A group of high school student from Highstown, New Jersey did something fairly amazing this year: They took effective action against government secrecy. They wrote a law, and, in a bitterly divided Congress, they got it passed. And President Trump signed it. The students in Stu Wexler’s American government class, persuaded Congress to preserve and...
Category: Congress
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The National Security Status Quo Is Dying of Unpopularity
In Time, Ian Bremmer makes a key point about the 2020 presidential election. The U.S. policymaking elite (“the blob”) and its militarized interventionist foreign policy is threatened by popular rejection. According to a recent poll, substantial majorities of both Democrats and Republicans want to put the era of Endless War behind us. No matter what party they...
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Not a Coup: Bipartisan Gang Of 8 Did Not Object to FBI’s Trump Probe
The “Gang of Eight” is Washington shorthand for the congressional leaders who are privy to almost all secret intelligence information held by the U.S. government. They are the majority and minority leaders in the Senate, the Speaker of the House and the House minority leader, and the ranking Democrats and Republicans on the House and...
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Barr and Bolton Undermined Congressional Oversight of CIA
The past is prologue to the Trump administration. Thirty years ago, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Attorney General Nominee William Barr were fighting congressional oversight of the CIA. As legal advisers to President Reagan, they insisted that the president did not need to disclose all covert operations to Congress, that Congress’s power of the...
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‘The Report’: Dianne Feinstein’s War With the CIA
This movie premiered recently at the Sundance film festival, which means it might be headed to a theater near you. That depends on whether a studio thinks that a movie that is critical of both the CIA and President Obama has commercial prospects. I hope so. The story of how the CIA–with the help of...