Why Free Immigration is a Right

Liberty has nothing to do with national interests. It is about the individual. It concerns the liberty to live your own life, to pursue your own livelihood, and to come and go as you please to anywhere that’s open to you or anywhere you’re invited to go.

Everyone Has Rights

The implications for immigration policy are obvious: Everyone–not just Americans, not just “citizens,” not just people with government permission slips, but everyone–has rights. They have the right to own or lease property, to take jobs, to make their own living, wherever they want, and to peacefully come and go whenever, wherever, and however they please as long as they don’t infringe on any other individual’s equal liberty. That means nothing short of free immigration, open borders, and immediate and unconditional amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants.

If a landlord rents an apartment to an immigrant, they have every right to live there, regardless of where they came from. If an immigrant buys land of their own, they have every right to live there, regardless of where they came from. If a friend invites them to come sleep on their couch or in their spare bedroom, they have every right to stay there as long as the friend wants them. Of course they do.

Nations have nothing to do with it; state governments have nothing to do with it; local governments have nothing to do with it; neighborhood busybodies and border-control freaks who want to inflict their prejudices on other people’s property have nothing to do with it. If you don’t want immigrants in your house then you are welcome not to invite them in. If you don’t want immigrants in your neighbor’s house, that’s tough for you, bro; you’ll need to keep your prejudices on your own property.

A recent post at the “Libertarian Realist” blog (actually, they are neither) claims to take issue with Sheldon Richman’s defense of free immigration. The post is an example of astonishing sophistry, beginning with a long attack on Sheldon’s comments about “the right to travel and settle anywhere.”

They complain that in a free society, landowners should be able to throw out uninvited trespassers, so there cannot be any such right. Apparently, they neglected Sheldon’s direct statement that the right of free immigration is “the right to travel and settle anywhere so long as no one else’s rights are violated.” Or they chose to ignore this, and hoped nobody would notice the bait-and-switch. Of course, everybody has a right to shut their own door. But their own, not their neighbors’.

A Nation's Interests Don't Matter

Like most border-nationalists, the “Libertarian Realist” is not particularly interested in what libertarian principles imply; they’re interested mainly in finding rationalizations to pass off a foreordained anti-immigration conclusion as if it had something to do with principles individual liberty (it doesn’t). Apparently, they think the following is a crushing put down:

What we’re dealing with in the open-borders camp are… moral purists whose creed is altruistic egalitarian humanism.”

To be fair, that is pretty much my creed, yes. But then, if the alternative is moral corruptionism, or anti-humanism, or an ethic of domination and subordination, then I am pretty much comfortable with where I stand.

They also find it odd that libertarians believe things like this:

...They believe that it’s morally wrong for the people of any nation to pursue a self-interested immigration program.”

Well good God, of course it is morally wrong for nations to pursue their “self-interest” in anything, and especially in border control policies. People have self-interests that matter, morally; nations do not. Nations are toxic hellholes of false identity and purveyors of monstrous political violence.

Nations are not rational people; they are not free associations or contractual agreements; they are unchosen, coercively assembled collectives, whose interests are typically an abortion of, if not an outright war against, the moral interests of individual people which actually deserve to be cultivated, practiced and respected. For anyone committed to individual liberty, a nations’ “interests” deserve no notice at all except to trample them underfoot.

Reprinted from Center for a Stateless Society.

Charles Johnson

Charles Johnson is a writer and philosopher living and working in Auburn, Alabama.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Governments Can Theoretically Destroy All Wealth in the World in One Year

A recent article pointed out that Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year.

Shocking.

It’s also shocking that governments can theoretically destroy all wealth in one year.

Governments are quite literally all around us, even governments within governments. There is one in your town, one in your home, one in your office, another in your county, another in your state, and then there is the biggest one of all: the federal government.

Around the globe, governments even get to together and act to make war, bail out their friends, and regulate people.

All of them keep growing every year, in good times and bad. They get more powerful, more invasive, more inquisitive about your life and finances. There’s a good chance that at least one government is staring at you right now, sizing you up, eyes glistening in the shadows, ready to pounce on your wealth and liberty.

Governments can’t live on their own. Their only source of energy is someone else’s money. They have many strategies on how to get it, and many excuses for why they must get ever more. They tell people that without them, life would be nasty, brutish, and short. And yet, even a casual observer can see that governments specialize in nastiness, brutality, and shortening life.

If you were to tally up all the wealth taken by governments in a single year, how much would it be? According to the Tax Foundation, “In 2012, governments [in the United States] at all levels collected $4.2 trillion in taxes and other receipts and spent $5.5 trillion on government programs, thereby running a combined deficit of $1.3 trillion.”

That’s an unfathomable amount of wealth extraction, but it raises the question: what is the limit?

And here is where matters become chilling: there isn’t one. There isn’t anything to stop governments from taking as much as they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they can get it, so long as people don’t protest or push back.

And if history is any indication, governments just can’t seem to stop or even slow down. In other words, government could eat all wealth and still be hungry.

Taxing isn’t the only way governments get money. They also issue bills of credit and try to get people to buy them. Normally, your debt instrument has to be of solid quality to attract investors. Governments have figured out a different way. They came up with central banks, essentially machines that print money. They can credibly promise to pay on their debt no matter what. This has generally assured investors.

But experts also point out a serious problem: printing enough money to pay the debt and service all future obligations, would actually obliterate the value of money itself. It could theoretically fall to zero.

What is stopping that from happening? In theory, nothing. Only the benevolence of government officials, the evidence of which is in short supply.

With all these governments around, acting without limit and extracting wealth in every possible way and facing no constraints on the possibility of literally destroying every last bit of wealth on planet earth, what are we to do?

Experts say that we need to find ways to limit them, some means of controlling their voracious appetites. People have indeed tried this, but without much luck. This accounts for the growing interest in what people once thought was a crazy idea: just get rid of them altogether.

Regardless, so long as governments as we know them are this big, this powerful, this much on the loose, the perception that we are safe from their insatiable gluttony will be an illusion.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Purpose of Manufacturing Isn't to Create Jobs

Funny thing about American manufacturing: The good news about what’s happening at American factories often sounds like bad news to politicians.

