Category Archives: ethics

An Overstated Case

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A couple of Wall Street Journal news writers have laid out the concerns in the Supreme Court’s consideration of whether President Donald Trump (R) can fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Bank governor.

It will test whether the court’s conservative majority, which has spent years eroding the independence of regulatory agencies, is willing to make an exception for the institution that controls interest rates, inflation, and the stability of the global financial system.

One out of three isn’t all that terribly bad, but the first and third items are of critical importance.

[E]roding the independence of regulatory agencies…. What independence? They were created as instruments of the Executive Branch. As such, under our Constitution, they cannot be independent, for all that Congress averred it so. That would be a violation of our Constitution’s carefully constructed separation of powers. Those agencies are entirely under the authority of the President as the Chief Executive of the Executive Branch. Far from years of eroding the independence, the Court has been glacially slow in recognizing the agencies’ lack of independence.

The stability of the global financial system? Really?

It’s certainly true that the US, with our enormous economy and the size of our market for the global economy, even in today’s tariff regime, exerts outsize influence on the global economy.

However, it exerts influence only, not control.

The impact of our central bank on the global economy is as much—at least—the outcome of other nations’ government decisions as it is that of our own decisions. They don’t get to hide behind us or our central bank in their decision-making, nor do they get to blame us or our central bank for the poor outcomes of their decision-making. The stability of the global financial system is an affair of collective responsibility, not one of unilaterality.

Ellison Returned some Money

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Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), who seems deeply connected with his State’s multi-billion dollar welfare fraud via his lack of action on when advised years prior to the current public exposure, returned some $2,500 in illegally donated money. When called on all the donations from welfare fraudsters, Ellison answered the call.

Ellison had already returned a $2,500 campaign contribution to a donor who was indicted in September 2022 for the food aid fraud. The donor, Liban Alishire, later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering and awaits sentencing, court records show.

Never mind that that’s not all the money that folks who had defrauded the State or are charged with defrauding the State but whose trials have not yet begun that Ellison has not yet given up. The larger question here concerns these $2,500, which were returned to the fraudster. Those dollars could easily have supported the fraudster’s benefit, his defense bills or his potential restitution bill, for instance.

There are alternatives for what could have been done with Ellison’s illegally funded donations; he still can use those alternatives for the rest of his…donations.

State Senator John Hoffman [D], who received eight questionable donations that totaled about $3,300, sent all of the money to the US Marshals Service because the donated money might have been obtained through fraud.
“It was the right thing to do,” he told The Center Square.

But not Ellison. He still put it to his own and his donor’s good use.

Lost in the Reporting

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Or, perhaps carefully ignored in the reporting. The Free Press has its collective panties in a wedgy over an FBI raid on Washington Post news writer Hannah Natanson. It seems that, pursuant to the FBI’s investigation into the leak by a defense contractor of classified information, the FBI executed a warrant on Natanson and seized two of her laptops, her phone, and a smartwatch.

Of course that raid, part of what should be a thorough investigation of the leak and the defense contractor’s role in it (if any), has the “fourth estate” in a tizzy. The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement:

Without assurances that journalists can protect their reporting materials, accountability journalism will suffer a major setback, eroding yet another mechanism for government accountability.

That’s true up to a point. However, “accountability journalism” doesn’t place those news writers outside our laws. Were that so, that self-appointed title would be laughably hypocritical. If news writers are going to traffic in stolen goods—as leaked classified information most assuredly is—than of course those news writers must be held accountable: they must be arrested, brought to trial, and if convicted, jailed.

Of course, the FBI has not said Natanson was directly involved (or involved at all) in the leak, but that is beside the point of press accountability—a point the press is busily ignoring at the top of its collective lungs.

An Activist Judge Gets It Wrong

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DC District Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson has ruled that

the Trump administration is legally required to secure funding for the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and that failing to do so would violate a prior court order barring the government from dismantling or shutting down the agency[.]

However.

Leave aside the fact that the question of the Trump administration funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the question of the Trump administration dismantling or shutting down the agency are distinctly separate questions.

The fact of interest here is Jackson’s mistaken ruling that Trump must fund the CFPB. He cannot. By the statute that created the CFPB, that agency is funded solely by the penalties it exacts via its enforcement actions (pay no attention to the conflict of interest behind the curtain) and from the Federal Reserve Bank, the latter which the CFPB draws from according to CFPB-determined needs (pay no attention to the doings behind this curtain, either).

The Trump administration has no control over and no capacity to produce CFPB funding. This is the sort of shenanigan in which activist judges engage, causing increased cost and delay in cleaning up prior messes.

In the “Go Figure” Category

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New Jersey is one of several States that do not require a photo ID to vote. It’s also one of a number of States that offer reduced fare to some groups—senior citizens, military personnel, the infirm, for instance—on their mass transit systems.

Go figure:

Per Rutherford’s Shore News Network, as quoted by Fox News,

Starting January 1 [last Thursday], photo ID required for NJ Transit reduced fares but not for voting[.]

Hmm….