Category: reason

Joe Biden’s Plan for Big Government

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With his policy announcement about another COVID-19 relief bill, President Joe Biden declares loud and clear that he will not shy away from spending blowouts and fiscal irresponsibility. For the most part, his proposed plan is nothing more than a way to use the current crisis to deliver on Democrats’ longtime dream to explode the size and scope of the federal government.

The objective of the $1.9 trillion plan is noble enough: stimulate the economy, provide relief to Americans, and combat the pandemic. But noble doesn’t always mean good. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I would add political expediency to that expression.

The plan’s $160 billion vaccination program and related COVID-19 health policies are its best aspects. That said, there’s a lot of wishful thinking behind the notion that a lack of money or federal intervention explain the slow vaccine rollout as opposed to defective governmental institutions. I recommend Yuval Levin’s piece for National Review on “Biden’s Pandemic-Policy Challenge,” which does a great job of highlighting the difficulties that the new administration will face on that front.

I also salute the administration’s desire to reopen the schools. But again, don’t buy into the idea that the main obstacle to opening them before was a lack of money in state budgets. The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards told me that total state and local government tax revenues “fell just $22 billion from the first to the second quarter of 2020 and then bounced back strongly in the third quarter. Meanwhile, federal aid to state-local governments soared $194 billion in the second quarter as a result of federal relief bills.” Federal relief has more than refilled state and local coffers, so there is no need for $170 billion more in state education subsidies proposed by the Biden administration.

Let’s also note that the notion that the federal government hasn’t done enough for Americans in terms of relief is quite ludicrous. Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes, “A typical unemployed workers will receive $35,000 over the course of a year (closer to $40k if they have a family) even if the Biden plan isn’t enacted.” Also, during this time, the economy has recovered at a good rate and is only slated to improve if politicians refrain from erecting barriers between employers and employees, as the Biden plan would love to do.

Consider the proposed $15 minimum wage for all employees, even those who make most of their earnings on tips and hence command a low hourly wage. If you support this, please ask yourself the following question: How will such an increase in costs affect the millions of small businesses that have already been battered by the pandemic and government lockdowns? Writing for The Dispatch, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Brian Riedl explains, “forcing restaurants, which are failing at record rates, to raise their own tipped minimum wage by 600 percent is economic malpractice.”

Then you have the call for another $1,400 in individual stimulus checks, to be added to the $600 approved by Congress about a month ago. That money isn’t even out the door yet, and Biden is asking for more. Many of the people who will get these checks haven’t lost their jobs, and those who have lost their jobs are covered by unemployment benefits.

This brings me to the emergency unemployment benefits, which the new administration wants to extend through September with a $400 federal add-on. New data show that the added bonus means that 62 percent of the recipients will again be making more money while unemployed than they were as employees.

Add to all of this making permanent the temporary extensions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, child care subsidies, family leave benefits, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, as well as an expansion of the child tax credit. As Riedl notes, “in short, President-elect Biden would use the pandemic to enact large, unrelated, permanent expansions of the federal government.”

You don’t have to be a raging libertarian to understand that this is excessive, it will create massive disincentives to work and it will leave future generations with a level of government intrusion and debt of a country that looks more like Italy than the United States.

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Biden Issues At Least 15 Executive Orders and Actions on Day One

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Since being inaugurated as president late yesterday morning, Joe Biden has been busy dismantling Donald Trump’s executive orders. So far, the Biden administration has already undone several Trump-era immigration policies (including Trump’s moratorium on immigrants from certain African and/or predominantly Muslim countries), Trump’s 1776 Commission, and his ban on diversity training.

Goodbye Travel Bans and Census Changes

In one executive order issued yesterday, Biden revoked Trump’s March 2017, September 2017, April 2018, and January 2020 immigration and travel orders and instructed the secretary of state to tell all embassies and consulates “to resume visa processing in a manner consistent with the revocation of the Executive Order and Proclamations specified.”

“There is no real doubt that Biden has the power to reverse the travel bans by executive action alone,” writes Volokh Conspiracy blogger Ilya Somin. “If you buy the Trump Administration’s position on their legal status, they were decisions entirely left to the discretion of the president, which means a new president can repeal them any time he wants to, and for almost any reason….If you believe, as I and other critics do, that the travel bans were unconstitutional, it is even more clear Biden has the authority to repeal them. Indeed, in that event, he would have a legal duty to do so.”

In another order, Biden revoked Trump’s July 2019 order requiring census takers to collect citizenship info and Trump’s July 2020 order excluding undocumented immigrants from congressional apportionment counts based on census data.

