January 2012

LibertyWeek 58: Throw the Bums Out!

by Richard Morrison on August 31, 2009

in CEI Projects, Features, Podcast, Zeitgeist

Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host Jeremy Lott of the Capital Research Center and special guest Sean Higgins of Investor’s Business Daily for Episode 58 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin with a revolt against congressional incumbency, wicked and foolish climate policy and a political sea change in the land of the rising sun. We continue with a technology news interview with Ryan Radia and finish with some fiscally sound Olympic News.

Obama Health-Care Plan Would Drive Up Inflation and Health-Care Costs, Shrink Economy, and Reinforce Worst Features of Status Quo

by Hans Bader on August 31, 2009 · 1 comment

in Healthcare, Legal, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

ObamaCare would shrink the economy, drive up health-care costs and inflation, and increase the deficit, notes David Kopel, a “lifelong Democrat.” Kopel provides “Economic projections of the consequences of Obamacare” drawn from a study “from the Independent Institute” on “the national and Colorado consequences of Obama care, based on” its “one trillion dollar increase in health care subsidies over the next decade. These consequences include:

Overall, total federal expenditures will be 5.6 percent higher than otherwise by 2019, adding $285.6 billion to the federal deficit in 2019.

An increase in national health care expenditures by an additional 8.9 percent by 2019.

An increase in medical price inflation by 5.2 percent above what it would have been otherwise by 2019.

Reduce U.S. economic growth in 2019 compared to the baseline scenario by 4.9 percent for the nation as a whole and 4.3 percent in Colorado.

Higher medical inflation and overall expenditures will ultimately lead to government expenditures that exceed the $1.0 trillion in expenditures on health subsidies. The net present value of all additional federal government expenditures through 2019 that will occur as a result of a federal health care reform is $1.2 trillion, or a $3,900 bill for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Despite the additional $1 trillion in expected health care subsidies by the government, 30 million people would remain uninsured. The cost to reduce the number of uninsured by 16 million people is $62,500 in subsidy expenditures per person insured.”

ObamaCare will increase, rather than reduce, health care costs for many reasons. As Shikha Dalmia explains, one of those reasons is that it does nothing about the main drivers of high health-care costs, like the fact that doctor salaries are much higher than in other countries — physician’s pay is twice as high in the U.S. as in Europe. This is the product of arbitrary government limits on who can practice medicine.

A doctor shortage is looming, but the AMA has successfully lobbied Congress to artificially restrict the number of doctors in America, through measures such as limits on the number of federally-funded residencies. Thanks to arbitrary AMA requirements, medical education is a much most costly and wasteful process in the U.S. than in other countries. And there are lots of unnecessary restrictions on who can become a doctor (like barring immigrant doctors who have practiced for years unless they redo their residencies all over again in the U.S.), and arbitrary limits on qualified non-doctors providing health care (like bans on midwives in many states, even though they can competently handle most childbirths quite cheaply).

ObamaCare also does nothing about the enormous cost of malpractice lawsuits, ignoring the advice of both Republicans and moderate Democrats like former Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ). The status quo of having malpractice claims ruled on by unguided juries that don’t understand medicine — rather than specialized tribunals that do — is harmful to everyone but trial lawyers. Doctors and their insurers end up paying off meritless malpractice claims, which result in doctors ordering lots of unnecessary and costly tests to avoid getting sued (so-called defensive medicine). And patients who really were injured as a result of doctors’ negligence sometimes get no compensation at all due to jury error or inability to afford massive legal fees. But ObamaCare leaves this harmful status quo entirely intact.

That’s not the only thing wrong with ObamaCare. Washington Post columnists and others have noted that ObamaCare would worsen the worst features of the status quo.

ObamaCare is full of special-interest giveaways and constitutionally-dubious provisions like racial preferences and set-asides, which has led to ObamaCare being criticized by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Obama’s own advisors have called into question his claims about how ObamaCare will supposedly let you keep your health coverage while cutting costs. “ObamaCare is all about rationing,” says Obama adviser Martin Feldstein. Feldstein earlier noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and massively raise taxes.

Feldstein, a Harvard professor, warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health-care.

