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Does Gorsuch’s Respect For Precedent Mean He Will Never Strike Roe?

By
Gustavo
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0

Progressives are not known to highly value tradition, nor do they much care what prior generations thought. It is thus a curious spectacle when every few years, after a Republican president nominates someone to the Supreme Court, these same progressives enter some Burkean trance, sanctimoniously wax on about the importance of precedent and judicial stability, and force the nominee to genuflect to the doctrine of stare decisis as if it were a fundamental law of nature.

So it goes with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch. Specifically commenting on Roe v. Wade at his nomination hearing, Gorsuch explained, “[the opinion] is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992, and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as a precedent of the United States Supreme Court, worthy as treatment of precedent, like any other case.”

The testimony mirrors what Gorsuch has been telling senators privately, notably agreeing with Sen. Susan Collins’s statement that five current justices’ disagreeing with a Supreme Court decision is not sufficient grounds to overturn it.

So should conservatives, particularly pro-lifers who voted for the president for the sole reason that he promised to nominate a judge who would overturn Roe, give in to their inner fear that, in the end, good things will never happen in Washington?

Stare Decisis Is a Consideration, Not a Surety

Maybe, but not because of Judge Gorsuch’s answers. Stare decisis is not, much to the chagrin of senators Feinstein, Franken, et al., a blanket prohibition on the Supreme Court’s changing course. If it were, African Americans would ride in separate but equal train cars (Plessy), former slaves would not have civil rights (Dred Scott), states could not regulate wages (Lochner), and the state could consign whole categories of citizens to special camps based only on their national origin (Korematsu).

So what is stare decisis? Courts have observed that to make law predictable, foster reliance on judicial decisions, and avoid endless relitigation, there needs to be some “special justification” to reverse a prior opinion. Whether special cause exists depends on a “series of prudential and pragmatic considerations,” including (but not limited to) how badly reasoned the prior opinion was, its unworkability, whether changed facts or a changed understanding of the facts have negated its justification, how recent the opinion is, and developments in other legal areas.

As Notre Dame law professor Randy Kozel noted, “[T]he modern doctrine of stare decisis is essentially indeterminate. The various factors that drive the doctrine are largely devoid of independent meaning or predictive force.” The Supreme Court is quick to point out when overruling precedent (as it did in Lawrence over sodomy laws) that stare decisis is not an “inexorable command.” In fact, the court did not even mention the doctrine in Obergefell (gay marriage).

These Objections Are About Politics, Not Good Law

Opposition to the Gorsuch nomination, obviously, has nothing to do with the judge’s respect for precedent. Would these senators give two cents about precedent if they thought the nominee considered Heller (gun rights), Hobby Lobby (religious freedom and the contraceptive mandate), and Citizens United (free speech) to be wrongly decided?

Rather, the nomination brings home the practical consequence of progressives’ legislativization of the judiciary. Progressives have viewed the Constitution as a vehicle for establishing whatever policies strike them as expedient today. In the progressive view, the words of the Constitution have no fixed and definite meaning. For them, the Constitution’s only purpose is to allow Ivy League-educated lawyers to fix any problems the rest of us cause them as if there were a linear correlation between education and good sense.

But if five judges can fashion a right that never existed before, five others can just as easily refashion it or do away with it completely. Thus, as Robert McFarland writes at The Public Discourse, progressives use stare decisis as a rhetorical device “to insulate poorly reasoned judicial pronouncements from the scrutiny of later jurists.”

Roe Is Rotten Precedent

Beyond the logical malpractice of its underpinning reasoning, there is ample cause to overturn Roe. The decision has fundamentally distorted American politics for more than four decades. Thanks to scientific and technological advances, more Americans than ever now accept (along with established science) that the fetus is a separate and living human being. Yet Roe rested on a political decision, not sound constitutional reasoning, so it diminishes the Supreme Court’s credibility across the board.

The decision and its aftermath further demonstrate that a handful of unelected and unaccountable judges are not the best people to figure out how to handle difficult issues. The judges recognized a cultural problem—that pregnancy imposed a difficult burden on some women—and imposed a policy solution that gave women a blanket right to terminate the preborn child’s life.

But in doing so, the court let Congress, the president, 50 states, every legislator and bureaucrat in the country, cultural institutions, churches, families, and individuals—especially fathers—off the hook for addressing all the social and economic dysfunction that drives women to abortion. Instead of crafting solutions that respect mother and child, our society has the Supreme Court’s blessing to blindly peddle abortion as a panacea.

But the issues that drive demand for abortion are too complicated and too individualized to be addressed in a blanket fashion by nine robed elites who experience the issue as an academic subject. They require the ingenuity and compassion of a nation.

Obama Spying Revelations Are Such A Big Deal

By
Gustavo
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0

In the last three months of the Obama presidency, significant personal information from and about the Trump transition was collected and widely disseminated at intelligence agencies, according to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.

Dozens of intelligence reports provided to Nunes by an unnamed whistleblower were floating around during the sensitive transition period following the election, he said. The information collection itself may have technically been legal, but the failure to properly mask the information “alarmed” the California congressman, who notified the White House of the surveillance and dissemination of information on Wednesday afternoon.

Many of the reporter’s presents didn’t seem to grasp the significance of what Nunes revealed. You can — and should — watch that press conference here.

Nunes began his remarks by reiterating his Monday request that anyone with information on surveillance of Trump or his team come forward. “I also said while there was not a physical wiretap of Trump Tower, I was concerned that other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.” While Nunes’ earlier refutation of Trump’s wiretap claim received outsize attention by the media, his concern about other surveillance did not.

He then dropped the bombshell: “First, I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Second, details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value, were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked. Fourth and finally, I want to be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team.” Again:

1) Information was collected on the Trump team by Obama administration agencies.
2) This information had no reason to be shared in intelligence reports to Obama officials.
3) Obama officials may have flouted legally required attempts to minimize and mask personal identifying information.
4) This had nothing to do with Russia.

He later explained that these reports were related to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-permitted information collections. Such collections of information on foreign sources require hiding and protecting information about U.S. citizens incidentally picked up during the process when disseminating reports on information gleaned. He even referenced how this reminded him of the trouble the spy agencies got in when failing to mask members of Congress they routinely picked up while spying on Israel. So his concern is not just that the personal identifying information was not masked, but that there appeared to be little or no foreign intelligence value in the spreading of information regarding the political opponents of the previous administration.

Nunes said he wants to know who was aware of this behavior, why it was not disclosed to Congress, who requested and authorized the additional unmasking, whether anyone directed the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates, and whether any laws and regulations or procedures were violated.

Nunes says “it was essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.” He also said, “What I read was clearly significant information about president-elect Trump and his team.”

When an administration is spreading around reports of political and personal discussions, failing to mask that information, and the information itself isn’t of foreign intelligence value, you have the makings of a huge scandal.

Many of the reporters at the press conference didn’t seem to know the significance of what they were being told, with many asking questions about Russia or the physical wire-tapping of Trump Tower, two issues Nunes had already specifically ruled out. Finally, a reporter asked whether Trump and his team were being spied on by the intelligence community.

The response from Nunes is something: “Well, I guess it all depends on one’s definition of spying. Clearly, it bothers me enough, I’m not comfortable with it, and I want to make sure the White House understands it and that’s why I briefed the speaker this morning.”

