Congress has the power of the purse. Failure to appear: no paycheck. Multiple failure to appear: automatic departmental budget cut, ultimately to zero. The executive may choose to illegally shuffle money around but that doesn't work for long.
Ironically the legislation that created DHS (a big mistake made opportunistically at the time) also included a GOP wish that made it not subject to the same set of employee rules the rest of the civil service is.* So DHS is the easiest to do this with.
* It is still partially unionized, though the GOP tried to eliminate this when forming the department as well.
The proper course of action is holding the person or persons in Contempt of Congress, then dispatching forces under the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Legislature.
They have teeth if they truly want to get to the bottom of it, don't let anyone fool you. The Legislature has it's own "Executive-Lite" arm specifically intended to facilitate the conductance of legislative business whether the summoned feels like cooperating or not.
That the Legislature refuses to flex that capability is more a sign of the woeful state of modern politics than anything else.
I want to see the Mace of the United States get used, damnit!
Congress could arrest the agency's officials one at a time, and keep them in jail, until they get to one who decides to fulfill their duty to the nation.
They do, but the politics of this means that if you try to temporarily defund customs then you're under the label of "X wants to defund our border patrol and let in anyone!"
Well of course, but they are already being oppositional by refusing to obey a lawful request. So this kind of response should be expected and not feared.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. While we probably should improve/expand asylum infrastructure, and similar programs, we can't just open the borders. We have a lot of social programs that are already strained (mostly by legislation designed to hobble them) by our current population; until those are sorted out we don't have a strong enough foundation for faster/more immigration.
I disagree. Let's move fast and break things. Status quo is not going to improve our welfare in either the literal or policy sense. Economically speaking, immigration is the most profitable policy decision a government can make.
Extremism is very rarely a solution to unsatisfactory status quo.
Being an extremist, you are vastly more likely to unite the country against yourself and roll back any progress on your cause than you are to advance it.
If they get much more broken there's going to be riots in the places rich white people live.
Now that I think about your idea more, I agree. Destroy the entire social safety net, bring in 20-50 million refugees and hope America survives the civil war.
Breaking things in this context would put peoples' lives at risk. There are already millions of newly unemployed citizens in the US. If the system is strained too far those who are already at risk could lose access to shelter, food, and clean water. Not to mention anyone who's unemployed likely doesn't have good access to healthcare right now.
So fix the programs that provide those things. I’m a hard libertarian on this issue. The government should not be telling us where we can travel or live. We wouldn’t accept it from our government and nobody should accept it from other governments either.
When you have finite resources and an economy that is not driven by unskilled labor you cannot have unlimited immigration unless your stance is that new migrants will be ineligible for public assistance. You risk bankrupting social programs otherwise.
Mass migration also hinders assimilation. When you have a steady stream of migrants, those migrants can integrate into the local culture. When you have a massive burst as you would if you suddenly deregulated immigration, those individuals have enough non-native support as to never come under pressure to assimilate. This is not a good thing and is precisely what leads to massive nationalist backlash.
All that being said, I do support generally increasing quotas while also largely uncapping skilled immigration.
This isn't ironic to anyone who believes public unions are anti-democratic. DHS being the easiest to deal with is the whole point of it not being unionized.
The executive has the power of surveillance, so they can get dirt on the right Congress people to turn the screws on to prevent any semblance of return to a checks and balances system, one that is completely eroded in all but the most meaningless ways. Of course, bribes and that sort of thing from k-street usually prevent the need for use of dirt, but the more powerful one is, the more likely there's a video of them somewhere on an Epstein alike property doing dirty things.
A real analysis of the three branches including the fourth estate will show the executive has gobbled them all up in the backroom, of course allowing the illusion to continue for the public. This bribery-blackmail system is bipartisan, and as for the executive... it's the cabinet and shadow cabinet with real power.
No, this isn't over the top. This is a root causal issue. The blackmail system's tendrils reach deep into the political and business establishment, and until that is addressed, policy initiatives will continue to be abated by this type of control. It doesn't matter what your policy wants are, or what side of the isle you choose to align with (if any), if the blackmail system can usurp it by being a more immediate threat.
