For the latest evidence of the price the American people have paid for a feckless Republican Congress, look no further than the impunity with which the Obama administration is acting in a direct rebuke to the American people on one of the core national security concerns of our time.

Or was one of the central themes of the presidential election that Barack Obama’s party just lost not the need to assert American sovereignty and our national interest first by at least pausing immigration from jihadist hotspots?

Alas, it is only fitting that the swan song of this administration reads as follows: “Bring us your tired, your poor, your unvetted refugees.”

The news to which I am referring comes from a Fox report that the U.S. State Department has classified details on a deal the Obama administration cut with Australia resulting in the resettlement of approximately 2,500 refugees to the U.S. from countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other Islamic supremacist-majority nations — refugees rejected by the Australians themselves.

There is the usual outrage around this deal, including the fact that the president has never articulated why it is in America’s national interest to import refugees from Islamic supremacist nations at a time when Islamic supremacists tell us they wish to infiltrate by embedding among such peoples. And what about the fact that our FBI director said we were incapable of vetting such refugees? Likewise, the Obama administration has remained mum rather than demanding that other Islamic nations take responsibility for absorbing such refugees given similarity in culture, the relative logistical ease with which such actions could be taken, financial wherewithal. Fundamentally, the Obama administration continues to show compassion for non-Americans over and above those who elected him.

A theme I raised in a recent piece in opposition to the choice of Senate Foreign Relations Cmte Chair Bob Corker, R-Tenn. (F, 45%) for secretary of state in President-elect Trump’s administration recurs in this story well, further reflecting the damage Sen. Corker has wrought and why he ought not to reach Foggy Bottom.

In a letter on the matter addressed to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. (D, 66%) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. (D, 64%) wrote “This situation is concerning for many reasons,” continuing “your departments negotiated an international agreement regarding refugees without consulting or notifying Congress.”

The very Senate treaty ratification power that readers will recall Sen. Corker turned on its head in the Iran Deal, essentially conceding the Senate’s check on the president’s seminal disastrous piece of foreign policy, is what the president relied on to negotiate this secret agreement. This follows the president’s neglect of the senate with respect to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

What fear should a president have when Congress fails to adequately use its oversight powers, powers of the purse, advice and consent and impeachment powers in the face of a rampantly lawless agenda?

A President Donald Trump is going to have to clean up President Obama’s numerous messes, and at every turn face a Democratic minority that unlike Republicans in the Obama years will have no fear of using every parliamentary and political trick and maneuver to thwart policy they do not like and corrupt that which they cannot stop.

But he is also going to have to deal with a Republican Congress that has shown itself to be lacking in spine for the last eight years.

The reassertion of Congressional power during the Trump years will certainly be a welcome thing.

Let us hope however that it is not so one-sided as to allow President Obama’s most disastrous actions to substantially survive. (For more from the author of “From Refugees to the Iran Deal: Will Congress Get Its Act Together Under President Trump?” please click HERE)

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Since as a winning candidate Donald Trump made a powerful symbol of the impending 1,000 lost jobs at Carrier Air Conditioning, it was inevitable that he would intervene in that business. It would have been politically foolish not to — and as the many savvy professionals whom he crushed in 2016 now should realize, Trump is nobody’s fool. So we learned this week that he has indeed used the many levers at an incoming president’s disposal to strong-arm/sweet-talk the company into saving those jobs for Americans, and denying them to Mexicans.

My first book was on the merits of the free market and free trade, but when I watched the footage of Carrier workers learning last year that their jobs were on the chopping block, I got teary-eyed myself and found my heart saying (despite my head) that Trump should indeed violate economic logic and engage in big government meddling, to “do something” for those workers — as Ronald Reagan once intervened against his principles to use a tariff to “save” Harley-Davidson from Japanese competitors.

Protectionism: Patriotic But Self-Defeating

There’s a strong rational case against protectionism — especially of the kind Trump engaged in here. The most benign form of protectionism, as free market economist Wilhelm Röpke explained, is a simple tariff. A small or medium tariff indeed distorts the market and imposes some inefficiency, but not necessarily more than any other form of tax. If imposed with advance notice and kept at predictable levels, businessmen and investors can simply figure it in to the cost of doing business — as they currently do the cost of environmental regulations.

What Trump did with Carrier is an order of magnitude worse: He singled out a particular company, and got the federal government down into the nuts and bolts of how it does business, threatening its corporate parent with lost federal contracts unless it made a specific decision — namely, avoid opening a factory in Mexico, and keep one open in the U.S. That is more than “leveling the playing field” against supposedly unfair foreign competition. It is picking winners and losers, like a umpire who has been bribed.

