Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Current Events - June 19, 2013


Guess Who's Getting $70 Million in Bonuses?

Despite being under heavy scrutiny from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill and all over the country for inappropriately targeting conservative groups, IRS employees are about to receive $70 million in bonuses.
The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year, according to a GOP senator.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says his office has learned that the IRS is executing an agreement with the employees' union on Wednesday to pay the bonuses. Grassley says the bonuses should be canceled under an April directive from the White House budget office.

The directive was written by Danny Werfel, a former budget official who has since been appointed acting IRS commissioner.
"The IRS always claims to be short on resources," Grassley said. "But it appears to have $70 million for union bonuses. And it appears to be making an extra effort to give the bonuses despite opportunities to renegotiate with the union and federal instruction to cease discretionary bonuses during sequestration."
And how is this even possible? Through unions and government bureaucracy.
Office of Management and Budget "guidance directs that agencies should not pay discretionary monetary awards at this time, unless legally required," IRS spokeswoman Michelle Eldridge said in a statement. "IRS is under a legal obligation to comply with its collective bargaining agreement, which specifies the terms by which awards are paid to bargaining-unit employees."
Eldridge, however, would not say whether the IRS believes it is contractually obligated to pay the bonuses.

"In accordance with OMB guidance, the IRS is actively engaged with NTEU on these matters in recognition of our current budgetary constraints," Eldridge said.

The National Treasury Employees Union did not respond to requests for comment.
This news comes just as the quarterly taxes of Americans become due. As a reminder, Lois Lerner, the woman in charge of tax exempt groups during the time of the blatant Tea Party targeting, is still pulling a six figure paycheck while being put on "leave" just as summer begins. Must be nice! Not to mention during the time targeting occurred, Lerner received $42,000 in bonuses and raked in $740,000 in taxpayer funded salary between 2009 and 2012.

Keep working America, the IRS is depending on you. 


http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/06/19/guess-whos-getting-70-million-in-bonuses-n1622633

10 reasons the farm bill makes no sense

Congress is gearing up to pass a major farm bill for the first time since 2008, and this year’s bill threatens to be much larger than the last one.

Farm subsidies make political sense for many members of Congress. But they make no practical sense because they damage the economy, hurt the environment, and are grossly unfair.

So in the hopes that the practical will prevail over the political, here are 10 reasons why both the House and Senate should go back to the drawing board with their legislation:

1.) The farm bill is far too costly. George W. Bush vetoed the 2008 farm bill because it “would needlessly expand the size and scope of government.” Unfortunately, Congress overrode his veto and enacted that bill, costing $640 billion over 10 years. Today, the House is considering a farm bill that would cost taxpayers $940 billion over 10 years — 47 percent more than the one that even big-spending President Bush couldn’t stomach.

2.) Food stamp costs have exploded. About four-fifths of the cost of the farm bill is for food stamps. The House bill would trim food stamps by about $2 billion a year — but the costs of food stamps have quadrupled over the last decade from about $20 billion to $80 billion a year. The cut in the House bill is far too tiny after such a huge expansion.

3.) Farm subsidies are reverse Robin Hood. Farm subsidies transfer the earnings of average taxpaying families to well-off farm businesses. In 2011, the average income of farm households was $87,289, or 25 percent more than the $69,677 average of all U.S. households. Farm subsidies even go to millionaire farmland owners such as Mark Rockefeller and Ted Turner.

4.) Subsidies are very concentrated. Although politicians love to discuss the plight of small farmers, the vast majority of farm subsidies go to the largest farms. In recent years, the biggest 10 percent of farm businesses have received three-quarters of farm subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group.

5.) Subsidies damage the economy. In most industries, market prices balance supply and demand and encourage efficient production. By short-circuiting the market mechanism in agriculture, subsidies cause overproduction, land price inflation, and other distortions.

6.) Subsidies harm the environment. Farm programs draw marginal farmland into production and encourage the overuse of fertilizers. Lands that might otherwise be used for forests or wetlands get drawn into farm use. Florida sugar cane cultivation, for example, causes substantial damage to the Everglades, yet it thrives because of import protections.

7.) Farm programs harm free trade. U.S. farm subsidies are a hurdle to promoting free markets around the world, and this year’s farm bill could increase international trade distortions. U.S. farm programs also hinder the ability of poor countries to achieve stronger economic growth with farm exports.

8.) Some farm programs harm consumers. Federal controls on the dairy and sugar industries raise prices and are costly to U.S. consumers.

