Category Archives: ethics

Impeachments

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) having successfully led her caucus into a strictly partisan (tribal, in Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s (D, HI) words), impeachment, she now has said she’ll withhold her Articles of Impeachment until she gets her way on how the Senate will conduct its trial (and because she understands her caucus has no case to present for trial).

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), working in concert with his BFF in the House, is demanding that the Senate call additional witnesses, confessing thereby that the House Progressive-Democrat caucus has not produced sufficient evidence to make its case.

Both are wrong, though.  This is not an Article III or State criminal trial proceeding; it’s a Federal Legislative Branch Impeachment proceeding.  The House investigates and develops the relevant facts.  The Senate conducts a trial based on those facts.

We are not Medieval England where the judges conduct their own investigation.

Even Pelosi and Schumer should understand that.

Xi, Lam, and Hong Kong

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam met in Beijing with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang earlier this week.  Li said, in a press conference afterward,

The city’s government must continue to make efforts in stopping violence and ending chaos in accordance with the law, and restore order.

On this, I agree.  Lam must have her police stand down from provoking violence in the protests by Hong Kong’s citizens and then using that violence as pretext for shooting tear gas at the protesters, beating them, and shooting them with live ammunition.

Lam must also have her government address in a serious manner—accepting the bulk of them, if not all—the five demands of the protestors:

  • withdrawal the extradition bill [lately done; although nothing has been done to prevent its being reintroduced]
  • Lam to step down
  • inquiry into police brutality
  • release of those arrested
  • greater democratic freedom

To which I add a sixth, a responsibility of the PRC press as well as of Lam’s Hong Kong government and of Xi’s PRC government:

  • To stop characterizing the protesters’ movement as an independence movement

It’s nothing of the sort. The protestors have been at pains to emphasize that they explicitly do not desire independence from the PRC; they want only their rights restored under the one nation, two systems framework promised by the PRC government at the time of handover from Great Britain.

When Lam has her government act responsibly, there can be a just peace and prosperous economic activity in Hong Kong.

The initiative is entirely hers. And Xi’s.

Congressional Supremacy

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Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (D, MI) was asked by Bill Hemmer on his Fox News show Friday morning after the Nadler Committee voted to send Articles of Impeachment to the House how she would vote on those Articles.

Slotkin led off by making a big deal about her CIA training (in objective analysis), then assuring us all that she would not vote based on polls, she would not be pushed one way or another, she would not vote based on newspaper articles.  No, she would vote on her gut and on what she thought was right.

Not one word, not one syllable, not a single minim of voting the way her constituents—her employers—instruct her to vote.  She hasn’t even asked her employers for their instruction.  She’s been elected, now it’s too Hell with her bosses.

Parliamentary Supremacy is alive and well in the Progressive-Democratic Party in the House.

And that stinks.

Culture and Compromise

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The subheadline of a Federalist article about the Boris Johnson/Tories election just concluded in Great Britain caught my eye. Read the whole article; it’s valuable in its entirety.

It is far easier for the right to compromise on economics than for the left to compromise on culture, religion, and nationalism. And that is the formula conservatives need to remember.

We’ve seen this in our nation, too: the Left’s and its Progressive-Democratic Party’s constant drumbeat of attacks against the right of particular, disapproved-of Americans to practice their religion and attacks on our nation, demanding, instead that we subordinate ourselves to internationalism, wherein we lose control of our own lives.  Understand: these sorts of things are unique to our nation. No other nation in the world has a written-down Constitution that says in so many words—opens with the words—that We the People are sovereign in our nation. Not Government, not any arm of Government, we citizens. Government works for us.

We’ve seen also the refusal of Progressive-Democrats to compromise, even to try, with Republicans. The Republican Party is just a Trumpian personality cult, they say.  Supporters of Trump are racists, now including Conservatives.  Blacks who support Trump are, to use more polite terms, Uncle Toms or oreos.  Women who support Trump are, at best, voting against their interest, and at worst, as was said about a Republican woman candidate for Vice President, she should be gang-raped by blacks and then shat in her mouth.  Americans, generally, are just bitter Bible- and gun-clingers, ignorant, racist, and misogynistic.  The Left and Party are in open warfare against our American culture.

In contrast, an ability to compromise on matters of economics, what those of the Right, the Republican Party and Conservatives in general are willing and able to do is a far more successful method, and it’s far more protective of American culture: economics is near, if not at, the center of culture.

It’s how businessmen of a particular religion live their business lives while still doing business with customers of differing religious tenets, or no such tenets at all.  It’s how businessmen protect their rights to speak openly and freely by not selling a product with a particular message to customers demanding that message, and this freedom is especially protected by American free markets: there will be another business just down the block willing to sell the same article with the customer-desired message.

Free market economics is how we interact with each other within the framework of culture.  And the freedom of our market is how we find compromise among each other.  And that preserves our American culture.

The fundamental difference in Western politics now is cultural, and is between Westphalian sovereignty and unifying nationalism on one hand, and complete individualist internationalism and rule by technocratic institutions on the other.

Indeed, in American politics in particular, as well as the British politics of which Sumantra Maitra was writing at the link. And one is preservative of our culture, our way of life, our central ethos, while the other is overtly, carefully considered destruction of all of that.

Voting Rights

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On the whole, convicted felons lose their right to cast votes in our elections for the rest of their lives. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) wants to restore this right to nonviolent felons.

It’s been a truism in our American jurisprudence and our American society that when a miscreant—a felon in the present case—has paid his debt to society (nominally including a measure of “make whole” his immediate victim), he should be allowed to start over, reenter society, and try to live honorably and on his own efforts rather than continuing to be dependent on society, a dependence begun with his dependence on our prison system for his existence as well as for his punishment.

Now, some crimes want a lifetime punishment, and a few demand the criminal’s life in compensation to society and to the victim.  Most crimes, though, have punishments that society has determined to be sufficient at a smaller price than the criminal’s life or life span.  These crimes are identifiable by their finite jail terms with parole following after release or by their having been suspended on the criminal’s good behavior during the period of suspension.

Many of those short-of-life crimes are violent crimes; Beshear wants to limit his action to non-violent crimes.

In principle, I agree with that.  When a man’s debt has been paid, his bill should be so marked, including with additional detriments, like a fundamental right of citizenship—voting—also lifted.  But we need to be careful with the definition of “non-violent.”  I suggest that a con job is non-violent, or a burglary of an unoccupied building.  I suggest, though, that dealing drugs is not at all non-violent, even if no guns are used: it destroys lives.  Drug dealing has no merely temporary effects.  I suggest, further, that identity theft, for all that no guns may have been involved, is far from non-violent.  Identity theft can destroy a life as thoroughly as drugs: it takes financial resources necessary for the victim’s present life and his future life.

Again, I agree, in principle, with the concept of restoring a citizen’s right to vote to a felon whose crime was non-violent and who has completed his sentence in every respect, including restitution.  But we need to know the details of Beshear’s specific proposal before we can agree that he’s on the right track.