Epstein wasn't a one off. There are many more Epstein's you haven't heard about yet, still doing their thing. They don't do it alone either, you have intelligence agencies of all kinds involved, because of the power differential it offers them. This is the machiavellian realpolitik of power. Lets have the courage to talk about it and not shirk the responsibility to do so.
I started to write a long response, but found myself repeatly reffering to a peice by Whitney Webb [1] that touches the subject better than I can, and also one on Consortium News [2]. It's worth a read, and I highly encourage you to read the linked articles and exerpts. That should be a good start to a conversation if you want to continue. Another example I will refer people to isn't a US case, but is one of the better documented cases, the Dutroux Affair aka The Belgian X-Files. Beware the answers to the questions you ask on this topic, don't tread lightly into that last one.
PS. Wikipedia is heavily controlled on these topics, so don't reference it expecting to find details on the subject. A good example of this editorial censorship would be the Franklin Scandal. If one were to just read the wiki entry one would walk away thinking it was just a hoax, which isn't even close to the truth.
However, it also sounds like they're guilty of contempt of congress. Jail the guy they were talking to, call his superior. Repeat until you have the answers.
It's my understanding that Congress has the power to summon anybody, arrest and jail them for failure to appear. It sounds like they have neither the bodies nor the jail to actually execute that power -- nor have they tried to acquire such resources. The net effect is that the white house has refused to permit folks to appear before Congress, and Congress has acquiesced every time... setting a precedent that the Executive branch cannot, in fact, be checked by the Legislative branch.
>It's my understanding that Congress has the power to summon anybody, arrest and jail them for failure to appear.
AIUI, that's true. However, action (and inaction) by the Executive and inaction by Congress, not just recently either, complicates matters.
A pretty good article at Lawfare[0] discusses this at some length.
Also a bill[1] was introduced in the House last June to clarify some of these issues.
Hopefully more attention will be paid to ensuring that Congressional oversight is able to function effectively.
However, one must also guard against politicization of those processes -- but, IMHO, that's less important than making sure the Congress can effectively exercise its oversight role.
This is just interesting trivia, but the House and Senate can both ask their respective Sergeant at Arms to perform an arrest. This has never happened as far as I know, but from my reading seems to be permissible for a failure to appear.
There are plenty of logistical issues. I'm not sure the Sergeant at Arms even owns handcuffs, much less a place to keep people being held, and I'm sure it would suddenly become a huge scandal - but it would be very interesting.
In 1922, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms deputized someone who then traveled to Ohio and arrested the brother of the sitting Attorney General after he ignored a Senate subpoena and was cited for contempt of Congress. The arrest was upheld by the Supreme Court in McGrain v. Daugherty in 1927.
In 1934, the Senate cited two men for contempt of Congress and sentenced them to 10 days in the DC jail. One, William P. MacCracken, Jr, fought the case in court, eventually losing in the Supreme Court case Jurney v. MacCracken of 1935. He served one night of his sentence in the home of the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms and another in the Willard hotel... I was unable to figure out if he ever actually ended up in the DC jail.
> I'm not sure the Sergeant at Arms even owns handcuffs
Maybe not, but the House and Senate Sergeants-at-Arms jointly supervise the Capitol Police, whose officers I'm sure either can deputize at need. I'm fairly certain that the Capitol Police both have and are intimately familiar with the use of the whole panoply of law enforcement gear.
They do have holding cells in the Capitol Building as I recall, and Congress can refer things to DoJ. If the President stonewalls, there may be some need for someone to get creative, but the Courts are unlikely to intervene in any obstructive fashion whatsoever.
Traditionally Congress has referred enforcement to the US Department of Justice. The flaws of this should probably be obvious in the current political environment.
A lot of this came up during the investigations prior to the Trump impeachment in the context of forcing witnesses to appear.
Well, congress gets to decide which ways of getting the data will be legal. So if the congress is not satisfied that CBP is getting the data in a way that they are happy with, then they can and should change the rules.
Yes, CBP should be (is?) required to have a warrant. The crazy part is that, if the law were being respected, there would be a higher standard of behaviour for a government agency than for private companies. Dragnet surveillance is wrong and needs to be illegal no matter who the buyer is.
