All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Veterans in Politics: It’s Not About Honor

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A LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) from the U.S. Coast Guard-manned USS Samuel Chase disembarks troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One) wading onto the Fox Green section of Omaha Beach (Calvados, Basse-Normandie, France) on the morning of June 6, 1944. (photo credit: Wikipedia)
A LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) from the U.S. Coast Guard-manned USS Samuel Chase disembarks troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One) wading onto the Fox Green section of Omaha Beach (Calvados, Basse-Normandie, France) on the morning of June 6, 1944. (photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein reports that a new political organization, With Honor,  “has launched a major effort to elect to the House more recent military veterans who commit to working across party lines. … a bipartisan core of House Members who are inclined to seek common ground, whatever their personal views.”

The idea that veterans are particularly well-suited for political office — in part because of  “their experience working in diverse teams that pursue common goals under great stress,” as Brownstein describes With Honor CEO Rye Barcott’s view — is not a new one. Nor is the expectation of a ready and waiting bloc of voters, many perhaps veterans themselves, who are inclined to support veteran candidates.

Perhaps that was once the case, but it isn’t any more. The notion is anchored in a bygone age.

From 1952 to 1992, there was no point in bothering to run for president if you weren’t a World War Two veteran (the lone exception, Jimmy Carter, was about to graduate from the US Naval Academy when the war ended).

In 1992, non-veteran Bill Clinton,  slammed by some as a draft-dodger, defeated incumbent World War Two veteran George H.W. Bush. In 1996, that same non-veteran beat World War Two veteran Bob Dole.

In 2000, George W. Bush, technically a veteran but thought a deserter by many, beat an actual Vietnam veteran, Al Gore — and in 2004 he again won versus Vietnam veteran John Kerry.

In 2008,  non-veteran Barack Obama defeated veteran and former POW John McCain.

In 2012 and 2016, neither major American political party bothered to run a veteran for president. Why would they? Their most credible veteran candidates had lost five times in a row to non-veterans or to politicians with disputed claims as to the character of their military service.

I’ll let you in on three little secrets:

First, the only thing all veterans have in common is that we’re former government employees. Clerks. Cooks. Cops. Mechanics. Truck drivers. And, yes, some combatants.

Second, we all joined the military for our own reasons. For college money. Because there weren’t a lot of good jobs in our towns. To learn a marketable skill. And, yes, some of us out of our own personal notions of duty or patriotism.

Third, we all have our own political convictions, from staunch conservative to bleeding heart liberal to social democrat to radical libertarian. Put three veterans in a room and you’ll get four answers to whatever question you ask them.

Forming a political organization around veterans is like forming a political organization around restaurant workers, stamp collectors, or avid kayakers.  If it ever made sense, it stopped making sense a long time ago.

Political organizations should be formed around principles and policy proposals, not around people who have the same former employer.

I’m not looking for politicians who “work across party lines” to “find common ground.” I’m looking for candidates who will defend our liberty and reduce the size, scope and power of government. And I don’t care who those politicians used to work for. Neither should you.

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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Bye, Bye, FBI? The Case for Disbanding the Federal Frankenstein’s Monster

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English: Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue NW an...
English: Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue NW and look up F Street NW at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., in the United States. Español: Edificio J. Edgar Hoover, la sede de FBI (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is always under fire for something. As of late January, that something is destruction of evidence. Text messages between agents involved in the Bureau’s investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from a key time frame during the presidential transition,  are missing. Congress, the Bureau, and the US Justice Department are at each other’s throats over the missing messages and what they might say.

It’s far from the first time, as James Bovard points out at The Hill. In 1973, acting FBI director Patrick Gray was forced to resign for destroying evidence in the Watergate investigation. After the 1992 murder of Vicki Weaver by an FBI sniper, an FBI division chief went to prison for destruction of evidence in that case.

The FBI has  had 110 years to prove its worth. A dispassionate look at its history says that it’s far more often served as a center for blackmail, corruption, and political manipulation than as anything resembling a legitimate law enforcement agency.

In fact, it was a bad idea in the first place.

The FBI — then merely the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI — was created during a congressional recess and without congressional approval by the Attorney General in 1908 for purposes of “investigating” (read: Drumming up a scare over) the role of prostitution in “white slavery,” a forerunner of today’s “human trafficking” panic. It’s pretty much gone downhill from there.

The US Constitution defines only three federal crimes: Treason, piracy and counterfeiting. The first two are military matters and the third is handled by the Secret Service. There’s no room for an FBI in a constitutional law enforcement scheme.

One excuse for keeping the FBI going has been to facilitate investigations of crimes with an interstate angle. But given today’s technology, the states could presumably set up their own clearinghouses to exchange information and track down cross-border bank robbers and kidnappers. The FBI is just another bureaucratic layer inserting itself between the commission of a crime and the arrest of those thought to be responsible.

While the FBI has no particularly compelling, or even legitimate, mission, it certainly has its illegitimate uses. It’s probably not going too far to think of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director, as having been a sort of shadow president for much of his 48 years of service. He used agents to get the goods on aspiring political leaders, and apparently used that information to get what he wanted from them both for the Bureau itself and in public policy generally.

One big problem with a federal law enforcement agency as big and well-funded as the FBI is that at some points it’s almost certain to stop working for the rest of the government and start running the rest of the government. Election? Who needs an election? Just ask J. Edgar what to do.

Unfortunately, the second big problem with such an agency is that it’s hard to get rid of after more than a century of nearly uncontested power.

But we should try.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

The Worst Thing About Federal Government “Shutdowns”

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Diagram of US Federal Government and American ...
Diagram of US Federal Government and American Union. Published: 1862, July 15. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second worst thing about federal government “shutdowns” is that they’re almost entirely meaningless theatrical productions  — tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — from beginning to end.

The worst thing about such “shutdowns” is that they end, usually in a way that undoes most of what little good they accomplished in the first place.

I’m writing this on the first (and for all I know, the last) morning of the latest such “shutdown.” It comes after a fight over a temporary spending bill that, had it passed, would have given congressional Republicans and Democrats a few more weeks to fight over spending in the longer term.

Maybe this “shutdown” will last a day. Maybe it will last a week. I’m guessing it will be a short one. Unlike some, it’s not based on a conflict between a Congress of one party  and a president of the other party, but rather simply on the inability of Mitch McConnell to whip a few Republican Senators into line.

The real effects of the “shutdown,” such as they are, will kick in Monday when “non-essential” federal government activities stop happening and the government workers associated with those activities go home on (supposedly) unpaid furlough.

Some government inspectors will temporarily stop descending on factories and other workplaces to tick off boxes on forms.

The National Park Service will hang up “closed” signs at gatehouses around the country.

About half of the 800,000 civilian workers at the Pentagon will stop pushing the paper that moves money from your bank accounts to the bottom lines of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Some of those who do keep working won’t be paid until the curtain falls on this particular performance of the recurring “shutdown” play.

Those effects will end when 51 US Senators pronounce themselves happy enough with the spending deal to flip the switch back to “on,” and a majority of the US House of Representatives quickly agrees that the Senate bill is close enough (for government work) to the one the House already passed.

When it’s over, all those government employees will go back to work. And if history is an indicator, they’ll all get paid for the time they were off. And as usual, few people will ask the big question:

If all those activities that got “shut down” were “non-essential,” why are they government activities in the first place?

The case for government is, usually, that it does things that must be done and that can’t be done by any other organization. Designating an activity “non-essential” is just another way of saying it’s a way of wasting money on something either unnecessary or better left to the market.

This, too, shall pass. Unfortunately.

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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