Another reporter again asked if Nunes thinks the Obama administration spied on Trump and Nunes again said, “I’m not going to get into legal definitions here, but clearly I have a concern.” He’s cautious and diplomatic, but this is what he’s “alarmed” about. While the incidental collection isn’t technically spying, the dissemination of such information without cause makes it look a lot like it is.

One reporter present at the press conference instead thought this was the big takeaway of learning that the Obama administration might have been spying on Trump during the transition period:

A lot of confusion regarding Trump/wiretapping and whether Trump is vindicated via Nunes statements. Let’s un-muddy the waters (1/5)
Trump’s claim: “Obama was tapping my phones in October,” and in “Trump Tower just before the victory.” (2/5)
Nunes info today doesn’t support Trump: Incidental surveillance of Trump team in Nov/Dec/Jan. Unclear if comms were from Trump Tower (3/5)
Nunes: No wiretapping.
FBI/NSA: No evidence to support tweets.
Senate Intel Committee: No evidence to support tweets. (4/5)
Conclusion: Nothing we’ve heard from Nunes/FBI/NSA vindicated Trump’s claim of wiretapping, and not during the time period he referenced. (5/5)

Okay, then! Now that we’ve debunked the issue of whether Obama personally crawled into Trump Tower in late October to lay down wiretaps, can we talk about the significant information revealed by the House Intelligence Committee chairman regarding the Obama administration’s questionable behavior in November, December, and January? The selective leaking of Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders? The unmasking and smearing of Michael Flynn? Now that we’ve gotten the wiretap issue out of the way? Can we? Or as I put it on Monday even before this latest bombshell, “We should be having a conversation about the surveillance of a political opponent.”

Imagine that President George W. Bush had listened in on Obama transition team discussions and spread that information throughout the bureaucracy. Can you imagine how outraged the entire press corps would have been? And rightly so! Abusing foreign surveillance machinery to collect and spread information on political opponents is wrong. Selectively leaking that information via a coordinated campaign to a receptive media complex in order to give an unsubstantiated impression that a political opponent is illegitimate or compromised is also not great.

If the laws and regulations guiding the collection of information by spy agencies were violated by the party in power to hurt the opposing party, that’s banana republic stuff. It matters not whether the Trump team were officially the targets, whether the targets were designed to obscure the real targets, or whether it truly was an incidental collection. The effect was that members of the Trump team had their privacy invaded and that the information gathered was disseminated and even leaked to the public by the Obama-led bureaucracy.

While the media might be laser-focused on whether Obama personally wiretapped Trump, as Trump seemed to claim in his tweets a few weeks ago, the American public is not keen on the idea that other techniques or forms of electronic surveillance were used on Obama’s political opponents. Further, the media attempts to deflect and downplay and run interference for Obama officials and other Democrats regarding this significant information reveal a journalistic complex seeking not truth nor protection of civil liberties, but partisan point scoring.

Hawaii Judge Halting Trump’s Travel Ban And 5 Reasons It is Bad

By
Gustavo
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0

Hours before it was to take effect, a federal judge in Hawaii put President Donald Trump’s latest Middle East travel ban on hold. The executive order, which was a loosened version of a previous version struck down by another court, suspends entry to the United States for 90 days from nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It also suspends the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days.

“This is an unprecedented judicial overreach,” Trump said of Judge Derrick Watson’s order, during a rally in Nashville.

Whether you agree or disagree with the executive order — and there are plenty of people on both sides of that debate, for many different reasons — the judge’s ruling has some serious problems. Here are a few of them.

1. Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings

Trump said the temporary travel restriction was needed for national security. In issuing his temporary restraining order, Watson said Trump’s order was a result of nothing more than religious animus against Muslims. The judge’s order is predicated on what he thinks Trump wants to do, not the order itself.

Throughout the ruling, Judge Watson concedes there’s nothing about the executive order that would be problematic if not for his interpretation of Trump’s statements made in the months and years prior to issuing it. He repeatedly states his feeling that Trump had a bad motive in issuing the order.

Judges using campaign rhetoric to infer intent instead of plainly evaluating the law as written is a dangerous development. Also because the public can witness the selective use of this trick, it undermines confidence in the judiciary at a time when the judiciary can’t afford too much erosion of trust.

Imagine, for instance, if judges ruled that the Obama-era Health and Human Services mandate forcing nuns to pay for birth control and abortifacients against their religious will was motivated by President Barack Obama’s religious animus since he had made derogatory comments during his campaign about people bitterly clinging to God. Judges have ruled against powerful mandates such as that one for much better reasons than a parsing of Obama’s campaign rhetoric or political speeches.

Or remember when the Supreme Court saved Obamacare by ruling it constitutional because the individual mandate — the penalty people had to pay for not buying health insurance — could be considered a tax? They ruled that way despite the fact that President Obama repeatedly maintained that the mandate was not a tax. Or as one attorney on Twitter joked:

Throughout his ruling, Watson shifts from discussing Trump’s campaign rhetoric to the executive order itself. In this sense, Watson’s decision looks to be largely a rewrite of a February decision issued by Judge Leonie Brinkema in Aziz v. Trump.

The restraining order is a commentary on Trump rather than the executive order he promulgated. Law professor Josh Blackman wrote of the earlier Brinkema ruling that the judge had “applied a ‘forever taint’ not to the executive order, but to Donald Trump himself.” In defending the earlier executive order that limited travel from seven countries, the government pointed out the naming of those countries as requiring “special scrutiny” by the Obama administration.

Brinkema wrote, “Absent the direct evidence of animus presented by the Commonwealth, singling out these countries for additional scrutiny might not raise Establishment Clause concerns; however, with that direct evidence, a different picture emerges.” In other words, if Obama selected those countries for extreme vetting, she would find it lawful but because Trump had, it was unlawful.

As Blackman notes, “No matter that Trump excluded forty-three other Muslim-majority nations that account for 90 percent of the global Muslim population. Even though three of the included nations are state-sponsors of terrorism! It will always a ‘Muslim ban’ because of comments he made on the O’Reilly Factor in 2011, a policy he adopted in 2015, and abandoned after his lawyers told him it was illegal. She admits as much. ‘A person,’ she writes, ‘is not made brand new simply by taking the oath of office.’ Not the policy. The person. Trump.”

Watson essentially makes the same point in his restraining order. Even though his own ruling notes the evolution in Trump’s rhetoric from a “Muslim” ban to a restriction on certain “territories,” in his view the original motivation of the man remains and forever taints the immigration policy of the executive branch for all time, no matter the words of the policy itself.

2. Selective Quotations

Watson’s temporary restraining order focuses exclusively on campaign rhetoric from Trump and his advisors. He dismisses the government’s desire to “focus on the Executive Order’s text, rather than its context” by waving it away and discussing Trump’s press releases and cable news talking points. But those statements are selectively quoted.

For instance, Watson quotes Rudolph Giuliani as saying, “When [Mr. Trump] first announced it, he said, ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.’”

Well, yes. Giuliani further explains how he put together a commission featuring judge and former attorney general Michael Mukasey, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee Michael McCaul, and other expert lawyers. He says they focused on “instead of religion, danger. The areas of the world that create danger for us, which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible.” He reiterated that the ban was “not based on religion. It’s based on places where there is substantial evidence that people are sending terrorists into our country.”

