Question for the Future

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My wife put it to me re the Progressive-Democratic Party: Stipulate arguendo that Trump is reelected (regardless of the [Progressive-Democrats’] nominee). Who’s their bench for 4 years from now? Amy? Pete? ?????

It’s true enough, there is no next generation in Party; they’re going to have to skip one to get to anyone even remotely viable.  Who do they have?

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) is all they have in their next generation, but she’s a one-hoss shay that’s starting to fall apart.

Pete Buttigieg would seem to be the front-runner in that skipped-to generation, but he’s just not capable. Too many demographics don’t trust him: black voters because he’s been worthless, even counterproductive, in his own small city; veterans because he’s bragged too much about his soft tour in Afghanistan (as such tours go), spending his free time on roof tops smoking and getting into his laptop instead of looking for ways to further his unit’s mission; moderates of any stripe because his economic and social safety net ideas are destructive of the things that actually would support the least among us.

Robert Francis O’Rourke is in the mix—and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden has promised to make him the head of a Gun Confiscation program in a Biden administration. And he is born to it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) will be old enough for 2024 and beyond elections, but she won’t be mature enough. Her social welfare, climate, and economic ideas are just plain crazy.

Ro Khanna (D, CA) will happily parrot the Party line, including the new Party-centric position of free stuff for everyone, and that’s certainly sufficient to qualify him for Party standard bearer. He virtue signals with the best of them, too, but none of that is enough for anything serious. And he doesn’t have the fire in the belly required to go past the safety of his California district.

I tend to favor an Ocasio-Cortez-O’Rourke ticket, though: their ideas need to be dragged out into the open and clearly, sharply debated as the only way to put those foolishnesses to rest.

(Double) Standards of Protection for Government Officials

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) threatened two Supreme Court Justices if they didn’t rule his way on a Louisiana law requiring doctors to have hospital admission privileges as a prerequisite to doing abortions. (The case actually has little to do with abortions; it concerns whether third parties—doctors here—can sue on behalf of others, especially when those others have suffered no harm from the matter.)

Schumer stood on the steps the Supreme Court building in front of a noisy protest crowd and, pointing back at the Supreme Court building, said [the quote below starts at about 0:45],

I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

The lack of “Justice” honorific might seem merely rude on Schumer’s part, but he omitted it to emphasize the directness and seriousness of his threat. The smirk on his face as he took in the crowd’s noisy approval illustrates the matter, too.

Schumer, of course, denied through his spokesman (apparently he didn’t have the courage to speak directly), that he was threatening the Justices, insisting that he was talking political retribution for Republican politicians. The video at the link demonstrates the lie of that. Schumer, in one paragraph of his speech was clearly addressing—facing, pointing at, calling by name—two Justices. It wasn’t until the next paragraph that he addressed—facing his crowd, no pointing, no Republican addressed by name (not even his chiefest opponent, the Senate Majority Leader so instrumental in getting those Justices confirmed)—Republican politicians.

On the floor of the Senate Thursday, Schumer doubled down on his threat. First, he lied about making a threat; his words weren’t intended that way, he claimed. He’s from Brooklyn and Brooklynites speak in strong language, he said—as if being his habit makes it all right. Then he tried to downplay his words by insisting that Republicans are creating the situation with their politics and with their “manufactured outrage” over Schumer’s remarks.

Then Schumer, still on the floor of the Senate at the end of his doubling down, refused even to apologize to the Justices. He just yielded back his time.

The Wall Street Journal, in its op-ed on the matter, mentioned President Donald Trump’s call for Justice recusal in emphasis of the seriousness of Schumer’s escalation of the Left’s political rhetoric:

Mr Trump recently tweeted that liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves on cases involving his Administration.

It’s much more than this, though.  Trump didn’t threaten Ginsburg and Sotomayor, individually or together, if they didn’t comply. Not tacitly, especially not as nakedly as Schumer threatened Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

The Secret Service gets after folks who threaten Presidents. Don’t Justices—on the same government hierarchical level as Presidents—deserve the same protection? Apparently not, when it’s a Progressive-Democrat who makes the threat.

A Post-Super Tuesday Thought

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With Progressive-Democratic Party Primaries and Caucuses mostly complete (California is still…counting…its ballots, and I’m ignoring Iowa’s pseudo-caucus entirely) through last Tuesday, some results have become more or less apparent.

Joe Biden has won or leads in (as I write, Maine remains too close to call) 11 States, and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has won 5 States.  There’s nothing to be gleaned from any geographical spread in these States; there remain 34, scattered about the countryside, in which Party contests are yet to be held.

What’s interesting in these results is the margin of victory by each candidate.

Biden’s margin of victory averaged 17%, and Sanders’ averaged 18%. (Fun with statistics: taking out margins less than double-digits, and Biden’s margin of victory jumps to 25%, while Sanders’ moves to 20%—his lone single-digit margin was 9%.)

