Tag Archives: political parties

There’s Clemency, and There’s Clemency

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On his way, almost literally, out the door, now-ex-President Joe Biden (D) issued preemptive pardons to Congressional members of the J6 Committee and the committee’s staffers. Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R, GA), running the follow-on committee for the last two years, has the right of it:

You don’t forgive somebody of something unless they have potentially done something[.]
I mean, to me, this is basically, if not an actual admission, it’s truly the perception of admitting that there was wrongdoing done[.]

And, as Just the News put it at the link:

It was a stunning act…that begged a provocative question: what did an official panel of Congress do that was so bad it needed to be absolved by an act of presidential clemency?

It’s instructive that none of those preemptively pardoned—Congressmen and staffers alike—have rejected Biden’s pardon, not even on the grounds that they don’t need it and don’t want it, being innocent of wrong-doing in the first place. Not even Senator Adam Schiff (D, CA) who as Congressman was a member of that committee, declined the pardon, going no farther than to protest the lack of necessity for it.

Winning in court is a high financial price to pay for one’s innocence, to be sure, but those haled in have avenues for being made whole: malicious prosecution, for instance, and in civil cases, collecting costs from those who sued and lost. They’re not even settling in order to avoid costs; they’re ducking down behind their pardons.

How would they get their reputations back after going through trial? On the other hand, how will they get their reputations back after having been pardoned? At least with court outcomes, they’d have official declarations of no wrong-doing. Their acceptance of these pardons deny them even of that much, even as those acceptances do nothing to lend credibility to claims of having done nothing wrong.

I echo JtN’s question: what have they done that’s so bad they fear exposure in court?

Changes to the Administrative Procedure Act?

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The incoming Trump administration and the newly installed Republican-led Congress (even if only more-or-less so in the Chaos Caucus-infested House) want to make deep changes to that Act. The law requires, among other things, advance public notice before regulations are adopted or rescinded. The Act more broadly

  • requires agencies to keep the public informed of their organization, procedures and rules
  • provides for public participation in the rulemaking process, for instance through public commenting
  • establishes uniform standards for the conduct of formal rulemaking and adjudication
  • defines the scope of judicial review

That public participation is the advance notice and public comment part, with the mandated notice being several months. The Act, though, was done in 1946, when information moved at the speed of newspapers and radio. We have computers today and the Internet with their vastly sped-up—not quite instantaneous—information dissemination capabilities. The advance notice requirement could easily and beneficially be shortened to 30 days for notice and public comment.

The transparency requirement could be sharply improved. One path for that is strictly enforcing responsiveness to FOIA requests by all agencies: require agency response within those same 30 days, with any failure to respond being deemed approved and the requested information required to be delivered in toto on the 31st day. Redactions also would be profitably limited much further, with reasons for allowed redactions being much more limited. Any document still containing redactions would be delivered promptly to the requester with the same document, wholly unredacted, delivered to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the relevant House and Senate committees for their information.

The judicial review requirement needs also to be tightened. This can be done by subjecting all rules that come before a court to substantial evidence review, which encompasses the agency’s assessment of the evidence in the record and its application of that evidence in reaching a decision. That standard requires courts to decide for themselves whether the agency’s factual and policy determinations were warranted in light of all the information before the agency at the time of decision. This is especially important in light of the Supreme Court’s rescission of Chevron Deference: courts no longer are subordinate to agency technocrat “expertise,” no longer expected to take an agency’s bureaucrats’ blandishments seriously.

Why Some Can’t Have Nice Things

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A canonical example of this is Progressive-Democrat Party-run Chicago and Illinois:

City taxpayers spent $262 million from August 2022 through last month to care for migrants, records show, in addition to $368 million in state and federal grants.

Assuming a naïve estimate of 50% of those grants being from Springfield, that’s nearly half a billion dollars that could have gone—should have gone—toward dealing with Chicago’s homeless—more than 76,000 as of a month ago—supporting voucher and charter schools to improve the abusively undereducated children’s opportunities, (re)creating a market economy so the unemployed and underemployed could get jobs and off the city’s and State’s welfare rolls. That last, too, would release yet more funds for dealing with those homeless, children, and jobs.

All of that is a set of failure conditions that Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat managers are determined to maintain.

An effort to water down Chicago’s sanctuary ordinance failed Wednesday [15 January 2025], 39-11, in a city council vote. Mayor Brandon Johnson [D], a progressive critical of Trump, opposed a proposal that would have allowed police to work with federal agencies on deportation cases for those accused or convicted of gang activity, drug crimes, sex trafficking, or sex crimes with minors.

These wonders would rather have gangs, drugs, and sex criminals roaming the city’s neighborhoods than take care of their own.

This sort of progressive abusiveness is why so many American citizens can’t have nice things.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Identity Politics

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James Freeman had an interesting op-ed on this subject. At the end of his piece, he quoted Michael Baharaeen, who blogs at the Liberal Patriot [emphasis in the quote]:

One such risk [political…of focusing on identity politics] is coming to believe that the shared characteristic that binds a group of people together is the most important factor informing that group’s voting habits… conceiving of any group in monolithic terms risks missing meaningful differences within it. Even terms like “Latino” have limited utility, as they lump the very different life experiences of people with ancestry in, say, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia into one broad category….

Indeed. It might be more useful, instead, to focus on the differing positions, perspectives, ideas themselves without any regard for who, or which group, has them. Maybe Party would be better served, be more attuned to what makes us all Americans, to treat us all as the individual Americans that we are, rather than as this or that collected subset of us and then pretend to care about each group.

A Foolish Question

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors note that California’s Progressive-Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has waived some permitting requirements for some folks to facilitate their rebuilding efforts in the wake of the fires burning to ashes some suburbs of Los Angeles. Then they ask

Why not ease regulations for all projects if the rules are such a barrier to development?

It’s clear enough why not. Newsom hasn’t had the epiphany the editors’ headline at the link claims; he’s pandering to the uber-rich and to the upper middle class folks in what is really a narrow slice of the whole of California. Those rich who’ve lost their homes to the fires are major donors to him and to Party. The waiver is limited to these panderees because throughout that whole of the rest of California, Green groups and unions operate, and they’re major donors, also, to Newsom and to Party.