This is actually not true! This is a pedantic point but I think is important.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
Ok, so the article buries a lot of the context here. To clarify: plaintiffs can 100% sue the city for this under tort law (I believe the clean water act, but there’s probably other causes of action). This particular case was about suing the city officials in their personal capacity. So making those individuals pay, instead of/in addition to the city. Government officials are generally protected under qualified immunity. One exception to qualified immunity is 42 USC 1983: deprivation of rights under color of law. But that requires them to prove that these officials violated some constitutional right, beyond just some statute.
The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
> This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
The state can also file criminal charges against the officials, although given that the Flint water crisis didn't result in any criminal convictions despite the evidence, I'm not holding my breath. Not to mention that the state could choose _not_ to file charges. In which case, what avenue for justice is left? Financial compensation is only part of it.
They absolutely can, depending on the jurisdiction. I saw plenty of cases out of Atlanta with drug possession cases with no prior history getting an ankle monitor, back when they were live streaming bond hearings from Rice street.
What on earth is this claim? Are you sure you’re on top of Fulton County’s 1500-person ankle monitoring program, and the push to reduce jail overcrowding? Have you really been tracking the national trend to introduce ankle monitors for pre-trial defendants who would have been simply released on recognizance?
I’ve always wondered why candidates need so much money. I mean, this doesn’t go directly into their pockets, it’s largely used to fund ads, right?
I have a pet theory about political ads that I would love to find data to be able to confirm/deny. My theory is that those political ads don’t actually convince anyone about who to vote for, and aren’t intended to. Instead, it’s about convincing the people who already support you and your party to show up and vote. If that’s true, then the root cause of all of this money being injected into politics is really a symptom of low voter turnout. And so anything we can do to improve voter turnout will lessen the influence of money in politics.
My justification for this theory is that I see all of these political ads and really don’t find them convincing or liable to change my vote. I actually find attack ads often have the opposite effect on me, where I am immediately skeptical of whatever claim they advance and feel sure there’s important context they are leaving out. Of course I know I’m not the average voter, and other people may see it differently, but I’d love to see some data on this.
I think you may be taking for granted the political dupoloy and candidate equality.
Third-party candidates are almost always unknown and remain unknown to the public, because they have no money to advertise and achieve name recognition, get their message out. The pay-to-play nature of elections preserves the duopoly of the major parties.
Consider also primary campaigns: typically an incumbent has vastly more money to spend than challengers, who are again usually unknown.
When it comes to general election campaigns between two duopolist candidates, there is usually less of a difference in fundraising ability, so it may seem like money doesn't matter a lot. I see campaign donations as more of an entrance fee than a guarantee of victory. It's gatekeeping, where the gates are closed to any politician who can't be purchased by wealthy interests.
This depends on the ad. Professional political analysts make it a job to understand whether they need to increase voter turnout, convince fence-sitting voters, etc, and shape ads that target those demographics.
Low voter turnout is much more of a problem in the US where voting isn't compulsory.
It's like with commercial advertising. It only needs to influence enough people, whether it convinces them to buy (or vote) what they already wanted, or it convinces them to want that.
I always wondered why the US accuses other South-Asian nation states of deep corruption when they have the most gigantic corruption system in the world.
Do you really think that traveling somewhere to experience a natural or historical or cultural landmark is intrinsically immoral? Do you think less of me for traveling to South Africa to go on a Safari? For visiting the Louvre? Why?
I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement.
As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
Oh we can and should absolutely do both. Travel and tourism has other downsides which make it worth reducing it, like the fast spread of diseases for example.
Sure, but as I said in my second example, forcing oil and natural gas companies to prevent methane leaks would have much more of an impact than reducing air travel, and requires no sacrifice for the average person. When considering which policies to advance, we should look at both the potential impact AND the democratic support for it.
Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.
The neo Calvinism runs deep. People think fixing problems involves austerity and take aways for the unelect.
It's a real problem because it has really bad political optics. And results in obsessing about 'fixing' inconsequential things or solutions that make things worse.
If people like Steve are advocating for such insanely unpopular policies as ending all travel (or is it just that you need to prove to the government that you have a valid reason for a travel permit?) I don’t think they’re concerned with the ideas’ democratic prospects at all.
Seems like he’s looking forward to a dictatorship that will just tell us all what we’re allowed to do, without the burdensome need for our dumb pleb voices to be heard. Maybe they could call the folks who enforce the policy the “Klimate Governing Board.”
Short answer - yes. If you post bond, and you don't violate the terms of your bond, you get your bond back when your case is resolved, whether you were found guilty or not guilty.