American factories are one of the wonders of the world, and, in spite of what President Donald Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders, and other lightly informed populists claim, they are humming. U.S. manufacturing output is about 68 percent higher today in real terms (meaning inflation-adjusted terms) than it was before NAFTA was enacted; manufacturing output is about double in real terms what it was in the 1980s and more than three times what it was in the 1950s. As our factories grow more efficient, output per man-hour has grown, too, which is what troubles the populists and demagogues: Our factories employ a much smaller share of the U.S. work force than they once did.

All Jobs Are Temporary

But it is important to keep in mind: That growth in manufacturing output did not come in spite of the decline in factory employment but partly because of it. Automation not only makes current production more efficient but also makes it easier to improve efficiency in the future: More heavily automated factory processes are much easier to upgrade than are those heavily dependent on human labor.

The complaint usually goes something like this: “What good is that increased output if it comes at the expense of good manufacturing jobs?” Often, this will be accompanied by fictitious claims about Henry Ford’s paying his workers more so that they could afford to buy his cars, a complete invention that is one of the favorite myths of economic populists of Left and Right.

Here, we need a little bit less Milton Friedman and a little more Marcus Aurelius: “What is this thing in itself? What is its purpose? What does it do?”

The purpose of an automobile factory is not to “create jobs,” as the politicians like to say. Its function is not to add to the employment rolls with good wages and UAW benefits, adding to the local tax base and helping to sustain the community—as desirable as all those things are.

The purpose of an automobile factory is not to create jobs—it is to create automobiles. Jobs are a means, not an end. Human labor is valuable to the extent that it contributes to human prosperity and human flourishing, not in and of itself as a matter of abstraction.

There are cases in which this is so obvious that practically everybody understands it. When we talk about building new pipelines (and good on the Trump administration for getting out of the way of getting that done), our progressive friends sometimes sniff that many of the new jobs associated with that work are “temporary.” (“Temporary jobs” is a phrase usually delivered with a distinct sniff.)

Here is a little something to consider: Unless you are building the Second Avenue Subway in New York City, all construction jobs are temporary—buildings get built. Projects come to completion, and work gets finished. It is in the nature of construction jobs to come to an end. And it is not only construction: A technology-industry friend attending the recent National Review Ideas Summit in Washington bluntly shared the view from Silicon Valley: “All jobs are temporary.”

Trade is a Technology

Consider this thought experiment: Say that a Star Trek fan manages to invent something like the replicator from that science-fiction series, meaning that all purely material desires can be more or less fulfilled instantly: “Tea, Earl Grey, hot!” and that’s that. Such an invention would be devastating for the employment prospects of billions of people, including pretty much everyone on Earth not working in a purely service-oriented or intellectual capacity along with a great many people working in service jobs, too: There are no chai wallahs on the Enterprise.



But we would be enormously better off in real terms. There would be no expensive prescription drugs, no shortage of Pappy Van Winkle, no scarcity of ordinary consumable goods at all. Presumably, you could have Michelangelo’s Pietà—arguably the most beautiful thing made by a man so far—in your backyard, provided you could figure out a way to move it there. (Job opportunities, after all!) You could have three of them, if you liked, or three dozen. You could pour a nice 1982 Bordeaux over your Fruity Pebbles, if you liked. Once you sobered up, you could drive around in one of your 1968 Ferrari Dinos.

Consider another kind of machine, a more limited one: Bryan Caplan’s magical idea for a machine that turns corn into cars: “Lo and behold—corn goes in, and cars come out.” It will not ruin Professor Caplan’s M. Night Shyamalan moment to reveal the twist ending to his story: There is such a machine, and it is called trade. “What difference does it make what’s inside the factory?” Professor Caplan asks. “For all intents and purposes, trade is a kind of technology, a creative way to reduce our cost of living and thereby raise our standard of living.”

Trade—and capitalism—is in fact a machine of a different sort: a social machine.

Global capitalism anno Domini 2017 is not quite a Star Trek replicator, but it is something close. What would you do with a replicator? Presumably, most of us would first ensure that we never wanted for the basics of life—food, shelter, clothing, medical necessities—and then we probably would spend a great deal of time enjoying things that once had been reserved to very wealthy people. It would be interesting to see what happened socially after the novelty of that wore off, when a ten-pound diamond became just another rock and there were no more consumer goods that functioned as status symbols.

Unrestrained Ingenuity

But would that really be so different from where we are now? Things that were until quite recently “a millionaire’s whim” are so common and so widely available that we do not even think about them. And what really functions as a status symbol right now—having a Mercedes, or being in really good physical condition, or having a fulfilling and creative job, or having rarefied experiences that money cannot buy? You can lease a Mercedes for less than $100 a week.



If I were a Republican politician or someone paid to advise such creatures, I might point out that the great sources of friction in our public life right now have to do mainly with a few areas in which abundance has not been allowed to emerge. We have one economic model for producing food and mobile phones and automobiles, and a different one for producing health care and education, and to some extent (more in some areas of the country than others) housing.

The typical American today can afford housing that is much better (larger, better built, better furnished) than could the typical American of his grandparents’ generation. He can afford a better car and better food than a millionaire of that generation. And he has access to better health care and educational options, too, but these have not improved at the rate of everything else in his life, and the options for financing them have become a source of insecurity and stress.

The people who have an explicit legal obligation to work not on our behalf but on behalf of their shareholders do a pretty good job of giving us what we want; the people who vow to work on our behalf do not. That is a paradox only if you do not think about it too much, and not thinking about it too much is the business that politicians are in.

If capitalism—which is to say, human ingenuity set free to follow its own natural course—is a kind of social machine, then politicians are something like children who take apart complex machines without understanding what they do or how to put them back together. (At their worst, they are simply saboteurs.) When they rail against capitalism, automation, trade, and the like, they resemble nothing so much as those hominids at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, shrieking hysterically at something that is simply beyond their comprehension.

A social machine is different from an ordinary mechanical one, but you can still throw sand in the gears.

Reprinted from National Review.

Kevin D. Williamson

Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Truth and Myth on the Gender Pay Gap

The ongoing battle over gender equality has turned the question of the relative pay of women and men into quite the political football. Over the last few years, defenders of markets, including me, have been on the offensive, arguing that the gender pay gap is in some sense a “myth.” More recently, critics have replied that it’s not a myth and that those who think it is a myth are peddling nonsense.

