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America’s harsh anti-immigration policies under the Trump administration are hardly a good example for the rest of the world. But leave it to the supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to distort a well-intentioned American law for nefarious ends. They have dusted off something called the Lautenberg Amendment, an obscure Cold War-era law, to justify Modi’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Modi’s law has sparked massive protests in India and condemnation around the world. But his supporters claim there is no functional difference between America’s Lautenberg Amendment and India’s CAA.

A recent piece in News18, CNN’s Indian news site, dismissed the West’s reaction to the CAA as “ill-informed” because it “ignored the similarities to the U.S.’s Lautenberg Amendment.” Likewise, the HAF (the Hindu American Foundation), a U.S.-based outfit dedicated to fighting Hinduphobia, advises U.S. critics to read the Lautenberg Amendment before criticizing the CAA. Meanwhile, Modi supporters in the Indian-American community are petitioning the Seattle City Council to reject the “severely misguided, misinformed” anti-CAA resolution floated by one of its members because CAA is India’s Lautenberg.

But this is pure posturing meant to confuse the world.

It is true that America passed Lautenberg, named after the Democratic Jewish senator from New Jersey who sponsored it, in 1990 to hand Jews and Christians in the Soviet Union and some Southeast Asian countries—Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos—an expedited pathway to gain refugee status in America. Typically, prospective refugees have to individually prove they are facing persecution to gain admission (and they have to flee to another country and apply through international organizations like the United Nations). But Lautenberg created a presumption of persecution for Jews and Christians because of concerns that the political turmoil generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union might make them even more vulnerable to persecution than usual. So they had to show merely a generalized—not individualized—fear to be considered for admission. (Also sometimes they could apply directly from their home countries without fleeing first.) When Lautenberg was passed, International Refugee Assistance Project’s Betsy Fisher told The Week it created additional pathways to expand America’s relatively generous refugee program at the time (before the current administration gutted it).

What does the CAA do?

It fast-tracks citizenship for Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsees from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh who arrived in India before December 2014—but leaves out persecuted Muslims such as the Ahmaidyas from Pakistan or the Rohingya from Myanmar. In other words, it imposes a religious test for citizenship.

CAA’s supporters argue this is functionally similar to Lautenberg because just like Lautenberg, the CAA creates special channels for some groups without eliminating existing channels for any group. Muslims who are left out of the CAA can still access normal channels for admission, just like refugees not covered by Lautenberg can apply through usual channels.

But this analysis strains the truth at every level.

For starters, unlike the CAA, Lautenberg is a flexible, ongoing program, not a one-time deal. Its underlying purpose is to create a mechanism to rescue the most vulnerable religious groups in the world at any given time. Hence, the law has to be reauthorized every year at which point lawmakers have the option of revising the list of groups needing help. In 2004, Lautenberg was extended to Iran—and not just the Jews and Christians in the country but also the Baha’is, a religious sect that is considered heretical by Iran’s mullahs.

In other words, Lautenberg cuts against dominant prejudices while the CAA caters to them. Moreover, Lautenberg, laudably, aimed to admit more refugees into America, not create a discriminatory citizenship standard for those inside the country. When it comes to U.S. citizenship, one uniform standard applies to everyone regardless of race, caste, creed, religion, or nationality.

But the biggest lie that CAA supporters tell is that refugees not fast-tracked by the law can still avail normal channels, just like Lautenberg.

Lautenberg relaxed standards for some refugees to admit more in. The CAA admits not a single extra refugee. Furthermore, once admitted, refugees in America have a pretty straightforward path to citizenship. But India’s existing refugee and citizenship channels are a sick joke.

Unlike much of the world, India has studiously refused to sign the United Nations convention on refugees or other similar protocols. So it is under no obligation under international law to extend even minimal care or assistance to those fleeing to its shores. Moreover, note Ipsita Chakravarty and Vijayta Lalwani of Scroll.in, one of the few unafraid and honest publications left in India in the Modi era, India has no dedicated law that guarantees basic due process rights to refugees. It relies, instead, “on a thicket of other laws” and vague operating procedures to determine who has a “well-founded fear” of persecution.

