Jerrold Nadler

The U.S. House of Representatives today passed a bill that would authorize billions in federal spending on Amtrak, boosting opportunities for high-speed rail and other programs in the Northeast and around the country.

The bill, which would allow more than $14 billion in spending, could also provide some money for Moynihan Station as part of a $2.5 billion grant program, according to Representative Jerry Nadler’s office, which has been active in pushing the bill. It also contains a provision that would have Amtrak take proposals to build a higher-speed rail link between Washington, D.C., and New York City, looking to reduce the trip to two hours; however, such a proposal would likely cost billions.  read more »

By this fall, according to activists, the city could lose over 10 percent of the remaining 90,000 affordable housing units that exist under the federal Section 8 program if Congress doesn't plug a $2.4 billion budget shortfall at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A pair of U.S. representatives, Nydia Velazquez of Brooklyn and Queens and Jerrold Nadler of Brooklyn and Manhattan, are holding a rally tonight to pressure Congress to approve supplemental funding so HUD can continue to guarantee owners of Section 8 buildings rents to match the market. Without such gurantees, there's a risk of apartments leaving Section 8 for the increasingly expensive open market.

“If owners can’t rely on the subsidy then they will opt out of the Section 8 program,” Patrick Coleman of the group Tenants and Neighbors, one of the rally’s organizers, said. The rally's at 6:30 at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South.  read more »

Representative Jerry Nadler says that all the talk of Hillary Clinton paving the path to war with Iran by supporting a bill that labels the country's Republican Guards as a terrorist organization amounts to "demogoguery on the part of her opponents."

"That's a minor thing," he said of the bill. "I don't think it's very consequential."

He said that Clinton was "exactly right" in arguing, as she did in today's Foreign Affairs article, that the Bush administration offered "false choices" between ineffectual diplomacy and all out war.

(Lee Feinstein, national security advisor for the Clinton campaign, characterized the choice between wanting to "rush to war" and wanting to do "nothing.")

Nadler said that negotiating with Iran made sense, as did imposing sanctions to impact their oil exports, with the aim of offering to lift those sanctions if they gave up their nuclear plans. The real danger, he said, would be creating a solidified opposition to America in the politically fractuous Iran by "threatening them militaristically. Then you'll have Iranian solidarity."

Congressman Jerry Nadler, who will spearhead a series of congressional hearings entitled “The Constitution in Crisis: The State of Civil Liberties in America,” said today that President Bush and the US Attorney General are engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” for their role in the NSA wire tapping.

“I think the one issue that hasn’t gotten enough attention is the overwhelming obviousness of the fact that this entire warrantless wiretapping is illegal and the president and attorney general are engaged in a criminal conspiracy,” Nadler told Josh Marshall in an interview this morning. “I mean, to me, this is worse than Watergate.”

The first hearing begins around 2 p.m.

The bold-faced names are coming out for two Democrats: Hillary Clinton and... Jerrold Nadler.

Christina Aguilera is going to be performing at a June 7 fund-raiser for Hillary that's being organized by Ron Burkle and Harvey Weinstein, among others, at Capitale on Grand Street.
And tonight, Julianne Moore and Cynthia Nixon will be at the Hudson Theatre to honor Nadler for his 30th year of public service and his 60th birthday.

Also expected to be there, according to the invitation, are Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Cuomo and John Conyers, who chairs the House Committee on the Judiciary.

With Sept. 11 hearings coming up, downtown Congressman wants to focus on feds first.  read more »

This morning, I spoke with Jerry Nadler who will be chairing a Congressional hearing about the health impacts of the air at Ground Zero, which has taken on greater significance now that city's chief medical examiner directly connected the death of a young woman to her exposure to toxins there.

"The next thing that has to happen is that there has to be official recognition that that chronic exposure for first responders caused sickness and death," Nadler said. "And that hasn’t happened yet."

He went on to say that "the average cost of an apartment that was found to be contaminated was estimated at between $10-20,000. Per apartment. Now, you may have thousands of apartments -- thousands of work spaces. We don’t know. So, it's possible it's several billion dollars. Possibly a lot less. We just don’t know until we do the assessment."

"Now that’s a lot of money," he added. "Almost three days of the Iraq War. It puts it in perspective. To save our people from future illnesses and sickness, we can’t afford this kind of money, but we piss it away in three days in Iraq."

Even before today's testimony by Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales' former chief-of-staff, Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York was convinced that the attorney general's days were numbered.

"I think it' the end of Gonzales, but I hope it's a lot more," said Nadler earlier this week. The chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties added that he is in favor of issuing subpoenas to the most senior administration officials.

When I asked him about the prospect of the officials fighting the subpoenas and refusing to testify in court, Nadler said "They can't contest every single one. If they do there will be a confrontation."

--Jason Horowitz

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Following up on this story today, Congressman Jerrold Nadler just called in to say that he will be introducing his own bill within the next few days to try to force a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by limiting funding for the war.

"You have got to use funding -- it's the only real enforcement congress has," he said.

Nadler said he recognized that slashing funds is politically problematic in that any restrictions on funding for the war will be portrayed as an abandonment of the troops.