It turns out that both sides have a point. Whether the gender pay gap is a myth depends upon exactly what claim either side is making. Below, I hope to sort out these various claims and make clear what we can and cannot say is true and false about the gender pay gap.

What Is Mythical?

For decades, critics of markets have trotted out the claim that women make only a percentage of what men do as evidence that markets discriminate against women. Early on, women were claimed to make only about 65% of what men do. Now that number is more like 80%. So one observation from the start is that the gap, whatever its causes, has narrowed since the 1970s.

But why would people claim this is a myth? Two reasons. First, if the critics are claiming that the 80% number means that when men and women with the exact same skills and experience and preferences do the exact same work that women get paid 80 cents for every dollar men do, they are wrong. That is not what the 80% figure shows.

Rather, that number is the ratio of female to male wages among full-time workers, across all kinds of jobs and regardless of the skills and preferences of the workers. That 80% is an aggregate – it is not an apples-to-apples comparison of men and women doing the same work. Thus, the claim that women get paid 80% of what men do for the same work is a myth.

Correspondingly, the other myth is that the missing 20% represents discrimination by employers. Once we understand where the gap figure comes from, we know right away that this other claim is a myth. To know if there is discrimination, we’d need to make the apples-to-apples comparison.

In fact, that is what economic studies of the gap attempt to do. They attempt to hold everything else constant and compare employees who are as similar as possible, and who are in jobs as similar as possible, except that some are male and some are female.

If there is a gap left unexplained by skills and experience, then economists treat that presumptively as due to discrimination, pending further studies. The consensus of those studies is that the clear majority of the gap is explained by skills, experience, and preferences. So it is a myth that the missing 20% is all due to discrimination.

What Is Not a Myth

You’ll notice that I said “the clear majority” of the gender wage gap is explained by factors other than discrimination, but not all of it. The consensus of the economic studies is that there is still about 3 to 5 percentage points of the 20 percent, or roughly 15 to 25% of the gap, that cannot be accounted for by economic differences and that might well be due to discrimination.

So it is not a myth that there might be discrimination in labor markets. Even the economic studies that show that most of the gap is explained by other factors do not say that all of the gap can be accounted for by such things. Although the economic studies don’t test directly for discrimination, the fact that other kinds of studies suggest that it exists in labor markets is consistent with the existence of an economically unexplained portion of the gap.

People who want to argue that the 80% figure is mythical therefore need to be very precise in saying exactly what is mythical about it.

The most accurate summary is something like the following:  “It’s a myth that women get paid only 80% of what men do when they have the same skills and experience and are doing the same work, but it’s also a myth to claim that economics shows there is no gender discrimination in labor markets because studies show that economic factors cannot explain all of the gender wage gap.”

Labor Market Discrimination Versus Sexism

To be even more precise, what the economic studies indicate is that “labor market discrimination” explains, at best, only a fraction of the gender wage gap. It would also be a myth to say that “sexism” explains only that fraction. Even if employers largely don’t discriminate based on gender by paying equally qualified men and women differently, employer-driven discrimination is not the only form of sexism that might matter for explaining pay differentials by gender.

All the economic studies say is that differences in skills, experiences, and preferences between men and women explain the clear majority of the gap. What such studies do not address is the degree to which the differences in men’s and women’s skills and knowledge (their “human capital”) is due to sexism before they come to the labor market. Nor do such studies ask whether differences in preferences or job experience by gender are also due to sexism or other aspects of socialization.

For example, if girls are told from a young age that girls aren’t very good at math and science, and are thereby discouraged from majoring in those areas and earning higher salaries as a result, those factors will contribute to the 80% figure. But notice, that’s not because employers are discriminating. If sexism pushes women into lower paying fields, that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily being paid less than men for the same work in that field. What’s causing their lower wages is sexism in places other than the markets.

Defenders of markets can legitimately argue that markets tend not to discriminate by gender, but that sexism exists elsewhere and thereby indirectly affects how economic outcomes are patterned by gender.

Preferences, Choices, and Culture

Feminist critics also argue that the explanations people like me have offered for the gap are problematic when we talk about the different “preferences” that men and women have. For example, the fact that women are more likely to work part-time than men, or less likely to work overtime when they work full-time, are factors that explain the differences in pay by gender. If women prefer to spend more time with family, their wages will fall. If women prefer less risky work, they will make less.

Feminists argue that such “preferences” really aren’t preferences to the degree they are products of socialization. Do women really “choose” to do all of those things, or are they just playing out gender roles they haven’t really chosen?

There’s no reason to deny that socialization might matter. Agreeing with that claim implies no necessary role for policy. We’ve already seen that the problem largely isn’t with employers or in labor markets. Instead, if we think that such socialization is a problem, and that the world would be a better, and more liberal, place if women felt more empowered to, say, enter the math and science majors and earn a better living as a result, we can work to change the culture in ways that address these concerns. The same could be said of persuading men to devote more time to child raising and other forms of household production.

Working through voluntary processes and the institutions of civil society to reduce sexism seems a far more congenial option than using policy. I also think that the long-standing liberal concern with the dignity and growth of all individuals should make us want to address the sexism that remains in our culture. This is a set of issues on which we can agree with progressive feminists – working together to change the culture is a better solution than trying to regulate labor markets in ways that are not necessary.

An Honest Accounting

The gender wage gap is not as simple as either the defenders of markets or their feminist critics make it out to be. Although the entire gap is not the result of labor market discrimination, a fraction of it might be. The portion not explained by labor market discrimination might well result from latent misogyny in the culture.

There is an additional factor that relates to institutions. Controlled and hampered labor markets reduce competitiveness in positions and salaries for everyone, and provide greater opportunities for invidious and irrational discrimination to take place. The less rivalrous the market, the more you find forms of power, including that stemming from bias, can express themselves.

Today’s labor market is far from free, so it should not surprise us to find that it is yielding noncompetitive and non-optimal outcomes.

Those of us who like markets should not be afraid to argue that labor market discrimination is not the dominant problem here, but we also shouldn’t be afraid to admit that sexism matters and we should be willing to push back at it in partnership with our friends on the left where we can.