If you’re going to quote the man, quote the man. Yet if he’d done that, he would not have been able to write that “These plainly-worded statements… betray the Executive Order’s stated secular purpose.”

3. Unforced Errors

Watson favorably cites the plaintiffs’ condemnation of Trump for saying the following about his earlier executive order that gave priority to persecuted religious minorities such as Christians and Yazidis:

On January 27, 2017, interview with Christian Broadcasting Network, President Trump said that persecuted Christians would be given priority under the first Executive Order. He said (once again, falsely): ‘Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.’

Once again, falsely? Once again, falsely? It’s mildly disconcerting the judge would know so little about persecuted religious minorities in the region relevant to the travel ban. Here’s a report from September of last year:

The Obama administration hit its goal this week of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees — yet only a fraction of a percent are Christians, stoking criticism that officials are not doing enough to address their plight in the Middle East.
Of the 10,801 refugees accepted in fiscal 2016 from the war-torn country, 56 are Christians or .5 percent.
A total of 10,722 were Muslims, and 17 were Yazidis.
The numbers are disproportionate to the Christian population in Syria, estimated last year by the U.S. government to make up roughly 10 percent of the population. Since the outbreak of civil war in 2011, it is estimated that between 500,000 and 1 million Christians have fled the country, while many have been targeted and slaughtered by the Islamic State.
In March, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. had determined that ISIS has committed genocide against minority religious groups, including Christians and Yazidis.

Once again, falsely? What’s false about what Trump said in that interview from which we’re supposed to deduce so much intent and motivation?

For more, read Nina Shea’s Wall Street Journal piece “The U.S. and U.N. Have Abandoned Christian Refugees.”

4. Confusion about the Establishment Clause

The plaintiffs in the case before Judge Watson said the executive order denies them their right to associate with family members overseas and results in “having to live in a country and in a State where there is the perception that the Government has established a disfavored religion.”

Watson uses the three-part Lemon test for the First Amendment. That means the law must have a primary secular purpose, may not have the principal effect of advancing or inhibiting religion, and may not foster an excessive entanglement with religion. Watson says it fails the first part of the test. Yet the idea that the executive order has no secular purpose is laughably wrong. One can disagree with the executive order or its goals without denying that those goals are secular.

Watson admits that the executive order doesn’t discriminate for or against any religion or for religion versus non-religion. He admits that the executive order doesn’t even mention anything about religion. He notes that the government defended the religious neutrality of the text and noted what a small percentage of global Muslims the ban covers. But he says “The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable.” He says you can demonstrate animus without targeting the entire population and besides, the countries targeted involve a lot of Muslims.

The problem is that Watson neglects to note that the Establishment Clause has not been held by courts to apply to immigration policy. Back to Blackman:

Two decades ago, immigration scholar Enid F. Trucios-Haynes observed in the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal that applying the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence to long-standing immigration laws ‘is particularly awkward.’ Under either the Lemon test or the related ‘endorsement’ test, a facially neutral law with a non-secular purpose is constitutionally suspect. A law that prefers religion over non-religion is very likely unconstitutional. A law that overtly prefers certain religious sects over others is almost certainly unconstitutional. Yet, immigration law routinely does all of the above, and neither Congress nor the courts have expressed even the slightest concern for the Establishment Clause—that is, until President Trump’s executive order.

Blackman looks at major court cases that have shown preference or favor for one religious group over another, or religious over non-religious, and the courts and other branches of government don’t seem particularly concerned about violations of the Establishment Clause. That’s not to say they couldn’t develop an opposition to immigration policy that benefits persecuted religious minorities or restricts entry to particular regions with majority religions, but they haven’t demonstrated it thus far.

“My tentative conclusion is the Establishment Clause, in light of foreign policy concerns and Congress’s plenary powers over naturalization, simply have not applied with full force to immigration law,” Blackman writes. He notes that the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act includes a section designed to root out discriminatory quotas. That section specifically and intentionally doesn’t include religion in the list of what can’t be discriminated against.

5. Judicial Overreach

“This grandstanding judicial supremacism has to stop,” wrote Roger Kimball. Indeed, it’s hard to see how the logic of this temporary restraining order would ever permit a Trump administration to have any immigration policy whatsoever with regard to majority-Muslim countries.

What’s more, the idea that these courts are putting forth that restricting entry to a country with a majority religion suggests bias against that entire religion would make any and all immigration policy unconstitutional. Very few countries don’t have a majority religion, after all.

Regardless of one’s views on the particulars of this executive order and its efficacy, the ability to determine who can enter the country is one of the most obvious and important sovereign decisions a people makes. That power is vested in the executive branch and should not be enjoined by rogue judges. Unelected and unaccountable judges ignoring the law in favor of their feelings is a threat to self-government and rule of law. It needs to stop.

Do Liberal’s Know Simple Math? Donald Trump’s Effective Tax Rate In 2005 Was Actually 79 Percent, Not 25 Percent

By
Gustavo
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0

Contrary to initial reports based on a leaked copy of President Donald Trump’s form 1040 from 2005, the president actually paid an effective tax rate of 79 percent on his income that year. In their zeal to disclose details from Trump’s leaked tax returns, many journalists improperly calculated the effective tax rate, which they claimed was 25 percent.

Numerous news outlets, including the New York Times, Bloomberg, and CNBC, inaccurately characterized both Trump’s taxable income as well as his total effective tax rate. Other outlets correctly noted former president Barack Obama’s effective tax rate of 18.7 percent in 2016 (he paid $81,472 in federal taxes on an AGI of $436,065), but incorrectly compared that number to a different one they used to calculate Trump’s effective rate.

To properly calculate a taxpayer’s total effective tax rate, one must divide total tax liability by adjusted gross income, or AGI. Total tax liability can be found on line 63 of a form 1040, while AGI can be found on line 37 or 38. But instead of using AGI as the denominator in the effective tax rate calculation for Trump, many journalists added $103 million in losses (found on line 21) to Trump’s actual AGI of $48.6 million to produce an annual income figure of $151 million. They then divided Trump’s tax liability of $38.4 million over the $151 million figure to produce an effective tax rate of 25 percent.

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/842115809078087680

That number is incorrect. The correct calculation of Trump’s total effective federal tax rate in 2015 is a total tax liability of $38.4 million divided by AGI of $48.6 million, which produces an effective tax rate of 79 percent.

In fact, this correct calculation is how Obama’s most recent effective federal tax rate of 18.7 percent was calculated by both the media and the Obama White House.

The Trump White House, however, was also guilty of conflating “income,” which is not a line on a tax form, and adjusted gross income, which is a specific number used to calculate the effective tax rate. While Trump may well have earned $150 million on a cash basis in 2005, his reported taxable income was actually $48.6 million.

You can view the full two pages of Trump’s leaked 2005 form 1040 here.

Hello, Uber/Lyft? It’s Your Ex-Girlfriend Austin! Please Come Back.

By
Gustavo
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0

Every year, the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas offers a chance at a break-out moment for a new technology. The conference is famous for attracting the hip and hipsters of technology, film, and music for 10 days of panels and parties. Start-ups take the chance to pitch this demographic, as influential as it is insufferable, on new services. Twitter had its coming-out party at SXSW Interactive in 2007, GroupMe in 2011, and Meerkat in 2015. You get the idea.

