Over the years I’ve bemoaned the fact presidential candidates rarely focus on food-policy issues. In 2012, for example, I wrote a column on issues I thought the presidential candidates should be discussing but had ignored to date. I did the same in a 2016 column. Each time, my entreaties fell on deaf ears.
For this presidential election—taking place during a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on everything from food supply chains to restaurants—I decided to ask a handful of people from different areas of the food-policy realm to answer the following question in around 100 words: What is the key food-policy issue(s) the presidential candidates should be talking about (but aren’t)?
Several people, from various parts of the food-policy realm, responded. (Thanks!) Their unedited responses—save for adding a few hyperlinks where needed—are below. Keep in mind that this column presents a survey from across a wide spectrum of the food-policy world. Not all the ideas below are ones I (or Reason) endorse.
Jayson Lusk, Distinguished Professor & Head of the Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University: The COVID-19 related disruptions to our food supply chain revealed there were a number of barriers preventing food from freely flowing from areas of low demand (restaurants) to areas of high demand (grocery stores). In many instances, regulations were a major obstacle. For example, many eggs are delivered to restaurants in liquid form, and regulations prohibited eggs from these facilities being sold in grocery stores. The result was an unnecessarily large spike in grocery egg prices and an unnecessarily large fall in liquid egg prices. In many locales, restaurants were prohibited from selling food directly to consumers because they lacked grocery licenses.
Mike Callicrate, Rancher & Advocate: Food security is national security. We are currently dependent upon a few predatory multinational corporations for our food. They are also serial felons. For example, recently, JBS/Pilgrim’s Pride agreed to pay $110 million in fines for price-fixing. The campaigns should be offering plans to rebuild our nation’s food system around a more resilient and sustainable local/regional model, applying an urgent critical infrastructure approach. Initially, the new infrastructure should be paid for by the federal government, with a high priority on connecting producers as directly as possible with consumers, circumventing the current middlemen who have proven to be fragile and unreliable. There should be renewed efforts to address monopoly power and predatory practices to totally protect the new food economy.
Jeff Stier, Senior Fellow, Taxpayers Protection Alliance: Consistent with his deregulatory agenda, President Trump should have campaigned on a pledge to streamline food and agriculture regulation in a manner that would foster innovation. For instance, the turf-battle between the USDA and FDA over cell-based food (are we allowed to call it “meat”?) caused costly delays and rewarded rent-seekers rather than innovators.
Vice President Biden could channel his enthusiasm for protecting the environment into not only cell-based foods but other advanced food and agricultural technologies that would benefit the environment. Doing so through smarter regulatory policy would benefit both the environment and the American economy, as innovators could export greener food technology around the globe.
Michele Simon, founder and vice president of policy, Plant Based Foods Association: Sadly food issues rarely make it onto presidential platforms. Of course, I think we should be hearing about how shifting to a plant-based diet is a key solution to climate change. While the current focus on the pandemic and related healthcare issues are important, many of the co-morbidities we are seeing are related to poor diet, so food is connected to many issues.
Pete Kennedy, attorney, Weston A. Price Foundation: The key issue the candidates aren’t addressing is the decentralization of food production and distribution. With the upheaval in the food system after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis and the decline in food imported into the US, now more than ever is the time to strengthen food security by further deregulation of food produced and consumed at the local level. This effort will improve local and regional self-sufficiency in food production, food safety, public health, the vitality of local economies, small farm prosperity, and community resiliency.
Judith McGeary, executive director, Farm & Ranch Freedom Alliance: I wish the candidates were talking about the fact that small sustainable farms provide real solutions for numerous problems, in ways that make sense to people at all points of the political spectrum. Small business economic development, food security, climate change, public health— small farms could make a huge contribution on all these issues if the government stopped buying into the “bigger is better” myth.
Liz Williams, founder & curator, National Food & Beverage Foundation: COVID-19 has driven food insecurity to the century’s highest levels. The existing food insecurity of the working poor, often not based on a lack of calories, but inadequate nutrition, places its victims at higher risk for major impacts of COVID-19. And pandemic closures of gathering places and the corresponding loss of jobs creates new victims of food insecurity, who are not familiar with the meager food safety net. SNAP, food bank pickup sites, and community resources are a labyrinth to maneuver for the new victim. Without money to buy food, and without food banks or a means to get to them, food insecurity can actually mean starvation, public health risks, poor school performance (especially with schools closed), and increased COVID-19 issues. Local food banks and community groups cannot do this alone. No one seems to be talking about the hungry.