If you do something that violates the terms of your bond, the prosecution can file a motion alleging a violation, at which point the defendedant can admit to the violation or deny and request a hearing. Then there's an evidentiary hearing, basically a mini-trial, where the judge hears evidence and determines if there was a violation. If that happens, the consequences can depend. You can forfeit your bond, your bond can be raised, new bond conditions can be imposed, etc.
If you were given a cash bond and can't afford it, you can contract with a bail bondsman. That bail bondsman will pay the bail for you, and in some sense takes responsibility for you not violating your bond, in exchange for some fee (usually 10% of the bond amount). That amount is NOT refunded
For those that don't know, grand juries declining an indictment is extremely rare. A grand jury is basically a check on prosecution, that they have to have some initial evidence before charging someone with a felony. The standards are much lower than the subsequent criminal proceedings.
The grand jury only hears from the prosecution, there is no defense involved. Only a majority of the grand jury has to sign off, not unanimous like in an actual trial. The standard of evidence is just probable cause, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The rules of evidence are relaxed, meaning hearsay and other evidence can potentially be introduced that would normally be barred from a trial.
Because of the above, the rate of indictment from a grand jury is very high, over 90%. Most prosecutors will go their entire careers without getting a "no true bill" (meaning the grand jury did not sign off on an indictment). There's a saying that "a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich." So the fact that there was no indictment here is a big deal. It will probably hurt that prosecutor's career.
Though sometimes a prosecutors office will use a grand jury to fail to indict intentionally, like when the accused is a police officer they work with. It's a good way to launder away a prosecution that the DA doesn't want to pursue for political reasons.
I've banged on about this before, but every state needs to adopt a law where allegations of illegal behavior by cops are always handled by a Special Prosecutor, never the local DA. The incentives are too fucked for a DA to ever be trusted to handle it properly.
Do we know that to be the case? This could just as likely be an incompetent prosecutor showing up with inadequate or invalidated evidence and the jury throwing the case out on grounds of procedural incompetence rather than sympathy.
I don’t know it for a fact but the prosecutors apparently had video evidence and sales receipts. I was definitely projecting my own feelings on the grand jury response.
The stat is very high, but that doesn’t tell you anything about why grand juries don’t indict in the small percentage where they don’t, nor why they elected not to here.
Real life events are rarely monocausal; it's not one "rather than" the other, instead it's almost certainly a combination of both (and other factors besides). Especially with (as several other commenters who pointed out) how rare a lack of indictment is.
This attitude can be a strong precursor to positive change. In Canada, Dr. Morgentaler performed abortions in Montréal, and prosecutors were unable to compose a jury of enough people who would return a guilty verdict for any abortion. So it created an untenable situation for the government, who had no choice but to let doctors completely break the law until they were deemed unconstitutional against the newly penned charter.
Not real recent. Nullification like this goes far back. It just requires a certain level of bias across the jury pool. After which, some people or companies will be unable to be protected by criminal law.
> Nullification is a different thing and grand juries cannot do it.
It might not fit the textbook definition of jury nullification, but it would absolutely fit the spirit of the definition.
If the prosecution presents nearly irrefutable proof that the Ohio man destroyed the camera (Which from what I've heard is the case), but the grand jury declined to indict anyway because they're vehemently against Flock cameras and want to stick it to the government, then as far as I'm concerned, that's nullification.
It doesn’t fit the spirit, because it doesn’t have the legal qualities of nullification. In particular, the prosecutor can choose to empanel a new grand jury and seek a new indictment on the exact same charge.
That's a technical distinction over which the original jurors have no control. I think the scenario described in GP exactly meets the spirit of nullification.
The entire point is that they have no control! That’s what makes it not nullification.
Edit: to be clear, the essential quality of nullification is that it’s the product of a contradiction between two unassailable principles in our legal system. Without that contradiction, which does not exist in a grand jury context, a juror’s decision is not nullifying. It’s just a decision.
I get what you mean, but using a word with a very specific meaning in a legal context to mean something else that's similar and likewise in a legal context, but with a more vague definition, will just create confusion. This kind of confusion in a legal context can cause major problems for people when they're trying to understand the law as it applies to their case.
I don't think calling this nullification even adds any "spirit" meaning that isn't already present in "the grand jury declined to indict".
These two things can be similar, but the details matter here.
Why can't grand juries do it? I thought that it's when juries intentionally rule against what the law says, while saying otherwise, as a consequence of juries not being able to be penalized for their ruling. I don't seen any reason that the same can't happen with a grand jury.