This basically leaves refugees to the tender mercies of bureaucrats. The upshot unsurprisingly is that those groups the CAA targets for favoritism already get better treatment than the others from the Indian system.

Even before the CAA, note Chakravarty and Lalwani, Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Bangladesh were able to obtain driver’s licenses, bank accounts, and PAN cards (the equivalent of Social Security cards). They even got access to education and health-care facilities and can buy “small dwelling units for self-occupation and self-employment.” This is not a lot but it is a lot more than what the Rohingya or the Ahmadiyas get.

These groups have been herded into filthy camps and can’t even obtain SIM cards for cell phones. More shockingly, two years ago, when tens of thousands of Rohingyas were desperately trying to escape Myanmar because of the unspeakable brutality of the security forces, Modi declared the Rohingya refugees in India a “terror threat” and wanted to deport them back to their country to be slaughtered. Indeed, thousands of Rohingyas live in just five Indian cities but only 500 have been granted long-term visas.

In other words, referring these folks to “normal channels” means consigning them to either a sub-human existence in camps or certain death back home.

But the biggest lie that CAA supporters peddle is that the law won’t leave these groups any worse off. What the law’s proponents conveniently don’t acknowledge is that the CAA is only one arm of Modi’s pincer to disenfranchise Muslims on India’s soil. The other is the National Registry of Citizenship (NRC).

This registry, which Modi’s Muslim-baiting home minister has declared will be implemented nationwide by 2024, would require India’s 1.3 billion individuals to prove to the government that they are citizens. Every man, woman, and child in India will have to arrange papers showing, for example, that they have ancestors going back to a specified cutoff date, along with other requirements.

This is a near-impossible task for India’s poor and illiterate especially given the notoriously bad record-keeping at the municipal level—and the Modi government knows this. Indeed, if the pilot program in the province of Assam is any indication, the upshot of this exercise will be that hundreds of millions of Indians of all faiths will be unable to come up with the proper paperwork to make the cut.

The whole point of the CAA is to hand Hindus and other select groups who don’t make it on the NRC a way out while stripping citizenship rights from an untold number of India’s 140 million Muslims, not just recent refugees but also those with ties going back generations. The Modi government is reportedly building detention camps all over the country for those excluded from the NRC.

This is the opposite of Lautenberg—both in letter and spirit.

To be sure, Lautenberg has never fully lived up to its promise. Like the rest of the refugee program, it’s become hostage to competing special interests and the foreign policy whims of the sitting administration. And, shamefully, phony national security considerations have prevented the law from being extended to groups like the Iraqi Yazidis who were facing genocide by ISIS.

India has invoked bad American immigration laws for its nativist ends in the past. For example, a 2005 Indian Supreme Court ruling actually quoted from the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious and largely discarded 1889 Chinese Exclusion decision to declare that “the highest duty of a nation” is to “give security against foreign aggression and encroachment” including from “vast hordes” of foreigners “crowding in upon us.”

But turning a well-intentioned American law on its head to justify the Modi government’s sinister designs is obscene. The world should see this insidious comparison by Modi cheerleaders for the disinformation campaign that it is: A new low.

This column originally appeared in The Week.

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When President Donald Trump’s budget proposal landed yesterday, Democrats were quick to denounce it as savage and inhumane.

The budget, which Trump officials say would balance in 2035, would “inflict devastating cuts to critical lifelines that millions of Americans rely on,” according to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.). Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, called it “immoral,” “shameful,” and “profoundly unethical.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), another presidential hopeful, tweeted out a bunch of numbers purporting to show the dramatic cuts to entitlement programs Trump’s plan calls for. 

$756 billion in Medicare cuts
$920 billion in Medicaid cuts
$24 billion in Social Security cuts

Trump wants to take money out of your pockets so there's more for his rich buddies. We are building a grassroots movement to stop him. https://t.co/fyjf8nIz2e

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) February 10, 2020

There are at least a few problems with these responses, among them that Warren’s Medicare numbers are wrong. 