This year was supposed to be Fasten’s year. Or RideAustin’s. The year of the Uber/Lyft alternative. Instead, when the techies of SXSW Interactive flooded the city, apps crashed, ride prices surged, drivers couldn’t or didn’t pick up, and a bunch of “Silicon Valley” extras were left standing in the rain on one of Austin’s biggest party nights while locals trying to get to work were stranded or priced out, too.

How did we get here? Local Austin officials effectively chased popular ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft out of the city by passing regulations that would require drivers to be fingerprinted among other things.

Here’s what happened. Back in December [2015], Austin’s city council passed an ordinance requiring fingerprinting for drivers, “trade dress” for rideshare vehicles, restrictions on where drivers can pick up and drop off passengers, and an onerous data reporting scheme. Among the many justifications offered by the city council, the taxi lobby, and their cheerleaders in the local press was the need to “create a level playing field.”

In response, Uber and Lyft collected more than 65,000 signatures—more than three times the required amount—in support of a more reasonable ordinance to regulate ridesharing. It was placed on the ballot as Proposition 1 and a special election was held May 7. A paltry 17 percent of voters weighed in—in a city of more than 885,000—and the pro-regulation crowd won the day by a vote of 48,673 to 38,539, thanks in part to the confusing ballot language.

Never fear, though. As the behemoths of the ride-sharing industry exited the city, “ride-hailing” services more palatable to urbane liberal sensibilities entered. The two most prominent are Fasten and RideAustin, whose central appeal to the people of Austin is the moral superiority of not responding to the free market. Fasten claims not to do surge pricing and takes only $1 per ride from drivers instead of the larger percentage of ride-sharing services. RideAustin is a nonprofit that encourages riders to round up to the nearest dollar and donate the difference to charity.

This moral superiority, however, does not translate to service superiority, particularly when the crowds of SXSW increase demand by 12-fold.

“It wasn’t the greatest page in our history,” Fasten CEO Kirill Evdakov told Bloomberg News after outages took the Fasten app down for several hours. “Hopefully we can regain the trust.”

Fasten paid money for this opportunity, partnering with SXSW, as Lyft has done in the past, to be the official ride service of the festival. The Boston-based start-up is only available in Boston and Austin and has deliberately kept its workforce and growth slow and small to stay viable with its $1-per-ride skim.

Evdakov told AdWeek his company has more than doubled its customer base in Austin over two days, but adding them doesn’t mean they’ll keep them, as these tweets from SXSW users suggest.

https://twitter.com/Fayza/status/841304363217883138

Before SXSW, these start-ups were eagerly anticipating their biggest “stress test” and their “springboard” to take on Uber.

“There’s no secret sauce,” RideAustin spokesperson Joe Deshotel told CNN days before SXSW started. “The technology is becoming easier to replicate. It’s really about culture. Do riders and drivers like what you’re doing? Do they feel like they’re a part of it?”
One Internet entrepreneur even took the weekend meltdown as an opportunity to move some load-testing services. Never change the Internet.

Fasten and RideAustin will probably get these problems sorted out after this initial failure, and they publicly apologized, but as industry pub, TechCrunch put it: “Austin definitely missed its chance to prove that cities are ready to function without Uber or Lyft.” This is not to say Uber or Lyft don’t crash or fall short sometimes. They do! But there is a secret sauce, and rejecting it makes success far less likely.

Fasten and RideAustin were granted practical access and spiritual absolution by the people of Austin because they boast about eschewing the very market forces that allow Uber and Lyft to work well, especially during a big event. By only allowing access for ride-sharing services that act less like Uber and more like taxis, they got ride-sharing services that work less like Uber and more like taxis, whose failures are the very reason Uber and Lyft exist.

The weekend failure led to a perfect SXSW moment— one blue check mark castigating other blue check marks on Twitter for their privilege because they expected services that claim to offer rides to offer rides.

In an ironic turn of events, Fasten even seemed to resort to the very kind of price surging it claims not to use. Why? Because on a busy night with high demand, a big event, and rain, you need price signaling to attract more drivers and quickly sort and prioritize need throughout a market.

“Boost pricing,” as Fasten calls it, is driven by customers choosing to pay more instead of the company deciding to charge more for rides, but the idea is the same— “higher prices, determined by an algorithm, are necessary to attract drivers during busy times,” according to Fasten’s CEO. So they call it something different and the drivers get more of the windfall than with Uber and Lyft, but the results are equally expensive and less reliable:

RideAustin is a nonprofit organization, which doesn’t incentivize working with killer efficiency as, say, a profit motive might. As many found this weekend, good intentions don’t give people rides. Uber and Lyft do.

Back in the halcyon days before SXSW actually started and people needed rides, CNN Tech reported that Austin was showing the rest of us how to move on from a tech break-up. Austin voted to send the companies packing. The city is very happy in its new relationships and doesn’t even think about its ex anymore, according to Austin Mayor Steve Adler, who in Orwellian fashion, declared the new environment the triumph of an “open market…competition and innovation.”

Texas legislators are considering a bill that might roll back some of the onerous regulations that chased Uber and Lyft away, which may entice them to return to Austin. After this weekend, Austin may want its ex back.

Environmentalist Protest Destroys The Environment At Standing Rock

By
Gustavo
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0

After half a year, hundreds of arrests, and thousands of headlines, the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline has drawn to an end at the Standing Rock site. On February 22, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum forced an evacuation of the protesters’ camps. The government needed time to clean the environmental mess the environmentalists left behind.

That paradoxical reality underscores many of the problems with efforts that claim to solve potential problems. In the end, this lengthy “protest” accomplished none of its stated goals, cost millions to those on both sides, and left the area in crisis thanks to the very sorts who claimed to be there as a form of protection.

Instigated by resistance and lawsuits brought forth by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, protesters descended on the flats of the Cannonball River plain and encamped to resist the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The tribe has been in court battling the Army Corps of Engineers over the pipeline. Tribal elders resisted despite the dubious merit of complaints this construction would violate sacred tribal lands and threaten their water supply, even though numerous other pipelines already run through these lands.

We Just Want to Take a Toll

The tribe may have been actually just haggling over compensation. The Washington Examiner reported that during talks with the group representing the pipeline construction—Energy Transfer Partners—the tribe had been given a number of offers. Addressing the concerns cited, ETP pledged water monitoring systems and pipeline emergency support.

These offers were not accepted: “time and again the tribe rebuffed or ignored the company’s offers demanding, instead, a toll on the crude that passed through the pipeline, an ultimatum that showed the tribe’s true desire — easy money.”

With that protester from across the country, emboldened by numerous celebrity supporters, poured into the South Dakota region. The new encampment held thousands of protesters. These were well-funded, long-term activists given the dwellings they constructed and supplies shipped into the squatters.

Earth First—Or Second, Or At Least In the Top Ten

As the media played along with the spokespersons, relaying the message of “peaceful” protesters,” protesters clashed numerous times with authorities. Access roads to the camp were blocked with machinery and environmentally friendly tire fires. Many of these led to numerous arrests. North Dakota tabulated the cost for its taxpayers to monitor, control, and babysit these protesters since they began arriving on August 10, 2016: $33 million.

South Dakota also recorded more than 700 arrests in the course of those six months, and 92 percent of those arrested were from outside the state. Over one-third of those were people with prior criminal records, totaling 1,400 charges. These cannot be dismissed as solely charges from prior protests, for the majority were arrested over thefts or violence.

