Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

“Executive Privilege” Should Be Ended, Not Extended

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Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

On November 9, DC District Court judge Tanya Chutkan refused former US president Donald Trump’s request, based on “executive privilege,” for a preliminary injunction forbidding the National Archives and Records Administration to release documents to the US House committee grandstanding on … er, “investigating” … the January 6 Capitol riot.

If  Trump’s name goes down in history for anything of substance rather than mere flash, it  should probably be for his bizarre claim that  people who aren’t executives anymore retain  “executive privilege” over information pertaining to their time in office.

The concept of “executive privilege” appears nowhere in the US Constitution, but instead developed over history in court decisions, culminating in 1974’s US v. Nixon.

Nixon lost that case and had to turn over audiotapes of Oval Office conversations as part of the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation, but the Supreme Court did assert a “valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them,” so as to encourage “candor” rather than “a concern for appearances and for their own interests.” Appeals to “national security,” justified or not,  also remain a perennial “executive privilege” favorite.

What we haven’t faced before is a legal test of the notion that “executive privilege” inheres in the person rather than the office, remaining a former president’s prerogative after he’s lost his bid for re-election and returned to private life. It’s a silly notion without basis in law, jurisprudence, tradition, or common sense.

The US government’s executive branch records logically fall under the stewardship of that branch and of its current chief executive, not of every Bill, George, Barack, and Donald who may have held the post in the past.  And the purpose of that stewardship supposedly answers to claims of “the common good” rather than the comfort of former executives. The current chief executive, President Joe Biden, has directed the National Archives to release the documents requested by Congress, leading to Trump’s challenge.

The bigger question is whether “executive privilege” has any defensible place at all in a government that claims to be a democratic republic made legitimate the consent of the governed. The answer is no.

The purpose of the executive branch is to execute the will of Congress and, by supposed extension, the people. The president isn’t a king and the US government isn’t a company he owns. He’s an employee, a functionary, a gofer.  He operates at the direction and behest of Congress. His actions should therefore be subject to its constant examination and evaluation.

Donald Trump isn’t even any of those things anymore. He’s just a disgruntled former employee who enjoys no plausible “privilege” whatsoever regarding the historical records of his administration and its actions.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?

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Silent clown Buster Keaton gets clobbered by two of the many “Cops” in his 1922 comedy short. Public domain.

A year after the man dubbed the “Insane Clown President” by Matt Taibbi was voted out, Trump-era dread still haunts the USA.

As the end of October approached, numerous news outlets debunked online rumors that “clowns are allegedly planning their own purge the night before Halloween.” Yet while madcap maniacs’ mayhem was conspicuous in its absence, so was skeptical scrutiny of the similarly apocalyptic anxieties over the off-year elections of November 2.

When the forerunners of 2021’s clown warnings circulated in 2016, Mad magazine noted that common features with the concurrent presidential campaign included “men wearing makeup and disturbing grins” and being “like something out of a horror story.” If anything, such comparisons are too flattering to the political circus.

The campaign trail’s rivalries are more obnoxious than the one between Crazy magazine mascot Obnoxio the Clown and Mad‘s Alfred E. Neuman, who himself became a clown rather than merely clownish on the cover of Mad Clowns Around. Insane Clown Posse is not the threat to civil society that the FBI’s classification of the fanbase of the horrorcore hip hop duo as a gang itself became.

Election results confirming the Pew Research Center’s report that “support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly” likewise reflect the premise of the Purge films (the second was subtitled Anarchy) that the absence of law and order would lead to chaos. Yet as Howard Zinn observed half a century ago, a society where “order based on law and on the force of law” preempts “harmonious relationships” and nonviolent settling of disputes “is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind — confusion, chaos, international banditry.”

In an interview for their July 1976 issue, Karl Hess told Playboy magazine that “the Presidency could be overthrown tomorrow if the American people suddenly began laughing at it, or ignoring it” and that there was no need to “reach for the musket if all you need is a custard pie.” Looking back on that same bicentennial year’s presidential race for Vanity Fair, Wavy Gravy recalled that he was considered “too weird to arrest” when a bulge in his pocket turned out to be from gag teeth rather than a firearm, with the jester-protester choosing to follow its chattering rather than that of the candidates since “nobody should have that much power.”

Voting with one’s feet without passing through a polling site can be an effective path to change, even if those feet are wearing clown shoes.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, November 5, 2021
  2. “Was it a clown car or a cop car I saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, November 5, 2021
  3. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, November 10, 2021
  4. “Was it a Clown Car, or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup Record-Tribune & Winnett Times [Montana], November 10, 2021
Op-Eds

When Our Politicians Buy Never-Ending War, We Get What They Make Us Pay For

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Men of US 64th Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, celebrate the news of the Armistice, November 11, 1918. Public Domain
Men of US 64th Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, celebrate the news of the Armistice, November 11, 1918. Public Domain

In 1954, Congress passed, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed, a bill transforming Armistice Day — November 11, a post-World-War One celebration of peace — into Veterans Day,  a celebration of warriors.

Personally, I stick to the original name and the original purpose in my observation of the holiday. Looking at the numbers involved, though, it’s little wonder I find myself swimming against that particular tide.

In 1860, the US armed forces comprised 27,958 soldiers, sailors, and Marines. That figure jumped by six figures each year throughout the Civil War to a high of 1,000,692 by 1865 — after which it fell to less than 40,000 a decade after that conflagration’s end.

Similarly, after growing to a strength of nearly 3 million for World War One (1917-18), the armed forces found themselves less than a tenth that size by 1928.

The post-World-War-Two establishment didn’t maintain that tradition. While there was indeed shrinkage from the wartime high of 12 million, the number has never since fallen below 1.3 million — a third again as many as put down half a seceded continent in arms, while simultaneously conquering the far west, 80 years before.

US military spending followed the same track. Prior to World War Two, outside of wartime or preparation for obviously impending war, US “defense” spending seldom exceeded 2% of Gross Domestic Product and only once (in 1936) topped 3%. Since World War Two, it’s never gone BELOW 3% — since the second year of this century it’s never gone below 4%.

For some, though, too much is never enough. The Heritage Foundation warns that “[a]s currently postured, the U.S. military continues to be only marginally able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests.”

What are those “vital national interests?” Heritage defines them in terms of “a return to long-term competition with major powers, explicitly naming China and Russia as primary competitors” and “[s]ufficient military capacity to deter or win against large conventional powers in geographically distant regions.”

That’s a far cry from Thomas Jefferson’s “essential principles of our government”: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations: entangling alliances with none.”

It’s also a repudiation of John Quincy Adams’s 1821 description of an America which “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

As the US Senate considers the latest National “Defense” Authorization Act, Congress clearly intends to bestow more money, not less, on the armed forces. And this despite the end of America’s ruinous 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan.

That’s not just fiscally irresponsible, it’s physically dangerous to the very people “Veterans Day” purports to honor and the peace Armistice Day was intended to celebrate.

As Abraham Maslow wrote, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

The continued maintenance of armed forces many times as large and expensive as any plausible claim of “national defense” could justify results in the use of those armed forces for everything but their supposed purpose.

It’s time to cut the US military budget, deeply. That’s not enough to achieve lasting peace, but it’s the necessary first step.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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