Category: reason

New Jersey officially became the 14th state to legalize recreational use of marijuana after Democratic Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed three bills into law this week.

New Jersey lawmakers have been struggling and failing to actually legalize recreational sales and use for years. Last year, lawmakers punted the matter to voters in a referendum. Those voters overwhelmingly said yes—67 percent approved an amendment to the state constitution legalizing marijuana possession, cultivation, and use.

But that amendment still left lawmakers with the job of hammering out the actual laws controlling the marijuana marketplace. In the meantime, police were actually still citing people for marijuana possession despite the legalization proposition passing in November.

The new legislation will allow adults over the age of 21 to possess up to six ounces of marijuana. It’ll be months before retail sales actually start, and, of course, those sales will be heavily regulated and taxed. And unfortunately for New Jersey tokers with green thumbs, residents will not be permitted to grow their own.

A debate over how to deal with underage users contributed to the delay in getting the bills passed. Ultimately, pushed by Murphy, lawmakers agreed to smaller penalties for underage use, starting with a written warning, followed by recommendations to social service organizations, and then finally $50 citations for subsequent offenses.

The legislation also contains some notable criminal justice reforms. For example, it states that the smell of marijuana is not enough to constitute “reasonable articulable suspicion” to justify a police stop to determine if a suspect is violating the new marijuana laws. It also specifies that underage users will be cited, not arrested, and will not be photographed or fingerprinted. Records for underage marijuana violations will be maintained separately from other records and will be kept confidential. Essentially, to the extent that they’ll be enforcing marijuana restrictions against those under 21, the state is trying to avoid a punitive approach that will affect a young person’s future.

Meanwhile, the neighboring state of New York is still figuring out how or if it’s going to legalize marijuana this year. Like New Jersey, the Empire State has been trying and failing for several years now to get a bill together that will earn the support of both lawmakers and the governor.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made legalization a priority this year, but his initial plan had some serious problems. Like New Jersey, it will still forbid New Yorkers to grow their own marijuana. In addition, it lacked a mechanism to allow for marijuana to be delivered. And, strangely, Cuomo’s proposal actually increased the criminal penalties for anybody caught selling marijuana to anybody under 21.

Cuomo has now released some proposed amendments that will resolve some of the conflicts. One amendment calls for the state’s regulatory agency to oversee licenses for delivery. A second amendment will keep penalties for underaged dealing as they are (a misdemeanor). Notably, Cuomo’s plan does not include the automatic expungement of previous marijuana convictions.

Cuomo’s amended plan still forbids home cultivation. However, Marijuana Moment notes that a bill proposed by lawmakers does allow for personal cultivation, so this is still a point of contention between lawmakers and the governor.

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The Supreme Court on Monday dealt another blow to qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields civil servants from accountability for alleged misconduct.

It’s a stark change from this time last year. In February 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit awarded qualified immunity to a correctional officer who pepper-sprayed an inmate without provocation. It was that decision—McCoy v. Alamu—that the justices reversed yesterday and remanded back to the lower court for reconsideration.

Their move is subtle and went unnoticed by just about every major news outlet. It doesn’t alter the legal doctrine itself. But it does gesture to the lower courts that they should hold state actors to a higher standard—a welcome change in qualified immunity jurisprudence.

The decision invokes another Supreme Court ruling in a recent case: Taylor v. Riojas, in which several prison guards were originally given qualified immunity, also by the 5th Circuit, after locking a naked inmate in two squalid cells, one covered with “massive amounts” of human feces and the other filled with raw sewage. In November, the justices rejected that and wrote in an unsigned opinion that “no reasonable officer” would think placing an inmate in such conditions was constitutional. It was the first time the high court had rejected a qualified immunity defense since 2004.

In discussions around qualified immunity, reasonable is the operative word. Would a reasonable state actor know that their conduct was wrong? To find out, courts are to consider two prongs: whether an offense was unconstitutional, and whether or not it was “clearly established” in a previous court precedent that said the offense was unconstitutional, such that the offending party would have notice.

