Fun ethics week! Lots to talk about!
Open Forum!
Fun ethics week! Lots to talk about!
Author: Jack Marshall
Pro Tip: Don’t Extol Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Because It Will Make You Look Like An Idiot [Expanded]
For your early morning reading pleasure, I give you Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s 4,568th (approximately) unhinged rant about climate change and how evil conservatives are destroying, oh, everything. I saw this dog’s breakfast “liked” and “loved” on Facebook by smart people who should know better, and am hoping against hope they didn’t actually read the thing.
Whitehouse is Little Rhodey’s senior U.S. Senator, Democrat of course, and his speech this week on the Senate floor (several members had to be hospitalized after they rolled their eyes too hard) was reflexively praised by “The Nation,” which employs far, far, FAR left lunatic Elie Mystal as an editor.
[Digression: You remember Elie, don’t you? He can only appear in public now on MSNBC without being chased by men in white coats carrying butterfly nets. He was too extreme for the left-biased legal gossip rag “Above the Law,” which published his radical nonsense before he went completely bonkers. Elie has opined that all black jurors should always vote to acquit black defendants no matter hwo guilty they are. Nice. (I wonder what the ABA would say if juries paid any attention to him?) More recently he called for foreign nations to issue sanctions against the U.S.]
Read it. Or at least try. I dare you. I double dare you. First, it is garbled, rambling and incoherent (not unlike this), perhaps not quite Authentic Frontier Gibberish, but too close to be tolerated from a U.S. Senator. Second, and this has always been true of his rants, Whiethouse obviously doesn’t understand climate change science at all, like all hysterics who want the U.S. to spend trillions and cripple the economy based on speculation. This country can’t slow down climate change, whatever it is, without the vast majority of the world joining in and they won’t, don’t and can’t. This includes giant countries India and China. Does Whitehouse really not comprehend this, or is he just pimping for a world dictatorship? Oh, who knows? There is no justification for paying any attention to him, ever.
Whitehouse has, for example, repeatedly said that Americans who oppose the climate change “consensus” should be imprisoned. To this, law professor/pundit Glenn Reynolds responded,
“First, this man should be voted out of office as soon as human possible. His ignorance is dangerous. Second, the state bar should require him to undergo at least 100 hours of mandatory continuing legal education on the subject of constitutional law, with emphasis on the First Amendment. Newsflash: joining together to discuss common interests and even–gasp!–funding research, white papers and lobbying efforts to advance one’s perspectives on an issue isn’t illegal; its free speech.”
It should be no surprise that Whitehouse implies that the Texas flood is the result of evil Republicans and Donald Trump not caring about our planet slowly burning up, though there is no evidence of the tragedy being caused by climate change (or DOGE cuts). [Added] I just saw this…
Awwww. Too BAD, Senator!
But he has other villains to finger: “dark money” that elects those evil Republicans (funny, getting far more money in donations than Donald Trump didn’t seem to help Kamala Harris any); “creepy billionaires,” and a “captured Supreme Court.” In fact, I can’t let this pass; here is that part of the rant:
Biden’s Doctor Claims Privilege and Takes The Fifth
Former President Biden’s White House physician, Kevin O’Connor, refused to answer questions for the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the White House and Democratic cover-up of Biden’s mental decline and disability. News accounts from the Axis keep stating that Biden’s condition and a cover-up are “alleged” only, but res ipsa loquitur: what we already know, have witnessed and heard tells us all we need to know except the who, how, and how long. Biden was (is ) suffering from dementia of one kind or another. His condition was carefully, if insufficiently, hidden from the public. The fact that his power had to be exercised by unelected figures using the President as their agent, puppet or beard constitutes at least as great a scandal as Watergate, and perhaps a more substantial attack on our democracy.
This betrayal of the public trust requires at least as thorough an investigation as that definitive scandal in the Nixon White House received. Democrats, however, unlike the Republicans of the Watergate era, are refusing to do their duty and assist in the inquiry, probably because they have metaphorical blood on their hands. They were complicit. They were guilty. The House inquiry includes questions about whether Biden’s staff used the autopen to illegally carry out official actions in Biden’s name. One would think both Democrats and Republicans would be concerned about this. Apparently not. Make of that what you will.
Ethics Incident on Glebe Rd.
The past four days have been extended chaos on all fronts, so maybe that explains the inattentiveness that resulting in my running out gas in traffic for the first time in more than thirty years. It was raining lightly, I had groceries in the car, and there was nothing to do but turn on my flashers and wave the cars behind me into the next lane. Meanwhile my passenger and current house guest volunteered to walk down Glebe Road in Arlington, Va., to the nearest gas station, which wasn’t all that near.
Of the approximately 100 vehicles that passed, exactly two drivers paid any attention to my plight at all. One was a concerned Hispanic woman with an equally concerned child of about 8, but before her inquiry a young man had pulled over, rolled down his window and asked, “Need help?” I began, “There’s a bald guy walking to get me some gas…” and he said, “Got it!” then sped away.
