Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown Law Center Dean William Treanor

[Psst! It’s Georgetown University Law Center, not “school.” The Hill and other lazy publications keep calling it the law school, which was what the institution’s name was before it moved from the Georgetown campus (in Georgetown, a picturesque section of D.C.) to Capitol Hill near all the courts, including the Supreme Court. If you saw the place, you would know that “center” is an appropriate description. The name was the inspiration of then Dean Paul Dean, visionary, a respected lawyer and talented fund-raiser. He was also a good friend of mine as well as a cherished mentor]

William Trainor has been criticized on Ethics Alarms before notably during this fiasco, when he punished an incoming faculty member, Illya Shapiro, for daring to question Joe Biden’s wisdom of narrowing his choice of Supreme Court nominees to fill a vacancy to women of color, the same criteria that worked out so, so well with Kamala Harris. Following the lead of his radically indoctrinated students (it’s supposed to be the other way around), the GULC dean suspended Shapiro pending…well, something, and then after letting him twist slowly in the wind for months, finally let him back into the fold whereupon Shapiro quite properly told him to take his job and shove it, as I would have under like circumstances.

There were other instances when Trainer allowed his institution to be more woke than responsible; he is largely the reason my Law Center diploma is turned face to the wall in my ProEthics office. Here is an episode that didn’t directly involve the Dean but that occurred on his watch.

Now comes another skirmish. Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin sent a letter to GULC last month asking if the Law Center had eliminated its commitment to DEI. “At this time, you should know that no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered,” Martin wrote.

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House Democrats Emulate Al Green En Masse Just So There Is No Mistaking The Party’s Descent Into…[Corrected]

Early during President Trump’s State of the Union Message [See footnote below], Texas Representative Al Green, who already filed articles of impeachment against the President, shook his cane and shouted, refusing to stop disrupting the speech until Speaker Mike Johnson had the House Sergeant of Arms escort him out of the chamber. Green then went to the first camera he saw and declared, “I’ll accept my punishment! It was worth it.”

Speaker Mike Johnson had issued several warnings. “Members are directed to uphold and maintain decorum in the House and to cease any further disruptions,” he said. Then, “That’s your warning. Members are engaging in willful and continuing breach of decorum. And the Chair is prepared to direct the Sergeant at arms to restore order to the joint session. Take your seat,” Johnson said. Finally, “The members continue to engage in willful and concerted disruption of proper decorum. The chair now directs the Sergeant at Arms to restore order. Remove this gentleman from the chamber.”

Green’s official censure was assumed to be a certainty, and sure enough, Green was censured the next day. The vote was 224-198, with 10 Democrats joining all Republicans, so we know that at least ten Democrats have a shred of dignity and respect for the institution of Congress. (Green and freshman Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Ala., voted “present”) As the vote proceeded, Green sat by himself along the center aisle as tradition dictates.

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Never Mind “The Appearance of Impropriety,” Democrats Need To Avoid The Appearance of Stupidity

Let’s see: the ethical values that Congressional Democrats spat upon last night were competence, responsibility, integrity, respect, civility, courtesy, decency, dignity, self-restraint, prudence, fairness and patriotism. That’s quite an accomplishment in a single event. The party’s decision to challenge the GOP’s well-earned title as “The Stupid Party” last night during the State of the Union address was, in turn,

  • Foolish
  • Juvenile
  • Desperate
  • Embarrassing (to their party, the  nation and the institution of Congress)
  • Damning
  • Damaging to democracy
  • An appeal to the Trump Deranged while simultaneously proving how crippling the malady can be…and…
  • …a gift to the man they hate so much, President Trump.

In “True Grit,” the villain Tom Cheney is shot by young Maddie Ross after he taunts her by telling the girl how to cock the giant pistol she has aimed at him. He is stunned when she shoots him, and cries out, “I didn’t think you’d do it!”

I might make “The Cheney” a new Ethics Alarms distinction. I had read about the ridiculous college campus protest-level tactics Democrats were considering, and posted about them yesterday, as well as noting that the party’s leader in the House, Hakeem Jefferies, had advised them to eschew such nonsense in favor of a “strong, determined and dignified Democratic presence in the chamber.” Jeffries was right for a change, and I really thought all of the stories about the Democrats bringing props and dressing up would prove to be false alarms. I didn’t think they’d do it! Yet when the time for the yearly Presidential “speech “state of the nation” speech arrived, there were the Democrats, looking like the studio audience in a particularly ugly episode of “Let’s Make a Deal.”

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Ethics Quote of the Year (So Far): Donald Sensing

“Finally, hating Trump is merely cheap virtue signaling. It is neither a method nor a plan. But if you feel better about hating Trump than you feel bad about Ukrainians getting killed with no end in sight, then you are morally bankrupt and God forbid you have any say in what happens.”

—-Military expert, commentator and Methodist minister Daniel Sensing concluding his blog post, “‘I stand with Ukraine’ means what, exactly?”