Tyler Lindholm, rancher and state representative, Wyoming: Presidential elections are consistently devoid of one topic, in particular, let alone food policy….Why shouldn’t States be the master of their own markets and in return let the people be the master of their own free market? To put it into perspective, it is now easier to sell marijuana brownies in Colorado directly to a consumer than it is to sell a ribeye steak in Wyoming directly. Standing on the principle of removing barriers for States to economically develop by promoting direct-to-consumer sales is a winning issue. It’s also important to note though that farmers and ranchers rarely have lobbyists to line pockets. I expect nothing.
Daren Bakst, senior research fellow in agricultural policy, Heritage Foundation: Policymakers need to remove the excessive government intervention that exists in food policy. They should be freeing up food innovation instead of hindering it, reducing farmers’ dependence on government, not increasing it, and removing barriers to the sale of food, such as meat, not keeping these barriers in place. Then there’s free trade. The U.S. should be fighting to remove trade barriers imposed by other countries and taking action to remove our own barriers. In general, food policy should respect consumer dietary choices and allow individuals across the food supply chain to have the freedom to meet this demand.
Tom Philpott, food & agriculture correspondent, Mother Jones: With povertyspreading and thehunger on the rise, the candidates should be talking about how they’ll ramp up food aid and bolster institutions like school lunch—and how to boost wages and improve conditions for vital food-system workers. Then there’s the climate emergency: fires, floods, and droughts haunt California, our main source of fresh produce; while ever-fiercer spring storms have created an unprecedented, unchecked, soil-erosion crisis in the Midwest corn belt. The candidates should be competing over who has the best plan to mitigate climate change and protect our food system from its now-inevitable ravages.
Baylen Linnekin, columnist, Reason.com, Sr. Fellow, Reason Foundation: Other than a handful of minor COVID-related deregulatory efforts (e.g., temporarily easing food labeling rules), I wish Donald Trump could point to even one meaningful food-policy accomplishment his administration had achieved during the past four years. I wish Joe Biden would call out the folly of Trump’s food protectionism and make the case for freer trade and the elimination of food tariffs and farm subsidies.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/37XP3tt
via IFTTT
Over the years I’ve bemoaned the fact presidential candidates rarely focus on food-policy issues. In 2012, for example, I wrote a column on issues I thought the presidential candidates should be discussing but had ignored to date. I did the same in a 2016 column. Each time, my entreaties fell on deaf ears.
For this presidential election—taking place during a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on everything from food supply chains to restaurants—I decided to ask a handful of people from different areas of the food-policy realm to answer the following question in around 100 words: What is the key food-policy issue(s) the presidential candidates should be talking about (but aren’t)?
Several people, from various parts of the food-policy realm, responded. (Thanks!) Their unedited responses—save for adding a few hyperlinks where needed—are below. Keep in mind that this column presents a survey from across a wide spectrum of the food-policy world. Not all the ideas below are ones I (or Reason) endorse.
Jayson Lusk, Distinguished Professor & Head of the Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University: The COVID-19 related disruptions to our food supply chain revealed there were a number of barriers preventing food from freely flowing from areas of low demand (restaurants) to areas of high demand (grocery stores). In many instances, regulations were a major obstacle. For example, many eggs are delivered to restaurants in liquid form, and regulations prohibited eggs from these facilities being sold in grocery stores. The result was an unnecessarily large spike in grocery egg prices and an unnecessarily large fall in liquid egg prices. In many locales, restaurants were prohibited from selling food directly to consumers because they lacked grocery licenses.
Mike Callicrate, Rancher & Advocate: Food security is national security. We are currently dependent upon a few predatory multinational corporations for our food. They are also serial felons. For example, recently, JBS/Pilgrim’s Pride agreed to pay $110 million in fines for price-fixing. The campaigns should be offering plans to rebuild our nation’s food system around a more resilient and sustainable local/regional model, applying an urgent critical infrastructure approach. Initially, the new infrastructure should be paid for by the federal government, with a high priority on connecting producers as directly as possible with consumers, circumventing the current middlemen who have proven to be fragile and unreliable. There should be renewed efforts to address monopoly power and predatory practices to totally protect the new food economy.
Jeff Stier, Senior Fellow, Taxpayers Protection Alliance: Consistent with his deregulatory agenda, President Trump should have campaigned on a pledge to streamline food and agriculture regulation in a manner that would foster innovation. For instance, the turf-battle between the USDA and FDA over cell-based food (are we allowed to call it “meat”?) caused costly delays and rewarded rent-seekers rather than innovators.
