The State Department remains a major barrier to reopening the United States to legal travel and immigration. As of mid‐​July, two thirds of consulates remained fully or partially closed to anything other than emergency nonimmigrant visa appointments. About 44 percent are completely closed to non‐​emergency nonimmigrant visa appointments. The open consulates are reporting ever‐​growing wait times—in many cases, six months to a year.

Consular officers have all received the opportunity to obtain COVID-19 vaccines since May. More than 3.5 billion COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide altogether this year. Moreover, all travelers to the United States must receive negative COVID-19 tests. Nonetheless, the State Department is keeping the doors closed to appointments, and it has refused to waive interviews in most cases or use virtual interviews. In fact, a State Department representative claimed doing so would be illegal, despite a statute directly authorizing in‐​person interview waivers during “unusual or emergent circumstances” like a pandemic.

As I explained in May, the State Department does not publish any accessible public information on immigrant visa appointment availability by consulate, but it is anecdotally similar to nonimmigrant availability. The department fails to publish aggregate statistics on its reopening progress and only makes available information on nonimmigrant (i.e. temporary) visa availability in an online search tool that only returns results for individual consulates. The statistics cited in this post come from querying that search tool on July 15.

Of the 237 issuing posts, only 81 were scheduling all tourist, student, and all other nonimmigrant (i.e. temporary) visa appointments as of July 15. No appointments would be available outside of emergencies for at least one of those three categories. Another 104 consulates were completely closed to nonimmigrant visa appointments, meaning that in July, there were more consulates fully closed than fully open.

Table 1 shows the torturously slow progress of the Biden administration in getting the consulates back to normal. In April, 59 percent were fully closed. Now, 44 percent are fully closed—a change of less than 5 percentage points per month. At this rate, the State Department will at least partially reopen all of its consulates in May 2022. In April, 76 percent of consulates were partially closed. Now, 66 percent are partly closed—a rate of increase of barely 3 percentage points per month. At this rate, the State Department will be fully open in March 2023.

For the open consulates, the wait times have grown from 95 days in April to 164 days in July for business and tourist traveler visas, from 25 to 46 days for student and exchange visitor visas, and from 40 to 59 days for all other nonimmigrant visa categories.

While these statistics only include figures for nonimmigrant visas, the situation for permanent immigrants is equally dire. In July, the State Department reported it had a backlog of 566,384 immigrant visa applicants who were documentarily qualified but needed a visa appointment. It had scheduled just 34,408 for appointments that month. The backlog ballooned from 60,866 in 2019 and has even grown from 494,289 in April.

The Biden administration is failing to process immigrant and nonimmigrant visas and as a result is drastically cutting legal immigration and travel. It can and should waive interviews and take other measures to speed up processing.

According to a new Charlotte Observer report, a liquor shortage in North Carolina, which heavily regulates alcohol sales, prices and distribution, is harming area bars and restaurants. State liquor officials blame the pandemic and global supply chains:

During Wednesday’s regular meeting of the N.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, chairman Zander Guy Jr. started off by addressing the statewide liquor shortage. “We all are experiencing the supply and demand shortage, and hopefully that will resolve itself in time,” he said.

North Carolina has 171 ABC county boards across the state that are challenged under the current conditions, Guy said.

That includes the Mecklenburg County ABC Board, which manages the sale of distilled spirits at its 29 retail stores and also sells liquor to restaurants and bars. The commission contracts with a privately‐​owned warehouse contractor, LB&B Associates, which is responsible for the receipt, storage and distribution of spirituous liquor throughout the state.…

But like other industries across the country such as meat, glass and aluminum, the liquor industry is experiencing tight supply and high demand resulting in shortages, Mecklenburg ABC Board CEO Keva Walton told the Observer.…

The North Carolina ABC laws provide a uniform pricing structure to protect against price gouging and untimely price hikes, Walton said. He did not answer questions about which distilled spirits are hard to find or when the shortage might ease.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, which has far less stringent liquor regulations, things seem to be going just fine:

Across the state line, Liquor at the Lake in Lake Wylie, S.C., is fully stocked, assistant manager Josh Martin said.

