Libertarians for Obama

Now that Senator John McCain is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, it is time for libertarians to examine his candidacy.  If he should turn out to be antithetical to libertarian premises, libertarian support should rationally fall elsewhere.  Given the arguments I have made and will continue to make regarding reasons libertarians should support Obama, I believe that support should be given to Obama’s candidacy - especially as he continues to battle Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination - by voting for him in the remaining Democratic primaries if possible, and voting for him in the general elections.

One of the simplest ways to describe libertarian philosophy is that it stands for shrinking government.  Bush has obviously been one of the most anti-libertarian presidents this country has seen in that regard.  As far as McCain is concerned, he will continue the Bush trend.

In an essay written for the magazine Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, McCain pledges the following (with bolding helpfully supplied by Matt Welch of Reason magazine):

I will increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps from the currently planned level of roughly 750,000 troops to 900,000 troops. Enhancing recruitment will require more resources and will take time, but it must be done as soon as possible.

Along with more personnel, our military needs additional equipment in order to make up for its recent losses and modernize. We can partially offset some of this additional investment by cutting wasteful spending. But we can also afford to spend more on national defense, which currently consumes less than four cents of every dollar that our economy generates — far less than what we spent during the Cold War. We must also accelerate the transformation of our military, which is still configured to fight enemies that no longer exist.

America needs not simply more soldiers but more soldiers with the skills necessary to help friendly governments and their security forces resist common foes. I will create an Army Advisory Corps with 20,000 soldiers to partner with militaries abroad, and I will increase the number of U.S. personnel available to engage in Special Forces operations, civil affairs activities, military policing, and military intelligence. We also need a nonmilitary deployable police force to train foreign forces and help maintain law and order in places threatened by state collapse.

Today, understanding foreign cultures is not a luxury but a strategic necessity. As president, I will launch a crash program in civilian and military schools to prepare more experts in critical languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, and Pashto. Students at our service academies should be required to study abroad. I will enlarge the military’s Foreign Area Officer program and create a new specialty in strategic interrogation in order to produce more interrogators who can obtain critical knowledge from detainees by using advanced psychological techniques, rather than the kind of abusive tactics properly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

I will set up a new agency patterned after the erstwhile Office of Strategic Services. A modern-day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare, civil affairs, and psychological warfare; covert-action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines from inside and outside government. Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization. It would fight terrorist subversion around the world and in cyberspace. It could take risks that our bureaucracies today rarely consider taking — such as deploying infiltrating agents without diplomatic cover in terrorist states and organizations — and play a key role in frontline efforts to rebuild failed states.

As we increase our military capacity, we must also enhance our civilian capacity. As president, I will energize and expand our postconflict reconstruction capabilities so that any military campaign would be complemented by a civilian “surge” that would build the political and economic foundations of peace. To better coordinate our disparate military and civilian operations, I will ask Congress for a civilian follow-on to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which fostered a culture of joint operations within the military services. The new act would create a framework for civil servants and military forces to train and work together in order to facilitate cooperation in postconflict reconstruction.

We must also revitalize our public diplomacy. In 1998, the Clinton administration and Congress mistakenly agreed to abolish the U.S. Information Agency and move its public diplomacy functions to the State Department. This amounted to unilateral disarmament in the war of ideas. I will work with Congress to create a new independent agency with the sole purpose of getting America’s message to the world — a critical element in combating Islamic extremism and restoring the positive image of our country abroad.

Given that defense spending is largely responsible for the explosion of government in the Bush administration, it is clear that McCain will continue (and expand) the disastrous growth of government that we have seen in the Bush administration.

ABC News reports:

In the 4th quarter of 2007, individuals in the Army, Navy and Air Force made those branches of the armed services the No. 13, No. 18 and No. 21, contributing industries, respectively. War opponent Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, received the most from donors in the military, collecting at least $212,000 from them. Another war opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, was second with about $94,000.

The issue of illegal immigration is getting a lot of media attention this election cycle.  New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s aborted plan to allow New Yorkers who couldn’t prove their immigration status to obtain drivers licenses is still brought up today to try to measure the positions of the candidates.  In this vein, Jim Harper at the Cato-at-liberty blog writes:

Senator Obama supports licensing without regard to immigration status

Many people believe that illegal immigrants shouldn’t be “rewarded” with drivers’ licenses. Fair enough: the rule of law is important. There’s also a theory that denying illegal immigrants “benefits” like driver licensing will make the country inhospitable enough that they will leave. This has not borne out, however. Denying illegal immigrants licenses has merely caused unlicensed and untrained driving, with the hit-and-run accidents and higher insurance rates that flow from that.

The major reason, though, why I agree with Senator Obama is because the linking of driver licensing and immigration status is part of the move to convert the driver’s license into a national ID card. Mission-creep at the country’s DMVs is not just causing growth in one of the least-liked bureaucracies. It’s creating the infrastructure for direct regulatory control of individuals by the federal government.

