Wrong Way to Punish the FBI?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are concerned that doing away with FISA’s Section 702 would be the wrong way to punish the FBI.

I agree. But the editors are missing the point. They too narrowly justify 702 with this:

Congress created Section 702 after 9/11 to address intelligence-gathering gaps. It lets the government collect information without a warrant on non-US citizens living abroad.

That’s a worthy purpose; although the realization has demonstrated the difficulty of using the capability to good effect, and without abusing it. Or the impossibility of that with the current regime. The FBI has demonstrated that, as an institution, it cannot be trusted with 702 output, and the FISA Court has empirically demonstrated that cannot be trusted, either—not after squawking about FBI lies in the latter’s filings and then proceeding to accept unquestioningly further FBI blandishments and warrant applications.

Answering those deficiencies, though, is a separate matter from applying the appropriate responses to the FBI’s misbehaviors and the FISA Court’s yapping about those misbehaviors.

The FBI is irretrievably broken—its lies to a court are only part of the institution’s failures; its stonewalling of Congress under the risible rationalization that its internal procedure policies are superior to Congress’ constitutionally mandated oversight obligations are another—and it needs to be erased from our government altogether. That, not dealing with 702, is the correct response to the FBI’s institutional dishonesty.

The correct FISA-related action is to make the FISA Court a public proceeding court or itself eliminated as well. That’s not punishing anybody; that’s simply getting rid of the stain of a secretive Star Chamber and forcing “court” activities out into the sunlight, or bringing the warrant application/granting process back into a proper Article III court. Those courts, after all, are fully checked out on the process of keeping warrants sealed until execution.

Be More Obsequious

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Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is tired of the Republican Party.

I wish the Republican Party would be—somebody would take it back, that we’d have a real Republican Party.

The Progressive-Democratic Party position, as demonstrated by Pelosi, is that the Republican Party should go back to being satisfied with being the loyal opposition and stop being so uppity.

Backwards

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Senator Tommy Tuberville (R, AL) has a hold on a number of President Joe Biden’s (D) DoD appointments and promotion lists—something often distorted into being an outright block, but in fact is only a requirement that these appointments and lists go through by floor votes in the Senate rather than by rubber stamp, unconsidered unanimous consent. Tuberville’s hold is motivated by his opposition to SecDef Lloyd Austin’s insistence that DoD fund military members’ abortions, travel to locations providing abortions, and abortion-related services. It’s bad enough that DoD would cover these expenses—can only cover these expenses—with taxpayer monies, but Austin’s insistence is in direct violation of the Hyde Amendment, which blocks just such taxpayer-funded expenses.

And that’s before we get to the immorality of killing unborn babies in the first place.

Lucas Kunce is a Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senate from Missouri and is running against the incumbent Josh Hawley. He decries Tuberville’s hold. He thinks Tuberville’s hold is negatively impacting national security, and he cynically wraps himself in his 13 years as a Marine, including his time in the badly bloated (my characterization) Pentagon.

Kunce has it backwards, and cynically so. To the extent the lack of these appointments and lists affects national security, that is solely from Austin’s insistence on DoD support for abortion. If Kunce—and Austin and Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D), the latter whom controls the Senate’s vote schedule—were serious about claims of national security risk, they’d leave off from holding out for abortion at taxpayer expense. They’d drop that matter and allow the appointments and lists to go through, or they’d push for the floor votes; either way, they’d desist from using the disagreement for their personal political gain.

Unionized Laziness

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The United Auto Workers union is bent on being the epitome of it. UAW’s President Shawn Fain:

I think we should push a 32-hour work week.

In return for working less, the union is willing to settle for

  • Increased paid time off
  • Double-digit raises

In an ideal world, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, along with the other major car companies that assemble their cars in the US, will have the stones to tell the union to take a hike. American companies are not job welfare entities, they exist to produce goods and services for consumers and to make profits for their owners.

If the union wants to have a light work week and big pay, it should start its own car company and operate within those parameters.

It’s Safer This Way

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Recall that, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ (D) slur regarding Florida’s updated education curriculum, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) invited her to Florida to discuss with him that curriculum.

Harris doesn’t want to. She made it to Florida, though, to talk to the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention. That’s where she made her excuses and backed away.

They attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates with a proposal that most recently came in of a politically motivated roundtable[.]
Well, I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.

The core of her excuse-making is that strawman of hers, a dolly she’ll have to play with by herself. No one is suggesting, including in the curriculum, that there are, or were, any redeeming qualities of slavery. Nor was that the subject of the discussion DeSantis offered; he offered to discuss the curriculum and how it proposed to teach, in the proximate matter, black history, including slavery, in the United States and in Florida.

It’s easy to sit in the safety of the sidelines and carp. It’s cowardly, too, but it’s entirely consistent for the border tsar who’s never been to our southern border.