Tag Archives: freedom

Resetting with Russia and China

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Given Russia’s and the People’s Republic of China’s veto of an Arab League motion before the UN’s Security Council “aimed at ending the violence in Syria that called for Mr. Assad to hand over his powers to his vice president and allow creation of a unity government,” vetoes that came hours after Assad’s murderous artillery bombardment of the Syrian city of Homs with an estimated 200 civilian deaths )about which Russia and the PRC surely knew), it may be time to “reset” relations.

Plainly, these vetoes are motivated by either, or both, of two things.  Others have written of Putin’s reluctance to admit that a dysfunctional, even dishonest, much less a murderous government should be susceptible to abolishment by the people: for one thing, Syria is important to a Russian naval presence in the Med, for another, Putin doesn’t want to encourage the Russian people along the same lines, and so on.  Other Chinese motives also seem apparent: Iran is a convenient source of needed oil, and Syria is an important, if not critical, ally of the Iranians.

Another motive is much more stark.  A butcher in charge of Syria hurts the US.  American impotence in dealing with this butcher, especially after the benign (compared to the Syrian situation) affair of Gadhafi, hurts the US.  Vetoes of American-backed (if Arab-led in the present instance) public initiatives demonstrate that impotence.

Following these vetoes, we’re getting some unusually strongly couched statements from President Obama’s State Department.  UN Ambassador Susan Rice has said of the vetoes

The United States is disgusted that a couple of members of this Council continue to prevent us from fulfilling our sole purpose.

and

The people of Syria…have been slapped in the face by several members of the Security Council today.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said

What happened yesterday at the United Nations was a travesty.

and

Faced with a neutered Security Council, we have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations….

and

We will work to expose those who are still funding the regime and sending it weapons to be used against defenseless Syrians, including women and children….

The question becomes, then, is this a sign that resetting is beginning?  Or is it just more idle chit-chat and firm finger-shaking from the Obama administration?

First Racism, Now Bullying (Cont’d)

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I first posted on this subject last week.  It’s a matter that concerns a school administrator’s definition of a student’s essay, written for a sanctioned debate, as bullying  for the sole reason, apparently, that the essay expressed opposition to adoption by gay couples.  In that post, I wrote that I had emailed District Superintendent Todd Carlson, the administrator who found the dissenting opinion an act of bullying, the following questions:

1) The hoo-raw is about a student newspaper op-ed debate in the form of an essay supporting gay couple adoption and an essay opposing gay couple adoption.  Is this a fair characterization of the newspaper’s debate?
2) I request access to copies of the student essays written in favor of and in opposition to gay couples and adoption.
3) You are reported as saying “It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people” in reference to the “anti” essay.  Is this an accurate quote?  If so, please advise how the “anti” position could have made without such bullying.  What terms and arguments would have been acceptable?

Dr Carlson has chosen not to respond.

Mathew Staver, founder of the Liberty Counsel, wrote to Dr Carlson also decrying the Superintendent’s bullying.  Staver described Carlson’s own bullying.

He’s using his position to bully this student. This is absolutely the epitome of intolerance….
When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing [the essay], and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he “had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic[.]”

Then came the threat.  Carlson told Wegner

[W]e have the power to suspend you if we want to.

Although Dr Carlson declined to make the boy’s essay available to me; Staver obtained a copy of both essays in the debate, apparently from a copy of the student newspaper in which the essays originally appeared.  He made the essays available at the above link, and both essays can be read here, as well.

Read the essays, and decide for yourselves whether the boy is “bullying” anyone.

In the meantime, it’s curious that Carlson refuses to explain his own actions, or to explain the manner in which an opposing opinion could be couched in a non-bullying manner.

Rights Upheld

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Last fall, I posted about a right-to-privacy case that involved police planting a GPS tracker in a suspect’s car without court sanction.  To briefly recap,  police wished to track the comings and goings of a suspected drug trafficker, so they obtained a search warrant for planting a GPS tracker on the suspect’s car.  In execution, though, the police had let the warrant expire before they acted on it, and then they planted the tracker outside the warrant’s jurisdiction.

The government argued that attaching the tracker to a car’s underside was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and further that no one who drove on public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored.  Of course it was exactly this sort of cynical arrogance that contributed to our Founders’ writing into our Bill of Rights a requirement for the government to show cause to and get permission from a court before that government could invade and search an individual or his property.  Indeed, many of the government’s men understood this today; albeit they were breathtakingly careless in the execution: police had, in fact, obtained a warrant to attach the tracker, but within the District of Columbia.  However, they then installed the device after the warrant had expired and while the car was parked in Maryland.

Today, reports The Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling.  In a unanimous opinion, the Court said that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle—the Founders’ view, and American rights, were vindicated and upheld.

Still, the Court split in its opinion.  Justice Antonin Scalia, in the five-Justice majority opinion, held that the 18th century concept of “persons, houses, papers, and effects” included such private properties as 21st century automobiles in the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches (and seizures).  Thus, the 4th Amendment is technology-agnostic: our rights appertain to us, not to our property.  But we knew that from our Declaration of Independence.

