Category Archives: ethics

Suing Government Officials

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As part of the Reopen Government Act passed by the Senate, then by the House, and signed into law by the President, Senate Republicans had slipped in a provision allowing Senators to sue…the government…over having had their cell phone records secretly collected by Federal government Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was pretending to investigate the January 6 Capitol Hill riot participants.

Notably, the bill explicitly strips federal officials of qualified immunity—a legal doctrine that has long shielded government agents from personal liability even in cases of egregious constitutional violations.

Aside from the fact that a successful suit by a Senator would result in us taxpayers paying the judgement rather than the government officials who did the deed, it would exclude House members, and worse, us average Americans from that capacity.

There’s an alternative to that that would be more far-reaching than just rescinding the Senate’s amendment.

Contrast this with the fate of the Bivens Act of 2024, a modest bill that would have amended America’s premier civil-rights statute. Under Section 1983 of the US Code, Americans can sue state and local officials for constitutional violations, but federal officials are virtually untouchable. The Bivens Act would change that, while still keeping qualified immunity as a defense. The bill sought to codify a cause of action that the Supreme Court has steadily eroded over the past two decades. It died in committee without a vote.

The House needs to revisit the Bivens Act and include it in their rescission bill.

And go a step further.

Qualified immunity for government officials is a highly useful judicial doctrine (not statute) which protects those persons from a plethora of frivolous suits. But the bar is too high, allowing some constitutionally miscreanting officials to skate on otherwise egregious behavior. An additional move that would mitigate this would be to change the onus from requiring the plaintiff to prove why qualified immunity should not apply in his case to requiring the defendant to prove why it should. And an additional step, which would mitigate all those suits that would turn on that proof: the loser of the case over whether qualified immunity should apply, must pay the winner all legal costs involved.

Be Still, my Heart

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Visa and Mastercard, two of the largest credit card issuers, may be reaching a deal with merchants over fees charged merchants. This could settle a dispute that’s gone on for two decades.

Under terms being discussed, Visa and Mastercard would lower credit-card interchange fees, which are often between 2% and 2.5%, by an average of around 0.1 percentage point over several years[.]

A whole tenth of a percentage point. That miniscule fraction adds up, some, over many years, for the card issuers, but it does nothing for the individual merchant—or the merchant chain.

To put that magnanimity in perspective, imagine an investor—one of those merchants, perhaps—investing in an instrument that grows at 0.1% per year.

Were he to start with a $10,000 investment, after 10 years, his pile will have grown to $10,100.451.001. After 20 years, the duration of the current dispute, he would have a $10,201.91 golden egg.

Be still, my heart. With friends like this in the merchants’ world, I’ll continue to do business, as much as possible and especially with local mom-and-pops, in cash, which lets the merchant keep all of the money I’m paying for his good or service.

Interesting Idea

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This one from President Donald Trump (R), who has one on occasion.

I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over[.]

The idea wants study to identify any hidden implications, good or bad. It also wants a couple of criteria attached. One is a means test for eligibility for the payments. The Federal Poverty Guidelines do a good job of locating the threshold for poverty. Anyone or any family with income above the poverty guideline is, by definition, not living in poverty, and so should be ineligible.

The other criterion is a sunset clause. The subsidies, even as direct payments to the individuals, should have a hard expiration date beyond which they end, irrevocably (or as nearly so as a Congress can make a statute, which frankly isn’t much). The duration of the payments should be only long enough to allow the individual and family make their own budgetary adjustments, plus what might be called an engineering slop cushion—perhaps six months.

All in all, though, this is a good initial consideration.

Whose Inheritance Is It?

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A son wrote to The Moneyist, worried that because he makes so much more than his siblings and freely lives like it he’ll be cut out of his parents’ will. He closed his letter with this paragraph, and Quentin Fottrell seems to have made a meal out the distraction contained in it, instead of giving the short and sweet answer that the question needed.

My siblings don’t make nearly as much as me. They’d say I’m crass or rude for saying that. I’m concerned that my parents are going to strike me from any will/inheritance. If siblings earn different amounts, should that be the primary driver for how much they should get?

Fottrell opened with most of the right answer.

Your parents can divide their estate as they see fit.

Unfortunately, he went on to talk about siblings being differentially poorly- (or well-) off, and so the lesser well-off can receive a larger slice of their parents’ pie. He then proceeded to suggest, over several paragraphs, that the letter-writer’s arrogance and self-importance could well play a role in any parental inheritance decision. Never mind that Fottrell had no evidence in the letter that that played a role, although the letter-writer seems to have made no effort to hide his financial success under a bushel.

Fottrell would have done well to end his response with that opening sentence. He would have done better to add this short bit to that opening: the estate, the inheritance, is the parents’ money and assets and no one else’s. It’s their property to do with as they see fit, and no one else has any claim on it, whether child, parental sibling, or stranger. Parents have no intrinsic duty to leave their money, their assets, to anyone in particular, and they can leave it to no one at all and let the State sort it out.

Full stop.

“The Path Forward”

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Progressive-Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) is insisting that Republicans are to blame for the ongoing government shutdown.

Republican leadership chose a path they knew would lead to a government shutdown and so far have refused to negotiate a bipartisan deal that would address the healthcare crisis, and find a path forward to reopen the government.

In fact, the Progressive-Democrats guaranteed the shutdown from the start, as confirmed ex post facto, with the House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D, MA) bragging that suffering families are the Progressive-Democrats’ leverage, Rhode Island Progressive-Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse saying the shutdown is “the only lever we have,” and Schumer bragging that the longer the shutdown continues, the better it is for Democrats.

The Progressive-Democrats claim that they want to negotiate Obamacare subsidy extensions as a condition to their voting to reopen the government. However, it’s their intransigence that’s preventing those discussions from occurring, as they know full well.

The path forward is pretty straightforward. To paraphrase someone, the path forward to reopen the government is to vote to reopen the government. The Republicans have done that. The Progressive-Democrats refuse to do that.