Tall Tales Gun Grabbers Tell

June 17, 2016

One might hope that after the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, Democrats would get serious about protecting Americans from ISIS. But instead of uniting with Republicans to identify common ground in the fight against terrorism, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) launched a 15-hour filibuster Wednesday demanding an end to what he called the “gun show loophole.”

Now Murphy was honest enough to admit that the Orlando shooter did pass a background check, but then Murphy went on to say:

“Let's say that the Orlando shooter was on a list that prohibited him from buying a weapon and he went to a store and was denied that AR-15-style weapon because he was on that list. But all he would have to do is go to a weekend gun show or go online, and he would be able to get that weapon without a background check.”

This is just plain false. There is no such thing as a “gun show” or “online” loophole to federal background check requirements. Federal law does not care where or when a gun transaction happens, only who is involved in that transaction.

So if you go to a “weekend gun show” and buy a gun from one of the many licensed gun dealers there, you will still have to undergo a background check. Same if you buy a gun online.

What matters is who is selling the gun and how often they sell them. If you sell your friends or neighbors an occasional firearm, you don’t need to conduct a background check. But if you are “engaged in the business” of selling firearms, then you do need to administer a background check on every sale.

And that wasn’t the only tall tale Murphy told. Murphy also claimed that: "AR-15-style weapons weren't legal in the United States until 2004 after being banned for 10 years. It is not coincidental that there was a massive increase in mass shootings in this country after 2004.”

Again, this is just plain false. According to Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox there were about 18 mass shooting a year in the two decades before the assault weapons ban, 19 mass shootings a year in the decade during the assault weapons ban, and 21 mass shooting a year after the ban.

Murphy’s post-assault weapons ban shooting spike is pure myth.

Finally, Murphy also claimed, “in States that have imposed those reasonable limitations” on guns “there are less gun crimes. There are less homicides.”

This is also false. While it is true that states with more guns do have more “gun deaths,” once you remove suicides from the equation, the correlation disappears. When you look at just “gun crimes” and “homicides” strict gun control laws have no effect.

Emotions are always high after a deadly attack. Americans want to do something to stop the pain.

But acting on emotion, and not facts, is terrible public policy and a danger to all of our constitutional rights.

From Poverty Trap to Temporary Lifeline

June 10, 2016

The key to understanding America’s social-welfare system today – and why it needs to be reformed – is not its bloated annual budget but its tendency to undermine the two most dependable routes out of poverty: work and marriage.

For many Americans struggling to make ends meet, our safety net works as it was intended, providing a temporary lifeline when they fall on hard times and need help getting back on their feet.

But for millions more living in or on the edge of poverty, our welfare state functions more like a Faustian bargain. The needy receive the resources for life’s basic necessities, but only so long as they refrain from taking positive steps – like getting a job and getting married – toward self-sufficiency.

The surest way to improve one’s lot in life is through hard work. And we know from a mountain of social-science research – confirming millennia of experience and intuition – that the stability and support engendered by marriage improves the economic outlook not only of adults, but also their kids.

Yet our welfare programs penalize marriage by reducing – and often eliminating altogether – a couple’s combined benefits after they get married. Our welfare programs also punish work. Beneficiaries face benefit “cliffs” as their incomes rise, either from finding a job or getting a raise, and only two of the more than 80 means-tested programs require able-bodied adults to work in order to receive aid.

So it was predictable that government spending on welfare programs would balloon over the decades, eventually reaching approximately $1 trillion this year – a staggering sum that nonetheless pales in comparison to the social and human costs of our broken welfare system.

The real problem with our welfare system isn’t that it’s expensive or ineffective, but that it is culturally and spiritually debilitating – leaving the very people it purports to help estranged from the only influences that are capable of fostering upward mobility.

So welfare reform, properly understood, is as much a moral imperative as it is an economic necessity. Yes, we want a more affordable welfare system, but we also want inspired, self-reliant citizens, capable of leading productive and happy lives.

The American people deserve both, which is why I recently teamed up with Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) to introduce the Welfare Reform and Upward Mobility Act, a bill that repairs the crucial link between effort and reward in the federal food-stamp program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Modeled after Maine’s recent successful reforms, the Welfare Reform and Upward Mobility Act establishes a monthly 80-hour work requirement for all “ABAWD” food-stamp recipients (ABAWD stands for able-bodied adults without dependents) and creates work-activation programs that provide beneficiaries with vocational education, job training, community service opportunities, job-search assistance, and other resources to promote self-sufficiency.

