There is an important column on immigration today in The Washington Times Commentary section by Mark Metcalf, a former Justice Department colleague and good friend of mine.  I previously reported for The Foundry on his testimony in June about our broken immigration court system before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. Metcalf is a former immigration judge who writes about the disdain the Obama administration has shown toward the rule of law with its wholesale dismissal of thousands of cases against illegal aliens. It is also ignoring the more than 600,000 outstanding deportation orders already issued by immigration courts (unless a particular alien has a criminal record).

This will, Metcalf points out, “assure that more illegal immigration will follow — with illegal [alien]s confident that the administration, which refused to secure this nation’s borders, will not remove those who enter and remain illegally.”

This policy of ignoring the law, ignoring court orders, and implementing the across-the-board dismissal of immigration cases against illegal aliens can occur because of a fact that few members of the public realize: our immigration courts are administrative courts within the Justice Department, and the judges are DOJ employees. Because they are not Article III federal courts with independent authority, they don’t have “the historic check and balance of authoritative courts — courts that can refuse the bidding of a reckless executive agency.”

What is so infuriating about the Obama administration’s case dismissal policy is that it means that illegal aliens are being treated better than ordinary citizens: “Aliens who enter this nation illegally and then evade court or disobey orders to leave are treated better than the general public … In any other court, court evasion results in contempt charges, arrest and incarceration.”  Not so in the Obama-Holder world of justice.

Like all good socialists Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez believes private property is theft, so he wants to steal it back in the people’s name.  Chavez remains on an expropriation roll, having gobbled up huge sections of the Venezuelan economy, reportedly $22 billion in transactions in the past four years. For the powerful and prominent he has offered compensation, drawing on Venezuela’s oil wealth, but for many promises and litigation lead only to misery and despair.

Franklin Brito was a 49-year agronomist and modest property owner with a grievance against the Venezuelan government who wanted is day in court but became a victim of Kafkaesque frustration and denial of justice.

In December 2009, the hunger-striking Brito was taken into custody and placed in the care of the State.  He died August 30^th in a Caracas military hospital.  The family intends to make the details of his “incarceration” and medical mistreatment known via the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, which has already issued a comprehensive report on the aggressive destruction of individual rights occurring in Venezuela.

The Chavez regime denies Brito had a valid land claim.  It argues he was mentally unstable and had become a tool of the Venezuelan opposition.  The official communiqué states: “we are obliged to reject the pharisaism of the media machine, the opposition with only electoral ends, and the authorities of the Church, which encouraged Brito’s extreme decisions in order to cause a death serving their dirty flags.”  Case closed!

The machinery of “the Bolivarian Revolution” and “Socialism of the 21^st Century” continues to grind on, running roughshod over property rights and rule of law, ignoring the legitimate complaints of citizens, and quick to label anyone who opposes the increasingly brazen concentration of power in the hands of an authoritarian regime as either crazy, a class enemy, or a tool of U.S. imperialism.

Brito paid a high price for the injustices committed by a State that is increasingly without rule of law.  In Venezuela he has become an instant symbol of the growing opposition to Chavista misrule.  Brito’s sad fate and the forced march to Cuban-style communism will influence voters’ decisions when Venezuelans go to the polls on September 26 to select a new national legislative body and seek to regain a real voice in shaping Venezuela’s future.

How can the government grow the nation’s welfare roles and undermine efforts to support marriage, in a single effort? It must simply follow the plan outlined in President Obama’s budget: pay states to grow their welfare roles and eliminate programs that encourage healthy marriage in low-income communities. Despite the fact that low work hours and single motherhood are two of the greatest contributors to poverty in the United States, the newly released budget undoes welfare provisions that encourage work and discourage out-of-wedlock childbearing.

Prior to the reforms of 1996, the federal government’s welfare policy was to dish out more money to states as the states increased their welfare roles. Not surprisingly, this provided no incentive to transition welfare recipients into the workforce. Welfare reform did away with this negative incentive and created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, leading to dramatic caseload declines and a decrease in the child poverty rate.

