Month: July 2019

Lawsuit Challenges State Department Policy Discriminating Against Foreign-Born Children of Same-Sex Married Couples

A  gay couple recently filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of a State Department policy that denies automatic citizenship to children of married US-citizen same-sex parents born abroad (in this case through a surrogacy arrangement):

Derek Mize and Jonathan Gregg, who married in New York in 2015, had their daughter Simone Mize-Gregg via surrogacy in England in 2018, their lawyer said in a statement. Both fathers are listed on the birth certificate.

When they applied for Simone’s US citizenship, the US consulate in London rejected their application… “The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) states that children of married U.S. citizens born abroad are U.S. citizens from birth so long as one of their parents has lived in the U.S. at some point, but the State Department routinely denies that right to same-sex couples and their children,” the statement says.

“The State Department’s policy is not only cruel, it is unconstitutional. The government refuses to recognize Jonathan and Derek’s marriage and all of Simone’s rights as a U.S. citizen,” Aaron C. Morris, one of the couple’s attorneys and executive director of Immigration Equality, said…..

The lawsuit says that, “Because she is the child of two men, the U.S. Department of State evaluated Simone’s citizenship under the standards only applicable to children ‘born out of wedlock’ and refused to recognize Simone’s U.S. citizenship.”

The full text of the complaint filed by Mize and Gregg’s counsel is available here. It argues that the State Department policy violates both the Immigration and Nationality Act (which does not, in its text, distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex marriages), and the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the State Department has adopted the absurd position that the baby is only eligible for a tourist visa, and therefore can only stay in the US for 90 days at a time. If the child is forced to leave the country, she will be separated from at least one of her parents, as he cannot leave the US due to the need for ongoing treatment for a brain tumor.

Simone might have qualified for US citizenship even under the rules for children “born out of wedlock.” But in such cases, the law mandates that the biological US-citizen parent must have lived in the US for five consecutive years, and Jonathan Gregg was one year short.

The plaintiffs here are absolutely right that the State Department’s policy is both cruel and unconstitutional. In  Sessions v. Morales-Santana (2017), the Supreme Court struck down a law that made it easier for foreign-born children of unwed US-citizen mothers to acquire citizenship than foreign-born children of unwed citizen fathers. The Court  emphasized that “Laws granting or denying benefits ‘on the basis of the sex of the qualifying parent…’  differentiate on the basis of gender, and therefore attract heightened review under the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.” It also concluded that the law in question could not possibly pass heightened scrutiny, because the sex discrimination it imposes does not substantially advance any important government interest.

The same reasoning applies to the State Department policy on children of same-sex parents. Here too, the government discriminates based on the sex of the parents in question. If both are the same sex, they are treated differently than if they are not. And, here too, there is no defensible government interest that is advanced by the sex discrimination in quest.

The State Department automatically grants citizenship to foreign-born children of US opposite-sex married couples who use a surrogate or a sperm donor. It does not require both parents to have a biological connection to the child, and treat it as “born out of wedlock” if one parent does not. There is no reason, other than rank bigotry, to deny the same treatment to children of same-sex married couples. The government cannot even claim that the policy is justified by a supposed need to to privilege biological parents over non-biological ones, since the rule does not similarly disfavor non-biological parents in opposite-sex marriages.

Admittedly, the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down laws banning same-sex marriage, was not completely clear about several aspects of the scope of its holding, including whether it meant that all legal rights associated with marriage must be available to same-sex couples on the same basis as opposite-sex ones. I criticized the mushy nature of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s reasoning at the time the ruling came down.

I continue to believe that the Court would have done better to simply rule that laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional because they discriminate on the basis of sex, as Northwestern law Professor Andrew Koppelman and I urged in an amicus brief we filed in Obergefell. Among other things, that approach would have made clear that all government discrimination against same-sex couples is presumptively unconstitutional.

But the Supreme Court has since clarified—in a 6-3 ruling in Pavan v. Smith (2017)—that the Obergefell entitles same-sex married couples to the same “rights, benefits, and responsibilities” of marriage as opposite-sex ones. That surely includes the right to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born children. Even Obergefell itself indicates that one of the main reasons for striking down laws banning same-sex marriage is to ensure that children of same-sex parents have access to “the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers.” There are few more denials of “recognition, stability, and predictability” than a rule that essentially prevents some children from living in the same country as their parents (or, in this case, from doing so for more than 90 days at a time).

