Category: reason

Impeaching Trump for his Role in Inciting the Attack on the Capitol Doesn’t Violate “Established Free Speech Rights””

Impeachment
President Andrew Johnson.

 

In a recent post, co-blogger Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman double down on their earlier claim that impeaching and convicting Donald Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol would violate his First Amendment rights. They recognize that the Senate isn’t necessarily bound by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on this topic. But they continue to insist that conviction would go against “established First Amendment rights.”

In reality, it would do no such thing. As critics like Jonathan Adler, Andrew Koppelman, and myself pointed out in response to Blackman and Tillman’s earlier post, established First Amendment law does not protect high government officials from being removed from their positions based on their speech. If it did, Trump would have violated the First Amendment himself on each of the many occasions when he fired a cabinet member or other high-ranking subordinate for expressing views the president didn’t like. And if officials can be removed from their positions for such reasons, there is equally no First Amendment constraint on using the Senate’s power to bar impeached and convicted officials from holding office in the future.

In my earlier post on this topic, I also noted some absurd and dangerous consequences of adopting the Blackman-Tillman position, and addressed concerns that my own view could lead to a dangerous slippery slope of its own.

In their most recent piece, Blackman and Tillman fail to address the fundamental flaw in their position pointed out by critics. But they do try to buttress their argument by citing the precedent of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. They are right to point out that one of the eleven articles of impeachment against Johnson targeted speeches in which he “attempt[ed] to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof.” And it is also true that some of the senators who voted to acquit claimed that conviction on this article would violate Johnson’s First Amendment rights.

But I am skeptical that this does much to help Blackman and Tillman’s defense of Trump against impeachment today. As they also point out, many other members of Congress rejected the position that Johnson’s First Amendment rights would be violated in any way by conviction. And this group is, on the whole, a far more impressive one than the coalition of white supremacist Democrats and sometimes corrupt Republicans who just barely managed to get Johnson acquitted (the 35-19 vote for conviction was just one short of the 2/3 majority required).

As Blackman and Tillman note, the pro-impeachment camp included such luminaries as Senator Charles Sumner (a longtime leader of the antislavery constitutional movement whose ideas underpinned the Reconstruction Amendment), and Rep. John Bingham, perhaps the single most important framer of the Fourteenth Amendment. If we’re going to reason based on authority and precedent, I’ll take Bingham and Sumner over Johnson’s defenders any day of the week.

More generally, the narrow acquittal of Johnson is no longer seen in the positive light that many viewed it from the late 19th century to the mid-twentieth (when John F. Kennedy praised it in his book Profiles in Courage). Today, many (though, of course, not all) historians and legal scholars recognize that Johnson actually deserved to be convicted because of his efforts to sabotage Reconstruction and maintain white supremacy in the post-Civil War South. This was the broader issue underlying the specific details of the charges against him. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed, author of a  biography of Johnson has a helpful summary:

The confrontation between Johnson and the men who wanted to remove him from office, the so-called Radical Republicans, was a fight over the future direction of the United States; a fight with implications that reverberate to this day. Johnson’s real crime in the eyes of opponents was that he had used the power of the presidency to prevent Congress from giving aid to the four million African-Americans freed after the Civil War. Johnson’s deep antipathy toward black people, not his view of the Constitution, guided his actions…

Johnson had opposed slavery because he thought it hurt the class of poor whites from which he had come. Blacks were to be freed but left to the mercy of white Southerners. His plan of action—to put whites back in charge in the South—set him on a collision course with the Radical Republicans, who believed that the South must be transformed to incorporate blacks into American society as equals….

Johnson opposed congressional measures adopted to try to help African-Americans become productive members of society with the dignity accorded to whites. He opposed black suffrage, land reform and efforts to protect blacks against the violence that Southern whites unleashed upon them after the war’s end.

