Tag Archives: culture

Wrong Way to Punish the FBI?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are concerned that doing away with FISA’s Section 702 would be the wrong way to punish the FBI.

I agree. But the editors are missing the point. They too narrowly justify 702 with this:

Congress created Section 702 after 9/11 to address intelligence-gathering gaps. It lets the government collect information without a warrant on non-US citizens living abroad.

That’s a worthy purpose; although the realization has demonstrated the difficulty of using the capability to good effect, and without abusing it. Or the impossibility of that with the current regime. The FBI has demonstrated that, as an institution, it cannot be trusted with 702 output, and the FISA Court has empirically demonstrated that cannot be trusted, either—not after squawking about FBI lies in the latter’s filings and then proceeding to accept unquestioningly further FBI blandishments and warrant applications.

Answering those deficiencies, though, is a separate matter from applying the appropriate responses to the FBI’s misbehaviors and the FISA Court’s yapping about those misbehaviors.

The FBI is irretrievably broken—its lies to a court are only part of the institution’s failures; its stonewalling of Congress under the risible rationalization that its internal procedure policies are superior to Congress’ constitutionally mandated oversight obligations are another—and it needs to be erased from our government altogether. That, not dealing with 702, is the correct response to the FBI’s institutional dishonesty.

The correct FISA-related action is to make the FISA Court a public proceeding court or itself eliminated as well. That’s not punishing anybody; that’s simply getting rid of the stain of a secretive Star Chamber and forcing “court” activities out into the sunlight, or bringing the warrant application/granting process back into a proper Article III court. Those courts, after all, are fully checked out on the process of keeping warrants sealed until execution.

The IRS Refuses

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House Ways and Means Committee chairman Jason Smith (R, MO) and Committee member David Schweikert (R, AZ) are pressing IRS Commissioner David Werfel for information regarding the IRS’ destruction of 30 million tax documents two years ago. They’ve sent a letter to Werfel

asking for the memorandum that explained the recommendation for the “unprocessed, paper-filed informational returns.”

Schweikert told Just the News‘ The Center Square

[W]e’ve never been able to get a satisfactory answer from the IRS of why this was done was done, and is that policy that allowed it to happen? Is there a way to make sure this never happens again?

The IRS is being its usual uncooperative self, though:

The committee is looking for the memo by August 8, but the tax agency has not complied with previous requests for additional information. For example, the committee asked for the memo on May 17, 2022, but the IRS said on May 18, 2022, it would be too risky and declined to provide it, according to the letter.

The IRS isn’t the only Federal agency that refuses to cooperate. The DoJ is famous for its uncooperativeness, and so are State and DoD. There are others. DoJ is especially egregious because it just as routinely refuses to enforce Congressional subpoenas.

There is another way for Congress to get cooperation, or at least to sanction the agencies refusing to cooperate. Congress can apply the Holman Rule to reduce, even eliminate, the salaries of individual Federal employees who refuse. Congress can reduce, even eliminate, funding for the agency that refuses, or whose personnel refuse, to cooperate.

Congress should stop dickering over the matter, too. Immediately on first refusal, one of both of the above measures should be undertaken.

That, though, takes more political courage than too many incumbent Congressmen have so far demonstrated.

Israel’s Judicial Reform

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Israel has taken a step toward limiting the governing power and authority of its Supreme Court. Prior to last Monday’s vote, Israel’s highest court could blithely strike down Knesset-enacted statutes based on nothing more concrete or measurable than the personal opinions of what constituted the statute’s “reasonableness” in the minds of the judges constituting the Court’s majority in any particular case. If those judges didn’t like the statute, they could cry “unreasonable,” and strike it.

This reform law will restrict

the power of the country’s top court and hand more control to lawmakers. It aims to restrict the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government or executive decisions on the basis of reasonability…. Supporters say the reasonableness standard is too nebulous and allows the courts to overrule the will of elected officials for political purposes.

