Category Archives: ethics

No Records Kept

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Minnesota has a process whereby prospective voters lacking identification or proof of residency

can bypass the requirements by having another registered voter from the same precinct vouch for the voter wanting to register or signing a proof-of-residence oath in front of an election judge, which is attached to the voter’s registration application.

America First Legal filed FOIA requests with the State’s Secretary of State seeking documentation regarding those completed vouchers, and the State’s SecState answered No data responsive. At all.

Records? We ain’t got no records. We don’t have to show you any stinking records.

This is Minnesota actively permitting anyone to vote, citizen or not, legally present or not, in the State’s elections and in the State’s national-level elections.

The Rogue United Nations

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opened their Friday editorial with this:

[Y]ou can always count on the United Nations to rehabilitate a rogue. So it did on Monday by granting the Islamic Republic [of Iran] a leadership role at a conference on nuclear nonproliferation.
You can’t make this up, and with the UN you never need to.

 The leadership role?

The global body chose Iran as one of the 34 vice presidents to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

I’ll elide the idiocy of a committee so large and so bloated with feel-good title inflation as to have 34(!) vice presidents.

The larger matter is this. While the editors are correct to characterize Iran as a rogue nation, they’ve missed the beam in their own eye: the UN is, itself, a rogue entity, no longer serving to work toward/preserve peace and comity among nations as it was—however naively—created to do. Instead, it routinely gives high level voice to the very kind of political entities it was intended to corral.

In the end, the only reason to continue the expense of providing facilities in New York City for the UN’s headquarters is the wisdom of the old adage of keeping one’s enemies closer.

Louisiana Primary Elections

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Louisiana’s Republican Governor Jeff Landry has canceled the State’s upcoming primary elections in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v Callais, which struck down Louisiana’s Congressional district map as unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. A Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress, Lindsay Garcia, and voter Eugene Collins (whose presence appears to be nothing more than a device to give Garcia standing to sue) has sued to stop the cancelation.

They also called on refraining “from disenfranchising any qualified Louisiana voter or de-listing any qualified candidate in any contest on the May 16, 2026 or June 27, 2026 ballot.”
“It cannot conduct a primary under a remedial map that does not yet exist, in a remedial proceeding that has not yet begun, before a court that does not yet have jurisdiction,” the suit reads.

Far more importantly, though, the State cannot conduct a primary under a map that is unconstitutional and so unusable. No voter is disenfranchised by canceling the present elections; they would, however, be wholly disenfranchised by their voting based on an illegal district map. Nor are any existing candidates delisted, except by being left to campaign in an illegally drawn district via an erroneously listed ballot.

None of the candidates of any of the parties know, at present, who their constituents are, and even more important, none of Louisiana’s voters know, today, who their prospective Representatives might be. The ones cannot campaign effectively, and the others cannot vote effectively.

It’s necessary that the State’s primary elections be held in abeyance until a usable district map is put in place. Once the new map is in place, all of the existing candidates, along with any new candidates who might appear, will remain eligible and listed on the ballots—just on the correct ballots. All of the voters will know the legal district in which they’ll vote, and they’ll know who their prospective Representatives will be.

The Progressive-Democrat’s suit is without merit and should be dismissed promptly as the apparen stall effort that it is.

A Solution

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Last year, a People’s Republic of China-owned and -operated mine in Zambia had a catastrophic failure of a mine tailings wall, creating an environmental disaster for Zambian citizens.

[A] tailings dam owned by Sino-Metals collapsed and unleashed toxic sludge into the Kafue River, farmlands along the river valley are scorched, hundreds of people lack a source of clean drinking water and residents continue to live on land contaminated with heavy metals.

The Zambian government meekly aided the PRC and its mine operators in covering up this disaster, trying to hide it from the public. To hell with its own citizens who still are paying with their health and their lives for the failure, now of their own government in addition to that of the PRC and its mine operators.

According to a US House Select Committee on China,

The Zambian government, which owes $6.6 billion to the Chinese government and Chinese lenders, has held back from pressing Sino-Metals over the disaster, fearing retaliation from China….

Retaliation. Here’s an alternate solution: cancel the contract with Sino-Metals and all other PRC “investments” and “loans” in Zambia, declare the $6.6 billion debt reclassified as the PRC’s and Sino-Metals’ debt to Zambia for the cleanup, and dare the PRC to retaliate in any material way.

No actual dollars would flow from this, but two salutary things would result: Zambia would be freed from a debt it never should have taken on in the first place—PRC terms are notoriously usurious and are designed for to force default and confiscation of the collateral (here, the mine itself) put up for the loan. Zambia also would be out from under the PRC’s thumb and free(r) to trade its wealth of natural resources to more honorable nations under more equitable terms.

No Question Here

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Federal District Judge Loren AliKhan is the presiding judge in Soffer v George Washington University, a case centered on allegations that antisemitic activity is rampant on the GWU campus. While serving in that capacity, the GWU Law School hired the judge as an adjunct professor.

The overlap has prompted questions about a potential conflict of interest, given federal rules requiring judges to avoid cases in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. AliKhan did not immediately step aside but issued a 10-day stay in late March to consider whether recusal is warranted. Since the April 20 status conference, no final decision has been publicly announced.

??

How is this even a question? Those Federal rules don’t just bar judges’ conflicts of interest, nor is this merely a matter of questions of impartiality. Those rules bar judges from actions that create even the appearance of a conflict of interest, a requirement that, if honored by judges, preempts any questions of impartiality.

It’s more than that, though. While AliKhan was presiding, she should never have even considered the GWU offer of employment, or she should have resigned from the bench altogether: teaching in a law school hews too close to the ethical line and creates that barred appearance of conflict.

That she hasn’t even deigned recuse herself yet (as I write on Sunday) is instructive of her level of ethics. Given that lack, GWU’s Law School should reconsider its hiring of her, and if the Law School can’t figure it out, GWU should act in its subordinate Law School’s stead. Either of those entiities’ decision to do nothing would be instructive, also.