Aug. 8, 2019
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Red flag laws to confiscate guns without the ability to mount a defense raise a gigantic red flag on due process
Democrat presidential candidate after Democrat presidential
candidate promising to ban and confiscate guns.
And I see President Donald Trump supporting state red flag laws which
will lay the groundwork for them to do it. Unfortunately, we don’t have to
speculate about the inevitable outcome of red flag laws, as fifteen states have
adopted them including Maryland where I reside.
Last November, in the county just north of my residence, police decided
to execute a “red flag” warrant at 5:17 am, and the predictable result was that
the subject of the warrant ended up dead from a police bullet. The dead gun owner was unavailable to contest
the police version of the shooting.
Video: To stop China boosting exports by manipulating yuan, block Beijing from the treasuries market
Besides its artificial peg to the dollar, another way China is
able to weaken the yuan is through the stockpiling of hundreds of billions of
U.S. Treasuries. What if the Treasury barred treasuries sales to China?
Matt Phillips: A weak dollar could help the U.S. Getting one isn’t so Easy.
“The trade war between Washington and Beijing took an unexpected
turn this week as China let its currency drop sharply and the United States
responded by officially designating the country a currency manipulator. The
confrontation underscored the Trump administration’s focus on weakness in
foreign currencies — and the corresponding strength of the dollar — as a drag
on the American economy. Now, investors are gaming out the prospect that the
United States could actively intervene in the financial markets, in a
significant break from a decades-long commitment to free-floating currencies… In
theory, it can. But in practice it isn’t easy.”
Red flag laws to
confiscate guns without the ability to mount a defense raise a gigantic red
flag on due process
By Rick Manning
I worked with Donald Trump’s team before he announced for the presidency on opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a policy decision which put me at odds with many of my conservative friends. But defending the United States of America against a trade deal which would eviscerate our national sovereignty was worth the cost.
Today I find myself in opposition to President Trump on a pair of foundational issues – the right to keep and bear arms and due process, which both are under attack through so-called red flag laws. The sad reality is that history demonstrates that these types of well-meaning laws are too easily abused.
I do not make this choice lightly. Recently after returning from a meeting at the White House, I had lunch with a friend. A fellow patron of the restaurant overheard that I had been in the meeting and heard me say favorable things about the president, after which this unknown person approached my table and started screaming invective at me. Even as his two young boys pleaded with and pulled on Dad trying to get him to leave, this self-proclaimed Georgetown Law grad continued his screaming rant as spittle flew from his foaming mouth. Along the way, he expressed the opinion that I and everyone like me should die, along with other lovely bits of wisdom.
Online and media crazies declaring all supporters of Donald Trump to be Nazi’s can be discounted as a legitimate threat to the safety of those of us who have historically supported the president, but when someone who ostensibly is well educated and part of the legal system completely loses it simply because of the existence of a Donald Trump supporter in his midst, that is a red flag.
Another red flag is the abuse of the FISA Court by politically motivated high-ranking FBI officials who launched a three year witch hunt of Donald Trump using “unverified and salacious” opposition research, with the help of a complicit media, in an attempt to initially influence and then overturn the results of the 2016 election. If the president of the United States is not safe from politically motivated abuse of the prosecutorial system, how can the average citizen trust that a law allowing legal “temporary” confiscation of firearms using “expedited due process” won’t be abused by every risk averse and politically motivated prosecutor in America?
Almost thirty years ago, when I was the state lobbyist for the National Rifle Association handling New Jersey, I saw and fought against law enforcement’s abuse of that state’s gun laws. I remember the woman in her twenties who was not allowed to purchase a handgun by local law enforcement for five years until she won a court decision — all because she made the mistake of calling a suicide hotline one time when she was 16 and her parents were going through a divorce. That single call was viewed as a red flag and an excuse to deny her a handgun permit.
And today, I see Democrat presidential candidate after Democrat presidential candidate promising to ban and confiscate guns. And I see President Donald Trump supporting a red flag law which will lay the groundwork for them to do it.
In a world where supporting Donald Trump is a red flag for the left, it is both politically and from a policy perspective disastrous for President Trump to support any red flag confiscation measure, no matter the purported “expedited due process” safeguard. In New York City, a MAGA hat wearing gallery owner was beaten for simply wearing the hat. In Miami, a black man wearing a MAGA hat at the Cheesecake Factory was surrounded and threatened by restaurant employees. Trump administration officials have repeatedly been harassed and denied service at restaurants, and Democratic officials have encouraged this behavior. The obvious truth is that the left has has so demonized anyone who supports Donald Trump that no legal ground can be ceded to give these loons of the left a lawful pathway to confiscate guns. No amount of due process protection will matter to those who believe that all Trump supporters are Nazis and hence all Trump supporters are evil and should be stripped of their rights.
Unfortunately, we don’t have to speculate about the inevitable outcome of red flag laws, as fifteen states have adopted them, including Maryland where I reside. Last November, in the county just north of my residence, police decided to execute a “red flag” warrant at 5:17 a.m., and the predictable result was that the subject of the warrant ended up dead from a police bullet. The dead gun owner was unavailable to contest the police version of the shooting.
Red flag laws are designed to confiscate a person’s legally held property under the presumption that they may misuse that property in the future. And given that the accusation itself is that the accused has the possibility of doing violence to themselves or others, even the most well-intentioned prosecutor and law enforcement agents will err on the side of denying the rights of the accused due to the fear that the accusation may prove correct – and failure to aggressively enforce the law will be devastating to their personal careers regardless of the credibility of the complaint. The accused is then required to prove that the accusation is wrong with those sitting in judgment facing enormous political pressure to leave confiscation orders in place, destroying the presumption of innocence. What’s more, in today’s Internet age, the accused forever will be tainted by the accusation regardless of outcome.