As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes, the budget calls for about $600 billion in Medicare cuts, not $750 billion. That’s because some of the funds are not actually cut but reclassified, taken from one part of the Medicare budget and spent elsewhere. In addition, the cuts that Trump proposes aren’t exactly radical overhauls: Similar proposals appeared in President Barack Obama’s budgets, and in the proposals of Democratic presidential candidates. They would affect payments to providers, but would not directly reduce benefits, and could even lead to reduced costs for seniors in the program. 

But there is an even deeper problem with these attacks: None of these cuts are ever going to happen.

The president’s annual budget proposal has about as much impact on the budget process as the lunch menu in the Rayburn House Office Building cafeteria, possibly less, given that one actually impacts the disposition of sitting members of Congress. No serious person, which admittedly excludes some presidential candidates, thinks otherwise, which is why virtually every news story about the budget has some version of a to-be-sure-this-does-not-matter caveat buried somewhere in the warnings about budget cuts and secret limited government radicalism. (“The White House budget is largely a messaging document,” reports The New York Times. “The proposal is unlikely to become law,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “What ultimately gets passed may show little resemblance to what the President has proposed,” explains CNN.) GOP lawmakers are treating it with the sort of respect they usually reserve for protesters wearing sandwich boards: “In the end, Sen. Mike Enzi (R–Wyo.) told The Wall Street Journal, “they are just a list of suggestions.” 

Acknowledgments that the president’s budget plan won’t pass are usually paired with an insistence that the budget is a “statement of priorities,” or, per Pelosi, “a statement of values.” The underlying argument is that even if the White House budget won’t ever be passed into law, it’s a guide to what the president would like to do, and it’s reasonable to criticize him for it. 

This has certainly been true of administrations past, and it is fair up to a point. A presidential budget plan certainly tells us something about the president and how he believes the government should spend its—rather, your—money. 

But in the case of Trump I would argue that it is at least partially, and perhaps mostly, something else: a guide to how the president and his advisers want people to think he’d spend money. 

Hence the Medicare “cuts” which don’t directly touch benefits; the elimination of Obamacare and the savings it would offer with promises to replace it but only vague hints as to what that might be; and, most of all, the assumption of super-charged economic growth over the next decade, well beyond what the Trump administration has accomplished so far, and well beyond what rival forecasters project. 

The new Trump budget concedes — for the first time, officially — that growth did not hit 3% in 2018 or 2019.

It then returns to forecasting 3.1% growth (q4/q4) this year.https://t.co/PYbBPNWZLM

— Jim Tankersley (@jimtankersley) February 10, 2020

That projected boom doesn’t just make the budget’s hypothetical future economy look good. It makes the relatively modest cuts Trump calls for much easier to swallow by boosting tax revenues to the tune of about $4 trillion over the next decade, making the budget picture look far rosier than is remotely realistic. 

Amazing note from @Brian_Riedl:

The White House budget assumes GDP will be *$21 trillion higher* over the next 10 years than CBO did, bc WH assumes very fast economic growth.

That gives the WH an additional $4 trillion to make their books balance — which they don't until 2035

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 10, 2020

Trump’s budget isn’t a plan or a rough guide for Congress. It’s a fantasy of economic boom times in which a soaring economy makes real fiscal challenges go away. It’s an exercise in wishful thinking. 

That doesn’t mean Trump’s budget doesn’t have some good ideas (fantasies sometimes do) or that it isn’t worth arguing about (any major presidential document is worthy of serious and substantive analysis). But it does mean it’s better understood as a sort of campaign flyer, a politician’s gauzy vision of a gilded economy, than as a meaningful to-do list for lawmakers. 

As for Trump’s true priorities, it’s worth examining his record as it actually exists, in the form of the budgets that have passed and spending that has occurred under his watch. As Chris Edwards, a budget scholar at the Cato Institute, notes, with the help of both Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress, Trump’s promises of spending cuts and debt reduction have been largely hollow, and that wouldn’t change even if Trump’s budget plan were somehow to pass in full.

Notably, the trajectory of federal spending under Trump has been upwards in both domestic and military spending—in contrast to Obama, who spent a little less on both during the same time. 

As Edwards writes, “Trump has been a big spender across the board.” 

