Ultra Vires

Damnit! (I guess)

Ok. Like I've said here before, I'm slowly working up the schwerpunkt to do a paper on torture. The basis for it is a comparison of "extreme techniques" in interrogation by the U.S. in Iraq and the NKVD during the Great Terror. The "torture table", as I've nicknamed it, is the central piece to establish the comparison. It has some empty cells yet.

But apparently not for long. Every time I turn around new evidence that we used similar methods crops up. One of the blanks was the incarceration of family members to intimidate those under question. Tonight there was a news report on it and on a secret U.S. army unit charged with carrying out the needed abductions.

I don't relish having such good evidence for my work.

Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.

- Tracy Lightcap

Yeah, What Leiter Says!

Boy, is this ever right! I have to contend with the results of watching this dreck in my classes on law and courts all the time and, believe me, it ain't easy. The kicker to the analysis is that people who watch these shows the most religiously (and I chose that adjective carefully) are the children the just-a-little-ahead-of-the-working-poor-shown-on-the-shows families. They can really "relate" to the screw-ups who make it on stage in these travesties.

The problem is just what this post pinpoints, but is even more incidious. It isn't the middle and upper class kids who buy the premises of these shows; they've been innoculated by an elite culture that still has a bit of noblesse oblige left in it. It isn't the working poor; they know people like the ones Springer et al. exploit and they know why these folks are having problems. No, the ones who buy into the basic idea that the poor are unworthy of a public role are the very people who are a generation or less away from them. And for them, of course, it's a matter of "human nature" or "bad life choices", never, never the life traps we have so subtly constructed for the poor suckers they laugh at on the court shows.

Now that I've started thinking about this, maybe I'll start something serious. Later, that is.

- Tracy Lightcap

Well! That Explains a Lot.

I've been working on a paper and had a problem. How could I compare the actions of a political elite in an authoritarian society (the CC of the CPSU(B) from 1929 - 37, if you must know) with the actions of an elite in a democratic one (Congress during the last 5 years)? Obviously, thought I, the institutional constraints in a working democracy would insure that members of Congress would be far more independent and less compliant than the CC! Then, during a revision of my latest, I read this paper.

We expect members of Congress to be mainly concerned with re-election. Re-election in the past has required some hard choices, something no elected politician likes. Those choices have usually involved managing debts by deciding on priorities in government taxing and spending. This is no longer the case and I have to give the Bush administration credit for seeing it.

As long as the central banks of other countries buy - and don't call in - our debts, there is no reason, in the short run (i.e. the only run that counts for elected politicians), for Congress in a undivided and ideologically coherent government to exercise its legislative or oversight powers to control executive action. Having our deficits financed by foreign entities gives the Bush administration all the advantages of governments in "developing" countries that are held aloft by international agencies with none of the consequences. The President can refrain from vetoing legislation and insure that the pork is delivered. Tax cuts can be legislated during a time of war. The financing of political campaigns can be tied more closely to delivered legislative benefits than any time since the Harding administration. And all - all - without ever having to force a distasteful choice on the electorate or a discouraging word from Congress.

Now, throw in the threats of electoral retaliation against recalcitrant members of the majority from the White House and the leadership of Congress. Complete the mix with a strong dose of fears concerning both national security and re-election prospects. Result: acceptance and reinforcement of extensions of executive power.

Or, short Tracy, could we find, in a democratic society, situations where executive dominance could reach levels that free the executive, at least for short periods, from the institutional constraints on executive action that bound it even during similar undeclared wars in the past?

You bet your bippy.

- Tracy Lightcap