Accountability on The Bob Zadek Show is treated less as a legal standard than as a structural absence: the missing mechanism by which public officials answer for their conduct. Guests locate that absence in courts, administrative agencies, police departments and public schools, and disagree about whether it can be restored through existing institutions or only through exit and private choice.
Judicial accountability and recusal
Bob Zadek frames the judiciary as “far and away the least accountable and the least thought-through by our founders of our system of government,” telling guest Larry Klayman that judges are the only public officials with no accountability and no system for removing merely bad judges. A corrupt or sexually abusive judge may face removal, but a judge who simply does not know the law and decides wrongly stays on the job forever; Zadek says the founders “simply didn’t think through the structure of the federal judicial system.”Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012)
The concrete case the episode turns on is recusal. Zadek explains that in the inferior courts there are clear rules requiring a judge to step aside where there has been contact with the issues that might be perceived as improper, and those rules govern all judges — but the Supreme Court has long since decided they do not govern the Supreme Court itself. Justices make their own decisions about whether to sit, and Chief Justice Roberts has announced he will not use whatever power he may have as Chief Justice to ask Elena Kagan to step aside, which Zadek notes he could not do anyway. Zadek says it is clear that if this were an inferior court Kagan would be required to step aside, but because it is the Supreme Court the requirement is not there. Klayman states that he has two matters in different courts; he describes filing a case concerning the contacts of the White House with lobbying groups and a judge ruling that he was entitled to that information under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, after which the administration stonewalled through the Justice Department. Klayman then filed a motion to have Obama held in contempt, which he says the judge has been sitting on for six months. Klayman’s conclusion is that there is “no accountability across the board” and that judges “are politicians in robes.”Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012)
Zadek agrees, and both men concentrate the blame on structure rather than individuals. Klayman’s proposed remedy is a citizens’ grand jury, and he raises the possibility of civil disobedience on the Gandhi model. He tells Zadek that whether Romney or Obama wins, the American people need to rise up and hold politicians accountable, and that he does not believe the country has a republic or a representative form of government anymore.Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012)
Administrative agencies and the failure of oversight
The TSA episode presents accountability as a relationship that has simply gone missing. Zadek asks Jim Bovard about the agency’s size, and Bovard puts it at about 45,000 screeners at the airports. Bovard describes the agency as “very arrogant and arbitrary” and says that if someone is abused by them the chance of getting any answers or justice is almost nil. He notes the agency has been hammered by the Inspector General for the Homeland Security and by the Government Accountability Office, and that the screeners and whole-body scanners are almost completely incompetent at discovering weapons and mock explosives when IG agents choose to — the sentence breaks off there in the excerpt.Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Zadek’s framing of the constitutional problem is that Congress was supposed to be the watchdog. Bovard says the founding fathers expected Congress to keep a leash on the executive agencies, because in the history of King George it was the King’s agents who tyrannized the Americans rather than the King himself, and that Congress has “utterly failed to put a leash on the TSA.” Zadek’s response is that nobody does — that there has been a profound abdication both by Congress and by the Supreme Court in ceding so much power to administrative agencies, and that the TSA is perhaps the most significant example of that. Because they are keeping the homeland safe, he says, they are given “almost a carte blanche in government with no accountability and all the funding they could possibly want.”Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
The episode also links the agency’s discretion to speech. Zadek argues that the First Amendment guarantee does not hold in practice because a TSA agent in a blue uniform can punish a traveler merely for complaining about the process, and that complaining is one of the things screeners trained in psychology to spot terrorists look for as a sign that you are a terrorist. Bovard’s reply is that the agency maintains its power even though Congress “pisses and moans every now and then” without punishing abuses.Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Police unions and the discipline problem
Philip K. Howard opens his discussion of police accountability with a definition: “democracy’s nothing but a process of accountability.” He tells Bob Zadek that there is no accountability in American public employment, supporting the point with figures — 99 percent of public employees receive a fully successful rating; two or three teachers out of 300,000 are dismissed each year in California for performance; dismissal rates for performance across all sectors run between zero and 0.02 percent. An employee, in his summary, can do almost anything except be politically incorrect or murder somebody.Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
