Sept. 11, 2001
WASHINGTON – President Obama vetoed a bill late Friday afternoon that would allow U.S. families of victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia for alleged involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America.
A veto override requires a two-thirds vote in the House and the Senate, and Congress is poised to do just that, after the bill passed unanimously in both chambers. It would be the first time Congress has overridden any of Obama’s 13 vetoes.
However, the issue is not so cut and dry, as evidenced by the fact it puts Obama and former congresswoman Michele Bachmann on the same side, even though they are opposed by nearly the entire Washington establishment. Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have also both endorsed the bill.
However, voices of dissent have emerged.
Two of those most prominent voices belong to conservatives who have long and substantial records of opposing Islamic extremism: Former Rep. Bachmann, R-Minn., and Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor, constitutional expert and National Review columnist.
They are both lawyers, and both concerned with the effect the bill, if it becomes law, could have upon what’s called the principle of sovereign immunity.
The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, would allow an exception to that principle, which effectively prevents one country from being sued in the court of another country.
The bill’s proponents say its wording is narrowly tailored to allow only the relatives of the 9/11 victims to sue Saudi officials who may have been complicit in the planning or financing of the terror attacks, without violating the sovereign immunity principle.
But the president and other critics say that is not true.
“I think, the more I hear it, that the ‘narrowly tailored’ claim is nonsense,” McCarthy told WND.
“The issue is not how tightly we can draft a statute to apply solely to a unique case; it is what other countries will do in response, which will not be at all affected by our effort to be narrow,” he continued.
And, McCarthy warned, “Once you abandon the principle involved here, all bets are off. This is a political issue for diplomacy, not a litigation matter for the courts.”
Bachmann agreed, telling WND, “Andy is exactly right.”
She made the comment while at an airport, between flights, so the former lawmaker did not have time to elaborate. But Bachmann made sure to make clear she was voicing support for the principle, not the president, by adding, “Obama’s vaunted diplomacy skills are a failed chimera.”
Suddenly, it’s not just these two conservatives who are expressing doubts about the bill becoming law. Leading members of the Republican establishment now seem to be having second thoughts.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., said he thinks there are enough votes for the veto override, but he also seemed to take both sides of the issue, saying, “I worry about trial lawyers trying to get rich off of this. And I do worry about the precedence. At the same time, these victims do need to have their day in court.”
And Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have begun calling for changes to the bill that would make it harder to sue U.S. officials in foreign courts.
The European Union sent a letter opposing the bill to the U.S. State Department on Wednesday.
Additionally, on that same day, a group of former national security officials who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations sent a letter to Obama expressing legal concerns over the weakening of sovereign immunity, as well as political concerns about undermining relations with the Saudis.
In vetoing the bill, Obama expressed great sympathy for the relative of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, but in listing his reasons for rejecting the bill he contended JASTA could open the way for U.S. officials to be sued in foreign courts, even including American troops.
And McCarthy agrees with that, telling WND he stands by what he wrote in a piece last week in the National Review titled, “Obama Is Right to Veto Bill Enabling Suits against the Saudis.”
Because the U.S. has interests and troops around the world, and because those troops are often involved in deadly operations while pursuing national interests and defense, McCarthy argued, “our nation has far more to lose than most nations by playing this game.”
His key points in that article:
- “Relations between governments are best handled through diplomacy, not legal proceedings.”
- “Legal cases can be unpredictable due to the differences in the predispositions and skill levels of the individual judges and litigators.”
- The potential for bad court decisions “is why countries mutually grant their officials diplomatic immunity, which bars prosecution of even serious crimes committed by diplomatic personnel.”
- “It is why a country’s diplomatic installations are considered its sovereign territory even on foreign soil.”
- “[T]he fervor for this legislation is indeed ironic for Republicans who complain — quite justifiably — that Obama regards international terrorism as a law-enforcement matter to be pursued in the courts.”
- “The judiciary is no more proper a forum for conducting diplomacy than it is for dealing with a national-security challenge.”
- “Obviously, even if it is sued successfully, the Saudi government is never actually going to pay any judgments.”
- “[T]here is also no reason why the Obama administration could not negotiate with the Saudis in an effort to create a fund to compensate 9/11 victims.”
- “Furthermore, there is no restriction, and should be none, on civil lawsuits against individual Saudi citizens and entities that are complicit in terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks.”
McCarthy makes clear he is not sympathetic to the administration’s concerns about that it would enrage the Saudi regime, stating, “We should be enraging them.”
“The United States should stop pretending that the Saudis are a reliable counterterrorism ally,” he continued. “We should be exposing and condemning the regime’s enforcement of barbaric sharia corporal penalties, as well as sharia’s systematic discrimination against women, apostates, non-Muslims, Muslim minorities, and homosexuals.”
McCarthy also wonders about the politics of it all.
“Why,” he asks, “when the Republican-controlled Congress is finally willing to fight President Obama to the point of forcing and potentially overriding a veto, do they pick an issue on which Obama is right?”
Indeed, why did GOP lawmakers pick a fight on this issue when they refused to use the power of the purse to defund his entire agenda, including Obamacare, executive orders on immigration, and government funding of Planned Parenthood?
Perhaps because they see this issue as a political slam-dunk.
McCarthy calls its a “grandstanding exhibition” by Congress in support of “the most sympathetic imaginable” private litigants, “the families of 9/11 victims.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/09/23/obama-vetoes-bill-allowing-911-families-to-sue-saudis/
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