Arise Ye Believers in Bipartisan Compromise! Your Moment has Arrived!

Perhaps the Republicans have created an opportunity for the great American tradition of bipartisan compromise to create a new synthesis and a happy solution may arise which is not perfect but is not too bad either.

The House of Representatives, controlled by a tiny majority of self-righteous Republicans, has violated yet another tradition of American Governance which has traditionally put national defense before partisan politics.  The House has, it would seem, violated this principle and attached their right wing nuttiness as a rider to the omnibus defense bill. One such rider says that the military can not give leave or support to any woman who wishes an abortion in a state which prohibits it. This is of course a big problem for the US Military who has many women in uniform who are of child bearing age.  You can't be in the Marines and be pregnant even if it is peacetime.  That is ridiculous and would make it impossible for many women to serve their country in this way.  What can be done? 

The answer is obvious to those with eyes to see. The rider should be allowed to stand, but perhaps with a delay of lets say 24 months. This will allow the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard time to move their bases from Red states to Blue states where abortion is permitted.  Of course this will be expensive and sadly the Red states may see *some* financial penalties from all that federal money that formerly was pumped into their economies now transferred to another location.  But you cant make an omelet without breaking eggs and it seems to me that honor on all sides is thus preserved.

Filibuster Did Not Apply to Republican Tax Bill

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Why is it only the Democrats who have to be on their knees and beg the Republicans to please, please, please let them pass a bill. I checked and the Republican Tax bill which gave money to their rich friends and destroyed the deficit (remember: it was going to pay for itself by increased GNP, ha ha ha ha ha) was passed 51 to 49. So obviously its bullshit and they should just pass the stimulus 51 - 50 (with VP Harris) and move on to the next.

[Ha so the answer is that this was a reconsiliation, which seems weird to me, but there it is]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/01/us/politics/senate-tax-bill-vote.html

Rebuttal to Rumor about House Impeachment and Subpoenas

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I have done a lot of reading on the issues of (a) what the House has to do to start an investigation and (b) who can issue subpoenas.  This email is a report on what I have discovered so far and what my sources were.  If you can point me to any other relevant material, by all means do so.

So far as I know the following is accurate but somewhat simplified.  In broad strokes, the situation is clear and unambiguous although when it comes to the individual merits of a specific subpoena and whether executive privilege or attorney privilege applies then that opens a different set of issues that we are not addressing here.  What we are discussing is the assertion that the House did not follow the rules when it came to starting an investigation and that therefore all the subpoenas are invalid.  Both of these assertions are false.

The primary sources are (a) the constitution, (b) articles about the constitution and impeachment written in various law journals (Harvard and Georgetown seem to be the leading ones so far), (c) Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports which are a fabulous resource see below, and (d) a funny blog I read a lot called www.lawfareblog.com, which is a blog about congress and national security. They try to be bipartisan, but I think in this case what it means is that smart people of different opinions write articles on a topic and then ignore each other.  Theoretically, one should be knowledgable about all the times the House has investigated someone to see what the precedent is, but that is going to be much harder to do.   (As an aside, I love the CRS reports and they are a great resource.  The idea is that you are (for example) a new member of Congress and you have no idea what the history of our relationship with Turkey and the Kurds are, and you dont have that much time to read.  So the CRS will probably have written a nice background paper for you.  Many of the papers can be found at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/)

So as I understand it, it goes something like this.  The constitution gives the sole right to the House to "impeach" which is essentially to act as a grand jury (i.e. to choose to bring an indictment, or not) in any matter involving the executive, the judiciary and, for that matter, themselves.  The Senate is not involved unless Articles of Impeachment are passed by the House by a simple majority of the present and voting members.  Both the House and the Senate may investigate pretty much whatever they want, but only committees can issue subpoenas.  Each committee has its own rules and its own traditions about all sorts of things, but certainly about subpoenas.  In general the rules are voted on, accepted, and then published at the beginning of each session of congress.  Sometimes the rules are modified in mid-session, for example the House Judiciary Committee recently changed the rules to allow more time for a witness to be questioned.  So far as I can tell, there is no special procedure which has to be followed before an impeachment investigation has begun.  I find no reference to one anywhere.  There is however a variety of rules involving what a committee must do to issue a subpoena and those rules seem to be different between the different committees.