In a separate lawsuit brought against the government in court, representatives of the protesters claimed they were victims of brutality during the conflicts. The law enforcement defendants submitted lengthy paperwork displaying the voluminous amount of threats of violence from the protesters on social media and other outlets.

An early sign of hope was President Obama declaring an end to the construction project. Invoking environmental concerns, on November 6 he signed an order halting the construction. Donald Trump’s election a few days later led to a quick reversal in a new executive order on January 24.

We Love the Earth So Much We’ll Destroy It

As the protest stretched into December no end to the conflict appeared in sight. A particularly brutal snowstorm changed things drastically. As drifts of snow blew in overnight, the crowds plummeted from thousands to just a few hundred die-hards. Most of those fled instantly, abandoning the items they had trucked in. This exposed a monumental environmental threat at the location, created entirely by environmentalists.

The main camp was located at the Cannonball-Missouri confluence that was declared a significant historic Indian trading post. The protesters desecrated that sacred land with garbage. Garbage, building materials, and months of untreated human waste from thousands of squatters now threaten the very water they claimed to be protecting.

The governor forced the evacuation so crews could begin the cleanup. Hundreds of large-capacity waste removal trucks have already carted out more than 1,000 tons of waste. Another environmental hazard is underreported: authorities have counted several hundred abandoned vehicles. The camp sat on a natural floodplain, and the work now is round-the-clock to clear out waste and debris before the spring thaw.

At spring melt the Cannonball River current is strong enough to carry these left-behind vehicles, along with fuel, oil, and other polluting agents, into the Missouri River. Thus, in the desire to prevent a pipeline disaster that could pollute the Missouri someday, these globe-lovers have threatened that same river with an environmental crisis that is more likely to happen tomorrow.

A Tribe Called ‘Debt’

For its efforts to protect the region, the Sioux tribe has incurred significant losses. The land they wanted to keep pristine has been befouled by the very people who undertook their cause. The tribe has also reported $6 million in losses at its nearby casino, largely because the squatters shut down the bridge that channels gamblers to its resort. Following a number of fires protesters set on the causeway to keep out the authorities, the bridge was declared unsafe.

The tribe has collected money for the cleanup efforts, but the state of North Dakota is absorbing most of the costs. Most of the effort to clear the hazardous waste is conducted not by the tribe, but the Army Corps of Engineers.

Let’s process this: As the Sioux tribe took the Army Corps of Engineers to court to ostensibly protect lands, their resulting protest created an environmental crisis on those lands. The very same Army Corps is cleaning up the mess to prevent pollution in the very same water the tribe fears could become polluted. It doesn’t take a shaman to see this has become a self-fulfilled prophecy.

Trump Open To Negotiation On Obamacare. Here’s His Chance

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Gustavo
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The Republican Study Committee is backing two proposed changes to the Obamacare repeal and replace bill now under consideration in the House, both of which concern Medicaid. The first amendment would freeze Medicaid enrollment under Obamacare’s lavish funding rates at the end of this year, two years sooner than the GOP repeal bill. The second amendment would impose work requirements on able-bodied, childless adults enrolled in Medicaid (the Obamacare expansion enrollees).

For non-health policy wonks, those two provisions might not sound like much, but both of them strike at the heart of Obamacare’s fundamentally flawed approach to health care, which seeks above all to expand state control of health care. If President Trump is really open-minded about negotiating changes to the Republicans’ already-beleaguered repeal and replace bill, these amendments are a good place to start.

The Obamacare Bribed States to Enroll More Dependents

Let’s start with the first one. Under Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, the federal government paid states more for newly eligible enrollees than for those who were already enrolled in the traditional Medicaid program. The funding formula varies by state, but on average the federal government pays 60 percent of the cost of covering Medicaid enrollees and the state pays the rest.

Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion sweetened that deal for states. Anyone earning less than about $16,400 a year could sign up for Medicaid and the federal government would pay for the entire cost of these new enrollees for the first three years, gradually ratcheting down to 90 percent by the year 2020.

For many states, that was an offer they couldn’t refuse. It amounted to an influx of billions of federal tax dollars that went first to state coffers and then to insurers and hospitals. Blue states like California and New York jumped at the offer, and eventually, even some Republican-controlled states signed on. To date, 31 states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid, including 16 states with GOP governors—including Vice President Mike Pence, who at the time was governor of Indiana.

Since 2014, these states have raked in billions in federal funds. Progressive think tanks and advocacy groups have issued various briefs claiming that expansion states are saving money and non-expansion states are losing out.

Medicaid Is a Giant Boondoggle For States

But there’s a problem with this analysis. Of course, expansion states are saving money—if by “saving money” you mean “receiving billions in federal tax dollars they wouldn’t otherwise receive.” The problem is, even without repealing Obamacare, states were always going to assume more of the cost of Medicaid expansion. Even under a Democratic administration, it was unlikely the federal government would fund 90 percent of the cost of expansion enrollees indefinitely. (Obama tried to shift expansion costs onto states as early as 2012.)

Hence, states were always going to need to come up with ever-more funding for Medicaid. But Medicaid was gradually swamping state budgets even before Obamacare. Ask any state lawmaker on any budget appropriations committee what their most pressing problem is, and you are likely to hear it’s the state Medicaid program.

It doesn’t matter whether a state has expanded or not. In Texas, which didn’t expand and maintains a comparatively lean program, Medicaid now accounts for 30 percent of the state budget. This wasn’t always the case. In 2000, Medicaid only consumed 20 percent of Texas’ budget (PDF). In California, Medicaid is 27 percent of the state budget, and the majority of state taxes go to pay for the program, which now covers nearly 12 million people—a third of the state’s residents.

To make matters worse, the coverage Medicaid provides is notoriously poor, in part because Medicaid doesn’t really improve enrollees’ health, as the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment showed. Moreover, the billions of federal and state tax dollars don’t primarily go to patients but to hospitals and insurers, which is probably why so many hospital groups have come out against the Republican plan.

In this context, forcing millions of able-bodied, working-age adults into this program is a recipe for out-of-control Medicaid spending. Keep in mind that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion fundamentally transformed what had been a narrowly tailored welfare program into a broad-based entitlement. Created in 1965 alongside Medicare, Medicaid was originally meant to cover the indigent elderly, low-income pregnant women and their infant children, and the disabled. In other words, people who couldn’t work.

Obamacare imposed Medicaid to an entirely new population that most state programs had never covered. For example, expansion means that a 35-year-old man with no disabilities and no children is entitled to health coverage he doesn’t have to pay for under a state’s Medicaid program as long as he doesn’t make more than $16,400 a year.

Trump Could Negotiate a Historical Reform of Medicaid

That brings us to the second amendment the Republican Study Committee backed: work requirements for the expansion enrollees. As a matter of principle, this makes sense. After all, that able-bodied 35-year-old doesn’t really need Medicaid, he needs a full-time job so he can purchase his own health coverage or get it from his employer.

But as a matter of policy, it’s a bit tricky. If our 35-year-old bachelor worked a full-time job at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, he’d earn $15,080 a year and still qualify for Medicaid. But if he gets a small raise, say to $8 an hour, he’d earn too much to qualify for coverage. It’s easy to see how such work requirements contain strong incentives to earn less, not more—a pitfall of all means-tested welfare schemes.