Johnson had repeatedly used his powers as president to undermine congressional efforts to protect the rights of recently freed slaves and other blacks in the South. His apparent violations of the Tenure of Office Act (the immediate target of most of the impeachment articles) were part of an effort to replace officials willing to implement Congress’ laws with ones he hoped would be inclined to support his own efforts to sabotage them. Whether or not he violated a specific valid law (Johnson’s defenders claimed the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional, a view eventually backed by the Supreme Court in 1926), Johnson had grossly abused his powers and richly deserved to be removed from office (for good discussions of the reasons why impeachment for technically legal abuses of power is permissible, see analyses by  Keith Whittington  and prominent conservative legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen).

This doesn’t mean every single article of impeachment lodged against Johnson was justified. In my view, Article 10 (the one focused on his speech) was weak, and probably deserved to be rejected; in the end the Senate did not even vote on it. But Johnson’s statements attacking Congress were much less dangerous and egregious than Trump’s more recent ones. Among other key differences, Johnson’s remarks were not made to a crowd with lots of known violent elements that were about to march on the Capitol; they also didn’t come in the aftermath of a long history of justifying and praising violence by his supporters.

Be that as it may, the acquittal of Andrew Johnson was not a valuable precedent to be followed, but a shameful episode in American history, where Congress let a malevolent president get away with egregious abuses of power. It should not be used to help another malicious president get off the hook today.

 

 

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

cnpphotos198726

President-elect Joe Biden called Thursday night for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package that will include another round of relief checks for most Americans, a bailout for state and local governments, boosted unemployment payments, and a higher federal minimum wage.

The package is the first part of what Biden called a two-step plan to get America through the rest of the pandemic. The second part will be the centerpiece of Biden’s first State of the Union address, scheduled for next month.

Biden’s proposals combine elements of last year’s COVID-19 bills with some Democratic priorities that didn’t make the cut. Biden will have slim Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but he stressed the need for bipartisan support on a spending package that he described as a response to a “crisis of deep human suffering.”

“During this pandemic, millions of Americans, through no fault of their own, have lost the dignity of a job and a paycheck,” Biden said. “It’s tested us beyond measure.”

About half the total cost of the proposal is aimed at households and unemployed workers. Biden wants Congress to approve $1,400 checks—on top of the $600 that individuals who earned less than $87,000 in 2019 received this month, as well as the $1,200 payments approved as part of the first COVID stimulus bill Congress passed in March 2020. It is unclear if there will be income cut-offs for the new payments, but Biden said he would push Congress to include adult dependents (such as college students) in the payments to households, even though they had been excluded from the $600 payments that Congress approved last month.

According to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for balanced budgets, the new round of direct payments would cost $465 billion. Biden also called for Congress to expand the federal child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child, which would reduce federal revenue by about $120 billion per year.

Another major element of Biden’s plan is a $400-per-month federal supplement to state unemployment payments, which will continue through September. That comes with a price tag of $350 billion.

Biden is also proposing $170 billion to assist in reopening schools and a $350 billion bailout of state and local governments. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Those last two details may be the most contentious details. Democrats pushed for a similar bailout in earlier negotiations over COVID stimulus bills, but Senate Republicans blocked them. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority once the winners of two Georgia run-off elections are sworn-in, but the case for a state bailout remains shaky.

Democrats may still need Republican votes for much of Biden’s plan. The reconciliation process could be used to amend existing tax and budget matters with a simple majority vote in the Senate—perhaps to do something like adjusting the amount of the child tax credit—but relief checks and a state government bailout will likely require 60 votes.

That may also explain why some other Democratic priorities, such as the restoration of the state and local tax deduction (the “SALT” deduction), are not included in the package Biden outlined Thursday. The abolition of the SALT deduction was a major element of the tax overhaul passed by Republicans in 2017, and undoing that would likely cost Biden any shot at GOP support for this proposal.

The big unanswered question is how Biden plans to pay for it all. Thanks to years of poor budgeting and overzealous spending by Congress and President Donald Trump, America faces a $3 trillion budget deficit and a national debt that’s zooming towards $30 trillion. An additional $1.9 trillion will only add to the nation’s already overburdened credit card.

Biden did not address plans for spending offsets or tax increases in his speech. An unnamed Biden official told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the president-elect did not believe now was the time for worrying about widening budget deficits and that Biden’s focus was on the more immediate emergency.

Previously, Biden has indicated that he will push for higher taxes on corporations and on individuals making more than $400,000 annually.

