Road To World War 3 Unveiled: Is China Planning To Deploy Its Army Against North Korea?

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

New photos of a recent highway construction in China could be part of a contingency plan to invade North Korea or amass a huge army on their shared border.

Experts fear this newly uncovered plot could stoke the fires of World War 3, inevitably involving the United States.

According to The Express UK, communist China has traditionally been North Korea’s closest ally, but Kim Jong-un’s continued nuclear and ballistic missile tests have tested Beijing’s patience on the rising tensions worldwide. These new revelations also come as North Korea was spotted transporting 30 Scud missiles from Hwangju, south of the capital Pyongyang, to Nampo, on the Korea Bay coast opposite China.

New photos have emerged and they reveal that the Communist superpower is building a six-lane highway in its desolately populated northeast on route to North Korea.

With most Chinese peasants not able to afford the luxury of a car, the construction of the G1112 Ji’an–Shuangliao Expressway, has led experts to believe it will be used for quick deployment of tanks and troops to its North Korean border.

The photos obtained by Daily Star Online show Chinese construction workers digging tunnels through the mountains and massive cranes constructing bridges over rivers.

Chinese workers construct a six lane highway to North Korea’s border.

Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea studies and director of the program on US-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Daily Star Online:

“China’s Jilin province has even budgeted and paid for improvements in road infrastructure inside some parts of North Korea in recent years in order to improve logistical access to the Rason port inside North Korea.”

Dean Cheng, an Asia security expert at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington, said Beijing would have a ”vast array” of contingency plans involving military options to seize Kim Jong-un’s nuclear weapons. And just last week, a highly respected security think tank warned that the threat of war between China and the US was now real. In the bombshell report, the Rand Corporation said any conflict between North Korea and South Korea and the US would quickly spiral into World War 3.

If it’s decided upon by a nation to “take out” the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Un, American and Chinese troops would then rush across the border in a race to take control of the tyrant’s nuclear weapons and missile facilities colliding in a clash between China and the US, effectively spawning WW3. A whopping 85% of North Korea’s nuclear facilities are believed to be located within 62 miles of the Chinese border.

China actually threatened the US with a “real war” last month. The communist nation said that Donald Trump had made a “serious miscalculation” over North Korea. Photos uncovered by a North Korean monitoring site suggested China was secretly helping Kim’s nuclear missile program. But there were other confusing and conflicting signs that North Korea may be preparing to fire missiles towards China next week.

It looks like the world is steamrolling its way to a third world war.

NAFTA Talks Heat Up As Trump Administration Takes Aggressive Stance On Autos

Trump"s NAFTA negotiators in recent days put forth a string of bold proposals on everything from auto rules of origin, a sunset clause, government procurement, and gutting dispute panels seen by the other nations as core to the pact. The moves were long-signaled, as was Canadian and Mexican opposition to them, but with a more aggressive stance taken by U.S. negotiators in the 4th round of talks, which will continue today in Washington D.C., many are beginning to question whether a deal is ultimately feasible.  Per Bloomberg:

The fourth round of Nafta talks will continue Monday at a Washington-area hotel, before a ministerial-level meeting on Tuesday. People familiar with the proceedings describe essentially a two-track process: legitimate progress being made to modernize the pact in less contentious areas, including topics like regulations and services, with essentially no progress on the most divisive U.S. proposals.

Nafta’s fate may now hang on how flexible the U.S. is about its demands heading into the fifth round of talks, scheduled for Mexico City around the first week of November. While the parties had wanted to reach a deal by December, officials familiar with the negotiations say the talks are likely to drag on for months.

Of course, hanging over the negotiations are Trump’s regular threats to walk away.

One official familiar with the proceedings, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said on Sunday that it seems more likely Trump will give the mandatory six months’ notice required to leave Nafta, though not necessarily end up backing out. Others were less sure.

“He’s unpredictable, so I don’t know,” said Stephen Moore, a senior economic adviser during Trump’s campaign and chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. “I do feel, though, that his bark has been worse than his bite on trade. That doesn’t mean that he’s retreating. But I think we’re going to see a Nafta 2.0 that will find areas that will give the U.S. even greater benefits, while protecting American workers.”

Mexico has signaled that it won’t negotiate during the six-month window if Trump announces he’ll walk away, and it’s unclear what the next steps would be were that to happen. Congress and others are vowing legal and political fights if the president tries to pull out. If Trump manages to, though, Canada could still fall back on an existing bilateral deal with the U.S.; Mexico has no such previous deal.

That said, as Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means committee, said over the weekend, a full withdrawal from NAFTA would require a vote from Congress...a hurdle which Trump has had some difficulty clearing in his first 10 months in Washington D.C.

The proposals have spurred public warnings from prominent U.S. lawmakers and the private sector about the perils of scuttling a deal that over more than two decades has broken down trade barriers, including tariffs, for industries like manufacturing and agriculture.

Warnings are growing from Congress. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means committee, said he prefers a Nafta renewal to a pull-out, which he said Congress would probably block.

If Trump “even suggests that the United States should leave Nafta, to undo that relationship, you would have to go back to Congress. And that would be a much more difficult task for him,” Neal said in a Canadian TV interview with The West Block that aired on Sunday.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued its own warning. Last week, Chief Executive Officer Tom Donohue visited Mexico City and pledged to fight “like hell” to preserve Nafta. The largest American business lobbying group plans to send an “army” of representatives to Capitol Hill to demonstrate support for the deal, Donohue said.

Of course, as Boston Consulting Group pointed out in a recent presentation to the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, any success in imposing tariffs on imported parts could mean large price increases for American consumers as roughly $2,000 worth of content on each U.S. assembled car is sourced from Mexico.

Meanwhile, Mexico is just one small component of a truly global automotive supply chain with $3,500 worth of imported parts on each car assembled in U.S. plants.

For those reasons, Mexico’s negotiators said they’re still optimistic a deal can be reached because they expect pushback from the U.S. private sector.

Here is the full presentation from Boston Consulting Group:

North Korea Said To Seek Help From Republicans "To Figure Out Trump"

In what may be the most bizarre development of the day, the WaPo reports that in their ongoing feud with President Trump, the North Korean government has quietly sought the help of an unlikely counterparty: Republicans.

As the WaPo details, officials in Pyongyang have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, "in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump and his confusing messages to Kim Jong Un’s regime." The outreach is said to have begun before the current eruption of threats between the two leaders, but will likely become only more urgent "as Trump and Kim have descended into name-calling that sharply increases the chances of potentially catastrophic misunderstandings."

“Their No. 1 concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out,” a source with direct knowledge of North Korea’s approach to Asia experts with Republican connections told the WaPo.

