Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Washington, D.C.: Backsliding?

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In 2006, the people of Washington, D.C., elected Adrian Fenty (D) to be their sixth mayor since the establishment of the ‘home rule’ city government. I certainly didn’t agree with him on everything—his positions on gun control, for example, were misguided and counterproductive—but on the whole, Fenty had a very positive impact on the city. He and his appointed schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, embarked on a surprisingly successful mission to improve the District’s public schools. He overhauled and reorganized dysfunctional city government agencies. He and his appointed police chief, Cathy Lanier, managed to reduce the city’s homicide rate by over twenty-five percent. In the four years Fenty was in office, D.C. became a noticeably nicer, safer place to visit.

Coming to power eight years after Mayor Anthony Williams (D), a competent if unremarkable leader, Fenty inherited a city on a positive trajectory. Williams had largely dismantled the almost twenty-years of cocaine-encrusted embarrassment left by Mayor Marion Barry (D), and had guided the city into a healthy cycle of renewal and improvement. The budgets were in good shape, crime rates were dropping (though not fast enough), and the schools had seen some tepid improvements. Williams deserves much praise for what he did. When Fenty became mayor, he took all those good things and accelerated them. Williams’s tenure was marked with slow, steady steps in the right direction. Fenty, however, seemed to prefer taking energetic leaps.

Fenty wasn’t (and still isn’t) a ‘politics as usual’ kind of guy. Before becoming mayor, he broke ranks with then-Mayor Williams and opposed city funding for the Washington Nationals baseball stadium, believing that the team should have had to pay for its own playground—a refreshingly responsible, free-market position. Since leaving the mayor’s office, he has publicly supported Governor Scott Walker’s (R-WI) efforts to rein-in Wisconsin’s ballooning budget by reducing the coercive power of government employee unions. The Fenty administration was largely bereft of corruption and controversy; the best his opposition could come up with was complaints about how Rhee dealt with the teachers’ unions, and a big ‘scandal’ that revolved around how he didn’t share tickets to sporting events with members of the city council.

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Thanks for Nothing, Motorola

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When I decided to buy my first tablet computer, I played around with the available machines and settled on the Motorola Xoom ‘Family Edition,’ or mz505. Android devices were the best option since I already had an Android phone and would have a big head-start on apps. The mz505 seemed to be the best balance of performance and price among Android tablets at the time—mid $300’s and enough horsepower to avoid any lagginess. Most importantly, Motorola had made an explicit promise that the mz505—then running Android 3.1—would soon be upgraded to the new and improved Android 4.

That was in January 2012, and Android 4 was already three months old. Motorola had implied (though hadn’t promised) that the update would come in the first quarter—before the end of March. When they eventually announced their upgrade schedule, I was disappointed to find that the mz505 was scheduled for upgrade in the second quarter—which ended this past Saturday. But a month or so ago, Motorola updated their schedule and moved the mz505 upgrade to third quarter—by the end of September. That will be almost a year after Android 4 came out. Thanks for nothing, Motorola.

Motorola’s miserable failure to provide a basic level of software update support for their products is inexcusable, especially since they promised that support for the mz505 before I bought it. I plan to stick with the Android operating system for now, but from now on I will only buy Google’s flagship ‘Nexus’ devices. They are all-but guaranteed to get timely software updates for as long as the hardware can handle them. I’m tired of being artificially locked out of the new features, bigfixes, and improvements of my chosen platform.

For my phone, a Motorola Droid 2 Global that has also been artificially blocked from updates, I’m not eligible for an affordable upgrade until the end of the year. But Google, partnering with Asus, has announced their own Nexus tablet: the Nexus 7. It is a seven inch tablet that ships with Android 4.1, and it costs only two hundred dollars. I ordered one on the day it was announced, and as soon as it arrives my mz505 goes up on eBay. Maybe it’ll get the Android 4 update someday . . . if Motorola ever awakens from their stupor. I wouldn’t count on it though. It’s bad policy to trust liars.