In the coming days, Biden intends to outline his plans for a national vaccination effort, including an ambitious goal to deliver 100 million vaccinations during the new administration’s first 100 days. To the extent that Biden can in fact streamline the process and get more shots in more arms, that’s welcome. So too is a push to reopen the schools as soon as possible. And targeted relief for unemployed workers will help people harmed by the pandemic and by the government-imposed lockdowns it inspired.

But near-universal $1,400 checks are not good policy, no matter how popular they might be. States and local governments have the ability to make their own taxing and spending decisions and should not expect or require federal aid—and certainly not when the federal government is in such dire fiscal straits on its own. And ambitious plans to increase social spending and hike wages that don’t have anything to do with the pandemic should be considered separately.

Congress should scrutinize each element of Biden’s “part one” relief plan, and pass only the proposals that will directly and immediately help to end the pandemic or relieve its effects.

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Impeaching Trump for his Role in Inciting the Attack on the Capitol Doesn’t Violate “Established Free Speech Rights””

Impeachment
President Andrew Johnson.

 

In a recent post, co-blogger Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman double down on their earlier claim that impeaching and convicting Donald Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol would violate his First Amendment rights. They recognize that the Senate isn’t necessarily bound by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on this topic. But they continue to insist that conviction would go against “established First Amendment rights.”

In reality, it would do no such thing. As critics like Jonathan Adler, Andrew Koppelman, and myself pointed out in response to Blackman and Tillman’s earlier post, established First Amendment law does not protect high government officials from being removed from their positions based on their speech. If it did, Trump would have violated the First Amendment himself on each of the many occasions when he fired a cabinet member or other high-ranking subordinate for expressing views the president didn’t like. And if officials can be removed from their positions for such reasons, there is equally no First Amendment constraint on using the Senate’s power to bar impeached and convicted officials from holding office in the future.

In my earlier post on this topic, I also noted some absurd and dangerous consequences of adopting the Blackman-Tillman position, and addressed concerns that my own view could lead to a dangerous slippery slope of its own.

In their most recent piece, Blackman and Tillman fail to address the fundamental flaw in their position pointed out by critics. But they do try to buttress their argument by citing the precedent of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. They are right to point out that one of the eleven articles of impeachment against Johnson targeted speeches in which he “attempt[ed] to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof.” And it is also true that some of the senators who voted to acquit claimed that conviction on this article would violate Johnson’s First Amendment rights.

But I am skeptical that this does much to help Blackman and Tillman’s defense of Trump against impeachment today. As they also point out, many other members of Congress rejected the position that Johnson’s First Amendment rights would be violated in any way by conviction. And this group is, on the whole, a far more impressive one than the coalition of white supremacist Democrats and sometimes corrupt Republicans who just barely managed to get Johnson acquitted (the 35-19 vote for conviction was just one short of the 2/3 majority required).

As Blackman and Tillman note, the pro-impeachment camp included such luminaries as Senator Charles Sumner (a longtime leader of the antislavery constitutional movement whose ideas underpinned the Reconstruction Amendment), and Rep. John Bingham, perhaps the single most important framer of the Fourteenth Amendment. If we’re going to reason based on authority and precedent, I’ll take Bingham and Sumner over Johnson’s defenders any day of the week.

More generally, the narrow acquittal of Johnson is no longer seen in the positive light that many viewed it from the late 19th century to the mid-twentieth (when John F. Kennedy praised it in his book Profiles in Courage). Today, many (though, of course, not all) historians and legal scholars recognize that Johnson actually deserved to be convicted because of his efforts to sabotage Reconstruction and maintain white supremacy in the post-Civil War South. This was the broader issue underlying the specific details of the charges against him. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed, author of a  biography of Johnson has a helpful summary:

The confrontation between Johnson and the men who wanted to remove him from office, the so-called Radical Republicans, was a fight over the future direction of the United States; a fight with implications that reverberate to this day. Johnson’s real crime in the eyes of opponents was that he had used the power of the presidency to prevent Congress from giving aid to the four million African-Americans freed after the Civil War. Johnson’s deep antipathy toward black people, not his view of the Constitution, guided his actions…

Johnson had opposed slavery because he thought it hurt the class of poor whites from which he had come. Blacks were to be freed but left to the mercy of white Southerners. His plan of action—to put whites back in charge in the South—set him on a collision course with the Radical Republicans, who believed that the South must be transformed to incorporate blacks into American society as equals….