In about 30 minutes my friend hopped out of the stranger’s car. The young man had picked my freind up, taken him to two gas stations (the first had no gas cans), waited for my freind to fill a gallon plastic water bottle with gasoline as the stranger fashioned a make-shift funnel out of a soda bottle, and driven him back to the site of my humiliation, where my tank was duly filled sufficiently to get me to a station. My friend told me that the Good Samaritan was a military officer, a devout Christian, and one hell of a nice guy.
There is hope.
Now if only I weren’t such a hopeless screw-up…
The ABA Doubles Down On An Unethical SCOTUS Ruling
Begining with Batson v. Kentucky, 476 US. 79 (1986), trial lawyers in both criminal and civil cases have been officially forbidden from exercising peremptory challenges to potential jurors based on the prospective juror’s race or gender on the theory that this violates prospective jurors’ equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was a utopian ruling and grandstanding by the Supreme Court in deliberate defiance of the Sixth Amendment right of citizens to a fair trial as well as contradictory to the legal profession’s duty of zealous representation.
The majority in Batson fantasized that in many cases racial or gender bias, positive or negative, is will be likely based on the jurors’ characteristics alone. There is a scene in “Airplane! II” where a man on trial for abusing his ex-wive, and all of the jurors are women nursing babies. The film came out a few years before Batson. Courts have permitted lawyers to strike jurors based on a prospective juror’s age, marital status, disability, or socioeconomic status, but especially since the infection of critical race theory and the destruction of race relations initiated by Barack Obama, the fact that an attorney can’t decide in a particular case that he wants as few blacks/whites/ women men as possible without risking a verdict being overturned or being subjected to a disciplinary complaint is one more way progressives have managed to distort the rule of law.
So, naturally, the American Bar Association, having now become a full member of the Axis of Unethical Conduct, has decided to bolster the Batson decision, which really needs to be ove-turned, For this it relies on its controversial and arguably unconstitutional Model Rule 8.4 (g) (which Ethics Alarms has been discussing for years), which reads,
“It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law. This paragraph does not limit the ability of a lawyer to accept decline or withdraw from a representation in accordance with Rule 1.16. This paragraph does not preclude legitimate advice or advocacy consistent with these Rules.”
It’s a really bad rule, vague and insidious, which is why only a minority of states have adopted it and why some courts struck it down when their state bars tried. How can any lawyer, or anybody at all, “know” what kind of conduct is going to be found discriminatory today, when, for example, criticizing an incompetent Presidential candidate for sounding like a vaudevillian’s doubletalk routine is likely to be called “racist”? (I’m sorry to keep picking on poor Kamala, but I didn’t nominate her…). But the ABA is now more devoted to the woke overhaul of society than it is law or ethics—see this recent post–so ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 517 was inevitable. The only mystery is what took the ABA so long.
Here’s the gist of it:
An Ethics Alarms “Bite Me!” Goes To Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison!
The “Bite Me!”is an Ethics Alarms designation reserved for either an individual whose “response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness is to say, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs,” or as used several times here, to impugn the author of unethical conduct that demands the response, “Bite me!”
Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison is a licensed psychologist and a “spiritual integration coach,” whatever the hell THAT means. She’s seeking her 15 minutes of faux fame by lecturing us about how people can unwittingly give off an “unapproachable energy,” thus sending out a “bad vibe.”
“Giving off a bad vibe’ means unintentionally projecting energy, through words, tone and body language, that others perceive as negative, inauthentic, or that make one appear unapproachable,” she explains. “It often triggers discomfort and mistrust, even when no harm is intended. Since our brains are wired to detect dissonance between what someone says and how they say it, the non-verbal signals which inform our emotional responses are exceedingly influential and powerful in shaping our interactions.”
Dr. Harrison has identified nine phrases she says can create these bad vibes if one isn’t careful. Gee, I wonder if “Bite me, you insufferable, over-credentialed fool!” is on the list? In her case, the “Bite Me!” is earned by abuse of authority and making gullible people stupid with New Age psychobabble. Here is her list, and my reactions.
1.”I’m Just Being Honest!”
Ethics Dunce: Wells Fargo Bank
Hmmmm. Well THAT certainly enhances my trust in my bank!
As I told the Wells Fargo customer service agent (“second line!”) when I finally got through to one, I don’t need this. My wife’s sudden death put me in financial hell, punched my business in the metaphorical solar plexus, and sent me on a harrowing odyssey to repair my economic state—debts, credit, taxes—regarding problems I didn’t even know existed. Messages from my bank telling me I am over my credit limit causes my adrenaline level to shoot through the top of my head. Yes, a home repair financing arrangement required me today to employ a new credit card for the full amount: I thought that’s what it was for. Silly me. Foolishly, I didn’t realize that charging $8,000 for an $8000 purchase on a credit card with an $8,000 credit limit would cause me to go over that credit limit.
But I’ve never been good at such matters.