Were immigration status and driver licensing solidly linked nationwide, the driver’s license would not just be a “benefit” of citizenship. It would then clearly be amenable to use as an immigration-control tool — as has already been proposed. Law-abiding, native-born citizens would more and more often be required to show ID. And it would be converted to additional uses. The federal government could condition our access to goods, services, and infrastructure on carrying and presenting a national ID, possession of which the government could make conditional on every regulatory whim that swept past.

We need to restore the driver’s license to its original role — as a license to drive. American citizens should not have to submit or prove their Social Security numbers in order to get licensed. If illegal immigrants “benefit” from that, so be it. It’s more important to protect U.S. citizens’ liberties now and for the future than to “go after” illegal immigrants while reform of our out-of-whack immigration laws languishes.

This is surely election season, and with election season comes the endless stream of candidate endorsements.  Many are from fellow politicians and are based upon the political nature of the race.  Then there are endorsements from people who care deeply about an issue, and wish to see the best candidate on that issue win the election.  This is the latter.

We are at a critical point in the Presidential campaign, and as lawyers who have been deeply involved in the Guantanamo litigation to preserve the important right to habeas corpus, we are writing to urge you to support Senator Obama.

Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo.

Obama, before becoming a United States Senator, was, of course, a state senator in Illinois. His campaign has used an accomplishment of his during this service as evidence of his ability to be a politician and pass legislation over intense opposition: he spearheaded a law mandating the videotaping of police interrogations.  I think that beyond his political ability, this event is telling of another important facet to Obama’s candidacy: his commitment to civil liberties.

Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason magazine, has authored a groundbreaking study on the use of paramilitary police tactics.  He has also, on his personal blog, examined the lack of proper accountability for police officers who break the law or overuse force. Through this work, he has highlighted an inordinate number of abuses in Chicago, Illinois.  Here is a short list that does not purport to be exhaustive:

• Chicago police shootings are, for practical purposes, uninvestigated.
• Chicago police were to establish a constant presence on the street in battle dress.
• Chicago police officer assaults elderly man, stays on force, does nothing while fellow police assault bar patrons.
• Chicago resident complains to local newspaper about police harassment, and has her apartment raided three days after the story appears.
• Chicago police abuse cases exceed national average.
• Chicago police officer assaults wheelchair-bound hospital patient, resumes duty after suspension.
• “A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a [Chicago] police officer than to get officially arrested by one.”

The law mandating interrogation videotaping was, unsurprisingly, vigorously opposed by the police, among others.  By fighting for the passage of the interrogation-videotaping law, Obama has proven himself to be not only the only presidential candidate with a basic understanding of the necessity to systemically reduce police abuses, but also one of the only politicians in office with such an understanding.

Speaking personally, this issue is one of the first things that made Obama an appealing candidate to me.  His decision to lead the campaign to get this law passed reveals a deep moral character and a sympathy to heightened oversight of a police force that increasingly sees itself as separate and distinct from “civilians.”  I trust him to use the power of the federal government granted under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to enforce this oversight.  No other candidate has this record.

From recent televised debates, at least this has become clear: Obama is the only leading candidate who opposes the war in Iraq. The Republicans certainly don’t. Clinton may think that the war was mismanaged, which it has been, but she refuses to repudiate her vote on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Let it not, five years later, be forgotten exactly what it was that was passed:

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized to use the
Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary
and appropriate in order to—
(1) defend the national security of the United States against
the continuing threat posed by Iraq

It is not enough to ask what our next President to do with the war that we have on our hands today. Rather, we must also ask whether our next President will give us a new war. Among the front-ronners, Obama, and Obama alone, has stated the clear and plain truth that there was no national interest at stake in invading Iraq. That we were discussing whether to invade Iraq ought to have contained the answer within the question. I trust in Obama’s judgment to not lead us into any more unnecessary invasions - as if there were ever an invasion that were necessary.

Lincoln Chafee is correct in that “helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.” Failing that, I would settle for not promoting Bush’s helpers to the Presidency.

As we prepare to enter the post-Bush era, libertarians like myself have been asking themselves what, if anything, can be done to reverse, roll-back, and prevent the re-occurrence of the horrendous record of the Bush administration.

The Republican Party, as a whole, deservedly has the albatross of the Iraq War hanging around its neck. The Republican Party, as a whole, has been responsible for profligate deficit spending that threatens to ruin our economy. The Republican Party, as a whole, has left the Constitution in tatters as it wears the flag as a cape.

I believe that only the record and rhetoric of Barack Obama presents libertarians with a real option for change.

What is at stake in this election is civil liberties. And Obama has the best, most consistent, and most trustworthy record on those issues of any electable candidate running. I am a particular fan of his government-transparency measures, like his Illinois legislation requiring that all police interrogations be videotaped. It isn’t enough to merely advocate for civil liberties; we need concrete provisions to protect them, with real teeth, and Obama’s got the best record of any serious candidate. I have confidence that an Obama presidency will save habeas corpus, and close Guantanamo. I have confidence that an Obama presidency will bring a humble foreign policy that does not seek to send Americans on pointless foreign adventures. I have no such confidence with any other electable candidate.

But before Obama can become the next President of the United States, he must first be nominated as the candidate for the Democratic Party. As primary season continues, those of you who are able must come out and support Obama in the polls: we need him now.