Trent's Blog

How deep does the stimulus rabbit-hole go? 'Who knows, man? Who knows?'

Posted By: Trent Franks on November 19, 2009

Advice for Citizen Activists: What you can do to prevent the reinstatement of the Assault Weapons Ban

Posted By: Rep. Trent Franks on June 1, 2009

Filed Under: Second Amendment   Judiciary  

Guns & Ammo Magazine
 
Attorney General Eric Holder made headlines recently when he told reporters that the Obama Administration intended to deliver on its promise to reinstate the expired Semiautomatic Assault Weapons Ban.  The seeming threat has created ripples of anticipatory anxiety among Second  Amendment advocates throughout the country.
 
Many individuals have voiced a sense of helplessness over what the ordinary citizen can do to effect change, and specifically, to prevent a reinstatement of the unconstitutional federal ban on the possession, transfer, or domestic manufacture of Semiautomatic Assault Weapons.
 
Despite the traditional trend of a left-leaning Democratic government to inhibit Second Amendment freedoms, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are not unified with the Obama Administration in their position on the Assault Weapons Ban. Both Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have stated in recent weeks that they would oppose a reinstatement of the ban.
 
But the reality of political tension within party leadership confers no assurance that there will not be attempts, as General Holder suggested, to reinstate the unconstitutional federal ban. 
 
A time-tested theory, espoused succinctly by Margaret Thatcher, says, "First you win the argument; then you win the vote." Any political victory is preceded by engaging in and winning the public debate.  This requires that citizens calmly, credibly, and persuasively work to educate others and thereby undo the plague of ignorance that is most often at the root of difference in opinion over this and many other Second Amendment issues. 
 
For instance, most people do not know that machine guns were effectively banned in the 1934 National Firearms Act, and that the Assault Weapons Ban prohibited semiautomatic firearms based on statutorily defined characteristics that were largely cosmetic (not mechanical) in nature. They know little, if anything, about current gun regulations, firearm safety, or the status or effect of pending federal legislation. 
 
That being the case, the task of communicating the facts to your family, your community, and your elected leaders falls upon the shoulders of you, the citizen activist.
 
Here are a few practical steps:
 
•     Commit to educating yourself thoroughly on the issue first.  You cannot be an effective advocate unless you yourself are equipped with knowledge about the issue and opposing arguments.
 
•     Write an op-ed or letter to the editor in your local and national papers.  This is one of the best methods to raise public awareness about an issue.
 
•     Start a blog on the topic and network with other bloggers. Set up a media tracker such as "Google alerts" to monitor what the press and other bloggers are saying about that issue, and post that information on your blog to make it a resource for others who want to learn about the SAW ban or follow the issue.
 
•     Form a local working group with other citizens who want to advocate for your issue and are willing to commit to writing op-ed's and letters to the editor in a collaborated manner.
 
•     Start a petition.  This is best done in coordination with your working group.  Post the petition on your group's website or blog and look for ways to drive traffic to the petition.  This is a time-honored way of effecting political change, and it gives an "action item" to people who want to make their voice heard on the issue.
 
•     Coordinate with your working group to take out an educational, informative ad in the local paper.
 
•     Call your local (as well as national) talk radio show. This has the potential of reaching thousands of listeners at a time.
 
•     Make sure you are taking the time to call and write your Congressional representatives in the United States House and Senate. Don't underestimate the effect that a collaborated outreach from constituents can have on your elected Representatives. 
 
•     Lastly, don't yield to discouragement.  Patient persistence is perhaps the most potent tool in your arsenal as an aspiring citizen activist.
 
While it can be tempting to believe that effecting tangible political change is impossible for the average citizen, nothing could be farther from the truth.  As Samuel Adams stated, "It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."

More Failed Policies Won't Lift Housing Market

Posted By: Rep. Trent Franks on June 1, 2009

Filed Under: Economy   Financial Sector   Local Issues  

Arizona Republic

According to an April report, Phoenix is now leading the entire nation in the number of home foreclosures. Valley bankruptcies reached a 41 month high in March, and in the city of Maryvale, approximately one in two homes are in foreclosure.
 
