We must reject watchlists if we are a nation of laws

I favor strict national gun regulation. There are bad ways to do it, and good ways, but almost any consistent regime would be an improvement over the status quo. If you had asked me the day before yesterday, I would have said that I'd support nearly any gun control measure that was brought before the U.S. Congress.

Well, congratulations, Democrats! You've discovered a way to do it, maybe the only way, that I find stupid and unconscionable: extending the power of "terrorist watch lists" into the realm of gun control. That you should stage a theatrical stunt on the House floor over this measure, of all measures, after you've spent my entire adult life caving cravenly to one right-wing authoritarian demand after another, from illegal war to the normalization of torture, beggars the imagination.

Right off the bat, let's be clear that this measure will have almost no effect on gun violence. But unlike most gun control measures, this one is not merely feeble; it is actively malign, because it further empowers an evil institution.

The so-called "terrorist watch list" is a fundamentally broken idea that is both impossible to implement well, and a moral catastrophe for the rule of law and human equality and liberty.

There are over a million identities on the watchlist, mashed together from many sources of unknown provenance and overseen by nobody with any accountability to disinterested review. Anybody who has worked with database integrations and human organizations of any size knows with total certainty that this watchlist is full of nonsense. Ted Kennedy was on the watchlist. Bollywood movie star Shah Rukh Khan was on the watchlist. The "terrorist watchlist" is a pile of garbage wrapped in a tire fire.

It can't help but be so: the count of people worldwide who engage in non-state terrorism against civilians is miniscule. It is a numerical certainty that nearly all of the people who are on a million-member watchlist are entirely innocent and have no potential to commit a terrorist act.

And how did the data come to be such a fetid swamp of nonsense? Nobody will tell you. The contents of the watchlist are secret; the processes for getting an identity onto the watchlist are secret; the criteria for getting your identity off the watchlist are secret. Good luck if you end up on it, and you're somebody with less clout than a sitting United States Senator or an international celebrity.

Maybe it's time for a brief refresher on how a nation of laws is supposed to work. Laws must be known to the people who govern them. There must be an agreed-upon process — a due process, you might say — by which people are deprived of their rights under those laws. Once you have been convicted of a crime, the state's carceral machinery may act upon you, but until then, merely suspected persons retain their rights. And you don't lose your rights in secret, whereupon you may sue to get them back; the burden of proof is on the state to exercise this due process to take your rights away.

Making legal processes open to public inspection is the most powerful way that we know to ensure that their operation is just; that, for example, we are not merely turning people into second-class citizens for being Muslim or black or whatever the current least-favored category of citizens is. One would think that this argument, at least — that, as Black Lives Matter and related movements have made undeniably clear in recent years, the state operates in flagrantly discriminatory ways when it operates without scrutiny — would carry some currency, even in a left-of-center discourse that values civil liberties less and less as the Bush years recede into the distance.

Yet through the depressing machinery of tribalism, it has suddenly become conventional wisdom in progressive circles that all right-thinking people shall support a bill that further entrenches the influence of the racist, unaccountable, unconstitutional no-fly-list. Otherwise-intelligent people in my Twitter feed have even argued that passing this legislation is the first step towards "fixing" the watchlist:

5/ both so we can *start* regulating guns, *and* so we can start fixing the watchlist, we should absolutely pass the Democratic proposal.

— Ben Adida (@benadida) June 23, 2016

Astonishing. Astonishing. I have no way of even processing the level of wishful thinking and partisan groupthink necessary for a reasonable person to make this argument in good faith. Can you think of a single example in history where giving a Kafkaesque bureaucratic apparatus additional unaccountable power led to its reform, let alone any such apparatus connected with the security state? I doubt it; the ratchet turns in the other direction.

I have an alternate prediction. Should this legislation be passed by Democrats, we can look forward to the positions around the watchlist becoming crystallized along partisan lines. Since empowering the watchlist will count as a signature political achievement for Democrats, attained through a highly memorable media stunt, henceforth Democrats will fight any efforts that even remotely smell like dismantling the watchlist; this will, of course, include any efforts at meaningful reform. As reverence for the immaculate watchlist turns into a shibboleth of partisan identification, enterprising Democrats will eventually start to propose even more unconstitutional measures to extend its influence into other areas of public life. The extensions will come with, at best, token reforms; perhaps these reforms will moderate its effects on upper-class and upper-middle-class people with surplus time and financial resources, but leave the overall system fundamentally unaccountable and outside any recognizable form of due process for nearly everybody on it. Millions more human beings will suddenly become second-class in the eyes of state; their circle of rights will gradually shrink. The normalization of secret law in the United States will accelerate. Neither Democrats nor Republicans will have the stomach to turn this ratchet backwards.

Furthermore, having discovered again that "terrorism" is the magic word which can rally even the most spineless legislators into action and cow even the most intransigent opponents, Democrats will use this handy rhetorical cudgel to beat anybody who disagrees with them, just as Republicans did during the Bush years, until it is nearly meaningless with overuse. This will be used to pass all manner of additional legislation, equally stupid. Meanwhile, progressives like myself will be excoriated for allegedly being on the side of terrorists and right-wing loons, simply for opposing stupid and malign laws.

Limits to trust in the executive

W. Wilkinson points to some mostly good things Obama's done so far* to limit executive power. And, on the one hand, provided he sticks by these commitments, that's great for the next 4 or 8 years.

But on the other hand, the very fact that a President can change these norms simply by issuing an executive order is deeply disturbing. The next President can override these orders with different ones. This can be read as evidence that elections matter — contra the Greens and assorted other cynics who say there's no meaningful difference between the candidates of the two parties — but elections shouldn't matter in this particular way. It just shouldn't be possible for the President to run the executive in a way that's completely unanswerable to the public's questioning, to say nothing of the law.