In practice, however, the doctrine has emboldened many unreasonable officials doing unreasonable things, like the cops who stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant, or the cop who shot a 10-year-old child while aiming at a nonthreatening dog. Though it might appear obvious to a bystander that such conduct infringed on the victims’ rights, they were not afforded the privilege to sue, because no previous court rulings outlined the situations in question with near-exact detail.

McCoy presented a similar dilemma. The guard, referred to in the decision as Mr. Alamu, allegedly pepper-sprayed an inmate, Prince McCoy Jr., after a different prisoner threw water on Alamu. That prisoner then shielded the front of his cell with bedding so that he was unreachable when Alamu returned. Frustrated, he instead attacked McCoy, who was housed in a neighboring cell. After an internal investigation, Alamu was found to have violated policy and was placed on a three-month probation.

He also violated McCoy’s Eighth Amendment rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, the 5th Circuit said. But it wasn’t clearly established that it was a violation, so, again, the victim was told that any civil suit against Alamu would be discarded.

“We held that the spraying crossed that line,” wrote Circuit Judge Jerry E. Smith. “But it was not beyond debate that it did, so the law wasn’t clearly established.”

The decision epitomizes broken logic. “It really indicates the level of granularity that courts go into in order to figure out whether or not qualified immunity applies or not,” Anya Bidwell, an Institute for Justice attorney, tells Reason. “They don’t just look at broad principles of the law. They’re looking at factual distinctions, like whether an inmate was pepper-sprayed versus whether an inmate was tased.”

Such granularity also defined the 5th Circuit’s original ruling in Taylor. Though the judges conceded that the guards’ actions—sticking an inmate in two deplorably filthy cells—were unconstitutional, it was not clearly established that they were unconstitutional. That opinion, likewise penned by Smith, noted that although the guards’ behavior was cruel and unusual, they could not be held accountable because the prisoner only suffered in those circumstances for six days—a timeframe that had not yet been ironed out explicitly in prior case law.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly admonished courts not to define the relevant law too capaciously,” Smith wrote last year. But it was the Supreme Court that overturned both of his recent qualified immunity rulings, telling the 5th Circuit on Monday to specifically rethink McCoy in light of their reversal in Taylor.

In some sense, however, Smith isn’t wrong; the high court has indeed demanded a ridiculous standard for overcoming qualified immunity in past terms, and last year they declined several opportunities to reconsider the doctrine. And while they still seem hesitant to alter qualified immunity itself, the decision yesterday indicates a potential change in justices’ opinions about just how hard they should make it for the public to hold civil servants accountable.

“There is a pattern developing, where the Court is signaling very strongly to the lower courts…that certain actions by government officials are obviously wrong, and that any reasonable official would have known,” says Bidwell.

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Shaina Bell, the 24-year-old Ohio mom arrested for leaving her kids in a Motel 6 room while she worked her evening shift at a Little Caesars, has something much better than a pizza to deliver now: A home for her kids, made possible by the $165,000 raised for her family in a GoFundMe campaign.

“A lot of people are saying hurtful things, but a lot of people are also being there for me and showing great support,” Bell said in an interview with WKBN. As for the funds, “I’m just over appreciative to what’s going on.”

The story began on February 11, when cops knocked on the motel room door where Bell’s daughter, 10, was home with her little sister, age 2. After the girl told the officers that her mom was working and she would be back by 10:00 p.m., they arrested mom on two misdemeanor charges of endangering her children. Then they threw her in jail. She was released on bail the next day, and her story quickly went viral.

Bell’s mom, Danielle Hosey, launched the GoFundMe campaign after she started hearing that there were “people in the community that would like to send assistance to my daughter and her children.” The funds are earmarked for them alone. The original goal was $5,000. Hosey wrote:

This campaign was created to help Shaina and her children raise the money they need in order to secure permanent and safe housing. Everything raised will go directly to establishing a safe and permanent home for Shaina, Faith, Jai’Sean and Jade.

“We understand that everyone has a story and we are grateful that you are listening to ours. From the bottom of our hearts we not only appreciate the financial contributions, but also the outpouring of support in the form of kind words and understanding.

There were two large donations. Cleveland Cavalier Javale Mcgee gave $5,000, and Pierre “Pee” Thomas, co-founder of Quality Control Music (who also seems to do some cool stuff on the side), gave $10,000.