There are myths on both sides here, and taking steps toward gender equality requires an honest accounting of the economic and social facts.

Steven Horwitz

Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions. He is spending the 2016-17 academic year as a Visiting Scholar at the John H. Schnatter Institute for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise at Ball State University.

He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Why Is Trump Waging War on the Freedom Caucus?

Why is Trump attacking the House Freedom Caucus? He has tweeted that “we must fight them.”

My first thought: this is inevitable. Destiny is unfolding before our eyes!

There is the obvious fact that the Freedom Caucus was the reason the GOP’s so-called replacement for Obamacare went down to defeat. They fought it for a solid reason: it would not have reduced premiums or deductibles, and it would not have increased access to a greater degree of choice in the health-insurance market.

These people knew this. How? Because there was not one word of that bill that enabled the health care industry to become more competitive. Competition is the standard by which reform must be judged. The core problem of Obamacare (among many) was that it froze the market in an artificial form and insulated it from competitive forces.

At minimum, any reform must unfreeze the market. The proposed reform did not do that.

Bad Reform

That means the reform would not have been good for the American people. It would not have been good for the Republican Party. And then the chance for real reform – long promised by many people in the party – would have been gone.

Trump latched on to the proposal without understanding it. Or, other theories: he doesn’t care, he actually does favor universal coverage even if it is terrible, or he just wanted some pyrrhic victory even if it did nothing to improve the access.

The Freedom Caucus killed it. And I’m trying to think back in political history here, is there another time since World War Two that a pro-freedom faction of the Republican Party killed a bill pushed by the majority that pertained to such a large sector and dealt with such a hugely important program?

I can’t think of one.

What this signifies is extremely important. We might be seeing the emergence of a classically liberal faction within the GOP, one that is self consciously driven by an agenda that is centered on a clear goal: getting us closer to an ideal of a free society. The Caucus isn’t fully formed yet in an ideological sense, but its agenda is becoming less blurry by the day. (And please don't call them the "hard right wing.")

The old GOP coalition included nationalists, militarists, free enterprisers, and social conservatives. The Trump takeover has strained it to the breaking point. Now the genuine believers in freedom are gaining a better understanding of themselves and what they must do.

For the first times in our lives! Even in our parents’ and grandparents’ lives!

The Larger Picture

Trump is obviously not a student of history or political philosophy, but he does embody a strain of thinking with a history that traces back in time. I discussed this in some detail here, here, and here, among many other places. The tradition of thought he inhabits stands in radical opposition to the liberal tradition. It always has. We just remain rather ignorant of this fact because the fascist tradition of thought has been dormant for many decades, and so is strangely unfamiliar to this generation of political observers.

So let us be clear: this manner of thinking that celebrates the nation-state, believes in great collectives on the move, panics about the demographic genocide of a race, rails against the “other” invading our shores, puts all hope in a powerful executive, and otherwise believes not in freedom but rather in compliance, loyalty, and hero worship – this manner of thinking has always and everywhere included liberals (or libertarians) as part of the enemy to be destroyed.

And why is this? Liberalism to them represents “rootless cosmopolitanism,” in the old Nazi phrase. They are willing to do business with anyone, move anywhere, and imagine that the good life of peace and prosperity is more than enough to aspire to in order to achieve the best of all possible worlds. They don’t believe that war is ennobling and heroic, but rather bloody and destructive. They are in awe of the creation of wealth out of simple exchanges and small innovations. They are champions of the old bourgeois spirit.

To the liberal mind, the goal of life is to live well in peace and experience social and financial gain, with ever more alleviation of life’s pains and sufferings. Here is magic. Here is beauty. Here is true heroism.

The alt-right mind will have none of this. They want the clash, the war, the struggle against the enemy, big theaters of epic battles that pit great collectives against each other. If you want a hilarious caricature of this life outlook, no one does it better than Roderick Spode.

Natural Enemies

This is why these two groups can never get along politically. They desire different things. It has always and everywhere been true that when the strongmen of the right-Hegelian mindset gain control, they target the liberals for destruction. Liberals become the enemy that must be crushed.

And so it is that a mere few months into the presidency of this odd figure that the Freedom Caucus has emerged as a leading opposition. They will back him where they can but will otherwise adhere to the great principle of freedom. When their interests diverge, the Freedom Caucus will go the other way. It is not loyalty but freedom that drives them. It is not party but principle that makes them do what they do.

To any aspiring despot, such views are intolerable, as bad as the reliable left-wing opposition.

Listen, I’m all for working with anyone to achieve freedom. When Trump is right (as he is on environmental regulation, capital gains taxes, and some other issues), he deserves to be backed. When he is wrong, he deserves to be opposed. This is not about partisanship. It is about obtaining freer lives.

But let us not languish in naïvete. The mindset of the right-wing Hegelian is not at all the same as a descendant of the legacy of Adam Smith. They know it. We need to know it too.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

On Diversity of Top Staff, Senate Republicans Outpace Democrats

Senate Democrats apparently could take some tips from Senate Republicans in hiring more racially diverse senior staff.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., noting that Republicans have an edge on Democrat colleagues in this department, said he wants to encourage his colleagues to find and bring on board qualified minority applicants.

“We have one of the most diverse staffs in the Senate, and that means you get more information with different perspectives than my other colleagues, which has been very helpful,” Scott told The Daily Signal in an interview.

Of 336 top personal staffers for the Senate’s 100 members, including chiefs of staff or legislative directors, only three were black in 2015, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ racial diversity study reported. (Note: The initial version of this story incorrectly put the number at five.)

Today, five of those top staffers are black: One works for a Democrat and the other four work for Republicans.

Jennifer DeCasper is chief of staff to Scott, while Brennen Britton is chief of staff to Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan. Scott joined the Senate in 2013, Moran in 2011.

Clinton Odom is legislative director for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Courtney Temple is legislative director for Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and D.J. Jordan is communications director for Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. Harris joined the Senate in January, Tillis and Lankford two years earlier.

Of 39 directors of majority and minority staffs for official Senate committees, the center also found in 2015, one was African-American. (Note: The initial version of this story incorrectly said no staff director was black.)