In a similar case decided in February, a federal district court ruled that the State Department policy violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, and therefore chose not to rule on the constitutional issues. That ruling is now under appeal. If the courts rule that the State Department policy is permissible under immigration laws enacted by Congress, the combination of Pavan, Obergefell, and Morales-Santana should doom it on constitutional grounds.

If judges conclude that the relevant parts of the INA are ambiguous, lower courts must interpret the statute to treat same-sex and opposite-sex couples equally, in order to avoid constitutional problems. In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) and other cases, the Supreme Court made clear that it will adopt almost any reasonably plausible interpretation of a federal statute that avoids the risk of making it unconstitutional. I am no great fan of this  “constitutional avoidance” canon. But it is binding Supreme Court precedent, and lower courts have to follow it.

Elsewhere, I have argued that the right to live and work in the US (and other countries) should not be so heavily dependent on a “hereditary aristocracy” of citizenship determined largely by circumstances of birth. But the right way to address this injustice is to increase freedom of movement for non-citizens, not to make the current system of hereditary rights even more restrictive by adding a dose of sex discrimination into the mix. In any event, this broader moral issue does not change the legal analysis that applies to cases like this one.

 

 

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

Mass Protests Force the Resignation of Puerto Rico’s Scandal-Plagued Governor

Embattled Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Wednesday evening that he will resign from office following days of demonstrations demanding his ouster over leaked offensive text messages between the governor and his staff.

“My only priority has been the transformation of our island and the wellbeing of our people,” Rosselló said last night in a televised address, adding that he would step down by August 2. “The demands have been overwhelming and I’ve received them with the highest degree of humility.”

The governor’s resignation came two days after a massive march in San Juan—reportedly one of the largest in the island’s history—which saw protestors filling the city’s main freeway demanding that Rosselló step down.

Earlier in the month, local media published some 900 pages of group texts involving the governor and senior members of his administration in which they made misogynistic remarks about female politicians, mocked victims of recent hurricanes, and expressed disdain for a federal oversight board that’s been set up to guide the island out of its severe debt and pension crisis.

The texts were the last straw for many residents of the U.S. commonwealth.

The messages were published in the press at the same time that the FBI was arresting other senior members of Rosselló’s administration for giving government contracts to politically-connected firms.

In addition to government corruption, Puerto Ricans have had to endure the long-lasting effects of 2017’s Hurricane Maria. The storm caused billions of dollars in damage and knocked out much of the island’s mismanaged, debt-laden, government-owned electrical grid.

The island’s economy has essentially been in recession since the mid-2000s and roughly 500,000 Puerto Ricans have left the island over the past decade, according to the Pew Research Center. Population loss and a shrinking private sector have only made it harder for Puerto Rico to cope with its government debt crisis. The island owes some $74 billion in debt and another $50 billion in pension obligations, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial.

That same Journal editorial notes that Rosselló has used his time in office to fight efforts at scaling back this debt, including his flat refusals to implement furloughs of government workers and cuts to public pensions ordered by a federal fiscal oversight board set up in 2016. Some of the governor’s private texts featured rather undiplomatic statements and emojis directed at this oversight board.

In addition to massive government spending and generous public pensions, Puerto Rico’s collection of government-owned corporations have helped fuel its debt crisis. As Marc Joffe, a policy analyst with the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), noted in 2016, there are some 50 government-owned corporations on the island. According to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report, up to 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s debt as of 2014 was owed by these publicly-owned corporations.

Making things harder for the Puerto Rican economy is the Jones Act, a century-old piece of legislation that requires goods shipped between U.S. ports to be carried by U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-manned vessels. This requires companies sending goods between the U.S. mainland and the island to use a smaller number of more expensive, Jones Act-compliant ships.

A 2012 study from the New York Federal Reserve found that the cost of sending a shipping container from the East Coast of the U.S. to Puerto Rico are double what it would cost to send that same container to ports in nearby Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

However, liberalizing the Puerto Rican economy and paring back its public sector is not a particularly populist cause. The Los Angeles Times reports that Monday’s protestors directed their anger at both the governor as well as the federal oversight board and its unpopular spending cuts.