Holder Found in Contempt of Congress

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The United States House of Representatives has voted 255-67 to hold Attorney General Eric Holder (D) in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with congressional committee subpoenas. Seventeen Democratic representatives joined in the vote for the contempt resolution, while over one hundred protested by walking out of the chamber and refusing to vote.

Holder has refused to turn over certain Department of Justice documents relating to illegal gunrunning operations executed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) between 2006 and 2011. In addition, he has repeatedly provided misleading and inaccurate testimony to congressional investigators, including lying about when he found out about the operation and wrongfully accusing his predecessor of having been briefed on it.

This is the first time in U.S. history that a sitting cabinet-level officer has been held in contempt of Congress, although lower ranking officials—including White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton under President George W. Bush (R)—have been held in contempt for similar refusals to cooperate with congressional investigations.

The House of Representatives will now refer this matter to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ronald Machen Jr., who has a duty to investigate and decide whether to bring criminal charges against Holder. Machen, however, is part of Holder’s Justice Department, which presents an obvious conflict of interest. Under normal circumstances Holder would be expected to appoint a special prosecutor instead, but since he is the subject of the resolution this would also present a serious conflict of interest.

It is unclear at this time how these conflicts of interest will be reconciled and whether a criminal investigation will move forward.

Supreme Court Upholds ‘ObamaCare’

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The United States Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to uphold the the ‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,’ which is colloquially known as ‘ObamaCare,’ including the controversial individual mandate. The court also voted to limit, but not invalidate, some of the law’s Medicaid provisions.

The court ruled that the mandate is actually a tax, and therefore falls under the federal government’s broad taxing authorities. The argument put forth by the court is that the mandate is not actually a mandate, per se, since citizens still have a legal option to not comply with it and pay a fine (now redefined as a tax) instead. So, in short, citizens have the option to buy health insurance and pay lower taxes (i.e., not pay the fine), or not buy health insurance and pay higher taxes (i.e., pay the fine). Notably, the court also ruled that the mandate would not have been constitutional under the commerce clause.

It is unclear what limits, if any, the court has left in-place on the extent of federal authorities. Under the precedent now established by this ruling, it would appear that the federal government can require any action or inaction on the part of its citizens, so long as the punishment for failure to comply is a monetary fine (now redefined as a tax) rather than criminal charges. For example, imagine a federal requirement that all families purchase a Chevrolet Volt or pay a $60,000 fine. It appears that this would now be perfectly legal.

The majority opinion was issued by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Justice Elena Kagan. A dissenting opinion was issued by Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Samuel Alito.

Supreme Court Overturns Bulk of AZ Immigration Law

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The United States Supreme Court has voted 5-3 to overturn the bulk of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, ruling that many of its provisions are preempted by federal immigration law. In particular, the court has overturned the state-level requirement that aliens carry registration papers, the state-level prohibition on illegal immigrants seeking work, and the requirement that police stop and arrest anybody they suspect of being an illegal immigrant.

The court did, however, uphold the law’s requirement that police officers verify the immigration status of anybody lawfully detained for other reasons when there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the detained person is in the U.S. illegally. Also notable, many of the law’s provisions—the requirement that aliens carry registration papers, for example—simply mirror federal immigration laws which remain in-place.

At issue in this case was the doctrine of federal preemption. Immigration policy clearly falls under the federal government’s constitutional authorities, but it was unclear whether states had the authority to enforce federal immigration policy on their own when federal authorities failed to do so, or whether they had the authority to enact their own, stricter immigration policies within their own borders. This ruling strictly limits state authorities and places immigration matters almost wholly in the federal sphere.

The majority opinion was issued by Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Separate opinions were issued by Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Samuel Alito that concurred and dissented with different parts of the majority opinion. Justice Elana Kagan recused herself from participation due to her involvement in the case as Solicitor General under President Barack Obama (D) before being appointed to the court.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.