Unfortunately, these successful reforms were undercut in a variety of policy moves and all but wiped out by last year’s stimulus bill that created the $5 billion TANF Emergency Fund. This fund pays states 80 cents on the dollar for every new case they receive beyond their caseload amount for 2007 or 2008, once again providing incentive for states to grow their welfare roles.

Now, the President is proposing $2.5 billion to expand and extend this supposedly temporary emergency fund. Although the President links the need for this emergency money to the current recession, the truth is that the 1996 welfare reform already created a $2 billion nest egg for tough economic times such as this. Moreover, the funding the President has proposed would not even be dispensed to states based on their unemployment rates, but would merely be doled out based on caseload numbers. Basically, whether or not jobs are available makes no difference as to how many people can receive federal assistance.

Unfortunately, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) has jumped on the bandwagon with the President, but has proposed even greater expansions to the welfare system. His legislation would allow states to collect as much federal money as they need to support their caseload (provided that the state does not receive more than 50 percent of its annual TANF dollars). Both Obama and McDermott have a clear message for states: increase the dole and the government will increase your pay.

Not only does the President plan to expand welfare, but he has also eliminated the program that aims to eliminate single motherhood, one of the greatest contributors to poverty in the United States. In 2005, Bush implemented the healthy marriage program to help those from low-income communities learn skills for building strong marriages. To replace this program, President Obama has introduced his “Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund.” While this sounds similar in name, it is in fact just another jobs program, and focuses very little on fatherhood, marriage, or families.

The welfare reforms of 1996 encouraged individual liberty, promoting work and freedom from government dependence. Now, the current administration is moving backwards and pulling its most vulnerable citizens with it. True welfare should help everyone: the taxpayer, who is allowed to keep more of his or her paycheck, and the welfare recipient, who is lifted to personal independence.

The latest jobs report showed the unemployment rate ticking up to 9.6 percent, putting the final nail in the coffin of recovery summer. The Obama Administration announced “Recovery Summer” last June to highlight the expected gains in jobs and economic strength resulting from Obama’s stimulus. Not. The economy is literally sliding into the fall.

President Obama, who has already tried a massive and massively ineffectual stimulus bill followed by a series of policy gimmicks (cash for clunkers, tax credits for first-time homebuyers) has announced that, once again, he is focusing intently on the economy. The following from The Washington Post is telling:

His advisers described his attentiveness—noting, for example, that he discussed the economy with New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) for 15 minutes before golfing—but got little traction.

It is comforting to know the President has time to discuss the economy with the mayor of New York City—and to learn that he could spend 15 minutes doing so. Fifteen whole minutes he could slip into his busy schedule between golf rounds.

There is in fact a good explanation for the President’s inability to spend more time on creating the millions of jobs he promised. As is now evident, he just does not know what else to try. The policies that would work—tax relief, spending cuts, free trade, reducing regulations—are anathema to him and his ideology. So, he can either change course or play golf.

Belying the image of the “liberated” working mother, a recent National Review Online commentary cites research by Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, showing that, for the vast majority married moms, the workplace is not the top choice of where they want to spend their days.

In reviewing data from the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, Wilcox found that only 18 percent of married women with children said they would prefer to work full-time, in contrast to 46 percent who would prefer to work part-time and 36 percent who said that they would prefer to stay at home. In addition, among married moms who were working full-time, nearly 75 percent said they would rather work fewer hours or not at all.

A bevy of sociological studies show that the mother’s intuition regarding what is best for her children is on the mark. Research throughout the last two decades reveals that children who attend day care centers are more likely to exhibit problem behavior and poor social skills than those being cared for by their parents. Furthermore, the children’s problem behavior is more pronounced the younger they are when they enter day care and the more hours they spend in center care each week.

