Tag Archives: government

Presidential Obstruction

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…by the President of the Congress, according to The Babylon Bee:

The suggestion that Trump obstructed Congress turned out to be a far more popular idea than Democrats had predicted.

But they closed with this:

At publishing time, Trump was looking for ways to obstruct both the judicial and executive branches, further increasing his popularity.

However, Trump already is obstructing the Judicial Branch. Look at all those evil, dysfunctional textualists he’s getting appointed to the district courts, appellate circuits, and Supreme Court. And it’s appearing increasingly possible that he’ll get one more obstructive Justice, too, to set back Roberts.

And, to hear denizens of the “interagency coordination” facility lionized by no less a light that Fiona “Quite Cross” Hill tell it, he’s busily obstructing the Executive Branch, as well.

I’m surprised the Bee missed this in their satire.

The FBI and Surveillance

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DoJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, has produced a report that’s pretty damning of the FBI and its surveillance practices.  This has raised concerns about how far the FBI goes, and whether it exceeds the spirit, even the letter, of our laws governing FBI surveillance.

Monday’s report…also faulted the bureau for its “failure to adhere to its own standards of accuracy and completeness when filing applications” to conduct electronic surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign staffer, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Privacy advocates said the report’s findings validated their belief that surveillance practices under the FISA law…lacked adequate oversight and transparency.

Indeed. And this is the crux of the matter.  I suspect that the FISA law and other of our government surveillance-related laws are adequate to their task (eliding questions about FISA’s courts). It’s the humans in charge of the FBI, and their subordinates, who are wanting in this.

It’s virtually certain that additional law, or tweakings of existing laws, will accomplishment a good approximation of nothing in redressing this.

I suggest that what is needed are a couple of things.  One is an increase in the severity of sanction applied to those FBI managers (I won’t call them leaders; failure here disqualifies them from that favorable label) who fail in their oversight duties and separately in their transparency duties.  This will produce improvement, but that will erode, just as we’ve reached our present sorry pass via erosion over the past several years. J Edgar Hoover and James Comey are merely the culmination of such erosion.

The other thing promises to produce more long-lasting results. FBI managers who are Presidentially nominated and Senate confirmed should be barred from any service, including pro bono and lobbying, within DoJ under any immediately subsequent administration; they can go work in the private sector instead. Their eligibility for DoJ employment could be restored with the election of the second President (not the next President reelected) after the one in whose administration they served.

This removal from employment should extend into and across the top tiers just below the confirmation positions, as well.

None of those folks will have necessarily done anything wrong or even untoward; it’s merely necessary to break up and terminate the accumulating power of incumbency and bureaucratic inertia.  Some might worry that too much corporate memory would be lost.  Such memory and history are valuable in any enterprise; however, in the case of the FBI, there will be sufficient value in the senior agents and remaining other senior employees. As well as from the non-FBI DoJ with its outside-looking-in perspective.

Impeachment

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The House Progressive-Democrats have settled on two Articles of Impeachment.

The first article is on abuse of power. Democrats allege that Mr Trump took advantage of his position as president to pressure Kyiv to investigate a political rival. The second article is on obstruction of Congress, related to the president’s moves to block aides from participating in the impeachment investigation.

In conjunction with this, The Wall Street Journal asked a question:

Do you think President Trump will be impeached in the House under these two articles?

Of course he will. It’s long since become politically impossible for the Progressive-Democrats to step back from this. They’re wholly committed; even stepping back to a vote of Censure, as some have suggested, would be a confession that they’ve just been engaged in a smear campaign.

Never mind that they insist, with straight faces, that it’s an impeachable offense for a President to move to defend himself against Congressional accusations, including this Congress’ empty ones.

Never mind that the Progressive-Democrats’ hearings, even as one-sided as they’ve constructed them to be, completely failed to reveal a shred of evidence of anything—only 2nd- and 3rd-hand, even some 4th-hand, hearsay and suppositions and presumptions.

And Fiona Hill’s being “quite cross” that she was being bypassed in foreign policy development vis-à-vis Ukraine.

And the Progressive-Democrats putting more stock in an ad hoc “interagency coordination group”—which has no existence in law or Executive Order—than it does in the policies of the person Constitutionally in charge of foreign policy.

The trial in the Senate will be interesting, and not only for the trial itself. It’ll be interesting to see whether Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA) will answer a summons to testify, or whether he’ll hide behind his (likely) role as prosecutor in that trial, just as he hid behind his role as House Intelligence Committee Chairman to refuse to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Senate does about Schiff’s likely refusal.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Senate handles its summons of the whistleblower and that one’s refusal to appear.

Short and Sweet

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I watched the Nadler burlesque show that’s masquerading as the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing yesterday so you didn’t have to.  Here is the short and sweet of it.

The three Progressive-Democrat law professor witnesses each opened their opening statements by saying President Donald Trump was guilty and should be impeached even before they knew the impeachment charges being preferred.  They couldn’t know the charges because the Judiciary Committee has not written the articles of impeachment. Indeed, the committee chairman, Jerry Nadler (D, NY) has refused—and he refused repeatedly during yesterday’s show—even to say when the next hearing would be held or what witnesses would be called.

Those three Progressive-Democrat law professor witnesses went further: they pronounced their guilty verdicts even before they expressed their opinions of what might constitute an impeachable offense.

Like any burlesque show, we know how this will end because the script and choreography have long been written.

Surveillance

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It turns out the People’s Republic of China government is a collection of pikers compared to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a pair of bills Monday, one of which will require all consumer electronic devices sold in the country to be pre-installed with Russian software, while the other will register individual journalists as foreign agents.

Government spyware pre-installed on Russian citizens’ devices, so Russia’s modern-day KGB successor can track where Russian citizens are, with whom they’re communicating, what they’re doing, down to the last detail.

Government spyware that will not only identify who is a journalist (Russia’s definition of “journalist”), but register them as foreign agents—right alongside diplomats, diplomat staff, foreign-declared agents of a diplomat staff, but without any of the protections of those diplomats and staffs.

PRC President Xi Jinping seems yet to have lots to learn from the Russians.