Archive for January, 2010
Does This Mean I’m On a Watch-List?
From the DCCC comes this little beauty:
While making today’s announcement that he will once again run for Congress in New York’s 24th district, [Candidate for New York's 24th Congressional Disctrict Richard] Hanna also launched a new campaign website where he shamelessly touts his ties to the CATO [sic] Institute, a right wing extremist group that has long been a vocal advocate for extremist, unfair trade policies that would allow companies to ship American jobs overseas [emphasis mine].
The fact that Hanna is touting his leadership role in a group that prides its commitment to unfair trade policies that send American jobs overseas is downright shameful,” said Shripal Shah, Northeast Regional Press Secretary at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
To clarify, the press release quotes Hanna’s campaign website, which makes clear that Hanna is “a sustaining member of the CATO Institute, having traveled to Russia as part of an international study group. ” That means he gives Cato between $500 and $999 per year and went on a Cato-organized trip to Russia.
The DCCC’s release goes on:
The CATO Institute is a right wing extremist group that has long advocated for unfair trade policies regardless of their impact on American jobs. [emphasis theirs] CATO has been one of the leading advocates for unfair trade deals and believes that increases in unemployment should not prevent enacting new trade deals. The CATO Policy Handbook specifically says Congress should “avoid using trade deficits and concerns about employment levels as excuses for imposing trade restrictions” as it calls for the US to move away from “reciprocity’’ and “level playing fields.” [CATO Policy Handbook, 6th ed, Chapter 64.
Should I thank them for linking to our handbook?
On a personal note, I am due to renew my visa in March. Can anyone advise me on whether this characterization of Cato’s Center for Trade Policy Studies will jeapordize its renewal?
HT: Jonathan Blanks
Update: for a broader look at the inanity of the DCCC’s characterization of Cato as a “right-wing extremist” group, see this excellent blog post by Cato Media Fellow Radley Balko.
The Libertarian Vote in the Age of Obama
Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts seems to reflect some of the trends David Kirby and I note in our new study, “The Libertarian Vote in the Age of Obama,” released today. We wrote, “Libertarians seem to be a lead indicator of trends in centrist, independent-minded voters. If libertarians continue to lead the independents away from Obama, Democrats will lose 2010 midterm elections they would otherwise win.” That seems to have happened in Virginia, New Jersey, and now Massachusetts. Young voters, whom we examine in the study, also seem to have moved sharply in Massachusetts from heavy support for Obama in 2008 to slightly less strong support for Brown this week.
Using our strict screen based on American National Election Studies data, we find that 14 percent of voters were libertarian in 2008. Other analysts using broader criteria find larger numbers. Gallup calculates the distribution of ideology every year and found that libertarians made up 23 percent of respondents in their 2009 survey. Our analysis of data from a 2007 Washington Post-ABC News poll found that people with libertarian views were 26 percent of respondents. And a Zogby poll found that 59 percent of Americans would describe themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” while 44 percent would accept the description “fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian.”
Libertarian voters swung away from Bush and the GOP in 2004 and 2006, but in 2008 they swung back, voting for McCain by 71 to 27 percent, presumably because the prospect of a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress in the midst of a financial crisis was frightening to small-government voters. Also, while many libertarian intellectuals had a real antipathy to McCain, the typical libertarian voter saw McCain as an independent, straight-talking maverick who was a strong opponent of earmarks and pork-barrel spending and never talked about social issues.
One encouraging point in the study: libertarians may be becoming more organized. In our 2006 study we wrote, “Social conservatives have evangelical churches, the Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family. . . . Liberals have unions. . . . Libertarians have think tanks.” In the past three years, however, libertarians have become a more visible, organized force in politics, particularly as campaigns move online. Note the Ron Paul campaign and the heavy libertarian involvement in the widespread and decentralized “Tea Party” movement.
The new study also includes new data on young libertarian voters, Ron Paul voters, libertarians and abortion, “secular centrist” voters, and how libertarians voted for Congress in the past five elections.
Federal Transportation Follies
The 2009 stimulus bill gave the U.S. Department of Transportation $50 billion to distribute to the states for highways, roads, and bridges. A House bill passed in December would add another $28 billion. According to Washington folklore, spending on infrastructure is always good because it’ll create jobs and spur economic growth. However, three recent examples are a reminder that the government often does a poor job of allocating resources.