Johnson opposed congressional measures adopted to try to help African-Americans become productive members of society with the dignity accorded to whites. He opposed black suffrage, land reform and efforts to protect blacks against the violence that Southern whites unleashed upon them after the war’s end.

Johnson had repeatedly used his powers as president to undermine congressional efforts to protect the rights of recently freed slaves and other blacks in the South. His apparent violations of the Tenure of Office Act (the immediate target of most of the impeachment articles) were part of an effort to replace officials willing to implement Congress’ laws with ones he hoped would be inclined to support his own efforts to sabotage them. Whether or not he violated a specific valid law (Johnson’s defenders claimed the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional, a view eventually backed by the Supreme Court in 1926), Johnson had grossly abused his powers and richly deserved to be removed from office (for good discussions of the reasons why impeachment for technically legal abuses of power is permissible, see analyses by  Keith Whittington  and prominent conservative legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen).

This doesn’t mean every single article of impeachment lodged against Johnson was justified. In my view, Article 10 (the one focused on his speech) was weak, and probably deserved to be rejected; in the end the Senate did not even vote on it. But Johnson’s statements attacking Congress were much less dangerous and egregious than Trump’s more recent ones. Among other key differences, Johnson’s remarks were not made to a crowd with lots of known violent elements that were about to march on the Capitol; they also didn’t come in the aftermath of a long history of justifying and praising violence by his supporters.

Be that as it may, the acquittal of Andrew Johnson was not a valuable precedent to be followed, but a shameful episode in American history, where Congress let a malevolent president get away with egregious abuses of power. It should not be used to help another malicious president get off the hook today.

 

 

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

cnpphotos198726

President-elect Joe Biden called Thursday night for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package that will include another round of relief checks for most Americans, a bailout for state and local governments, boosted unemployment payments, and a higher federal minimum wage.

The package is the first part of what Biden called a two-step plan to get America through the rest of the pandemic. The second part will be the centerpiece of Biden’s first State of the Union address, scheduled for next month.

Biden’s proposals combine elements of last year’s COVID-19 bills with some Democratic priorities that didn’t make the cut. Biden will have slim Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but he stressed the need for bipartisan support on a spending package that he described as a response to a “crisis of deep human suffering.”

“During this pandemic, millions of Americans, through no fault of their own, have lost the dignity of a job and a paycheck,” Biden said. “It’s tested us beyond measure.”

About half the total cost of the proposal is aimed at households and unemployed workers. Biden wants Congress to approve $1,400 checks—on top of the $600 that individuals who earned less than $87,000 in 2019 received this month, as well as the $1,200 payments approved as part of the first COVID stimulus bill Congress passed in March 2020. It is unclear if there will be income cut-offs for the new payments, but Biden said he would push Congress to include adult dependents (such as college students) in the payments to households, even though they had been excluded from the $600 payments that Congress approved last month.

According to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for balanced budgets, the new round of direct payments would cost $465 billion. Biden also called for Congress to expand the federal child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child, which would reduce federal revenue by about $120 billion per year.

Another major element of Biden’s plan is a $400-per-month federal supplement to state unemployment payments, which will continue through September. That comes with a price tag of $350 billion.

Biden is also proposing $170 billion to assist in reopening schools and a $350 billion bailout of state and local governments. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Those last two details may be the most contentious details. Democrats pushed for a similar bailout in earlier negotiations over COVID stimulus bills, but Senate Republicans blocked them. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority once the winners of two Georgia run-off elections are sworn-in, but the case for a state bailout remains shaky.

Democrats may still need Republican votes for much of Biden’s plan. The reconciliation process could be used to amend existing tax and budget matters with a simple majority vote in the Senate—perhaps to do something like adjusting the amount of the child tax credit—but relief checks and a state government bailout will likely require 60 votes.