‘Remain in Mexico’ and more policies suspended by DHS

Notice of more immigration policy changes came via the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In a Wednesday memo, Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske instructed Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to “conduct a review of policies and practices concerning immigration enforcement” and also announced new interim policies, “including a 100-day pause on certain removals.”

DHS will still focus on apprehending and deporting people crossing the border illegally and anyone deemed to be a potential threat to national security or public safety, the memo stresses. The 100-day pause on deportations does not apply to immigrants “engaged in [or] suspected of terrorism or espionage, or [who] otherwise poses a danger to the national security,” people who were “not physically present in the United States before November 1, 2020,” immigrants who “voluntarily agreed to waive any rights to remain in the United States,” or anyone else the acting director of ICE determines can be removed.

DHS also announced on Wednesday that it would suspend Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program enrollments. “The Trump administration’s controversial ‘remain in Mexico’ policy requir[ed] asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S. from the southern border to wait in Mexico for American court hearings,” notes NPR. “The program has led to roughly 60,000 migrants getting sent back across the border since MPP was first implemented in January 2019.”

As of January 21, DHS “will cease adding individuals into the program,” the department said in a short statement. “However, current COVID-19 non-essential travel restrictions, both at the border and in the region, remain in place at this time. All current MPP participants should remain where they are, pending further official information from U.S. government officials.”

Other Orders Revoked

Reversing these Trump immigration restrictions is all great. Biden also issued a memorandum telling Homeland Security to take action “to preserve and fortify” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Some of Biden’s actions simply undo executive overreach by the Trump administration and can be applauded. In one such order, Biden disbanded Trump’s “1776 Commission” on “patriotic education.”

Other new Biden orders and memorandums are murkier. In an “Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” Biden revoked Trump’s September 2020 order (titled “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping”) banning certain types of diversity training for government employees, contractors, or grant recipients—then added a new diversity working groups, commissions, and protocols that maybe feel like social justice and keeps government bureaucrats busy but fails to produce meaningful or tangible results.

I haven’t had time yet to go through all of Biden’s new actions (which you can find here). But it’s clear, as Reason‘s Christian Britschgi commented yesterday, that “if you were hoping President Joe Biden might break from former President Donald Trump’s broad view of executive authority,” you shouldn’t hold your breath.

FREE MINDS

“I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user,” writes Columbia University neuroscience professor Carl Hart. “I do not have a drug-use problem.”

Hart’s new book—Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear—“is not a book promoting drug use, nor is it a ‘how to’ book,” he writes in an author’s note at the start. Rather, it relies on “personal anecdotes and scientific research…to dispel drug myths and to illustrate the many potential benefits of responsible drug use.”

Hear Hart talk to Reason‘s Nick Gillespie about it here.

FREE MARKETS

FOLLOW-UP

Civil rights groups say no to a new war on terror. The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Freedom Network USA, Human Rights Watch, the National Women’s Law Center, the Presbyterian Church, The Human Trafficking Legal Center, The Sentencing Project, and 127 other groups are asking Biden and congressional Democrats not to expand domestic terror laws. “We are concerned that a new federal domestic terrorism statute or list would adversely impact civil rights and — as our nation’s long and disturbing history of targeting Black Activists, Muslims, Arabs, and movements for social and racial justice has shown — this new authority could be used to expand racial profiling or be wielded to surveil and investigate communities of color and political opponents in the name of national security,” they write.

The letter also points out that “The Justice Department (DOJ), including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has over 50 terrorism-related statutes it can use to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct, including white supremacist violence, as well as dozens of other federal statutes relating to hate crimes, organized crime, and violent crimes. The failure to confront and hold accountable white nationalist violence is not a question of not having appropriate tools to employ, but a failure to use those on hand.”

“The letter is necessary because Biden and his administration came into the White House already planning to focus on domestic terrorism, and one possibility the transition team was mulling over is the Confronting Threats of Domestic Terrorism Act, H.R. 4192, which was introduced in 2019 by Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.),” writes Reason‘s Scott Shackford.

QUICK HITS

  • John Brennan warns that the Trump “insurgency” is made up of “religious authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

  • In South Korea, which has the world’s lowest birthrate, “pro-natalist policies have attempted to solve the problem by attributing the cause of low birthrates to women and pressuring them to give birth,” Ewha Womans University professor Sunhye Kim told NBC News. However, NBC reports, “the public is increasingly pushing back against such policies, she said.”

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Reminder: The 2020 Harlan Institute-Ashbrook Virtual Supreme Court

Last fall, the Harlan Institute and Ashbrook announced the Eighth Annual Virtual Supreme Court Competition. This competition offers teams of two high school students the opportunity to research cutting-edge constitutional law, write persuasive appellate briefs, argue against other students through video chats, and try to persuade a panel of esteemed attorneys during oral argument that their side is correct. This year the competition focuses on Torres v. Madrid.

The competition is endorsed by the Center for Civic Education’s We The People Competition:

“The Center for Civic Education is excited to endorse the Virtual Supreme Court Competition. The Competition is relevant for high school students studying the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

-Robert Leming, Director, We the People Programs, Center for Civic Education

The Question

Resolved:  

Is an unsuccessful attempt to detain a suspect by use of physical force a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment or must physical force be successful in detaining a suspect to constitute a “seizure”?

The Rules

This competition has two stages, which mirror the process by which attorneys litigate cases. 

Stage One: The Briefing and Oral Arguments

A team of two students will be responsible for writing an appellate brief arguing for either the petitioner or the respondent, as well as completing an oral argument video. The brief and video will be due by February 22, 2021.You can see the winning briefs from 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.


Stage Two: The Tournament

The Harlan Institute and Ashbrook will select the top sixteen teams supporting the Petitioner and Respondent, and seed them for the oral argument semifinals in April 2021. All teams will compete in a virtual oral argument session over Zoom judged by the Harlan Institute and Ashbrook. Only teams that submit briefs that fully comply with all of the rules will be considered for oral argument. You can see the videos from the 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 2017, 2018, and 2019 competitions.

Historically, the final round of the Virtual Supreme Court Competition has been held at the Georgetown Supreme Court Institute in Washington, D.C. However, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we cannot plan an in-person gathering. As a result, we will host the championship round over Zoom in May 2021. The competition will be judged by a panel of expert judges, including lawyers, university level debate champions, and legal scholars.

The Prizes

Grand Prize—The Solicitors General of FantasySCOTUS

The members of top Petitioner and Respondent teams will be invited to attend the Ashbrook Academy on the Supreme Court and the Constitution in June 2021. Ashbrook will cover reasonable travel costs to the academy. Members of the winning team will each receive a $500 Amazon gift card. Members of the runner-up team will each receive a $250 Amazon.com gift card.

Semifinalists

Members of the sixteen semifinalist teams will each receive a $25 Amazon.com gift card.

Instructions

Coaches can register their teams at the Institute of Competition Sciences. Read the problem, and get started! Good luck.

Please send any questions to info@harlaninstitute.org.

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A Letter From a Florida Inmate Asked for Help. It Arrived Too Late.

theresa mathis.v2

It was early January when Theresa Mathis’ November 22 letter arrived in my mailbox. It had come the long way: from a women’s prison in Central Florida to Reason‘s Los Angeles office, and then back to my home address in South Florida.

Mathis was asking for help. She had sold some hydrocodone pills to an undercover cop, and now she was 12 years into a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence. It was her first offense. She’d entered prison at 50 years old. Mathis had recently read about how some state attorney’s offices in Florida were, in an acknowledgment that sentences like hers were insane, revisiting opioid cases and striking deals to release inmates on time served.

“It is a blessing that I found you and at the right timing,” she wrote.

I forwarded a picture of Mathis’ letter to my former Reason Foundation coworker, Lauren Krisai. We had worked together on a 2017 investigation into how Florida’s opioid trafficking laws resulted in draconian sentences for low-level and first-time offenders. Krisai had pored over hundreds of these cases. She didn’t recognize Mathis’ name, so she looked her up on the Florida Department of Corrections website. 

The timing was not right. 

Mathis, 62, died on December 29 in prison. As I looked at her letter—written in neat cursive except for “God bless u” squeezed into the lower right corner—I felt sick.

I wondered how Mathis ended up in Lowell Correctional Institution, a place so wretched that the Trump Justice Department recently put Florida on notice that the conditions there violated women’s constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment. A 2015 Miami Herald investigation found, in addition to rampant sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, rancid food, and vermin infestations.

A transcript from Mathis’ 2009 sentencing hearing started to fill in the blanks. Mathis had pleaded guilty to three counts of trafficking hydrocodone after selling pills to an undercover officer and a confidential informant.

“I had a dependency on prescription pills which clouded my judgement,” Mathis begged the judge. “I have a loving family waiting for me in Michigan. I also have a brand new grandson that I would like to help raise, also three sons in their twenties. I worked at General Motors for 20 years and can be a productive human being. There is a good possibility that I could get my job back and retire in 10 years. Please don’t take my life away from me.”

