House Republicans Drop Mandate to Prioritize Removing Criminal Aliens Over Others

By David Bier

Last week, when discussing the Trump administration’s secret memo requiring “enforcement action” against “all removable aliens” who immigration agents encounter, I pointed out that every year since 2008, the House Appropriations Committee has included a provision in its version of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill that requires the department to “prioritize the identification and removal of aliens convicted of a crime by the severity of that crime.”

I also noted that this provision was strangely left out of the “omnibus” funding bill enacted into law this May, which packaged funding for all departments in a single bill. But I chalked that up to an oversight due to the irregular process of putting together the large bill and predicted that the provision would reappear in the individual appropriations bill for 2018. I was wrong. The new House appropriations bill for DHS contains no requirement for prioritization. Now the Trump administration’s illogical non-prioritization policies will receive the tacit consent of the committee.

Remember that this provision has been included no matter which party controlled the House for almost a decade—really for as long as DHS has carried out major deportation operations. The first bill to contain this language was 2008 to fund the department for 2009 written by House Democrats and signed by President Bush. Here’s 2010 written by House Democrats and signed by President Obama. In 2011, House Republicans funded the government with a series of continuing resolutions—which essentially maintain the earlier funding bills’ status quo.

In 2012, 2013, 2014, however, Republicans wrote the bills and President Obama signed them with the requirement to prioritize criminal aliens based on the severity of their crime. Then in March 2015, the House of Representatives entered a bitter fight to stop President Obama’s proposed program to give work permits to certain non-criminal unauthorized immigrants who were parents of U.S. children (DAPA). In so doing, it nearly shut down the department. Yet the Republican funding bill for 2015 still included explicit language requiring prioritization. It did again in 2016.

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Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

What Federal Spending to Cut?

By Chris Edwards

Federal government spending is rising, deficits are chronic, and debt is reaching dangerous levels. Growing spending and debt are undermining the economy and may push the nation into a crisis. The solution is cutting and eliminating programs in every federal department.

I have posted a new plan at DownsizingGovernment.org that would reduce spending by almost one-quarter and balance the budget within a decade. The cuts compliment the ones proposed by President Trump in his 2018 budget.

Federal spending cuts would spur economic growth by shifting resources from lower-valued government activities to higher-valued private ones. Indeed, much federal spending is not just low value, it actively distorts markets and thus reduces overall income levels.

Cuts would expand personal freedom by giving people more control over their lives and by reducing the top-down controls that come with federal spending activities.

Liberals see government spending cuts as evil, while conservatives may see them as a necessary evil. Actually, spending cuts would positively benefit society.

From the full list of proposed cuts, these are my favorites: 

  • End farm subsidies and rural subsidies.
  • End K-12 school subsidies.
  • End HUD, including rental and public housing subsidies.
  • End urban transit subsidies.
  • End the ACA.
  • Reduce Social Security growth by indexing initial benefits to prices.
  • Raise Medicare cost sharing to increase skin in the game.
  • Block grant Medicaid to encourage states to find savings.
  • Privatize TVA, the PMAs, USPS, Amtrak, and air traffic control.

 See the full plan here.

  

Topics:
Tax and Budget Policy

DHS: Don’t Want Your Face Scanned? Don’t Travel!

By Matthew Feeney

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a privacy impact assessment for its Traveler Verification Service (TVS), a program designed to develop and expand DHS’s biometric entry-exit system for international flights. The document sends a clear message to passengers: if you don’t want your biometric information to be collected, don’t travel.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 required an automated screening system for foreign nationals leaving and entering the United States. Since 1996 a range of legislation has called for the implementation of a biometric entry-exit system, although such a system has yet to be fully implemented. In March, President Trump signed Executive Order 13780, which called upon DHS to “expedite the completion and implementation of a biometric entry-exit tracking system for in-scope travelers to the United States.”

According to the DHS privacy assessment, TVS is growing:

[Customs and Border Protection] is publishing this updated [privacy impact assessment] because the recently initiated TVS is expanding to allow commercial air carriers and select airport authorities (“partners”) to provide their own facial recognition cameras and capture the images of travelers consistent with their own business processes and requirements (for example, to use facial images instead of paper boarding passes).

