Thanks to Cato’s Caleb Brown for this graphic reminder of then-candidate Barack Obama’s hairpin backflip on the question of telecom immunity—one that was to prefigure his backflips on a long list of other surveillance and civil liberties issues.

Yesterday, senators voted to proceed with debating the immigration reform bill on the floor of the Senate. The Gang of Eight’s bill was amended numerous times in the Judiciary Committee but now it will face input and criticism from the rest of the Senate. There are four big areas of the legislation to watch for amendments and criticisms:

Welfare

Numerous amendments will be introduced to further block non-citizen access to the welfare state. Cato colleagues and I have done a lot of work on this issue, including a forthcoming policy analysis, that has provided some of the intellectual ammunition demonstrating the viability of building a wall around the welfare state while increasing lawful immigration.

Border Security

Senators like John Cornyn (R‑TX) are deeply worried that the current bill does not provide enough border security. The current bill adds billions of dollars to an enforcement system that has grown along with the rest of the government over the last few decades. The best way to limit unlawful immigration is to increase legal immigration opportunities, such as temporary guest worker visas and other broader measures. Senator Cornyn’s border security amendment will be crucial for the bill’s political success but will not much affect the policy outcome of the legislation—except to make it more expensive.

E‑Verify

With scandals about government invasions of privacy, one would think a national electronic employment eligibility system like E‑Verify would raise opposition. Designed to weed unlawful immigrants out of the work force, the system is fraught with problems and raises numerous privacy concerns that my colleague Jim Harper has explored here. Given how internal enforcement has almost zero deterrent effect on unlawful immigration, it’s a mystery why so many so-called limited government conservatives support it in the first place.

Legal Immigration 

The guest worker provisions of the bill are too regulated, too restricted, and too limited for workers of every skill category. Applied retroactively, the proposed guest worker visa system would not be big enough to channel most unlawful workers who came in previous years into the legal market. Regardless, the immigration reform bill is a step in the right direction for guest workers—albeit a small one.

There are other important policy and political issues going forward, from controversy over the net fiscal cost of immigration reform to the tremendous economic benefits of increasing the number of productive people, but these are the big ones to follow for libertarians and fellow travelers.

The world has moved on to the latest crisis du jour, but it wasn’t that long ago when North Korea’s Kim Jong-un was dominating global headlines threatening to nuke places like Austin, Texas. (Why Austin? Maybe because Cato Senior Fellow Ted Galen Carpenter now resides there, but that’s only speculation on my part!)

Since then Pyongyang has gone largely silent. But on Sunday representatives from the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea met with South Korean officials and plotted expanded talks for later this week. As Yogi Berra once observed, it’s déjà vu all over again.

The DPRK has been threatening the peace in Northeast Asia since its founding in 1948. In the 1990s the Republic of Korea decided to try appeasement, providing roughly $10 billion in aid and investment to the North in ensuing years. Alas, Pyongyang simply took the cash from the so-called Sunshine Policy and built more nuclear weapons.

Andrei Lankov, who as a Soviet student studied in Pyongyang and now teaches in the South, argues that the Kim family regime is unlikely to ever reform, since doing so would threaten its survival. Any change is likely to lead to an eventual South Korean takeover. So the DPRK regime tries to extort money out of other nations.

The ROK again is the chief target, since the upcoming talks were expected to focus on reopening the Kaesong Industrial Complex, closed by the North during its recent provocative cycle. The KIC provides Pyongyang with $90 million annually in salary revenue alone. Apparently the North also wants to restart tourist tours elsewhere, which would provide more hard currency.

Seoul would be foolish to agree. As I argue on American Spectator online:

What possible argument is there for keeping the subsidies going after Kim Jong-un’s recent fire-and-brimstone tirade? South Koreans are putting money into the hands of the North’s barbaric elite which is threatening to destroy the ROK. Every won sent north can be used to add more nuclear weapons, miniaturize nuclear bombs, and extend the range of nuclear-capable missiles.

The argument that making North Korean officials feel warm and fuzzy will convince them to cast off their collective security coat has been disproved by experience. Lankov still argues that in the long-term the subversive impact of KIC on the North Korean population makes it worth the cost. That might be true if the money didn’t act as a direct subsidy for the regime. Cutting the North’s financial windpipe would seem to be a better strategy.

Of course, the South Korean government can set its own policy. But American taxpayers should not protect a country which is subsidizing its potential enemy. In effect, Seoul is paying Kim & Co. to build weapons which would be used to kill the very Americans guarding the ROK.