Currently, none of the staff directors is black or Latino, said Spencer Overton, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy organization “that supports elected officials and policy experts who serve communities of color across the country.”

The study did not explore diversity in terms of sex, religion, or sexual orientation.

For a Democratic Party that prides itself on embracing diversity, Scott said, the lack of it among Democrat staffers on Capitol Hill doesn’t make much sense.

“We are oftentimes maligned as the party that doesn’t open the door of opportunities,” Scott said of Republicans, “whereas the other side of the aisle is celebrated for being the party of opportunity, when in fact there may be room for improvement in their staff numbers.”

Scott’s 17-member staff on Capitol Hill includes nine individuals who are black, Hispanic, or Asian, or who have developmental disabilities. When women are included, the number rises to 13,  communications director Sean Smith said.

South Carolina’s Scott is the only black Republican in the Senate, where California’s Harris and New Jersey’s Cory Booker are the only black Democrats.

DeCasper, Scott’s chief of staff, says diversity in leadership “starts from the top.”

Those who serve as leaders determine how diverse their parties will be, regardless of their claims, DeCasper said.

“I do know that it starts from the top,” DeCasper, who is African-American, said in an email to The Daily Signal. “If the folks at the top aren’t intentional about diversity, then the office is going to reflect that.”

It takes effort, she said.

“There has to be a real intentionality about diversifying your office,” DeCasper said. “It may take a little longer, it may take reaching into communities you don’t normally turn to for resumes, but it’s worth it.”

Overton told The Daily Signal in a phone interview that the lack of diversity on Senate Democrats’ staffs stems from a lack of a pool of candidates to pull from.

“I think that there is a lack of a pipeline,” Overton said. “I think there is a pipeline issue.”

Paid internships, Overton says, are a way to build a pool of diversity:

So if you think about it, most internships are unpaid on the Hill. There are a lot of people of all racial backgrounds who do not have the money to actually enter in that internship entryway to an entry-level job later on. Our pool already is not a strong pool because of the lack of paid internships.

Scott, however, says it is important to hire individuals based on experience and qualifications for a particular position, not single out diversity as the one stipulation for hiring.

“We don’t want to encourage folks to hire minorities for the sake of hiring minorities, but to hire the right person for the right job without any exclusions,” Scott said.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is leading by example in that chamber.

In December, Ryan hired Jonathan Burks, a veteran Hill aide who is black, as his chief of staff. The hire made Burks the highest-ranking staffer in the House who also happens to be African-American.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., decided to introduce  diversity rules this month for Democrats “under pressure from party members and some of their own employees,” The Washington Post reported.

Democrats’ Senate offices “are now formally encouraged to consider at least one minority candidate when interviewing for an open position,” Roll Call reported.

The new rules, The Washington Post reported, model the so-called Rooney rule, which it described as “an NFL policy that requires teams to interview minorities for any head coaching or senior football operations positions.”

Scott told The Daily Signal that there are plentiful opportunities where conservatives can bring in staffers whose diversity will contribute significantly to Congress and embody the convictions of members:

As an African-American Republican who gets a whole lot of hate mail [and] a whole lot of poking because of my affiliation with the conservative party, when I look around the Senate [I see] real opportunities to make a difference. There’s no question that every single staff member is very valuable, but the top of the food chain, from a staff perspective, remains empty.

She can’t speak for Democrats, DeCasper said, but her friends on the other side of the aisle say they are “troubled” by the lack of diversity on Democrats’ staffs.

“When I talk to my Democrat friends about this issue they are really, really troubled,” DeCasper said.

The disappointment is warranted, she said.

“I think it’s because their hearts hurt about it,” DeCasper said, adding:

We all pick our parties based on what’s best for our beliefs. And when you see the party that you love, the party that you defend and support, not actually caring about one of what I believe many think are the underpinnings of their ideology—diversity—it hurts.  And rightfully so.

Scott said building a more diverse staff  isn’t about gaining the spotlight, but bringing in qualified individuals to serve the public.

“We’re not looking for media attention,” Scott said. “We just keep hiring more people who happen to be more diverse. And my friends on the left, I would hope that they find qualified, competent candidates who happen to be candidates of color.”

Report by The Daily Signal's Rachel del Guidice. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

First Amendment rights still in peril following climate-change probes

MADISON, Wis. – Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of the day an army of Democratic prosecutors unveiled a coordinated campaign to hunt down so-called “climate change deniers.” Constitutional experts have described the initiative as one of the more egregious attacks on the First Amendment in U.S. history.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, caught in the crosshairs of the climate change coalition of the willing, marked the anniversary with a combination of celebration and vigilance.One year later, New York Attorney General’s Eric Schneiderman’scoalition of Attorneys General United for Clean Power has disintegrated in the heat of its own abusive law enforcement practices. The same fate seemingly awaits former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

“While pretending that this was a law enforcement investigation, Schneiderman made clear that he was pushing a policy agenda—‘to defend the climate change progress made under President Obama and to push the next president for even more aggressive action,’” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman in a statement.

“Since then, Schneiderman’s coalition has fallen apart: most of its members have left, the subpoenas served on us and Exxon by Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker were quickly withdrawn, and the climate science debate that this gang tried to shut down is more energetic than ever,” Kazman added.  “Ironically, nowhere is that better demonstrated than by (Tuesday’s) environmental Executive Order from the president.”

Trump announced the Environmental Protection Agency will begin unraveling the Obama administration’s carbon-emissions reduction plan that critics have blasted as a job-killing government overreach.

Trump was surrounded by coal miners Tuesday as he signed the executive order. The president has said boosting U.S. fossil fuel production in pursuit of energy independence is a priority for his administration.

“My action today is the latest in a series of steps to create American jobs and to grow American wealth. We’re ending the theft of American prosperity and rebuilding our beloved country,” he said before signing the order at an EPA that clearly is moving in a different direction from the aggressive enforcement agency of the past eight years.

Not surprisingly, the climate change faithful are furious. Obama EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy sees all of her regulatory work going up in smoke.

“This is not just dangerous; it’s embarrassing to us and our businesses on a global scale to be dismissing opportunities for new technologies, economic growth, and US leadership,” she said in a statement.