9.) Farm subsidies are scandal-prone. As in all federal subsidy programs, a substantial share of farm subsidies are wasted on fraudulent and improper payments. Subsidies also go to farmers who haven’t suffered substantial losses.

10.) Farmers don’t need subsidies. If farm subsidies ended, U.S. agriculture would face some short-term adjustments, but it would thrive over the long term. Farmers would adjust their planting and land use, cut costs, and diversify their sources of income. A stronger and more innovative agriculture industry would emerge, as occurred in New Zealand after that nation repealed virtually all its farm subsidies in 1984.

Farm bills usually benefit from substantial political momentum, but this year’s bill isn’t a done deal yet. In the House, there are many members who weren’t in office when the 2008 farm bill was enacted and who see themselves as fiscal conservatives. They know that the federal debt is far higher today than it was in 2008, and hopefully they understand that passing a farm bill that is 47 percent more expensive than the last one is the wrong way to go.

Niall Ferguson: The Regulated States of America

Tocqueville saw a nation of individuals who were defiant of authority. Today? Welcome to Planet Government.

In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. "The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it."

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals." 

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: "Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools." 

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

The decline of American associational life was memorably documented in Robert Puttnam's seminal 1995 essay "Bowling Alone," which documented the exodus of Americans from bowling leagues, Rotary clubs and the like. Since then, the downward trend in "social capital" has only continued. According to the 2006 World Values Survey, active membership even of religious associations has declined from just over half the population to little more than a third (37%). The proportion of Americans who are active members of cultural associations is down to 14% from 24%; for professional associations the figure is now just 12%, compared with more than a fifth in 1995. And, no, Facebook FB +0.74% is not a substitute.

Instead of joining together to get things done, Americans have increasingly become dependent on Washington. On foreign policy, it may still be true that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But when it comes to domestic policy, we all now come from the same place: Planet Government. 

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period. 

The last time regulation was cut was under Ronald Reagan, when the number of pages in the Federal Register fell by 31%. Surprise: Real GDP grew by 30% in that same period. But Leviathan's diet lasted just eight years. Since 1993, 81,883 new rules have been issued. In the past 10 years, the "final rules" issued by our 63 federal departments, agencies and commissions have outnumbered laws passed by Congress 223 to 1.

Right now there are 4,062 new regulations at various stages of implementation, of which 224 are deemed "economically significant," i.e., their economic impact will exceed $100 million. 

The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that's on top of the federal government's $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms. 

Next year's big treat will be the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, something every small business in the country must be looking forward to with eager anticipation. Then, as Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) warned readers on this page 10 months ago, there's also the Labor Department's new fiduciary rule, which will increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers; the EPA's new Ozone Rule, which will impose up to $90 billion in yearly costs on American manufacturers; and the Department of Transportation's Rear-View Camera Rule. That's so you never have to turn your head around when backing up. 

President Obama occasionally pays lip service to the idea of tax reform. But nothing actually gets done and the Internal Revenue Service code (plus associated regulations) just keeps growing—it passed the nine-million-word mark back in 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, meaning nearly 19% more verbiage than 10 years before. While some taxes may have been cut in the intervening years, the tax code just kept growing.

I wonder if all this could have anything to do with the fact that we still have nearly 12 million people out of work, plus eight million working part-time jobs, five long years after the financial crisis began. 

Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming. Toward the end of "Democracy in America" he warned against the government becoming "an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . . cover[ing] [society's] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way."

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: "It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd." 

If that makes you bleat with frustration, there's still hope.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324021104578551291160259734.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

Community college professor allegedly tells students: support gay rights or else

A professor at a community college in Tennessee allegedly ordered students in her general psychology class to wear “Rainbow Coalition” ribbons for an entire day to advertise support for the advancement of gay and lesbian political causes.

The professor, Linda Brunton, informed her students at Columbia State Community College that opponents of gay marriage are “uneducated bigots” who “attack homosexuals with hate,” reports Fox News Radio.

Travis Barham, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal organization, has sent a letter to Columbia State’s president on behalf of several students in Brunton’s class.

The letter seeks an apology to those students because, Barham claims, Brunton violated their First Amendment rights by forcing them to promote a specific political agenda. The letter also calls for the two-year community college to punish Brunton.

Alliance Defending Freedom claims that Brunton instructed students to write a paper describing how they suffered discrimination because they support gay rights. The professor allegedly told students who objected because of their religious convictions that their personal opinions didn’t matter.

“When students objected to how she was pushing her personal views on the class, she explained that it is her job ‘to educate the ignorant and uneducated elements of society,’” Barham told Fox News.

The professor reportedly prohibited any discussion of the morality of homosexuality, rejecting such lines of reasoning as “throwing Bible verses.”

