RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/trump-removes-the-state-department-inspector-general/

It would be better to reserve judgment until we know the reasons.

President Trump has ousted another inspector general, the fourth IG in the last six weeks. This time, Steve Linick of the State Department was cashiered. The White House says the president has his reasons for no longer having “the fullest confidence” in IG Linick. Perhaps . . . but it is curious how these removals always seem to happen late on Fridays, when administrations do things they’d prefer you didn’t notice.

I am not a fan of the institution of inspector general because it is constitutionally suspect, to say the least. An IG works in the executive branch, and is therefore subordinate to the president, yet reports to Congress. This is a hybrid that flouts separation-of-powers principles. Predictably, it has deleterious effects. Congress has become too dependent on the in-house IG at executive departments and agencies, atrophying its oversight muscles. The existence of the IG makes it harder for department and agency leadership to deal swiftly with misconduct. And because the IG answers to dual constituencies in political minefields, IG reports often suffer from on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand syndrome.

All that said, the institution is not going anywhere anytime soon, just as the administrative state’s distortion of the separation of powers seems to be a permanent feature of modern government — and modern governmental dysfunction. We should try to make the system work as well as it can, though its design flaws may make it increasingly irrelevant.

The Trump administration says that Linick was insufficiently aggressive in investigating the State Department’s role in promoting the bogus reporting of Christopher Steele, the former British spy and primary author of the Democrat-sponsored “dossier” that the Obama administration peddled to the FISA court and on Capitol Hill, while the Clinton campaign peddled it to the media. Trump critics counter that Linick was investigating whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had directed a State Department official to perform personal tasks for Pompeo and his wife; and that Linick had incurred the administration’s wrath by focusing on alleged retaliation by Trump political appointees against career officials.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/18/pandemic_power_grabs_143222.html

Most policy discussions about the pandemic focus on the agonizing trade-off between public health and economic survival. That’s understandable — those are the central issues — but they have overshadowed two other major questions: Is the crisis shifting more power to Washington, D.C.? Is it undermining essential legal protections and, if so, for how long?

National crises often lead to more centralized power. But everything about this one is unusual, including President Trump’s decision to let state and local authorities make nearly all decisions about daily life and business activity. Washington provides expert advice, policy guidance, backup supplies, emergency personnel, and massive funding. It has not issued national mandates. Trump has refused to shift more power to the central government.

Trump’s approach contrasts sharply with Washington’s one-size-fits-all response to the oil crisis of 1973-74. To save gasoline, Congress passed, and Richard Nixon signed, a bill setting a new national speed limit, 55 mph, to be applied everywhere in the country. It wasn’t popular everywhere, particularly in the sprawling and sparsely populated West, but the feds had a hammer for states that didn’t want to comply: no 55 mph limit, no federal highway money.

Washington planners also demanded every state let drivers turn right at red lights.  The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 required it if states were to receive any federal energy-conservation money. That rule, like the national speed limit, fit some locales better than others. In Boston, for example, politicians initially resisted the idea. They knew local drivers considered stop lights little more than “suggestions.” Permitting right-on-red would only add to the chaos. No matter. They buckled rather than lose Washington funding.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/498180-were-risking-national-suicide-if-we-dont-adjust-our-pandemic-response

By now, everyone recognizes Dr. Anthony Fauci. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is one of the most cited immunology researchers of all time and unquestionably one of the most acclaimed. As specified in his own bio, his deep expertise is in research of immune-mediated and infectious disease, particularly their basic mechanisms and treatments. During this COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci has been a central figure, a key adviser to President Trump and a man to whom the entire country, indeed the world, looks for wisdom and expertise. 

However, our elected representatives, the public and the media misunderstand his focused role and even his expertise as a scientist. Basic science underlying a viral pandemic is absolutely critical. But now is the time for the design of sound public policy — and that involves a far broader formulation than a single-minded focus on stopping COVID-19 at all costs.

Policymakers and the public have not received several key messages that are critical to alleviate fear and guide a safe reopening of society. That has led to a gross failure in policy at the state level:

There has been a failure to remind everyone that the stated goal of the policy – total lockdown and whole-population isolation – has been accomplished in most of the United States, including the epicenter of New York. Specifically, two curves, hospitalizations per day and deaths per day, have flattened. The goal was to prevent hospital overcrowding and, aside from a few in the New York area, hospitals were not overcrowded. Today, most hospitals stand under-filled, necessitating layoffs of personnel. More importantly, it was never a policy goal to eliminate all cases of COVID-19. That is impossible, unnecessary and illogical, when 99 percent of infected people have no significant illness from it.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/the-left-is-what-it-once-loathed/

Compare the current progressive view about civil liberties against the old liberal positions of the past.

Surveillance and spying on U.S. citizens? Remember liberal Senator Frank Church of Idaho and his 1975 post-Watergate select Senate investigative committee? It found the CIA, FBI, and NSA improperly over three decades had tapped into the phones of Americans, opened their mail, and worked with telecommunications companies to monitor the data of supposedly suspect politicians, actors, celebrities, and political activists. “Collusion” with the communists and the Russians was often the pretense to surveil American citizens.

Consider Church either a bastion of civil liberties protection or a dangerous firebrand who weakened the CIA and FBI. But the point is that the Left’s position had once mostly been that the government’s unelected deep-state intelligence officers simply had too much power to trust. 

Indeed, the ACLU was outraged at what the committee revealed. Church was deified as a liberal hero uncovering government abuse. About the worst thing a government could do, liberals reminded us, was to spy on its own citizens. 

Then we were also warned that the scandal was the result of the government, for over 30 years, targeting mostly liberals on grounds of trumped-up suspicions that they were sympathetic to Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Yet in addition, the Left argued that the state had no business spying on any American at all, unless it had a certified warrant and ample criminal cause—or we found ourselves in a war with enemies at home among us.