Principles

[Update: As it turned out, my title for this piece was premature. The measure discussed below made it out of committee, but was not enacted as a formal resolution.]

In a long-overdue move, today a Congressional panel approved a measure which labels the massacre of Armenian civilians by the military forces of the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” Proposals to apply this term to the atrocity committed nearly a century ago have been punted down the line from one Congress to the next for many years now. The wholesale massacre of civilians by a military force is inexcusable under any circumstances, and the fact that it has taken Congress this long to call the act by its true name is shameful and sad.

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The filibuster, simply put, is the practice of talking proposed legislation to death. Presently, in the Senate, a three-fifths majority vote is required to end a filibuster: a high standard that aims toward consensus instead of mere majority rule.

Back in the days of the Bush administration, when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, the Republican leadership grew frustrated that Senate Democrats had the temerity to use the filibuster block 4% of President Bush’s ideologically extremist judicial nominations. In response, then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) proposed using what he dubbed the “nuclear option.” Under the so-called nuclear option, a motion could be carried with a simple majority that would end the long-standing practice of the Parliamentary maneuver known as the filibuster, at least in the case of judicial appointments.

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Of course I agree with the sentiments expressed by President Obama in his op-ed piece in the New York Times.  While more rallying cry than technical discussion, the President’s piece insists that health insurance reform is necessary, and he names four specific impacts which such legislation would have on the lives of ordinary Americans.

The first of these is affordable, portable insurance coverage for everyone, including those who are presently uninsured.

Then he mentions the broad goal of controlling costs and cutting systemic inefficiencies, and gives examples of ways in which such cost-cutting measures would impact other aspects of the system.

It is on his fourth point that President Obama’s editorial waxes the most eloquent with specific policy agendas for the legislation under discussion:

Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No one in America should go broke because they get sick. Most important, we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies.

All of these are, as I say, admirable sentiments: goals which you would think our whole country could unite behind.

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In my book Principles for a Self-Directed Society, section 6.3.2.1 “Big Brother Really Is Watching You,” I discuss legislation which was then pending:  the FISA Amendments Act, which has received much publicity in the media.  The legislation was intended to hugely broaden Presidential powers by essentially signing off after the fact on an illegal warrantless wiretap program which the Bush administration had already been conducting for years. The FISA Amendments Act is an extension of a previous bill which did just that for a limited time; but the new bill also reforms the system that was established by the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in several ways. The aspect of the legislation which has received the most attention in the media is the retroactive immunity it provides to telecommunications companies which participated in the illegal warrantless surveillance program; yet although this provision may be the most obviously odious, it is hardly the most sinister part of the bill. According to Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the bill “allow[s] the government to apply for wiretaps after beginning surveillance and [to] continue monitoring Americans’ phone calls and e-mail messages [even] if the FISA court rejects the application.” (Emphasis added.)

I would like to remind America that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution specifically prohibits the government from conducting any search without a warrant based on probable cause.
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In section 4.2.1 of Principles for a Self-Directed Society, I summarize some of the effects and implications of global climate change, including the 2007/08 United Nations Human Development Report, which concluded that more than 260 million people were adversely affected by climate change related disasters in the first four years of the 21st century alone; and that the only way to prevent long term exponential worsening of the situation is for industrialized nations to make painfully drastic reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. I then considered an extreme worst-case climate change scenario report, written by private contractors for the Department of Defense. However, that report has been disavowed by the Pentagon; and although it is scientifically not unimaginable, as the report demonstrates with several examples of historical climatological events, most people find the concept of abrupt climate shift to be too much like science fiction, and hopefully it will stay that way.
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