ObamaCare is likely to be a costly boondoggle like his stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office predicts will shrink the economy “in the long run,” and which funds waste like a $15 million border-crossing facility for a deserted area on the Canadian border that only 3 people cross per day.

Hoover and the Great Depression

by Ryan Young on August 31, 2009 · 1 comment

in Economy, Regulation

One of the oddities of U.S. history is that Herbert Hoover is regarded as a free-market president. He grew federal spending by 52% in just four years. Engaged in massive deficit spending. Created the Federal Home Loan Bank. And the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Signed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs into law. And the Agricultural Marketing Act. And so on. Free-market, he was not.

The Hoover myth is showing some cracks, fortunately. Where most civics textbooks would blame Hoover’s laissez-faire policies for the Great Depression, a new paper by UCLA’s Lee Ohanian fingers Hoover’s labor market interventions.

I’m personally convinced the Depression was more of a monetary phenomenon than a fiscal one. But Ohanian is surely right that Hoover’s dictating to companies what wages shall pay their workers was a net negative for the economy.

It’s certainly possible to blame Hoover’s policies for the Great Depression. Just not on the grounds that those policies were free-market. People shouldn’t have to read obscure academic journals to find that out.

Rep. Klein Spends $13,000 of Taxpayer Money on Telephone Town Hall

by Kevin Hilferty on August 31, 2009 · 1 comment

in Politics as Usual

A politician wasting taxpayers’ money is generally not surprising. A congressman spending nearly $13,000 on a telephone town hall meeting, though, certainly is.

Last week Representative Ron Klein (D-Fla.) spent $12,964 of federal money to hold a town hall meeting on health care reform by way of a conference call. The Palm Beach Post reported that the call lasted approximately 70 minutes and had 6,350 listeners. Some have suggested that one of the reasons that Klein held the meeting over the phone was to avoid anti-socialized health care crashers.

This isn’t the first time Klein’s wasteful spending has graced the pages of CEI. Rep. Klein is famous for his co-sponsoring of the Homeowners’ Defense Act, a bill that would promise federal money for state-run insurers in the event of catastrophes like hurricanes. CEI’s Center for Risk, Regulation, and Markets refers to the bill as the Beach House Bailout bill, saying that the legislation would make the whole country pay to subsidize the insurance of those living in riskier areas like Florida.

Regulation of the Day 42: Hearing Aid Calibration

by Ryan Young on August 31, 2009 · 3 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

In Virginia, state law requires hearing aids to be calibrated at least annually. Records must be kept for three years.

Obama to Cut Off Aid to Honduras, Based on Legal Mistake and Misreading of the Law

by Hans Bader on August 29, 2009 · 13 comments

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The Obama Administration is about to cut off aid to Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Earlier, the Obama Administration blocked travel to the United States by the people of Honduras.

Both actions are foolish responses to a recent ruling by the supreme court of Honduras refusing to approve the return to power of the country’s bullying ex-president and would-be dictator, Mel Zelaya. Zelaya was earlier arrested by soldiers acting on orders of the Honduras Supreme Court, which had ruled that he was no longer president. He was then replaced by his country’s Congress with a civilian successor, and forced into exile. Zelaya’s removal came after he systematically abused his powers: he sought to circumvent constitutional term limits, used mobs to intimidate his critics, threatened public employees with termination if they refused to help him violate the Constitution, engaged in massive corruption, illegally cut off public funds to local governments whose leaders refused to back his quest for more power, denied basic government services to his critics, refused to enforce dozens of laws passed by Congress, and spent the country into virtual bankruptcy, refusing to submit a budget so that he could illegally spend public funds on his cronies.

State Department lawyers, who are not experts on Honduran law, plan to declare the ex-president’s removal a “military coup” to justify cutting off aid, even though Honduras has a civilian president, and the ex-president was lawfully removed from office (although his subsequent exile may technically have violated Honduran law).

Journalists nonsensically refer to Honduras’s removal of its ex-president as a “coup” even while admitting that it was approved by the country’s supreme court. But if it was legal, by definition, it cannot be a coup, since a coup is defined as “the unconstitutional overthrow of a legitimate government by a small group.”

The ex-president’s removal was perfectly constitutional, say many lawyers and foreign policy experts, including attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady.

Moreover, the ex-president’s removal was not a “coup” because it was not committed by a “small group,” as the definition of “coup” requires. The removal of Honduras’s president was supported by the entire Honduran Supreme Court, an almost unanimous Honduran Congress, and much of Honduran society. Honduras did not lose its government, but merely replaced one illegitimate part of it: its overbearing president. And his removal from office (as opposed to his subsequent exile) was clearly legally justified.

The fact that solders, not police, enforced the removal of Honduras’s ex-president does not make it a coup. Because soldiers, “instead of the police,” carried out the court’s orders to remove the ex-president, the removal has been falsely called a “military coup” by liberal journalists, the Obama Administration, the Carter Center, and the leftist regimes that now prevail in much of Latin America. But soldiers’ participation made sense. Only soldiers, not police, would have enough manpower to remove a would-be dictator who was the most powerful man in his country, with his own bodyguards. More importantly, the Honduran Constitution expressly vests the military — not police — with the power to enforce Constitutional guarantees like term limits, in Article 272. The president forfeited his right to rule by proposing an end to term limits (Honduras has had such a problem with elected presidents later becoming “presidents for life” through vote fraud and intimidation that Article 239 of the Honduras Constitution strips presidents of the presidency if they even “propose” an end to term limits). And soldiers have occasionally been used to enforce court orders, even in the U.S., such as in the 1957 Little Rock desegregation order.

The State Department staff are reported to have a ridiculous response to all this. The State Department is apparently well aware of the constitutional provisions that justify the ex-president’s removal, but believes that they are irrelevant because they were not cited by the Honduran Supreme Court prior to the President’s removal. The U.S. Embassy in Honduras argues that because the court did not cite Article 239 in its order removing the President, Article 239′s provision stripping presidents of their office for proposing an end to term limits (as Honduras’s ex-president did) is an irrelevant after-the-fact “post-removal” rationalization.

The State Department staff’s position reflects a basic misunderstanding of how courts operate in the real world. It is quite common for courts to rule first, and issue an opinion explaining their reasoning later, especially in election disputes and other cases where courts need to rule rapidly (like removing a would-be dictator). Many of the court rulings in the Bush v. Gore litigation, for example, were issued first, with the court opinions explaining them following only later. When the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the federal government’s bankruptcy plan for Chrysler, it ruled first on June 5, and issued its opinion explaining its order only two months later, on August 5. When the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Georgia Thompson’s conviction and ordered her release from jail in United States v. Thompson, 484 F.3d 877 (7th Cir. 2007), it did so from the bench, “without waiting until completion of a written decision,” and explained its decision only 2 weeks later. Thus, the fact that the Honduras Supreme Court did not explicitly cite Article 239 in its decisions leading to the ex-president’s removal is of no consequence.

Confronted with the sound legal basis for removing the ex-president under his country’s constitution, the Obama Administration has responded with a series of increasingly weak rationalizations for stubbornly seeking to force his return on the Honduran people.

For example, President Obama has erroneously suggested that people have a “universal right” to keep the presidents they elected in office — even, apparently, if they violate their country’s constitution, as Honduras’s ex-president did. That is certainly not true in the U.S.: Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, but was forced to leave office 2 years later after he attempted to cover up the Watergate burglary.

Obama’s nominee for assistant secretary of state has erroneously argued that presidents should not be removed without unspecified “judicial process.” That argument is at odds with our own Constitution’s provision for legislative impeachment; Honduras’s constitutional provision automatically stripping presidents of their office if they even propose changes to constitutional term limits, without the need for impeachment or conviction; and the fact that Honduras’s ex-president was in fact removed through a “judicial” order, that has now been reaffirmed in a “judicial process.”

The Obama Administration earlier ignored bedrock constitutional principles by taking actions predicated on the erroneous idea that Honduran legislators and judges lost their right to hold office when Honduras’s ex-president was removed. That’s like saying that after Richard Nixon resigned in Watergate, all of his judicial appointees (including the 4 Supreme Court justices he appointed, such as Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist) should have automatically lost their posts, and the entire Congress should have resigned. In an effort to pressure Honduras’s legislature and courts, Obama’s State Department earlier rescinded the visas of a Honduran Supreme Court justice, the leader of Honduras’s Congress, and its human-rights ombudsman, who had criticized human-rights abuses and intimidation by the ex-president. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly justified the taking away of the visas by saying that “We don’t recognize Roberto Micheletti as the president of Honduras. We recognize Manuel Zelaya.” U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens similarly explained the revocation of a supreme court justice’s visa by saying that “the Supreme Court justice was part of the ‘regime.’”

But Congress and the Supreme Court are co-equal branches of government that do not lose their right to hold office merely because the president leaves his office. Presidents are not emperors. They are not the government, but merely part of it. President Obama was not taught this bizarre theory of imperial power at Harvard Law School, which he and I both attended.

Obama’s demand that Honduras reinstate its would-be dictator has emboldened other elected leaders in Latin America to try to make themselves dictators. (Even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, admitted in an editorial by Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl that the Obama Administration has shown a “willful disregard of political oppression” by left-wing dictators in Latin America).

Obama’s demand that Honduras’s ex-president be returned to office has been supported by the Cuban communist dictator Castro and the Venezuelan socialist dictator Chavez, who counted Honduras’s deposed president as an ally, despite his background as a wealthy and corrupt landowner.

But allying with Castro and Chavez to force the return of Honduras’s would-be dictator has not even improved U.S. relations with their countries. The dictators Castro and Chavez continue to attack and oppose the United States at every turn, and oppose all of its Latin American initiatives, like its plans for bases in Colombia to fight drug trafficking. Obama has received nothing in exchange for his appeasement of Latin America’s left.

CEI Weekly: EPA Ponders Axing Whistleblower’s Department

by Charles Huang on August 28, 2009

in Culture, Features, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Tech & Telecom, Zeitgeist

CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the Weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.

>CEI Weekly
August 28, 2009

>>EPA contemplates shutting down the NCEE, where whistleblower, Alan Carlin, worked.
>Upon learning of the news, CEI published a news release and Sam Kazman wrote a blog emphasizing the need for NCEE
>A Detroit News editorial recaps on the EPA cover-up of Carlin’s report.
>An editorial in the Washington Times writes on the contradiction that will be created by the Obama Administration if it marginalizes the NCEE because of Carlin’s whistle blowing.

>>Shaping the Debate
Labeling Won’t Make Water Safer
Angela Logomasini’s Op-ed in the Detroit News

Nanotechnology: Innovation vs. Corporate Welfare
Ryan Young’s Article in the Washington Examiner Opinion Zone

NFL Should Stop Cracking Down on Sports Betting
Michelle Minton’s Letter in USA Today

Anger Over UK Quango’s Global Green Campaign
Iain Murray’s Quotation in the Daily Mail

FCC Votes to Assess Wireless Innovation and Competition
Ryan Radia’s Quotation in TWICE.com


>>Best of the Blogs
Ted Kennedy’s Deregulatory Legacy on Airlines and Trucking
by John Berlau
For a brief, shining moment, in the mid to late 1970s, Kennedy viewed smaller government as the most compassionate answer in one area of economic life: transportation. Kennedy was the prime mover in Congress behind the airline and trucking deregulation bills that were signed by President Jimmy Carter.
Regulation of the Day 41: The Color of Beer Cans
by Ryan Young
“Having already solved all of the country’s economic problems, the Federal Trade Commission now has time to threaten to step in and stop Budweiser from selling cans of Bud Light with college sports team colors on the labels.”
Elaine Chao: Union Transparency “More Important than Beck;” EFCA “Terrible”
by Ivan Osorio
Former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao described the union transparency requirements introduced during the Bush administration as “more important than Beck.”. . . Under Beck, workers who are required to pay for union representation may reclaim the portion of their dues that are not used for representation purposes.


>>LibertyWeek Podcast
Episode 57: The Scandal That Wouldn’t Die
In episode 57, we start with Blue Dogs and health care legislation, cash for clunkers running on fumes, and AT&T’s response to an iPhone controversy. We continue on with the scandal that wouldn’t die and the architectural historian’s version of Olympic News.


>>Support CEI
Like what you read?
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 25-year record of success is made possible by our over 3,000 supporters. Make sure to stop by www.cei.org/support and make a donation to continue your support or become a supporter. Curious about all the possible ways to donate to CEI? Contact Al Canata at acanata@cei.org or 202-331-2280 to find out more.