“We don’t have a shortage at the moment,” Martin said.

In fact, they’re seeing increased demand… from North Carolinians:

He said the store off Highway 49 near the Buster Boyd Bridge is seeing an uptick in sales with more people headed to the lake and because of the shortage on some liquor brands in North Carolina. Some people come as far as Concord and Huntersville [NC], he said, to find specific spirits, including bourbons.…

Unlike North Carolina liquor sales, which is regulated by the state, South Carolina stores can cater to customer’s tastes. “We try to get a variety of various liquors throughout the country,” Martin said.

For a national — maybe even global — problem, North Carolina’s liquor situation sure seems local.

Kevin Drum is a progressive blogger who was at Mother Jones until early this year. He caused a stir two weeks ago with a blog post titled “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals.” Taking issue with most of his ideological compatriots and with much of the mainstream media, he wrote, “over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.…Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” He cited such “hot button social issues” as same‐​sex marriage, immigration, abortion, crime, “defund the police,” cancel culture, and wokeness. Drum stressed in a followup post that he was generally “all on board with most progressive change”; he just thought moving too far too fast would hurt Democrats electorally. Nevertheless, left‐​liberals were not happy with the column, but conservatives loved it. Peggy Noonan got a whole Wall Street Journal column out of it.

Tim Miller, a former Republican operative turned anti‐​Trump strategist, wasn’t having it. Sure, he said, the data showed that Democratic voters had shifted more than Republican voters. But culture wars start at the top:

But when it comes to the actions of politicians, the aggressive, top down Culture War is being driven overwhelmingly from the right. And the shift rightward among Republican politicians on culture war issues is as dramatic—if not more so—than the leftward shift among Democratic voters on policy.

So who’s right? As in so many issues, they both have a point. The cultural trends of the last generation and more have been leftward — in many cases we might say they have been classically liberal — and in the Trump and post‐​Trump eras the leftward pressure has picked up steam. Republican politicians have shifted their focus from fiscal conservatism and national security to angry tweeting about football players’ knees and the threat to Mr. Potato Head. Rather than creating a good climate for economic growth, Republican legislatures are banning “vaccine passports” and Critical Race Theory.

But some of this right‐​wing culture war is in response to real social and political changes that have upset many voters. Civil rights, feminism, and gay rights all created a backlash, and right‐​wing politicians in earlier eras capitalized on that backlash. Now strong majorities support most of the outcomes of those battles, so politicians have moved on. But progressives are now pushing new measures: chasing down every baker and florist in the country who declines to use their talents for a gay wedding and forcing them to comply; pushing K-12 school curriculum based on thinkers such as Ibram X. Kendi who are well to the left of the mainstream on matters of race; imposing a national policy, never passed by Congress, on local school districts to guarantee transgender access to school locker rooms and sports; and more.

Miller is right: it’s Republican politicians, not Democrats, who raise hell about these issues. But that’s because they represent the voters who see themselves losing these battles. And most Democratic politicians don’t want to be vocal advocates of these policies. Think back to gay marriage: most Democrats, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton opposed it or avoided the subject until the polls turned positive. Right now Democrats prefer to focus their messaging on populist economic issues, not controversial social issues, especially when the social policies are being effectively advanced through bureaucratic impositions and court decisions. (Speaking of courts, I noted a few years ago that the federal courts prevent conservative states from being as conservative they’d like to be.)

As a libertarian, I wish Republicans and Fox News would spend less time on critical race theory and more time on Biden’s latest plan to spend $4 trillion the Treasury doesn’t have or the troubling use of executive orders and the administrative state. And like Drum, I often sympathize with liberals more than social conservatives on the expansion of equal rights and personal freedoms. But I’m not surprised that conservative voters and politicians push back when they feel — rightly or wrongly — that their traditions and values are under assault. Conservatism at its core is the opposition to change, for better and for worse, and especially relatively rapid change. Republicans, unlike Democrats, have little success in getting the policies they want on social issues from the courts and the bureaucracy, which leads to a greater focus on doing it through popular agitation and elected politicians.

