Conservative Principles Now

Last week Greece was admitted as the 36th member nation of the Visa Waiver Program, (VWP). While this is certainly a welcome move for a program that hasn’t added a new member since 2008, it also highlights a real lack of willpower and effort by the White House to keep adding new member countries. In fact, DHS can barely add any new members right now because of the biometric exit mandate Congress linked to its waiver authority. The biometric mandate—which hasn’t gotten much of anywhere is a real stumbling block for the program—yet, the White House hasn’t even tried to pressure Congress to decouple them.

For a President who once emphasized, how we need “a new era of American diplomacy” he has done little to support VWP—which betters relations between the U.S. and its member nations. As explained by Heritage Analysts, the VWP offers many benefits to the U.S. and its allies. When travelers come to the United States, they spend billions of dollars in American restaurants, stores, and hotels, and also have the opportunity to bring positive experiences of the U.S. back to their home countries to be shared with others. While diplomatically, membership in the program serves as a real sign of trust to our allies—something they have expressed repeatedly throughout the program’s existence.

Prior to Greece’s admission, the Department of Homeland Security had identified several “road map” nations, that is, nations that were on the right path to becoming member nations. Yet as the White House has done little to foster their admittance and countries such as Poland, Romania, and Taiwan have clearly become frustrated.

The President needs to go out and make the case to Congress for VWP. He needs to talk about the 2007 security modifications that made this program a valuable counterterrorism tool. And he needs to explain how DHS should be granted permanent waiver authority to allow nations to join the VWP more readily. Likewise, the Visa Waiver Program must be decoupled from the mandate for biometric air-exit, which seriously limits the ability of the program to grow further. At the same time, ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, must remain user-friendly to allow member citizens to easily apply for entry, and older member nations must be held to the same security standards as new nations.

Bringing Greece into the program is progress for VWP, but other American allies are waiting…

In the alleged new era of transparency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is making quite a name for itself as being the agency of opacity. The latest is the EPA’s suppression of a video entitled, “The Huge Mistake” by Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, two lawyers currently working at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – a video that says cap and trade will not work. From the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered two of its attorneys to remove a video they posted on YouTube about problems with climate change legislation backed by the Obama administration or face “disciplinary action”, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The couple had received clearance for posting the video but EPA took issue with its content following publication of an op-ed piece by the two in The Washington Post on October 31.”

PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch remarked, “EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens. EPA reversed itself because someone in headquarters had a tantrum about their Washington Post essay.”

In their Washington Post column, Williams and Zabel rightly criticize the carbon offset measure in cap and trade, arguing that past experiments with offsets have led to nothing but fraud with no reduction in carbon dioxide. They also stress that likening the carbon cap and trade program to the acid rain cap and trade program is comparing apples and oranges because minor modifications and low-cost alternatives aren’t available for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels - as they were to address sulfur dioxide emissions linked to acid rain.

This comes after the EPA suppressed an internal report from one of the agency’s own, 35-year analyst Alan Carlin - a scientist who specializes in climate change. His report warned that the science of climate change was dubious and that we shouldn’t pass laws that will raise energy prices, hurt American families and hobble the nation’s economy without a full understanding of climate change.

We spoke to Dr. Carlin when the story first broke in June and he said, “I’ve been involved in public policy since 1966 or 1967. There’s never been anything exactly like this. I am now under a gag order.”

Once the Competitive Enterprise Institute released some of the EPA’s back-and-forth emails with Dr. Carlin, it became blatant that report had been smothered for political reasons: “One of the e-mails is from Dr. Al McGartland, director of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics reads, “The administrator and administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. … I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

This also comes after Senators Boxer and Kerry produced a ‘semi-final draft’ version of their cap and trade bill, which included the billions of dollars worth of emission allowance permits to different industries and released it only to the EPA to model the economic impacts. The draft was unavailable to the public until after the Environment and Public Works committee voted on it. The Heritage Foundation is one of few organizations to have modeled the economic effects of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. Bill Beach, the director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, wrote a letter to Senator Boxer (CCing Senator Kerry, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Senator Inhofe) asking for a copy of the semi-draft legislation to model the economic effects of the bill but did not receive a copy of the bill.

Zabel has first hand experience with cap and trade, overseeing California’s cap and trade and offsets programs. Apparently, this was the problem according to the Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson. He writes, “One EPA official said that the agency’s response wasn’t due to the content of the attorneys’ writings, but to the way they highlighted their EPA experience in making their arguments.”

But isn’t Zabel exactly the type of person who should be warning us about the inefficiencies of a cap and trade system. Wouldn’t you want to utilize his highly specialized knowledge and experience?

President Obama, in his memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies, wrote that “Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.”

Given Obama’s propensity for hiring czars, maybe the solution to the EPA’s cover ups is a transparency czar.