These are the kinds of reforms states have been wanting to try for a long time, but the federal government has refused. All that federal Medicaid funding comes with strings attached, and states have been incredibly restricted in the kinds of rules and requirements they can impose on Medicaid enrollees.

Medicaid’s problems go back decades, and Obamacare made them worse. Trump and congressional Republicans have a chance to change all that. If they manage to wind down Obamacare’s enhanced Medicaid expansion funding while giving states meaningful control over their programs, then the GOP repeal and replace plan might just turn out to be an unexpected success.

Everything Your State And You Need To Know About Trump’s New Immigration Order

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Gustavo
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The new immigration executive order is better than the old one. Here are the main things it gets right, and the big questions it leaves unanswered.

The administration’s immigration policy is in the news again, this time with a revised immigration and refugee executive order, and mainstream media outlets are making sure everybody knows that the new order is pure evil.

However, as with the last iteration of this executive order, very little of the commentary seems based on its actual facts, which you can read here. Is it just the same old ban recycled? Did the administration completely walk back its entire policy? What actually happened?

In this article, I’ll walk you through the new order piece by piece, explaining how it’s different from the last one. But before we get to the order’s text, we should take a second to consider how telling it is that a whole new order was released. Revoking the old order and issuing a new one, instead of fighting out the lawsuits for the old order, suggests that the administration expected to lose at least some of those lawsuits. It also suggests they listened to critics (like me) who suggested that revoke, revise, and replace was better than trying to stick to the old order.

This new executive order makes some important fixes that improve the administration’s refugee and immigration policy in notable ways. However, in at least one respect, it continues to betray the priorities of conservatives, perhaps even more than the initial order.

Administration Is Defensive About Country Selection

Evidently, my line of criticism suggesting that there was no rational tie between the countries selected struck a nerve somewhere in the administration. In this new order, they have provided 10 paragraphs of details about why they chose those seven initial countries.

However, I think the administration does protest too much. The new list of countries is cut to just six, and no longer specifically restricts Iraq. It does still specifically restrict Iran, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Three reasons are given: “Each of these countries is a state sponsor of terrorism, has been significantly compromised by terrorist organizations, or contains active conflict zones.”

Syria, Iran, and Sudan fall under the “state sponsors of terror” heading, according to the state department. So a ban on those three as a group certainly has some rational ties if the administration believes state sponsors are likely to export terror, which seems perfectly reasonable to believe.

Next, comes the “armed conflict” rationale. According to Wikipedia, four countries have ongoing armed conflicts with at least 10,000 fatalities in 2016: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Mexico (the drug war). Of those, only Syria remains specially restricted. I’ll discuss Iraq more below.

Meanwhile, another 10 armed conflicts have had at least 1,000 casualties in 2016: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, Cameroon, Niger, Chad, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. Again, of those, just Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen are targeted. So on the armed conflict front, we do get several of the banned countries… but lots of other countries too, many with far more severe conflicts.

Finally, we come to countries “significantly compromised by terrorist organizations.” No detail is given about what this means, and no country is specifically identified in the new order under that designation. However, the document the order cites does include a section about terrorist safe-havens. The State Department identifies Mali as being a terrorist safe haven, as well as the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, and Venezuela. Again, several of these countries are on the list of restricted countries, but much more are not.

Thus, the exhaustive explanation given ultimately explains nothing. The executive order could be read to imply that banned countries meet these criteria and provide poor documentation on citizens: but that’s not the case for Iran, which is on the list, while poor-documenters like Mali, South Sudan, Chad, or Niger are not on the list.

In other words, while quite verbose, the reasoning provided does not explain why the six countries still under special restrictive status remain so. There may indeed be a good reason for caution from these countries, but, if so, then undoubtedly the same holds for numerous other countries as well. If the administration has selected these six for mere expediency, triaging the most dangerous countries, then they should clarify their reasoning on why these countries are the most dangerous, when they are not demonstrably different from many other countries in terms of terrorism and active conflict.

The list is shorter now, which I’ll show below represents an improvement. But ultimately, on the “why were these countries chosen” front, the new order gives no additional clarity.

Iraqis Allowed Back In 1(g) and 1(h)

Of course, one major change did occur: Iraq was dropped from the list. Here, the administration can count a success amid the general failure of the initial order. According to the new order, Iraq has made credible pledges to improve their domestic screening and to support stricter vetting. This is ultimately the end goal of the administration for every country on this list, so in Iraq we can see an example of what the administration hopes will happen everywhere: we’ll play rough with another country for a few weeks or months, then they’ll blink first and agree to support the implementation of stricter screening for visas, and help provide resources to do it. The mainstream media isn’t going to report the case of Iraq as a success. But if the new EO’s claims about Iraqi compliance are true, then it indicates at least a small part of the original EO’s political strategy.

However, there is a concerning statement in this same section. Namely, “The Attorney General has reported to me that more than 300 persons who entered the United States as refugees are currently the subjects of counterterrorism investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” This is quite jarring. Not because refugees are perfect; they aren’t. Some refugees have indeed become terrorists, though the number is fairly small.

Rather, what’s jarring here is the presumption of guilt: if the FBI is doing its job correctly, then, of course, the number of investigations will be large. And the vast majority should be innocent. We don’t want the FBI only opening investigations after they’re sure of guilt! Claiming that this “300 investigations” number is meaningful would be deeply misguided, especially since over 1 million people admitted as refugees reside in the United States today.

It seems obvious, of course, why the number of investigations was cited rather than the number of convictions: the number of convictions is an unimpressively small number over the last decade (somewhere between 10 and 60 convictions; exact data is hard to come by).

Visa Control Better Managed This Time: 2(a) through 3(c)

The visa ban last time came suddenly, with no rules for exceptions, and its application was haphazard. First dual citizens were banned, then allowed. Permanent residents were banned, then allowed. The rules kept changing and hadn’t been properly thought out, and people with legally valid visas were denied entry. The new order is vastly better organized.

The new order delays implementation until later this month, allowing time for travel plans to be made by visa-holders, and for government agencies to make implementation plans. It also provides categorical exceptions, in addition to case-by-case powers granted to DHS. This is vital and was one of my core criticisms of the initial order. The lack of categorical exceptions made the policy far too draconian and, ultimately, unenforceable. Now, categorical exceptions are made for refugees, diplomats, dual nationals, permanent residents, and existing visa-holders. It also allows back in anybody booted out under the old order, and explicitly acknowledges the right to asylum claims. It also provides illustrative examples of why case-by-case waivers might be granted: for students, for legitimate business activities, if a person resides with a U.S. citizen family member, for an infant or adopted child, or U.S. government employees, etc.

These changes are crucial. Essentially, instead of a total travel ban, the administration is saying they will only issue new visas to the six restricted countries under exceptional conditions. That is a monumental change in emphasis and is well within the powers of the President. Basically, instead of the “default setting” for Iran being “we’ll issue a travel visa if we don’t find anything bad,” now it’s “we’ll only issue a travel visa if you have a specific reason to travel.” You can disagree with this policy or agree with it, but it’s light-years more reasonable, enforceable, and in keeping with American values than the former policy—and it’s far more reasonable than most media outlets are probably going to admit.

