|
|
Evidence of Things Not Seen (episode 85). President Bartlett and Leo try to convince the Russian president to allow the recovery of an unmanned spy plane that was recording evidence of loose nuclear safeguards in Russia (1). Josh interviews a candidate to replace Ainsley Hayes as White House associate counsel; the candidate is a Republican who is on the outs with his party because of his views on soft money (2). Someone shoots at the White House in an apparent attempt to commit "suicide by cop" (3). The staff plays poker.
| 
The White House
|
Russia : Nuclear Weapons and the Threat of Proliferation (last updated May 15, 2002) (back to top)
The threat of loose nuclear weapons and accidents in Russia has risen dramatically in recent years, especially given the poor Russian economy and the efforts of terrorist organizations and some states to secure weapons of mass destruction. According to a February 2002 report by the CIA, Russian nuclear facilities are underfunded and have weak security and there have been a handful of reported incidents in which weapons-grade nuclear material was stolen from such facilities over the last 10 years.
"The proliferation problem is bad and getting worse," Assistant Secretary for Nonproliferation John S. Wolf said at a conference in April 2003. Wolf said that the main challenges were the lack of money to fund threat-reduction projects and the political problems arriving at implementation guidelines.
A related source of concern has been preventing Russian scientists and technology from spreading to countries such as Iran and North Korea which reportedly seek to develop nuclear weapons. In 1995, Russia agreed to finish the construction of a light-water nuclear reactor in southern Iran, though Russia did back away from building additional infrastructure that the United States said would enable Iran to accelerate its efforts to develop its own nuclear weapons (for more on the Iran reactor situation, go here).
Programs Target Aspects of Proliferation Problem
For years, the United States has conducted a variety of programs that work with Russia to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons and material spreading beyond Russia's borders. The programs target different aspects of Russia's nuclear situation and thus include the destruction of weapons, the securing of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the shift of military scientists to civilian work, and the redevelopment of the ten nuclear cities that formed the backbone of Russia’s nuclear complex.
For example, the Department of Defense's Cooperative Threat-Reduction Program, which began in 1992 and is popularly known as the Nunn-Lugar program after its founding senators, focuses on destroying vehicles for delivering nuclear weapons and on securing former nuclear weapons and components. The Department of Energy's Materials Protection, Control, and Accountability (MPC&A) Program funds cooperative efforts to improve security systems ensuring that all of Russia's plutonium and highly enriched uranium is accounted for.
Other programs include :
- The Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, begun in 1994 and formerly known as the Industrial Partnership Program, uses Department of Energy experts to facilitates joint ventures between US companies and Russian technical institutes. This program now incorporates the Nuclear Cities Initiative, which helped create nonmilitary work for Russia's 122,000 nuclear scientists and helped Russia downsize these cities where they live. Russia's nuclear cities are in economic shambles, and reports have surfaced of guards leaving their posts to forage for food and of smuggling operations.
- A plan to build facilities in Russia and the United States that could allow each country to destroy 34 tons of stored plutonium each. The plan, as currently structured, would cost Russia at least $2.1 billion and the United States at least $6.5 billion.
- The International Science and Technology Center in Moscow helps fund peaceful activities by Russian scientists. This program was begun in 1992 by the United States through its state and defense departments, the European Union and Japan.
Besides the CTR programs, another major effort to reduce Russian stockpiles is an agreement in which the United States promised to purchase 500 tons of Russian highly-enriched uranium from dismantled nuclear weapons for use as fuel for civilian reactors. The initial agreement was signed in February 1993 and the formal contract in January 1994. Experts have called the HEU agreement a great program but have criticized the conflicting interests behind it; even though US security interests probably would be served best by buying the HEU immediately, the deal is structured to avoid flooding the commercial market and thus spreads purchases out over a 20-year period.
Bilateral Warhead Reduction
The United States has also worked with Russia to reduce the number of warheads that both countries maintain. In May 2002, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin signed the Treaty of Moscow in which they pledged to cut the U.S. and Russian stockpiles by roughly two-thirds over the next decade so that each side would have less than 2,200 warheads each. According to the CIA's February 2002 report, Russia maintained at that time less than 5,000 operational strategic nuclear warheads in its strategic nuclear triad. One complication to these negotiations had been the Bush administration's plans to develop a national missile defense system and to thus abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (for more on missile defense, go here).
Prior efforts to reduce each side's nuclear arsenal since the Cold War's end were done through the START treaties. The START I treaty that was signed in 1991 required the parties to reduce their nuclear arms to 6,000 warheads on each side by December 2001, and all parties reportedly met this requirement. The START II treaty that as signed in 1993 required the reduction in warheads to about 3,500 warheads on each side, in two phases; this treaty was ratified by the United States in 1996 and by Russia in 2000 but never implemented.
