Im-Politic: Trump-ism Without Trump for America as a Whole?

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"Defund the Police", allies, CCP Virus, China, climate change, coronavirus, court packing, COVID 19, Democrats, election 2020, enforcement, Executive Orders, filibuster, Green New Deal, Huawei, human rights, Im-Politic, Immigration, Joe Biden, judiciary, lockdowns, mask mandate, masks, metals, multilateralism, Muslim ban, Phase One, progressives, Republicans, sanctions, Senate, shutdowns, stimulus, Supreme Court, tariffs, taxes, Trade, trade wars, Trump, unions, Wuhan virus

Since election day, I’ve spent some time and space here and on the air speculating about the future of what I called Trump-ism without Donald Trump in conservative and Republican Party political ranks. Just this weekend, my attention turned to another subject and possibility: Trump-ism without Mr. Trump more broadly speaking, as a shaper – and indeed a decisive shaper – of national public policy during a Joe Biden presidency. Maybe surprisingly, the chances look pretty good.

That is, it’s entirely possible that a Biden administration won’t be able to undo many of President Trump’s signature domestic and foreign policies, at least for years, and it even looks likely if the Senate remains Republican. Think about it issue-by-issue.

With the Senate in Republican hands, there’s simply no prospect at least during the first two Biden years for Democratic progressives’ proposals to pack the Supreme Court, to eliminate the Senate filibuster, or to recast the economy along the lines of the Green New Deal, or grant statehood Democratic strongholds Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A big tax increase on corporations and on the Biden definition of the super-rich looks off the table as well.

If the Senate does flip, the filibuster might be history. But big Democratic losses in the House, and the claims by many veterans of and newcomers to their caucus that those other progressive ambitions, along with Defunding the Police, were to blame, could also gut or greatly water down much of the rest of the far Left’s agenda, too.

CCP Virus policy could be substantially unchanged, too. For all the Biden talk of a national mask mandate, ordering one is almost surely beyond a President’s constitutional powers. Moreover, his pandemic advisors are making clear that, at least for the time being, a sweeping national economic lockdown isn’t what they have in mind. I suspect that some virus economic relief measures willl be signed into law sometime this spring or even earlier, but they won’t carry the total $2 trillion price tag on which Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have insisted for months. In fact, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of relief being provided a la carte, as Congressional Republicans have suggested – e.g., including popular provisions like some form of unemployment payment bonus extension and stimulus checks, and excluding less popular measures like stimulus aid for illegal aliens.

My strong sense is that Biden is itching to declare an end to President Trump’s trade wars, and as noted previously, here he could well find common cause with the many Senate Republicans from the party’s establishment wing who have never been comfortable bucking the wishes of an Offshoring Lobby whose campaign contributions it’s long raked in.

Yet the former Vice President has promised his labor union supporters that until the trade problems caused by China’s massive steel overproduction were (somehow) solved, he wouldn’t lift the Trump metals tariffs on allies (which help prevent transshipment and block these third countries from exporting their own China steel trade problems to the United States) – even though they’re the levies that have drawn the most fire from foreign policy globalists and other trade and globalization zealots.

As for the China tariffs themselves, the latest from the Biden team is that they’ll be reviewed. So even though he’s slammed them as wildly counterproductive, they’re obviously not going anywhere soon. (See here for the specifics.) 

Later? Biden’s going to be hard-pressed to lift the levies unless one or both of the following developments take place: first, the allied support he’s touted as the key to combating Beijing’s trade and other economic abuses actually materializes in very convincing ways; second, the Biden administration receives major Chinese concessions in return. Since even if such concessions (e.g., China’s agreement to eliminate or scale back various mercantile practices) were enforceable (they won’t be unless Biden follows the Trump Phase One deal’s approach), they’ll surely require lengthy negotiations. Ditto for Trump administration sanctions on China tech entities like the telecommunications giant Huawei. So expect the Trump-ian China status quo to long outlast Mr. Trump.

