I guess the follow-up question is, “Should it?’
Republican Jack Ciattarelli almost won against current Governor Phil Murphy, who is now term-limited out in Blue New Jersey, considered a Democratic stronghold. Now Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill is running for governor against Ciattarelli. Sherrill has run on her military record both to get into Congress and now, but she also has two separate scandals that undermine her credibility and right to the public’s trust.
Scandal #1: like Tim “Knucklehead” Walz, she has claimed to have held a higher rank than she actually had. In more than 20 fundraising appeals during her time in Congress, her campaign referred to her as a retired lieutenant commander. Sherrill’s Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty form states otherwise: she retired from the service as a lieutenant. Sherrill attended the United States Naval Academy and served in the Navy until 2003. She was nominated for the rank of lieutenant commander, but was never confirmed. Never mind: she’s been advertising herself at the higher rank ever since. In 2021, Sort-of President Joe Biden referred to Sherrill as “lieutenant commander” during public remarks in her state, and Sherrill quietly accepted the promotion.
Democrats apparently don’t care about their elected officials lying about their military records. There’s Walz, of course, and Connecticut U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal won his seat (and re-election) despite years of claiming combat experience in Vietnam that he never had (he “misspoke”).
Last week, another scandal involving Sherrill’s military background emerged. Rep. Sherrill was not allowed to walk with her graduating class at the US Naval Academy and her name was struck from the commencement program as punishment for her involvement in a massive cheating scandal involving 130 midshipmen in her class. She had violated the school’s honor code by knowing about her classmates cheating and not reporting them.
Naturally, Sherrill is spinning this as a good thing: you know, nobody likes a “rat.” But the reality is that she had pledged to follow an ethics code and deliberately defied it. Come to think of it, given how everyone at the White House and every Democratic member of Congress decided not to let the American people know that their President was in the midst of a crippling cognitive decline, Democrats probably do see her deliberate refusal to obey an ethics code as a good thing.
It isn’t.
But since Bill Clinton’s supporters embraced “everybody does it” as sufficient justification for accepting a U.S. President who lied under oath in court, to a grand jury and to the American people (“I did not have sex with that woman…”), Americans have happily ignored the principle that the “fish rots from the head down” in selecting their leaders. And the fish has been rotting. I’ll bet right now that Sherrill’s two scandals cost her very little in the final vote tally. “Everybody does it,” after all, and with elected leaders like Sherrill as their role models, Americans will do even more of it.
Ethics Alarms 
You forgot to mention that she is criticized for making $7 million in stock trades as a member of Congress and when pressed on it by Charlemagne on the Breakfast Club radio show she dodged the question by saying I am unaware of it.
We shall see. Previous polls showed her significantly ahead, but now one showed both candidates in a dead heat. If that’s the case, the independents are going to decide this, and they might be influenced by these facts. Those who were going to vote for her anyway and those who weren’t are pretty much already figured in. She’s also following on two terms of another Democrat, and that might work against her, NJ doesn’t like one party in the governor’s office too long.
Just watched an RCP podcast that touched on this race. They interviewed the Emerson pollster, who just came out with a poll showing the race as dead even. I don’t recall them discussing her military record.
What they did discuss was that it appeared to them that New Jersey has been trending from blue to purple, versus Virginia from purple to blue.
I recall the 2021 NJ governor’s race as being unexpectedly close, and I understand that Kelly (?) is fairly unpopular now. In Virginia, Spanberger (?) is taking some flak about transgender issues I believe (what a surprise).
Just read a Legal Insurrection article on the NJ debate — it was a pretty scathing indictment of Sherrill’s performance.
We’ll see. Sounds promising though.
Murphy, but close enough for purposes of this discussion.
And here I thought ethics violations in military academies were fatal to careers. I thought offenders were busted down to enlisted rank and paid off their educational debt by serving at that level. I guess I was wrong.
Hmm, I wonder if they hesitated to exact this punishment because 130 midshipmen involved? That might have created more negative publicity about the scandal than they wanted… plus journalistic investigations into previous cheating scandals yadda yadda
Ah, I hadn’t gone and read the link JM posted, turns out it was likely more than 130–it was potentially 60% of the entire class who saw a copy of the exam before the test.
“The scandal revolved around electrical engineering exam answers that some midshipmen obtained and shared with their classmates in December 1992. Two dozen of Sherrill’s classmates were expelled, and one of those involved said in 2002 that he thought more than 400 out of the 663 midshipmen who took the exam had seen copies of it in advance.”
So, there were over four hundred cheaters released into the fleet that year. Nice.
Yeah at that level it seems clear there were some pretty severe system problems. Yes people are responsible for their own unethical choices and there are also issues with leaving one’s car unlocked with the keys in the ignition in neighborhoods known to be populated with teenagers….
So, you’re saying it was the fault of the instructor?
No, I’m saying that people (all people) are responsible for their choices. Multiple parties can be at fault for their relevant choices at the same time.
When I was an instructor, I felt that it was my responsibility both to clearly articulate what I did and did not consider to be cheating AND to make it difficult to cheat AND let the students know the ways I would be checking for potential cheating (running essays through plagiarism check software, for example).
IMO Fairness requires this because when students KNOW that it is really easy to cheat, they rightfully resent both the other students who are cheating AND the instructor and the systems implemented (or not implemented) by the instructor for leaving the keys in the car, so to speak. They feel they are put at a disadvantage for following the rules, which really sucks.
Mikie Sherrill was allowed to graduate from the Naval Academy but not allowed to walk. The cheaters were expelled. I have read somewhere that at the Naval Academy failure to report a honor code violation is not a honor code violation itself; this is different at other military academies like VMI and West Point.
CIA agent Andrew Bustamante has a story about how his career in the Air Force academy ended when he reported a code violation regarding alcohol use. The officers to whom he reported the story expelled the most egregious violator but did not take well to Andrew reporting the violation. This story illustrates that even at military academy snitching on fellow soldiers is frowned upon precisely because unit cohesion and trust at the battlefield is all important, and nobody trusts snitches and rats.
So here we may ask the question: was Mikie Sherrill caught at the horn’s of an ethics dilemma? As many people have an instinctive dislike of snitching on classmates I expect this to have little impact on the election.
In unrelated news, Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford in 1976 has died at the age of 95.