“Dr. Brunton essentially turned her general psychology class into a semester-long clinic on the demands of the homosexual movement,” Barham added.

A representative from Columbia State heard about the kerfuffle from Fox News and promised to find out more. Brunton has not yet commented.

Brunton holds two degrees from Eastern Kentucky University and a doctor of education from Tennessee State University. She is a member of the Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Educators Network.

The directional university alumna lists AIDS awareness and education as well as diversity issues among her professional interests.

Brunton’s other interests include “vacationing in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico!” and “swimming with wild dolphins!” (The exclamation points are Brunton’s, not The Daily Caller’s!)

The alleged incident is reasonably similar to an incident involving a math professor at Brevard Community College in Florida who forced her students to sign pledges that they would vote for President Barack Obama last November. The school’s president eventually recommended that the professor, Sharon Sweet, be sacked.

CBO: Gang of Eight Bill Fails to Stop 75 Percent of Illegal Immigration

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its analysis of the economic impact of the Gang of Eight’s immigration-reform proposal. Proponents are likely to emphasize the report’s findings that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $197 billion over the next decade (although Republicans will likely be asked to explain why this estimate is any more reliable than the CBO’s predictions regarding Obamacare).
However, the bill’s supporters are certain to downplay other aspects of the CBO report, particularly the section on “Future Unauthorized Residents.” The CBO predicts that some of the bill’s enforcement measures, such as the establishment of an employment-verification system, are likely to reduce the future flow of illegal immigrants, but they’re less optimistic about the bill’s ability to stop individuals from overstaying their temporary work visas, a problem that accounts for at least 40 percent of the existing population of illegal immigrants. 

“Other aspects of the bill would probably increase the number of unauthorized residents — in particular, people overstaying their visas issued under the new programs for temporary workers,” CBO writes. And as a result, “the net annual flow of unauthorized residents would decrease by about 25 percent relative to what would occur under current law.” That’s not an insignificant reduction, but it hardly inspires confidence that Gang’s proposal will be more successful than the failed 1986 reform bill at preventing future illegal immigration. Regarding our current levels of illegal immigration, Senator Marco Rubio has often said one of the goal’s of this bill is “to ensure this never happens again in the future.”

Congress has already passed laws (following the 9/11 terror attacks) meant to tackle the visa-overstay problem, but the federal government has yet to install a biometric entry-exit system to make sure individuals leave the country when they are supposed to. Rubio has repeatedly idenitified this as a flaw in the current immigration system, and has said he would not support a reform bill unless “enforcement mechanisms are in place.”

On Tuesday, Rubio joined Democrats and six other Republicans to defeat an amendment to the bill that would have required the implementation of an entry-exit system to track visa overstays before illegal immigrants are granted legal status. Despite expressing his “support” for the “goal” of the amendment, offered by Senator David Vitter (R., La.), Rubio said in a statement that he opposed the amendment because it “delays the process of submitting illegal immigrants to background checks and the imposition of fines for having violated our immigration laws.” He promised to ”continue working with my Republican colleagues to improve the entry-exit system measures in the legislation.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/351424/cbo-gang-eight-bill-fails-stop-75-percent-illegal-immigration-andrew-stiles 

Congress Is Trying to Fool You on Immigration

Congress is trying to fool you.

Here’s how they do business. A piece of legislation is going to cost trillions of dollars, but Members of Congress don’t want the public to see that. Instead, they have the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) look at the bill for just the first 10 years—and they move any costly items off into the future on purpose.

They did it with Obamacare—saved the budget bombshells for later. Now they’re trying to do it with immigration.

Yesterday, the CBO released its score of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill. Heritage experts are still analyzing the full report, but a few things jumped out immediately. The Gang of Eight bill:


