Legislative Chair Grace Norton: Letter to Editor: Immigration and the Trump Administration




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Editor, News-Register:
The various statements by government officials, news media, pundits, and politicians have created a great deal of confusion about why and how we find ourselves with baby internment centers, kids in cages, and jails over-populated with migrants. It takes more knowledge of government and procedure than most folks have to really understand how and why we got where we are.
The “why” is fairly easy. The Trump Administration wants to re-shape immigration into the United States to take in more people with high levels of education and skills and very few people with low levels of education and skills who do not speak English. Despite the fact that much of the U.S. citizenry can trace ancestry to immigrants fleeing persecution, violence, and poverty, a significant segment of our citizens want to limit the number of people coming here for the same reasons their own ancestors came here. In addition, there is a widespread but false belief that there are many with criminal intent or criminal backgrounds seeking entry, although government data show that the crime rate for immigrants is lower than that of native-born Americans. There is also an exaggerated view of the MS-13, a gang that began in Los Angeles and exists in Latin America only because during the 1990s we deported MS-13 members we should have jailed. People holding one or more of these beliefs are a significant portion of those President Trump sees as his “base.”
The “how” is a bit more complicated. In order to try to implement President Trump’s immigration goal, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made a series of decisions that have resulted in separating thousands of children from their parents and problems with caring for them properly. The major factor was Sessions’ decision to require all U.S. attorneys to process every adult entering the U.S. without a visa to the criminal courts.
Before this directive was issued, U.S. attorneys had the discretion to refer cases either to the criminal court system or to the immigration court system. They generally referred those who had no previous history of entering without visas and those asking for asylum to the immigration courts, which could order immediate deportation, order the adult(s) held with their children for hearing of asylum claims, order the adult held in custody while the child was placed with relative, or release the family on bond with the adult(s) wearing ankle monitors while awaiting a decision on asylum or deportation. When the U.S. attorney did refer the case to the criminl courts, the adult was held in jail and the child(ren) placed with relatives or in foster care. Only when the adult is sent through the criminal justice system is there a requirement to separate adults and children; so, Attorney General Sesions’ order to refer cases only to the criminal justice system directly caused the problem we’ve seen.
Complicating the situation is the decision-making style of the president. Previous administrations had clear policy-making processes carried out by bureaucrats President Trump likes to call “the Deep State.” All large organizations, governments included, need many long-employed, career professionals in order to function. These are divided into departments, sections, etc., that require different kinds and levels of skills, knowledge, and expertise. In previous administrations, presidents would use those people to think through what would be the potential consequenes of whatever the president wanted to do and then get the necessary resources, facilities, etc., in place to deal with those possible consequences before the program or policy was announced and implemented. President Trump has a tendency to order a program begun before his cabinet secetaries have had a chance to get the downstream necessities in place. This is a consequence of his lack of knowledge of how government works and his own work history in a family company that doesn’t even have a board of directors.
In previous administrations, people requesting asylum were not jailed as criminals before their asylum claims were adjudicated. Today, they are treated as criminals. Attorney General Sessions has also made a decision to narrow the grounds for claiming asylum by eliminating “violence” as a basis for requesting asylum. He did this knowing that there was a “caravan” on its way from Central America fleeing violence. The families in the caravans could not have known about these changes while they were on their way here. In addition, government agents have been slow-walking immigrants seeking asylum, keeping them outside on bridges for days or weeks at a time, moving themselves into Mexican territory to turn back refugees well outside the border, and/or denying their asylum claims before any hearing. The result of these actions taken by border patrol agents acting on their own is often to put migrants in the position of having to choose between returning to criminal-controlled towns to be killed, raped, or extorted on the Mexican side of the border or trying to enter the U.S. between ports of entry.
There were clearly better ways to deal with immigration than the current administration chose. But he chose to implement a policy without the necessary preparation for the consequences. Hopefully, they will learn from their mistakes to plan first and announce policy changes only after they have prepared for the consequences.
Grace Norton
Wheeling

Senator, Answer the Senator's Question

Senate Republicans Pass Stealth Increase in Property Taxes 

They Let Counties Take The Heat

Senate Republicans narrowly passed SB 609, which would automatically raise every county’s property tax levy to the statutory maximum, and cut the state school aid funding by the amount raised.