Seventeen and eighteen per cent, and that’s with five or six serious candidates on the ballots. I include Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI), who’s serious and articulate in her positions, even though she has no chance at the nomination.  Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) got serious numbers of votes even though they folded to pressure from the Party Elites and quit in favor of endorsing Biden: their quitting came too late to be removed from any Super Tuesday ballots. What if Biden and Sanders had been going head-to-head with their votes not diluted by these other candidates?

Biden’s and Sanders’ margins of victory indicate that the Progressive-Democratic Party is every bit as bitterly divided on ideological grounds as Party has made our nation.

Look now for a brokered convention, and watch carefully the antics and shenanigans Michael Bloomberg pulls in Milwaukee. He’s dropped out and endorsed Biden, and he still has tons of uncommitted cash money for his horse-trading and deal-making. Is he now the Veep candidate?

Note:  My claims are based on votes cast, not delegate counts, and they’re taken from Fox News’ estimates as of Wednesday morning.  While the vote totals are incomplete as I write, they’re very nearly so, and so they’re highly indicative of the final outcome for these States.

Close

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…but no cigar.  Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) has some thoughts on fixing the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its secret FISA Court.  He’s on the right track, but his ideas fall short.

Lee wants to fix the FISA Court and tighten the parameters under which it operates. This Star Chamber cannot be fixed; it must be disbanded and the sections creating and empowering it must be rescinded from the FISA altogether.

There remains a need to guard against and to respond to espionage and interference efforts, and there remains a need for that response to involve investigations of American citizens who might be involved in those foreign assaults.  There remains a need to keep many of our responses and investigations secret—for a time—so as not to tip off the targets of our investigations, whether they’re foreign or American.

Counterbalancing that is the even more crucial need to protect Americans’ individual liberties, including those being investigated.  Especially the latter need protection; they’ve not been shown to have done anything wrong, but public suspicions would ruin the reputations of those actually innocent.

Our present Article III courts already are well-versed in handling secret warrants where necessary for domestic criminal investigations and for sealing records until it’s useful to release them or after sufficient time has passed that their release will not harm an ongoing investigation.  FISA warrants can be handled here.

Many of Lee’s other ideas, with some adjustments, will work just fine in a sealed Article III court.

He wants to expand the role of an amicus in FISA warrant applications beyond warrants involving a novel or significant interpretation of law.

amicus should advocate for the privacy and civil liberties of the person targeted.

The role needs to be expanded further. This new amicus should overtly act as Devil’s advocate and seek to expose weaknesses in the warrant application with a view to getting the application denied. The target legitimately cannot be present, yet in most domestic criminal cases, the target has opportunities to contest the warrant, even if only after the fact.  Such a contest needs to be present with FISA warrants, as well.

Lee wants relevant agencies to be required to provide all information in their possession as part of the application, including any exculpatory evidence. The FBI Director and the Attorney General should be required to certify that this has been done, and there needs to be heavy sanctions applied to the agents, the Director and the AG if this requirement has been found, after the warrant’s submittal, to have gone unsatisfied. It’s almost never enough merely to punish the workers directly responsible; too often they acted improperly because they were actively allowed to or because they were permitted to by too lax supervision.

It’s critical that we take these kinds of measures in response to the failures of and abuses from the present FISA setup so that this sort of violation of United States citizens never happen again.

Tight Schedule

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Negotiations are in progress on the nature of the, primarily economic, relationship between Great Britain and the European Union now that the former has taken its leave of and independence from the former. The relationship being negotiated is primarily economic; although, law enforcement, judicial cooperation, foreign policy, security, and defense are under discussion, also.  The functional deadline for these negotiations is 31 December 2020, after which the Brits have said they’re done, deal or no deal.

Ten rounds of meetings are scheduled every three weeks from Monday, March 2, until October when a deal is desired.

Following which enacting legislation would need to be passed by both sides in order to bring the deal to life. “Most experts” think this is a tight schedule.

It need not be, though: the putative tightness of this schedule is directly and strictly a function of the degree of intransigence that will be exhibited by the EU’s negotiators.  I hold out no great expectations here; the EU has been operating in bad faith, using its position to discourage other dissatisfied nations from going out from the Union, ever since the Brits voted for sovereignty.

In this current round of negotiations, too, the Brits appear more serious than the EU.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened to accelerate [the schedule] further last week, saying the UK would end talks as early as June if negotiations had failed to progress by then.

It needn’t be a tight schedule, nor need it be “tightened” further. Again, that’s up to the continental Europeans.

Sadly, the EU’s intransigence is demonstrated in a couple of areas:

  • EU wants the UK to enact EU regulations and laws regarding business subsidies, labor law, the environment
  • EU wants its Common Fisheries Policy to apply in British territorial waters, especially British coastal waters

Nor is the matter of EU labor movement entirely settled; the EU still hopes for free access—essentially waiver of British national borders—for EU workers to British territory.

These run directly counter to Great Britain’s national sovereignty; of course, the continental Europeans know this full well. It’s why they demand these accessions.