Op-Eds

Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted Cruz

21 Comments
Ted Cruz speaking at Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. on October 7, 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
Ted Cruz speaking at Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. on October 7, 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

As Texas went dark last week, with much of the state’s population experiencing blackouts under severe winter weather conditions, US senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and his family jetted off to Cancun for a warm, sunny family vacation. Mockery and outrage ensued.

The mockery was quite fun and often on point given Cruz’s political positions (“heroic father crosses Mexican border and travels 1200 miles to find running water, heat, and electricity for his family”). The outrage, well, not so much.

Cruz doesn’t work as a lineman for any of the several utilities serving Houston.

Nor does he staff a complaint desk handling public calls reporting power outages.

In fact, he doesn’t even work in Houston. He works in Washington, DC.

For some reason, though, he’s taking hits for a  “failure of leadership” because he didn’t stay in Texas to suffer along with his constituents.

Ted Cruz isn’t a “leader.” He’s a US Senator. He casts one of 100 votes in a national legislative body. He is not the energy tsar of Texas. The most his constituents could reasonably expect of him would be to lobby US president Joe Biden for emergency assistance from the federal Emergency Management Agency. That’s something he could more easily do by phone than in person, especially given pandemic-related social distancing norms, and his phone presumably works as well from Cancun as it would from College Station, Corpus Christi, or Caldwell.

Is a sun-soaked vacation during a winter weather event “bad optics?” Only to people who place greater value on and trust in Ted Cruz, his position, and his activities than they should. Making sure you have electricity just isn’t his job — and if it was you could probably expect longer and more frequent blackouts, not shorter and fewer ones.

Whose job is it to make sure Texans have electricity? That would be the mission of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Well, sort of. ERCOT, a “membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,” is overseen and regulated by Texas’s Public Utility Commission and state legislature.

In other words, by a bunch of politicians and government employees.

A case could be made that last week’s storms and freezes were a rare and unforeseeable circumstance and that ERCOT and its political masters aren’t really to blame.

There’s no case to be made that Ted Cruz IS to blame. Or that his family trip to Cancun somehow insults his constituents. Lighten up, folks.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Joe Biden and “Open Borders”: As If

Leave a comment

The Stature of Liberty. Photo from MaxPixel's free collection.

On February 9, more than 50 Republican members of the US House of Representatives sent President Joe Biden a letter decrying his “open border” policies. Of all the hyperbolic claims I’ve read regarding the Biden administration since Inauguration Day, that one takes the cake. In neither word nor action has the new president come within a country mile of supporting “open borders” in  principle or in policy.

As the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier notes, “Biden has been in office for less than a month. Many people keep saying ‘give him time.’ But what’s concerning isn’t that Biden hasn’t ‘gotten around to immigration yet.’ It’s that he has, and is intentionally choosing to perpetuate one of the worst immigration regimes in American history.”

That’s true of both his early executive orders (yes, he cut off misappropriated funding for Donald Trump’s “border wall” boondoggle, but boondoggles being boondoggles, the wall wasn’t stopping anyone anyway) and the legislative proposal he unveiled on February 18 (he wants a “path to citizenship” and is asking for some visa caps to be raised, but not for immigration freedom).

For the most part, Biden’s just carrying on in the Obama/Trump tradition of gaming immigration to satisfy authoritarians on both the “right” (the “won’t say we’re white nationalists, but you get it” wing of the Republican Party) and the “left” (Democrats beholden, like Biden himself, to the corrupt remnant of what was once a vital, universally pro-worker “organized labor” movement but over time became a protectionist racket).

House Republicans have mistaken a fellow authoritarian “border security” cultist for a pro-freedom activist. And they think that’s a bad thing!

Would you like to know who DID support “open borders?”

The framers of the US Constitution,  in Article I, Section 9 forbade the federal government to regulate immigration for 20 years, after which a constitutional amendment would have been required to create any such federal power (see the Tenth Amendment). It never was so amended, but in 1875 an activist Supreme Court miracled the power up out of whole cloth in Chy Lung v. Freeman.

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (some Republicans may remember them) also supported “open borders,” in those words, during the the 1980 Republican presidential primaries. And eight years later, even after mass migrations from Vietnam and Cuba, Reagan still supported “open borders” in his farewell address:

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life …. a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

Immigration freedom has always been an unalloyed social and economic good. When a politician supports anything less, he outs himself as an enemy of both human freedom and economic prosperity.

Republican politicians abandoned “open borders” for Joe Biden’s long-time position. Now they accuse him, essentially, of being a closet Reaganite! It doesn’t get much sillier than that.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

What Happened to “We The People?”

4 Comments
The White House "We The People" Page Before the Biden administration memory-holed it
The White House “We The People” Page Before the Biden administration memory-holed it

“The will of the people has been heard,” said President Joe Biden in his inaugural address on January 20, “and the will of the people has been heeded.” Later in the speech, Biden told us that “the American story” depends on “‘We the People’ who seek a more perfect union.”

At some point on that same day, Biden’s incoming administration shut down “We The People,” a section of the White House web site launched by the Obama administration.

“We The People” brought the First Amendment’s right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” into the digital age, with the promise of official responses to petitions receiving 100,000 or more signatures within 30 days.

So, why is it gone? As of this writing, I’ve been unable to find any public comment from the administration. They seem to have simply memory-holed “We The People.”

Maybe they’re just working on a site upgrade, but if so one might reasonably expect a placeholder page saying so. Instead, visitors to the site are redirected to the main White House page.

Or maybe the administration considers listening to “We The People” and responding to our concerns an embarrassment and/or a waste of time.

Granted, some past petitions have been a little silly (for example, one urging the US government to build a Star Wars-style Death Star), while others have been embarrassing to the president in power (more than a million signers sought the release of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns).

That last one may be a clue as to the administration’s motives. If Americans have an easy mechanism for demanding a presidential response to our grievances, and if the president doesn’t want to do what we’re asking of him, it puts him on the spot. He can tell us to buzz off, which no president really wants to be heard doing. He can offer a response that says nothing but feels good, or just ignore us, but we’ll notice.

For all his “We the People” guff, Joe Biden seems far more focused on “unity,” by which he seems to mean everyone doing what Joe Biden and his party tell them to do. In this, he’s not unlike his predecessors.

My columns don’t usually include a call to action, but this one’s an exception. I’ve created a petition at Change.org asking the Biden administration to restore “We The People.” I hope you’ll sign it at Change.org/RestoreWeThePeople.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY