A seemingly scary story in The Wall Street Journal, by Jason Douglas and Joanna Sugden, warns of “a more‐​contagious and possibly deadlier coronavirus variant” in the U.K., implying that British cases and deaths are spreading faster than before.

The reason the new “more contagious” strain is supposedly spreading so rapidly, they suggest, is because the British government failed to continue a suitably strict lockdown on businesses, workers, and consumers.

“When lockdown lifted in early December,” write Douglas and Sugden, “the new variant went national.” But the U.K. never really “lifted” the lockdown. They just eased it modestly — in lower‐​risk locations‐ from Dec. 2 to Jan 4 (“until at least mid‐​February”). And the authors of this story neglect to tell readers what happened to COVID-19 infections and deaths recently about three months after the new variant “went national.”

What happened is that the 7‐​day average of new cases has fallen by a third‐ from 14,899 on December 1 to 10,089 on February 26, according to The New York Times. COVID-19 is not spreading faster with the new variant. On the contrary, COVID-19 is spreading much more slowly than in early December, when this Wall Street Journal story marked the start of a supposedly frightening new national variant.

Such inconvenient facts would not fit very well in this otherwise exciting story about new variants of COVID-19, which experts wrongly predicted would make infections grow more rapidly.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021, attempted insurrection by supporters of then‐​President Donald Trump, you can pretty much bet if you make even a clearly joking reference to “going after” House or Senate members, there’s a vastly increased chance you’ll get a visit from the FBI. As we prepare to close out Black History Month for 2021, it’s worth remembering that the lives of all House and Senate members were not valued equally in an early time.

Today, I have a piece up on the DRAD blog about the first African American House member elected to Congress in the 20th Century: Oscar De Priest. De Priest was the son of freed slaves, and as you can read in my DRAD blog piece, he got exactly the kind of racist treatment from Southern Democrats like John Rankin (D-MS) and Thomas Busby (D-MS). What made his Congressional experience even worse was getting a death threat from an anonymous, avowed KKK member warning De Priest to “leave this town right away” or else. As I noted on the DRAD blog:

On March 3, 1930 (the same day he received the threat letter), De Priest forwarded the correspondence to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, telling him “Any consideration or investigation given this matter will be appreciated by me.” Three days later, Hoover wrote back to De Priest to tell him that “Inasmuch as this matter is one coming within the jurisdiction of the postal authorities, I have taken the liberty of forwarding your communication to the Chief Post Office Inspector.”

Hoover’s referral to Chief Post Office Inspector W. R. Spilman reflected indifference, not a sense of urgency that a sitting member of the House of Representatives had received a threat of violence in the mail. “There is attached hereto for your information and for such action as, in your discretion, may be deemed appropriate…” Hoover wrote Spilman, giving no indication the Bureau was paying any further attention to the threat.

As I further note in the DRAD blog piece, the FBI definitely continued to keep tabs on De Priest even after he left Congress. According to an October 30, 2020 FOIA response I received from the FBI, at least two additional Classification 100 (Domestic Security) files dealing with De Priest were transferred to the National Archives; I have a FOIA pending for those files.

The sad reality is that the FBI’s penchant for monitoring people on the basis of their skin color is not simply a historical artifact from the 1930s when De Priest was in the House. As the extract below from the FBI’s Classification Guide (also obtained via FOIA by Cato) shows, contrary to prior FBI claims they have not expunged characterizations such as “Black Separatist Extremists” from its IT systems.

Just 36 days into his presidency Joe Biden has launched airstrikes against Iranian‐​backed militias in Syria. It is an ill‐​advised move for several reasons. Perhaps most troubling, it deepens U.S. military involvement in Syria’s murky civil war. Unfortunately, the latest step is symptomatic of the administration’s overall policy. In one of his first actions as president, Biden dispatched some 200 troops and 40 trucks of mostly military supplies to support Kurdish factions in eastern Syria.

Not only do the air strikes increase the likelihood of another bloody Middle East entanglement for the United States, they’re objectionable for other reasons. Russia is deeply involved in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered regime. It is never a good idea for two major powers, especially two nuclear‐​armed powers, to be operating in the same arena to back opposing factions in an armed conflict. That situation creates a dangerous risk of clashes between U.S. and Russian forces. Indeed, there already have been at least two ugly incidents. Such an episode can easily spiral out of control.

The airstrikes on pro‐​Iranian forces also greatly complicate the administration’s stated intention of reviving the multilateral agreement to impose limits on Tehran’s nuclear program. That effort already was faltering because each side has insisted that the other take the first substantive step toward a rapprochement. Washington’s new provocation further complicates an already fragile process.

Finally, the attack is another unhealthy manifestation of the imperial presidency. Once again, an occupant of the Oval Office has initiated military action against a sovereign country without even consulting Congress, much less asking for a declaration of war. Presidential arrogance has been especially pronounced with respect to Syria policy during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Syria did not attack the United States, and Congress has never formally authorized military operations in that country. Yet the United States now has several thousand troops there, has provided material support to insurgent factions attempting to overthrow Assad, and now is engaged in combat operations against the Syrian government and its militia allies.

