All posts by: Dinah Winnick

In his latest Baltimore Sun column, UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller, responds to the White House’s challenging month, including more Benghazi developments and scandals involving the IRS and journalist bugging.

“Taken separately, none of these episodes is fatal,” writes Schaller, “But, taken together, these three political problems reveal an underlying fault in President Obama’s leadership style. […] Mr. Obama too often seems politically detached.”

How has this become problematic in the Obama presidency? Schaller suggests, “We tend to equate the abuse of presidential power with its use…In Mr. Obama’s case, however, the abuse of power emanates from non-use. Failing to employ the power of the presidency to protect journalists, whistleblowers, and political opponents constitutes the abuse of power in absentia and is byproduct of this president’s political detachment.”

This week the OpenGov Foundation and MarylandReporter.com led a focus group to examine transparency in Maryland politics and government. Conversation centered on the Maryland General Assembly website, redesigned in December 2012. The groups also asked for feedback on the website from external experts, including UMBC political science professor Roy T. Meyers.

Meyers told MarylandReporter.com that he was glad the new site moves away from the previous subscription model, which charged a fee to access the most current legislative information. However, he critiqued “delays in [posting] voting records on second and especially third reading.” The article suggests this problem is in part due to a policy that gives senators and delegates until the end of the business day to record or change their electronic votes in the case of a mistake or malfunction, delaying final tallies.

“The lesson we’ve learned over these last 10, 15 years is no matter how good your [crisis management] plan is, it’s always going to fall short,” says Sunil Dasgupta in today’s Gazette.

Dasgupta, director of UMBC’s political science program at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) and non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, is co-teaching a crisis management class at USG. The point of the course, he explains, is not to prepare for specific disasters, but to get students thinking about how to build resilience and make decisions in catastrophic situations that they cannot fully plan for or predict. Although many students in the course have not yet selected majors, Dasgupta says he hopes some of them will explore careers in crisis management.

In his latest opinion column for the Baltimore Sun, UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller takes on accusations surrounding the recent U.S. Department of Homeland Security purchase of large quantities of ammunition (up to 1.6 billion rounds in some reports)—including claims that the Obama administration is arming itself while simultaneously trying to disarm the citizenry through gun control legislation.

In researching the purchase, Schaller found:

It turns out the order is closer to 750 million rounds and covers a five-year period and the 70,000 federal officers who require firearm certification or retraining. That’s roughly 2,200 rounds per officer per year; recreational gun users often dispense several hundred rounds during a single firing range visit.

Schaller concludes that this “scandal” is more conspiracy than legitimate critique of government overreach. He suggests that gun advocates would benefit from ignoring such distractions and instead focusing on what he identifies as real examples of government abuse of power, or addressing the risks that can come with gun ownership.