As Congress moves forward with the proposed Electoral Count Reform Act, there is broad, bipartisan consensus on the need to reform the ECA and how ECRA would go about doing so. Attention has therefore turned to a variety of technical drafting details that have been flagged for concern. At the recent Senate Rules hearing on ECA reform, members of both parties and the cross-ideological lineup of expert witnesses generally agreed that these fixes are important to get right, even while praising the overall framework and main provisions of ECRA. My colleague Thomas Berry and I agree with that general sentiment, and focused on some of the tweaks we suggest in our statement to the committee.
One of the main areas of concern, and perhaps the most surprising element of the ECRA draft as released by the Collins-Manchin working group, concerns the valid grounds for objections during the joint session. These are the rules that limit on what basis members of Congress may challenge a state’s electoral votes, and a central goal of ECA reform is to constrain that process to its proper, narrow constitutional limits.
The ECRA draft retains the existing ECA’s provision on this point mostly unchanged, including two of its most notoriously uncertain terms: that objections may be entertained on the basis that electors were not “lawfully certified” or that their votes were not “regularly given.” These are terms of art intended to reflect a specific set of (generally unlikely) problems: that the electors whose votes have been submitted are not actually the persons who were appointed by the state as its members of the Electoral College, or that their votes violate any of the handful of explicit constitutional provisions governing how the electors are to vote and for whom they may vote.
That bifurcation runs through the existing ECA, is strengthened by ECRA, and is grounded in the underlying constitutional provisions and principles. There are, essentially, two distinct questions: who a state has appointed as its presidential electors, and how those electors have voted. With one notable exception, Congress is properly bound to the outcome from the states on the former question. On the latter, Congress (and only Congress) can properly consider the rare scenarios where validly appointed electors have cast invalid votes: by voting for an ineligible candidate, for example, or failing to cast their votes according to the procedures spelled out in the Twelfth Amendment.
Cato at Liberty
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Canceling Student Debt Could Inflate College Prices? Suddenly, People Don’t Like It
“Debt” is an unpleasant word, evoking an obligation that people can feel hangs over them. Given that, it would be no surprise if mass cancellation of federal student loans, as President Biden declared last week, had intuitive appeal to many people. Indeed, new polling from Cato’s Project on Public Opinion reveals just such support. But it also reveals something else: When presented with potential downsides of mass cancellation, especially its quite possible effect on infamously high college prices, sentiment flips from major support to major opposition.
The basic premise in the new survey is a bit different from what Biden ended up announcing, asking about “forgiveness” for individuals making less than $150,000 and households less than $300,000, rather than the $125,000 and $250,000 in the final plan. Also, the administration added $20,000 of cancellation for loans held by people who also received Pell Grants, moving more of the benefit to lower-income borrowers than higher. But it was still mass cancellation.
As seen below, presenting student debt forgiveness by itself generates lopsided support, with approval outpacing disapproval 64 to 36 percent.
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New NAEP Scores Show Drops in Reading and Math
Pandemic schooling didn’t work for a lot of kids. While this is widely acknowledged, it helps to have data to back up the assumption. And now we have it, for 9‑year-olds at least.
Scores were released today for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is often called the nation’s report card. This data comes from a special long-term trend assessment of 9‑year-old students conducted this past January to March. Peggy Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), noted today’s release is “the first nationally representative report comparing student achievement from before the pandemic to now.”
Unfortunately, the predictions about how kids were faring educationally were correct. Average scores fell 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020. This is the largest drop in reading since 1990, and the first ever statistically significant decline in mathematics.
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Gorbachev’s Russia
In 1990, after the liberation of Eastern Europe but while Mikhail Gorbachev was still in power in the Soviet Union, I visited Moscow and St. Petersburg as part of a Cato Institute conference. One evening at dinner I was seated next to a young Russian woman, a graduate student or young researcher. She told me she was studying Italian. I asked why. She said, “Because I love Italy!” I asked, “What do you like — the people, the language, the food?” She replied, “Everything!” Then I asked if she had been to Italy. “No,” she replied wistfully. And I felt so sad. This young scholar who loves everything Italian had never been to Italy. I knew that any American graduate student studying Italian language or culture would have visited Italy.
It’s a small story, but it’s a reminder of the poverty and oppression in the Russia in which Gorbachev rose to power.