  • WILL NOT stop illegal immigration – Despite promises of a secure border, the bill would slow future illegal immigration by only 25 percent, according to the CBO. In the next couple of decades, that means 7.5 million new illegal immigrants.
  • WILL drive down wages – For legal American workers, the CBO estimates the bill would drive down their average wages.
The bill will burden taxpayers with trillions of dollars in welfare and entitlement costs for the newly legalized immigrants under amnesty. Heritage’s Robert Rector explains:
S.744 provides only a temporary delay in eligibility to welfare and entitlements. Over time, S.744 makes all 18.5 million eligible for nearly every government program, including: Obamacare, 80 different welfare programs, Social Security and Medicare. When this occurs, spending will explode, but nearly all the real costs do not appear in the CBO score.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, explained how the Gang of Eight purposefully hid the true costs of the bill:
The bill’s drafters relied on the same scoring gimmicks used by the Obamacare drafters to conceal its true cost from taxpayers and to manipulate the CBO score. There is a reason why eligibility for the most expensive federal benefits was largely delayed outside the 10-year scoring window: to mislead the public. As Ranking Member of the Budget Committee, I asked CBO to provide a long-term estimate. Sadly, CBO did not provide the long-term estimate as requested.
Heritage's Derrick Morgan wrote yesterday about the CBO's selective time period:
The CBO report also does little to assuage concern that the amnesty portion of the bill would be very costly to U.S. taxpayers. It provides only a look at the first 10 years in any real detail. (It includes only a sketch of the second 10 years.)
Sessions added, “This bill guarantees three things: amnesty, increased welfare costs, and lower wages for the U.S. workforce. It would be the biggest setback for poor and middle-class Americans of any legislation Congress has considered in decades.”

It’s easy to get the result you want when you don’t have to account for a bill’s cost. That’s exactly what the Gang of Eight is trying to get away with.
 
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/06/19/morning-bell-congress-is-trying-to-fool-you-on-immigration/?roi=echo3-16008076144-13273152-ec545a53cad3b52f9566b00f0546ebd5&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Yes, Premiums Will Go Up

It’s an open-and-shut case: Rates will go up a lot under Obamacare.

Last month, the Manhattan Institute’s Avik Roy — joined by Lanhee Chen, Yuval Levin, and Dan Kessler — set off a firestorm by audaciously challenging the prevailing Obamacare-friendly story about what will happen to premiums when the law’s implementation begins in earnest in 2014. Specifically, Roy and the others disputed the initial news stories coming out of California, fed by state officials, which indicated that the premiums paid by state residents enrolled in the Obamacare exchange would be lower in 2014 compared with 2013. Indeed, according to state officials, the premiums charged by plans in the exchange would be an amazing 2 to 29 percent lower than comparable coverage in 2013. A true Obamacare miracle! The law’s apologists were exultant at the news, and said so in numerous columns and blog posts.

Of course, this never should have been believed by anyone. Obamacare is imposing a minimum benefit for insurance that is in excess of what many consumers purchase on their own today. And the law is imposing many new rules on what insurance companies may and may not take into account when setting premiums. There is no experience anywhere indicating that these kinds of changes will lower premiums. And there’s an abundance of evidence from state experiments indicating that these changes will increase premiums, and probably quite substantially.

So Roy and the others were rightly suspicious of the spin coming out of California and decided to take a look themselves. What they found is that California officials were comparing the Obamacare exchange premiums with small-employer plans, not the existing individual market in the state. This was a completely inappropriate comparison. It is the enrollees in the individual-insurance market who will have little choice but to get their coverage from the exchange next year. Employees of small businesses can still get their insurance outside of the exchange, and do so on a self-insured basis to avoid getting pooled with insurance enrollees outside their firms. But for people in the individual market, there’s no getting around Obamacare.

And for them, a fair reading of the data is that the vast majority of individual-market participants will pay a lot more in 2014 for their health insurance, not less, despite protestations to the contrary by the law’s advocates.

And it’s not going to be a small number of people who pay more. According to the Census Bureau, there were 19 million people under the age of 65 enrolled in directly purchased private health insurance in 2011. The vast majority of these people were buying coverage in state-regulated insurance markets. Health-insurance experts have been warning since the law was debated that these consumers would pay substantially more under the law because of the restrictions on age-rating of insurance premiums and the strong likelihood that the insurance pool in the exchanges will be less healthy than today’s individual-insurance market. (The exceptions are the residents of the few states with tight insurance regulations today, such as New Jersey and New York. Those residents are already paying very high premiums in markets that are largely dysfunctional or nonexistent.) Study after study — by Oliver Wyman, by Milliman, and by the Society of Actuaries — have confirmed the views of the experts, which is that premiums are going up a lot for most people in the individual-insurance market. Looking across these studies, one can expect premium increases, on average, in the range of 30 to 50 percent, depending on the state.

The law’s defenders counter that the new federal subsidies will paper over the premium hikes for some people. And it is certainly true that massive new federal spending will partially obscure the premium increases for the lowest-income households. But that’s not going to help middle-class families or even lower-middle-class families.