How much will your county lose?

The move is a shell game to plug the state’s budget deficit — to the tune of $79.3 million - by forcing local county boards of education take the heat for the huge tax increase. The bill gives counties the option to roll back the levy, but doing so would not restore the state cuts, leaving mammoth holes in local county and BOE budgets. 

The measure narrowly passed, 17-16.  How did your Senator vote?

“We’re voting an 18 percent increase on taxes,” said Senator Robert Plymale, D-Wayne. “I just want to make sure we understand we are voting on a tax increase in this bill.”

Republican supporters struggled to admit that the bill was a tax increase. Asked by Sen. John Unger, D-Berkeley, if the bill increased taxes, Sen. Ryan Ferns, R-Ohio, said, “I think it does to the extent that the board of education doesn’t opt to lower that rate down.”

“The money raised by the school levy stays, every dollar, with the county board of education,” insisted Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan. “It does affect, in an inverse way, the amount of money that the school aid formula suggests that we provide to school boards.”  The increase in property taxes will fall hardest on the shoulders of our senior citizens and lower income families.

Well, ok then.  Sounds like a tax increase to us.

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A Trifecta of Micromanaging West Virginia Schools

West Virginia State Senate Debate of Senate Bill 18 on March 29th

SB 18 gives the legislature final say on curriculum  and testing decisions made for West Virginia schools.  Politicians don't need to be making those decisions, educators do.  We need to let teachers teach.

Check out this short video about our Senate Democrats fight against SB 18, which Republican Education Chair, Senator Kenny Mann said was, "not needed."

Senator Mike Romano called it, "a mandate for micromanagement of our education system."

Republican Senator Patricia Rucker: "We get to dictate what standards and curriculum they use." (She home schools her kids.)

Democrat Leader Roman Prezioso: “This bill is ill-conceived, irresponsible and unconstitutional. They hit the trifecta.”

It passed 18-16. #BadIdeasFactory

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Republicans Use Rare Procedural Maneuver To Avoid Amendments 

to Cancer Creek Bill

After Judiciary Committee testimony highlighted water quality concerns, bill
was voted out of committee with no opportunity for further debate or amendments.

West Virginia State Capitol

March 23, 2017

Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee used a rare procedural maneuver to end debate they didn't like on House Bill 2506, the “Cancer Creek" bill. After about two hours of testimony, mostly from opponents of the bill, Senator Randy Smith, Republican-Tucker, moved to approve the bill, which ended debate and eliminated the potential for committee members to amend the legislation.

The bill changes the criteria used to set water permit limits for pollutants from the current 7Q10 — which sets the standard based on the lowest seven-day consecutive flow of a stream — to solely the “harmonic mean” standard, which calculates the average flow of a stream. 

All surrounding states use a combination of “7Q10” or a similar low flow criteria for non-carcinogen pollution and “harmonic flow” for carcinogens.  Concerned citizens testifying about the bill pointed out this could lead to lowering the state’s water quality standards to dangerous levels, especially during drought conditions when water flows are low. 

The motion to vote on the bill passed eight to six. The motion to actually send the bill to the floor passed 10 to 5.

UPDATE March 27:  Democrats tried to amend the bill on 2nd reading from the floor.  All amendments were rejected with votes going along Party lines: http://www.legis.state.wv.us/legisdocs/2017/RS/votes/senate/03-27-0230.pdf

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What is causing our trade deficits?

