By James Taranto
Sept. 29, 2016 2:01 p.m. ET
464 COMMENTS
“Congress Disses Obama One Last Time” reads a Politico headline. “Diss” (or “dis”) is a slang term for “disrespect,” so the implication is that lawmakers have personally slighted the president, when in fact all they have done is exercise their authority under the Constitution.
And what they did is more aptly characterized as a first than a last. The House and Senate both easily mustered the two-thirds majorities required to approve the only veto override in Obama’s more than 7½ years in office. In this column’s view Obama is right on the substance—the new law is a bad one—but the story of how it came to pass is one in which everyone in Washington, including the president, looks terrible.
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The new law, styled the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act or Jasta, “would allow victims of terrorism on U.S. soil to sue foreign governments found responsible for those attacks,” as Politico explains. Its main target is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and it is supposed to benefit one of the most sympathetic groups in America, survivors of the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
Unsurprisingly—and necessarily for a successful veto override—the act had wide bipartisan support. The vote to override was 97-1 in the Senate; Minority Leader Harry Reid was the sole dissenter, and it is probably no coincidence he is retiring at the end of the year. (Virginia’s Tim Kaine and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, off campaigning for Hillary Clinton, missed the vote.) The House vote was 348-77, with only 18 Republicans and 59 Democrats voting against.
So what’s not to like about a bill that helps terror victims at the expense of our friends the Saudis? The Wall Street Journal made the case for the president’s position in an editorial last week: “If Jasta becomes law, crucial decisions affecting U.S. foreign policy will be influenced by judges and tort lawyers, instead of the U.S. President and diplomats.” The editorial further noted that “the anti-Saudi posturing is building at the moment the Saudis are showing a greater commitment to domestic reform and the antiterror effort.”
The president did not make his case so strongly. In fact, the text of that Politico story suggests that it was he who “dissed” Congress more than the other way around:
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said he and other senators repeatedly requested meetings with White House officials to hash out a potential deal that could accommodate some of the administration’s concerns.
But he heard nothing back, Corker said. It’s just been “dial tone,” the senator added.
“There’s been zero involvement from the White House. Zero,” Corker said, forming a “zero” with his fingers to underscore his point. “When you have a veto like this, it takes involvement, constructive involvement. I mean, there’s nothing.”
But Corker and his colleagues look equally feckless. Twenty-eight of them, from both parties, signed a letter yesterday to Sens. John Cornyn (R., Texas) and Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), the legislation’s lead sponsors, promising to “work with you in a constructive manner to appropriately mitigate” the bill’s “unintended consequences.” Why not do that before passing the law?
The president made that point Wednesday night, in a CNN “town hall”: “We found out some of the people who voted for it said, frankly, we didn’t know what was in it. And there was no debate of it. And it was, you know, basically a political vote.”
It’s more than a little rich for the man who gave us ObamaCare to be complaining now about lawmakers’ failure to read legislation without knowing what was in it. But the president is right on this point, notwithstanding his lack of credibility. Though it’s a bit silly for him to complain that it was “a political vote.” When is a vote not political?
Obama also said: “It’s an example of why sometimes you have to do what’s hard. And, frankly, I wish Congress here had done what’s hard.” Fair enough, but perhaps they would have if he had done the hard work of private persuasion that he seems to think beneath him.
“This is the single most embarrassing thing the United States Senate has done possibly since 1983,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said yesterday, according to the Hill (the House hadn’t yet voted):
Earnest was responding to a reporter who told him Wednesday’s vote was the most overwhelming since a 95-0 veto override vote in 1983. In that year, the Senate overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of a land bill to give a few acres to six retired couples who paid for it, but later learned that it was still government property because of a surveying error.
The Washington Post contemporaneously reported on that veto, which “came under attack . . . from Republicans and Democrats as an act of insensitivity to the elderly.” Reagan’s veto message said the bill “ ‘would create a clearly undesirable precedent’ by encouraging other landowners to claim federal land at no charge.” We’re at a loss to understand why Earnest is siding with Reagan on that question 33 years later.
So here we have a law passed by congressmen who acknowledge it is likely to have deleterious unintended consequences and self-righteously denounced by a president who couldn’t be bothered to make the case to lawmakers ahead of the vote. And some in the press—we’re looking at you, Politico—portray it as just a big personal spat.
Is it any wonder many voters are fed up enough with Washington that they are willing to consider sending a man to the White House who lacks the basic experience and knowledge that one would think would be a prerequisite for the presidency?
For that matter, is it any wonder other voters, having done exactly that eight years ago, worry about repeating the same mistake?
