Earlier, I wrote about how, thanks to civil-service regulations, it is hard to fire government employees for misconduct, despite often-ignored Constitutional provisions, such as the Appointments Clause, that the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution to enable department heads to fire and replace federal “officers.” As a result, I was concerned that IRS managers and employees would continue to escape punishment for making burdensome, intrusive, and unconstitutional demands for irrelevant information from non-profit groups that were critical of the government, such as the Tea Party, and which taught about the Constitution. These intrusive investigations violated the First Amendment.
It turns out that they could, after a protracted and costly process, be fired for the types of misconduct they committed — and that their termination for such misconduct may technically be mandated, not merely permitted, by a 1998 law. A lawyer discusses this at Powerline. Misconduct, not incompetence, will likely need to be shown. As noted earlier, few federal employees with ‘‘poor’’ ratings ever get fired, and civil-service employees ‘‘are almost impossible to fire’’ for incompetence, to quote the Houston and San Francisco Chronicle newspapers.
In the American Spectator, CEI Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray and Geoffrey McLatchey explain why the Senate should be skeptical of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which fell six votes short of the 67 needed for ratification last December. As they note, “the treaty would enable an enormous increase in the potential power of UN bureaucrats over the American people and undermine national sovereignty.” Moreover, although “CRPD proponents argue that it merely reiterates existing U.S. disability law,” this is simply false, based on the treaty’s plain language.
It also delegates authority to a UN committee, they note, resulting in a “loss of U.S. sovereignty.” UN committees like to define free speech as discrimination against minority groups in violation of international treaties, making it dangerous to ratify such treaties. For example, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has ruled Germany violated international law by not prosecuting a former legislator for remarks to a scholarly journal about Turkish-immigrant welfare recipients that were deemed racially offensive. The UN committee ruled Germany’s failure to prosecute the speaker violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
As Murray and McLatchey point out, “Under CRPD Article 34, U.S. policy would be subject to the ‘Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,’ a U.N.-appointed panel consisting of 12 ‘experts.’ The history of other UN bodies [such as] the Human Rights Council — which includes countries with a long history of human rights abuses and hostility toward the United States — is not encouraging. And the Convention’s vague language — such as defining disabilities as ‘an evolving concept’ — suggests the Committee will have ample opportunity to redefine terms to America’s disadvantage.”
Subjecting American policies to the UN is a bad idea, especially given many UN officials’ anti-American ideologies. Such hostility is illustrated by the disturbing remarks blaming America for the Boston terrorist bombing by “Richard A. Falk, the U.N. ‘human rights’ official and Princeton professor. . . .Commenting on the Boston bombing, Falk wrote, “Should we not all be meditating on W.H. Auden’s haunting line: ‘Those to whom evil is done/do evil in return’?” “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”
As Murray and McLatchey note, “The CRPD also requires the United States to set up a propaganda agency. Yes, you read that right. Article 8 states that signatories must take “immediate and effective measures…to raise awareness throughout society, including at the family level, regarding persons with disabilities, and to foster respect for the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities.” It becomes the federal government’s duty to “combat stereotypes… in all areas of life” by “initiating and maintaining effective public awareness campaigns.”
We previously explained how the CRPD could harm small business and civil liberties at this link. Cato Institute legal analyst Walter Olson highlighted troublesome provisions in the treaty in an article in The Daily Caller, and a followup analysis at Cato at Liberty. As Olson pointed out, other mandates in the treaty that go beyond current U.S. law include costly “requirements for ‘guides, readers and professional sign language interpreters” for facilities that currently don’t require them. As I previously noted, this would appear to partly override the Supreme Court’s decision in Southeastern Community College v. Davis (1979) limiting the degree of accommodation that can be imposed. They also seem to impose new insurance mandates that call into question fundamental actuarial principles used by prudent insurers.
It’s hard to get rid of a career bureaucrat, even at the managerial level. “After you’ve been here for a year, it’s easier to kill you than fire you.” That’s what my co-workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics would tell me on a sunny day, after we’d used up our lunch hour, but wanted to walk around the National Mall rather than go back to work. I was reminded of this when I learned that not one IRS employee has been so much as reprimanded for their role in making incredibly burdensome, intrusive, and unconstitutional demands for irrelevant information from non-profit groups critical of the government. (By contrast, the head of the IRS was forced to leave his position a month earlier than he wished, in a presidential “firing” designed to create the illusion of accountability.) As Reason magazine notes:
The IRS has admitted to sitting on applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups for political reasons.
According to the government’s own investigation, applications containing terms such as Tea Party and Patriot were singled out for delays and holds even as groups with liberal-sounding names like “Bus for Progress” and “Progress Florida” sailed through the process.