The Florida legislature passed harsh mandatory minimum sentences in 1999 in response to the state’s booming black market for opioid pills. The laws were supposed to target drug kingpins, but the weight thresholds to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence were so low that they mostly ensnared people selling to support their habit. 

Like many other cases Krisai and I had come across, the judge at Mathis’ sentencing was disgusted at the sentence he was required to impose, but he had no choice.

“I do not for the life of me understand why the Florida legislature has come up with the mandatory minimum sentences they have for prescription painkillers, in which a relatively—in the court’s view—small amount of prescription painkillers results in just an incredibly harsh sentence,” circuit judge Jon Morgan said. “But it is not my job or option as a judge to decide what the law should be. I’m required to follow the law as it is. And I’m sorry that it is what it is in your particular case.”

From the transcript, I got the name of Mathis’ lawyer at the time, Brock Shields. More than a decade later, Shields remembered the case well and told me it was one of the sadder ones he’d worked. “She was a very nice woman caught up in a real difficult situation,” he wrote to me.

The reason Mathis got the full 25 years, Shields said, was that she turned down a nine-year plea deal and instead entered into an agreement to provide “substantial assistance” to law enforcement. This means becoming a confidential informant and setting up other sellers. The more deals you set up, the more time you get knocked off your sentence. The catch is you have to plead guilty in advance, and if you can’t deliver, you’ll take the full sentence on the chin.

Shields said he advised Mathis against turning down the plea deal, but he can understand why she rolled the dice. Imagine looking at nine hard years in Florida state prison—no air conditioning, by the way—or the chance to avoid most, maybe all of it, if you could just give the police enough other names. Shields didn’t see any way that Mathis could get enough cases to get her sentence below nine years, though. “It wasn’t going to happen,” he said.

The result of this is that well-connected dealers walk while small fish like Mathis end up on the hook. For example, Reason‘s 2017 investigation described the case of Cynthia Powell, a 40-year-old grandmother who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for selling pills to an undercover police officer. Powell had also entered into a substantial assistance agreement with prosecutors but was unable to deliver.

Shields gave me the phone number for Benjamin Mathis, one of Theresa Mathis’ three sons. We talked several days after her funeral. That was the first time in 12 years that Benjamin had seen his mother. It was the first time Theresa Mathis’ grandchildren had ever seen her.

“We always worried about my mother and father,” he told me. “We just didn’t get to see them, because it wasn’t like they were incarcerated here where I can go visit them. It really ripped our family apart.”

Mathis described his mother as a good-hearted person, hard worker, born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan. She wasn’t into the drug scene, he said, but went down a bad path.

In prison, she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other lung ailments that led to difficulty breathing, but Mathis says she couldn’t get any treatment. She had just recently been approved for a transfer to another prison and, from what Mathis could gather from other inmates, was carrying her possessions out when she collapsed from an apparent heart attack.

“I feel like the prison itself killed her,” Mathis says. “If she was at home, staying with me, she would have been fine. She would have had a lot of the treatment.”

Mathis wonders if his mother had COVID-19, but he says the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC)  didn’t perform an autopsy. He doesn’t have the money to pay for one, or for a lawyer to sue the FDOC, so the exact causes and circumstances of her death will likely remain unknown.

Mathis shared texts and pictures he had been sent from other women who had been incarcerated with his mother. “I slept next to your mom for over a year,” one read. “I would hold her hand. The best soul in the world, feisty as can be, great spirit.”

Another message included a letter Theresa Mathis had sent on December 12. “I’m now 62 and COPD has gotten worse,” she wrote. “I’m struggling. To top it off they put me in the kitchen. Baby, I’m pressing forward.”

The shame of it all is that there is widespread acknowledgment that sentences like Mathis’ were a mistake.

In 2014, the Florida legislature increased the minimum weight thresholds that triggered the mandatory minimum sentences for opioid trafficking. However, those changes were not retroactive. They meant nothing for Mathis or the hundreds of other inmates who are still serving sentences that are no longer on the books. Bills were introduced to fix the situation for these inmates, but the legislation went nowhere, despite ceaseless lobbying from prisoner advocates and groups like FAMM, a nonprofit that opposes mandatory minimum sentences.

“I am heartbroken and nauseated by the thought of Theresa Mathis dying in a prison cell, and I hope her memory haunts every member of the Florida Legislature until they fix the stupid laws that kept her there unnecessarily,” says Greg Newburn, the Florida director of state policy for FAMM.

Some prosecutors’ offices around Florida have started to review old opioid sentences, including the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office, which handled Mathis’ case. Mathis had in fact recently received an application from the office to have her sentence reviewed. She would have been a prime candidate. 