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

“Credit Card Splurge” Suggests Imminent Storm

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

You’d think that the drop in yields and a Fed about to cut rates would’ve brought about some relief to credit card bills. No Sir.

And you might think that the highest interest rates on credit cards ever would deter consumers from loading up on additional credit card debt. Oh no.

Pedal to the metal and the cumulative picture spells trouble.

Look at the data.

Here are credit card interest rates versus the Fed Funds rate:

Credit card companies are charging interest rates on credit cards with the widest spread above the Fed funds rate ever. Not only that, these are the highest credit card interest rates ever. But there is no inflation. Right.

Looks like consumers are getting screwed.

As a natural consequence personal interest payments are racing higher:

Does this stop consumers from adding to credit card debt? Nope, they keep piling in:

And in Q2 consumers really went for it:

Revolving debt went up by 8% in April/May (vs. up 1.5% in Q1). 8% on top of the existing record credit card debt already.

Best hope they can all pay it off quickly otherwise those high interest rates will demand a reckoning.

Why the credit splurge as opposed to paying with cash? Either it’s pure confidence in their jobs and income or a larger trend perhaps, that of consumer stress.

Any signs that would suggest stress? Look no further to mortgages, the cash buyer has dried up:

So it’s not just credit cards that suggest a drying up of disposable cash.

But hey, maybe recent stock market gains have made everybody overly confident. After all stocks don’t go down anymore.

Best hope it’s not dumb confidence.

Oh.

Unless you consider carrying record credit card debt and paying record interest rates and adding 8% of credit card debt on top of that in just one quarter to be smart.

Fact is 58% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. Large swaths of the American population are at the edge of trouble:

“27% of adults would need to borrow or sell something to pay for an unexpected expense of $400. One quarter of adults have no retirement savings, and skipped necessary medical care in 2018 because they were unable to afford the cost”.

While we all live in a non sustainable fantasy of 3.8% unemployment reality is 50 year lows in unemployment don’t last. And yet the figures above are exacerbated by one very inconvenient fact: 78% of US workers live paycheck to paycheck.

That’s called living on the edge. And what better way to prepare for the next downturn than having little to no savings, but record credit card balances, paying record interest rates and piling on more credit card as we speak?

Best economy ever. Not if you look at the details. The credit card splurge is warning of a coming storm.

For the latest public analysis please visit NorthmanTrader. To subscribe to our market products please visit Services.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2K7DLp7 Tyler Durden

Mass Protests Force the Resignation of Puerto Rico’s Scandal-Plagued Governor

Embattled Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Wednesday evening that he will resign from office following days of demonstrations demanding his ouster over leaked offensive text messages between the governor and his staff.

“My only priority has been the transformation of our island and the wellbeing of our people,” Rosselló said last night in a televised address, adding that he would step down by August 2. “The demands have been overwhelming and I’ve received them with the highest degree of humility.”

The governor’s resignation came two days after a massive march in San Juan—reportedly one of the largest in the island’s history—which saw protestors filling the city’s main freeway demanding that Rosselló step down.

Earlier in the month, local media published some 900 pages of group texts involving the governor and senior members of his administration in which they made misogynistic remarks about female politicians, mocked victims of recent hurricanes, and expressed disdain for a federal oversight board that’s been set up to guide the island out of its severe debt and pension crisis.

The texts were the last straw for many residents of the U.S. commonwealth.

The messages were published in the press at the same time that the FBI was arresting other senior members of Rosselló’s administration for giving government contracts to politically-connected firms.

In addition to government corruption, Puerto Ricans have had to endure the long-lasting effects of 2017’s Hurricane Maria. The storm caused billions of dollars in damage and knocked out much of the island’s mismanaged, debt-laden, government-owned electrical grid.

The island’s economy has essentially been in recession since the mid-2000s and roughly 500,000 Puerto Ricans have left the island over the past decade, according to the Pew Research Center. Population loss and a shrinking private sector have only made it harder for Puerto Rico to cope with its government debt crisis. The island owes some $74 billion in debt and another $50 billion in pension obligations, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial.

