Cato Daily Dispatch for November 13, 2002
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Bush Wins Key Support for Homeland Security DepartmentCato Files Brief in Campaign Finance Case
Experts Urge Canadian Government to Delay Kyoto Protocol Ratification
Bush Wins Key Support for Homeland Security Department
President Bush won an important post-election battle in the Senate yesterday, with three key moderates announcing their support for a revised version of his proposed Department of Homeland Security, virtually assuring it of congressional passage, Reuters reports. The department is designed to better protect the nation against an attack like the one on Sept. 11, 2001.
The legislation would implement the biggest U.S. government reorganization in a half century by rolling into the new department all or parts of 22 existing federal agencies, including the Border Patrol, Secret Service and Coast Guard.
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), said the House would take up the revised measure on Wednesday. The Senate is expected to provide its needed concurrence by early next week, aides said.
In a Cato Institute foreign policy briefing, Eric Taylor, a former Army officer, notes that instead of creating a new bureaucracy, "efforts for increased security should focus on timely intelligence sharing, threat recognition, and action. Without dramatic improvements in those areas, coordination and implementation of policy by the new offices and department will likely remain problematic."
According to Ivan Eland, Cato's director of defense policy studies, "even before the September attacks, the U.S. government had sufficient bureaucratic machinery to deal with terrorist attacks on the homeland without adding a new department." He added, "the real problem revealed by the terrorist attacks is too much bureaucracy - causing too many communication and coordination problems - not too little." In his commentary, "Bush Plan is Just 'Do Something'", Eland outlines the flaws that could render a new homeland security department ineffective.
Cato Files Brief in Campaign Finance Case
The Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice yesterday filed an amici curiae brief in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which took effect on November 6. The document has been submitted as part of the case, Sen. Mitch McConnell v. Federal Election Commission.
The brief challenges inconsistencies in the landmark 1976 Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo.
"As with many rights, exercising the right to speak almost always costs money, especially if the speaker intends to reach a large audience," the brief states. "The right to speak thus necessarily encompasses the right to pay for speech or the distribution of speech, just as the right to counsel encompasses the right to hire a lawyer and the right to free exercise of religion includes the right to contribute to a church. In each of those cases the expenditure or contribution is protected not because "money is speech" or "money is a lawyer," or "money is religion," but rather because the expenditure of money is part of the exercise of the right to speak, to counsel, or to free exercise of religion.
In a recent op-ed, John Samples, director of Cato's Center for Representative Government, and Patrick Basham, a senior fellow at the center, write that the BCRA will have little impact. "The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act will certainly change American politics, but probably not for the better. Elections will be less competitive, interest groups will become wealthier and our political system will become increasingly tied up in the courts," they write.
Experts Urge Canadian Government to Delay Kyoto Protocol Ratification
A group of Canadian and international climate science and energy specialists has urged the Canadian government in Ottawa to delay ratifying the Kyoto Accord until further consultation is undertaken with the scientific and energy community, according to The Globe and Mail.
The eight specialists, representing more than 20 of their colleagues in the fields of climate change and energy, say they have identified key flaws in the science supporting Kyoto.
Among the group's contentions: Humanity is not the primary cause of global climate change; computer models do not show catastrophic warming in the future; there is no reason to believe that current rates of temperature change are in any way different from what one would expect from entirely natural causes; and variations in the sun's brightness, not CO2 levels, account for most of earth's climate change.
In "The Devolution of Kyoto Power", Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies Pat Michaels, one of the eight specialists in Ottawa, wrote that "the entire Kyoto Protocol, if adopted worldwide, wouldn't change global temperature enough to even be measured in the average lifetime of everyone on earth today. Instead, if you want to have a significant affect on the earth's temperature, you have to somehow legislate people to reduce their total energy use by about 50 percent in the next 50 years, even as the number of people using energy will nearly double in that time. That works out to about 25 percent of today's energy running tomorrow's house, car and economy."
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org
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