Tag Archives : Build House

Mitch McConnell’s historic miscalculation

At the conclusion of the January 6 select committee’s summer hearings, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) admonished his fellow Republicans supporting former President Trump, saying, “Oaths matter more than party tribalism or the cheap thrill of scoring political points.”

But one Republican who repeatedly ignored that message during the Trump years is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). After opposing Trump’s conviction following his impeachment by the House in 2021, McConnell took to the Senate floor and attempted to cast aside his not guilty vote by excoriating Trump: “January 6 was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like. . .  .There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

McConnell’s words were just that — words. Instead of convicting Trump, which would have forever disqualified him from holding “any Office of honor, Trust, or Profit under the United States,” McConnell let Trump off on a technicality that a former president could not be impeached and convicted. McConnell also gave Trump other off-ramps, including lobbying against a bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot.

Today, McConnell says of the Jan. 6 hearings, “It will be interesting to reveal all the participants that are involved,” but then immediately changes the subject to other issues he wants to discuss — inflation, crime, immigration and the Southern border.

After Jan. 6, an “exhilarated” McConnell concluded that Trump was a spent force who had “totally discredited himself.” This was an error of historic proportions. Today, Trump is the country’s most powerful Republican and the odds-on-favorite to be the party’s 2024 presidential nominee. Trump’s imprimatur is a powerhouse in Republican contests. His successes include a Trump acolyte winning the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Maryland over Trump’s Republican nemesis Gov. Larry Hogan; Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) likely defeat at the hands of a Trump-endorsed candidate; and winning Senate nominations for Hershel Walker, J. D. Vance and Mehmet Oz. Sixty percent of Republicans want their party to follow Trump’s leadership, and 55 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of McConnell — thanks, in part, to Trump’s calling him a “disloyal sleazebag” and an “old, broken down crow.”

Mitch McConnell’s sole focus is power — how to seize it and use it for partisan ends. After the Republican Party’s 2010 landslide victories, McConnell announced that his top priority was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. When a Supreme Court seat became available in February 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, McConnell kept it in abeyance for a year so Trump could name his successor. And when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, McConnell rushed the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, giving conservatives a 6-3 supermajority.

While McConnell would like to be remembered for transforming the federal judiciary, his enduring legacy will be the damage he has done to the institutions of government. For example, public approval of the court has fallen to 38 percent. By contrast, the court’s approval numbers in September 2020, just before McConnell’s Supreme Court packing, stood at a healthy 66 percent.

We have learned that Donald Trump’s dereliction of duty and support for overturning the 2020 presidential election represents the worst betrayal of a president’s constitutional oath since James Buchanan allowed the Southern states to secede in 1861. Instead of defending Congress’s institutional prerogatives, McConnell put partisanship above country while cynically hoping that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, would ensure his fall from grace.

Instead, Trump’s unprecedented dominance of the Republican Party makes it an ongoing danger to our constitutional republic. As Liz Cheney told a captive audience at the Reagan Library, “We are confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before. And that is a former president who is threatening to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic. And he is aided by Republican leaders and elected officials who made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man.”

When the history books are written, Donald Trump is likely to hover somewhere in James Buchanan territory. And unlike past Republican senatorial giants, including Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.), who helped Harry Truman win the Cold War; Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.), who played a vital role in passing the civil rights legislation of the 1960s; Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), whose incisive Watergate questioning – “What did the President know and when did he know it?” – helped end the Nixon presidency; and Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who was instrumental in passing the Americans with Disabilities Act and food stamp school lunch programs, Mitch McConnell will be remembered as the man who helped destroy the Senate. When McConnell decided in 2021 to absolve Trump, he should have heeded Niccolo Machiavelli’s purported advice, “If you’re going to shoot the king, don’t miss.”

John Kenneth White is a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America. His latest book, co-authored with Matthew Kerbel, is “American Political Parties: Why They Formed, How They Function, and Where They’re Headed.”

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Corporate PACs rack up $21 million in donations to election objectors

Corporate PACs affiliated with Fortune 500 companies and their trade groups have donated $21.5 million to GOP lawmakers who objected to the 2020 election results, according to a new report from the liberal advocacy group Accountable.US.

Most companies have resumed making PAC donations to Republicans who voted against certifying President Biden’s win after initially pausing their political giving following the Jan. 6, 2021 capitol attack. 

Very few large corporations are still ruling out donations to all of the 147 GOP objectors — which include lawmakers in line to win leadership positions or committee gavels depending on the results of November’s elections — instead opting not to bankroll a small number of Republicans who continue to make inaccurate and inflammatory statements about the 2020 election. 