That same Journal editorial notes that Rosselló has used his time in office to fight efforts at scaling back this debt, including his flat refusals to implement furloughs of government workers and cuts to public pensions ordered by a federal fiscal oversight board set up in 2016. Some of the governor’s private texts featured rather undiplomatic statements and emojis directed at this oversight board.

In addition to massive government spending and generous public pensions, Puerto Rico’s collection of government-owned corporations have helped fuel its debt crisis. As Marc Joffe, a policy analyst with the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), noted in 2016, there are some 50 government-owned corporations on the island. According to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report, up to 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s debt as of 2014 was owed by these publicly-owned corporations.

Making things harder for the Puerto Rican economy is the Jones Act, a century-old piece of legislation that requires goods shipped between U.S. ports to be carried by U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-manned vessels. This requires companies sending goods between the U.S. mainland and the island to use a smaller number of more expensive, Jones Act-compliant ships.

A 2012 study from the New York Federal Reserve found that the cost of sending a shipping container from the East Coast of the U.S. to Puerto Rico are double what it would cost to send that same container to ports in nearby Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

However, liberalizing the Puerto Rican economy and paring back its public sector is not a particularly populist cause. The Los Angeles Times reports that Monday’s protestors directed their anger at both the governor as well as the federal oversight board and its unpopular spending cuts.

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

Attorney General Barr Orders the Federal Government To Start Executing Prisoners Again

U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced today that the federal government is going to get back into the execution business.

There are 62 people on death row in the federal Bureau of Prisons, but there have been no executions by the federal government since 2003. And there have only been three of these executions since the federal death penalty was reinstituted in 1988 (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was one of them).

If Barr gets his way, that number is going to jump to eight by 2020. He announced today that the Justice Department plans to execute five men in December and January. Barr notes that these five men have exhausted their appeals. They have also committed crimes so severe that their pending executions might not stir up much outrage. Here are the five case summaries from the Justice Department:

  • Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, murdered a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl. After robbing and shooting the victims with a stun gun, Lee covered their heads with plastic bags, sealed the bags with duct tape, weighed down each victim with rocks, and threw the family of three into the Illinois bayou. On May 4, 1999, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas found Lee guilty of numerous offenses, including three counts of murder in aid of racketeering, and he was sentenced to death. Lee’s execution is scheduled to occur on Dec. 9, 2019.
  • Lezmond Mitchell stabbed to death a 63-year-old grandmother and forced her nine-year-old granddaughter to sit beside her lifeless body for a 30- to 40-mile drive. Mitchell then slit the girl’s throat twice, crushed her head with 20-pound rocks, and severed and buried both victims’ heads and hands. On May 8, 2003, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona found Mitchell guilty of numerous offenses, including first-degree murder, felony murder, and carjacking resulting in murder, and he was sentenced to death. Mitchell’s execution is scheduled to occur on Dec. 11, 2019.
  • Wesley Ira Purkey violently raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl, and then dismembered, burned, and dumped the young girl’s body in a septic pond. He also was convicted in state court for using a claw hammer to bludgeon to death an 80-year-old woman who suffered from polio and walked with a cane. On Nov. 5, 2003, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri found Purkey guilty of kidnapping a child resulting in the child’s death, and he was sentenced to death. Purkey’s execution is scheduled to occur on Dec. 13, 2019.
  • Alfred Bourgeois physically and emotionally tortured, sexually molested, and then beat to death his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. On March 16, 2004, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas found Bourgeois guilty of multiple offenses, including murder, and he was sentenced to death. Bourgeois’ execution is scheduled to occur on Jan. 13, 2020.
  • Dustin Lee Honken shot and killed five people: two men who planned to testify against him and a single, working mother and her 10-year-old and 6-year-old daughters. On Oct. 14, 2004, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa found Honken guilty of numerous offenses, including five counts of murder during the course of a continuing criminal enterprise, and he was sentenced to death. Honken’s execution is scheduled to occur on Jan. 15, 2020.

It seems unlikely that Barr’s decision will meet with much pushback aside from capital punishment abolitionists, who oppose state-sanctioned murder in all cases. Does it matter that, at Purkey’s sentencing hearing, several people came forward to testify that he had been physically and sexually abused by his parents as a child? Probably not in the court of public opinion.