While the North Koreans do not appear to be interested in negotiations about their nuclear program, they want forums for insisting on being recognized as a nuclear state, something the Trump administration has made clear it is not interested in. At a multilateral meeting here in Switzerland earlier this month, North Korea’s representatives were adamant about being recognized as a nuclear weapons state and showed no willingness to even talk about denuclearization.

But to get a better understanding of American intentions, in the absence official diplomatic talks with the U.S. government, North Korea’s mission to the United Nations invited Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst who is now the Heritage Foundation’s top expert on North Korea, to visit Pyongyang for meetings.

Trump has close ties to Heritage, a conservative think-tank which has influenced the president on everything from travel restrictions to defense spending, although not to Klingner personally.

“They’re on a new binge of reaching out to American scholars and ex-officials,” said Klingner, who declined the North Korean invitation. “While such meetings are useful, if the regime wants to send a clear message, it should reach out directly to the U.S. government.”

North Korean intermediaries have also approached Douglas Paal, who served as an Asia expert on the national security councils of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and is now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

They wanted Paal to arrange talks between North Korean officials and American experts with Republican ties in a neutral place like Switzerland. He also declined the North Korean request.

“The North Koreans are clearly eager to deliver a message. But I think they’re only interested in getting some travel, in getting out of the country for a bit,” Paal said.

While in the past North Korea has traditionally participated in strategy meeting with foreign power on neutral soil such as Geneva, Singapore and Malaysia, since Trump’s election in November, the North Korean representatives have been predominantly interested in figuring out the unconventional president’s strategy, according to almost a dozen people involved in the discussions. 

While early in Trump’s term, the North Koreans had been asking broad questions - Is President Trump serious about closing American military bases in South Korea and Japan,  as he said on the campaign trail? Might he really send American nuclear weapons back to the southern half of the Korean Peninsula - the questions have since become more specific. Why are Trump’s top officials, notably Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, directly contradicting the president so often?

“My own guess is that they are somewhat puzzled as to the direction in which the U.S. is going, so they’re trying to open up channels to take the pulse in Washington,” said Evans Revere, a former State Department official. “They haven’t seen the U.S. act like this before.”

Still, participants at various international summits which included the North Koreans are skeptical about this approach: “I’m very pessimistic,” said Shin Beom-chul, a North Korea expert at the South’s Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, after participating in the meeting in Glion. “They want to keep their nuclear weapons and they will only return to dialogue after the United States nullifies its ‘hostile policy.’ They want the U.S. to stop all military exercises and lift all sanctions on them.”

The bottom line: “North Korea wants to be recognized as a nuclear weapons state,” said Ken Jimbo, who teaches at Keio University in Japan. “But when is North Korea ready for talks? This is what I kept asking the North Koreans: How much is enough?”

While we doubt that Pyongyang will ever be able to figure out Trump, perhaps as a token of diplomacy, Kim Jong-Un can create a twitter account and engage in direct head-to-head tweetstorms with Trump. While that would hardly prevent a potential adverse fallout from the two leaders" relentless jawboning, at least the devolution of the world to a pre-nuclear war state will be far more entertaining.

Why Obamacare Repeal Failed

Authored by Taylor Lewis via Mises Canada blog,

"Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars

That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!” – Othello

Republicans lost, big league. On the one solid promise they’ve repeated ad nauseam for seven years and running, the party of Reagan came up short.

The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, is here to stay. Congressional Republicans, despite a million vows to the contrary, failed to repeal it. Disagreement within the ranks proved too much; members couldn’t find a way to reconcile their rhetoric with practice.

Ironically enough, the man who gave a brief flicker of hope to Obamacare opponents was the same who snuffed it out: Senator John McCain.

Recently diagnosed with glioblastoma, McCain returned to Washington in time to vote for the motion to proceed with debate on a possible repeal package. In the wee hours of Friday morning, he cast the deciding “nay” vote on what was marketed as “skinny repeal,” an amendment to abolish some of the worst parts of Obamacare, including the individual mandate.

Just like that, McCain went from Senate savior to Judas Iscariot. In a press statement, the Arizona senator expressed concern that, despite Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s assurances, the amendment would be immediately passed by the House and sent to President Trump’s desk. McCain was far from the only senator to voice reserve over this prospect.

McCain’s objection gets to the absurdity of the whole repeal effort: Republicans, failing to pass out an outright Obamacare repeal, were willing to pass a bill they openly hoped would not become law, but would only go to conference with the House and emerge as new legislation entirely.

The McCain gambit demonstrated just how out of sync the Republican strategy on reforming health care is. It was so bad that Politico copy-editors wrote the headline “Senate Republicans hope their own Obamacare repeal won’t become law” and weren’t inaccurate. The desperation to pass something, anything, is lawmaking at its most juvenile.

As one Twitter observer put it, “McCain voted NO so other GOP Sens who shared his view could vote YES last night to let them save face w/conservative base voters.” I can’t think of a more apt description.

The Republicans’ failure of vision and action leaves Obamacare the little law that could. Through multiple court challenges, numerous elections, and a totally united opposition government threatening to extirpate it for good, President Obama’s crowning achievement remains.

Now, every American who cast a GOP ballot in the hopes of de-socializing health care is shaking their head at this shameful acquiescence. Republicans deserve their scorn, but those casting blame are not entirely innocent. Culpability rests on both sides of the aisle: Voters should have never expected a clean and easy slicing away at an entitlement program. And, more so, GOP candidates should have never portrayed the effort as a cinch.

But even while entitlements may be a dependency-causing drug, Republicans still managed to squander what was a stars-aligned opportunity. Coming away from November with full control of Congress and the White House created an imperative to act. Premiums have steadily increased under Obamacare since its inception. The government-run exchanges are a mess, with insurers abandoning them faster than the Titanic. Iowa only has one insurer, Medica, operating on the state exchange. States like Arizona (McCain’s home state!) only have a few insurers. An analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that by the end of 2017, one third of U.S. counties will have only one insurer.

Price and availability statistics provide ample reason for reform. But Republicans were helped by something more: A prime example of the dangers of government-administered health care. The heart-wrenching case of little Charlie Gard made world headlines by putting the cruelty of Britain’s National Health Service on full display. Charlie was diagnosed with encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, which left him unable to breathe on his own while slowly destroying his organs. Gard’s parents wanted to seek experimental treatment in America, but the hospital refused to release their child.

Charlie was taken off life support the day of the failed Obamacare repeal vote, drawing his last breath shortly after. At the end, the hospital even denied the parents’ request to take Charlie home so he could live his last few moments away from the sterile ward walls.