To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.

Charles Huang
Web and Media Associate
Competitive Enterprise Institute
chuang@cei.org
http://www.cei.org
http://www.openmarket.org
202-331-1010

Government gets ‘emergency’ control of the internet in new Senate bill

by Gary Howard on August 28, 2009 · 1 comment

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Tech & Telecom

This story just hit the Drudge Report’s front page.  Declan McCullagh at CNET writes today about the latest revision of S.773, a bill that would give the president “emergency control” of the internet in case of a “cybersecurity emergency.”  Wayne Crews, CEI Vice President for Policy,  released a statement on the naming of the cybersecurity chief and wrote an article on this back in May.  See an excerpt below:

Policy makers should avoid collectivizing and centralizing risk management, especially in frontier industries like information technology. Yes, we need government-backed “police forces” to protect private networks and infrastructure, but we also need the “barbed wire” and “door locks” which private companies continuously compete with each other to improve. When government overrules market competition for information/electronic security, it creates barriers to innovative private security solutions. We become less secure, not more.

Some reports indicate that the administration and Congress are seeking government authority over private networks-like power grids and computer networks-in the event of breaches. The very term “cyber” at once means everything and therefore nothing: American telecommunications, the power grid; virtually anything networked to some other computer is fair game to a new czar. The dominant tenor of the cybersecurity debate today is toward greater federal control over private infrastructure.

Washington has a proper role. It entails protecting government’s own networks and setting internal security standards, not regulating private networks. It involves arresting computer criminals and avoiding creating threats to data security in the form of data retention mandates, national ID schemes, proposals to re-regulate encryption, and czars that set terms for all they survey.

Security is an industry, and industries-and abstract concepts like “technology”-do not need czars in Washington. Innovation in information security and privacy protection do not flow from D.C. Rather, a government tech czar would likely grow in “stature” as a target for lobbyists. A federal technology chief could all too easily become an agent for establishing government authority over frontier technologies.

Both suppliers and customers increasingly demand better security from all firms. Improving private incentives for information sharing is at least as important as greater government coordination to ensure security and critical infrastructure protection. That job will entail liberalizing critical infrastructure assets-like telecommunications and electricity networks-and relaxing antitrust constraints so firms can enhance reliability through the kind of “partial mergers” that are anathema to today’s antitrust enforcers.

Private cybersecurity initiatives will gradually move us toward thriving liability and insurance markets for cutting-edge sectors. Heavy-handed cyber-czar gestures and legislation cannot address the lack of authentication and inability to exclude bad actors that is at the root of today’s cybersecurity problems.

Like everything else in the market, security technologies-from biometric identifiers to firewalls to encrypted databases-and cybersecurity services-from consulting to liability insurance to network monitoring-benefit from competition. Corporate information and security officers deal with cybersecurity concerns every day. It’s not clear what government could really fix-but it could break a lot.

See the statement release here.

EPA Considers Closing NCEE – Dr. Alan Carlin’s Unit

by Sam Kazman on August 27, 2009

in Culture, Environment, Features, Global Warming, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

The EPA whistleblower saga took a new turn this week with a report that EPA was considering shutting down the agency unit in which Dr. Alan Carlin works.  Dr. Carlin is the senior EPA analyst who authored a 100-page study last March, which severely criticized the scientific basis for the agency’s position on global warming.  CEI broke the story in late June, when it unveiled a series of emails to Dr. Carlin from his boss, stating that his study would not be disclosed, and that Dr. Carlin was to stop working on global warming issues, because criticizing EPA’s position would only cause trouble.

Dr. Carlin works in EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE), whose function is, in its words, “analyzing the economic and health impacts of environmental regulations and policies, and … informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.”  EPA has long been criticized for the tunnel-vision, cost-be-damned nature of many of its policies.  (See, for example, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s 1995 book, Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation, written before he joined the court.)  Economists are the most likely professionals within EPA to examine the real-world effects of its policies.  For that reason, the NCEE is potentially a major restraining force on the agency’s out-of-this-world regulatory ambitions.  Wouldn’t it be great for EPA to get this office out of the way?

Hopefully, the publicity and scrutiny that Dr. Carlin’s report has received since it became public will carry over to EPA’s plans for NCEE, and this agency, with its hollow commitment to scientific integrity and transparency, won’t get its wish.

