Gay Judges and Judicial Ethics

In another example of "not clear on the concept," the lobby against gay marraiges has accused a judge in the California Proposition 8 case of bias because he is gay. This would be like saying that divorce judges could not be married -- or divorced. It would be like saying that black judges could not sit in racial discrimination cases or that women could not adjudicate gender discrimination cases.

The accusation reveals the basic misunderstanding of the anti-gay lobby: gays are not pursuing an interest, but are being themselves.

Drone Strikes and International Law

(picture from http://ssecorp.blogspot.com/2011/08/predator-drone-aircraft-wallpapers_18.html)


As it has done in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the United States has decided to employ unmanned drones to drop bombs in Libya.

The use of drones raises interesting legal, ethical and political questions. Their obvious utility lies in complete absence of risk to American lives with their use. Even if shot down, a drone can only cost us money, not airmen or soldiers. Furthermore, their aim is accurate and precise; they hit what their controllers aim at. From a military persepctive, then, they can be ideal when they can be used.

But all of these strenghts also raise concerns. The Christian Science Montitor quotes David Ignatius in the The Washington Post thus:

My quick reaction, as a journalist who has chronicled the growing use of drones, is that this extension to the Libyan theater is a mistake. It brings a weapon that has become for many Muslims a symbol of the arrogance of US power into a theater next door to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, the most promising events in a generation. It projects American power in the most negative possible way.

I wrote late last year that the problem with the Predators is that they provide too easy an answer to political and military problems.

In other words, it looks and feels like we are playing god, floating around the skies with our ability to kill whomever we like. Send a drone to kill the one we don't like, and everything will OK, right? Well, not always and not for everyone.

Furthermore, drone strikes act more like extrajudicial executions than military maneuvers. In October of 2010, NYU professor and UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions John Alston wrote

that We need the United States to be more up front and say, 'OK, we're willing to discuss some aspects of this program,' otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.

At issue, in part, is that the US targets specific individuals, but keeps the reasons for their killing secret in an effort to protect the program and the hardware. These are not attacks on legitimate military targets as traditionally understood, with the necessary consequence of the death of bunches of people. Rather, the government chooses a person to kill, and then kills him. Because there is never any airing of evidence against this person, never mind a trial, the attacks raise serious concerns about due process.

It's ironic, of course, that international law will not give much resistance to the arbitrary killing of dozens of men, largely through the accidents of fate, that result from traditional bombings, but has no place for the assassination of a single person. Ethically, it seems better in some ways for the US to try to identify people who really "dserve" to die.

Millbrook School student Sarah Whalen wrote a very good essay on these questions in 2006. To quote her:

The United States’ use of targeted killing is an unwise decision in terms of its own foreign and domestic policy. It not only is contradictory to American values, but violates international law and has been frowned upon by the worldwide community. However, thus far this has not stopped its use or changed its legality within American domestic law. Although previously banned, assassination can be ordered by the executive branch from the powers delegated to the President by Congress. Even though permitted under U.S. law, the negative effects hinder the progression in the fight against hatred and violence that the world is currently facing in the twenty- first century.

The Budget and Rational Discourse

After weeks of public posturing, Congress finally passed a budget, hours before the federal government would have been forced to shut down. Of course, "public posturing" might mean "good negotiating," and there ois nothing inherently wrong with negotiating. In fact, in one view, both House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama did their jobs fairly well, preventing the economic collapse that would have followed a shut-down while aslo refusing to bail on their basic principles. In difficult moments like these compromise can be painful and expensive.

But the real question will be whether this budget or its underlying principles will achieve anything important. Mark McKinnon of The Daily Beast says that it will not, and that all Obama did was position himself to be re-elected in 2012. McKinnon says that Republican Paul Ryan's plan is the best Congressionally-proposed idea because it makes steep cuts and tries to reform the whole process. Mark Blumenthal, of The Huffington Post, on the other hand, says that Ryan's plan will be the electoral death of the GOP because nobody wants to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive statements: what works politically frequently fails economically. But it does make it harder to figure out what the answer is.

More important, though, is that the crisis may actually force people to have useful conversations. Political expediency will require that the government not become insolvent, that it not default on its debts, and that it avoid a new international emergency. That way, we can only hope, smart people will rise to the occasion and the old hacks will fall away.

"Conservative" States and Federal Spending

In another demonstration of the absurdity of so much political talk about government spending, the Daily Beast published a "gallery" ranking all 50 states according to how much federal tax money they take relative to the tax dollars they pay out.

The top five were Mississippi, West Virginia, New Mexico, Hawaii and Sarah Palin's Alaska. Alaska withdrew $2.24 from federal coffers for every dollar it paid in taxes. Small government, anyone?

Meanwhile, those tax-and-spend liberals in Massachusetts (#39 at $.95 per dollar), New York (.72 per dollar), Illinois (.79 per dollar) and Connecticut (.74 per dollar) actually helped carry all the deadbeats above.

What's that say? It says that everybody relies on the government for support in one way or another. That may not be good all the time -- fiscal conservatives have a point there -- but we should not pretend that conservatives are rugged individualists living off the land while liberals are welfare cheats. Let's get down to fact and decide how best to allocate resources.

That, after all, is whta politics really is for.