If the president gets in the business of directly trying to decide how every major manufacturing company in America makes such decisions, he is abandoning the free market altogether. Like Franklin Roosevelt, he is making himself effectively a board member of each of those companies. That starts a vicious cycle. Soon companies catch on that by threatening to move their factories abroad, they can provoke a presidential reaction — that pretty soon, the feds will move in and start offering tax breaks and other incentives, maybe extra federal contracts if they stay on American soil. Think of the squalid hog-slopping that happens when cities bid for the Olympics, or the bidding wars provoked by movie producers hungry for subsidies, and sports franchises who want new stadiums at taxpayer expense.

Making America Like the Post Office or Amtrak

All of this political meddling is profoundly wasteful, as the rotting hulks of Olympic complexes (and massive resulting deficits) testify all around the world. Such crony capitalism tends to benefit not productive and innovative companies, but those which are skilled at lobbying and greasing politicians’ palms. The more any business relies on federal help, the closer it becomes not to Southwest Airlines or Fedex, but to Amtrak and the Post Office. Is that really the way to make our companies profitable and high-paying? One of the most compelling reasons why the British voted for Brexit was to escape the micromanagement of the economy imposed by the wannabe federal government of the European Union.

Add up all those objections to protectionism, and then factor in how it raises the prices of ordinary goods for ordinary consumers, and you see why conservatives generally oppose it.

And yet, we need to look out for hard-pressed ordinary workers — the kind of people whose businesses don’t get bailed out by the U.S. federal government, as enormous Wall Street banks were after their reckless run of irresponsible investments in shaky mortgages, which crashed in 2008. Steve Bannon is right to observe that this bailout — conducted almost at gunpoint, under the threat of a “Great Depression” — was a corrupt transfer of wealth from the little guy to the “1 percenters,” which violated every tenet of free market economics and simple justice.

It is healthy that we feel some solidarity with blue collar workers simply because they’re fellow Americans — whose ancestors fought in our wars, and who still disproportionately enlist in our country’s armed services. (Long gone are the days when young men from elite schools routinely signed up for at least four years — though some Southerners still do.) The impulse to choose to “buy American” stems from the virtue of patriotism.

A Real Pro-Worker Agenda

We can be patriotic but smart. We can look out for U.S. workers without turning them into postal workers. (My dad was a mailman; as he told it, when two windows are open in a post office with a long line waiting, that means five workers sit idle, flipping through copies of Playboy they’ve stolen from the mail.) Here is a list of measures which a President Trump could take instead of Putin-style palm-greasing and browbeating to interfere with companies’ rational economic decisions. These steps would be populist in the positive sense, since they benefit the people.

Secure our country’s borders and workplaces by building a wall and making E-Verify mandatory for every business with more than five workers. Americans shouldn’t have to compete with unregulated, exploited laborers who can be threatened with deportation by their employers.

Drastically cut low-skill legal immigration, and the resettlement of refugees from distant countries. Some jobs are simply doomed to migrate overseas. But there’s no reason to fill the entry-level and low-skill jobs that can’t be outsourced with recent arrivals from other countries. Fixing immigration by itself would reduce most of the pressure on less-skilled American workers’ wages.

Cut our corporate tax rates, which are currently among the highest in the world. Stop granting tax breaks to individual companies (like Carrier) and grant them to … every company doing business in the U.S.

Greatly increase the per-child tax deduction for families, who are struggling under the regressive Social Security tax.

Promote school choice not by creating vouchers, which would give federal bureaucrats control over even private, Christian schools. Instead, create large and refundable tax credits which parents could use for tuition at any school — including home schools.

In one “grand bargain” piece of legislation, dismantle the labyrinth of regulations imposed after 2008 on banks to prevent them from failing, and use anti-trust laws to break up enormous banks that can threaten the whole economy with their reckless investments. Any bank that’s “too big to fail” is too big to exist — and the proliferation of such banks offers a perfect excuse for massive government meddling in that sector of the economy.

Reverse Richard Nixon’s massive blunder, and as George Gilder recommends, recouple U.S. currency to the price of gold. America’s post-war boom took place on a modified gold standard, and 1970s stagflation resulted when we abandoned it. Some link to an external commodity in limited supply in the real world would stop the Federal Reserve from massively inflating the money supply every time an incumbent president wanted to win an election — and sparking a mindless “boom” of wasteful investments in pointless dotcom startups and dodgy real estate boondoggles.

