A hand of one’s own

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a story about hand transplants and their variable results, benefits and risks, and the stories of some of the patients who’ve had them.

Reading the article, I was struck by a number of things. The first is how far medicine has come; I seem to remember reading about the first hand transplant not all that many years ago (actually, about twenty years ago—how time does fly). The second is how problematic these procedures often are. The third is how variable the results can be. Some patients have great success and some end up having the transplanted hand or hands removed, after all that work and hope.

I also was struck by how many of these patients had initially lost their extremities to sepsis, an illness I wrote about here.

When I read about these things, it takes me back to the decade in which I had nerve injuries in both my arms and suffered constant and often substantial neuropathic pain (I’ve described it here and elsewhere). I’m not comparing myself to these patients (thank goodness). Nevertheless, I have had a fairly lengthy experience of nerve injury, and then a lengthy convalescence (a couple of years, actually) and rehab from nerve surgery, and am well aware of the dangers and difficulties inherent in rehabbing any nerve problem. Hand transplants involve a great deal more, of course. But they also involve the reconnection and growth of many nerves, and that takes a long long time.

In particular, the article recalled a dream I had a night or two after surgery on my right arm. I dreamed that my arm had been amputated and I’d been given another arm that was attached at the shoulder with clumsy, Frankensteinsih stitches. At the time, my right arm was essentially unusable, and in tremendous pain. The rehab ended up being fraught with problems—I changed physical therapists about four times before I found one who knew how to help me—and my recovery took two to three years. It’s been about twenty years and I’m now about 85% to 90% better than I was before the surgery, which is practically miraculous and for which I’m very grateful. But a person doesn’t forget an experience like that.

During all the time I was recovering, I didn’t know the outcome. I didn’t even know whether I was recovering. In fact, for many months I was worse than before the surgery. The doctors had told me that my case was highly unusual and that my recovery wouldn’t be typical and might be more difficult than is usual, so I didn’t have any good comparison or even a time frame to guide me. So I remember what it was like to just not know whether what I’d done would help me or hurt me.

I’m not a person who tends to have no regrets. But in the case of my arm surgery I had no regrets, even during the dark times, because I felt I’d exhausted every other possible remedy during the near-decade I’d spent in terrible pain. I really felt I had nothing left but surgery, and I needed to try it even if the prognosis was uncertain. It had taken me a while to find a good surgeon willing to take me on as a patient (as I said, my case was unusually complicated). But one of the greatest arm surgeons in the world said “yes,” and that was it.

Hand transplant patients are rolling the dice and taking far larger risks than I ever did, and mine felt large enough. Some hand transplant patients have been doing okay with prostheses and just want something better. Some are struggling more with prostheses prior to the surgery. Some recover quickly, some slowly, some temporarily, some permanently (so far, anyway). Some go into kidney failure. One of the patients reported on in the article has died, although of a rare problem seemingly unrelated to her hand transplant.

I wish them all well. They’ve already had to deal with enormous hardship, and they’re dealing with it as best they can.

Lara Logan leaves the present-day journalism fold

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure that Lara Logan (she of the Superman-ish name) was ever in the fold in the first place. But if she ever was, she’s certainly left it now:

Logan herself got into trouble with CBS several years ago when she used an unreliable source for a Benghazi story that reflected poorly on the Obama administration. Aside from that, she has a history of intermittently voicing concerns that are not the party line. She also was the correspondent who was sexually assaulted and nearly killed by a large crowd while reporting from Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011.

Regarding Logan’s Benghazi report and the aftermath, here’s an unconsciously humorous memo from a CBS executive:

On 26 November 2013, Logan was forced to take a leave of absence due to the errors in the Benghazi report. Al Ortiz, Executive Director of Standards and Practices for CBS News, wrote in a memo, “Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the U.S. Government was misrepresenting the threat from Al Qaeda, and urging actions that the U.S. should take in response to the Benghazi attack. From a CBS News Standards perspective, there is a conflict in taking a public position on the government’s handling of Benghazi and Al Qaeda, while continuing to report on the story.”