More from the assessment:

These partners will capture the traveler images consistent with their business purposes, and then transmit the photos they capture to CBP through a connection with CBP’s cloud-based TVS. CBP does not capture the photos directly from the traveler under this TVS expansion.

There are already pilot face scanning schemes in place at airports in six American cities; Boston, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, New York City, and Washington, D.C. These pilot programs allow passengers and pilots to opt out. The DHS assessment explains that while you may be able to opt out of TVS scanning, government collection of your biometrics is unavoidable if you want to travel (highlighting is mine):

The assessment goes on to explain that passengers will be able to opt out of biometric identification under TVS. However, unless this opt-out option is clearly advertised to travelers it’s likely that most travelers will use a ubiquitous facial scanning system at airports.

Anyone who travels from American airports is familiar with the body scanners the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) uses for security. You can opt out of these scanners, but it’s very rare to see travelers telling TSA officials that they’re not going through the machines. When I opt out of these scanners I’m almost always the only one doing so. That is, unless I’m traveling with some Cato colleagues.

Sadly, millions of Americans consider passing through a body scanner to be an ordinary part of air travel. It would be a shame if facial scans became as widely accepted.

Topics:
Law and Civil Liberties

Are ObamaCare’s Community-Rating Regulations a System of Price Controls?

By Michael F. Cannon

ObamaCare’s community-rating regulations generally bar insurance companies from using any factor other than age to determine premiums, and prevent insurers from charging 64-year-olds more than three times what they charge 18-year-olds. I have long maintained community rating is nothing more than a system of government price controls, and should meet with the usual scorn economists universally heap on such boneheaded policies.

An esteemed colleague challenges my claim that ObamaCare’s community-rating is a system of price controls, because “the government doesn’t set a price.” Here is how I responded:

Price controls don’t always take the form of a fixed integer. Sometimes government sets prices using ratios.

Premium caps control prices by limiting this year’s premium to a ratio of last year’s premium. Medicaid’s prescription-drug price controls set prices as a ratio of the average wholesale price. Medicare’s price controls involve all sorts of complex ratios.

ObamaCare’s community-rating regulations control prices by (a) setting the ratio of premiums for healthy vs. sick people within each age category to 1:1, and (b) setting the ratio of premiums for young vs. old to 1:3. Insurers would not voluntarily follow those ratios, with good reason. But community rating forces insurers to set prices according to those ratios. Thus it is a price-control scheme.

Topics:
Health Care & Welfare, Regulatory Studies

Questioning THAAD’s Successful Test against an IRBM

By Eric Gomez

Yesterday the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced a successful test of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system against an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) target. This is a significant milestone for the THAAD system, which was recently deployed to South Korea to defend southern cities and the port of Busan against missile attack by North Korea. Even though this particular test was planned months ago, its timing is especially important given North Korea’s successful test of the Hwasong-12 IRBM in May 2017.

Despite the successful test, it would be dangerous and premature for U.S. policymakers to read too much into THAAD’s capabilities. Initial information about the test suggests that it did not reflect a wartime use of an IRBM by North Korea. Moreover, the test could have negative implications for U.S.-China strategic stability.

Based on the statement released by the MDA and video of the test, the test seems to have been relatively easy for THAAD. For example, at the moment the warhead is intercepted it does not seem close to any other objects. This makes it relatively easy for THAAD’s infrared sensor to locate the warhead and slam into it. However, it would be much harder for the sensor to locate the warhead if the target missile broke up in flight and cluttered the sensor. It is not clear whether the target missile used in the most recent test broke up in flight, but based on past tests it seems unlikely. This makes for successful testing, but it does not reflect real-world scenarios.

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Topics:
Foreign Policy and National Security

Hegemonic Blackmail: Allied Pressure and U.S. Intervention

By Emma Ashford

Discussions of military intervention often focus on the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This is entirely understandable: the war in Iraq was a catastrophic foreign policy choice that is still reshaping the political landscape of the Middle East today.

Yet the Iraq war is unusual in many ways. There was no existing civil war or humanitarian crisis, a factor which has driven many of America’s other post-Cold War interventions in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo and Libya. The United States also undertook the invasion of Iraq largely alone and against the wishes of other countries; unable to gain support from the majority of its NATO allies, the Iraq invasion relied on the so-called “coalition of the willing,” a small ad-hoc group of countries persuaded by the Bush administration.