The association between hours in day care and behavioral problems is prevalent regardless of socioeconomic status. And, sadly, the effects of time spent in day care centers can be long-term, with problem behavior extending even to middle-school years.

Research also indicates that the link between day care center attendance and problem behavior might be traced to an insecure mother–child attachment associated with extended hours in non-maternal care.

In addition to these socio-emotional difficulties are the health risks and propensity to infections and illness that numerous studies have found to be associated with day care center attendance.

In sum, years of research underscore the importance of mothers’ instinctive desire to be with their children: Mother’s intuition trumps the feminist icon. Taxpayers and policymakers should work to promote policies that would enable moms to make the choice to stay at home and care for their children.

The White House hailed last year’s “cash for clunkers” program as a successful government initiative that stimulated the economy, particularly the ailing auto industry. It provided $3,500–$4,500 rebates to consumers who purchase more fuel efficient cars and trade in their old vehicles, which dealerships then destroyed.

President Obama’s economic team said cash for clunkers lured consumers who would have bought a new car two to three years in the future into the immediate market. However, a new study from economists Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago and Atif Mian of University of California-Berkeley suggests otherwise. According to NPR:

The government’s “cash for clunkers” program boosted auto sales by 360,000 during the two months it was in place, according to a new study. But in the seven months that followed, sales were down by 360,000 compared to what they would have been without the program, the study found.

The implication: The program didn’t bring new buyers into the market. But it encouraged people who would have bought a car anyway to make their purchase a few months sooner.

Although it’s impossible to know what the economy would have done absent cash-for-clunkers, the authors of the study attempted to do so by analyzing “parts of the U.S. where, for one reason or another, there were almost no clunkers on the road when the program took effect. By comparing sales in those areas to sales in more clunker-rich parts of the country, they were able to estimate the program’s effects.”

New auto sales reports show that August 2010 sales are down 21 percent from August 2009, which included the cash-for-clunkers program. For those who couldn’t afford to take advantage of the taxpayer-funded subsidy for the purchase of a new vehicle, the news is also grim. The reduction in the supply of used cars—partly from destruction of traded-in vehicles and partly because new car sales are down—has driven up used car prices. The prices of some models have risen as much as 30 percent, and even the smaller models are up 10 percent. So by what measure can this program be called a success?

Since 1985, the hands-down winner for worst marketing campaign has been New Coke—the disastrous flop when Coca-Cola tried to change its flavor.

After 25 years, we have a new contender—President Obama’s “Summer of Recovery” slogan of 2010.

The big media splash began in June, touting that “Obama, Biden declare ‘Recovery Summer,’” including six weeks of nationwide barnstorming visits by POTUS and VPOTUS.  All summer, a hyper-active Recovery Blog on the White House website trumpeted what they wanted Americans to believe.  Even the titles seemed to be lifted from works of juvenile fiction:

• President Obama Breaks Ground on 10,000th Recovery Act Road Project; Let the Summer of Recovery begin!
• The Vice President & the Recovery Act Go to Yellowstone
• The Vice President and the Recovery Act on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon
• On the Road to Recovery – Manchester, New Hampshire
• President Obama on June Jobs Numbers: A Positive Six Months

But the figures said otherwise.   The administration had to eat its earlier words and down-grade the second quarter growth rate from the originally-announced 2.4% to an anemic 1.6% annual rate.

Official reports showed the U.S. economy lost 125,000 jobs in June, then131,000 more in July,  followed by 54,000 in August, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.6%.  An ABC News headline showed the disconnect between the White House and reality:  President Obama Reacts to August Jobs Numbers, Doesn’t Mention Net Job Loss of 54K

Other headlines told a different and more convincing story than Obama’s team could spin:   Enormous spending and deficits.  Unemployment high and long-lasting.  Job creation stagnant.  Record deficits.  Car sales slumping.  Home sales plummeting.

