Daily Archives: 19 March 2013

The Obama Sequester in Action

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From Fox News:

The top US immigration enforcement official acknowledged Thursday that the Obama administration has in fact released thousands of illegal immigrants from local jails over the last month despite prior claims that the release was only in the hundreds.

The sequester clemency:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton, at a House appropriations subcommittee hearing, said the agency released a total of 2,228 illegal immigrants from local jails “throughout the country” between Feb. 9 and March 1 for “solely budgetary reasons.”

But DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano says she knew nothing of this.  Of course.  She’s Sgt Schultz.

Another Victory over Big Government

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Here’s the long and the short of it, as summarized in The Wall Street Journal:

A federal judge this week struck down a controversial set of laws allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seek people’s records without a court’s approval, saying the strict secrecy orders demanded by the laws are not constitutional.

US District Judge Susan Illston (Northern District of California) ordered the government to stop sending national security letters or to stop trying to enforce gag orders related to them, but she stayed her order pending the government’s appeal.

Of course, it’ll go to the 9th Circuit, which means it will go on to the Supreme Court, so the fight isn’t over.  But this is an excellent start.

Illston’s opinion decried these violations of Americans’ individual freedom:

[The] pervasive use of nondisclosure orders…creates too large a danger that speech is being unnecessarily restricted.

She added [emphasis added]:

[T]he statute impermissibly attempts to circumscribe a court’s ability to review the necessity of nondisclosure orders.  …the NSL nondisclosure provisions significantly infringe on speech regarding controversial government powers.  …  As written, the statute expressly limits a court’s powers to modify or set aside a nondisclosure order to [certain] situations….  The statute’s intent…is incompatible with the court’s duty to searchingly test restrictions on speech.

There are two problems with these letters.  One is that they allow searches without a court’s warrant.  The FBI can use them to search for phone data and for financial and electronic records, and all the FBI agent needs is his Field Office Special Agent in Charge to say it’s all jake.  This is a clear violation of our 4th Amendment.

The other problem worsens this exponentially: the FBI can require (or could before Illston’s ruling) the recipient of the letter to keep quiet about his receipt—denying the owner of the records any opportunity to respond to the search before it happens.  This also denies two critical aspects of the 1st Amendment: that right to speak of receipt and the duty of a court to adjudicate any allegation of a 1st Amendment violation.

Illston’s ruling can be read here.

Something about Missile Defense

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I won’t go into the older history of the Progressives’ vilification of President Ronald Reagan over his push for a missile defense, and I won’t mention then-Senator John Kerry’s (D, MA) denunciation of such a system as

a dream based on illusion, but one which could have real and terrible consequences[.]

But we do need to think about Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 promise to gut missile defense development programs and—in one of the few spending cuts to which Progressives have agreed in recent history—to cut spending on such things.

We do need to think about President Barack Obama’s betrayal of Poland and the Czech Republic when he cancelled agreements to deploy missile defense systems there on the basis of Russian demurral.

We do need to think about spending $2 billion to add a whole 14 interceptors to our existing de minimis system in this time of world-ending sequester.

We do need to think about Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s analysts justifying all of this:

Although American and South Korean intelligence officials doubt the North is close to being able to follow through on a nuclear strike, or that it would even try, given its almost certain destruction, analysts say the country’s aggressive behavior is an important and worrying sign of changing calculations in the North.

After all, this “analysis” comes in light of the Russians and the Iranians having or being allowed to achieve this capability, yet we withdraw missile defenses from European locations that could defend Israel and Europe.

We do need to think about DoD delaying deployment at additional sites, including the East Coast, in order to do an environmental study, first.

We do need to think about whether this administration has any sort of clue at all about a coherent national defense policy.

Congressman Mike Rogers (R, AL), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee, is saying

Four years ago, the Obama administration began to unilaterally disarm our defenses and deterrent in the hope our enemies would follow suit.  President Obama is finally realizing what President Reagan taught us 30 years ago—the best way to keep the peace is through strength.

But is he?  Or is all of this just the loud posturing of a paper tiger?  After all, Pentagon officials are dismissing Rogers’ criticism, insisting that northern Korean technology was considerably less developed four years ago.  Yet surely they know that Russia’s wasn’t, when Reagan’s missile defense efforts were so loudly pooh-poohed, and surely they know that Russian technology was 30 years improved when Obama acceded to Russian demands to cancel our missile defense plans in eastern Europe.

Hmm….