If taking a public position on a government action disqualified a reporter from reporting on that action, these days half (or more) of the journalists in America would be out of a job. I can get behind that—I actually think that reporters shouldn’t be speaking or writing about their personal politics. But that wouldn’t fix the larger problem, which is that they report from the skewed perspective of their personal politics.

[NOTE: More here about Logan’s previous journalistic life and times, including the Ortiz investigation of her CBS story about Benghazi.]

Mark Penn writes an excellent summary of Russiagate and the FBI and DOJ’s role

The New Neo Posted on by

Worth reading.

But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is Penn’s resume: “Mark Penn…was chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.”

Did they do something terrible to him? Because he’s certainly left the reservation.

I also recommend this by Victor Davis Hanson, although I don’t think I agree with him that the coup is dead.

Jussie Smollett and confirmation bias

The New Neo Posted on by

The story of the attack on Jussie Smollett was a suspicious one from the start. I say that for two reasons. The first is that so many of these recent reports of racially motivated attacks, physical or symbolic, have turned out to be self-perpetrated hoaxes. The second is the many inconsistencies, glitches, and lapses of logic in Smollett’s own story (listed by Kyle Smith here).

But this was a story MSM and the left deeply wanted to be true. And as with so many other stories the press deeply wants to be true—the racist MAGA-hatted Covington kids, Christine Blasey Ford’s tale of the would-be teen rapist Brett Kavanaugh, the marauding frat boys of Virginia, the feces-covered Tawana Brawley—when people want a story to be true they tend to suspend disbelief and even logic in the effort to keep believing it.

It’s called confirmation bias:

Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is a variation of the more general tendency of apophenia.

People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

Don’t think this is limited to the left. It’s not. But it’s rampant there, perhaps because the left is very “emotionally charged” right now, to say the least.

But reporters are supposed to be especially aware of confirmation bias and to be on constant guard against it. When reporters see themselves as crusaders for a cause, rather than dedicated to truth no matter where it leads them, we have a state of affairs where they can be easily fooled because of their confirmation bias.

Today, though, it’s worse than that. Some may be fooled, but some know that they should be more skeptical and more thorough in investigating something, but purposely suppress that knowledge because of sheer and utter partisanship. That’s not confirmation bias—or, if it is, it’s willful conscious confirmation bias.

Which could also be called purposely writing outright propaganda.

With all of this in mind, I find this WaPo op-ed by Nana Efua Mumford fascinating. Mumford—the executive assistant to The Post’s editorial board—is black, and she seems to have grown up in Chicago. Mumford describes her back-and-forth struggles with the Smollett story this way:

…[W]hen I first heard of the attack on Smollett, I had to pause. On “Empire,” Jamal Lyon came out as gay in front of his homophobic, abusive father; took a bullet for that same father and overcame an addiction to pain pills. Was I reading last week’s episode recap, or did this actually happen in my hometown of Chicago? Almost immediately, I had a terrible feeling that I was victim blaming, or worse, that I am so brainwashed that I no longer can hear cries of hurt and outrage from my own black community. It was a horrifying feeling that I am still trying to work through almost three weeks later.

So for Mumford—who I think is being honest than self-serving here, although I can’t be sure—her initial skepticism was followed almost immediately by self-blame at her own thoughtcrime for doubting Smollett’s story. She seems to still be troubled by her initial failure to follow the dictates of groupthink, rather than being proud of her independent thinking and devotion to logic instead.

I use those Orwellian terms purposely and not as a gimmick, because Orwell was describing the left and the ways in which it controls independent thinking and trains a person to stop all such meanderings from the Truth as the Party sees it and wills it. That’s what Mumford appears to be struggling against.

She writes:

I wanted to believe Smollett. I really did. I know that there is a deep, dark racist history in Chicago and, if proved true, this would be just one more point on the list. I wanted to believe him with every fiber of my being, most of all because the consequences if he were lying were almost too awful to contemplate.

