The headline, when I saw it early this afternoon, nearly knocked me out of my chair: “Iraqi leaders call on U.S. to set withdrawal schedule.” And the text of the story, reporting that an Iraqi government (and Arab League) sponsored “unity conference” of Sunnis and Shi’a in Cairo had called for a “timetable” for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops–accompanied by a sunny statement from the Iraqi Interior Minister saying it could happen by the end of next year–was even more startling. After spending months arguing with my fellow Democrats over the arcana of a “benchmarked withdrawal” as opposed to a “timetable withdrawal,” my initial reaction was: Hell, that settles it for me.And I’m not the only one who reacted this way. Kos said: “Every person that opposes a US withdrawal timetable is now operating in direct opposition to the wishes of the Iraqi government.”But when you drill a bit deeper into the news from Cairo, you discover that the “unity statement” did not specify any dates for the immediate, intermediate, or ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops. In other words, it called for a “timetable” without “times.” In that respect, it tracked the Democratic Iraq resolution that was defeated in the U.S. Senate last week, which used the symbolic “T-word” without specifying any dates, though it did call on the administration to announce “estimated dates” for withdrawals based on the anticipated achievement of “benchmarks.” (The successful Republican-sponsored resolution was nuanced to the point of sophistry: it urged the administration to announce a “schedule” for withdrawals, based on “benchmarks,” but avoided the “T-word,” which the administration tried to spin as a gigantic victory).I have no clue whether these words have the same meaning in Arabic as in English, but I do know that train timetables are a pretty universal phenomenon. Whether you are in Washington or in Baghdad, when you consult a “timetable,” you don’t want to discover that your train will leave the station at some point after it has arrived, when the equipment and the crew are ready and the passengers are loaded.One thing, and perhaps only one thing, is clear: up until now, the Bush administration has refused to acknowledge, much less embrace, any specific scheme of “benchmarks” for withdrawal of U.S. troops, beyond its general bromides that we’ll leave when “the job is done” and when “Iraqis are able to provide their own security.” And despite widespread hints that the Pentagon is already planning significant troop withdrawals next year, the Bushies have not only refused to talk about any “schedule” for withdrawal; they have in fact demonized anyone who tried to force them to do so.Presumably, that line of argument ended today. After all, 85 U.S. Senators (if you count those who voted for either Senate resolution last week) called for a benchmarked withdrawal and for the idea, if not the specifics, of a timetable or a schedule or whatever you wish to call it. Now the Iraqi government and a wide-ranging coalition of Iraqi political factions have done the same.Moreover, and this is probably the implicit compromise achieved in Cairo, everybody understands that the first big “benchmark” is the December elections in Iraq. If they are successful in creating a popularly-backed permanent government, with significant support from Arab Sunnis, then it will become a lot easier to talk about real “timetables” for the withdrawal of U.S.troops.In terms of domestic U.S. politics, the only problem then will be to deal with the likely administration flip-flop, whereby Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly embrace and even take credit for this development, while still attacking those who were “prematurely” calling for withdrawals, benchmarked or timed. But hey, that’s a small price to pay for the possibility that we can get out of Iraq soon, without encouraging a civil war or a permanent terrorist outpost. It’s not as though Bush’s record is clean on Iraq even if he does draw down troops quickly, and his and his party’s record on absolutely everything else richly deserves more attention.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 3: Democrats Should Call Out Trump’s Big Lies on Abortion
Everyone knows that Donald Trump can’t be trusted on abortion policy (or many other things). But his particular lies on abortion are worth noting, as I explained at New York.
There is no exercise more exhausting and probably futile than examining a Donald Trump speech or social-media post for lies, half-truths, and incoherent self-contradictions. But it’s important on occasion to highlight some very big whoppers he tells that are central to his political strategy. It’s well known that Trump’s own position on abortion policy has wandered all over the map, and it’s plausible to suggest his approach is entirely transactional. Now that he’s staked out a “states’ rights” position on abortion that is designed to take a losing issue off the table in the 2024 presidential election, he’s telling two very specific lies to justify his latest flip-flop.