President Obama said “the report’s findings are intolerable and inexcusable” and even fired the acting head of the Internal Revenue Service.
But “intolerable and inexcusable” doesn’t mean any consequences, at least not yet. Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS Exempt Organization Division, is now pleading the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering any questions. (Even left-leaning fact-checkers say she has lied to the public.) [click to continue…]
The Heritage Foundation’s new report on the fiscal costs of legalization for unauthorized immigrants concluded that it will cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. Yesterday, I listed some reasons why I think this number is much too high, and on Wednesday, explained why I thought John Locke would say, “Keep immigration. Reform welfare.” Today, I want to look at the broader economic implications of the Heritage study.
“Government policy should limit immigration to those who will be net fiscal contributors,” the authors concluded, “avoiding those who will increase poverty and impose new costs on overburdened U.S. taxpayers.” This conclusion means that Heritage believes that anyone who is not contributing more in taxes than they receive in taxes is an economic liability, hurting the economy and “increasing poverty.”
But this conclusion that only immigrants who will be “net fiscal contributors” are economically valuable and that the rest “increase poverty” applies equally to lower-wage Americans. “Following amnesty,” the report states, “the fiscal costs of former unlawful immigrant households will be roughly the same as those of lawful immigrant and non-immigrant households with the same level of education.”
In fact, according to Heritage, its conclusion applies to anyone without a college degree, meaning 70 percent of Americans, under the Heritage formula, “increase poverty.” In fact, the Heritage report readily admits this fact: “Poorly educated households, whether immigrant or U.S.-born, receive far more in government benefits than they pay in taxes,” it concludes.
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Real youth unemployment is at 16.1 percent, the highest sustained rate since World War II. As the non-partisan youth advocacy group Generation Opportunity notes,
- The [official] youth unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds for April 2013 is 11.1 percent (NSA).
- The effective unemployment rate is 16.1 percent, which adjusts for labor participation rate by including those who have given up looking for work. The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.7 million young adults that are not counted as “unemployed” by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.
- The April 2013 youth unemployment rate for 18-29 year old African-Americans is 20.4 percent (NSA).
Evan Feinberg of Generation Opportunity argues that “It is a rough time to be a young person in America. . . with about 2 million college students graduating this month, there is no sign of an economic recovery for my generation. Half of all graduating seniors aren’t going to find meaningful work in the coming months.”
The New York Times noted that the most recent jobs “numbers mask a stubborn jobs problem.” “The economy continues to add jobs in proportion to population growth. Nothing less, nothing more.” But “job activity does not seem to be accelerating.” “Construction employment has barely budged.” And in “Europe, policy makers delivered a grim forecast.”
AEI’s James Pethokoukis argues that lousy jobs growth has been artificially concealed due to Obamacare, which replaces full-time jobs with part-time jobs, resulting in a typical newly-created job being of less economic value than previous jobs. We discussed earlier how official unemployment figures conceal rising joblessness, as Obamacare strangles job creation. Other government mandates are also hurting hiring. For example, the EEOC, which flouts federal laws, is discouraging hiring by creating a bad legal climate for employers.
Don’t let the optimism surrounding last month’s job numbers fool you. The unemployment rate’s decline from 7.6 percent in March to 7.5 percent in April is more statistical artifact than progress. Like that of our Western European neighbors—and the U.K. in particular—the U.S. economy is stuck in a rut. Why? The answer is simple. Government profligacy overburdens the economy while propping up private inefficiencies, as I explain in Investors Business Daily.
Since 2008, Washington policymakers have been pacing around the doctor’s office too afraid to take the bitter but effective pill America needs: slash federal spending and end the U.S. Fed’s life support for zombie banks.
Economically stagnant Britain shows us where this continued procrastination leads. Instead of dashing after our tea-drinking transatlantic neighbors, American policymakers should look to Estonia, which took its austerity meds and quickly returned to prosperity.
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Is shareholder activism a good or a bad thing? That depends on what any given resolution seeks to improve the company’s performance, and thereby increase shareholder value. That seems like a simple enough and easily understood measure to determine which shareholder resolutions merit consideration. But resolutions that do not meet that criterion are often introduced at public companies’ shareholder meetings, often by labor union pension funds.
A new study from Navigant Economics, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, analyzes resolutions scored by the AFL-CIO in its “Key Votes Survey” between 2009 and 2012, and finds “no conclusive or pervasive evidence that the shareholder proposals assessed in this study improve firm value or result in an economic benefit to pension plans and plan participants.”
Today, at a Chamber event to announce the study’s release, former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Harvey Pitt. He noted that shareholder activism can be useful, but not when it seeks to advance social agendas. Moreover, successful shareholder activism should advance the interest of all shareholders.