But there were also many donations of $10 or sometimes even $5, seeming to represent a whole lot of people saying: I don’t have a lot either—and I understand.

Many commenters reminisced about how young they had been when their moms left them to go to work, and how this was not neglect. As Thomas, the $10,000 donor, wrote on Instagram: “My mom used to have to do the same thing when we were young, not cause of abandonment issues, it’s because people can’t afford child care working at a pizza shop. She wasn’t hanging out at a club. She was at work.”

Right now Idaho, Oklahoma, Nevada, South Carolina, and Texas are considering “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bills endorsed by Let Grow, the nonprofit I run. These bills ensure that parents who don’t supervise their kids 24/7—whether by choice or circumstance—will not be considered guilty of neglect unless there is obvious danger to their kids that they consciously or recklessly ignore. The law expressly protects the right of children to be unsupervised when they are mature enough to be trusted, as Bell’s daughter plainly was.

“It’s time to stop punishing parents in the name of protecting children,” said Let Grow’s Legal Consultant, Diane Redleaf, a children and families advocate who has worked for decades to make sure poverty is not mistaken for bad parenting. “Reasonable independence for children isn’t neglect. It’s time to make clear what true neglect actually looks like, so that families can look to the law and the authorities enforcing it to protect the sanctity of their homes—even when those homes happen to be a Motel 6.”

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“Blackstone is one of the largest landlords in [the] world,” tweeted the New York tenant advocacy group Housing Justice for All in May. “We know they’re rich enough to #CancelRent, and we’re going to make them.”

And then there’s Chao Huai Gao, an immigrant from Zhengzhou, China. He owns a modest two-story house in Queens and isn’t rich enough to forgo rental income. He tells Reason that the emotional distress of having an occupant who isn’t paying rent and who he can’t evict has him contemplating “jumping off of a building.”

Gao came to the U.S. in 1999, working in New York restaurants and nail salons and doing interior renovation. “I haven’t taken a day off since I came to America,” he says. In 2017, he and his wife, who is a caretaker, made a down payment on a house as an investment property, supplementing their savings with a loan from their family in China. To cover their mortgage, they rented out both floors and moved into a cheap studio apartment nearby with their two young daughters.

In March 2020, the college students sharing the second-floor apartment gave notice that they were moving out. After the apartment was vacated, a neighbor alerted Gao that he noticed that the lights were on at night. Soon after, Gao discovered that one of his former tenants had given her keys to a friend who had moved in without permission. 

Gao has never met the squatter now living in his house and is afraid to contact this person out of fear that he’ll be sued for harassment. The squatter, who is a dropout from an elite private university, has never offered to pay rent. (Reason was unable to reach him for comment, so we’re not including his name in this story.) 

Under New York state law, because the squatter has been in the apartment for more than 30 days, retaking possession will require a court order—but Gao can’t obtain a court order, because New York’s housing courts have been mostly closed during the pandemic. Gao tells Reason that he’s in a state of personal crisis, hemorrhaging money, and consumed with worry about losing his home.

Gao is part of an association of about 200 Chinese immigrant landlords in New York City with tenants who have stopped paying rent. They’re speaking out about the impact of the government’s decision to temporarily halt evictions—a policy championed by the #CancelRent movement. On September 4, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a national eviction moratorium that is currently set to expire at the end of March. New York is one of many states that has also passed a series of administrative orders and temporary laws halting evictions on top of the CDC order. 

Although technically these measures are intended to help tenants directly impacted by the pandemic, in practice they’ve brought New York’s eviction proceedings to a complete halt. From mid-March through the end of November, in a typical year, there would have been about 14,000 evictions in New York City. In 2020, over this same period, there were just 2. New York now has a backlog of 200,000 eviction cases that pre-date COVID-19. 

“The pandemic is proving…that we need to advocate vigorously for projects and policy proposals that get us closer to a universal right to housing,” says Cea Weaver, the campaign coordinator for Housing Justice For All. “We need to sort of think about the role that exclusion and profit, which are the sort of characteristics of the private property market, have played and think about different systems and structures that we could put into place that would help more people be housed.” Weaver, who’s a rising star in New York political circles—she was recently nominated to join the city’s powerful planning commission—describes the relationship between landlords and tenants as “exploitative.”

