Exiting the Paris agreement is the right call. | Lawmakers can give college administrators a backbone. | A doctor shortage is looming. | The Supreme Court can clean up the lower courts' travel order decisions.

June 3, 2017
Exiting the Paris climate agreement will not hurt the climate but it will help the poor. What should be done about students shouting down speakers they don’t like? It’s time for lawmakers to give college administrators a backbone. Obamacare didn’t do anything to increase the supply of doctors, and now the nation is looking at a shortage. The Supreme Court will have an opportunity to fix the courts’ political decisions on the Trump administration’s travel orders.
Exiting the Paris climate agreement will not hurt the climate but it will help the poor. President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. That’s the right decision, explains Marlo Lewis: “Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement overturns Obama’s end run around the Constitution’s treaty process, safeguards American democracy from foreign interference, dispels the Agreement’s long shadow over the U.S. energy and manufacturing sectors, foils corporate schemes to enrich special interests at consumers and taxpayers’ expense, and helps ensure developing countries will have the access to affordable energy they need to lift people out of poverty.” Lewis goes on to elaborate on the bad risk/reward ratio for the United States as well as developing countries: “Some well-meaning people believe America should stay in the Agreement to help mitigate global climate change. But the treaty is at best all pain for no environmental gain. As environmental researcher Bjorn Lomborg points out, even if all Paris parties fulfill every promise contained in their NDCs by 2030, the total temperature reduction will be 0.048°C (0.086°F) by 2100. That change is less than the current margin of error (0.08°C) in estimates of annual average global temperature. The reduction in the policy-relevant future (the next quarter century) will be even more miniscule—too small to affect weather patterns, polar bear populations, or any climatic factor people actually care about. “‘Yet U.S. GDP loss could be about $250 billion in 2025 increasing to about $420 billion per year on average and a cumulative loss of about $4 trillion between 2022 and 2031,’ according to a study by NERA Economic Consulting. Such losses would mean hardship for millions of Americans, especially low-income households. “The biggest losers, though, would likely be the world’s poorest people. The Agreement’s mid-century emission reduction goal cannot be reached unless developing countries dramatically reduce their current consumption of affordable energy from fossil fuels. “Yet more than a billion people in those countries have no access to electricity and billions more have too little to support development. Forcing already energy-poor nations to go on an energy diet is a cure worse than the alleged disease and potentially a humanitarian disaster.” [Competitive Enterprise Institute]   Is there an alternative to silence or violence on campus? This is the “Year of the Shout Down” writes Stanley Kurtz, who catalogs the major and minor disruptions of speakers on campus. It makes for a lengthy post at National Review, where he concludes: “A fully empowered campus left unworried about repercussions will turn its violence and intimidation beyond visiting speakers to administrators, faculty, and students. This is already happening, as the nightmarish campus takeover at Evergreen State College, the UC Santa Cruz takeover, and various portentous incidents elsewhere indicate. Almost every speaker shout-down holds the potential for student-on-student violence, since many feature competing chants and angry back-and-forth that could easily burst into a direct clash. “At the same time, as Berkeley did with David Horowitz and Ann Coulter this year, administrators will find ways to manipulate the rules to shut out controversial speakers. They will police shout-downs not by disciplining disruptors but by kowtowing to Left’s speech boundaries. “One potential outcome would be broader civil violence as members of the public jump into the chaotic disciplinary vacuum to support their own side. We’ve seen glimmers of this already at Berkeley. “The only realistic alternative to a race between violence and silence is campus free-speech legislation that directly addresses shout-downs. Only the Goldwater proposal does that.” [National Review] And here is the Goldwater proposal summarized: “The model bill offered herein is designed to change the balance of forces contributing to the current baleful national climate for campus free speech. […] First, it creates an official university policy that strongly affirms the importance of free expression, while formally nullifying any existing restrictive speech codes. Second, it establishes a system of disciplinary sanctions for students and others who interfere with the free-speech rights of others, while strongly protecting the due-process rights of those accused of such disruption. Third, it empowers persons whose free-speech rights have been infringed to seek legal recourse and recover court costs and attorney’s fees. Fourth, it ensures that students will be informed of their university’s commitment to free expression, and of the penalties for the violation of others’ free-speech rights, during a special section of freshman orientation. Fifth, it authorizes a special subcommittee of the university governing board to issue a yearly report to the board itself, the public, the governor, and the legislature on the administrative handling of free-speech issues, including the application of disciplinary sanctions. In sum, the model bill is designed to encourage public and institutional oversight of administrators’ handling of free-speech issues, thus counterbalancing pressures on administrators to overlook interference with the free-speech rights of others.” [Goldwater Institute]   In order to get more health care, we need more doctors. By 2030, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the