Category: reason

The most positive aspect of President Donald Trump’s legacy is his administration’s success at slowing the growth of federal regulations. It’s also perhaps his most fragile.

During his first days in office, incoming President Joe Biden is planning to sign “dozens of executive orders, presidential memoranda” which will involve rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, expanding wilderness protections, and moving the country toward a 100 percent “clean energy” economy.

In order to facilitate this flurry of presidential activity, Biden will also need to take aim at Trump’s executive orders that attempted to account for the costs of new regulations and limited the number of new rules which could be imposed.

“The priority of the Trump administration has been to reduce regulatory burdens,” says James Broughel, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “The Biden administration is going to want to issue lots of new regulations. That’s a near certainty. We’re going from an era where reducing burdens was the goal to where burdens will be added in the name of achieving certain social goals.”

The guiding light of the Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts was Executive Order 13771. That 2017 order instituted the famous rule that regulators issue two deregulatory actions for every new regulatory action. It also created a system of accounting for the costs of new regulations and the cost savings of deregulatory actions. This was used to give federal departments regulatory budgets that limited the costs of new regulations they could impose, and often required them to find regulatory savings.

Using this measurement of regulatory savings, the Trump administration has been modestly successful at its goal of deregulating the economy, claiming $198 billion in eliminated regulatory costs. From fiscal years 2017–2019, the administration claims to have eliminated 3.6 rules for every new rule added. That ratio is 3.2 for fiscal year 2020.

Using other measurements, the Trump administration has been less successful. In some areas, they’ve done more to slow the growth of the administrative state without significantly reducing it. The length of the Code of Federal Regulations stayed essentially flat during Trump’s time in office, hovering at around 185,000 pages. The Mercatus Center’s tracker of restrictive words in the federal regulatory code comes to a similar result, finding that these words grew from 1.08 million at the beginning of Trump’s term to 1.09 million as of January 1, 2021.

Trump “leaves us with fewer regulations than Hillary Clinton would have—though not many fewer regulations than we had before,” summarizes Robert Verbruggen in a November National Review article.

One can expect this limited progress to be more than reversed under the new administration. Biden has already announced plans to reinstate Obama-era regulations that were pared back by the Trump administration.

Politico reports that he’ll likely try to revive the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan—which regulated carbon dioxide emissions from power plants—that the Trump administration had replaced in 2019. Biden’s housing platform calls for a revival of the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule that Trump gutted in July 2020. The Trump administration’s replacement of the Obama administration’s clean water rules will also likely be ditched.

The incoming administration’s attempts to revive big Obama-era rules that Trump eliminated or scaled back will likely spark legal challenges. Biden will still have plenty of room to issue a steady stream of less significant regulations that typically don’t attract lawsuits.

In order to facilitate new rules, large and small, Biden will almost certainly rescind Executive Order 13771 and all the limits it imposed on new red tape.

“All the cost caps will probably be eliminated,” says Broughel, as will the regulatory budget the Trump administration used to account for the costs of new rules. Doing so would be a “slap in the face at trying to estimate the effects of the regulatory system.”

Nevertheless, the fact that the Trump administration was able to adopt a regulatory budget at all proves that it can be done. Other future administrations might be more able and willing to pick it up again.

“I suspect in some form the regulatory budget will come back,” says Broughel. “The Trump administration showed that it was workable.”

Throughout his presidential campaign, Biden promised Americans a return to normalcy after the unusual, often unsettling administration of Donald Trump. There could be nothing more normal than the federal government issuing a steady stream of red tape without bothering to account for its costs.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/35Y9DYP
via IFTTT

With inauguration less than 24 hours away, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward,  Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch discuss what they would like to see happen in the new Biden administration vs. what will most likely transpire.

Discussed in the show:

1:21: Inauguration speeches and security theater.

17:31: Joe Biden’s $1.9 Trillion COVID relief package and eviction moratoriums.

33:14: The $15 minimum wage

44:17: Trump’s parting pardons

56:19: Media recommendations of the week.

