‘Ban the box’ pro-criminal legislation snuck into … the national DEFENSE bill

Yesterday, we learned that an amnesty provision for Liberians was slipped into what was supposed to be a national defense bill for our own homeland, citizens, and soldiers. Well, it turns out that there is more fundamental social engineering embedded in this 3,400-page monstrosity that could never pass in a transparent debate over a stand-alone bill. If foreign nationals were able to get their handout in the bill, I guess the bipartisan liberals felt that domestic criminals needed to get theirs too.

Slipped into page 1,014 of the bill is the Orwellianly named “Fair Chance Act,” a piece of legislation that bars the federal government from asking about criminal records on job applications for government jobs. This applies to both government workers and government private contractors, except for those jobs that require security clearances. This has been a major priority of the Soros-Koch alliance in normalizing criminals, along with letting them out of prison early, abolishing bail, and giving felons the right to vote.

I have already chronicled how such legislation actually harms many black job applicants and how this is a Trojan horse to begin applying anti-discrimination laws to criminals even in the private workplace. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “ban the box” policies “decrease the probability of being employed by 3.4 percentage points (5.1%) for young, low-skilled black men, and by 2.3 percentage points (2.9%) for young, low-skilled Hispanic men.”

However, regardless of your view on this legislation, much like the decision to raise the tobacco age in the omnibus bill, this is a very big policy change that should require a transparent debate in a stand-alone bill. Instead, they insidiously stuck it into a defense bill that includes a pay raise for soldiers. Nobody knew this was in the bill until pro-criminal groups starting bragging about it. That’s how I found out about it, as did one Senate office: “Never in our wildest dreams did we think a criminal justice provision would make its way into an NDAA,” one senior staffer for a conservative senator told CR.

Yesterday, we found out about the provision in the bill granting amnesty to 4,000 Liberian illegal. This, despite the fact that we provide Liberia with $109 million in aid to improve its own homeland. There are other problematic provisions buried in this bill as well that the president and members of Congress seem to be completely unaware of. At the same time, it contains nothing to promote conservative priorities on the mission, character, and objectives of the military, much less any response to the Pensacola shooting in terms of foreign visas and base security. Quite the contrary, the bill actually adds 4,000 more visas for Afghani officials who worked with our military at a time when the Washington Post revealed the entire building of an Afghani military to be a farce. But fear not, Ivankacare, aka a new entitlement of paid family leave for federal workers who already enjoy a more generous benefit package than private workers, was also slipped into the final bill.

What’s further insidious is that this president will wind up signing a “second step” for criminals in the “ban the box” provision before even signing a first step for victims of crime to close the numerous loopholes created by federal courts that allow some of the most violent criminals to escape justice. That is what the president campaigned on.

The rush to pass massive bills with numerous unannounced extraneous policy changes demonstrates a broader ailment with our government. Almost all of our major social and policy changes in this country come from courts and unelected bureaucrats. Even the few things that come from democratically elected legislators as may as well be from unelected people. They stuff the most contentious changes into either massive omnibus bills or universal national defense bills and vote on them before anyone in Congress knows they are there, much less the public.

How prescient was James Madison when he warned, “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”

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