Ángel Manuel Ortiz‐​Díaz is the owner of two cockfighting venues and a breeder and owner of more than 200 gamecocks. Deeply ingrained in Puerto Rico’s history, tradition, and culture, cockfighting is commonplace on the island. The heavily regulated industry has grown to support more than 11,000 jobs and injects approximately $65 million annually into Puerto Rico’s economy.

Under the Federal Animal Welfare Act, each “state” (including Puerto Rico) was left to decide whether it wanted to engage in intrastate cockfighting. Enacted pursuant to the Commerce Clause, the act only punished cockfighting that was intertwined with interstate or foreign commerce; anything purely intrastate was off limits for Congress to prohibit. That changed when the act was amended in 2018, making cockfighting in Puerto Rico a criminal offense even though it remained locally legal and outside the scope of interstate and foreign commerce.

Seemingly unconvinced that there is any meaningful limit on Congress’s commerce power, the First Circuit rejected Ortiz-Díaz’s argument that wholly intrastate non‐​economic activity cannot be reached by the commerce power. By allowing the criminalization of a non‐​interstate, non‐​commerce activity through a clause designed to give Congress power over interstate commerce, the First Circuit decided that realistically, no activity is safe from federal control.

Cato, joined by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and Professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law Center (and Cato senior fellow), has filed a brief supporting Ortiz-Díaz’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Commerce Clause, in conjunction with the Necessary and Proper Clause, was originally meant to act as a restriction on federal involvement in local affairs, not a rubber stamp for congressional legislation. Regardless of the merits of Congress’s desire to outlaw cockfighting, good intentions must not be allowed to erase constitutional safeguards.

We urge the court to grant certiorari to articulate a judicially administrable standard restricting Congress’s power to regulating actual interstate commerce along with activities that are demonstrably necessary to effectuate that regulation. Such a standard would allow localities to remain in control over the decisions that most affect their daily lives. In the 20th century, with a few exceptions, the Court validated Congress’s attempt to have jurisdiction over everything via the argument that in order for Congress to have effective power over commerce, it was necessary and proper for Congress to have power over everything. Since the Constitution explicitly and unquestionably grants Congress limited powers, that cannot be what the Constitution means, and the Court should take this case to make that clear.

Last December I wrote an op‐​ed (in Spanish) titled “Losing Fear in Cuba” pointing to what appeared to be a significant, new development: ordinary Cubans were becoming unafraid to publicly protest the communist regime. The mass uprising across the country this week in which Cubans shouted, “Down with the dictatorship,” and chanted “Liberty” was astounding because it was unprecedented in Cuba’s police state. But it also showed that Cubans have indeed lost their fear of openly defying the regime.

This is a profound change in Cuban society that caught the dictatorship by surprise. It has forced a regime that wishes to retain power at all costs to violently repress the population—through beatings, disappearances, and killings—in a widespread and public manner, a departure from its usual method of more limited or hidden forms of repression.

Independent Cuban journalist Reinaldo Escobar describes the impact of the July 11 uprising in this way: “The majority of Cubans has a new perception about the prevailing level of disapproval….The images that show protesters in numerous cities yelling ‘We are not afraid,’ ‘We want change,’ or the simple repetition of the word ‘Liberty’ made clear to every individual that what he was thinking and did not dare to say was not an extravagant personal thought, but rather a shared feeling.”

The regime, of course, has long been unpopular, but expressing as much has been dangerous and typically done in private. The mass protests have validated such sentiments and shown just how widespread they are. They were also unprecedented in Cuba in several ways. The protests were the first to be massive, on a national level, and simultaneous; they were the first to demand an end to the dictatorship, and to destroy government vehicles, other state property and photos of Fidel Castro.

For those reasons, former Salvadoran guerilla leader Joaquin Villalobos says the regime has been forced into a position it has sought to avoid. That’s because the regime has long relied on a system of selective repression and massive social control and intelligence that seeks to prevent things from getting out of hand. According to Villalobos, typically “The arrests are selective, torture should not leave any marks, and some of the opposition, instead of being assassinated, die of ‘accidents’ or commit ‘suicide.’” The recent uprisings, he explains, broke through the extensive system of prevention and espionage.

