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The Death of Trust in Bipartisan Lawmaking
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is a 2023 law, driven by nearly a decade of cross-party and cross-tribe interests, best summarized by the intro to this 2018 Atlantic piece:
While a 1978 amendment to Title VII established pregnancy as a protected characteristic, the PWFA's congressional support saw it as too limited in scope and in what accommodations it could require businesses to hold.
Another point, however, dropped in mid-April:
This isn't necessarily new, or a surprise: some courts had already held that the 1978 Title VII amendment protected abortion as a pregnancy-related medical condition, albeit with the more restricted scope. There are good pragmatic or philosophical arguments in favor or against, either in regards to abortion specifically or as a law in general, and some !!fun!! questions about a possible that the EEOC's rule-making treats as purely theoretical. There are some, if not exactly strong, arguments that the text of the law requires it.
Several Republican congresscritters who voted for and cosponsored the bill promptly blasted this interpretation, swearing that they were sure and assured it wouldn't happen. Social conservatives, on the other hand, prompted sang I told you so.
Mattes and his organization do still exist, but haven't commented on the new regulation. They're not, it can be fairly readily assumed, in a huge hurry to partner with the ACLU on statute-writing or sponsor-wrangling any time soon.
Okay, well that's not a policy I actually care about, so it's at least kinda funny, and .
FFLs and How To Get Your Dog Shot By The ATF
The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act had many components, but one of many that gun rights advocates pointed out at length as a matter of concern, even well before the law's language was fully concrete, was the redefinition of gun dealers and engaging in the business of firearms sales, from "principal objective of livelihood and profit" to "predominantly earn a profit". The ATF released its final rule on this new statutory definition in early April, shortly after shooting someone in the head while all their agents forgot their cameras at home, explicitly citing the BSCA's new language as cause.
Three guesses on how that went, and the first two don't count:
The only thing that the new rule explicitly does not consider to be "predominantly earn[ing] a profit" is if an individual is liquidating all or part of their owned firearms, without (ever?) purchasing new ones, and I wouldn't bet my pet's life on it. In some ways, it's kinda impressive: the final rule, as opposed to the original proposal, reacted to gunnie concerns about the underspecificity of one resale exception by explicitly removing firearms owned for personal protection from it. In some cases, it breaks from the text of the statute. Halbrook highlights a statutory exception that the ATF refines down to covers repair and customization.
I've written before about the same act smothering archery and hunter training programs at schools, and while this was eventually (and to my surprise) amended, that passed late enough to leave programs screwed over for last school year. We'll see how many schools are willing or able to bring them back.
All around me are familiar faces, Worn out places, worn out FACEs
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a 1994 statute from the old days before backronyms were popularized outside of the military, and consisted of three major prohibitions:
It was considered the height of bipartisan compromise at a difficult time (and Bill Clinton's statescraft, in contrast to the then-expensive Assault Weapons Ban), and like many laws from that era, it reflects a draconian view of punishment. While a first nonviolent offense can 'only' result in a maximum of six months imprisonment and a 10k USD fine, these numbers scale rapidly for repeat offenses, and can be rapidly stacked, even in marginal cases, with other charges to boost the scope of a trial and the possible punishment.
Uh. Except you might notice a pattern in what direction both the successful and failed cases go, and what prongs of the FACE Act they cover. It's not that the feds never prosecute someone for clear violations of this law; they just do it by using an entirely different law that predated and does not scale, and accept plea bargains for the most minimal punishments. That disparity has been around for a while, even if it's only become more obvious with Jane's Revenge floating around.
It does not, as a matter of law, matter whether the FACEs is ever enforced against a specific political viewpoint. And from the view of the 'don't break the laws, fucko' or 'don't block access to public spaces' caucus, I've got little sympathy for protestors getting burned when they signed up for the frying pan. But if you sent a message back in time to the 1994 GOP and told them they were just repeating the 1988 18 USC 247, I doubt they'd have trumpeted it.
Joe Wilson and the Affordable Care Act
There's a number of famous controversies during the run-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, along with some lesser-known ones. The extent trans-related healthcare would be covered and what expectations that invoked was a sleeper, while the question of "encouraged end-of-life" care rather famously got above the fold at length.
Joe Wilson is best-remembered, to the extent he's remembered at all, for one of the better-known ones. He shouted out "You lie" during the middle of a joint session of congress where then-President Obama disavowed that "our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants", a matter Republicans feared would be thrown.
To be fair to President Obama, he's (officially) been out of office for the better part of a decade. To be less fair to Biden, there's no statute changed about any of this in that whole timeframe, and Obama was using the future tense. Whatever Obama thought he was proposing, this is what his proposal got, and it's not like he's complaining.
Wilson received a reprimand for his outburst. There'd be some irony in him living long enough to crow about it, though he hasn't done so yet. And even if he did, being right is cold comfort for anyone other than the politicians.
One of These Things Is Not Like The Others
The Affordable Care Act, unlike the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act or Pregnant Workers Fairness Act or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, was more the result of long negotiation rather than long negotiation and compromise between the parties. There are no Republican cosponsors or even congressional votes for the law to be betrayed, because there were no Republican congressional votes for the ACA at all; at most, there were some (long-booted) Blue Dogs.
Quite a large number of moderates, of one stripe or another, drew that as a particular failure. They could, we were told, have gotten more serious concessions; they could, we were told, have achieved their own separate goals. How much they were moderates or 'moderates' often said how much 'they' in the previous passages stood for the GOP or for that particular person's particular goals. During the second half of the Obama years, many of the particular goals side painted the Republicans as the Party of No; after, this obstinate unwillingness to give up a slice of the cake was drawn as both cause and effect of various Republican maladies, from poll numbers among young professionals to failure to integrate into the administrative class to the price of tea in China.
The PWFA and BSCA rulemakings and FACEs prosecutions come as the punchlines to those particularly jokes. No one's come away from any statute feeling the GOP has a better finger on the interests of the public, or was able to represent its people's interests better than the What's The Matter With Kansas asshole. Perhaps these laws are all cherry-picked, and every other major bipartisan statute had everyone walk away smiling, or the GOP betrayed the Democratic Party. Nor, given the speed that even matters as simple as dictionaries have turned to political ends, is there any way to promise that the next time would be different, or that even laws and statutes that conservatives badly want would be resistant. Indeed, the longest delay was the case where they compromised in no amount at all!
You still don't get that many tries to break trust, and it's expensive to rebuild.
There is all that. Although it seems baked into the post is the unsaid premise that the problem is the laws were crafted poorly/maliciously. But, IMHO, the problem is all the enforcement agencies have been captured by neoliberals. And so there simply is no law that they won't interpret in the manner that most suits their objectives. I mean, already with the constitution, you'd think "shall not be infringed" is clear as day. But to a neoliberal lawyer, or a judge that decides "The second amendment does not exist in my courtroom", it's all very nuanced.
So I suppose my opinion is that no law can possibly be crafted to prevent these enforcement agencies from just doing whatever they wanted to do anyways. As such, if you really want to curtail their behavior, you must abolish them.
But I'd be willing to settle for abolishing the undemocratic regime where unaccountable agencies get to make up whatever regulations they want without any oversight from congress, and seeing how things go from there first. A guy can hope.
Oh, my apologies; I don't really mean to take a position on that. It's quite possible that even the most consequential and hidden stuff, like the coverage for gender identity stuff in the ACA, was totally well-intended to the most circumscribed bounds (though I'm not optimistic). It's possible that Obama genuine did at the time not want to fund health insurance for DACA, and there are almost certainly cases where the law was far more explicit and clearly written and reversed anyway. Halbrook's examples of ATF adventurism probably fall there, and I'm a long fan of pointing to problems like whether FOPA means you can stop to piss in Albany, or where a certain high-profile someone revised multiple statutory requirements to destroy records and not record or transfer them at a government facility to instead permit keeping them.
Similarly, one can readily imagine a world where every law was written in the most backhanded way by some evil grand vizier, yet it wouldn't matter because they were enforced by some even-handed personification of justice. We're just not in that world.
Yeah, there's definitely that.
But while that's definitely a bigger problem, and maybe even a coup-complete one, I think it's worth noting the separate issue and incentive where enacting a law or portion of a law to prevent something instead turned into ammunition to enact the desired change. And even if that's a rare matter, even if biased enforcement agencies are replaced or abolished, it's going to be something that will remain as a failure mode.
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While we're dreaming can we get omnibus bills to be banned? Also make a law where anyone in congress/the house can put anyone else present on the spot for knowing the bill's text from memory. If he doesn't know it verbatim then the bill is delayed until everyone involved( yes every single one) learns what it says.
Further make it so you can't add random bullshit to a bill in an amendment.
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What exactly do you mean by neoliberal?
I've never seen it used in the way you're using it.
Catch-all pejorative for political opponents is actually the standard usage.
I've usually seen it to mean something having some level of pro-free market (with, of course, a pejorative sense, and while pretending to refer to a precise group), which this didn't exactly seem like.
I'm being a little glib. As a pejorative it's tended to have pro-free market connotations, though when right-wingers adopt the term they tend to emphasize the globalist aspect of that rather than the anti-regulation/anti-public sector implication of left-wing usage. In either case, it tends to suffer from lumping together a wide range of people who may not be part of the same political coalition as each other or hold the views imputed to them.
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It is slightly more specific than that. The standard meaning of "neoliberal" is "person with economic views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that the unfortunately now-standard meaning of "fascist" is "person with social views to my right who I dislike."
There is also a rarer reclamatory use of the term found on places like /r/neoliberal - the people using the word this way think the key neoliberal beliefs are free trade, support legal immigration at or above current levels, general scepticism of economic regulation, agnosticism about the ideal size of the welfare state.
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
I think that is because they would be calling him a fascist. Trump's right-wing views on the only social issue that matters (immigration) are the most salient thing about his politics.
In addition, part of Trump's political strategy is maintaining plausible deniability that he is to the right of Obama on economic issues, including by attacking elite consensus economic policy from a "left-wing" direction over trade, industrial strategy etc.
A quick search turned out, in Google, at least this Jacobin article that situates Trump as something different from neoliberalism and indeed opposed to it while also situating him on the Right, yet not calling him a fascist. (This was admittedly after a quick skim, there might be some indication of the last in the other words, but I didn't spot it.) This would mean that there's at least one leftist who is able to do that.
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Ten years ago, I would have agreed with you, but it's extremely common to see right-wing populists use it as a pejorative as well, targeting people to the left of them economically.
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Well there are other words in the amendment. Words like 'bear arms', the meaning of which is pretty clearly up for debate even if you come down on the side of a broad interpretation.
Can you respond to his point about the judge that said it does not exist in her courtroom?
That seems to me the bigger issue.
State criminal courts don't do constitutional debates. He broke NY law. Whether that law is unconstitutional (probably yes) is outside the remit of that court.
This is not true. Trial-level criminal courts can and do apply constitutional arguments to their cases all the time.
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I was pleasantly surprised that ChatGPT was able to produce real court cases where State Courts have ruled on Constitutionality:
The New York Court of Appeals struck down the state's death penalty law, citing the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution. The court held that the death penalty statute violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
The California Supreme Court upheld the right to free speech under the First Amendment and California Constitution, allowing individuals to gather signatures in shopping centers despite private property rights. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision.
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated the Eighth Amendment due to its arbitrary application and evolving standards of decency.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court addressed federal Eighth Amendment issues regarding sentencing juveniles to life without parole. The court applied the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama to ban such sentences.
The Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated both the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution due to evidence of racial bias in its application.
Older LLMs would regularly hallucinate with this sort of question.
Edit: link updated to include follow up ChatGPT conversation, which included State courts that weren't State Supreme Courts ruling on Constitutionality:
Yes, not only do state criminal courts handle federal constitutional questions, it's actual necessary for a plaintiff or defendant to bring constitutional complaints to the trial-level court or they risk surrendering the question on appeal (with a few exceptions not relevant here).
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So that implies... that challenging the constitutionality of the state law can still happen, but needs to be pushed through the court hierarchy to the federal courts before that can happen?
Gosh. What a system...
It's not true at all.
Could you elaborate?
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, both state and federally. State courts are certainly allowed to evaluate the constitutionality of state laws.
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To clarify a little more than supremacy, trial courts are triers of fact: did the accused do the thing the state says they did, and is that a violation of what the law says. They do not evaluate the validity of the laws.
If your belief is that the law itself is invalid then you have to make that case at the appellate courts.
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Would you call "...openly carry military weapons..." a broad interpretation of that part? From my point of view, that's about as narrow as you can get before you start chipping away at the text. A broad interpretation would exempt American citizens from nonproliferation treaties.
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The provision also needs read in connection with the militia clause of art 1
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It's a cliche: Bipartisanship is when the stupid party and the evil party get together to do something stupid and evil.
For now, I don't think it's going to go away: large portions of the Republican leadership still believe in bipartisanship. If you imagine (simplistically) any compromise to lie between two extremes on a spectrum, that compromise will fall somewhere in the middle. But probably not the middle. One side gets more. The question is: which side gets more? But it's probably frequently at least in somebody's interest to write a policy and appeal to bipartisanship. That's half the problem solved.
Besides, there are lots of small picayune daily humdrums, about which nobody really cares, on which members have to work together anyway. Trust or no trust, it takes a very specific kind of person who can get elected to Congress and then defect on the deal. Most of those such members now make up the wing of the Republican party characterized as "MAGA" and "extreme," and it requires them to constantly sail upwind against all other incentive. Just this morning I was listening to Katherine Clark explaining on NPR how Democrats would probably vote to save Mike Johnson's speakership, because, uh, we have to get back to the serious work of "governing," not "politicking". "But what are Democrats getting out of this," the interviewer asks? Uh, well, the American People know right from wrong, and we need to act to sustain our economic recovery, and in November when abortion access is on the ballot... ... ... ... ...
I think this toy model misses and important dynamic that seems to happen somewhat regularly. Instead of policy changes that are at two ends of the spectrum, instead imagine one group that thinks the status quo is basically fine and one group that wants to make a change. Any compromise at all, literally any agreement to do something will be in the direction that the party of change prefers. The specific issue that I see this on is firearms, where there are just almost never actually any meaningful compromises that include tradeoffs, it's just one side winning and getting more of what they want while declaring it a compromise.
Of course, there are paths to tradeoffs even on these sorts of things because issues aren't necessary monofactorial and logrolling other policy preferences is also an option, but in practice, a compromise on "gun safety" is going to look an awful lot like an unmitigated win for that side of things.
The other problem is future negotiations. If a compromise between Do Nothing and X is Y, then Y becomes the status quo against which the next compromise occurs.
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I'm reading the general lesson of this is that:
Republicans (and congressmen in general) should assume that government agencies will not listen to their intent and do everything they can to interpret every law passed in as left-conforming a way possible.