There is still much work to be done to ensure that our welfare system strengthens, rather than undermines, work and marriage. But this bill is a critical first step. And like all future reforms, it will succeed by making poverty not tolerable, but temporary.

The Climate Change Bullies

May 27, 2016

It has long been obvious that the Democratic Party’s assertion that the science of climate change is “settled” is little more than a cheap public-relations ploy masquerading as a monopoly on scientific knowledge. To give the matter a moment’s thought is to recognize that science – that field of inquiry dedicated to testing new theories, challenging prevailing views of the natural world, and overturning the conventional wisdom of the scientific community – cannot be settled.

But for anyone still skeptical that the Democratic Party’s science-is-settled claim is not just a hackneyed platitude but a tool of propaganda, consider the recent statements from the Obama Administration’s top lawyer and head of the Department of Justice (DOJ), Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

On March 10 Attorney General Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the DOJ has engaged in internal discussions exploring the possibility of prosecuting organizations and individuals for holding opinions about climate change that she and the other lawyers at DOJ find objectionable. Attorney General Lynch even admitted that she has already referred the matter to the criminal investigative division within the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

So “settled” is climate-change science that fealty to its irrefutable and permanent conclusions must be compelled through the threat of violence by the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.

Outrage and condemnation are the appropriate responses to the Obama Administration’s inclination to deploy the DOJ and FBI to harass American citizens for holding unfashionable opinions.

Initiating criminal prosecution for a private entity’s opinions on climate change is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and an abuse of power that rises to the level of prosecutorial misconduct. That’s why I recently joined four of my colleagues – Senators Cruz (TX), Sessions (AL), Perdue (GA), and Vitter (LA) – in sending a letter to Attorney General Lynch demanding that the DOJ immediately cease its ongoing use of law-enforcement resources to stifle private debate on climate change.

But it’s also important to see this episode for what it really is. Threatening to imprison those who disagree with the Democratic Party’s radical climate-change agenda is not only a stunning indulgence of the authoritarian temptation – it’s an embarrassing attempt, by a lame-duck president desperate for attention, to short-circuit a debate that could not be won fair and square. Like the playground bully who picks up the ball and walks home when he knows he’s going to lose the game, by attempting to stifle free inquiry and debate, rather than engage in it, the Obama Administration is doing what sore losers always do.

So at the same time that we denounce the tinpot bully and resist with unshakeable firmness his attempts to suppress debate on today’s most controversial topics, we must not forget also to mock him.

The Case for a Regulatory Budget

May 20, 2016

The federal regulatory state is out of control. It is out of control economically, costing Americans between $1 trillion and $2 trillion per year in artificially inflated prices. And it is out of control politically, as federal bureaucrats now write upwards of 95 percent of all new federal “laws” without winning a single vote in Congress or at the ballot box.

The Founders wrote our Constitution specifically to protect the American people from this kind
of government without consent. They gave exclusive legislative power to the most accountable branch of the federal government – Congress.

Having elected legislators solely responsible for federal law makes it easy for the American people to know who to blame when policy decisions go bad. This stringent accountability is inconvenient for elected officials. That’s why members of Congress have spent decades delegating their legislative powers to the Executive Branch – to duck political responsibility
for actual policy decisions.

The Article I Project was launched this year to help reverse this trend. Central among A1P’s goals is to restore direct, accountable congressional control over the federal regulatory system. To that end, next week Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) and I will introduce new legislation next week titled the “Article I Regulatory Budget Act.”

Our bill would, for the first time, require Congress to vote on the total regulatory burden each
federal agency may impose on the American people each year – a budget for federal regulatory costs to mirror Congress’s annual budget for taxes and spending.

Under the discipline of a regulatory budget, Congress would be directly responsible for the size
and scope of the regulatory state. Executive agencies could still issue and enforce their rules, but only so long as their impact fits within the regulatory-cost limits established by Congress.

This would give regulatory agencies – really for the first time – an incentive to make their regulations cost-effective. They would be made to work for the American people instead of the other way around. And the American people, for their part, would be empowered to make informed judgments at the ballot box about economic regulations.

This is what the Founders had in mind when they wrote Article I of the Constitution in the first place: a lawmaking system accountable to – and therefore legitimate in the eyes of – the people.

No National Zoning Board

May 13, 2016

The Obama economy has been tough on America’s working families. Just this week Pew Research Center reported that in the last 15 years “the middle class lost ground in nearly nine-in-ten U.S. metropolitan areas.”

One cause of this 15-year squeeze of hardworking Americans? Rising housing prices.