Nathan Richardson of the environmental extremist group Resources for the Future likened the executive order to the short list of America’s “truly shameful” days. Among them, “the Dred Scott decision, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, and Abu Ghraib —most of them symbolic of a larger national moral failure.”

As CEI pointed out, Richardson’s opinion was quickly endorsed by Vox explainers and a New York Times reporter.

Those entities need not fear the threat of a sweeping, state-sponsored investigation into what they said and who they associate with. But CEI and other research organizations that have challenged the flawed science of the climate change crowd have had such a probe hanging over them for months.

Former Vice President Al Gore was on hand March 29, 2016, when Schneiderman and 16 other Democratic AGs moved to take up their investigative campaign against ExxonMobil and other alleged violators of “climate fraud.”

CEI soon after was targeted by the Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker. The AG sought “kitchen sink” subpoenas that “plainly aimed at suppressing free speech and scientific inquiry” the nonprofit think tank sponsors.

In June, Walker withdrew his subpoenas of ExxonMobil and CEI. The attorney general claimed he was looking into whether ExxonMobil had concealed its “understanding of climate change” from customers and investors.

“He served an astonishingly overbroad subpoena on a public policy organization, demanding that it reveal its internal communications and communications with allies,” CEI’s court motion stated. “He conceded, in his briefing, that his subpoena was unsupported by the statutory authority that he cited as justifying it. And he has undertaken a series of legal maneuvers to evade judicial scrutiny of his actions, even while continuing to threaten CEI.”

The legal battles go on.

In a similar legal battle, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, part of the so-called “Green 20,”sought 40 years of ExxonMobil’s documents in a subpoena. The company’s attorneys in September argued in a Texas court that if Healey’s overly broad subpoena was allowed to stand, “nothing is to stop a state prosecutor from issuing a subpoena to a political opponent seeking decades of records on the theory that a disagreement about policy constitutes fraud.”

U.S. District Court Judge Ed Kinkeide agreed the New York and Massachusetts investigations were politically motivated.The lawsuit remains in play, with Healey refusing to comply wit congressional subpoenas.

In November, a New York Supreme Court justice ordered Schneiderman to release common interest agreements with other state AGs that CEI had sought in an open records request.

“CEI’s court victory is a blow to the anti-free speech campaign led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman,” CEI’s Kazman said in a statement. “While the campaign by him and his cohorts that began in March (2016) continues against those who disagree with him on global warming, we are glad to see that it is being held subject to the basic laws of the land.”

Attorney Andrew Grossman has represented CEI in its legal actions against the attorneys general. Grossman and his Washington, D.C.-based law firm also represented Wisconsin conservative activist Eric O’Keefe in a federal lawsuit against prosecutors of the state’s infamous John Doe investigation. The campaign finance probe, launched by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat, targeted dozens of conservative groups and Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Investigators raided the homes of several citizens and seized millions of electronic communications in the secret dragnet ruled unconstitutional by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Grossman noted the similarities of the politically motivated investigations.

“In both instances you have law enforcement officials using the powers of their office to target people on the basis of their opinions,” the attorney said, adding that liberals increasingly have abdicated their position as defenders of free speech.

Grossman said the failure of the climate change prosecutors’ coalition should be the end of the story, but CEI isn’t taking anything for granted.

“CEI is going to continue to make arguments for First Amendment rights. Not just for themselves; they want to make sure everyone has that opportunity, even those with whom they disagree.”

M.D. Kittle is bureau chief for Wisconsin Watchdog and First Amendment reporter for Watchdog.org. Contact him at mkittle@watchdog.org.

Budget Cuts Face Resistance From Republican Lawmakers

Republican leaders are voicing disapproval of budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump.

“I doubt there’d be a lot of appetite for dramatic cuts this year,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Roll Call. “I just look at it as a conversation. They’ve got their views, we’ve got our views, and we need to sit down and work that out.”

According to CQ Roll Call’s Budget Tracker newsletter, Republican leaders such as Cornyn are openly disproving of Trump’s requested $18 billion in spending cuts for the current fiscal year budget, Politico reports.

Funding for the federal government will run out during the last week of April. In order to avoid a government shutdown, Congress must pass a spending bill by April 28.

Trump has suggested several ways to trim government spending, and some of the reductions include cutting “$1.3 billion from Pell Grant funding for college students; $1.2 billion from the National Institutes of Health; and $1.5 billion from the Community Development Block Grant program,” according to Budget Tracker.

Some of these cuts are alarming Republicans lawmakers such as Sen. Lamar Alexander. The Tennessee Republican chairs the Senate energy-water appropriations subcommittee. He’s hinting that Trump’s requested budget cuts may go ignored.

“[Trump] suggested some things and of course we’ll look at them, but we’ll write the budget,” Alexander told CQ.

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who serves as chairman of the House subcommittee on labor, health and human services, education, and related agencies, also suggested that Trump’s requested budget cuts might not be implemented.

“You know that’s fine, but it’s a little late in the process,” Cole told CQ. “We’ve closed out our bills.”

In his “skinny” budget proposal for the next fiscal year, Trump proposed to end taxpayer funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports public TV and radio broadcasters like NPR and PBS.

“This is an agency we all admire,” Cole said, according to Budget Tracker.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received $445 million in federal funding in 2016.

According to Budget Tracker, Republican lawmakers appeared skeptical about ending funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. One GOP lawmaker, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, questioned if funding the corporation is necessary.

Romina Boccia, deputy director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that the apparent refusal of Republican lawmakers to support Trump’s budget cuts are disappointing.

“For years now, Republicans have told the American people that if only they controlled both chambers of Congress and the executive, they could actually get stuff done,” Boccia said. “Now, we are seeing that those too were apparently empty promises.”

Report by The Daily Signal's Rachel del Guidice. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

Pro-Life Activist Who Filmed Planned Parenthood Responds to ‘Bogus’ Charges

The pro-life activists who created undercover videos that triggered multiple state and congressional investigations into Planned Parenthood’s abortion practices are facing more than a dozen new felony charges in California.

The charges, brought by the state’s attorney general, allege Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden and his partner, Sandra Merritt, unlawfully recorded people without their consent, and conspired to invade their privacy. In total, Daleiden and Merritt face 15 felony charges.