The West Valley in particular has been hit especially hard, having experienced a severe spike in foreclosure rates in the cities of Surprise, El Mirage, Peoria, and Glendale over the past many months. Amidst such seemingly dire news for homeowners, it is crucial for us to reflect on the lessons we've learned over the past few years by considering the policies that helped contribute to the current mortgage crisis, and what we can do to address them.
 
Unfortunately, much of the turmoil in our financial markets is rooted in failed government policies affecting the mortgage industry, through government sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as in corrupt rating agencies who fueled false confidence in the stability of incredibly risky loans. And while many lenders proved to be unscrupulous, so did many borrowers.
 
In 2006, there was a 44% increase in mortgage loan fraud filings in 2006, often stemming from borrowers materially misrepresenting their income, assets, or debt, forging documents, or simply lying about whether the property would be occupied as a primary residence, when in fact it was purchased for investment purposes. The Boston Federal Reserve concluded that the main reason for foreclosures in the subprime market has been the decline in the value of their homes, supporting the conclusion that these homeowners never intended to pay their mortgages at the higher reset interest rate.
 
Instead, they bet that their home would continue to appreciate, allowing them to refinance before the expiration of the lower “teaser” rate.
 
One piece of legislation in particular that fueled the cascades of foreclosures was the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007. I was one of only 27 Members in the U.S. House of Representatives and the only Member of the Arizona Congressional Delegation to vote against this legislation. While the bill did lower taxes for a small number of Americans and the motive behind it was admirable, the broader effect of the bill was largely overlooked by Members of both parties.
 
Previous to that legislation, the IRS considered forgiven debt as "income," and therefore collected taxes on it. The unintended consequence of the bill -- which modified tax laws for residential property to limit the amount of taxable forgiven debt -- was that it often made it more financially rational for homeowners to walk away from their home rather than to fulfill one's contract with the bank and struggle to keep it.
 
Due to the bursting of the government-fueled housing bubble, the majority of houses purchased between 2004 and 2007 are "under water," meaning the owner's mortgage is greater than the value of the home. Although the foreclosure process has traditionally been an involved, expensive and time-consuming process, policies such as the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act made voluntarily foreclosing and going through the seven-year credit rehabilitation suddenly easier than paying even the most conservative and conventional of all home loans, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage.
 
Enacting more of the same failed policies -- that is, embracing extreme federal intervention and nationalization of the housing market -- will not restore our ailing housing market. When the government intervenes and decides when prices are too high and when they are too low—based on political and media-driven interests rather than objective economic calculations—the result is an artificially manipulation of the market, hampering the market’s natural corrective tendencies and extending the timeframe in which such corrections occur, thereby spreading the damage to a wider population than would otherwise be adversely affected. These are the exact causes that helped shape our current financial crisis in the first place.
 
Government should encourage the injection of private capital into the mortgage industry again to shore up home prices, stop the precipitous decline of housing values, and reverse the destructive flood of mortgage foreclosures.
 
Federal lawmakers can best help the marketplace normalize by sending a clear message of certainty that there will not be a mortgage bailout enacted and that the government will not engage in risk management with the private sector. Taxpayers at large should not be asked to absorb any of the risk; the risk should be shouldered by the private sector.
 
Lawmakers must also be wary of hastily passing legislation that creates a "cure" worse than the disease. For instance, despite its misleading title, last year's American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act provided enormously costly corporate bailouts, imposed additional tax increases, and created slush funds for politically motivated organizations. None of these are solutions to our mortgage crisis.
 
A viable alternative to massive government-interventionist "solutions" to the housing market must first and foremost protect law-abiding taxpayers by refusing to burden them with subsidizing market failure, fraud, and poor investment decisions. We must also reject slush funds for political activist organizations; encourage personal accountability and responsible borrowing, lending, and investing; stimulate the creation of wealth; and address the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain at the core of the housing problem. Only by remaining committed to these tried-and-proven principles will we restore stability and profitability to the mortgage industry.  