The decision to launch airstrikes is a worrisome omen with respect to the administration’s overall Syria policy. Key members of the president’s foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, are long‐​time advocates of a more concerted U.S. effort to oust Assad, even when Biden, as vice president, seemed more hesitant. Now, he needs to listen to that inner voice of caution and resist the poisonous advice of such hawkish advisers. The Syrian quagmire beckons, and the Biden administration is flirting with having the United States wade into it.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in hot water. His handling of nursing homes during the pandemic was tragically flawed and his attempted coverup of the blunders has heightened the scandal. The governor has also been accused of sexual harassment by a former aide.

I reported on the governor’s policies in Cato’s fiscal report card. Cuomo received the worst grade of “F” in the 2020 report for his large tax and spending increases.

Interestingly, the essence of Cuomo’s political approach was captured in a 2009 essay by former Cato analyst Tad DeHaven. He presciently described character flaws that recent scandals have drawn attention to. DeHaven’s comments reprinted below were in an essay about failures at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Cuomo joined HUD in 1993, became secretary in 1997, and left office in 2001.

DeHaven portrays Cuomo as acutely interested in self-publicity, a bit of a back-stabber, and very hostile to criticism. It is true that many politicians exhibit those tendencies, and it also true that other HUD secretaries have been awful, such as Reagan’s secretary Sam Pierce. But the general pattern of Cuomo’s recent behaviors as governor were strikingly apparent back in the 1990s, as DeHaven discussed:

E‐​Verify is systematically unable to enforce workplace immigration laws. E‐​Verify, which is an online government program that allows employers to check the work authorization of their new hires to supposedly exclude illegal immigrant workers, “was promised as the silver bullet to immigration problems” according to former Arizona Republican state senator Rich Crandall. “E‐​Verify was going to solve our challenges with immigration,” Crandall said. Or at least, that’s what the advocates told him. Now advocates and U.S. Senators like Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Mitt Romney (R-UT) have introduced a national E‐​Verify mandate that would force all businesses to use the system when making a new hire.

As it often turns out, the advocates and the politicians they influence are wrong. E‐​Verify doesn’t work because it is a very easy‐​to‐​fool system – to say nothing of its errors in falsely identifying illegal immigrants and the huge regulatory cost that it imposes. Businesses take the risk of getting around E‐​Verify by not using it in states where it is legally mandated. They also look the other way when the documents are questionable – often for good legal reasons. The government cannot expect every business to become specialized at identifying whether particular documents are actually owned by the applicant holding them.

An illegal immigrant worker who presents somebody else’s legal work documents gets approved because E‐​Verify only checks paper, it doesn’t check the person holding it. This obviously incentivizes identity theft. Making scarce government documents necessary for certain market activities creates a black market for those documents. It’s no coincidence that Arizona, which mandated E‐​Verify for all new hires in 2008, had the highest rate of reported identity theft in the United States. Nor is it a coincidence that identity theft really took off nationally after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act required employment verification via the I-9 form.

Illegal immigrant workers also “rent” legitimate documents from legal workers. One survey‐​based paper found that immigrant farmworkers estimated that 50 to 70 percent of their coworkers used loaned documents whose procurement is usually arranged by a supervisor, friend, colleague, or a fourth party. It turns out, that fourth party likely includes staffing agencies hired by businesses to administer E‐​Verify and other employment requirement schemes for new hires.

Currently, some shady staffing agencies hire illegal immigrants by lending legitimate identifications to them. They try to avoid using E‐​Verify but it’s easy to see how this business model will expand dramatically if E‐​Verify were to become mandatory. Even if the business owners themselves don’t want to dip their toes into this black market, many employees will be tempted if they could make $300 for each identification they lend. If Congress were to ever mandate E‐​Verify nationwide, one should expect that price to rise along with surging demand created by that government system.

E‐​Verify and employment verification are effective subsidies of identity theft and identity loans in myriad ways that we are just beginning to understand. Hopefully, Congress won’t ever give us a reason to fully understand how adaptive shady operators in a black market can be.

Yesterday, President Biden's nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, testified at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. (Tai is very likely to be confirmed, and the hearing was not particularly contentious). Many of the questions she was asked were about the specific trade interests of the Senators' constituents, but there were also some broader systemic questions, including a couple on China. In this post, I'll mention two questions on China trade issues where I found Tai's answers interesting (once in a good way, once in a bad way).

First, Senator Bennet of Colorado asked the following (starts at 2:34:43)

President Trump had a go it alone approach … , launching trade wars around the world that alienated our allies and undermined an effective global response to China.

At the same time, China was strategically investing in the Mediterranean and African countries, expanding its reach in the South China Sea region, and the One Belt, One Road initiative. While China is an important market for agricultural products …, they failed to live up to their agreements.

