SENSENBRENNER OPPOSES the “path to citizenship.”
Archive for 2006
May 28, 2006
I’VE HAD GOOD LUCK WITH MY DELLS. Doug Weinstein, not so much.
But he’s had worse trouble with Adaptec.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi rails against the GOP “culture of corruption.”
And in the most boneheaded political move of 2006, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., just handed her extra rope.
This has been a sorry year for congressional ethics. Cunningham pleaded guilty. Under indictment and with news reports linking him to Abramoff, Rep. Tom DeLay has announced his resignation. When he pleaded guilty, Abramoff implicated Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. Last month, Alan Mollohan, D-W.V., stepped down from the House ethics committee after The Wall Street Journal reported that he was under investigation for directing federal spending to nonprofits with which he has financial ties. So when the FBI raided the office of Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., Hastert should have kept his head down and, for a change, let Pelosi do the squirming.
Instead, Hastert and Pelosi issued a joint statement demanding that the federal government return “the papers it unconstitutionally seized.” Bush responded by sealing the seized records for 45 days.
Be it noted that the FBI had a subpoena and the House raid followed a search of Jefferson’s home last August that netted $90,000 stashed in Jefferson’s freezer — money that allegedly came from a $100,000 bribe captured on videotape. The feds had tried to get Jefferson to honor the subpoena for months — but to no avail.
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., told The Washington Times, “Make no mistake, the American people will come to one conclusion — that congressional leaders are trying to protect their own from valid investigation.” That’s certainly how I see it.
Me too.
MORE ON WARD CHURCHILL, from a CU department head.
CAR CRASH AT INDY: Donald Sensing has more, including video.
SINCE THE SUBJECT’S IN THE NEWS AGAIN, here’s the Kerry Christmas in Cambodia speech post. There’s more background here, here, and here.
And refresh my memory: Did Kerry ever release his military records in full, as he promised? It seems rather silly of him to restart this debacle otherwise.
UPDATE: More here.
And Ed Driscoll is dubbing Kerry’s newest initiative the “Blogosphere Full Employment Act of 2006.” He is a gift that keeps on giving. More here, too.
TOM ELIA offers historical perspective for the ignorant.
IT’S A SPECIAL MEMORIAL DAY Carnival of the Recipes! I cooked barbecued chicken on the grill last night; the InstaDaughter made strawberry and blueberry trifle for dessert.
I KNEW IT WAS COMING: Amazon TV.
UPDATE: The reviews so far aren’t that positive.
THE PIECE BY PROF. ROBERT TURNER OF VIRGINIA that I linked yesterday, on separation of powers and Congressional immunity, is now up as a free link at OpinionJournal.com.
UPDATE: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has split with Hastert and Pelosi:
FRIST: … if there are accusations of bribery, of having lost the trust, abused the trust of the American people, criminal activity, no House member, no senator, nobody in government should be above the law of the land, period.
And a search warrant was obtained to go in. So to answer your question, no, I don’t think it abused separation of powers. I think there’s allegations of criminal activity, and the American people need to have the law enforced.
I don’t think it was a separation of powers question. I’ve looked at it very carefully.
He’s right, of course.
IF YOU WANT TO HELP the victims of the Java earthquake, most of the charities in this list will probably be helping.
May 27, 2006
PROBLEMS IN EAST TIMOR, but the United Nations doesn’t seem to have done much good:
After several soldiers opened fire on unarmed police in Dili on Thursday, killing 10 as they were being escorted from their headquarters by U.N. officers, the traumatized force melted away. Frightened officers fled for the surrounding hills. On Saturday, no one patrolled the largely abandoned streets but the vigilantes. . . .
Hours after the United Nations announced it was also evacuating nonessential personnel from the country, dozens of employees trickled into the U.N. compound carrying suitcases and backpacks. Some were distraught over leaving their Timorese colleagues behind and abruptly suspending services to the country’s impoverished population.
I can imagine. It certainly seems to have upset the Timorese:
Arriving at Dili’s airport, Tim Costello, the head of aid agency World Vision said the departure of international aid staff and UN officials was sending a bad signal.
“The symbols are all wrong,” Costello told AAP.
“The people who are camped here (at the airport), who can never get on a plane, see the UN leaving.