While propriety says children shouldn’t be political props, the Gard story was impossible to escape. And even with its sad ending as a backdrop, Republicans still couldn’t muster the will to undo America’s largest entitlement program since Medicare.

Conservative commentators are at a loss to explain how Republicans could bungle such a huge opportunity. The answer, though, is easy, but it’s not an easy one to face for those who derive an income from drafting talking points.

Many of Obamacare’s main aspects were Republican-devised and first implemented by a Republican governor. As Matthew Walther writes, Obamacare is, at its heart, a “plan devised by the Heritage Foundation in the ’90s that is messy but not ipso facto unacceptable. The only problem is that it was passed by a guy with a D behind his name.”

Republicans were never going to repeal a Republican health care plan. For all their talk of free-markets, the last thing any GOP politicians will do is support an entirely unfettered marketplace in any service. Like it or not, Obamacare is a midway point between wholly private enterprise and a single-payer, government-run health care system.

Does this failure mean the Republican Party is finished? Surely, seven years of a failed promise will spell doom at the ballot box, right?

Hardly. A new Gallup poll shows that, for the first time ever, Obamacare has majority support from Americans. In a revealing New York Times dispatch from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, rural Trump-backers have come to terms with Obamacare. “As much as I was against it,” said one fiscally conservative voter, “at this point I’m against the repeal.” One restaurant owner commented, “I can’t even remember why I opposed it.”

Come 2018, it’s hard to see amnesia’s muddying effect dissipating.

29 States Refuse To Give Data To Voter Fraud Panel, "What Are They Trying To Hide" Trump Asks

Together with lashing out at the anchors of Morning Joe, slamming "garbage" fake news CNN, and suggesting that Greta Van Susteren was fired because she "refused to go along with Trump hate", President Trump on Saturday blasted the 29 (and rising) states refusing to comply with his election fraud commission"s request for voter data to a commission he created to investigate alleged voter fraud, asking "what are they trying to hide?"

Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

Last Wednesday, Trump"s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity - which was formed to investigate his claim that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election - sent a letter to all 50 states asking them to turn over voter information including names, the last four digits of social security numbers, addresses, birth dates, political affiliation, felony convictions and voting histories.  The request was for information publicly available under each state"s laws. And while some states are providing part of this information, many states immediately raised concerns and voiced their opposition to providing the information, and as of Saturday morning, more than half of all US states - 29 at last count - had refused to comply with the commission"s requests, saying they are unnecessary and violated privacy, according to statements from election officials and media reports.

"This commission was formed to try to find basis for the lie that President Trump put forward that has no foundation," Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes told Reuters previously in an interview.

Among the states refusing to comply with Trump"s request are both Democratic and Republican states.

* * *

Echoing Trump"s skepticism, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of the commission, had a similar response to the president on states refusing to comply.

“Frankly, if a state like Kentucky or California won’t provide available information, one has to ask the question, ‘Why not?’” Kobach said Friday during an interview with NPR. “I mean, what are they trying to hide if they don’t want a presidential advisory commission to study their state voter rolls?” he asked.

Several states replied to that question, as the Hill reports.

"There"s not enough bourbon here in Kentucky to make this request seem sensible," Kentucky"s Democratic Secretary of State, Alison Lundergan Grimes, said on MSNBC. "Not on my watch are we going to be releasing sensitive information that relate to the privacy of individuals."

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, also said he won"t turn over any information to the panel, telling members of the voter fraud commission to, "go jump in the Gulf of Mexico."

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, took a similar line, calling the Trump investigation an attempt to suppress the vote.

You can add PA to that list. We will not participate in this systematic effort to suppress the vote. https://t.co/EHnY2NJI5R

— Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) June 30, 2017

Election officials from both sides of the aisle expressed skepticism about Trump’s claim of voter fraud:  “In Ohio, we pride ourselves on being a state where it is easy to vote and hard to cheat,” said Jon Husted, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state. “Voter fraud happens, it"s rare and when it happens we hold people accountable. I believe that as the Commission does its work, it will find the same about our state." 

Several states, among them California and New York, said participating in the attempt to compile voter data would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud,” according to Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla. On the other hand, by refusing to participate in the first place, they force Trump himself to question what it is they are hiding.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, both Democrats, said their states would not provide confidential information. “New York refuses to perpetuate the myth voter fraud played a role in our election,” Cuomo said in a statement. “We will not be complying with this request.”

Even Kansas, where Kobach is secretary of state, will not share voters" Social Security information with the commission. “In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available," Kobach told the Kansas City Star. "Every state receives the same letter, but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available."

Officials in Connecticut, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington also expressed skepticism and said their states would withhold nonpublic information. North Carolina will provide all but the last four digits of Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver"s license numbers.

Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea (D) took her criticism further, saying Kobach was unfit to lead the commission, given his record of strict voting laws and a recent court fine for failing to produce documents related to a lawsuit over voting laws. 

* * *

Trump has made such allegations of voter fraud before, including claiming that that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election.

Kobach says he does not know if such claims are true but the commission is investigating them. He is an advocate of strict voter identification laws, which he says are necessary to combat fraud. Opponents say those laws hinder access to the polls primarily for elderly and minority voters.

Meanwhile, the Hill reported that officials have raised questions about the commission’s discretion obtaining the confidential documents.

“State statutes permit the [Wisconsin commission] to share confidential information in limited circumstances with law enforcement agencies or agencies of other states,” Haas said. “The presidential commission does not appear to qualify under either of these categories.” 

Trump appointed another voter identification supporter, Heritage Foundation fellow Hans von Spakovsky, to the commission Thursday. Von Spakovsky, one of Kobach’s mentors, has long advocated for stricter voter access rules.

As of noon on Saturday, the states who have refused the Commission"s demands are: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

The Over-Criminalization Of American Life

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The over-criminalization of America has undermined justice, the rule of law and legal egalitarianism.

While the corporate media devotes itself to sports, entertainment, dining out and the latest political kerfuffle, America has become the Over-Criminalization Capital of the World. The proliferation of laws and administrative regulations, federal, state and local, that carry criminal penalties has swollen into the tens of thousands.

The number of incarcerated Americans exceeds 2.3 million, with the majority being non-violent offenders--often for War on Drugs offenses.

Holly Harris has written an important summary of this profoundly destabilizing trend: The Prisoner Dilemma: Ending America"s Incarceration Epidemic (Foreign Affairs, registration required).

The over-criminalization of America is a relatively recent trend. As Harris notes:

It wasn’t always like this. In 1972, for every 100,000 U.S. residents, 161 were incarcerated. By 2015, that rate had more than quadrupled, with nearly 670 out of every 100,000 Americans behind bars.

