Criminal Negligence

So, today thousands of flights were grounded, and thousands more were forced to stay in the air, because the FAA had a computer glitch that made it difficult to process all the flight plans of all the commercial and private flights.

In the course of reporting this event, news agencies have discovered that the FAA computer system is a patchwork, ad-hoc network of outdated equipment that has been in need of an holistic upgrade for several years. After last April’s FAA controversy, where thousands of flights were grounded over the FAA’s failure to properly inspect planes for a certain cabling issue, it should now be clear that the FAA is a poorly run, poorly organized division of the federal bureaucracy.

If only they were the only ones. How about the FDA? Just this year, we’ve had reports of salmonella from spinach, tomatoes, and jalapenos, all of which sneaked past FDA inspectors and made it into our grocery stores. How about the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who let children's toys come into our country from China with lead paint? And what about FEMA? We all remember how the response to Hurricane Katrina went.

And of course, there is the Justice Department. Eight Federal Judges were fired for their political views, an act that is unquestionably illegal. The former AG Alberto Gonzalez’s response, under oath, was that he “couldn’t recall” why the judges were fired, he “couldn’t recall” who told him to fire the judges, and he “couldn’t recall” what as discussed in the meetings regarding those judges, or even who sat in on those meetings. The White House chief of staff and the White House Counsel were both subpoenaed to testify before Congress regarding the issue, and of course neither one showed up. Congress held them in contempt, the courts agreed, and the White House’s response has been to appeal the decision. They don’t have anything to hide, of course.

Speaking of the Justice Department, the woman who was in charge of hiring federal prosecutors was Monica Goodling, the former Bush Campaign opposition researcher. It turns out, she was asking job applicants for the non-political position of prosecutor questions like “why are you a Republican?” and “what is it about George W Bush that makes you want to serve him?” Obviously, this is highly illegal. But the Justice Department has refused to investigate itself in this matter. The Attorney General’s reason for not investigating: “Not every violation of the law is a crime.” Wow.

Finally, there’s the FEC, whose job it is to be the referee in all federal elections. During the primaries, when the McCain campaign was running low on cash, they requested public financing. The deal with public financing is that the government gives you money for your campaign, but on the condition that you accept a spending limit. The McCain campaign requested the public funds, then used the promise of public funding as collateral to obtain a private loan from a bank. Once they received the private loan, they cancelled the request for pubic financing. At the very least, this is a shady abuse of a loophole in the public financing system.

But there’s more: according to public financing laws, laws that John McCain himself co-wrote in the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, a candidate cannot opt out of public funding once he’s signed up for it, unless he gets permission from the FEC. It is the job of the FEC to investigate this and other possible breaches of finance law, and to impose penalties accordingly. However, the FEC has not investigated the McCain campaign’s shady abuse of public funding, because the FEC cannot do anything right now. The FEC is supposed to be made up of six members, three from each party, and a quarom of 4 members is required to initiate investigations. Right now, there are only two people on the FEC, with four vacancies waiting to be filled.

That’s right: in the middle of the presidential election, there is no referee. It is the responsibility of the President to appoint people to fill vacancies in the FEC, with Congressional approval. The problem is, the President keeps nominating unqualified friends for the position, and the Congress will not approve them.

And this gets to my point. The heads of the FAA, Justice Department, CPSC, FDA, and FEMA were all unqualified friends of the President who were nominated by the President and rubber-stamp approved by the Republican Congress. And in every one of the those agencies, there have been catastrophic failures ranging from national inconveniences to national tragedies. The management of the federal bureaucracy has been criminally negligent.

So, when bleeding heart liberals like me whine about impeaching our president, it’s not just because of the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, or the abuses of federal power through the FISA program, or the use of Executive Signing Statements as a de facto line-item vito, or the systematic use of former Pentagon officials as agents of propaganda on American soil, or the selective use of intelligence to mislead the nation into supporting an unnecessary war, or the nationwide use of the politics of personal destruction, or the reckless waste of taxpayer money in the biggest expansion of the federal government in fifty years, or the leaking of an undercover CIA agent’s identity into the press as a way getting revenge on her husband, or the granting of no-bid contracts to companies whose executives are personal friends of the administration, or the decision to grant federal contractors in Iraq full exemption from both American laws and Iraqi laws, or any of the other countless hundreds of examples of corruption and poor judgment. We ask for impeachment because the primary responsibility of the president is not to be commander-in-chief, or to be chief diplomat and head of state, but to be the manager of the federal bureaucracy, to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” And with all the failures of our government in the last eight years, at some point we have to blame the guy in charge.