DACA decision reaffims Congress makes the laws. | Can FEMA discriminate against churches? | Plus: Due process on campus, unions, and higher education.
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| September 9, 2017 |
| President Obama bypassed Congress in creating the DACA program to suspend immigration law enforcement. By deciding to phase out the program and calling on Congress to pass legislation to address the issue, President Trump is abiding by the Constitution. In Trinity Lutheran, the Supreme Court said the government cannot exclude religious organizations from participating in widely available public benefit programs. Doesn't that mean FEMA can't exclude houses of worship from applying for rebuilding grants? The Obama era guidance that pushed colleges to disregard due process rights in sexual assault cases is going to be revoked. It's not necessary for labor and business to have an adversarial relationship in order to protect workers; co-ops are a type of union that could supplant organized labor. Would making colleges responsible for some portion of defaulted school loans give them the incentive to serve their students' better? |
| DACA decision reaffirms that Congress makes the laws. This week, President Trump announced his administration would phase-out a program created by the Obama administration in 2012 that allows illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as minors to avoid deportation. He also called on Congress to pass legislation within six months to address the status of this group of immigrants. The program is called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. As Hans von Spakovsky explains, winding down DACA is the right decision because President Obama had no authority to create such a program in the first place: "Responding in October 2010 to demands that he implement immigration reforms unilaterally, Obama declared, 'I am not king. I can't do these things just by myself.' In March 2011, he said that with 'respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case.' In May 2011, he acknowledged that he couldn't 'just bypass Congress and change the (immigration) law myself. ... That's not how a democracy works.' "Yet in 2012, he did it anyway. He put DACA in place to provide pseudo-legal status to illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as minors, including as teenagers. He promised them that they wouldn't be deported and provided them with work authorizations and access to Social Security and other government benefits. "And he did this despite the fact that the immigration laws passed by Congress do not give the president the ability to do this. Indeed, Congress specifically rejected bills to provide such benefits. […] "The place to have the debate about what to do about illegal aliens who were minors when they came to this country is in the halls of Congress, not the White House. Failure to correct this unilateral, unconstitutional overreach would set a dangerous precedent that weakens our constitutional balance of powers. As law professor Jonathan Turley said, 'If a president can claim sweeping discretion to suspend key federal laws, the entire legislative process becomes little more than a pretense.'" [The Heritage Foundation]
Can FEMA discriminate against churches in providing relief? A new lawsuit filed by the Becket Fund challenges the Federal Emergency Management Agency's exclusion of houses of worship from applying for grants for rebuilding. The Becket Fund describes its lawsuit: "In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, houses of worship and religious organizations across Houston, Texas opened their doors and welcomed thousands of families forced to evacuate their homes. For local churches, synagogues, and mosques, this was nothing new. From housing and feeding evacuees to loading trucks with meals and hygiene supplies, houses of worship are pillars of safety, hope, and help when disaster strikes. "But disaster doesn't discriminate, and houses of worship suffer the same kind of devastation that the rest of their communities do. Houston-area houses of worship like Harvest Family Church and Hi-Way Tabernacle suffered unprecedented flooding, and churches along the Gulf Coast like Rockport First Assembly had their steeples blown off and windows blown out. So at the same time that churches are springing into action, they're also picking up the pieces. […] "But while FEMA recognizes that houses of worship are essential partners in the recovery process, it bans them from receiving recovery grants that are available to other similar private nonprofits. These grants are available to rebuild and repair damaged buildings at a broad range of private nonprofit organizations, such as museums, zoos, and even community centers that provide services such as sewing classes and stamp-collecting clubs. But churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship are categorically denied because they use their buildings primarily for religious purposes. FEMA has repeatedly praised churches and religious ministries for the valuable shelter and aid they provide to disaster-stricken communities, and regularly uses houses of worship as staging areas for relief efforts. "But it denies them equal access to emergency relief simply because they are religious. Even though they are essential to rebuilding communities. Even though they serve as staging areas for FEMA's own relief efforts. "This discriminatory policy stands in defiance of a recent Supreme Court ruling in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer that protects the right of religious organizations to participate in widely available programs on equal footing with secular organizations." [The Becket Fund]
