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One hundred years ago today, Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify the 18th amendment, which set Prohibition in motion a year later. Prohibition is widely, and rightly, remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest policy mistakes, and it contains more than a few lessons that remain relevant today.

The decision by the states and the federal government to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and transportation of most alcohol in the United States was born of racism, nativism, government paternalism, and moralizing religiosity.

As Harvard’s Lisa McGirr writes in today’s New York Times, Prohibition was fueled by white protestant disdain for urban immigrants and the saloons they frequented. Prohibition was backed by the Ku Klux Klan, and was promoted by former members of the Anti-Saloon League. The influential Women’s Christian Temperance Union called for the deportation of anyone who violated alcohol law but wasn’t a citizen. German beer makers were tarred as un-American. It was a moral failure, driven as much by spite towards the nation’s increasing foreign-born population as by concern about excessive drinking.

But Prohibition also failed on its own terms. Instead of putting a stop to problem drinking, it criminalized it, making it more dangerous in the process. Prohibition created a violent black market for alcohol that helped empower and enrich violent criminals in the process. Problem drinkers continued to imbibe. Many drinkers switched from relatively low-proof beer to much higher proof alcohol, which was easier to transport.

Under Prohibition, drinking was still common—see, for example, this 1932 map of Harlem speakeasies, which suggests that boozy nightlife flourished—but black-market liquor was more expensive, lower quality, and sometimes dangerous to drink, since producers had to keep their work hidden from the view of authorities. That necessity bred vast corruption, as bootleggers paid off government officials, effectively making police and politicians, many of whom continued to drink themselves, partners in their illegal operations. This, in turn, bred distrust in the government, which was plainly hypocritical in its operations.

Yet the effect of Prohibition was not to turn Americans away from the government. As McGirr writes, Prohibition “cracked the door open toward other forms of regulation. Not only did Prohibition forge the edifice of the federal penal state, but growing numbers of Americans looked to the federal government for solutions to social and economic problems.” Even, and perhaps especially, in failure, it created demand for further intervention.

For today’s policymakers and policy influencers, Prohibition remains a cautionary tale about government overreach: It was a dysfunctional and badly run system predicated on ugly, populist notions and deluded ideas about the power of government to solve social problems. Not only did it fail to accomplish its goals, it created a host of unintended consequences that were worse than the problems it was supposed to solve.

The straightforward lessons of Prohibition are obviously applicable to any number of public policy issues making headlines today, from the opioid crisis to marijuana legalization to immigration, and our elected leaders would be wise to heed them.

But there is another lesson from Prohibition that is often overlooked—not from its beginning, but from its end, more than a decade later, with the 21st amendment, which repealed the 18th. That lesson is that, with enough time, even the worst policy mistakes can be corrected. Progress may be halting and frustrating, but America can learn from its mistakes and change its course. Yes, the effects of Prohibition lingered on for decades, in the damage it did to cocktail culture, in the institution of restrictive state liquor laws, and in the overall growth of the state. But there is little danger that full-on Prohibition will return, and slowly but surely the similarly restrictive policies that have governed marijuana are being undone.

So yes, the anniversary of Prohibition is a warning of all the ways that government policies can go wrong, and the lasting damage the worst of those policies can do. But its eventual reversal and tainted legacy also offer reasons for hope. Prohibition’s end is a reminder that the very worst policies, no matter their scale, aren’t locked in place, and we aren’t stuck with them forever.

Los Angeles County’s new sheriff made it a campaign point that he was going to be focusing on the rank-and-file and rooting out cronyism from the leadership of the department. So it may come as a surprise to quite a few folks that he has just reinstated a deputy and campaign supporter who had been fired for allegedly stalking and physically attacking his ex-girlfriend.

Maya Lau at the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who just took office in December, has hired back Deputy Caren Carl Mandoyan, who was fired in 2016 by then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell (whom Villanueva defeated in November’s election) for the alleged abusive behavior. Mandoyan’s firing was upheld by a county appeals board.

The Times notes that Mandoyan’s rehire is the only one of its type so far, but it certainly sends quite the message. Villanueva won’t explain why he rehired the deputy, explaining in a statement that California’s laws sealing police personnel records forbids doing so.

Prosecutors declined to file charges against Mandoyan, but the Times did get copies for an application for a restraining order the woman—a fellow deputy—had filed as well as a memo from the district attorney’s office describing the case. The woman was photographed with bruises and provided video evidence of him trying to force his way into her home. Prosecutors determined, though, that they didn’t have enough evidence to charge Mandoyan with a crime.

