Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Our Criminal Justice System

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…has become a crime:

The combination of vague and pervasive criminal laws — the federal government literally doesn’t know how many federal criminal laws there are — and prosecutorial discretion, plus easy overcharging and coercive plea-bargaining, means that where criminal law is concerned we don’t really have a judicial system as most people imagine it. Instead, we have a criminal justice bureaucracy that assesses guilt and imposes penalties with only modest supervision from the judiciary, and with very little actual accountability. (When a South Carolina judge suggested earlier this year that prosecutors should follow the law, prosecutors revolted.)

In a recent Columbia Law Review essay, I suggest some remedies to this problem: First, prosecutors should have “skin in the game” — if someone’s charged with 100 crimes but convicted of only one, the state should have to pay 99% of his legal fees. This would discourage overcharging. (So would judicial oversight, but we’ve seen little enough of that.) Second, plea-bargain offers should be disclosed at trial, so that judges and juries can understand just how serious the state really thinks the offense is. Empowering juries and grand juries (a standard joke is that any competent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich) would also provide more supervision. And finally, I think that prosecutors should be stripped of their absolute immunity to suit — an immunity created by judicial activism, not by statute — and should be subject to civil damages for misconduct such as withholding evidence.

It’s a travesty. They should take the whole federal criminal code and throw it out, and start over.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Putin’s Cold Hard Facts

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Options for confronting them:

Obama’s post-aggression sanctions regimen is not merely inadequate, it is a joke. Russian hard-power aggression, annexation and expansion require a hard-power response. Here are some I recommend: (1) We can’t flip-flop NATO Article 5, NATO’s commitment to mutual defense. The U.S. must demonstrate it takes its NATO obligations seriously. So, deploy U.S. troops to Poland. The U.S. withdrew its last tanks from Germany in 2013. The Poland garrison needs a U.S. armor brigade. (2) Cancel all defense budget cuts. Faculty club snark aside, peace through strength means something. (3) Open federal lands to natural gas “fracking” and start shipping gas to Europe. Undermining Russian gas sales is a real economic sanction. (4) Arm the Baltic nations. They are also NATO allies. And (5) deploy the GBI’s to Poland, and build a more robust missile defense system. As for permanently deploying U.S. Patriot PAC-3 short-range anti-missile missiles in Poland — that’s an idea whose time has come.

I think we need a new Marshall Plan to quickly reconfigure Europe’s energy infrastructure. If Obama was really serious about his “phone and pen” there are things that are entirely within his power to do. He could open up Keystone and approve the permits for those LNG terminals tomorrow. Investments in new European pipelines and terminals could be paid for with revenues from gas sales. And despite Kerry’s idiotic blathering about an end to all life on earth, this is the real crisis, not carbon.