Month: July 2019

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Last month, a divided Seventh Circuit panel overturned a $4 mil jury verdict against Polk County, Wisconsin. The jury had faulted the county for failing to prevent repeated sexual assaults of inmates by one of its guards, but the Seventh Circuit noted that the guard had violated county policy forbidding such assaults. This week, IJ filed an amicus brief urging rehearing en banc. From the brief: “If the panel’s decision stands, municipalities in this Circuit will be able to skirt liability for constitutional infringements simply by promulgating policies they have no intention of ever enforcing.” Over at Forbes.com, IJ’s Nick Sibilla has more.

• Man parks his car in a reserved parking spot, for which he lacks a permit, about 1,000 feet from the U.S. Capitol. After cops discover three guns in the car, man is convicted of possessing a firearm while on the Capitol grounds. Following a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, the case returns to the D.C. Circuit for a ruling on the man’s Second Amendment and due process defenses. Which lack merit, the court affirms. The conviction stands.
• Seeking to escape the murderous wrath of a Mumbai mobster, Indian man enters the U.S. on a visitor’s visa with his wife and two children. Over the next 20 years, he has two more kids and builds a successful business that enables him to be the sole provider for the family and put his kids through college. Yikes! He’s arrested during a routine traffic stop, and the gov’t seeks to deport him. Board of Immigration Appeals: Sure, it would be difficult for his U.S. citizen children if he were deported, but it wouldn’t be substantially more difficult for them than what one would expect in such a situation. And he’s 19 years too late to seek asylum. Send him back. Third Circuit: Indeed.
• Allegation: Forced by a federal injunction to permit a “far-right advocacy group” to hold a rally, Charlottesville, Va. police adopt a stand-down policy for the rally and refrain from intervening in the violent confrontations that ensue. Counter-protestor is maced, beaten, and soaked with bottles of urine by white supremacists while police stand by and do nothing. And the counter-protestor cannot sue the police for failing to protect him, affirms the Fourth Circuit.
• Allegation: Officer points gun at Waverly, W.Va. family dog that is restrained and can’t reach the officer. A 113-pound woman steps between him and the dog. He grabs her arm; she struggles; he flings her to the ground, arrests her. He then enters the home without a warrant or consent and seizes electronic devices, including a phone with video of the incident. The officer makes statements that “were not entirely truthful,” and the woman is charged with obstruction. (A jury acquits.) District court: Can’t sue over that. Qualified immunity. Fourth Circuit: Reversed.
• Allegation: Attala County, Miss. officer gives man, whose speech is unintelligible, a lift, drops him off at county line at dusk—per county custom of removing vagrants to other jurisdictions. Shortly after, the man is killed by a passing motorist. Fifth Circuit: No qualified immunity for the officer. (The district court denied qualified immunity to the county as well.)
• A sexagenarian is raped and murdered in her Kalkaska, Mich. home in 1996. Following a tip from a jailhouse informant, police home in on 22-year-old suffering from brain damage and mental illness. He confesses after nine interrogations and multiple lie detector tests. Two DNA samples are on the victim—the inmate does not match one, and the other cannot be tested using then-available technology. He’s convicted anyway. After improvements in DNA technology, the other DNA sample is tested in 2013, and it also excludes the inmate. His conviction is vacated, he’s released, and he sues the officers who interrogated him for coercing the confession, plus the county. Sixth Circuit: No qualified immunity for two of the officers. (Click here for some local journalism.)
