Freedom Line Blog

A Border Patrol memo obtained by the Washington Times and referenced today in a Senate hearing identifies the main reason Central American women and children are risking illegal entry into the United States – A guaranteed ‘free pass’ by federal government.

“The immigrants come seeking ‘permisos,’ which apparently are the ‘notices to appear,’ the legal documents given to non-Mexicans caught at the border,” reports the paper. “Those notices officially put the immigrants into deportation proceedings. The immigrants usually are released to await a court date, giving them a chance to fade into the shadows in the interior of the U.S.”

According to the Border Patrol memo, “This information is apparently common knowledge in Central America and is spread by word of mouth and international and local media.” It goes on to say that, “A high percentage of the subjects interviewed stated their family members in the U.S. urged them to travel immediately, because the United States government was only issuing immigration ‘permisos’ until the end of June 2014.”

The only permissive immigration policy I’m aware of that is slated to end this month is President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – or DACA – program.

In my column this week I explain how President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action program impels more illegal immigrants to bring or send for their children, hoping that once here the federal government will expand the de facto amnesty program.

Recently, President Obama announced that he is extending DACA another two years to the end of his presidency. That means we can expect to see increasing numbers of Central American and perhaps other illegal immigrants flooding into the country seeking those promised “permisos” that allow them to drift into the shadows and avoid deportation.

Given enough time to put down roots perhaps they’ll demand to come out of the shadows on a pathway to citizenship.

Last week House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) sent a letter to President Barack Obama demanding that “any veteran unable to obtain an appointment within 30 days [have] the option to receive non-VA care.”

This week it was revealed that 57,000 veterans have been waiting 90 days or longer for care from VA facilities.

But at a time when the White House is dithering, the acting VA chief is adopting Boehner’s approach.

“The interim VA secretary said he would spend $300 million to increase hours for VA medical staffers and contract with private clinics to see veterans who are unable to get care through VA medical centers,” reports the Washington Post.

Kudos to Sloan Gibson, the temporary VA secretary, for leveraging the private sector to care for those who’ve rendered the highest public service.

In an interview with CFIF, Erin Murphy, partner at Bancroft PLLC, discusses her successful legal argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in McCutcheon v. FEC, in which the Court held the federal aggregate limits on campaign contributions unconstitutional.  Ms. Murphy also discusses her work on Bond v. United States, a case recently decided by the Court involving a poisoned mailbox.

Listen to the interview here.

The “First Sale” doctrine refers to an exception in copyright law that allows people to resell used physical products such as books, DVDs, CDs, etc.  While a century of Supreme Court precedent and federal statutes protect that exception for physical goods, some now want to extend it to digital goods even though the doctrine’s underlying logic does not rightfully apply.  More on this in next week’s Liberty Update, but for now, two good recent commentaries from Jim Martin over at the 60 Plus Association and George Landrith over at Frontiers for Freedom.

As Mr. Martin notes:

In the online space, where copies of intangible content are identical to originals, never decay, and are virtually costless to reproduce and transport, creation of a new first sale doctrine would destroy the primary market and discourage investment, innovation and creation.”

And as Mr. Landrith observes:

The ‘first sale’ exception makes sense for physical objects, but it does not make sense for intangible content.  Many have criticized the creative community for being slow to adjust to the modern digital marketplace.  But now some of those same voices are calling for government regulation which would effectively drag our modern modes for distributing books, movies and music back to a 1908 framework that only contemplated physical distribution.”

By now Americans are well familiar with the Obama Administration’s habit of circumventing laws and persecuting groups it disfavors.  The IRS.  Operation “Fast and Furious.”  Targeting journalists.  The EPA.  More recently, its release of five high-level terrorists from Guantanamo Bay without consulting Congress as required by statute.

Now, we can add “Operation Choke Point” to that dishonorable list.

As detailed by a new House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report, Operation Choke Point is an Obama Justice Department campaign to “choke out” perfectly legal businesses that the Administration simply finds politically objectionable.  “The goal of the initiative,” the House report notes, “is to deny these merchants access to the banking and payments networks that every business needs to survive”:

Over the past year, the Department of Justice has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of banks and payment processors, known informally as ‘Operation Choke Point.’  As of December 2013, the Department has issued over fifty subpoenas to banks and payment processors.  The ostensible goal of the investigation is to combat mass-market consumer fraud by foreclosing fraudsters’ access to payment systems.  However, there is evidence that the true goal of Operation Choke Point is to target industries deemed ‘high-risk’ or otherwise objectionable by the Administration.”

Those targeted industries include firearms and ammunition sellers, short-term lenders that help lower-income workers, and other legitimate businesses.  By threatening and pressuring banks and financial institutions through this operation, the Obama Administration hopes to pressure them to refuse to continue doing business with law-abiding targeted industries.  Although the Administration claims to be acting on the basis of federal statutes prohibiting consumer fraud, the House report notes that no fraud by the targeted businesses has been demonstrated, let alone proven by evidence in a court of law.

The House will continue to pursue the matter, but individual Americans can do their part by remaining vigilant on this issue, and by contacting their elected representatives in the House and Senate to demand action (contact information can be found quickly and easily on CFIF’s “Take Action” page here).

Lee:  VA Scandal Scapegoating: Don’t Blame Insufficient Spending, Bush or Iraq and Afghan Wars
Senik:  Barack Obama, Presidential Kamikaze
Ellis:  Minnesota’s First “Unsession” Repeals 1,175 Laws

Podcast:  New CO2 Emissions Rules: A Misguided Pursuit
Jester’s Courtroom:  Some Kind of Friend

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

In an interview with CFIF, Lance Brown, Executive Director of Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy, discusses the EPA’s misguided attempt to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, the costs associated with the recent proposal and why President Obama is wrong in suggesting that reducing carbon will prevent asthma or heart attacks.