Their authority to shut down intelligence agencies is purely theoretical. Not only would they be able to discover any effort to do that while it was in progress, but they could threaten or destroy the congresspeople who were most indispensable to that effort.
It's slightly scary to think about how total surveillance works on the populace in general, but nobody has any interest in most people (and knowing surveillance is in operation is enough motivation to make people intentionally less interesting.) Politicians and corporate decisionmakers are and will be the most subject to surveillance and control through that surveillance.
Here's the thing though: blackmail only works if you let it. Not everything a Congressperson could have in the closet is going to get them in any way removed from office. Once the intelligence community actually makes any good on any type of threat, congressional representatives no longer have any reason to play ball.
In short, blackmail doesn't work on the shameless.
What? Blackmail doesn’t reveal itself as some news report saying “CIA reports that Congressman X did blah blah blah, therefore the CIA recommends that you should not vote for him in the next election and other Congressmen should not work with him”.
It appears as something like “Leaked photographs reveal scandalous behavior by Congressman X. This scandal destroyed his reputation in Congress leading to him being ineffective in Congress, and made him deeply unpopular with voters, which will lead to him losing his next election”.
This is kind of a moot point if the portion of Congress which disagrees with this doesn't have control of both houses. Which is how Congress is supposed to work (it's not supposed to be very fast) but I don't think the founders had Congress delegating rulemaking powers to executive authorities in mind.
The portion of Congress which disagrees with this doesn't have control of anything. One of them is Warren, and Pelosi was campaigning against Markey just a month ago.
If Congress wants to effect change, they can literally write new laws.
I'm far less convinced that their investigative and committee powers should be held in that high of a regard, they're too easily hijacked by partisan politics and often fail to have any meaningful impact.
If they're truly that concerned about the problem, then make it illegal for federal law enforcement agencies to buy data on suspects or investigative targets from third-party sources. If you don't definitively kill the market, then I suspect you might just be looking for a political hand out.
Surely Congress needs to be able to investigate these matters before writing new laws?
I'm finding it hard to understand why you wouldn't want congressional committees (i.e. the people who regulate the country) to have the power to investigate bodies established and funded by Congress. Can you clarify?
I mean. The endless hearings about Clinton's emails? The endless hearing about Benghazi? Obamacare? The endless hearings about Trump and Russia and election interference? Going futher back - McCarthy and communism, Howard Hughes and airlines. MLB and steroids? Virtually all Americans believe that some congessional hearings were just useless partisan exercise - they just differ on which ones.
I think the examples are self evident to most people who follow American politics. If you had indicated that you were a foreigner and indicated that you were asking for an example, not a clarification, I might have given a kinder response.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion: the government should have a higher standard than many private companies here, since they have a monopoly on physical force. Amazon isn’t going to arrest and deport me.
To the extent that your livelihood is dependent on Amazon, sure; it’s analogous to how you can be fired from any private company for almost anything in most states. But they won’t garnish your wages regardless of where you find employment next or put you in jail and force you to work for pennies an hour though. It’s an entirely different magnitude.
I wasn't thinking of employees, but rather people running businesses selling things on Amazon or otherwise using their services. Insofar as Amazon can fire you, they're no different from any small business.
Well, not quite. If Amazon fires you in the first few years of working there they'll demand part of the signing bonus back. That may not be wage garnishment but I know firsthand that it feels coercive to people in that situation; a fine for quitting a job is awfully close to indentured servitude. I quit as soon as that period had past but I would have quit a year earlier if not for that policy.
And speaking of indentured servitude, H1B workers have it even worse since quiting or getting fired might get them deported, not merely fined.
> I wasn't thinking of employees, but rather people running businesses selling things on Amazon or otherwise using their services. Insofar as Amazon can fire you, they're no different from any small business.
This is a really wild take! Why would Amazon be required to keep doing business with some random product manufacturer or reseller?
There are many small businesses who use Amazon as a platform for reaching their customers. If Amazon kicks them out, their business evaporates in an instant.
You may think it's foolish to create such a fragile business. I know I do. But the fact remains that this happens. Ebay and YouTube are to other obvious examples of corporate platforms people use to pay rent, which many cut them off capriciously and without due process. As are mobile appstores, particularly Apple's.