A 21st-Century Civil Rights Battle

Posted By: Rep. Trent Franks on April 20, 2009

Filed Under: Pro-life   PRENDA   Judiciary  

The Washinton Times
 
The most recent U.S. census reveals that abortion clinics are engaged in an insidious form of racial and sex-based discrimination.

In a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Columbia University economic researchers Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund said they found a significant gender imbalance between males and females within immigrant populations in the United States, which they think provides "evidence of sex-selection, most likely at the prenatal stage."

The data revealed unnatural sex-ratio imbalances within segments of certain immigrant populations, including those originating from India, Vietnam, Thailand, Armenia and especially China, where government-enforced "one child" policies and a culturally engrained "son preference" have made sex-selection abortion so prevalent that boys outnumber girls by as much as a 2-to-1 ratio in rural communities.

One Harvard University economist estimated that more than 100 million women were "demographically missing" from the world because of widespread and underreported practices of prenatal sex selection, an astonishing figure.

Regardless of one's position on abortion, this form of discrimination should horrify every American. The idea of killing a baby simply because she is a girl is reprehensible. Unsurprisingly, a March 2006 Zogby International poll found that 86 percent of Americans supported a prohibition on sex-selection abortion. Indeed, what good are the hard-won liberties of voting and other women's rights if babies may still be aborted simply for being girls?

Ironically, we are doing a better job internationally on this issue than we are at home. At the United Nations' 2007 annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women, 51st Session, the U.S. delegation spearheaded a resolution calling on countries to eliminate sex-selective abortion. The commission has urged governments of all nations "to take necessary measures to prevent ... prenatal sex selection."

Congress also voiced strong disapproval of the practice when 362 members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, passed a resolution in 2006 condemning the "communist government of China" for "its one-child policy, which promotes sex-selection abortion and female infanticide on a massive scale, a 'gendercide' which has led to millions of 'missing girls.' " Notwithstanding this widespread revulsion of sex-selection abortion and despite proof it occurs in America, sex-selective abortion remains legal and, therefore, tacitly condoned.

Abortion is being used not only to abort boys and girls just because they are boys and girls. Equally reprehensible is the reality of race-based abortion. Last spring, some federally funded clinics were exposed as agreeing to accept funds from persons who expressly asked that their donations be used to reduce the black population by abortion.

The history of the American abortion movement is replete with evidence of the purposeful placement of family planning clinics in areas with high concentrations of minorities. In fact, as many as 70 percent of abortion clinics are located in inner-city or minority neighborhoods. The impact has been devastating to black families. Fifty percent - 1 in 2 - of black children are aborted today in America.

A September 2008 report by the Guttmacher Institute revealed that black babies are five times likelier to be aborted than white babies. A quarter of the black population is demographically missing.

Racism in any form should cause us to recoil, but the reality of these staggering figures should make us all violently ill. Do we realize that, primarily through federally funded abortion clinics placed in our inner cities, we are contributing to the deadliest form of discrimination in our country's history against the most-discriminated-against minority in American history by systematically eliminating fully half of all blacks waiting to be born?

The United States has worked hard to eliminate widespread and systematic race and sex discrimination, which we recognize as a detestable part of our past. In both race and sex discrimination, Americans ultimately responded in the strongest possible legal terms by enacting constitutional amendments to end slavery and give women the right to vote (the 14th and 19th Amendments), ending the government sanction of such discrimination. However, eliminating discriminatory practices still must be among our highest priorities.

It is past time to reject the discriminatory disgrace of aborting a child based on race or sex. To that end, I have introduced H.R. 1822, the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2009, which would prohibit the practice of, or solicitation or acceptance of funds for, race- or sex-selection abortion.

Americans can support the effort to address this unspoken evil by encouraging the Democratic Leadership, including Mrs. Pelosi, and their own members of Congress to address this insidious form of discrimination by enacting this legislation.

Selecting girls and only girls for elimination or reducing the population of a given ethnic group or race distorts the entire shape of our society and undermines the entire foundation of human dignity and equality.

