“Yes, all you intrusive government-lovers out there in TV Land, it’s time for the game show sweeping America: “Guess What Party!” It’s the exciting contest where our competitors try to guess the party affiliation of the state or national legislators by the nature of the bills they have introduced.

“It’s not as easy as you might think! For example, Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur filed legislation (SB 1316) mandating that bloggers writing about the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Cabinet or Legislature to register with the state. Bloggers daring to comment on such elected officials must also report any compensation they receive or may receive. Registration would be required within five days of any blog mentioning an elected state official, and thereafter, bloggers would have to file monthly reports on what posts mention those officials.

Can you say “Chilling free speech”? How about “undue burden”? Sure you can! Sen. Brodeur must be a Democrat, right? After all, that’s the party that is now actively hostile to the First Amendment (among others) and slowly but surely moving toward a totalitarian system in which thoughts, words, and personal liberties would be tightly controlled “for the greater good” and to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion. But if you buzzed in with that answer, you’d lose the round of ‘Guess What Party!’

You would have forgotten how incredibly ignorant and stupid that bill is! The bill is unconstitutional on its face, and if we had a competent education system, any 6th grader would know it. Brodeur is a member of the Republican Party—you know, the party so bone-headed that it somehow managed to almost get wiped out in the mid-term elections even in the middle of epic inflation under an incompetent Democratic administration that makes Jimmy Carter seem like Franklin Roosevelt. Brodeur is a GOP deep thinker in the great GOP tradition of George Santos, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Herschel Walker and Michael Steele. You better not leap to conclusions on “Guess What Party!”

Now here’s today’s challenge, panel….

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In “Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?,” Suzy Weiss writes as if students taking advantage of loose standards and professorial sloth to cheat is a recent phenomenon. I can assure her (and her readers) that it’s not. The example she begins with brought back nasty memories for me.

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

The online wrinkle is obviously an addition to the mix, but I encountered this exact scenaio at Georgetown Law Center. My Constitutional Law professor, Nathan Lewin, gave the class a take-home, open-book, self-timed mid-term exam. We were to complete the multi-question essay test in a single session of three hours precisely, which is exactly what I did, dropping my pen mid-way through the last question. After I turned the exam in, I was informed by several classmates that I was a sucker. Continue reading →

That was the predictably partisan slant of Vox regarding the highly skeptical reception Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness bribe to young voters in the run-up to the 2022 midterms got from most of the Supreme Court Justices in oral arguments in two cases, Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown. But that’s Vox for you.

Whether the $400 billion treasury heist is Constitutional or not, it is definitely unethical to the core, and not just because the U.S. is already approaching—has surpassed?—perilous National Debt levels during an administration determined to buy votes and power. Responsible taxpayers are going to be forced to gift irresponsible students who took out loans they couldn’t afford, with many hoping they wouldn’t have to. Responsible college graduates (or their parents) who paid back all of their student loans or never got them will be played for chumps. This is the measure that Vox, and to be fair, most of the mainstream media, is representing as wonderful.

The legal and Constitutional disputes are closer than the ethical one. A sloppily drafted 2003 law authorized the Secretary of Education to address emergencies, in full knowledge, one assumes, that the party favoring brute federal power believes that “no emergency should go to waste.” The language of the law is especially dangerous in an era where much of the Democratic Party is is openly totalitarian in methods and rhetoric. The Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, the HEROES Act (Oooo! Such a clever acronym!), gives the Secretary of Education power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to protect borrowers affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

Like all laws now, most Senators and House members probably didn’t read or think about the bill carefully if at all: it was a post 9-11 reflex. President Bush didn’t have the sense to veto it either. Now, thanks to the contrived “national emergency” of the pandemic, there is at least a colorable claim that the act enables the obscene giveaway. It might be stupid, but SCOTUS is supposed to decide if it is legal.

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