Credibility plummeted as well as White House happy talk didn’t match the stubbornly inconvenient facts.  Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, amazingly said the lousy August numbers “are reassuring that growth and recovery are continuing.”

Efforts to reach out to its usually-responsive youth audience were stymied by a National League of Cities’ report that began, “Summer jobs prospects for teenagers have been diminishing steadily over the past decade, but early data for June 2010 show that employment rates for the nation’s 16- to 19-year-olds have fallen to stunning new lows.”

It all prompted normally supportive liberal economist Paul Krugman to write, “This isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters.”

The President had promised allies in Congress that the summer barnstorming tour would trumpet success and turn around the rotten poll numbers for him and his party.  He and the Vice-President made stops that included Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, Kentucky and Illinois, coinciding with fundraisers that included California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida, New York, Washington and Ohio.

But the message on Obama’s teleprompter differed dramatically from what everyday Americans were experiencing.  The New York Times put a “Welcome to the Recovery” title on a Pollyanna op-ed by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  But it was more believable when Geithner admitted to ABC News, “U.S. unemployment may rise again before it falls.  And the economy isn’t recovering rapidly enough.”

The White House and its allies bally-hoo their claims, but the contrast with the personal experience of most Americans is stark.  That’s unlikely to change even with the “re-education” efforts proposed by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius about the vastly-unpopular Obamacare law.

Those re-education efforts may fall as flat as the classic question, “Who are you going to believe?  Me or your own lying eyes?”

All is not lost.  Elections are less than two months away.  The Heritage Foundation has submitted 128 pro-growth ideas in its “Solutions for America” proposal.  The public is attentive and active.

For the White House, Labor Day couldn’t mark the end of summer soon enough.

To America’s left, the classic exaggeration was George W. Bush celebrating success in Iraq while a banner proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.”  Now the right has its counterpart:  Barack Obama’s “Summer of Recovery.”

Ernest Istook served 14 years as a U.S. Congressman and is a distinguished fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

The August jobs report shows the Obama jobs deficit at 7.5 million workers. The Obama jobs deficit is the difference between the current level of employment and the level he promised his stimulus policies would achieve at the end of 2010. The President boasted that his policies would create 3.5 million jobs, pushing total employment by December 2010 to 137.8 million. As of this report, he is 7.5 million jobs short. By his own metric, the President’s policies have failed.

According to today’s jobs report, the economy lost 54,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent. In short, the economy is in trouble. His policies having failed as expected, Obama is now flailing about looking for yet another ineffectual and costly “stimulus” program, continuing the President’s penchant for gimmickry.

Policies such as a temporary payroll tax holiday (reported to be under consideration) are worse than doing nothing. First, they do next to nothing to increase hiring. Second, such gimmicks reinforce the confidence-sapping realization that the President either completely fails to comprehend the nature of the economy or he is willing to put ideology above prosperity.

Gimmicks rarely work. The “cash for clunkers” program accelerated car purchases for a while, pulling purchases from the future into the present. The future is now, however, and car sales remain weak.

Likewise, the housing tax credit temporarily pushed up housing purchases, but now the credit is gone and housing is worse off for the ride, because buyers and sellers are even less sure of correct price levels. This added uncertainty makes both buyers and sellers more hesitant to agree on a price, thus slowing housing sales even more than conditions otherwise warrant.

The Administration needs to abandon its dalliances with gimmickry and focus on economic fundamentals. One fundamental is this: The Administration needs to abandon its attachment to the Obama tax hikes—the expiration of the most economically important elements of the 2001 and 2003 tax provisions. Allowing any of these tax provisions to expire at the end of the year is irresponsible economic policy. It is also unnecessary as a matter of fiscal policy, as projected deficits are the result of excess spending, not a dearth of revenues. Cutting spending back to historical levels is all that is necessary to get budget deficits under control.