Accordingly, minimize dependence on government agencies for one's legislative agenda, and prefer to shrink power when possible.
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Trust to me seems like why the immigration bill failed. If you don’t trust the other party to implement legislation in good faith and all the power rests with the executive then winning the next election is far more important.
Yeah. I think the more recent immigration bills also had to deal with the aftermath of the Gang of Eight attempt in 2013, which even contemporaneously was seen as Rubio getting punked by some embarrassingly useless compromises-in-name-only
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The Trump DoJ has released a summary of FACE Act prosecutions and their tactics during the Biden administration.
There's some subtle stuff, here:
And probably a lot of other stuff I'm missing from speedreading or because I don't care much about abortion law. But most of it's pretty unsurprising to long-time critics. The DoJ and FBI lied to Congress? Oh, somebody go better tell Louis Freeh that they're stepping on his copyright.
A more... enraging behavior is that the Biden administration had the specific information comparing pro-abortion and anti-abortion FACE prosecutions, provided it to pro-abortion groups proactively, and did not provide it to anti-abortion individuals who requested it for their criminal defenses (or, separately, a sitting congressman), even as trial deadlines against the DOJ closed in. The DoJ pointed to FOIA request options, and as far as I can tell didn't actually fulfill those FOIA requests when they came in. That chart is pretty damning, now that we can actually see it... and it still probably wouldn't have been enough to bring a selective prosecution defense successfully, and it's kinda messy how Brady attaches to selective prosecution defenses and this part of a trial and where the right hand can pretend the left doesn't know what's going on.
It's still worth remembering that it's the room temperature.
There's some morbidly funny turnabout is fair play stuff going on right now (afaik, the Trump admin policy hasn't even been stayed/enjoined/tro'd/mandamus/boesburg'd yet!). There's probably a deeper dive that could be drawn into a top-level post.
But the simple answer is this. There is undoubtedly some salami-slicing, here. Nevertheless, there is also clear evidence of the Biden administration requested, and getting, severe sentences for anti-abortion nonviolent protesters, even where the bad conduct had already been punished under state law, while requesting minimal or less-than-minimal sentences for pro-abortion protesters. Worse, the three pro-abortion cases were only initiated well after the discrepancy in prosecution had become well-known, and seem to have been farmed solely to pretend equal coverage.
You may notice that there is no religious prosecutions column. That's not because everybody forgot to ask about it. They did ask, and they got zero.
There is no mention of Noata.
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I don't know that any of these are great examples. Let's approach them individually:
Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act
It's a bit academic, but it should be noted that the EEOC doesn't actually have Title VII rulemaking authority. The "rules" they promulgate are merely interpretive documents that inform businesses on how to comply and inform courts on the agency's interpretation. The courts themselves are only bound to follow EEOC guidance if it's "reasonable". Now, there are decisions out there that say that courts can't just wave these away and should give the agency deference, so there's a pretty big hurdle to overcome if you want to go against this guidance, and it gets pretty complicated here, but suffice it to say that courts aren't bound by these rules the same as they would if they were promulgated by an agency that actually had rulemaking authority. It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.
As far as the actual rule is concerned, it's hard to say from a Republican perspective what the EEOC should have actually done. Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related. Saying nothing about the matter isn't an option either. Since they're still bound by the APA, they have to address the comments they received, and they received plenty of comments about abortion. And even if they could have just omitted the abortion section, all that really does is kick the can down the road for when a court actually has to decide the matter, and it's unlikely that any but the staunchest anti-abortion judge would rule that abortions aren't related to pregnancy.
But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation. The rules pretty clearly state that the effect of this guidance is that an employer is required to give a woman leave (paid or unpaid) to receive an abortion. While this seems like raw culture war bait, the reality is that, excepting for circumstances where someone is trying to rub it in an employer's face, no one is specifically asking for time off to get an abortion. I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions. Employers generally aren't allowed to ask employees about medical conditions that aren't work-related, except to verify leave, although as long as a doctor confirms that the absence is for a medical reason they can't really inquire further. And I doubt they would, since hunting for people who are getting abortions means, practically speaking, that they'd have to investigate every employee's medical leave, which I doubt any really want to do. There may be some unlikely confluence of factors where this could become a real issue, but I doubt it. Most women seeking abortions aren't going to tell their employers that they need time off specifically to get one.
If Republicans felt that strongly of this, they would have sought to get specific language into the bill. They didn't, and complaining about this is just them getting hoisted by their own petard given the electoral consequences involved.
FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point. The point is that someone has to come up with these definitions and they have to conform with the statutory language without being overbroad. But that's tricky. The problem here is that there are two basic categories that are uncontroversial. One is the people who are actually running gun stores who need FFLs for legitimate business purposes. The other is people who simply have a gun they don't want anymore and want to sell it. But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language. Now it's up to the ATF to flesh out that definition to cover the myriad circumstances in which someone might be selling guns "for profit". And that's hard! The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped. They simply aren't arguing that the law was a good idea but ATF bungled the implementation; they're arguing that the law was a bad idea to begin with and using the ATF's interpretation as proof. But those are two separate arguments.
FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue. At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring. It's also telling that the act also allows for private enforcement via a civil cause of action that few parties seem bothered to sue under. That being said, anti-abortion protestors necessarily do most of their work when the place is open and in full view of the public. Most of the church vandalism was done at night by people who actually disguised themselves. One type of crime is much easier to investigate than the other.
Of course, that doesn't really apply to the Nota case, because the perpetrator was caught in the act. But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline. Houck, on the other hand, was found not guilty by a jury. For all we know he could have been offered the same deal as Nota but turned it down; I'd be surprised to say the least, if there was no deal offered at all.
You, uh, missed a spot. Or, for one without a header, whether one can stop to piss in Albany without risking a felony. And it's not like these things are the only examples -- if I hadn't hit trans stuff separately, I'd be pointing out the entire circuit where the ADA now covers gender identity disorders, despite the explicit text of the ADA excluding that by name!
By which you mean they issued a NPR, and then changed basically zip in response to significant public comment.
The statute, for whatever it matters, does not cover all pregnancy-related matters: it covers "pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions." It's... actually not that hard to notice the difference between a medical procedure and a medical condition.
Maybe that difference shouldn’t on net matter, or the doctrine of constitutional avoidance should rule. There's perfectly good fairness or policy reasons that it should, and perhaps in a world where the text was about pregnancy-related anythings and conservatives had eaten the administrative agencies, I'd be making arguments that they're betrayed trust in an important compromise.
And yet we're here.
Yet rather than the answer to "It's no big deal" being "fine, then let me win" instead, we find that everyone insists it is both necessary and obvious, no matter how much they have to play with statute's language to get the job done.
Indeed, even were there some central case that were vital or some symbolic victory that should be a big deal to the progressive movement and a trivial one to conservatives, the religious freedom concerns that the EEOC itself claims never happen still can't get a "fine, then let me win". While "The Commission also received tens of thousands of comments asserting that giving certain accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, such as providing leave for abortion, infertility treatments, or contraception, would infringe upon the employer's religious freedom", the final rule gloss over any serious management or standard of those concerns, leaving such questions open to "defenses using a case-by-case analysis" and motioning to a statutory defense that only protects religious organization's ability to hire people of that religion.
((Spoiler: there's few cases only because everyone paying attention knows defending against a suit is high-risk and staggeringly expensive, and there's absolutely no guarantee that the vague religious freedom exceptions might apply until very late in appeals, so the EEOC can get 99.9% of the impact just by noisily threatening enforcement and then shrugging that their political opponents leave the entire topic like a landmine.))
Not only could I, eighteen thousand people did, as Halbrook points out in his link, but you're right to say that, too, is besides the point. The ATF and APA do not care about the little people. But it does make this rhetorical question more than a little obnoxious.
But Congress did not write a law saying that you can not sell firearms as a hobbyist; it wrote that you needed an FFL to sell firearms to "predominantly earn a profit", and the ATF decided that included firearms sales that included a profit at all, or even if they didn't have a profit but might be motivated by the money. Congress has not even modified the statutory requirements for provisioning an FFL in decades! And I'll point again to the ATF happily ignoring the strict text of the statute whenever it decides that it knows best.
When you write that the government really doesn't like them, that's true in the sense that 'the government' means progressives, operating under a presumption that compromise means progressive interests get a large portion of what they demand, and conservative interests get fucked, and not in the fun way.
I can separately argue that the law was badly intended, but I don't think there's anything insightful to point out that people want to ban guns entirely and make being an FFL as difficult as possible and impossible for many. Yes, duh, I predicted that literally before Biden was sworn in as President, I can't pretend to be surprised today. Props to you for at least admitting that the whole point is make onerous rules that drive hobbyists and part-timers from the field, but it isn't exactly some deep cover.
No, the problem as I'm trying to highlight is that there is a group of people who claimed at length that this was -- as held in the name -- a Bipartisan compromise that would include both further restrictions and clarifications protecting gunnies, and this didn't happen at all. The statute still explicitly recognizes private sales, but the ATF doesn't actually recognize any way to clearly comply with it in this rule-making.
In many ways, they would have been better served by flipping anyone who offered claimed concessions the bird. It matters, that for many, that is increasingly clear.
It... actually was a pretty big controversy back in the 2008-2012 timeframe, as activists had begun disrupting church services, while both feds and state officials left the matter to civil litigation. The ADF actually brought suit with some limited success in that case, though both the org and the individuals were basically judgement proof.
At the same 2008-2012 timeframe, the DoJ was highlighting increased use from the pre-Obama framework where it was largely perceived as targeting bad actors on the scale of arson or bombings. If you want to rest your argument on the masterful control of the DoJ Trump demonstrated, I hope you have fun, but I'm gonna have a hard time taking it seriously.
The information that we can't see or find or read, even presuming it actually exists, does not actually do a good job of protecting trust, especially given the extent this glosses over a wide variety of other stuff in the reporting (Nota spraypainting an employee's face and threw a rock at them, and also spray-painted a police car). The lack of SWAT, I am sure, has a similarly plausible and similarly unprovable charitable explanation.
Indeed, yes, the guy who didn't destroy property or spraypaint anyone in the face could have gotten a plea bargain. Of course, Houck was found not-guilty, while Nota was caught spraypaint-handed. Interestingly, we do happen to have another example I linked where the people were actually guilty of a FACE Act violation against abortion clinics, and one of the protestors plead guilty, turned government witness, and got 10 months in prison for her plea deal.
Yes, I'm sure there's some post-hoc way that This One Is Different. There might even be ways to argue it that doesn't look hilariously biased (Davis conspired to block a hallway! something something sentencing guidelines! two counts, because Nota didn't do two illegal things at once!), though I'm not optimistic. But the readiness that people defending these disparities can discover that it is impossible to evaluate the merits or compare in any statistically meaningful way are starting to echo.
In case anyone else is put off by the volume of other links, I want to point out that this was a particularly amusing little rabbit hole to go down, despite my disinterest in most of the NixOS drama.
[Demand for codifying mandatory apologies to anyone who makes a claim of having been hurt]
[Pointing out that the validity of each claim might be an important detail]
[Doubling down, insisting that "if your mindset is already in that kind of detail" you're probably not "productive"]
[Pointing out that this kind of insult is hurtful and should deserve an apology]
[crickets chirping]
They might as well save some bytes and replace the CoC with "Who, whom?". That would also give them more time to focus on software, if somehow they retain any of the detail-oriented people you need to write decent software.
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It's been a long time since we've discussed Trump, and there have been a number of developments in the court cases against him, and so I'm here to say that our long mottizan nightmare of peace and tranquility is finally over.
Florida
CNN: Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial
Trump's trial in Florida over classified documents has been indefinitely postponed. (Jack Smith had requested it start the day after Trump's New York trial ended.) It turns out that new revelations made in documents Trump's lawyers requested have upended the case. CNN doesn't elaborate on what happened, for which I'll turn to this story:
Prosecutors admit key evidence in document case has been tampered with
It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations. For instance, that famous picture of classified documents with cover sheets raided from Mar-a-Lago? It turns out those documents didn't have cover sheets, the FBI staged them before photographing, and they didn't even correctly label all of the documents they supposedly took:
The DOJ's Doctored Crime Scene Photo of Mar-a-Lago Raid
In order to prove Donald Trump had documents he wasn't supposed to have, the goverment took documents Trump had (that the NARA gave him in mislabeled boxes) and added cover sheets for photographs to them.
Whoops!
Judge Cannon has indefinitely postponed trial while Jack Smith's prosecutors work out answers to the questions posed by all these new revelations.
Georgia
CBS: Georgia appeals court will review decision that allowed Fani Willis to stay on Trump's Fulton County case
News-watchers will remember that, several months ago, it turned out that Fulton Prosecutor Fani Willis was hiring her secret lover to work on the Trump election fraud case. He was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while they dated and went on vacations together, for which she insisted (without evidence) that she always paid him back. This posed a serious concern of misconduct and the risk that Fani Willis would be forced off the case entirely. After weeks of wrangling, Judge McAfee ruled that Willis could stay on the case, as long as Nathan Wade did not. Trump's team appealed the ruling, and now, the Georgia Appeals Court will hear the decision:
Re-hearing the Fani Willis conflict of interest decision might lead to a repeat of the earlier hearing, where Fani repeatedly shouted over the courtroom and judge:
Fiery DA Fani Willis loses it on lawyer during misconduct hearing: ‘Don’t be cute with me!’
[...[
So the question of prosecuting Trump over the 2020 election in Georgia will have to wait until it's determined how much of a liar the prosecuting DA might or might not have been.
New York
This trial is the juiciest of all, as it is currently in session in New York, with the judge threatening to have Trump locked up:
CBS: Trump held in contempt again for violating gag order as judge threatens jail time
Trump has promised, in interview and social media post, that he's willing to go to jail for exercising his First Amendment rights to criticize Judge Merchan, having said in April that it would be his "great honor" to go to jail for violating Merchan's gag order.
The issue really stems from Trump's accusations of political bias in the New York courtroom. The gag order was imposed after Trump attacked Merchan's daughter for working for Democratic fundraisers:
Dem clients of daughter of NY judge in Trump hush-money trial raised $93M off the case
Another such example is that one of Bragg's prosecutors working the case is Matthew Colangelo, who left the #3 position at DOJ under Merrick Garland to work the Trump case:
Daily Mail: REVEALED: New PROOF the anti-Trump prosecutor in hush money trial is a 'true believer' in Leftist 'lawfare'... as Matthew Colangelo is exposed for taking thousands of dollars from Democratic party
Judge Merchan himself, it turned out, donated (a small amount) to the Biden campaign:
Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump case, donated to Biden campaign in 2020
The state is arguing, in effect, that Trump, by paying Stormy Daniels in 2017, falsified business records that should have rightfully been marked as a campaign contribution, and thus constituted a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election. The count of falsifying business records is a misdemeanor under New York State Law, but can be elevated into a felony charge if the business records were falsified with the intent to commit another crime. Curiously, Alvin Bragg has alleged that Trump falsified business records to commit another crime, but has not charged him with committing any other crimes:
The New York Case Against Trump Relies on a 'Twisty' Legal Theory That Reeks of Desperation
Section 17-152 has never actually been prosecuted to this effect, so the case is entirely novel. New York is arguing, in effect, that Donald Trump engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election by falsifying business records in 2017.