But denying landlords legal recourse to enforce their contracts is more likely to exacerbate housing shortages. In New York, the moratorium is reminiscent of policies of the 1960s and ’70s that also undermined private contracts between landlords and tenants, driving owners to abandon their buildings and leave entire neighborhoods for dead.

One problem with the eviction moratorium is that, in practice, it doesn’t only impact those in need. It is making widespread abuse possible, in which tenants with the means to pay their rent are taking advantage of the situation to live in their apartments at no cost.

Take Won, a Chinese immigrant landlord who asked that we only use her last name. She owns a two-family house in Queens and works as a home health aide caring for an elderly couple. Her husband is a waiter at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, though he’s barely been able to work since the pandemic began. Won says her tenant owes her more than $80,000 in back rent. “I just want the government to open the court,” she tells Reason.

Won says that if her tenants were unemployed or financially distressed, she would be willing to work with them. “These people, no money, I can help. Pay later,” she says. “But these people, no. The people have money.”

Reason wasn’t able to reach Won’s tenants for comment, so we’re not using their names in this story. But we did find that the father in the family is currently employed in the construction industry, and that the tenants are renting a second apartment in a house in Queens Village, where they’ve also stopped paying rent and owe $12,000 to the couple that owns the house, who are also Chinese immigrants.

Many of the working-class landlords in Gao’s group say they’re in danger of losing everything. The government has backed them into a situation in which they have no choice but to maintain their buildings at a loss. 

One Chinese immigrant landlord, who works as a hairstylist and asked to remain anonymous, tells Reason that she used money that her mother had saved, over the course of 20 years working seven days a week in a nail salon, to make a down payment on a house in Queens in 2016. She fears that all of that hard work will now go to benefit her tenant, who has stopped paying rent and who she says is mentally unstable. “We just want to take back the house we bought ourselves. Is that wrong?” she tells Reason through an interpreter.

This group has come together, mostly in WeChat groups, where they commiserate and strategize. At a protest in October, a few hundred landlords—most of them immigrants—huddled under umbrellas outside New York City Hall, holding signs and chanting, “Fair laws for landlords!”

According to Michael Wang, a Chinese immigrant and businessman who organized the recent protests, foreign-born New Yorkers are more likely to buy property for cultural reasons. “We think it’s relatively less risky to put money into property,” he tells Reason through an interpreter. “Investing in property is a relatively less risky and easier investment for people who just came to the U.S. with limited English.” For Gao and many immigrant landlords, owning property turned out not to be an easy investment after all.

Gao says his squatter is getting away with “robbery.” Weaver calls that statement “deeply misleading.” Weaver, who the real estate magazine The Real Deal dubbed the “tenant movement’s giant killer” for her behind-the-scenes role in the passage of a 2019 state law strengthening New York’s rent regulation laws, says the eviction moratorium is just a “pause” because it doesn’t mean that “the landlord can never collect the rent.”

In practice, though, collecting rent money will be extraordinarily difficult after the moratorium is lifted. The case backlog in housing court could mean that landlords will wait years for their cases to be heard, and recovering large sums of money is difficult under the best of circumstances. Nativ Winiarsky, a New York attorney specializing in landlord-tenant litigation, tells Reason in an email that he sees “little chance that landlords will be able to fully recover the significant arrears that will have accumulated.”

“Those are part of the costs of being a landlord,” Weaver responds. 

Owners say that having almost no legal recourse when their tenants don’t pay their rent was not part of the deal when investing in real estate. Landlord groups around the country have sued on the grounds that halting the judicial process that allows them to retake their property violates their due process rights, and that the national moratorium is an unconstitutional expansion of federal power.

One Chinese immigrant landlord, who asked to remain anonymous, reports that she worked as a housekeeper at a hotel that recently closed down. She says her tenant stopped paying rent over the summer and was demanding a $12,000 cash payment to move out.

