By Elizabeth Price Foley and David B. Rivkin Jr. — Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Since its partisan passage in 2010, Obamacare has traversed a rocky road. President Obama has taken numerous executive actions to delay and modify the poorly written law in an effort to ease the political consequences of full implementation and make it work. However, in the president’s zeal to rewrite yet another area of law — immigration — he’s sabotaged one of Obamacare’s primary goals: expanding employer-sponsored health insurance.

The president’s executive actions on immigration — the major one of which is currently on hold due to a court order — confers two specific benefits upon approximately 6 million individuals who have entered this country illegally or overstayed their visas. First, they are completely exempted from deportation. Second, they are granted work permits. These unilaterally conferred benefits are powerful evidence that the president isn’t just exercising executive “discretion” by prioritizing enforcement of existing immigration law — he is rewriting it.

This massive influx of now-lawful workers will predictably reduce job opportunities for U.S. citizens and lawful residents. But beyond this obvious negative impact, granting work permits to these individuals will have a subtler, equally pernicious effect: It will encourage employers to hire these 6 million individuals over U.S. citizens and legal residents. This is due to Obamacare’s structure.

Under Obamacare, employers must pay a tax — called the “employer responsibility” tax — if they either fail to offer insurance altogether, or they offer “substandard” insurance. The employer responsibility tax is hefty, ranging between $2,000 to $3,000 per year, and is payable for every full-time employee who buys health insurance on an exchange and receives a tax subsidy as a result. The idea is to incentivize employers to offer generous insurance coverage, thus keeping workers off the exchanges, and away from tax subsidies. If no full-time worker receives a tax subsidy for buying health insurance, the employer will pay no employer responsibility tax. Read more »

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. And LEE A. CASEY, Jan. 20, 2015

Nuclear talks between Iran and the U.S. recommenced Jan. 14, ahead of full international talks with senior officials from the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China and Germany two days later. A final agreement is to be reached no later than June 30. Nothing less than Middle Eastern and global security hangs in the balance.

That security depends on verifiable elimination of Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is likely to accept a deal leaving in place a substantial Iranian nuclear-weapons infrastructure, including uranium-enrichment capability, long-range ballistic missiles and the ability to deploy a rudimentary nuclear force on short notice. A course correction that only Congress can effect is urgently needed.

It is difficult for Congress to stop a president determined to sign an agreement with foreign leaders. And as this newspaper pointed out in a recent editorial, President Obama has threatened to veto any legislation to impose further sanctions on Iran if the June 30 deadline is not met. Still, Tehran’s insistence that existing U.S. sanctions be lifted as part of a nuclear-weapons agreement gives U.S. lawmakers substantial leverage. The collapse of oil prices, which dealt a heavy blow to the already weakened Iranian economy, has further increased this leverage. Here is what Congress should do:

First, Congress should insist that any Iranian agreement take the form of a treaty. The Constitution requires that treaties be made only with the advice and consent of the Senate. At the time it was adopted, and throughout most of U.S. history, agreements fundamentally ordering the relationship between the U.S. and foreign nations took the form of treaties, not executive orders. A mere executive agreement, which Mr. Obama may use to evade congressional constraints here, would be constitutionally insufficient. Read more »

Since the 1990s, Congress has maintained that Jerusalem should be recognized as Israel’s capital. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, presidents have stated that Jerusalem’s status can only be decided as part of a broader peace settlement. On Monday this dispute again reached the Supreme Court, and it offers the justices a unique opportunity to elucidate the proper way to resolve separation-of-power disputes between Congress and the executive.

Zivotofsky v. Kerry involves Menachem Zivotofsky, a 12-year-old Jerusalem-born American citizen. His parents want Israel identified as his birthplace on his passport. Section 214(d) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003, permits this choice, but the secretary of state refused to comply, listing Jerusalem alone as his place of birth. The secretary argues that the law violates established U.S. foreign policy and interferes with the president’s exclusive power to recognize foreign states and their territorial extent.

In the first round of this litigation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia concluded that this contest presented a political question that the courts could not answer. The Supreme Court reversed that decision, explaining that however “political” the circumstances, the question was a straightforward one of constitutional law suitable for judicial resolution.

The D.C. Circuit reheard the case last year and concluded that section 214(d) is unconstitutional because the president has the exclusive authority to determine the territorial boundaries of foreign states, their capitals and their governments—at least for purposes of U.S. diplomatic intercourse.

This authority is based in clear constitutional text that gives the president the power “to receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers.” Although the court found this language ambiguous (relying instead on historical practice and Supreme Court statements that the president alone has the power to recognize a foreign state as sovereign), the framers used this language precisely and to a purpose.

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By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew Grossman

The criminalization of politics is bad enough—just ask Texas Gov. Rick Perry—but a new turn to target citizens as well threatens to permanently warp our political discourse. Like it or not, federal courts will have to intervene to uphold Americans’ First Amendment rights against win-at-any-cost politics.

Wisconsin is ground zero of this phenomenon. A partisan elected district attorney, John Chisholm, reportedly goaded on by his union-steward wife, Colleen, decided to take aim at Republican Gov. Scott Walker after his 2011 “Budget Repair Bill” cut back on public-sector collective bargaining within the state. But Mr. Chisholm didn’t stop there: After an aggressive criminal investigation failed to knock Mr. Walker out of office, the district attorney set his sights on the governor’s philosophical allies, an assortment of conservative citizen groups that supported Walker’s reforms.

The claim was that these groups illegally “coordinated” their speech on the issues with Gov. Walker’s campaign, thereby circumventing campaign-finance regulations. The evidence? Intercepted emails and phone records showing that some of the groups communicated with Gov. Walker’s campaign, mostly on policy issues. That wasn’t enough to bring charges, but it did allow Mr. Chisholm to launch an aggressive criminal investigation targeting Gov. Walker’s supporters, complete with home raids and everything-but-the-kitchen sink subpoenas.

These efforts had the intended effect: Funding for conservative policy advocacy dried up and Gov. Walker’s supporters were forced to redirect their energies from political activism to courtroom litigation.

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Obama’s directive to protect the privacy of foreigners will make Americans less safe.

By Mike Pompeo and David B. Rivkin Jr.

On Jan. 17, in response to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s theft of U.S. intelligence secrets and concerns over the NSA’s bulk metadata collection, President Obama issued a Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-28) that neither strengthens American security nor enhances Americans’ privacy. To the contrary, it undermines our intelligence capabilities in service of a novel cause: foreign privacy interests.

All nations collect and analyze foreign communications or signals, what is known as “signals intelligence.” American technological prowess has produced the world’s most abundant stream of signals intelligence, thwarting plots against the U.S. and saving lives. PPD-28 threatens American safety by restricting the use of this signals intelligence.

First, under the new directive, U.S. officials are required to ensure that all searches of foreign signals intelligence are limited to six purposes: countering foreign espionage, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, cybersecurity, threats to U.S. or allied forces, and transnational crime.

Such policy guidance is appropriate in principle, but these limitations are mere window dressing. Intelligence activities are already heavily scrutinized by executive-branch lawyers to protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the intelligence community must now operate under the presumption that they are somehow engaged in wrongdoing and must justify each and every step by reference to a proper “purpose” to rebut that presumption. This will make intelligence analysts overly cautious and reduce their flexibility in handling security threats.

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