That hasn’t stopped companies from giving big to lawmakers who are attacking the credibility of the Jan. 6 select committee even as it unearths new details about former President Trump’s apparent efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his refusals to condemn Jan. 6 rioters.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who repeatedly bashes the committee for refusing to include pro-Trump Republicans, is the top recipient of Fortune 500 money among election objectors, receiving $696,000. Raytheon, Humana and Citigroup were among his donors last month, according to Federal Election Commission filings. 

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who is set to speak at Trump’s Washington, D.C., summit this week alongside McCarthy and several other House Republicans, took in $612,500 from corporate PACs.

Home Depot is the top donor to election objectors among Fortune 500 companies, giving $420,000 through its PAC. Federal contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin and second and third, donating $367,500 and $326,000 respectively. 

“Companies that claim to support democracy but fail to align their political spending with their stated values need to make it clear to their customers, shareholders, and own employees that they value something much more — having political influence over lawmakers no matter how dangerous their views,” Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig said in a statement.

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Feehery: It is time to end the imperial presidency

You know what former President Trump and President Biden have in common? 

They both show the vital importance of ending the imperial presidency. Following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) panicked and asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley if there were procedures in place to prevent Trump from hitting the nuclear button as a potential response to the “stolen election.” That act said a lot about what the Speaker really thought about the state of the power of the president.  

When the Supreme Court recently ruled that Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency didn’t have the power to write its own environmental laws, it similarly sent a signal about the necessary limits of the executive branch. 

Under the Constitution, it is Congress, as represented by the people under Article I, that is supposed to be the most powerful of the co-equal branches. But over the last several decades, Congress has forfeited is ability to control the executive branch.  

The once-powerful House and Senate Appropriations committees almost never flex their muscles to bring executive branch officials to heel. This is especially the case when it comes to prosecuting the endless wars in which America seemingly always involves itself.  

The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war, but that hasn’t happened since Pearl Harbor.  

Ending the imperial presidency isn’t just about endlessly investigating the current occupant of the Oval Office, although doing some oversight of Biden and his family’s business deals seems like a useful and potentially fruitful exercise. It is also about ending the reckless power of executive branch officials.  

In the aftermath of Watergate, efforts were made to bring some reforms to the clandestine world of the CIA and FBI. Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had the ability to quash enemies and use the full power of the government to achieve his personal vision of American exceptionalism. That is too much power to give to one bureaucrat.  

Congress must put some guardrails on the presidency and on the executive branch.  

This should be a bipartisan project. Republicans should support it because they need to stop the Biden administration from going completely off-the-rails on COVID-19 policy, energy production, the economy and education funding. Democrats should support it because, well, you never know whether or when Trump might return to the Oval Office.  

What guardrails can there be? 

Make it more difficult for any president to put his finger on the nuclear button. Make sure that a White House can’t pursue its agenda solely with a phone and a pen, as former President Obama once did. Make sure they must go through the normal legislative procedures and pass actual laws.  

Limit the ability for public health officials to declare public health emergencies without action by lawmakers. Pass spending bills, allow for congressional earmarks and otherwise use the power of the purse as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.  

Bring war declaring powers back to Congress and stop the rogue operations that diminish our standing around the world.  

Put term limits on executive branch officials, especially those who have immense power to spend public money.  

It’s time to end the imperial presidency. It’s time to bring power back to the people and their elected representatives in Congress. 

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).   

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Uvalde elementary school principal placed on paid administrative leave

An attorney for the principal of the Uvalde, Texas school that was the scene of a mass shooting in May confirmed that the official had been placed on paid administrative leave.

Attorney Ricardo Cedillo confirmed in a statement to The Hill that his client, Robb Elementary School Principal Mandy Gutierrez, was placed on paid leave by Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Hal Harrell on Monday.

The details regarding her suspension were not immediately clear.

Harrell announced last month that the Uvalde school district police chief, Pete Arredondo, would be placed on administrative leave, noting in a statement “the lack of clarity that remains and the unknown timing of when I will receive the results of the investigations.”

Arredondo and the law enforcement community were criticized for their response to the mass shooting in May that left 19 children and two adults dead at Robb Elementary School and later helped prompt national gun reform legislation.

A Texas House investigative committee offered a report earlier this month that detailed a series of errors that would factor into the response to the mass shooting, including a “void in leadership” over the lack of an incident commander.