This case is a hot one as it is currently in trial, and will likely be resolved with a few weeks. The question of whether the jury can be unbiased in such conditions is ongoing.
I will omit Trump's last criminal court case, the January 6th case run out of DC, as it is currently pending on a Supreme Court decision as to whether Presidents can even be tried for official acts in the first place, which would throw the whole case back down to the lower courts to disentangle which of Trump's actions on January 6th constituted private action. It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
In case there's any question left about the press's lack of objectivity, the CNN article you cited -- article, not editorial, not column -- contains this bit:
It's yet one more of these irregular verbs.
I defend myself.
You air unfounded theories about the prosecution.
He is held in contempt of court for raising the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones.
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One way in which I see a second Trump term being significantly different from the first one is that he's not going to be shy around things like this.
Nor should he be. When the Senate assassinates Caeser, it's bad news all around. When the Senate fails to assassinate Caeser...
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This assumes there's actually things he can do "around things like this." I've made my case before as to why a second Trump term won't be significantly different from the first, because whatever his powers on musty old parchments nobody cares about, the President is a figurehead who only has as much authority as the Permanent Bureaucracy allows him.
This has been my position on Trump 2, and why I'd have preferred Desantis.
Trump could come in on day 1 and intentionally fire every single person in Fedgov that he has authority to fire, and those layoffs would be slow-walked so they'd take weeks to actually take effect, lawsuits would fly, deadlines would be pushed constantly further and further back, in some cases they'd just ignore the order entirely, and feet would be dragging this whole time to wait out his 4 year term. Inevitably, some of those workers would be "unfired" when it turns out there's nobody else immediately available to do their particular job.
If Trump can't bring in competent staffers to implement his plans, and he doesn't have a well of 'replacement' workers to step up and actually give the old ones the boot, 4 years is almost certainly not enough to significantly cut down the Federal Bureaucracy.
All that said, Javier Milei seems to have successfully made huge swaths of the Argentenian bureaucracy go AFUERA (correct me if I'm missing something) so there is a model for pulling it off.
Remember when Trump ordered the relocation of the Department of Agriculture Headquarters? It apparently worked almost as well as he intended! Shocker!
Trump is planning to raid the Abbott, Desantis, and Youngkin administrations for personnel. In particular the next governor of Virginia is overwhelmingly likely to be a democrat who fires them all anyways and both Texas and Florida have functioning conservative talent pipelines. It’s not like trump can’t get competent people.
Certainly not ones big enough to replace as much of the Permanent Bureaucracy as would need to be replaced. Assuming, of course, that Trump is even able to actually remove the people currently in place. And assuming he even gets elected.
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Who will actually risk the possible consequences, often due to Trump himself turning on them?
I'm not so sure.
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Eh, I’ve heard it before. He hires the best people, right?
What’s the deal with Virginia? Last I heard, the fights over schooling worked out okay for Republicans. Same for trans issues in general. What else is salient in the state, such that the polling leans so blue? @WhiningCoil
Virginia is dominated by Northern Virginia, which is a Washington DC suburb. For all intents and purposes, Virginia has been colonized by the federal government and votes with it's interest 99% of the time. Democrats have to be incredibly fucking retarded to squander their natural advantages, and they managed it back when Northam was elected. But for the most part, it doesn't matter.
Schools were probably the most salient issue that peeled off enough normies. And it was an uphill battle the entire time. The news lied, the schools lied, the politicians lied. And every time the truth eventually came out they just lied more. When they effectively lost the public relations battles, and the legal battles, they just dug their heels in and went "nuh uh". Nearly every school district is defying our Governors order with respect to trans students, knowing full well the school administrators will keep their jobs longer than our governor. It's tied up in courts, and even if the schools somehow lose, it's not their money they pay out. It's ours. But they are betting, probably correctly, that they can run out the clock until a Democrat takes over and drops the cases.
One county near me hit derangement levels I didn't think were possible, and voted in an even more pro-"pornography in schools" slate of board candidates. One took his oath of office on a literally stack of pornographic "childrens" books. Everyone clapped.
I've totally given up. Starting next year we are homeschooling our children. We were on the fence, taking our chances with private school. But after the most recent federal reinterpretation of Title IX, it's obvious no institution in any state is safe. Every single day we meet parents at parks doing the same thing. A not insignificant proportion of those parents are (or should I say were?) teachers themselves, and are choosing to protect their children from what they've seen the education system in our state become.
Do you think Virginia's non-consecutive-governor rule has an effect on their ability to make lasting change?
It certainly seems to. All we've gotten is a deep blue bureaucracy that holds the line, lies, sues, and is generally unproductive and passive aggressive when the executive is a Republican, and then double times it to push an agenda as soon as a Democrat gets back in. And frankly, it seems like the GOP has abandoned our state, there is almost no talent pipeline, and the old Clinton political machine has it's fingers in everything.
Fuck, I'm already getting mailers about local candidates. I live in a deep, deep red county, and all the mailers have been for Democrat candidates, and they all tout their experience in three letter agencies "fighting extremist" as credentials to keep "MAGA extremist" out of government. Of course all it takes to be a "MAGA extremist" to these people is think pornography shouldn't be in middle schools, or that schools shouldn't secretly transition children without their parents consent or knowledge.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro
Title IX doesn't apply to private institutions that don't receive federal funding.
Very few private educational institutions don't receive federal funding. Private means private-run, not exclusively-privately-funded, because we built a gigantic money pipeline for "our" "education system" back when people were still foolish enough to believe that resources could be shared.
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Nope. As soon as the trans stuff disappeared from the headlines, the voters promptly forgot and voted the same school board right back in.
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Virginia is a blue state to begin with and it tends to swing away from the party in power, not towards it. They also have a weirdly timed election that would strongly benefit democrats if Trump wins in 2024 and IIRC Youngkin can't hold two consecutive terms.
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Recreational use and sale of marijuana was legalized before Youngkin took office, but he refused categorically to take any steps to establish any mechanism for legal sale.
I, for one, am kind of salty about that; I had visited Denver in previous years, enjoyed my share of legally purchased edibles and was really looking forward to being able to get them at a local mall.
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Think about it. How many competent, respectable people want the job of being Trump’s lackey to fix the X department? In the unlikely event that you aren’t fired and are even somewhat successful at purging the entrenched civil service, you have a good chance of literally going to jail once the next administration gets in.
One of Trump's big actual problems was a simple lack of anyone who was loyal to him or who he would show loyalty to, outside his own family.
I would consider this a personal failing of his.
On the other hand, if Trump put out a general call to his supporters to apply for Federal Government positions and he would expedite their hiring, he'd get probably tens of thousands of people responding.
I wouldn't expect 'competent, respectable' people to answer the call, but still.
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Does it, though? Because I, for one, am not sure about that at all. Because, first, does a president have the authority to fire an A.U.S.A like Smith on paper? Second, even if a president does have that power in theory, well, how DC is supposed to work on paper and how it actually works are two distinct things, so is this a power the president has in reality, or merely on some musty old piece of paper nobody who matters cares about? (I here link this marginally relevant Substack piece from our dear @KulakRevolt.)
Third, and perhaps most important, even if a president has such a firing power in general, one could easily argue that in this situation Trump would not, because allowing him to use said otherwise-legitimate authority "to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida" against him would so fatally-undermine basic justice and the rule of law that the very survival of Our Democracy demands the suspension of said authority until the cases are resolved, and that it be incumbent upon all to #Resist any attempt by Trump to remove Smith.
My personal expectation is that none of these things are going to matter — the system is going to find some way to push past all these roadblocks and keep these cases going.
Trump can definitely pardon himself, and his chances of firing jack smith are better than you think because at the end of the day he can always send law enforcement in to escort him out of the building if he gets ignored. Changing schedule F is probably one of trump’s first acts in office and the former Desantis staffer in charge of drafting that executive order will not leave that particular loophole in place.
What law enforcement? Why wouldn't they side with Smith?
Suppose Trump orders Smith fired, and the Justice Department says "no he's not" and ignores Trump. Trump tells the FBI to escort him out of the building… at which point the FBI says back, 'No, we're not doing that. You can't fire Smith; Smith is still employed no matter what you say, so we're not escorting him out. And if you try to send someone else to remove Smith, well, as far as we're concerned such a person will be trying to obstruct Smith in the course of his duties as a federal official, which is a serious federal crime, and we will arrest them on that very charge.' What then?
The Virginia national guard arresting FBI members for insubordination is a nightmare scenario for the deep state and it won’t happen because the DOJ will not #resist hard enough to bring it about.
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It's definitely an open question. But I don't think it amounts to much. Trump can pardon himself, he can fire everyone involved he can get his hands on, he can declassify any and all documents involved, he could order the entire classification system revoked. If Congress is on his side, they can open investigations into the investigators, they can defund the offices involved. And even if Congress isn't on his side, they couldn't impeach him before and won't impeach him over this.
Anything could happen, but I find it very unlikely that Trump's enemies will really push (escalate) a Constitutional crisis over classified documents the public isn't even allowed to know the details of, especially given all the other issues with this case.
Again, I dispute this. If he says John Q. Bureaucrat is fired, but the rest of DC says Mr. Bureaucrat isn't fired; they still work with Mr. Bureaucrat when he comes into the office; payroll still issues Mr. Bureaucrat his paycheck; and they have the guy Trump appointed to replace John hauled out of the building and arrested for trespassing, because he doesn't work there, since the job he claims to hold is actually still held by Mr. Bureaucrat; and anyone who tries to remove Mr. Bureaucrat on orders from Trump gets arrested themselves by the FBI for attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the exercise of his duties, because Mr. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee… then has John Q. Bureaucrat really been fired?
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps treating them as classified anyway?
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps acting as if the system is still in place?
With what people? Who are they going to order to carry out these investigations? What if those people ignore that order? Or side with those they're "investigating" against Trump and Congress?
Government "shutdowns," where nothing shuts down and the executive branch continued to spend and disburse funds without the constitutionally-mandated Congressional authorization, say otherwise. What happens when Congress "defunds" the offices, and Treasury just ignores them and keeps issuing the offices their funds as before?
Why not? I don't understand why everyone seems to think a "Constitutional crisis" would be any kind of big deal. What would change, really?
If we try and you're wrong, then we win. If we try and you're right, then this creates common knowledge of the problem, which is useful for coordinating further escalation, which creates opportunities for an eventual win.
What's the alternative? If we don't fight, we definately lose. What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing? What's the outcome you're actually attempting to avoid, and how do your prescriptions actually lead to avoiding it?
Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.
This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it. (This is a point David Z. Hines has been making for years now.) These are my friends, my family, my neighbors I'm talking about. They're never going to do anything. They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply. Let somebody else take the risk of resisting Federal tyranny. And don't come around expecting them to join up with you — they don't take no orders from nobody, y'hear?
About a year ago, I did some reading about historical counterinsurgency methods, particularly Rome. And, contra to Princess Leia's comment to Tarkin, crackdowns usually didn't generate greater resistance, they generated submission. When they did lead to "further escalation," it was generally only a single cycle — Rome's second crackdown usually got the job done. The only exception, with multiple cycles of escalation, was the Jews — and look how that turned out:
…
We are not the imperial Japanese, and the Blues are not 1940s America. Should the Russian Whites have surrendered meekly to the Reds? My read is no, but again, our situation isn't Whites vs Reds either. We are actually in a much better situation, against a much less ruthless enemy. We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally. There is no rational basis for despair in the current situation.
The Reds I see around me are evidently capable of considerable coordination. You should at least consider the possibility that your personal experiences do not generalize.
Your opinion is that I am a liar, because I have repeatedly stated that I believe that "2nd Amendment solutions" are both a possible and practical solution to the current situation, without providing details of how that would work. I've stated that I prefer being called a liar to providing those details, annoying as it is, because I'm still hoping the current push for peaceful defiance will work. But I will note that every time you initiate this argument, you claim that "2nd Amendment solutions" means hicks with AR15s in twos and threes attempting to fight the US government. I think you badly underestimate both the chances both of the hicks actually trying this and the possible effectiveness of the strategy if they do, but I believe I've stated a number of times that my understanding of "2nd Amendment solutions" does not consist of Red Tribers, singly or in numbers, fighting the government with their personal collections of small-arms. If that was the scenario I was expecting, I would be significantly less confident in success, though still not as pessimistic as you. But that is not, in fact, the scenario I think is likely, and my assessment of that scenario is not the source of my confidence. If the Blues find a genie that magically un-exists all guns in America, it would not materially change my estimate of our chances for overthrowing Blue Tribe. The Second Amendment and the firearms it is intended to protect are much, much more valuable as a coordination mechanism than for pure tactical advantage. The tactical advantages come from other vectors, vectors which neither you nor most others appear to have grasped. I think this is a good thing, because we might still be able to unwind this mess before people like you stumble across them, a whole lot of people die, and the lights probably go out for the forseeable future.
And the part I can't figure out is, what your actual position is. Let's say you're right about everything. I'm lying, and we have no chance. You appear to argue that the correct option is unilateral surrender, let the Blues do whatever they want, in the hope that they'll abuse us less. Is that correct?
And you never will.
Your enemy holds the bureaucracy. They hold the media. They hold the vast majority of the corporations. They hold an even more complete majority of educational institutions. They hold Federal law enforcement and state law enforcement in many states. And of course all big city law enforcement. Your tribe has paths for exit but no paths for entrance -- you may birth more young people but they end up rejecting you under the influence of the institutions. Immigrants may not join the other tribe but they vote for their party, and so do their children.
And most of your tribe respects all of those institutions despite their obvious capture. They can cynically ignore all the rules, all the laws, everything, to go after one of yours, and when the verdict comes in, your tribe will accept it. Ask Alex Jones or Rudy Giuliani. When Trump is duly convicted in New York Kangaroo Court, a large number of your people will say "Well, the jury had more information than I do, so he must be guilty" or similar rationalizations to trust the institutions. Because the very idea that the institutions are utterly corrupt and should be defied is anti-conservative.
That is the rational basis for despair.
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet. The Bureaucracy tried to put Rittenhouse in a cell for the rest of his life, and he's a free man. The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
The media are losing their influence, and in many cases their ability to even keep their doors open due to their entire business model going extinct.