And yet I struggled with Smollett’s story.

So for Mumford this was an enormous struggle, a very real one and certainly not a trivial one. It’s one that is faced by anyone reluctant to change his/her mind (and that’s just about everyone, believe me) about something basic. Perhaps the saddest thing in Mumford’s story is the fact that she would rather the attack on Smollett have been bona fide than that he be found to have been lying and a complicit hoaxer in his own supposed victimization.

Unfortunately (at least by yesterday, which was when Mumford’s op-ed was published) Mumford is still fighting the truth and taking sides against it. That is the strength of groupthink. And in doing so, she commits another error and exposes previous confirmation bias on her part [emphasis mine]:

If Smollett’s story is found to be untrue, it will cause irreparable damage to the communities most affected. Smollett would be the first example skeptics cite when they say we should be dubious of victims who step forward to share their experiences of racist hate crimes or sexual violence. The incident would be touted as proof that there is a leftist conspiracy to cast Trump supporters as violent, murderous racists. It would be the very embodiment of “fake news.”

And that reason, more than any other, is why I need this story to be true, despite its ugliness and despite what it would say about the danger of the world I live in. The damage done would be too deep and long-lasting.

Mumford says that the Smollett story would be the first example skeptics would cite. Where has she been all her life? In this post, I’ve already cited a few that easily take priority—high-profile cases, too—and I did it just off the top of my head. There are plenty more, and you can find many lists of them: race hoaxes in 2016, some more recent ones here, and that’s just the tip of a huge iceberg, and not a really hidden one at that. If Mumford is unaware of this history, both old and new, it’s due to more confirmation bias, either unconscious or willful.

Right now the status of the Smollett story is that most media outlets are reporting that “Chicago Police believe Smollett paid two men to orchestrate the alleged assault.” That seems most likely, because Smollett’s behavior around the crime was not the behavior of an actual victim (see Kyle Smith’s summary of Smollett’s suspicious behaviors).

So at this point, logic seems to indicate that Smollett was in on it. But I’m open to new information that would tell me that Smollett’s new defense is correct, and that (as he says) these two black guys from Nigeria who are acquaintances of his really did attack him and yell racist epithets, and then framed him by saying he paid them to do it. It’s a bit far-fetched, but stranger things have happened. How two Nigerian guys could masquerade as white guys is a little hard to picture, even if they wore ski masks and gloves and were totally covered up. But it’s possible. Hard to believe, but possible. Phone records, emails, and/or records of any payments by Smollett to the brothers would be part of the evidence that could shed light on this aspect of the whole sordid mess.

But whether it was Smollett himself or whether he was being framed by the brothers, the indictment of the MSM and the left stands: they believed a hoax, and a fairly transparent hoax at that. Or they pretended to believe it for propaganda purposes. Either way, it’s bad.

And for many and varied politicians, the same.

[NOTE: Another thing that’s indisputable is how much Smollett hates Donald Trump, which would serve as a possible motive if he is in fact the hoax’s perpetrator:

Pretty nasty stuff.]

[ADDENDUM: This is satire, right? Right?]

RIP Pat Caddell

The New Neo Posted on by

This is sad news:

Pollster and political analyst Pat Caddell died from a stroke on Saturday at the age of 68.

I don’t watch cable news very often, but I’ve certainly watched it enough to be familiar with Pat Cadell. He was whip-smart, iconoclastic, and an independent and bold thinker.

He was somewhat of a political changer, or at least a semi-changer (or a stay-the-samer-while-everyone-else-moves-er). But at any rate, he distrusted both parties:

As for the future, Caddell may have been estranged from the Democratic party but he had contempt for the Republican party’s leadership. He accurately predicted that the GOP would lose the House in the 2018 midterms, caustically explaining the loss to Breitbart News as follows:

“The Republican party is essentially wusses. They will not fight. They don’t believe in fighting. They just lay down and roll over, and usually for their donor class, who are basically antithetical to 90 percent of Republicans and what they want.”