While household income has largely been flat during the Obama recovery – the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression – housing prices have continued to sky rocket, in large part because government regulations artificially inflate the cost of building new units. In fact, regulatory fees on home builders have increased a whopping 30 percent since 2011, as reported in The Wall Street Journal last week.

And yet the Obama administration wants to make this problem even worse by implementing its “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule, which was issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last year. According to HUD officials, this rule is needed because “increasing a neighborhood’s appeal to families with different income and ethnic profiles can encourage a more diversified population and reduce isolation.”

In other words, this new regulation is designed to give unelected, anonymous bureaucrats in Washington the power to pick and choose who your new next-door neighbor will be. If they don’t believe your neighborhood is “diverse” enough, they will seize control of local zoning decisions – choosing what should be built, where, and who should pay for it – in order to make your neighborhood look more like they want it to.

HUD has this power because far too many communities have become accustomed to relying on the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which gives federal dollars to local communities for projects designed to reduce poverty and housing segregation.

But a recent study by the Reason Foundation demonstrated that while the CDBG program has been a boon for special interests and channeling taxpayer dollars to politically connected groups, it has been entirely unsuccessful in actually reducing poverty or housing segregation.

The so-called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule would only continue CDBG’s well-established track record of failure. Instead of helping all American families by lowering housing costs, the AFFH rule would only add yet another layer of bureaucratic red tape on developers, making it less likely – not more – that they will find it worthwhile to build more housing units.

Next week, the Senate will have a chance to fight back against this misguided power grab, by adopting an amendment to this year’s Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill that would prohibit HUD officials from spending any money to implement the new rule.

Americans are indeed suffering from high housing prices. But the answer is not a top down National Zoning Board in Washington.

Restoring Congressional Accountability Through Appropriations Process

April 29, 2016

Of all the words that the American people use to describe Congress today, one of the most common — and accurate — is unaccountable.

As hardworking men and women across the country continue to protest dysfunctional and costly regulations, the response from their elected lawmakers remains the same: blame is shifted, fingers are pointed, and scapegoats are brought forth to defend those who are charged with making the laws.

This is the very definition of unaccountability, and it pervades the culture of Washington, because Congress has allowed it to infect our institutions.

Many Americans assume that they’re being lied to when their elected lawmakers blame someone else for the rules that are raising their cost of living and eating away at their paychecks.

But the truth is actually more troubling. Most of the items on the federal government’s list of do’s and don’ts are not written and passed by Congress at all – they are imposed unilaterally by unelected bureaucrats in one of the Executive Branch’s many administrative agencies.

No wonder federal regulations are estimated to cost the American people between $1 trillion and $2 trillion every year. And those trillions of dollars don’t just evaporate. They’re transferred from families and businesses who pay artificially inflated prices to all the special-interest middle-men who get rich off red tape.

For those who recognize the moral and material problems of hiding the regulatory process in a faceless bureaucracy, the REINS Act provides a commonsense solution. This bill would require congressional approval for all major regulatory rules, so that members of Congress would no longer be able to blame executive agencies for costly regulations.

Unfortunately, even with 37 cosponsors in the Senate and the endorsement of a majority in the House, support for the REINS Act has yet to reach a critical mass in Congress. But hope for regulatory reform is not lost.

As Congress proceeds through the appropriations process this Spring, each spending bill presents an opportunity to advance structural reforms that would restore congressional accountability over federal regulations. Think of it as the REINS Act in miniature: as each spending bill comes before Congress, reform-minded lawmakers have the opportunity to attach a REINS-like amendment requiring congressional approval for all major rules issued by the executive agencies that are funded by that particular bill.

Earlier this week, I pursued this strategy by trying to introduce an amendment that would restrict the Department of Energy from spending any funds to implement or enforce regulations whose compliance costs exceed $100 million unless specifically approved by Congress.

Regrettably, my amendment was blocked. But I’m confident that the defenders of the dysfunctional status quo will find it increasingly difficult to obstruct commonsense reforms that will make Congress more accountable to the public, because if Congress is ever going to win back the trust of the American people, we must prove that we are trustworthy. And the best way to do that is to make ourselves once again accountable for the consequences of the laws of this country.

No Money, No Consent

April 22, 2016

Today at United Nations Headquarters in New York City Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives of over 130 nations will sign the Framework Convention on Climate Change agreement that was negotiated in Paris last December.

According to President Obama, this “historic agreement” will “hold every country accountable” if they fail to meet its carbon emission targets.