Sources: The CIA's February 2002 annual report to Congress on the safety and security of Russian nuclear facilities and military forces is on-line here. Assistant Secretary for Nonproliferation John S. Wolf's April 4, 2003 remarks are on-line via the State Department here. David E. Sanger, Bush and Putin agree to reduce stockpile of nuclear warheads, New York Times, November 14, 2001. Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: containing the threat of loose Russian nuclear weapons and fissile material, by Graham T. Allison, Owen R. Cote, Jr., Richard A. Falkenrath, and Steven E. Miller (MIT Press 1996). Managing the Global Nuclear Materials Threat, a report of the CSIS Project on Global Nuclear Materials Management, chaired by Sam Nunn (Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2000). Judith Miller with Michael R. Gordon, U.S. review on Russia urges keeping most arms controls, New York Times, July 16, 2001.
Campaign Finance Overview (last updated February 2, 2003) (back to top)
Under the new campaign-finance system that took effect after the November 2002 general election, candidates for federal elections are more restricted in their use of non-federal funds, aka "soft money," that their political parties previously could spend on their behalf without much regulation. Political candidates now have to rely even more on money raised and spent according to the "hard" federal guidelines that they previously could effectively sidestep.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which was signed into law on March 27, 2002, ended the unregulated use of non-federal funds by prohibiting national party committees from soliciting soft money and also by prohibiting state and local party committees from spending soft money in connection with federal elections. Banning soft money's influence was the centerpiece of the campaign-finance reform legislation sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin).
At the same time, the BCRA raised contribution limits so that individuals contribute greater amounts to a candidate's campaign. Individuals can now contribute $2,000 to an individual candidate's campaign per election (previously $1,000) and can contribute up to $95,000 every two years (previously $25,000 a year).
The BCRA also includes a so-called "Millionaires Amendment," which relaxes such contribution limits for a candidate facing a self-financed candidate. Once an opponent spends personal funds above a certain threshold ($350,000 for the House, and a varying threshold dependent on the size of the state for the Senate), House and Senate candidates get the benefits of higher contribution limits. Moreover, Senate candidates can have their national and state party committees make unlimited coordinated expenditures on their behalf once their opponents' spending exceeds the threshold by ten times.
Republicans have generally raised more hard money than Democrats, especially in the 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns. In 2001, the Republican and Democratic National Committees raised $82 million and $46.5 million, respectively. Over the 1990s, both parties took advantage of the hard/soft money distinction and raised comparable amounts of unregulated non-federal funds. Parties used this soft money to free up hard money that would otherwise be spent on expenses, such as overhead and voter drives, which benefit individual candidates as well as the overall party.
Modern campaign finance regulation began with the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which was passed in 1971 and amended in 1974 and 1979. The first major piece of federal legislation on the subject since the 1925 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the FECA enacted the following changes by:
- allowing for the public funding of presidential elections,
- setting per-voter spending limits on the nominating process,
- requiring periodic disclosure of campaign spending,
- prohibiting unions from directly contributing money to candidates while still allowing them to form political action committees, contribute to parties' nonfederal "soft money" accounts, and engage in "issue advocacy" (corporations were already under similar restrictions due to earlier federal campaign finance laws), and
- establishing an enforcement agency that would eventually become the Federal Election Commission.
- NOTE: The FECA also limited the amount of money that a campaign could spend on media advertising, but this provision was declared unconstitutional under the First Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1976 case Buckley v Valeo.
Under the FECA, all money given to influence federal elections was subject to the "hard" limits of the federal law and was thus called "hard money." Under federal law, citizens could contribute only $1,000 to a national candidate per election (primary and general elections are counted as separate), $20,000 to the federal accounts of a national party committee, and $5,000 to a political committee. Beyond these specific limits, citizens are limited to a total of $25,000 a year to federal contributions. Political parties were allowed to spend money as "coordinated expenses" directly on behalf of individual candidate, subject to limits based on the size of a state and the kind of race.
But there were many, many ways around these limits, stemming from how political parties generally act in both federal and state capacities whereas the FECA, as a federal law, is limited simply to the federal sphere. By soliciting and using money for nonfederal accounts in ways that blur federal and state lines, political parties could raise "soft money" that is not subject to the "hard" limits of federal law and then spend the money during federal election years on behalf of the overall party, which happens to include the federal candidate. Such intermingling was deemed by the FEC to be impermissible in 1976 but became permissible with a policy reversal in 1978.