• The Sixth Circuit determines that Tennessee’s General Assembly lacks standing to pursue its lawsuit alleging the feds violated the Spending Clause and the Tenth Amendment when Congress enacted laws requiring states to provide Medicaid to eligible refugees.
• Allegation: Kansas City, Mo. police apprehend homicide suspect. (Turns out he’s innocent.) Nonetheless, detectives then send SWAT into his home to search for evidence. Yikes! The suspect hasn’t lived there for months; there’s no evidence to be found. Instead, there are four innocent occupants, including a 2-year-old who suffers a significant development regression after officers ignite a flash-bang grenade in the room she’s in. Eighth Circuit (over two partial dissents): No qualified immunity for the SWAT officers; qualified immunity for the detectives.
• The Koala—a student newspaper at the University of California, San Diego—publishes an article satirizing safe spaces and trigger warnings. The student government (triggered, perhaps) promptly votes to eliminate student-organization funding for all print media. The Koala sues. District court: Case dismissed. The Koala‘s claims are barred by the Eleventh Amendment. Also, its Free Press Clause claim fails on the merits. So does its Free Speech Clause claim. And its retaliation claim. Ninth Circuit: We disagree with literally everything the district court said. The case can proceed.
• Montana prison officials allegedly mistreat mentally ill inmates, keeping them in solitary confinement for months and years at a time, denying them medication, among other things. Cruel and unusual punishment? Ninth Circuit: The case should not have been dismissed. Reassigned to a different district judge.
• Allegation: Caldwell, Idaho police threaten to arrest woman for harboring a fugitive if she doesn’t consent to search of her house. She consents but isn’t told they’re sending in a SWAT team. The raid leaves gaping holes in ceilings and walls and saturates the house with tear gas, rendering it uninhabitable for two months. (The fugitive isn’t there.) Can she sue? Two-thirds of a Ninth Circuit panel says no.
• The feds intercept package of meth headed to man’s Honolulu condo. They replace nearly all the meth with rock salt and deliver it. But it’s unclear if the man will pick up the package from the building’s mail room and take it to his condo or if the package will be picked up and taken somewhere else, so officers don’t think they can get a warrant to search the condo. The man takes the package to his condo, and officers knock down the door when he declines to open it. Ninth Circuit: The search wasn’t unreasonable. He could have been destroying the evidence. Dissent: Destroying the rock salt? They needed a warrant.
• NPR publishes an unflattering story about a quixotic musician, including such highlights as the time the man pretended to be Jimi Hendrix’s son and the time he attempted to sell his own album to himself on an internet auction for $18k (besting the previous record of $15k set by an original 1987 promo copy of Prince’s The Black Album). After NPR refused to pull the article, he filed a 93-page pro se complaint alleging the piece was defamatory. Tenth Circuit: Nope.
• Allegation: Barber County, Kan. officers give man inconsistent orders (hands up, get on the ground). Eight seconds later, an officer shoots him in the chest with a beanbag from close range, killing him, even though he was unarmed, standing still with hands at his sides. Tenth Circuit: Video from bodycam doesn’t show everything but doesn’t contradict the allegations. A jury should decide if this was excessive force.
• Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) limits state and local legislators’ power to levy taxes; such measures must instead go to a popular vote and any revenues raised in excess of the prior year’s spending must be refunded to taxpayers. Legislators: Which violates the federal law that gave statehood to Colorado. Tenth Circuit (2016, after a trip to SCOTUS): Legislators, suing on behalf of the legislature, don’t have standing to challenge TABOR. Tenth Circuit (2019): But local gov’ts do.