“This was an essential duty he had assigned to himself in the plan mentioned above, yet it was not effectively performed by anyone,” the report said, referring to Arredondo.

“The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon,” it added.

The Hill has reached out to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District for comment. 

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When will American businesses wake up to the threat of Chinese espionage?

In an unprecedented joint public appearance on July 6, FBI Director Christopher Wray and his British counterpart, MI-5 Director General Ken McCallum, warned a London audience of business leaders and academics that China posed a “massive, shared challenge.”

Beijing, said Wray, was “set on stealing your technology – whatever it is that makes your industry tick – and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.” McCallum was equally forceful, describing China’s “coordinated campaign on a grand scale,” representing “a strategic contest across decades.”

This is not the first time Wray has spoken out in unambiguous terms. At the Reagan Presidential Library in California on Jan. 31, he stressed that China’s threat to America’s economic security had “reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before.” This stress on foreign-government threats to America’s private sector may seem unusual for the FBI. But Wray has correctly focused on the incredibly broad scope of Beijing’s menacing behavior, well beyond intelligence gathering and clandestine actions against the U.S. and allied governments. 

Wray’s public statements are complementary to Vice President Mike Pence’s 2018 warning about Beijing’s widespread efforts to influence U.S. public opinion. Unfortunately, we are, even now, only just awakening to the extraordinary scope of China’s whole-of government (which, given the autocratic nature of the Chinese regime, essentially means whole-of-society) operations against our economy and society, and that of our allies. This awakening must spread, and quickly.

In government, President Biden’s performance has been decidedly mixed. He deserves credit for the first in-person meeting of the “Quad” (Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.), a constellation with enormous potential (but, so far, few practical achievements) for constraining China. The Pentagon agreed to the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (“AUKUS”) project to build nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarines for Australia, a conceptual and operational breakthrough whose success or failure has major strategic implications across the Indo-Pacific. 

By contrast, Biden may have already rescinded Trump administration decisionmaking rules on offensive cyber efforts, thereby returning to Obama-era procedures that effectively strangled such measures, crippling our ability to strike pre-emptively against Chinese election-meddling efforts.

Biden, seemingly intimidated by Chinese complaints about a projected Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has urged her not to go.

AUKUS and the Quad represent initial steps in constructing a denser alliance framework, more akin to the North Atlantic pattern. Analysts have long worried that America’s bilateral Asian alliances are merely “hub-and-spoke” arrangements, but this picture is changing. Newly inaugurated South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, for example, is seeking to forge closer trilateral relations with Tokyo and Washington, symbolized by the three leaders’ recent meeting in Madrid. The “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partnership (among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and U.S.) consists entirely of Pacific powers. The pieces are there for robust Indo-Pacific cooperation against the full range of Chinese threats.

Ironically, America’s sleeper problem, one spotlighted by Wray and McCallum, lies in the private sector. Despite two decades of increasing warning signs, American firms, led by financial and high-tech enterprises, invested and traded with China as if international political risk no longer warranted deep consideration in business decisions. Extensive capital investment in China exposed intellectual property to Beijing’s high-tech piracy. 

Forced-technology transfers as a condition of doing business there, and the dangers to supply chains from political tensions, were ignored or minimized. Even today, as the political risks of doing business with China are skyrocketing, especially in sensitive national-security-related areas, many U.S. business leaders still do not appreciate the threats they face.

Assurances that China does not engage in commercial espionage or theft of intellectual property should carry no weight with Western businesses. In 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and a gullible President Obama agreed that neither of their governments “will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property,” a commitment to which Beijing’s Ministry of State Security has paid no heed whatever.

Worse, too many business executives and politicians across the spectrum seem to believe that the proper response to Chinese threats is massive federal expenditures to bolster U.S. competitiveness.

This approach fundamentally misperceives the problem. America doesn’t suffer from a deficit of creativity and innovation. It suffers instead from decades of China stealing our creativity and innovation, as FBI Director Wray has forcefully explained and in some cases benefitting from the gratuitous transfer of intellectual property by credulous Americans heedless of the consequences.  

Beijing has weaponized what superficially appear to be commercial telecommunications firms such as Huawei and ZTE, making them arms of the Chinese state. The Trump and Biden administrations have imposed increasingly strict sanctions on such firms. But enormous damage has already been done, including putting at risk communications involving America’s land-based, ballistic-missile forces.  