At the last minute the Kim government pulled out of the planned talks. The official reason was a tiff over relative rank of the negotiators. More likely the DPRK is playing its usual game of raising positive expectations and then creating tension, with the plan to soon return to whisper sweet nothings in Seoul’s ear.

Whatever happens to the latest round of talks, as I’ve long argued it is time for Washington to disentangle itself from the Korean peninsula. American troops should come home; America’s defense guarantee should end. North Korea should become its neighbors’ problem. Then maybe Seoul would spend millions more dollars directly on the South Korean military rather than indirectly on the North Korean military.

Faithful readers of this blog will have noticed that the government lost unanimously before the Supreme Court in yesterday’s quirky raisin case (which Ilya Somin points out is the government’s third unanimous property-rights loss in 15 months). Even more keen Cato followers will have realized that this ruling comes on the heels of three other unanimous government losses this term, which I described in a Bloomberg View op-ed last week. And my biggest fans (hi Dad!) will have remembered that this continues a seeming pattern — not sure if statistically significant, but does look anomolous — that I chronicled in a Wall Street Journal op-ed a year ago.

As I said last week,

These cases have nothing in common, other than the government’s view that federal power is virtually unlimited: Citizens must subsume their liberty to whatever the experts in a given field determine the best or most useful policy to be.

If the government can’t get even one of the liberal justices to agree with it on any of these unrelated cases, it should realize there’s something seriously wrong with its constitutional vision.

I wonder if I’ll get to write the same op-ed every year at this time.

I periodically post TV interviews and the second-most-watched segment — edged out only by my debate with Robert Reich on Keynesian economics — was when I discussed how President Obama’s statist policies are bad for young people.

So there’s obviously some concern about the future of the country and what it means for today’s youth.

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity has examined this issue and taken it to the next level, cramming a lot of information into this six-minute video.

The video highlights four specific ways that government intervention disadvantages younger Americans.

1. Labor market interventions such as minimum wage mandates make it more difficult for young people to find employment and climb the economic ladder.

3. Young people are trapped in a poorly designed Social Security system and politicians such as Obama think the answer is to make them pay more and get less.

4. Government has created a major third-party payer problem in higher education, putting young people on a treadmill of ever higher tuition and record debt.

What makes this situation so surreal is that young people — as noted at the start of the video — are the one group who think the “government should do more”!

I hope you share this video with every young person you know and help them understand that statism is the enemy of hope and opportunity.

And maybe also show them this poster if they need some extra help grasping the problem.

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed a farm bill with a projected price tag of $955 billion over ten years. As my colleague Sallie James explains, neither the Senate farm bill nor the House version offer up much in the way of real “reform.” And as Chris Edwards notes, both the Senate and House versions would spend more than the previous farm bill.  

One reason why taxpayers are about to get handed another _____ sandwich is because the politicians responsible for crafting the legislation are, well, politicians. And out of the mouths of politicians often come statements that indicate a softness of thought. Take, for instance, the following comments from Senate Agriculture Committee chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D‑MI) who just successfully shepherded a farm bill through the Senate: 

“I don’t think you can have an economy unless you make things and grow things. This bill is about growing things. That’s what we need to do in this country,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D‑Mich.), who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee.

The Senate just voted to take more money from average taxpayers and give it to higher-income farm households because we need to “grow things”? Things won’t grow unless the grower gets a check from the government? What in the world is Sen. Stabenow talking about? Grow things? 

Apparently, one need only to have watched Sesame Street to be qualified to centrally plan the nation’s agricultural economy:

As Ilya noted, the Supreme Court yesterday cleared the procedural roadblocks for the Horne family, which grows and processes raisins in California, to challenge the operations of the USDA’s marketing order system as an unlawful taking of their property without compensation. The Hornes say that under the USDA’s California Raisin Marketing Order, the Raisin Administrative Committee demanded that they hand over 47 percent of their raisins to be disposed of in ways that do not compete with sales in the domestic retail raisin market, such as export programs and school lunches. 

47 percent! Back in January that figure reminded me of an earlier scale of government extraction: 

Max Boot, who has written a new book on the history of guerrilla movements, tells how Shamil, firebrand leader of a celebrated 19th-century Muslim insurgency in Chechnya and Dagestan, began to lose the allegiance of “many ordinary villagers who balked at his demands for annual tax payments amounting to 12 percent of their harvest.” Instead, they switched their allegiance instead to the rival Russian czar, whose demands were more modest.

If only Washington were content with the czar’s less-than-12 percent. For more on regulatory takings, check out this testimony from way back in 1995 by Cato’s own Roger Pilon before the House Judiciary Committee.