Priorities of Religious People Abandoned: 6(a) to 6(d)

However, while improvements were made to many sections related to visas and immigration, the new order’s section on refugees remains deeply saddening. The old executive order prioritized religious minorities while also banning all Syrian refugees forever, and banning all refugees from all countries for 120 days. The new order does not prioritize religious minorities, doesn’t ban Syrian refugees at all, but does still pause refugee admissions for 120 days.

First, let’s talk about improvements. The new order creates explicit permission for refugees already in transit or scheduled for admission to enter the country. That’s good because otherwise you just get refugees who we’ve already promised to care for trapped in airports as we suddenly renege on our promise. If we’re a nation that keeps its promises, we can’t behave like that. So this administrative change is a real improvement.

Likewise, removing the blanket ban on Syrian refugees is a good thing even, if you support extreme vetting of Syrians. Some Syrians are deserving refugees who we want to allow in! Maybe not all, and certainly we want to be cautious, but nobody thinks “zero” is the right number of deserving Syrian refugees. With appropriately strict vetting, surely at least a few Syrians are legitimate refugees we want to accept.

Next, we can look at a change that probably doesn’t matter on its own: the religious preference is gone. The reality is that current U.S. law already prioritizes persecuted religions and religious minorities, as I’ve shown extensively elsewhere. Adding the religious preference in the old order really didn’t change U.S. law at all, so dropping it in the new order would also have the same outcome. It just doesn’t matter either way.

That is, on its own, the religious preference didn’t matter. Combined with the rest of the order it may matter. In the old executive order, the religious preference appeared to be a special way that persecuted minorities could be let into the country despite the 120-day pause, maybe despite the 50,000 refugee camp. The case-by-case religious waiver was written fairly broadly, so its exact extent wasn’t clear, but it basically served as a tool to make the whole cap-and-pause system a bit more in keeping with American, and Christian, values.

But now? Now we’ve paused admissions for 120 days from March 16 (so until mid-June) with an option for further extension. We’ve still capped at 50,000 refugees total, and we’ve removed the one hint of a tool we had to aid our suffering brethren around the world. We have simply closed our doors to religious minorities, especially Christians, fleeing persecution. To reach just 50,000 admissions in this fiscal year, we will have to have one of the slowest paces of refugee admissions for the remaining months that we’ve ever had.

As I said in my discussion of the old executive order: reducing refugee admissions from Obama-era highs of around 110,000 may be reasonable. But cutting them to historically ungenerous levels adds nothing to American safety while tarnishing our image.

What’s the Same In This New EO?

The rest of the order is essentially unchanged. The visa interview waiver program is suspended, creating a hassle for repeat foreign travelers. Biometric exit tracking is expedited, which may improve security, but will create an extra hassle for Americans leaving the country too. Countries with visa reciprocity are pressured to ensure they honor their agreements. None of these provisions are very controversial, and none changed substantively.

Some media outlets have raised concern about a section 5(g), which says “to the extent permitted by law and as practicable, State and local jurisdictions be granted a role…” in managing the refugee program. But concerns on that front seem misplaced, as this section is essentially unchanged from the original order, it explicitly recognizes the goal is to be achieved within existing law, and refugee programs as they exist today already include the buy-in of numerous state and local institutions.

The New EO Is Better But Still Needs Fixing

The new executive order is better than the old one. First of all, it shows actual thought and competence. Important waivers, exceptions, delays and administrative measures are included to ensure it runs smoothly and doesn’t break the law. The most draconian measures were removed, focusing attention on more clearly legal, achievable goals. Some initial objectives have already been achieved, like getting Iraq on board with tougher vetting. The blanket ban on Syrian immigrants was removed. These are all good changes that show the administration is listening to critics and incorporating feedback, a welcome trend that all Americans should want from their government.

However, key problems remain. We still have no real clarity, despite an exhausting wall-of-words, about why those specific countries were targeted. We still have a pause in refugee admissions without any good reason for it. We still have no clarity on how vetting procedures are going to be improved. We still have an incredibly low refugee admission cap out of line with traditional American values.

The administration has made real progress improving one of their flagship policy initiatives. They should keep making progress by raising the refugee cap to a more reasonable figure (maybe 70,000 or 80,000—still 30,000 below President Obama), explaining more clearly why they chose the countries they did and not other countries, and by continuing active refugee processing efforts even while they improve vetting. These changes won’t meaningfully endanger Americans. They will make programmatic goals easier to implement, will shield the administration from some ongoing criticism, and will show their continued commitment to aggressively promoting America’s traditional role as leader of the free world: first in war and, as the millions of refugees we have housed will acknowledge, first in peace.

Barack Obama Compared Slaves To Immigrants 11 Times

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Gustavo
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WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 01: U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks and takes reporters' questions in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House August 1, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama talked about the new jobs numbers, the failure of Congress to pass border security legislation, the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict and the crisis in Ukraine. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

This week, liberals savagely mocked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson for allegedly comparing slaves to immigrants. It looks like they’ve completely forgotten about all the times Barack Obama did the exact same thing.

While speaking to a group of employees at his department on Monday, Carson said: “There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

His comment quickly ignited a firestorm among critics.

The funny thing is, Obama has made very similar comments numerous times in the past. Here are eleven of them.

1. At a Naturalization Ceremony in 2015

While addressing a crowd at the National Archives and Records Administration in 2015, Obama said this.

2. At a Naturalization Ceremony Three Years Earlier

In a speech at a naturalization ceremony in 2012, then-President Obama said this about slave ships:

We say it so often, we sometimes forget what it means — we are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are one of the first Americans, a Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from someplace else — whether they arrived on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, whether they came through Ellis Island or crossed the Rio Grande.

It’s a line he has used often in his speeches throughout his tenure in office, with slight variations.

 3. At A DNC Event on April 28, 2011

Obama had this to say while addressing a crowd at an event hosted by the Democratic National Committee on April 28:

I want a confident America where, yes, everybody makes sacrifices, but nobody bears all the burden, and we live up to the idea that no matter who we are, no matter what we look like, no matter whether our ancestors landed on Ellis Island or came here on a slave ship or crossed the Rio Grande, we are all connected to one another.  We rise and fall together.

4. At Commencement Speech One Day Later

While delivering a commencement speech at Miami-Dade College April 29, 2011, Obama repeated the line above, but with a bit of a twist:

We didn’t raise the Statue of Liberty with its back to the world; we raised it with its light to the world.  Whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower or a slave ship; whether they signed in at Ellis Island or they crossed the Rio Grande — we are one people.

5. At a DNC Event in Harlem, March 29, 2011

Then-President Obama said:

And so what we wanted to do was adapt to the times, adapt to the 21st century, but also remind ourselves that there are some old-fashioned, timeworn values; that whether your forebears landed at Ellis Island or they came here on a slave ship or they crossed the Rio Grande, or however they got here, they typically had a commitment to hard work and a commitment to community and a commitment to family and a willingness to dream big dreams, and a patriotism that was not rooted in ethnicity but was rooted in a creed and a set of ideals and a belief that in America anything was possible.

6. At Another DNC event in California, April 22, 2011

Obama said:

My vision is for one where we’re living within our means but we’re still investing in our future, and everybody is making sacrifices and nobody bears all the burden, and we live up to the idea that no matter what you look like or where you come from, whether you landed here — your ancestors landed here on Ellis Island or they came here on a slave ship, or they just came over the Rio Grande, that we are all connected to one another and we all rise and fall together.