Some committees need a vote before a subpoena can be issued.  Some committees delegate this ability to the Chairman or to the Chairman and the ranking minority leader acting as a team.  Some committees allow the minority members to block a subpoena.  An excellent discussion of this is

Each committee has its own rules about what can be delegated to the chairman of the committee, what the ranking minority member can do, how much notice must be given, whether the ranking minority member can, for example, block a subpoena, and so forth.  There is no one standard here, each committee has its own rules.  I recommend you read the CRS report on the issue which can be found at:  https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44247.pdf

As I suspected there is no magical procedure that has to be followed to start an investigation.  Do you really think that the Democrats would be so stupid as to "forget"?  I sure dont.  But I was surprised a bit at the different rules of the different committees, that was news to me.  What is not at all clear is what Congress can do when you have a rogue, obviously corrupt administration like the current Republican/Trump one.  Ultimately, Congress has the power to put people in jail for contempt of Congress and I think that is likely to be where this leads. You can do your friends a favor by feeding this back to them.  Its their credibility that gets hurt by stuff like this.

There is an amazing about of bullshit out there.  I dont know why the Republicans put up with this.

Message To My Congress Person 10/12/2017

Dear Congressman Hunter,

Well we certainly are in a pickle, arent we, sir? What a time you have chosen to be in politics!

Although I realize you are a devout Republican, I am in your district, I am a voting citizen, and I am hopping mad about our loonytoon so-called President. In fact, I have never been so mad about anything political in my life, and I have been involved in the process before.

So what to do?

Well, its really not clear. But at the least I can write my congress person and politely but firmly request that you impeach that son-of-a-bitch as soon as possible, if not sooner. And since Pence is definitely compromised, he has to go too.

Remember if you dont do it soon, you may end up with Nancy Pelosi as president.

Yours very sincerely,

MW

Verizon Data Leakage, Should Congress Act?

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Should Congress be forced to make it illegal for corporations to grossly fail to protect their customer's privacy? That of course should not be necessary, because by 2017 we have had so many gross violations of privacy due to corporate incompetence and since we are all aware of foreign intelligence services as well as international crime organizations working to collect such data (and other forms of IP) to use against Americans, that even a stupid moron, yes, even an American Corporation should know that they have a responsibility to work with diligence and skill to protect their customers' data, in particular their customer's passwords.

So what are we to make of the latest Verizon failure to (a) protect this data and (b) when notified by an outside firm of this exposure of customer data, failing to take the steps necesssary to protect the data in a timely fashion?

The facts in the case are that Verizon did not discover the breach, an outside firm did. The problem was that a Verizon subcontractor had maintained a complete database of Verizon's wireless customers, their user ids, personal information and, crucially, their PINs / passwords, in a cloud file that was open for reading by anyone. How the subcontractor could have made such a mistake is unknown, but the responsibility does not lie with them, it lies with Verizon to see that their customer's data is secure.

But even worse, is that when notified of the problem, it took two weeks, from June 8 to June 22, to correct the problem. And furthermore, correcting the problem was, in this case, relatively easy. You just protect the file on the cloud (in terms of who has read access to it) or you remove the file from the cloud. Now in the long run you may have to do something more sophisticated to achieve some larger corporate goal, but in the short run, just remove the file.

Since Corporate America has failed to take the steps necessary to protect Americans, it is up to Congress to improve the incentives to perform. A simple and probably effective way to do this is to put the senior executives of the corporation in prison for a period of correction, so that they can learn new and better skills to help them fit into society. I would think that a top executive, the CEO or COO, would require a healthy 10 or 20 years in prison, except in extreme cases.

In this case, though, a lesser penalty will probably be applied. The senior executives will probably be forced to accept a pay raise and a 7 figure bonus. This is America after all.

Here is a report on the Verizon data leakage

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/341655-massive-data-leakage-at-verizon

And my Facebook sarcasm is below: