Suing Government Officials

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As part of the Reopen Government Act passed by the Senate, then by the House, and signed into law by the President, Senate Republicans had slipped in a provision allowing Senators to sue…the government…over having had their cell phone records secretly collected by Federal government Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was pretending to investigate the January 6 Capitol Hill riot participants.

Notably, the bill explicitly strips federal officials of qualified immunity—a legal doctrine that has long shielded government agents from personal liability even in cases of egregious constitutional violations.

Aside from the fact that a successful suit by a Senator would result in us taxpayers paying the judgement rather than the government officials who did the deed, it would exclude House members, and worse, us average Americans from that capacity.

There’s an alternative to that that would be more far-reaching than just rescinding the Senate’s amendment.

Contrast this with the fate of the Bivens Act of 2024, a modest bill that would have amended America’s premier civil-rights statute. Under Section 1983 of the US Code, Americans can sue state and local officials for constitutional violations, but federal officials are virtually untouchable. The Bivens Act would change that, while still keeping qualified immunity as a defense. The bill sought to codify a cause of action that the Supreme Court has steadily eroded over the past two decades. It died in committee without a vote.

The House needs to revisit the Bivens Act and include it in their rescission bill.

And go a step further.

Qualified immunity for government officials is a highly useful judicial doctrine (not statute) which protects those persons from a plethora of frivolous suits. But the bar is too high, allowing some constitutionally miscreanting officials to skate on otherwise egregious behavior. An additional move that would mitigate this would be to change the onus from requiring the plaintiff to prove why qualified immunity should not apply in his case to requiring the defendant to prove why it should. And an additional step, which would mitigate all those suits that would turn on that proof: the loser of the case over whether qualified immunity should apply, must pay the winner all legal costs involved.

A Couple of A Propos Characterizations

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As usual, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy (R) shows his mastery of them. Here are two.

On the Progressive-Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY):

Senator Schumer gambled, and he lost. He’s kind of walking around now looking like a guy who just lost his luggage.
I think his testicles are on back order from China[.]

On the Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY):

The congresswoman is a creation of the media.
I’ve never heard anybody describe her as a policy maven. My experience with her is if you scratch the surface, you just get more surface.

Some might characterize these as cheap shots. That doesn’t make them inapt, though.

US Chip Export Restrictions

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They’re beginning to bite in the People’s Republic of China, according to “people familiar.”

Shortages of advanced semiconductors are so acute that the government has begun intervening in how the output of China’s largest contract chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International, is distributed, according to people familiar with the matter. Chinese authorities are trying to give priority to the needs of tech conglomerate and national champion Huawei Technologies, which uses SMIC technology to make artificial-intelligence chips, the people said.

Say the report is accurate, the mythical nature of the source notwithstanding. What is the PRC doing about it besides allocating domestic production from the center?

Up against restrictions, some semiconductor companies such as Shanghai-based MetaX are designing chips on older, more available technology, bundling two or more smaller chips together to compensate for more limited computing power. Bundling strategies at Chinese companies have resulted in electricity-guzzling data centers, prompting multiple local governments to start subsidizing their power bills, people familiar with the matter said.

And they smuggle American chips that have been banned from export to the PRC. The PRC also will solve its data center energy problem.

The correct answer to this, though, is not to remove the export restrictions. The correct answer is to do our own workarounds of this type, learn the details of the PRC’s workarounds, and learn how the PRC solves its own data center energy shortage problems at the same time we work out solutions to our own data center energy shortage problems. Doing that would better prepare us for future such shortages, and it would enable us to better target restrictions on American goods, not just chips, headed for the PRC, whether directly or via third (and fourth) party nations.

“How on Earth is that a Problem?”

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Harvard has awakened to its problem with grade inflation, and the students it has admitted are having their own problem.

A recent internal report found that Harvard is dishing out too many A’s, and that the current undergrad system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and “damaging the academic culture of the College more generally.”

In an honest grading system, taking a letter grade scale of A-F, where A is best, F is failing, and C is average, it wouldn’t be the case that a school, much less an allegedly elite one like Harvard, would be dishing out too many A’s. Under such a grading regime, the large majority of grades would be C’s—after all, the majority of a population clusters around some measure of average, whatever the population is. Maybe 10% of students would get A’s and 10% would get F’s. The rest would be roughly evenly distributed between B’s and D’s.

The grades lower than A would (or should) be spurs to work harder and do better. Those getting F’s would be candidates for dropping, or being dropped, out of Harvard and so no longer wasting their parents’ money.

Consider some numbers reflecting the level of effort Harvard’s students put into their classes.

The average time students spend studying outside class has barely changed, from 6.08 hours a week for each of their courses in fall 2006 to 6.3 hours this spring, according to the report by Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education.

Let’s assume a heavy class load of four classes, each meeting three times per week for an hour and a half for each meeting. For spring 2025, that works out, according to my run-of-the-mill third grade arithmetic, to some 18 hours per week in the classroom. Those 6.3 hours per week per course on “homework” works out, according to that same arithmetic, to 25.2 hours per week of homework. That sums to 43.2 hours per week on classwork.

That’s an outer bound. When I went to a top-drawer private college, I took four classes per week, but those that met three times per week met for one-hour sessions. The classes with hour-and-a-half sessions met only twice per week.

Oh—the strain.

The nature of the students’ problem is made plain by this plaint from one student:

You admitted these students because they have straight A’s, and now they’re getting a lot of A’s, and it’s, like, “This is a problem.” And I’m thinking, how on earth is that a problem?

What these Precious Ones need to understand is that they’re no longer competing with run-of-the-mill high school students for grades. Now they’re competing with a much higher, much more capable, collection of students, students who really are their peers. It’s a different population than the one of which they were members in high school. Of course the grade definition of “average” has gone up, as has the grade definition of “superior” and “best.”

What Harvard’s managers, and especially its teachers, need to understand is that, after explaining this difference (which should be obvious to the students; they are, after all, the cream of their high school classes), there’s no need to discuss the matter further. The students who can’t handle the new regime of grading—being expected actually to work for their A’s—need simply to be dropped from the school.

Waffling Weasel Words

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Recall Heritage Foundation‘s MFWIC Kevin Roberts’ full-throated and enthusiastic embrace of Tucker Carlson who did his own bearhug of antisemitic, racist, and misogynist bigot and Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Roberts’ behavior has badly—perhaps irrevocably—damaged the Foundation. Now Roberts is further demonstrating his unfitness. Regarding his embrace, Roberts began with a pseudo-apology.

That didn’t play well anywhere, so he fired his chief of staff who wrote the statement he read into the camera.

That didn’t work, either, so,

[H]e blamed the audience: “Not as many people as I thought were ready for a little bit of nuance[.]”

No, wait—

Roberts changed tack. “Sometimes you can make a mistake with the best of intentions,” he said Monday. “My mistake was not saying we aren’t going to participate in cancel culture—we’re not. My mistake was letting that…override the central motivation that I had,” which was “fighting against antisemitism in all its forms.”

The Roberts doth waffle too much, methinks.

It’s time for the Heritage Foundation to terminate Roberts for cause. If it will not separate him from the Foundation in any manner, it’s time for the rest of us to put the Foundation away from us.