A web search comes up with articles saying that it's more common with non-grand juries, but that's not the same as "cannot do it", while they also speak about a prosecutor's ability to re-indict, but that still doesn't guarantee them a charge.
Nullification is based on a contradiction in terms: juries cannot be punished for the judgments they render, and prosecutors may not re-try a case to obtain their preferred outcome (“double jeopardy”).
With a grand jury, the second term doesn’t apply: the grand jury’s decision doesn’t prevent a second indictment.
So in other words: grand juries can choose to render “faithless” decisions, but they can’t nullify a case in the sense that matters.
It may have to do with the state of accusations. Pre-grand jury there is no evidence of a crime. Once a grand jury rules with the prosecutor a crime has been defined.
Not sure why your comment is being downvote. That is in fact the best explanation for what is going on here, and the outcome has little to do with the competence of the prosecutor, as is perhaps alluded to by the original comment.
It's good to see individuals on a jury acting according to rational self-interest.
If it didn't originate with the show, Law & Order (the original run) has the line: "You could get a ham sandwich indicted" was said to Jack McCoy in one episode. I think I remember it coming up again in another episode.
He was a republican. He wanted to stop using grand juries to bring indictments, so he wasn’t impartial in his assessment.
Unrelatedly, he had an affair with a republican fund-raiser. When it ended, started making threats to kidnap her daughter, who was 14 at the time. He sent a sexually explicit note to the daughter, enclosing a condom.
He got a 15-month prison sentence.
This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal. They haven’t lived up to those standards for a couple years now.
I appreciated the interesting info on the originator of this quote, though this sentence made no sense to me:
> This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
Frankly, I've seen all types of people use this quote, not just Republicans, which is a simple statement that there is a very low bar to indict in a grand jury proceeding, which any reasonable assessment of the statistics would deem true. The fact that the originator of the quote turned out to be a douchebag is totally irrelevant.
Also, I think this part is missing a very important step:
> The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal.
While that may explain the very high conviction rate at trial, getting a grand jury indictment was also an excellent way for prosecutors to get a plea deal if the accused was looking at decades in jail even if the "beyond a reasonable doubt" threshold would be unlikely to be met.
No, but there’s more incentive to propagate the trope of you or your friends find themselves in a position where downplaying a federal indictment is a PR move you’d want to make. Yes, that could be anyone, but the indictment rate by party of administration sure is an interesting statistic.
The democratic party is the party in the US more often concerned with the interests of people accused of crimes by the criminal justice system. Republicans are more often concerned with the criminal justice system being insufficiently punitive and therefore tolerating crime.
Unless the crimes are alleged to have been committed by the political classes themselves.
Lists of indictments (and convictions) by administration over the past 50+ years (dating to the Nixon administration) shows a sharp majority under Republican presidential administrations.
The two most recent shifts, which Wikipedia traces to roughly 1980 and 2016 have substantially changed what were traditional hallmarks particularly of the Republican Party. Whilst in rhetoric the GOP remains "tough on crime", in practice it rather more consistently hews to Wilhoit's Law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
While I think it's good to make a point that the republican party was very different in the early decades of the previous century, I'm not sure being born in the 1930 is the right cutoff for that. Mitch McConnell, one of the major faces of the current Republican party, was born only a decade later.
Fair point, but I'd call Mitch very adaptable and he has remained actively in politics for decades -- so he evolved to match where the voters went. Sol Wachtler hasn't held any office since the 80s.
A pithy quote from the bowels of the Internet (a commenter on a blog). Liberals love it, conservatives hate it, I don't know that it describes an old school republican very well, or even MAGA for that matter.
That quote is completely spot on, so any objection to it is worthy of asking why so. The problem with that is that it's not likely to have a satisfactory answer.
I did some cursory digging on that before I shared it. There's fundamental differences of thought for what government is supposed to be, and it's obviously mutated over time.
At its core, government is power over people, and the evergreen question is "how far should that power go, and who wields that power?"
I believe that there are reasonable concerns on "both sides" about that, but the reality is that power is effectively wielded by the wealthy. Democracy is an experiment that ostensibly runs counter to that.
And Democrats were the party of slavery. Why do you bring this up? I'd think the Hackernews crowd would know history and wouldn't be surprised that on a long enough time line, philosophies change.
He coined the term in the mid-80s. There's a whole lot of continuity between the Republicans of the mid-80s and the ones of today, even if some of the ones of the past might be horrified with what's become of their legacy.