Two scenarios that could see at least some of the tariffs or tech sanctions lifted? First, the Chinese make some promises to improve their climate change policies that will be completely phony, but will appeal greatly to the Green New Deal-pushing progressives who will wield much more power if the Senate changes hands, and who have demonstrated virtually no interest in China economic issues. Second, Beijing pledges to ease up on its human rights crackdowns on Hong Kong and the Muslims of Xinjiang province. These promises would be easier to monitor and enforce, but the Chinese regime views such issues as utterly non-negotiable because they’re matters of sovereignty. So China’s repressive practices won’t even be on the official agenda of any talks. Unofficial understandings might be reached under which Beijing would take modest positive steps or suspend further contemplated repression. But I wouldn’t count on such an outcome.

Two areas where Biden supposedly could make big decisions unilaterally whatever happens in the Senate, are immigration and climate change. Executive orders would be the tools, and apparently that’s indeed the game plan. But as Mr. Trump discovered, what Executive Orders and even more routine adminstrative actions can do, a single federal judge responding to a special interest group’s request can delay for months. And these judicial decisions can interfere with presidential authority even on subjects that for decades has been recognized as wide-ranging – notably making immigration enforcement decisions when border crossings impact national security, as with the so-called Trump “Muslim ban.”

I know much less about climate change, but a recently retired attorney friend with long experience litigating on these issues told me that even before Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court, the Justices collectively looked askance on efforts to create new policy initiatives without legislating. Another “originalist” on the Court should leave even less scope for ignoring Congress.

The bottom line is especially curious given the almost universal expectations that this presidential election would be the most important in recent U.S. history: A deeply divided electorate could well have produced a mandate for more of the same – at least until the 2022 midterms.

Im-Politic: The Needless New Immigration Policy Mess

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American Muslims, Center for Immigration Studies, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, Egypt, Executive Orders, green card holders, Im-Politic, Immigration, Muslims, Norman Matloff, Obama, Pakistan, refugees, Saudi Arabia, September 11, Syria, terrorism, Trump

The last 48 hours’ flow of immigration policy-related news has been unprecedented – or certainly nearly so. To me, the big takeaway is clear: In the course of developing and announcing a fundamentally sound policy framework for handling immigration- and refugee-related national security issues, the Trump administration has allowed vague and/or confusing provisions to create an unnecessary political firestorm.

The needless confusion stemmed mainly from the apparent treatment of green card holders in the Executive Order on “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.”  These individuals have been granted permanent resident legal status by the U.S. government, and have extensively vetted. Perhaps that’s why the Order makes no specific mention of them.    

Yet early yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seemed to confirm that the Orders’s 90-day ban on entry into the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries deemed (correctly) to be hotbeds of terrorism and/or Islamic extremism includes green card holders.  

Both moves seemed so mystifying that my first reaction was skepticism. Particularly fishy to me was the source of the DHS statement. It came from a department spokesperson identified by name. But she was described as “acting,”and given that we’re still in the new administration’s earliest days, it was legitimate to wonder where she got her information and whether it’s accurate. And indeed, shortly afterwards, “senior administration officials” (who oddly remained nameless) were saying that the green card measures would be administered on a case-by-case basis. Clearly, this sequence of events doesn’t speak well at all for the togetherness of the new administration’s act.

But there’s no reasonable doubt that much of the tumult that’s surrounded the rest of the Trump immigration moves is nothing more than another outburst of stealth chattering class support for Open Borders policies. This charge is justified for at least two reasons:

First, the notion that Trump’s refugee measures represent a wholesale trashing of America’s humanitarian heritage is juvenile at best and reckless and ignorant (or both) at worst. The Trump-haters who have claiming that the Statue of Liberty is weeping and the like seem to be ignoring how even Barack Obama severely limited refugee admissions from war-torn Syria – to 10,000 in 2016. The previous year, only 1,800 were resettled. And clearly reflecting security concerns, the screening process typically took between 18 and 24 months.