Justice Samuel Alito went even further, in a dissenting concurring opinion (signed  onto by the likes of Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Stephen Breyer).  Alito held that the warrantless (unwarranted?) GPS tracker implant not only violated the victim’s right of privacy, it violated his  “reasonable expectation of privacy,”  because, as the Court had held as long ago as 1967, “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”

Alito was quite clear in his reasoning, as summarized by the WSJ at the above link:

…a property-based approach was too narrow to guard against the proliferating threats to personal privacy modern technology posed.

In broadening Scalia’s argument, we see that technology agnosticism, again, with regard to our rights and freedoms.

In the end, the original obtaining of a warrant, coupled with the administration’s argument  that the warrantless search was only a trivial violation, demonstrates this administration’s utter cynicism when it comes to the rights and freedoms of Americans—and the continued need for the 4th Amendment to be applied rigorously and zealously.

He Must Be Doing Something Right

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According to The Wall Street Journal, our ambassador to the People’s Republic of China thinks the Chinese performance on human rights is in the wane part of a cyclical trend.

Ambassador Gary Locke told television interviewer Charlie Rose in an interview that aired on Monday that China is significantly cracking down on dissent. He said Chinese leaders were afraid they could face uprisings similar to last year’s Arab Spring.

The human-rights climate “has always ebbed and flowed in China, up and down, but we seem to be in a down period and it’s getting worse.”

Some of the renewing trends that prompted Locke’s comments include these:

[F]ollowing anonymous online calls for an Arab World-style Jasmine Revolution in China, security forces detained or confined to their homes dozens of lawyers, artists, writers and other political activists.

and

Religious followers, particularly Tibetan Buddhists, Muslims and Christians who worship in unauthorized churches, have also been targeted….

The Chinese reacted badly to this, which tells me that Ambassador Locke isn’t far wrong.  China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Weimin, disputed Locke’s assertion, saying in part,

Some people always take viewpoints of the minority in China as the mainstream public opinion, and I think this is entirely wrong.  If it is this way, should we take the views of those in the Occupy Wall Street movement as society’s mainstream public point of view?

As an aside, I wonder why he didn’t single out the Tea Party movement.  Maybe he understands something that our Democrats don’t….

Recess Appointments and Trust

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President Obama has, in the past, criticized President Bush’s alleged tendency to push Constitutional limits in seeking to expand Executive Branch power.

Now we come to some “recess” appointments, made because Republicans allegedly were blocking Senate confirmation.  Michael McConnell, writing for Advancing a Free Society, offers some insight.

First, the present set of appointments (to the CFPB and to the NLRB) were made while the Senate was in session through a series of pro forma, short sessions, ostensibly for the purpose of blocking recess appointments.  The use of pro forma sessions for this purpose was a tactic devised in 2007 by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) and then-Senator Barack Obama (D, IL) specifically to prevent Bush from making recess appointments.

Second, ex-University of Chicago Constitutional Law Professor Barack Obama appears to have acted without legal advice other than his own: even his own Office of Legal Counsel, the body intended to advise presidents ahead of time on the legality of an action (and note that this is advice; OLC opinions are not law and are not binding), didn’t issue their opinion justifying Obama’s appointments until two days after the appointments had been made.  McConnell is more generous than I, suggesting that “presumably it reflects the advice given to the President in advance.”  I have my doubts.

Third, there are a number of legal arguments that suggest that Obama’s appointments are, in fact, unconstitutional, all centering on the fact that, as Reid and Senator Obama understood in 2007, the Senate actually has to be in recess before recess appointments can be made.  McConnell offers the following.

Obama and his pet OLC insist that since the Senate had announced an intention of conducting no business during its pro forma sessions, it was, in fact in recess.  Never mind that Obama signed into law at least two pieces of legislation that had been passed during those sessions, including the infamous payroll tax reduction extension.  This is old news.  McConnell offers new insight, though:

It is hard to see why the Senate’s stated intention not to do business takes legal and constitutional precedence over its manifest ability to do so.

McConnell goes on:

[T]he Opinion creates an implausible distinction between the legal efficacy of pro forma sessions for various constitutional purposes. According to the Opinion, a pro forma session is not sufficient to interrupt a recess for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, but it is sufficient to satisfy the constitutional command that neither branch adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other  and that Congress convene on January 3 unless a law has provided for a different day…. Why a pro forma session would count for some purposes and not others is a mystery.

And there are other, longer-standing demonstrations of the illegitimacy of these appointments.  For one thing, the NLRB “nominees” hadn’t even been proposed to the Senate until two days prior to their previously announced, well publicized, ordinary holiday break, which the Senate then voluntarily gave up in order to remain in (pro forma) session.  The only one who was blocking Senate confirmation here was the President.

Also, we get the strange concept that the President can decide for himself when the Senate (or, by extension, the Congress) is in session, the Senate (or the Congress) not being competent to make that determination for itself.  Certainly, the President can adjourn both houses when they cannot agree between themselves on adjournment and ask him for help.  Certainly, the President can call the Congress into session to deal with emergencies.  Deciding that they actually have convened—or not—seems a bit of an expansion of Executive Branch power.

Where’s the love?  Where’s the trust?  Hmm….