That may also explain why some other Democratic priorities, such as the restoration of the state and local tax deduction (the “SALT” deduction), are not included in the package Biden outlined Thursday. The abolition of the SALT deduction was a major element of the tax overhaul passed by Republicans in 2017, and undoing that would likely cost Biden any shot at GOP support for this proposal.

The big unanswered question is how Biden plans to pay for it all. Thanks to years of poor budgeting and overzealous spending by Congress and President Donald Trump, America faces a $3 trillion budget deficit and a national debt that’s zooming towards $30 trillion. An additional $1.9 trillion will only add to the nation’s already overburdened credit card.

Biden did not address plans for spending offsets or tax increases in his speech. An unnamed Biden official told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the president-elect did not believe now was the time for worrying about widening budget deficits and that Biden’s focus was on the more immediate emergency.

Previously, Biden has indicated that he will push for higher taxes on corporations and on individuals making more than $400,000 annually.

In the coming days, Biden intends to outline his plans for a national vaccination effort, including an ambitious goal to deliver 100 million vaccinations during the new administration’s first 100 days. To the extent that Biden can in fact streamline the process and get more shots in more arms, that’s welcome. So too is a push to reopen the schools as soon as possible. And targeted relief for unemployed workers will help people harmed by the pandemic and by the government-imposed lockdowns it inspired.

But near-universal $1,400 checks are not good policy, no matter how popular they might be. States and local governments have the ability to make their own taxing and spending decisions and should not expect or require federal aid—and certainly not when the federal government is in such dire fiscal straits on its own. And ambitious plans to increase social spending and hike wages that don’t have anything to do with the pandemic should be considered separately.

Congress should scrutinize each element of Biden’s “part one” relief plan, and pass only the proposals that will directly and immediately help to end the pandemic or relieve its effects.

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On the Appeal of Trump to Trump fFans

I’ve been mystified for the last five-plus years as to what his fans find attractive about Trump. I’m not talking about people who think of him as the lesser evil to a Democratic administration, but people who wholeheartedly support him.

I almost never like any politician, so I’m not the best person to address this issue, and to some extent the appeal of political celebrities is always going to be a somewhat mysterious product of visceral emotion. (Why did so many American celebrities and intellectuals fall for Fidel Castro? Beats me.)

But I had a recent epiphany: there is a large segment of American society, maybe 15-20%, that has not had a president who represents their basic worldview for decades. These folks tend to be white, exurban or rural, believe in religious tradition and cultural conservatism without being regular church-goers, very patriotic, very pro-military, hostile to immigration and free trade, skeptical of big business, big government, and establishment experts, and in favor of entitlement programs and the safety net. Gannett or some similar media outfit profiled them well a couple of decades ago, but I can’t find a link.

Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan appealed to this demographic to a large extent. Beyond that, the only major national figure I can think of in my lifetime who more or less represented them was George Wallace.

So along comes Trump who appeals to this constituency almost perfectly. Sure, he’s a rich New Yorker, but his outer-borough accent and mentality, scorned by the elite, reminds people that their own regional accents are also scorned by the elite.

This constituency used to be divided between Republicans and Democrats, which is one reason they lacked influence on presidential nominees, but they have shifted to be heavily Republican, which gave them a lot of influence on the nominating process in 2020, and they chose Trump.

Trump, to almost everyone’s surprise, wins. So how do big government, big business, elite experts and so on, i.e., the establishment, react, from his fans’ perspective? Without even giving Trump a chance, they decree that he is illegitimate, that he needs to be resisted, and that his voters are beyond redemption; “this is 1932 in Germany” was not a rare reaction.

So, from these voters’ perspective, the one time in their lifetimes and much longer a president comes around who really speaks to their worldview, the establishment tries to destroy him. Rather than the anti-Trump sentiment persuading them, it makes them stronger supporters, people who see Trump as their weapon against an establishment that disparages them.

Now, while I never joined “the resistance,” I was a never-Trumper, and my perspective is much closer to the establishment’s than to Trump fans. But this intellectual exercise wasn’t an attempt to figure out whether I got Trump wrong, but to try to understand why his fans have been so supportive. I’m sure my explanation is at best only a partial one, but I think it is at least a partial one.