Vice President Biden could channel his enthusiasm for protecting the environment into not only cell-based foods but other advanced food and agricultural technologies that would benefit the environment. Doing so through smarter regulatory policy would benefit both the environment and the American economy, as innovators could export greener food technology around the globe.
Michele Simon, founder and vice president of policy, Plant Based Foods Association: Sadly food issues rarely make it onto presidential platforms. Of course, I think we should be hearing about how shifting to a plant-based diet is a key solution to climate change. While the current focus on the pandemic and related healthcare issues are important, many of the co-morbidities we are seeing are related to poor diet, so food is connected to many issues.
Pete Kennedy, attorney, Weston A. Price Foundation: The key issue the candidates aren’t addressing is the decentralization of food production and distribution. With the upheaval in the food system after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis and the decline in food imported into the US, now more than ever is the time to strengthen food security by further deregulation of food produced and consumed at the local level. This effort will improve local and regional self-sufficiency in food production, food safety, public health, the vitality of local economies, small farm prosperity, and community resiliency.
Judith McGeary, executive director, Farm & Ranch Freedom Alliance: I wish the candidates were talking about the fact that small sustainable farms provide real solutions for numerous problems, in ways that make sense to people at all points of the political spectrum. Small business economic development, food security, climate change, public health— small farms could make a huge contribution on all these issues if the government stopped buying into the “bigger is better” myth.
Liz Williams, founder & curator, National Food & Beverage Foundation: COVID-19 has driven food insecurity to the century’s highest levels. The existing food insecurity of the working poor, often not based on a lack of calories, but inadequate nutrition, places its victims at higher risk for major impacts of COVID-19. And pandemic closures of gathering places and the corresponding loss of jobs creates new victims of food insecurity, who are not familiar with the meager food safety net. SNAP, food bank pickup sites, and community resources are a labyrinth to maneuver for the new victim. Without money to buy food, and without food banks or a means to get to them, food insecurity can actually mean starvation, public health risks, poor school performance (especially with schools closed), and increased COVID-19 issues. Local food banks and community groups cannot do this alone. No one seems to be talking about the hungry.
Tyler Lindholm, rancher and state representative, Wyoming: Presidential elections are consistently devoid of one topic, in particular, let alone food policy….Why shouldn’t States be the master of their own markets and in return let the people be the master of their own free market? To put it into perspective, it is now easier to sell marijuana brownies in Colorado directly to a consumer than it is to sell a ribeye steak in Wyoming directly. Standing on the principle of removing barriers for States to economically develop by promoting direct-to-consumer sales is a winning issue. It’s also important to note though that farmers and ranchers rarely have lobbyists to line pockets. I expect nothing.
Daren Bakst, senior research fellow in agricultural policy, Heritage Foundation: Policymakers need to remove the excessive government intervention that exists in food policy. They should be freeing up food innovation instead of hindering it, reducing farmers’ dependence on government, not increasing it, and removing barriers to the sale of food, such as meat, not keeping these barriers in place. Then there’s free trade. The U.S. should be fighting to remove trade barriers imposed by other countries and taking action to remove our own barriers. In general, food policy should respect consumer dietary choices and allow individuals across the food supply chain to have the freedom to meet this demand.
Tom Philpott, food & agriculture correspondent, Mother Jones: With povertyspreading and thehunger on the rise, the candidates should be talking about how they’ll ramp up food aid and bolster institutions like school lunch—and how to boost wages and improve conditions for vital food-system workers. Then there’s the climate emergency: fires, floods, and droughts haunt California, our main source of fresh produce; while ever-fiercer spring storms have created an unprecedented, unchecked, soil-erosion crisis in the Midwest corn belt. The candidates should be competing over who has the best plan to mitigate climate change and protect our food system from its now-inevitable ravages.
Baylen Linnekin, columnist, Reason.com, Sr. Fellow, Reason Foundation: Other than a handful of minor COVID-related deregulatory efforts (e.g., temporarily easing food labeling rules), I wish Donald Trump could point to even one meaningful food-policy accomplishment his administration had achieved during the past four years. I wish Joe Biden would call out the folly of Trump’s food protectionism and make the case for freer trade and the elimination of food tariffs and farm subsidies.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/37XP3tt
via IFTTT
My colleague Todd Henderson has an opinion piece at Newsweek arguing that court-packing—adding additional Justices to the Supreme Court, for the purpose of changing the Court’s decisions—is unconstitutional. I don’t agree with the piece, but it has already attracted a ton of criticism and that criticism deserves more scrutiny.
