McTurtle won’t like it.
Thanks for posting this article TPM!
“According to the bill, Trump is required to send Congress a report explaining why he wants to suspend or terminate a particular set of sanctions. Lawmakers would then have 30 days to decide whether to allow the move or reject it.”
Based on how this admin has approached “making its case” in the courts over the Muslim Ban, if this bill somehow becomes law and this actually happens, the arguments should be hysterical, something like “because I say so”.
This piece of legislation almost feels like a palace revolt to me. A giant, bipartisan FU to this wannabe dictator. A smack down. If this conniving jerk vetoes it, all hell will break loose. If he doesn’t, Putin may just throw him under the bus. Not sure what that explosion or those tires tracks will look like, but this could be interesting.
Interesting if Trump will connive, try to somehow ignore it!? Simply neglect to apply the sanctions to his Bosom Buddy Russia?! Korea is in there partly to complicate and defeat such a bad faith maneuver!
And BTW, did Trump (and Moscow?) know this was coming?
On AM Joy this morning Col. Lawrence Wilkerson had some very interesting comments on the Iran portion of the sanctions. He does not paint a pretty picture of where Comrade Chaos is determined to lead us.
Well worth listening to.
(Audio only)
He also has a great take on Hair Führer’s boasting about the USS Gerald Ford:
“I find it really interesting that he declared the Gerald Ford, an almost $13 billion dollar aircraft carrier, as the instrumentality of American power. We’re waiting, Joy, for an American aircraft carrier, like the battleships in Pearl Harbor in 1941, to be sunk. … Because this is a naval battle system, like the battleships in 1941, that is looking for a place to sink.”
Its Congress reasserting itself…and then some. They are basically determining foreign policy in terms of sanctions on their own, without any input from the Administration. Normally, that alone would be making betlway pundits sit up and take notice.
But since we aren’t in normal anymore, this was more or less required, before Trump handed over the keys to Moscow on everything. He won’t like this one bit, but I don’t see there is much he can do about it. The Senate will sign up for the sanctions pack against North Korea, and they thing will land on his desk, with a veto proof majority.
And no, pocket vetos are not really a viable option anymore. Basically if the President doesn’t sign a bill within 10 days, it becomes law as if he signed it. The only slight exception is if he tries to return it to Congress while Congress is in recess, it could be “pocket vetoed”. But both sides have routinely named an agent to stay in place to fulfill that role during a recess.
So Trump will have no options.
I didn’t hear that piece, but I would have to question the quote you are giving here.
There were multiple factors that lead to the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor. But putting those aside and addressing, what I assume he is speaking to, the change of Navy Doctrine from battleships to aircraft carriers as the supreme masters of naval combat, this was largely due to the massive improvements made in airplanes during that time period. No other technology has really made the same sort of shift that would replace aircraft carriers. (And we do lose quite a number of aircraft carriers in WWII after Pearl Harbor).
Indeed, most of the advances we have seen have only increased the effectiveness of aircraft carrier strike forces. And at the same time, rest of the world’s navys have diminished considerably compared to ours. No country is even close to where we are on the oceans, we have more carriers than rest of the world combined, for instance. In WWII, there was not anywhere near this force superiority between Japan, USA, the British Commonwealth and France that there is now.
An argument can be made that ground to ship missiles would be a similar threat (they ARE a threat), but ground based missiles are only effective where a country holds ground. And Navy Doctrince has evolved to address those issues, as demonstrated during the Falkland Wars (Basically smaller ships escort the carrier to take the hit from such things).
So from my perspective, implying that today’s carriers are 1941’s battleships is pretty off base and kind of bizarre.
Cue the further mental disintegration of Trump as he tries to find a way to stave off Putins anger while stopping Mueller from destroying his family. He’s really in the deep end now.
Good that they are taking this out of Trump’s short-fingered hands. Not supportive of the Iran component of these sanctions. Iran is in compliance with the nuclear-deal and this only undercuts our already shaky position as even pretending to be honest about Iran.
I understand you argument @daveyjones64 (“Davy Jones”, as in “Davy Jones Locker”, ?) but one of the things I read about in the papers is “Ballistic anti-Carrier” missiles, which would pose a threat even to a well-screened Carrier group.
It would probably require a nuclear war-head, both China and North-Korea got these and a reasonable delivery system. Targeting can be a problem, but you could either put up your own satellite tracking, listen in on another nations, or just use conventional means.
I am not making an argument that Carriers are unsinkable and invulnerable. They are neither, and never have been. I am making the point that his argument about what happened to battleships is about to happen to carriers is nonsensical.
Pearl Harbor proved that ships are harbor are extremely vulnerable to air attacks, which can be launched from carriers. This was actually done earlier by England against the Italians in Taranto. The Battles of Coral Sea and Midway, along with the sinking of the British battleships off of Singapore by Japanese planes, are what ushered in the era of carriers. Battleships went away as the mainstay of navy strategy, because of the increased efficiency of aircraft carriers. Not merely because they were sunk. (Lots of battleships had been sunk before Pearl Harbor).
Arguing aircraft carriers are obsolete because they can be sunk isn’t logical. Arguing that aircraft carriers will go away because something more effective will replace them, is logical. But he is making no such claim.