Not “Back to Other Agencies”

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are dismayed that an intel naif like Bill Pulte has been designated the Acting Director of National Intelligence. They go farther and want the whole office of the DNI eliminated altogether. I’ll not go into Pulte’s qualifications, or lack, for the position; my disagreement with the disposition of the office.

Its first director, John Negroponte, quickly hired hundreds of people who duplicated the job of the analytical side of the CIA. It’s now a vast political bureaucracy.

The editors are correct in this criticism.

However.

From the editors’ penultimate paragraph:

In a better world, Congress would use Mr. Pulte’s appointment to eliminate the DNI and send its staff back to other agencies.

No, if that staff really is redundant (and the vast bulk of them are), that better world would see the large excess returned to the private sector, rather than reallocated elsewhere in the government, inflicting their unneeded employment on other agencies.

Better yet would be for Congress to amend the legislation creating the Office of DNI: cap the total number of employees, volunteers, staff on loan to the DNI, and political appointees, Senate confirmable or not, at some low number like 100 and no more. In conjunction with this, explicitly limit the ODNI DOC to coordination among the other intelligence agencies, facilitating communications among them, and the like. Explicitly bar ODNI from doing its own intelligence gathering or fact checking of other agencies’ data, and the like. Give the DNI some teeth: his instruction for an agency to share these data, unredacted, in toto, and immediately, with that (or those) other agency(s) should be directive, not suggestive, with bureaucrats stalling, slow-walking, or outright refusing, being a fireable offence on the DNI’s authority, with the President strongly encouraged to fire the obstructing political appointees.

But as the editors alluded with their own proposal, that’s in an ideal world. We live in a Congressional world, instead.

At It Again

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Section 702 of FISA is up for renewal, and President Donald Trump (R) has nominated Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte for DNI after the incumbent Tulsi Gabbard announced her resignation to be with her husband, who’s been diagnosed with cancer.

Progressive-Democrats, obstructionist Never Trump-No To Republicans to the core, are saying they’ll block Pulte’s confirmation unless they get what they want in FISA’s renewal legislation.

Regardless of what we might think about FISA and its Star Chamber court or of Pulte’s fitness for DNI, it’s time for Republicans to locate their spine, recovery a measure of unity, and use their majority to simply ignore these Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and move ahead. Who will become DNI has nothing to do with whether FISA should be renewed. This is just Party attempting to extort their way into control.

How Dare They?

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The Supreme Court overruled a district court three judge panel and allowed Alabama to proceed with a prior Congressional district map that’s skewed 6-1 toward Republican House representatives instead of that lower court’s mandated newly created map that skewed 5-2 for Republicans. This ruling came in the aftermath of the Court’s prior Callais ruling that held that racial gerrymandering was no longer allowed.

Progressive-Democrats are in their usual uproar.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election. … Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians.”
The President Barack Obama-appointed justice also wrote that the high-court’s conservative majority “chooses the second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”

And

In a public statement, [Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Terri Sewell (AL)] called it a decision allowing Alabama to use its “racist congressional map” for the midterms, expressing frustration over the reversal of prior efforts to create additional majority-minority districts.

My irony meter is pegged, and my hypocrisy warning light is flashing. There’s nothing more racist than demanding some Americans be segregated into a separate voting district, explicitly as Sotomayor, et al., and Sewell are demanding for the protection of those singled-out Americans. How hypocritical that the politician is objecting to the possibility of losing a Congressional seat that belongs to her.

How dare those impudent Justices insist on acting on what our Constitution and the Voting Rights Act actually say instead of what those Progressive-Democrats and their subordinate activist Justices want them to say?

Duplicity and Mistaken Imperative

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There was a ceasefire agreed between Iran and the US and Israel in the recent US-Israeli conflict against Iran aimed at preventing the latter from acquiring nuclear weapons. Then, amid skirmishing during this ceasefire, which remains in official effect, Iran showed its duplicity by welching on the terms of the ceasefire by insisting, de novo, that Israel’s conflict with Iran’s terrorist satrap Hezbollah, operating in Lebanon, was actually a part of that ceasefire agreement.

That conflict is a separate matter between Israel and Hezbollah, and never has been a part of the ceasefire. Iran’s insistence that it is is Iran’s confession that Hezbollah is an instrument of Iran’s terrorist government, and that lately insistence is a demonstration (as if another one is needed) of the Iran government’s duplicity and intrinsic untrustworthiness.

President Donald Trump (R) has long made clear his abhorrence of war, with its broad destruction and civilian casualty rate. The conflicts Trump has fought despite that abhorrence are emblematic of that, with their brevity, sharpness, and precision, which have vastly limited civilian casualties, including during the current conflict with Iran. In this latter case, sharpness and precision have limited destruction to Iran’s nuclear weapons development-associated facilities and military facilities and personnel. Civilian damage, damage to civilian infrastructure has been remarkably constrained.

Therein lies Trump’s mistaken imperative. In his desire to bring a diplomatic end to the conflict with Iran, he is overemphasizing his abhorrence for death and destruction by acceding to Iran’s insistence that Israel’s separate conflict with Hezbollah be included in any ceasefire agreement: Israel must end its conflict with Hezbollah. Trump pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into agreeing that separate ceasefire.

This is a broad mistake, and it will lead only to a prolongation of both conflicts with concomitant increased death and destruction. The better answer would have been (and still could be) to require Iran and Hezbollah work a separate peace with Israel and to resume full out attacks on Iran, this time with a view to destroying its ability to fight at all, with the conflict continuing in full force until Iran’s government men and women agree to forswear in a provable way its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, including an official statement acknowledging that the Strait is international waters and that Iran has no ambition to control it.

“Bound to Add Upward Pressure”

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An American Enterprise Institute letter-writer wrote in Monday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal about his concerns regarding David Malpass’ view that the Federal Reserve needs to seriously set about reducing its balance sheet.

With the budget deficit projected at about $2 trillion a year and with foreign investors seeming to be losing their appetite for US Treasury bonds, any attempt by the Fed to reduce its balance sheet size today is bound to add upward pressure to long-term interest rates.

This, despite his stated position in his immediately prior paragraph that

David Malpass is certainly correct to argue that Fed balance sheet reduction is a worthy monetary policy objective[.]

If not now, though, then when? There’ll always be an excuse for today to put off the shrinkage until later, but there’ll always be some Next Big Thing coming up later that wants more delay. The letter-writer headlined his missive with the position that the Fed needs to take a long view in its determination of when to shrink its sheets.

It’s just barely possible, though, that the new Director has just that perspective. The longer the balance sheet reduction is delayed, the more expensive and disruptive to our economy that reduction will be when it is put into action. It’s the suboptimal short-term view to wait until later to begin for today’s convenience.

No, either way, short-term upward pressure will be added to interest rates. Better to grunt through that disruption now, before it gets really expensive.