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
And yet, those agencies can and have been successfully defied, and they can and have fought and lost.
And those cities continue to decay.
They don't actually have a plan. They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect. We are currently organizing that defection, and it is delivering tangible results. Your predictions have been consistent for some time, and increasingly they are being falsified by the actual outcomes. Your prediction was that Abbott would not be able to defy Biden on the border, but he did. Your prediction, I think, would be that Republicans would "compromise" and vote for the border bill, but we didn't. Resistance is not costless, but the costs can and are being borne.
Time will tell.
Too much of my tribe does, it's true, but less and less each day, and the more we push resistance, the more obvious the problems with the system become and the less my tribe respects it.
This is a prediction. Let's see how it goes.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that Conservatism is on the way out. Again, Abbott and DeSantis seem to be going for open defiance. The gun culture is definately going for open defiance. Trump's supporters are going for open defiance. Maybe you're right and it will all fizzle out, but that does not appear to me to be the trajectory we're on.
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We haven't begun to fight because we're never going to. Because we're not capable of it. Every time, this wasn't the hill to die on. Every time, it wasn't yet time. Every time, we've backed down and said "next time" or "someday." Because we're never dying on any hills, because it will never be time, because "someday" will never come. We've always backed down, and we're always going to back down.
Because anything more than those random hicks requires levels of organization of which we are not capable. (It's how one can tell all the sizable "militia groups" are Fed honeypot operations — they're simply too coordinated to be authentic. It's got to be undercover FBI doing all the organizing.)
Organization requires hierarchy, requires following directions from others; and we're talking about people who declare that "they don't take orders from anyone but Jesus." They boast about how if someone told us to breathe, we'd suffocate ourselves to death just to spite them. Who swear that no matter how dire things get, should anyone dare talk to them about organizing or coordinating or fighting together — even if they've been a friend for decades — that automatically makes that person "the Enemy" and they will shoot them dead on the spot.
How are you going to get that guy to join up? How are you going to get him to follow directions, to coordinate his actions with yours, to not immediately go off and do his own "Lone wolf" thing?
As for your "other vectors," I suspect you're talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities. Those are a bit easier to do with a smaller group, but from what I've seen from investigating the issue, it's still more coordination than anyone I know is capable of.
Yes. At the very least, I want people to accept the war was lost long ago, and there's nothing we can do about it now (if not going further, to "accept we're utterly doomed and LDAR," or even "spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come by taking The Exit early," but I get that most are too religious to consider that).
Speak for yourself. Maybe that is the way you are. Maybe that is the way the people around you are. It is not the way I am, and it is not the way the people around me are. There's a decent argument that Rittenhouse single-handedly ended the Floyd riots, and he survived the Blues' attempts to crush him for it, and the attempts to crush him appear to me to have been costly for the Blues. They attempted to crush Kavanaugh, and failed. Gun owners refuse to comply with state and federal laws, and they get away with it. This is exactly the sort of coordination you and @The_Nybbler consistently claim doesn't exist, because you are both so black-pilled that you refuse to accept contrary evidence.
Abbott defying Biden on the border requires significant organization. Gun owners refusing to comply with registration requires coordination. But in fact, you are fundamentally wrong about the level of coordination required to destroy our present society. The amount of organization required is effectively zero. It can be done with individuals alone.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Red Tribers coordinate on all sorts of things, from defying law to purging the Republican party.
Infrastructure vulnerabilities are a significant part of why I think small bands of hicks with rifles have a better chance than you allow. To my knowledge, they never did find the guys who shot up that substation, and that is an example of an attack that can be effectively carried out by one person alone.
In any case, no, I am not talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
This is what I don't get. If we've already lost and the best thing we can do is to kill ourselves and spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come, why are the horrors to come horrors? You don't appear to believe in God, so once you're dead that's it, and none of this actually matters in the end. Even fighting, it really is not that hard to make sure you aren't taken alive, and then the horror is over. If you're right, we fight and they crush us, and this is worse... why? We're already doomed, no? What benefit is derived from quiet surrender? You already hate your life and want to die; how does surrendering to the blues improve any part of your situation? Why do you care about this question at all?
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From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president. While there are certainly mid-level bureaucrats who would do everything legal in their power to thwart his preferred policies (and some might even risk their job by going beyond that), I think the rest of DC pretending that Trump does not exist will not be an option. For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that? If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?
We already had four years of Trump. He was not my favorite president, but contrary to predictions from the left he turned out not to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I don't think he would build death camps in his second presidency. It would not be the end of the world.
On the other hand, democracy in the US had (with one notable exception) been a great success in avoiding conflicts being resolved by force of arms. Even if Trump's supporters would idly stand by while the executive defected, the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.
Trump's second term would not be about replacing the constitution with the Fuehrerprinzip. If he gets the EC votes, he may get out of legal troubles which may or may not have been politically motivated in the first place. This will not be the end of the world any more than Nixon getting pardoned about Watergate was the end of the world.
Again, this is how it's supposed to be, on paper. But that matters as much as when Bart Simpson was sent back to kindergarten:
The law isn't what's written on paper, the law is whatever is enforced. There's how the "employee handbook" says a workplace is supposed to work, and then there's how the workplace actually operates. (The very existence of "bothering by the book" and malicious compliance illustrates that there's a difference between the two, sometimes rather vast.) The written constitution is like an ignored, out-of-date employee handbook.
Maybe, maybe not. But it won't matter.
Absolutely yes. Because there's no actual enforcement mechanism for SCOTUS decisions, except the willingness of the executive to heed them. From the federal court system's own webpage:
And from Cliff Notes:
(DC still hasn't given Mr. Heller his permit.)
Not really. I mean, sure, maybe a few people might resort to violence, but only a few hundred at most, and they'll all be lone actors independently pursuing disorganized, poorly-targeted acts of domestic terror. Nothing that the FBI and ATF won't be able to handle (particularly given that at least half of our would-be rebels would be receiving "assistance" from someone in the pay of the FBI). Maybe you get a few more "Oklahoma City"s, but, as in that case, the perpetrators will accomplish nothing but creating martyrs for the other side, tainting their own side by association, and getting themselves executed (assuming the state takes them alive at all). And once a sufficiently-strong example is made of these people, most everyone else will be disincentivized to follow in their footsteps.
The nice thing about democracies is that there is a peaceful path forward if you are unhappy with an administration. Canvas for your issue, change the mind of the voters, change the stance of politicians or get elected yourself. Not an easy path forward, but with some notable benefits over the alternative.
This Calvin and Hobbes comic illustrates the position the bureaucracy would find itself in if they decided to do their thing without the blessings of President, SC and Congress.
And while this is getting deep into silly "could Darth Vader take Superman in a fight?" hypotheticals territory, there is the fact that the federal police agencies are not the strongest kid on the block. The US military seems kind of big on following a chain of command which ultimately ends with the president. They obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, but if the constitutional organs of the US are in agreement that a part of the DC bureaucracy is in rebellion, I strongly expect them to intercede on the side of the constitution. And a battle of federal law enforcement vs the US army would be even more lopsided that a battle of Feds versus Trump militias.
They pre-emptively refused to quell the Floyd Riots, and that was before the COVID purges.
Exactly. Anyone expecting the Pentagon brass to intervene on behalf of Trump (or Red America, for that matter) is bound to be sorely disappointed.
And this is all contingent on Trump even winning. Odds are, we get a second Biden term, followed by a younger and lefty-er Dem after that (and after that, and after that…)
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And just who's supposed to be revolting, and how? I keep bringing up the German Peasants' War for a reason. As the late Kontextmaschine over at Tumblr said, about JFK's quote that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," that making violent revolution inevitable then crushing it by force can be a viable strategy. It will confirm, in the minds of Blue Tribers, the truth of every comment they've made about "neo-Confederates," or about domestic terrorism being the biggest threat to Our Democracy, and that there really is no living with the Deplorables, they'll truly have to be crushed utterly, and the surviving children forcibly reeducated residential-school-style.
The same military who
lied to"misled" Trump when he was president? The same military where these people are in command:…
Or see here:
…
…
…
…
More on that latter:
…
(Emphasis added.)
And on the Floyd riots:
…
The US Military is famously apolitical, and, like you note, they obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, particularly on behalf of Trump. The guys at the top, especially, spend a lot of time in DC, and interacting quite a bit with other DC "insiders." They're not going to want to send in troops to shoot fellow Americans — civilians, at that, even if Trump says they're in "insurrection." So all they need to do is declare that any conflict over authority, and what is or isn't in the president's power to do, is a civilian political matter, because the US Military does not get involved in civilian political matters, full stop.
So, let me ask you, if Trump declares the bureaucracy in insurrection, and the top brass say "no they're not," and tell Trump to go f*** himself — or even if they just say "civilian matter, we're staying out of it" — what then?
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Yeah, the power of the President is greatly constrained by the bureaucracy, but that doesn't actually mean that the bureaucracy is this all-powerful behemoth. What does it mean for "the rest of DC" to say something? Even in a 95% blue town there are Republican officials and justices and appointees and mandarins. If the bureaucrats want to unfire someone: Who's going to sign the paychecks? ; Who's going to sign off on maintaining the security clearances? ; Who's going to assign work? These are all people who would have to report to the President, or report to somebody who does. Why would the FBI step in and arrest people? This is a very unusual circumstance you're proposing, it would be unique in the history of the United States, and not "What would change, really?"
I'm moderately skeptical that DC will actually prove capable of being reformed and constrained any time soon, but it's not as though DC is this perpetual motion machine that escapes all laws of history and politics. Yeah, it would be a big deal if Trump got into office and tried firing people: that's why they don't want it to happen!
Can't they rehire people as a contractor and effectively give them a pay rise? This is standard practice in many bureaucracies, as far as I understand it.
There are all kinds of Yes-Minister style games you can play.
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APA review, NEPA review, Hiding the relevant documents from the president and hoping he forgets, lawsuits, injunctions, protests; if Trump succeeds in firing a large portion of the entire civil service, you think tens of thousands of intelligent, well-connected people in the same city all pissed off at the same guy won’t be able to do anything about it?
While those are all real possibilities, they are very distinct from the scenario you described above: Bureaucrats unfiring somebody by disobeying direct orders.
That specific scenario may or may not be plausible. I don’t know how the federal government’s payroll software works, but that is the level that these things need to be analyzed on if you want a clear or definitive answer.
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The same people who do so right now. (I mean, it's not like Biden is doing so.)
Again, on paper. What if they just don't? The President's orders aren't magic — they contain no inherent power to compel obedience in and of themselves.
Because they're as anti-Trump as the rest of the > 90% Leftist fed bureaucracy, and thus they'll agree with them that Trump can't fire John Q. Bureaucrat, and that John Q. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee. And attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the course of his duties — which is, in this view, what anyone attempting to remove John Q. Bureaucrat would be doing — is a federal crime. Why wouldn't the FBI arrest someone they believe to be committing a federal offense?
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I hope that happens. Then those people can all be labeled as insurrectionists and Texas and Florida national guard can come in and literally kill the bureaucrats.
The Republicans would rather lose forever than tear apart the country that way.
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This would require a Republican governor with the guts to actually send troops against "fellow Americans" — civilians at that — rather than just threaten. It would also require National Guard troops willing to gun down "fellow American" civilians, even if they're feds.
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Jesus Christ dude. You know that bureaucrats are why we don't all live in mud huts and rape each other right? Have a little gratitude. You're posting this on an internet forum that only exists because generations of bureaucrats kept society together for a few thousand years.
Nope. You are mistaking bureaucrats for merchants.
Who enforces those contracts?
Not the current crop of Bureaucrats, certainly.
Bureaucrats do not create society or wealth. They are a necessary evil to keep the peace and prosperity that productive people build, and the "necessary" part assumes that they are not corrupt.
Our Bureaucrats are deeply, irredeemably corrupt. They are not necessary, only evil.
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Read Order Without Law. In iterative games, contact law is largely pointless.
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What’s stopping trump from responding to that by declaring them all in a state of revolt and deputizing red state national guards to restore federal authority? Resistance libs already fever dream about that in their persecution porn; they won’t take a chance on Abbott and Desantis being de facto dictators for half the country, and if there’s already a constitutional crisis, well, alea iacta est.
That "red state national guards" aren't the sort to fire on fellow Americans?
Are they the sort to stand around at the entrance to federal workplaces checking ID badges, though?
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This is a tendentious presentation imo. Politico presents this as:
I think it's reasonable to put cover sheets on the classified documents, given they are classified. The documents would have already had classification markings, so I don't see how this is "willfully misleading" the public "into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security".
"Some or all", here, seems unjustified - I don't think anyone (other than perhaps Trump on Twitter) is claiming the accusations are all fake - that's a much stronger claim than "the documents aren't in the same order that they were when we scanned them". Your sources imply this is like "tampering" with evidence, and it may (not sure) be a procedural issue, but things like "adding cover sheets" and "reordering documents" don't undermine the claim that Trump committed a crime.
The use of the classified cover sheets in that photo does many things
It provides a lot more visual impact than just classified documents with markings.
It gives the impression that it would be obvious to anyone who casually looked in the box that it had classified documents. This is important because "knowingly" is an element of some of the charges.
It effectively substitutes the FBI's CLAIM that the documents were classified for the actual evidence of classification.
Since the classification markings on the pre-printed cover sheets didn't have to match those on the documents, it provided the impression that the documents had perhaps a higher classification level than they did. For instance, the NPR story claimed one of the cover sheets said "UP TO HCS-P/SI/TK", leading them to believe Trump had documents related to HUMINT. I thought at the time this was odd, you don't put "UP TO" on your caveats. But it makes perfect sense for a placeholder that might be used for a wide range of documents you might find. And given that, there might well have been no HUMINT at all; the placeholder is not evidence.
Since the narrative accompanying the photo in court filings did not reveal that the cover sheets were added by the FBI, it constitutes an attempt to prejudice and/or mislead the court (as well as the public)
This is true, and probably isn't ideal, but it is not a huge issue. Maybe prosecutors shouldn't do things for 'visual impact', but they do, and at any rate the conduct of Trump and his lawyers at various legal proceedings has been 100x worse.
Pretty sure the documents themselves have clear classification markings on them?
To the public, maybe? The claim is true, though, and it's not evidence to the courts, though. If those documents weren't actually classified when trump was President, Trump's lawyers would be all over that.
Do you actually think this made a difference in anyone's reaction to this case? And, again, the courts are considering the actual documents and their classification levels. Here is an article going over the actual documents and their classification levels and contents. I do not think the cover pages were materially misleading given that.
Even if this is the case -- and we in fact do not know that -- it would only be noticed by examining the document. Just casually looking in the open box would not make it obvious. There's a reason cover sheets are very noticable like that.