The over-criminalization of America is rooted in federal laws and regulations, and state and local governments have followed suite. here is Harris"s account:

The burgeoning U.S. prison population reflects a federal criminal code that has spiraled out of control. No one—not even the government itself—has ever been able to specify with any certainty the precise number of federal crimes defined by the 54 sections contained in the 27,000 or so pages of the U.S. Code. In the 1980s, lawyers at the Department of Justice attempted to tabulate the figure “for the express purpose of exposing the idiocy” of the criminal code, as one of them later put it. The best they were able to come up with was an educated guess of 3,000 crimes. Today, the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates that federal laws currently enumerate nearly 5,000 crimes, a number that grows every year.

Overcriminalization extends beyond the law books, partly because regulations are often backed by criminal penalties. That is the case for rules that govern matters as trivial as the sale of grated cheese, the precise composition of chicken Kiev dishes, and the washing of cars at the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health. State laws add tens of thousands more such crimes. Taken together, they push the total number of criminally punishable offenses in the United States into the hundreds of thousands. The long arm of the law reaches into nearly every aspect of American life. The legal scholar Harvey Silverglate has concluded that the typical American commits at least three federal felonies a day, simply by going through his or her normal routine.

Federal policies reward states for building prisons and mandating harsher sentences:

...federal incentives for states that safely decrease their prison populations and reconsider ineffective sentencing regimes...would represent a stark reversal of legislation signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, which did just the opposite, offering federal dollars to states that imposed harsher criminal penalties and built more prisons, which contributed to the explosion of incarceration rates during the past two decades.

How did we become a Gulag Nation of tens of thousands of laws and regulations and mandatory harsh sentences for non-violent crimes--a society imprisoned for administrative crimes that aren"t even tried in our judiciary system? I would suggest two primary sources:

1. The relentless expansion of central-state power over every aspect of life. As I describe in my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, the state has only one ontological imperative: to expand its power and control. There are no equivalent mechanisms for reducing the legal/regulatory burdens imposed by the state; various reforms aimed at reducing the quantity of laws and regulations have not even made a dent in the over-criminalization of America.

The second dynamic is the political reality that the easiest way for politicos to be seen as "doing something" is to pass more laws and regulations criminalizing an additional aspect of life. The state and its elites justify the state"s relentless expansion of power and control by claiming problems can only be solved by centralizing power further and increasing the number and severity of penalties.

Criminalization is the ultimate expansion of the state"s monopoly on coercive violence. As the state expands its power to imprison or punish its citizens for an ever-wider range of often petty infractions, increasingly via a bureaucratic administrative process that strips the citizens of due process, another pernicious dynamic emerges: the informal application and enforcement of formal laws and regulations.

In other words, the laws and regulations are enforced at the discretion of the state"s officials. This is the systemic source of driving while black: a defective tail-light gets an African-American driver pulled over, while drivers of other ethnic origin get a pass.

This is also the source of America"s systemic blind eye on white-collar crimes while the War on Drugs mandates harsh sentences with a cruel vengeance. When there are so many laws and regulations to choose from, government officials have immense discretion over which laws and regulations to enforce.

Prosecutors seeking to increase their body count will use harsh drug laws to force innocents to accept plea bargains, while federal prosecutors don"t even pursue white-collar corporate fraud on a vast scale.

The over-criminalization of America has undermined justice, the rule of law and the bedrock notion that everyone is equal under the law, i.e. legal egalitarianism.

The over-criminalization of America breeds corruption as the wealthy and powerful evade the crushing burden of over-regulation by either buying political favors in our pay-to-play "democracy" (money votes, money wins) or by hiring teams of attorneys, CPAs, etc. to seek loopholes or construct a courtroom defense.

Meanwhile, the peasantry are offered a harsh plea bargain.

The over-criminalization of America is one core reason why the status quo has failed and cannot be reformed. That is the title of one of my short works, Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, which explains why the ceaseless expansion of centralized power leads to failure and collapse.

The Inconvenient Truth Behind The Net Neutrality Movement

Via Disobedient Media

The control of private information on the internet has been a contentious for as long as the people have been online. It has long been the consensus that maintaining internet freedoms is essential for free expression, the exchange of ideas and the ability for proponents of democracy and human rights activists to mobilize and advocate for political, social, and economic reform. Currently, the debate about internet freedom is centered around the concept of net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites by offering different speeds of bandwidth to different service providers. While publications such as Forbes and The Heritage Foundation paint net neutrality as a principle which threatens internet freedoms in the long term and hurts consumers by reducing their ability to customize internet services offered to them, proponents argue that it ensures equal access to the internet. However, major supporters of net neutrality have created doubts about the concept due to their increasing support of censorship, violations of personal privacy and attacks against political opponents and journalists.

The most immediate issue with net neutrality is the fact that many of the groups supporting it are purportedly concerned with social issues which are totally unrelated. One such organization is the protest movement Color of Change. Color of Change"s website states that their mission is "design campaigns powerful enough to end practices that unfairly hold black people back." However, the group has increasingly begun to focus on advocating for net neutrality, a cause which does not appear to be related to their mission statement in any obvious manner. Color of Change claims that changes the FCC plans to make to net neutrality rules will "devastate black communities" without bothering to explain exactly how this might happen. In February 2015, the executive director of Color for Change Rashad Robinson published an opinion piece in The Hill where he claimed that securing the right to net neutrality victory would be "civil rights history in the making."

Despite their apparent support for the principle of net neutrality, Color for Change has primarily concerned itself with attacking journalists who report news with a conservative perspective, including Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Bill O"Reilly. On May 18th, 2017, USA News reported that Color of Change and other protest groups planned a protest and meeting with FCC officials ahead of it"s intended vote to repeal Obama era protections requiring that all internet traffic be offered equally. Rather than focus on defending "information equality," the protest seemed to center around attacking alternative media. Signs photographed at the event demanded censorship of the Drudge Report, Breitbart News and conservative journalists. Video footage of the event shows Color of Change speakers stating that O"Reilly"s firing from Fox News was a result of net neutrality advocacy. The FCC ultimately ruled 2-1 to start the process of eliminating net neutrality rules and begin classification of home and mobile internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

Pro-net neutrality protestors carry signs advocating censorship

The focus on censorship of the media at an event purporting to focus on "information equality" is no surprise given Color of Change"s financial supporters. Data published by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that in 2016, billionaire George Soros made two payments totaling $400,000 to the group. The Washington Examiner has stated that Soros and the Ford Foundation have donated over $196 million to various net neutrality advocacy groups. Soros has spent hundreds of millions supporting various anti-government movements, including the Women"s March, the People"s Climate March, the Tax Day protests and far left Berkeley protest group Refuse Fascism. The ACLU also began actively organizing and training protest movements just one month after Soros sank $35 million into the group.

