Daily Archives: 22 May 2025

“Be Wary of Judicial Umpires”

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That’s the headline on Nate Silver’s Sunday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section.

He’s right, but I have that skepticism from a different angle.

Judges’ and Justices’ sole role—made explicit in our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, and Article III and by their oaths of office—is to apply the clauses of our Constitution and the statutes before them in any particular case as they are written. These are much more precisely defined than any umpire’s visual sighting of penumbral limits from his skewed perspective, which is all the perspective umpires have. The laws (and regulations) that come before judges and Justices are ambiguous, similarly metaphorically skewed? Then they are unconstitutionally vague and should be struck. Umpires don’t get to dismiss pitches that they only hazily see; they must make their guesses. Judges and Justices have that ability; they have no excuse for acting like umpires and not like judges and Justices.

Full stop.

There’s a Hint There

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John Bolton has a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he claims to be worried about the fate of the President’s National Security Council. I’ll leave aside the fact that his source is either a dishonest leaker or a voice in his head. This is what he buried toward the end of his piece:

Scowcroft’s model [of an NSC structure] bestowed a key advantage on the president: creating interagency staff who reached into bureaucratic depths gave him [the President] greater insight into potential agency agendas and disagreements before they rose to higher levels, thereby reducing the risks of confrontation and delay. A dramatically constrained NSC staff wouldn’t have such abilities.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to clean out the bureaucracies at those other agencies, eliminating agency agendas and the bureaucrats who push them, at the expense of the agenda of the White House for which they work.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to thin those agencies’ payrolls to shallow out those bureaucratic depths.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to install agency chiefs and deputies/assistants who would work with each other to resolve more of the disagreements, then consciously bring the remaining disagreements to the President for him to resolve—which is part of a President’s job.

No maybe, this time—it most assuredly would be better to fire those bureaucrats who would rather be confrontational than work as part of the team they were hired to be part of.