The damage the Obama tax hikes would do goes beyond the immediate effects of the tax hikes themselves. Such an indefensible economic policy under current conditions sends a strong signal to families and businesses alike: Either the President is completely lost at sea when it comes to economic policy or he is willing to put his big-government, high-tax ideology above the need for job creation. Either way, if the Obama tax hikes go through, the Obama jobs deficit is likely to remain for years to come.

In April, while campaigning in Pennsylvania, Vice President Joe Biden promised the American people: “I’m here to tell you, some time in the next couple of months, we’re going to be creating between 250,000 jobs a month and 500,000 jobs a month. … We caught a lot of bad breaks on the way down. We’re going to catch a few good breaks because of good planning on the way up.” And for a while it looked like Biden was a genius. In May, the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payroll employment rose by 290,000 the previous month and in June they reported that the U.S. economy added another 431,000 jobs. President Barack Obama’s “good planning” was working! But then the next report showed the U.S. economy lost 125,000 jobs in June and then the August report found another 131,000 jobs were lost in July. Today the Labor Department released the September jobs report, showing nonfarm payrolls decreased again by 54,000 and that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 9.6%.

By every objective measure, President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package has been a complete failure. When President Obama was selling his stimulus plan to the American people, he promised it would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. At the time, employment stood at about 134.3 million, according to the Labor Department’s most commonly used measure. That established an Obama jobs target for December 2010 at 137.8 million. According to the latest jobs report, total U.S. employment stood at 130.3 million in August, which means the cumulative Obama jobs deficit stands at 7.5 million.

Despite the mounting evidence of failure, the Obama administration is still completely unapologetic. Defending her tenure as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer told journalists at the National Press Club Wednesday: “The current recession has been fundamentally different from other postwar recessions. … Precisely because such severe financial shocks have been rare, there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact. To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did, and why they cut labor so much more than they normally would, given the decline in output.” But after first admitting that the experts don’t understand the current crisis, she then confidently asserts:

It is clear that the Recovery Act has played a large role in the turnaround in GDP and employment. In a report that Jared Bernstein and I issued during the transition, we estimated that by the end of 2010, a stimulus package like the Recovery Act would raise real GDP by about 3½ percent and employment by about 3½ million jobs, relative to what otherwise would have occurred…. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, CEA’s own estimates, and estimates from a range of respected private sector analysts suggest that the Act has already raised employment by approximately two to three million jobs relative to what it otherwise would have been.

Got that? Romer first admits that her magic Keynesian formulas were completely useless in predicting how bad the recession would be, and then she turns right around and uses those exact same formulas to justify the success of the stimulus. If that bootstrapping weren’t audacious enough, Romer then went on to claim that “the United States still faces a substantial shortfall of aggregate demand” and that “structural changes in the composition of our output or a mismatch between worker skills and jobs” having nothing to do with continued high unemployment. So instead of changing course, Romer wants us to double down with a second round of economic stimulus.

How much more stimulus does the Obama administration want to spend? Romer wouldn’t say, and the White House is desperate to avoid calling any new action “stimulus,” but The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has crunched the numbers and come up with a ballpark size of how big the original economic stimulus package would have to have been if we take the left’s Keynesian economics as gospel: “Full employment is perhaps 4.5-5%. If we assume that stimulus benefits increase linearly, that means we would have needed a stimulus of, on the low end, $2.5 trillion. On the high end, it would have been in the $4-5 trillion range.”

Even the Obama administration doesn’t want to add another $5 trillion to our $13.5 trillion national debt. That is why the Obama administration is pushing a $921 billion tax hike set to take effect on January 1, 2011. There is only one word for proposing $981 billion in taxes to pay for trillions in failed stimulus spending in the midst of 9.6% unemployment: audacity.

