty is still significant (maybe 0.5 W/m2 either way).
To my mind, the 'first-order' forcings would be the ones without which you can't really do without in assessing global climate change. I would therefore argue that for the global mean the well-mixed GHGs and the counterbalancing reflecitve aerosol effects are 'first-order' – without GHGs there is no appreciable warming signal, and without the aerosols, the warming from GHGs is excessive and important changes in the diurnal cycle and cloudiness are not captured. Everything else (apart from volcanos, which are a special case) is in the noise. If we were to break it down even further, I would argue that CO2, CH4 and sulphates (the main non-soot aerosol) were the only 'first order' forcings. It is curious to note that this is the combination of forcings that were predominantly used in the simulations discussed in IPCC (1995) where the conclusion was made that the 'balance of evidence' supported the notion of ongoing human-caused climate change.
Before the emails come streaming in, let me make it clear that this isn't to say that 'second order' forcings are unimportant. On the contrary, many of these effects have very specific signatures in the climate system (in the stratosphere, in the Arctic and in the tropics) that need to be understood much better – however they are unlikely to have a big impact on the global mean temperature. Thus when it comes to global warming, neither land use change/vegetation type, nor for instance, the biogeochemical effect of increased CO2 are 'first order'. The first example is clearly important locally (impacts of deforestation, urban development etc.) while the second effect is as yet inadequately unquantified but there doesn't appear to be any a priori reason to think it is globally important. It doesn't therefore make much sense to claim that some of the smaller forcings are 'first-order' despite their importance, and conceivably dominance, at smaller scales.
To be sure, some of these effects (such as the impact of irrigation on surface water vapour, or land use changes on evapotranspiration) are not easily dealt with in terms of the tropospheric radiative forcing – a point that was well made in the National Academies report on radiative forcing (on which Dr. Pielke was an author). However, the dominance of well-mixed greenhouse gases on the anthropogenic forcing over the last few decades is robust to almost any estimate of the uncertainty in the other forcings. This is clearly a different opinion to that held by Dr. Pielke. However, this is probably due to our different perspectives in what we feel are important questions (local vs. global), rather than a disagreement over fundamentals.
Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, R. Ruedy, L. Nazarenko, A. Lacis, G.A. Schmidt, G. Russell, I. Aleinov, M. Bauer, S. Bauer, N. Bell, B. Cairns, V. Canuto, M. Chandler, Y. Cheng, A. Del Genio, G. Faluvegi, E. Fleming, A. Friend, T. Hall, C. Jackman, M. Kelley, N. Kiang, D. Koch, J. Lean, J. Lerner, K. Lo, S. Menon, R. Miller, P. Minnis, T. Novakov, V. Oinas, Ja. Perlwitz, Ju. Perlwitz, D. Rind, A. Romanou, D. Shindell, P. Stone, S. Sun, N. Tausnev, D. Thresher, B. Wielicki, T. Wong, M. Yao, and S. Zhang 2005. Efficacy of climate forcings. J. Geophys. Res., in press.
Myhre, G. and A. Myhre, Uncertainties in radiative forcing due to surface albedo changes caused by land use changes,
Ramankutty, N., and J.A. Foley (1999). Estimating historical changes in global land cover: croplands from 1700 to 1992.


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Dierks Bentley, Quarantined in Colorado, Is 'Just Kind of Living Right Now'
Dierks Bentley's Instagram dispatches from the novel coronavirus pandemic have grown sparser as the months have worn on: A snap from a recent mountain-biking adventure here, a nostalgic-for-live music shot there, an occasional promotional post for his daughters' radio show or the Hot Country Knights. He's been quarantining with his family in Colorado, and honestly, scrolling through his photos, it's not hard to imagine him just ... not coming back.
"[We're] kinda just here indefinitely, I guess ... happy to be out here right now," Bentley says over the phone from his hideaway in the Centennial State. His social media coordinator has been on him to post more often, "but I'm like, 'Ah, I'm kind of just living right now ... the world is taking a little bit of a break, and I think we are, too.'"
Bentley chuckles at the thought of taking an early retirement and making the mountains his permanent home, though. He's still got his two dozen band and crew members on his payroll and is "looking forward to getting back out with the band and crew when I can," he stresses.
"I'm just concentrating on the things I can concentrate on right now, which is my family," the singer adds of what he's jokingly calling a "mid-career retirement," albeit a forced one. "I'm writing a lot of songs ... just concentrating on my family and my kids and my music."
Bentley has mostly stayed away from livestreaming performances from home, but on Thursday (Sept. 10), he'll take part in the Tito's Made to Order: South virtual music festival, one of four events highlighting music from each quadrant of the country. The country star will play an acoustic, but fully produced set from "a pretty beautiful outdoor space" near his current home in Colorado.
"I'm looking forward to any opportunity to play live music ... Any chance to perform, certainly when it raises money for a great cause ... is awesome," he says. "It's not like a live show, but they've done a really great job ... of making something that I think fans are interested in watching."
As part of the Made to Order festival, Tito's Handmade Vodka is donating $100,000 to World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit founded by celebrity chef José Andrés that responds to global crises with food for those in need, and encouraging viewers to donate, too. During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, WCK has been paying restaurants to cook meals for people in need in their neighborhoods, and all money raised during the festival will support Black-owned restaurants doing that work.
"What a great concept," Bentley says of World Central Kitchen. He saw a 60 Minutes piece on the organization, so when this opportunity came up, it made "total sense" to get involved.
"It's an awesome thing to be part of," the singer says of the virtual festival, "and something we need to be doing more of 'cause I don't see us getting back onstage for real for a while."
Fans who tune into the event via TitosVodka.com or on the Tito's YouTube channel will get a set full of hits, and maybe a cover or two, from Bentley. He's been writing new music and has even briefly gone back to Nashville to record some of it, but he knows that's not what people want from him right now.
As for when fans will get to hear that new stuff: Even Bentley himself isn't sure just yet. Lately, he's just been "play[ing] music for the love of playing music," taking his time and "trying not to rush into anything."
"[I want to] put music out that says something that's important to me ... I'm just trying to follow the muse, so I'm not working too much," he confesses, choosing instead to have a little fun. Hiking, camping, rock climbing, fishing, biking — it's all on the table. So is growing a mullet.
"I look like ... when was it that I had that long hair?" Bentley says. "That might be a surprise when fans see me."
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