Wouldn't that be an argument that we should do something about Amazon's monopoly, then? If they provide the only service that allows some chunk of the economy to function, that should be taken into account when we regulate them more heavily.
> Venntel sources its data from weather, games, e-commerce, and other innocuous apps, whose users may be unaware that their location is being sold to the U.S. government.
The weather app would be a little tricky, but clearly what we need is a way to spoof our location. Just pick a random coordinates each time these apps request it. Add as much noise to the data as possible to make it as useless as possible. I don't think it is enough to limit location to when we're using the app. We need to flood these apps with bad data.
It doesn't fix all location privacy issues, but iOS took a nice step recently of making "precise location" a toggle that users can turn off. For a fitness app, you'd give it a precise location. For weather, knowing what town you're in is probably fine.
> clearly what we need is a way to spoof our location. Just pick a random coordinates each time these apps request it.
A handful of us nerds may run some niche version of Android that allows this, but it is hard to imagine Google allowing random location spoofing on all the phones with its Play Services installed, especially considering that Google itself wants to know your exact location for advertising purposes.
In the developer options of nearly any android phone since like at least 8, is a setting for "Select mock location app". It's current use? People often used it to cheat in Pokemon Go
From a lay outsider's perspective, it seems like there is no real "balance of power" that's oft-touted when Americans discuss their politics. It seems like agencies like the DHS and CBP have all the power (backed by the president, who seems to have complete and ultimate power), and all Congress has the power to do (or perhaps, doesn't care to exercise any power it may have) is draft letters and launch investigations that have no real repercussions for those responsible for abuses. It would make me really happy if someone provides links to cases where the opposite was true - where Congress successfully exercised power over DHS, CBP, ETC.
It happens all of the time, you just generally do not hear about it as most of it takes place informally or via means you aren't paying attention to. In fact, one of the major complaints regarding DHS' ability to be effective has been that they have too much oversight. DHS reports to over 3x as many committees, subcommittees, and caucuses in Congress as the next closest Department (DoD, for anyone wondering).
For example, Congress holds Constitutional authority to appropriate funds to agencies. A great place to see where Congress exercises that authority is via spending bills[1][2]. Depending on the organization, they will get into nitty gritty details to the point of almost micromanaging an organization. As an example of where you do not typically see/look, is the lead up to the creation of spending bills. There is a ton of research, cajoling, persuading, and compromising on all sides of the aisle during that process.
It may seem that there is not a balance of power, but perceptions are notoriously faulty. It is the same way that if I were to watch the news regularly, I would think the world is being taken over by terrorists or that crime is at an all time high - neither of which are true. Things are not nearly as bad as they seem and people have a habit of romanticizing the past.
That being said, there is currently a divided government (e.g., political science speak for Legislative and Executive branches being controlled by different parties). In addition, this administration has had three Supreme Court appointments in a single term. That is pretty much unheard of. The Legislative Branch has also delegated some pretty significant authorities to the Executive, which has been problematic in some cases.
I guess to wrap this up - what you are seeing is not new. The behavior is just more apparent because of modern society's unprecedented access to information and a recent trend of politicians who don not have enough shame to hide their shady behavior.
Congress can trivially defund anything they please. It is illegal to spend money that hasn't been directly allocated by Congress.
The US's problem is that Congress has abdicated most of its power to government agencies in the Executive branch, and politicians are happy with this as it makes them less responsible for failures to properly govern.
If you're interested in learning more about the subject, I'd recommend this interview with Justin Amash (libertarian congressman not running for re-election). I think most of his statements (in this interview) are quite non-partisan.
> From a lay outsider's perspective, it seems like there is no real "balance of power" that's oft-touted when Americans discuss their politics.
Congress has taken the path of contacting the agency's IG and asking them to investigate and follow up. In a situation where the the IG is a trusted actor, which is usually true, this is a normal and reasonable preliminary step for Congress to take in an investigation.
Congress have the option to get increasingly adversarial in their oversight if it doesn't work out, but the nice thing about working with the IG is, there are no constitutional separation of powers issues with an investigation run by a cabinet-level agency's IG. When the system is functioning halfway normally, bureaucrats and political appointees in the agency must cooperate with the IG, and woe to them if they don't. Contrast that with a Congressional investigation that might be contested legally in a number of ways based on separation of powers concerns. Constitutionally and practically, it's the difference between the executive branch being investigated by the legislative branch and the executive branch being investigated by their own superiors in the executive branch.
