constitution

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Holding Politicians Accountable


Within our Federal Government there exists two sets of rules: one set is for civil servants while the other is for politicians and political appointees.  Within the former are a set of very strict standard which must be adhered to.  This group includes the members of our military which has an even more strict set of rules than those for civil servants.  The latter, however, seem to have no particular set of rules save that one indicated in the Constitution, “high crimes and misdemeanors.”  So very vague is that rule that only two presidents and a rather small handful of others have ever been held to it, and none successfully.

The members of our military are held to what is called the Military Code of Conduct, a set of 131 rules to which the must adhere, some of which seemingly contradict the Constitution itself, but which when challenged in the US Supreme Judicial Court have never been found lacking or at fault.  Civil servants are required to undergo an annual code of ethics training course which is given, generally, by a lawyer from that department’s office of ethics.  One portion of those ethics quite clearly set out a standard that states unequivocally any semblance “of a conflict of interest” will not be tolerated.  In any given year, hundreds of federal employees are tried in a court of law for violations of this code, and that is a good thing.  It is meant not only to enforce the law, but to give the public confidence in how federal employees conduct themselves.  To show the strictness of such rules, one states that no federal employee may accept any gift of greater value than $25 which includes meals, educational opportunities, etc.  The lone exception is if such gift is open to the public in general and that anyone, upon application, can avail themselves of such gift.

Now comes our political appointees.  In particular I want to bring about the person of General David Patraeus.  He graduated from West Point in 1972 and got an advanced degree from Princeton University.  He served a particularly distinguished career which elevated him to four stars, the greatest rank any military person can aspire.  Then in 2011 he was appointed to head the CIA.  In every respect he is an American hero who rose the well-earned heights.  It all came crashing down when it was revealed he had had a dalliance with Paula Broadwell.  The shame in all that is not that he had the affair, but that he was forced to resign.  If such dalliances meant an end to political careers the wreckage of such during our history would have easily end the career of half our presidents and probably equal numbers of Congress.  So corrupt was the administration of warren G. Harding that is has long be speculated had he not died first he would definitely have been one President who would have been removed from office by Congress.  If you want to know more about this, look up what is called “the teapot dome scandal.”

Most, if not all, of our US Senators are millionaires and are either so far removed from the middle-class, if they had ever been a part of it, to remember what it is like to be a part of it.  None came from poverty.  The same can be said for much of the House of Representatives.  That might not be so bad if not for the fact that they seldom represent the will of their constituency.  For them, quid pro quo is the only business they understand.  Simply put, that means those who contribute the most to their reelection get the greatest part of their attention and can count on their vote going their way.

They say it is impolite to speak ill of the dead, but to make a point I feel I must.  Sen. Edward Kennedy represented Massachusetts from the early 1960s until his death.  He was a decidedly unethical and devious man.  He was absolutely at fault in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, July 18, 1969.  He was obviously not run from office, as he probably should have been, but was given a 2-month suspended jail sentence for “leaving the scene.”   Even though I have always been a registered Democrat, I never once voted for the man as I felt him incapable of honesty.  When he ran unopposed, I wrote in my own name on the ballot.  I also requested assistance from his office with a problem I was have one time.  After visiting there I never got so much as a polite “we cannot help you” response from them.  But then, that is what unprincipled self-important people do.

Today, Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, is acting in much the same way.  He claims he wants Wall Street reform and stricter regulations on financial institutions.  He says he wants to kill the 15% tax of earned interest that only the very wealthy enjoy.  That means, the top rate paid on all earned interest, by millionaires in particular, is 15%.  An average person who got lucky and won a million dollars would pay close to a 35% rate on that income while the millionaire will be assessed only 15% on his multiple of millions earned in interest.

Members of congress are regularly wined and dined at very expensive restaurants, given expensive gifts, given free memberships in exclusive clubs, and so forth.  It is hard to imagine that these members of congress will concern themselves quite so much with their constituents who sent them to congress to do their bidding than with those who spend lavishly on them.