Other big name proponents of net neutrality have themselves been implicated in improper censorship and violations of personal privacy. In April, The Verge reported that Google, Netflix and Facebook were among a number of companies leading a group known as The Internet Association in efforts to lobby for retaining protections of net neutrality. The involvement of these tech giants in pushing for net neutrality raises troubling questions about who truly benefits from regulations which support the concept.

Since the end of the 2016 US presidential elections, Google has increasingly become involved in censorship of so-called "fake news." In spring of 2017, Google News Lab used its CrossCheck project to fight “fake news” prior to the French presidential election in collaboration with journalists, newsrooms, and social media companies alike. What CrossCheck appeared to act a function that took the liberty of appointing various groups to collaboratively decide what is true or false in real-time. Google"s push to become involved in censorship came after George Soros acquired stakes in Netflix as well as Google"s holding company Alphabet.

Facebook has similarly faced criticism for engaging in censorship and instances of improper access to user"s personal data. In February, Disobedient Media discovered that Facebook was self-censoring links to a story by CNBC which discussed comments picked up on a hot mic during a conversation between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg where Merkel asked Zuckerberg to censor speech critical of immigrants and Zuckerberg agreed to do so. The censorship came after Zuckerberg edited a manifesto to remove an admission that he supported monitoring private channels of communication. In February 2017, Zuckerberg released a 5,700 word essay warning about “isolationist” threats to globalism, stating that Facebook was there to help counteract popular trends towards nationalism and pro-soveriegn state ideologies. The original draft of the essay was “revised” to remove a reference which had revealed that Facebook actively monitored private conversations of individuals accused of plotting terror attacks.

In March 2017, BBC News conducted an investigation exposing a child abuse ring operating on Facebook which resulted in a four year prison sentence for one of the offenders. In response to the BBC"s report, Facebook left 80% of photos depicting child abuse online, then reported the BBC journalists to the police before cancelling plans for an interview. Facebook subsequently apologized for their behavior, but The Times reported in April that the social media giant may face criminal prosecution relating to the images of child abuse as well as pro-jihadist content which was being shared on the website. A May 2017 report by Heat Street has also revealed that Facebook has been continually shutting down "ex-Muslim" and atheist groups using its social media services.

While the debate may continue for some years to come, the open support by large sponsors for federal regulation raises serious concerns about net neutrality. The deep financial involvement of George Soros, the focus of protest groups on targeting free speech and the colored history of corporate sponsors of the principle makes it clear that "information equality" is likely much darker than it appears on the surface.

Trump Obamacare Repeal Blew Up Bigly Because of a House Divided Against Itself

Trump’s really big supporters openly grieved that the explosion of his emphatically promised Obamacare replacement bodes poorly for all of Trump’s plans. Fox’s Sean Hannity and Lou Dobb’s regaled the Republican party for failing to take the reins and lead now that the party finally has the chance to prove it can do what it has promised. Hannity stated that numerous high authorities told him this marks the end of any Obamacare repeal for 2017.

This first attempt by Trump and his party to see if they can accomplish anything together was by everyone’s account (except Trump’s) a dismal failure. Even Paul Ryan, who drafted the plan that Trump endorsed, admitted the enormity of failure quite honestly. The least I can say for him (not being one who likes him in the slightest) is that he owned it.

Ryan picked up the argument leveled against Republicans by Democrats when they were running congress, which said that it is easy to be an opposition party and simply stand against everything, but quite a different matter to be creative and actually govern. Democrats long argued that Republicans really have no plan to replace Obamacare that could possibly succeed — that they were all talk — and Republicans just proved them right. Since Republicans kept Democrats completely out of the discussion, it’s fair to say Republicans failed entirely on their own.

Ryan failed embarrassingly, and I question whether his leadership will survive this failure, except for the fact that the faction most responsible for the failure (outside of Ryan himself) is the one that would likely seek his blood if Ryan had succeeded. Nevertheless, they cannot stand him and would probably join any other faction that now wants to bring him down.

Trump failed bigly, too, because the truth is that he swore over and over to his supporters that he would get a “great” replacement through congress as one of his first orders of business. Granted he did not say he would succeed right away, but only that he would make it his first order of business. It is, however, now questionable that he will ever get a replacement through, much less a great one. He has three more years to try again, but a total failure within your own party to get your first order of business done, especially when it is something the entire Republican party has said it will do over and over for years and when you are in your honeymoon period, is no small failure.

Ryan has manned up to that. The party needs to also. Trump blamed it on Democrats, but that actually is deplorable, because Trump knew every time he made the promise that he didn’t have a ghost of a chance at getting Democrat support, given how much he attacked them over the plan. How could he not know that unless he is delusional? The last group in the world that would help him repeal Obamacare would be Democrats. So, if the repeal’s failure is their fault, give that they were never even included in the discussion, the failure to realize the obvious — that they would never support him — was his own.

Republicans could learn from this and do better, but it remains to be seen whether they are able and willing to learn. That requires humility, which is always scarce in congress. In the meantime, the failure to deliver Trump’s big promise of “immediate Obamacare repeal” is a death knell to the Trump Rally, and the clock is ticking against all of Trump’s plans.

(It doesn’t guarantee that the stock market will immediately crash, though it easily could; but its rally days are over. My prediction last year was that the rally would end as soon as Trump and congress had to actually work together. That is when investors would be forced to grasp reality and see that nothing Trump has promised is anywhere near as likely to come to pass as they believe. That is when I expected they will start to let go of their Tumphoria. Candidate promises are easily made. Legislation is not, and congress has never been more divided. Neither has that congressional subset called Republicans.

A house divided against itself

Here is how it all came down.

The proposed American Health Care Act (AHCA) died because the House Republican Conference (the official name for the entire Republican caucus in the House of Representatives) is divided into factions that aligned in three groups.  When the center group — the largest group of Republicans who solidly backed Paul Ryan’s bill — tried to move further right to appease the most conservative group, it lost votes from the group that is furthest left (more centrist with respect to American politics overall). There are nowhere near enough votes in the center group of Republicans to beat Democratic opposition, and compromise toward one faction lost the other; so no House majority could be built.

It is hard to say exactly who was in each group because no vote was taken to put members on record, but this appears to be generally how things fell apart:

1) By far the largest group would have consisted of the house’s largest conservative faction (172 members), known as the Republican Study Committee, probably joined by members of the House Republican Conference who do not identify with any particular faction. I’m talking here about the group that solidly supported President Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan on the AHCA as originally drafted.