Other Links:

“The Last Thing We Need Is Another War on Terror” by Spencer Ackerman

“Biden’s $1.9 Trillion COVID Relief Package Includes More Stimulus Checks, State Government Bailout, $15 Federal Minimum Wage” by Eric Boehm

“The Year Teachers Unions Killed the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg” by Matt Welch

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com and be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsor: Get an up-close look at the history of the Constitution with the Institute for Justice’s new podcast, Bound by Oath. Available wherever you check out podcasts.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: “Angeline” by The Brothers Steve.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3sIrCw0
via IFTTT

Pacific Legal Foundation’s Center for the Separation of Powers and George Mason University’s Liberty & Law Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School seek papers for a
State Judicial Deference Research Roundtable, to be held in late August or early
September 2021, in Arlington, VA, or virtually. [For full details, click this link]

Possible topics include:

1. What impact has eliminating and/or limiting deference had on the success rate of litigants challenging government action (i.e., does the government lose more often without or with limited deference doctrines)?
2. Has eliminating and/or limiting deference had a measurable impact on the regulatory burdens that citizens in those states experience?
3. In states that have eliminated deference, have agencies been measurably hampered in their ability to regulate and enforce their regulations?
4. What economic impacts have there been from the elimination or limitation of judicial deference, if any?
5. Do 1–4 above differ based on whether a state eliminated or limited deference through judicial decision or political means?
6. Has eliminating deference had any impact on the legislative process in these states?
7. What reasons have courts, legislators, or public policy groups given in favor of or  against the elimination of deference in the states? How is this reasoning and rhetoric similar or different from the debate concerning federal deference?
8. What impact has the elimination of deference had on the precedential value of decisions that relied on deference.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3o0Muv9
via IFTTT

I blogged previously here about the case of Hoda Muthana, who was born in the United States and later joined ISIS in Syria. In a unanimous decision issued today, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against her when it upheld the district court’s decision below that had denied her citizenship claim.

Judge Rao argued that because the U.S. government was not notified of the loss of diplomatic status for Muthana’s father before her birth, Hoda Muthana did not attain citizenship by virtue of her birth on American soil. Even though the U.S. government treated Muthana as a citizen from at least 2005 (when it issued her first passport) until 2016 (when it cancelled her then-current passport, claiming that she had been issued a passport in error), the circuit court refused to grant equitable relief.

“The Executive has no authority to confer citizenship on Hoda outside of the naturalization rules created by Congress. Nor do the courts have an equitable power to grant citizenship,” Judge Rao wrote in her opinion in a rather conclusory manner. My coauthor Cassandra Robertson and I have explained in our work, most recently in our forthcoming article Inalienable Citizenship here, why this is incorrect.

Notably, Judge Rao relies almost exclusively on citations to INS v. Pangilinan and Fedorenko v. United States to rule against equitable relief. The Pangilinan case, however, involved individuals for whom the government had never recognized citizenship claims and who wanted to be made citizens via judicial declaration. The government did, however, recognize Muthana as a citizen–for at least eleven years.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court in Fedorenko focused on the idea that “district courts lack equitable discretion to refrain from entering a judgment of denaturalization against a naturalized citizen whose citizenship was procured illegally or by willful misrepresentation of material facts.” The government never argued that Muthana’s citizenship was obtained via bad faith. Indeed, her father could have sought out naturalization for her like he did for his younger children if the government had ever flagged a problem as to Muthana’s status.

Both Pangilinan and Fedorenko are thus distinguishable, and the D.C. Circuit should have engaged in more thorough analysis if it wanted to dispel Muthana’s equitable claims. The judicial outcome in her case is both disappointing and unjust, and the current composition of the Supreme Court provides low odds of the case being granted certiorari.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3oZp22t
via IFTTT

A Florida man who had fought in a Kurdish militia against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and helped rescue a shooting victim in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) was arrested on Friday for allegedly threatening Inauguration Day violence against Trump supporters at Florida’s state capitol.

The case strangely touches on many corners of American life, from the U.S. military interventions in the Middle East to the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked American cities last summer. It is also part of a cycle of political revenge and government crackdowns that may continue long after the 2020 presidential election.

“Armed racist mobs have planted the Confederate flag in the nations Capitol [sic] while announcing their plans to storm every American state Capitol on or around inauguration day. We will fight back,” Tallahassee activist Daniel Alan Baker wrote under his own name in the description to a now-deleted Facebook event, which he promoted with physical fliers and a YouTube video. “We will circle the state Capitol and let them fight the cops and take the building. Then we will encircle them and trap them inside. We will drive them out of Tallahassee with every caliber available.”

The author of the alleged threat is a veteran of the war against ISIS—but he didn’t fight for the U.S. military.