One remarkable document that emerged from that conflict is the report from the 1937 Senate Judiciary Committee, on which Todd relies, which argued at length that court-packing for the purpose of manipulating the Supreme Court was unconstitutional, because it violated the spirit of the Constitution and the separation of powers. Before you dismiss challenges to court-packing as frivolous, you should really read it. And these arguments appeared much more widely in the legislative debate at the time as well.
After I read this report, I found it disturbingly easy to imagine a judicial opinion invalidating court-packing (many of these points are in Todd’s piece):
First it would talk about how in general Congress has power to structure the Court, but that under the long-established principles of the separation of powers, no one branch can be allowed to effectively destroy another.
Then it would argue that Congress has never before engaged in overtly outcome-motivated court-packing. (It’s not clear whether this is true, but there’s a respectable historical debate about the Civil War/Reconstruction era and other relevant moments, so the Court could say it with a straight face.)
Then it would note that the closest precedent was the New Deal battle over court packing, in which the legislative branch—dominated by a supermajority of the President’s own party—responded with powerful constitutional arguments, which may have helped carry the day against the President.
And finally it could say that in the years since, the arguments against court packing have only become more powerful: We have an additional 83 years of practice in which court packing is seen as generally unacceptable. And we have the rise of explicit judicial supremacy in Cooper v. Aaron and many other cases, which place the Supreme Court at the apex of the interpretive hierarchy—a position it could hardly occupy if Congress could pack the Court.
(Who would challenge the legislation? Presumably any Supreme Court litigant has standing to raise the question of who is lawfully entitled to hear his case. Though in some ways the Court would have to confront the issue earlier, when deciding whether the Justices would cooperate in administering the oath, give the new appointees office space, and so on.)
Now I don’t agree with this argument at all, and I don’t think the Supreme Court should strike down court-packing, if it occurs. But I know why I don’t agree with this argument, and I’m genuinely uncertain about why others don’t.
So far as I can tell, there are three basic paths to rejecting this argument:
The original meaning of the Constitution is our law, and under the original meaning, Congress’s Article I powers allow it to set the size of the Court even if it does so in order to manipulate the Court’s decisions.
The original meaning is not decisive, but even so, there are no unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court.
There are unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court, but court packing does not violate such a constraint.
I am an originalist, so point number 1 does it for me. But a lot of the people who reject this argument as frivolous do not accept originalism as decisive, so they must take one of the other two paths. Both of the other two paths seem plausible to me, but I think they would benefit from being spelled out.
For point number 2, if there are no nontextual separation of powers doctrines in this area, why not? And does that imply a rejection of other nontextual separation of powers doctrines, and if not what distinguishes them? This could be a very fruitful case study for understanding how non-originalists determine the validity of an asserted non-textual norm.
Or for point number 3, if court-packing complies with the nontextual separation of powers norms, why is that? One possibility is that court-packing is valid because it is a sort of “constitutional self-help,” valid only because it is a form of necessary retaliation against supposed misbehavior by the Court. But if this is the theory, it would be quite arresting to spell it out, and it would imply that the validity of court-packing rises or falls on the charge of judicial misbehavior. I’m sure it is not the only possible form of argument number 3, but hearing the other arguments would be helpful, and would also inform the broader debates about court reform.
I am an originalist, and I do not think court-packing is unconstitutional. Non-originalists seem to agree, and I assume they have good reasons of their own for doing so. But those reasons are not obvious to me, and the constitutional debate would benefit if they were spelled out, with their implications.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/322009s
via IFTTT
My colleague Todd Henderson has an opinion piece at Newsweek arguing that court-packing—adding additional Justices to the Supreme Court, for the purpose of changing the Court’s decisions—is unconstitutional. I don’t agree with the piece, but it has already attracted a ton of criticism and that criticism deserves more scrutiny.
One remarkable document that emerged from that conflict is the report from the 1937 Senate Judiciary Committee, on which Todd relies, which argued at length that court-packing for the purpose of manipulating the Supreme Court was unconstitutional, because it violated the spirit of the Constitution and the separation of powers. Before you dismiss challenges to court-packing as frivolous, you should really read it. And these arguments appeared much more widely in the legislative debate at the time as well.
After I read this report, I found it disturbingly easy to imagine a judicial opinion invalidating court-packing (many of these points are in Todd’s piece):
First it would talk about how in general Congress has power to structure the Court, but that under the long-established principles of the separation of powers, no one branch can be allowed to effectively destroy another.
