Category Archives: Law

The overreaction to this, from people like Larry Tribe, has been hyperbolic. I’ve been having some arguments on Twitter with people, including Bob Zubrin (who is the Never Trumper’s Never Trumper), on the roles and responsibilities of the branches of government and of the federal workforce. Bob thinks that someone should disobey (or even countermand) a presidential order that they consider illegal, and somehow still keep their job. My position is that while no one is required to break the law or violate the Constitution, they are not the law unto themselves. Employees of the executive branch report ultimately to the president, and are accountable to him or her. The president is accountable either to the states in an election, or to the Congress, who can impeach and remove him. There is nothing in the Constitution about insubordination to the White House being a check on executive power, and to allow it would be to remove the unelected employees of the executive branch from any accountability to any one at all, giving us a tyranny of the bureaucracy. I don’t think that Bob has fully thought this through. I’m sure that Madison et al would never have intended this.

[Afternoon update]

I agree with Ben Sasse:

Sasse also emphasized the importance of three separate, co-equal branches of government, including ensuring the Justice Department is “very, very insulated from partisan politics.”

“We have three branches of government, not one, not 17, right? And so you need to have investigative and prosecutorial functions be in the Article II branch of government. They need to be in the executive branch, but there should be lots of insulation from the career civil servants and the leadership of the Justice Department from political decision-making at the White House,” he said.

It would help if we had an educational system that actually taught about the Constitution. And a president who had read it.

Business, Economics, Law, Political Commentary

The Peoples’ Republic Of California

May 14, 2017 Rand Simberg 2 Comments

Wants to essentially outlaw book signings.

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Low-Cost Launch

May 11, 2017 Rand Simberg

The military could have it in the next half decade, but it’s going to have to work at it:

Miller argued that taking advantage of the current opportunities is going to require leadership from an organization that doesn’t exist yet in the Pentagon.

“We need an organization that’s not totally there,” he said. “We need an organization that has the right culture to understand private industry and partner with them. It needs to have the right authorities…It needs to have the right leadership and vision to go exercise this plan. We did not find any existing organization that has all the right qualities now, so we recommended creating a purpose-built organization to go execute this strategy.”

Schilling said the study was “not an indictment in any way shape or form” of the work of the Air Force’s Operationally Responsive Space Office in New Mexico.

He has to say that, but in fact it is. ORS has been pretty blinkered in its thinking. Of course, it’s not like it’s ever had a huge budget to work with.

[Update a few minutes later]

Funding to defend space systems will be in the next budget:

“Our fundamental challenge is we have to deal with space as an increasingly challenged domain,” he said at a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel discussion in Arlington, Virginia, on national security space priorities in the Trump administration. The problem is that the current systems were not built to withstand attacks, he added.

“What you will see in the budget is measured steps across the enterprise on how we address mission assurance,” he said, without going into details on how much will be proposed.

They will be “measured steps” and the work will take many several budget cycles, beyond the current future year defense program, which projects funding out for five years.

“It took us a long time to build the existing system. It is going to take a significant amount of time to transform it into the mission-assured system that is required in the future,” he said.

Yes. And the sooner they start the better. This is long overdue.

Business, Economics, Law, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society