United States will face a physician shortage of at least 40,000 and the shortage could be as high as 105,000. The problem, as Kevin Dayaratna and John O’Shea write, arises because graduate medical education is largely controlled by government funding: “In the 1960s, the federal government became involved in post-graduate medical training when federal funding for GME became part of mandatory spending in the Medicare program. Federal support of GME was never intended to be permanent, yet has remained the primary funding source of residency programs for the past 50 years. […]   “Partially to address the rapidly rising costs of GME and in response to warnings of a physician surplus, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 included several provisions relating to GME, most importantly the imposition of a cap on the number of Medicare-funded allopathic and osteopathic residency slots at 1996 levels. This cap has remained in place ever since. […] “Because GME funding goes directly to the teaching institutions, this money is often focused on the narrow needs of the teaching hospital rather than the broader health care needs of the population as a whole. In general, the U.S. has not adequately supplied the training needed to meet the demand for, among others, primary care physicians and general surgeons, especially for rural areas of the country. […] “In a free market, resources are consistently adjusted in a manner that allows supply to be consistent with demand. When demand changes, supply also responds in a corresponding manner. The current GME system, on the other hand, is incapable of adequately responding to market forces, leaving many highly qualified medical school graduates without residency training positions in the main residency match. “As a result, despite the growing physician shortage, many medical graduates are unable to enter the field and treat patients in any capacity. In 2017, there were nearly 5,000 medical graduates in the U.S. who did not place into a residency program during the main residency match.” The solution, they write, is to create provisional medical licenses that allow medical graduates to enter the field of medicine: “To take advantage of the existing surplus of talent in the U.S., policymakers should allow medical school graduates to practice under provisional medical licenses. State governments could establish provisional licenses that would enable medical graduates to work under the supervision of a primary care physician or hospital to assist in care and acquire training. Medical graduates, both American and international, who have passed the United States Medical Licensing Exams, or equivalent proficiency examinations, should be eligible for this type of licensing.” [The Heritage Foundation]   The Supreme Court will have an opportunity to undo the courts’ political rulings. Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth District Circuit upheld a nationwide injunction on the administration’s temporary order restricting travel to the United States from six majority Muslim nations. The court decided that the real purpose of the order was not safeguarding the nation’s security but rather discriminating against Muslims contrary to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Trump administration has now appealed that decision to the Supreme Court. Hans von Spakovsky summarizes the Fourth Circuit’s errors: “The three dissenting judges in this case, let by Judge Paul Niemeyer, point out the mistakes and deliberate errors made by the majority. As to the original district court that issued the injunction, Niemeyer outlines how that court ‘refused to apply Kleindienst v. Mandel…which held that courts are precluded from ‘look[ing] behind’ ‘facially legitimate and bona fide’ exercises of executive discretion in the immigration context to discern other possible motives.’ “The district court, they also point out, ‘seriously erred’ by ‘fabricating a new proposition of law – indeed, a new rule – that provides for the consideration of campaign statements to recast a later-issued executive order’ and ‘by radically extending Supreme Court Establishment Clause precedents.’ This ‘approach is not only unprecedented, it is totally unworkable and inappropriate under any standard of analysis.’ “Mandel is the 1972 Supreme Court decision that governs any actions by Congress and the executive branch affecting aliens outside of our border who are seeking admission. This binding precedent severely limited the ability of courts to second-guess such a decision, holding that when the executive branch has exercised its authority to exclude aliens ‘on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason,’ the courts cannot ‘look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against First Amendment interests’ of the plaintiffs. “While the district court ignored the Mandel holding, the Fourth Circuit majority (according to Niemeyer) simply ‘reworked’ the district court’s analysis by ‘applying Mandel, albeit contrary to its holding, to defer only to the facial legitimacy of the Order but not to its facial bona fides, despite the Mandel Court’s holding.’ Further, ‘the majority, after violating Mandel, then adopts the same new rule of law adopted by the district court to consider candidate Trump’s campaign statements to find the Executive Order’s stated reasons ‘pretext[ual]’…and then to rewrite the Order to find it in violation of the Establishment Clause.’ That ‘too is unprecedented and unworkable.’ “The Fourth Circuit has engaged in the same type of misbehavior that the Ninth Circuit did, as explained in a scathing dissent written by Ninth Circuit judges Jay Bybee, Alex Kozinski, Consuelo Callahan, Carlos Bea and Sandra Ikuta. As those judges said in that case, the U.S. Constitution ‘commits the power to make foreign policy, including the decision to permit or forbid entry into the United States, to the President and Congress.’ It does not give that power to the unelected judges of the Fourth or Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.” [Fox News]
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