The episode’s central illustration is Derek Chauvin. Howard says Chauvin, who put his knee on George Floyd for nine minutes, was known to be tightly wound and probably should not have been on the street with a deadly weapon, but the police chief had no authority to terminate him and no authority even to reassign him. In the Minneapolis police department where he worked, Howard says there had been 2,600 complaints in the prior decade, of which 17 resulted in any kind of discipline, and the most severe discipline in a ten-year period was a 40-hour suspension.Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Howard extends the argument to the Memphis killing of Tyre Nichols: if you cannot assign a mature, experienced officer to nighttime duty in bad neighborhoods, you get young, barely trained officers who get overexcited and become “a kind of a gang,” which is what happened apparently in Memphis — and you cannot assign the experienced officer because the union contract gives seniority the right to daytime duty in the suburbs. On Zadek’s telling, union leaders are elected on the platform of protecting members’ jobs, which by definition benefits the worst performers, because they are the ones whose jobs are at risk. Zadek stresses that the show will never be anti-police and that he is not complaining about police forces or too much police; the target is the union institution and its leadership. He adds that teachers’ unions protect the same dynamic through “rubber rooms.”Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
School choice as substitute accountability
Matt Beienburg describes accountability in education as something families obtain by leaving. Discussing Arizona’s broadening of education savings account legislation, he says the program “brings accountability that you otherwise just do not have,” because parents who are not satisfied with the education on offer can go somewhere else. He frames the mechanism as voting with your feet.Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
Beienburg notes the legislation passed and was signed, but that in Arizona it takes 90 days to take effect and that an opposition effort to block the law means it has not yet gone into effect and students have not been able to join the program. He expects existing private schools will serve families who could not previously afford them, and that micro-schools and learning pods — small, close-knit communities of perhaps a dozen students, closer to the old one-room schoolhouse — will emerge without all the bureaucracy and administrative spending. He also says the Biden administration has tried to hand down funding requirements and carrots to schools that teach things like the 1619 Project or Ibram Kendi’s anti-racism, and that school choice and ESAs insulate families from that pressure.Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
Zadek’s own framing is that the ESA removes power over educational content from the education bureaucracy — a narrow band of government bureaucrats including teachers and administrators — and gives it to the customers, so that people vote with dollars and feet rather than through ballot voting, which he calls “kind of an empty ritual for the most part.” He asks whether it is too early to observe the effect on providers, quality and the nature of the educational process.Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
Howard supplies a comparison in the same vein: Thomas Sowell compared public schools with charter schools sharing the same buildings in inner cities, with students chosen by lottery from the same neighborhoods. In one Harlem building, Howard says, the charter school ranked 37th in the state of New York out of 2,400 elementary schools in academic achievement, while the public school sharing the same building in the same year ranked 1,694th. The single element that differed, in his account, was accountability and the ability to manage — the charter school spent less per student and had bigger class sizes but redirected money to art and music.Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Across episodes: how the question changes
Across the four episodes, the topic moves from a remedy the public must seize to a remedy the public can simply exercise. In 2012 Larry Klayman, speaking with Bob Zadek, locates the failure in judges and politicians who cannot be held to account and proposes citizens’ grand juries and Gandhian civil disobedience — an uprising to hold officials accountable. In 2015, Bob Zadek and Jim Bovard describe an agency nobody watches and a Congress that will not act, with no remedy named. By 2022 and 2023, Matt Beienburg and Philip K. Howard describe accountability as a byproduct of exit — dollar voting and foot voting in Arizona’s ESA program, and the management ability that distinguishes a charter school from the public school in the same building. The earlier treatment asks how the people can hold officials to account; the later treatment asks how the people can leave. The 2015 pair of excerpts shows the question argued in the same terms as 2012 and adds no development.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe how recusal rules for the inferior courts are codified or which authority imposed them, nor do they report the outcome of Klayman’s contempt motion or of the Obamacare records case. They do not state whether Arizona’s ESA law ultimately took effect or what became of the effort to block it. They give no account of how Congress might practically reassert a leash on the TSA, and the Bovard sentence about incompetence at discovering weapons breaks off before its point is made.