By Grace Norton

Legislative Chair

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are blaming “trade deals” for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States that so many of their supporters see as the root cause of their being “left behind” because wages have stagnated or even declined for what used to be the middle class.   Bernie Sanders sees himself as some sort of visionary for casting votes against NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements.  Trump argues that American negotiators were simply incompetent and allowed themselves to be bested by the Chinese and others.  Both Sanders and Trump are  dead wrong.

The real causes of the economic situation we now have are quite different from what those candidates blame. They began decades before any of the trade agreements now being blamed were even contemplated.   One of the most important of the actual causes dates from the 1950's and three others date from the late 1960's.   Each of these has had more of an impact on the restructuring of the American economy and the changes in people’s relative  economic status than all of the trade agreements combined. 

At the close of World War II, the United States had the only major industrial economy that had not been absolutely devastated by the war.  Our wartime industries had ramped up to produce everything needed to win the war, often by stopping production of hundreds of kinds of consumer goods.  When the war ended, we had a huge backlog of domestic demand as well as a huge demand from abroad for materials to re-build the economies of war-torn nations.  We were running three shifts a day getting every ounce of production we could get out of factories built before and during the war.   Meanwhile,  the Europeans and Japanese were busy building new, more efficient industrial facilities to replace those destroyed by war;  and the Third World was starting to actually develop industrial economies instead of merely producing raw materials.   The entry of new producers meant that there was soon to be too much production capacity for some products, among them steel.  Much of the new production came from factories that were more efficient than the American factories and paid their workers less.  Their products could be sold for less than American-made products.   For awhile, the non-European producers could not match the quality of American-made products, but they soon learned how to make products of competitive quality.

The second of the causes was the collapse of attempts to create a system of monetary management among the major economic nations of the world.  The Brettotn-Woods system was created in the later  years of World War II to try to ensure that there would be a system of financial rules and institutions that would facilitate fair trade and other international relations.  Parties included the U. S., western European nations, China, Australia, and, after the war ended, Germany  and  Japan.  The idea was to tie the value of these major currencies to an agreed upon price of gold bullion ($35 per ounce) with the United States as guarantor of what was necessary to maintain flexibility and liquidity to faciltate trade and economic development.   The fatal flaw of Bretton-Woods was the impossibility of maintaining a stable price of gold on the open bullion market.  It was possible to accumulate dollars, trade 35 paper dollars for an ounce of gold, then sell that gold on the bullion market for much more than $35 an ounce.  Other problems with Bretton-Woods created recessionary pressures within the U. S. economy that both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations tried, without much success, to address.   In 1971, President Nixon unilaterally took the United States out of the system, allowing the American dollar to “float” against the value of other currencies of the world.  Absent the United States’ participation, the Bretton-Woods system could not function.  But in a condition of  “floating” currencies, the relative strength of one currency against another affects the relative price of goods to consumers.   A strong U. S. dollar causes American goods to be quite expensive when they are sold in countries with relatively weaker dollars.  Conversely, goods made in countries with weak dollars should cost less when sold in the U. S., although the benefits of any lower cost may well go entirely to the importer rather than to the actual consumer.

The third major problem is an outgrowth of the second.  Some nations engage in currency manipulation to gain trade advantages.  Currency manipulation involves a government buying or selling its own currency in order to change the exchange rate of its currency-what people get when they convert, for example, dollars into Euros.   Artificially changing the exchange rate drive the currency’s value away from the equilibrium that would have been achieved by market forces alone.    The object of manipulation is to be unfair to trading partners.  In a lot of ways, currency manipulation is to business what point-shaving is to sports.  For some time now, China and some other nations have believed that it is in their own national interest to manipulate currency to make their goods cheaper than comparable items made in other countries so that trading partners will buy more from them.  For example, the Chinese government thinks this will stimulate demand for goods made in China and result in more jobs for their workers and more profits for their industries.  Currency manipulation is actually independent of the terms of trade agreements, but it affects the results of  trade agreements to the nations invovled.  To continue the analogy to sports, point-shaving will affect a team’s win/loss record and  possibly enrich team owners independently of league rules, the schedules agreed to by the teams, etc.  The point-shaving  effects can spill over into such things as where teams stand in the draft choices, player salaries, etc.    Several well-designed and reputable studies have concluded that currency manipulation alone has cost the United States 5.8 million jobs and Canada millions more.  

