Tribe Home Opener Tonight!

Just Hours Away! 

The Tribe opens its home football schedule tonight against the Norfolk State Spartans.    The unranked Spartans are 0-2, having lost to nationally-ranked Maine in a defensive struggle, 10-6 and Liberty, 17-0.  Ranked 16th in the Sports Network Poll and 19th in the Coaches Poll, the Tribe is 1-1, having lost to Virginia Tech on opening day and defeated Hampton, 42-14, last week.  William and Mary leads the series with the Spartans 4-0.  (For the Tribe's all-time record against other 2014 opponents, go here.) 

Good luck to both teams, and GO TRIBE! 

A "Win Win" for American Workers

Wants to Make Work Pay

Ditto, But Has a Better Plan 

Speaking in Wisconsin on Labor Day, President Obama reiterated his call for a higher national minimum wage. The President claimed that such coercive wage fixing will help ensure that "hard work pays off --- with higher wages, and higher incomes."  The President did not mention a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office predicting, consistent with economic science, that the President's proposal to mandate a minimum wage of $10.10 per hour would throw 500,000 Americans, and perhaps more, out of work.  Nor did the President mention other scientific evidence rebutting his previous claims that raising the minimum wage will stimulate the economy and increase employment.

President Obama is right to be concerned about the economic plight of America's working poor. Fortunately a resident of Wisconsin has offered an alternative plan that would improve the living standards of millions of Americans without the various negative consequences of higher minimum wages.  In particular, Congressman Paul Ryan has proposed expanding the earned income tax credit ("EITC") for workers without children, thus significantly raising the effective wage that such individuals receive.

As currently structured, the EITC provides an annual tax credit of $5,500 to an individual with two children who works full time at minimum wage.  When combined with the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and the refundable child tax credit of $1,000 per child, the EITC pushes the effective wage for such individuals to just under $11.00 per hour.  (See this tax calculator to generate these data.)  Individual workers without children fare far worse under the current tax code, however.  Such individuals are of course not eligible for the child tax credit.  Moreover, the EITC provides such individuals only $503 per year, less than one tenth what individuals with two children receive.

Congressman Ryan's proposal would double the $503 credit for such employees, lower the eligibility age from 25 to 21 and raise the income cap that limits participation in the program. The Ryan proposal would be superior to increases in the minimum wage in several ways. First, the proposal would not throw any Americans out of work.  Second, raising the EITC would confer its benefits only on individuals who need assistance.  By contrast, raising the minimum wage would confer benefits on all minimum wage employees, including, say, teenagers and college students in high income households.  Indeed, most individuals who work for minimum wage are not in or near poverty, with the result that higher minimum wages redistribute income from businesses and consumers (some poor) to individuals in the middle and upper classes.  Third, the burden of an increased EITC would fall on the community as a whole, and not merely upon those employers (and their consumers) that happen to occupy low wage industries.  Fourth, the cost of increasing the EITC would be transparent, unlike the cost of the minimum wage and other labor regulations.   Fifth, the EITC would preserve a level playing field between employers competing with one another in the marketplace. By contrast, mandating a higher minimum wage would disproportionately burden small, labor-intensive firms vis a vis those with capital-intensive production processes, thus protecting large incumbent firms and distorting firms' choices of production technology.  (See pp. 293-95 of this article for additional detail regarding how minimum wages and other labor regulation can disadvantage firms with labor-intensive production processes.)   It is thus no surprise that leading economists, such as Christina Romer, have endorsed the EITC as superior to the minimum wage as a means of ensuring that hard work pays off.  Nor is it surprising that various newspapers, including the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun, have endorsed Congressman Ryan's plan.  (See here and here).  Indeed, President Obama has himself advocated such an increase in the EITC, albeit in addition to a job-killing minimum wage.

It should be noted that, even if Congressman Ryan's plan becomes law, the effective wage of a childless American earning the minimum wage will still be less than $10.00 per hour.  Perhaps there is room for a compromise of sorts between the President and Congressman Ryan.  That is, President Obama could back off his demand that Congress increase the minimum wage, and Congressman Ryan could propose a more generous increase in the EITC. Such a plan would be a "win win" for millions of American workers.

Even Binding on the GAO 

Various media outlets are reporting that the Obama Administration violated federal law when it swapped five Taliban prisoners for Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, whom the Taliban had held captive for five years.  (See here and here, for instance.) These stories uniformly cite a report by the non-partisan General Accounting Office, an arm of Congress, prepared at the request of the several U.S. Senators. This report asserts that the swap violated two different statutes. First, the report concludes that the swap violated the National Defense Authorization Act for 2014, which provides that the President must notify Congress 30 days in advance before releasing any prisoner from Guantanamo Bay. Second, the report concludes that the expenditure of money necessary to effectuate the transfer violated the "Antideficiency Act," which prohibits the expenditure of funds that exceeds Congressional authorization.