Caddell correctly predicted the rise of someone like Trump who would appeal to those disaffected from government as usual, and once Trump was in the running he predicted that he had a good chance of winning. So at least he got to say “I told you so.”

RIP, Pat Caddell.

[NOTE: See also this (hat tip: commenter “Snow on Pine”) as well as this.]

The genius of Peter Sellers

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then this blog has visitors of the anti-vaxx or anti-fluoride variety. Reading one of the latter the other day, I thought of the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” and recalled that the Jack D. Ripper character had a thing against fluoride.

YouTube easily provided the scene. When I watched it, I was struck anew by the fact that Peter Sellers was a comic genius. Watch what he does here. It’s somehow both subtle and close to the edge of too much at the same time. He plays it right smack on that border, and it’s screamingly funny.

On the rebirth of socialism

The New Neo Posted on by

This column by Matthew Continetti had such a promising title: “What to Do About the Rebirth of Socialism: Where it came from and how to stop it.”

Well, maybe that’s biting off too big a hunk to chew in such a small essay—but still, I was surprised that Continetti failed to discuss two of the very biggest elements in socialism’s resurgence: the inherent surface attractiveness of socialism, and the fact that the left has taken over education in this country.

Continetti sees the rise of socialism as fools rushing into the cultural gap made by the withdrawal of religion, and that’s certainly a significant part of the picture:

The bourgeois values of honesty, fidelity, diligence, reticence, delayed gratification, and self-control that once reigned supreme have been contested for many decades by an ethic of self-expression, self-indulgence, instant gratification, and demanding the impossible. Our politics is a competition for control over what Michael Novak called the “empty shrine” at the center of pluralist democracy.

As far as I can see, Continetti is also ignoring the fact that a great many religious denominations today have become dominated by leftist thought (some of the Protestant ones, the current Pope, and Reform Judaism, to name just a few).

I’ve written several posts on the attractions of socialism; it appeals to certain basic aspects of human nature that will always be with us: covetousness, anger, guilt, a desire to feel righteous, and the need for simple-sounding solutions. But there’s also the obvious fact that many many decades ago the left set its sights on taking over the educational system, and has done so successfully.

Lenin is alleged to have said: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Well, “never” is a long time. But the basic principle of early indoctrination is there, and the leftists have been wildly successful in that particular arena.

About Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

I have my doubts about this article. The author may be dreaming, or making much too much of some events that have much less significance than he thinks.

But it’s certainly interesting, and so I bring it up for discussion. An excerpt:

The Warsaw conference on peace and security in the Middle East dealt primarily with the Iranian threat to that region and its highlights were undoubtedly the unprecedented signs of continued thaw in relations between Israel, represented at the highest level by prime minister Netanyahu, and the states of the Arabian Peninsula, represented at the foreign minister level…

What is the cause for these developments that are as unprecedented as they are unreported by the American media? One word: Trump. Trump did three things that forever changed the political makeup of the Middle East…First, he swapped out the plaque on the American Consulate in Jerusalem for one that said EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. With this move Trump signaled to the Arabs that the US had no more tolerance for scenarios in which Israel was not a permanent presence in the region…Second, Trump allowed the full might of American technological innovation to be brought to bear in extracting marginal oil deposits,..Finally, Trump withdrew from the so-called Iran deal, making it clear that in the holy war between the medieval Shia and the slightly more modern Sunna, the US was going to help the forces of sanity rather than the forces of eschatological craziness.

“Forever”? Not so sure about that; couldn’t any of these things be undone by future President OAC (or some other Democrat so inclined)? And are the Saudis really the forces of sanity? In comparison to the Iranian government, perhaps, but the Saudis have been (or at least used to be) a huge sponsor of Wahabism and therefore an inspiration for a large swath of terrorists.