The third of the 1960's era problems was a conscious decision by the Nixon administration to actually facilitate the transfer of manufaturing jobs to low-wage areas.  One Nixon-era grand idea was what has come to be known as “trickle-down economics,” the idea that if we make it possible for businesses to maximize profits, they will create more jobs and the wealth will funnel down to ordinary workers.  One Secretary of  Defense proclaimed that “whatever was good for General Motors was good for the country.”  The other grand idea of the Nixon-era economic advisors, which actually worked to some extent against the other big idea,  was to take advantage of the advances in technology by fostering the growth of  high-technology jobs in the United States while moving the low-skilled production jobs to lower-wage countries and lower-wage states so that the workers there could afford to buy more American-made products.  Simultaneously, there was a determined effort  to hold down wages for American workers because labor costs are among the easiest costs to control.  Wages had increased dramatically after World War II because of union activity in the post-war years to make up for wage freezes during the war.  The push for “right-to-work” laws is an on-going part of efforts to hold down wages.  What we need to realize is that manufacturing jobs began to be eliminated on a large scale in 1970, when Nixon was president--not after the passage of NAFTA in 1994.  Between 1970 and 1974, each of  the industrial states in the northeastern part of the country lost hundreds of  businesses each year–many to southern states. Wages for American workers began to stagnate in 1970, a quarter of a century before  the passage of NAFTA.

What has happened to the United States economy since 1970 has also happened to some extent in other First World nations.   Germany fared better than most because it took steps to make it expensive for companies to move out of the country–for example, requiring them to fully fund pensions for workers who would be out of jobs, requiring them to repay communities for infrastructure and other expenditutes made for the benefit of the business but otherwise unnecesary to the community.  Faced with large up-front costs to make moving the company possible, most decided to stay put.  European nations that bought into austerity as the means to recover from the effects of the world-wide economic chaos of the 2008-10 have not fared nearly as well as the U. S., which took a stimulus approach.   Japan is among the Asian nations that is having problems similar to our own.  China, too, is having major problems now.   Trump, at least, woud hae people believe that all of these nations are “beating” the United States in everything having to do with manufacturing and trade–but it simply is not true.  

Religious Freedom is Anything But Free

by Grace Norton

Legislative Chair

The spate of so-called “religious freedom” and “religious freedom restoration” laws being passed by a number of state legislatures are, in fact, nothing more than discrimination-promotion legislation.  The language of the bills purports either to prohit  government from interfering with individuals’ religious freedom or else to “restore” religious freedoms allegedly being interfered with by government actions.   The first purpose is unnecessary because the First Amendment of the Constitution already prohibits government interference with freedom of religion throughout the United States and its territories.  The second purpose presumes that substantial interference with religion actually exists.  Some factual basis  is supposed to be established credibly by that section of legisltion known as “legislative purpose.”  These laws fail the credible basis test.

What the Constitution protects in the First Amndment is, first,  unrestricted freedom to believe something (e.g., that there is a God, that the earth was created in seven days, etc.)  There is no constitutional requirement that the belief be rational, that it conform to fact established by legitimate evidence, or that it conform to social norms.  The First Amendment also protects the “free exercise” of religion, but it does that on a somewhat restricted basis.  For example, a parent may not require his child to handle poisonous snakes to prove  the child’s faith.  Nor must government permit someone to blow up an abortion clinic no matter how strongly his religion opposes abortion, or gun down a group of people no matter how strongly he believes in Islamic jihad.  The free exercise of religion, particularly outside the context of an actual religious ritual occurring in a place of worship, ends at the point where it interferes with the fundamental rights of others.