First, an Alaska legislative audit concluded that the state should not have spent federal transportation money building a road to the site of the proposed “Bridge to Nowhere,” which was canceled after a national outcry. Alaska kept the federal money originally earmarked for the bridge, and then-Governor Sarah Palin agreed to spend $26 million of it on the road despite the fact there was no bridge.
Second, the Department of Transportation is supposed to exclude “unethical, dishonest, or otherwise irresponsible” parties from receiving federal funds. But according to a report from DOT’s inspector general, the average case took DOT officials “300 days to reach a suspension decision and over 400 days to reach a debarment decision.” For example, Kentucky awarded $24 million in transportation stimulus money to companies with officials under review by the Federal Highway Administration for bribery, theft, and obstruction of justice. The FHA took 10 months to review the companies before ultimately suspending them, but Kentucky had already given the companies the money.
Third, a Tennessee television station analyzed the state’s use of federal transportation stimulus money and found that it “spent an average of $161,500 per job created and that some paving jobs, which were temporary, cost taxpayers more than $1 million each.” The station interviewed a construction company that had been busy during the summer when it had federal money. Now its trucks are idle and the workers it hired have all been laid off.
Randal O’Toole says that “The best test of infrastructure value is whether users are willing to pay for it.” There’s almost no connection between infrastructure projects funded by federal taxpayers and the typically local users. Leaving infrastructure projects to state and local governments to fund would make more of a connection. Privatization, which would utilize tolling and other user fees, would be even better.
Statism Update from Brussels
America may have dodged the bullet of Obamacare thanks to voters in Massachusetts, but even if the left ultimately succeeds in expanding government’s control of health care, the United States will still have more freedom than Europe. It seems that the European Union’s governing entities, the European Commission and the semi-ceremonial European Parliament, combine the worst features of statism and collectivism from the entire continent. The Euro-crats make lots of noises about subsidiarity and other policies to leave decision making in the hands of national and local governments, but virtually every policy coming from Brussels is a new power grab for unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. The latest example is possible EU-wide driving laws for the purposes of imposing absurdly low speed limits and to requiring foolish rules against more comfortable and safer large cars. Here’s what the UK-based Express wrote about the topic:
Brussels bureaucrats want to slap draconian European Union driving laws on Britain’s roads in a new “green” campaign on motorists, it emerged last night. Measures being considered include a barrage of new maximum speed limits in town and city areas. British motorists could also be forced to undertake exams in “environmentally-friendly” road skills as part of an EU-wide overhaul of driving tests. And many large cars and other so-called gas-guzzling vehicles face being banned from newly-declared “green zones” in urban centres. The latest threat of meddling from Brussels comes in an Action Plan on Urban Mobility drawn up by European Commission transport chiefs. …Mats Persson, of the Euro-sceptic think tank Open Europe, commented: “This illustrates that the EU simply can’t stop interfering in every aspect of people’s lives.”
Meanwhile, a different tentacle of the European octopus is proposing that the European Union be given the power to audit budget numbers from member nations. Given the fiscal fiasco in Greece, this seems like it might be a reasonable step – until one remembers that the EU’s auditors every year give a failing grade to the EU’s own budget practices. The EU Observer reports on the issue, but the phrase “blind leading the blind” somehow did not get included:
…the European Commission has indicated it will seek audit powers for the EU’s statistics office, Eurostat, in order to verify elements of national government accounts. …Speaking to journalists after a meeting of EU finance ministers on Tuesday (19 January), outgoing EU economy commissioner Joaquin Almunia said greater Eurostat auditing powers could have avoided the mistakes that led to the Greek revision. He said the commission will propose “a new regulation in order to obtain powers, which we’ve already requested, to give Eurostat the possibility of carrying out audits.”
