Tag Archives: ethics

At Whose Cost?

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The Federal courts, in the person of Judge Robert Conrad in his capacity as Director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts, wants that office to take control of and responsibility for the physical Federal courthouses around the nation.

This request is a long-standing Judicial Conference position, originally adopted in 1989, and reaffirmed again in 2006. This position is being sought now because the condition of many buildings housing the Judiciary has reached a crisis point after decades of inadequate management and oversight.
This has led to over $8 billion worth of delinquent infrastructure repairs that have created risks to safety, security, and court operations. The recent unilateral actions and reorganization of GSA have only exacerbated these conditions[.]

Whether that last is accurate is a separate question. It’s nevertheless a valid beef, but my questions here are these: who will produce those $8 billion, the AOUSC through some sort of fee structure (levied on whom), some sort of GSA-/Congressional-mandated fee structure (levied on whom)? A line item in one of Congress’ appropriation bills? Something else?

Next, is this a one-time fund, or is it ongoing? At what sustainment level?

Then, who will administer the fund, whether it’s one-time or ongoing? Will this be an AOUSC function, or will it be GSA, Congressional, …?

Finally, who will let, agree, and administer the upgrade/maintenance contracts? Again, would this fall to the AOUSC, to GSA, to someone else?

In Which the Judge is Wrong on Principle

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Even if he might be correct in a strictly legal sense (which does constrain him via his oath of office). Magistrate Judge William Porter has ruled that DoJ may not search the electronic devices seized from Washington Post news writer Hannah Natanson. Porter claimed, as paraphrased by Just the News

seizing Natanson’s devices the department took her work product, documentary material, and access to the confidential sources—”all the tools she needs as a working journalist.”

The underlying case centers on Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, an IT employee of a government contractor, supposedly removing classified information and passing that information to Natanson.

This is Porter claiming that received stolen property is legitimately a news writer’s “work product.”

For anyone outside the journalism guild, receiving stolen property is a serious felony. It’s long past time to end this criminal carveout for news writers and the news outlets that employ them. Stolen property is precisely that, not more and not less, no matter who gets it.

Who Drove the Settlement?

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Centerview Partners, a niche investment bank, agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by an intern who claimed she was terminated improperly over a disability she said she had. As is usual in many civil suits, the terms are unknown. The settlement came just before the trial was due to start, and

just a few days after the judge seemed to cast doubt on [Kathryn ] Shiber’s ability to claim the millions of dollars in compensation. During a pretrial conference Thursday, the judge said at one point that it would be improper for the jury to consider what she would have earned had she stayed at Centerview beyond the three-year program.

That timing raises questions in my suspicious pea brain, primary of which is who was the motivator for the settlement. Was it Centerview, looking to avoid the potential of an enormous payout to Shiber? Was it Shiber, who was satisfied with the settlement terms, whatever they are? Was it her lawyers, who in a fee-seeking imperative, bailed on Shiber since they no longer would be guaranteed their own enormous payout cut from those millions of dollars in compensation that otherwise would have been available to get access to?

Enquiring minds want to know.

A Cynically Irrelevant Argument

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Here’s the lede:

A coalition of climate and health organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday in an effort to combat its repeal of a landmark climate finding.

Because of course they do. The landmark climate “finding” that has been repealed is the finding that plant food in the form of atmospheric CO2 actually is a pollutant. That fiction has expanded costs of living for us American citizens for decades, and its removal is good riddance. Nevertheless, the climate funding industry is waxing hysterical over the nation’s turn toward rationality.

Their suit proceeds, cynically, from an irrelevancy. Peter Zalzal, of the Environmental Defense Fund:

Repealing the endangerment finding endangers all of us. People everywhere will face more pollution, higher costs, and thousands of avoidable deaths.

Even were that true—it isn’t—it’s irrelevant. The question is an economic, and so a political, one. Our courts have no jurisdiction for hearing this argument. Our judges and Justices are bound by our Constitution and their oaths of office to uphold and defend it, and by their oaths they’re further constrained to rule based on the text of any statute that comes before them. They cannot, legitimately, rule based on what they wished our Constitution and statutes said, nor can they, legitimately, rule based on their personal views of what’s good or bad for our society.

This sort of suit should be tossed at the outset, with prejudice, and with sanctions on the lawyers and their employing firms for bringing frivolous suits.

California Teacher Strikes

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More accurately, teacher union strikes in California.

A wave of teacher contracts is up for renegotiation now, thanks to a strategy the unions implemented a few years ago to synchronize expiration dates. Dozens of California school districts are in talks, with some already at an impasse or in mediation.
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By coordinating negotiations across the state with the threat of strikes, the unions aim to escalate funding battles from local school boards to the state legislature, said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, a union representing more than 300,000 educators. …
“This resets the power dynamic,” Goldberg said.

There’s this, too:

Total enrollment in the district has fallen by about 37% since 2018-19 to just over 390,000 students, officials say. Over that span, the number of teachers has held steady at around 25,500 while overall staffing has increased 15%.

Can you say “featherbedding,” boys and girls?

Kids’ public school education would suffer from a strike prolonged by school boards’ refusal to deal with unions “negotiating” in blatantly bad faith? How would anyone tell the difference? Kids in California already are afflicted by an education regime in those public school environments that’s so bad as to border on child abuse.

School boards need to screw their collective courage to the sticking post and tell the unions and their baldly excessive demands to go…pound sand.