But everything happened too late. The Florida legislature reduced the trafficking thresholds too late. Lawmakers dithered on making those changes retroactive. Prosecutors didn’t start second-guessing the wisdom of warehousing first-time drug offenders until it was too late. The mail was too late.

There are hundreds of other opioid offenders still serving outdated opioid trafficking sentences in Florida prisons, though. One of them is Benjamin Mathis’ father, who was sentenced along with Theresa Mathis.

“He’s still in prison, and I just want to iterate how important it is to try to get him home,” Mathis says.

If lawmakers need convincing, I have a letter I can forward. I believe it belongs to them.

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Reminder: The 2020 Harlan Institute-Ashbrook Virtual Supreme Court

Last fall, the Harlan Institute and Ashbrook announced the Eighth Annual Virtual Supreme Court Competition. This competition offers teams of two high school students the opportunity to research cutting-edge constitutional law, write persuasive appellate briefs, argue against other students through video chats, and try to persuade a panel of esteemed attorneys during oral argument that their side is correct. This year the competition focuses on Torres v. Madrid.

The competition is endorsed by the Center for Civic Education’s We The People Competition:

“The Center for Civic Education is excited to endorse the Virtual Supreme Court Competition. The Competition is relevant for high school students studying the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

-Robert Leming, Director, We the People Programs, Center for Civic Education

The Question

Resolved:  

Is an unsuccessful attempt to detain a suspect by use of physical force a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment or must physical force be successful in detaining a suspect to constitute a “seizure”?

The Rules

This competition has two stages, which mirror the process by which attorneys litigate cases. 

Stage One: The Briefing and Oral Arguments

A team of two students will be responsible for writing an appellate brief arguing for either the petitioner or the respondent, as well as completing an oral argument video. The brief and video will be due by February 22, 2021.You can see the winning briefs from 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.


Stage Two: The Tournament

The Harlan Institute and Ashbrook will select the top sixteen teams supporting the Petitioner and Respondent, and seed them for the oral argument semifinals in April 2021. All teams will compete in a virtual oral argument session over Zoom judged by the Harlan Institute and Ashbrook. Only teams that submit briefs that fully comply with all of the rules will be considered for oral argument. You can see the videos from the 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 2017, 2018, and 2019 competitions.

Historically, the final round of the Virtual Supreme Court Competition has been held at the Georgetown Supreme Court Institute in Washington, D.C. However, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we cannot plan an in-person gathering. As a result, we will host the championship round over Zoom in May 2021. The competition will be judged by a panel of expert judges, including lawyers, university level debate champions, and legal scholars.

The Prizes

Grand Prize—The Solicitors General of FantasySCOTUS

The members of top Petitioner and Respondent teams will be invited to attend the Ashbrook Academy on the Supreme Court and the Constitution in June 2021. Ashbrook will cover reasonable travel costs to the academy. Members of the winning team will each receive a $500 Amazon gift card. Members of the runner-up team will each receive a $250 Amazon.com gift card.

Semifinalists

Members of the sixteen semifinalist teams will each receive a $25 Amazon.com gift card.

Instructions

Coaches can register their teams at the Institute of Competition Sciences. Read the problem, and get started! Good luck.

Please send any questions to info@harlaninstitute.org.

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A Letter From a Florida Inmate Asked for Help. It Arrived Too Late.

theresa mathis.v2

It was early January when Theresa Mathis’ November 22 letter arrived in my mailbox. It had come the long way: from a women’s prison in Central Florida to Reason‘s Los Angeles office, and then back to my home address in South Florida.

Mathis was asking for help. She had sold some hydrocodone pills to an undercover cop, and now she was 12 years into a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence. It was her first offense. She’d entered prison at 50 years old. Mathis had recently read about how some state attorney’s offices in Florida were, in an acknowledgment that sentences like hers were insane, revisiting opioid cases and striking deals to release inmates on time served.

“It is a blessing that I found you and at the right timing,” she wrote.

I forwarded a picture of Mathis’ letter to my former Reason Foundation coworker, Lauren Krisai. We had worked together on a 2017 investigation into how Florida’s opioid trafficking laws resulted in draconian sentences for low-level and first-time offenders. Krisai had pored over hundreds of these cases. She didn’t recognize Mathis’ name, so she looked her up on the Florida Department of Corrections website. 

The timing was not right. 

Mathis, 62, died on December 29 in prison. As I looked at her letter—written in neat cursive except for “God bless u” squeezed into the lower right corner—I felt sick.