Last but not least, that same EU Observer story has a tiny bit of good news, or at least a dark cloud with a silver lining. Some of Europe’s governments want to impose an EU-wide tax on banks. This certainly fits the theme of ever-growing levels of bureaucracy and interference from Brussels, but the good news is that there is still (even under the statist Lisbon Treaty) a national veto on tax matters. So even though some of the big nations in Europe want to demagogue against the financial sector, the EU’s taxation commissioner (and former communist apparatchik from Hungary) indicated with sadness that such a tax probably would not make it through the process:
While discussion on Greece took up considerable time, EU finance ministers did have an opportunity to discuss a Swedish proposal for an EU-wide bank levy to mitigate the effects of future financial crises. …British, Belgian and German ministers were amongst those who showed moderate support for the idea. However, outgoing EU taxation commissioner Laszlo Kovacs said it was unlikely to fly because of EU unanimity voting in the area of taxation.
Sacrificing Liberties in the Name of Security
The new Justice Department Inspector General report finds that the FBI broke the law in seeking phone records. Reports Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine:
In a report (PDF) issued today, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine shows that the FBI routinely broke the law for several years by demanding telephone records through informal methods that were not authorized by statute. The abuses, which involved thousands of records, are especially striking because it is not very hard for the FBI to obtain this information legally. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) allows the bureau to demand records from phone companies through a “national security letter” (NSL) signed by the director or an official he designates. Under FBI policy, any special agent in charge can sign an NSL, which simply states that the records sought are “relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”
In 2003 FBI officials began dodging this minimal requirement by asking telecommunications carriers to suppy records without the legally required NSL “due to exigent circumstances” and promising to provide an NSL after the fact. These so-called exigent letters, which were often used when no emergency actually existed, were an extralegal contrivance that violated ECPA, bureau policy, and guidelines issued by the attorney general. The retroactive NSLs promised by the exigent letters often failed to appear because there was no authorized investigation to which they could be linked. To fix that problem, FBI officials resorted to another illegal procedure, issuing “blanket” NSLs tied to no particular investigation.
Even these pseudolegalities look downright upright next to the FBI’s other informal methods of obtaining records, which included requests by email, phone, post-it note, and in-person oral communication as well as “sneak peeks,” which were about as legitimate as they sound. The failure to follow the established NSL process is legally significant because ECPA prohibits telecom companies from disclosing customer records to the government except in specified circumstances. One of them is not when an FBI agent shows up at your office and says, “Mind if I take a look at that?”
The targets of the FBI’s illegal record grabs are unknown, with one major exception. “Some of the most troubling improper requests for telephone records,” the inspector general’s report notes, “occurred in media leak cases, where the FBI sought and acquired reporters’ telephone toll billing records and calling activity information without following federal regulation or obtaining the required Attorney General approval.” In 2008 FBI Director Robert Mueller apologized for the bureau’s improper snooping on foreign correspondents for The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Obviously, federal agencies require investigative authority to combat terrorism and other crimes. But those investigations need to be conducted in accordance with the law and Constitution. We must never forget that it is a free society which we are defending.
Lessons from the Brown Victory in Massachusetts
In this new video, Cato’s David Boaz and John Samples evaluate what Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts means for Democrats and Republicans in the near and far term. Samples and Boaz contend that Tuesday’s election sent a message to Democrats that they have clearly overreached, but Republicans need to be careful and realize that they’re still not very popular either.
John Samples is the author of the forthcoming book, The Struggle to Limit Government, available soon at the Cato store.
Are We Mad about SAFRA?
This morning I mused about whether yesterday’s Massachusetts miracle would curb the drive to have the feds take over K-12 education. In particular, I wondered if the president’s new proposal to extend the “Race to the Top” – and as part of that directly connect local districts to the feds –will meet an almost immediate demise as legislators dive frantically to avoid the backlash against ever-expanding federal power.
My hope is that it will, but I’m not especially sanguine. The prospects for stemming the centralization tide are probably better today than they were yesterday, but federal education initiatives tend to have a fair amount of bipartisan support, especially if they throw money at public schools — which liberals like — as well as things like charter schools, merit pay, and “standards” that conservatives support. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama, facing hopeless prospects on health care, cap and trade, and other anger-igniters, were to propose reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act as one big Race to the Top. Incorporating both big bucks and things conservatives endorse, it would stand a pretty good chance of garnering some Republican support. And that would allow Obama to say he has learned his lesson about working with both parties while letting legislators head back home declaring that they’d done something “for the children.”
Wednesday Links
- David Boaz on Obama’s first year: “From this libertarian, Obama’s first year looks grim. …He may well end up like Lyndon Johnson, with an ambitious domestic agenda eventually bogged down by endless war. But I don’t think his wished-for FDR model — a transformative agenda that is both popular and long-lasting — is in the cards.”
