Category Archives: rights

In Which I Side with the “Liberal” Judges

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Regarding the NSA’s broad (much too broad, IMNSHO) surveillance of American citizens, the three judges hearing an appeal to the 2nd Circuit Appellate Court (Democrat appointees, all) expressed concern about that breadth. A Federal District Court had ruled the surveillance constitutional, and the ACLU is leading the appeal (and so I’m siding with that crowd, too, on this matter).

In an oral argument that was set for less than 30 minutes and lasted nearly two hours, three judges on a panel hearing the case at the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan probed claims by the ACLU that the federal government’s collection of data relating to “every phone call made or received by residents of the United States” is illegal and unconstitutional.

Indeed,

[Judge Gerard] Lynch asked how well briefed members of Congress were before voting, and questioned how much they understood about the program. At one point, [Judge Robert] Sack chimed in, “We don’t know what we don’t know” about NSA operations.

Lynch and [Judge Vernon] Broderick both questioned why the government’s justification for the bulk phone data collection program would not also extend to bank records, credit card transactions, and other personal data. Lynch asked if the government’s argument would not also entitle it to access “every American’s everything.”

It’s a fine line between the legitimate security needs of the Federal government if it’s to do the job for which we hired it—to protect us from foreign threats and from each other—on the one hand, and our individual liberty and responsibility on the other. Ben Franklin was right.

It’s necessary, also, to keep in mind that without our individual liberty and responsibility, we have no security. It matters not a whit whether we’d be enslaved by our own government or by a foreign power—we’d still be slaves.

Our Constitution has drawn that line: judge-issued warrants, on a showing of probable cause, are necessary to the legitimacy of the collection. These warrants also must be particular to the person and his property, and they also must be particular to the things being sought out. Fishing expeditions are not allowed.

True, “warrants” are sought in advance via a FISA court. But the FISA court is a secret court, a Star Chamber, no matter its currently good intentions. “Warrants” issued by it similarly are secret, which is to say, they don’t exist: they’re not public, and the person being “searched” under them has neither the ability to contest the warrant in court prior to its execution nor the ability to quash at trial the data discovered and/or seized. Nor can there be any guarantee that, given an ultimate victory, whether over an individual warrant that was discovered or over the process (the DC Circuit is hearing a similar appeal, and the thing is likely to find itself in front of the Supreme Court in the next session), the collected data actually will be expunged.

The 2nd Circuit’s case can be followed as American Civil Liberties Union v Clapper, 14-42, US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Wave Election

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There are wave elections, and there are wave elections. In 1894, for instance, the Republicans gained 130 seats in the House out of a total of 357 seats up for election. In 1932, the Democrats gained 97 seats out of 435. In 2010, the Republicans picked up 63 seats.

But all politics is local.

In Alabama’s 2nd District, for instance, the Republican won by 5,000 votes out of 216,000 cast in 2010, a margin of 2%. In Texas’ 23rd District, the Republican won by 7,000 votes out of 151,000 cast, and in the 27th District, the Republican won by 700 votes out of 105,000. In South Dakota, the Republican won by 7,000 votes out of 319,000. In Minnesota’s 8th District, the Republican won by 4,000 out of 277,000 cast.

So it went throughout the country, and so it went in all the wave elections. Waves occur from the aggregation of local politics, local elections, and a very large number of those local elections are not blowouts at all (though many are; some elections look like the losing candidate was just taking up space on the ballot).

In the coming 2014 mid-terms, the races in both the House and the Senate are similarly extremely tight, especially in the so-called battleground States. Indeed, even in wave elections, potsful of seats are locked up tight by the incumbent. See, for instance, the map presented here, showing gains and holds from the 2010 wave.

If the 2014 close races all break the Republicans’ way in the Senate, they could pick up 12 of the 6 seats they need to take control. If those races go the Democrats’ way, though, so would the wave go their way: they’d have 67 seats (counting the Independent and the Socialist who caucus with the Democrats) instead of their current 55.

Local politics.