Charlottesville, Virginia imposes a business license tax on freelance writers. Which is weird because business license taxes are meant to defray the cost of infrastructure that businesses and their customers use, and freelancers like Corban Addison and John Hart don’t have storefronts or walk-in customers; they sit at their desks and write. And it’s also unconstitutional. The First Amendment prohibits the gov’t from treating speakers unequally without a good reason, and the traditional press is exempted from the tax. Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits vague laws, and no ordinary freelance writer could know from reading the ordinance that they are subject to the tax. So earlier this week, Corban and John sued the city and surrounding Albemarle County. Click here to read more.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Y5HwoQ
via IFTTT

Postmodernism is necessary for a politics of individual liberty.

That was the topic of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on June 17, 2019. It featured Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford University, and author Thaddeus Russell. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.

It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Hicks prevailed in the debate by convincing 34 percent of audience members to change their minds.

Arguing for the affirmative was Russell, whose 2011 book, A Renegade History of the United States, argues that cherished American freedoms come from the selfish desires of ordinary people. Renegade University, founded by Russell, offers courses on diverse subjects from postmodernism to the history of martial arts.

Hicks argued for the negative. He’s the executive director at The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2011) and Nietzsche and the Nazis (2010).

The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.

Produced by Todd Krainin.

‘Modum’ by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Y2Bd5c
via IFTTT

A new threat is menacing the American homeland: Chinese buses and trains. Or at least Congress thinks so. Both the House and Senate have passed bills that would prohibit public transit agencies from using federal money to purchase transit vehicles manufactured by Chinese companies.

The legislation is a response to the rapid growth of the state-owned Chinese Rolling Railway Stock Company (CRRC), which has already inked contracts to supply transit agencies in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago with rail cars. The company has also established manufacturing plants in Massachusetts and Illinois.

CRRC’s expansion has worried both American manufacturers, who say that the company is unfairly using the Chinese government’s support to undercut other market players, and national security hawks, who worry that cyber backdoors in the company’s rail cars will allow the Chinese government to spy on passengers and sabotage transit networks.

“With the financial backing of Beijing, CRRC is systematically working to drive established competitors out of the market and to achieve a monopoly in transit rail car production,” Scott Paul, president of the American Alliance of Manufacturing, testified to Congress in April. “If successful, this would be a disaster for taxpayers and for transit providers.”

No U.S.-owned companies are currently making passenger rail cars. But Paul argued that CRRC could one day muscle into freight rail car production, where a number of U.S.-owned companies are active.

Foreign companies’ reliance on government support is a common justification for protectionist measures. In July alone, the U.S. Commerce Department has recommended that tariffs be placed on Chinese-made steel and quartz because of the state subsidies they’ve received.

Free traders generally counter that if foreign governments want to tax their own citizens to provide the U.S. with cheaper goods, we should let them. Other major suppliers of passenger rail cars in the U.S., including the Canadian company Bombardier, are no strangers to government subsidies.

There is also something strange about arguing that government subsidies are distorting the market for transit vehicles, which are themselves being bought by government-owned transit agencies with taxpayer dollars to service government-subsidized transit riders.

But in CRRC’s case, it’s not just a matter of whether the company is getting government support. It’s which government is supporting it. China, analysts warn, can’t be trusted to build vital transportation infrastructure, given the potential for surveillance and sabotage.

This security concern has been heightened by CRRC’s announcement that it would bid on a contract to supply the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority a.k.a. Metro, with new rail cars. Metro runs bus and rail service in and around the nation’s capital.

“The risk is very high that Chinese-built-in surveillance cameras could track the movements and routines of passengers, searching for high-value targets that intelligence officials can then identify to vacuum data from using the train’s built-in Wi-Fi,” warned John Adams, a retired general and head of security consultancy Guardian Six, in written congressional testimony.

“The company that is hired to build the Metro cars will also have access to Metro tunnels for repairs and maintenance,” said Erik Olson of the Rail Security Alliance (RSA) to the Washington Post. “Those tunnels run by the Capitol, the Pentagon, and all of the city’s major business and government offices.”

The RSA even deployed canvassers to Metro stations in D.C. to warn riders about the potential dangers of CRRC’s bid, the Post reports.

CRRC officials have themselves dismissed out of hand the idea that they could include spyware in the vehicles. Others have questioned how useful train cars would be for espionage and intelligence gathering.

“If you are going to spy on somebody would you really use a metro car?” John Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies asked Reuters. “VIPs are unlikely to be on mass transit to begin with, and if they are, they probably aren’t reading sensitive documents,” adds Wall Street Journal columnist Nathaniel Taplin.

At the risk of sounding glib, there’s also probably not a lot that the Chinese government could do to sabotage public transit in D.C. that Metro has not already thought of.

Years of deferred maintenance and poor management have left the nation’s capital with a rail transit system prone to delays, station shutdowns, and the occasional track fire. Ridership is in a free fall, with people increasingly either driving or making use of rideshare services.

Trains coming to an abrupt halt en route to the Pentagon? Tracks bursting into flames underground? This sounds less like the opening salvo of a Chinese cyberattack and more like a typical weekday riding Metro.

There’s a good argument to be made for ending federal subsidies to transit projects altogether. But if these subsidies continue, transit agencies owe it to taxpayers to get the most bang for their buck when purchasing buses and trains. By arbitrarily cutting off funds to any agency looking to purchase Chinese transit vehicles, Congress isn’t protecting U.S. security. It’s throwing taxpayers under the bus.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Oinym1
via IFTTT

Veronica Mars. Available now on Hulu.

