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I wonder why the government fought this tooth and nail. Do they just really hate to lose, so they double down time and again? Or are they worried that losing on

I wonder why the government fought this tooth and nail. Do they just really hate to lose, so they double down time and again? Or are they worried that losing once will open the floodgates to a torrent of litigation?

xfitm3 8y ago
My belief is that behavior like this is no more than an attempt at a cover up and ultimately protecting each other. Much like some police officers will perjure themselves to protect another officer.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  This is the sort of behavior that groups of incompetent people engage in. Specifically reflexively trying to hide any appearance of incompetence.
chongli 8y ago
I would call it a mixture of pride and moral hazard. People are generally far less likely to pursue "scorched earth litigation" when they must personally bear the costs and risks of their actions. Given that this is the government, they are playing this cruel game with other people's money. Whatever happens, the public loses.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > they are playing this cruel game with other people's money. This meme about taxes needs to die.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    The government represents us in the same way that a hedge fund owner represents its clients. They have a job to do: ensuring the money is well spent, however it isn't their money and they do not make their own rules.
    - dgzl 8y ago
      Except taxpayers don't have much choice in this game unfortunately.
      - true_religion 8y ago
        What do you mean? The government is not a single contiguous entity. To have another government, elect different politicians. The frustration is that however much we dislike Tuesday government, these are the representatives that we collectively chose.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      That is literally not the case. Not legally, not morally, not in any reasonable sense except in a certain vein of political rhetoric which has no basis in reality. The government has no fiduciary duty to you or any other citizen or any tax payer.
  - chongli 8y ago
    Just because I'm critical of how the government allocates its spending doesn't mean I'm against taxes. Be careful about what you assume of people.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      That's not what I'm talking about. The government doesn't spend other peoples' money. It spends its own money. Tax revenue is money people owe to the government. Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. The meme I'm talking about is "taxpayer's money". It's a bullshit piece of rhetoric that tries to imply that the government has some legal or moral duty to the people who pay taxes. That is expressly not the case. The government's money is not in any sort of fiduciary relationship with anyone else. The fact that you nor anyone else didn't even notice what I was talking about just shows how pervasive this meme is.
      - jMyles 8y ago
        > Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. Maybe in the sense, like in Office Space, that "it becomes ours", but not in any real way. The government is the public entity; its things are everyone's things. The fact that it (with few exceptions) acts like a private entity, with entitlement to its plunder, doesn't change anything about this.
      - MaulingMonkey 8y ago
        Government employees aren't spending their own money. If you want to split hairs, we can say those employees spend "other entities money" instead of "other people's money", but the entire core of the points made remains. Similar problems of waste can happen with large corporations. (The smaller the company, the more likely such waste will actually impact your own paycheck, and the more market forces will make such waste painful.) "Taxpayer's money" is useful rhetorical shorthand to remind people that creating government money requires either increasing taxes (taking money from taxpayers), printing more money ("taxing" holders of the currency through inflation), etcetera. We have the notion of "for the people, by the people" - that the government should act in the interests of it's citizenry ("taxpayers", if sometimes quite indirectly), that the money should be spend wisely instead of wasted - both in the moral duty sense, and sometimes in the legal duty sense as well. Can you give an example of a legal and moral use of government funds that doesn't benefit taxpayers or citizens? The closest I can come up with is foreign aid and other outwardly focused actions, which still aim to "benefit" the local citizenry through warm and fuzzy feelings, better international relationships, better access to oil and foreign markets, etc...
  - dexterdog 8y ago
    How is it a meme? The govt gets to play with essentially unlimited funds. Is it a wonder that they rarely spend it efficiently? Is it also a wonder that they never actually lower overall taxes?
    - SomeHacker44 8y ago
      The recent large uptick of the federal deficit would seem to disagree with your final question.
    - c3534l 8y ago
      The government lowers taxes all the time. The last three presidents for instance.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        The first of the last three Presidents took office in 2001. Federal receipts in 2000 were $2.03T. They are now >$3.3T. (This also exceeds the amount of inflation over the same period.) And the increase in the deficits is the increase in spending on top of that.
        Shaanie 8y ago
        Given the population increase and inflation, my calculation puts the expected tax at 3.3167T.
        c3534l 8y ago
        Right, but Bush took office during the tech bust followed by a massive recession caused by 9/11 and a number of corporate scandals. Receipts may have increased, but that's because size of the pie has grown, not because you're taking a larger slice.