Mandoyan sued to get his job back but then dropped the suit last month after Villanueva was elected. Mandoyan was also part of Villanueva’s campaign, and he was photographed by the Times participating in a swearing-in ceremony in December for new hires at the sheriff’s department, holding the box of pins for the sheriff.

That this is how Villanueva chooses to move forward with his term as sheriff, after removing two officials from their jobs advising the department to make sure law enforcement officers are engaging in “constitutional policing,” has some folks concerned. From the Times:

“I’m a little flabbergasted and shocked that we’re now confronted with this kind of hiring policy,” Patti Giggans, the chairwoman of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, said of Mandoyan’s reinstatement. “It’s very disturbing. I think every commissioner will be very bothered by this.”

Out with the old administration’s cronyism, and in with the new? Villanueva’s public campaigning focused a lot on pushing immigration officials out of Los Angeles’ jails (McDonnell had allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff to maintain an office in there). But Villanueva also made it very clear that he believed deputies and those in lower ranks were being unfairly punished. He says he wants to potentially create some sort of commission to rehear the cases of deputies who believe they had been wronged in some fashion by the sheriff’s department’s disciplinary procedures. Villanueva claims that he had previously been unfairly targeted for discipline by department leadership for political reasons and denied promotions.

We may end up learning more about Mandoyan’s case. With the start of the new year, new records about police conduct investigations are now covered by California’s Public Records Act. The sheriff’s department is supposed to release certain records about Mandoyan upon request, but there are limits and it’s not quite clear whether they’d apply here. The law covers cases of sexual assault by law enforcement officers or where they are caught engaging in deception on the job (like perjury, or concealing or fabricating evidence). So an investigation on domestic violence or stalking might not fall under the new release rules. But the Times has submitted a public records request to see what they can get about Mandoyan’s work history (similiarly, Reason has submitted a records request under the new rules for anything they have about Villanueva’s history of discipline).

What’s happening now should serve as a reminder of how hard it is to get rid of problem cops. But with these new public records laws, at least California residents can know who they are. Though law enforcement representatives are fighting to stop even that information from being released.

The upcoming Women’s March has been roiled in controversy and in-fighting. It has been accused both of catering to minority women and white women too much. It’s progressive organizers have been accused of anti-Semitism and hobnobbing with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a man who stands for everything—misogyny, homophobia—that progressivism stands against.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such bitter feuds as merely birthing pains or a clash of personalities that happen in any embryonic (no pun intended!) movement, I note in my column at The Week. The fact of the matter is that if the Women’s March can’t overcome its internal differences and agree on an agenda, it’s because women’s problems today pale in comparison to those faced by other groups. Women confront discrimination—but less by virtue of being women and more by virtue of being members of some other, more marginalized or reviled group. So it makes no sense to try and shoehorn these other groups into a mass feminist movement.

“The sooner American feminists realize this, the easier it might be for the left to identify an authentic social justice movement focused on eliminating real oppression faced by genuinely marginalized groups, not relatively marginal concerns of powerful ones,” I note.

If American feminists want to march somewhere, they should try joining their sisters in Kerala, India, where five million women formed a human chain to protest actual gender discrimination this month.

Go here to read the whole piece.

In a divided ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court seemed to set a low bar for what sort of robbery offenses count as a “violent felony” under federal law.

The case, Stokeling v. United States, involved a career criminal facing a 15-year minimum prison sentence following his latest conviction, this time on a federal gun charge. It split the Court along interesting lines. Justice Stephen Breyer, normally associated with the Court’s liberal wing, voted with Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito in the majority. Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, joined his more liberal colleagues—Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan—in the minority.

The actual facts of the case were not in question. After he was arrested in Florida on suspicion of burglary in 2015, police found a handgun in Denard Stokeling’s backpack. He eventually pleaded guilty and was convicted of illegally possessing the gun and ammunition. Thanks to the Armed Criminal Career Act (ACCA), which sets penalties for people convicted on federal gun charges who have three or more “violent felony” convictions on their record, Stokeling faced a minimum of 15 years behind bars.

Stokeling did not dispute that he had previously been convicted of home invasion, kidnapping, and robbery. But he did say the 1997 robbery conviction, stemming from an incident where he tried to steal necklaces right off a woman’s neck, should not have qualified as a “violent felony.” Rather than a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison for his gun conviction, Stokeling said he should be facing no more than 87 months (a little over seven years), according to CNN.