Fifteen years and three networks ago, the Veronica Mars theme song—the Dandy Warhols’ “We Used To Be Friends“—referred to the show’s running class-warfare story of a Nancy Drew-ish girl exiled from her high school’s in-group. Now, as the show enters its long-delayed fourth season, the new version (the Warhols have been dumped for Chrissie Hynde) feels more like a greeting to an old pal. Veronica is back, as prickly, vengeful and noirish as ever, and television—or at least streaming services—is a more wonderfully crime-ridden place for it.

In many ways, the now-30ish Veronica (Kristen Bell, these days better known as the slatternly lost soul of NBC’s The Good Place) hasn’t changed. She’s still working at the private detective agency owned by her dad Keith (Enrico Colantoni). Her boyfriend is still the volcanic Logan (Jason Dohring).

And many of Veronica’s cases are still generated by the perpetual warfare between avaricious developers and a grimy underclass that, together, seem to comprise the entire population of Neptune, the little Southern California beach town where she lives. (The first line of the first season of Veronica Mars was her narration: “Welcome to Neptune, California. A town without a middle class.”)

But looking more closely, things are fraying around the edges. Keith Mars has increasingly common memory failures that may be the result of a car crash or, worse yet, the onset of dementia. Logan is now a naval intelligence officer frequently called off on clandestine missions whose long absences dismay him but, worrisomely, not Veronica, whose work on divorce cases has soured her on marriage.

That’s not the only hard spot in her heart. The cynicism Veronica developed at her expulsion from (and ultimately drugging and rape by) her old A-list pals back in high-school has developed into an intense bitterness toward everything and everybody in town. “Neptune didn’t need another private investigator,” she reflects. “It needed an enema.”

Her attitude is hardly helped when the town is wracked by a series of lethal bombings at the height of spring break, the apex of its tourist season. Her firm is immediately hired by an Arab-American congressman who suspects he may have been the chief intended target—and not for reasons of bigotry or politics, but sexual blackmail.

The Mars pursuit of the killer is complicated, though, by other investigators. Among them are a group of true-crime groupies who call themselves Murderheads, led by a bughouse pizza deliveryman (Patton Oswalt, The King Of Queens), who seem interested in altering the evidence to validate their own conspiracy theories.

Even more troublesome: A Mexican cartel godfather whose nephew was killed has dispatched a dreamily ontological buttonman (Clifton Collins Jr., Westworld) to identify the killer and bring back his head, a mission made more circuitous by the gangbanger’s recurrent musing about the undercurrent of determinism in old Elvis Presley records. “There’s no such thing as free will,” he argues to a fellow assassin as “In the Ghetto” echoes from the car radio. “Why are we here? You? Me? The asshole in the trunk?” It’s unclear whether the screams of the kidnap victim on his way to a desert grave suggest agreement or dissent.

The collision of the three investigations amid the continuing wave of bombs produces a satisfying number of plot twists and a startling degree of gory violence—though, as in the original series, Veronica Mars includes a few too many characters and subplots for its own good. (I once attended a press event for the original series where a TV critic began his question by saying, “Veronica Mars is my favorite show where I never know what’s going on…”)

But the plotting has always been secondary in this show. The wit and affection between Veronica and her father, contrasting with their jagged suspicion of the rest of the world, is an arresting experience, particularly with Bell’s singular ability to flash between bleak despair and sunburst joy.

And the writers (led by series creator Rob Thomas and including former basketball star Kareem Abdul Jabbar, better known for his work on the other side of the camera) have taken full advantage of the fact that Veronica is not 17 but 30, and more importantly is no longer working on a teenybopper network like The CW. Watching Veronica Mars practically requires one device set to the Urban Dictionary, to decipher expressions like WTC or LSC (that one, short for “long swinging cock,” seems to be an invention of the writers’ room) and another to a scatological bartender’s guide for recipes to drinks like Sex on My Face, Cocksucking Cowboy, and Bend Over Shirley.

Even the soundtrack is stuffed with ironic jokes—when’s the last time you heard a Captain and Tennille record on a TV show? And not the one about rodent sex, either.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2LLmll5
via IFTTT