Well, in the Middle East, there probably aren’t a whole lot of great choices for an alignment.

The author goes on to posit an apocalyptic and Manichean battle brewing

And so the battle lines are drawn, the battle of Gog and Magog, of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, as the Dead Sea Scrolls have prophesied, is just about ready to commence. On the side of light we have an unlikely coalition of Sunni Arabs, Israel, and the newly minted American nationalist movement under the leadership of president Trump. On the side of darkness, there is the Shia Persians and their auxiliaries in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, the neo-Ottoman Turks, the corrupt and criminal “Palestinian” leadership, be it the PLO or the Hamas, neo-Imperial Russia under the leadership of its cohort of kleptomaniacs, the anti-Semitic Western Europeans, and the neo-communist and equally anti-Semitic American progressives represented by the Democratic Party.

Only three-quarters of a century after the last battle for the soul of mankind was fought and won by the Sons of Light, albeit with tremendous sacrifice and near world-wide destruction, a new battle of similar proportions is brewing.

I used the word “Manichean” to describe the battle this author envisions. It’s a word I learned long ago, and so I decided to check on its more precise meaning. What I found indicated it’s even more apropos to the author’s prediction—and especially his metaphors—than I’d originally thought:

Manichaeism was a major religious movement that was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani in the Sasanian Empire.

Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness.

Is the country outraged about the soft coup…

The New Neo Posted on by

…or is it only the right that’s outraged?

That’s a rhetorical question; I’m pretty sure of the answer, and it’s door #2. That in and of itself is disturbing, because it’s evidence of the fact that way too many people would—in the words of Sir Thomas More in “A Man For All Seasons” addressing William Roper—“cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil.”

The Devil, of course, was Donald Trump. What was his great crime? Nothing; he fired Comey, something he had every right to do. But the DOJ and the FBI didn’t like it and they didn’t like him, so these supposed guardians of our legal system decided to cut a great road through the law. And my guess is that most Democrats these days would approve heartily, because they are unaware (or don’t care) about what Sir Thomas More says to Roper next in the play:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Actually, I understand why the big muck-a-mucks in the FBI and DOJ who planned and executed all of this thought they would be able to stand upright. After all, they’ve got the power, and they were doing it in secrecy, and if they were successful, other people such as Hillary Clinton would be in even greater power and would almost certainly protect them. If their plans had succeeded, it would have been just fine for them. It was only the election of Trump combined with a Republican Congress that brought some of this out of the shadows.

The thing that’s more difficult to understand, although hardly impossible to understand, is why run-of-the-mill Democrats, the far less powerful, don’t see themselves as potentially vulnerable to that blowing wind. But I think it’s difficult for people in general to stand back and look at things abstractly, and then imagine a turn of events. Instead, if a particular approach harms a person you consider the enemy, it’s no-holds barred.

Or maybe they think that Trump really is the Devil or some earthly equivalent. Perhaps they really think he is Hitler, American-style. The fact that there’s no reason to think so doesn’t matter; let’s just say they really think so. Then, working clandestinely to bring him down in nearly any way possible—as in the real Resistance during World War II, and all the plots against Hitler—would be applauded by nearly everyone.

Which is probably one of the main reasons that it’s important to the left to label Trump as Hitler in the minds of as much of the public as possible. Then just about anything feels justified in working against him.

There are many articles I’d recommend in order to get up to speed on what we know so far about the soft coup. I’d suggest this one by Roger Kimball for starters:

The FBI didn’t like the President. so they plotted to remove him from office. That is the irreducible minimum, class, that you should take away from this whole sordid lesson.

For more detail, please go to Byron York’s piece, if you haven’t already read it.