The Republican Study Committee — formed in 1973 to keep an eye on the party’s moderate leadership during the Nixon-Ford years — is the House’s oldest active faction. It has allied itself over the years with the National Rifle Association, the Heritage Foundation, Focus on the Family, the religious right, Concerned Women for America, the conservative magazine National Review.  One might now categorize it as representing the center of the House Republican Conference (though the truest middle consists people who don’t belong to any faction).

This caucus, as the House Republican Conference’s mainstay faction, has included such Republican luminaries as Vice President Dan Quayle, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and current Vice President Mike Pence. House Speaker John Boehner was not a member of the group.

2) The smallest, rewest, and most conservative faction of the House Republican Conference, called the “Freedom Caucus,” was established in 2015 to battle then Speaker John Boehner, particularly to fight his approval of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act). These members of congress can be seen as the present rabble rousers because this is the faction that was willing to shut down the government in the original fight against Obamacare. Naturally, this group remains set toward making sure Obamacare is completely repealed and is willing to shut down government again, including apparently the leader of the House and the President just to make sure Obamacare is fully repealed. Not compromising on abolishing Obamacare was more important to them than whether or not Trump succeeds by getting off to a strong start.

The Freedom Caucus is tough enough that it forced John Boehner to remove his butt from the speaker’s cushion, which led to his exiting congress altogether, so Paul Ryan knows full well they could accomplish that again. This battle-hardened caucus embraces the tea party folks, but it is not the Tea Party Caucus, which is now nearly inactive because the official Tea Party Caucus was largely rejected by citizens in the tea party movement (including members of congress, such as Marco Rubio, who were elected by those citizens). It was rejected because the tea party movement saw the Tea Party Caucus as a Republican attempt to hijack a grass-roots movement. By nature, those who identify themselves as part of the tea party movement do not want to see their movement institutionalized or co-opted by the establishment.

The Freedom Caucus currently has thirty-one members. The group that initially opposed the ACHA certainly included this faction and likely some of the Republicans’ more libertarian faction, formed by Representative Ron Paul, called the Liberty Caucus. These two factions overlap in membership. Michelle Bachman, for example, was a founder of the Tea Party Caucus (now largely subsumed by the Freedom Caucus) and a member of the Liberty Caucus.

3) A larger faction of the House Republican Conference consists of about fifty people, who are the left-most Republicans in the House of Representatives (meaning only that they are moderates since no one in the Republican party is a leftist). This group was established in 1994 as the “Tuesday Group” when Republicans took control of the House under the more conservative leadership of Newt Gingrich. Gingrich rallied Republicans around his Contract with America. The Tuesday Group formed to resist Gingrich’s more conservative positioning of the Republican party.

The actual battle went like this: Unquestionably, those aligned with the Freedom Caucus felt the original AHCA bill, as proposed by Paul Ryan, did not go far enough in repealing Obamacare. Therefore, the group of Republicans who were with Trump and Ryan modified the bill to strip out more of Obamacare by taking down some of its Medicaid provisions and other benefits in order go gain some of the more conservative votes. That resulted in those aligned with the Tuesday Group (the most moderate Republicans) feeling the bill now went further right than they could tolerate. As a result, the Republicans lost some moderate votes when they compromised to pick up more conservative votes, and they never gained all of the conservative votes. So, they could not find a majority that could agree on any bill, and they had already thumbed their noses at Democrats completely, so they certainly wouldn’t get any help there.

Why Trump faces big-league troubles in enacting any of his stimulus plans

As Lincoln said in quoting Jesus Christ, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” (Lincoln was talking about government. Jesus was talking about the devil. Beg me to describe the difference.)

One major accusation Democrats made against Republicans when Republicans ran an opposition government against Obama was that it is easy to simply be against everything. It is quite another job to govern — to have a clear vision, a good vision that will actually do something for America, and then to unite behind it. Anybody can oppose things without an idea in his or her head as to what will actually work to do some good.

Now that he’s been knocked around by his own party, Paul Ryan co-opted the argument as his own: (See his comments at the start and then at the 6:30 time maker and especially 8:12 marker.)

And this is exactly why Trump is going to have a hard time getting his legislation passed. Republicans could somewhat unite in opposing anything Democrats came up with because even enemies are known to unite around a common foe. However, the formation of the Freedom Caucus and its overthrow of John Boehner proves even that kind of unity is never complete and hard to achieve. Coming up with great ideas, which Trump entrusted to Ryan, and then uniting around something you can support, though not fully, is harder still.

As the new opposition government, Democrats are solidly united against Trump, and the Republican party is too divided to create a large enough majority to overcome the Democrats. It has become increasingly divided since the tea-party movement began, so that will not easily change. It could change now that all Republicans should be able to see that, if they don’t unite around something, they will get nothing at all; but will it?

The Freedom Caucus has not exactly shown itself to be a group that is amendable to softening its positions toward the party’s center, and the Tuesday Group, which might soften toward the party’s center, will never go as far right on anything as the Freedom Caucus demands. That said, other issues may be less polarizing than Obamacare, given that the Freedom Caucus largely formed around the intention of defeating Obamacare during the Boehner years.

It took only took a matter of days for plan number one to fall embarrassingly flat on its face. That’s a bitter reality for both Trump and Ryan because promises to repeal and replace Obamacare or just abolish it entirely were the biggest and most frequent pledges heard from all Republicans. So, if they can’t get together on that …

Trump also blinked on his get-tough negotiations with his own party. He said he was going to force a vote so that Republicans who voted against this repeal and replacement of parts of Obamacare would be held accountable on election day. He reneged and backed Ryan’s desire to simply pull the vote so that no one is held accountable and no one can see by what margin it actually failed. (Perhaps the failure was bigger than we know.)

As a result, no one had to go on record as being the reason hope of an Obamacare repeal in 2017 failed. As Ryan announced in the video above, Obamacare now stands as the law of the land for the foreseeable future because Republicans could not find any plan around which they could form a congressional majority. (In other words, he will not approve another go at it in this session of congress because the votes are not there, nor is the hope of compromise; and any future party leader is going to be hesitant to take this battle on, seeing how Ryan got clobbered.)

Due to a small faction demanding everything, no Republican got anything they could take back to their voters. Even strong supporters of President Trump like Lou Hobbs and Sean Hannity see this as a massive failure of the Republican House to accomplish anything:

As Hannity said to all congressional Republicans in the video above just before the bill’s final hour,

It’s time for you to give the American people a bill that you have now promised them for almost eight years. I would argue tonight, Failure is not an option for the president of the United States and his first piece of legislation. If you don’t succeed, you will have nobody to blame but yourselves…. And here’s my message to you people in congress: For the love of God, after eight years, can you please do your job? Can you please find a way to work together? Can you please find a way to serve your country, not yourselves, not your re-election?