Daleiden dismissed the charges as “bogus” and politically motivated.

“The bogus charges from Planned Parenthood’s political cronies are fake news,” he said in a statement. “The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners like StemExpress and DV Biologics—currently being prosecuted in California—who have harvested and sold aborted baby body parts for profit for years in direct violation of state and federal law.”

The charges date back to videos the pro-life activist group Center for Medical Progress secretly recorded and published in 2015. Those videos raised questions about whether Planned Parenthood profits off the sale of tissue and body parts from aborted babies, which is illegal under federal law.

Planned Parenthood has consistently denied these allegations, and issued a statement applauding the new charges brought against Daleiden and Merritt.

The Daily Signal also reached out to middlemen tissue procurement companies StemExpress and DV Biologics, but they did not immediately respond.

Casey Mattox, a senior counsel at the pro-life Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal that even in two-party consent states like California, “It’s well understood as a matter of First Amendment law that people have a right to be able to record their own conversations.” He added:

These were publicly recorded conversations, they were recorded in restaurants and other places where Planned Parenthood officials should not have expected they had any privacy at all. I find it fascinating that the state of California is apparently very concerned about the privacy of Planned Parenthood officials, and much less concerned about getting to the truth of Planned Parenthood actually engaging in violations of the law by selling baby body parts.

Planned Parenthood was cleared by several states that investigated the matter, but a yearlong congressional probe launched by Republicans resulted in a handful of criminal and regulatory referrals to the Department of Justice.

Daleiden and Merritt already faced charges in Texas, where a Houston-based grand jury indicted them for using fake IDs during their undercover investigation. Daleiden was also indicted for “intentionally and knowingly” offering to buy human organs.

In July 2016, a Texas district attorney dismissed the criminal charges brought against Daleiden and Merritt.

The new charges in California come as Congress gets closer to defunding Planned Parenthood. The failed Republican health care plan, which had the backing of Republican leadership and the White House but was opposed by many conservatives and centrists, would have defunded Planned Parenthood for one year.

Now, Republicans are eyeing a budget tool called reconciliation to strip the nation’s largest abortion provider of its taxpayer dollars.

“We think reconciliation is the tool, because that gets it in law,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a press conference on Tuesday. “Reconciliation is the way to go.”

Already, taxpayer dollars are banned from being used to fund abortions under the Hyde Amendment. However, conservatives maintain the more than $500 million Planned Parenthood receives is fungible, and winds up subsidizing thousands of abortions each year.

In light of the new allegations, the Center for Medical Progress released a brand new video on Wednesday. In that video, a former Planned Parenthood medical director in Arizona allegedly says abortion doctors “need to pay attention to who’s in the room” to deal with an infant born alive.

In his statement, Daleiden suggested that more videos are likely to come.

“We look forward to showing the entire world what is on our yet-unreleased videotapes of Planned Parenthood’s criminal baby body parts enterprise, in vindication of the First Amendment rights of all,” he said.

The Daily Signal contacted Planned Parenthood for comment. The organization has not responded.

Freedom Caucus Not Phased by Trump’s Tweet Threat

After Republicans pulled a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare last week, conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus are shrugging off criticism leveled at them by Republican colleagues—including from President Donald Trump himself.

In a Thursday morning tweet, Trump said the Freedom Caucus “will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team,” and vowed to “fight” conservative members in 2018 midterm elections.

“When people say the Freedom Caucus is jeopardizing the president’s agenda, guess what jeopardizes the president’s agenda?” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., a freshman Freedom Caucus member. “Losing the House and Senate jeopardizes the president’s agenda. You have to keep your promises and our promises are to repeal Obamacare.”

“The Freedom Caucus is trying to keep our promises,” Biggs said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “I don’t think going to Democrats, especially when they are trying to impeach the president, seems rational or realistic.”

About half of the more than 30 members of the Freedom Caucus joined at least 17 centrist Republicans in refusing to back the GOP leadership’s health care bill.

Centrists worried the bill imperiled too much of Obamacare, and conservatives said it did not go far enough.

Despite the bill’s failure, and signals that the White House wants to move on to other issues, Freedom Caucus members insist they want to work with Trump to craft a bill Republicans can unite around.

“The Freedom Caucus’ job is simple: to do what we promised the American people we’d do,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., told The Daily Signal in a statement. “Our group has worked tirelessly to try to improve the [American Health Care Act] to ensure it will actually bring down costs for everyday Americans. We believe this is our job and our duty and not something we can let fall by the wayside and move on to the next policy battle. We’re open to working with any and everyone that is willing to work toward a solution.”

Freedom Caucus members say it would be a mistake for Trump to rely on Democrats and centrist Republicans to advance other parts of his agenda, including tax reform, and passing a short-term spending bill before April 28.

“There are competing factions in the White House and whoever got Trump’s ear on this one is just not serving him well,” said Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., a Freedom Caucus member, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “The Democrats aren’t letting any of Trump’s appointments through, and there is no evidence the Democrats will show any taste for repealing Obamacare in any way, shape, or form.”

“The Freedom Caucus is basically the base of the Trump vote,” Brat added. “So whoever is advising him to go back to the old formula that has failed for year after year, that’s just terrible counsel.”

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, a founding Freedom Caucus member, seconded that view, warning Trump via Twitter to “remember who your real friends are.”

Biggs insists he still believes Trump shares his conservative principles, and he is hopeful the president decides to follow them.

“The Freedom Caucus more than any group of Republicans in Congress are the ones who supported Trump to be president,” Biggs said. “Some in our group really went out on a limb and took it on the chin and supported Trump because he said he stood for the principle of repealing Obamacare, he stood for building a wall, he talked about a balanced budget, reforming taxes, everything we stand for.”

“Each person has their own level of capacity to accept or reject stress,” Biggs added. “I didn’t run for re-election in 2018. I ran for election in 2016 because I believed certain things, I made the case I would do things, and I have been out here busting my tail trying to do those things. If I can do those things, re-election will take care of itself.”

Nearly all of the Freedom Caucus members won their districts last fall by greater margins than Trump did.