And to the court, at the time.
How do you know? At this point you have only the FBI's say-so.
Yes, there was in fact a lot of screaming about "OMG nuclear secrets" and "OMG HUMINT, Trump's getting our spies killed!"
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the government didn't have to stage a photo to release to the public or put the photo in the public charging document
in a world where the prosecution is attempting to redact and black out anything and everything they don't carefully curate for an agenda and engage in repeated fights for failure to turn over discovery requiring attorneys to file FOIA requests to gov agencies, it is honestly laughable to try to imply that the government was just being reasonable when they put cover sheets on classified documents reading CLASSIFIED PAY ATTENTION TO ME CLASSIFIED HUMAN INTEL CLASSIFIED so they could take a picture and have it published to influence the media and public
yes, they do because a defense to at least some of the more serious charges is that Trump didn't know the specific documents were there and didn't handle or interact with the documents and therefore was not engaged in willful conduct with respect to the those documents which would be supported by the documents still being in the exact order at time of seizure which they were when NARA created the boxes and told Trump to come get them and when they returned the boxes they demanded Trump turn over
I agree that this would be really, really bad.
But I dont see any reason to believe its true beyond wanting to believe its true.
Julie Kelly does not justify her assertion.
are you referring to use the cover sheets for the photo?
sure she does, she uses the changing statements of Jay Bratt, knowledge of what cover sheets they brought with them, the uniform nature of their appearance in the photo attached with a paperclip, the rolling trickle truth of prosecutors being forced to admit at the very least they made misleading statements about various pieces of critical evidence in the case, and the fact that no classified cover sheets were logged as "recovered" in the container
you can claim the DOJ team has not explicitly written "yes, we placed these cover sheets saying 'up to human intel' on the documents and took a picture of them," but you cannot claim she doesn't justify her assertion
No one else in the media se3ms to think she has justified herself. Foxnews and OAN haven't jumped on this. It's wishcasting.
okay, so you knew she had justified her speculation, having read the linked article, and you still wrote a comment claiming she didn't
and now you're dropping that having not addressed any part of that support and are claiming because you haven't seen "others in the media" or foxnews/oan talk about it, it's without support? what? why would I or anyone care what foxnews or oan think or do about anything
this is just dishonest
No more so than Otis Eugene Ray. Rank speculation is not justification. Your definition may differ.
If you believe that this story is more than wishcasting you should ask yourself why real conservative media outlets aren't repeating it.
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Did you read this link?
The author doesn't justify they assertion at all. They take this snippet:
And assert that the photo is using those placeholder sheets.
But the quote doesn't say that. And the filing doesn't say that.
Can anyone else justify this assertion that the photo includes cover sheets provided by the FBI?
I would find it disturbing if true, but I see no reason to accept this reporter's assertion as fact.
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Hot damn. If the FBI managed to screw up the investigation of what should be obvious misconduct, I’m going to be so disappointed. Let’s see what exactly they did…
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/03/mar-a-lago-trump-classified-documents-00156124
Looks like they added placeholders and cover sheets when they initially sorted the fifteen boxes. And then possibly failed to remove them? Assuming every cover sheet was left in the count, and there are really only half as many documents as stated in the warrant, that could mean Trump’s 15 boxes held fewer than 100! Witch hunt!
This is stupid. It’s also not the cause of the delay, which stems from the complaint that those searched boxes are now out of order. How much did they change? No idea. How did they notice the change? Because the contents were exhaustively documented after the seizure.
It’s not a great look for the prosecution. But it also has no bearing on the facts of the case. If Trump’s team could point to any version of the boxes as favorable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I don’t mind a delay of the trial, but I’m not going to treat this as exculpatory.
The "placeholders" are part of their strategy of trying the case in the media, e.g.. Not just the visual impact of the cover sheets, but media people (including NPR in that article) using the caveats on the placeholders (provided by the FBI) to show what a horrible thing Trump did.
I agree that using the photo as such is editorial narrative-peddling of the basest sort.
It’s like…you’ve seen those photos of heroin bricks and gold-plated guns from drug busts. They’re pure propaganda, right? The police want to look strong and successful, so they have incentives both to create such photos and to spread them around. Departments will tend towards policies that let them do it, like stacking all the product in one spot. But does that make the drug bust illegitimate?
I guess I’d expect a magically apolitical FBI to generate very similar photos. Maybe department policy includes a stack of cover sheets. (In my experience, the government loves those things, even in unclassified situations like training.) Or maybe they made the decision in the moment, either to make their sort easier, or to get that snappy photo.
If that’s true, then we’re back to priors. I believe the FBI is somewhat politically aware, and I assume some of its leadership holds a grudge against the FPOTUS. I don’t believe that was the driving factor. Then again, I wasn’t expecting them to pull the trigger at all.
If the gold-plated guns were actually props (not recovered in the bust), it at least risks poisoning the jury pool. And that photo wasn't actually just a publicity photo -- it was included in a court filing by the Justice Department, so it also IMO constitutes an attempt to prejudice the court.
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Of course DOJ messed the case up, because there was no "obvious misconduct" without them trying to arrange it!
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/05/02/unredactions_reveal_early_white_house_involvement_in_trump_documents_case_1028630.html
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1784226958127014361
Haphazardly fill boxes with mislabel classified information, tell the Trump team to pick them up, then accuse Trump of haphazardly storing classified information. No neutral operators, no brave civil servants executing the spirit of the law, just Biden appointees organizing more lawfare against their opponents. Take salacious pictures of Trump's classified documents on cover sheets that were brought there for the purpose, to prejudice the public against Trump, because that's the same playbook that's worked all along. (It's not like Trump colluded with Russia either.) And it's not like anybody is going to prosecute Biden or Mike Pence over classified documents either.
Jack Smith had to admit that they lied, "this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented," about their central piece of evidence. How is the government going to prove that Trump should have known how to handle these documents when the government itself was wrong about what they were. They gave him mislabeled documents, essentially making it impossible for him to have ever handled them properly in the first place.
Remember how many times progressives on social media were wrong about Russia, and about Trump's legal woes in general? I think you're doing the same thing in reverse here. What the government's alleged to have done is very minor, but a lot of the words look like the words you'd use in a major situation, so it's blown up into a big deal.
Well, the same people who orchestrated Russiagate are now running the government. The parallel runs toward more scam prosecutions. Why do you think they lied about the cover sheets?
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The government insists that it wasn’t wrong about what they were. Or even which box they were in. Only that it was an error to say they were “in the original, intact form as seized,” because the order is not the same. Page 8.
Nor do you have a good reason to believe the documents were planted. Only that Trump was informed of some (other?) boxes left in Virginia. His administration has never denied that the boxes belonged to him, has it?
And what’s all this bullshit about mislabeling? A banker’s box in your house is inappropriate for any level of classification.
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it was discovered because Judge Cannon originally responding to supported accusations to require a special master to review the boxes for privileged information and that special master is the person who documented the state of the boxes which prove the government lied
not because the "contents" were exhaustively documented by the prosecution/fbi who were forced to admit they lied to the court about the documents and their handling post-seizure
also, does it give you any pause the linked politico article relies entirely on the statements of the Smith team which has already admitted to not being truthful with the court or defense counsel on multiple occasions? sure, they're liars, but their newest excuse which would takes tens of thousands of dollars and tons of effort to expose as lies are totally, definitely true now
whether the documents were ever disturbed from their original state after they were put into banker boxes by the national archives and picked up by Trump speaks directly to willful conduct element under the provisions of the espionage act Trump is charged with
a version of facts whereby the documents are still in chronological order when they were seized by the government does have an significant effect on at least this element
I agree that the reordering reflects badly on both the FBI and the prosecution. I agree that it should reduce their credibility, and that we should be skeptical of anything they say, checking it against actual evidence. Fortunately, we have actual evidence reviewed by a third party—the scans which revealed this inconsistency.
The change between those scans (taken in late ‘22) and today does not affect the substance of the case. A change before those scans could, but I haven’t seen anyone with actual skin in the game make that allegation.
Who have you seen propose this “chronological order” defense? Perhaps Trump’s counsel? Because I don’t think they’re disputing the authenticity of the special master scans.
government admission that evidence has been tampered with post seizure is a serious issue; you want to give the government the benefit of the doubt in all places we don't have "actual evidence" their conduct was below the standard we should expect, but that isn't a fair assessment given the history of these prosecutors not only in this case but others
we're talking about an extreme standard to prove criminal guilt; reasonable doubt inhabits these hidden areas of government conduct
at some point, 'oopsies, we made yet another misleading statement totally accidentally and also fought to avoid admitting it for months and also here are better, more innocent explanations for why evidence has been tampered with' should adjust your priors in meaningful ways as opposed to handwaving "reduced credibility" which doesn't actually affect the way you evaluate any of this
for these prosecutors, bridging the gap from this admission to concluding they're likely lying is justifiable
...You appear to be making the above argument about "oopsies" in this case. But of course, the agency in question has an absolutely horrifying history of previous "oopsies". @gattsuru covers a small selection of recent cases, and as he mentions, those aren't even top-ten contenders.
The FBI has been a deeply corrupt institution since the day of its founding. We actually know quite a few details about the sort of leader Hoover was, and the sort of organization he built. We know how that organization operated six decades ago, five, four, three. And then, somehow, the magical trustworthiness always appears for the current agency whose behavior we can only incompletely analyze, so they always get the benefit not only of the doubt, but of willful ignorance.
I should put together a list of OIG reports into FBI misconduct over the last couple decades. The reports will regularly find pretty serious misconduct and additionally list facts readers can easily connect as what is very likely some sort of extortion crime and then the report gets put in a cabinet somewhere mostly without any media attention, the agents involved will retire with full benefits, and then we turn the page and forget about it ready to be exasperated with the next FBI accusation against "the bad guys." For example, the OIG report looking into the FBI's handling of multiple victim accusations about USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Does anyone else find it odd that while this investigation was being slow-walked to the point it wasn't moving at all until a local paper The Indystar broke the story wide-open and lead to public allegations by former gymnasts, the head of the office and likely his underling were working on obtaining post retirement cushy jobs with the US Olympic committee? Odd the head of the office lied to OIG investigators to attempt to cover up their misrepresentations of evidence and witness interviews as well as their attempt to coincidentally seek a job with USA Gymnastics/US Olympic committee. Huh, weird, oh well I guess he gets to retire with full benefits.
This agency is rotten to the core. I legitimately do not understand how it continues to enjoy such high reputation for credibility given the long list of known abuses where no one was meaningfully held accountable. I legitimately do not understand why judge's eyes gloss over or even they get angry when it's suggested these people shouldn't be assumed to be the most credible people to ever exist. It's almost comical how much defense counsel has to tip-toe around it until they find essentially a smoking gun. We turn the page and forget about it, "oh here look, the FBI is going after ____ for ____. He must be a bad guy." Do I think the FBI is above planting and manipulating evidence, lying about it, and ruining lives trying to cover it up? Not only do I think they are willing to do that, there are dozens of cases of it being proven they did just that.
Funny enough, I remember that reddit comment because it made me RES tag gattsuru as just "great." edit: I typed out the above before I looked further down the thread where gattsuru mentioned it.
What's particularly funny is how even defense lawyers get into it. Cfe when themotte's own notice that an FBI agent perjured herself at length during a criminal trial; he was genuinely curious how the FBI agent would weasel out of it (spoiler: easily!), and even entertained the possibility "whether the prosecutors will bother" to bring perjury charges (spoiler: no).
If the spreadsheet has the data, and it was just hidden, then she didn’t perjure herself by saying she handed over all the data.
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I don’t doubt for one minute that Trump had classified documents, but it does suggest that the intended audience for the indictment was the American Electorate rather than a federal judge. Thinking back to the political situation at the time the charges were unsealed, Jack Smith and the Justice Department probably thought this was the kill-shot for Trump’s campaign.
I think that’s plausible, but not because of the revelations here.
Check out page 8. The government concedes that they were inconsistent because the order within boxes changed. Nothing else. They insist that the only other change to contents is the placeholder cards.
But nothing in the indictment, the sealing, the warrant depended on order! It was all about number of documents suspected to remain. Nothing I’ve seen in here casts doubt on that unless we assume that the boxes were made up wholesale. I’m not willing to bite that bullet.
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Government Programs Should Have Legible Budgets
This kind of rule may come across as obvious, pointless, or doomed depending on your perspective.
There is an impulse among many to see a problem in society and turn to government for a solution. I strongly disagree with this impulse. But I also think that these people and myself could come to terms on some shared "rules of engagement".
To start we should agree on some basic things:
There are many devils in the little details, but what these three basic things suggest is that there should be: A set way of collecting taxes. A budget using those taxes that pays out to various social causes. The determination of that budget can be debated upon in some agreed way (maybe by electing representatives to a 'congress'). And that all social programs must go through this set of procedures.
To address the criticisms:
"This is pointless we already do things this way."
Sometimes governments do it this way, sometimes they don't.
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not follow these rules. Private individuals are given the ability to sue other private individuals to provide accommodations for them. The threat of getting sued also encourages a lot of preemptive work on the part of companies. How much does all of this suing and preemptive work cost? No one knows. How much will it cost you to provide for people with disabilities? Maybe a standard amount. Maybe you'll be one of the unlucky ones that gets sued in a new novel interpretation of the law and you'll win a reverse lottery.
How much do you think it is worth it to help disabled people in this country? It seems like a valid political question, but right now the American Government is basically on a blind autopilot path. It cannot know how much is spent. It cannot control how much is spent. And it cannot work out more lucrative and appealing deals for edge cases.
A little while ago (maybe a decade) some university (maybe MIT) decided to put all of their classes online for digital consumption, for free. Sometime later they were forced to take down the entire archive, because they were not subtitled, and a deaf person could not access them. The deaf person wanted them all subtitled. Subtitling a free online resource would have been too expensive and not worth it. So they were instead just removed for everyone. This is the kind of problem that a competent government middleman can solve:
[In the alternative universe where the ADA creates a government middleman agency for solving disability issues.] Each deaf person is allotted $5,000 a year to solve for their disability. They can choose to spend this on hearing implants, or on paying towards having some work transcribed. If enough deaf people want a thing transcribed it gets done. No business owner or non-profit is suddenly held hostage. No single person or entity is stuck paying enormous costs. Things aren't removed from public consumption just because a disabled person can't access it. We know how much is spent on deaf people per year. Medical companies that want to solve or fix a disability have a clear customer market for potential solutions.
This is doomed people would rather have the costs hidden and less obvious.
As I said above, sometimes the government does follow the good set of rules. I'd consider an agency like NASA a good example. The American people give some vague indications of how important they think space science and exploration is to their elected representatives. Those elected representatives can talk with the scientists, engineers, and managers at NASA to determine if maybe there are some important research projects that the general public doesn't know about but might want if they did know about it. NASA's budget is paid through taxes and is a clear line item on the federal budget. For the last two decades NASA has been about 0.5% of the federal budget. Which sounds vaguely correct to me in proportion to how much Americans care about funding Space related stuff.
