Jeff Sessions has resigned as Attorney General, a move that opens up many questions about the future of investigations into the White House and harsh federal law enforcement.
While it is true that Sessions’s record should worry those who believe in limited government and individual liberty, Cato's Trevor Burrus and Alex Nowrasteh believe the actual reason for Session’s resignation is that he recused himself from involvement in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
“He’s not fired for [his] positions [on criminal justice and immigration]. He has been fired because he did the right thing, and that I think should worry libertarians, liberals, and conservatives who are following this issue,” said Alex Nowrasteh.
Is MAGAnomics Working? Not Exactly…
Economic policy isn’t just about the present; it’s mainly about the long term…
The unemployment rate hovers around record-low levels, gross domestic product growth topped 4 percent in the second quarter, and consumer confidence is as high as it’s been since the late-1990s boom.
But, the federal debt is over $21 trillion, more than the nation’s GDP for an entire year. And that’s only part of America’s financial woes. So how is MAGAnomics doing in that regard?
Trump’s economic agenda is little more than an impulsive dislike of trade and immigration, a hazy desire for less regulation, and a desire to lower taxes temporarily but not do the hard work to lower taxes permanently.
In other words, MAGAnomics is more a marketing slogan than a serious plan to strengthen the nation’s economy.
New Executive Order on Immigration Raises More Legal Questions
President Trump recently modified his policy of separating children from their families. His new executive order requires the children of border crossers to be detained with their family members.
Although a slight improvement over family separation, President Trump’s decision raises different questions of whether detaining families together violates the 1997 Flores Settlement, whereby children have to be released after 20 days, which would necessitate family separation.
The potential Flores problem could be mitigated entirely by Trump if he relied on alternatives to detention (ATD) programs instead of uniform detention of all border crossers.
To get around the problem, the Trump administration could expand the ISAP II program, increase bond issuances, and allow Community Management Programs to house and monitor migrant families with some sort of incentive/disincentive to make sure that the people they monitor show up to their hearings.
If past experience is any guide, ATD programs could ensure that 90% of immigration court orders are carried out. That is less than perfect compliance, but it is far cheaper, more humanitarian, and less of a political disaster for this administration.
Trump’s Tariff Talk A Key Topic at G7 Summit
President Trump’s ideas on trade often seem paradoxical…
The G7 summit, which groups Canada, the US, the UK, France, Italy, Japan and Germany, was held Canada this past week. As expected, much of the talk was on the Trump administration’s subverting the rules of international trade with a wrecking ball of tariff indiscretions.
As has been the case every day for the past 16+ months, the U.S. and global economies remain exposed to the whims of an unorthodox president who precariously steers policy from one extreme to the other, keeping us in a perpetual state of uncertainty.
At the G-7 summit, President Trump floated both abolition of all tariffs worldwide and banning trade with certain countries entirely over the course of just 24 hours.
Unfortunately, rather than seeing free trade as a means of promoting mutually beneficial exchange between buyers and sellers, President Trump thinks of trade as a zero-sum game that sees nations “winning” if they export more than they import.
Immigrants Are Not Inherently Criminals
Since taking office, President Trump has expanded interior immigration enforcement and made it easier for states and local governments to apprehend and detain illegal immigrants.
His actions are often based on the widespread perception that illegal immigrants are a significant and disproportionate source of crime in the United States. But, that’s frankly not true.
According to 2016 American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau, illegal immigrants are 47% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Legal immigrants are 78% less likely to be incarcerated than natives.
Relative to their shares of the population, all immigrants — legal and illegal — are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans relative to their shares of the population.
The Myth of a Post-1945 “Liberal World Order”
Recent political tumult and the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency have driven anxious commentators to lament the collapse of a post-1945 “liberal world order.”
Nostalgic for the institution building and multilateral moment of the early postwar era, they counsel Washington to restore a battered tradition, uphold economic and security commitments, and promote liberal values.
