The spark for this post is the recent fiasco engineered by Modesto Junior College in California, which told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the student center on September 17, 2013, which happens to be Constitution Day. College police and administrators demanded that student Robert Van Tuinen stop passing out Constitution pamphlets and told him that he would only be allowed to pass them out in the college’s tiny free speech zone, and only after scheduling it several days or weeks ahead of time. Fortunately, as is almost always the case in such campus outrages, The Fire, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (and what does it tell us that this indispensable champion of individual rights is widely regarded as a “conservative” organization?) was at the ready, and ripped off a letter to the school administrators that served the dual purpose of warning it to back off and holding it up to national ridicule. Continue reading
the U.S. Constitution
Flat, Flat, Flat…and Infuriating
This was bound to happen.
A graph of President Obama’s leadership learning curve since January, 2009. This is actually a new graph, including data since the last one of these I posted, though I recognize that the difference is hard to see…
Waaay back in 2009, when the new President improvidently and recklessly commented on a local dispute between a Harvard professor and a Cambridge policeman, I pointed out that Obama needed to learnthe ethical limits on his power and influence. Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit” is not license for the highest office-holder in the land to try to mold public opinion on every conceivable matter, local or national, and to influence decisions solely within the authority of others. For the President to state his personal verdict on anything he wakes up concerned about risks putting a weighty thumb on the scales of justice. It is an abuse of power—a President behaving like an emperor.
This is not a difficult concept; indeed, with occasional lapses, every other President has grasped it instinctively. Not Barack Obama. Brilliant Barack Obama. “Constitutional scholar” Barack Obama. For while the Gates episode may have been a rookie mistake, he has engaged in exactly the same unethical, arrogant conduct repeatedly, here, and here, and here and here, and here, and especially here—and I’m sure I may have missed a few.
Each time I pointed out this inexcusable habit, I was barraged by glossy-eyed readers who made excuses for Obama and rationalized his grandstanding remarks, accusing me of being biased and hypercritical. But with each new instance, it should have been progressively clearer that I correctly diagnosed this malady in 2009. Now, after Obama has done it yet again, commenting inappropriately about the military sexual harassment scandal, this proclivity has finally had tangible legal consequences. You can’t say I didn’t warn him. Continue reading
Incompetent Elected Officials Of The Month: The U.S. Congress
“Oh, THAT…”
We know that our elected officials don’t think it is important for them to read the bills they vote for (or against.) That’s irresponsible, but this is illegal: as pointed out by Thomas Beck in the Wall Street Journal, both Houses of Congress, but especially the Senate, defy the most basic Parliamentary rule of all, one that is mandated in the Constitution. The requirement: having more than 50% of members present, a quorum, in order to do business.
“Congress has ignored the quorum requirement for decades, yet neither the president nor the courts has questioned the practice. The one time the Supreme Court was called upon to apply the quorum requirement was in the 1892 case of United States v. Ballin. A statute was challenged on the basis that, while a majority was present in the House when the act was passed, a majority didn’t cast votes on it. A unanimous Supreme Court explained that what matters is whether a majority is present: ‘All that the Constitution requires is the presence of a majority, and when that majority are present the power of the House arises.’ Continue reading
Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: New York State Senator Greg Ball (R)
Trust me, guys, you really don’t want to vote for Greg Ball again…he’s embarrassing your district.
Every now and then, a public official says something so brain-meltingly ridiculous that I wish I had a traditional blog and could write, “What an idiot!” and leave it at that. This is one of those times.
Republican New York State Senator Greg Ball must represent the troglodyte section of New York—you know, that famous district heavily populated with prehistoric cave-dwellers who were discovered frozen in 1989, thawed out alive, and became politically active?—based on his unapologetic,nail-spitting, un-American tweet regarding the younger, surviving terrorist brother who engineered the Boston Marathon bombing:
What an idiot.
No, no, I can’t say that.
This is an unethical tweet. It’s an irresponsible tweet. Supporting torture “to save more lives” explicitly rejects the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitutional requirements of Due Process and the Bill of Rights prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and compelled testimony against self-interest. The “anything to save more lives” illogic, though recently adopted, to his shame and disgrace, by the presumably less idiotic President Obama in his quest for more gun regulations, is, of course, the open door to martial law and the permanent trade of liberty for security. I wrote about this at some length in the wake of the Abu Ghraib fiasco; reading “The Ethics of American Torture” again now, I would hold the same today, as would, I hope, most of you. (Don’t bother to read this, Senator Ball; it’s more than 140 characters, and you wouldn’t understand it anyway.) I wrote in part, Continue reading
Incompetent Elected Officials Of the Month: Oh, Brother!
My mood after I wrote this...
As more and more observers predict that the individual mandate, a cornerstone of Obamacare, will be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, I found my mind returning to the topics that have bothered me from the beginning. Why didn’t Congress make certain that it was on sound constitutional ground when it passed the law? Did they really understand what they were passing? Is it possible that our elected officials could spend so much time and occupy so much of the nation’s attention on an issue they didn’t understand? Surely our highest elected officials entrusted with devising the laws of this great nation must understand the powers and limits that relate to their duties in the Constitution. Don’t they? Isn’t that a minimum qualification for office?