Federal elections to the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives were thus shaped indirectly by soft money. Presidential candidates could draw upon public funding without any private contributions for the general election (about $60 million in 1996), but also got the benefit of soft money provided by their parties. Candidates for the House or Senate were limited to private contributions raised under "hard" money limits and "soft money" provided by their parties.
The controversy over soft money came to widespread public attention in 1996 with revelations about the involvement of President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore in party fund-raising efforts and the use of the White House for party fund-raising activities. The Democratic National Committee ultimately admitted receiving more than $3 million from possibly illegal or improper sources, and questions were raised about whether some money solicited was used improperly for Clinton's re-election campaign in violation of federal spending limits.
The scandal implicated two aspects of the soft money distinction. The first and most important is the overt intermingling of funds in possible violation of campaign spending. A second issue is whether someone could be prosecuted under U.S. Criminal Code 607 for soliciting funds for a federal election from "any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties." This somewhat murky provision has its roots in the Pendleton Act that created the federal civil service in 1883 and arguably bars anyone - including Bill Clinton and Al Gore - from making fundraising calls for hard money from a federal office such as in the White House.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act culminated the long struggle to ban or limit the use of soft money. In recent years, reform bills failed because senators would use the filibuster to prevent measures from coming to a vote, or the House would fail to bring the issue to a vote. Finally, the House voted in favor of the measure on February 14, 2002, and the Senate also passed it on March 20, 2002. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on March 27, 2002.
Beyond the ban on soft money, the BCRA raised the limits on hard-money contributions, prohibited contributions by foreign nationals, and prohibited political fundraising on federal property more clearly.
For more on campaign finance, go here.
Sources: The Federal Election Commission is on-line here, and has information on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and its implementing regulations on-line here. Campaign Finance Reform, edited by Anthony Corrado et al. (The Brookings Institution Press, 1997). Selecting the President: From 1789 to 1996 (Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1997). Common Cause, a public-advocacy group, has campaign-finance resources, including a chronology of campaign-finance reform available here. The Brookings Institution also has a good resource available here. Federal and non-federal fundraising statistics were taken from a May 15, 2001 FEC press release on-line here. Statistics on off-election year fundraising are also available through a February 21, 2002 press release on-line here. The Republican and Democratic National Committees' 2001 fundraising statistics were taken from press releases here and here.
"Suicide by Cop" (last updated April 24, 2003) (back to top)
The shooting depicted in this episode of the West Wing appears to be based on real-life incidents that occurred at the White House in 1994 and 2001.
The most recent incident occurred on February 7, 2001, when Robert Pickett, a 47-year-old accountant from Indiana, appeared at the south fence of the White House with a gun and was shot in the knee after refusing to put down the weapon and firing at least two shots. Pickett had sent an apparent suicide letter to Indiana newspapers shortly before the incident in which he reportedly blamed the IRS for destroying his life. He was sentenced in July 2001 to three years in prison, which he was to serve at a federal hospital.
The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill described the Pickett incident as a "suicide by cop" situation in a February 9, 2001 statement. According to NAMI, this phenomenon occurs "frequently" in many cities and some studies have shown to at least 10 and perhaps up to 40 percent of police shootings could fit the "suicide by cop" pattern.
A similar incident occurred at the White House on October 29, 1994. Around 3 p.m. that day, Francisco Martin Duran, a 26-year-old Colorado resident, used a semiautomatic rifle to fire at least 29 shots at the White House from the south sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue (one bullet penetrated a window in the West Wing's press briefing room). Duran paused to reload, and was tackled by a tourist, Harry Michael Rakosky, before Secret Service officers could shoot Duran.
Duran reportedly told an officer "I wish you had shot me" and had a note suggesting that he had expected to be killed. Duran was convicted of ten counts including attempted murder of the President of the United States, and was sentenced in June 1995 to 40 years imprisonment.
Despite such incidents, the White House is considered a relatively safe location for the president given the security measures and physical barriers in place there. In fact, all assassination attempts have occurred when the President was away from the White House. Even the 1950 attack by Puerto Rican nationalists that resulted in the deaths of a White House police officer did not target the White House, but the nearby Blair House where President Harry S Truman was staying while the White House was undergoing repairs. For more on assassinations and attempted assassinations, go here.
Sources: The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill's February 9, 2001 statement on the Robert Pickett incident is on-line here. CNN's article on Pickett being sentenced is on-line here. Department of the Treasury, Public Report of the White House Security Review (May 1995).
|