 

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On the Appeal of Trump to Trump fFans

I’ve been mystified for the last five-plus years as to what his fans find attractive about Trump. I’m not talking about people who think of him as the lesser evil to a Democratic administration, but people who wholeheartedly support him.

I almost never like any politician, so I’m not the best person to address this issue, and to some extent the appeal of political celebrities is always going to be a somewhat mysterious product of visceral emotion. (Why did so many American celebrities and intellectuals fall for Fidel Castro? Beats me.)

But I had a recent epiphany: there is a large segment of American society, maybe 15-20%, that has not had a president who represents their basic worldview for decades. These folks tend to be white, exurban or rural, believe in religious tradition and cultural conservatism without being regular church-goers, very patriotic, very pro-military, hostile to immigration and free trade, skeptical of big business, big government, and establishment experts, and in favor of entitlement programs and the safety net. Gannett or some similar media outfit profiled them well a couple of decades ago, but I can’t find a link.

Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan appealed to this demographic to a large extent. Beyond that, the only major national figure I can think of in my lifetime who more or less represented them was George Wallace.

So along comes Trump who appeals to this constituency almost perfectly. Sure, he’s a rich New Yorker, but his outer-borough accent and mentality, scorned by the elite, reminds people that their own regional accents are also scorned by the elite.

This constituency used to be divided between Republicans and Democrats, which is one reason they lacked influence on presidential nominees, but they have shifted to be heavily Republican, which gave them a lot of influence on the nominating process in 2020, and they chose Trump.

Trump, to almost everyone’s surprise, wins. So how do big government, big business, elite experts and so on, i.e., the establishment, react, from his fans’ perspective? Without even giving Trump a chance, they decree that he is illegitimate, that he needs to be resisted, and that his voters are beyond redemption; “this is 1932 in Germany” was not a rare reaction.

So, from these voters’ perspective, the one time in their lifetimes and much longer a president comes around who really speaks to their worldview, the establishment tries to destroy him. Rather than the anti-Trump sentiment persuading them, it makes them stronger supporters, people who see Trump as their weapon against an establishment that disparages them.

Now, while I never joined “the resistance,” I was a never-Trumper, and my perspective is much closer to the establishment’s than to Trump fans. But this intellectual exercise wasn’t an attempt to figure out whether I got Trump wrong, but to try to understand why his fans have been so supportive. I’m sure my explanation is at best only a partial one, but I think it is at least a partial one.

 

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Closing Bars and Restaurants Didn’t Stop People From Gathering

krtphotoslive876914

Banning indoor dining at bars and restaurants has failed to stop people from gathering together, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot admitted Thursday as she issued a call to reopen those establishments “as quickly as possible.”

It’s been nearly three months since Chicago ordered bars and restaurants to stop indoor service, but the ban has predictably failed to stop people from getting together. As the shutdowns devastated the city food service industry, they also created a black market for socialization. Lightfoot told a local CBS affiliate today that city officials now are seeking ways to cut down on private underground parties.

“People are engaging in risky behavior that is not only putting themselves at risk, but putting their families, their co-workers, and other ones at risk. Let’s bring it out of the shadows,” Lightfoot said. “Let’s allow them to have some recreation in restaurants, in bars, where we can actually work with responsible owners and managers to regulate and protect people from COVID-19.”

That is, of course, exactly what groups like the Illinois Restaurant Association and workers in the industry predicted would happen.

Whether Chicago’s bars and restaurants can reopen soon is not entirely up to the mayor. Under rules imposed by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, indoor dining is still banned statewide—though the Democratic governor has signaled that some other COVID-19 restrictions could be lifted soon.

Lightfoot’s comments echo this week’s acknowledgment by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that locking down bars and restaurants is not a sustainable strategy for dealing with COVID-19. As part of his state of the state address, Cuomo warned that New York “simply cannon stay closed” until herd immunity to the virus is achieved. “We will have nothing left to open,” the governor said. “We must reopen the economy, but we must do it smartly and safely.”

It turns out that shutting down wide swaths of the economy was neither smart nor safe. Even with the lockdowns, the United States is currently seeing record levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths. California and New York are experiencing the worst outbreaks despite have imposed some of the strictest rules.