Quick Hits:

• Thanks to even more expensive coverage mandated by Obamacare, companies are increasingly passing on higher health care premium costs to workers.
• Thanks to a proposed oil drilling ban, BP says it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Thanks to a weak job market, far fewer 18 to 29 year olds now identify themselves as Democrats, compared with 2008.
• According to a new poll from Arizona, 64% of Arizona voters still support the state’s new immigration enforcement law.
• The Obama Justice Department is now suing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for not cooperating with AG Eric Holder’s civil rights probe.

A production platform caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico this morning 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay, Louisiana. Fortunately, according to early reports, the 13 workers on the platform survived the scare, but rescue crews took the workers to the hospital for precautionary measures.

What exploded was not a drilling rig (like in the instance of the BP spill) but a production platform. AP reports that the shallow-water platform was not producing oil at the time of the explosion, although the well does normally produce approximately 58,800 gallons of oil and 900,000 cubic feet of gas per day. Although an official for Mariner, the company that operates the rig, reported that no oil is leaking from the platform and they properly shut the well, a thin oil sheen was present. The latest speculation is that the sheen may be from spilled petroleum from the production platform.

Without a doubt this is a different case than BP’s Macondo well blowout that leaked over 200 million gallons of oil into the water—with BP’s posing a much bigger environmental and economic challenge. If anything, the silver lining from Mariner’s production platform fire is that their response in terms of closing the seven collection wells and evacuation of the 13 crew members seems to have been professionally and successfully carried out.

Figuring out what caused the fire should be a priority for Mariner and regulators, but this shouldn’t be used as justification for the drilling moratorium. We need to recognize that offshore oil drilling is still an important national and economic priority. Energy is the lifeblood of the American economy, and oil is a significant part of our country’s energy portfolio, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. Offshore drilling provides about one-third of the U.S.’s domestic oil. These much-needed sources off our coastal waters have the potential to provide energy to every aspect of the U.S. economy at a time when fuel shortages that lead to increased energy prices can mean death to struggling industries.

As rare as these occurrences are, the clear reality is that rig and platform fires that threaten human safety and can cause significant environmental damage cannot keep occurring. We need to transition to a system that promotes safety and allows drilling to continue instead of piling on regulations that make it unnecessarily and prohibitively expensive to drill of America’s coasts. An important part of that effort should be liability reform for the secondary costs that stem from offshore oil and gas accidents.

The current system places a $75 million cap for the responsible party for these costs. Liability costs above $75 million up to $1 billion are funded by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund (OSLTF). The OSLTF is financed by an eight-cent-per-barrel tax on imported and domestic oil. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 stipulates different liability limits for different oil and gas operations.

This system distorts risk of oil and gas operations in two fundamental ways. The artificially low cap of $75 million established 20 years ago does not fully or directly capture the risk of offshore operations. Secondly, rather than placing responsibility with the liable company, the OSLTF shifts responsibility to the entire industry and, ultimately, the federal government, thereby reducing the incentive for individual companies to operate safely.

Although the fire on the Mariner production platform was not a result of the liability system, a new system is necessary that better promotes safe offshore drilling operations.

Congress should reform the OSLTF and remove the $75 million liability cap, replacing it with a new system that accurately assesses the risks of offshore oil and gas operations and appropriately assigns those risks to industry operators. Companies should demonstrate to federal regulators an ability to insure against the liability risk associated with specific offshore oil and gas operations (exploration, extraction, and transportation, etc.) in federal waters. Private risk assessors would determine liability coverage requirements for specific activities, and federal regulators would certify that liability requirements are met. The means for meeting liability coverage requirements would not be limited but may include self-insurance, insurance pools, dedicated assets, or private insurance policies.

The federal government would create a private, tiered insurance framework and administrative process to manage claims. The central element of the insurance framework would be a private and voluntary pooled insurance fund for claims above $1 billion. The claims process would ensure that legitimate claims are paid fully and efficiently while protecting responsible parties from frivolous lawsuits. This is a system that would better align risk and behavior and enhance the safety of America’s offshore oil and gas operations.