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Given that there's not much to do in Colorado now besides shiver and throw dollar bills into the stove (a fuel source that is getting more competitive with natural gas all the time), it's little wonder that we've been paying so much attention to the confirmation hearings in Washington.
Part of the attraction is that a Coloradan has been nominated to serve as secretary of the interior. That would be former state attorney general Gale Norton, who as a private attorney appeared before the Chaffee County Planning Commission a couple of years ago.
She was here to help uphold the Divine Right of Subdividers by arguing on behalf of a development that involved scores of half-acre lots, each with its own septic system. It sat uphill from some folks who got their drinking water from wells.
Certain of those residents had problems with that, and argued that their county government had some duty to protect their water supply by not increasing to the risk of adding coliform bacteria to their aquifer.
But the developer wasted his money when he brought in Norton. At the time, a majority of our county commissioners had never seen a development they didn't admire, and they almost certainly would have approved it even without encouragement from a high-powered and well-connected Denver attorney.
That's not an issue in the confirmation hearings in Washington, of course. The major expressed concern about Norton, and about John Ashcroft, the nominee for attorney general of the United States, is whether they will enforce laws that they don't believe in.
For instance, would Norton defend the endangered species act in court, even though she personally sees it as an unconstitutional abridgement of private property rights? Would Ashcroft protect the rights of people attempting to enter clinics that provide abortions, even though he sees any abortion, even one occasioned by rape or incest, as a variety of premeditated cold-blooded murder?
On the surface, it seems easy to answer the question, at
least about Norton. She opposed Amendment 2, the 1992
initiative that made Colorado the hate state
because
it forbade cities from outlawing discrimination against
homosexuals. But it was her duty as attorney general to
defend the constitution and laws of the state of Colorado,
which unfortunately then included Amendment 2. She did, all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found Amendment 2
in violation of the federal constitution, and struck it
down.
These are not new issues -- the conflict between
job
and conscience
is as old as human
society.
Years ago, I wrote something about Kit Carson and his
betrayal of the Navajo in the Bosque Redondo horror. A
defender wrote that Carson was an officer in the U.S. Army,
and had his orders, and What was he supposed to do?
Resign his commission?
To which I wrote back, Of course. That's exactly
what another great American warrior, Gen. George Crook, did
when he got orders to betray the Apache.
Or for a more recent example, consider the career of Robert Strange McNamara, who as secretary of defense pursued the war in Vietnam long after he had personally come to believe it was unwinnable.
Was America served well because he did his duty? Or would the nation have been better off if he had resigned in 1965 and then went public with his analysis?
How can we ever know?
On one hand, we expect public officials to carry out their duties, which often includes enforcing moronic laws and regulations.
On the other hand, we hold elections in this country, and the people who get into office are supposed to set priorities. That is, an elected district attorney or sheriff has finite resources, and might well decide that those resources would be better applied to prosecuting violent crime or drunken driving, rather than the seizure of improper gardens.
Almost every political position involves discretion and selection. The people in office are humans, not robots, and they're supposed to set priorities and allocate resources accordingly. They're supposed to exercise judgment, or else we'd have nothing but impersonal bureaucracies bound totally by regulations.
So it seems proper for the Senate committees to be asking about priorities and conscience. Such issues lie at the heart of our political system.
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