Tag Archives: government

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.

Sanctions and Trust

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Does his own party trust him anymore on sanctions against Iran—or anything else?

In a letter to President Obama (formally to his Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner), two Senators, Robert Menendez (D, NJ), Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Peace Corps, and Global Narcotics Affairs, and Mark Kirk (R, IL), Member of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, felt constrained to remind Obama and his administration of Congress’ intent when it passed (and Obama signed into law) the recent Menendez-Kirk Amendment to the Comprehensive Iran Sanction, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISAD).  This amendment authorized oil and financial sanctions against Iran should Iran insist on continuing on their course to obtaining nuclear weapons.

We understand that the administration is drafting rules to guide the implementation of the law and we hereby seek to convey the legislative intent underlying certain terms and phrases in the amendment and to ensure that the positive developments that have occurred as a result of the amendment are buttressed  by the administrative rules[.]

The Senators opened their letter with the above.  Their concern arises from Obama’s attempt to eviscerate the amendment to CISAD while it was being developed, even though it was an amendment that Obama had urged and to which Menendez and Kirk had agreed, and then after that agreement, Obama’s repudiation of it (interestingly, following that repudiation the amendment passed the Senate by a 100-0 vote).  Menendez has separately advised Obama that, as a result of Obama’s…behavior, “This certainly undermines your relationship with me for the future.”

The Senators, via their letter, laid out the specifics of some of their concerns.  These included the administration’s definition of the “significant reductions” other nations might claim as a means of continuing to do business with Iran’s Central Bank and to trade for Iranian oil while avoiding the US response mandated by CISAD—the cutting off of those nations’ banks from the US economy.  The strict definition was laid out in that underlying law; the Senators do not trust the administration to hew to that definition in its new implementing rules.  The Senators spelled it out in their letter:

To ascribe more variable terminology to the definition of “significantly reduced” would diminish the ability of countries to understand and comply with the amendment.  An unevenly applied interpretation would also call into question the seriousness of the sanctions policy and send mixed signals to both Iran and our allies.

Menendez and Kirk also are concerned that Obama will use the “national security” waiver in the sanctions law to completely weasel out of applying the sanctions: they fear he won’t apply any waiver on a case-by-case basis, as the amendment requires, attempting instead a blanket waiver that prevents any sanctions anywhere.

It was not our intent that the term “waive the imposition of sanctions under paragraph (1)” as meaning only one waiver is needed to waive the imposition of all sanctions.  In other words, with one report to Congress, the President could decide that not institution will be subject to sanctions….

They concluded,

We would welcome an opportunity to discuss these points with you prior to the publication of the final rule for the Menendez-Kirk amendment.

The Senate no longer trusts this President; his own party no longer trusts him.  Where is the basis for trust on the part of anyone else?  In any event, Obama’s rules are due out this week.  Maybe we’ll see the effect of the Senators’ letter.

Hasn’t Our Economy Been Managed Disastrously Enough?

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Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D, OH) considers that the oil and gas businessmen are greedy b*stards, and they cannot be trusted.  He wants to put their business’ profits under government control—and not just any part of government; he wants to cut the Congress out of the picture and set up another Board for President Obama.  He’s joined by five more Democrats.

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

This “Reasonable Profits Board” is intended to control gas profits in the industry.

Further, in an amazing display of economic ignorance, the bill Kucinich proposes actually requires, in all seriousness, that it’s the oil and gas companies who must pay the tax.  They really don’t believe that the cost increase would be passed on to the customers.  They really don’t understand that the tax, and the cost bump to the end user, would simply depress the business’ ability to fund their own operations, expand hiring, search for more oil and gas supplies, conduct R&D, and so on; and it would similarly reduce consumers’ ability to put food on their tables and pay their rents.

But it’s all for a good cause.  Kucinich earmarks the taxes for funding alternative transportation programs when oil-and-gas prices spike.  This is just ridiculous on its face.  If those “alternative transportation programs” were any good, they wouldn’t need government subsidies—your tax monies—to compete in the market.  Just look at how the Obama High Speed Rail boondoggle, including the California bullet train, for instance, have turned out.  See who’s left holding the bag for that “alternative transportation program” stuff and nonsense.

I’m a bit confused by another aspect of this proposal, though.  It’s a lot of trouble to get such legislation passed these days, especially with unruly Republicans running amok in the House.  It would be a lot easier just to have the EPA issue a rule.

The other Democrats who are pushing this invasion of the free market are these

  • John Conyers, Jr. (D, MI)
  • Bob Filner (D, CA)
  • Marcia Fudge (D, OH)
  • Jim Langevin (D, RI)
  • Lynn Woolsey (D, CA):

All six need to be replaced at the 2012 election, if not in the Democratic Party primaries leading into the election.

On Shrinking Government

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This should be, in principle, an Obama move that we can support.  Of course, the devil will be in the details, and this “shrinkage” is pretty trivial—only a reduction of 2,000, or so, civil servants out of a total Federal work force of nearly 4.5 million, and a cost reduction of walking around money—$3 billion over 10 years.  But it’s a start, and if we wait until the last step has been mapped out to a gnat’s patootie, the journey will never start.

What the President wants to do in the present case is consolidate some unnamed Commerce “core business functions” with the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Trade and Development Agency.

His idea has been under consideration for some time, but one objection to it is one that this poor, dumb Texas boy doesn’t understand.  Those earlier thoughts had also included moving the NOAA from Commerce to Interior, but there was “resistance internally to moving it to the Interior Department.”  The boss said to move, so off they go.  Where’s the problem?

Maybe, while we’re at it, we could also eliminate the EPA and the President’s Office of Legal Counsel.  Oh, wait….

The mechanics proposed are interesting, too, and are the real reason for my initial support (subject to satisfaction with the details, as always).  With this initial consolidation permission, the bill if passed, would let the President propose other reorganizations of his Executive Branch and require the Congress to give it an un-amended, up or down vote within 90 days.  Thus, the President gets more flexibility over the structure of his Branch, and the Congress retains its present power over the structure of the Federal government, including the Executive Branch.

However, the ability for either party to stall and to posture for political gain would become much more difficult.  And the members of Congress would have to be on the public record, in front of their constituents, for their individual decisions on the reorgs.  Moreover, amendments remain eminently possible: the pre-proposal dickerings that should be occurring anyway would get objections worked out, and the necessary modifications to satisfy the reasons for a down vote would constitute such amendments as well.

This wants a close look, devoid of political imperatives on both sides.