President Obama has received criticism from yet another Supreme Court justice concerning his inappropriate and unprecedented chastisement of the Court during the State of the Union address. Obama criticized the Court’s recent campaign finance opinion while six of the justices sat before him, obviously unable to respond to the criticism during the address.
Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts told a group of University of Alabama law students that the State of the Union has “degenerated into a political pep rally” and, like his colleague Justice Thomas did just days after the event, questioned whether justices should attend at all.
“The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court – according the requirements of protocol – has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.”
Unsurprisingly, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded to Roberts’ remarks with a statement that merely reiterated Obama’s criticism of the Court:
What is troubling is that this decision opened the floodgates for corporations and special interests to pour money into elections – drowning out the voices of average Americans. The president has long been committed to reducing the undue influence of special interests and their lobbyists over government. That is why he spoke out to condemn the decision and is working with Congress on a legislative response.
But this merely dodges the issue raised by the Chief Justice, which is not whether the decision was correct (it was), or whether the president is free to wrongly criticize it (he is), but whether the time and venue of that criticism were appropriate. Indeed no one contends that the president overstepped his bounds by the mere act of speaking out against the decision. Chief Justice Roberts agrees that anyone is free to criticize the Court, and contends that certain people even have an obligation to do so. But “the setting, the circumstances, and the decorum” have to be taken into consideration.
Perhaps Obama should have stuck to a press statement in the first place.
The EU’s beleaguered Foreign Minister, Baroness Ashton, stated yesterday that she is no longer opposed to the creation of a permanent EU military headquarters to support a European army that will stand separate from NATO. In a flip-flop that would make John Kerry blush, first she was against the idea and now she’s in favor. How quickly the world’s highest paid politician changes her mind.
A permanent EU headquarters is yet another step toward an independent EU defense identity to undermine the primacy of NATO in European security structures, and American leadership in transatlantic affairs. Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns described it as, “the greatest threat to the future of the Alliance.”
Both the UK and United States have long opposed this wasteful and duplicative policy, which is largely the purview of Franco-German elites who want the EU as a counterbalance to American influence in Europe. The EU already has access to national military planning centers for its missions, as well as NATO’s headquarters upon request. It also has a fledgling temporary headquarters for its civilian missions. There is neither the need nor the resources for a second military headquarters, only the political will by Euro-fanatics to erode the supremacy of NATO in Europe.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently decried Europe’s demilitarization and pitiful defense spending. Just four (Bulgaria, France, Greece, and the U.K.) of the 21 EU-NATO members spend the NATO benchmark of 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense. The EU can therefore only afford a separate army and its own Headquarters at NATO’s expense.
As NATO renegotiates its Strategic Concept, it will have to better lay out the relationship between itself and the EU, especially on questions of primacy and resources. U.S. planners must take a clearer-headed view of the EU’s ambitions to supplant, rather than complement NATO than they are presently. As Robin Harris, a former member of the Downing Street Policy Unit, has written, “The NATO Web site proudly boasts that there is a ‘strategic partnership’ between NATO and the E.U. There is no such thing, only an incipient strategic competition between America and Europe.”