MWI Weekly 9.9.2022
"Queen Elizabeth II at State Opening 2014" by Mikepaws is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
With the unofficial end of summer here, let me just say, before we get to anything else, we hope you enjoyed your Labor Day weekend and some final days of fun and frivolity before getting back to The Routine.
At the Institute, it's been a challenging but productive several months. But I'm happy to report, we've learned a lot since our early days, and with everyone now back we're ready to implement our lessons learned.
We're also now in a position to tackle some of the big projects we've had in mind all along. We'll be checking off boxes in the coming months, building step-by-step, so stay tuned. It's kind of an old-school erector set job, but one where we now have a more detailed blueprint than ever to guide our work. It's pretty exciting.
And now, let's take a look at the latest.
A Peace of Her Heart
The death of Queen Elizabeth II yesterday -- sad as it was not only for her family and subjects, but for her many admirers -- was not exactly unexpected, given her age. But it still came as something of a shock. More than a few people have noted how she seemed ready to just go on forever.
Part of the reason is surely her stunning longevity. Her 70 years as monarch represents the longest reign in British history, and one of the longest in the history of the world. Hard as it is to believe, nine of 10 people alive on Earth today were born after she ascended to the throne. She literally was the queen of a lifetime.
She was also, by all accounts, an extraordinary individual. For us Americans, raised as we are on small-"r" republicanism, we may think of her only in terms of the pomp and circumstance surrounding her role in British society. It's something we're not always fully in tune with (as Alice Frazier of Washington, D.C. so vividly demonstrated in 1991).
But where we have fallen short of obeying the proprieties, or perhaps failed to fully grasp them, she never lost her cool. That alone would have been worthy of admiration. There's something commendable about anyone who can stay unruffled when protocols centuries in the making are being violated, especially when those protocols are all about you.
Her forbearance and impeccable good manners were perhaps never more on display than during her trip to Northern Ireland in 2012. There, she famously shook hands with Martin McGuiness, who was then a deputy First Minister in the Northern Irish government. But before his career in elective politics, McGuiness was, by all accounts, a member of the Irish Republican Army, and perhaps even a senior commander, during the Troubles.
Which made any recognition from the Queen herself highly symbolic. After all, her second cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had been assassinated by the IRA in 1979, on the same day 18 British soldiers had been killed in an ambush. To acknowledge McGuiness was to turn a page many thought could never be turned.
Yet turn it she did, with stunning calm and assurance. The significance was lost on no one, especially those who were even then (and, to some extent, even now) still living in the aftermath of decades of conflict, strife and death. And while we will never know exactly what she said to McGuiness privately, we do know how much her public gesture of graciousness meant to those most concerned.
And that, perhaps, will be her lasting legacy in history. Much will be written about the dissolution of the British Empire during her reign, but we can only hope there will be enough room left over to recognize how much and how often she at least tried to use her many roles to pursue justice, democracy and human rights -- perhaps more than any previous King or Queen of England.
In the long, long history of the British monarchy, that is not a half-bad legacy to claim. May her majesty rest in peace.
More Mayhem at Mar-a-Lago
Just when it seemed the story out of Florida couldn't get any worse, it got much worse. Which maybe shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, given the former president's lifelong track record of stories, well, just getting worse.
But in this case, it's not some comically obvious grift, or even a fairly clever piece of (let's be charitable here) financial fancy dancing like the DWAC Trump SPAC. What's at stake is nothing less than the national security of the United States of America, and it's no joke.
The first and most obvious problem we face is trying to understand what secrets may have been lost from Trump's storage room. Or office closet. Or from the bottom of Melania's undies drawer. Or wherever else he stashed the papers he purloined from the federal government.
Figuring that angle out requires the authorities to be able to examine the papers and put together the story of what they were, where they were, who may have seen them who shouldn't have and (and here's where things get really bad) who may have gotten their hands on them if they're missing entirely.
None of which is much of a concern to Trump himself, of course. His focus is, as always, on saving his own skin. And having learned how to handle himself from none other than Roy Cohn, he knows his only shot now is to delay, delay, delay.
Which brings us to Judge Aileen Cannon and the issue of the special master. First, to be clear: Special masters are assigned to review evidence in federal cases all the time when issues of privilege arise. There's nothing particularly special about it, other than the name.
And while the Left may want to insist Judge Cannon is tilting the scales in favor of Trump because she's a Trump appointee -- and a recess appointee, at that -- there's nothing inherently wrong with a federal judge showing a former president a certain degree of deference, either. Which Judge Cannon made clear in the hearing to discuss the matter:
A Mar-a-Lago Showdown in Federal Court - Lawfare (lawfareblog.com)
So far, so good, even if it means playing into Trump's hands a little by dragging things out.
