Sen. Jim DeMint and his Republican colleagues don’t mind the suspension of civil liberties as long as the people doing it are “business-friendly.”
When Sen. Jim DeMint and his Republican colleagues visited Honduras this week, they did so in support of a regime that shuts down opposition news media and arrests dissidents for “sedition.” Â They also, of course, did so in defiance of the foreign policy of the United States. Â But I suppose that if the anti-torture law doesn’t apply to Republican Presidents, then we can’t expect the Logan Act to apply to Republican Senators and Representatives.
Update Steve Benen points out that DeMint isn’t alone: Â going abroad to frustrate the foreign policy of the United States is now a fad in the Congressional GOP.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
This sort of behavior has a well established pedigree in the GOP. Nixon and Kissinger, for electoral purposes, secretly scuttled LBJ's attempt in 1968 to start Vietnam War peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Nixon, of course, went on to win the election based on a campaign that one antiwar group at the time characterized as "a secret plan to end an undeclared war, backed by a silent majority." Of course, we all know how that went.
Isn't subverting the diplomatic efforts of one's own government to end a war treasonous? Just wondering…