“I worked in the United States for a whole 29 years. I worked to the point that my waist needs surgery. I can’t even sell my house.” she tells Reason through an interpreter. “Now my waist hurts so much. I’m jobless….I really can’t sleep at night. I really don’t know how to live anymore.”

The media has predicted a huge “wave of evictions” (see here, here, here, and here) nationally if the moratoria are lifted. In New York, tenant activists dragged furniture into the streets at a protest in October to dramatize the potential impact. 

But the soaring rental vacancy rate has made landlords more willing than ever to communicate with their tenants and offer rent reductions. Winiarsky says that the “large majority” of his “clients are doing everything they can to work with their tenants” because they recognize that “everyone is hurting.” Winiarsky says his office is “inundated right now drafting deferment and rent reduction agreements.”

In New York, before the pandemic, only about 1 in 10 eviction filings ended in a city marshall or sheriff physically removing a tenant from a dwelling. But because there existed a process through which landlords could enforce their contracts and get tenants who weren’t paying their rent to come to the negotiating table or move out, they had legal recourse.

Some tenants may be purposely targeting immigrant landlords because they may deem them less equipped to navigate New York housing law, but they’re not the only ones who are being taken advantage of. Sharon Redhead, who owns a building in Brooklyn, told the New York Daily News that some of her tenants who are out of work have kept up with their rent, while others with jobs “aren’t paying any rent at all.” Clarence Hamer, according to the Daily News, is the owner of a two-family home with a tenant who isn’t paying rent but is subletting rooms at a profit.

The New York Post told the story of 88-year-old Harlem landlord David Howson, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and has a tenant who hasn’t paid rent since 2016. “We are completely destitute,” Howson’s daughter told the Post.

Weaver says tenants taking advantage of the eviction moratorium not to pay their rent are “aberrations,” and she cites recent census survey data showing that renters are more financially distressed than those who own their own homes. Newspapers have recounted the stories of many tenants in crisis, such as Diba Gaye, whose wife recently died of heart disease and who lost his job stocking groceries. “I don’t want to lose my house too,” he told The New York Times. There’s also Halima Abdul-Wahhab, who says that she and her two children are at risk of homelessness. “I’m at a job where I don’t make that much, but I just try to maintain as much as I can,” she said. “Rent is not the only thing that has to be paid every month.”

But these individuals can be helped through the direct aid that the government has been providing since the early days of the pandemic in the form of interest-free loans, stimulus checks, and a substantial increase in unemployment benefits. Cities and states have also spent billions on rent relief programs.

These programs bring their own problems and tradeoffs, and those funded through philanthropy have proven more effective than government-financed ones. But if tenants are receiving the aid they need, owners should still be able to turn to the courts if they don’t pay their rent.

Weaver says this approach fails to help populations that are hard to reach with direct aid, such as undocumented immigrants. Her organization helped to draft a proposed state law under which the government would cover missing rent, no matter the reason tenants hadn’t paid, and with strings attached for landlords who accept the money, such as a provision requiring that they freeze rents for a period of 5 years. She said this approach would “help to get the money out the fastest.”

But there’s another reason Weaver and her political allies want to make landlords dependent on federal subsidies. Emergency policies enacted in times of crisis are prone to becoming permanent, which some members of the #CancelRent movement say is the goal. 

Weaver would like to see the entire real estate industry restructured in a model akin to public housing—but for rich people too.

“In public housing, people are paying 30 percent of their income,” Weaver told Reason. “What I am envisioning is a world in which housing is owned by a collective and people are paying 30 percent of their income in order to live in their housing. If your income is zero, you pay zero. If your income is $500,000 a year, you’re paying 30 percent of that.”

When asked how the federal government could afford such a program, Weaver told Reason that it could “print” the money.

“America is beautiful,” Gao, the Queens landlord with a squatter in his second-floor apartment, tells Reason. “But [when] nobody pay[s] rent, [it] is not beautiful.”

When Gao, and other immigrant landlords, decided to come to the United States to create a better life, this is not the American dream they thought they were buying into.