I wondered how Mathis ended up in Lowell Correctional Institution, a place so wretched that the Trump Justice Department recently put Florida on notice that the conditions there violated women’s constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment. A 2015 Miami Herald investigation found, in addition to rampant sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, rancid food, and vermin infestations.

A transcript from Mathis’ 2009 sentencing hearing started to fill in the blanks. Mathis had pleaded guilty to three counts of trafficking hydrocodone after selling pills to an undercover officer and a confidential informant.

“I had a dependency on prescription pills which clouded my judgement,” Mathis begged the judge. “I have a loving family waiting for me in Michigan. I also have a brand new grandson that I would like to help raise, also three sons in their twenties. I worked at General Motors for 20 years and can be a productive human being. There is a good possibility that I could get my job back and retire in 10 years. Please don’t take my life away from me.”

The Florida legislature passed harsh mandatory minimum sentences in 1999 in response to the state’s booming black market for opioid pills. The laws were supposed to target drug kingpins, but the weight thresholds to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence were so low that they mostly ensnared people selling to support their habit. 

Like many other cases Krisai and I had come across, the judge at Mathis’ sentencing was disgusted at the sentence he was required to impose, but he had no choice.

“I do not for the life of me understand why the Florida legislature has come up with the mandatory minimum sentences they have for prescription painkillers, in which a relatively—in the court’s view—small amount of prescription painkillers results in just an incredibly harsh sentence,” circuit judge Jon Morgan said. “But it is not my job or option as a judge to decide what the law should be. I’m required to follow the law as it is. And I’m sorry that it is what it is in your particular case.”

From the transcript, I got the name of Mathis’ lawyer at the time, Brock Shields. More than a decade later, Shields remembered the case well and told me it was one of the sadder ones he’d worked. “She was a very nice woman caught up in a real difficult situation,” he wrote to me.

The reason Mathis got the full 25 years, Shields said, was that she turned down a nine-year plea deal and instead entered into an agreement to provide “substantial assistance” to law enforcement. This means becoming a confidential informant and setting up other sellers. The more deals you set up, the more time you get knocked off your sentence. The catch is you have to plead guilty in advance, and if you can’t deliver, you’ll take the full sentence on the chin.

Shields said he advised Mathis against turning down the plea deal, but he can understand why she rolled the dice. Imagine looking at nine hard years in Florida state prison—no air conditioning, by the way—or the chance to avoid most, maybe all of it, if you could just give the police enough other names. Shields didn’t see any way that Mathis could get enough cases to get her sentence below nine years, though. “It wasn’t going to happen,” he said.

The result of this is that well-connected dealers walk while small fish like Mathis end up on the hook. For example, Reason‘s 2017 investigation described the case of Cynthia Powell, a 40-year-old grandmother who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for selling pills to an undercover police officer. Powell had also entered into a substantial assistance agreement with prosecutors but was unable to deliver.

Shields gave me the phone number for Benjamin Mathis, one of Theresa Mathis’ three sons. We talked several days after her funeral. That was the first time in 12 years that Benjamin had seen his mother. It was the first time Theresa Mathis’ grandchildren had ever seen her.

“We always worried about my mother and father,” he told me. “We just didn’t get to see them, because it wasn’t like they were incarcerated here where I can go visit them. It really ripped our family apart.”

Mathis described his mother as a good-hearted person, hard worker, born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan. She wasn’t into the drug scene, he said, but went down a bad path.

In prison, she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other lung ailments that led to difficulty breathing, but Mathis says she couldn’t get any treatment. She had just recently been approved for a transfer to another prison and, from what Mathis could gather from other inmates, was carrying her possessions out when she collapsed from an apparent heart attack.

“I feel like the prison itself killed her,” Mathis says. “If she was at home, staying with me, she would have been fine. She would have had a lot of the treatment.”

Mathis wonders if his mother had COVID-19, but he says the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC)  didn’t perform an autopsy. He doesn’t have the money to pay for one, or for a lawyer to sue the FDOC, so the exact causes and circumstances of her death will likely remain unknown.

Mathis shared texts and pictures he had been sent from other women who had been incarcerated with his mother. “I slept next to your mom for over a year,” one read. “I would hold her hand. The best soul in the world, feisty as can be, great spirit.”

Another message included a letter Theresa Mathis had sent on December 12. “I’m now 62 and COPD has gotten worse,” she wrote. “I’m struggling. To top it off they put me in the kitchen. Baby, I’m pressing forward.”

The shame of it all is that there is widespread acknowledgment that sentences like Mathis’ were a mistake.

