Tag Archives: government

Who’s Protecting Whom?

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The Drug Enforcement Agency has the way of the Secret Service, at least in Colombia: partying with prostitutes. DEA seems to have taken the thing a step further, though: the parties appear to be funded by the drug cartels the partying agents were sent to investigate.

The agents’ punishment? Two weeks of suspension. Naturally, Congress is…dismayed…both with the behavior and with the wrist-slap. How the anger is expressed is instructive, though. DEA Administrator Michelle Leonhart testified in front of the House Oversight Committee that there’s not much more she can do; civil service system law and regulations keep her from doing more. She’s not even allowed to have input on the sanctions to be applied for such misbehavior.

The solution to such impediments is obvious.

However, Congressman Stephen Lynch (D, MA) won’t can’t see that obvious solution. Instead, he’s accusing Leonhart of having a hand in the failure:

You’re protecting the people who solicited prostitutes who had 15 to 20 sex parties, went through this whole operation, and used taxpayer money to do it.

And there’s the Committee’s Ranking Member, Elijah Cummings (D, MD) asking Leonhart

Do you think you’re the right person for this job?

Of course, there’s no thought by the Democrats (and apparently none by the Republicans, either) to changing the civil service laws that Leonhart thinks handcuff her. There’s no thought here to curtailing the power of the various civil service unions so that Agency and Department heads can fire miscreants promptly for misbehavior.

Gotta protect those unions. There’s too much money at stake here.

The 10th Amendment

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Here’s an example of the 10th Amendment in action:

While the United States and Iran edge closer to a nuclear deal, nearly two dozen US states are imposing their own sanctions against Tehran—a move some say could derail fragile talks between the two countries.

The states, though, say they aren’t budging. In fact, Kansas and Mississippi are even considering adding more sanctions.

And

Several states across the country have put their own measures in place to punish Iran-linked companies operating in certain sectors of its economy, directing public pension funds with billions of dollars in assets to divesting from the firms and sometimes barring them from public contracts[.]

Other states doing this sort of thing include Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Oregon, among others.

Would that the White House had similarly capable judgment.

The Arrogance of Democrat Power

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CIA Director John Brennan had this to say at the Harvard Institute of Politics regarding the nuclear weapons deal “negotiated” with Iran:

I must tell you the individuals who say this deal provides a pathway for Iran to a bomb are being wholly disingenuous, in my view, if they know the facts, understand what’s required for a program[.]

How dare you criticize your Betters!?

Sit down, and shut up.

As The Wall Street Journal put it,

Mr Brennan’s naked public partisanship harms the CIA by making whatever it now says about Iran simply unbelievable.

But remember this in 2016.

A Problem with Censorship

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[Ukraine’s] Parliament voted Thursday to ban Soviet as well as Nazi symbols here….

Lawmakers voted 254-0 in favor of the bill, which outlawed any “public rejection of the criminal nature” of the Soviet or Nazi regimes in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that was overrun by the Germans in World War II.

Their heart is in the right place.

Yuriy Lutsenko, a senior Member of Parliament with the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, added this about the legislation:

Symbols including five-pointed stars and hammers and sickles will disappear from the streets of Ukrainian cities[.]

But the USSR’s flag isn’t the only thing that uses the symbology of a five-pointed star. So do the United States flag and the European Union flag—the latter which Ukraine would like to join.

This illustrates a problem with government censorship. Leaving aside the fundamental inappropriateness of censorship by governments, it’s tough for government to censor narrowly enough to block the target without also blocking the friends.

Roll Call Votes

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Senator Bob Corker (R, TN) has a bill in his Foreign Relations Committee that would require President Barack Obama to submit the deal he’s “negotiating” with Iran concerning the latter’s nuclear weapons program to Congress for approval or disapproval. His bill is was cosponsored by a large number of Democrats, so large that a week ago, he had 64 Senate votes for its passage.

Those Democrats are disappearing faster than fog in the West Texas sun as Obama begins turning up the heat on them. In their finest Saul Alinsky fashion, though, they’re covering their fade with a move to amend and gut the bill. As Kimberly Strassel put it in her op-ed at the link,

The goal of these amendments is to render the Corker legislation useless. Yet if Republicans balk, watch for Senate Democrats to howl that the GOP is acting in a partisan fashion, or refusing to be flexible. And watch for those same Senate Democrats to then use those complaints as their pretext for voting against the legislation.

And

[I]t appears that Mr Corker’s only path to 67—if that is even possible—is to so water-down his own bill as to make it useless. Does he want a meaningless 67-vote victory? The better route is to shoot for 60, send a principled bill to the president’s desk, and force the commander in chief and his defenders to solely face the consequences of a bad Iran deal.

Indeed. And Corker should demand a roll call vote in his committee, and Republicans should demand a roll call votes on the Senate floor, both on passage and on the veto override vote.

And that information should be bruited about in the 2016 campaign season—including in the Democrat primaries.