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Why Kerry Deserves Praise for the Peace Talk Agreement

Posted: 21 Jul 2013 08:19 AM PDT

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference in Tel Aviv on June 30, 2013. (Reuters)

Secretary of State John Kerry's announcement that Israeli and Palestinian officials had "reached an agreement that establishes a basis" for the resumption of direct peace talks is a badly needed foreign policy achievement for the Obama administration.

The talks are not yet finalized and seem unlikely to eventually succeed, but six months of shuttle diplomacy by Kerry is the first example of successful American diplomacy in the Middle East in several years.

The many difficulties Kerry faced in simply getting the two sides to agree to the first direct talks in three years show how difficult the path ahead will be. The negotiations are so sensitive that he and other American officials refused to release details of the agreement.

"The agreement is still in the process of being formalized," Kerry said, "so we are absolutely not going to talk about any of the elements now."

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that a release of Palestinian prisoners was a key element of the agreement for talks. In his announcement, Kerry said that "if everything goes as planned" the talks would begin in "a week or so" in Washington.

Yuval Steinitz, the minister for strategic affairs, said on Israel Radio on Saturday that a prisoner release was part of the tentative agreement.

"There will be some release of prisoners," he said. "I don't want to give any numbers but there will be heavyweight prisoners who have been in jail for tens of years."

It was not clear when, or if, the releases would occur. Israeli officials said the prisoner release and even participating in the talks depended on a vote by the government's senior leadership. They said that vote would occur in the next several days. They also said the two sides had agreed that the talks would last at least six months.

Whether Netanyahu can win final Conservative members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government are opposed to making any major concessions to the Palestinians. Other Israeli officials have insisted that any prisoner release occur in stages as an incentive for Palestinians to seriously negotiate.

For months, Palestinian officials have said a pre-condition for talks was the release of roughly 100 Palestinian prisoners in jail since before the 1993 Oslo Accords. They also demanded a public announcement by Israeli officials that the talks would be based on Israel's 1967 borders, including land swaps that would involve large Israeli settlements. Palestinians have also long demanded a freeze on Israeli settlement building. Israeli officials have said they would agree to no preconditions.

The details of the tentative agreement remain unknown but Abbas may have accepted an American assurance, not an Israeli one, that the talks be based on the 1967 borders. In exchange, Netanyahu may have agreed on a staged release of Palestinian prisoners.

After Kerry made the announcement in Amman on Friday, a senior State Department official suggested that both sides had compromised.

"I'll also give credit to President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu," the official said. "They haven't made decisions like these before."

The announcement is a boost for Kerry. For months, commentators have ridiculed his efforts as hopeless. The initial agreement shows that after a decade of disastrous American military interventions in the region American diplomacy can be an effective tool in the Middle East.

As I've written before, Washington's options go beyond mounting massive military invasions or doing nothing at all in the region. Kerry's success shows that diplomacy can matter. What Kerry has achieved should not be exaggerated. The last direct talks between the two sides fell apart after several weeks in 2010 over a settlement freeze. Analysts say Netanyahu is unlikely to offer better terms than that of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, whose negotiations with the Palestinians failed in 2009.

Palestinians, meanwhile, fear that the Israelis are engaging in talks to delay a long-threatened Palestinian drive to have the United Nations recognize them as a state. They also fear that the Israelis will also use the time to build more settlements.

Yet in a region of seemingly endless setbacks, a small step forward has occurred. Kerry will face criticism. He will likely be mocked for spending so much time on the deadlocked Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

But on Friday, Kerry was deservedly triumphant. For now, he deserves it.

This article also appears at Reuters.com, an Atlantic partner site.

Even the Aide Who Coined the Hastert Rule Says the Hastert Rule Isn't Working

Posted: 21 Jul 2013 05:00 AM PDT

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House Speaker John Boehner has a tough job -- so tough that Democrats have taken to pitying him. "I feel sorry for the speaker," Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, recently confessed. New York magazine described Boehner as "one of the most beleaguered powerful people in Washington," and quoted one of his closest allies, former Rep. Steve LaTourette, as being unable to fathom what Boehner likes about his job. There's a rumor going around that Boehner's preparing to chuck it all and retire.