If we cannot find common ground on such a bedrock American principle, regardless of our differing perspectives on abortion, what hope remains? 

Lesson from AIG: Time to Stop the Bailout Stampede

Posted By: Rep. Trent Franks on March 18, 2009

Filed Under: Financial Sector   Economy   Federal Budget  

TownHall.com
 
The doublespeak coming from leading Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration has reached new heights this week. Taxpayers are rightfully outraged at reports that after financing hundreds of billions in federal bailouts, they are now also footing the bill for AIG executives receiving $165 million in retention pay and "performance-based" bonuses-- when many of these same executives are responsible for putting AIG in its untenable position in the first place.

The Administration is likewise expressing outrage over the AIG bonus payments, but this of course comes after White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs assured the American people that the Administration knew how every dime AIG had received thus far had been spent. The White House continues to offer no explanation for the fact that these bonus contracts were on the books well before the most recent plan to award the struggling financial conglomerate with another $30 billion was announced.

To be clear, American taxpayers have financed AIG's bad investment and management decisions not once, but three times: first a $60 billion loan, then $50 billion to buy toxic assets, and then $40 billion to buy preferred shares of stock. And now, another $30 billion installment from the second half of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Funds) approved earlier this year.

Then, Monday night, after most of the AIG bonuses had already been disbursed, Democrats began calling for a tax on the AIG executives who had received these hefty bonuses. Yet only a month ago, when the Senate considered the $787 billion stimulus bill, Senate Democrats passed an amendment by Senator Chris Dodd providing an exception for "contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009." That is, Senator Dodd and other Democrat leaders who are decrying the outrageousness of exorbitant executive bonuses were the very ones to guarantee that the bonus checks would be written.

Senator Dodd arguably wields more influence over the banking industry than any other Member of the U.S. Senate, as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. According to opensecrets.com, Senator Dodd was AIG's largest single recipient of campaign donations during the 2008 election cycle; and one of AIG's largest offices is based in Connecticut. The connection is stark: the Senator from Connecticut ensured executives were allowed to receive their exorbitant bonuses even at the expense of American people struggling to pay their bills and keep their homes.

It's becoming increasingly clear that both the elected and appointed Democratic leaders at the helm of the world's largest financial ship of state, responsible for navigating us out of a spiraling economic crisis, have forfeited the common sense and commitment to the principles of a free market -- the most basic of which is the freedom of business to succeed and the freedom to fail -- which have formed America's economic compass for over two hundred years.

Confidence in the ability of our national leaders to restore stability to our financial markets is the most crucial factor to encouraging the investment of private capital and incentivizing growth in our financial markets again. But with government leaders performing like this, one can't blame the markets for continuing to lose faith.

As for the executive bonuses, unfortunately these contractual obligations are binding and it remains unclear as to whether there is any clear and constitutional method for the government to recoup the $165 million it allegedly never intended to give to the AIG executives. Over two hundred years of common law precludes the imposition of retroactive taxation or a politically-motivated tax aimed at specific individuals, let alone the dangerous precedent that would be set by such action.

But hardworking taxpayers should not lose sight of the bigger picture. The unfortunate reality is that $165 million is a mere drop in the bucket when one considers that they are actually being left on the hook for nearly $200 billion in bailout funds AIG has been allocated at taxpayer expense.

The AIG bonus fiasco only signifies the much larger problem of government intervention in the private sector, whether in the mortgage industry, credit markets, or any other aspect of our free market economy. Those of us who have voted against each of the consecutive government bailouts starting in September 2008 cannot help but believe that our commitment to preserving the principles of our free market has now been vindicated.

If we're to effectively "plug the holes" in the deflating balloon of consumer confidence, the Democratic leaders in government must commit to returning to the simple principles of personal responsibility, transparency, and integrity which they're demanding of everyone else, whether individuals or financial giants like AIG. Looking forward, the only viable response to incentivizing real economic growth and bringing true stability to our ailing financial markets absolutely must include an exit strategy for the growing government monopolies of private financial assets.