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        The number of people eligible for Medicare and the level of benefits it pays out are basically entirely independent from how many rolls of adhesive tape 3M sells. If they sell twice as much tape, so that the same percentage of their profits is twice as much money, you don't inherently have to expand Medicare in order to spend all the additional money (and then some). But they did. The size of government does not inherently need to scale linearly with the size of the economy. The cost of some services may scale with population, but that's something else entirely. For example, general productivity improvements may grow the economy at the same population level, but they imply needing fewer resources to achieve the same level of government services because the same productivity improvements should make the provision of government services more efficient too. And not all government services even need to scale with population. If we had twice as many citizens, would that really require us to double the military budget? "Government programs expand to consume all available funding" explains why the government budget does expand with the economy, not why it should.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    I’m getting very tired of seeing people here misinterpret others’ words in the least charitable light possible. GP in no way indicated that they were anti-tax, but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      > but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is. Literally not the case. I like how you said I misinterpreted the words of the original post but then repeated the very meme I said needs to die. It's fake news. The tax payer owes taxes to the government. The government spends its own money, not someone else's. The shallowest reflection on the matter would reveal this meme to be a sham of pure rhetoric.
  - jkartchner 8y ago
    It's not about taxes at all. The government has no financial limits, particularly where political damage could be done. A defendant, unless exceptionally wealthy, does. Dr. Ibrahim had to put up almost $4 million just to get back to square one. Do you have that kind of money lying around? If not, what would have happened to you in Dr. Ibrahims shoes?
- test6554 8y ago
  The other side of the coin could be equally terrible though. No government employee regulates anything because their personal bank account can’t handle it.
  - chongli 8y ago
    Yes, this is why very simple rules are difficult to apply to all cases in the real world. The answer to almost every question is "it depends."
tinus_hn 8y ago
The government believes the law, with its checks and balances, is not strong enough to prevent attacks. The law prefers letting 9 guilty people walk free if that prevents one innocent person from being unfairly punished. You can’t allow 9 hijackers to attack just to avoid not allowing one person to fly. As the government is limited by the law they use tricks to go around it, in this case by using a secret list with secret rules and contents. You’re not allowed to know the list exists so you can’t contest if you are on it by mistake. There can be no precedent that allows people to remove themselves from the list.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  Why all this costly nonsense? Executing the person on the spot would surely be more time and resource effective. It would also serve as a better deterrent.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    Because murder is illegal. Making your life impossible in and outside the justice system is not, as shown by this case. The government pays the legal fees, not the FBI agent or DOJ lawyers. Edit: My comment was meant to say that this was /is a loophole so the Gov stays "within the law." Killing you is obviously illegal, using their entire power to ruin you is not because they try 1000 arguments before the courts. May the truth win....er, if you have the time and tens of million$.
    - NullPrefix 8y ago
      >Because murder is illegal What? Who cares about that. We aren't talking about regular citizens, but about people on no fly lists. Only terrorists get there
- T3OU-736 8y ago
  But govt can write laws. After all, that is good the oft-abused NSLs are part of Patriot Act. Are you saying they the judiciary, upon seeing this law, would invalidate it at first opportunity?
gralx 8y ago
Dr. Ibrahim is still barred from entry to the U.S. "for reasons that remain secret, as noted in the latest 9th Circuit opinion". These "secret" reasons might answer your question and be the real reason Holder signed off on that affidavit (i.e., it was _not_ perjury). U.S. officials abuse their country's lack of transparency to evade scrutiny, and innocent people suffer because of it.
- wl 8y ago
  Current law is that you have no right to an explanation for why your visa was denied. After this litigation, the no-fly list is a different thing entirely. I'd put money on her visa being denied because the folks who screwed up and put her on the no-fly list resent her fighting so hard and so publicly to get off it.
dgzl 8y ago
All the above. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Small government supporters argue that without the power to be held (i.e. small government) that you can worry less about corruption, because it's easier to see.
- p_thrillington 8y ago
  Right, it moves the corruption to the private sector, where the now smaller government is (and by proxy those vote) unable to effectively police it
  - dgzl 8y ago
    Perfect, quite literally. When corruption exposes itself, and it does from time to time (literally pick any recent year for a serious example), the private sector and free market should give us a competitive option. There is no option for our government.

xfitm3 8y ago

My belief is that behavior like this is no more than an attempt at a cover up and ultimately protecting each other. Much like some police officers will perjure themselves to protect another officer.