Individuals and business owners have every incentive to take precautions. But people will judge their level of risk and act accordingly, no matter what the government tells them.

Bans on indoor dining have been popular since last fall, when public health experts fingered restaurants as particularly dangerous vectors for spreading COVID, based on a Centers for Disease Control study of COVID infections in 10 states.

But contact-tracing data released by the Cuomo administration in mid-December showed that just 1.4 percent of the state’s COVID cases in the previous three months were connected to bars and restaurants. In Minnesota, where both indoor and outdoor dining were banned for weeks during the holiday season (and where indoor dining was still off-limits until this week), only 1.7 percent of cases have been traced to restaurants.

In Los Angeles, city officials abruptly banned outdoor dining last month (indoor dining was already off the table), pulling the rug out from under restaurateurs who had spent significant sums of money retrofitting their facilities for outdoor-only service. Meanwhile, no evidence showed that outdoor dining was a serious health threat.

And as Chicago’s experience demonstrates, simply shutting bars and restaurants is no guarantee that people won’t get together to eat and drink. Indeed, since most restaurants are larger and better ventilated than your average urban apartment, it seems safer to let people gather there.

Lightfoot said Thursday that she will urge Pritzker to roll back the ban on indoor dining and that she believes business owners can enforce precautions such as mask-wearing and social distancing.

“I feel very strongly that we are very close to a point when we should be talking about opening up our bars and restaurants,” she said, according to CBS Chicago.

In fact, we’re long past that point. But it’s good to see some politicians catching up.

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No, AOC, It’s Not the Government’s Job to ‘Rein in Our Media’

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) told her social media followers earlier this week that Democrats in Congress might respond to the Capitol riot with some sort of “media literacy” initiative.

The phrase media literacy ordinarily implies helping individuals make sense of the media landscape, but AOC seems to have more in mind than that: She suggested “we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.”

It’s true that both traditional media and social media sometimes spread “disinformation and misinformation.” But the federal government has no formal role to play in suppressing its spread. The First Amendment explicitly bars Congress from infringing on freedom of the press or freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has recognized no exceptions for disinformation. If the government could ban disinformation, after all, it could use that as a cover for banning speech that is not actually false but merely critical of the government, or of specific politicians. Recall that Democrats swiftly denounced The New York Post‘s report on Hunter Biden’s foreign connections as “disinformation,” even though many underlying aspects of the story have since been confirmed.

Social media platforms are currently struggling with how to identify disinformation and what actions against it are appropriate. Certain subjects—such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election results—are aggressively policed, while other misleading content is left alone. Users have every right to criticize these decisions, but ultimately Twitter and Facebook are private companies with the right to set their own moderation policies. They can prohibit speech they define as misinformation. Congress can’t.

In suggesting a role for the government to regulate the media’s speech, AOC is echoing comments made by numerous right-wing figures—most notably President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called for changing libel laws to make it easier for maligned officials to sue the press. Trump has also made threats against newspapers for covering his presidency negatively. It’s critical that the law not be changed; the media must be free to vigorously criticize the president, Congress, or any other aspect of the government, even if the reporting is sometimes wrong or off-base. Similarly, addressing disinformation should be a job for private platforms and individual readers, not the government.

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Closing Bars and Restaurants Didn’t Stop People From Gathering

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Banning indoor dining at bars and restaurants has failed to stop people from gathering together, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot admitted Thursday as she issued a call to reopen those establishments “as quickly as possible.”

It’s been nearly three months since Chicago ordered bars and restaurants to stop indoor service, but the ban has predictably failed to stop people from getting together. As the shutdowns devastated the city food service industry, they also created a black market for socialization. Lightfoot told a local CBS affiliate today that city officials now are seeking ways to cut down on private underground parties.

“People are engaging in risky behavior that is not only putting themselves at risk, but putting their families, their co-workers, and other ones at risk. Let’s bring it out of the shadows,” Lightfoot said. “Let’s allow them to have some recreation in restaurants, in bars, where we can actually work with responsible owners and managers to regulate and protect people from COVID-19.”

