Month: November 2021

Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.), whose vote may very well determine the eventual fate of President Joe Biden’s biggest legislative initiative, reiterated his opposition to any bill that adds to the national debt or risks adding fuel to inflation.

“I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward, but I’m equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country,” Manchin said at a press conference Monday. He noted that both Medicare and Social Security are on track to become insolvent—an arrangement that would impose mandatory benefit cuts across the board—within the next 12 years. Without addressing those looming concerns, Manchin said, any bill that “expands social programs and irresponsibly adds to our $29 trillion in national debt” would be unwise.

When Democrats decided in the spring to split President Joe Biden’s proposed “Build Back Better” plan into two pieces, it was supposed to set up a delicate legislative pas de deux. Instead, they’re playing a game of chicken. The roughly $1 trillion infrastructure plan (which includes about $500 billion in new spending and another $500 billion in repurposed spending) enjoyed bipartisan support when it cleared the Senate in July. But it has languished in the House since then: Progressive Democrats are unwilling to send it to Biden’s desk until the Senate agrees to pass a social spending package that would likely include a series of tax increases.

That spending bill, which Democrats hope to maneuver through the Senate via the reconciliation process, started out as a $3.5 trillion measure. Last week, Biden announced a supposed compromise in an attempt to appease Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.), who have opposed the higher taxes and borrowing necessary to finance the larger proposal.

Manchin’s comments suggest that the senator will not give his approval to that slimmed-down proposal without additional scrutiny.

“What I see are shell games,” Manchin said. “Budget gimmicks,” he said, would make Biden’s $1.75 trillion proposal cost almost twice that much in the long run.

One of the biggest gimmicks in the bill has to do with the expanded, refundable child tax credit program, which will cost about $110 billion annually. Democrats are proposing to extend it for only a single year, thus making the bill’s long-term costs seem significantly lower than if they had to account for 10 years of spending, as is the norm. The framework also seems to overestimate how much revenue would be generated by various proposals, potentially leaving big gaps that would have to be filled by borrowing.

“This is a recipe for an economic crisis,” Manchin added. “None of us should ever misrepresent to the American people what the real cost of legislation is.”

Manchin offered pointed criticism of the progressive wing of the House Democratic caucus, saying that lawmakers in the lower chamber should be given the opportunity to vote on the infrastructure plan even if the Senate has not approved the social spending bill. On Friday, Biden urged House leaders to vote on the infrastructure bill, but the impasse continues. Holding the infrastructure bill “hostage,” Manchin said, “is not going to work in getting my support for the reconciliation bill.”

The game of chicken continues.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3w7tGje
via IFTTT

The federal government has agreed to return a New Orleans man’s life savings after Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents seized it at an airport through a practice known as civil asset forfeiture.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, announced that federal prosecutors have agreed to dismiss the government’s case against roughly $28,000 in cash the DEA seized from Kermit Warren, a grandfather who says he was carrying the money to potentially buy a tow truck. Warren was never charged with a crime, but under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even when the owner hasn’t been charged or convicted of a crime.

Reason reported on Warren’s civil asset forfeiture case in August. Warren, a former longshoreman and shoeshiner, says he and his son had gotten laid off from their jobs last year during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and he was trying to turn a side business as a scrapper into a full-time venture. He and his son traveled to Ohio last November with the cash to purchase a tow truck. However, Warren claims the tow truck was too large for his needs, so he and his son bought a one-way ticket back home.

In the airport, three DEA agents stopped the two men and questioned them about the bag of cash they were carrying. The federal government didn’t file a complaint against Warren’s money until this April, claiming Warren and his son gave suspicious and incomplete answers about their travel itinerary and plans to buy the truck. Warren, who says he was panicking, also falsely claimed to be a retired police officer. Based on that, the agents concluded that Warren was involved in drug trafficking and seized his money.