And of course, Andrew C. McCarthy:

The reason for the collusion label is obvious. Those peddling the “Putin hacked the election” story have always lacked credible evidence that Trump was complicit in the Kremlin’s “cyber-espionage.” They could not show a criminal conspiracy. Connections between denizens of Trump World and Putin’s circle might be very intriguing, and perhaps even politically scandalous. But only a conspiracy — an agreement by two or more people to commit an actual criminal offense, such as hacking — would be a reasonable basis for prosecution or impeachment…

Because [Rosenstein] had written the memorandum originally used to justify Comey’s dismissal, congressional Democrats slammed him for complicity in what they portrayed as Trump’s obstruction of the Russia probe. Rosenstein wanted to appease them by appointing the special counsel they were demanding.

Special counsels, however, are not supposed to be appointed unless there is a solid basis to believe a crime has been committed. Rosenstein was lawyer enough to know that a president’s firing of an FBI director — a firing that Rosenstein himself had argued was justified — could not be an obstruction crime. And he knew that there was no proof that Trump had conspired in Russia’s cyberespionage. So . . . how to justify appointing a special counsel?

Easy: Make it a counterintelligence probe. That way, there would be no need for a crime, since such investigations are just intelligence-gathering exercises.

What’s that? You say there’s no basis in the special-counsel regulations to appoint one for counterintelligence? You say the Justice Department does not appoint prosecutors for counterintelligence investigations, which are the FBI’s bailiwick? So what? The special-counsel regulations expressly say that they create no enforceable rights enabling anyone to challenge the Justice Department’s flouting of them. Rosenstein knew he could ignore the rules and there was not a thing anyone could do about it…

What is “collusion,” then? Increasingly, it looks like the criminalization of policy disputes.

“The criminalization of policy disputes” is a great summary of what’s been going on—that, and the planting of false evidence to support that criminalization.

In other words, cutting a great road through the law to get after the opponent you’ve labeled as the Devil. And at least half the country is happily walking down that road that’s been cut.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s another article on the subject that’s worth reading.

And the intrepid Alan Dershowitz, likewise.

Dershowitz is practically alone among Democrats, however.]

Ocasio-Cortez: let’s help the workers by losing them some potential jobs

The New Neo Posted on by

But oh, we can all feel so self-righteous about it, as AOC does:

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez rather perfectly embodies the point Margaret Thatcher was making here about the far left:

Even Mayor de Blasio seems upset with AOC:

A hot-under-the-collar Mayor Bill de Blasio tore into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday as he blistered both the online giant and local politicians who opposed bringing it to Queens.

“As a progressive my entire life — and I ain’t changing — I’ll take on any progressive anywhere that thinks it’s a good idea to lose jobs and revenue because I think that’s out of touch with what working people want,” the mayor said on WNYC radio.

Pelosi says a Democratic president could declare a national emergency, too, so you better watch out

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “huxley.”]

Nancy Pelosi reacts:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday issued a warning to Republicans poised to support President Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency at the southern border: the next Democratic president, she said, could do the same on guns.

“A Democratic president can declare emergencies, as well,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans.”

Oh, really?

First of all, a Democratic president certainly wouldn’t restrain him/herself from declaring a national emergency just because a Republican hadn’t done it yet.

Secondly, of course any president has the right to declare a national emergency, and many have done so already. The real questions are: (1) under what conditions can a president declare a national emergency; and (2) what is a president allowed to do when that emergency is declared?

So, let’s get some facts.

The power of a president to declare a national emergency is a statutory one, enacted in 1976 to supersede a previous hodge-podge. Such a declaration needs to be renewed annually to be in effect, and Congress can revoke it “with either a joint resolution and the President’s signature, or with a veto-proof majority vote.”

Prior to the passage of that National Emergencies Act:

…[P]residents [had] asserted the power to declare emergencies without limiting their scope or duration, without citing the relevant statutes, and without congressional oversight. The Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer limited what a president could do in such an emergency, but did not limit the emergency declaration power itself.

Since the signing of that bill, there have been 42 national emergencies declared; most of them limited trade in various ways in accord with another act of Congress.

Under what conditions can a national emergency be declared? It’s pretty broad:

The Act authorized the President to activate emergency provisions of law via an emergency declaration on the conditions that the President specifies the provisions so activated and notifies Congress.