7. Another DNC Event in Austin, Texas on May 10, 2011

He said:

That’s our vision of America.  It’s not a vision of a small America.  It’s a vision of a big America, a bold and optimistic America, an America that does big things.  It’s a vision where we’re living within our means but we’re still investing in our future; where everybody is making sacrifices, but nobody alone bears all the burden; where we live up to the idea that no matter who you — what you look like, or who you are, no matter whether your ancestors landed on Ellis Island or came over here on a slave ship or crossed the Rio Grande, that we’re all connected to one another, and that we rise or fall together.

8. Another DNC Event in Boston, Eight Days Later

Obama said:

No matter what we look like, where we come from, what God we worship to, no matter whether our ancestors landed on Ellis Island or came here on a slave ship or crossed the Rio Grande, we believe that we are all connected and we rise and fall together. And that is a strength.  That is the strength of America.  That’s the heart of the idea of America.  That’s the heart of the idea of our campaign.

9. Another DNC Event in Philadelphia, June 30, 2011

Obama said:

And the good news is that America is possible — an America where we’re living within our means, but we’re still investing in the future.  That’s possible.  Where everybody is making sacrifices, but nobody bears all the burden by themselves.  The idea that no matter what we look like or who we are, no matter whether our ancestors came from Ellis Island or on a slave ship, or across the Rio Grande, that we are all connected to one another, and that we rise and fall together.

10. At a Gala for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, September 2011

At the Washington D.C. event, Obama said this:

It’s a vision where we live within our means, but we invest in our future; where everybody makes sacrifices, but nobody has to bear the burden alone, and everybody shares in our success; where we live up to the idea that no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter what your surname — whether your ancestors landed at Ellis Island, or came over on a slave ship, or crossed the Rio Grande — we are all connected, and we all rise and fall together.

11. And at a Forum on American Latino Heritage, October 2011

While addressing a crowd at the Department of the Interior in Washington DC, Obama said:

And here in America, we are united by more than the color of our skin or the language that we speak.  We are joined together by a shared creed, a shared set of values.  We’re connected by the future we want for ourselves and our children.  And we determine our own destiny here.  Whether your ancestors came from a — came over on a slave ship, or crossed the Rio Grande, or were here long before the country was founded, we’re in this together.  And we have the opportunity right now to determine our own destiny.

Next time progressives decide to skewer a Republican for saying something, it would behoove them to see if President Obama has said the exact same thing. Or, at least, stop pretending not to know what Ben Carson is talking about.

Trump Haters And Boosters, Are Making America Stupid Again

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Gustavo
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A new CNN poll finds that around two-thirds of Americans want a special prosecutor to investigate contacts between Russians and the Donald Trump campaign, and 55 percent are “somewhat concerned” by reports that the president’s associates had contact with “suspected Russian operatives.”

Well, if you put it that way, what kind of seditious scoundrel wouldn’t be troubled by the president’s comrades huddling with “suspected Russian operatives”? What if CNN asked voters this, though: Are you concerned that an attorney general nominee met with the Russian ambassador in course of his duties as a U.S. senator and member of the Armed Services Committee? I suspect the numbers would look a bit different.

As it goes, I’m perfectly willing to believe the absolute worst about politicians, including this president. But voters are confusing the passionate certitude of liberals — and thus the passionate certitude of most of the mainstream media — with the facts. As of yet, the accusation made by Democrats that Trump has colluded with Russians to rig the election aren’t predicated on a single piece of hard evidence. Perhaps there is something nefarious going on, but a cloying attitude towards Vladimir Putin (which is a political and foreign policy concern) shouldn’t convince you that a congressional investigation is needed.

With the level of leaking we’ve seen from people in the intelligence community, supposedly on a mission to save democracy from 2016 voters, shouldn’t we have already seen some proof of a conspiracy? Shouldn’t journalists, who have been working from the assumption that collusion is a fact, have gotten hands on hard evidence? If we ever see this evidence, we can admit that the intelligence community has done its patriotic duty. Until then, they look like political hacks destabilizing democratic institutions by feeding the partisan circus. Because as far as we know, Gen. Michael Flynn is a liar with poor judgment, not a felon.

“So let’s have an investigation to find out!?” We hear this quite often. What does this mean in practice?

In 2006, 51 percent of Democrats believed President Bush knew of or abetted the 9/11 attacks. Why were there no investigations into the matter? Probably because most elected Democrats felt a debt of responsibility to the office, unlike the ones demanding an attorney general resign for telling the truth. Even nine years into the Obama presidency, 41 percent of Republicans, including the future president, didn’t believe the man was born in the United States. I promise you, they had plenty of theories. Why didn’t Republicans in Congress launch investigations into the pressing matter of the fake birth certificates? Because politicians don’t have to give in to every widely held fiction.

Last we heard, 52 percent of Democrats believe Russia “tampered with the vote totals” to get Trump elected president. Which is, of course, completely bananas. With many your former run-of-the-mill partisan flunkies churning out conspiratorial metafiction, we shouldn’t be surprised that voters are concerned. It’s because of partisans, most of whom are decent, intelligent, capable people in their everyday lives, seem to lose hold of their senses when it comes to politics. And Democrats are enabling them.

Take Chris Coons, senator from Delaware, who suggested last week that the FBI had “transcripts” proving that President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials colluded to try to rig the election. (How the Russians can “rig” an election, even if the collusion claims were true, is a mystery to me, but that’s for another column.) Well, this weekend, Coons told Fox News host Chris Wallace: “I have no hard evidence of collusion. To the extent those comments that you just replayed might in some way be misinterpreted as leading to a hyperventilating attitude here in the Senate about this, I apologize for that.”

Whoops. Coons, and those who refer to the average duplicitous, hack-happy Russian diplomats who meet with senators (and have been forever) as “suspected Russian operatives,” are the ones feeding the hyperventilating attitude as a the way to undermine the legitimacy of the president. It’s turned politics from its usual corrupt and vapid self into something even more ridiculous.

So, naturally, Donald Trump has gotten into the act. This weekend, through a series of tweets, Trump called on lawmakers to investigate the claim that Obama tapped his phones during the campaign. Why not?

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/838752669183406080

Though I doubt CNN will ask voters if they are “somewhat concerned” by reports that a presidential candidate’s headquarters were tapped by Hillary operative Barack Obama? Instead, they call the claims “baseless.” Obama defenders also ran to highlight former director of national intelligence James Clapper’s contention that there was no tapping of Trump. But Clapper also said this:

We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, ‘our,’ that’s N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.

We know Clapper lied to the American people before, so feel free to believe whatever you like about his contentions. Moreover, Clapper’s denial doesn’t mean that Trump aides were not swept up in some routine surveillance of Russian diplomats. And Trump is probably making no distinction between “Obama” and the U.S. government when he accuses the former of spying on him. Whatever the case, Trump has a responsibility to offer concrete proof before making these serious allegations. As do Democrats. Everyone show us your work so we can move on.

Of course, Trump brings a lot of this on himself, with the crude, un-presidential way he conducts himself. No one should be surprised if there is a genuine scandal in his future. That doesn’t mean we have to sign on to every politically convenient obsession of the Left.

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