Last Thursday, after the Institute for Justice provided pay stubs for Warren dating back to 2016 and text messages from the company that owned the tow truck, federal prosecutors agreed to dismiss the forfeiture complaint against Warren’s money and return it.

“I’m relieved that I will finally get my hard-earned savings back after a year of suffering,” Warren said in an Institute for Justice press release. “But what happened to me was wrong. The officers and prosecutors treated me like a criminal when all I was trying to do was improve my business and my life. For a year, they’ve left me struggling to survive a pandemic and a hurricane without my savings. I did nothing wrong, but until the law is changed so that everyone is protected, I am not going to have cash in my house anymore.”

There is nothing illegal about flying domestically with large amounts of cash, but local and federal law enforcement frequently stop travelers, search their luggage, and seize their cash on suspicion of drug trafficking, even if they find no drugs.

The DEA and Transportation Security Administration often flag airport travelers who exhibit supposedly suspicious behavior, such as purchasing one-way tickets with short turnaround times and traveling lightly. In 2016, a USA Today investigation found the DEA seized more than $209 million from at least 5,200 travelers in 15 major airports over the previous decade.

Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is an essential tool to fight organized crime, like drug trafficking, by targeting its illicit proceeds.

However, civil liberties groups say there are too few protections for innocent owners and too many incentives for police to seize property on flimsy suspicions. More than half of all U.S. states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform because of those concerns.

The Institute for Justice is currently litigating a separate class-action lawsuit on behalf of people whose cash was seized by the DEA at airports. One of the lead plaintiffs in that case, Stacy Jones, had $43,167 in cash seized by the DEA as she was trying to fly home to Tampa, Florida, from Wilmington, North Carolina. Jones says the cash was from the sale of a used car, as well as money she and her husband intended to take to a casino.

One of the other named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Terrence Rolin, a 79-year-old retired railroad engineer, had his life savings of $82,373 seized by the DEA after his daughter tried to take it on a flight out of Pittsburgh with the intent of depositing it in a bank. After the case went public, the DEA returned the money.

“Kermit’s case highlights how the federal government abuses civil forfeiture,” says Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Dan Alban. “It seizes cash on the flimsiest of pretexts—traveling with cash at an airport—and effectively forces people to prove their own innocence to get their money back. And even in a best-case scenario, it can take over a year for them to get their property back.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3ExVrEQ
via IFTTT

The Supreme Court has just refused to hear a case at the nexus of the First Amendment and police abuse, declining to hear a petition from a man who says his free speech rights were violated when a group of cops searched his tablet without a warrant and attempted to delete a video he took of them beating a suspect.

Officers with the Denver Police Department (DPD) cornered Levi Frasier in the summer of 2014 after they noticed he had recorded an altercation moments prior. The video showed a cop punching a suspect in the face six times while executing an arrest over an alleged drug deal—the man had a sock in his mouth that the cops thought was contraband—and it captured a different officer throwing a woman to the ground by her ankle when she approached the scene screaming. Upon noticing Frasier, DPD Officer Russell Bothwell shouted “Camera!” and the group proceeded to harass him for the footage. Frasier says the police implied they would jail him if he refused to produce the clip. “Well, we could do this the easy way or we could do this the hard way,” Officer Christopher L. Evans reportedly said, pointing to his squad car. Despite Frasier’s protestations, the police then confiscated the tablet and went through it without the owner’s permission.

Those officers were given qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that allows a slew of state actors to infringe on your rights if the way they went about doing so has not specifically been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court or the same federal circuit. It’s a granular standard that has seen government officials get off for assaulting and arresting a man for standing outside of his own home, for shooting and killing a man who had been sleeping in his car, for beating a man after pulling him over for broken lights, for leaving an innocent man’s home in ruins after conducting a SWAT raid on the wrong house, and for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Without a prior ruling with identical facts, the victims in the above scenarios were not allowed to state their claims before a jury.

