Officials Fear Backlash Over The Release Of The (Democrats #39;) CIA Torture Report
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Officials Fear Backlash Over The Release Of The (Democrats') CIA Torture Report - Video
On Tuesday, Senate Democrats will use some of their last hours in the Senate majority to release the much-anticipated report about the CIA's methods of extracting information from terror suspects, called "enhanced interrogation" by some and "torture" by others.
The report is 6,000 pages long, but only the 480-page executive summary will be released. It is contentious, opposed by both Republicans and former CIA officials who argue that it not only is false, but that it will bring harm to American personnel abroad.
Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said she will release the report Tuesday morning around 11 a.m., and will not comment until that time.
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CBS News' Bob Orr and former CIA Director Michael Hayden discuss the controversy surrounding the forthcoming report from the Senate Intelligence ...
Former CIA director Michael Hayden said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday that the report would damage CIA morale by making the workforce "feel as if it has been tried and convicted in absentia since the senate Democrats and their staff didn't talk to anyone actively involved in the program." He also said the information would motivate people to attack Americans and American facilities overseas, and making U.S. allies wary about cooperating with America in the future.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, warned of "violence and deaths" abroad in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union" and called the report's release "a terrible idea.
The concern for U.S. personnel abroad prompted Secretary of State John Kerry to call Feinstein to discuss "the impact that the release" of the report would have on factors ranging from U.S. efforts to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the safety of American hostages around the world, State Department Jen Psaki told reporters Monday.
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White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the Senate Intelligence committee will release its controversial report on the CIA's use of torture...
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Democrats prepare to release contentious CIA torture report
Washington Just over a year ago, Senate Democrats went "nuclear," changing the rules to make it far easier to confirm most presidential nominees from judges to cabinet secretaries. Republicans, in response, went ballistic, issuing doomsday warnings of the move's consequences. Now, they may well keep the rule change.
Hypocrisy? Or practicality?
Continuing it would certainly go against the grain of Sen. Mitch McConnells pledge to restore the Senate to its traditional ways of working. The Republican from Kentucky, who will lead the Senate when the GOP takes controlJan. 6, plans to bring the subject up with his caucusTuesday.
But the spokesman for the current Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, says the nuclear option which removed the threat of a blocking filibuster from all nominees except for the Supreme Court was unequivocally worth it. The change to simple majority approval smoothed the gears of the Senate, allowing easier confirmation of nominees.
The move allowed Democrats to alleviate the emergency in judicial vacancies in federal courts, fill vacancies in the crucial federal circuit court of appeals that hears challenges to executive actions, and confirm key nominees, such as Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who was charged with planning the presidents executive action on immigration, writes spokesman Adam Jentleson in an email.
Indeed, the 113th Congress (2013-2014) has had a 95 percent rate of confirmation for judicial appointees unheard of, according to Sarah Binder, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution.
In short, why wouldn't a majority leader want to keep the Senate's new confirmation rule?
The main concern is that this path could turn into a slippery slope that fundamentally alters the character of the Senate and undermines the Founding Fathers' vision for the chamber. The threat of filibuster which requires 60 votes to overcome helps the Senate act in a deliberative way, so it can temper the hot-headed House, which requires only majority votes.
If Senator McConnell keeps the new rule intact, why stop there? Why not apply it to legislation? If a controlling party were to go that far, then the Senate would be little different from the House, where the majority can get what it wants without concern for what the opposing party thinks.
Thats why some Republicans, such as Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, want to reverse the rule change and go back to the way things were. But McConnell has said that its hard to un-ring a bell. If Republicans change the rule back, they reason, Democrats can just unchange it the next time they are in power.
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One year later, Senate's 'nuclear option' has worked. Is that good?
Southern Democrats who lost key races this election cycle
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
New Orleans (CNN) -- The 2014 elections seemed like the final reckoning for Southern Democrats, the culmination of a political metamorphosis that began in the Civil Rights era and concluded under the nation's first black President.
Wiped out in governors' races, clobbered in Senate contests, irrelevant in many House districts and boxed out of state legislatures, Democrats in the South today look like a rump party consigned to a lifetime of indignity.
"I can't remember it being any gloomier for Democrats in the South than it is today," said Curtis Wilkie, the longtime journalist and observer of Southern life who lectures at the University of Mississippi. "The party has been demonized by Republicans. It's very bleak. I just don't see anything good for them on the horizon."
Democrats are looking everywhere for solutions to their Southern problem. They hope population changes will make states such as Georgia and North Carolina more hospitable. They want more financial help from the national party. Some are even clinging to the dim hope that Hillary Clinton might help make inroads with white working class voters in Arkansas in 2016.
Success here is crucial for the party. There's virtually no way for Democrats to win back a majority in the Senate -- much less the House -- without finding a way to compete more effectively in the South. But the truth is there are no easy answers for a party so deep in the hole.
White voters have abandoned Democrats for decades, and the flight has only hastened under President Barack Obama. The migration has created a troublesome math problem: Democrats across the region now depend on African-American voters and not much else.
It's a disastrous formula in low-turnout midterms dominated by white voters. In Louisiana on Saturday, deep south Democrats bid farewell to their last remaining Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu, who won the African-American vote but failed to secure enough white support in her race against Republican Bill Cassidy. Landrieu won just 18 percent of white voters on Election Day in November, and she failed to expand that margin in the runoff, resulting in another knife-twisting loss for Democrats hoping to put the devastating 2014 midterms behind them.
With Landrieu's loss, there are now just three Democrats senators hailing from the Old Confederacy: Mark Warner and Tim Kaine in Virginia, and Bill Nelson in Florida. But both of those states have diverse populations and thriving economies that have pushed them away, culturally and politically, from their southern neighbors.
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The plight of the Southern Democrat
By Dana Bash and Ted Barrett, CNN
updated 5:11 PM EST, Mon December 8, 2014
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (2nd R) (R-KY) answers questions on Capitol Hill in September.
(CNN) -- They called it the "nuclear option" when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democrats changed Senate rules this year to make it easier to confirm long-stalled executive and judicial branch nominees.
Now Senate Republicans will hold a special closed meeting Tuesday afternoon to weigh whether or not to change the filibuster rules back when they take control of the Senate in January, according to a GOP aide.
Related: 5 ways life changed after the Senate nuclear option
While many Republicans have pushed to change the rules back -- so that 60 votes again would be required to break a filibuster of most presidential executive and judicial appointments -- others have signaled Republicans might not try to change the rules.
In fact, Sen Orrin Hatch of Utah, a senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee who is influential with GOP senators on these matters, wrote in Monday's Politico that despite being a "Senate institutionalist" he no longer feels the rules should be changed back because doing so would reward Democrats for skirting the rules, allowing them to "pack important courts" with "far-left judges."
"Republicans would need 60 votes to confirm their nominees (should a Republican win the White House), while Democrats needed only 51 vote to confirm their own picks," Hatch wrote. "Such a partisan double-standard makes no sense and would cause irreparable harm to our third branch of government."
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GOP will consider undoing Democrats' 'nuclear option'