That is, of course, exactly what groups like the Illinois Restaurant Association and workers in the industry predicted would happen.

Whether Chicago’s bars and restaurants can reopen soon is not entirely up to the mayor. Under rules imposed by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, indoor dining is still banned statewide—though the Democratic governor has signaled that some other COVID-19 restrictions could be lifted soon.

Lightfoot’s comments echo this week’s acknowledgment by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that locking down bars and restaurants is not a sustainable strategy for dealing with COVID-19. As part of his state of the state address, Cuomo warned that New York “simply cannon stay closed” until herd immunity to the virus is achieved. “We will have nothing left to open,” the governor said. “We must reopen the economy, but we must do it smartly and safely.”

It turns out that shutting down wide swaths of the economy was neither smart nor safe. Even with the lockdowns, the United States is currently seeing record levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths. California and New York are experiencing the worst outbreaks despite have imposed some of the strictest rules.

Individuals and business owners have every incentive to take precautions. But people will judge their level of risk and act accordingly, no matter what the government tells them.

Bans on indoor dining have been popular since last fall, when public health experts fingered restaurants as particularly dangerous vectors for spreading COVID, based on a Centers for Disease Control study of COVID infections in 10 states.

But contact-tracing data released by the Cuomo administration in mid-December showed that just 1.4 percent of the state’s COVID cases in the previous three months were connected to bars and restaurants. In Minnesota, where both indoor and outdoor dining were banned for weeks during the holiday season (and where indoor dining was still off-limits until this week), only 1.7 percent of cases have been traced to restaurants.

In Los Angeles, city officials abruptly banned outdoor dining last month (indoor dining was already off the table), pulling the rug out from under restaurateurs who had spent significant sums of money retrofitting their facilities for outdoor-only service. Meanwhile, no evidence showed that outdoor dining was a serious health threat.

And as Chicago’s experience demonstrates, simply shutting bars and restaurants is no guarantee that people won’t get together to eat and drink. Indeed, since most restaurants are larger and better ventilated than your average urban apartment, it seems safer to let people gather there.

Lightfoot said Thursday that she will urge Pritzker to roll back the ban on indoor dining and that she believes business owners can enforce precautions such as mask-wearing and social distancing.

“I feel very strongly that we are very close to a point when we should be talking about opening up our bars and restaurants,” she said, according to CBS Chicago.

In fact, we’re long past that point. But it’s good to see some politicians catching up.

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No, AOC, It’s Not the Government’s Job to ‘Rein in Our Media’

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) told her social media followers earlier this week that Democrats in Congress might respond to the Capitol riot with some sort of “media literacy” initiative.

The phrase media literacy ordinarily implies helping individuals make sense of the media landscape, but AOC seems to have more in mind than that: She suggested “we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.”

It’s true that both traditional media and social media sometimes spread “disinformation and misinformation.” But the federal government has no formal role to play in suppressing its spread. The First Amendment explicitly bars Congress from infringing on freedom of the press or freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has recognized no exceptions for disinformation. If the government could ban disinformation, after all, it could use that as a cover for banning speech that is not actually false but merely critical of the government, or of specific politicians. Recall that Democrats swiftly denounced The New York Post‘s report on Hunter Biden’s foreign connections as “disinformation,” even though many underlying aspects of the story have since been confirmed.

Social media platforms are currently struggling with how to identify disinformation and what actions against it are appropriate. Certain subjects—such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election results—are aggressively policed, while other misleading content is left alone. Users have every right to criticize these decisions, but ultimately Twitter and Facebook are private companies with the right to set their own moderation policies. They can prohibit speech they define as misinformation. Congress can’t.

In suggesting a role for the government to regulate the media’s speech, AOC is echoing comments made by numerous right-wing figures—most notably President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called for changing libel laws to make it easier for maligned officials to sue the press. Trump has also made threats against newspapers for covering his presidency negatively. It’s critical that the law not be changed; the media must be free to vigorously criticize the president, Congress, or any other aspect of the government, even if the reporting is sometimes wrong or off-base. Similarly, addressing disinformation should be a job for private platforms and individual readers, not the government.

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