It is ahistorical because it is blind to the process of “ordering” the world and erases the memory of violence, coercion, and compromise that also marked postwar diplomatic history. It loses sight of the realities and limits of the exercise of power abroad, the multiplicity of orders that arose, and the conflicted and contradictory nature of liberalism itself.
While liberalism and liberal projects existed, such “order” as existed rested on the imperial prerogatives of a superpower that attempted to impose order by stepping outside rules and accommodating illiberal forces.
This nostalgia is harmful because framing the world before Trump in absolute moral terms as a “liberal order” makes it harder to consider measures that are needed to adapt to change: the retrenchment of security commitments, the redistribution of burdens among allies, prudent war-avoidance, and the limitation of foreign policy ambitions. It also impedes the United States from performing an increasingly important task: to reappraise its grand strategy in order to bring its power and commitments into balance.
Confirming Haspel Is a Vote For Torture
The use of mass surveillance and torture are the hallmarks of totalitarian governments…
Yesterday, Gina Haspel President Trump’s nominee to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), testified in a confirmation hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).
One incident in Haspel’s 30+ year CIA career stands out above all: her time running one of the now-infamous Agency “black site” interrogation centers used in the Bush administration’s torture program. Haspel’s challenge will be in getting Senators and the public to look beyond existing media accounts about her alleged role in running the “black site” at which al Qaeda suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was repeatedly waterboarded, and her role in carrying out the destruction of videotapes showing the gruesome sessions.
It took a pliant Secretary of State to not make waves about the “black sites.” It took an eager group of lawyers in the Department of Justice’ Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to write the opinions effectively redefining torture out of existence. When he took office, President Obama could’ve fired the CIA personnel involved in the torture program. He didn’t, and that’s one reason why Gina Haspel now has a shot to run the CIA.
Fast forward a few years and we now have a pliant Secretary of State who in the past has clearly stated his support for the first torture program, like President Trump. We have a Justice Department that is constantly under siege from a White House. And we have a previous manager of America’s first torture program teed up to lead the federal agency that ran that same program.
That’s bad news for liberty.
North Korea & How to Avoid (Potentially Nuclear) Catastrophe
U.S. military action is no solution for the North Korean crisis…
Although President Trump and Kim Jong-un are set to meet this summer, the Trump administration has regularly shown that it considers military action a viable option if it is unsatisfied with diplomatic efforts.
But, any attempts to use force to denuclearize North Korea would likely spiral out of control and lead to mass casualties. Absent a clear, imminent threat, diplomacy is consequently the only viable U.S. strategy in the region.
Although U.S. policymakers seek to rid the Kim regime of its nuclear weapons, the Trump administration has few viable options. Kim views his nuclear capability as a critical deterrent. U.S. attempts to forcibly deprive the regime of its nukes could lead to escalation, with North Korea feeling a compulsion to strike first in a “use it or lose it” scenario.
In fact, in such a delicate situation, almost any U.S. military action would likely trigger full-scale war. A limited surgical strike designed to target North Korea’s nuclear arsenal would not likely be sufficient, as the locations of all North Korea’s nukes are not known and some assets are likely buried deep underground. Even an operation aimed at taking out North Korea leadership would not prevent a war from erupting, given that artillery squads threatening Seoul have orders to fire on the city “without orders from above” in the event of a U.S. attack.
Such an escalation would be devastating, given that roughly 26 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area, leaving them vulnerable to artillery, Scud missiles, and biological weapons, not to mention a nuclear strike. Even a conventional artillery barrage could cause tens of thousands of deaths within hours. North Korea could also target South Korea’s nuclear power plants, causing major casualties as a result of fallout. Other potential targets include the Yongsan Garrison, where the U.S. Army keeps its Korean headquarters and 26,000 Americans live, as well as Guam and Tokyo.