- The message from Massachusetts: “There can be no denying that this election was a clear cut rejection of the Democratic health care bills.”
- Attacks from all sides: See what happens when the Right takes on free enterprise.
- A new dictator in Iraq?
- Podcast: Daniel Ikenson discusses Obama’s trade policy.
Filibuster Obama Nominees? I’m Shocked!
At Politico Arena today, Clinton’s acting U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger worries that after yesterday’s vote in Massachusetts, Obama’s Supreme Court nominees may be subject to Republican filibusters.
My response:
Walter, my good friend, where were you all during the Bush ’43 years? I recall seeing you often in town, when you weren’t teaching down in Durham. But if I may judge from your Arena concern today that Republican senators, after the late unpleasantry in Massachusetts, may now filibuster an Obama Supreme Court nominee, you must have missed the unprecedented and repeated Democratic filibusters of Bush appellate court nominees over several of those years. Did you forget that after the Democrats took control of the Senate in May 2001, following Jim Jeffords becoming an Independent, eight of Bush’s first eleven May 2001 appellate court nominees had not had so much as a Judiciary Committee hearing as we were coming down to the 2002 elections? And after the Democrats lost control of the Senate in those elections, when they could no longer stall by refusing to hold hearings, they moved to the filibuster — over no fewer than ten nominees. Did you forget that our good friend, the eminently qualified Miguel Estrada, one of Bush’s May 2001 nominees, finally withdrew his name from consideration in September 2003, after 28 months in limbo and six failed cloture votes?
To be sure, those were appellate court nominees, but the principle is the same — and Bush’s Supreme Court nominees escaped a filibuster, let me remind you, only after the “gang of 14″ finally reached a compromise, failing which the “nuclear option” would have brought an end to the unprecedented Democratic filibuster of Bush’s nominees. (I ignore the 1968 Abe Fortas case, which had special circumstances.)
If Republicans were to filibuster an Obama nominee, therefore, instructions for doing so would be readily at hand. I’m not suggesting they do so, however. The filibuster is, as you know, an extra-constitutional procedure, with something of a checkered history. For better or worse, it has served as an additional check on the passions of the lower chamber, but its use for executive nominations, as distinct from legislation, raises difficult separation-of-powers questions, which are your main concern, I’m sure.
School Choice Advocates: Beware Washington
The Brookings Institution will release a new school choice policy guide on February 2nd, and from the sound of it, children, parents, taxpayers, and the authors themselves should be concerned. The guide will provide:
a series of practical and novel recommendations for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including national chartering of virtual education providers; expanding the types of information collected on school performance; providing incentives for low-performing school districts to increase choice and competition; and creating independent school choice portals to aid parents in choosing between schools.
The goals these recommendations are meant to achieve are entirely laudable, but there are three reasons for serious concern:
1) The Constitution delegates to the federal government no power to provide or regulate education services, except in the execution of its explicitly enumerated powers. So the Supreme Court can ensure that state education programs abide by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, but Congress cannot “charter virtual education providers.” Of course the federal government has been transgressing the limits on its education powers for more than half a century, but no one who supports the rule of law can condone that transgression, much less its expansion.
2) From a regulatory standpoint, Washington is the worst level of government at which to implement an education program. National education programs impose a single set of rules on every participating provider in the country. Get those rules wrong — either up front or down the road — and you not only hobble the effectiveness of every single provider, but you eliminate the possibility of comparing outcomes between providers operating under different sets of rules. In essence you lose the ability to distinguish between different “treatments” — to determine what helps and what is harmful to the service’s overall success.
3) We have ample evidence about the quality of education programs implemented by the federal government. For example, after 45 years and $166 billion, Head Start has just been proven entirely ineffective. (See also the NCLB paper linked to in “1)”, above). Once again, this problem is exacerbated by the all-encompassing nature of federal programs. Get them wrong and you get them wrong for every participating student, everywhere in the country. With variation in programs among states, by contrast, we not only have the ability to compare the merits of alternative approaches, we have powerful incentives for states to get their programs right. Just as tax competition drives businesses from one state or nation to another, so, too, can education policy competition. States with better policies will attract businesses and more mobile residents from states with worse ones, eventually compelling the inferior policy states to redress their errors. We’re just beginning to see the prospects for this now, as school choice programs proliferate and grow at the state level, and introducing national programs that might well interfere with this process would be a disastrous mistake.