The first is his now-routine claim that “both sides” and even “legal scholars on both sides” of the abortion debate “agreed” that Roe v. Wade needed to be reversed, leaving abortion policy up to the states:
This claim was the centerpiece of Trump’s April 9 statement setting out his position on abortion for the 2024 general election, as CNN noted:
“In a video statement on abortion policy he posted on social media Monday, Trump said: ‘I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade. They wanted it ended.’ Later in his statement, Trump said that since ‘we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,’ states are free to determine their own abortion laws.”
This is clearly and demonstrably false. The three “legal experts” on the Supreme Court who passionately dissented from the decision to reverse Roe are just the tip of the iceberg of anguish over the defiance of precedent and ideological reasoning underlying Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Society of American Law Teachers immediately and definitively issued a “condemnation” of the Dobbs decision. When the case was being argued before the Supreme Court, the American Bar Association filed an amicus brief arguing the constitutional doctrine of stare decisis required that Roe be left in place. None of these views were novel. Back in 1989 when an earlier threat to abortion rights had emerged, 885 law professors signed onto a brief defending Roe.
Sure, there was a tiny minority of “pro-choice, anti-Roe” liberals over the years who claimed resentment of the power of the unelected judges who decided Roe would eventually threaten abortion rights (not as much, it turns out, as the unelected judges that decided Dobbs). And yes, there have always been progressive critics (notably Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) of the particular reasoning in the original Roe decision, but by no means have any of them (particularly Ginsburg) favored abandoning the federal constitutional right to abortion even if they supported a different constitutional basis for that right. So Trump’s claim is grossly nonfactual and is indeed not one that any self-respecting conservative fan of Dobbs would ever make.
The second big lie that Trump has formulated to defend his latest states’-rights position is that he’s just supporting the age-old Republican stance on the subject, as he has just asserted at Truth Social:
“Sending this Issue back to the States was the Policy of the Republican Party and Conservatives for over 50 years, due to States’ Rights and 10th Amendment, and only happened because of the Justices I proudly Nominated and got Confirmed.”
Yes, of course a growing majority of Republicans have favored reversal of Roe as a way station to a nationwide ban on abortion, but not as an end in itself. The GOP first came out for a federal constitutional amendment to ban abortion from sea to shining sea in its 1980 party platform, and every single Republican presidential nominee since then has backed the idea. There have been disagreements as to whether such a constitutional amendment should include exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. But the last GOP presidential nominee to share Trump’s position that the states should be the final arbiter of abortion policy was Gerald R. Ford in 1976, as the New York Times reported at the time:
“[Ford] said that as President he must enforce the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that forbids states to ban abortions. But he has come out in favor of a constitutional amendment that would overturn that ruling and return to the states the option of drawing up their own abortion laws.”
Ronald Reagan, who challenged Ford’s nomination in 1976 and was already a proponent of a “pro-life” constitutional amendment, and the GOP formally adopted that position in 1980; four years later, it adopted its long-standing proposal that by constitutional amendment or by a judicial ruling the protection of fetal life under the 14th Amendment should be recognized and imposed on the country regardless of what states wanted. Anti-abortion leader Marjorie Dannenfelser noted this well-known history in a not-so-subtle rebuke to Trump’s revisionist history, as NBC News reported:
“’Since 1984, the GOP platform has affirmed that 14th Amendment protections apply to unborn babies and endorsed congressional action to clarify this fact through legislation,’ Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement to NBC News. ‘Republicans led the charge to outlaw barbaric partial-birth abortions federally, and both chambers have voted multiple times to limit painful late-term abortion. The Senate voted on this most recently in 2020. In January 2023, House Republicans also voted to protect infants born alive during an abortion.’”
It’s pretty clear that anti-abortion activists know Trump is lying about both Roe v. Wade and the GOP tradition and will support him anyway. But the rest of us should take due notice that the once and perhaps future president’s word on this subject, including his current pledge to leave abortion policy to the states, cannot be trusted for even a moment. Absent the abolition of the Senate filibuster (which, lest we forget, Trump backed as president out of impatience with the Senate’s refusal to bend the knee to his every demand), there isn’t going to be a complete federal ban on abortion in the foreseeable future. But Trump can be counted on to use the powers of the presidency to make life miserable for women needing abortion services, among the many “enemies of the people” he wants to punish.