The GAO report is incomplete to say the least.  Federal law includes more than just statutes duly enacted by Congress.  The paramount Federal law is the U.S. Constitution, which declares itself the supreme law of the land.  Article II of the Constitution vests the Executive power in the President and also provides that the President is "Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." As previously explained on this blog, this provision grants the President power over what Joseph Story called "the direction of war" once Congress has initiated such hostilities.  Congress has authorized hostilities against individuals and organizations that planned and perpetrated the 9-11 attacks, included those, like the Taliban, who aided and/or harbored the perpetrators.  (See here, elaborating on the September 18, 2001 "Authorization to Use Military Force"). Having authorized the use of military force against our enemies, Congress cannot interfere with the President's exercise of the powers as Commander-in-Chief, any more than Congress can interfere with the President's authority to nominate a judge once it has created the judgeship by statute.

There is a strong argument that the detention and release of prisoners falls squarely within what Story called "the direction of war."  The conduct of military operations often results in the capture and subsequent detention, sometimes for the duration of the conflict, of those who surrender.  Direction of battlefield operations requires continuous decision making about whether to detain such prisoners, how and whether to collect intelligence from such prisoners, and which prisoners to release and when.  Such decisions are bound up with other tactical decisions, such as whether to conduct raids to capture additional prisoners, whether to enter temporary truces during which wounded prisoners are exchanged, and whether to release prisoners for the purpose of planting false intelligence with the enemy. The detention and treatment of prisoners can have strategic implications as well; an enemy might decline to surrender unless it receives adequate assurances that its captured soldiers will be released in a timely fashion.  Finally, successful negotiations with adversaries, again pursuant to the President's Article II powers, often depends upon preventing leaks so as to ensure the utmost secrecy.   Requiring the President always to notify Congress 30 days before releasing one or more such prisoners could in some cases unconstitutionally infringe on Article II of the Constitution.

If in fact the detention and release of prisoners falls within the President's authority to "direct war" and negotiate with adversaries, then President Obama was free to ignore, as unconstitutional, legislative constraints on the exercise of that power. In the same way, for instance, President George W. Bush was free to ignore legislation that purported to require the military to obtain a judicial warrant before gathering military intelligence from phone conversations between Americans and suspected members of Al Qaeda located in other countries. Presidents, like courts, are duty-bound to decline to enforce legislation they believe to be unconstitutional, regardless of whether courts have agreed or will agree with the President. (See here). Indeed, when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2014, President Obama issued a signing statement contending that the notification requirement could in some cases infringe upon the President's Article II authority by depriving the President of the "flexibility, among other things, to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers."  As previously explained on this blog, such statements are an entirely legitimate means by which the President may publicly contest legislation he or she believes to be unconstitutional.

The GAO report did not examine whether the statutory provisions it invoked infringed upon Article II of the Constitution.   Instead, the report reiterated the GAO's apparent practice of declining to opine on the constitutionality of duly enacted statutes.  The GAO also asserted that statutes passed by Congress and signed by the President are "entitled to a heavy presumption of in favor of constitutionality."

GAO's failure to consider the constitutional dimensions of the question was unfortunate and weakens the persuasiveness of the report's conclusion that the Administration "broke the law," given that unconstitutional statutes are not "law" in the first place. Moreover, the report's invocation of a presumption of constitutionality is misplaced. Such a presumption might make sense in the judicial context, when judges evaluate the constitutionality of legislation passed by Congress and defended in court by the President.  Where, however, Congress and a sitting President disagree about the constitutionality of legislation that purports to constrain the President, the application of such a presumption is unwarranted.  As Justice Scalia once explained, in such cases there is simply  no rationale for according the constitutional views of one branch of government greater deference than those of the other. See Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 687, 704-705  (Scalia, J. dissenting).  As James Madison explained in Federalist 49: "The several departments being perfectly co-ordinate by the terms of their common commission, neither of them, it is evident, can pretend to an exclusive or superior right of settling the boundaries between their respective powers." (quoted in id.)  Thus, "[a]s one of the interested and coordinate parties to the underlying constitutional dispute, Congress, no more than the President, is entitled to the benefit of the doubt."  Morrison, 487 U.S. at 705 (Scalia, J. dissenting).    By ignoring James Madison and Justice Scalia and invoking this misplaced "heavy presumption," the GAO avoided the sort of analysis that may have clarified and helped resolve the constitutional dispute between Congress and the President.

Hopefully GAO will discard its practice of disregarding the Constitution when opining on the legality of executive branch actions.