Over the last two decades, we’ve seen fewer executions on the state level. Annual executions have dropped from a high of 98 in 1999 to 25 in 2018, with all of those taking place in eight states. Since 2000, several states have eliminated the use of the death penalty entirely and four state governors have imposed moratoriums.

Americans are moving away from the use of the death penalty as a form of punishment. During this same period of execution decline, and during this drop of executions, violent crime has largely trended downward. Both numbers moving down in unison reflects the consensus among criminal justice researchers that the death penalty does not deter crime.

Barr’s decision is not about public safety, but optics. When it comes to crime control, Pres. Trump favors dazzling displays of state violence. He has called for executing drug dealers and praised Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte for ordering the extrajudicial murder of thousands of people suspected of drug offenses. In 1989, he called for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers wrongly convicted (and later exonerated) for a rape they did not commit. Of course, he supports murdering people convicted of murder.

There remains the question of how, exactly, the Justice Department is going to arrange these executions. Barr’s press release indicates they’ll be using pentobarbital for lethal injections, a drug that has faced significant criticism after it was used in botched executions in Oklahoma. Drug companies are increasingly resistant to providing chemicals that are going to be used to execute prisoners and some states have turned to secrecy to try to protect their supply sources from public view. BuzzFeed, which has done a significant amount of journalism surrounding the problems with lethal injection, has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons in order to obtain records showing how the feds acquire and use lethal injection drugs.

Barr is reinstituting a form of irreversible punishment that the states are increasingly turning away from and that does not appear to have any impact on violent crime rates.

And we haven’t even touched on the fact that death penalty convictions sometimes result in the defendants’ exoneration. Just last year in California, Vincente Benavides, who served 25 years for allegedly sexually assaulting and murdering a child, was exonerated after experts determined that the child wasn’t actually assaulted and that her injuries were likely the result of getting hit by a car. Benavides’ release, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, was the 162nd exoneration of a person on death row since 1973.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2OhbIc1
via IFTTT

Beyond Volkswagen: BYND Shorts Crucified As Borrow Fee Hit 144%

Two months ago, in mid-May, we warned intrepid contrarians against shorting the latest cult “story” stock, Beyond Meat – which on May 1 completed the strongest IPO since the 2008 financial crisis – for two reasons: some 43% of Beyond Meat’s float was sold short, making BYND one of the top 20 most-shorted U.S. companies, and the borrow fee was approaching triple digits, meaning one would have to double their money, i.e. the stock would have to drop to zero, in a year just to break even.

Well, since then what we back then dubbed a “beyond Volkswagen short squeeze” has only gotten worse, and today the stocks has exploded higher once again, rising 8%, and is now an absolutely mind-blowing 775% higher from its IPO offering price of $25:

Sadly, for those shorts hoping that the relentless squeeze higher may soon be ending we have bad news. Not only has deluge of shorts not eased, but according to the latest data, there were 5.5 million shorts, which is a record 47% of the stock float, making it one of the 10 most shorted companies in the US stock market!

And the even greater paradox is that the higher the stock rises, the more investors want to short it, resulting in a borrow fee which at last check was over 144%, more than double the next most shorted stock, Overstock, whose borrow fee is “only” 65.1%. This means that not only does one have to be ready to suffer continued margin pain as the stock keeps rising, but anyone putting a BYND short on now has to be confident the stock will drop to 0 in less than a year to avoid a theta bleed to death.

via @Ro_Patel

And while BYND is not Volkswagen quite yet, it only has to go up 4x from here to hit $1,000.

Considering that fundamentals clearly are irrelevant here – at a market cap of $13.2 billion, BYND is trading at 150x LTM revenues – there is no telling how much higher a forced squeeze can take this stock. Add a few cultists who believe Bernstein analyst Alexia Howard, who said that sales could hit $2 billion over the next decade (from $88 million currently) if it increases its share in the alternative meat market to 5% from 2% today, and it is certainly possible that round after round of shorts will continue to get cremated, as they hope to perfectly time the top and short this name back to its fair value about 100% lower.

