Tag Archives: ethics

“Impose Boundaries on Immigration Law”

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That’s the title of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s op-ed in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.  In it, he decried the lack of uniformity of our immigration laws and associated judicial rulings on those laws.

…US immigration law is far from uniform. Inconsistent rulings by the 12 federal appellate courts have created a hodgepodge of jurisprudence, in which the applicable legal precedents depend on the location of the immigration court that heard a case.

He proposed a solution.

Congress can and should restore uniformity and promote efficiency by consolidating all immigration appeals in a specialized court of immigration appeals.

Whatever the merits of Rosenstein’s proposal, though, before any immigration law—any law—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  Before any specialist court—any court—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  This is particularly critical given the judge-centric nature of his proposal.

Judges cannot be allowed to place their personal views of societal need or “fairness” above what the law they’re applying actually says.  Judges cannot be allowed to violate their oaths of office with their imposition of personal views in place of imposing the text of the law(s) before them in cases, including immigration cases.

Failure requires consequences, else judicial failure will continue, to the increasing detriment of our republic.  Those consequences must include, in the most egregious instances or when particular judges demonstrate an especial predilection for activism, removal from the bench.

Pseudo-Journalism

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Terry Moran and Devin Dwyer, of ABC News, decided it would be cool, to make fun of President Donald Trump’s future funeral arrangements. In the middle of President George HW Bush’s funeral proceedings.  To draw attention away from the occasion of the death of an American President who oversaw the collapse of one of our post-war most powerful enemies.

They pretended to joke about an ego-driven funeral process.

Then there’s Don Lemon, of CNN.

I don’t think I would’ve shake hands with him. I would just—no, couldn’t do it. I’m not that big of a person. I would hope that I would be, but I don’t—I can’t fake the funk, as they say. And I’m not saying that the Obamas did that [when they shook hands with Trump at the funeral].
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I’m not petty and small.  That’s real, brother. That’s real.

Therewith, Lemon showed himself to be every bit as small and venal as he claims Trump to be.  With that, he’s showing how basely hypocritical he is.

And neither one of these crews could stand to cover Bush’s funeral without bringing out their Trump-bashing commentary.

Together, these two examples illustrate how far what passes for modern journalism has sunk. It’s become an insult to the intelligence and the character of honest Americans throughout our great nation.

Macron and Nationalism

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French President Emmanuel Macron decries nationalism when he’s taking his swipes at President Donald Trump.  But he’s only showing his nationalistic, cynical hypocrisy when he does that.

As The Wall Street Journal has noticed,

[T]he French are nationalist to the core. Ask the European parliamentarians and their staffers who must make the expensive, time-consuming, carbon-emitting trip from Brussels to Strasbourg once a month to maintain the absurd fiction that French Strasbourg is the home of the European Parliament. Ask any European negotiator who has tried to prune back the Common Agricultural Policy, a giant boondoggle under which France is the largest recipient of funds. Ask any Italian diplomat about French policies in Libya. Ask any American negotiator about France’s approach to trade.

And this from Germany’s Finance Minister and Vice-Chancellor, Olaf Scholz on 28 November.

Here is my proposal: In the medium term, France’s seat on the Security Council could be converted into a seat for the EU. In return, France would then have the right to appoint the EU ambassador to the United Nations in perpetuity.

It really doesn’t get much more anti-nationalist than that, right?  Give up the nationalist seat in favor of a continental seat?

Macron and his anti-nationalist government demurred, the very next day.

When defending our national positions, we take all European positions into consideration. We actively participate, together with Germany and all other member states, in the coordination of the EU’s position.

Of course, you do.  So long, as it suits our national positions.

No, insists anti-nationalist Macron.  We’ll keep our French seat, thank you.

Veterans Administration Fails Again

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Recall the VA’s failure regarding paying our veterans all of the funds they’re due under the GI Bill; those student veterans are being shorted the money they’re owed.  That shortchanging will continue next year due to a “software glitch” that the VA isn’t fixing any time soon.

Now we get the VA’s Undersecretary of Benefits, Paul Lawrence, saying that the agency has no plans to retroactively pay shortchanged GI Bill recipients or to make next year’s VA victims whole.  He didn’t even have the integrity to admit this to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee before which he was testifying—under oath, mind you, as is typical for witnesses before Congressional hearings—until he’d been pressed on the matter by several Congressmen.

After that admission, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said otherwise:

To clear up any confusion, I want to make clear that each and every post-9/11 GI Bill beneficiary will be made 100 percent whole—retroactively if need be—for their housing benefits for this academic year based on Forever GI Bill rates, not on post-9/11 GI Bill rates[.]

Whom to believe?  Based on what evidence?  It’s true enough that of the two, only one was under oath, and it wasn’t Wilkie, but that doesn’t count for much here.

And this: that software glitch is being blamed on an outmoded computer system that hadn’t/couldn’t be upgraded due to lack of funds.  Molly Jenkins, a spokeswoman for that House VA committee had a different view, though:

It’s laughable that VA is blaming Congress for its IT issues, especially given the fact that Congress just passed the largest VA budget in history[.]

She also emphasized that the VA was allotted $30 million to improve its system.

She then pointed out a few other things: one is that the VA’s problems are “inexcusable, decades-long and well-documented.”

And that that the agency already is six months late with a required progress update.

And

[VA] sounded no alarms in their May 2018 report that there would be any delays at all[.]

It’s hard to tell whether VA management is not trying, is breathtakingly incompetent, or is actively defying Congress—and our veterans, whom the VA was created to support.

In any event, the VA needs to be eliminated and its once and future budgets committed to vouchers for our veterans.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Desperation

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With his legacy mostly erased, and more of it on the way after the current temporary interruption—an outcome ex-President Barack Obama (D) will thank us for in the fullness of time and his clearer understanding—Obama is desperate to preserve such of it as he can with his revisionist history.

Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday took credit for the boom in US oil and gas production, saying, “That was me, people.”

Of course, it was.  His sequestration of Federal lands and offshore fields from oil and gas exploration with his slow-walking of the necessary permits were instrumental in triggering the boom.

You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole—suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas….

Never mind that those year-on-year increases—small as they were—were driven by exploration and exploitation of those fields on private and other non-Federal lands.  The increases didn’t get serious until Obama and his administration were out of the way, but we’ll not mention that.

Another bit of history that the revisionist Obama carefully elided was provided by ex-Shell Oil Company President John Hofmeister:

…he tried to remake the power generation industry without involving Congress, and the Paris accords—again without involving Congress.

That remake was his threat—which he tried most enthusiastically to carry out—to eliminate our carbon-based (mostly coal, but oil and gas, also) electricity production industry, along with the wholesale destruction to our overall economy that acting on his Paris Accord would have wreaked.

The extent of Obama’s desperation is sad.