Subpoenas

Congressman Jim Banks (R, IN) wants to subpoena Congressman Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) telephone records in retaliation for Schiff’s releasing the personal call records of a fellow Congressman, journalists, and President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers.

This is why I’ve called for a tit for tat.

Banks’ anger is understandable, but his proposed retaliatory move is misguided.  The Congressman whose call record was so dishonestly publicized by Schiff, Devin Nunes, has the better response: deal with Schiff’s dishonesty and his abuse of subpoenas in court, not with revenge.

Nor Republicans nor Conservatives are Progressive-Democrats; there’s no need to stoop to their level. There’s no need for honest men and women to weaponize the subpoena process or the subpoenas themselves as the Progressive-Democrats are so dishonestly trying to do. Subpoenas are legitimate only if there is legitimate probable cause.

Negotiated Penalties

I’m not going to pick on Boeing, but I am going to describe that company’s alleged wrong-doing in a particular case as a canonical example of a principle.

Boeing stands accused by the FAA of

install[ing] defective parts inside the wings of around 130 737NG aircraft and then knowingly vouch[ing that] they met all federal safety requirements.

In consequence, the FAA has proposed a $3.9 million penalty.  As if Boeing should have a say in the penalty it chooses to pay.  This is nonsense.

There should be no proposals, no entertainments of counterproposals from the accused, no time wasted on discussions.  If the FAA thinks it has a case it can make in court, it should make its case in court and apply the court’s penalty.  If the FAA doesn’t think it has a case it can make in court, it has no legitimate case at all, and it should walk away.

So it should be with SEC-“negotiated” penalties for alleged wrong-doings, for EPA “cases,” for any government agency with a beef to bring.

Some might argue that this is little different from a prosecutor offering a plea deal to an accused criminal. Those folks would be right—and it’s wrong there, too.

Others might argue that such affairs are efficient ways to correct bad corporate behavior, that matters can be settled faster this way than through court trials.  Not in the long run, though, and not broadly.  Such “settlements” are binding only on the agency and the company it has “penalized,” and the allegedly misbehaving company too often later repeats the assessed behavior or something similar.

Court outcomes, on the other hand, bind everyone in the court’s jurisdiction (nationally, in those cases that wind up at the Supreme Court).

Furthermore, too often in these business accusations and settlements, the settlement results in the company making no admission of wrong-doing.  In accepting such an outcome, the agency demonstrates that it had no case to bring in the first place; it merely browbeat some vig for the agency by using its vastly superior Government power and breadth of resources.

These “settlements” are conveniences to the government, to be sure, but Government’s convenience is no basis for obtaining justice.  All that’s obtained from such outcomes is…Government convenience.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

That’s what French unions are demanding with their strikes against French President Emmanuel Macron’s and French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe’s plans to streamline, standardize, and otherwise reduce the cost to French taxpayers of France’s byzantine pension system.

Never mind that the pension system consists of 42 different pension plans or that French civil servants insist that they are, somehow, special and so should have special perquisites unavailable to petty private sector workers.

Trains, subways, and buses were still severely curtailed on Friday, and hundreds of domestic and regional flights were canceled. There were no demonstrations on Friday, but unions have warned the strike could last days and become one of the biggest in France in over two decades.

And

Civil servants, in particular, fear they may lose advantages they have over private-sector employees.

To hell with their fellow citizens attempting to get to and from their own work, to and from their own necessary errands, to and from their own entertainments.  The unions want theirs, and no one else matters.

All the government wants to do is to

extend the number of years needed to collect a full pension and create a universal plan that would do away with the so-called special regimes enjoyed by French civil servants, including rail workers.

Currently, full retirement occurs after 43 years of work or age 62; the latter being the youngest full-retirement age in the OECD.

“Screw you,” say the unions, exemplified by Catherine Perret, Confederal Secretary of the CGT trade union:

We won’t let go[.]

This is the naked, if strictly legal, extortion of union strikes made national.  The US has Taft-Hartley, in which the government can order the end to a strike for a significant period during which serious negotiations could occur.  France, not so much; its unions are amok.

Streamlining Negotiations

DoJ says it wants to “streamline” negotiations over the size of penalties misbehaving white collar employees should pay.

Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski, the head of the department’s criminal division—which overseas various white-collar criminal investigations—said the DOJ has sought to reduce the time it takes to negotiate resolutions by grounding proposed fines in US sentencing guidelines and other objective criteria.

Here’s a thought on how to streamline those negotiations.

Stop negotiating.  Make a plea offer (rarely, these too often get used to extort guilty pleas of any sort), and if the white collar declines—no back and forth—go to criminal trial.  Better, if DoJ thinks it has an actual case, go straight to criminal trial.

If DoJ doesn’t think it can make its case in front of a criminal court jury, then DoJ doesn’t have a case to make. Leave the white collar the hell alone.

YGTBSM

Congressman Al Green (D, TX) is upset that, of all of the law professor witnesses testifying at Wednesday’s Jerry Nadler-run (D, NY) Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing, not one of them was “a person of color.” In his upset, he actually said this on the House floor before the Committee began its round of the Progressive-Democrats’ inquisition:

It hurts my heart, Mr Speaker, to see the Judiciary Committee hearing experts on the topic of impeachment—one of the seminal issues of this Congress—hearing experts…and not one person of color among the experts.
What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we have experts but not one person of color? Are we saying that there are no people of color who are experts on this topic of impeachment?

Because, for this man, the most important characteristic, the defining characteristic of anyone is the color of his skin.  What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we insist we cannot have a collection of experts unless some of them are “persons of color?”

Apparently Green does not believe in Martin Luther King’s dream: that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The racism is strong and stench-ridden in this Congressman.