It's not hard to see why: Of 234 Republicans, just 20 percent are reliably loyal to the speaker, a Washington Post analysis recently demonstrated. More than half have gone against him on two or more of this year's biggest votes. Boehner has also suffered a series of humiliating failed floor votes, from his "Plan B" on the fiscal cliff to the recent debacle of the farm bill. Of nine bills that have passed the current Congress and been enacted, four of them did not have the support of a majority of House Republicans, and made it through the House with mostly Democratic votes instead.

Those votes violated the "Hastert rule," an informal guideline formulated by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House. Hastert pledged in 2003 not to allow votes on bills that didn't have the support of "the majority of the majority," meaning more than half of the Republican members of Congress. Democrats -- led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- decried the move at the time as an overly partisan attempt to marginalize their influence.

Today, Boehner's violations of the Hastert rule have angered conservatives who see themselves as the ones marginalized by his ability to get around their demands. Under pressure, Boehner has repeatedly reassured them that he won't break the rule again when it comes to immigration reform. Something resembling the bill that has passed the Senate would likely pass the House if it came to a floor vote, with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans in support. But Boehner has made clear he won't allow that to happen.

Back when the Hastert rule first became a thing, a Hastert spokesman named John Feehery defended it to the Washington Post. "If you pass major bills without the majority of the majority, then you tend not to be a long-term speaker," Feehery said, adding, "I think [Hastert] was prudent to listen to his members."

That's what the Hastert rule is really about, Feehery, now a lobbyist and consultant, told me recently -- political survival. It's just common sense: The speaker is elected by a majority vote of his caucus; if he does things a majority of his caucus doesn't like, they can vote him out.

Feehery actually wrote the speech in which Hastert laid out the rule that bears his name. He coined the catchy phrase "majority of the majority." And now he thinks Boehner ought to ditch the Hastert rule.

Feehery outlined his thinking in a blog post in January. In a recent interview, he elaborated: Given the current "ungovernable" state of the House GOP caucus, he told me, Boehner must balance the risk to his own standing with the "larger reputational risk" to the Republican Party of things like, say, blocking the Violence Against Women Act -- which would have happened had Boehner not violated the Hastert rule to get it through with the votes of just 38 percent of his members.

(Amusingly, Hastert, who is also now a lobbyist, disagrees. "If you start to rely on the minority to get the majority of your votes, then all of the sudden you're not running the shop anymore. I think that's what it comes down to," he told Roll Call in March. "It worked for me.")

Feehery posits that every speaker has to govern differently depending on the situation. He points to the example of former Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill, who, he notes, "pretty much let the Republicans run the floor in the first two years of the Reagan Presidency. ... O'Neill felt that the president should have the opportunity to put his program in place."

Intrigued by this, I emailed John Aloysius Farrell, O'Neill's biographer (and an Atlantic contributor). He replied:

[O'Neill's] problem was this: In those days the Democratic Party had a partisan majority but not an ideological majority. There were still many representatives from the South and the border states who had a D next to their name. ...

In the Reagan years, those Democrats from the south and west felt that they were under intense pressure back home, where the president was hugely popular.... Their constituents were conservative, loved Reagan and the D representatives saw themselves in dire trouble if they were painted as obstructionists. ...

So Tip could not run the House by the Hastert rule -- his southern and western Democrats were a minority, but would have raised holy divisive hell if he tried to keep Reagan's program off the floor. This was proven when the votes were indeed held, and Tip and his northern and midwestern and California liberals -- the majority of the majority -- lost on both tax and spending cuts.

If the Democrats wanted to keep the House, Tip had to keep those boll weevil Democrats in the caucus, and allow them to go home and campaign as enablers or supporters of Reagan, while at the same time satisfying his own partisan obligations and the demands of northern liberals that he put up a fight.

O'Neill did believe Reagan deserved to have his program voted on, Farrell said. But he also believed, as Feehery noted, that Reagan would inevitably overreach, benefiting Democrats politically. And that's what happened: Reagan tried to cut Social Security, and Democrats rode the issue to huge gains in the 1982 elections.

Like O'Neill, Boehner has a partisan majority that is often divided ideologically. He has a large number of members who need to vote against Democrat-backed legislation for political reasons, but might not mind seeing such legislation pass in the end -- and thus might not hold it against Boehner when he violates the Hastert rule. That is, they wouldn't depose him as speaker.

O'Neill was frequently humiliated by his divided caucus, just as Boehner is today. But he's now remembered as an effective and savvy liberal leader who embodied the art of compromise. If Boehner is looking for a model, maybe Hastert is the wrong speaker to emulate.

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