November, 15 2018, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Daniel Schuman, Policy Director
Daniel@demandprogress.org, 240-237-3930
In Wake of Midterms, 27 Groups Endorse Crucial Reforms to Strengthen Oversight of the Intelligence Community
WASHINGTON
Today a bipartisan group of 27 organizations signed a letter [LINK] calling on the House of Representatives to strengthen its oversight of the intelligence community with specific recommendations for modernizing the House Intelligence Committee, empowering all members of the House to fully participate in oversight, and establishing a broad-based review of intelligence practices.
Particularly since the election of Donald Trump, more members of Congress have vocalized their need for access to intelligence-related information to perform their legislative and oversight duties -- even as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has devolved into a political battleground. As POLITICO has reported, membership on HPSCI has become attractive for lawmakers keen to engage in high-profile partisan clashes, with at least 70 Republicans and dozens of Democrats expressing interest in joining the committee.
While facilitation of a thorough and impartial investigation into election interference and collusion is critical to our democracy, this is a responsibility that redounds to all members of and multiple committees in the House, and HPSCI has shown its current configuration is incapable of addressing these and other weighty matters. For many years, not just the last two, HPSCI has neither shown itself capable of providing impartial, vigorous, and sweeping intel oversight nor respecting its proper role of collaborating with other committees of jurisdiction and appropriately apprising the entire House and the public of its findings. Systemic reforms to HPSCI and congressional oversight of the intelligence community are necessary to meet this mandate. Today's letter offers a timely roadmap for the House as it considers what to include in its rules package for the 116th Congress, which is currently being drafted and will receive a final vote on January 3, 2019.
"Congress must reform how it conducts oversight over intelligence matters if it is to provide a meaningful check on the Executive branch." said Daniel Schuman, Demand Progress Policy Director. "The House Intelligence Committee is broken, and only significant changes in how the House conducts intelligence oversight, including significant alterations to the Intelligence Committee, will begin to address their yawing deficits. The views and interests of other committees with jurisdiction over intelligence matters as well as those of members of congress writ large must be adequately represented, as the Intelligence Committee has shown itself inadequate to the task."
"Congress must reinvigorate its commitment to provide meaningful oversight of intelligence activities. As scores of new members seek to join HPSCI and rules are drafted for the start of the new Congress, we urge congressional leadership to enact these widely-endorsed reforms."
The letter specifically recommends changing how all members of HPSCI are chosen, makes HPSCI more responsive to the House as a whole, and recommends a select committee be created to look at intelligence abuses since 9/11.
See the complete letter here [LINK] and below. For more information, see this white paper [LINK] that supports the recommendations at a higher level of detail.
Demand Progress amplifies the voice of the people -- and wields it to make government accountable and contest concentrated corporate power. Our mission is to protect the democratic character of the internet -- and wield it to contest concentrated corporate power and hold government accountable.
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A trio of progressive watchdog groups on Thursday unveiled a new database detailing the "troubling connections" between the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing justices, the conservative organizations that have intervened in cases before the court, and the wealthy donors funding them.
Take Back the Court, Revolving Door Project, and True North Research published the database at SupremeTransparency.org, which "shines a spotlight on the complex web connecting justices to powerbrokers and the organizations that those powerbrokers fund, lead, and are otherwise linked to."
The watchdogs found that nearly 1 in 7 amicus briefs filed during the 2023-24 Supreme Court term were lodged by at least one powerbroker-affiliated organization. This affects 32 different cases before the court.
"The current U.S. Supreme Court has gone rogue."
For example, in Moore v. United States—in which the Supreme Court could preemptively ban or limit wealth taxes—half of all amicus briefs were filed by groups affiliated with right-wing powerbrokers.
In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch want to scupper the Chevron deference, a 40-year precedent under which judges defer to the legal interpretations of federal agencies if Congress has not passed any laws on an issue. Powerbroker-affiliated organizations have filed more than one-third of the amicus briefs seeking to overturn the Chevron doctrine.
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"There is just as much of a conflict of interest when a justice hears a case involving a benefactor as a named party and one in which the person who illicitly enabled their luxurious lifestyle is 'merely' similarly situated to one of the parties," Hauser added.
According to SupremeTransparency.org:
The current U.S. Supreme Court has gone rogue. The right-wing justices that make up the court's supermajority frequently toy with precedent and the rule of law to issue opinions that not only defy the will of a majority of Americans, but also rewrite constitutional principles, overturn widely respected legal precedents, and gut longstanding rules that protect the public interest.
In just the 2021 and 2022 Supreme Court terms alone, the court overturned Roe v. Wadeafter 49 years; gutted both the decades-old Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act; overturned a 100+ year old gun safety law; eroded the National Labor Relations Act (adopted as part of New Deal reforms to protect workers); broke with their own procedures regarding standing to sue in order to block student debt relief; and reversed decades of precedent to end the decadeslong practice of race-conscious college admissions policies that promoted diversity and redressed discrimination. But this radically reactionary court and its radically reactionary justices aren't acting alone.
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The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said that economic shrinkage was largely locked in by mid-century by existing climate change, but that actions taken to reduce emissions now could determine whether income losses hold steady at around 20% or triple through the second half of the century.
"These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions," study lead author and PIK scientist Leonie Wenz said in a statement. "We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately—if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100."
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"That seems like… a lot," writer and climate advocate Bill McKibben wrote in response to the findings. "The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year."
This means that the costs of inaction have already exceeded the costs of limiting global heating to 2°C by six times, the study authors said. However, limiting warming to 2°C can still significantly reduce economic losses through 2100.
"This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering noneconomic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity," Wenz said.
The damages predicted by the study were more than twice those of similar analyses because the researchers looked beyond national temperature data to also incorporate the impacts of extreme weather and rainfall on more than 1,600 subnational regions over a 40-year period, The Guardian explained.
"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected," PIK scientist and first author Maximilian Kotz said in a statement. "These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labor productivity, or infrastructure."
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Unlike previous studies, the research predicted economic losses for most wealthier countries in the Global North, with the U.S. and German economies shrinking by 11% by mid-century, France's by 13%, and the U.K.'s by 7%. However, the countries set to suffer the most are countries closer to the equator that have lower incomes already and have historically done much less to contribute to the climate crisis. Iraq, for example, could see incomes drop by 30%, Botswana 25%, and Brazil 21%.
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Wenz told The Guardian that the results were "devastating."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking," Wenz said.
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It is on us to decide: Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on, will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas, and coal.
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