In my newly published article in the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, I attempt to move past the Iraq War case to examine the broader range of U.S. military interventions. I look at the two recent civil war cases where intervention was possible – Syria and Libya during the Arab spring – to explore the role played by allies and security partners in decision-making about whether to intervene.  

Logic suggests that smaller states do have a strong incentive to seek the help of a major power ally like the United States for their interventions. As I note in the article:

“Put more simply, small states can benefit substantially from the intervention of a major power ally, particularly if they lack the capacity or manpower to carry out an effective campaign alone. African Union peacekeeping forces, for example, typically lack military assets required for their missions; training, logistical support and equipment are often provided by the United States to overcome this deficiency (Williams 2011)…. pressure from allies to join an intervention is likely to be highest when A is larger (i.e., relatively more capable in military terms) than B, and has the potential to tip the balance toward B’s intervention objectives.”

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Topics:
Foreign Policy and National Security

Is ObamaCare Conservative?

By Michael F. Cannon

That’s the thesis of a Washington Post opinion piece titled, “Why replacing Obamacare is so hard: It’s fundamentally conservative” by Northwestern University professor Craig Garthwaite. A lot of ObamaCare supporters find this claim appealing. If true, then it makes them look moderate and open to compromise, and makes ObamaCare’s conservative opponents look duplicitous and partisan. But is it true?

No. Not by a long shot.

I’m not a conservative. (I was, once, in my youth, but I’m feeling much better now.) So I will let the editors of National Review explain what a conservative approach to health reform is, as they did in this unsigned 2007 editorial. Spoiler alert: it’s a far cry from ObamaCare.

Against Universal Coverage

By The Editors — June 21, 2007

The Democrats running for president are competing over whose health-care plan gets closest to “universal coverage.” The Republican presidential candidates, meanwhile, have been mostly silent. Their inattention to the issue is a mistake. A great many voters are anxious about health care, and better government policies could alleviate that anxiety. The Republican candidates have an opportunity to present a distinctively conservative set of reforms.

Those reforms should begin with the rejection of the goal of universal coverage. Deregulating health insurance would make it more affordable, and thus increase the number of Americans with coverage. But to achieve universal coverage would require either having the government provide it to everyone or forcing everyone to buy it. The first option, national health insurance in some form or other, would either bust the budget or cripple medical innovation, and possibly have both effects. Mandatory health insurance, meanwhile, would entail a governmental definition of a minimum package of benefits that insurance has to cover. Over time, that minimum package would grow more and more expensive as provider groups lobbied the government to include their services in the mandate.

The health-care debate has centered on the uninsured. That so many people do not have health insurance is a consequence of foolish government policies: regulations that raise the price of insurance, and a tax code that ensures that most people get their insurance through their employer. If you don’t work for a company that provides health insurance, you’re out of luck. People locked out of the insurance system still have access to health care. But they often end up in emergency rooms because they did not receive preventive care.

For most people, however, it is another aspect of our employer-based health-care system that causes the most trouble: the insecurity it creates. People worry that if they switch jobs, they will lose their health insurance. They worry that their company will cut back on health benefits. Universal coverage is not necessary to address these worries. Making it possible for individuals to own their health-insurance policies themselves, rather than getting them through their companies, would solve the problem. It would also reduce the political momentum behind socialized medicine.

Most universal-coverage plans accept the least rational features of our health-care system — its reliance on employer-based coverage and on “insurance” that covers routine expenses — and merely try to expand that system to cover more people. Republicans should go in a different direction, proposing market reforms that make insurance more affordable and portable. If such reforms are implemented, more people will have insurance.

Some people, especially young and healthy people, may choose not to buy health insurance even when it is cheaper. Contrary to popular belief, such people do not cause everyone else to pay much higher premiums. Forcing them to get insurance would, on the other hand, lead to a worse health-care system for everyone because it would necessitate so much more government intervention. So what should the government do about the holdouts? Leave them alone. It’s a free country.

Topics:
Government and Politics, Health Care & Welfare

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