Category Archives: ethics

Another Miss

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This time by The Wall Street Journal.  In an op-ed about the coward’s piece in The New York Times (if that individual actually exists, otherwise it’s the cowardice of the NYT editorial staff), the WSJ closed with this remark.

The tragedy of this Presidency is that his rants and insults—even toward people who work for him—threaten to overwhelm his policy achievements.

This is true only because the persons of the press choose to enable that. It’s their conscious editorial choice to give emphasis to President Donald Trump’s rants and insults over his policy efforts and achievements. It’s their carefully deliberated editorial choice to give primacy to form over substance.

Unitary Executive

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Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that held hearings last week on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, had an op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that opened with this.

Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. He’s been declared an existential threat to the nation.

He’s also accused of favoring a unitary Executive and thereby ceding dangerously broad power to the President.

What the accusers carefully ignore is that it’s Congress that has so broadly expanded the power of a unitary Executive, while eliding the fact that our Constitution’s Article II created the unitary Executive in the first place.  It is, after all, Congress that has created all of the Agencies and Cabinet Departments that are in the Executive Branch.  It is Congress that has delegated all the power to those facilities by ceding to them rule-making authority.  All the Executive can do is hire and fire the facilities’ management teams–the only check he has on an overreaching Congress and its abuse of power.

Mind Your Place

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Ken Harrelson, a broadcaster for Chicago’s White Sox baseball team and himself a some-time baseball player, thinks basketball player LeBron James should just shut up and play.

Well I used to watch LeBron [James] but no more. I wish these guys would keep their nose out of politics and just play because people didn’t come to hear their opinions on politicians[.]

Because everyone should just mind his place.

This stinks.  It’s of a piece with the Left’s identity politics: blacks are required to vote a particular way, women are only allowed specific opinions, whites have privilege, and on and on.  It’s the return of segregation, only it’s political segregation rather than physical, and political segregation doesn’t even pretend to be equal while separate.

There’s much with which I disagree in James’ commentary, but his status as a professional basketball player no more disqualifies him from commenting on political matters, or any other subject, than does my status as a writer qualify me to comment.

Oh, and on the subject of political commentary by sports figures, maybe Harrelson should heed his own advice and stick to calling baseball games.  He’s is, after all, “just” a sports figure like James.

Or not.  Because sports figures really do get to comment on politics.

Kavanaugh and Precedents

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Brent Kendall, in a piece in Monday’s The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the importance of judicial precedence and how willing Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh would be to overturn them.

Liberals warn that key rulings on abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights could be weakened or reversed by a court that leans further to the right. Many conservatives, on the other hand, hope those precedents will be limited by future rulings and eventually crumble, even if Judge Kavanaugh moves carefully rather than tearing through established doctrine.

Sure enough, in Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing’s opening remarks, it was the End of Days according to the Progressive-Democrats on the Committee.  Kavanaugh represents, you see, everything wrong with President Donald Trump (even though his nomination to office was confirmed a couple of years ago), with Republicans, and with the non-Progressive world.  Women will die (although unborn babies dying doesn’t matter).  People will get horribly sick.  Segregation will return (although it was the Progressive-Democrat Woodrow Wilson who resegregated the Federal government work force that post-Civil War Republicans had integrated, and it’s Progressive-Democrats’ identity politics that actively seeks to segregate Americans politically.)  Violence will rule the streets.

As Kendall pointed out, though,

The judicial doctrine of stare decisis—respect for precedent—is a pillar of the US legal system, and justices generally are reluctant to toss out a ruling without a compelling reason that goes beyond believing it was wrongly decided.

There are two reasons why a precedent should be reversed or overturned by a court, in particular by the Supreme Court.  One, contra reluctant judges (and Kendall?), is if the precedent was wrongly decided: in that case, the precedent should be overturned.  Allowing an error to stand only allows injustice from the error to stand, and the longer the delay in correcting the error, the greater the injustice.  It’s never too late to correct an error.

The other reason is if the circumstances of the precedent no longer apply.  An example of this is the Supreme Court’s ruling of a lack of presumption of privacy in its upholding warrantless wiretapping of a wireless telephone connected to its homeowner’s base station by a then-unencrypted radio signal.  The public has gotten quite a bit more sophisticated about privacy and quite a bit more concerned with preserving it in all venues today, and so the circumstance of that precedent no longer applies—it should be reversed.

In either case, though, it’s not a straightforward affair to come to the recognition of error or of inapplicability.  That depends on the particular facts of a case and on what the applicable law actually says.  It’s unreasonable to expect Judge Kavanaugh to be able to comment substantively on whether he’d use a case to overturn Roe v Wade, for instance, or any of the other cases the Progressive-Democrats have their panties twisted around: he hasn’t seen those cases, since they haven’t come before him.

It’s also unreasonable to say what he might do, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at her confirmation hearing.  To speculate in advance would be to prejudge those cases, and no honest judge can do that.

The Progressive-Democrats know that, also.

Trust Us

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It seems that Alphabet and Mastercard have hooked up: Mastercard seems to have agreed to share its customers’ shopping habits with Alphabet’s Google in return for Google’s separately accumulated data on those same customers.  The subhead on Bloomberg‘s piece is instructive:

Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data

The hookup is this:

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the US. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

And that Mastercard freely sold.

Who knew the deal had been done?  Almost nobody, especially including the owners (morally if not legally) of those data.

[M]ost of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Then this:

[T]he deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.

Gee.  Ya think?

It also raises the broader privacy concern of how much personal that data primary collectors, like credit card companies, are busily peddling to the Googles of the world behind our backs.

A carefully anonymous Google spokeswoman offered this:

Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information.  We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners.

Trust us.  Trust us both.

Sure.