That’s due at least in part to a series of temporary budget deals Congress passed under his watch, in which Republicans demanded increased spending on defense, and Democrats demanded increased spending on domestic programs, and the two sides compromised by agreeing to spend more on both. 

Over the coming year, you can expect more of the same. As The Wall Street Journal reports, lawmakers will likely “punt final decisions on 2021 spending until after the November presidential election, and instead fund the government with temporary spending measures for the first few months of the fiscal year.” This sort of crude congressional dealmaking has been the reality under Trump, and it is this—not the president’s fantasy budgets—that is all but certain to continue. 

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Gina Teixeira, an attorney with the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, got the call last May. A court was going to force a man to undergo shock therapy, and he wanted her help fighting the order.

He wasn’t alone. Teixeira regularly receives inquiries from Connecticut patients facing involuntary shock treatment court orders, including one client who she says has been unwillingly subjected to the shocks 500 times.

“I think it happens a lot more than people realize,” Teixeira says.

Shock therapy, also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), was developed in the late 1930s as a psychiatric treatment for severe psychosis and catatonia. Patients undergoing the procedure receive jolts of electricity from electrodes placed on their temples, triggering a brain seizure and convulsions that last up to a minute. After the two Italian psychiatrists who invented the treatment reported positive results, a 1938 news headline declared “Madness Cured with Electricity.”

It soon became evident, though, that the treatment could cause severe cognitive impairment and memory loss. In a 1944 study, shock therapy recipients “described losses such as the inability to recognize friends and acquaintances” which “remained after years and appeared to be permanent.” Another study worryingly concluded that patients who improved or recovered after the seizure-inducing treatments had a “high frequency of relapse.” 

Reports subsequently emerged in the 1950s of psychiatric hospital doctors and orderlies using the novel treatment to modify the behavior of harmless and healthy patients. One woman was given shock treatment because her family was upset she had run off with her apparently “homosexual” boyfriend and “walked about carrying ‘Proust’ under her arm.” 

To counter evidence of shock therapy’s serious side effects, limited therapeutic benefits, and potential for abuse, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) partnered with shock industry lobbyists in the 1970s to persuade the public that the treatment was safe and effective. Though it took time, the public relations campaign succeeded. Prominent media outlets regularly report that today’s “safe and effective” version of electroconvulsive therapy no longer resembles the barbaric shock procedure depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

Many recipients voluntarily consent to shock therapy, which is typically given for treatment-resistant depression, and get better. In 2008, the National Mental Health Association reported that shock treatments tripled to 100,000 a year, a figure that is frequently re-printed in other news publications. In 2016, Dr. Linda Lagemann, a former associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, estimated that shock therapy generates $1.8 billion in costs annually, half of which are covered by Medicare.

Corresponding with shock therapy’s comeback, reports of the procedure’s devastating side effects and limited effectiveness re-appeared. A 2010 review of eight meta-analyses concluded that, because shock therapy causes persistent and permanent memory loss and a slight increased risk of death, “its use cannot be scientifically justified.” In 2018, as the result of a class-action lawsuit, ECT device maker Somatics added a warning to its instruction manual that in “rare cases, patients may experience…permanent brain damage.”

Despite such accounts, warnings and studies, many states still allow physicians to force shock therapy onto people who don’t want it. While physicians are typically required to secure court orders before forcibly shocking patients, the Minnesota City Pages has called the process “more of a bureaucratic formality than a serious deliberation.” 

 It is virtually impossible to know how many Americans are involuntarily shocked, since, besides Texas, states don’t require hospitals to report how often they administer the procedure. Likewise, medical privacy laws make it prohibitively difficult for the public to attend involuntary shock hearings.

Without proper scrutiny, patients in Connecticut are especially vulnerable to getting unnecessarily shocked. It is one of the only U.S. states that allows civil psychiatric facilities to hospitalize individuals involuntarily for an indefinite length of time, with minimal judicial oversight: Patients are entitled to a clinical review by a doctor just once a year, and only entitled to a full judicial review every two years. In early 2018, the Connecticut Legal Rights Project filed a class-action lawsuit to declare the state’s civil commitment statute unconstitutional.