I hope that school choice advocates, including those who have contributed to the forthcoming Brookings report, will weigh these concerns.
Scott Brown and the Future Supreme Court Vacancy
Josh Blackman and Lyle Denniston offer some thoughts on the effect of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts earthquake on the looming retirement of — and the nomination of a replacement for — Justice John Paul Stevens. Josh and Lyle both latch onto the idea that Brown’s providing the 41st vote to sustain a potential Republican filibuster could cause President Obama to nominate someone more moderate than would be the case if the Democrats had maintained their super-majority. Lyle goes on to speculate that both Obama and Senate Democrats, looking to this fall’s election, will generally want to tack right in the face of an emboldened GOP and impatient electorate.
I think this sort of analysis is a misapplication of otherwise correct political analysis to the sui generis event that is a Supreme Court nomination. Yes, Scott Brown’s presence in the Kennedy people’s seat will change the dynamic of the health care debate, definitively kill cap and trade, otherwise alter the Democrats’ legislative agenda — and even affect lower court nominees. But I’m not so sure it will affect Obama’s calculus in picking a new Supreme Court justice.
Here’s why: Despite having been a constitutional law professor — whom I did not have when I was in law school, though I passed him in the halls a few times — the president has not really tried to advance his ideological agenda in the courts. It’s bizarre, really, that judicial nominations have not at all been a priority for this administration given that few people pay attention to lower court appointments and this could have been a place where the president could have thrown some bones to his base at little political cost (and certainly far less cost than the rest of his domestic agenda).
Moreover, based on the Sotomayor nomination, we see that when it comes to the Supreme Court, Obama is much more about affirmative action than appointing either the best-qualified Democrats or the most ”progressive” ones (or both, to provide a counterweight to Justice Scalia). (Note that Sotomayor at the time of her nomination was nowhere near the best or most left-wing member of the federal judiciary.) Even with a filibuster-proof Senate majority, we would have been unlikely to see a Cass Sunstein or Harold Koh pick — though each took not insignificant heat and delay in being confirmed to regulatory czar and head State Department lawyer, respectively. (And Larry Tribe is too old.)
With Sonia Sotomayor, Obama hit the “twofer” of a woman and a Hispanic (the first unless you count Benjamin Cardozo). With the Stevens replacement, women and minorities are still slightly preferred but the key “diversity” quota to fill is “non-judge” — and, per the above, a non-controversial one on whom the president won’t have to spend much political capital.
And so, while the prohibitive favorite — solicitor general Elana Kagan (and a woman) – is no surprise, you heard it here first that the other likely nominees, in no particular order, are Janet Napolitano (DHS secretary, woman), Deval Patrick (Massachusetts governor, black), Jennifer Granholm (Michigan governor, woman), Kathleen Sullivan (former Stanford dean, lesbian), Amy Klobuchar (senator, woman), and Akhil Amar (Yale law professor, South Asian). I’ll comment on their relative merits in future posts, but nobody on that list is both a radical and an intellectual heavyweight, and the list has not changed with Scott Brown’s election (though the indirect spotlight during the campaign on Gov. Patrick’s unpopularity might have hurt his chances).
SSA Fails to Verify With E-Verify
Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times that the Social Security Administration—an integral part of the E-Verify government background check system—regularly fails to use E-Verify properly.
Despite helping run the government’s electronic database designed to weed out illegal-immigrant workers, Social Security failed to run E-Verify checks on its own employees nearly 20 percent of the time.
That’s according to this report, which also found that SSA failed to verify employees during the correct time-frame a whopping 49% of the time.
E-Verify is not supposed to be used for pre-screening, but SSA ran a background check before hiring new employees 25% of the time. Fifty-one percent were screened timely. The remaining 24% were screened after the seven-day window during which new hires are supposed to be screened.
If the federal agency at the heart of this background check system can’t operate it well, this casts doubt on the idea of mandating every private employer across the country to use it.
I discussed some of the problems with programs like E-Verify in my paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
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