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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.

Except the only thing that what makes them different from organized crime is also the shared belief in laws that form and direct them.

> will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?

If they don't, i.e. if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not, the whole thing will unravel. Laws won't mean anything anymore, and then suddenly the president is just a random dude, the FBI is just a bunch of thugs with guns and suits, and USA is just words on a map.

You don't want to go there.

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I think you misinterpreted something in my note. Continuing to enforce yesterday's laws after Congress repeals them would not seem to me to be the opposite of "openly picking and choosing which laws are valid"; rather, it would be an even more extreme form of it, because you're no longer even just picking from the laws currently on the books!

It would seem so, and I apologize. I think that this bit:

> The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow?

specifically mentions of McCarthy and Jim Crow, made me misunderstand this bit:

> What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?

That is, the first part made me think of Bad Laws created by Bad People, and this made me parse the final question as: "What if today's president and Congress turn into Bad People and make Bad Laws, should the FBI enforce such Bad Laws, even when they're obviously just like Bad Laws from Bad People of the dark chapter of our past?".

The point I'm making is, yes, the FBI has to enforce law, good or bad, because that's the reason it exists. If it starts getting picky, it invalidates its own mandate.

Also, FBI as an organization is not an independent entity that sworn fealty to the government - it is a construct of the government. Therefore, if "The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it", what the FBI should do, as an organization, is to lie down and take the beating, and allow itself to be disbanded. The FBI was created to protect democracy (in specific ways), has sworn to do it, so if the democracy decides it no longer needs the FBI, then the sworn duty of the FBI is to stop existing. For the FBI to do otherwise is to break the oath and invalidate its own existence.

(Now this applies to the organization. As for the people in it, they're also citizens with conscience, and they're free to work within the process to right what they see as morally wrong, and/or quit.)

I'm mostly saying the same thing, but from a somewhat less prescriptive point of view. I'm less concerned with what the FBI should do than with what it will do and, by the nature of the organization, what it can do. I think these are much more interesting questions, because I really doubt any FBI agents are reading this thread in order to base their plans on my opinions or yours.

So, from my perspective, the normative questions you're bringing up are sort of a distraction. I don't want to waste my emotional energy on praising or condemning FBI agents, which seems like the only possible outcome of the normative debate.

(My examples may not have been well chosen to avoid that debate, but I discarded many even worse ones.)

Of course each individual person in the organization can do anything they choose, within their physical and mental capabilities, and what they think they should do will probably influence what they will do; but what the organization as a whole can do is constrained by those individuals' ability to coordinate. (And what you think or I think they should do doesn't enter into it at all.)

And, from that coordination point of view, at least from an outside perspective, it's not obvious that it's capable of meaningful resistance beyond simple self-preservation.

>>openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not

ah yes, the same way every major police department in the US has been functioning for most of living memory

> if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not

They already did that under Biden.

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