Charles Huang

Web and Media Associate

Competitive Enterprise Institute

chuang@cei.org

http://www.cei.org

http://www.openmarket.org

202-331-1010

Yet, an article in the Washington Times today quotes Roger Middleton, a piracy specialist at the London-based Chatham House: “the international community was still ’solidly against’ armed guards aboard vessels at sea” and goes on to note that “American ships have taken a different line from the rest of the international community.”  Remember when Ross Perot sent his own team to Iran to rescue his employees.  Americans aren’t immune to self-defense and rarely are as concerned as the “international community” about the root causes that have driven these poor individuals to resort to piracy.

Perhaps, America hasn’t gone quite as crazy as we think.

Billions from the stimulus are being spent on creating tens of thousands of imaginary jobs in 440 phantom Congressional districts, according to the government’s own web site:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. . . . The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

From ABC News:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There’s no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government’s recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don’t exist.

The Washington Examiner says that “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

That’s the good part.  The bad part is that both he and Wallach want to combine the two issues - global warming and trade - and deal with them together. That was a recommendation that the Peterson Institute for International Economics made in a study earlier this year. What that would mean still seems a bit vague.  According to the op-ed, this synthesis would involve –

. . . a new code of “best practices” on greenhouse gas emission controls, including establishment of “policy space” for countries to limit emissions without sacrificing the competitive position of their industries. The institute also recommended that countries adopt a time-limited “peace clause” in which pursuit of new trade barriers would be suspended while the negotiations proceeded, and that a global climate accord be linked to a new global trade accord.

The synthesis would seem to involve  countries agreeing to a “code” that would address restrictions on CO2 emissions  and be generally consistent with WTO rules even if some technical rules would be violated.  Countries signing up for the code would agree not to bring those technical issues to the WTO for dispute resolution (the “peace clause”).

Those “technical” issues, in practice, however, are likely to become substantive issues, as countries enact  a broad array of restrictive  measures to protect their own industries.  But, never fear, the Peterson Institute also recommends in its book that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or some international arbiter decide when a code member isn’t in compliance with its international commitments.  Then, if that’s the case, other code members could take trade reprisals against that non-complying member.

Does this sound like a simple plan that would run smoothly?  Not in my book.

The article concludes with a bit of hyperbole — that the “only way to solve our problems is to treat them together.”  Otherwise, we’ll have “paralysis.”

Given the fact that global warming policy prescriptions have been extremely controversial even before the Kyoto Protocol 12 years ago, and the fact that the WTO’s Doha Round for 8 years has been mired down in disagreements among rich and poor countries, does it seem likely that putting these two divisive issues together will produce harmony?

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Charles Huang

Web and Media Associate

Competitive Enterprise Institute

chuang@cei.org

http://www.cei.org

http://www.openmarket.org

202-331-1010

The law, passed last year, is part of an effort to keep obesity rates low and avoid related health problems.

One problem with using wasitlines as the primary metric is that results can vary among measurers. According to one article, “Satoru Yamada, a doctor at Kitasato Institute Hospital in Tokyo, published a study two years ago in which several doctors measured the waist of the same person. Their results varied by as much as 7.8 centimeters.”

That’s almost ten percent of the average waistline. It is sad that Japanese regulators have a strong enough nanny-state streak to legislate allowable physical dimensions. But the lack of precision in enforcing their edict must be maddening for the people involved.

“We must push our trading partners to do their part to curb harmful emissions and we must devise a border measure, consistent with our international obligations, to prevent the carbon leakage that would occur if US manufacturing shifts to countries without effective climate change programs.”

Currently the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, has rushed through its own bill without minority input to try to catch up with the House, which passed its cap-and-trade bill - H.R. 2454 — on June 26, 2009. The House bill contains a border tax adjustment measure, while the Senate bill does not.  At least, yet.  But Baucus’ comments are a strong signal that the Senate bill will also include tariffs or border “adjustments,” i.e., taxes.