The cynical reason why I believe that programs have hidden or "laundered" costs is that I don't believe voters would be actually willing to fund them if the true costs were obvious. If a party has a temporary political victory the best the best way to leverage it is through hidden and laundered costs. Pass a medicare act that doesn't really change the rules until you are out of office. Pass a civil rights act with murky enforcement that can be slowly ratcheted up every year.
Despite politicians doing this pretty often, I don't think it is what voters actually want. There is a huge amount of frustration from people over these sorts of policies. Hanania's book the Origins of Woke kind of blew up one of these issues recently. But they are all going to become problems, because when you remove the funding control from government there is no funding control. There is no countervailing force to push down the costs of these various programs. And the only way to get rid of them is often just destroy them altogether. So while people might have supported the ADA if it was 1% of the budget, they might start getting pissed at the program when it balloons up to 10% of the budget and a bunch of reverse lottery sob stories start showing up in the news. And suddenly instead of 10% or even 1% of the budget, you get 0% for your cause and no one trusts you with a 1% allotment cuz they will all remember the horror days of 10%. I don't know how likely a full reversal to 0% is for any of these policies. But that seems to be whats on the table as far as alternatives go.
There is also an ongoing legal weakness to many of these policies. Now that the supreme court is mostly conservative it could start invalidating different laundered cost schemes that have been liberal policy staples for decades. Affirmative action has taken a hit. Paid housing for the homeless might get hit next.
Conclusion
In general I think we should be suspicious of any public program that tries to hide its costs, or launder those costs onto private actors. Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs. If you want a social program done or accomplished, you need to be willing to raise taxes and pay for it. If voters can't stomach raising taxes to pay for a particular social program, then too bad! Nothing is free. Start comparing the costs and fighting for them in the agreed upon battlefield.
What if NASA functioned like the ADA? Every company with more than 50 employees could be made legally liable for failure to launch probes into space to explore the Solar System. The law could be enforced by lawsuits against companies that have "workplaces hostile to space exploration" because they skimp on how many probes they launch.
This sounds horrible and likely to lead to gaming the system.
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The most famous and most 'successful' shrouding of costs related to government is tax withholding. If people had to actually pay their tax bill all at once, they would be pissed, but by withholding throughout the year, and then returning the amount that was too much, people feel like they're getting paid to do their taxes, instead of being robbed slightly less.
And this is why anyone who starts their own business and, therefore, has to file quarterly immediately starts hollering "taxes are too damn high!" .... and then you also start paying self-employment tax.
Show me a person who:
And I will show you someone who wants to vote for a conservative with their mind and wallet, but may let their heart and social signaling sway them to voting for a liberal.
You're smuggling in the assumption that the reaction to paying out tax instead of having it withheld is the more "correct"/rational reaction. I could just as easily assert voting conservative for that reason is letting their heart and wallet override their mind.
No, quite the opposite. I am explicitly stating that those in the situation of which I gave a criteria (business owner, parent, homeowner) creates a shift in values that would precipitate a change in voting.
Politics is the organization and operation at scale of a marketplace of values. I'll never make the claim that conservatives are more rational than liberals. I will always make the claim that the conservative set of values is better for a functioning society and that liberal values are far more about individual level emotional validation than society level outcomes.
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On the other hand, if the tax bill were itemised in proportion to the Federal budget, it might be harder for certain demagogues to get people angry about a government program that costs them ⅒¢....
There is a pie chart of government expenses at the end of the Form 1040 instructions.
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In Australia tax bills are itemized in proportion to the budget, they give you a little chart that shows where all your money is going. I didn't even know we still did 'industry assistance' but we do. All the little fish would be put down in 'other' though.
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Don't know how true this is. Your W2 says how much tax you paid, everyone knows how much is being taken.
No, they don't know it. I volunteer with the VITA program doing tax prep for low-income people, and most of my clients don't appreciate that the government is taking money from their paychecks to pay tax. I explain it to them every year, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't stick.
I'm pretty sure half my clients don't even read their W-2's or other tax forms, except to go "this's a tax form from my employer / bank / charity / etc; guess I'll bring it when I go do taxes."
If you’re working with low income people, there’s a good chance they’re getting more back than they pay in.
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Income taxation didn't really take off until the invention of tax withholding. Even after the ratification of the 16th Amendment, Congress found popular resistance to the income tax too strong for it to actually be enforced. It wasn't until they partnered with corporations, which were growing in importance in society, to withhold taxes that resistance died down and the tax could be collected. Psychologically, it makes a big difference. You see a number at the end of the year that corresponds to what the government took, but they took it before you even knew they were taking it. You get a paycheck and then there's some accounting about how much they took which comes with a bonus for you. At least, for most people.
Your dates don't really line up though. Withholding isn't until 1943. You see higher income taxes earlier, after Roosevelt becomes president. You then see an even steeper rise in taxes in general as the USA becomes more and more involved in the war. Finally in 1943 you see withholding implemented, but this is after a decade of higher and higher taxes spurred on by the depression and war. After WW2 you see lower, but still high income taxes and finally income taxes come down after the neo-liberal revolution in the 80s. Withholding doesn't seem important in this picture.
The story I heard was Milton Friedman came up with withholding...hated the idea of it as a more small government person, but thought it was the best way to get enough money to win WWII.
No idea how true that is.
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Excellent post!
Another example of this is AML/KYC regulations, which basically require banks to serve as a branch of law enforcement at their own expense. From the excellent Bits About Money post on the topic:
Sorry for the giant quote-post. I don't have much to say about this topic beyond "the above article is fully consistent with what little experience I have of AML/KYC from my work". I just think that article is very very good and also quite relevant to the topic at hand.
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Except that's not what happens. Your program lasts forever because it sounds good to the normies and has strong built-in constituencies. So there's no incentive NOT to do this; if you do it you win.
Wild suggestion - every 50 years or so we switch to dictatorship for a while to clean up the mess.
To this and @2rafa's comment below;
Please don't slip into blackpill "debugging authoritarianism."
The solution is simply less legislation and regulation over. Less bureaucracy, less gover-nance.
One of the reasons I like to describe myself as a Willmoore Kendall conservative is because he specifically talks about the dirty trick of citizens of all political persuasions now (which is to say, in the 1960s!) taking as axiomatic a level of daily government interference in their lives that leaders from the founding fathers through to Lincoln and all the way up to (just before) FDR would have found pants-shittingly insane and illiberal.
The eager temptation nowadays is to use those evil powers for good (which is an inherent and intractable contradiction) - I.e. having an "authoritarian white boy summer" to drain the swamp or whatever. If you accomplish even those admirable ends by illiberal means, you've just set conditions for a counter-movement to swing back the other way in even greater force. "They did this, so we gotta do that!" is always a good rallying cry.
I'll admit that I don't have a great solution or even strategy for how to yield these ends with non-evil means. I think SCOTUS will help very slowly and over a very long term. I think the Federal bureaucracy may eventually collapse under its own weight and be re-organized. I can already see that the PMC factories we call universities are burning themselves down. But, "victory" (however you may define it) is still far from guaranteed. To get somehow even more handwavy, I think a byproduct of an actual kinetic conflict with China could be a revitalization in patriotic citizenship that may contribute to a larger suspicion of hyper-individualism. Then again, without a large scale draft of military recruitment effort, the war will be "a Washington thing" that is actually a fucking everybody thing. I'm starting to go in circles here, so I'll cut it off.
Liberalism and democracy are tools not goals.
I think you mistake what me and 2rafa are talking about is that a state have 2 modes - slow burn and fast. Democracy is by design made to be ineffective - especially the modern, especially the US one. And whenever you look at history - the big fast efficient strides are made usually under some form of authoritarian government. Democracy is quite good in maintaining a nash equilibrium, authoritarian government - into moving from one to another. Both have uses. A deep state problem can't be solved democratically - as is big all encompassing bureaucracy.
But right now - the authoritarian streak of the US is manifested trough courts which perverts the justice system.
Hmm, okay. There's something here.
Totally agree with your latest comment (especially like the Nash equilibrium usage) ... And also agree that the big changes do happen under an authoritarian model (especially if a crisis is involved; Civil War, WW2, 2008 Financial Crisis).
But my value assertion remains the same - we shouldn't ever really be ok with an authoritarian system.
So, I guess the question / problem becomes - I am being naive and wishful in thought that it will never happen again (probably?) If it's unavoidable, should we seek to steer towards "conservative authoritarianism", however that odd term is defined? I take it that that's roughly your/@2rafa's position?
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A good move would be to appoint a president with absolute power under the constitution (ie to make any law except that which SCOTUS rules unconstitutional) for a single 8-year term, with Congress’ sole function being to approve a new debt ceiling every 5 years and - but only with a supermajority in both houses - to dismiss the president if necessary. A secondary mechanism could involve a supermajority of state governments doing the same. That’s enough safeguards to avoid an insane dictator while allowing for high capacity governance.
Problem is that there's not enough counterweight then to keep that president from messing with the legislation or even just enforcement around voting. Eight years you're out is legible enough to create a Schelling point to unite the country around enforcement. Look at the drama in the last election around single-digit percentages of votes. That is a healthy thing, I like seeing that. I think it'd be too easy to suppress that with near-absolute power.
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This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
Let's say society is worried about accidents caused by self-driving cars and wants to allocate some amount of resources to fixing the problem. There are two straightforward ways to structure the resource allocation:
Pass a law specifying that victims of accidents caused by self-driving cars can sue the manufacturer for damages, or;
Pass a set of safety regulations that self driving car companies have to comply with, and if a compliant self-driving car nevertheless causes an accident, the government compensates the victim.
In scenario 1 we are causing the cost of accidents to be carried by the car company, who is in the best position to figure out how to prevent accidents. So we have given them a monetary incentive to devote a rational amount of resources to fixing or improving the problem. This is the opposite of a reverse lottery because the car company is in the best position out of anyone to try to predict and prevent accidents.
Scenario 2 creates a situation where car companies are only encouraged to comply with regulations, rather than try to figure out the best way to prevent accidents. The regulator is in a much worse position to know what regulations will actually be effective at preventing accidents, and the regulator has no direct monetary incentive to care about preventing accidents. Simultaneously, they also have no monetary incentive to care about over-preventing accidents either. So we will almost necessarily get an inefficient set of regulations that devote an incorrect amount of resources to the problem.
Unfortunately, if manufacturers of self-driving cars can be sued for all accidents in which self-driving cars are involved (the "caused" part doesn't come into play until the lawsuit is underway), self-driving cars are essentially banned. The cost of covering that liability is staggering.
Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway. It's trivially true that anyone can file suit for anything, but the plaintiff isn't going to recover any money unless they have evidence of causation and damages.
Also, my thought experiment notwithstanding, it's already totally possible to sue self-driving car manufacturers for causing accidents, yet these companies are not only in business but doing better than ever.
The expenses start immediately.
And yes, I predict that if actual self-driving cars become more common, either we will see limits on liability or the companies will be driven out of the market or out of business.
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Do you think the cost of self-driving car insurance would be higher than human-driven car insurance? If so, would that cost be spurious or would it reflect genuine harms?
Ideally it should be fine, but I don't trust that the ideal case would happen.
Human-driven liability insurance doesn't cover everything. Losses are limited. If you start a chain-reaction collision and kill a whole bunch of people, your insurance company will pay our to your maximum, and you'll lose everything you have and have to declare bankruptcy. Maybe you'll go to jail or commit suicide, but either way your victims ain't getting anything more. If a self-driving car does the same, the losses are limited to the value of the self-driving car company, which is likely far greater than any individual. And the company has far more exposure. And the plaintiffs and juries know the self-driving car company has much deeper pockets than an insured driver, so I expect you'd see more lawsuits per incident and higher judgements.
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I don't see why that's a problem, to be honest.
There has to be some sort of consequence for the manufacturer when self-driving cars cause an accident, same as how human drivers pay fines or go to jail. What's your preferred liability structure?
I don't know. All I know is the consequences. Once the cars become popular enough, a self-driving car company is basically going to be mostly a legal company, defending (or settling) lawsuits in all 50 states involving its cars. And that's even if its cars are perfect and never cause accidents, especially since the car company is going to look like "deep pockets" to plaintiff's attorneys and juries. The cost of all this legal defense is going to increase the cost of the cars by a ridiculous amount, and the more cars there are the more of a chance of a "reverse lottery" where a self-driving car is involved in an accident that kills a busful of kindergartners and is found liable for more than Alex Jones even was. As long as there's a fairly small number of cars they can play the odds, but a liability regime which involves a car manufacturer in every major accident one of their cars is involved in will kill the whole thing.
An imperfect analogy already exists with commercial vehicles, where the company that owns them and their insurance company is held liable for any damages caused by the driver.
The usual demands are so high as to be called the ‘ghetto lottery’.
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You're assuming the car companies are the ones footing the bill. They buy insurance for things like this, and the premiums reflect the risk and the average settlement value. This is how every company manages risk, including the car companies, who already get sued in product liability actions. Unless the risks are so high that they effectively become uninsurable, the cost of the insurance will just be reflected in the price of the vehicle. And if they are uninsurable, then self-driving cars are probably too dangerous to be marketed as such anyway. I would mention that I say this as someone who is skeptical that full self driving will be available in his lifetime.
Insurance helps individual drivers because they can pool their risk with all the other drivers. A self-driving car company selling a sufficient number cars may as well self-insure. And yes, the expected cost of liability would be baked into the cars in either case, but I expect if they got it right, self-driving cars would be prohibitively expensive. If they got it wrong they'd go bankrupt when they big verdict came up.
The big downside of self-insuring for a company is probably political. If you've got a policy from Lloyd's any effort to bankrupt you through insurance payout lawfare is going to get a lot of very important people upset on your behalf.
If musk self-insured there's nothing stopping Some Judge In New York from ordering 70 billion dollar payouts every time a Tesla is involved in a fender-bender.
You need to smear the money around for self defense, and pay off enough of the Party that they at least can't unify in looting you.
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As a products liability lawyer, I can tell you that insurance coverage is a lot more complicated than that. Any hypothetical policy would base the premiums on the number of vehicles sold. If there's a defect that results in injury, only a small percentage of the affected vehicles are going to result in claims, and only a small percentage of the total claims are going to involve huge losses. Huge verdicts only result when the insurance companies are adamant that there is no liability and are looking to get out from under it. Once it's clear there's liability (and often not even then), they'll settle claims at standard rates. You may get a couple of eye popping verdicts but these won't become a normal thing. No Plaintiff's lawyer is going to spend 100k+ taking a contingency case to trial chasing a verdict that's likely to bankrupt the company and leave him and his client waiting 5 years in the unsecured creditor line in a Chapter 11 hoping they can recover a percentage of the original verdict. Better to take the cash now.