The White House has also acknowledged that the agreement contains “legally binding” provisions designed to create a “long-term framework” that will force the United States and signatory countries to reduce carbon emissions for decades to come.

Despite these facts, President Obama has already announced he will not submit the Paris Climate Agreement to the Senate for advice and consent. Instead, the White House claims the signature environmental achievement of the president’s tenure is just an “international agreement” not meriting Senate attention.

If the stakes weren’t so high, this claim would be laughable on its face.

Not only was this agreement’s predecessor, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, submitted to the Senate and approved as a treaty, but when the Senate ratified that treaty, the Foreign Relations Committee specifically reported that any future emissions targets agreed to through the Convention “would have to be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent.”

President Obama has chosen to ignore this directive.

He has also chosen to ignore the State Department’s eight-factor test that is used to determine “whether any international agreement should be brought into force as a treaty or as an international agreement other than a treaty” (you can read each of those eight factors here).

The only reason President Obama is not sending the Paris Climate Agreement to the Senate as a treaty is that he knows the Senate would handily reject it.

This is an unacceptable breach of Article II Section 2 of the Constitution, and Congress must do something about it.

If President Obama fails to do so, then Congress must prevent its implementation by forbidding any payments to the agreement’s “Green Climate Fund,” an international slush fund included in the Paris agreement to induce developing nations to sign the agreement.

If Congress fails to specifically prohibit taxpayer money from being spent implementing the Paris Climate Agreement, then they will be complicit in President Obama’s subversion of the Constitution.

A Teaching Moment

April 15, 2016

More than seven years into the Obama administration, one would hope that Congress would have come to grips with the president’s will-to-power approach to politics.

On every issue – from health care and immigration to welfare and energy – President Obama has proven that he will abide by the letter of the law only to the extent that it conforms with his preferred policy outcome.

There is no policy area where this pattern of behavior has been more clearly established than education.

From day one, President Obama used stimulus dollars to try to bribe states to adopt common core standards. Then when that money ran out, he tried to leverage the stringent testing standards in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act to achieve the same goal.

Under that law, a school could be deemed as “failing” by the federal education bureaucracy if it did not meet excessively high standardized testing benchmarks. But if a state agreed to adopt common core, the Obama administration promised to waive the NCLB penalties.

Nothing in NCLB allowed Obama to use the law to force common core on the states in this manner, but he did it anyway.

Given these glaring lessons of recent history, one would have hoped that Congress would make sure that the law that replaced NCLB – the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was debated and passed in December of last year – included enforceable protections against similar violations of the law by the president. But, as I pointed out at the time in an op-ed for the Deseret News, although the bill included limitations on the education secretary’s authority to coerce states into adopting federal standards, “[w]ithout a substantial enforcement mechanism — losing money — a future secretary will be just as able to side-step words intended to roll back his or her authority."

Now, just months later, President Obama’s new education secretary is doing exactly that. Education Week reports that the Department of Education’s draft rule for implementing ESSA will require states to change how they currently fund their schools in a way that will “force teacher transfers to equalize spending on salaries between schools, and significantly disrupt how districts allocate money and resources.”

This is exactly the kind of top-down micromanagement of education policy that has failed to produce any meaningful improvements in academic achievement – especially for students from low-income communities – over the past 50 years. States should be free to allocate their education resources as they see fit. Bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be dictating which teachers work in which schools.

But this is exactly what happens when Congress delegates too much power to executive-branch agencies. This is what happens when Congress simply trusts – but does not verify – that the executive branch will follow the law.

The only way to stop the executive branch from abusing its power is to not give it power in the first place.

Instead of funneling money through Washington bureaucrats before sending it to America’s school districts and classrooms, federal-education dollars should follow the students to any public or private school of their choice.

Until we do that, we should not act surprised when the same centralized education model works to the benefit of central planners and bureaucratic busybodies, instead of parents, teachers, and students.

The Federal Bureaucracy Strikes Again

April 8, 2016

If you want to understand the corruption, deceit, and might-makes-right culture at the core of the federal government’s dysfunction and disgrace today, look no further than the two big stories out of Washington this week.

On Monday President Obama’s Treasury Department released sweeping new regulations effectively rewriting the tax code to make it even more difficult for U.S. companies to escape the double taxation on overseas earnings currently extracted by the IRS. Rather than trying to lower the U.S. corporate income tax rate – which is the highest in the industrialized world – the Obama administration wants to make it even more costly to do business in America.

Not to be outdone by the economic folly of their colleagues at the Treasury Department, on Wednesday bureaucrats at the Department of Labor published 1,000 pages of new regulations – collectively called “the fiduciary rule” – targeting the investment industry that will make it more expensive and less likely for low- and middle-income Americans to save for their future.

