CT Blue

A McCain spokesman says his man is against giving the telecoms immunity, until, that is, they express “heartfelt repentance”.

As president, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain would not support immunity for the telecoms that aided the Bush administration’s warrantless spying program, unless there were revealing Congressional hearings and heartfelt repentance from those telephone and internet companies, a campaign surrogate said Wednesday

We Catholics, both present and ex, are very familiar with the concept of repentance. Each and every day of my grammar school career I said an “Act of contrition”, in which I told god I was “heartily sorry for having offended” him. Who knows, on one or two occasions during those eight years I may, in fact, have been heartily sorry. If called before Congress to say for sure, I would have to confess that like everyone who works for George Bush, I simply can’t recall.

Nonetheless I understand the concept of heartfelt repentance, it having been drilled into me all those years. Without it no confession is truly valid, and your ticket to heaven will not be punched. One of the prerequisites for heartfelt repentance is a heart within which said repentance is felt. In law, a corporation is an artificial person, which means it has, at best, an artificial heart. It is, perforce, incapable of heartfelt anything.

We know without asking that John McCain would consider mere heartfelt repentance insufficient to forgive we humans who transgress. That is for god to do, though the Christians who make up his party would recommend that He stay his hand. For us there are prisons and foreclosures. For telecoms there is immunity, bought at the price of an “Act of Contrition” as rote as those I parroted after Confession.

The law is an imperfect thing. The common law recognized early on that it is well nigh impossible to afford perfect redress. Not even from a human defendant does it require heartfelt repentance. The quality of such feelings can never be truly assessed and, even if truly heartfelt, repentance rarely helps the victim. So, in their collective wisdom, centuries of judges have arrived at the conclusion that it is more efficacious to inflict pain on the transgressor in the form of a transfer of money, cash on the barrelhead, to the victim. Not perfect, but it has proven impossible to come up with a better approach. And, though corporations are incapable of a true act of contrition, they are very capable of feeling pain. The point is to change behavior, and it has worked remarkably well with corporations. The products we use are safer, not so much because of the Consumer Products Safety Commission, but because of good, old fashioned products liability cases. In the case of the telecoms I’d suggest that we each get one free month of telephone service as compensation for the invasion of our privacy. This may not induce heartfelt repentance in the telecoms, but I can almost guarantee that they will not trespass against us again.