This unfortunate idea is gaining greater traction among global warming advocates as a way to maintain U.S. competitiveness for industries, such as steel and cement, that would be facing higher costs if an energy suppression bill to address global warming is passed.  Proponents of “border measures” also see this as a way to curtail so-called leakage of carbon-intensive industries and related jobs to other countries without similar constraints. Of course, the common justification for those who want to hobble their competition is the refrain: “Level the playing field.”  In Washington politics, that usually means bringing your competitors down to your level.  Check out this article for some possible consequences.

These endorsements could portend a carbon tariff push in Copenhagen when world climate pukkas gather on December 7, 2009. Luckily for people in the U.S., it’s not likely that a newly minted global warming bill will be in their pockets.

Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, which refused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus package, and only 7.6 percent in Germany, which adopted a stimulus package that was smaller relative to its economy than ours was.  (Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated President Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.)

A “broader measure of U.S. unemployment,” including discouraged workers, puts U.S. unemployment at 17.5 percent, reports the New York Times.

As the Post notes, “For many on the left, the lament for years has been: Why can’t America be more like Europe? Why can’t rustic Americans be more like sophisticated Europeans? The sentiment has resurfaced in recent months as the health-care debate has raged on — why can’t the American health-care system be more like Europe’s?”

Well, America is now more like Europe when it comes to unemployment.  But not when it comes to social benefits and protections.  The American Left knows how to import Europe’s failures, but not its successes.

The massive health-care bill passed by the House on Saturday is a classic example.  It would expand health care coverage somewhat, but not to European levels, and it would vastly increase the costs of our health care system, rather than reducing it to European levels.   It would also increase taxes to “European levels of taxation.”  The health care bill contains politically-correct provisions that Europeans would never put up with, like pork for trial lawyers and racial preferences.  And restrictions on national competition in health insurance, which do not exist in Europe.

In France, doctors don’t need to be paid as much, because competing professions, like lawyers, are paid less.  French law is much more conservative than American law when it comes to lawsuits, including lawsuits against doctors.  There are NO punitive damages, and France discourages lawsuits by making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the other side’s legal bills.  (Other European countries have specialized health courts, rather than American-style jury trials, to cut lawyers’ bills, speedily compensate the injured, and prevent American-style baseless lawsuits against doctors.)  There are no racial preferences — even my Marxist father-in-law, a French trade unionist who likes Michael Moore’s book Stupid White Men, thinks that racial preferences are evil.  French people do not let political correctness shackle their minds the way American leftists do.

Europe is not as far to the left of America as people think, and America’s business climate is already not much more favorable than Europe’s.  For every three ways in which Europe is more socialistic than America, there are two ways in which it is less socialistic than America.  The Obama administration is getting rid of our advantages, but not our disadvantages.

American tort law and family law are much more burdensome, anti-business, and bent on redistribution of wealth, than Europe’s.

Confronted with the specter of new burdens under the health-care bills and global-warming bills backed by the Obama administration, many businesses with the money to do so are afraid to hire people and create jobs lest they be stuck with a large tab for things like health care benefits for newly-hired, less-skilled employees.

The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly admitted that Obama’s stimulus package will shrink the economy “in the long run.”  It contained welfare and repealed welfare reform.  Unemployment is higher now than if Congress had voted it down.

Many historians cite World War I as the twentieth century’s opening act. Sixteen million souls died in that war over nothing. Two of the nations it toppled became the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Communist and fascist governments would combine to kill more than one hundred million people over the next seven decades. Those needless deaths are the twentieth century’s legacy, every bit as much as the transistor or rock ‘n roll.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was that short, bloody century’s coda.

November 9, 1989 was also the start of something better. It was a nation’s way of saying that it was ready to move on to better times. To a new world defined not by oppression, ideology, and servitude, but by freedom. Sweet, precious, fragile freedom. Seeing the footage on the news was like witnessing something being born. The hope and potential that surround every birth were glimmering in people’s eyes. It was beautiful.