Gibbon1 8y ago
This is the sort of behavior that groups of incompetent people engage in. Specifically reflexively trying to hide any appearance of incompetence.

chongli 8y ago

I would call it a mixture of pride and moral hazard. People are generally far less likely to pursue "scorched earth litigation" when they must personally bear the costs and risks of their actions. Given that this is the government, they are playing this cruel game with other people's money. Whatever happens, the public loses.

danharaj 8y ago
> they are playing this cruel game with other people's money. This meme about taxes needs to die.
- true_religion 8y ago
  The government represents us in the same way that a hedge fund owner represents its clients. They have a job to do: ensuring the money is well spent, however it isn't their money and they do not make their own rules.
  - dgzl 8y ago
    Except taxpayers don't have much choice in this game unfortunately.
    - true_religion 8y ago
      What do you mean? The government is not a single contiguous entity. To have another government, elect different politicians. The frustration is that however much we dislike Tuesday government, these are the representatives that we collectively chose.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    That is literally not the case. Not legally, not morally, not in any reasonable sense except in a certain vein of political rhetoric which has no basis in reality. The government has no fiduciary duty to you or any other citizen or any tax payer.
- chongli 8y ago
  Just because I'm critical of how the government allocates its spending doesn't mean I'm against taxes. Be careful about what you assume of people.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    That's not what I'm talking about. The government doesn't spend other peoples' money. It spends its own money. Tax revenue is money people owe to the government. Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. The meme I'm talking about is "taxpayer's money". It's a bullshit piece of rhetoric that tries to imply that the government has some legal or moral duty to the people who pay taxes. That is expressly not the case. The government's money is not in any sort of fiduciary relationship with anyone else. The fact that you nor anyone else didn't even notice what I was talking about just shows how pervasive this meme is.
    - jMyles 8y ago
      > Once the government has it, that money is the government's money. Maybe in the sense, like in Office Space, that "it becomes ours", but not in any real way. The government is the public entity; its things are everyone's things. The fact that it (with few exceptions) acts like a private entity, with entitlement to its plunder, doesn't change anything about this.
    - MaulingMonkey 8y ago
      Government employees aren't spending their own money. If you want to split hairs, we can say those employees spend "other entities money" instead of "other people's money", but the entire core of the points made remains. Similar problems of waste can happen with large corporations. (The smaller the company, the more likely such waste will actually impact your own paycheck, and the more market forces will make such waste painful.) "Taxpayer's money" is useful rhetorical shorthand to remind people that creating government money requires either increasing taxes (taking money from taxpayers), printing more money ("taxing" holders of the currency through inflation), etcetera. We have the notion of "for the people, by the people" - that the government should act in the interests of it's citizenry ("taxpayers", if sometimes quite indirectly), that the money should be spend wisely instead of wasted - both in the moral duty sense, and sometimes in the legal duty sense as well. Can you give an example of a legal and moral use of government funds that doesn't benefit taxpayers or citizens? The closest I can come up with is foreign aid and other outwardly focused actions, which still aim to "benefit" the local citizenry through warm and fuzzy feelings, better international relationships, better access to oil and foreign markets, etc...
- dexterdog 8y ago
  How is it a meme? The govt gets to play with essentially unlimited funds. Is it a wonder that they rarely spend it efficiently? Is it also a wonder that they never actually lower overall taxes?
  - SomeHacker44 8y ago
    The recent large uptick of the federal deficit would seem to disagree with your final question.
  - c3534l 8y ago
    The government lowers taxes all the time. The last three presidents for instance.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      The first of the last three Presidents took office in 2001. Federal receipts in 2000 were $2.03T. They are now >$3.3T. (This also exceeds the amount of inflation over the same period.) And the increase in the deficits is the increase in spending on top of that.
      - Shaanie 8y ago
        Given the population increase and inflation, my calculation puts the expected tax at 3.3167T.
      - c3534l 8y ago
        Right, but Bush took office during the tech bust followed by a massive recession caused by 9/11 and a number of corporate scandals. Receipts may have increased, but that's because size of the pie has grown, not because you're taking a larger slice.
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        The number of people eligible for Medicare and the level of benefits it pays out are basically entirely independent from how many rolls of adhesive tape 3M sells. If they sell twice as much tape, so that the same percentage of their profits is twice as much money, you don't inherently have to expand Medicare in order to spend all the additional money (and then some). But they did. The size of government does not inherently need to scale linearly with the size of the economy. The cost of some services may scale with population, but that's something else entirely. For example, general productivity improvements may grow the economy at the same population level, but they imply needing fewer resources to achieve the same level of government services because the same productivity improvements should make the provision of government services more efficient too. And not all government services even need to scale with population. If we had twice as many citizens, would that really require us to double the military budget? "Government programs expand to consume all available funding" explains why the government budget does expand with the economy, not why it should.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  I’m getting very tired of seeing people here misinterpret others’ words in the least charitable light possible. GP in no way indicated that they were anti-tax, but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    > but correctly indicated that government officials are not personally responsible for the costs of litigation, the tax payer is. Literally not the case. I like how you said I misinterpreted the words of the original post but then repeated the very meme I said needs to die. It's fake news. The tax payer owes taxes to the government. The government spends its own money, not someone else's. The shallowest reflection on the matter would reveal this meme to be a sham of pure rhetoric.
- jkartchner 8y ago
  It's not about taxes at all. The government has no financial limits, particularly where political damage could be done. A defendant, unless exceptionally wealthy, does. Dr. Ibrahim had to put up almost $4 million just to get back to square one. Do you have that kind of money lying around? If not, what would have happened to you in Dr. Ibrahims shoes?
test6554 8y ago
The other side of the coin could be equally terrible though. No government employee regulates anything because their personal bank account can’t handle it.
- chongli 8y ago
  Yes, this is why very simple rules are difficult to apply to all cases in the real world. The answer to almost every question is "it depends."

