This afternoon, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Skilling v. U.S. Most media coverage so far seems to be focusing on former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling’s request for an entirely new trial based on claims that the District Court where he was convicted failed to ensure an impartial jury when they refused to transfer the trial out of Houston.
While every American’s Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury is important, many limited government conservatives (and civil libertarian liberals) are much more concerned with the fate of Skilling’s other challenge … to the 1988 “honest services fraud” statute, which states: “For the purposes of this chapter, the term, scheme or artifice to defraud includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” What could possibly be wrong with that?
The problem is that the statute then fails to provide any guidance as to what an “intangible right of honest services” is or how to tell when someone has been deprived of that right. This allows prosecutors to terrorize Americans with prosecutions for acts they had no idea were crimes.
For example, prosecutors nabbed one Wisconsin state civil servant for failing to follow every detail of the state’s arcane administrative rules on procurement. The convicted civil servant’s crime? She awarded the contract to the lowest bidder which prosecutors argued made her supervisors look better and thus increased her job security. In other words, she was convicted of saving the taxpayers money!
And prosecution are not limited to the public sector. The Wall Street Journal notes:
In the mid-1990’s, federal prosecutors in Texas successfully brought a charge against three men’s-basketball coaches at Baylor University, a private school, for scheming to obtain credits and scholarships for players, in violation of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. Baylor, the court found, was deprived of honest services.
Everybody, civil servants and private citizens, has a moral obligation to be honest. But the government has no business giving prosecutors a blank check to punish dishonesty criminally whenever they see fit. The “honest services fraud” statute is just one more example of the Overcriminalization of our country. There are now over 4,450 federal criminal penalties on the books and Congress seems to want use criminal law to “solve” every problem in the nation. No wonder 56% of Americans tell CNN they think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.
Hopefully the power of the federal government to send Americans to jail for trivial conduct will start being rolled back today.
There are links between terrorist attacks, job losses, and the health care legislation that is being completed behind closed doors: 1) A massive failed bureaucracy didn’t protect Flight 253 from a would-be bomber, so why expect that an even-larger bureaucracy can protect our health? 2)With 10% unemployment and 85,000 more jobs lost during the Christmas buying season, why pass a health care bill that promises to be a huge job-killer?
The common factor is that big government cannot efficiently guarantee homeland security or job security, much less health security. Big government is killing the economy by making it too risky for companies to create jobs.
While terrorist attacks and the suffering job market push health care out of the headlines, the threat of government-run health care moves ahead stealthily behind closed doors. Its hallmarks are exorbitant costs, extreme bureaucracy, and no help for the 85% of Americans who have coverage they find satisfactory (but just wish didn’t cost so much). But the legislation is no longer about them.
As one writer observed, “What started as a plan to find ways to cover people who don’t have insurance transformed into thousands of pages of new regulations, mandates, prohibitions, oversight and general central control.”
Both House and Senate bills would retain an army of existing health bureaucrats, and add a new bureaucracy under the “health czar”—formally known as the “Health Choices Commissioner”–with far more intrusive regimentation of your life than any airport screening system.
Adding more taxpayer-funded bureaucracy was President Obama’s announced response to a failed security system, and he’s applying that same approach to health care, just as he does to jobs.
When the Labor Department announced the loss of 85,000 more jobs, President Obama’s “solution” was to subsidize the creation of a claimed 17,000 “green” jobs by giving $2.3-billion in subsidies to wind and solar energy. That works out to $135,295 in taxpayer per money per job, but will also kill more jobs than it creates, by displacing current energy sector jobs.
Reality doesn’t work the way Obama claims. We already have 7.7-million fewer jobs than Obama promised we’d have if we passed if we passed his $787-billion “stimulus” package. And most jobs “saved or created” were government jobs.
Voters are not fooled. According to Rasmussen Reports, “Half of voters nationwide (50%) say increases in government spending hurts the overall economy. Just 28% says increased government spending helps the economy.”
So why make the job market worse by passing President Obama’s health care plan? As The Heritage Foundation has assessed, the pending health care legislation—with its taxes, regulations and mandates—will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Big government is what is holding back the economy. More big government is the disease, not the cure.
As one business analyst tells the media “Unemployment is at 10 percent and all these businesses see are higher costs in the future from health care and other policies — so they are hoarding cash. They’re making money, but why logically would any businessman use this money to expand if he doesn’t know what all his costs will be because of the expansion of these government programs?”
Our biggest job-creators, small businesses, are especially skittish. As NFIB (National Federation of Independent Businesses) reports, after its latest national survey of small business, the problem is the uncertainty caused by big government:
The horizon is filled with cost unknowns, from healthcare to cap and trade to yawning deficits and the need to come to grips with them, from paid family and medical leave to card check, from expiration of the Bush tax cuts to state decisions about their finances. Washington cannot expect small business owners, facing difficult economic circumstances anyway, to commit themselves to investing in new employees or equipment and vehicles without acknowledging and revealing the policy-inspired costs that will be imposed on them. It is all about uncertainty and confidence.
A similar and detailed description was also offered in the Wall Street Journal by economic scholars from Stanford and the University of Chicago (including Nobel Prize winner Gary S. Becker), who summarized the stifling threat as “changes that could radically transform the American economy.”
As President Ronald Reagan so often reminded us, government is not the solution . . . it’s the problem.