Beijing’s espionage deviousness is exemplified by its offer to build a Chinese garden at Washington’s National Arboretum, which would actually be a concealed listening post, and by its accessing user data from the popular Tik-Tok app.

We are still not adequately awake to the potential that virtually any Chinese “business” enterprise could be an agent of commercial infiltration and exploitation.

However, appropriate defensive measures should not be confused with massive subsidies to the U.S. information-technology industry. There is clearly a need for more federal spending to counter Chinese espionage and piracy of intellectual property and other critical data, but that spending should be for military and intelligence measures to enhance our defensive and offensive capabilities. 

Moreover, money to replace existing equipment sold by Huawei, ZTE and others, largely in rural and sparsely populated areas, but which can affect the nationwide telecommunications grid, is well spent.

Expenditures for “regional technology hubs,” by contrast, will not enhance creativity, but will shrink the federal dollars available for critically needed efforts at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.

Chris Wray has more than enough to occupy his time at the FBI, so his public focus on the threat of Chinese espionage demonstrates just how serious he judges the threat to be. American businesses and government should pay more attention to what he is saying.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.

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Raskin says he doesn't buy the Secret Service's lost text story

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, said he doesn’t believe the Secret Service’s story regarding the deletion of text messages the panel subpoenaed. 

The committee asked the Secret Service to turn over text messages between agents on Jan. 5, 2001 and Jan. 6, 2021 to see if there was further evidence of former President Trump’s activities leading up to and during the riot. However, the Secret Service was only able to turn over one message, saying the rest were deleted during a device replacement program. 

“I don’t really buy that for one minute,” Raskin said on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” “For one thing, isn’t it a little odd that all of the texts would vanish for Jan. 6th and Jan. 5th? Of all the days, what an odd coincidence that is.” 

“And, you know, there was a preplanned migration of the phones that just happened to be on the same day as the first violent insurrection in American history. So, I am a little dubious of that so count me a skeptic.”

The Secret Service said agents were told before the migration to flag any content that would be worthy to save in the federal records and they are encouraged not to communicate through texts frequently due to security concerns. 

“There’s no reason for us to say the texts were lost. I mean, how do you know that those people texted? They were told to upload their official records, and they did. So this is partly what we’re going to communicate to the committee, all of the data that we have. People say texts were lost. How do you know texts were sent?” agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told The Hill.

The Secret Service is facing harsh criticism for this incident, with the National Archives saying the agency needed to conduct an internal investigation into the matter. 

The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, however, told the Secret Service to stop its internal investigation as DHS launched a criminal probe into the deleted texts. 

“I will tell you this, that everybody who has tried to hide a fact and hide the truth from this committee has gotten his or her comeuppance because there are other people coming forward to tell the truth all the time,” Raskin told Colbert.

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Press: Success of Jan. 6 hearings: Three brave GOP women

If they gave out Emmys for congressional hearings, there’s no doubt about it : This summer’s blockbuster hearings by the Jan. 6 select committee would win hands down. Washington’s never seen anything like it. 

Let’s be honest. Most hearings are less exciting than watching paint dry — nothing but talk, talk, talk; members of Congress bickering among themselves; witnesses droning on without saying anything; no control, no direction, no message. A total waste of time. 

But not these hearings. Just the opposite. Netflix could not have produced a better series. They were tight. They were focused. They were brilliantly choreographed. 

Each hearing had one central theme, delivered in skillfully edited — and short — video clips and buttressed by carefully chosen — and short — statements by live witnesses. After brief opening statements by the chair and vice chair, one committee member alone was designated to lead the hearing, while all other members simply shut up. 

Like bookends, the committee’s first and last hearings were the most powerful. On June 10, the committee opened by showing never-before-seen video of the carnage at the Capitol on Jan. 6. In its July 21 finale, the committee documented how, for more than three hours, former President Trump watched the violence on television but did nothing to stop it. 

And the hearings have already had an impact. Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) closed the July 21 hearing by asking the critical question: “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?” The very next day, based on that argument alone — that Trump had failed to do his duty on Jan. 6 — The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, both controlled by longtime Trump supporter Rupert Murdoch,  answered her question: No way. 

“It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime,” concluded the New York Post editorial board. “But as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.” 

Success has many mothers and fathers, and there are many who deserve credit for the Jan. 6 hearings:  Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), for running a tight ship; committee members, for not grandstanding;  Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), for appointing Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.)  to the committee; and, perversely, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), for making the dumb mistake of rejecting a bipartisan committee with the same number of Democrats and Republicans. 