"The way around that is not to cut the funding but to condition the funding," he said, explaining that his bill will "say no funds appropriated at all except for the following purposes: One, protect the troops. Two, withdraw on the following timetable. Three, reconstruction to help Iraq. And four, diplomacy to set up international conferences."

Nadler says the bill will also include a measure that bars any funds for increasing troops at any time.

Just to be clear, this is a longshot.

For the bill to go anywhere, it needs the support of the Democratic leadership. (Nadler says that, so far, Maurice Hinchey of New York, Lynn Woolsey of California and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts have expressed interest in supporting the measure.)

And even if such a bill made it far enough to come before the executive, President Bush would be likely to veto it.

"You put this as a limitation on the appropriations bill," said Nadler. "If he vetoes it he has no money."

And what about Democrats like Sen. Joe Biden, who has said that Congress "micromanaging" the war through legislative restrictions is unconstitutional?

"I don't agree with Biden," Nadler said. "You can certainly condition use of funds. The basic problem that you have is that you've got a stubborn jerk in the White House who will ignore anything and do what he wants to do."

--Jason Horowitz

One job I appointed myself to upon returning from Israel was that of trying to acquaint Americans, and especially American Jews, with a sense of Israel as a real country and not a dream state. Most American Jews have not been to Israel, and their views of the country are based on the same images I had before I went: Leon Uris's Exodus, the '67 War, kibbutzes, Moshe Dayan's eyepatch, Abba Eban's speeches, etc.

Tony Kushner tried to break the spell for me a few months back when he said that American Jews' idea of Israel was a "fantasy built on a delusion." The delusion was the lack of understanding that creating the country in the first place had involved ethnic cleansing in 1948 (all those Palestinian refugees), while the fantasy was the belief that Israel wasn't really a foreign country, but some kind of aching Jewish dream of a homeland and a refuge, forever in peril from the evil Arabs.

Now that I have seen what Kushner meant, two ways I've tried to correct the image as a journalist is to describe how militarized Israeli society is and how out of touch with Arabs the Israelis are, if they're not downright racist. Two problems that I would guess bedevil other nationalist countries. For Israel is a very nationalist place. Doesn't prize diversity.

This is all by way of introducing a link. It's become a minor scandal in Israel that on July 12, the day the war broke out following Hizbollah's lethal raid, the Israeli Defence Forces chief of staff, Gen. Dan Halutz, sold stock worth about $25,000. In other words, as war councils were being convened and Halutz was publicly vowing to take Lebanon 20 years back, he was also calling his broker to sell a portfolio. Halutz has confirmed the deal, but blasted the leak.

This incident should be laid side by side with New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler's statement that when the war broke out, he felt just as he felt in June 1967, that Israel was in a war for its very existence. Nadler's fear is widely shared in America. But the two facts show the difference between the real state of Israel and the fantasy state. In the real state, the top general so takes for granted the future existence of Israel that he has time to call up his broker during the outbreak of hostilities with a neighboring militia. In the fantasy state, an American congressman has a vision of a heroic homeland being smashed to bits by the Arabs. Americans need a reality check.

“We will stand for Israel because Israel stands for American values as well as Israeli ones,&r  read more »

An article in this week's Observer about the unanimity among New York politicians in supporting Israel's bombing of Lebanon (surprise) contains an important statement by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (who was a brave opponent of the Iraq war):

[Nadler] equated support for Israel at this moment with support for the country's right to exist at all..."This reminds me very much of the first week of June 1967, and I'm very worried about it. That was the week before the Six Day War broke out.."

Is that a realistic attitude? No. Look how much has changed since '67. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace agreements with Israel. Israel's existence may have been at risk through the '73 war (we can argue about that), but who can say that now? It is a regional hegemon. Syria and Israel have been very close to peace; and Syria is so poor Israel could walk into Damascus tomorrow. Saudi Arabia has said approving things of Israel's attacks on Lebanon. Though yes Israel has an enemy in Iran, Iran—which by the way, used to be on the U.S. side in the war on terror, right up thru Afghanistan—is being faced down by the world. This latest fighting would seem to truly endanger the existence of Lebanon, not Israel.

Nadler's emotional statements underscore what Henry Siegman told the Washington Post Magazine the other day:

"There's a certain dynamic to organized Jewish life as to all so-called defense organizations created to protect a supposedly vulnerable group," says Henry Siegman, who once served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress and now directs the U.S./Middle East project at the Council of Foreign Relations. "It creates a culture of victimhood, and it often attracts people who feel like they're victims as well."

As Michael Desch's article on the "myth of abandonment" fostered by the Holocaust suggests, citing "existential" fears for Israel is an unconscious way of invoking the Holocaust to justify anything Israel does. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had no nuclear weapons.

Jerry Nadler reacted to yesterday's setback on a housing bill with angry sarcasm --  read more »

Jerry Nadler reacted to yesterday's setback on a housing bill with angry sarcasm --  read more »

Jerrold Nadler's office just announced that he has gotten a $2.4 million appropriation written into the House's energy and water appropriations bill for next year.

The money is intended to go towards a project that would slow beachhead erosion on Coney Island by building... T-Groins.  read more »

I think we'll let them explain this one. Read on for the full release.

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