At issue was the definition of a “violent felony” under the ACCA and whether or not it encompasses Florida’s definition of “robbery.” According to the ACCA, a “violent felony” is “any crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another.”

Florida law, meanwhile, says that “robbery” is “the taking of money or other property…from the person or custody of another…when in the course of the taking there is the use of force, violence, assault, or putting in fear.” And as Thomas noted in his majority opinion, the Florida Supreme Court “has explained that the ‘use of force’ necessary to commit robbery requires ‘resistance by the victim that is overcome by the physical force of the offender.'”

In other words, robbery is not necessarily classified as a “violent felony” under the ACCA. “Physical force,” on the other hand, is. But the question in this case, as SCOTUSblog pointed out in October, did not involve the level of physical force Stokeling used in the necklace incident. Rather, the Court had to determine whether it’s possible, under Florida’s definition of robbery, to commit the crime without using “physical force.” If it is, then convictions under Florida’s robbery law, and possibly other states’ robbery statutes as well, wouldn’t qualify as violent felonies under the ACCA.

Ultimately, the Court said it’s not, with Thomas writing that the ACCA “encompasses robbery offenses that require the criminal to overcome the victim’s resistance.”

“Robbery that must overpower a victim’s will—even a feeble or weak-willed victim—necessarily involves a physical confrontation and struggle,” he wrote for the majority. “The altercation need not cause pain or injury or even be prolonged; it is the physical contest between the criminal and the victim that is itself ‘capable of causing physical pain or injury.'”

Thomas was quoting the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority decision in Johnson v. United States, which also involved the ACCA. The kind of physical force that could conceivably injure a victim, Thomas argued, “includes the amount of force necessary to overcome a victim’s resistance.”

But “Florida robbery…covers too broad a range of conduct to qualify as a ‘violent felony’ under the ACCA,” wrote Sotomayor in her dissent. She particularly took issue with Thomas’s wide interpretation of the word “capable.” In Johnson, “the Court could not have meant ‘capable’ in the ‘potentiality’ sense,” she said. “Rather, it meant it in the sense that its entire text indicates: ‘force capable of causing physical pain or injury’ in the sense that a ‘strong’ or ‘substantial degree of force’ can cause physical pain or injury,” she added, referencing the Johnson decision.

Sotomayor provided a few examples to back up her reasoning. “As any first-year torts student (or person with a shoulder injury) quickly learns, even a tap on the shoulder is ‘capable of causing physical pain or injury’ in certain cases,” she wrote, alluding to her recent shoulder dislocation.

Even minor uses of force fall under Florida’s definition of robbery, she said. But these are not violent felonies. “For example, the force element of Florida robbery is satisfied by a pickpocket who attempts to pull free after the victim catches his arm,” Sotomayor wrote. “A thief who grabs a bag from a victim’s shoulder also commits Florida robbery, so long as the victim instinctively holds on to the bag’s strap for a moment.”

“Florida law applies the label ‘robbery’ to crimes that are, at most, a half-notch above garden-variety pickpocketing or shoplifting” she concluded. And locking up such offenders for 15 years is not all necessary, she suggested.

Sotomayor does bring up some interesting points. In this case, it’s hard to have sympathy for Stokeling, who’s clearly a career criminal (whether he deserves to be put away for 15 years is another question). But it’s certainly possible to envision a scenario where a habitual pickpocketer or shoplifter is eventually convicted on a gun charge and sentenced to prison for longer than he or she deserves.

It remains to be seen what ramifications this ruling will have on future cases. In the meantime, you can read Thomas’s majority opinion and Sotomayor’s dissent here.

At his confirmation hearing yesterday, William Barr, Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general, said he will not target state-licensed marijuana businesses, although he called the current conflict between federal prohibition and state legalization “untenable.” In response to questioning by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Barr said he would prefer a uniformly enforced federal ban on marijuana but recognizes that the Obama administration’s accommodation of the newly legal cannabis industry, as reflected in a 2013 memo from then-Deputy Attorney General James Cole, created expectations on which investors have reasonably relied.

Although Sessions officially rescinded the Cole memo a year ago, U.S. attorneys have shown little enthusiasm for cracking down on marijuana suppliers who comply with state law, and Barr said he is not interested in doing that either. “I’m not going to go after companies that have relied on the Cole memorandum,” Barr said. “My approach to this would be not to upset settled expectations and the reliance interests that have arisen as a result of the Cole memorandum. Investments have been made, so there [has] been reliance on it. I don’t think it’s appropriate to upset those interests.”