Then it would argue that Congress has never before engaged in overtly outcome-motivated court-packing. (It’s not clear whether this is true, but there’s a respectable historical debate about the Civil War/Reconstruction era and other relevant moments, so the Court could say it with a straight face.)
Then it would note that the closest precedent was the New Deal battle over court packing, in which the legislative branch—dominated by a supermajority of the President’s own party—responded with powerful constitutional arguments, which may have helped carry the day against the President.
And finally it could say that in the years since, the arguments against court packing have only become more powerful: We have an additional 83 years of practice in which court packing is seen as generally unacceptable. And we have the rise of explicit judicial supremacy in Cooper v. Aaron and many other cases, which place the Supreme Court at the apex of the interpretive hierarchy—a position it could hardly occupy if Congress could pack the Court.
(Who would challenge the legislation? Presumably any Supreme Court litigant has standing to raise the question of who is lawfully entitled to hear his case. Though in some ways the Court would have to confront the issue earlier, when deciding whether the Justices would cooperate in administering the oath, give the new appointees office space, and so on.)
Now I don’t agree with this argument at all, and I don’t think the Supreme Court should strike down court-packing, if it occurs. But I know why I don’t agree with this argument, and I’m genuinely uncertain about why others don’t.
So far as I can tell, there are three basic paths to rejecting this argument:
The original meaning of the Constitution is our law, and under the original meaning, Congress’s Article I powers allow it to set the size of the Court even if it does so in order to manipulate the Court’s decisions.
The original meaning is not decisive, but even so, there are no unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court.
There are unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court, but court packing does not violate such a constraint.
I am an originalist, so point number 1 does it for me. But a lot of the people who reject this argument as frivolous do not accept originalism as decisive, so they must take one of the other two paths. Both of the other two paths seem plausible to me, but I think they would benefit from being spelled out.
For point number 2, if there are no nontextual separation of powers doctrines in this area, why not? And does that imply a rejection of other nontextual separation of powers doctrines, and if not what distinguishes them? This could be a very fruitful case study for understanding how non-originalists determine the validity of an asserted non-textual norm.
Or for point number 3, if court-packing complies with the nontextual separation of powers norms, why is that? One possibility is that court-packing is valid because it is a sort of “constitutional self-help,” valid only because it is a form of necessary retaliation against supposed misbehavior by the Court. But if this is the theory, it would be quite arresting to spell it out, and it would imply that the validity of court-packing rises or falls on the charge of judicial misbehavior. I’m sure it is not the only possible form of argument number 3, but hearing the other arguments would be helpful, and would also inform the broader debates about court reform.
I am an originalist, and I do not think court-packing is unconstitutional. Non-originalists seem to agree, and I assume they have good reasons of their own for doing so. But those reasons are not obvious to me, and the constitutional debate would benefit if they were spelled out, with their implications.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/322009s
via IFTTT
I was scrolling through the posts on my Maryland neighborhood’s Listserv this summer when a notice for a bake sale caught my eye. This was no brownies-on-a-card-table affair. It sounded like a banquet, with snickerdoodles, madeleines, pecan butterballs, lemon shortbread, and other treats spread out in a senior center’s parking lot.
Anyone who lives in a middle-class suburb knows that when Type A parents organize to raise money for the PTA, nothing can stand in their way. But this was a fundraiser for an initiative called Bakers Against Racism. All of the proceeds went to Black Lives Matter DC and, more generally, to groups that are fighting police brutality.
Suburbia is supposed to represent everything bland and boring, yet it still manages to surprise us. How can a place that we’re intimately familiar with—more than half of America lives in the suburbs—be so unknowable? This is the enigma Jason Diamond plumbs in The Sprawl, a collection of essays tracing the “undercurrent of strangeness” running beneath fescue lawns and chain restaurants, linking Ray Bradbury to Poltergeist to punk rock. The result is an enjoyable, generous, and heartfelt tour around the suburbs of the American psyche, although Diamond sometimes boxes himself in with a too-rigid conception of the suburban way of life.
Diamond lives in Brooklyn, but his roots are suburban. Growing up, he bounced around communities on Chicago’s North Shore. These are not just any suburbs: They’re the suburbs, thanks to Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and other movies that John Hughes filmed in the area, shaping the world’s perceptions of American suburbia for a generation to come. The misfits of The Breakfast Club are the kind of suburban souls whom Diamond most identifies with—creative, lonely teenagers restless to explore the world beyond their cul-de-sacs.