I think politicians should be held to many of the same rules that civil servants are held to.  I also think campaign finance laws should be written to prohibit contributions to any single person or party except from individual voters, and that such amounts would also be limited.  The only way we will ever get Congress to listen to the will of the people is to limit the ability of the will of the PAC, the corporation, or any non-individual to be minimized.

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Republican Nominating Process Shows Demise of American Political System?


It was reported in the Boston Globe (June 24, 2012, P. B1) recently that the state Republican Party revoked the delegate status of 17 Republican delegates.  Why?  They had refused to sign an oath of support to Mitt Romney.  Massachusetts, of course, voted overwhelmingly for Romney as the Republican candidate but state Republican party rules do not bind delegates, nor does it require any oath of allegiance.  The state party decided that had to be changed.  Why?  The 17 delegates in question were supporters of Ron Paul.

What state party leaders fear is that the Paul delegates, once at the Republican Convention, would draw attention to Paul’s agenda.  That, of course, has the possibility of gaining support from delegates of other states at the convention and bring on unwanted turmoil.  This is nothing new, of course, but it is showing the power of the super-pacs who now seem to control our election process.

To be fair, I think the same sort of process exists within the Democrat Party but since it is not looking for a candidate this year, it is not nearly so important that party doctrine be held in lock-step at their Republican counterparts seem to need.

This really started about 1994 when Republican party leaders demanded that all congressional members sign their “Contract With America.”  On the outside it seemed not only harmless, but a truly good thing.  Much of what the contract contained were statements that seemed entirely common sense.  But it served as a vehicle to reign in party members in the future.   By the time of Pres. Bush’s first election party leadership brought in their “our way or the highway” by threatening the withholding of election funding.  It has been, to say the least, effective.

The point is, Americans have allowed the election process to be co-opted by extremely well-financed political action committees.  These committees, both conservative and liberal, set agendas.  And now we have the “super-PACs” to deal with.  These PACs have made public financing of campaigns irrelevant.  That means, a single person or business can give as much money as it wants to a PAC that is not directly supporting any single political candidate.  How have the gotten around that?   Simple.  They launch attack ads against opponents’ ideas without ever mentioning the candidate they support.

Campaign Finance Reform of many years ago was designed to keep this exact thing from happening, but there are truly gifted and talented people who can find a hole in a seeminly solid slab.  They have an army of lawyers on the ready, as well, to back up their position should they be challenged.

I fear we are becoming a country where puppets of well-placed people do their bidding in the halls of Congress.  Our elected officials only get there after they have been vetted by rich and powerful groups.   Simply put, the best candidate for office will never get past the nominating process if he/she does not sign on the line with the PACs that support their party.  If Abraham Lincoln had to run his campaign then, as things are now, he would never have been supported.  He was an unknown from Illinois who was not presently in public office and who had only once served a two-year term as an Illinois representative.  Family problems that become known once he was president would have served as fodder for his opponent.

We cannot allow our political system to be taken over by the rich and powerful.  This is at the heart of what the founders of this country feared.  Such had been the case in 1775 England when the Lords of English Parliament held a deaf ear to their American cousins.  And that, as much as anything, is what is at the heart of our Constitution.  No other country had regularly scheduled elections as we do here in America, a purposeful design of the constitution.  No other country in the world has the absolute separation of powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, as we do in America.  And nowhere else is the power of the people so heavily invested in the words of a constitution as is in ours.

The PACs and super-PACs serve only to undermine those powers for their own selfish purposes.  PACs do serve a good purpose but their power and sway have got to be brought into check.  They wield far too much power in our elections and now, seemingly, hold the power of who, at the very least, will be that party’s nominee to any elective office.  This is a serious affront to the ideals that Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and so many others fought for.  It is time Americans became not just angry, but furious with the way the PACs are conducting themselves, and in turn, affecting our sacred political process.

