PREEMPTIVE STRIKE

“To take action before something occurs or to prevent something from happening rather then waiting till it happens to deal with it.”

Under the laws of the land, it is not an acceptable defense to say that you have committed a violation of the law in order to prevent a criminal action against yourself or another. A simpler way of putting it is that you can not kill someone that some time in the future may kill you.  Since the future is often written as life moves through what is happening right now.  You can not justify self defense against some one who has at the moment not done anything to kill you.  At the moment they have not put your life in immediate danger, so you are not defending yourself.

The following is based on an actual case where the person did kill his best friend with the claim that he knew that sometime in the future the victim without warning would kill him. FOR THE MOST PART, the authorities did not doubt that this truly was the case. The names are not the true names of the actors involved:

Tim had grown up in a area where the general opinion of the Police was one of distrust.That the Police did not do their job to protect the citizens and more was a occupying force. It did not help Tim’s opinion when he made the decision to get involved in crime.  A younger life of committing crime, getting arrested and serving time.

But with his last prison time, he finally came to believe this was not the life he wanted.  He learned a trade in prison and if you ever took a look at the choices of trade that are available to learn while locked up, it might make you wonder just how anyone could really make it on the outside.  But Tim did, he worked hard and soon his life had changed with a family and working daily. His life was more like that of middle America, a nice house for himself and his wife and children. Nice things to enjoy and a pleasant and comfortable place to live.

His life long friend and someone he had grown up with was Fred. They had hung together, laugh together and even done time together.  Each had the others back and were just a call away from the other.  If one had done time in prison, the other would be there when they were released with new clothes and a place to stay till they got back into the swing of things. Fred was Tim’s only real friend and likewise, it had been that way since the beginning. When Fred had gotten out the last time, it was Tim )though by then had straighten out his life) who was there with the new clothes and brought Fred to his home to sleep on the couch and fed him.

While Fred had been locked up the last time, Tim had bought the family a new large color TV. One day when Tim and his family were out shopping, they came home and discovered the TV missing.  The house had been broken into and the only thing missing was the TV. When Fred came back he seemed to also be confused and angry that someone would have done such a thing to his best friend. He said he would try to find out who it was along with Tim was going to try to find out.

Monday, 8/23/10, Public Square

How broken is the U.S. Senate?

Senate Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5, requires unanimous consent for committees and subcommittees to hold hearings after two in the afternoon while the Senate is in session.  The Republicans had turned this old rule into a new means of obstruction.

Harry Reid controls the Senate’s schedule, but Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, who is the Minority Leader, can object. Since nearly everything in the Senate depends on unanimous consent, the main business of the place is a continuous negotiation between these two men.

The Senate has been referred to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”  But the amount of real deliberation, in terms of exchange of ideas, seems very limited.  The floor of the Senate is where the theatrics occur, not conversations which make point and counterpoint and challenge each other.  A senator typically gives a prepared speech that’s already been vetted through the staff. Then another guy gets up and gives a speech on a completely different subject.  While these speeches are given their colleagues aren’t even around.  The presiding officer of the Senate — freshmen of the majority party take rotating, hour-long shifts intended to introduce them to the ways of the institution — sits in his chair on the dais, and the only people who pay attention to a speech are the Senate stenographers.  Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber.

While senators are in Washington, their days are scheduled in fifteen-minute intervals: staff meetings, interviews, visits from lobbyists and home-state groups, caucus lunches, committee hearings, briefing books, floor votes, fund-raisers. Each senator sits on three or four committees and even more subcommittees, most of which meet during the same morning hours, which helps explain why committee tables are often nearly empty, and why senators drifting into a hearing can barely sustain a coherent line of questioning. All this activity is crammed into a three-day week, for it’s an unwritten rule of the modern Senate that votes are almost never scheduled for Mondays or Fridays, which allows senators to spend four days away from the capital.

Nothing dominates the life of a senator more than raising money.  Tom Daschle once sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think: “Sometimes, you’re dialing for dollars, you get the call, you’ve got to get over to vote, you’ve got fifteen minutes. You don’t have a clue what’s on the floor, your staff is whispering in your ears, you’re running onto the floor, then you check with your leader—you double check—but, just to make triple sure, there’s a little sheet of paper on the clerk’s table: The leader recommends an aye vote, or a no vote. So you’ve got all these checks just to make sure you don’t screw up, but even then you screw up sometimes. But, if you’re ever pressed, ‘Why did you vote that way?’—you just walk out thinking, Oh, my God, I hope nobody asks, because I don’t have a clue.”

How many rules of senatorial procedure are relics from days gone past?  How often do we have to hear about the Senate being deadlocked before we expect something more and better from our elected officials?  How much of what actually happens on the floor of the Senate makes a mockery of public policy?

fnord