For instance, as Kessler reported, the premium for a typical Kaiser Permanente insurance product sold in Oregon and California will go up by about $1,100 per year for a young, healthy male. It will also go up for generally healthy people in their 30s and even 40s because of the restrictions on age-rating. But the subsidy structure in Obamacare will cover these extra costs only for those with incomes below about 250 percent of the poverty line. Individuals with $33,000 in income and no family (about 300 percent of the federal poverty line) will have their premiums subsidized only for amounts in excess of 9.5 percent of household income. If they elect to buy high-deductible insurance coverage like what they are purchasing today, they will have to pay the entire added premium themselves.

This is not news. It is the consensus view of what is likely to happen, and it has been for some time. So why hasn’t the public heard more about this? The answer: fear.

An episode from 2010 can help explain. At that time, several of Obamacare’s insurance rules were about to go into effect in 2011, and insurance companies were preparing their customers for the likely cost increases coming their way. Several of them had issued press releases explaining the reasons for the premium hikes, which the Obama administration found threatening. And so, in September of that year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius attempted to suppress the free-speech rights of the industry. She wrote a remarkable letter to America’s Health Insurance Plans — the trade association for health insurers — with this thinly veiled threat: Any plan caught blaming Obamacare for premium hikes could lose its right to do business in the regulated marketplace.

Subtle it was not. And it was certainly remarkable that a cabinet secretary felt free to threaten an entire industry with sanctions if it did not toe the line on the administration’s political messaging. But, sadly, it may have worked because, despite scores of studies all pointing to the same conclusion, the industry has been very reluctant to clearly explain to the public what is about to come its way.

But the day of reckoning is near. This summer and fall, the actual premiums in the Obamacare exchanges will become visible for all to see. As was the case with California, there will be a lot of spin coming from the Obama administration and its allies. But also like California, spin will get them only so far. In the end, those who are enrolled in individually purchased insurance plans will figure out that they are going to pay a lot more, and they won’t be happy about it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351423/yes-premiums-will-go-james-c-capretta

Constitutional Amendment Would Gut Rights for Organizations

Experts: Amendment would restrict what advocacy groups could say and do

Legal experts say a constitutional amendment proposed by Senate Democrats would eliminate all constitutional rights for nonprofit groups and many religious organizations.

Constitutional scholars also suggested the amendment could allow the National Security Agency—currently under fire for its controversial intelligence gathering techniques—to seize information on Americans at whim.
The amendment is an attempt to reverse the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. FEC, which struck down restrictions on political speech by corporations, unions, and nonprofits.

Rather than simply reversing that decision, the amendment offered by Sens. Jon Tester (D., Mont.) and Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) would eliminate all constitutional rights not only for for-profit corporations but also for nonprofit groups and many churches.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the measure “is one of the dumbest amendments yet proposed.”

It would restrict not just those groups’ First Amendment rights but all of their constitutionally-protected liberties, according to Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA.

“The proposed amendment would authorize Congress, states, and local governments to, for instance, restrict what most newspapers publish, restrict what most advocacy groups, such as the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and the NRA say, restrict what is said and done by most churches, and seize the property of corporations without just compensation,” Volokh told the Washington Free Beacon in an email.

The text of the amendment states, “The words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies, or other corporate entities.”

“Corporate entities,” Volokh noted, include most media companies, nonprofit groups, and religious organizations. “Under the proposed amendment, all these groups—as well as ordinary businesses—would lose all their constitutional rights.”

Controversy over revelations that the National Security Agency may have collected information on Americans through telecommunications and Internet companies could fuel concerns over a measure that would eliminate those companies’ rights to decline requests for information from the federal government.
The Tester-Murphy amendment would eliminate “any rights to due process when a corporation’s property is seized,” Volokh said, allowing the NSA or any other government body to seize those companies’ customer records without due process.

A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NSA in light of recent revelations about its intelligence-gathering activities depends on the theory that the ACLU and other nonprofit groups have constitutional rights, according to Wendy Kaminer, a board member of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.

ACLU v. Clapper, filed in the wake of the [NSA leaker Edward] Snowden revelations, is based on the ACLU’s First and Fourth Amendment rights, which, according to progressives, ACLU should not possess,” Kaminer wrote on Monday.

The Tester-Murphy amendment attempts to safeguard constitutional rights for individuals by stating that it shall not “limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association, and all such other rights of the people.”

Volokh insists that clause would not protect newspapers or nonprofits “on the theory that restricting those organizations’ speech would deny the constitutional rights of individual reporters or organization leaders.”

“The government would still be freed to restrict those reporters and leaders from speaking using corporate resources, which is to say speaking in the pages of the newspaper or using the offices or assets of the organization,” he noted.

Neither Tester’s nor Murphy’s offices returned requests for comment.

http://freebeacon.com/constitutional-amendment-would-gut-rights-for-organizations/

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