There are certain exceptions, but they don’t apply to the current case (one, for example, is regulating transactions in foreign gold and silver}. But Pelosi’s rhetoric aside, there are also 136 enumerated and relatively specific powers granted, and you can find a list of them here (written in December of 2018):

Unknown to most Americans, a vast set of laws gives the president greatly enhanced powers during emergencies. President Donald Trump’s threats to bypass Congress and secure funding for a wall along the border with Mexico by declaring a national emergency are not just posturing. The Brennan Center, building on previous research, has identified 123 statutory powers that may become available to the president when de [sic] declares a national emergency, including two that might offer some legal cover for his wall-building ambitions (10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) and 33 U.S.C. 2293 on our list…).

Here is 10 U.S.C. 2808(a):

Secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects, and may authorize Secretaries of the military departments to undertake military construction projects, that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.

And the one I consider more relevant, 33 U.S.C. 2293:

Secretary of the Army may terminate or defer any Army civil works project and apply the resources, including funds, personnel, and equipment, of the Army’s civil works program to authorized civil works, military construction, and civil defense projects that are essential to the national defense, without regard to any other provision of law.

Looking at that, I think it’s relatively straightforward that the president has very broad powers to declare national emergencies and that what Trump proposes to do—if he uses the Army’s civil works program—might be fully legal under 33 U.S.C. 2293, if the argument is accepted that the wall is essential to the national defense or if it is found to be an “authorized civil work.” Naturally, there will be a legal challenge that the wall and the immigration situation is not the sort of immediate and threatening emergency that would justify such a declaration, and/or that it’s unnecessary for national defense and/or not an authorized civil work.

In addition, there’s the question of whether Trump can use the military to do this; here’s a discussion of that. Suffice to say the answer is “maybe,” and the issue is likely to be settled in court, as well.

And lastly, there is the question of obtaining the land for the wall through eminent domain (written January 7, 2019) [emphasis mine]:

The United States has a long tradition of authorizing the military to seize private land for a federal project…

…Congress has delegated the power to seize private property to many military branches, including the Army Corps of Engineers to construct military bases and the Department of Navy to acquire land for airfields and gunnery ranges…

If Congress passes a budget that includes Trump’s $5 billion in border wall funding, then technically it is possible that the Army Corps of Engineers could begin seizing land and constructing the wall…

One-third of the land is owned by the federal government, while the rest of the land is owned by states, private property owners or Native American tribes.

It occurs to me that the value of the bill that Trump signed today (in addition to its ending the shutdown issue for a while) is that it contains statutory authorization for the building of a wall, and therefore can help with the near-certain court fight over the eminent domain issue. Despite its restrictions and “poison pills,” its enactment means that Congress has authorized a wall and this may give the authority for the eminent domain taking.

The judiciary will be kept very very busy. For starters, I fully expect several circuit courts to enjoin part or all of Trump’s declaration, and then the Supreme Court may have to take up the overarching question of whether a circuit court can issue such an injuction for the entire country on matters of national importance. This is a question SCOTUS has ducked so far, but it may not be able to duck it for long.

The storm and drang around this, the hue and cry, are just beginning.

[NOTE: By the way, statements such as Pelosi’s, with its false equivalence, are wrong (although they are par for the course). As far as I can tell, and unlike building a public work for national defense—gun control is probably not something that can be fit into one of the presidential powers listed under the National Emergencies Act. In addition, if there’s not a controlling Congressional law authorizing the action, such as is in effect with bills authorizing the building of the border wall, that could be another problem for Pelosi’s plans.

Of course, where there’s a will, there may be a way. And in that sense—which may be the most practical sense of all—Pelosi is right. The National Emergencies Act, and its 136 provisions, can probably be effectively stretched by a president of either party, if conditions are right and especially if there is a simpatico SCOTUS majority in place:

In the past several decades, Congress has provided what the Constitution did not: emergency powers that have the potential for creating emergencies rather than ending them. Presidents have built on these powers with their own secret directives. What has prevented the wholesale abuse of these authorities until now is a baseline commitment to liberal democracy on the part of past presidents. Under a president who doesn’t share that commitment, what might we see?