Photo Credits: Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Brian Branch Price/ZUMA Press/Newscom; 1354732 © Jimmy Lopes | Dreamstime.com;ID 3180810 © Photo168 | Dreamstime.com; SMXRF/starmaxinc.com/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom

Footage Credit: Damian Bartolacci/Pond5

Music Credits: “January,” by Kai Engel, Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Written and produced by Jim Epstein; graphics by Isaac Reese; translation by Shuang Li; audio post-production by Ian Keyser

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Retail stores in most of California are only allowed to operate at 25 percent capacity. A new bill in the state legislature would ensure that whatever part of their shop is allowed to be open is as inclusive as possible.

Last week, Assembly Members Evan Low (D–Cupertino) and Cristina Garcia (D–Los Angeles) introduced a bill that would require retailers to offer their toys and childcare products in a gender-neutral format.

Brick-and-mortar shops would have to display the majority of their products and clothing aimed at children in one undivided, unisex area on the sales floor. They’d also be barred from putting up signage that would indicate whether a product was intended for a boy or girl.

California-based retailers that sell children’s products online would also have to have a page on their website that offers these products in a general neutral fashion. The bill would allow retailers to title that section of their website “kids,” “unisex,” or “gender neutral.”

The bill is nearly identical to one that Low introduced last year, telling Politico at the time that he was hoping to create a more inclusive shopping experience. “This is an issue of children being able to express themselves without bias,” he said.

Low dropped the bill in May to prioritize COVID-19-related work but promised to pick up the fight later, saying in a statement that “the policy behind this bill is not only important in regards to addressing perceived societal norms but also ensuring that prejudice and judgment does not play a prominent role in our children’s lives. I look forward to working on this issue in the future.”

If passed, stores that did put dresses in a separate girls section could be hit with a $1,000 civil fine. The policy would only apply to retail department stores with over 500 employees.

Even without mandates, some retailers have been moving away from gendered in-store promotion. In 2015, Target announced that it would get rid of separate sections for bedding and toys.

At the time, the company was careful to note that they weren’t eliminating all gender distinctions in their store layout and signage, saying that “some cases, like apparel, where there are fit and sizing differences” gender-based suggestions were appropriate.

Low’s bill would deprive Target and other retailers of making that choice for themselves.

That stores like Target are voluntarily moving toward more gender-neutral promotions shows that mandating such a change isn’t necessary to provide a genderless child section to shoppers. The fact that some haven’t made the same move suggests that there may still be customers who find gendered distinctions helpful.

Regulating how companies market their products online and in their stores could potentially raise First Amendment challenges as well.

The bill would appear to disadvantage brick-and-mortar stores versus online retailers. But it’s those same brick-and-mortar retailers that have been hammered by the pandemic and related lockdown restrictions. Having to spend more complying with new regulations is the last thing many need.

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President Joe Biden has nominated Neera Tanden, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and president of the Center for American Progress, to serve as head of the U.S. Office on Management and Budget. But that nomination is on the rocks after Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) said he would vote against Tanden due to her history of tweeting aggressively at lawmakers.

“I have carefully reviewed Neera Tanden’s public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle from Senator [Bernie] Sanders to Senator [Mitch] McConnell and others,” said Manchin. “I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. For this reason, I cannot support her nomination.”

Many commentators pointed out that Manchin had no trouble voting to confirm Richard Grenell, who had also engaged in troll-ish behavior on Twitter, to be former President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany. Some have suggested that Tanden is being subjected to a racist and sexist double standard—that she is being held to account because she is a woman of color. According to Politico:

Janet Murguía, the president and chief executive of the Latino advocacy organization UnidosUS, said she had a call with her team Monday morning where the issue of Biden’s Cabinet picks hitting roadblocks sparked a protracted conversation and growing alarm.

“It’s been incredibly disturbing to see a pattern or a trend emerging where people of color and women seem to be at the bottom of the list in terms of hearings and getting their confirmations finalized,” Murguía said in an interview. “It’s highly offensive to see this foot-dragging going on when we have such an incredible need to put these different leaders in place in these different agencies.”

The problem with this line of argument is that there are many legitimate reasons to oppose Tanden for OMB. Incidentally, this is why Republicans need to be more careful about labeling all criticism of political figures as “cancel culture.” Holding politicians accountable for political statements and actions they have taken in the past is perfectly valid and fair.