Obama Punishes Small Country for Court Ruling Refusing to Reinstate Bullying Ex-President and Would-Be Dictator

by Hans Bader on August 27, 2009 · 18 comments

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony

The Obama Administration has decided to block travel by the people of Honduras to the United States to punish their country for its Supreme Court’s refusal to back the return to power of Honduras’s ex-president and would-be dictator, Manuel Zelaya, who is backed by left-wing Latin American dictators like Castro and Chavez.  The Obama Administration is now blocking the issuance of nearly all visas, meaning that a Honduran grandma who wants to visit her grandkids in the United States can’t.

Obama’s decision came in response to a recent ruling by the Honduras Supreme Court, ruling that the removal of the country’s would-be dictator was a perfectly lawful “constitutional succession,” and that he must face criminal charges for the crimes he committed as president.  Obama’s action will further destabilize a country whose economy has been pushed to the brink by recent turmoil, and which is the third-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. (Honduras has close economic links to the U.S., making it very vulnerable to sanctions).

Earlier, soldiers acting on orders from the Honduras Supreme Court removed Honduras’s president from office, after he attempted to circumvent constitutional term limits, used mobs to intimidate his critics, threatened public employees with termination if they refused to help him violate the Constitution, engaged in massive corruption, illegally cut off public funds to local governments whose leaders refused to back his quest for more power, denied basic government services to his critics, refused to enforce dozens of laws passed by Congress, and spent the country into virtual bankruptcy, refusing to submit a budget so that he could illegally spend public funds on his cronies and pet projects  (The ex-president made Richard Nixon look like an angel by comparison, and Americans would never put up with a president who behaved as badly as Honduras’s ex-president.   But American liberals sometimes romanticize left-wing dictators overseas, and Honduras’s ex-president, despite being a wealthy landowner, knew how to curry favor among intellectuals and journalists through seductive left-wing rhetoric).    The nation’s Congress then voted almost unanimously to replace him with the Congressional speaker, who is the country’s current president.

Because soldiers, “instead of the police,” carried out the court’s orders to remove the ex-president, the removal has been falsely referred to ever since as a “military coup” — by liberal journalists, the Obama Administration, the Carter Center, and the leftist regimes that now prevail in much of Latin America.  Never mind that only soldiers, not police, would have enough manpower to remove a would-be dictator who was the most powerful man in his country, with his own bodyguards.  Never mind that Honduran Constitution expressly vests the military — not police — with the power to enforce Constitutional guarantees like term limits, in Article 272. Or that the president forfeited his right to rule by proposing an end to term limits (Honduras has had such a problem with elected presidents later becoming “presidents for life”  through vote fraud and intimidation that Article 239 of the Honduras Constitution strips presidents of the presidency if they even “propose” an end to term limits). Or that soldiers have occasionally been used to enforce court orders, even in the U.S., such as in the 1957 Little Rock desegregation order.

The ex-president’s removal was perfectly legal, say many lawyers and foreign policy experts, including attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady.

That no “military coup” occurred in Honduras has long been clear, from the fact that it is the Honduras’s Supreme Court and Congress that continue to object on legal grounds to the ex-president’s return, while the military has said that it will not block his return if Honduras’s courts or legislature conclude that the President’s return would in fact be legal. (Indeed, the military was a big loser in the ex-president’s ouster, since the U.S. promptly cut off military aid as a result, and Honduras is heavily reliant on foreign aid)

Confronted with the legal basis for removing the ex-president under his country’s constitution, the Obama Administration has responded with a series of increasingly ridiculous rationalizations for stubbornly seeking to force his return on the Honduran people.

Obama has argued that elected presidents have a right to continue ruling even if they violate their country’s constitution, and his assistant secretary of state argued that presidents should not be removed without elaborate “judicial process” (an argument at odds with our own Constitution’s provision for legislative impeachment, and Honduras’s constitutional provision automatically stripping presidents of their office if they even propose changes to constitutional term limits).