I’m not so sure about that “baseline commitment” thing (see NOTE at the end of this post), at least not in recent decades, and even going quite far back. Lincoln was bitterly criticized for suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, for example. Harry Truman lost a court battle to be allowed to seize the steel mills during the Korean War. President Obama expanded presidential power to do an end run around Congress via executive orders.]

National emergency?

The New Neo Posted on by

As expected, President Trump signed the budget bill and declared a national emergency in order to move additional funds towards the task of building a wall.

(And I have some outside obligations for the next few hours, so I may take this up again in the late afternoon or early evening.)

But here’s my quick take—

I’m not sure why Trump signed a budget bill that so many people seem to think contains poison pills, except that he wanted to avert another shutdown crisis. I’ve long thought that the Democratic Congress held the winning hand on that because all shutdowns are automatically blamed—with a huge assist from the MSM—on the GOP, whether it’s the GOP controlling the House or the GOP controlling the executive branch. The rule is that it’s always the GOP at fault no matter which part of the government, and therefore which side of the argument, they represent.

And I’m also not sure why, having signed the bill, Trump’s going the national emergency route if—as many have previously suggested—he has other ways to move the money into wall-building. The national emergency route is the one I see as most fraught with political and constitutional peril. No doubt some of Trump’s legal advisors have said it will work out. But I think it gives the Democrats in Congress and elsewhere much ammunition to declare him a tyrant who must be stopped, and it does this at a time when the Democrats were busily engaged in sinking themselves in so many ways. This allows them to change the emphasis entirely.

Then again, no matter what Trump did about this issue (except, perhaps, for caving entirely), the Democrats would say he was being a tyrant.

Also, if the shoe were on the other foot, I have no doubt that the Democrats would defend a Democratic president who did the equivalent of what he’s doing (it wouldn’t be to build a wall, of course, but to some other purpose) and declare it perfectly fine.

And yes, national emergencies are declared all the time and we don’t notice. That’s because they are on relatively minor issues and involve relatively minor things. This involves the clash of two large principles—Congress’s power to pass a budget, and the presidential power to protect our borders.

The underlying problem is even bigger than that—it’s the breakdown of government into warring factions that have stripped away all pretense of comity and cooperation, all sense of “we’re in this together.” I used to think [see *NOTE below] that we had that general sense, and that it was not an illusion.

And the loss of that is the real national emergency.

*NOTE: I’m adding this note because I realize that the phrase “I used to think” needs clarification, although I hadn’t thought it did when I wrote it.

I don’t mean that “I used to think” we had a spirit of cooperation until last week. I don’t mean I used to think it until last month, or last year, or even last decade. When did I first realize it was gone? Perhaps during the 1990s or perhaps even earlier. I’m not sure, and there was no “aha!” moment when it struck me. It was a slowly growing perception that developed over several decades, and there were many elements and events and reactions to those events that fed into it.

So, when was it that I had thought that most of the nation felt that we’re in this together and needed to cooperate, at least on the really big things? I suppose I felt it very much when I was a child, during the 50s and then the early 60s. The disruption in this feeling began in the late 60s, of course, in dramatic fashion, but it still seemed (to me, at least) to recover somewhat during the 70s and 80s.

Perhaps that was an illusion. I also know I wasn’t paying close attention during those in-between years, when I was a young adult raising a child. It was during the 90s when I felt something was beginning to be very very wrong again. Then there was a brief period of togetherness (illusory togetherness, as it turns out) for a short while after 9/11, except for the vocal left. The more basic disunity problem came not too long after 9/11, and it has been growing and growing ever since.

Now it has reached a fever pitch, but by no means has it topped out.