If Ford was fully liable for any accident in which a driver of a Ford vehicle was found at fault, but this did not apply to any other vehicles, how much more do you think Ford vehicles would cost than all those other vehicles to cover that liability? I expect it would be at least an order of magnitude; being involved in an accident with a Ford vehicle would be a potential lottery-winner (regardless of who was at fault, and that's often muddy). And I think that's true even if from some nonexistent objective observer's POV, the Ford driver was never actually at fault.
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Yes this is a trivial problem to solve. We already have a massive auto insurance industry. Everything looks like self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers.
You either add it to the costs of the car as essentially pre-bought insurance for the purchaser (which should be cheaper than current policies) or work out some long-term payment plan on the buyer for yearly insurance (with some kind of termination in time after so many years etc).
The auto insurance industry works because there's a relatively low cap on liability per accident (after which they stop paying out and the driver is on the hook, but the driver is an individual who likely doesn't have much). Once the manufacturer is on the hook, that cap is irrelevant.
Commercial vehicle owners have such a high to nonexistent liability cap that there are entire sections of the insurance industry specializing in suing them, and somehow they manage.
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Ok fair enough. Average human low liability but big corporate gets $30 million a life.
Though I guess solutions can be found when it’s necessary.
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To the owner of the self-driving car would be another option, maybe? This seems like it would better work with cars that have a full self-driving mode, but could also be driven ordinarily.
I'm not convinced that self-driving cars would be banned, instead of just way more expensive. It would depend on how much liability they would tend to have.
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I'm gonna stick by my statement. I don't think the example you give really contradicts it. The actual world we live in has a mix of both systems where the American government gets to flip a coin "heads I win, tails you lose". They regulate the industries, and allow those industries to be sued by individuals. From what I understand this is actually a little strange by international standards. Russia (for traffic stuff) goes more down the route of sue anyone but very loose regulations. And most of Europe goes down the route of strict regulations, but you can't sue (for a bunch of business regulations).
In general, I think in cases of death or serious bodily injury it makes sense to have a court involved. In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved. I'm not suggesting entirely doing away with courts. But courts are a terrible place for solving economic distribution questions. They are simply far too expensive (judges and lawyers are generally smart and capable people).
But people can already sue for bodily injury or death, so when I say an expansion of what you can sue for is laundering costs, I mean that generally any new thing that you can sue for. (and there are some old things you can sue for that I also think are bullshit, but I specifically listed those things.)
How would you have contract disputes resolved? Inheritance disputes?
Much of these are solved through private arbitration, with courts as a resolver of last resort. The reason they are a last resort is that lawyers will eat up most of the money in the case. Which kind of defeats the purpose of a dispute over money. Courts are mainly avenues of Justice. As in you want the person who screwed you over monetarily not just to pay you back but to suffer.
Lawyers are used in arbitration as well, and unlike a judge you have to pay the arbitrator. I'm not sure why you think that's a cheaper option that litigation.
Where are you getting this idea? Usually courts are limited to awarding actual damages; punitive damages are the exception.
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In this vein, I think it would be a very different world if the lines in the budget were listed as percentages, and then the overall total was determined based on a factor of tax revenue. So a simplified version would look like:
War: 25%
Social Security: 25%
Bureaucracy: 25%
Debt: 25%
Total budget: 1.25x tax revenue for 2023.
And then the actual amount of money would get calculated based on these figures. Right now the numbers are so disconnected from anything the average person can comprehend.
Edit: I don't really mean for the average person to see percentages. Of course one could calculate percentages after the fact.
I mean for the politicians to only see a percentage on each line item. I mean for politicians to argue that X program should get .01% of the budget, while that program only receives .005%. Percentages are a way of declaring priorities. And you can't exceed 100%.
And then, after the percentages are selected, the total budget compared to the tax revenue for the previous year is argued about and chosen.
The IRS does publish just that, with two pie charts and text, at the end of the Form 1040 instructions!
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, hardly anyone reads it.
Somewhat cynically: actual fucking governance: 5%
Paul Krugman while he had some shred of connection to reality left called the USG insurance company with an army.
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I don't really mean for the average person to see percentages. Of course one could calculate percentages after the fact.
I mean for the politicians to only see a percentage on each line item. I mean for politicians to argue that X program should get .01% of the budget, while that program only receives .005%. Percentages are a way of declaring priorities.
And then, after the percentages are selected, the total budget compared to the tax revenue for the previous year is argued about and chosen.
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The UK government sends you a letter every year telling you what percentage of your taxes go to each thing. I don’t think it makes a huge difference because, as @EvanTh suggests, the only people who read it are people who are interested in the subject anyway, and they already know.
See edit:
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To be fair, I think a lot of them actually don’t know, and are totally fine with having an uninformed opinion.
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Apparently it's not just for the average person.
To be fair, it's easy to mock people who ought to know what they're talking about but the US funding market is legitimately impossible to describe.
The lady in that video got on my nerve. She managed to compress so many bad economic ideas and implications into such a short few sentences.
I also had to double check the date on that video. Is someone seriously asking after the last few years why we don't just print more money? Have they been to a restaurant or bought anything recently? We did the experiment during covid of just 'printing more money' and then we had record setting inflation.
There is also the rather basic idea that if you expect to be paid back in X currency in the future then you have a vested interest in that currency maintaining its value. Its a way of signalling commitment to the future value of the currency. Its like a CEO offering to only be paid in stock options that don't vest for a few years. It would signal they are confident in the future success of the company.
Wait, she's the one who's the problem, and not him? I thought she was just trying to bring up the problem that those who profess that we can just print money and not worry about debt don't understand why we borrow, showing that there's a problem with their model.
I can't even tell what the dude is saying. He is stuttering and mumbling and talking in circles.
"I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say: Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?"
The way she phrased it made me think she was saying it is ridiculous that we borrow our own currency. But yeah maybe I am just totally misinterpreting her tone.
I checked; I'm wrong.
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She's the wacky MMT advocate who thinks you can just print money to get out of any fiscal problems. He is a very progressive and fiscally liberal, but mainstream, economist who thinks that printing money and borrowing money have very different effects on inflation.
Together they fight crime?
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I checked, and yeah, you're right.
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The great thing about printing money here in America is that we are the USA USA USA baby! Everyone takes our dollar, they take it for oil, for oranges, for tungsten, for cars, for iphones. We print it up out of thin air and they give us real goods for it every day.
The higher the trade deficit the more they are getting ripped off by exchanging real goods for dollars. Even with all the printing we are still experiencing a strong dollar and less inflation compared to other countries that don't have the backing of the US economy and 11 carrier strike groups.
Look at any currency vs the US dollar over the last 4 years. The dollar is as strong as it has ever been. MMT is a brilliant scheme for extracting real material and goods from the rest of the world in exchange for protection and promises. It is crazy that we get away with it! USA USA USA!
This might run out, with devastating effect, some day.
If people lose confidence in the US dollar, suddenly they'll try to get rid of it, leading to an increase in domestic supply and dramatic inflation, and foreign goods in general will be much more expensive.
It might, when someone else has 11 carrier strike groups. It won't be in our lifetimes.
But how much does that actually matter to the value of the dollar?
My guess would be that the general value prospect to people and countries abroad of holding dollars are that:
But if 1 fails (due to, say, running out of people willing to finance US debt, meaning that we need to start printing money to fund things or pay back debtors), then some will drop the US dollar for other currencies. This will drive down the cost of the dollar, that is, cause inflation, which will lead to more of the same.
I don't expect 3 and 4 to go anywhere, but I think 1 and 2 could change, in a way that would meaningfully affect demand for dollars, and hurt US prosperity.
That said, that's mostly just from me thinking things through myself, not something better vetted, so is there some reason that I'm wrong, or something I'm missing?
Anything could happen, but it hasn't. People have been predicting the demise of the dollar for 60 years, from weird baskets of BRIC currency to crypto, to gold. It only gets stronger! It is interesting that people are always calling for the fall of the mighty USD and yet when I travel these days I can only buy more and more with the same amount of cash! Call me when that changes.
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Or if one of those gets sunk by hypersonic missiles. Or if you run out of people to con into manning them in exchange for IOUs.
I think it's quite reasonable to put a decent chance of dollar collapse happening within the next 50 years actually. Especially now that the dam of signing oil contracts in other currencies has broken. Though I'm still betting on Japanese style long term containment.
It becomes more likely if NATO decisively loses the Ukraine war. When force is the only thing backing the entire system, any large display of weakness is a potential black swan.
Lots of hypotheticals here. The dollar has only become stronger over the last 20 years despite rumors of demise. So forgive me if I take this with a huge grain of salt.
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Did you notice the accelerating pace of people accepting things which are not the dollar to trade internationally?
No. And neither has the dollar.
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Isn't this clip of him trying to explain the unexplainable (i.e. mmt)? It seems like they deliberately edited out the question to make him look like a moron and the whole film seems to be mmt propaganda.
Of course it's also possible that he is a moron, he doesn't seem to have any economic background anyway.
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I think his interview was taken out of context. Atleast I hope it was. The reason we borrow money instead of just printing all we need is it basically soaks up money that would end up elsewhere and cause inflation instead of being saved. And inflation reduction device.
He should be smart enough to know that so I have to assume he was just tired or wasn’t sure where they were going and didn’t feel like providing a better answer.
He might be an MMTer. That's gotten popular among the in crowd recently for obvious "we can print as much money as we want without worrying about inflation" reasons.
That wouldn’t even be a correct interpretation of MMT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
I think some butchered downstream version got all deficits are fake thing perhaps from the 2010’s where inflation was low so plausibly in their theory it was fake when inflation was below 2% and we had excess unemployment.
Having a correct interpretation of MMT does not in my experience seem to be a necessary precondition of being an MMTer.
The Low-IQ version of MMT while the high IQ version is right enough it may have been a better model in 1925.
It also I don’t think generalizes as well for a small open economy that isn’t as diversified or a powerhouse in every industry.
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This is rather MMTers poking some fun at other supposed macro experts who don't actually have a correct clear grasp on how money or government funding works. He kept tripping over his words because his intuition was leading him astray, so "government prints money and then lends it" kept coming out. The correct, clear, simple answer is that government prints money in the form of bonds every day, and swaps them with central bank reserves where appropriate (like swapping between $100 bills, $1 bills, and quarters where appropriate, perhaps when trying to ride the bus or go to the arcade). The only clash is that people have pre-existing non-sensical stricter definitions of the word "money", so MMT generally prefers to sidestep a language intuition issue and just refer more broadly to what matters, financial assets.
It's already been nearly a decade since mainstream economists stopped trying to say MMT is wrong, and switched to "we knew that already", so I guarantee you MMTers aren't saying something as obviously wrong as "we can print as much money as we want without worrying about inflation". And it's MMT who has pushed better & better verbal explanations to laypeople of all those interlocking balance sheets in IGI's linked NYFed diagram.
This might also be because talking with MMT'ers is often a constant exercise of dealing with motte-and-baileying with risible radical claims and commonsense stuff described in somewhat different words from usual.
Bingo.
I looked deep into MMT many years ago to find out what descriptive claims they made that were different from mainstream economics. I found three:
(1) Confidence in fiscal policymakers to e.g. time fiscal policy to control demand.
(2) An approximately flat SRAS curve, though many of its advocates don't realise this and haven't read about SRAS curves, because they have never read an intro macro textbook. In plain English, it's like an on/off model of how increased demand affects prices: until full employment, stimulus is more or less non-inflationary. Mainstream Keynesians used to believed this.
(3) Various Old Keynesian claims about the monetary policy or interest rate changes, though this is not universal among MMT advocates.
That's it. Everything else is motte-and-bailey, rhetoric, distractions which have performed the useful function of hiding MMT from most rigorous scrutiny, or uninteresting errors that some advocates of MMT make when they mix up normative with descriptive claims about how e.g. the Treasury works.
I'm not an economist and I don't understand much about it, so I wish you and @LateMechanic would have a discussion to illuminate this a bit. He seems to be pro-MMT and you seem to be against. You two have any thoughts on the other's view?
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It may be the case when dealing with random commenters on the internet, but that kind of goes for everything right? I'm talking about like Paul Krugman who kept being embarrassed when going a few rounds against MMT economists over the years, and he kept exposing that he couldn't shake some fundamental incorrect starting points like a loanable funds framework.
As for different words, that's definitely a communication hurdle where people feel like they're not speaking the same language. To me it seems to be warranted to actually cut to the heart of what matters with some different terminology, to avoid some pitfalls with peoples' everyday colloquial versions of money, lending, borrowing, etc., and talk about what is actually happening with each balance sheet operation.
But it has to be said that people in finance and central banking pretty much immediately understand MMT's descriptions in a matter of minutes. After MMT started gaining popularity, there were multiple central bank research papers put out saying the same types of things, to help educate the field and wider public, and to help correct classic misconceptions still being taught in economic textbooks. The only people who really struggled with it were mainstream academic economists, who had to try to translate real world explanations into their toy model terms. 'So you're saying that in your version of my model, my drawn curve here should be basically a vertical/horizontal line pushed out over here?'
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MMT covers a wide range of actual policy positions, some reasonable and some not. But in general it’s a retarded third world conspiracy that leads to stuff like Turkish and Argentine hyperinflation directed by idiotic leaders who reject any link between inflation and borrowing, not merely in theory but in practice. The unique situation the US and to a lesser extent other Anglo countries are in with regards to the effect of public borrowing on inflation is unique because of their balance of trade, foreign investment, very large service sectors and so on, just like Japan’s weird dynamic, and doesn’t prove MMT in any genuine way.
The core bulk of MMT is descriptive, showing how money, banking, and government finance work, from a fundamental logic & accounting level of interlocking balance sheets. When armed with these correct fundamentals, it's a lot easier to see where actual tradeoffs and choices apply, and to avoid being upset by goofy incorrect gut notions and suffering from various types of cognitive dissonance. If anyone even talks about "public borrowing", they likely still don't grasp what is even actually happening in the accounting plumbing.
The policy prescriptions which some MMT proponents tack onto that descriptive project is probably a mistake in my view. But most of them think that once you understand the real constraints, then some choices (like implementing a Job Guarantee / Employer of Last Resort program) are so obvious and moral that they should always be pitched at the same time, and ended up with a largely progressive following who wanted more of that. You can take or leave those prescriptions though, it doesn't make the descriptive project incorrect.
