I'd like to know exactly what foreign maritime traffic the Cato Institute and Lawrence H. Summers think can successfully navigate internal US waterways.[1] Freeing stuck ships can cost upwards of $1B, not to mention the ecological threat of discharged ballast, inviting wholesale invasion of snakehead and worse.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/business/chesapeake-cargo...
With respect to ballast water, any vessel discharging cargo or entering US ports has to abide by USCG and other regulations about treatment etc, regardless of whether or not it’s a JA-compliant vessel or not
Trusting in compliance does not remotely eliminate the grave risk of contamination, and enforcement only occurs after the damage is done. Anyone that has any affection for domestic marine species will see this as begging for ecological catastrophe.
But this is entirely orthogonal to the jones act because there are foreign vessels calling at US ports like literally all the time. They just don’t pick up cargo in one US port and take it to another US port.
These may discourage noncompliance, but they can not prevent it.
> But this is entirely orthogonal to the jones act because there are foreign vessels calling at US ports like literally all the time. They just don’t pick up cargo in one US port and take it to another US port.
As attractive as allowing foreign vessels to transport cargo from one domestic port to another, repealing the Jones Act will also permit foreign vessels to access inland ports such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, and Memphis. It would not take much for foreign vessels to accidentally, by negligence, or noncompliance introduce invasive species that would decimate populations of walleye, sauger, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, channel catfish, northern pike, bluegill and crappies that live in the Mississippi watershed. As omnipotent as they seem, inspections, permits, and audits would never be able to prevent that from occurring, yet the Jones Act clearly has, as these native populations still exist, and introduction of invasive species through ballast discharge of foreign vessels in these fragile ecosystems has been prevented.
As far as I can tell, though, the Jones Act doesn't regulate country of manufacture or require exclusive U.S. operation; it only requires U.S. flagging and crews. A foreign-flagged vessel is not really more or less likely than a domestic-flagged one to have been constructed in the U.S., or to have been transported here from elsewhere, or to operate elsewhere.
It's entirely possible (if French law permits) to have a U.S. flagged ship built in France that does river cruises on the Seine but occasionally sails (or realistically gets transported) back to the Mississippi, bringing with it whatever is stuck to its hull. On the other hand it's theoretically possible without the law to have a French-flagged and crewed ship that is built in the U.S. and never operates anywhere but the Mississippi, which seems to still satisfy your requirements. The Jones Act is an employment and profit law, not a health, safety, or environmental one.
And yet this does not guarantee repealing the Jones Act will not introduce environmental issues, and I'm not sure why we'd have such strong sympathy for limited profit opportunities of foreign operators and vessels restricted by the Jones Act.