They just couldn’t do it. They could not succeed even in the slightest compromise even with the promise that this was only phase one and more of their wishes would come later. Republicans now have all the reins of power, and they still accomplished nothing!

What it all means for the Trump Rally

This total fiasco — which was huge, really huge — demonstrates why I’ve said all along that Trump’s road to getting his plans enacted through congress, even with Republicans in control of both houses, is far from being the likelihood that has been priced into the stock market by the Trump Rally.

While the AHCA defeat is not the end of the game for Trump’s plans, it shows exactly why I’ve said the Trump Rally is a clear case of irrational exuberance on the scale that precedes a major crash (said when writing about the stock market’s response to Trump’s stimulus plans back in December):

Is the stock market irrational in its exuberance for shifting so much just because of Trump’s pledges, which are far, far from becoming reality? I think so. I haven’t even talked about Democrat resistance to Trump’s plans, and he’s already got resistance from the Republican leader of the senate…. That doesn’t mean the market won’t keep going up. Who knows what the maximum height or duration of irrational exuberance is (because who knows how crazy people can get); but I am certain of this much: the higher the stock market rockets upward on such irrationality, the harder it falls into the chasm of ever-growing debt from which it has been constructed…. There is nothing you’re going to do that can stop the markets (in stocks and bonds) from having their hangover when the bubbly stuff is over and irrational exuberance suddenly looks like delirium. Our greatest economic crashes have always happened when least expected. (“Irrational Exuberance in US Stock Market Grasps at 20K for Dow“)

This past week proves the stock market was irrationally premature in rising to Trump’s stimulus talk. Trump has no possibility of any support from Democrats, who hate his guts on just about everything he stands for, and we have now seen proof that he has no majority support he can count on in his own party.

This is one major reason I have refused to join those who believe things will and are now turning around economically because of Trump’s election, even though it has probably cost me readers (given that my audience is largely anti-establishment). For Trump’s plans to become reality, he has to build consensus around a plan that can save the economy, and he is far from either consensus or a plan that can save the economy from its fundamental flaws. The best his plan would do — if he could get it enacted — is pump it higher for a little longer. You can accomplish a little bit in the US by executive decree, but not much. Maybe Republicans will now join around a tax plan, but time is not on their side.

So, my prediction remains that the economy, including the stock market, goes down this year for the numerous reasons I’ve given beyond the solitary reason that has just played out above. He hasn’t even started squaring off with the Democrat’s opposition. This one went down just from the opposition within his own party!

It’s time to wake up and smell the ammonia!

United States Economic Freedom Tumbles To Historic Low

Submitted by Joseph Jankowski via PlanetFreeWill.com,

After eight years of the regulation-happy Obama administration, the United States has undergone a huge slide into the 17th most economically free country in the world, according to the Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index of Economic Freedom.

Under president Obama, the federal government issued over 600 major regulations, costing the U.S. economy hundreds of millions of dollars. Those regulations were placed on top of the 426 regulations introduced under eight years of George W. Bush.

Although Obama left the Oval Office confident in his legacy as a positive attribute to the U.S. economy, the proof which lies in the pudding couldn’t be anymore contradicting.

For the 9th time in past ten years, the United States has become less economically free.

According to the Heritage Foundation’s 2017 index, the U.S. ranks 17th out of 180 rated economies, trailing behind economies such as Switzerland (4th), Australia (5th), Chile (10th), and the United Kingdom (12th).

The “land of the free” was placed into the “mostly free” category, the second-tier economic freedom status into which it dropped in 2010.

In 2016, the U.S. ranked 11th in economic freedom.

For over two decades the index has measured a nation’s commitment to limited government and free enterprise on a scale of 0 to 100 by evaluating four critical policy pillars, including rule of law and regulatory efficiency.

Anthony Kim of the Daily Signal writes of the Unites States’ new historic low in the index:

A substantial expansion in the size and scope of government under the Obama administration—including through new and costly regulations in areas like finance, health care, and the environment—has hit wide swaths of the economy, affecting almost every American in some way and reducing opportunities for nongovernmental production and investment.

The growth of government has been accompanied by increasing cronyism that has undermined the rule of law and perceptions of fairness.

Our nation’s fiscal health has been grossly dented as well. The national debt has nearly doubled since 2009, growing from $10.6 trillion to around $20 trillion. In dollar terms, this is the largest increase in the national debt in U.S. history.

In practice, all of these negative developments that undercut America’s economic freedom have amounted to a gradual slide toward a more heavily bureaucratic state and an increasingly politicized economy over the past eight years.

Today, the imperative to restore America’s economic freedom and thereby revitalize vibrant entrepreneurial growth is stronger than ever. Americans deserve better, and they can do better.

It should also be mentioned that the federal government just collected a record number of taxes in the first quarter of the new fiscal year.

As PFW News reported at the start of the week:

According to the Monthly Treasury Statement released Monday, the U.S. Treasury collected a record of approximately $1,084,840,000,000 in tax revenues in the first four months of fiscal 2017 (Oct. 1, 2016 through Jan. 31, 2017).

In constant 2016 dollars, that is up $5,616,000,000 compared to the amount of taxes collected in the first four months of fiscal 2016.

The amount of taxes collected so far this fiscal year is equaled to about $7,133 per worker.

It is clear that the U.S. is an entirely over taxed and over regulate country. It is being suffocated by an enormous government which has become a black hole of debt and must take more and more from its population in order to keep the bubble full of air.

Other freedom indexes have also shown that the U.S. is falling in more than just economic liberty.

In 2016, the Human Freedom Index by the CATO and Fraser Institutes, which measures nations based on their level of personal, civil, and economic freedom, ranked the U.S. 23rd out of 159 countries.

CRA: The "Regulatory Game Changer" That Could Wipe Out 8 Years Of Obama Regs In An Hour

After a pompous, liberal agenda was crammed down the throats of the American people during his first two years in office, President Obama suffered staggering losses in Congress for the next six years that cost Democrats control of both houses.  But, heavy Democrat losses, courtesy of an electorate that vehemently rejected a far-left agenda, didn"t stop Obama from continuing to push through countless new rules and regulations from the White House all while pushing his authority to the brink of every Constitutional boundary known to man. 

Of course, the problem with "legislating from the White House" is that all those rules and regulations can be undone by the next administration.  And, as Kimberley Strassel points out in a Wall Street Journal Opinion piece today, a little know tool within the Congressional Review Act could allow Republicans to wipe out 8 full years of Obama"s liberal agenda, with a simple majority vote, all while preventing similar rules from every being recreated by future administrations.

Todd Gaziano on Wednesday stepped into a meeting of free-market attorneys, think tankers and Republican congressional staff to unveil a big idea. By the time he stepped out, he had reset Washington’s regulatory battle lines.