The man who contacted Teixeira last May, referred to as John Doe in court records, was a patient at the Greater Bridgeport Community Mental Health Center, a Connecticut state-run civil facility that treats adults with prolonged psychiatric and co-occurring illnesses. He had never undergone shock therapy before.

On May 3, 2019, clinicians testified at Bridgeport Probate Court that it was medically necessary to forcibly shock the man. Judge Paul Ganim agreed, and he empowered the man’s parents, who act as his conservators, to permit the shock therapy for up to 45 days. (No other details from the court hearing are public, as probate mental health court records are automatically sealed.)

That’s when the patient contacted Teixeira.

“He obviously was sophisticated enough to contact me and ask me to file an appeal,” Teixeira told the Connecticut Post. “The client told me he is really scared and asked me to help him. This should not be forced on him.”

Teixeira subsequently filed for an emergency order to halt the shock treatments, citing the man’s fear of side effects, including memory loss. Connecticut Assistant Attorney General Emily Melendez, representing the mental health center, then filed a motion opposing the order. Incredibly, Melendez asserted in her motion that the patient “does not allege any facts to support that such side effects exist or that if they do, that the risk of harm in not providing this treatment outweighs whatever other harm might come from the treatment.”

To bolster her emergency order filing, Teixeira asked Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services for assistance. Department officials never got back to her, and the probate court refused to postpone the procedure.

John Doe was forced to undergo his first round of shock therapy on May 17.

Teixeira was able to schedule an appeal hearing for June 3 at the Superior Court in Bridgeport. During the hearing, Melendez confessed that medical staff violated Connecticut’s shock statute.

In Connecticut, shock therapy can be administered over a patient’s objection only if the head of a hospital and two qualified physicians agree the patient is incapable of giving informed consent. In this case, Melendez conceded, only the head of the hospital and one qualified physician approved the procedure. The mental health center had improperly allowed a physician’s assistant to sign-off on the procedure in lieu of a second qualified physician.

It was a moot point, though, since the hospital had completed the medically necessary rounds of shock therapy, according to Melendez. (Melendez did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

After Melendez’ disclosure, Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis advised the hospital’s legal team that these “are liberty interests that are so important and the statutory protections are there for a reason.” She then sustained the patient’s appeal to halt any future shock treatments during the 45-day treatment window. 

The man has not been shocked since, according to Teixeira, though she is not authorized to say if he is still hospitalized.

Despite being appreciative of the judge’s ruling, Teixeira was furious that the court did not issue an automatic stay after she initially filed her appeal. “This what I really want to talk about, how flawed our shock statute is,” she said. “You have a probate order found to be legally defective—and it didn’t matter to my client because he was still shocked. To be deprived of that opportunity because the law does not include an automatic stay is a real problem.” 

According to Teixeira, the lack of authorization from a second qualified physician wasn’t the only defect in the shock application. The state’s shock statute requires any possible “less intrusive beneficial treatment” to be given to a patient before shock therapy is forcibly administered. Teixeira contends that the hospital violated this when it didn’t offer John Doe the opportunity to take psychiatric medication.

Teixeira is now representing Carol Levesque, a Connecticut woman fighting a shock application filed by Middletown’s Connecticut Valley Hospital. According to a complaint Teixeira filed in October, Levesque has been held against her will at the state-run psychiatric hospital since 2015. During that period, she has been shocked 500 times.

Teixeira is incensed at the hospital’s most recent shock therapy application, because the procedure has clearly not benefited Levesque. “After years of this forced shock and not having enough benefit for discharge,” Teixeira complained, “what’s the point?”

In that case, Teixeira was able to persuade a judge to grant a stay of the shock order prior to the appeal hearing. “Now she has the opportunity to challenge the order without constant threat,” Teixeira noted.

Even if Teixeira and Levesque win their appeal, the hospital can reapply for shock therapy after 45 days. “You can constantly petition for years and years, and no one is gonna tell you to stop,” Teixeira notes. “It’s a flaw in the system that doesn’t protect people.”

Since the shocks were halted, Levesque’s physical and mental health appear to have improved. “The hospital says without shock she deteriorates,” Teixeira says. “Every time I see her, she looks better.”

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