America witnessed this type of reputational assassination by accusation recently, and it is shocking that GOP politicians who witnessed the wild accusations levied against Justice Brett Kavanaugh are at all open to the idea that a federal gun confiscation law should be put in place that has at best only a fig leaf of due process protection.
And for this Trump supporter, the continuing push by this president in support of gun confiscation language serves as perhaps the biggest red flag of all.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
Video: To stop China boosting exports by manipulating yuan, block Beijing from the treasuries market
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJtRN_KPijw
ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column from the New York Times, Matt Phillips makes the case for a weaker dollar to offset competitive devaluations overseas by China and Europe:
A weak dollar could help the U.S. Getting one isn’t so Easy.
By Matt Phillips
The trade war between Washington and Beijing took an unexpected turn this week as China let its currency drop sharply and the United States responded by officially designating the country a currency manipulator.
The confrontation underscored the Trump administration’s focus on weakness in foreign currencies — and the corresponding strength of the dollar — as a drag on the American economy.
Now, investors are gaming out the prospect that the United States could actively intervene in the financial markets, in a significant break from a decades-long commitment to free-floating currencies.
“It’s a big deal because I think it would mark a new sort of phase in how the U.S. approaches the international economy,” said Michael Feroli, chief United States economist with JPMorgan Chase.
But while the president might want a weaker dollar, engineering one is complicated. Here’s the context you need to understand the United States’ changing approach to the dollar.
Why would the U.S. benefit from a weaker dollar?
A weaker currency makes a country’s exports cheaper for buyers overseas, giving a country a competitive advantage. For years, an artificially weak renminbi underpinned China’s growth as a manufacturing base for the rest of the world.
The Trump administration’s tariffs on imports of Chinese-made goods are meant to raise the price of those products once they land in the United States, discouraging Americans from buying them.
But one way for China to respond is to weaken the renminbi and undermine the impact of those tariffs by making those products cheaper.
That’s why when China allowed its closely controlled renminbi to depreciate sharply against the dollar on Monday, it was taken as a sign that the trade war between the United States and China was getting worse.
The currency has since strengthened, easing this tension somewhat, but China isn’t the only trading partner the president has a problem with.
For instance, in June, after the European Central Bank said it might restart stimulus programs to bolster the economy, Mr. Trump accused it of pushing down the value of the euro, “making it unfairly easier for them to compete against the USA.”
“They have been getting away with this for years, along with China and others,” he said on Twitter.
A weaker dollar has other benefits. For instance, it could also bolster corporate earnings. Roughly 40 percent of the revenue of the biggest American companies now comes from overseas, and a weaker dollar means those foreign sales make a bigger contribution to the bottom line. Those higher earnings can help give the stock market a lift.
None of this is a secret. But in the past, governments have shied away from weakening their currencies, in part because they were afraid it would also lead to an ugly bout of inflation, which was traditionally viewed as the big risk of a weak currency. These days, inflation around the world is incredibly low and shows little sign of rising.
“You have almost the perfect macro backdrop for policymakers to encourage currency weakness,” said Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at Deutsche Bank in New York.
How did this become a political issue?
Foreign exchange markets are a zero-sum game: If China’s currency weakens against the dollar, the dollar, by definition, strengthens.
So whether China is deliberately lowering the value of the renminbi, or the euro is tumbling because currency traders are worried about the region’s growth, the ultimate impact is that the dollar is stronger.
Strong currencies tend to weaken a country’s exports and bolster the consumption of foreign products. That can lead to larger trade deficits.
President Trump has made reducing the trade deficit with China a crucial focus of his administration and a crucial goal of the tariff war that began in 2018.
But that effort has had mixed results. The United States’ goods deficit with China initially widened to a record $43 billion in October before shrinking significantly since then. It is now hovering around $30 billion a month.
In theory, if the dollar weakened against the Chinese currency, it could do more to cut that trade deficit than a tariff battle, potentially offering the president a chance for a political victory going into the 2020 election.
If other countries can weaken their currency, why doesn’t the United States do the same?
In theory, it can. But in practice it isn’t easy.
In part, that’s just because the currency markets are so big. Every day, more than $5 trillion changes hands in those markets, and more than $4 trillion of those trades involve the dollar.
China controls the renminbi because it can use the bottomless buying power of its central bank, which publishes an official price for the currency every day around which it allows a certain amount of trading.
The People’s Bank of China has the ability to print renminbi to weaken the currency if the exchange rate gets too high. On the flip side, Beijing has $3 trillion in reserves it can deploy to keep the currency from getting too weak.
Right now, the United States doesn’t operate that way.
It has some capacity to intervene in financial markets by using the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a vehicle under the control of the Treasury secretary, with about $100 billion of buying power.
“Unless Congress gives Treasury authority to beef up the Exchange Stabilization Fund, it just doesn’t have enough firepower,” said Joseph Gagnon, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Last month, Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said the White House had considered an intervention to weaken the dollar before deciding against it. The same day, however, Mr. Trump contradicted Mr. Kudlow, telling reporters that all options were on the table.
“I could do that in two seconds if I wanted,” Mr. Trump said. “I didn’t say that I’m not going to do something.”
So in the past, when American politicians wanted to change the value of the dollar, they had to coordinate efforts involving a number of countries. That’s what happened in 1985, when the United States engineered an agreement to weaken the dollar as part of an agreement known as the Plaza Accord.
Of course, those countries were all strategic allies of the United States. Persuading China to let its currency strengthen to help the United States is a different situation all together.