How will you work with partners and allies, and the broader administration, to hold China accountable for its mercantilist and predatory practices. I should say the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people, but the Chinese government. You mentioned earlier in an answer to one of my colleagues that there had been a well worn path trod by former trade ambassadors, sort of expecting China to somehow adopt our economic system. That's clearly not going to happen. What tools are available to us, and maybe even beyond the trade tools, to be able to push back and ensure that we continue to lead?

Here was Tai's answer:

Again, I feel like this is part of the most consequential questions that we collectively as servants in the US government will need to figure out. …

I guess there are a couple ways that I would think about it. One is, rules that China has clearly signed up for, and agreed to. Those may be agreements that it has struck with trading partners. They may be the WTO rules. So rules that they have taken on as a member of a larger organization. And when we are in that area, we have designed for use enforcement tools to engage with the Chinese and hold them accountable. You promised to do X, you need to deliver on X.

There are also a lot of areas that are gray areas, where the rules are not clear or where we don't have rules yet. And I think that in that area, in terms of working with others, we have a couple options. One is, we create and we craft new rules, to address the gray areas. Separately, I think that that provides us with a lot of opportunity as well to think strategically about how to respond to the strategies that China is pursuing.

This combination of enforcing existing rules and negotiating new rules is pretty close to what I argued for with my colleagues Jim Bacchus and Huan Zhu in this paper. It may not be attention-getting like former President Trump's tariffs and tariff threats, but it could actually work to prod China to liberalize a bit more than it did as part of its accession to the World Trade Organization. (Trump's tariffs, by contrast, haven't had much impact on Chinese trade practices).

In his first bilateral visit with a foreign leader, President Joe Biden had a virtual sit‐​down with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The stakes were high, not least because Biden cancelled the permit for the Canadian‐​backed Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to delicately balance his country’s economic interests and the need to rebuild a fractured relationship with the United States.

Surprisingly, scant attention was paid during the meeting to the bilateral trade relationship and repairing damage suffered during the Trump years. Of particular note, Biden did nothing to address concerns over his executive order strengthening “Buy American” requirements for government procurement contracts, from which Canada has sought a waiver. The unwillingness to accede to this request was a missed opportunity that risks prolonging simmering tensions between the two countries.

Buy America requirements for procurement contracts have been around since 1933. Deeming the current state of affairs under these requirements insufficient for his own version of economic nationalism, the Biden administration has stiffened both them and the rules around how waivers are granted. Among these measures are a new means of measuring domestic content, an increased threshold for domestic content requirements for end products and construction materials, and increased price preferences for domestic products (essentially, the amount of money the government is willing to pay a domestic firm beyond the price offered by a foreign competitor).

Canada is no stranger to navigating such U.S. protectionism. In 2010, when Biden was Vice President, the country secured a waiver to Buy America rules implemented as part of President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It’s unclear whether this time will be different. When asked about a waiver for the United States’ third‐​largest trading partner, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki only offered that “no changes are anticipated” and “we’re still evaluating the application of that and how it will apply.”

Ottawa will certainly be interested to learn about the outcome of that evaluation. In 2015, the U.S. government awarded roughly 47,000 contracts worth $12.1 billion to foreign firms. Of that, Canadian firms received nearly 2,900 contracts worth $623.6 million—approximately 5 percent of the total. Although the amount is relatively modest, the stakes for Canadian firms could be raised if, as is widely expected, the Biden administration pushes forward with an infrastructure spending binge, where Canadian companies could certainly play a role.

If Canada is unable to secure a waiver, its options will be limited. While the North American Free Trade Agreement required that Canada, Mexico, and the United States provide non‐​discriminatory, “national treatment” to suppliers of goods and services from each other in many public sector procurement contracts, the agreement’s successor—the United States‐​Canada‐​Mexico Agreement (USMCA)—removed Canada from this chapter. In other words, a formerly competitive procurement market that treated Canadian and Mexican companies the same as American ones—thus ensuring the best cost and quality for American taxpayers—has been upended. Canada therefore does not have the option of pursuing a dispute under the USMCA.

Ottawa’s lone means of recourse is filing a dispute at the World Trade Organization, since both Canada and the United States are parties to the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA). But such a move could risk the goodwill established by the recent Biden‐​Trudeau meeting and encourage Biden to revisit the GPA and perhaps lessen U.S. commitments—a move he has already signaled a desire for. Furthermore, the WTO route will provide no quick resolution to matters with years of litigation a virtual certainty. Even worse, dispute settlement at the WTO has not been functioning since the Trump administration blocked the appointment of new members to the Appellate Body (the WTO’s appeals mechanism). Any appeal filed there would effectively be made “into the void.” In practical terms, it’s not an option.

While Trudeau was all smiles at the official briefing, and did much to reiterate the importance of the Canada-U.S. relationship, his “merci, mon ami” may have been premature. Yes, the two sides laid out a comprehensive roadmap for cooperation covering a variety of areas—but there were no clear deliverables. No concrete steps were taken by Biden to signal that the United States actually had turned the page. Niceties aside, what matters is policy, and right now the White House has done little to assuage one of its closest allies—and likely the rest of the world as well—that its approach on trade will be different.