Cricket sounds
OVER two years since its outbreak, Covid-19 is still a global pandemic and a major public health concern. Government-imposed restrictions and lockdowns are still ravaging economies all over the world, and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine is so much gasoline poured on an economic conflagration. The U.S. economy — the world’s largest — may be headed to a recession which usually results in “lower production levels, fewer jobs, and less spending by consumers and businesses.”
These do not bode well for the CNMI’s tourism-based economy. To be sure, unlike many local businesses, the CNMI’s main employer, the government, remains afloat, but only because of the $482 million in ARPA funds from the feds. That funding source, however, will be gone soon. Then what?
Instead of focusing on how to revive the tourism industry, create more business opportunities or identify potential new investors, many elected officials prefer “revenue generating measures” which, back in the day, were also known as highway robbery.
Hence, the recent announcement of new business license fees to be imposed on struggling businesses, and a proposed tax on BnBs which, unlike major hotels, apparently do not have a lot of friends in high places.
Government, throughout known human history, likes to take other people’s money while calling the same people “greedy.” Government also never realizes that increasing taxes or fees may result in less and not more revenue. As economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, “All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.”
And how do people react to higher priced commodities or services which are the likely result of higher taxes? They usually buy less of these commodities or services.
But that’s how most government officials and many politicians look at things when acting on legislation: they see what they want to see, but they are unaware of the unseen — that is, the possible unexpected and unwanted consequences.
Hence, many of them believe that imposing wage hikes will result in higher wages (and not workhour/benefit cuts, downsizing, layoffs); that banning unpleasant items or acts will make them go away (and not result in other, quite possibly worse, criminal activities); and saddling struggling businesses with additional costs amid economic uncertainty will result in more government revenue (not higher prices, business closures, less revenue).
How about cutting the costs of running this bloated government with so many redundant, overlapping, duplicative and pointless offices, agencies and programs?
Regarding the Insular Cases
IN May 2021, the Guam Legislature conducted a public hearing via Zoom regarding Resolution 56-36 which “supports a U.S. congressional effort to publicly reject the decisions known as the Insular Cases.” These are “a series of cases decided in the early 20th century defining the place of overseas territories in the American constitutional system.”
In the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona, introduced a bipartisan resolution, H.Res.279, which “calls on the courts, the U.S. Department of Justice, and other litigants to reject any continued reliance on the Insular Cases in present and future cases because the racially grounded holdings in the Insular Cases are contrary to the text and history of the Constitution and have no modern relevance.”
Maybe. But as law professor Rose Cuizon-Villazor told the Guam legislative public hearing, the Insular Cases also provided a successful defense against a federal challenge to Article 12 of the CNMI Constitution.
Recently, two local non-government organizations — the Northern Marianas Descent Corporation and the United Carolinian Association — filed a friend of the court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court to oppose a petition to overturn the Insular Cases. According to the lawyer of the NGOs, Joseph Horey, “Those cases are the legal foundation of Article XII and the Commonwealth Senate, thus of the entire U.S.-CNMI Covenant. Overturning them would invite a constitutional crisis in the CNMI.”
NMDC and UCA are hoping that the Commonwealth government, and any other concerned parties, will join them in opposing the petition which was filed by three American Samoans who are seeking birthright citizenship. (According to the New York Times, federal law says that American Samoans are “nationals, but not citizens, of the United States at birth….”)
In April this year, U.S. Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the “flaws in the Insular Cases are as fundamental as they are shameful. The Insular Cases have no foundation in the Constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes. They deserve no place in our law.”
The court, he wrote, should overrule those decisions in “an appropriate case.” He seemed to have one in mind, the NY Times noted, referring to the petition filed by the three American Samoans.
Attorney Horey is right. The CNMI government and other concerned parties should file their own amicus briefs.