Which incidentally reminds us of a simple trading rule we first presented back in 2013: the easiest way to generate alpha in this market – where nothing has made sense for the past decade – is just to go long the most shorted stocks; to be sure, BYND has been a phenomenal case study of precisely this. For those who think BYND has run too far, just create an equal-weighted long basket of the remaining 29 stock listed above, and sit back as the alpha trickles in, in this market made by idiots for idiots.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Guey71 Tyler Durden

Attorney General Barr Orders the Federal Government To Start Executing Prisoners Again

U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced today that the federal government is going to get back into the execution business.

There are 62 people on death row in the federal Bureau of Prisons, but there have been no executions by the federal government since 2003. And there have only been three of these executions since the federal death penalty was reinstituted in 1988 (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was one of them).

If Barr gets his way, that number is going to jump to eight by 2020. He announced today that the Justice Department plans to execute five men in December and January. Barr notes that these five men have exhausted their appeals. They have also committed crimes so severe that their pending executions might not stir up much outrage. Here are the five case summaries from the Justice Department:

  • Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, murdered a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl. After robbing and shooting the victims with a stun gun, Lee covered their heads with plastic bags, sealed the bags with duct tape, weighed down each victim with rocks, and threw the family of three into the Illinois bayou. On May 4, 1999, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas found Lee guilty of numerous offenses, including three counts of murder in aid of racketeering, and he was sentenced to death. Lee’s execution is scheduled to occur on Dec. 9, 2019.
  • Lezmond Mitchell stabbed to death a 63-year-old grandmother and forced her nine-year-old granddaughter to sit beside her lifeless body for a 30- to 40-mile drive. Mitchell then slit the girl’s throat twice, crushed her head with 20-pound rocks, and severed and buried both victims’ heads and hands. On May 8, 2003, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona found Mitchell guilty of numerous offenses, including first-degree murder, felony murder, and carjacking resulting in murder, and he was sentenced to death. Mitchell’s execution is scheduled to occur on Dec. 11, 2019.
  • Wesley Ira Purkey violently raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl, and then dismembered, burned, and dumped the young girl’s body in a septic pond. He also was convicted in state court for using a claw hammer to bludgeon to death an 80-year-old woman who suffered from polio and walked with a cane. On Nov. 5, 2003, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri found Purkey guilty of kidnapping a child resulting in the child’s death, and he was sentenced to death. Purkey’s execution is scheduled to occur on Dec. 13, 2019.
  • Alfred Bourgeois physically and emotionally tortured, sexually molested, and then beat to death his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. On March 16, 2004, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas found Bourgeois guilty of multiple offenses, including murder, and he was sentenced to death. Bourgeois’ execution is scheduled to occur on Jan. 13, 2020.
  • Dustin Lee Honken shot and killed five people: two men who planned to testify against him and a single, working mother and her 10-year-old and 6-year-old daughters. On Oct. 14, 2004, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa found Honken guilty of numerous offenses, including five counts of murder during the course of a continuing criminal enterprise, and he was sentenced to death. Honken’s execution is scheduled to occur on Jan. 15, 2020.

It seems unlikely that Barr’s decision will meet with much pushback aside from capital punishment abolitionists, who oppose state-sanctioned murder in all cases. Does it matter that, at Purkey’s sentencing hearing, several people came forward to testify that he had been physically and sexually abused by his parents as a child? Probably not in the court of public opinion.

Over the last two decades, we’ve seen fewer executions on the state level. Annual executions have dropped from a high of 98 in 1999 to 25 in 2018, with all of those taking place in eight states. Since 2000, several states have eliminated the use of the death penalty entirely and four state governors have imposed moratoriums.

Americans are moving away from the use of the death penalty as a form of punishment. During this same period of execution decline, and during this drop of executions, violent crime has largely trended downward. Both numbers moving down in unison reflects the consensus among criminal justice researchers that the death penalty does not deter crime.

Barr’s decision is not about public safety, but optics. When it comes to crime control, Pres. Trump favors dazzling displays of state violence. He has called for executing drug dealers and praised Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte for ordering the extrajudicial murder of thousands of people suspected of drug offenses. In 1989, he called for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers wrongly convicted (and later exonerated) for a rape they did not commit. Of course, he supports murdering people convicted of murder.

There remains the question of how, exactly, the Justice Department is going to arrange these executions. Barr’s press release indicates they’ll be using pentobarbital for lethal injections, a drug that has faced significant criticism after it was used in botched executions in Oklahoma. Drug companies are increasingly resistant to providing chemicals that are going to be used to execute prisoners and some states have turned to secrecy to try to protect their supply sources from public view. BuzzFeed, which has done a significant amount of journalism surrounding the problems with lethal injection, has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons in order to obtain records showing how the feds acquire and use lethal injection drugs.

Barr is reinstituting a form of irreversible punishment that the states are increasingly turning away from and that does not appear to have any impact on violent crime rates.

And we haven’t even touched on the fact that death penalty convictions sometimes result in the defendants’ exoneration. Just last year in California, Vincente Benavides, who served 25 years for allegedly sexually assaulting and murdering a child, was exonerated after experts determined that the child wasn’t actually assaulted and that her injuries were likely the result of getting hit by a car. Benavides’ release, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, was the 162nd exoneration of a person on death row since 1973.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2OhbIc1
via IFTTT

Justin Amash on Quitting the Republican Party and Life as an Independent

When Michigan Rep. Justin Amash declared his independence from the Republican Party on July 4, he instantly became one of the most controversial politicians in America. Donald Trump immediately took to Twitter to denounce Amash as a “total loser” and “one of the dumbest & most disloyal” members of the GOP.

Whether or not you agree with the five-term congressman’s choice to leave the Republican Party, he’s anything but dumb and unprincipled. Amash has been the most consistently libertarian member of Congress since taking office in 2011, repeatedly voting to reduce the size and spending of the federal government, to stop mass surveillance of American citizens, and to end wars that he believes lack constitutional authorization.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Amash, the 39-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants, to talk about what it feels like to be independent, why he won’t be joining Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s social-justice “squad” anytime soon, whether he thinks Donald Trump is racist, if he’s going to run for president as a Libertarian, and why he believes we need to talk more about love in national politics.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2K0JMnk
via IFTTT

Justin Amash on Quitting the Republican Party and Life as an Independent

When Michigan Rep. Justin Amash declared his independence from the Republican Party on July 4, he instantly became one of the most controversial politicians in America. Donald Trump immediately took to Twitter to denounce Amash as a “total loser” and “one of the dumbest & most disloyal” members of the GOP.

Whether or not you agree with the five-term congressman’s choice to leave the Republican Party, he’s anything but dumb and unprincipled. Amash has been the most consistently libertarian member of Congress since taking office in 2011, repeatedly voting to reduce the size and spending of the federal government, to stop mass surveillance of American citizens, and to end wars that he believes lack constitutional authorization.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Amash, the 39-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants, to talk about what it feels like to be independent, why he won’t be joining Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s social-justice “squad” anytime soon, whether he thinks Donald Trump is racist, if he’s going to run for president as a Libertarian, and why he believes we need to talk more about love in national politics.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2K0JMnk
via IFTTT

Welcome, Comrade Mueller, To America’s Soviet-Style Show-Trials!

Authored by Robert Bridge,

Any hope that the interrogation of prosecutor, Robert Mueller, would provide some closure to the endless spectacle of Russiagate was dashed. As long as Donald Trump is in power, the show must go on.

When Mueller, 74, was led into the lion’s den of the congressional coliseum on Wednesday to defend his 22-month, multi-million-dollar investigation from the slings and arrows of partisan power-brokers, the temptation to feel some pity for the man was surprisingly strong.

The former special counsel appeared frail, disheveled and, as many others have acknowledged, well past his prime. His demeanor resembled that of a powerful official who had just been yanked from bed at gunpoint to appear before a midnight military tribunal. The flimsy shield he hid behind when confronted with any serious question regarding his 448-page report was deference to “the ongoing investigation.”

The Republicans drew blood early. Jim Jordan, veteran House member and former wrestling champ, maneuvered Mueller into an inescapable lock-hold. Jordan pressed Mueller as to why the ‘witch hunt’ hauled away half a dozen Trump-connected cohorts to prison – including Roger Stone, a former adviser to the president, who was arrested in a crack-of-dawn FBI raid that was all-too conveniently filmed by a CNN camera crew – yet nobody affiliated with the Democratic Party suffered equally harsh measures.