These days Mr. Gaziano is a senior fellow in constitutional law at the Pacific Legal Foundation. But in 1996 he was counsel to then-Republican Rep. David McIntosh. He was intimately involved in drafting and passing a bill Mr. McIntosh sponsored: the Congressional Review Act. No one knows the law better.

Everyone right now is talking about the CRA, which gives Congress the ability, with simple majorities, to overrule regulations from the executive branch. Republicans are eager to use the law, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy this week unveiled the first five Obama rules that his chamber intends to nix.

So, here"s how it works:

But what Mr. Gaziano told Republicans on Wednesday was that the CRA grants them far greater powers, including the extraordinary ability to overrule regulations even back to the start of the Obama administration. The CRA also would allow the GOP to dismantle these regulations quickly, and to ensure those rules can’t come back, even under a future Democratic president. No kidding.

Here’s how it works: It turns out that the first line of the CRA requires any federal agency promulgating a rule to submit a “report” on it to the House and Senate. The 60-day clock starts either when the rule is published or when Congress receives the report—whichever comes later.

“There was always intended to be consequences if agencies didn’t deliver these reports,” Mr. Gaziano tells me. “And while some Obama agencies may have been better at sending reports, others, through incompetence or spite, likely didn’t.” Bottom line: There are rules for which there are no reports. And if the Trump administration were now to submit those reports—for rules implemented long ago—Congress would be free to vote the regulations down.

But, it gets even better:

There’s more. It turns out the CRA has a expansive definition of what counts as a “rule”—and it isn’t limited to those published in the Federal Register. The CRA also applies to “guidance” that agencies issue. Think the Obama administration’s controversial guidance on transgender bathrooms in schools or on Title IX and campus sexual assault. It is highly unlikely agencies submitted reports to lawmakers on these actions.

“If they haven’t reported it to Congress, it can now be challenged,” says Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Larkin, also at Wednesday’s meeting, told me challenges could be leveled against any rule or guidance back to 1996, when the CRA was passed.

The best part? Once Congress overrides a rule, agencies cannot reissue it in “substantially the same form” unless specifically authorized by future legislation. The CRA can keep bad regs and guidance off the books even in future Democratic administrations—a far safer approach than if the Mr. Trump simply rescinded them.

As Strassel points out: "The entire point of the CRA was to help legislators rein in administrations that ignored statutes and the will of Congress. Few White House occupants ever showed more contempt for the law and lawmakers than Mr. Obama. Republicans if anything should take pride in using a duly passed statue to dispose of his wayward regulatory regime. It’d be a fitting and just end to Mr. Obama’s abuse of authority—and one of the better investments of time this Congress could ever make."

Why Obamacare's "20 Million" Number Is Fake

Submitted by Genevieve Wood via DailySignal.com,

Liberals are notorious for caring about “groups” of people, but when it gets down to individual persons, not so much. You’re about to see this play out in spades as Democrats cry crocodile tears over the coming repeal of Obamacare.

You hear it over and over again: “This will be catastrophic for the 20 million people who were previously uninsured but now have coverage! You can’t take away their health care!”

First of all, no one is talking about doing that. Any repeal legislation will have a transition period for those who got coverage through Obamacare to move to new plans. And second, they will have more choices and better options. Win. Win.

But liberals would rather focus on quantity, how many millions we’ve given something to, versus quality, what does that “gift” mean for individual people.

The Obama administration claims 20 million more Americans today have health care due to Obamacare. The reality is that when you look at the actual net gains over the past two years since the program was fully implemented, the number is 14 million, and of that, 11.8 million (84 percent) were people given the “gift” of Medicaid.

And new research shows that even fewer people will be left without insurance after the repeal of Obamacare. Numbers are still being crunched, but between statistics released by the Congressional Budget Office and one of the infamous architects of Obamacare, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jonathan Gruber, it’s estimated that anywhere from 2 to 7 million people now on Medicaid would have qualified for the program even without Obamacare.

That further discredits the administration’s claim of 20 million more Americans having health insurance because of Obamacare.

Multiple studies have also shown that even those who are uninsured often have better outcomes than those with Medicaid. A University of Virginia study found that for eight different surgical procedures, Medicaid patients were more likely to die than privately insured or uninsured patients. They were also more likely to suffer complications.

And it is important to note that this study focused on procedures done from 2003-2007, prior to the geniuses in Washington deciding it was a good idea to put even more people on the already overburdened Medicaid system.

Additionally, despite what proponents of the law promised, there is little evidence to show that the use of emergency rooms, which have a higher level of medical errors, has decreased due to Obamacare.

Then there is this reality: While Obamacare has handed out millions of new Medicaid cards, that does not mean the recipients now have quality health care. In fact, it doesn’t ensure they have health care at all. That’s because increasing numbers of doctors aren’t accepting Medicaid.

As a Louisiana woman told The New York Times, “My Medicaid card is useless for me right now. It’s a useless piece of plastic. I can’t find an orthopedic surgeon or a pain management doctor who will accept Medicaid.”

Keep that in mind every time liberal Democratic senators pull out the Kleenex boxes bemoaning the fact Republicans are the ones trying to take people’s health care away.

Speaking of which, a much underreported fact of Obamacare is how many truly needy and disabled Americans are NOT getting the services they need because of the expansion of Medicaid for able-bodied adults (aka healthy) of prime working age, 19-54.

So while the left talks about all the new people Obamacare is helping, it neglects to mention that over half a million disabled people, from those with developmental disabilities to traumatic brain injuries, are on waiting lists for care.

And many of them are on waiting lists because Obamacare gives states more money to enroll able-bodied adults than it does to take care of disabled children and adults who qualified for Medicaid prior to Obamacare.

If you think that doesn’t have a real-world perverse impact, note this. Since Arkansas expanded its Medicaid program under Obamacare, it’s rolls have grown by 25 percent. During that same time, 79 people on the Medicaid waiting list who suffered from developmental disabilities have died. I would encourage you to read my former Heritage Foundation colleague Chris Jacob’s full piece on this.

Finally, it’s not just those enrolled in Medicaid that are finding fewer health care provider options. For people who now have health plans through the Obamacare exchanges, new Heritage Foundation research shows that this year, in 70 percent of counties across the country, those consumers will have only one or two insurers to choose from.

Add to that the millions of people who lost the doctors and health plans they liked and are now paying higher premiums for less coverage, and you can see that quality health care and anything resembling “choice” has quickly disappeared for an increasing number of Americans due to Obamacare.

So the next time a defender of Obamacare tries to take the moral high ground about the millions of people the law has helped, ask them to define what “help” looks like.