That standard is particularly egregious here, because the DPD enacted a policy in 2007 informing officers that the public has a constitutional right to film them on duty. But that wasn’t good enough, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which ruled in March that the only permissible avenue for overcoming qualified immunity is to find that perfect court precedent.

“Judicial decisions are the only valid interpretive source of the content of clearly established law; whatever training the officers received concerning the First Amendment was irrelevant to the clearly-established-law inquiry,” wrote Judge Jerome A. Holmes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. With the high court’s rejection today, that ruling will remain intact.

The rationale for qualified immunity is that officials should be free from vacuous lawsuits and thus deserve to be put “on notice” as to what is and is not constitutional behavior. From the 10th Circuit’s opinion, we are to deduce that obscure court precedents are more valuable at accomplishing that end than a department’s own stated policies, even though one would expect most government employees to be more familiar with the latter than the former.

Those training guidelines will now “somewhat lose their force,” says Anya Bidwell, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public interest firm. Cops have less reason to follow department rules if they know the federal courts will decline to hold them accountable for breaking those very rules. In shielding a group of rogue government employees, the court inadvertently weakened the public’s First Amendment rights.

“What’s particularly stunning here is that the people who wrote the training were able to correctly synthesize the law and conclude that the officers’ actions violated [a] constitutional right,” says Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at TechFreedom, an advocacy group focused on the intersection of technology and the First Amendment. “To rule that qualified immunity protects them, even though the department correctly pieced together the clearly established law to train them that such conduct is unlawful, simply because a court hadn’t ruled on that particular fact pattern, is extreme judicial hubris.”

The 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, and 11th Circuits have all acknowledged a First Amendment right to film the police. Had those officers misbehaved in a location subject to one of those federal circuit courts, they would not have been so lucky.

And while the 10th Circuit acknowledged that DPD training invoked a constitutional right to film the police, the court danced around coming to any conclusion on that subject. “We do not consider, nor opine on, whether Mr. Frasier actually had a First Amendment right to record the police performing their official duties in public spaces,” Holmes wrote, leaving officers in that jurisdiction free to violate the public’s rights in the same way again without fear of recourse.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3CDFlsy
via IFTTT

Dead & Beautiful. Available Thursday, November 4, on Shudder.

Somebody call Robert Stack. What inexplicable tic of marketing numbnuttedness led AMC’s horror-genre streaming service Shudder to delay the premiere of Chinese vampire saga Dead & Beautiful until the week after Halloween? Can we expect It’s a Wonderful Life at Easter and Caligula on Valentine’s Day?

Not that Dead & Beautiful is exactly epic in the annals of fang-banger flicks. Obsessively pursuing its central and overworked metaphor, that vampirism is a species of class warfare, D&B inadvertently turns dismayingly literal, a lush but ultimately lifeless spectacle. But it has some biting humor (yes, that’s a joke) and enticing decolletage along the way. If you forgot to have a Halloween party, you could do worse than to build a late one around a screening of this.

A joint Dutch-Taiwanese production without significant theatrical release that’s getting its first real screening on Shudder, D&B is a tale of five obscenely wealthy Taipei twenty-somethings (all played by young Asian and European actors with little if any American exposure) besotted with the exquisite ennui of the rich and beautiful. They wander a gorgeously desolate landscape of Lamborghini and Gucci, empty clubs and hotels that, like their lives, are dazzling but empty. They beat and abuse anybody they encounter—including themselves—just because they can.

Inevitably, one of their increasingly desperate attempts to relieve boredom—a nighttime hike through a rugged jungle once inhabited by ancient headhunters—goes badly. They awake from a drugged sleep with their teeth morphed into fangs and their elderly guide covered with bloody bite marks. The conclusion, that they’ve become literal and not just figurative vampires, seems obvious—and, once they get over the surprise (“I’m calling my helicopter!” shouts one) and away from the dawning sun, they’re curiously undismayed. They even blog about it.