Barr, an old-fashioned drug warrior, made it clear that he is not a fan of legalization. “We either should have a federal law that prohibits marijuana everywhere, which I would support myself, because I think it’s a mistake to back off from marijuana,” he said, or “if we want a federal approach, if we want states to have their own laws, let’s get there, and let’s get there the right way.” In response to a subsequent question from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Barr clarified that he meant Congress should change federal law if it wants the states free to set their own marijuana policies.

Although Barr’s remarks will be reassuring to all those cannabis investors, it is worth reflecting on his position that federalism is something Congress deigns to grant the states, as opposed to something the Constitution requires. Today marks 100 years since the ratification of the 18th Amendment, the result of an arduous process that prohibitionists recognized as the only legal way to accomplish their goal, because otherwise the federal government would not have had the authority to ban the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. After the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933, Congress no longer had that authority (except with respect to interstate trafficking in violation of state law, which the 21st amendment specifically addressed). There is no logical reason why these observations about the limits of federal power would apply to alcohol but not marijuana.

In fact, Harry Anslinger, the ardent pot prohibitionist who ran the Federal Bureau on Narcotics (FBN) from 1930 to 1962, conceded that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to ban marijuana. In 1931, as Anslinger was preparing a model marijuana prohibition law for the states, The New York Times noted that “there are no Federal laws on the growth or use of marijuana, the plant being grown so easily that there is almost no interstate commerce in it.” The Times reported that Anslinger “said the government under the Constitution cannot dictate what may be grown within individual States.” As late as 1937, the Times was saying the FBN “has admitted that its hands are tied by the fact that the marihuana weed is indigenous to so many States that its distribution is an intrastate problem.”

Later that year, when Congress passed the law that effectively banned marijuana at the federal level, it was framed as an exercise of the tax power, like the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 (or, to take a more recent example, the individual insurance mandate imposed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010). That’s the sort of maneuver Congress uses to accomplish indirectly what it lacks the authority to do directly. But when Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which includes a direct ban on marijuana, it abandoned any pretense of revenue raising. By then, thanks to a series of Supreme Court rulings that began a few years after the Marihuana Tax Act was passed, legislators took it for granted that they could do almost anything they wanted and justify it as an exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce.

Those rulings culminated in Gonzales v. Raich, the 2005 decision in which the Court said that power somehow reaches a bag of marijuana in a cancer patient’s nightstand, even if the dried plant matter never crossed state lines, even if she grew it herself, and even if state law allowed her to do so. “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause,” Justice Clarence Thomas observed in his dissent, “then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

Even Harry Anslinger understood what the Supreme Court now routinely denies: that interstate commerce does not include conduct that is not interstate or not commercial, let alone conduct that is neither. Barr complained that state marijuana legalization is “almost like a back-door nullification of federal law.” But that is a bad thing only if the federal law is legitimate, which marijuana prohibition is not.

On Wednesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) asked President Trump to delay his State of the Union address due to security concerns stemming from the government shutdown. Alternatively, Trump could simply submit a written statement in lieu of an in-person speech, noted Pelosi.

If Trump opted for the latter, this would be by far the best thing to come out of the shutdown. The elaborate spectacle of the modern State of the Union speech—a yearly production—is wholly unnecessary. The country would be well rid of it.

As Pelosi noted in her letter, for the first half of the country’s history, virtually all State of the Union speeches—formerly known as the President’s Annual Message to Congress—were delivered to the House of Representatives and read by a clerk. This became standard practice in 1801 with President Thomas Jefferson, who thought an in-person speech would be too reminiscent of a royal proclamation.

Jefferson’s tradition endured until President Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913. Wilson saw the event as an opportunity rally support for his expansive domestic agenda, and subsequent presidents have typically approached it the same way.

One hundred or so State of the Unions later, the executive branch is less constrained than ever before in U.S. history. Wilson’s tradition is not the sole or the predominant cause, but it does contribute to a vision of the president as the central and most important figure in the government, rather than one office amidst three co-equal branches. As Steve Chapman wrote for Reason in 2015, “The State of the Union address has grown in step with presidential presumption. It’s a conspicuous symptom of a dangerous malady: We expect too much of our presidents and limit them too little.”

Trump has not yet responded to Pelosi’s letter, and it’s hard to imagine him passing on a chance to hoard the spotlight. But if the shutdown somehow ends up forcing the government to cancel the State of the Union, I say good riddance.