The bills that legislatures have produced so far are, for the most part, vague and otherwise badly written.  All of them appear to empower the employees of  governments and/or  businesses to pick and choose what items on their job descriptions they would perform and for what customers they would perform them.   All that appears to be necessary to exempt an employee from doing part of his or her job is for the employee to claim that he/she has a “sincerely held religious belief” that doing some part of the job is immoral.   That is little short of utter insanity guaranted to subvert the purposes for which any workplace exists.

Government agencies exist to serve members of the public by providing some good or service.  Governments license businesses  to transfer goods and services it is lawful to transfer from the company to customers legally entitled to purchase them and able to pay for them.  Governments and businesses pay employees to facilitate the transfer of goods and servicess from the agency or business to the customer.  When a government agency or a business hires someone to do a job, that person is informed about what the job duties are; and, by accepting the job (and the compensation), the person assumes an obligation to do what is on the job description.  

People who either create a business or take a job knowing that they may not be able to perform its functions  for each and every customer are behaving unethically and/or immorally unless they informed the licensing body or the employer up front about any and all impediments to performing as expected.  An employer has a right not to hire someone unwilling or unable to perform what the job requires.   Historically, if some condition arises  in which an employee feels he or she cannot, in good conscience, do some aspect of the job or follow an order, the expectation has been that the employee resign–not that the employer and custormer have to put up with self-righteous non-performance.  The burden should be–and historically has been–on the employee to either do their job or resign from it. 

Does anyone really “sincerely believe” any of the following?

 

1. If  your church disapproves of gay marriage, it is immoral for you to serve pancakes to a same-sex couple.

2. It is an immoral act for you to set a plate of pancakes on the table of a gay patron.

3. It is an immoral act for you to talk to a gay patron to take his order for pancakes or process his payment for his bill.

Since when are activities such as serving food in a restaurant, selling wedding rings in a jewelry store, or recordng a certificate of marriage in as clerk’s office  either a “religious belief” or an “exercise of religion?  “Religious freedom” legislation tacitly acepts the false premise that these ordinary job activities are one or the other.

The truth is that these laws are being passed to facilitate discrimination.  They have nothing to do with “freedom of religion” or its “free exercise.”

Tentative 2016 WV Democratic Party 

State Convention Schedule

2016 WV Democratic Party State Convention Schedule
(tentative, for planning purposes only)
Charleston Civic Center

www.wvdemocrats.com

Friday, June 10, 2016
1:30pm Credentials Committee Meeting 
2:00pm Rules Committee Meeting
2:30pm Resolution Committee Meeting 

(30-minute intermission)

3:00 p.m.- Registration Open

3:00 – 6:00 pm Early Dinner Sponsor TBD 

6:30pm Convention Begins 
Invocation 
Pledge
State Party Chair Belinda Biafore, presiding

6:45pm Guest Speakers TBD

7:30pm Break Out into Congressional District Caucus 
7:45pm Congressional Caucuses Begin
1st

2nd

3rd

9:15pm Caucuses End

9:15pm Rules Committee count the votes for National Convention 
1st District Rules Committee Counts 2nd District Votes
2nd District Rules Committee Counts 3rd District Votes 
3rd District Rules Committee Counts 1st District Votes

9:30pm TBD (Maybe evening reception)

Saturday, June 11, 2016

8:00 am – 9:30am Breakfast

8:00 am – 9:30am Registration

9:45am Convention Begins
9:45am Guest Speaker

10:00am Announce Congressional District Caucus Winners 

10:15am Guest Speakers

11:00am Resolutions 
11:30am Party Platform up for adoption
12:30pm Elect 2 At-Large Reps for the Electoral College
1:30pm Adjourn

1:30pm Break for Lunch

2:30pm State Executive Committee Meeting
4:00pm National Convention Delegates Meeting;