While we were there, things were changing. Gorbachev had declared glasnost — opening — and perestroika — restructuring. The perestroika wasn’t going so well, but the glasnost was in full swing. Scholars and journalists were debating ideas. The Cato Institute was allowed to hold a conference titled “Transition to Freedom: The New Soviet Challenge”! Scholars such as James Buchanan, Peter Bauer, William Niskanen, George Gilder, and Jan Winiecki spoke alongside Russian scholars, the reformist mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg (still called Leningrad then), and members of the Supreme Soviet and the Presidential Council. The 500-Day Plan for transition to a market economy was being debated in the Supreme Soviet that very week. Our public forum attracted more than 800 Muscovites, and afterward I declared Moscow mayor Gavriil Popov’s speech on the decline of individualism and free markets in the 20th century “the most libertarian speech I have ever heard by a politician.”
In the end — though history never ends — Gorbachev changed Russia and the world, though not exactly as he intended. He set out to make the Soviet economy and Communist rule sustainable. The forces he set in motion led to the end of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, the Soviet empire, and his own rule. Central planning came to an end, but was not replaced by an open market economy. Russian-born author Cathy Young yesterday quoted Gorbachev’s 2016 declaration that that his creed was, “No blood” — as seen in his refusal to use Russian troops to keep Eastern Europe under Soviet rule — and that he was ultimately “a man of freedom”: “Freedom of choice, freedom of religion, freedom of speech; freedom, freedom.” And yet, she notes, “it’s difficult not to see symbolism in the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, died just a few months after the final death agony of the new Russia that he had, not always willingly, midwifed: a Russia of free travel and free speech, of McDonald’s restaurants and Adidas shoes, of openness to Western culture and Western values; a Russia that aspired to join the global community of liberal democracies.”
Let’s hope that history has not yet ended in Russia and that the country may yet find its way to peace and freedom. For more on Cato’s conference, see here and here.
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Chile’s Prosperity Is at Stake in Sunday’s Plebiscite
Chileans will head to the polls on Sunday to approve or reject a proposal for a new constitution, which The Economist has described as “a fiscally irresponsible left-wing wish list.”
As I mention in my latest video for Reason, the new constitutional draft bans “job insecurity,” expands welfare programs, mandates gender parity in all public institutions, and grants “social” rights to fund healthcare, housing, and education services. There is little or no regard for the question of who will pay these exorbitant bills. The new constitution also fails to mention or protect mining concessions, a pillar of the current system that has attracted private investment and allowed Chile to become the world’s leading exporter of copper and one of the top producers of lithium.
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New Poll: 76% of Americans Oppose Student Debt Cancellation if It Drives up the Price of College, 64% Oppose if It Raises Taxes
Majorities oppose cancelling federal student debt if it raises their taxes, primarily benefits the wealthy, increases college prices, or causes more employers to require degrees.
The Cato 2022 Student Debt Cancellation National Survey, a new national poll of 2,000 U.S. adults, finds 64% of Americans support the federal government forgiving up to $10,000 in federal student loans for people who earn less than $150,000 a year or less than $300,000 per year for married couples. However, support for cancelling federal student loan debt plummets when Americans consider its trade-offs.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose cancellation if forgiving $10,000 per borrower raises their taxes (64%) or if it primarily benefits higher income people (68%). Even more Americans oppose if cancellation incentivizes colleges and universities to further raise prices, as research has shown it may. About three-fourths of Americans would oppose student debt cancellation if it caused universities to raise their tuition and fees (76%) or if it caused more employers to require college degrees even if not needed to do the job (71%), also known as “credential inflation.”
“These data show that Americans don’t like the costs that many experts believe are associated with federal student loan forgiveness” said Cato’s Director of Polling Emily Ekins, Ph.D.
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Housing Innovation Faces Many Barriers
It is well understood that regulatory policy prohibits the private sector from producing enough housing to meet housing demand. Despite the obstacles, private industry continues to develop innovative strategies for meeting housing needs: for example, modular home manufacturers have expedited the home building process while managing to design aesthetically appealing homes at a substantially lower cost than traditional homes, communal living companies are offering furnished private bedrooms to young adults at lower price points in expensive cities, and short-term rental companies are offering flexible accommodations with amenities as an affordable alternative to hotels.
Unfortunately, innovative housing solutions are not immune to regulatory hurdles. This post explores the role the private sector is playing in providing housing solutions and highlights regulatory barriers that still need addressing by policymakers.
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