When I called Wells Fargo and asked why I had been sent that alert, I was told that they had no idea. Just fooling around, I guess. Just screwing with me. “I’m sorry. I guess the computer just sent the wrong email,” was the best I got.
Oh.
I pulled my accounts out of Wells Fargo during their last scandal, and came back when I discerned that they were no longer crooked there. Now they’re just stupid and incompetent.
Unethical Quote of the Week: SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor
“Public schools, this Court has said, are “at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny.” … They offer to children of all faiths and backgrounds an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society. That experience is critical to our Nation’s civic vitality. Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs. Today’s ruling ushers in that new reality.”
—-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting (ignorantly as usual) in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, the 6-3 ruling in which the Court held that schools have to give parents the option of having their children absent themselves from lessons that are adverse to the family’s’ religious beliefs.
Ethics Alarms already weighed in on this case earlier here, but I neglected to focus on the full calamity of the Wise Latina’s sinister dissent. The flood of incompetent, woke garbage spewing from her colleague Justice Jackson of late has raised a lively debate over which of the two women was the worst DEI appointment. Obama picked Sonia before DEI was a thing, so maybe Jackson, Biden’s selection, wins by default; still O made it clear that it was Sotomayor’s ethnicity and gender and not her legal acumen that got her the “historic” seat on the Court.
Addendum to “The Supreme Court Rules That The President Is In Charge of the Executive Branch, Just Like the Constitution Always Said.”
When I wrote the last post, I could not find a link to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sole written dissent in the 8-1 SCOTUS decision today to, you know, let the President of the United States run the Executive Branch, which the Constitution says he controls. Well, I finally did find one here, and the dissent is exactly what you would expect if you’ve read her recent hysterical, legally incompetent rants because her party isn’t getting away with its various efforts to cripple the Trump Administration. She is distinctly echoing the primal scream of frustration that the Axis is emitting because its dreams of a Woke paradise are evaporating by the hour.
She wrote in part, “In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground. This case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives — and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened. Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.”
This is a policy complaint, not a legal one. Remarkably, even the pathetic Justice Sotomayor went along with the majority. The fact that Presidents have sought authority to do what the Constitution makes clear that they already have the power to do does not amend the Constitution. The Court lifted the say because it believed it likely that the President’s reorganization of his own Branch would be found lawful. It’s a good bet, given that the Constitution backs him up and there is no progressive majority on the Court more concerned with blocking Republican policies than following the law.
The coalition of unions and activists that sued to block the cuts said in a statement, “Today’s decision has dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy.”
Are you sick of this narrative yet? It’s a grave thret to democracy to allow the elected President of the United Sates do what he said he would do if elected. More…
“This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.”
But it is. Nothing in the document requires Congressional approval for Presidential control of his own Branch. The Founders do not mention “federal workers” at all, and envisioned a government that would not have departments and agencies multiplying like rabbits. Jackson’s tell is the use of her term “wrecking ball.” That’s a political bias without relevance to the law or the Constitution. She is the one advocating an abuse of power, not the majority.
The Supreme Court Rules That The President Is In Charge of the Executive Branch, Just Like the Constitution Always Said.
Gee. What a radical, authoritarian concept.
“The decision could result in job losses for tens of thousands of employees at agencies including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury,” whines the New York Times. Awwww! That’s completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. That the Times, or some judges, or Democrats, or anyone else doesn’t like the effort to strip down and re-organize the bloated, corrupt, inefficient and profligate Federal government is their opinion and they are welcome to it. But it is the Executive Branch, and the various efforts to block the President from managing his own branch was unethical, an abuse of power, and indefensible.
The decision was preceded by a major ruling on June 27, when SCOTUS limited the ability of judges to block President Trump’s policies nationwide. This should not be treated as a partisan decision, but of course the Left wants it to be seen as so. This, again, demonstrates a death of integrity.
The emergency application on mass firings across federal agencies began with an executive order signed by Trump in February directing officials to prepare for major cuts to the federal work force. Then labor unions, advocacy groups and local governments sued to block it, counting on partisan judges to see it as their duty to block an Evil President. So Judge Susan Illston of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California temporarily paused the administration’s plans for layoffs and program closures, claiming that such cuts were most likely illegal without approval from Congress. There is no legal authority for that contention. She said a President cannot conduct large-scale reorganization of the executive branch without cooperation with Congress and following the process that the legislative branch has approved for government reorganization, and she froze mass layoffs and agency closures while the lower-court case proceeded.
The fact that past Presidents have chosen to seek cooperation from Congress in organization of the Executive Branch, often for political cover, never meant that they had to. Nonetheless, Judge Illston wrote that in order to make “large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his coequal branch and partner, the Congress.”
Balderdash.
The Trump administration appealed the ruling, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Judge Illston’s order. The Trump administration then filed an emergency application with the Supremes. Judges defying the Constitution to advance partisan warfare is an emergency. It’s called the Executive Branch for a reason.
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