But, in the end, credit must go to three brave Republican women who carried the day, led the fight, and delivered the most powerful testimony: Cheney; former Mark Meadows top aide Cassidy Hutchinson; and former deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews. 

Hutchinson electrified the nation with her account of Trump throwing plates of food across his dining room — “ketchup dripping down the wall” — and his temper tantrum in the presidential vehicle when Secret Service agents refused to drive him to the Capitol.  

Matthews followed with her calm but compelling account of how Trump, in the midst of the violence, chose not to use Twitter to ask supporters to go home, but instead to pour “gasoline on the fire” by calling then-Vice President Mike Pence a “coward.” 

And, consistently, it was Cheney who provided the focus, asked the toughest questions, and wrapped each hearing with a damning summation. 

How ironic, for a man who’s never shown much respect for women, that three brave women should help bring him down. 

Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”  

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Zelensky accuses Russia of 'gas blackmail'

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Moscow’s reduction of natural gas output to Europe “gas blackmail” after Russian gas giant Gazprom said that it would be reducing daily flows to just half of what it is currently providing daily.

“Even despite the concession regarding the Nord Stream turbine, Russia is not going to resume gas supplies to European countries, as it is contractually obligated to do. All this is done by Russia deliberately to make it as difficult as possible for Europeans to prepare for winter,” Zelensky said in an address on Monday.

“And this is an overt gas war that Russia is waging against a united Europe – this is exactly how it should be perceived,” he continued. “And they don’t care what will happen to the people, how they will suffer – from hunger due to the blocking of ports or from winter cold and poverty… Or from occupation. These are just different forms of terror.”

Gazprom announced earlier that day that it would be decreasing natural gas output starting Wednesday morning to just 33 million cubic meters daily, which is just 20 percent of its capacity and just half of what it has been providing, Reuters noted.

Gazprom’s announcement could impact energy supplies ahead of the winter when there will be higher demand for natural gas.

Draft legislation that seeks to decrease natural gas consumption voluntarily between August and March by 15 percent was approved by the European Union members on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. 

The European Union would be pressed to take immediate action, however, if the member governments fail to reduce their energy consumption as needed.

The development comes amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, which has raged on for months and prompted countries to sanction Russian commodities including oil.  

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The problem with a persistently late Federal Reserve

Some 15 months after the Federal Reserve started insisting that inflation was transitory and that we shouldn’t worry much about it, the rate of consumer price increases stands at a damaging 9.1 percent and, so far, has become the most consequential economic, social, political and institutional issue of 2022.

This unfortunate setup will result in an aggressive interest rate hike on Wednesday by a Fed scrambling to catch up with realities on the ground. As it tries to do so, however, the inflation issue is evolving once more and, due to the growing risk of recession, is again likely to catch the Fed offside.

What started out as inflation driven by a readily identifiable set of exogenous drives — namely, energy and food prices — has been allowed to become more entrenched and broad-based. Depending on who you ask, the blame game for why this has happened involves several actors with a recurrent one: A Fed that mis-analyzed, badly forecasted, poorly communicated, and inadequately responded to a phenomenon that is consequential for our society in a number of ways.

Desperate to catch up, the Fed is likely to take the unusual step of announcing on Wednesday another 75-basis-point increase in interest rates wrapped in a notably hawkish narrative. Equally unusual, and again a reflection of it being so late in responding, it will do so despite multiplying signs that the U.S. economy is slowing rapidly.

No wonder so many more people are worried that the Fed will push us into what would have been an otherwise-avoidable recession. This concern is a reflection of a larger issue: The current inflation dynamics are changing in a way that is likely to catch out the Fed yet again.

It would not surprise me if the recent 9.1 percent inflation print proves to be the peak for now. Specifically, the question is no longer the one that has been on so many people’s worry list, and rightly so: How high will inflation go in the next three months? It is now evolving to how fast and how far will inflation come down — and, equally if not more important, the extent of collateral damage for the economy.

I fear that, given how out of sync the Fed has been for so long, the downward trajectory of inflation may prove sticky and accompanied by unnecessary damage to livelihoods and a further worsening of inequality.

This is a scenario in which households, especially those with low income, face the double whammy of eroding purchasing power and growing income insecurity. It also is a scenario that risks fueling economic and financial instability internationally, as well as domestically.

Fortunately, it is not totally pre-ordained. Timely and appropriate policy responses can contain the worst of the damage, both to short- and longer-term societal wellbeing.