Baker had joined the U.S. Army in 2006, but went AWOL in 2007 before his unit was set to deploy to Iraq, according to the FBI’s criminal complaint. He was then homeless over the next decade, taking occasional jobs as a security guard.

In 2017, Baker joined an anti-ISIS rebel force in Syria known as the YPG, which stands for “People’s Protection Units” in the Kurdish language, the FBI claimed.

The YPG, now part of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), had taken in hundreds of foreign volunteers as it liberated northeastern Syria from ISIS. Baker served as a combat sniper, and even appeared in an Emmy Award-winning VICE News documentary about ISIS’s last stand in March 2019.

In the documentary, Baker leads part of a retreat under fire, helping save his fellow fighters and VICE journalist Aris Roussinos as ISIS militants overrun their outpost.

“Yeah! That’s our boys,” Baker hollers at the sound of a fighter jet from the U.S.-led military coalition. “OK, now’s the time to go!”

The YPG is also an enemy of Turkey. Turkish forces attacked the YPG in October 2019, six months after Baker had returned to the United States.

Baker allegedly wanted to take matters into his own hands. Multiple people told the FBI that he intended to find Turkish military pilots who were training at U.S. bases and “kill or mutilate them,” Special Agent Nicholas Marti wrote in an affidavit.

“The [SDF] is an ally of the United States and its forces have fought with the U.S. military in Syria against ISIS. As a rule, the SDF does not target civilians,” said a source close to the SDF. “It opposes violence of any kind against civilians, men, women and children. The SDF is not associated in any way with Mr. Baker.  He is not an SDF fighter.”

No attacks on Turkish pilots ever came to fruition, and Baker soon threw himself into a different struggle.

In mid-2020, protests against the police murder of George Floyd sparked unrest across the U.S. Baker traveled to Black Lives Matter protests around the country. He also picked up a reputation for aggressive online commentary.

“A number of us YPG volunteers warned Baker about his rhetoric online and how it could reflect negatively on the rest of us and the YPG,” said Joshua Bailey, another American veteran of the Kurdish fighting force.

The Turkish government and the Trump administration have both tried to connect left-wing political violence in the United States to returning YPG veterans, with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan arguing that “those behind the recent violence and looting during protests in the U.S. are working with the YPG” and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security drawing a link “between ANTIFA ideology and Kurdish democratic federalism teachings.”

Black Lives Matter protests eventually led to the creation of Seattle’s CHAZ, also known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), a police-free area occupied by anarchists and other activists. Baker came to the CHAZ/CHOP to volunteer as a medic.

On June 30, 2020, tragedy struck the protest zone. Vigilantes shot two black teenagers in an SUV, killing 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. It was the second deadly shooting in 10 days at the CHAZ/CHOP.

A video posted to Baker’s YouTube channel shows him helping the victims of the incident, even though Baker later claimed on Twitter that the victims had first “pulled guns and knives and beat ass [sic] and started driving around shooting.”

It remains unclear whether that is true.

In the video, Baker is startled by the sound of gunshots. He walks toward the noise, and finds a crowd shouting around an SUV with its windows blown out. Baker helps move the two victims (who are not visible) across the bloodstained ground to a waiting car, which takes them to the hospital.

Seattle police cleared out the CHAZ/CHOP soon after.

Baker told a journalist what his takeaway was in October 2020: “If they really wanted a revolution, we needed to get AK’s and start making bombs.”

His tone became much more frantic after the 2020 election. Baker made several posts on Facebook and Instagram warning that President Donald Trump would incite a military coup or civil war, according to the FBI’s affidavit.

Baker’s fears seemed to be at least partially confirmed on January 6, when a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in hopes of overturning the election results.

“Many of us are also sharing anxiety over and deeply concerned about recent events in the Capitol,” emphasized Bailey, the other YPG veteran, but the “overwhelming majority of YPG volunteers don’t hold accelerationist views, especially in light of what we have seen in the Syrian civil war.”

Baker’s brushes with violence in Syria and Seattle, however, did not seem to have turned him off from political violence.

Baker posted a series of YouTube videos about the “terrorists” at the Capitol, including one offering money to help identify them. On Tuesday, he posted the call to arms that got him arrested.

And he made a chilling prediction in a private Facebook post, according to the FBI’s affidavit.

“Aw, it’s yalls [sic] first civil war!” Baker allegedly wrote.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/38YsuoA
via IFTTT