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Op-Eds

Missing Children: The Pottery Barn Rule Revisited

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(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If one in five American parents couldn’t figure out where their kids were, most people would rightly see the phenomenon as a crisis and a national scandal. Grandstanding prosecutors with visions of gubernatorial campaigns dancing in their heads would conduct mass parental perp walks. Legislators would boost their presidential aspirations by co-sponsoring legislation requiring universal implantation of GPS trackers at birth.

But when the same US government that postures as a better parent than real parents, crows over “extreme vetting” of immigrants, and announces separation of undocumented families as policy, loses track of 19% of unaccompanied refugee children placed in homes by the Office of Refugee resettlement, ORR is “not legally responsible.” So says Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families.

That’s par for the course when it comes to government and responsibility.

For example, if I find myself in fear of a police officer and shoot him, you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be held “legally responsible.” But if that same police officer shoots me and then claims he was afraid because he thought my cell phone was a gun, the chances of any “legal responsibility” attaching are slim. If he doesn’t just get a  paid vacation (“administrative leave”) before being “cleared” as having “acted in accordance with department policy,” a court will likely find him not responsible under the theory of sovereign immunity (the idea that when a government employee is on the job, no personal liability attaches to that employee’s actions).

Even when a government official DOES “accept responsibility,” it usually reads as “OK, I’ve said I accept responsibility, now let’s forget about it and move on as if nothing happened, and don’t you dare mention it next time I’m up for promotion or re-election.”

In 2002, US Secretary of State Colin Powell allegedly invoked “the Pottery Barn rule” — “you break it, you bought it” — by way of trying to get President George W. Bush to rethink the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.

Pottery Barn actually has no such rule, but when I was a kid a lot of stores sported signs saying exactly that.

Government doesn’t have such a rule either, but it should.

A government employee who loses track of 1,475 children placed in his charge needs to to be fired — at least. An investigation of possible criminal negligence doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Nor does a home visit by the area’s Department of Children’s Services or equivalent to make sure his or her own kids haven’t gone missing.

Even better, we could stop handing over so much power to government on the silly supposition that government jobs magically make the people who hold them smarter, more competent, or more responsible than us regular folks.

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

Election 2018: Make Gridlock Great Again?

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President George W. Bush honors with the 2006 ...
President George W. Bush honors William Safire with the 2006 President Medal of Freedom during ceremonies Friday, Dec. 15, 2006, at the White House.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Gridlock is great,” wrote the late William Safire. “My motto is, ‘Don’t just do something. Stand there.'”

Well, maybe he wrote that. The quote is plastered across numerous web sites with attribution to Safire, but I’ve yet to find one that cites any of his numerous books or columns as source. It sounds like something he might have said. Close enough for government work (a phrase that originated either in the US during World War Two or Canada circa 1906, take your pick), right?

Safire died in 2009, at a time when American politics seemed to be proving him wrong.

Congress has been controlled by one party and the White House by another for eight of the  last 12 years. But instead of gridlock, what we’ve mostly seen is a sort of mutual back-scratching process in which each party rages (with all the vigor and believability of professional wrestlers) at, then “reluctantly” supports, the other’s excesses.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama vetoed 12 bills each during their combined sixteen years as president —  less than 2/3 as many as Bill Clinton in his eight years. The last president to veto fewer bills than either Bush or Obama was Warren G. Harding, who served for less than 2 1/2 years.

The betting public sets reasonably good odds on a return to “divided government” after this November’s midterm elections. At PredictIt, in answer to the question “What will be the balance of power in Congress after the 2018 midterms?”  shares in “Republican House, Republican Senate” and “Democratic House, Republican Senate” are each trading at 40 cents, with “Democratic House, Democratic Senate” at 28 cents and “Republican House, Democratic Senate” at 3 cents.

Prediction markets aren’t perfect, but they reflect the opinions of people who have money riding on being right, instead of just the opinions of people who happen to have opinions. A considerable percentage of people with skin in the game think that Republican president Donald Trump will face a partially or completely Democratic Congress, instead of a Congress dominated by his own party, starting next January.

Could real gridlock be on its way back into fashion? I’d like to think so. But I don’t.

Throughout Donald Trump’s career, he’s been anyone’s dog who’ll hunt — er, make deals — with him (ask the Democratic politicians he’s donated to over the years). If the Democrats do well in the midterms, he’ll probably just pronounce himself the most Democratic president in history, and act accordingly.

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

Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State

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FBI Badge & gun.
FBI Badge & gun. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since the “Russiagate” probe began, US president Donald Trump and his supporters have used lots of bandwidth raging against what they refer to as the “Deep State.” Does the Deep State exist? If so, what is it, and are its forces arrayed specifically against Donald Trump and  his administration?

Yes, the Deep State exists — probably more so at one end of its numerous definitions and less so at the other, but to some degree at both ends.

At the seemingly more benign end, the Deep State is simply what one might think of as the “permanent government” — the army of bureaucrats and functionaries whose careers span multiple administrations. Like all career employees of large organizations as groups, they tend to fear and resist change, and their sheer mass has an inertial effect. They energetically do things the old way and drag their feet on new things.

At the end dismissed by mainstream commentators as “conspiracy theory,” the Deep State is an invisible second government which acts in a coordinated manner to protect its prerogatives and advance its interests and favored policies versus changes supposedly demanded by “the people” via their elected representatives in Congress and the presidency. The premier example of this view is the claim that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the military industrial complex because (in one version) he was about to get the US out of Vietnam.

If that end of the spectrum sounds crazy to you, consider:

Former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former FBI deputy counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, while working on a pre-election investigation into alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government, exchanged text messages with incendiary content such as “there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”

In mid-May, it emerged that an FBI informant approached two or three (reports vary) advisers to Trump’s campaign during the same period to pry into those advisers’ alleged ties to the Russian government.

Is President Trump stretching the reports we’ve seen when he tweets “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story?”

Well, maybe. But not by much. On any fair reading, those two stories combined do look a lot like the second definition of Deep State skulduggery. The FBI was meddling in — acting to influence or in extremis overturn — a US presidential election (sound familiar?). The messages between Page and Strzok color that meddling as intentional Bureau political action, not as incidental investigative fallout which just happened to touch on the election.

While I disagree with President Trump on most issues, it’s hard to disagree with him when he rails against a transparently political witch hunt that has dragged on for more than a year visibly and for months before that beneath the surface. The Deep State is real. And dangerous.

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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