For the Fed, this requires an urgent step-improvement in addressing the four persistent failures mentioned earlier: analysis, prediction, communication and response. Too much time has already been lost, and at a substantial cost to its credibility and to the economy at large.

Working with other government agencies, the Fed also needs to do more to counter the growing risk of unsettling financial instability. Because of years of ultra-loose monetary policies that have involved zero interest rates and massive direct injections of liquidity, this threat has morphed and migrated from banks to a non-bank sector that has been conditioned to stretch far and wide for returns and, in the process, assume excessive risk.

For the administration and Congress, it means doing more to enhance supply, labor force participation, productivity and growth; targeting fiscal support on the most vulnerable segments of society; and taking the lead in improving global policy cooperation to address economic obstacles that, by their nature, require collective action.

The implications of insufficient progress on this policy agenda would extend beyond a more difficult short-term outlook for the U.S. and for the global economy.

They also threaten to lower our medium-term growth potential, worsen the inequality trifecta (of income, wealth and opportunity), place further pressure on our social and political fabric, and pull the rug from under a crisis-prone global economy.

This also a world that, once again, would distract attention away from dealing with critical secular challenges in climate and health that, year in and year out, are becoming more critical and harder to solve.

Mohamed A. El-Erian is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge University. He is an advisor to Allianz and Gramercy Fund Management, the Rene Kern Professor of Practice at The Wharton School, and a senior fellow at the Lauder Institute of the University of Pennsylvania.

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Entrepreneurs in the construction industry deserve opportunity, not racial quotas

An optimistic small-business owner in New York, Henry Kaiser’s life changed when he asked his girlfriend’s father for permission to marry her. Kaiser’s future father-in-law said he’d permit no wedding until Kaiser had saved enough money and built a house for his bride. He left Kaiser with one piece of advice: Move west. Kaiser did just that. His company built roads in the Pacific Northwest, created dams in California, and played a key role in the construction of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. Construction is a hard business, but to Henry Kaiser, problems were “only opportunities in work clothes.”

Entrepreneurs continue to play a key role in building America today. General contractors deal directly with the government to build schools, highways and other public works. But general contractors don’t do it all. Instead, they delegate portions of each assignment to subcontractors who have honed their area of specialization — paving, fencing, trucking, or some other niche. 

These subtractors often face racial discrimination when competing for jobs. Government policies (federal, state and local) today require general contractors to devote a percentage of their subcontracts, commonly called “set-asides,” to companies owned by racial minorities. They create an unconstitutional barrier to opportunity.

These set-aside requirements force general contractors to discriminate against subcontractors who are not certified as minority-owned. This can lead non-minority-owned subcontractors in some specialties to be shut out of public jobs altogether. For example, Alameda County has a pair of programs that call for 15 percent of each project to go to minority-owned businesses. A general contractor may do some work and divvy the rest among various subcontractors. Suppose that general contractor routinely employs the same minority-owned subcontractor in trucking to meet a portion of the goal. In that case, non-minority-owned subcontractors in the same field will be prevented from working on the project time and again.

These programs do a poor job of helping even the minority-owned businesses they are designed to favor. Many set-asides have been in place (in one form or another) for over 30 years. If they have not successfully redressed the problems posited by the government, there is no reason to think that they will now.

Even more, these programs are demeaning. One minority-owned contractor reports getting calls for jobs that the general contractor knows he cannot work on — just so that the general contractor can state that he has made good-faith efforts to subcontract to minority-owned businesses.

Racial set-asides in public contracting are not only unjust but also unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of the United States and the California Supreme Court both have struck down similar programs — the Supreme Court, on the grounds that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the California Supreme Court, on the grounds that it violated the California Constitution’s prohibition on racial discrimination, in public employment, public education, and public contracting.

On Monday, a nonprofit organization and two Alameda County residents challenged Alameda County’s racial set-asides in state court. They challenge the set-asides as violations of the state and federal constitutions (Disclosure: My firm, Pacific Legal Foundation, represents the plaintiffs in this case). The plaintiffs include Chinese immigrants who see shades of the collectivistic mindset that they have worked so hard to flee in today’s renewed calls for equity. Another plaintiff is a woman with decades of experience in the trucking company who has seen first-hand how connected companies take advantage of these programs at the expense of disfavored subcontractors.

For these entrepreneurs, the set-asides may be just one of many barriers to their flourishing. But it’s important for them to tear down these barriers — one at a time.

Wen Fa is a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans’ liberties when threatened by government overreach and abuse. Follow him on Twitter @wenfa1.

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