George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein has provided clues to the answers to those question, and you’re not going to like them. He writes: Continue reading
The Disgrace of the Health Care Reform Debacle, Brought Into Focus
Nice image. Unfortunately, the open book is "Catch 22"
“Some prominent academics have argued that the individual mandate is a clearly constitutional exercise of the federal government’s taxing power. Some of these same academics have argued that opponents of the individual mandate’s constitutionality are well outside the legal mainstream. Yet as of today, there has not been a single federal court — indeed, perhaps not even a single federal judge — who has accepted the taxing power argument. Not a one. And yet a half-dozen federal judges have found the mandate to be unconstitutional. So which arguments are outside of the mainstream again?”
Thus did Jonathan Adler, Case Western law professor and Director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation, chide the arrogant supporters of the health care reform act who dismissed as wackos and radicals critics who were alarmed at its intrusions onto personal freedom. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals’ rejection of the individual mandate, the provision requiring all adult citizens to buy private health insurance, is the most striking proof yet of the arrogant, unethical, dishonest, corrupt and incompetent manner in which the Democratic majority passed its version of health care reform. Continue reading
Unethical Quote of the Week: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Hillary said something unethical? I'm shocked! Shocked!
“But the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them? For the Obama Administration, the answer to that question is very easy.”
—–Obama Administration Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, responding in a press conference to Congressional objections that the U.S. continued participation in attacks on Libya violates the War Powers Resolution—which it undoubtedly does.
Most of the objections to Sec. Clinton’s comments focus on her apparent hypocrisy; after all, this is the same woman who as a U.S. Senator in 2003 objected to “are you with us or against us” rhetoric from the Bush Administration regarding the Iraq war by saying, “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.” But this isn’t necessarily hypocrisy: Hillary has a right to change her mind. What is unethical about her statement on Libya is that it is manipulative, unfair and dishonest. Continue reading
The Offensive Battle Over “Seven in Heaven Way”
"There goes Fred, getting all religious again...."
With some hesitation, I must re-open the issue of officious inter-meddlers and grievance-mongerers who get satisfaction and empowerment from claiming to be offended by things that could not possibly harm them or genuinely infringe on their rights. The atheists are at it again.
My position has been stated here and elsewhere many times: in the absence of genuine long or short term harm, the ethical human response to a symbolic grievance is to keep one’s response proportional to the offense, which sometimes means considering how many individuals will be made miserable in order to satisfy one individual or a small group, and letting it go. Forcing a university to change the long-standing name of its football team based on a dubious argument that the name is an offense to Native Americans when most Native Americans couldn’t care less, for example, is wrong. Forcing a school to stop teaching kindergarteners to sing “Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer” because a Jewish parent thinks the song promotes Christianity is wrong.
Now a group of New York City atheists is demanding that their city re-name a street that was dedicated to the memory of seven firefighters killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Continue reading
Ethics Hero: Rep. Ron Paul
One of the benefits of absolutist ethical systems is that they can force you to maintain your integrity when unethical positions are convenient or temporarily beneficial. So it was that libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tx) emerged from Monday’s New Hampshire debate among GOP Presidential hopefuls as the only candidate who rejected limiting the participation of gays in the military and the infamous “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. While Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum (naturally), Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty all said, in various and convoluted ways, that they supported DADT, Paul cut precisely to what is ethically offensive about the policy.
“We have to remember, rights don’t come in groups,” Paul said. “We shouldn’t have gay rights. Rights come as individuals….it would be behavior that would count, not the person who belongs to which group.”
I am far, far from being a Ron Paul fan, for his libertarian principles lead him to as many irresponsible positions as ethical ones. And he is certainly emboldened to risk the displeasure of the Republican base as a candidate with about as much chance of getting the Republican nomination as I do (though more of a chance than Newt Gingrich). But on a night when six of his rivals pandered to homophobia and embraced a policy that both violates core American values and endorses lying, Ron Paul alone had the courage and principle to correctly place “Don’t Ask” where it belongs, in conflict with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Herman Cain Flunks The Presidential Candidate Competency Test
Herman Cain's Consitution
The legal ethics standards do not require that a lawyer be fully knowledgeable and competent to handle a particular representation when he or she accepts the assignment, but does require that the lawyer be sufficiently up-to-speed in the legal area at issue when the work commences. That standard is reasonable for the law, but the American public should expect more when an individual has the audacity to pronounce himself fit to be President of the United States. One area I would hope a candidate wouldn’t need to bone up on after the fact: the nation’s founding documents.
Former pizza CEO and conservative radio host Herman Cain officially entered the contest for the GOP nomination over the weekend with this statement, following his exhortation to America’s public to read the Constitution:
“Keep reading! Don’t stop at life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”
Meet me at the bridge; I’ll be jumping at noon. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 