In 2014, the Florida legislature increased the minimum weight thresholds that triggered the mandatory minimum sentences for opioid trafficking. However, those changes were not retroactive. They meant nothing for Mathis or the hundreds of other inmates who are still serving sentences that are no longer on the books. Bills were introduced to fix the situation for these inmates, but the legislation went nowhere, despite ceaseless lobbying from prisoner advocates and groups like FAMM, a nonprofit that opposes mandatory minimum sentences.

“I am heartbroken and nauseated by the thought of Theresa Mathis dying in a prison cell, and I hope her memory haunts every member of the Florida Legislature until they fix the stupid laws that kept her there unnecessarily,” says Greg Newburn, the Florida director of state policy for FAMM.

Some prosecutors’ offices around Florida have started to review old opioid sentences, including the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office, which handled Mathis’ case. Mathis had in fact recently received an application from the office to have her sentence reviewed. She would have been a prime candidate. 

But everything happened too late. The Florida legislature reduced the trafficking thresholds too late. Lawmakers dithered on making those changes retroactive. Prosecutors didn’t start second-guessing the wisdom of warehousing first-time drug offenders until it was too late. The mail was too late.

There are hundreds of other opioid offenders still serving outdated opioid trafficking sentences in Florida prisons, though. One of them is Benjamin Mathis’ father, who was sentenced along with Theresa Mathis.

“He’s still in prison, and I just want to iterate how important it is to try to get him home,” Mathis says.

If lawmakers need convincing, I have a letter I can forward. I believe it belongs to them.

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After Brexit, Good News for Free Trade in the U.K.

Remainers

“Out and into the world” was the Spectator‘s headline on June 23, 2016, the day of the Brexit referendum. The cover showed Britain as a bright butterfly emerging from a small European Union-branded box.

I mention that headline for two reasons. First because, if I were an American, I might easily have formed the impression that Brexit was the U.K.’s version of Trumpism—nostalgic, nativist, and protectionist. This view, propagated by both supporters and opponents of Trump, finds almost hysterical expression in the pages of The New York Times, which runs regular features about what a racist hellhole Britain has become.

In fact, every libertarian I know (with one eccentric exception) voted Leave. We clocked the E.U. a long time ago for what it was: a dirigiste, corporatist, authoritarian racket. A

 condition of Britain joining was that we had to abandon free trade with more distant countries—notably those in the Commonwealth, such as Canada and Jamaica, which had previously enjoyed largely unrestricted access to our markets. During the 1970s, we were obliged to apply the Common External Tariff in phases and, with it, the various non-tariff barriers designed to prop up politically connected Continental industries.

A consequence of leaving is that we can now trade freely with every continent—including, naturally, Europe. This brings me to the second reason for recalling the butterfly: Britain has, as I write, signed a staggering 63 new trade deals, including one with the European Union.

This was not in the Remainer script. Campaigners who wanted to remain in the E.U. believed Britain outside of it was supposed to be feebler and more introverted. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, spent the referendum campaign talking about a high-seas, buccaneering Britain, but the other side, convinced that the only possible reason to vote Leave was hostility to immigration, never heard him.

Boris meant what he said. Last year, at the maritime museum in Greenwich, he made the most free market speech that I have heard from a mainstream politician. Brexit, as he saw it, was a chance for the country that gave the world Adam Smith and David Ricardo to recover its global vocation: “Humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely.”

Four weeks after that speech, the world locked down in response to the coronavirus. Bizarrely enough, the terrors predicted by Remainers thus came to pass, albeit not for the reason they expected. Britain did indeed suffer a recession, rising unemployment, and closed borders. 

Although the lockdowns asphyxiated economic activity and caused global trade volumes to plummet, there is every reason to be optimistic about Brexit. The deal that Britain has secured with the E.U. gives it what it wanted all along—and what Remainers always said was impossible—namely free trade without political union. Rather than accepting E.U. rules in exchange for preferential access, as former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May wanted, Johnson insisted on full regulatory autonomy. This means that some service industries will face new barriers when selling into the E.U., but their eyes are already turning to more distant horizons. In any case, free traders understand that barriers always do the most harm to the country (or customs union) that imposes them. There is something mercantilist, almost pre-modern, about the E.U.’s decision to view opening its markets as a favor to selected allies rather than as a growth strategy.

Some of Britain’s other 62 trade deals temporarily confirm existing arrangements, with a promise to be more comprehensive when time allows. Others, such as that with Japan, go further than the E.U. did. A few, notably Australia and New Zealand, are new, in the sense that Brussels has no deals with those countries.