Jordan reminded the mute Mueller that the FBI, with the blessing of the Democratic Party, had pulled off a historic first when they spied on two members of the Trump campaign, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. That brazen act of espionage should have been at the heart of Mueller’s probe, but strangely it went missing in action.

Here’s where things get really dark. In the course of the FBI’s undercover work, a mysterious Maltese professor by the name of Joseph Mifsud – who purportedly lied three times to investigators – passed along ‘secret information’ to Mr Papadopolous that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Papadopolous then informed a diplomat about the claim, which was then – thanks to the notoriously bad plumbing inside of the nation’s capital – leaked to the media. That single drop of fake news put into motion not only the bogus Steele dossier, complete with a bizarre reference to golden showers in Moscow, but the entire Russiagate hoax.

Jordan demanded to know why Mifsud, who was once photographed alongside Boris Johnson, the newly elected British prime minister, was not dragged in for questioning as were so many Republicans. Mueller’s silence on the matter was deafening.

There were other glorious moments for the Republicans in this made-for-TV reality show. Rep. Mike Turner, for example, resorted to props as he argued over a single word that appeared at the end of the Mueller Report: “exonerate.” The termwas found in the very last sentence of the report: “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That controversial statement has attracted much ire from the Republican camp, not to mention Trump himself.

Turner, with law books piled high on his pulpit, together with a copy of the US Constitution, lectured Mueller that neither he nor the attorney general has any power to exonerate the president of the United States, since ‘exonerate’ is not a legally binding term. The inclusion of that word, Turner argued, “colored the report,” thereby allowing US news channels to run with the ‘breaking news’ that “Trump was not exonerated.” It was a very clever way of demonstrating how the mainstream media can frame a story according to its political bias, which is known to lean heavily liberal and Democrat.

Devin Nunes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, echoed those sentiments when he said “the Russia investigation was never about finding the truth. It’s always been a simple media operation… this operation continues in this room today.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, were also fixated with words, first and foremost ‘obstruction.’ Since they failed to nail Trump to the cross of collusion, their next best approach was to accuse him of preventing Mueller from carrying out his assigned duties, which is a federal offense.

When asked by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler if “the report did not conclude that [the president] did not commit obstruction of justice,” Mueller responded: “That is correct.”

It was obvious to everyone watching where Nadler’s line of inquiry was leading, and that was to the explosive I-word: impeachment. Yet no amount of coaxing and fawning by the Democrats could get Mueller to spit out the one word that has been the wet dream material of every liberal voter since the debacle of the 2016 presidential election. So now the Democrats, if they decide to press forward with impeachment proceedings, will have to do so without the solemn consent of Robert Mueller, a veteran Washington insider with considerable standing and influence in the swamp. That makes the idea of impeaching Trump downright risky to the point that it has reportedly unhinged the Democrats down the middle.

According to Politico, Nadler suggested that several House committee chairs could start “drafting articles of impeachment against Trump.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, called the idea “premature,” according to anonymous sources.

So now the Democrats find themselves in a very precarious situation as the United States prepares to enter what promises to be one of the most momentous, not to mention tempestuous, presidential election seasons of all time. If they proceed with impeachment proceedings against Trump, they risk alienating a large segment of their constituents, many of whom are suffering ‘probe fatigue’ and are anxious to turn the page.

At the same time, however, many high-ranking Democrats may feel they have no choice but to make a major effort to dislodge Trump from the Oval Office due to one nagging consideration: Attorney General William Barr is actively investigating the many players involved in the ‘Russiagate’ saga and what he may unearth – specifically as to who was responsible for launching the greatest conspiracy theory of modern times – has certainly got a lot of Democrats extremely concerned. 

If Barr discovers that there was no legal basis for spying on the Trump campaign, some very influential people may find themselves – like Roger Stone – the target of early morning FBI raids at the behest of a Republican inquest.  

What this means is that the Democrats, by pushing for the impeachment of Trump, are in reality engaging in their own form of obstruction of justice, and that is justice over their own possible crimes.

In other words, fasten your seat-belts and start the popcorn because ‘Russiagate’ is not over; in fact, it has only just begun.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LGLA86 Tyler Durden