“I would hate to think of the message they get from that.
“I think it’s important for aid workers and the UN to actually be here and say, ‘You’re not so strife-torn and hopeless that it’s only a one-way ticket out.'”
The U.N. flies out, World Vision flies in. I know who I’d rather see getting my money. And Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has a sensible perspective:
“But it’s a very, very new country. After all, the referendum was only in August 1999.
“Full independence has come relatively recently. It’s going to be tough for them.”
These things take a while. It hasn’t fully settled down in the former Yugoslavia yet, after all.
A MAJOR QUAKE IN INDONESIA now said to have killed over 3,500 people. If past experience is any guide, those numbers will turn out to be low.
U.S. forces are standing by to help. That’s both the right thing to do, and good politics.
Of course, if you believe some sources, it’s all about the politics.
REPORTING FOR DUTY: A Memorial Day tribute.
THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF SCANDAL: CBS News turns Rep. William Jefferson into a Republican.
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll reminds me that CBS previously made Bush President back in 1998 in a story about how the U.S. failed to stop Osama back then.
TOM MAGUIRE: “John Kerry wants to re-fight the Swift Boats wars. My goodness, that is the only thing that could get the Times to cover this – during his campaign they stayed about as far from this story as Kerry was from Cambodia at Christmas time. . . . And just to be clear – I have no interest in beating on Kerry like a rented mule (again). I am much more curious to see whether we can demonstrate that the MSM was horribly deficient in their coverage of their story.”
A READER SAYS “It looks like this anti-aging stuff is working already:”
Doctors said sexually transmitted diseases among senior citizens are running rampant at a popular Central Florida retirement community, according to a Local 6 News report. . . .
A doctor blamed Viagra, a lack of sex education and no risk for pregnancy for the spike in sexually transmitted diseases at The Villages.
“All I can repeat are the things I have heard which are things like, ‘Should I bring the little blue pills over tonight?'” community singles group president Richard Matwyshen said.
Senior sex should still be safe sex.
PETER DIAMANDIS WINS THE HEINLEIN PRIZE: Rand Simberg has comments.
I think it’s well-deserved.
MORE ON CONGRESS AND THE SEPARATION OF POWERS: What’s frustrating in these discussions is the failure to distinguish between what the law should be in somebody’s opinion, and what it actually is, based on the Constitution and the caselaw. This entry on Congressional immunity from Jerry Pournelle — a smart guy, but no lawyer — is a good example:
Just as each House is the judge of the qualification of its members, each House is responsible for enforcement of ethics and criminal actions of members. The Houses have sufficient authority to do as they will in those cases.
When you bring the executive power into direct enforcement against sitting Members of either house of Congress, you end the separation of powers. It is easy for the executive to fake ‘evidence’ if it chooses. Once the executive power can intimidate sitting Members of Congress, you have an entirely different kind of government.
Now it is required that the Houses inquire into the criminal actions of Members. But that is done by their own agents, or at the request of the Speaker or President pro tem; not by the executive authority.
Now you may think that this is a good idea — I don’t, but Pournelle apparently does — but it is not now, nor has it ever been, the law. In fact, with the sole exception of impeachment (which doesn’t run against members of Congress), the Congress cannot investigate or try offenses, and impeachment is carefully distinguished from criminal prosecution in the Constitution. The Constitution’s prohibition of Bills of Attainder, in fact, explicitly forbids Congress dealing with criminal matters.
A house of Congress can also refuse to seat members it judges not properly elected, and expel members for misbehavior — but even then it’s not immune from outside review, as Powell v. McCormack makes clear. (And note that when a member is expelled, it’s generally after criminal conviction not the result of independent Congressional investigation). The autonomy of Congress extends only to legislative business: Congress could, if it chose, let a convicted Senator or Representative continue to vote and participate in Congressional business from a jail cell, but the Speech and Debate Clause provides no generalized immunity from law enforcement, which is an executive function. It’s just not true that, as Pournelle claims, “Members of Congress and Senators enjoy many of the immunities of the old Roman Tribunes of the People.” At least, not unless “many” means “a slight tinge.”
I don’t know why this, which is and always has been the law, seems so hard for some people to grasp. It’s true, of course, that things are done differently elsewhere: The Russian Duma has immunity from prosecution, for example. But that’s not how it’s done here. And I thought that we weren’t supposed to get our constitutional law from foreign jurisdictions?
