Category Archives: ethics

Chicago Police Management Confesses

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When ICE agents last week, in the course of their duties were rammed in their vehicles and then trapped and surrounded by 10 violent protesters’ vehicles—violent not least because ICE agents, in the course of this incident, were forced to shoot an armed woman who was threatening them—called the Chicago PD for assistance, the Chicago PD Chief of Patrol ordered his officers to decline to respond with assistance.

Now that city police management team is responding, sort of. The management team’s statement, released over the weekend:

To clarify misinformation currently circulating, CPD officers did in fact respond to the shooting scene involving federal authorities on Saturday to maintain public safety and traffic control[.]

This is management’s confession of their refusal to let the officers render assistance in that lethally dangerous situation. Management ordered its officers to maintain public safety and control the traffic. Not to affirmatively assist the ICE agents—which would have maximized public safety and flowed traffic much better.

Whose Shutdown Is It?

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The Progressive-Democrats in the Senate—nearly all of them, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY)—have closed the Federal government over their demands to get their minority party way entirely. Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA), as cited by The Wall Street Journal,

said he could vote for a spending bill with a promise to extend the ACA subsidies later, provided that he could get a commitment from the White House to impose a moratorium on firings and spending cuts.

So much for Party’s blather about demanding negotiations on the subsidies as a condition of reopening the government. Now, it’s Party demanding an outright guarantee of the extension, no negotiation at all.

So much, too, for any possibility of the Progressive-Democratic Party ever being interested in cutting spending, only constant increases.

Senator Angus King (I, ME) made even more explicit who is responsible for closing the government:

the vote’s result (Friday’s Senate vote on the House-passed clean CR) “demonstrated that a vague promise about conversations about the ACA isn’t going to be enough to induce my colleagues to end the shutdown.”

This is King’s acknowledgment that it’s Party that has shut the government, and it’s Party that insists on keeping the government shut. With their determined closure, it’s Party that’s harming ordinary Americans with their cutoff of project funding that leads to private sector jobs being HIAed, even as Party bleats that it’s Republicans who are responsible.

Party ignores the fact that the Republicans in the House, despite Party’s best efforts, passed a clean Continuing Resolution—no pork for either party, just funding for seven weeks of government operations—and sent it to the Senate. It’s Party in the Senate that is demanding a Christmas tree worth of Party pork be added to the CR or they’ll leave the government closed, those projects unfunded, and those jobs HIAed.

Lower Court Obstructionism

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In a legal environment in which Federal district court judges routinely block President Donald Trump’s (R) initiatives and the Supreme Court, via Trump emergency appeals, overrule those judges (and the occasional appellate court ruling) more often than those lower court judges deem appropriate, we’re seeing increasing whining from those lower court judges: they’re getting quite cross over not being listened to, all the while pretending not to understand the Supreme Court’s stays of these lower court blocks while the underlying case works its way through the legal system. As The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer put it,

The court, has given Trump much of what he has asked for so far, but the brevity of its orders has flummoxed judges who say there is no way to interpret them.

This is the measure of the lower courts’ defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court lifts the stays explicitly to let the underlying cases concerning the Trump initiatives proceed pending a final judgment. Often, appellate courts and district court judges, in lifting a stay or HIAing one, will say they’re doing so because they think the relevant party to the litigation is likely to prevail in the underlying case. The Supreme Court cannot say such things without prejudicing its eventual ruling in the case while it’s before those lower courts. The Court does say, often but not always, that it’s staying a case while the case wends its way. Even in those cases where the Court does not say, though, that much is clear to anyone reading with objective eyes.

These district (and appellate) judges know that.

Here’s an example of lower court defiance in the judge’s attempts at obstruction:

“Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system,” Gorsuch wrote.
US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts fired back at Gorsuch a couple of weeks later when she ruled the administration’s cuts to Harvard’s research funding were unconstitutional. In a footnote, Burroughs said it was “unhelpful and unnecessary” to criticize judges for defying the Supreme Court “when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”

What part of set that precedent aside is unclear to this judge? If it appears to her to be set aside, then from her perspective it is set aside. Is Burroughs really insisting she’s unable to follow a simple ruling without having in hand a long, detailed dissertation on why the ruling exists and why she must follow it? Would that ruling need to be written in words of one syllable or less? If so, she needs to find another line of work where her bosses have the time and inclination to hold her hand every step of the way.

On the other hand, it sounds like this judge is letting her disdain for Trump lead her to disrespect for and defiance of the Supreme Court. In that case, too, she needs to find another line of work, maybe with Bill Kristol.

New York Post Does the Same

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The New York Post condemned Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, over his refusal to condemn Hamas, the terrorist organization that invaded Israel two years ago, butchering Israeli women and children, raping Israeli women, and seizing hundreds of hostages, many of whom have been killed in captivity and many more of whom still are held by the terrorists.

The condemnation is entirely appropriate.

However, the NYP then proceeded to commit the same offense in the second paragraph of its article:

Mamdani stopped short of condemning the militant group after Netanyahu used his defiant address to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday to declare that Israel must “finish the job” in its war against Hamas.

No. Hamas is not a militant group. Far from it. Hamas is a terrorist organization through and through. I would have thought the NYP‘s publisher, if not its editors, knew better than this. Apparently, I’m too optimistic.

Should We Forgive Barry Bonds?

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That’s the lead-off question The Free Press asked in its Wednesday piece. The article then just beat around the bush on the matter while spilling endless pixels on the marketability of Bonds memorabilia and those of other disgraced baseball players, and on other baseball players alleged (with greater or lesser amounts of supporting data) to have cheated. But Bonds did cheat—he used performance enhancing drugs.

So: should we forgive Barry Bonds? Of course; we should have done so a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean we should forget his cheating. That cheating was of a magnitude—increasing, for instance the number of hits and the number of homeruns he would have gotten absence his PED use—that he has been, and rightly should continue to be, barred from baseball’s Hall of Fame. The stats he accrued from his PED use overshadowed other, honest, players and deprived them of their leading stats.

That some other players similarly cheated, or seriously violated other baseball rules (viz., betting on baseball games) in no way absolves Bonds. The existence of those other cheats and baseball’s spotty record regarding them only point up baseball’s atrociously inconsistent enforcement of its own rules.

And: just to drive home the point, forgiving is not the same as forgetting, and it’s long past time to stop conflating the two.