The Obama Administration earlier showed  its ignorance by suggesting that Honduran legislators and judges lost their right to hold office when Honduras’s ex-president was removed. That’s like saying that after Richard Nixon resigned in Watergate, all of his judicial appointees (including the 4 Supreme Court justices he appointed, such as Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist) should have automatically lost their posts, and the entire Congress should have resigned. In an effort to intimidate Honduras’s legislature and courts, Obama’s State Department earlier rescinded the visas of a Honduran Supreme Court justice, the leader of Honduras’s Congress, and its human-rights ombudsman, who had criticized human-rights abuses and intimidation by the ex-president. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly justified the taking away of the visas by saying that “We don’t recognize Roberto Micheletti as the president of Honduras. We recognize Manuel Zelaya.”

But Congress and the Supreme Court are co-equal branches of government that do not lose their right to hold office merely because the president leaves his office. Presidents are not emperors. They are not the government, but merely part of it. Obama was not taught this bizarre theory of imperial power at Harvard Law School, which he and I both attended.

Obama’s demand that Honduras reinstate its would-be dictator has emboldened other elected leaders in Latin America to try to make themselves dictators. (Even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, admits that Obama has shown a “willful disregard of political oppression” by left-wing dictators in Latin America).

There was no “coup” in Honduras.  A coup is the sudden, illegal deposition of a legitimate government by a small group.  The removal of Honduras’s president was supported by the entire Honduran Supreme Court, an almost unanimous Honduran Congress, and much of Honduran society. Honduras did not lose its government, but merely replaced one illegitimate part of it: its overbearing president. And his removal from office (as opposed to his subsequent exile) was clearly legally justified.

Given the substantial Honduran population in the U.S., and the fact that Hondurans frequently travel to and from the U.S. on business or to visit family members, the Obama Administration’s restrictions on their relatives’ right to travel are a serious encroachment on civil liberties.

Unlike the Washington Post, which has largely told the disturbing truth about Honduras’s ex-president (despite being a liberal paper),the wire services have often sugarcoated the terrible record in office of Honduras’s ex-president Zelaya, and his biggest supporter, the thuggish Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

For example, the Associated Press’s Morgan Lee and Alexandra Olson have given Zelaya and Chavez fawning coverage, claiming that it is only Latin America’s “elites” who object to them — a blatantly false claim, given that Zelaya was so unpopular among his people that his approval rating was only 30 percent at the time of his removal.  They called Chavez, who engaged in rampant vote fraud in his reelection bid (as well as censorship to silence critics and unfavorable publicity) “democratically elected.”  Never mind that Chavez  has shut down independent media, shot peaceful demonstrators, harassed elected mayors, and seized private property on a vast scale.

(Obama’s appointee to be the FCC’s “diversity officer” is a big fan of Venezuelan dictator Chavez, Mark Lloyd.  Lloyd has called Marxist Venezuela a model, praised its authoritarian leader’s “incredible revolution” and defended his attacks on independent media.  Obama’s nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State, Arturo Valenzuela, has reputation as a loud defender of Venezuelan dictator Chavez’s terrible record on freedom of the press.  Obama’s green-jobs czar, Van Jones, who is busy orchestrating advertiser boycotts of Obama’s media critics, was until recently a “member of a radical communist group that was dedicated to ‘organizing a revolutionary movement in America.’”)

Ignorant of Honduran economic realities, they also make much of the fact that Honduras’s ex-president raised the minimum wage, even though many of the beneficiaries of this increase were well-off public employees whose pay is based on a large multiple of the minimum wage, and many of Honduras’s poor are not covered by minimum wage laws.  Of those poor people who were covered, thousands lost their jobs when the minimum wage went up (since their employers could not afford to pay such increased wages for unskilled labor; a newspaper from the ex-president’s own Liberal Party predicted it would lead to 40,000 layoffs).  By contrast, public employees in Honduras sometimes have collective bargaining agreements that set their pay as a multiple of the minimum wage, meaning that a high-paid bureaucrat may get a pay raise when the minimum wage goes up.  Honduras’s ex-president also gave millions to his wealthy cronies, like the clownish buffoon Milton Jimenez.

Journalists nonsensically refer to Honduras’s removal of its ex-president as a “coup” even while admitting that it was ordered by the country’s supreme court.  But if it was legal, by definition, it cannot be a coup, since a coup requires “the unconstitutional overthrow of a legitimate government by a small group.”

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