Working Americans already face a host of obstacles that prevent them from saving for retirement or unexpected financial hardships, and observers from across the political spectrum agree that these new regulations will only further discourage private savings.

But as harmful as these policies will be for American families and businesses trying to get ahead in a still-stagnant economy, the real scandal of these new sets of rules are the flagrant abuses of power that created them.

In 2014 Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said “we do not believe we have the authority to address this inversion question through administrative action. [...] That’s why legislation is needed.” This was not a groundbreaking statement: everyone in Washington knows that the Secretary of the Treasury does not have the power to unilaterally change the tax laws just because he doesn’t like them. And yet that’s exactly what he did this week, with the blessing of President Obama – abandoning his constitutional scruples and betraying his respect for Congress’s rightful role in writing tax policy in order to score cheap political points.

Likewise, the Secretary of Labor has no legitimate authority to regulate the transactions between brokers and their retail clients as it does in its new fiduciary rule. The Dodd–Frank so-called financial reform law of 2010 explicitly authorized the Securities and Exchange Commission to perform this function. And yet, because the SEC had not yet fulfilled this mandate under Dodd-Frank, the Department of Labor stepped in to fill the regulatory void.

This is not how the American people expect their government to work, because it’s not how the federal government is supposed to work. The rules and regulations governing American society – especially those that have a major impact on our economy – must be debated and passed by elected members of Congress, not negotiated by industry insiders and unelected regulators behind closed doors in the shadowy federal bureaucracy.

That’s why I recently joined nine colleagues from the House and Senate to launch the Article I Project: a network of conservative policymakers working together on a new agenda of government reform and congressional re-empowerment.

The A1P recognizes that the problem of executive-branch overreach is often the result of perpetual, intentional congressional under-reach, and it proposes that a reclamation of those Article I powers by the House and Senate can lead not only to a more responsible, trustworthy government, but a healthier and happier republic.

It’s Time to Restore Separation of Powers

March 18, 2016

Last month I joined nine of my colleagues from the House and Senate to launch the Article I Project (A1P): a bicameral network of conservative policymakers working together on a new agenda of government reform and congressional re-empowerment.
 
At a time when our political system in Washington is held in such low regard by Americans of all political stripes, it may sound bizarre to talk about re-empowering Congress, one of the most distrusted institutions in the country.
 
But the premise of A1P is that the systematic dysfunction within our federal government is a result of a legislative branch that is not too strong, but too weak.
 
Our goal is simply to make Congress once again responsible – both in the sense of doing our constitutional duty, and doing it transparently so that our fellow countrymen can hold us accountable for the choices we make.
 
Over the course of the twentieth century, and accelerating in the twenty-first, Congress has handed too many of its constitutional responsibilities to the Executive Branch, creating a “headless fourth branch” of the federal government, untethered from any clear lines of accountability connecting policy, policymakers, and the people.
 
This upending of our constitutional order has led not only to bad policy, but to deep public distrust in our governing institutions.
 
Although Congress bears primary responsibility for this toxic state of affairs, the other two branches share in the blame.
 
In particular, the Supreme Court’s doctrine of “Chevron deference” has helped to midwife this shadowy fourth branch, by requiring Courts, under certain circumstances, to surrender their Article III constitutional power of judicial review to executive agencies. That is, with a sufficiently clever legal theory, an executive agency can impose on the American people laws that the people’s elected representatives never actually pass.
 
Chevron deference is hardly the only problem with the administrative state, nor is it the biggest. But it is one of the least defensible problems, with a clear and obvious fix.
 
The “Separation of Powers Restoration Act of 2016” is that fix. The bill would scrap the artificial and extra-constitutional deference standard set in Chevron and replace it with traditional judicial review of administrative actions. It would require courts to review challenges to agency interpretations of statutes or regulations “de novo” – that is, starting fresh from the text of the law or regulation itself, rather than preemptively deferring to the agency’s lawyers.
"Chevron deference is hardly the only problem with the administrative state, nor is it the biggest. But it is one of the least defensible problems, with a clear and obvious fix."
The only controversial aspect of this legislation is the unfair and un-American status quo it would reform. After all, interpreting the law, and ensuring it conforms with the Constitution, is not a novel understanding of the Judiciary’s role in our system of government. It’s what federal judges are for.
 
So A1P’s work to make members of Congress once again do their job begins with our work – and unanimous endorsement of this reform – to allow federal judges to once again do theirs.