Experiments with chewing gum and store security mirrors soon follow, and then transfused blood sipped from brandy snifters. Soon they’re out on the nighttime sidewalks, their fangs concealed by COVID masks, stalking prey, boredom evaporated by the moonlight. It’s not far to the double-dog dare of the nosferatu world: Bite me.

When Dead & Beautiful is not dwelling excessively on the soullessness of its protagonists, it can be quite amusing. Acts of awesome cultural appropriation (the kids maintain Bram Stoker stole Dracula not from Romanian history as European ethnocentrists would have it, but from oral histories of those Taiwanese headhunters) are followed by panicky millennial identity crises. “There’s something strange about being a Chinese vampire,” one of the young men complains to another. “We usually see white vampires, or black vampires, like Wesley Snipes.” What must it be like to be so young and callow you don’t remember The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires? Another reports a triumph of vampire mental gymnastics: He successfully clouded the mind of a 7-11 counter worker.

But like most heavily metaphored shows, D&B is more about style than action or characters, and it eventually collapses from the strain of its own weighty symbolism. (A conclusion that feels highly tacked-on does not help.) Even allegorical fangs have to penetrate the skin at some point, or concede to the observation of Shagal the Jewish nosferatu of The Fearless Vampire Killers when confronted by raging peasant brandishing a crucifix: “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Y65RMp
via IFTTT

Texas law S.B. 8 bans pre-viability abortions, which is something that Texas lawmakers are specifically prohibited from doing under existing U.S. Supreme Court precedent. To dodge legal accountability in federal court, those state lawmakers outsourced S.B. 8’s enforcement to private actors. According to the law, “any person” may sue “any person who…aids or abets the performance or inducement of abortion” and win at least a $10,000 bounty plus legal fees if the civil suit is successful. Because no state official is doing the enforcing, Texas maintains, no state official may face a pre-enforcement proceeding in federal court over this obvious denial of a judicially recognized constitutional right.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in two related cases that question whether Texas’ novel legal scheme should be allowed to stand. Justice Brett Kavanaugh cut to the heart of the matter, asking Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone about “the implications of your position for other constitutional rights.”

What if a state passed a law that says “everyone who sells an AR-15 is liable for a million dollars to any citizen,” Kavanaugh asked the Texas official. “Would that kind of law be exempt from pre-enforcement review in federal court?”

Stone conceded that his theory would shield that gun control law too. “My answers on whether or not federal court review is available does not turn on the nature of the right,” he told Kavanaugh.

So “Second Amendment rights, free exercise of religion rights, free speech rights,” Kavanaugh emphasized, could all “be targeted by other states” using the Texas abortion law as a model. “And you also said that the amount of the penalty doesn’t matter, a million dollars per sale,” Kavanaugh added. “A state passes a law [that says] anyone who declines to provide a good or service for use in a same-sex marriage, a million dollars if sued by anyone in the state, that’s exempt from pre-enforcement review?”

“Is that a yes?” Kavanaugh pressed the Texas official.

“Yes, your honor,” Stone replied.

Later, Justice Sonia Sotomayor picked up on Kavanaugh’s line of questioning. “A state dissatisfied with [District of Columbia v.] Heller says anyone who possesses a firearm anywhere is subject to litigation by any private citizen anywhere in the country and gets a million-dollar bounty,” Sotomayor said to Stone. “So this is not limited to abortion.” This is about any right “that a state is dissatisfied with.”

“Your point,” Sotomayor told Stone, “is that no matter how much a state intends to chill the exercise of a constitutional right…that does not give anyone a right to a federal forum when the state has deputized every citizen to act on its behalf.”

Kavanaugh and Sotomayor are correct. If allowed to stand, the structure of S.B. 8 will be copied by every state legislature that wants to restrict an unpopular right that the Supreme Court has recognized. That outcome should worry Americans of all political stripes.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3mxI69g
via IFTTT