Law & Order often takes from reality. The ham sandwich phrase is attributed to Solomon Wachter who was a judge on the New York court of Appeals and is anecdotally dated to the mid or late '80s. And then went widely into the culture and has shown up in novels, academic papers, and tv.
You _used_ to be able to indict a ham sandwich anyway. These days the federal government can’t even manage to indict someone caught on video throwing a hand sandwich at law enforcement.
In restaurant server parlance it means "item no longer available". The stock of baked potatoes has been depleted so the word goes out to the serving staff to "86 the baked potatoes".
you can indict a ham sandwich if you don't try to convince a grand jury that a mustard stain is terrorism. the grand jury found that throwing a sandwich at someone doesn't rise to the level of assault. what dude did was never contested, and they would have gotten a conviction if they charged appropriately, but instead they tried to "make an example" of him and instead they got made an example of.
It does really demonstrate societal rot - the public's loss of trust in so-called "law enforcement" due to how they've come to often behave as lawless thugs. And so if you want to restore the public's trust (vital social technology), then advocate for civil rights and legal accountability on those tasked with enforcing the law!
This seems like a very one sided view honestly. You could also say that, these days, the federal government can’t even manage to indict their political enemies, because DOJ under the current admin keeps getting laughed out of court.
not every time. there are people in jail/prison due to the times that the DOJ does not get laughed out of court. I think someone accused of being "antifa" got 100 years to make an example. I don't have the article to site, but shouldn't be hard to find.
Can you say more about this? I’m curious about what the career path looks like for these prosecutors and where the decision points are for their career progression.
Though it has been happening a little more with the current administration, which in fact did try to indict someone over (throwing) a sandwich (grand jury declined to do so)
Administration implies bureaucracy - separation of powers, the rule of law, formal procedures, dispassionately executing a job, etc. What we have at the moment is a regime.
But those labels are generally directed at the executive branch (the $President administration). Their failure was due to checks in the judicial branch. So we have a regime in the executive, but still have a somewhat functioning judiciary (despite the related push to further rot it from the top down).
Grand juries seem to have become newly relevant recently. In a number of cases they have refused to indict Trump's perceived enemies and in one case they almost literally refused to indict a ham sandwich.
Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?
Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism. But then again, people suspend reason when it comes to certain topics so I'm not surprised.
The political outcome is that Peter Thiel wants to have full control of all security apparatus around the world. Fighting Flock is 100% a political fight.
From what I'm seeing online, it looks like Houston started installing Flock cameras in 2022. How were they investigating kidnapping cases before that?
I'd be astonished if decades of methodology and infrastructure for investigating crime have all completely evaporated in the wake of a new and experimental tool -- one that's neither fully demonstrated its reliability as an investigation tool nor that it does not itself create a threat to public safety.
It's a bit polemical to blame their failure to apprehend their suspect on the lack of an tool that shouldn't have been necessary to apprehend the suspect in the first place, don't you think?
Just think of all the crime against children that is made harder to investigate because we aren't all required to have state monitoring devices in our homes and on all our electronic devices!
> It's like cutting the brakes of police cars or deflating their tires
These two things are decidedly not on the same level. Cutting someone's brakes is an attempt to kill the driver. Deflating tires is just plain old property damage.
Well the government was illegitimate. Is that what you're contending happening here? Are you trying to overthrow the police department or municipal government? How do you feel about Jan 6?
> Well the government was illegitimate. Is that what you're contending happening here?
When the jury of your peers decides that you should not be punished for something despite the law stating otherwise, it is a powerful statement. There's a reason why the judicial system is set up to allow this.
> Are you trying to overthrow the police department or municipal government?
The people in the US are not there yet. But you might want to recall JFK's words: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Take a look at what's happening in the US, think about it for a while, and then come back and tell everyone whether you think the people are being properly represented by their government and served by their public servants.
> How do you feel about Jan 6?
I feel that Jan 6 is one of the watershed moments that led us to where we are now. The fact that those responsible weren't punished was a clear signal that the rule of law was being abandoned.
You're behaving like the relationship between the government and the people is symmetrical. It's not. When the government stops obeying its own laws, people take notice.
The comment you're responding to didn't formulate the argument as "I am against [X], therefore I am justified in destroying property used to do [X]", but is rather closer "[X] is itself illegal and therefore I am justified in potentially destroying property in order to stop imminent lawbreaking".
You can argue the point as to whether this particular "[X]" actually does constitute illegal activity that a citizen is justified in responding to with force, but I don't think it's valid to mischaracterize the argument as the response being justified solely by personal opposition.