Diamond’s basic theory of suburban creativity is that dull suburbs foster a sense of alienation or anxiety or bottled-up longing that sometimes becomes art. So you get John Cheever’s famous short story “The Swimmer,” about a suburbanite who makes his way home from a party by pool-hopping across the backyards of his neighbors, a journey that turns progressively darker; but you also get the spate of suburban horror movies of the 1980s, with a menacing Freddy Krueger hinting at suburbanites’ fears of both urban crime and Russian nukes.
And you get lots and lots of music. Probably the strongest essay in the book is “In the Garage,” where Diamond explores the unselfconsciousness of teens messing around with riffs or beats in suburban basements. The raw, fatalistic rock of Suzi Quatro’s band the Pleasure Seekers sprang, he notes, not from mean city streets but from genteel Grosse Pointe, Michigan. In another Detroit suburb—Belleville—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson bonded in high school over their love of Kraftwerk and Bootsy Collins and went on to create Detroit techno.
Describing the suburban genesis of hardcore punk, Diamond takes a detour through the blog Hardcore Architecture, which brilliantly pairs punk bands of the 1980s with Google Street View photos of the homes at the mailing addresses they used. Mechanized Death was based in a Colonial Revival house in Montclair, New Jersey; No Comply produced “harsh abrasive thrash” in a little ranch house in Clearwater, Florida. Diamond locates the omphalos of suburban punk in Lodi, New Jersey, a working-class, largely Italian suburb of 25,000. In an unremarkable home there, Glenn Allen Anzalone, a.k.a. Glenn Danzig, put out the debut seven-inch of his band, the Misfits. The Misfits assembled their songs from the bric-a-brac of suburban adolescence: comic books, horror movies, William Burroughs novels. Other punk bands railed against conformity, but not so much the Misfits: “They didn’t write songs about the suburban experience; instead, they channeled it.”
Emphasizing suburbia’s role as a container for the child and teen psyche, Diamond fluidly weaves in moments of autobiography. In the most poignant of these, he returns to Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and the split-level on a hill that his parents bought when he was a baby, only to separate and move away shortly afterward. On childhood visits to family who lived in the same neighborhood, he writes, he would sometimes sneak away to the old house and gaze into what had been his bedroom.
For the author, escaping an unhappy childhood meant escaping from the suburbs. But having done so, he is unexpectedly struck by suburban longings. The smell of lighter fluid on a Weber grill full of charcoal briquettes is his madeleine. He gets nostalgic about skateboarding in parking lots, eating fries at Denny’s, and hanging out at the mall. (He hopes Generation Z will reinvent the mall as a true public space, fulfilling the utopian vision of its creator, architect Victor Gruen.)
Diamond’s effort to reexamine the places of his youth feels familiar, at least to this reader: As a teenager, I projected my feelings onto the world around me, but I later came to realize that my unhappiness sprang from who I was then, not where. The teenage angst animating the book gives it an emotional center.
Yet it’s also a limitation—suburbia is inhabited by more than moody high-schoolers. American suburbs have undergone considerable changes over the past few decades. The prevalence of aging Baby Boomers and a low birth rate mean that many suburban households these days don’t include kids. Suburban poverty is sharply on the rise. And despite a legacy of racial exclusion, suburbs are more diverse than ever; more black Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities, and immigrants have been flocking to suburbia. Diamond recounts these trends carefully at the beginning of the book, and he spends part of a chapter exploring suburban fiction by writers of color, but his core conception of what suburbia is doesn’t really budge.
After the election of 2016, Diamond confides, he started to seek out the enervating atmosphere of suburban chain stores and restaurants as a form of relaxation. Watching football at a Chili’s or wearing a Patagonia fleece to stand in line at Starbucks, you don’t need to worry about anyone judging you—it’s obvious that you’re not cool. “When I drive through the suburbs anywhere in the country, I notice all the same corporate boxes that anybody from any background can fit into. You might find some indie record store or a great Mexican restaurant…but it isn’t likely.”
Say what? In the area where I live, city people make trips to the suburbs just for Chinese and Vietnamese food. While not all cities have large suburban immigrant enclaves, many American suburbs are dotted with restaurants that serve up dishes from around the world, a reflection of residents’ diverse backgrounds and the importance of aging strip malls as small-business incubators. The idea of taking solace in Buffalo Wild Wings is funny, but a little more attention to majority-minority suburbs like Edison, New Jersey, or Missouri City, Texas, would have pointed in a different direction and enriched the book.