So why did the uprising happen? The proximate cause was the country’s severe and deteriorating economic crisis compounded by the pandemic, which the government has incompetently handled. Economic conditions are now worse in many ways than at any time in the post‐​Soviet period. With the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the end of massive subsidies it provided Cuba, the economy shrank by 35%, helping to spark the last, more limited protest in 1994. Venezuela under Hugo Chavez subsequently stepped in to provide massive subsidies, but that spigot too has run mostly dry in the past many years as Venezuela’s own socialist economy has collapsed into crisis. Economist Carmelo Mesa‐​Lago calculates that “most economic indicators are still below the 1989 level.”

The lack of outside financing to keep the socialist economy afloat explains the extreme shortages of food and basic necessities (including water), the electricity blackouts, and the added hardships of Covid‐​19 due to a decrepit and collapsed state‐​run health system. Those conditions have created tremendous frustration, but they do not explain why a spontaneous, massive national uprising occurred.

My article in December was prompted by the arrest of a group of artists, known as the San Isidro Movement that was set up to protest a 2018 law requiring government pre‐​approval for artists’ activities. The regime used the enforcement of laws intended to prevent the spread of Covid as a pretext to arrest the group last November. (See the Human Rights Watch report on how Cuba has used Covid rules to intensify repression.) What was remarkable was that the day after the arrest, 300 people gathered in front of the Ministry of Culture to protest it. It was Cuban artist Tania Bruguera who then observed that Cubans “are losing their fear and that is something nobody will be able to stop.”

The dissidence of well‐​known Cuban artists, the growing role of influencers on social media, and increased internet access in recent years enabled the July 11 uprising to take place. A combination of leadership from the world of arts and culture and new technology is breaching Cuba’s preventive system of surveillance and control. An example of the role artists are playing in popularizing dissent was the music video “Patria y Vida” that went viral earlier this year and that featured prominent Cuban musicians in Cuba and outside (and some of the San Isidro Movement artists) protesting the regime. (The title of the video means “Fatherland and Life” to counter the regime’s “Fatherland or Death” slogan.)

The newest dissidents build on decades of groundwork laid by a long list of political dissidents and human rights advocates including Oswaldo Payá, José Daniel Ferrer, Berta Soler and the Ladies in White, and Yoani Sánchez, who in a 2010 Cato paper said: “Now that the state is out of money and there are no more rights to exchange for benefits, the demand for freedom is on the rise.” She also observed that the internet was becoming a powerful tool giving rise to a community of cyber‐​dissidents: “this virtual space is like a training camp where Cubans go to relearn forgotten freedoms. The right of association can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networks, in a sort of compensation for the crime of ‘unlawful assembly’ established by the Cuban penal code.”

How right she was. The new conditions in Cuba have helped solve a collective action problem and emboldened Cuban citizens. The uprising that began in a town near Havana quickly spread to the rest of the country as Cubans saw what was happening on social media. As did the rest of the world. And even though the internet was cut off and has subsequently been partially restored, regime brutality is also being seen by Cubans and people around the world. Cell phones are ubiquitous, and Cubans are filming atrocities and sharing them on social media.

This matters enormously. In addition to shattering the myth that the Cuban people are content with communism since there is rarely any unrest and military troops are never seen putting down the people, the images coming out of Cuba remind the world that the Cuban government is in fact a military dictatorship. Videos show busloads of Cubans arriving in certain neighborhoods armed with bats and sticks to confront the protesters. In fact, those buses belong to the military and the Cubans they transport are its plain‐​clothed members. The thuggishness is not fooling anybody. Other security forces do look more militarized.

Moreover, if things get to the point where the military has to be called upon to shoot on the people, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda explains that the regime’s days would be counted. Taking such action would undermine its revolutionary credentials while a refusal to do so would mean the fall of the regime. That’s not the situation now, and the military government surely retains the upper hand, but it’s a dilemma that protesters may eventually force on the dictatorship.

The dictatorship has also been taking in lessons in repression from Venezuela, whose government it controls, and from Nicaragua, over which it has much influence. Both of those dictatorships have ruthlessly put down mass protests and so far, remained in power.