You can't hand the fox the keys to the henhouse and then simply trust in the fox's integrity. Even if you manage to find the one vegetarian fox in the world, you would not call "finding vegetarian foxes" a long-term strategy for henhouse protection.

Which is why Congress has to play a vigorous role in limiting executive power. Which, in turn, is why it was so shameful for Obama to capitulate on giving Verizon and AT&T immunity for their FISA lawbreaking, and why it's so necessary for Pelosi and Reid to open vigorous investigations into the Bush administration's past behavior.

Sadly, I don't think the Democrats are up to it. It's still early days for the newly elected Congress, but I suspect that ongoing crises of various kinds will serve as ample excuse not to pursue "divisive" investigations.

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*Although I don't see the point of freezing the salaries of top White House aides, except as a temporary and symbolic gesture. In a multi-trillion dollar Federal government budget, saving a few millions of dollars in salaries at the top, and thereby risking not attracting the best of the best, is penny wise and pound foolish. Certain super-high-prestige positions will attract top caliber people simply by virtue of the job title. But as you go further down the ladder, you get positions where the title's less impressive, but it's still important to attract people whose other options would include high-paying and high-prestige positions in the private sector. It's all fine and well to say that public servants should be public-spirited, but when choosing their careers, real people balance financial compensation, personal satisfaction, and the public interest. For some skill sets, private-sector work pays more than public-sector work and simultaneously offers less frustration, more autonomy, and still some sense of serving the public interest (albeit via market mechanisms). Do you want to lose people with those skill sets? What marginal reduction in the efficiency of the executive branch will you accept in order to maintain the fiction that White House employees are motivated by public-spiritedness and nothing else? If you'll accept 0.1%, then you've just wasted a couple billion dollars. An expensive fiction.

I am not worried about Election Day

About a week ago, I moved on to worrying about what happens after.

We face astonishing problems. The scale of the missed opportunities and bumbling mistakes and grave moral sins our nation has committed since 2000 boggles the mind. When I think back to how America felt in 1999, when I was graduating from college, how full of thrilling promise and possibility, and when I consider where we are today, I wonder if some colossal prank has been played upon me by the universe. Welcome to adulthood, boy; now watch this bright and shiny world of your youth rust and rot with corruption from top to bottom.

So, eight years later, here we are. But where is that? On the net, I see pictures and videos of massive cheering crowds; everywhere I read of hope, and a barely contained undercurrent of relief, sometimes exultation. Suppose that the election goes as all these people wish. What's going to happen, really?

In all likelihood, the Democrats will hold not only the Presidency, but both houses of Congress. And K Street and Wall Street have seen this coming for some months now. Meanwhile we see the Republican Party both discredited and divided against itself, abandoned by virtually all those who would provide it either the moral fiber or the intellectual rigor to reform itself. I suspect it will be a long time in the wilderness for Republicans.

And far from being exultant, I am stone cold sober about what this means. It means that anybody who wants to have power or influence for the next few electoral cycles already knows that they need to get close with the Democratic Party. It means that the fate of the nation will hang on how well the Democratic Party's immune system neutralizes the parasites drawn by that power: the legions of influence-peddlers, along with amoral narcissists of all stripes burning with ambition and nothing else. Does this make you optimistic? If so, you haven't been paying attention to Congressional Democrats for the past two decades.

Meanwhile, consider what will happen to the Republican opposition. For nearly half a century, the plutocratic Republican leadership has been carelessly cultivating the jingoistic, theocratic, and crypto-racist elements of American society for political advantage. What has emerged is a stupid, snarling, egotistical beast, twenty-odd percent of the electorate that is confused, bitterly angry, fearful of change, utterly disconnected from reality, and boastful of a national patrimony that it sees as exclusively its own. I find it hard to imagine what this beast will become as increasing political marginalization and economic upheavals feed its resentment. The twenty percenters will not shrivel up and die; they will stew in the juices of their rage. How will that rage transform them?

All in all, I fear that we will soon witness some truly ugly times in American politics, of which the current campaign is only a foretaste.

Now, my fears are not predictions. I'm merely stating possibilities. I still hope that all my anxieties are misplaced. But nonetheless these are the anxieties that plague me. If you're worried about the election, put those worries aside; they're hardly worth the trouble. Far bigger potential problems lurk beyond it.

No, fuck *you*, Barack Obama

Fuck you, Barack Obama. And fuck your staff with a rusty tent pole for throwing this out with the Friday trash so that it wouldn't get much news coverage.

Fuck you, Nancy Pelosi. Fuck you, Harry Reid.

I know you don't care about my vote, so perhaps this will make a bigger impact: you can say goodbye to the $2300 checks I was going to write for this election cycle. Of course, you probably don't care about that either, because you're going to get more and bigger checks from the telecom companies.

Fuck it all, the Republicans can burn down this country and piss on the ashes for all I care, because clearly you chickenshit assholes have nothing better to offer us.

As is often the case, Mark Pilgrim has the most astute reaction.

Hillary in 2012

So, allegedly, if you do the math and look at the polls, there is no way that Hillary can take the nomination with pledged delegates unless Obama has some unprecedented meltdown. There is, of course, a simple explanation for her present behavior: she believes that she can beat John McCain's re-election bid in 2012, but she does not believe that she can beat Obama's re-election bid.

While I'm at it, I'm pretty sure I picked the worst possible time to subscribe to Tim Lambert's Corrente feed. It's been nothing but anti-Obama seething for the past two months. Come on man, I can deal with the fact that you disagree with me, but write about something else for a change. I unsubscribed.