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The Incomprehensible Decision of the US Supreme Court


The US Supreme Judicial Court just decided that police has the right to do strip searches as they see fit, regardless of the nature of the crime someone is being detained for.  The decision, 5 to 4, is a misstep to be certain, but it is a very difficult one to correct.

The SJC exists for a single purpose, to uphold the Constitution of the United States on a legal issues brought before it.  It cannot, for example, act unilaterally.  It acts only on legal cases it accepts as brought before it from the lower courts.  It is the responsibility of the plaintiff to show that a lower court decision, or an action by the President of the United States or Congress, is unconstitutional in nature.  Such was the course of the case it heard on strip searches.

In this particular case the 4th Amendment, the right against unreasonable search and seizure, was at the heart of the matter.  I find it curious, therefore, the Judge Anton Scalia found in favor of upholding the right of law enforcement to conduct such searches as it sees fit.  I say that because Scalia is an “original intent” justice.  That is, he believes court actions must be consistent with the original intent of the portion of the Constitution in question.  I have heard Scalia interviewed and my opinion of his is he is a brilliant jurist with a very common sense approach to the law, very pragmatic.  I have always felt that his conservative political leanings not withstanding he would always err in favor of the broadest interpretation of the Constitution.  I am disappointed, therefore, the he took a very narrow approach to this case.

Let’s take the 2nd amendment as an example of how justices can differ greatly in their interpretation of our basic law.  The 2nd amendment has been the focus of an SJC case only twice in our nation’s history.  This is extremely unusual but it speaks to the court’s dis-ease with interpreting original desire.  The key word in this amendment is the word “militia.”  In 1774, prior to our nation’s war against England, each colony of the America’s was a government unto itself, and answerable only to the King and Parliament.  The colonists desired to have a defense force of their own so the formed state militias.  The minutemen of Massachusetts were just such a group.  When the king forbade the colonists from storing gun power, lead, and weapons, the colonists rightly viewed this as an act against the basic right to self-protection.  England had no intention of taking guns away from individuals but it did take offense to anyone other than its own forces collecting as an armed force.

The writers of the first ten amendments had certain overt actions taken by England, particularly between 1768 and 1775, in mind when they wrote each of the ten amendments.  If you look at the amendments you will find an admonishment against the government lodging its soldiers in private residences.  This does not seem to make much sense in today’s world but at the time the king had declared that the British army could in fact be housed in private homes as commanders saw fit.

Let’s be very clear about one thing.  The writers of this portion of the Constitution were extremely wary of any individual official using his office to gain any advantage over the individual and that individual’s right to move about and live as he sees fit.  Too many times the colonists had fallen victim to the whim of an official of the crown.  They wrote the entire Constitution and its first ten amendments with that in the front of their mind.  The writers believed that the rights of the individual must be upheld, even over the feeling of security by others.  For example, most of us find the rantings of neo-Nazis to be hate speech that has the possibility of inspiring violence against people.  But the reason we allow such hateful speech is that we have faith in the other laws of our country to protect us against people who would do us harm.  And that as much as we might like hate-speech removed from us we do so only at the peril of other forms of speech.

In the latest case it was decided that the safety of the law enforcement officials trumped the rights of the individual over unreasonable search.  In essence, the SJC said that strip searches are not unreasonable given the idea that “you never know” who might become dangerous or violent once inside a prison or jail.  I think this decision an abomination to our most basic of rights.  People in law enforcement understand theirs’ is a dangerous job by its very nature.  I think we should afford such officials every right to insure their own personal safety but the line gets crossed at being allowed to do a strip search just because you think someone might present a danger.

The 4th Amendment has been under attack ever since “The Patriot Act” took place.  The argument at that time was the same, public safety trumped individual rights.  As much as I want to feel as safe as possible, I also understand that a free society necessarily leaves us vulnerable to those who might do us harm.  But, it is never ever right to use group safety over individual safety.  The right of the individual in our society always has to trump the rights of any group.