Radical Reform

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Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro wants our judges and Justices to be bound by popular assent instead of being bound by law.

I think we need radical reform that’s actually going to ensure that the voices of the people are heard from, that the voices of the people are represented in the three branches of government. We don’t have that right now.

Shapiro wants to pack the Supreme Court to address that, and Jonathan Turley was properly worried in his piece about Shapiro’s sharp turn to the extreme left with that remark.

I add this to that concern. This is another reason we can’t trust the Progressive-Democratic Party with control of our government. It has nothing to do with patriotism or integrity. It’s that so many Party politicians simply do not understand at all our Federal government or its structure.

Only two of the three branches of our government are intended to represent “the voices of the people,” those are the two political branches, and the granularity of that representation itself varies broadly across their elected roles. The politicians in our Congress’ House of Representatives represent, first, the voices of their district’s constituents, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation, since our Congress has national responsibilities as well as to its members’ districts. The politicians in Congress’ Senate represent, first, the voices of their State’s citizens, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation. The politicians in the White House, the President and Vice President, represent the voices of the citizens of our nation.

The judges and Justices of the third branch, though, represent no citizens’ voices. They represent our Constitution and the statutes that come before them and are bound by oath apply those laws without respect to persons and by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges to do so without fear or favor in order to facilitate the necessary political independence of our Judicial Branch and the judges and Justices within it.

Party politicians demanding that the judiciary represent the voices of the people is their demand for the subordination of judges and Justices to the vagaries of politics at the expense of their binding to law.

An Insight into Agility

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NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte isn’t stupid. He’s worried about how to absorb the increased military spending that some NATO members finally are doing and turning that money into modern hardware and men and women trained to employ them in combat.

He’s adept at a particular style of politics—that of sycophancy toward President Donald Trump (R), referring as he does to NATO’s increased spending as the “Trump Trillion.” That’s nothing but a recognition that it took Trump’s hard words and mean tweets to prod the nations into actually increasing their defense spending instead of perennially yapping about it.

Importantly, he stated out loud a critical insight into modern military preparedness. Regarding lessons available to be learned from Russia’s war on Ukraine, he had this, using drones as his example:

It’s not about producing drones, but having the production capacity to produce drones because the technology itself is constantly adapting and is changing every two or three weeks.

That production agility doesn’t only apply to drones or to weapons and weapons systems, though. It also applies to tactics, to campaign strategies, and to soldier, sailor, and airman training.

It requires, too, the political stones to support those agilities. And that requires NATO’s member nations to understand that parochiality inhibits, possibly fatally, any chance for success in any war against an experienced NATO enemy.

Countries seeking to protect domestic companies are…duplicating efforts, such as building too many different types of armored vehicles. That kind of fragmentation is inefficient. It also means less cash for things such as air defense and deep-strike missiles.
Large systems that need to integrate armed forces across the continent, like intelligence, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities, could also be at risk of losing out.

It also leads to the outright failure of nominally agreed joint weapons programs. In the latest case, France, Germany, and Spain spent the last eight years arguing over their defense companies’ priorities for producing a joint fighter, the core pillar of Europe’s largest ⁠defence project. That parochialism led, finally, to complete failure to produce anything.

The leaders of Germany and France have agreed to scrap a landmark project to ​develop and build a new-generation fighter jet, officials said on Monday, bowing to industrial rivalries over Europe’s most ambitious defence programme.

It’s on the military and its political masters alone, though, to develop and deliver the means of protecting the logistic lines of communication. It doesn’t matter how well trained and dedicated are the personnel or how combat capable the equipment if they and the consumables they need—food and fuel—cannot be delivered to the front. Private enterprise can’t build any of that without the military’s clear specifications and the politicians to override nationalist parochialism and to provide the funds for the development and production—and the fortitude to monitor and call out, with stern sanctions, failures to perform, whether politicians or favored companies.

NATO still is less of an alliance than it is a committee of rivals. Correcting that would be Rutte’s next project, if he can last long enough.

Eroding Foundational Checks and Balances

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Greg Ip is worried that the checks and balances built into our Federal government by our Constitution are rapidly eroding due to President Donald Trump’s (R) unilateral actions. He’s badly mistaken. The erosion began long ago, and it accelerated starting in 2008. Trump has been resisting the erosion, for all the discomfort he’s causing a Leftist press too used to and too comfortable with that washing away.

FDR then tried to pack the Supreme Court; his own party revolted.

Ip ignored the rest of that story and its impact. Roosevelt didn’t get the additional Justices he wanted, but by 1943, he’d succeeded in getting appointed to the Court 8 Justices of his choice ou of the 9 comprising the Court. Our nation has been paying the price of that ever since, from Wickard which increased Federal economic power at the direct expense of the States, through Kelo, which increased Federal power at the direct expense of individual citizens and our property rights, and Chevron deference, which increased the power of Executive Branch agencies at the direct expense of both Congress and the President.

Shortly after taking office, he [Trump] fired the Democratic members of several independent agencies, including the FTC, effectively transforming them into executive departments.

On the contrary, this was Trump executing his constitutional authority as the head of the Executive Branch, and exercising his control over all of the Agencies and Departments of the Executive Branch. The Supreme Court, only recently restored to a body that adheres to what our Constitution actually says rather than what a Liberal, Roosevelt-esque-dominated Court want it to say, acknowledged that constitutional authority. The erosion here is from Congress, with its creation of an “independent” Federal Trade Commission in 1914 and subsequent further “independent” Agency creations. These creations were Congress’ unconstitutional attempt to create a fourth Branch of government by masquerading these creations as part of the Executive Branch.