Listen to the interview here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

“The number of jobs requiring medium levels of skill has shrunk, while the number at both ends of the distribution – those requiring high and low skill levels – has expanded,” says a new research report from the Dallas Federal Reserve.

This employment polarization is changing the standard of living for those in the middle class since, “The number of people performing low-skill, low-pay, manual labor has grown along with the number undertaking high-skill, high-pay, non-routine, principally problem-solving jobs.”

Moving to the wealthier pole requires adapting to non-routine cognitive work since computer automation and off-shoring makes jobs such as “brokers, clerks, tellers, cashiers, telemarketers, title examiners, bookkeepers, insurance underwriters, travel agents and technicians” increasingly irrelevant.

This is sobering news for those aspiring to middle class status. There was a time when a college degree qualified a person’s cognitive abilities, and working according to a companywide routine virtually guaranteed a middle class lifestyle. That time is past. Going forward the likelihood that a person will escape the perils of low-income will depend greatly on her ability to be increasingly entrepreneurial in every facet of her work; whether as a full-time employee or independent contractor.

It’s a reality many formerly comfortable middle class workers would like to avoid. But with computing power and automation spreading quickly everywhere, it looks like the only option available.

Welcome to the brave new job market.

By now you’ve probably heard about the scandal surrounding the Obama administration’s deal to free five Taliban officials held at Guantanamo Bay for what increasingly looks like a deserter from the U.S. Army stationed in Afghanistan.

Those in the mainstream media defending the move – including a Daily Beast columnist who tweeted, “What’s the argument that these five Taliban guys are so dangerous? Are they ninjas? Do they have superpowers?” – would do well to remember how the Taliban’s members earned their cells at Gitmo.

The five released prisoners “were top officials in the Taliban regime: a provincial governor, a deputy defense minister, a deputy intelligence minister, a top arms smuggler, and a top Taliban military commander. Two of them are wanted by the United Nations for war crimes committed against Afghanistan’s Shiites,” writes Robert Tracinski.

Tracinski then gives a sampling of what these kinds of Taliban officials do:

• Bomb schools because they let girls play sports
• Shoot a girl in the head because she stands up for her right to be educated
• Mutilate women to punish them for disobedience in their roles as marital slaves
• Drag a 7-year-old out of the yard where he is playing and hang him from a tree because his grandfather spoke out against the Taliban

America can’t right every wrong in the world, but surely it should be counted on to keep the world safe from criminals in its custody. Freeing five prisoners so they can rejoin the ranks of a known terrorist organization is a deplorable dereliction of duty. If any of these men go on to commit more crimes, those who agreed to their release will share the blame.

“All veterans on waiting lists should be able to easily access care outside the VA without waiting for a potentially corrupt facility to approve their request,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) writes today in a letter to President Barack Obama. “Our veterans should not be left in limbo, relying on what your own audit acknowledges is a ‘systematic lack of integrity within some Veterans Health Administration facilities.’”

As an immediate remedy Boehner calls on Obama to support legislation coming from the House Veterans Affairs Committee that would allow “any veteran unable to obtain an appointment within 30 days the option to receive non-VA care.”

If the president and his congressional allies have a better alternative they better put it forward. Too many veterans are waiting.

Recently, Yuval Levin wrote a characteristically sober and insightful post about the structural problems afflicting not just the Veterans Affairs hospital system, but the VA itself.

Amid other obstacles to reform, Levin explains why certain veterans groups share some of the blame for the VA’s managerial mess.

It is impossible to overstate the political power of the veterans’ interest groups over the VA. The simplest way to describe it is that they get everything they want, period. There are many powerful interest groups in Washington, but because their domain is carefully limited and politically and culturally sensitive, the vets’ groups have a kind of command of their arena that I don’t think any other sort of interest group approaches. And this is a big part of the reason why the VA is so dysfunctional, because it is not subject to congressional or administrative oversight in the usual sense. It answers fundamentally to the vets’ groups. They often informally review its annual budget request before it goes to OMB. They are uniquely involved in drafting budgets on the congressional side. They are considered a necessary signoff on every major decision. Their firm opposition to something is the end of the story. Their priorities are the VA’s priorities. And yet they are very well positioned to treat failures that result from their own distorting power over the system as reasons to increase their power.

Every successful interest group enjoys a certain amount of leverage to get what it wants, but the power exercised by veterans’ organizations that Levin describes is itself a scandal in need of reform. Somewhere the public’s commitment to serve those who served all got hijacked by lobbyists imposing policy choices that are clearly having deleterious effects on retired and disabled veterans. Any reform of the VA department needs to include whatever measures are necessary to uproot this latest case of regulatory capture.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT —  Daren Bakst, Research Fellow in Agricultural Policy, Heritage Foundation:  New School Lunch Requirements and Michelle Obama;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT — Megan L. Brown, Parnter, Wiley Rein LLP, Washington, D.C.:  Supreme Court Round-Up;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT —  Erin Murphy, Parnter, Bancroft PLLC, Washington, D.C.:  McCutcheon v. FEC;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT —  Paul Kersey, Director of Labor Policy, Illinois Policy Institute:  Unions and Home Healthcare Givers;

5:00 CST/6:00 pm EDT —  Guest T.B.A.:  Obama Administration, Air Pollution and Global Warming;  and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT — Timothy Lee, Senior Vice President, Legal and Public Affairs, CFIF:  Net Neutrality.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.