> If someone thinks abortion is illegal because it's against right to life. So bombing abortion clinics is justified. Is that how this works?
No, that's definitely not how it works, and your example clearly doesn't compare to what we're talking about. First, "right to life" is not a law that's being objectively violated, just a moral principle that certain people feel emotionally compelled to defend. This puts your example squarely on the "act to assert personal feelings" side of the divide, definitely not "act to stop imminent lawbreaking".
Second, while essentially all jurisdictions absolutely do allow citizens to intervene and use force to stop imminent lawbreaking, the rules around that usually require proportionality, and require that one's own actions merely be targeted at stopping the illegal activity, and not use disproportionate force beyond that. So even in a situation where abortion was illegal, bombing an abortion clinic would be a grossly excessive action that goes far beyond merely stopping the illegal activity.
By comparison, disabling or blocking cameras that have been set up to commit illegal espionage is a clearly proportionate response, narrowly targeted at the illegal activity, and not causing damage beyond that.
Of course you can, just you likely won't get any sympathy in the large number of cases where the public or government doesn't agree with you (police, abortion clinics).
In this case looks like the people agree with destroying these things.
Violence is increasingly the only path forward in America.
Apparently >50% of a jury did not agree with you, in this case, and that is one form of democracy we have to make sure decisions come from the consent of the governed. Looks like democracy to me.
This gives me an idea for a (less il)legal alternative: hang "Big Brother is Watching" signs on all of the Flock cameras. Or maybe we can pass a law saying Flock has to do it. That seems like the ideal compromise.
Sometimes the only way is civil disobedience to get the point across to paid off politicians and ones that overly friendly to sacrificing our rights to may the cops happy.
> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?
Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
> Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism.
"Terrorism," at this point, is just a term used to describe any action taken in opposition to the ruling class and its objectives of total domination & control, assuming that it has some potential to be effective (in contrast to toothless protests or voting).
> Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
I'm not sure where you got "near-unanimous" from. I think Flock cameras were rolled out en masse because public video surveillance has been common for a long time, and polling data has historically suggested (e.g. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/5881-63-accept-video-surve...) that Americans are fine with it.
This is also the democratic way, arguably more democratic, it's just probabilistic. Juries are supposed to be randomly sampled from the jurisdiction's population (a kind of democratic process).
The ability of a jury to judge the law, and not just the particular crime is a feature, not a bug of the justice system.
This is how the system is set up, and it is as legitimate as action through a legislative process.
EDIT: the parent asked a legitimate question in good faith, there is no need to downvote them because you disagree with their implied current understanding of an issue.
It’s an effective a surprisingly old technique, being used on cruise missiles as early as the 1960s. It actually precedes GPS and satellite navigation by several decades. Im continuously blown away by what engineers were able to do in that era with such limited computing power. Take a look at SAGE, for example.
Fun fact: the usage of TERCOM in the tomahawk missile actually limited its ability to be used in Operation Desert Storm. Routes had to be planned to go around actual topographical features, instead of hundreds of miles of flat desert.
Memory on the first cruise missiles was so sacred though that they it could only store the pre-planned flight terrain data. So they not only loaded target coordinates, but full flight plans and had to launch from the programmed position. Desert was difficult as it has too few features.
Important to note that this was not a decision on the merits. The court didn’t find that the decision was written by AI; just that the facts alleged would be covered by judicial immunity. Proper action is to appeal, and file a grievance with the Nevada Council of Judicial Discipline, possibly also the Nevada Bar Association. Those institutions take these things seriously, and the judge can end up with her license suspended or even disbarred. A license suspension, even a short one, is very serious for a judge. A judge is forbidden from having any other employment, so a judge under suspension isn’t getting a salary and can’t get other employment. So it’s a pretty significant monetary penalty.
EDIT: Yeah this plaintiff is nuts. His complaint, linked by a response to my comment and in other places, is just bizarre. I would highly doubt any allegations he might make.This guy has apparently been suing a bunch of judges in the family courts in Las Vegas. A lot of those proceedings appear to be online: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsKMpjAPcB2vRRCMtdEb1...
I find it telling that Volokh fails to link to the original complaint (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nvd.176...), which gives you a pretty good sense of why the court went down the route of foreclosing any second bite at this particular apple; and fails to mention the plaintiff has a history of filing against judges he appears to feel have wronged him, to the point that he was declared a vexatious litigant in Nevada and sanctioned in California for "impugn[ing] the integrity of the very system of justice in which they serve without a solid basis in both fact and law." Admittedly there's no requirement that a plaintiff be sympathetic to be right, but still...
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
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