tinus_hn 8y ago

The government believes the law, with its checks and balances, is not strong enough to prevent attacks. The law prefers letting 9 guilty people walk free if that prevents one innocent person from being unfairly punished. You can’t allow 9 hijackers to attack just to avoid not allowing one person to fly. As the government is limited by the law they use tricks to go around it, in this case by using a secret list with secret rules and contents. You’re not allowed to know the list exists so you can’t contest if you are on it by mistake. There can be no precedent that allows people to remove themselves from the list.

NullPrefix 8y ago
Why all this costly nonsense? Executing the person on the spot would surely be more time and resource effective. It would also serve as a better deterrent.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Because murder is illegal. Making your life impossible in and outside the justice system is not, as shown by this case. The government pays the legal fees, not the FBI agent or DOJ lawyers. Edit: My comment was meant to say that this was /is a loophole so the Gov stays "within the law." Killing you is obviously illegal, using their entire power to ruin you is not because they try 1000 arguments before the courts. May the truth win....er, if you have the time and tens of million$.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    >Because murder is illegal What? Who cares about that. We aren't talking about regular citizens, but about people on no fly lists. Only terrorists get there
T3OU-736 8y ago
But govt can write laws. After all, that is good the oft-abused NSLs are part of Patriot Act. Are you saying they the judiciary, upon seeing this law, would invalidate it at first opportunity?

gralx 8y ago

Dr. Ibrahim is still barred from entry to the U.S. "for reasons that remain secret, as noted in the latest 9th Circuit opinion". These "secret" reasons might answer your question and be the real reason Holder signed off on that affidavit (i.e., it was _not_ perjury). U.S. officials abuse their country's lack of transparency to evade scrutiny, and innocent people suffer because of it.

wl 8y ago
Current law is that you have no right to an explanation for why your visa was denied. After this litigation, the no-fly list is a different thing entirely. I'd put money on her visa being denied because the folks who screwed up and put her on the no-fly list resent her fighting so hard and so publicly to get off it.

dgzl 8y ago

All the above. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Small government supporters argue that without the power to be held (i.e. small government) that you can worry less about corruption, because it's easier to see.

p_thrillington 8y ago
Right, it moves the corruption to the private sector, where the now smaller government is (and by proxy those vote) unable to effectively police it
- dgzl 8y ago
  Perfect, quite literally. When corruption exposes itself, and it does from time to time (literally pick any recent year for a serious example), the private sector and free market should give us a competitive option. There is no option for our government.