A full-on war would be even more counterproductive for U.S. interests. The buildup to such a war would be hard to disguise, thus serving as a visible signal for Pyongyang to strike first. Although the U.S. military and South Korea’s military are more than a match for North Korea’s, such a war would be immensely costly and bloody. There is a high danger of such a war spilling out into Russia, China, and other nations, particularly if nuclear weapons are used.
The economic costs of such a war would also be staggering. Washington would face extraordinary pressure to underwrite occupation and finance reconstruction across the entire battle zone, with the United States’ share of the burden potentially reaching trillions of dollars.
Instead of considering military options, U.S. policymakers to make serious efforts to open diplomatic channels with the North. Direct and normalized communication would go a long way toward stepping away from the brink, particularly given that the U.S. and North Korea both have heads of state given to brashness.
The United States should also hold serious discussions with China. Possible confidence-building measures include offering aid for refugees, accepting possible Chinese military intervention in the aftermath of a North Korean collapse, as well as guaranteeing that U.S. forces would leave a reunited peninsula. Once tensions ease, the U.S. should reconsider its military alliance with South Korea, which now has a well-developed military capable of protecting the country on its own.
In other words, the United States should follow the same strategy it did with the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War, avoiding preventive strikes in favor of containment and deterrence.
There are risks to containing and deterring North Korea, but they pale beside the costs of plunging the peninsula into the abyss of war.
The U.S. Already Engages in “Extreme Vetting”
A new Cato study provides the first estimate of the number of terrorism vetting failures, both before and after the vetting enhancements implemented in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
A terrorism vetting failure occurs when a foreigner is granted entry to the United States who had terrorist associations or sympathies and who later committed a terrorism offense including support for terrorist groups abroad.
Only 13 people — 2% of the 531 individuals convicted of terrorism offenses or killed while committing an offense since 9/11 — entered due to a vetting failure in the post-9/11 security system.
There were 52 vetting failures in the 15 years leading up to 9/11, four times as many as in the 15 years since the attacks. From 2002 to 2016, the vetting system failed and permitted the entry of 1 radicalized terrorist for every 29 million visa or status approvals. This rate was 84% lower than during the 15-year period leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Only 1 of the 13 post-9/11 vetting failures resulted in a deadly attack in the United States. Thus, the rate for deadly terrorists was 1 for every 379 million visa or status approvals from 2002 through 2016.
During this same period, the chance of an American being killed in an attack committed by a terrorist who entered as a result of a vetting failure was 1 in 328 million per year. The risk from vetting failures was 99.5% lower during this period than during the 15-year period from 1987 to 2001.
The evidence indicates that the U.S. vetting system is already “extreme” enough to handle the challenge of foreign terrorist infiltration.
Sending Troops to the U.S.-Mexico Border Makes No Sense
Earlier this week, President Trump announced a plan to deploy troops to the Mexican border in response to about 1,000 Central Americans who are walking to the U.S. border to ask for asylum (which is their right under American law.
Whether President Trump’s proposed deployment of troops along the border is legal is a difficult question to answer. But, regardless of the legalities, the proposed deployment of American troops to the border without a clear mission at a time of low and falling illegal immigrant entries is an unnecessary waste of time and resources that could put Americans in harm’s way for no gain.
From about 1970 through 2006, Border Patrol faced an annual inflow of illegal immigrants far in excess of anything in recent years yet President Trump has decided that this is the time to put troops on the border.
Roughly 1,000 Central American asylum seekers who are slowly making their way north. There are 19,437 Border Patrol agents already waiting to apprehend them. If the current caravan makes it to the United States border, it would add about a single day’s worth of apprehensions. Border Patrol should be able to handle this comparatively small number of asylum seekers without military aid as they have done so before many times.
It is also unclear what the troops will actually accomplish on the border. Since the members of the caravan intend to surrender to Border Patrol or Customs Officers and ask for asylum, the troops serve no purpose. They will not deter asylum seekers.
All told, the most likely explanation for the proposed deployment is politics, and nothing more.