There is not a single MMT economist who is confused that different countries & currencies have different challenges. By the 2010s when they were starting to get traction after a decade, they probably knew more about it than almost anyone, because this was such a common early dismissal attempt 'yeah maybe they know about the US, but circumstances are special there'. The core logic still works in any situation, and understanding real constraints vs. imaginary or self-imposed constraints is the key thing to get right. There are definitely real constraints and tradeoffs in all cases.
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It says, Jared Bernstein, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.
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This mostly seems like a way to waste staffer time preparing reports which convert percentages in actual relevant cost information. You can't actually make the legislature decide budget priorities in purely percentage terms and then decide how much revenue to raise. Whatever the nominal procedural requirements, it's going to be negotiated holistically.
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Doesn't this critique also apply to the whole civil suit edifice? If a company breaks a contract with me, it is the government that backs the court resolution with force if necessary. Which kind of highlights a problem with giving a budget per person. Currently a company might make efforts to not break a contract because I can sue them, and that should count as government spending by this metric? And if the solution applies then each person is given a contract enforcement budget, but, a big company could simply sign a contract for oil rights on my land worth a million dollars, then break the contract and I only get 5000 dollars towards trying to rectify it?
In other words your solution removes the advantage of government force against entities that are less powerful than a government but more powerful than a normal individual. The whole point is to leverage the scale of the government as the aggregate of its citizens. Which I understand is somewhat antithetical to a Libertarian, but I think your proposal is kind of the worst of all worlds. I can see an argument to take the government out of it entirely and I can see an argument to have the government do the whole thing. But where the government does it, but only to a very minor extent for each person just seems more inefficient than either.
Which isn't to say I think the ADA way is right either, I'd rather just have a mandate passed on what a company needs to do, set up a department, people make complaints and the government either finds in the companies favor and does nothing, or uses government power to force the company to comply. Then you could also measure the cost both to the company and to the government of enforcement without diluting the whole purpose of having a government.
There are obligations you agree to and obligations that are forced upon you. If I agree to deliver 10 widgets to you then back out, I've backed out of an obligation I agreed to. If government says I need to deliver 10 widgets to you then I back out, I've backed out of an obligation that has been forced upon me. Obligations that are forced upon people seem like takings to me. If I had any faith in older supreme courts I'd wonder why they weren't considered 5th amendment violations.
I would be somewhat fine with this solution if they also kept track of the costs of these mandates, possibly by allowing partial tax write offs for anyone complying with them. I'm not really firmly fixed on a particular solution for this problem, just firmly in the position that it is a problem.
A mandate without funding is just a sneaky tax and spending scheme that doesn't get added to the government balance books and has far less oversight and checks/balances than other forms of spending. Even if you are a big government liberal there are good reasons to dislike this kind of scheme. There are not unlimited resources, and unless you only care about one particular pet issue that is using one of these mandates without funding then there is less wealth available for all other issues. Take this pet example:
All businesses must spend about $10k to accommodate a particular disability. The disability can also be fixed with a surgery. Fixing the disability for everyone would average out to about $5k per business. The government in this case could tax the businesses $9k each, spend $5k paying for fixing the disability, and then have $4k in tax revenue left over. The business is happier with this solution, the disability is solved for all cases (and places that get exclusions from ADA aren't also excluding people with the disability.)
I am Libertarian, but I also was an Economics Major in college. The ADA stuff bothers my economist side just as much as it bothers my libertarian side. If I am going to have a government doing things that I don't like, can I at least ask that they not do it stupidly and waste a bunch of money?
Sure! And I think the government should absolutely be deciding how much money it should be spending on say the ADA per person (assuming we decide it should be done at all which is of course not a given!). But I think then leaving it up to the person to have to coordinate on which businesses to target, is basically wasting the reason why governments are useful at all, which is coordinating these kind of issues.
And you will get no argument from me that governments should be do much better at keeping track of what is paid for what and the costs vs benefits of x. I was in government (local and central) long enough that I am certain I have had several rants about it.
As I mentioned, not too attached to the particular solution I had. Just that this is a problem. So I don't think we disagree too much.
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"Government force against entities" assumes that the entity did something, and that the government force is being used to stop it. On the contrary; the entity didn't do anything, but the government imposed an obligation on them.
Well in both cases the government is putting an obligation on the entity right? To stick to a contract or to make accommodations for those with disabilities. The government puts lots of obligations on entities. Paying taxes, environmental regulations etc.
Like I say, if you think the government should not put obligations on entities at all, then that is a consistent position. But the government should, but it should farm that out at some rate per person and then leave it up to those people to coordinate against larger entities is just missing the point the government is there to be the coordinator in the first place. There is no point in that halfway house.
Either have the government coordinate it, or not at all, but having it collect all the tax money up, disburse it to individuals then make them coordinate action is just adding additional steps to the process.
A company would be expected to have contracts, and would commit itself to some method of enforcing them, even in the absence of government interference; this isn't true for the ADA. It's the difference between the government enforcing better coordination on something that would exist regarelsss of the government's presence, and the government enforcing something that it imposed on its own.
Your framing is that the government's major role is to coordinate an existing transaction. That would be true in an actual contract; that would be false for the ADA.
If the government said that Bill Gates had to bow down to me, it would be misleading to describe that as "the government is there to coordinate what you and Bill Gates do" or to say "the government is just letting you negotiate with Gates, who's less powerful than a government but more powerful than a normal person".
Leave aside whether the government should do A or B, I am saying ONCE we decide A or B, then it's inefficient to have it coordinate one part (gathering the resources) but leaving it up to individuals to target the entity.
The advantage of government is coordination, so making it half coordinated and half not is wasting the advantage it gives you.
As I said, there is absolutely an argument that the government should not coordinate ADA stuff at all. But once we decide it should, the making each person have to target the resources individually and thus coordinate if they want to push against a bigger entity is just wasting the leverage.
That allows you to characterize the act any way you want just by dividing it up into steps and saying "leaving aside the first step...."
You can't separate whether the government should do A or B from the government's role in the transaction of which A/B are a part.
Well we can if we are just look at how efficient solutions might be as per the OP. I completely accept that some (many?) people do not think the government should do a lot of things, and that is a reasonable position to hold!
But if it IS doing a thing (like the ADA currently), then presumably we can still explore what would be more or less effective, even if we stipulate that you might not think it should be doing that thing in the first place? I mean it's all hypothetical anyway, unless one of us is secretly in the Cabinet, then we are not going to be impacting whether the thing happens nor how it happens. So a hypothetical discussion with the stipulation that discussing the how doesn't mean you are endorsing the should, doesn't seem too unreasonable?
But I don't think the government should not be doing that thing. (Defined nontrivially.)
Helping disabled people isn't bad. The problem is that doing so through lawsuits creates problems that don't happen when the government just taxes people and pays businesses $X to have disabled accommodations.
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The degree to which a government decision is about budget exists on a sliding spectrum.
Consider two extremes:
ADA is somewhere in between these extremes. It is clearly has a direct monetary impact on businesses. And sometimes as with the free videos, the outcomes are clearly bad.
But I don't think it is 100% only about money.
Consider a community of 10k of people with 20 wheelchair users and a single non-wheelchair supermarket. Say the owner has done the math and building a wheelchair ramp would not be cost-effective. I see the following options:
A) The government shrugs. B) The government pays some allowance to the wheelchair users. They try to pool together to get that ramp. The owner agrees. Good outcome. C) Like B, but the owner still not want the ramp. The ramp would take one of the spots of the parking lot (in fact, the best spot!), and he wants rent for that. Eventually the government overpays severely for that ramp. D) Like B, but the government forces the owner to allow that ramp. The owner mumbles something about commies. E-G) Like B-D, but the money comes from the government directly based on general rules instead of the actual demand. This bypasses coordination problems, but risks being less cost-effective. H) The government forces the owner to pay for the ramp out of his own pocket. Again he grumbles something about land of the free. In the end, everyone pays through increased supermarket prices and the general costs of having to follow more laws. I) Some kind of technical solution. Exo-skeletons, shopping-as-a-service, whatever.
Most of these options are not great. Excluding wheelchair users whenever the market forces are not in their favor is not nice. Creating more regulations is also not nice. Having a bureaucracy which figures out how much the supermarket should be paid for allowing that wheelchair ramp also is not nice. Relying on technological solutions will not always work.
Making the supermarket owner pay for the ramp has at least the advantage that there is little bureaucratic overhead. You do not need to figure out a fair price for getting the owner to allow that ramp, or if the government should pay for a ramp in the primary color of the market, and how much the government should pay if the owner also uses that ramp to move carts of goods, or employ wheelchair ramp inspectors. Pay for the ramp or get sued is not the simplest law there could be, but it is not the most complicated either.
This does not mean that the pathologies you mentioned (e.g. that it is easier to sell hidden costs than visible costs) don't play a role, though.
I mean this seriously: who fucking cares? Government is supposed to be fair and just, not nice. It is also supposed to be deliberately limited in scope and power, and demanding every single building in the country include ramps if they want to let people in off the street isn't part of it.
The crippled should take it up with God, not with Uncle Sam.
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Why not? Putting a request for grocery pickup with reimbursement on Instacart or Craigslist or the public library's bulletin board or whatever seems very simple and reliable. I assume it's backed up with small-claims court.
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I mean, I think the regime you describe for the ADA satisfies all of the 1-3 points you propose for basic things you agree on, though perhaps not in a manner you like.
Of course. The ADA, and many similar pieces of legislation, contain explicit limits on what is to be covered and who must (or may not) provide accommodation under the Act.
We do this with the ADA, and many similar laws, via a combination of the private market and our adversarial justice system. Businesses talk to consultants and experts to understand what they need to do to be in compliance. Sometimes people think they're wrong about whether they are and get sued. Then a jury of their peers is going to be responsible for figuring out whether they were in compliance and how much they harmed the plaintiff if they weren't.
This process may not come up with some obvious fixed-in-advance dollar amount but it seems a very common way of determining how much "we" should spend fixing a particular problem.
Of course. The Act describes who is covered and what accommodations those covered need to make. If anyone is alleged to be in violation theirs a public judicial process to determine if they are. Characterizing this as a "reverse lottery" is absurd. Lots of businesses (probably most) manage to go without being sued under the ADA or similar laws. Who wins and loses is not random either, unless you think the outcomes of jury trials are random. In which case there's this whole thing called "the criminal law" that should be much more concerning.
I worked in accessibility stuff for front end web development. So my experience is limited. But the horror stories were numerous of companies that got sued successfully for some ridiculous ADA website violations. (things like not having alt text for images). https://www.levelaccess.com/blog/title-iii-lawsuits-10-big-companies-sued-over-website-accessibility/
The Act is not specific when it comes to the web (there are web standards for accessibility, but they aren't mentioned or referenced by the law). I assume like most acts it probably has some intense specificity in some areas for the sake of some special interest groups that were paying close attention, and then serious lapses in specificity for all other areas. Leading to the inevitable outcome of random courts throughout the country trying to decide what the legislators meant (or alternatively, what they wanted the legislators to mean).
The courts are a good place for dispute resolution but they are a terrible place for rule-making. The difference is important and vital in this context. A court is always getting a tiny subset of cases around a particular rule delivered to them. Higher courts are often getting the cases that the current rule covers worst. The people who are well served by a particular rule never see the inside of a courtroom. Courts thus end up making rules that serve to fix a tiny minority of edge cases, without having to really consider what said rules might do for the main use cases. Are legislature has become dysfunctional and slow enough that courts have been forced into a rule-making role.
Courts are also intentionally limited in scope. They are to address the current problem in front of them. Not to seek out the ultimate cause and work out a better overall solution. This is great for problems like murder where the final act is very meaningful and important, but all the things that lead up to it are probably more trivial and varied. For something like "why dont you have good alt text on your web images" the final act is kind of meaningless and all the reasons leading up to why that alt next needs to be there matter a lot more.
The problem space in the world is also not conveniently broken up in ways we would like. Sometimes it is cheaper for businesses to solve an issue. Sometimes it is cheaper if all of the people suffering from a problem solve the issue. Take nearsightedness as a simple example. One way to solve it would be to require that all text is much larger and thus more readable at a distance. The other way to solve it is to have people with nearsightedness wear glasses. The ADA often forces a one size fits all solution to these problems, businesses must solve the problem, end of story. It would be a lot cheaper if all screen reader tech was just way better and could read even crappy websites. But instead we have crappy screen reader tech and any website that doesn't go out of its way to be accessible ends up being unreadable to screen readers. Even traditional problems like ramps for wheelchairs might have had a cheaper solution, like just having a few strong men lift the chair up a few steps. Or if robotic technology advanced enough just giving the disabled better wheelchairs that can walk them up and down stairs.
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The case of MIT having to delete open-access free knowledge for lack of being able to cost-justify captioning everything soured me greatly on the law, and was probably a major red pill for me in my life as it opened my eyes to the massive amount of ordinary altruistic good-doing that is suppressed by government bureaucracy and regulation, seemingly intentionally.
I remember the Berkeley online courses being ordered removed, and the switch from "that's an absurd hypothetical slippery slope that would never happen" to "of course that happened, it's how the law works idiot, why do you hate disabled people?"
But the ADA lawsuit trolls who were making millions filing thousands of suits against places they'd never been to were my wakeup call.
There's always one argument defending this stuff: "there's a procedural outcome! How can you complain about a procedural outcome? Do you not like juries of your peers?"
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Civil suits have been really popular, lately. Texas SB 8 for abortions. I think Florida’s HB 1557 does something similar for teaching about gender? Surely I’m missing some others.
In theory, these are blank checks for transferring money, just like the ADA. In practice, there’s only so many people getting abortions. Why shouldn’t disability suits be the same?
Civil suits can be very Zif's Law-prone, where a small number of actors can put an outsized number of lawsuits forward, unless the statute is very limited (and the various enforcement arms actually stick to that rather than redefining it). Laufer from Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, for example, filed "557 suits in sixteen different states, plus the District of Columbia", and while she's at the higher end of ADA testers, individual people with thousands of tester lawsuits exist.
But that depends on a number of very specific attributes: ADA tester targets have a lot of capital, they're often represented by insurance companies that are willing to give cash, the (court and administrative interpretation of) relevant statutory language in many circuits allows both standing and damages to be found without normal concrete harm, a very compliant regulatory system that writes increasingly broad material to base a lawsuit on, so on. Hence why SB8 lawsuits are very thin on the ground, and with HB1557 only allowing declaratory and injunctive relief it'll be the domain of morons tilting at windmills. The gun private right of action laws tend to be much more mixed -- lots of cash out there both to support lawsuits going in and reward them coming out, but standard of harm is a mess, and the PLCAA is only dying rather than dead.
In theory, it should be possible to write statutory language that limits testing trolls while still allowing even small lawsuits over actual harm, but a) a there's a pretty sizable portion of the support for the ADA that thinks the lawsuit heavy enforcement is a benefit, and b) it's not clear that actually would work, anyway.
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