Tag Archives: government

Backwards

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The arrogance of the Biden-Garland DoJ is on full display with its continued refusal to provide the audio tapes of the Hur-Joe Biden interviews.

The Biden-Garland refusal, through Garland’s Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte, in their letter to the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees that require the tapes:

We have repeatedly invited the Committees to identify how these audio recordings from law enforcement files would serve the purposes for which you say you want them[.]
We have also repeatedly urged the Committees to avoid unnecessary conflict and to respect the public interest in the Department’s ability to conduct effective investigations by protecting sensitive law enforcement files. The Committees have repeatedly failed to explain your needs or to demonstrate respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions[.]

Nor Congress nor any of its committees have any obligation to satisfy the demands of the DoJ. The obligation runs in the opposite direction: the DoJ must satisfy the Congress and its committees of the reasons why it cannot—not does not want to, but cannot—turn over the materials called for by the Congress or any of its committees.

If Biden-Garland are truly interested in avoiding unnecessary conflict, they will instruct the DoJ to stop forcing one and turn over the tapes. If they continue to refuse, then the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees must formally subpoena the tapes, if they have not already, promptly move to hold AG Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over this refusal, and then withhold funding, including salaries, from the Office of the Attorney General and from the White House Office until the contempt is satisfied.

Regarding respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions, this is especially risible. If the Biden-Garland DoJ wants to be respected and wants its law enforcement functions to be respected, they must behave respectably. The former would begin by turning over the tapes without any further stalling. The latter cannot begin to behave respectably until there’s a complete replacement of those functions’ top managers, teams that variously lie to or condone lying to FISA courts, and who have accused traditional Catholics of dangerous extremism, accused mothers objecting to school board woke policies of being terrorists, and on and on.

Australian Regulators’ Mistake

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Australian regulators are pressuring X to take down—to delete—a video posted to X showing the real-time terrorist attack in a western Sydney suburb on a Bishop of the Christ the Good Shepherd Church. X has blocked access to the video from locations within Australia per the regulators’ request, but is balking from going further. The regulators, though, are demanding the video be deleted altogether. Musk has responded that that would set the dangerous precedent of allowing one nation’s regulators to control the content of the Internet everywhere in the world, not just within the regulators’ own nation.

That’s a valid beef, but it misses entirely the much larger problem.

Deleting a posting altogether is nothing more than rewriting history and pretending the event posted about, and the post itself, never happened.

History is how we know where we were—geographically, economically, politically, socially, genetically, and on and on—how we know where we are (itself at immediate risk due to demands for real-time excision of current events), how we know how we got from then to now, and how we can learn how to get from now to a desired future. Rewriting history as every bit as dangerous to us as is any war and far more dangerous to our civilization.

X needs to stand tall against the Australians’ demand for revisionist history, and its fellow social platforms, vis., Meta, who so meekly complied with the regulators’ demand to rewrite history, need to find some courage, and some understanding of what they’re doing, and stop deleting postings, however repugnant, or merely government-disapproved, they may be.

Government Convenience

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The Federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission is vacuuming every scrap of data—including personally identifiable—on every single stock trade done by every single American, and it’s collecting these data from every single broker, exchange, clearing agency, and alternative trading system in the US.

It’s also doing this without any Congressional authorization to do so. The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed suit to attempt to block the SEC from continuing and to get the SEC’s Consolidated Audit Trail, the mechanism by which the SEC collects and stores these ill-gotten data, completely eliminated. Peggy Little, the NCLA’s Senior Litigation Counsel:

By seizing all financial data from all Americans who trade in the American exchanges, SEC arrogates surveillance powers and appropriates billions of dollars without a shred of Congressional authority—all while putting Americans’ savings and investments at grave and perpetual risk.
The Founders provided rock-solid protections in our Constitution to prevent just these autocratic and dangerous actions. This CAT must be ripped out, root and branch[.]

The SEC’s argument in favor of its invasion is utterly cynical [summarized by former Attorney General William Barr]:

[I]t could investigate things more easily if it weren’t limited to gathering investor information on a case-by-case basis after suspected wrongdoing took place.

Barr’s response:

But the whole point of the Fourth Amendment is to make the government less efficient by making it jump through hoops when it seeks to delve into private affairs[.]

Indeed. The convenience of Government is no excuse for Government doing anything. We the People don’t exist to give Government something to do. Government works for us.

It’s time to thoroughly rein in the SEC, and a (not the) efficient way to do so is for Congress to cut the SEC’s budget to the bone, including reducing its payroll line item, until the SEC’s commissioners and staff straighten up or are replaced. And note that that payroll line item includes those commissioners’ pay.

An Argument for Patronage

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James Freeman described Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s move to strengthen bureaucracy’s and bureaucrats’ control over our Federal government. Citing a CNN report, Freeman wrote:

Betsy Klein and Tami Luhby report for CNN:

The Biden administration has finalized a new rule bolstering protections for career federal workers, marking a move to preemptively halt or significantly slow any efforts by former President Donald Trump, should he win in November, to reduce or alter the federal workforce.

No swamp-draining allowed! The new Biden rule from the Office of Personnel Management is intended to impede Mr. Trump if he wins the presidency again and revives an executive order he issued in October of 2020. The Trump order created the option of converting thousands of senior bureaucrats into at-will employees. The CNN team has more:

Trump’s executive order created a new classification of federal employees titled “Schedule F” for employees serving in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” that typically do not change during a presidential transition.

Why shouldn’t a duly elected president have the authority to hire and fire policymakers in his own administration?

Indeed. While it’s certainly true that one administration’s agency or departmental rules or a President’s Executive Orders can be undone by a subsequent administration, Biden is illustrating the need for a return to statutory patronage in the Federal government’s bureaucracy. Statutes, after all, while undoable by a subsequent Congress, are much harder to undo.

With a patronage modification, this: civil servants and bureaucrats are hired on five-year contracts. Those contracts then are renewed, or not, in five-year increments at the sole discretion of the then sitting President or relevant Department/Agency head. And this additional fillip: upon leaving Federal government employ, whether through resignation/retirement/termination or through simple non-renewal, that now ex-employee has his security clearance automatically withdrawn.

Government Influence over the Means of Production

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The Biden administration wants to control—put a leash on—the development of artificial intelligence software, in contrast with the Clinton administration’s hands-off approach to the development of the Internet. That’s the thrust of a Wall Street Journal Monday article.

The matter is far deeper and far broader than that. Biden’s move regarding AI is of a piece with his moves regarding ICE vs battery cars, solar and wind energy vs oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy, and on and on.

In truth, Biden isn’t the first in this; too many prior administrations of both parties, have wanted to…influence…what our private enterprises, especially those that make things, should or can produce—or not produce. The efforts to control range can be indirect—Obamacare’s nationalization of our health provision and health coverage industries, in addition to Biden’s moves—and they reach as far back as Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful effort to nationalize our railroad system, Woodrow Wilson’s and Harry Truman’s outright seizures of a variety of factories and factory systems, ultimately overturned by the courts, and they include prior administrations’ indirect moves of subsidies for some industries—”green” energy, for instance—and no subsidies or significantly smaller subsidies for competing industries.

The matter reaches as deeply and broadly as our tax code, which by design gives overt preference to some industries and de-prefers some other industries.

The Biden administration has only greatly accelerated this trend of government intrusion into the affairs of private enterprise.

This expanding government insistence that private enterprise can make whatever it wants in whatever amounts it wants so long as it has government approval (even if only tacit) to do so is textbook Fascism: private ownership of the means of production, government control of what gets produced and the amounts produced.