Some Freedom Caucus lawmakers, however, believe the group demanded too much in the Obamacare debate, and is limiting its relevance moving forward unless it becomes more accommodating.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, left the caucus over the weekend, and Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., in an interview with Politico, wondered if caucus members overplayed their hand.

“If we see the thing fail completely—nothing but shards around us—then we probably saw the Freedom Caucus overplay their hand … and I say that as a grateful member of the Freedom Caucus,” Franks told Politico.

More cautious members fear that Trump wields a powerful megaphone, and his base of supporters are mostly the Freedom Caucus’ own constituents, meaning conservative lawmakers could be blamed if Republicans fail to repeal and replace Obamacare.

They acknowledge the sensitivity of negotiations, because moving the legislation too far to the right could discourage centrist Republicans, especially those in the Senate who represent states that expanded Medicaid.

Trump again targeted the Freedom Caucus in a Thursday night tweet, this time singling out the group’s leaders.

Yet other Freedom Caucus members embrace the targets on their backs, a hunted position they are used to occupying.

“Trump’s tweets reaffirm that the Freedom Caucus is having a major impact on public policy in Congress — that the Freedom Caucus is not a force to be ignored,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., in an interview with The Daily Signal. “This Twitterverse is the new Washington. I have zero worries about it. If you want me to vote for a piece of legislation, either persuade me it is good for America or change it so that it is good for America.”

Despite apparent cracks in the relationship, Brat maintains that Trump and the Freedom Caucus should form a natural alliance.

“The two themes Trump ran on is the forgotten man and draining the swamp,” Brat said. “The Freedom Caucus is all of that and that’s what we are moving forward on.”

Freedom Caucus Is an Ally, Not an Enemy in Draining the Swamp

President Donald Trump’s tweet that it’s the House Freedom Caucus that “we must fight” shows there may be a little confusion about what “draining the swamp” means or, at the very least, what it looks like.

I thought draining the swamp meant changing the culture not just in Washington, but of Washington. I thought it meant putting an end to business as usual, making deals behind closed doors, and the mentality that Washington knows best.

I thought it meant politicians would start doing what they promised voters they would do.

I truly thought that lawmakers fresh from the 2016 election, in particular Republicans, would do their due diligence in draining the swamp by getting rid of the government regulations and mandates forced on individuals and businesses in an effort to run more and more of our lives.

But, perhaps I was wrong.

Because if that is what draining the swamp looks like, then the House Freedom Caucus should be considered a loyal and reliable ally in that battle, not the enemy. It is a part of the solution, not the problem.

Republicans in Congress and running for Congress promised for seven years to repeal Obamacare. Candidate Trump changed the mantra to “repeal and replace.”

Fine. But if you promise to do both, then you have to do both.

The best strategy to do both would have been to repeal Obamacare first, as Republicans had agreed on before, and then debate in an open process the new reforms (the replace parts) that would improve our health care system from where it was even before Obamacare became the law of the land.

There was precedent for doing it this way. In early 2016, then-President Barack Obama vetoed a bill that repealed Obamacare—a bill overwhelmingly supported by the Republican-led House and Senate.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the former Freedom Caucus chairman, reintroduced this bill and encouraged GOP leaders to use it instead.

Meanwhile, weeks before GOP leaders unveiled their flawed American Health Care Act, the Freedom Caucus officially threw its support behind conservative health care reform legislation introduced by Paul and Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C.

From that moment in mid-February, it was clear where House conservatives stood on the matter of replacing Obamacare.

But congressional GOP leadership, perhaps at the urging of the White House, decided they wanted to do it differently.

OK, fine. But the way they went about doing it was to pull out the old Washington playbook.

Draft the bill behind closed doors first. Then hold hearings on a compressed (and, frankly, artificial) timeline so that lawmakers are allowed little opportunity to read and understand the bill, offer amendments or debate, discuss and work out compromises among their colleagues.

And lawmakers certainly won’t have time to have a conversation with their constituents about how the bill will affect them and get their feedback.

When all was said and done, the bill was more replace than repeal.

Yes, it capped federal Medicaid spending. Good. However, though Obamacare had expanded it, Medicaid was not a new program. So, that was more “reform” than “repeal.”

But new federal regulations, such as the essential benefits and preventative care mandates, which made up the architecture and web of Obamacare and were the primary drivers of higher premiums, were left in place.

At the end of the day, the legislation did not repeal the parts of Obamacare that had expanded the role of government in its takeover of the private health care market.

Here’s what you’re not hearing from GOP leadership or the White House: Freedom Caucus members wanted to get to “yes”—even more than their centrist Republican colleagues. Conservatives were even willing to swallow some of the bad policy in the American Health Care Act.

But neither GOP leadership nor the White House would budge on the disastrous Obamacare regulations that are driving up your premiums.

And that is Washington as usual. It’s OK to tinker with the financing of government programs as long as the government remains in control of said programs—in this case, in control of what makes up private insurance plans.

And that is why those who support draining the swamp should be thankful the House Freedom Caucus played a role in stopping what Republican Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie labeled #SwampCare.

Even now, as Freedom Caucus members try to collaborate with centrist Republicans, they’re getting unfairly blamed by Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump. In fact, one of Trump’s closest House allies, Rep. Chris Collins of New York, had this advice about working with the Freedom Caucus: “If that call comes in just hang up.”

GOP centrists seem to be following that advice. After a productive meeting between six centrists and six conservatives earlier this week, the centrists abruptly canceled a follow-up discussion.

We also know that at least 17 centrist Republicans were on the record in opposition of the bill. Had the bill come to a vote, that number could’ve doubled given the unpopularity of the legislation and lingering concerns among centrists.

So why is GOP leadership blaming the Freedom Caucus?

After all, conservatives were doing what they promised voters: repeal Obamacare. Presented with a flawed bill, they tried to make it better—even if it meant major compromises.

Their reward? Facing the scorn of a Trump tweet.

One thing is clear: There are too many Republicans who would prefer to keep Obamacare rather than repeal it, and those claiming they want to “drain the swamp” need to figure out, and figure out fast, what that means.

Let’s applaud the Freedom Caucus, and certainly not fight it.

Commentary by The Daily Signal's Genevieve Wood. Originally published at The Daily Signal.