It’s not possible to predict what happens next. Cuba is a different place today than it was before July 11. Cubans have lost their fear and the regime’s deteriorating ideological legitimacy matters for all of Latin America, especially at a time when the populist and the extreme left continue to pose a serious threat in countries throughout the region.

Cable television host Tucker Carlson has leveled an explosive charge at the National Security Agency: He claims the spy agency has been snooping through his e-mails and text messages as part of plot to discredit Carlson and his eponymous Fox News program. The NSA took the rare step of issuing a public statement denying that Carlson had been an intelligence target, and his own network—both its executives and its news division—has been conspicuously muted about the allegations. So what's going on here?

Based on the publicly available facts, I feel reasonably confident about three things: First, Carlson's sensationalist version of the story—that he was illegally targeted by the Biden administration in service to some political vendetta—is pretty unlikely to be true. Second, it is not only plausible but quite likely that some of Carlson's communications were nevertheless intercepted by NSA. Third, on the currently public facts, it not clear whether anyone at NSA or within the broader Intelligence Community did anything improper, let alone unlawful— and this should in itself be disturbing, because it illustrates how dangerously broad our foreign intelligence surveillance authorities have become.

Let's start with those public facts. Carlson says he was approached by a whistleblower from within the federal government who alerted him that certain of his communications had been reviewed by NSA, proving these claims by providing details that could only have come from Carlson's private e-mails and text messages. The host concluded that NSA had been "monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air." A few days later, Axios reported that Carlson had been seeking, via two "Kremlin intermediaries," to secure an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and that government had become aware of his outreach. Carlson had in turn learned of this, prompting his charge of illicit spying. In the aftermath of the Axios story, Carlson claimed vindication: Not only had he been spied on, he argued, but NSA had been leaking the details of his communications in an effort to discredit him.

I'm skeptical of Carlson's framing, though not because it's inconceivable in principle that American intelligence agencies might illegally target journalists or political enemies. They have a long and sordid history of doing precisely that, most notoriously during J. Edgar Hoover's disgraceful tenure as head of the FBI, which spawned a long-running project, known as COINTELPRO, dedicated to targeting domestic dissidents. Yet Carlson's theory of the case doesn't make a ton of sense. He says NSA planned to leak his attempts to secure a Putin interview in order to "paint me as a disloyal American... [a] stooge of the Kremlin, a traitor doing the bidding of a foreign adversary." That sounds like a singularly bad plan: Putin has been interviewed many times by mainstream American reporters, including Carlson's Fox colleague Chris Wallace back in 2018, and NBC News just last month. It is hard to think of a more ineffective smear than "television host seeks interview with foreign leader"—a fact that the host presumably intends to become public anyway when the interview is aired. And it is similarly hard to think of a riskier target—one more apt to provoke both internal and external scrutiny—than a well-known conservative media figure. NSA has no lawful way of directly targeting an American within the U.S. without the involvement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and several layers of Justice Department review. So the most exciting version of the story is that intelligence officials were prepared to hazard disgrace and prosecution for the sake of... possibly embarrassing a television infotainer? Stranger things have happened, but it doesn't seem at all likely.

Do you drive an imported car or one made here by a foreign‐​owned company? If so, you may be a serious threat to national security – if a long‐​awaited report from the Trump administration is to be believed.

No, really.

Last week, the Department of Commerce finally released its report on U.S. imports of automobiles and certain automotive parts, as part of the Trump administration’s 2018 investigation pursuant to Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. While the report was submitted to the president on February 17, 2019, it was not published in the Federal Register, as the law requires, because the statute does not provide a deadline for doing so – one of many glaring loopholes in the law that relieve the Executive Branch of its accountability to Congress and the public for any actions (tariffs, quotas, etc.) taken thereunder. The Biden administration’s move to release the report is welcome, and we hope that they will also release the four remaining reports (uranium ore, titanium sponge, transformers and their components, and vanadium) in the near future.

As we wrote in a paper earlier this year, however, even the release of all remaining reports would be insufficient when it comes to righting Section 232’s wrongs. The autos report’s history, findings, and implications – and a recent court case on Section 232 – make this clear.