Tanden, for her part, has a long history of questionable views. For one thing, she is utterly unconcerned about the deficit in times of crisis. In fact, she previously said if wild government spending were unpopular with voters, then the feds should get “oil rich countries” in the Middle East to pay off our debts in exchange for military help.

“We have a giant deficit,” wrote Tanden in a 2011 email. “They have a lot of oil. Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit. If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil rich countries partially pay us back doesn’t seem crazy to me.”

At the time the email was written, “engage in the world” meant U.S. military intervention in Libya, a disastrous foreign policy that produced years of warfare and strife. Tanden is a figure of the Clinton approach to the Middle East; there are good reasons to vote against giving such people any role in overseeing government budgets and policy. It’s neither racist nor sexist to keep the intellectual supporters of U.S. disasters in Iraq and Libya out of power.

FREE MINDS

Slate has indefinitely suspended Mike Pesca, host of “The Gist” podcast, after he argued in Slack conversations with colleagues that there might be some occasions when it is permissible for a white person to use the word nigger. Pesca specifically did not use the word himself during this discussion, though he argued that there might be legitimate journalistic reasons to do so. According to Defector:

The conversation continued sporadically for a few more hours before Pesca made his final point: “I don’t think it’s proper to use it in casual conversation and I’m in no position to tell Black NY Times workers that they shouldn’t be worried it’s going to pop out of a colleague’s mouth at some point. If you want my opinion it’s that there are some limited reasons why a non African American journalist or professor to use the word when conveying a quote in the name of clarity or factualness […] But it’s not a comfortable point to even pursue right now. If I had the opposite opinion I know a hundred ways I could make the opinion I actually have seem horrible and racist, and you know what, maybe it is.”

“I feel outraged,” a Slate staffer told me when asked about Pesca’s participation in the conversation. “I cannot believe I had to watch him enthusiastically provoke people on whether or not it is appropriate to use a racist slur.” Other Slate staffers that spoke to Defector expressed frustration and anger at Pesca’s insistence on having that particular conversation. “I don’t want to be in a workplace where people feel emboldened to have this argument. People’s humanity is not an intellectual debate,” one said.

The conversation was prompted by the news of the firing of New York Times journalist Donald McNeil, who was accused of upsetting teenagers with his use of the word during a Times-sponsored trip to Peru.

Now Pesca finds himself in a similar situation: His podcast is suspended pending an investigation by his bosses at Slate. “This was not a decision based around making an isolated abstract argument in a Slack channel,” said a spokesperson for the magazine.

But then it’s not clear why Pesca was suspended at all.

This slur, by the way, has appeared numerous times on Slate‘s website. A search for the word returns 375 results, including an article from July 10, 2020, “Big Scrabble’s decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.” The author of that piece, Stefan Fatsis, argued that it was absurd to consider the use of offensive words in Scrabble as a form of hateful speech. Although he did not use the word himself, he did quote Randall Kennedy, the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and referenced the book’s title in the article.

It’s one thing to use the word maliciously—it’s quite another for journalists and educators to quote it in certain contexts, including discussions about the meaning of words.

My takeaway from this event: SAY NOTHING ON SLACK EXCEPT, "hey."

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) February 23, 2021

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Reporters might finally get their hands on former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, according to CNN:

The Supreme Court cleared the way for a New York prosecutor to obtain former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, dealing a massive loss to Trump who has fiercely fought to shield his financial papers from prosecutors.

The documents will be subject to grand jury secrecy rules that restrict their public release.
The ruling is a bitter loss for Trump, even if the tax records are shielded from public disclosure, after he consistently argued that the subpoena issued by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance was overbroad and issued in bad faith.

QUICK HITS

• The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has passed the 500,000 mark.
• Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) isn’t the only politician from the state who skipped town after the terrible winter storms: Embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton went to Utah with his wife for “previously scheduled meetings.”
• The Conservative Political Action Conference is slated to begin later this week in Orlando, Florida. The theme is “uncanceled,” though the conference has already canceled one speaker over his offensive statements.
• Nancy Rommelmann in The Dispatch: “Words as Weapons: How Activist Journalists are Changing the New York Times.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3dIaNMK
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