Each of these ideas is Constitutional, populist and economically sound. A Trump administration could stick up for blue-collar workers and middle-class families without descending intp cronyism and corporatism. It just takes imagination and political courage. (For more from the author of “What Donald Trump Could Really Do for America’s Working Class” please click HERE)

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President-elect Donald Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter” pledges that “for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.”

This should be celebrated by the majority of Americans who think the federal government does too much.

At the outset of this regulatory unwinding, one potential priority stands out above the others. The Trump administration should review the 300,000 or more federal regulations that carry criminal penalties with the goal of amending them to carry only noncriminal sanctions—or otherwise, repeal them altogether.

Over a century ago, the Supreme Court decided that Congress may set a criminal penalty “for violations of regulations to be made by an executive officer.” (United States v. Grimaud (1911)). Since then, writes former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III, the “Congress has delegated to a host of federal agencies the power to define by regulation the elements of a broad range of different criminal laws.”

Today, these regulations number over 300,000. They are published in the bowels of the federal register—the place where few people outside of law firms and major corporations look to find laws—and are often drafted in ambiguous and often hyper-technical language that can’t be understood.

One might assume that if a regulation is serious enough for violators to be subject to criminal prosecution, it would be designed to prohibit conduct that is seriously harmful and morally condemnable. But this is often not the case.

For example, no one worries when they leave their house at night that a dog might bark at a squirrel. Most people don’t even pretend that they could prevent all dogs from barking. Yet it is a federal crime to allow a pet to make a noise that scares wildlife within a national park.

Nobody fears a local ice cream store might put a few too many drops of wine into a wine sorbet for sale. But that is also a federal crime punishable by up to one year in jail and fines of up to $1,000.

Consider John Sturgeon’s story as told by Heritage Foundation scholar Paul Larkin:

For more than 15 years, John Sturgeon used a hovercraft to reach moose-hunting grounds in Alaska without any incident or objection. Then, one day in 2007, two National Park Service rangers told Sturgeon that he was on federal property and hovercraft were illegal.

What followed this was almost a decade of costly litigation that concerned “federal criminal regulations no one knows (riding a hovercraft is prohibited) in places where no one lives (Alaskan backcountry).”

With little to no input from or accountability to voters, bureaucrats have run amok with the power to create new crimes.

One account on the Twitter social media platform titled “A Crime a Day” features plenty more federal criminal regulations that deserve scrutiny from any administration that is intent on reducing the size, scope, and power of the administrative state. These include:

Making it a crime to sell mixed nuts if the nuts pictured on the label aren’t in decreasing weight order (21 USC §333 & 21 CFR §164.110(f)).

Making it a federal crime to let small cigars leave the cigar factory unless they’re labeled “small” or “little” (26 USC §5762 & 27 CFR §41.73).

Making it a crime for amateur radio operators to sell amateur radio equipment, and using amateur radio too often (47 USC §502 & 47 CFR §97.113).

Making it a federal crime for the operator of a wharf to let his longshoremen use common drinking cups (33 USC §941(f) & 29 CFR §1918.95(b)(3)).

As these provisions convey, there are key differences between regulations and criminal statutes that must not be overlooked.

John Malcolm, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, has previously written:

Criminal laws are meant to enforce a commonly accepted moral code backed by the full force and authority of the government. Regulations, on the other hand, are meant to establish rules of the road in a variety of areas designed to curb excesses and to address consequences in a complex, rapidly evolving, highly industrialized society, with penalties attached for violations of those rules.

Allowing bureaucrats to enforce policy agendas with criminal penalties, and thus to create crimes that neither Congress nor the public likely ever imagined or intended, can have serious consequences. Malcolm continues:

While people often debate whether our society is overregulated, regardless of one’s views on that subject, it is important to recognize that there is a significant difference between regulations that carry civil or administrative penalties for violations and regulations that carry criminal penalties for violations. Individuals caught up in the latter may find themselves deprived of their liberty and stripped of their right to vote, to sit on a jury, and to possess a firearm, among other penalties that simply do not apply when someone violates a regulation that carries only civil or administrative penalties.

Experience shows that swift and certain civil sanctions are enough for agencies to deter and punish misconduct. In fact, even these are sometimes too severe.

Consider the example of Andy Johnson, a Wyoming welder. The Environmental Protection Agency fined him $16 million—$37,500 a day—for constructing a stock pond on his private 8-acre farm. Johnson described these penalties as “very threatening.”