The trick is that the system assumes IGs strive to be independent and empowers them accordingly, but the Trump administration has fired [1] multiple IGs that he felt were not friendly to his cause. With the investigation, if the IGs are not working in good faith, the Attorney General thwarts the investigation, the President is a crook, or whatever, the whole system melts down. And in this instance - where Congress is aware that the IG and others might not be working with their normal independence - Congress taking a lighter approach might be deference to the executive branch's authority, but practically, it's recognition of the fact that there's a decent chance there will be new cabinet officials, a new Attorney General, and a new President a few months from now. It's an inappropriate time for them to go nuclear.
I had to read the title a few times to my self it was that shocking. The audacity. The CBP is doing something illegal to citizens and then they refuse to come to court, essentially.
I wonder if a lawyer would say this was a cut and dried case of warrant-less search or if it's legally ambiguous. I can imagine naively arguments both for and against this.
According to [0] the "data comes from a variety of phone applications—such as gaming or weather apps." Their opt-out policy [1] confirms that since it requires a mobile advertising identifier. It seems like they can only collect data from mobile devices.
My son's response to the whole "Tik Tok gives the Chinese your deets" controversy was "I don't care, you can just buy all that information anyway." QED.
On one hand it seems pretty clear that ignoring Congress is pretty bad. On the other, buying something from a private party seems like it'd clearly be a requisition process and not require a warrant as unfortunate as that is.
Unreasonable searches do not become reasonable searches simply because they're done by Palantir.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That's never been interpreted to require, for example, that the USGS needs a warrant from a court to make a map.
Similarly, Palantir's collection of data isn't considered to be owned by those who it documents.
I may despise Palantir, or think there should be other reforms to how data "ownership" works, and I may think that private companies are creating a giant Constitution-circumventing loophole, but it's very disengenuous to suggest that our history would make any government purchasing or licensing of something from a private business subject to a warrant.
while emotionally i'm with you, logically i think that the data entering public commerce (until of course Palantir collected it illegally or in violation of privacy provisions of user contracts - which is pretty hard to establish given the multi-layer of data laundering) is like somebody walking the public street, ie. free game, in the sense that i don't see any explicit protection applicable in such a case.
It also seems to follow that slippery slope proverb "they came ... until they came for you" - government started by outsourcing (to military contractors) illegal actions against foreign citizens, statistically mostly accidental civilians, and the citizenry was mainly fine with it, and now government seems to apply the outsourcing loophole (starting with data, the rest will come later) to its own citizenry.
Failure to obey Congress? We're talking about agency which seems to have lost all humanity in their agents who shackle pregnant women right before and after delivery - i'm waiting for some military contractor to come up with and the CBP to buy the shackles allowing delivery while still on. Compare to that some database search without warrant...
I mean it is kind of naive to think that illegality and inhumanity can be practiced while confined just at one agency or area of operations without metastasizing across.
>while emotionally i'm with you, logically i think that the data entering public commerce (until of course Palantir collected it illegally or in violation of privacy provisions of user contracts - which is pretty hard to establish given the multi-layer of data laundering) is like somebody walking the public street, ie. free game, in the sense that i don't see any explicit protection applicable in such a case.
A fair assessment of the current situation. However, there's nothing stopping the US (or any other government) from restricting both the collection of such data and/or government use of that collected data.
What's apparently missing is the political will. Which points to the larger problem in the US -- sewers of filthy lucre flowing through the political system.
If you get rid of the necessity for all that money with strict public funding of elections, along with resources to allow all citizens to express themselves on an equal footing with everyone else, we're more likely to get a government focused on the needs of constituents rather than the desires of big money contributors.
How they get the data is not really as important as what they're doing with it -- that's what makes it an issue requiring a transparent legal analysis.
Ironically the legislation that created DHS (a big mistake made opportunistically at the time) also included a GOP wish that made it not subject to the same set of employee rules the rest of the civil service is.* So DHS is the easiest to do this with.
* It is still partially unionized, though the GOP tried to eliminate this when forming the department as well.