The Supreme Court also took a step toward restoring Constitutional order in our Federal government by—finally—eliminating the knee-jerk deference to those so-called independent Agencies, and others properly constituted as subordinate to the President, when it rescinded that misbegotten Chevron deference and emphasized the importance of and constitutional requirement that Congress do its own legislative work, work it cannot pass off to those Agencies.

Regarding Trump’s unilaterality in particular, in one sense, he’s only following the examples set by ex-President Barack Obama (D), who infamously bragged about—and used—his pen and telephone to ignore or override Congress, and ex-President Joe Biden (D) who ignored so many of our nation’s laws in his attempt to virtually erase our southern border.

That unilaterality also is being reined in by a constitution-supporting and -applying Court. Trump can fire those Agency personnel. His unilateral application of taxing, via tariffs, has been severely curtailed. His efforts to cancel already-committed Federal grants have been successfully blocked.

Other of his unilateral actions, though, actually are moves back toward Constitutional order. His moves to greatly reduce Department of Education employment and to closely circumscribe DoEd authorities are aimed at getting rid of the Department altogether. This would be entirely appropriate, since the Department is a relatively recent Congressional creation done at the direct expense of the States, taking as it does, control over the education of our nation’s children away from the States, and in many ways away from the parents, and centralizing that control within the Federal government.

The erosion of our government’s checks and balances has been vast, but it’s not only due to a President overstepping his authorities or deliberately ignoring his duties. It’s also been due to Congress shirking its legislative duties and to a Court ignoring its own duties. At present, though, it appears as though the erosion is being slowed, and an increasing move back toward order is in progress.

Who’s Responsible for Corporate Security?

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The headline raised the question:

Wars Are Blurring Lines Between Corporate and National Security

The article dealt primarily with physical security of critical items and areas, and it touched on cyber security. There are other areas, though, where responsibility among corporate management teams, police forces, and government, whether military or civilian agencies need to be sorted out.

There’s the question of supply chain security, an enemy nation embargoing Critical Items in the supply chain of a nation’s important corporation, whether that corporation is economically important or is an important defense establishment supplier. Even here, the responsibility is mixed. It’s on the military to defeat the embargo (and the political leadership to engage in the related diplomatic engagements while giving the military the tools with which to act). It’s on the corporate management, though, to adjust its supply chain to eliminate the embargo and to do anticipate other high-risk dependencies and make the adjustments necessary to preempt those dependencies. Where the dependency can be eliminated through domestic production, vis., of raw materials, it’s on the nation’s political leadership to remove regulatory and other roadblocks so that domestic production can be done.

There’s also the question of cyber security. Here, a breach of a corporation’s cyber security should be taken as evidence, though not of proof, of corporate management’s criminal negligence. This sort of thing is too obvious an area of weakness for corporate managers to miss or to decline to commit the resources either to block proactively, or to fight and repair successfully and promptly a breach. Here, also, it’s on those managers to make public the breach, what was affected, and who was affected, in fine to spread the word for the benefit of others.

Adding to the complexity, companies now need to protect the data networks that serve as gateways to critical infrastructure. Hackers increasingly target not just computer files to steal information but also systems managing vital functions like building access and factory control, remotely causing physical damage or enabling espionage.

To which I add: vital functions of communications and financial systems, inserting sleeper malware, to be triggered during a crisis or in association with a direct attack to shut down critical nodes in those systems’ infrastructure and erase the data in financial systems, as well inserting the sleeperware into water distribution, national electricity grids, fuel pipelines, with a view to shutting those down or causing their catastrophic failure.

Addressing the question of primary responsibility, Marc Glasser, ex-DHS Chief of Chemical Security US Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security:

The private owner can invest in redundancy, monitoring, and repair capacity, but only governments and militaries can really deter, patrol, attribute, or respond to hostile state activity[.]

Not entirely. That’s all true as far as it goes, but it only goes to reactivity. It’s the responsibility of corporate managers, military leadership, and politicians to act proactively in their spheres to anticipate and move to protect avenues of attack and to block attack attempts.

The Pope’s Error

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Pope Leo XIV, sitting on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa decried the fate of folks who made it that far and others who did not as they left their home countries, mostly in Africa, looking for a better life in Europe.

There are also those who choose not to be a neighbor and those who choose not to make a decision. Those who have lost their lives in this sea are victims both of decisions that were made and of decisions that were not made. Indifference to the common good and corruption in their countries of origin; a global economic system that generates poverty and exclusion; fear that fuels prejudice and contempt; the belief that such problems do not concern us; the criminal calculations of those who profit from the suffering of others; the slow and difficult transition from mere emergency management to the development of comprehensive and shared policies[.]

No. The problem here is not that the European nations are not accepting all of these folks, nor is it that they are beginning actively to block their entry. The correct answer is for Europe to leave off its [i]ndifference to the common good and corruption in their countries of origin and devote the resources those nations are misallocating ins to supporting those folks making it to Europe and to blocking further flows, instead to working the source: the criminal natures of the home countries so those folks don’t feel the need to try to leave.

The Pope sort of recognized this, but with badly misplaced emphasis.

Thanks to its geographical location and institutional framework, Europe is capable of addressing the crisis, in this region, in a comprehensive manner, integrating immediate relief efforts into a long-term strategic plan capable of receiving, protecting, supporting and integrating migrants, while at the same time assisting developing countries so that no one is forced to emigrate.

The Pope further muddles his argument with his insistent conflation of migrants with illegal aliens, which is what most of those making to Europe are and most of those getting to Lampedusa, and other waypoints, want to become.

That geographic location does place Europe conveniently close to the source, but it should be committing those resources exclusively to assisting developing countries so that no one is forced to emigrate. Half measures don’t accomplish anything other than waste and lost opportunity.

Then there could be fruitful trade between those nations and the nations of Europe, and that would potentiate the benefits for those then-erstwhile home nations and their populations as well as work to the economic—and moral—benefit of Europe.