Heritage scholars James Gattuso and Diane Katz report that the Obama administration “is responsible for an unparalleled expansion of the regulatory state, with the imposition of 229 major regulations since 2009 at a cost of $108 billion annually.”

Many regulations from previous administrations can and should be reviewed by a new administration seeking meaningful deregulation.

Yet “many of the worst effects” of overregulation, write Gattuso and Katz, such as “the loss of freedom and opportunity,” are greatest where violating an arcane regulation can be met with jail time, criminal fines, and all of the consequences that come with criminal prosecution and conviction.

So long as the Trump administration is looking for regulations to axe, officials in the Justice Department, federal agencies, and Congress should work together to strike as many regulatory crimes as possible. (For more from the author of “The Trump Administration Should Crack Down on Silly Rules That Carry Criminal Penalties” please click HERE)

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President-elect Donald Trump and his soon-to-be-selected secretary of homeland security will have a full plate when they take over in January.

Indeed, there are so many areas for reform and improvement that any efforts to fix the Department of Homeland Security could easily get bogged down.

Luckily, The Heritage Foundation has identified four main priorities that the next administration should focus on.

1. DHS Management

DHS management needs to be fixed. Its organizational cohesiveness and central leadership continue to present significant challenges that require more work than the Obama administration’s Unity of Effort initiative.

Additionally, the DHS’ office policy should be strengthened to create intra-agency policy, resolve agency disputes, and, above all, drive structural change so that DHS components can work more efficiently as a cohesive unit.

Luckily, the newly released National Defense Authorization Act conference report takes a step in this direction by upgrading the head of the DHS office of policy from assistant secretary to under secretary.

2. Immigration Laws

Current immigration laws must be enforced. In fiscal year 2015, DHS data show that only 462,463 removals and returns occurred—the lowest number since 1971. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported merely 63,000 criminal illegal immigrants from the U.S. compared to 150,000 in 2015.

President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration enforcement must be rescinded, and the 287(g) program, which trains and deputizes state and local police to help enforce immigration laws, needs to be strengthened.

Rapid-removal authority under Section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act should be expanded to discourage surges of illegal immigration. Additional prosecutors, judges, and agents should be requested so that more cases can be heard and illegal immigrants deported.

The U.S. also needs to make sure these criminal illegal immigrants appear at their designated court hearings by expanding effective “alternatives to detention,” such as GPS tracking anklets.

3. Cybersecurity

DHS has a much larger role in domestic cybersecurity due to the passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. The primary purpose of that bill was to make information sharing between private and public sectors more efficient.

This sharing will need to be monitored and improved, together with DHS’ intrusion detection and prevention system known as Einstein.

DHS will also need to play a role in helping the Trump administration respond to state-sponsored and directed cyberattacks. The U.S. should deploy all the tools at its disposal, including diplomatic, legal, visa, financial, and others, to retaliate.

4. Proper, Thorough Vetting

There is growing concern over how individuals, whether they are refugees, permanent immigrants, or visitors, are vetted before entering the U.S.

The refugee process takes on average 12-18 months to complete, with background checks being requested through various department databases, including the State Department, DHS, FBI, and National Counterterrorism Center databases.

Interviews are conducted that ask security and country-specific questions. In the case of Syrian refugees, the Syrian Enhanced Review has already started applying additional scrutiny to cases.

Congress needs detailed information from the administration on the nature of the risks incurred in the vetting process, and how it plans to mitigate those risks. Congress and the administration must also work together to begin the much-needed repair of America’s intelligence capabilities.

For regular immigrants and visitors, there is the traditional visa process, which involves a less lengthy but similar vetting process. San Bernardino attacker Tashfeen Malik managed to slip through this system, proving that there is always room for improvement.

Visitors from many countries are able to use the Visa Waiver Program, which does not require an in-person interview in order for the applicant to travel to the U.S.

Instead, VWP countries provide the U.S. with important intelligence on a variety of things, including known and suspected terrorists, serious criminals, and lost and stolen passports, as well as improving their airport security. VWP is a unique tool that is extremely valuable for U.S. security and should be strengthened and expanded.

In order to keep our homeland secure, the next homeland security secretary should prioritize these four issues. These reforms are essential to a cohesive, effective, and efficient Department of Homeland Security that can keep the U.S. safe. (For more from the author of “Top 4 Homeland Security Issues for the Trump Administration” please click HERE)

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