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Cato Institute attorney Ilya Shapiro wrote Tuesday about “Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights who personifies . . . this administration’s flouting of the rule of law.” As he notes, Perez “is due this week for a vote in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on his nomination to be Labor Secretary.”
Shapiro provides this “recap of Perez’s nefarious dealings” (drawing on the work of Quin Hillyer, who provides more detail at this link):
- Interference with the Supreme Court case of Magner v. Gallagher, getting the City of St. Paul to dismiss its appeal to prevent what would’ve been a sharp . . . rebuke to the federal government regarding its use of “disparate impact” racial theories in housing policy . . . [CEI discussed Perez's misuse of "disparate impact" law here]
- Refusal to comply with subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights [which CEI discussed here];
- Dismissal of the Justice Department’s already-won prosecution of the Black Panthers for voter intimidation during the 2008 election [which CEI discussed at this link];
- . . . running a department dedicated to the proposition that voting rights and other civil rights law don’t protect white people [CEI discussed an example here];
- Willfully misleading and lying to Congress under oath several times [D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said he made false claims in response to queries about the black panther case];
- Racial abuse of the New York fire department, to the detriment of public safety and qualified minority applicants;
- Hiring for “career” (non-political appointee) slots only attorneys who have demonstrable left-wing credentials—making Alberto Gonzales’s politicized-hiring foibles look like the model of civil service administration [see examples here];
- Trampling on religious liberties to the point the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his arguments in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC regarding the “ministerial exception” to employment laws;
- Conducting government business from a personal email account as many as 1,200 times (!) and now refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas to release those emails. [CEI lawyers have repeatedly uncovered such abuses, and the use of false-identity alias email addresses, by Obama administration officials, as you can see here and here].
CEI earlier discussed the Magner case and why the Obama administration’s position in that case could undermine the stability of the financial system and cause future financial meltdowns. (CEI joined in an amicus brief opposing the Obama administration’s position, in the Supreme Court). It also highlighted the Obama administration’s (and Perez’s) massive, ethically dubious payoff to the City of Saint Paul to drop the case. Earlier, CEI discussed the Obama administration’s extreme position in the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor case and how it would have undermined First Amendment freedoms, religious autonomy and the separation of church and state. CEI also examined the Justice Department’s politicized hiring during the Obama administration.
One way the current political climate discourages hiring is by turning problem employees into potential lawsuits for the employers who take the risk of hiring them. The legal climate has gotten much worse over the past several years due to the appointment of more left-wing, anti-employer judges by President Obama, and an increasingly out-of-control Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sues employers for terminating bad employees who fall into “protected classes,” and for sensible hiring decisions that most judges would consider perfectly legal, since the plain language of federal civil-rights laws permits them. The EEOC even sues employers for using hiring criteria required by state law, such as health and safety codes.
The EEOC’s abusive, out-of-control behavior is a point of agreement among lawyers who agree on little else, liberal and conservative alike. The liberal lawyer “Loki,” writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, observes:
Without going into too much detail, I recently had the bizarre experience of the EEOC first arguing that the plain language of the statute didn’t matter. Then we dug up their own policy, which contradicted their stated litigation position. They argued that their own policy didn’t matter. The issue hadn’t been litigated much, but we found case law directly on point contradicting them (and for which they had been sanctioned). They argued that the case law didn’t matter. Then we found prior DOJ opinions on the issue- guess what? The EEOC said the DOJ opinions didn’t matter.
The judge? He thought it mattered.
I wish this was a one-off experience, but it’s not. Every single time I have dealt with the EEOC, it’s something similar. It’s gotten to the point where I fully expect them to be pissing on my leg so they can tell me it’s raining. And note that I’m not reflexively anti-government; I’ve dealt with the DOJ and SEC (among others) and have nary a bad word to say with the attorneys I’ve dealt with. . .I honestly don’t know what it is in the water at the EEOC. . . I had to do a lot of research on EEOC cases, and I found so many cases where the trial courts just got fed up with the EEOC it wasn’t funny.
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CEI Research Associate Evan Woodham contributed to this post.
Another round of disappointing jobs numbers released last Friday shows more than ever that massive spending “stimulus” isn’t working in getting the U.S. economy going. We must, in the phrase coined by my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Iain Murray, “liberate to stimulate.”
But not only is the U.S. government piling on ever-more regulation on all sectors of the economy, it is stalling on implementing even modest bipartisan regulatory relief passed into law.
On April 5 of last year, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. Risking heat from allies, I praised the president for this action in conservative venues such as National Review, because I believe that good public policy actions should be praised no matter who the actor is.
But on its first birthday, much of the JOBS Act might as well still be in the womb. That’s because except for provisions that went into effect automatically — and these are working well, as I will get to in a minute — liberalized rules under the JOBS Act have been inexcusably delayed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
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