Due process is overdue for a return to campus. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced this week that her department would revise policies created by the Obama administration on dealing with allegations of sexual assault on campus. In 2011, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights issued a guidance letter that put schools on notice that they could lose some funding if they failed to deal with sexual assault allegations using procedures that made it easier to find the accused guilty. Schools complied and due process protections were all but eliminated. DeVos highlighted some of the problems in her speech, which Robby Soave has collected. Here is one particularly outrageous story: "'A student on another campus is under a Title IX investigation for a wrong answer on a quiz,' said DeVos. 'The question asked the name of the class Lab instructor. The student didn't know the instructor's name, so he made one up—Sarah Jackson—which unbeknownst to him turned out to be the name of a model. He was given a zero and told that his answer was 'inappropriate' because it allegedly objectified the female instructor. He was informed that his answer 'meets the Title IX definition of sexual harassment.' His university opened an investigation without any complainants.' "That can't be true. It's just too crazy, right? Wrong. It happened, and I wrote about it here: 'Tennessee Student Accused of Sexual Harassment Because He Wrote Instructor's Name Wrong.' And I posted a follow-up here: 'UT Student Now Being Investigated for Sexual Harassment After Writing His Instructor's Name Wrong.'" [Reason]
Time for a new model of union. Organized labor has become a funding mechanism for the Democratic Party while failing to serve the interests of workers. What to do? Oren Cass writes that co-ops could provide workers the support they need without relying on the adversarial and coercive arrangements created by U.S. labor law: "One potential path for this new kind of organization, taken by unions operating under the 'Ghent system' of many European countries, is to establish relationships with workers and provide benefits to them outside the employment context. In Denmark and Sweden, for instance, unions administer an unemployment-insurance system that workers join, independent of their employer. Those countries don't require workplace elections, good-faith bargaining by employers, or compulsory dues payments; yet a majority of workers are union members. […] "Co-ops also could partner with employers to improve the job-readiness of new hires and offer job training for all workers. When business leaders complain that they can't find enough qualified employees, the solution seems self-evident: if they need a better-trained workforce, perhaps they should invest more in training. But the economics of human capital are complex. If an employer improves a worker's skills, the worker can demand to be compensated accordingly—or leave for another firm. The employer might design his training so that the worker's skills are inapplicable elsewhere, but this leaves him far more vulnerable to an organizing campaign and strike; if his specially trained workers walk out, in other words, they can't easily be replaced. "Employers thus would like to hire high-skilled workers whom they don't pay to train, just as workers would like to acquire more skills and work in systems that value them accordingly. But how to get there? Co-ops could fund and conduct training programs, negotiate with employers to share costs and provide access to apprenticeships, and draw on government education programs as well. While workers would pay for a portion of their own training via co-op dues, they would benefit from substantial employer and government support—as well as, eventually, the full value of their improved skills. […] "The 'gig economy' introduces efficiency and dynamism into certain markets, while offering valuable flexibility to workers. But as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen observes, that kind of labor-market flexibility implies that 'more workers will have to teach and train themselves, whether for their current jobs or for a future job they might have later on. I submit many people cannot train themselves very well, even when the pecuniary returns from such training are fairly strongly positive.' "Given the burdens of current employment regulation and labor law, the transportation-network firm Uber is understandably reluctant to engage with its drivers as employees or to risk collective bargaining. But what if its drivers formed co-ops, independent of their relationship to Uber, to support one another and discuss with the firm arrangements like human-capital investment, which might benefit both sides?" [City Journal]
Skin in the game. A number of economists have argued that the higher education sector's largely non-profit set-up combined with heavy government subsidies induces colleges and universities to compete for prestige when they ought to be competing to provide students with knowledge and skills. Generation Opportunity has come along with an idea for encouraging institutions of higher education to refocus on serving the students: "The new model would be simple: if former students default on their loans, the school would be responsible for a portion of the debt. "There's already proof that a system like this would work. During the subprime mortgage crisis, lenders with risk-sharing requirements saw fewer borrowers default than those who didn't. "Universities' share of the repayment doesn't even have to be big. In the subprime mortgage example, lenders on the hook for as little as three percent of the loan still performed better. "With skin in the game, universities would have an added incentive to make sure their curriculum actually prepares students for life after college. Because students who drop out are more likely to fall behind on loan payments, colleges would also have added incentive to provide students the resources they need to succeed while in school." [Generation Opportunity] |
 The Heritage Foundation |
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