Top-Down

Dear Indigna,

The Supreme Court has ruled that “units of government” smaller than states, such as counties and cities, do not share the immunity from lawsuits granted to states and the federal government in the Constitution. Doesn’t this seem kind of unfair?

Losing Appellate
Chatham County, GA

Dear Loser,

Not at all. It’s all part of the Bush Administration’s “top-down” management and responsibility structure. The higher in an organization--Enron, say, or the federal government--a player is, the less responsibility they have to take for their actions. Instead, consequences for bad behavior or knuckle-headed decisions are pushed from the “top” “down” to the lowest chump they can get the punishment to stick to. In this case, states and even the federal government cannot be sued, so any nitpicky little problems you “citizens” want to whine about (oooh, the big bad drawbridge crushed your car, wah wah wah) will have to be dealt with and paid for by the counties or cities in which they occur, no matter how much of a federal case you want to make of it! Donald Rumsfeld is a master at this style of management. A textbook example is his making a pregnant, slow-witted 20-year-old private take the blame for Abu Ghraib.