Britain is also applying to join the Pacific trade bloc, the CPTPP—something the U.S. might want to reconsider. True, the U.K. is not a Pacific country (other than in the technical sense of owning Pitcairn) but we have exceptionally close ties with a number of existing members, including Australia, Singapore, and Canada. At the same time, the U.K. is negotiating with India, South America’s Mercosur trade bloc, and the Gulf monarchies.

Britain’s most important talks, though, are with the U.S., our chief trading partner and biggest investor. A North Atlantic trade deal would have happened decades ago had it not been for the E.U.’s protectionism, especially in agriculture. 

Voters are rarely enthusiastic for free trade, especially at a time like this, when their psychology have been impacted by the epidemic, making them warier and more inward-looking. But, for years to come, economic recovery is going to be the supreme policy goal. An ambitious U.S.-U.K. trade deal is the most obvious lever to pull.

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After Brexit, Good News for Free Trade in the U.K.

Remainers

“Out and into the world” was the Spectator‘s headline on June 23, 2016, the day of the Brexit referendum. The cover showed Britain as a bright butterfly emerging from a small European Union-branded box.

I mention that headline for two reasons. First because, if I were an American, I might easily have formed the impression that Brexit was the U.K.’s version of Trumpism—nostalgic, nativist, and protectionist. This view, propagated by both supporters and opponents of Trump, finds almost hysterical expression in the pages of The New York Times, which runs regular features about what a racist hellhole Britain has become.

In fact, every libertarian I know (with one eccentric exception) voted Leave. We clocked the E.U. a long time ago for what it was: a dirigiste, corporatist, authoritarian racket. A

 condition of Britain joining was that we had to abandon free trade with more distant countries—notably those in the Commonwealth, such as Canada and Jamaica, which had previously enjoyed largely unrestricted access to our markets. During the 1970s, we were obliged to apply the Common External Tariff in phases and, with it, the various non-tariff barriers designed to prop up politically connected Continental industries.

A consequence of leaving is that we can now trade freely with every continent—including, naturally, Europe. This brings me to the second reason for recalling the butterfly: Britain has, as I write, signed a staggering 63 new trade deals, including one with the European Union.

This was not in the Remainer script. Campaigners who wanted to remain in the E.U. believed Britain outside of it was supposed to be feebler and more introverted. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, spent the referendum campaign talking about a high-seas, buccaneering Britain, but the other side, convinced that the only possible reason to vote Leave was hostility to immigration, never heard him.

Boris meant what he said. Last year, at the maritime museum in Greenwich, he made the most free market speech that I have heard from a mainstream politician. Brexit, as he saw it, was a chance for the country that gave the world Adam Smith and David Ricardo to recover its global vocation: “Humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely.”

Four weeks after that speech, the world locked down in response to the coronavirus. Bizarrely enough, the terrors predicted by Remainers thus came to pass, albeit not for the reason they expected. Britain did indeed suffer a recession, rising unemployment, and closed borders. 

Although the lockdowns asphyxiated economic activity and caused global trade volumes to plummet, there is every reason to be optimistic about Brexit. The deal that Britain has secured with the E.U. gives it what it wanted all along—and what Remainers always said was impossible—namely free trade without political union. Rather than accepting E.U. rules in exchange for preferential access, as former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May wanted, Johnson insisted on full regulatory autonomy. This means that some service industries will face new barriers when selling into the E.U., but their eyes are already turning to more distant horizons. In any case, free traders understand that barriers always do the most harm to the country (or customs union) that imposes them. There is something mercantilist, almost pre-modern, about the E.U.’s decision to view opening its markets as a favor to selected allies rather than as a growth strategy.

Some of Britain’s other 62 trade deals temporarily confirm existing arrangements, with a promise to be more comprehensive when time allows. Others, such as that with Japan, go further than the E.U. did. A few, notably Australia and New Zealand, are new, in the sense that Brussels has no deals with those countries.

Britain is also applying to join the Pacific trade bloc, the CPTPP—something the U.S. might want to reconsider. True, the U.K. is not a Pacific country (other than in the technical sense of owning Pitcairn) but we have exceptionally close ties with a number of existing members, including Australia, Singapore, and Canada. At the same time, the U.K. is negotiating with India, South America’s Mercosur trade bloc, and the Gulf monarchies.

Britain’s most important talks, though, are with the U.S., our chief trading partner and biggest investor. A North Atlantic trade deal would have happened decades ago had it not been for the E.U.’s protectionism, especially in agriculture. 

Voters are rarely enthusiastic for free trade, especially at a time like this, when their psychology have been impacted by the epidemic, making them warier and more inward-looking. But, for years to come, economic recovery is going to be the supreme policy goal. An ambitious U.S.-U.K. trade deal is the most obvious lever to pull.

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