Accountability

Glenn Reynolds reprises one of his USA Today Opinion pieces.

...In America, if you misunderstand the law, or simply are ignorant of it, you will nonetheless be liable to go to jail or be sued — if you are an ordinary citizen. If you are a government official, you can generally avoid liability in a lawsuit by pleading “qualified immunity,” meaning, in essence, that you misunderstood the law or were ignorant of it, but acted in good faith, a defense that is not available to ordinary citizens. As a judge or prosecutor it’s even better: you enjoy “absolute immunity,” meaning that in almost every circumstance you can’t be sued at all.

...When the EPA poisoned the Animas River in Colorado, it rejected claims for damages, and nobody from the EPA went to jail. A private company under similar circumstances would have faced ruinous losses, and the executives would have risked criminal prosecution. Then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy skated.

When the IRS’s Lois Lerner deliberately targeted conservative groups — something the IRS admitted and apologized for — she retired with her pension and faced no charges. When Chinese hackers stole a vast database of secret military and intelligence personnel information, a blow some experts called a “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” nobody lost their job or went to jail. Accountability, it seems, is for the rest of us, the little people.

...Freedom from consequences: It’s the defining consequence of our modern titles of nobility. And as ordinary citizens get cut less and less slack, it becomes more and more noticeable that the people at the top pay little or no price for failure or worse. Either that will change, or we will see more populist anger in our politics.

Read more here.