Why didn’t President Obama simply open America’s doors much wider and faster to the immiserated Syrian hordes? Because even he recognized that the nation’s most fundamental self-interest – the safety of its existing citizens and legal residents – can’t be brushed aside even in the face of the most terrible tragedies.

President Trump and many others doubted, however, that even this screening was adequate. And they could point to copious compelling evidence. Principally, mass Middle East refugee admissions have in Europe have included terrorists involved in deadly attacks. In the United States, children of recent Middle East refugees or other immigrants have been responsible for the shootings and bombings in Orlando, Florida; San Bernardino, California, Boston, and Fort Hood. And Muslim residents have been involved (including arrested) in terrorism attempts in numbers vastly higher than their share of the overall American population.

Combine this with the virtual impossibility of getting accurate, reliable records from virtually destroyed countries or thoroughly failed states, and the real question before Americans is not why President Trump has banned entry of any kind from these lands, but why broad restrictions have taken so long to impose.

Second, it’s been frequently argued (including by President Obama) that even if refugees can be tied to terrorist attacks, the numbers of Americans killed have been infinistesimal. In particular, they’re fond of noting that the odds are lower than getting killed in bathroom accidents or everyday activities like driving.

What they keep missing, of course, is the completely different role of government negligence – and therefore preventability or avoidability – involved. Fatal accidents at home, for example, can often be avoided by moving with greater care, or more properly maintaining fixtures or appliances, or keeping clutter off the floor, or in numerous other ways. It’s also entirely possible to increase your chances of surviving your daily auto commute to work – by driving more defensively, by caring for your vehicle, by staying off the road in bad weather, etc.

Will these precautions guarantee your protection 100 percent? Of course not. In particular, they can’t completely remove the related elements of randomness and chance from life – tripping over a hard-to-see uneven stretch of pavement, sharing a road with a drunk driver, or flying in an airplane disabled by a flock of birds, experiencing a natural disaster, etc. Speaking of that last item, I would include in this category a decision like moving to or staying an earthquake-prone location, especially if relocating is a relatively easy option – though the element of randomness there is more debatable.

But reasonable people seem to accept these kinds of inevitable bad breaks. They understand the irrationality of shutting themselves in at home, for example, to stay safe. As for injuries or fatalities resulting from violence perpetrated by individuals admitted to the United States by a policy decision that ignores or downplays well known risks – they’re dramatically and unacceptably different. For there is nothing random about them; indeed, every last one of them was completely preventable. They’re the products of elected leaders who believe that the loss of American lives – in situations well short of war – are acceptable risks to run in exchange for benefits that, to put it kindly, are intangible (e.g., winning good will abroad), speculative (e.g., impeding recruitment by terrorist groups), or subjective (conforming with American values), or some combination of the two.

It’s certainly arguable that the previous administration was well within its rights in making those judgments and decisions. President Obama, after all, was legitimately elected – twice. But it’s just as arguable that Donald Trump’s White House victory owed in part to the public’s rejection of these calculations.

Having said this, at least two more aspects of the new Trump refugee policies are disturbing. First, why were countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan excluded – especially given the role of Saudis and Egyptians in the September 11 attacks cited explicitly by the Executive Order, and the role of Pakistan’s state security forces in supporting a wide range of terrorist activities, including strikes on U.S. Forces and facilities in Afghanistan?

Second, the Executive Order, in my view, admirably seeks to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.” But for precisely the same vetting-related reasons that it’s excruciatingly difficult to make sure that Syrians (and other Middle Easterners) aren’t terrorists or other dangerous types, it’s going to be equally difficult to figure out who’s a member of a persecuted religious minority and who isn’t.

I agree with President Trump that the previous U.S. refugee policy created too many unnecessary security risks, and also that temporary freezes and bans and the like in general are needed to enable his administration to develop a detailed alternative – including better vetting procedures . I also admire the vigor with which Mr. Trump has plunged into the presidency. But in the case of this Executive Order, it looks like too much haste might have needlessly created serious problems today, and the potential for more down the road.