Last night, probably the smartest and most reliably reasonable of my Trump-Deranged lawyer friends published a much-loved diatribe on Facebook condemning President Trump for the Oval Office meltdown with Zelenskyy last week. He doesn’t post often, but every one recently has been to take issue with a Trump, quote, policy or action. I’ve had to wrestle my metaphorical tongue to the floor every time. It would do no good to rebut him, and all my effort would do would diminish the respect he has for me because, on this topic, his powers of reasoning are gone. If I wanted to start a stampede of unfriending on my Facebook page, I would point him to the superb post by Donald Sensing flagged this morning on Instapundit by Prof. Glenn Reynolds. My friend would never see the post otherwise, since Reynolds’ legendary blog is relentlessly conservative and my friend would sooner draw a pentagram on his kitchen floor than sample anything written there. But Sensing, whose fascinating CV is here and who is better qualified to opine on the Ukraine-Russian conflict than either of us, has provided a superb analysis with clarity and logical force.

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“March Comes In” Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/3/25

March 1 was the 395 day anniversary of my wife’s sudden and unexpected death on Leap Year, 2024. I want to thank everyone who has been so kind , tolerant and supportive here. To be honest, it seems like yesterday that I found her lifeless body. I still have nightmares, anxiety, attacks of regret and sudden sadness when something triggers a memory, and almost anything can, from my dog to movies to songs, like this one, which for no reason at all suddenly started going through what I laughingly call “my mind”….

Anyway…thanks.

Meanwhile…

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

Today is supposedly Great Stupid Day, or Throw a Tantrum Day, or something. One of my previously functioning lawyer friends on Facebook posted the nonsense below, saying that “we all” should follow its wisdom “if we can”:

Regarding the Washington Post’s New Opinion Page Policy…

Do you understand what this means? I don’t.

Since a lot of writers work for Jeff, I would have suggested that he have one of them draft that statement with his oversight. Presumably he means that the Post will no longer publish op-eds like this…

…but he could have just as easily written that the Post will no longer give a platform to Trump Deranged nutballs like Jennifer Rubin, who had already quit anyway. My best analysis is that Bezos has just officially said that the Washington Post is leaving the Axis, and will no longer be a reliable ally and propaganda organ of the Far Left and the Democratic Party, which now consistently advocates that the U.S. become a European-style nanny state and that personal liberties be pared back, especially those enshrined in the First and Second Amendments. If that’s the idea, it is an admirable goal, though I think it is far too late for the Post to change course, and that the 95% Democrat city of D.C. is the worst possible place to try.

It is fun to see and hear the Angry Left freak out over the announcement. Here is one of the Post’s most unethical propagandists, the eloquent Phillip Bump:

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”

This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?

I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.

Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”

But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.

And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.

Here is AM Golden’s illuminating Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”…

***

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Today’s Unpleasant Ethics Question: How Can We Justify Trusting Today’s Scholars and Academics To Train Our Rising Generations?

I want to state at the outset that the ridiculous research paper I’m about to make fun of is only one horrifying example of institutional insanity, and it would be unfair to use it to characterize the entire higher education complex. However, I do believe that a healthy and functioning scholarly sector must have a way to reject, condemn and shun such abuses of position and authority.

I’ll have more to say on this matter after revealing the head-exploding product of University of San Diego professors Diane Marie Keeling and Bethany O’Shea.

These scholars have published a study titled “Conceptualizing Black Humanity Through Geopoetic Intimacy and Resistance: Memory Making-with Geologic Materials” Here is the abstract:

Amplifying the importance of geologic processes in subject formation, the study asserts that geological time is important for understanding memory and memorials. In the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Projects and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, materials of geologic composition like soil, and those made from earth materials, such as steel and bricks, are employed to trope the bodies of lynching victims and weather racist geologic formations of subjecthood. The holding and eroding of violent memories crafts an intimate and resistant geopoetics of Black humanity.

Oh. What???

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Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical

The Trump administration announced today that it would choose which media outlets participates in the Presidential press pool.

Good!

“In announcing plans to hand-select the reporters who can ask the president questions at many events,” the New York Times intoned darkly, “the White House is breaking decades of precedent.” Oh NO! Another “democratic norm” breached!

Naturally, the White House Correspondents’ Association, which was delegated the job back when the entire journalism establishment wasn’t allied with a single party and dedicated to bringing down the administration of any elected President who didn’t embrace their policy preferences, attacked the change in the manner of a proverbial stuck pig. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” wrote Eugene Daniels, a Politico reporter and the president of the association. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the President. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

In a functioning democracy, journalists exist to inform the public, not to bend elections to the will of the news outlets. Calling the current news media independent insults the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention to the deterioration of journalism ethics, aka. honesty, fairness, transparency, objectivity, competence and independence, over the past two decades.

Also, any Politico reporters should be hiding his head under a bag after the revelations about how it accepted “subscriptions” from the Biden Administration while covering it, and mostly positively at that. Here’s the unbiased Politico headline of today’s announcement: “White House seizes control of press pool, will decide which outlets cover events with President.” Oooh, “seizes!” Scary! Sounds awfully Hitler-y doesn’t it? The White House didn’t “seize” anything: it has always had the power to decide who attends press briefings, and it is asserting it.

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