The PRC’s Aggressiveness

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…extends to reaching inside sovereign nations and trying to influence internal matters. And the People’s Republic of China is using its manufactured grudge (based on events of 70 years—three generations—ago) to manufacture justification for this…intrusion.

China’s government on Thursday called on Japan to “break clean with militarism” after Tokyo confirmed that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent a note earlier this year to a ceremony honoring more than a thousand World War II-era war criminals praising their contributions.

Will the PRC also “break clean with militarism” and cease their grabs for the East and South China Seas?

Whether the dead honored at the Koyasan Buddhist temple are war criminals, as the post-WWII tribunal says they are, or they are not, as Japanese domestic law says (both then and now, in plain view of the PRC), is beside the point. This is an internal domestic matter, and the Chinese intrusion is not well brought-up behavior. They’ve missed a good opportunity to shut up.

Democracy People’s Republic of China Style

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And democracy Hong Kong style.

The PRC’s view of elections in its satrapy is that only candidates acceptable to the Communist Party of China can stand for office in Hong Kong. Indeed, the Deputy Secretary General of the National People’s Congress’ Standing Committee, Li Fei, has said out loud that openly nominating candidates would create a “chaotic society.” He went further:

[R]ights come from laws, they don’t come from the sky. Many Hong Kong people have wasted a lot of time discussing things that are not appropriate and aren’t discussing things that are appropriate.

The contrast between freedom and tyranny could hardly be made more starkly clear.

Pursuant to Li’s remarks,

The…Standing Committee ruled that all candidates for chief executive must receive more than half of the votes from a special nominating body before going before voters.

And

[T]he 1,200-member nominating committee would select two or three candidates. After one is selected through universal suffrage, the chief executive-elect “will have to be appointed by the Central People’s Government.”

The good citizens of Hong Kong, though, have been holding massive demonstrations during the current run-up to the elections for governing positions there, demanding that actual democracy break out (as agreed by the PRC when the UK gave up Hong Kong to them at the end of the last century). These citizens demur from the PRC’s despotism.

Democracy, freedom, are messy and chaotic at times. That’s the price, and the strength, of free men working their way along a path of their own choosing, rather than suffering the order of government telling them what their path must be. The noisiness and seeming chaos are in the nature of every man being free, of every man having his say, of every man acting in his own time according to his own needs and wishes. It is a sign of a healthy society.

My suggestion, in the hubris associated with my position on the outside looking in: the citizenry should agree on a couple of candidates for the relevant posts—most particularly, for Chief Executive—and then, en masse, write those names in, and thereby elect one of them to each of those relevant posts. The citizens then should demand the PRC recognize that man as the Hong Kong Chief Executive and those men as the elects for those relevant posts.

Of course, such a prior arrangement is not different from what the Standing Committee has done, but as a one-time event to make an important statement and to make the PRC’s behavior internationally public, perhaps an exception can be made. After all, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is the citizens of Hong Kong’s right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

In such an event, extraordinary measures become necessary.

More Federal Arrogance

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…EPA style.

Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX) is highlighting [follow the links there for his letter to EPA Director Gina “Joe” McCarthy and for the EPA’s maps) a new example of this: EPA rule-making regarding waterways, particularly those on private land and how those private property owners must handle water on their property. In support of this new rule-making effort (although the EPA denies it’s in support), the EPA has generated highly detailed maps of every waterway in the US—down to what it classifies as “ephemeral streams,” or streams that only have water in them as a result of rain falling. Such “streams” include ditches on private property, runoff through a depression in someone’s yard, and so on.

EPA Press Secretary Liz Purchia insists, regarding any mapping effort related to this rule-making effort, that any maps actually related to their rule(s) would have to include ground surveys in order to support the proposed rule, and she said that would be “prohibitively expensive.”

We’re left to conclude, then, that the EPA is holding itself willfully ignorant of the extent and effect of its rule because finding that out would be inconvenient. Yet the EPA is going ahead with its rule, anyway.

Oh, and those extremely detailed maps—themselves expensive enough to generate that the EPA is reluctant to discuss the terms of the contract with the map generator—were generated on the taxpayer dime solely for…because.

Hmm….