There’s also a misstep in the penultimate essay, “The Battle for the Soul of Nod Road.” Here Diamond recounts a campaign by homeowners in Avon, Connecticut, to block the construction of condos on a nearby golf course. “This was suburban activism,” Diamond notes with some surprise, and he comes around to their way of thinking: “It isn’t about keeping people out or stopping developers from doing business; it’s about retaining peace of mind. About holding people accountable and holding back the sprawl….Suburbia would only benefit if more of its people did the same.”
Yes, this is a form of suburban activism. But it isn’t surprising, and it’s certainly not beneficial. The campaign Diamond describes fits the larger pattern of affluent pushback to new development and, especially, to housing for people of limited means. (In 2018, the average household income in Avon was $132,500.) Defeating land-use reforms, as the Avon homeowners succeeded in doing, excludes would-be residents from desirable neighborhoods and schools in order to protect the status quo. This is what single-family zoning has done around the country for decades now, deepening racial and economic segregation.
But suburban activism takes many forms. Since the killing of George Floyd, Americans have protested in hundreds of suburbs, gathering in town squares, stopping traffic, and forming car caravans. Suburban demonstrators have sometimes faced police crackdowns, as in Aurora, Colorado, where police used pepper spray and batons to break up a June vigil for Elijah McClain, a local 23-year-old black man killed by police last year.
It’s much easier, of course, to put a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard—or to organize an anti-racist bake sale. But suburbia is already changing, perhaps more rapidly than Diamond is willing to credit. And as old attitudes are challenged, there’s reason to think the suburbs of the future will be more inclusive—and weirder—than the suburbs of today.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3mIRdBr
via IFTTT
I was scrolling through the posts on my Maryland neighborhood’s Listserv this summer when a notice for a bake sale caught my eye. This was no brownies-on-a-card-table affair. It sounded like a banquet, with snickerdoodles, madeleines, pecan butterballs, lemon shortbread, and other treats spread out in a senior center’s parking lot.
Anyone who lives in a middle-class suburb knows that when Type A parents organize to raise money for the PTA, nothing can stand in their way. But this was a fundraiser for an initiative called Bakers Against Racism. All of the proceeds went to Black Lives Matter DC and, more generally, to groups that are fighting police brutality.
Suburbia is supposed to represent everything bland and boring, yet it still manages to surprise us. How can a place that we’re intimately familiar with—more than half of America lives in the suburbs—be so unknowable? This is the enigma Jason Diamond plumbs in The Sprawl, a collection of essays tracing the “undercurrent of strangeness” running beneath fescue lawns and chain restaurants, linking Ray Bradbury to Poltergeist to punk rock. The result is an enjoyable, generous, and heartfelt tour around the suburbs of the American psyche, although Diamond sometimes boxes himself in with a too-rigid conception of the suburban way of life.
Diamond lives in Brooklyn, but his roots are suburban. Growing up, he bounced around communities on Chicago’s North Shore. These are not just any suburbs: They’re the suburbs, thanks to Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and other movies that John Hughes filmed in the area, shaping the world’s perceptions of American suburbia for a generation to come. The misfits of The Breakfast Club are the kind of suburban souls whom Diamond most identifies with—creative, lonely teenagers restless to explore the world beyond their cul-de-sacs.
Diamond’s basic theory of suburban creativity is that dull suburbs foster a sense of alienation or anxiety or bottled-up longing that sometimes becomes art. So you get John Cheever’s famous short story “The Swimmer,” about a suburbanite who makes his way home from a party by pool-hopping across the backyards of his neighbors, a journey that turns progressively darker; but you also get the spate of suburban horror movies of the 1980s, with a menacing Freddy Krueger hinting at suburbanites’ fears of both urban crime and Russian nukes.
And you get lots and lots of music. Probably the strongest essay in the book is “In the Garage,” where Diamond explores the unselfconsciousness of teens messing around with riffs or beats in suburban basements. The raw, fatalistic rock of Suzi Quatro’s band the Pleasure Seekers sprang, he notes, not from mean city streets but from genteel Grosse Pointe, Michigan. In another Detroit suburb—Belleville—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson bonded in high school over their love of Kraftwerk and Bootsy Collins and went on to create Detroit techno.