What Berlin’s people did on that day also inspired half a continent to send the same message to their leaders. What a noble achievement. How worthy of commemoration, now that twenty years have passed.

What a shame, then, that this milestone has been treated more like a millstone by the media. Reporters more concerned with today’s news cycle are giving at best perfunctory attention to a day that showed us all that is good about humanity.

To partially right that wrong, CEI has produced a short video commemorating what the Berlin Wall’s fall symbolizes. I hope you will watch it and enjoy it. Of course, it is hard to convey in a few short minutes what the people living in that Wall’s shadow went through for 29 long years.

So put yourself in their shoes. Think what they thought. Look right in the eyes of those separated families as they try to catch glimpses of each other over that wall. And the people who risked their lives escaping. And the soldier carrying back the body of someone who didn’t make it. What was going through his mind as he carried out his grisly task? That might give you an idea of what the Berlin Wall meant.

We all need to remember the Berlin Wall. We need to say to each other, “Never again.” And we have to mean it.

One school of thought attributes the tragedy to politically-correct double standards imposed on the military that kept the alarm bells from going off.

Other commentators point to a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Doubtless other factors could have contributed to the tragedy as well.

The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits left behind by the Bush administration from $4.4 trillion to $9.3 trillion. His record-setting budgets flagrantly violate his promise to propose a “net spending cut.”

Obama broke his campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year by signing into law a regressive excise tax increase to expand the SCHIP program, and by proposing a cap-and-trade energy tax that could charge up to $2 trillion, a massive cost that Obama himself has said will be passed “on to consumers,” as well as homeowners and motorists. (In 2008, Obama privately admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle that if he was elected, electricity bills would “skyrocket” under his administration, but it didn’t report that.)

He also broke his promise not to raise taxes by backing health-care bills that would impose a laundry list of new taxes on the middle class, including a tax on uninsured people.  Americans for Tax Reform earlier summarized the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

The costly cap-and-trade energy bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”  (Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)

Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.   It would enrich politically-connected corporations, and result in massive destruction of the world’s forests.   By expanding ethanol subsidies and mandates, it would cause enormous “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have already resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and by diverting cropland to fuel production away from food production, they have already caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

Over and over again, Obama has broken his campaign promise to give the public five days of notice before signing bills into law, including his very first law, the trial-lawyer backed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Obama also repeatedly made false claims about the Supreme Court decision that the Ledbetter law overruled, misstating the facts of that case and how long it gives employees to sue over pay discrimination (the Court did NOT say that employees have to sue even before discovering discrimination).

Obama broke seven campaign promises dealing with transparency and clean government in signing the $800 billion stimulus package, much of whose contents were secret until shortly before Congress voted on it, and whose 1400 pages went unread by most Congressmen who voted on it.  (It repealed welfare reform and contained loads of welfare, pork, and waste, while wiping out jobs in the export sector.)

Obama’s broken promises are part of a larger pattern of dishonesty. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. Obama’s budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a staggering $2.3 trillion more than Obama claimed.

Case in point: Home Products International (HPI), an American company, makes ironing tables. So does Hardware, a Chinese company. I personally have no idea which firm makes the better ironing table. That’s for consumers to decide.

Or at least it should be for consumers to decide. But it doesn’t always work that way in practice. HPI seems to have already made that decision for us.

At HPI’s request, the International Trade Administration will continue to add anti-dumping duties to the price of the Chinese-made ironing tables. That way HPI doesn’t have to worry as much about competing. Sorry, consumers.

Is this fair? Of course not. But all too often, it is how regulation works.

According to Bjørn Lomborg, “For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives. ”

Let’s pursue those smarter policies, then.

The Washington Post admits that the ex-president, Manuel Zelaya, was trying to make himself into a dictator, like his mentor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.  But the Post demands that he be returned to power anyway because he was “illegally deported” by the military after being removed from office.