There’s a good oped on how unhappy many members of Congress are with the notion of accountability and how anxious they are for special status, by Prof. Bob Turner, in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s subscription-only, but here’s an excerpt:
Put simply, only Congress can inquire into the motives or content of votes, speeches or other official legislative acts.
But as the Supreme Court observed in the 1972 case of United States v. Brewster, the clause was never intended to immunize corrupt legislators who violate felony bribery statutes — laws that have expressly applied to members of Congress for more than 150 years. In Brewster, the court noted the clause was not written “to make Members of Congress super-citizens, immune from criminal responsibility,” adding: “Taking a bribe is, obviously, no part of the legislative process or function; it is not a legislative act. It is not, by any conceivable interpretation, an act performed as a part of or even incidental to the role of a legislator.”
Such behavior is therefore not protected by the Constitution. The purpose of the Speech or Debate Clause was to protect the integrity of the legislative process, and the Court noted that bribery, “perhaps even more than Executive power,” would “gravely undermine legislative integrity and defeat the right of the public to honest representation.”
A dozen years ago, I testified before the House Committee on Administration on this same basic issue. Newt Gingrich and other reformers were trying to bring Congress under the same ethics laws it had imposed upon the rest of the country, and some indignant legislators seemed confident that the laws were not supposed to apply to them. The hearing was held in a small room in a part of the Capitol Building off-limits to the public, with exactly enough chairs for members, staff and the three witnesses.
Two members of the public who managed to make their way to the room were turned away on the grounds that there was “no room” for public observers.
Critics of the Gingrich proposal did not hear what they wanted. Some seemed genuinely shocked when I informed them that, in Federalist No. 57, James Madison noted one of the constraints in the Constitution to prevent legislators from enacting “oppressive measures” was that “they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.”
It is increasingly rare to find a spirit of bipartisanship in Congress these days. So a display of the spirit would have been a good thing to see — especially in a time of war — but for the fact that the issue now uniting Republican and Democratic leaders is an outrageous assertion that members of Congress are above the law, and that the Constitution immunizes legislators who betray their public trust in return for bribes from investigation by the executive branch.
In light of the attitudes held by so many of our legislators, it is no wonder three times as many Americans disapprove of Congress’s job-performance as approve, according to last week’s Gallup Poll. Those are Congress’s lowest numbers since the Democrats were last in power a dozen years ago.
Congress probably has the power, constitutionally, to immunize its members from prosecution while in office. Such legislation would be immensely unpopular, of course, and would cause a lot of people to lose reelection: “Vote for me — I’m in favor of immunity for corrupt members of Congress!” isn’t much of a slogan.
That’s why members of Congress are making a bogus Constitutional argument instead of using their undisputed legislative powers: To avoid the very kind of legislative responsibility to the voters that the Constitution, and separation of powers, places squarely in their laps. Such behavior is reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in Clinton v. Jones, and I don’t recall many of the Republicans who are taking a pro-immunity position now endorsing Clinton’s approach then.
IRAN, IRAQ, AND NUKES: Iraq the Model asks:
Does the CNN have problems with translation from Arabic to English or is it a case of deliberate twisting of facts?
Read the whole thing.
I am listening to President Bush’s speech at West Point and thinking “Why didn’t he give this speech three years ago?”
He’s liveblogged it.
Does the just-passed Senate immigration bill really only require illegal immigrants to pay back taxes for 3 of the past 5 years? It looks that way. I’ll take that deal! … My sophisticated political antennae tell me that this provision will not go over well! At some point, the voters may conclude the Senate has simply lost its mind.
Ya think? And yes, I’d like a couple of tax-free years, please. And without even having to donate a kidney!
BECAUSE YOUR BOOK CAN’T BE ANY GOOD IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT POLITICAL ATTITUDES:
Yesterday, we blogged the Yale press release (dated 5/23/06) stating that Michael J. Graetz (Yale) & Ian Shapiro (Yale) had won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for their book Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton University Press, 2005). According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the foundation at the last minute rescinded the award because of Shapiro’s opposition to the unionization of Yale graduate students.
Jeez.