All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Mueller Report: Secrecy Shouldn’t be an Option

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As February draws to an end, rumors abound that we’re about to see Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Or at least that someone — namely, newly confirmed US Attorney General William Barr — is about to see that report.  The rest of us, maybe not so much.

“I don’t know at the end of the day what will be releasable,” Barr told the US Senate during his January confirmation hearing.  “I am going to make as much information available as I can consistent with the rules and regulations.”

That’s not good enough.

Robert Mueller has spent nearly two years and more than $25 million supposedly getting to the bottom of the “Russian meddling” claims — claims that have, both before and throughout his tenure, roiled the news cycle and called the integrity of American elections into question.

Mueller may answer to Barr, but both he and Barr claim to work for the public. And that money didn’t come out of Mueller’s pockets or Barr’s. It came out of your pocket and was supposedly spent on your behalf.

That report is, by any reasonable standard, your property.

Not Mueller’s. Not Barr’s. Not President Trump’s. Not Congress’s. Yours.

You should be able to read every last word of it. If you want to, anyway.

Congressional Democrats are all over this, and we know why — they expect the report to condemn President Trump to one degree or another. While it may stop short of the most overheated claims (like the idea cultivated by former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe  and others that Trump could be an actual Russian agent), they hope it will at least reveal damning evidence of collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Vladimir Putin’s regime, finally getting 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton off the hook for her poorly run campaign and embarrassing loss.

US Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is already threatening to subpoena Mueller and sue for release of the report, with any redactions made by Congress rather than by the Department of Justice. That’s a start, but it’s not good enough either. No redactions are permissible. We shouldn’t just see the parts of the report that Schiff wants us to see because they support Schiff’s preferred conclusions.

If these two years of “Russiagate” theatrics have really been about getting at the truth and not just about embarrassing Donald Trump or even removing him from office while redeeming Clinton’s reputation, well, let’s have a look at the report sans edits by Barr OR Schiff and see whether or not WE think it does those things.

The era of public permissiveness regarding government secrecy is — or at least should be — over.

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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Mandatory National Service: “Strengthening American Democracy” by Ignoring Americans’ Rights

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Family of slaves in Georgia, circa 1850

On January 23,  the US National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service released its “interim report”  following up with hearings for public comment in February.

The Commission’s motto, or at least the sentiment expressed in large font at the top of its web site, is “Strengthening American Democracy Through Service.” But the report itself bespeaks a working definition of “American democracy” completely at odds with both long-held American standards of freedom and basic rule of law.

The commission reports that it is “considering ways to implement universal service, such as …. Establish[ing] a norm for every American to devote at least a full year to either military, national, or public service; and Requir[ing] all Americans to serve, with a choice in how to satisfy the requirement.”

As a matter of law, that last suggestion was — or at least SHOULD have been — settled in 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

As a matter of the values for which Americans rose up and fought their revolution, they are clearly laid out in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …”

Put differently — and this is a universal, not merely American, moral claim — your life belongs to you, not to the state.

The state has no legitimate power to take your life, or any portion of it, from you, nor any legitimate power to force you to serve its goals rather than seeking after your own happiness.

“Mandatory national service” is slavery, full stop. It’s a moral abomination with no conceivable justification in anything resembling a free society, and under the US Constitution in particular it is clearly and unambiguously illegal.

And yes, that includes the military draft, contrary to the sophistry of the US Supreme Court’s Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, Jr. in 1918’s Arver v. US ruling upholding that institution in World War One.

If anything, a military draft is even more repugnant than non-military “mandatory national service” insofar as it goes beyond deprivation of liberty and pursuit of happiness and, as a matter of policy, places the draftee’s very life in danger.

The full brief of any legitimate National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, properly understood as a matter of both morality and law, would be to  recommend that Congress abolish the Selective Service System and its mandatory draft registration scheme.

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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The Real Emergency Isn’t About the Wall. It’s About the Separation of Powers.

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RGBStock White House

US president Donald Trump recently declared a “national emergency” under which he intends to divert money from the US Department of Defense’s budget and use it to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

No biggie, Trump said as he announced the “emergency.” Happens all the time (59 other times since 1976, to be exact).  Purely routine.

But it’s not routine at all. It is, in fact, a declaration of presidential dictatorship that shreds the US Constitution’s separation of powers requirements.

Most presidential emergency declarations have been either on matters supposedly requiring immediate action which Congress could be expected to subsequently approve (for example, George W. Bush’s 2001 declaration of emergency in the wake of 9/11), or pursuant to policies already approved by Congress (for example, specific sanctions on countries already condemned by Congress to general treatment of that type).

Trump’s declaration is different — but there is applicable precedent to consider. We’ve been down this road before, just not quite so far.

In 2013, Republicans in Congress flirted with refusal to raise the  “debt ceiling” — a limit on how much money the federal government allows itself to borrow.

As  a deadline approached after which the US government would be in default to its creditors,  House Democrats urged president Barack Obama to ignore Congress  and raise the debt ceiling by emergency decree.

How are the two situations alike?

Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution assigns the power to “borrow Money on the credit of the United States” exclusively to Congress.

Article I, Section 9 of the US Constitution similarly empowers Congress to decide how money may and may not be spent: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

By unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, Obama would have become an outlaw, an extra-constitutional dictator rather than a president. Republicans pointed this out at the time. Fortunately, an 11th-hour deal averted the possibility of Obama following his co-partisans’ advice.

By asserting the “emergency” power to spend money on  a project that Congress has explicitly declined to fund by appropriation (multiple times, in fact), Trump has effectively resigned the presidency and declared himself an absolute monarch.

And THAT, friends, is a REAL emergency.

If Congress has any desire to save what’s left of the Constitution — and any political will to act on that desire — the obvious, immediate, and absolutely necessary next step is the impeachment of Donald Trump and his removal from the office of President of the United States. Nothing less will suffice, and the case against him is airtight.

Over the course of more than two centuries, the Constitution has frayed, and sometimes broken. Maybe it’s time to let it go. If that’s the case, I’d personally rather it gave way to something better than the banana republic style dictatorship the American presidency has descended toward in recent decades.

If Congress doesn’t make Trump the bottom of that slide, there is no bottom, and we are doomed to suffer through a dark new era of uncontested presidential tyranny.

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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