But the ex-president is busy spinning the agreement as an unqualified recognition of his right to rule, which it isn’t.  And Obama Administration officials, like the State Department’s Thomas Shannon, are busy threatening Honduran legislators with sanctions and cancellation of their visas if they vote against reinstating Zelaya, in a manner seemingly at odds with the agreement itself.

Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya 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.

By levying sanctions on Honduras, and refusing to recognize its current government, the Obama administration has destabilized the country, one of the poorest in Latin America, resulting in mass layoffs leading to 65% unemployment among workers at small and medium-size enterprises in Honduras.  Vulnerable social groups in Honduras, like orphans, have suffered especially acutely, and malnutrition has risen.

Even before the current crisis, the World Food Program noted that “One out of  four Honduran children under 5 years old falls  to chronic malnutrition. In some rural communities to the west of the country, chronic malnutrition can reach 48.5 percent.”  Since the crisis, things have gotten much worse: “A woman caring for six grandchildren can no longer afford milk. A bricklayer who used to work six days a week now is lucky to get two. A shop manager has seen his earnings evaporate.”

The Obama administration insisted that Zelaya’s removal was illegal, although many legal commentators said that Honduras’s removal of ex-president Manuel Zelaya was legal — and thus, not a coup. 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.  Former Secretary of State James Baker, a lawyer, says that Honduras’s removal of Zelaya from office was legal, although its exiling of him was not.

Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya 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.

By levying sanctions on Honduras, and refusing to recognize its current government, the Obama Administration has destabilized the country, one of the poorest in Latin America, resulting in mass layoffs leading to 65% unemployment among workers at small and medium-size enterprises in Honduras.  Vulnerable social groups in Honduras, like orphans, have suffered especially acutely, and malnutrition has risen.  Even before the current crisis, the World Food Program noted that “One out of  four Honduran children under 5 years old falls  to chronic malnutrition. In some rural communities to the west of the country, chronic malnutrition can reach 48.5 percent.”  After it, things have only gotten worse: “A woman caring for six grandchildren can no longer afford milk. A bricklayer who used to work six days a week now is lucky to get two. A shop manager has seen his earnings evaporate.”

The Obama Administration insisted that Zelaya’s removal was illegal, although many legal commentators said that Honduras’s removal of ex-president Zelaya was legal — and thus, not a coup. 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.  Former Secretary of State James Baker, a lawyer, says that Honduras’s removal of Zelaya from office was legal, although its exiling of him was not.

While attacking Honduras’ democratically-elected Congress and Supreme Court for their role in removing and replacing the country’s ex-president and would-be dictator, the Obama Administration has paid little attention to human-rights abuses in countries ruled by dictatorships.  Those countries include Guinea, where troops recently committed mass rapes against women in broad daylight; Niger, where the president recently turned himself into a dictator; Iran, where vast numbers of pro-democracy demonstrators have been tortured or killed; and Nicaragua, right next door to Honduras, where the unpopular president, who routinely engages in vote fraud, is busy trampling on constitutional term limits in order to turn himself into a president-for-life.

“A month ago, the Law Library of Congress reviewed the removal of Manuel Zelaya from his post as President of Honduras, an act that the Obama administration called a ‘coup’ and demanded reversed for its illegality.  To the embarrassment of the White House and State Department, the Congressional body determined that Honduras acted lawfully in removing Zelaya for his crimes against their constitution, although they determined that his exile broke Honduran law.  Now John Kerry wants the Law Library to retract its findings, apparently trying to rewrite history to hide the facts of the case.”

Earlier, the Obama administration overruled career justice department lawyers in voting rights and voter intimidation cases, to give a green light to unconstitutional legislation, and protect an Obama poll-watcher and Democratic Party official from being held accountable for wrongdoing.  Obama also fired an inspector general for uncovering wrongdoing by a prominent Obama supporter.

Contrary to what Senator Kerry claims, there are many legal commentators who say that Honduras’s removal of ex-president Manuel Zelaya was legal — and thus, not a coup.

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.

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a lawyer, says that Honduras’s removal of Zelaya from office was legal, although its exiling of him was not.

Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya 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.

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.”

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.

Law professors like James Lindgren, Jonathan Adler, Glenn Reynolds, and William Jacobson have also criticized the administration’s position on Honduras.

By levying sanctions on Honduras, and refusing to recognize its current government, the Obama administration has destabilized the country, one of the poorest in Latin America, resulting in mass layoffs leading to 65% unemployment among workers at small and medium-size enterprises in Honduras.  Vulnerable social groups in Honduras, like orphans, have suffered especially acutely, and malnutrition has risen.

While attacking Honduras’ democratically-elected Congress and Supreme Court for their role in removing and replacing the country’s ex-president and would-be dictator, the Obama administration has paid little attention to human-rights abuses in countries ruled by dictatorships.  Those countries include Guinea, where troops recently committed mass rapes against women in broad daylight; Niger, where the president recently turned himself into a dictator; Iran, where vast numbers of pro-democracy demonstrators have been tortured or killed; and Nicaragua, right next door to Honduras, where the unpopular president, who routinely engages in vote fraud, is busy trampling on constitutional term limits in order to turn himself into a president-for-life.

The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime affect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal court.  It also adds sexual orientation, gender, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law that was originally designed to protect racial minorities.

The hate-crimes bill was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for allowing the reprosecution in federal court of people found innocent in state court.  The Commission called the new law a “menace to civil liberties” because it is an end-run around constitutional guarantees against double jeopardy.

As explained earlier, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy.  Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer thus object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds.   Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of prosecuting all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial.  When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which some journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.

But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.”  Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration has long supported the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

As law professors like Jonathan Turley and Eugene Volokh have noted, the Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech at the United Nations, joining in calls to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation in violation of international human-rights treaties. In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, discussing the racial implications of the death penalty, and calling homosexuality immoral.  In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

The New York Times notes that “the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown.” With that much imprecision built in, if the labels change consumer behavior as much as supporters hope, it’s entirely possible that eco-concsious diets could result in more carbon emissions, not less. A classic case of leaping before you look.

This new religion is a piece of work. It comes complete with a deity (Gaia), clergy (activists), indulgences (carbon credits), and now, dietary restrictions.

The measure was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on double-jeopardy grounds.  As I previously explained at length, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy.  Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer also object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds.   Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of trying all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial.  When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill contains speech-related provisions designed to allow prosecution of people who are not violent and do not intend to cause hate crimes, but whose speech inadvertently incites a hate crime by some violent, bigoted nut.  For now, courts are likely to block such prosecutions on First Amendment grounds, under the Supreme Court’s Brandenburg decision banning prosecutions of people whose speech unintentionally incites violence or other illegal acts (and the federal appeals court ruling in White v. Lee faithfully applying that principle to speech that incites violations of federal civil-rights and anti-discrimination statutes).  But if the ideological composition of the Supreme Court changes substantially, it is conceivable (although far from certain) that that could change.  Although the provisions will probably prove unsuccessful in censoring speech, it speaks volumes about the mindset of the hate-crimes bill’s backers that they would even try.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision, as I explained earlier.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.

But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.”  Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration supports the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

The Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech and blasphemy at the United Nations, joining in calls by left-wing lawyers and conservative Islamic countries to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation.  Religious minorities have often been persecuted for “blasphemy” in Islamic countries for disagreeing with Islam, criticizing the prophet Mohammed, or interpreting Islam’s holy book, the Koran, differently than the majority of Muslims do.  In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, defending the death penalty against racism charges, and calling homosexuality immoral.  In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

Torethy Frank is one of them. She has other priorities, such as escaping crushing poverty: “Torethy and her family of six live in a small house made of concrete and brick with no running water. As a toilet, they use a hole dug in the ground. They have no shower and there is no fixed electricity supply.”

You can see why the two degrees of projected warming over the next century are not at the top of her “problems to solve” list. I would argue that ending global poverty should be a little higher on ours. Certainly higher than global warming.