In fine, the new law requires the Supreme Court to have a far more specific and publicly measurable rationale for striking a law. Otherwise, the matter is returned to the representatives of the Israeli people, the Knesset, and to the people themselves. In particular, if the people disagree with the law, they can fire their Knesset representative(s) at the next election and replace those persons with representatives who will make the adjustments or recissions the people demand. The people have no such possibility with the Supreme Court; those worthies, once selected, are in office until age 70. The people making the ultimate decisions, rather than unaccountable office holders doing so, is the stuff of democracy, whether popular or republican.

Critics of the new law claim that it’s an attack on democracy. One citizen:

We refuse to accept this. It is clear to us all that there is no alternative. We either escalate or we leave the country.

And Yair Lapid, an opposition leader:

This is the destruction of Israeli democracy[.]

That’s democratic opposition? No, that’s opposition to democracy. It’s disappointing that the “opposition” in Israel is so opposed to the idea of the people’s representatives—and the people themselves through their democratically selected representatives—having the primary say in Israel’s laws. It’s also illustrative of the opposition’s ideology that they’re so opposed to that degree of democracy.

The kerfuffle also is illustrative of the problems stemming from not having an actual, written-down constitution to which anyone—government official (judge, member of the Knesset, Prime Minister) or private citizen—can point and say, “This is what our constitution requires,” and engage in open and transparent (to coin a phrase) debate concerning what a law or a proposed law says, rather than depending on cloistered judges’ obscure and too often limited explanations that are stripped of the reasonings and closed-chambered debates conducted as the Court arrives at its rulings.

Maybe, Instead…

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Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland, has decided it’s had enough of parent input regarding its program of “storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions and same-sex romance for elementary-age children. The MCPS, in its magnanimity, had allowed parents to opt their children out of such things, but the parents, en masse, opted their children out.

MCPS responded by issuing a blanket policy of no exceptions and no notifications—no more opt out for all those uppity recalcitrant parents.

Never mind that

the storybooks…explicitly encourage[e] children to “question sexuality and gender identity, focus on romantic feelings, and embrace gender transitioning[.]
Pre-kindergarten students, for example, are required to read Pride Puppy, which “promotes pride parades as family-friendly events without cautioning about the frequent nudity and sexually explicit conduct….”

Maybe, instead, there should be a blanket removal of the program altogether. It’s time, also, for a blanket removal of the MCPS school board and its Superintendent and staff.

CIOs, Affirmative Action, and Diversity

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Company CIOs, Chief Information Officer inhabitants of the C-Suites, claim to be worried about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling banning colleges’ and universities’ use of race as an admission criterion on their own access to a suitably “diversity”-laden work force.

By removing race from college admission considerations, the pool of tech talent entering the workforce may not only be less diverse, it could also be smaller if underrepresented minorities don’t see the field as a welcoming or viable option, those executives say.

No, rather than looking to plus up their virtue credentials, these executives should be more worried about (prospective) employees’ ability to do the job than about whether their departments have the “correct” balance of skin colors and sexes.

There is this from Juniper Networks‘ CIO:

“I worry about, in universities, if we’re not making it a more hospitable environment, that we make it harder than it is,” said Sharon Mandell…. That means companies and IT leaders need to work to convince diverse workers that technology is “a compelling place, and a welcome place for them.”

That hints at a good start (but only hints); however, by beginning at the college/university level, it renders itself too late to be an effective start. Of course, I’m also, probably naively, assuming a benign definition of “hospitable.”

Hence my question: if these CIOs and their companies are serious, and not just virtue-signaling, what are they doing to improve K-12 education and the resulting better preparation for all students? If all students get an equal opportunity at a quality education, the resulting population of job applicants—whatever the job—will pretty much automatically have a requisite diversity, artificial as that criterion is.

Unless, of course, these CIOs (they wouldn’t be alone in this regard) actually think some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior in ability to other groups of humans and so those lesser groups need special handling and protection.