But where things go off the rails is on the question of privilege. Boiled down to its essentials, Trump's lawyers were arguing executive privilege covers documents which belong to the federal government. They're not his. It's a completely different issue than anything covered by attorney-client privilege, which is what a special master is supposed to determine in situations where the property belongs to the defendant.
(Trump jumbles it up all the time when talking to his sympathizers, of course, likely on purpose. Privilege is privilege is privilege.)
Were that the only issue, we'd be talking about bad lawyering and decision by a federal judge who bent over backwards to make up for the truly awful arguments being made before them. It's the kind of work a jurist normally would do for a pro se defendant, meaning someone who was defending themselves in court and getting themselves into a lot of hot water.
Unfortunately, in her decision Judge Cannon included a stay preventing the Department of Justice (read: FBI) from using the materials seized in its investigation of Trump for mishandling classified materials or obstructing justice. But that also means the FBI can't cooperate with the rest of the national security community in trying to track down where the information may have gone.
Yesterday, the government filed the expected appeal, and it's quite perfectly crafted. Whether or not the judge will reverse her decision probably won't matter; on appeal higher courts will almost certainly allow the government to proceed as normal. And whether or not a special master can be agreed between the parties today, the DoJ has mostly concluded its review at this point, anyway.
Which makes all of this, ultimately, a not-entirely-unreasonable attempt by a judge to accommodate an entirely unreasonable potential defendant -- Trump has not actually been charged, so we haven't even reached the point where all the normal remedies would be available to him anyway -- with a poorly reasoned decision delaying the process in a case where every minute may matter.
In other words, the usual mayhem.
How much damage, if any, has actually been done is a matter of assessment. Some have taken a CIA memo from last October as a sign there's already trouble, although there's no way to verify whether any information lost from Mar-a-Lago can be tied to the loss of informants the memo refers to. Yet.
But either way, the threat to national security is obvious enough. And it's no joke. No joke at all.
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From Commentary:
This week we feature a good long post on Michael J. Mazarr's seven attributes of national success. The piece includes quite a bit of policy to go along with the general themes. And our own Whig twist, of course. So check it out. We'll be expounding on all of it going forward.
READ MORE >
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A rather strange story boiled up through the Culture War over the last couple weeks or so. Normally, it's the kind of thing we could dismiss as the usual silliness when an agenda sneaks its way into an inappropriate place. But what makes this particular story so intriguing, and so disturbing, is how subtly the goalposts are shifted.
It starts with a relatively standard review of ethics rules by a scientific journal, Nature Human Behaviour, which is part of the famous Nature family of publications. Fair enough; it's incumbent on researchers to ensure they are not doing any harm to the subjects of their research.
But this policy takes it a step further. It's not the subjects of the research they're concerned about. It's anyone who could be "harmed" by the conclusions the research leads to:
(P)eople can be harmed indirectly. For example, research may — inadvertently — stigmatize individuals or human groups. It may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. It may provide justification for undermining the human rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics.
Along with other Springer Nature colleagues, we led the development of new guidance that addresses these potential harms and is incorporated in our research ethics guidance. This guidance extends consideration of the principles of ‘beneficence’ and ‘non-maleficence’ — key elements of all ethics frameworks for research with human participants — to any academic publication.
The danger to the free exchange of ideas should be obvious enough. But for scientists especially, whose entire profession is supposed to be centered around the pursuit of truth wherever it may lead, it's a particularly chilling view. It's hard to see how any researcher could feel free to publish their conclusions under such a policy without at least considering whether they'll be pilloried for not being gentle enough to someone in a favored group.
And that is not how science is supposed to work. If we are only to deal in comfortable facts, or at least facts which only make the right people comfortable in the right ways, we're no longer dealing with facts at all.
Finally, a piece in the Associated Press hits on how the National Archive has become a political target. It's the kind of craziness probably no one could have envisioned just a few short years ago, but it's becoming more and more common as the rot reaches deeper and wider into even our most basic -- and innocent -- institutions.
How Archives went from 'National Treasure' to political prey | AP News
It's the kind of lunacy the Institute, and the Whig Movement in general, is committed to combatting. If there's one thing we wish to do more than anything else, it's restore a semblance of sanity to our political discourse. To become a member and join in the effort, just click on the link below or visit our website. More voices mean a better country, a better nation and a better world.
Why Become a Member? — Modern Whig Institute
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a Welcome Letter
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(Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery.)
And that does it for this week. Remember to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates on our newest content and initiatives. And be sure to say hello.
As always, it's a pleasure to be at your service. See you next week.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org. ___________________________________________________________
The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.