Describing the suburban genesis of hardcore punk, Diamond takes a detour through the blog Hardcore Architecture, which brilliantly pairs punk bands of the 1980s with Google Street View photos of the homes at the mailing addresses they used. Mechanized Death was based in a Colonial Revival house in Montclair, New Jersey; No Comply produced “harsh abrasive thrash” in a little ranch house in Clearwater, Florida. Diamond locates the omphalos of suburban punk in Lodi, New Jersey, a working-class, largely Italian suburb of 25,000. In an unremarkable home there, Glenn Allen Anzalone, a.k.a. Glenn Danzig, put out the debut seven-inch of his band, the Misfits. The Misfits assembled their songs from the bric-a-brac of suburban adolescence: comic books, horror movies, William Burroughs novels. Other punk bands railed against conformity, but not so much the Misfits: “They didn’t write songs about the suburban experience; instead, they channeled it.”
Emphasizing suburbia’s role as a container for the child and teen psyche, Diamond fluidly weaves in moments of autobiography. In the most poignant of these, he returns to Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and the split-level on a hill that his parents bought when he was a baby, only to separate and move away shortly afterward. On childhood visits to family who lived in the same neighborhood, he writes, he would sometimes sneak away to the old house and gaze into what had been his bedroom.
For the author, escaping an unhappy childhood meant escaping from the suburbs. But having done so, he is unexpectedly struck by suburban longings. The smell of lighter fluid on a Weber grill full of charcoal briquettes is his madeleine. He gets nostalgic about skateboarding in parking lots, eating fries at Denny’s, and hanging out at the mall. (He hopes Generation Z will reinvent the mall as a true public space, fulfilling the utopian vision of its creator, architect Victor Gruen.)
Diamond’s effort to reexamine the places of his youth feels familiar, at least to this reader: As a teenager, I projected my feelings onto the world around me, but I later came to realize that my unhappiness sprang from who I was then, not where. The teenage angst animating the book gives it an emotional center.
Yet it’s also a limitation—suburbia is inhabited by more than moody high-schoolers. American suburbs have undergone considerable changes over the past few decades. The prevalence of aging Baby Boomers and a low birth rate mean that many suburban households these days don’t include kids. Suburban poverty is sharply on the rise. And despite a legacy of racial exclusion, suburbs are more diverse than ever; more black Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities, and immigrants have been flocking to suburbia. Diamond recounts these trends carefully at the beginning of the book, and he spends part of a chapter exploring suburban fiction by writers of color, but his core conception of what suburbia is doesn’t really budge.
After the election of 2016, Diamond confides, he started to seek out the enervating atmosphere of suburban chain stores and restaurants as a form of relaxation. Watching football at a Chili’s or wearing a Patagonia fleece to stand in line at Starbucks, you don’t need to worry about anyone judging you—it’s obvious that you’re not cool. “When I drive through the suburbs anywhere in the country, I notice all the same corporate boxes that anybody from any background can fit into. You might find some indie record store or a great Mexican restaurant…but it isn’t likely.”
Say what? In the area where I live, city people make trips to the suburbs just for Chinese and Vietnamese food. While not all cities have large suburban immigrant enclaves, many American suburbs are dotted with restaurants that serve up dishes from around the world, a reflection of residents’ diverse backgrounds and the importance of aging strip malls as small-business incubators. The idea of taking solace in Buffalo Wild Wings is funny, but a little more attention to majority-minority suburbs like Edison, New Jersey, or Missouri City, Texas, would have pointed in a different direction and enriched the book.
There’s also a misstep in the penultimate essay, “The Battle for the Soul of Nod Road.” Here Diamond recounts a campaign by homeowners in Avon, Connecticut, to block the construction of condos on a nearby golf course. “This was suburban activism,” Diamond notes with some surprise, and he comes around to their way of thinking: “It isn’t about keeping people out or stopping developers from doing business; it’s about retaining peace of mind. About holding people accountable and holding back the sprawl….Suburbia would only benefit if more of its people did the same.”
Yes, this is a form of suburban activism. But it isn’t surprising, and it’s certainly not beneficial. The campaign Diamond describes fits the larger pattern of affluent pushback to new development and, especially, to housing for people of limited means. (In 2018, the average household income in Avon was $132,500.) Defeating land-use reforms, as the Avon homeowners succeeded in doing, excludes would-be residents from desirable neighborhoods and schools in order to protect the status quo. This is what single-family zoning has done around the country for decades now, deepening racial and economic segregation.
But suburban activism takes many forms. Since the killing of George Floyd, Americans have protested in hundreds of suburbs, gathering in town squares, stopping traffic, and forming car caravans. Suburban demonstrators have sometimes faced police crackdowns, as in Aurora, Colorado, where police used pepper spray and batons to break up a June vigil for Elijah McClain, a local 23-year-old black man killed by police last year.
It’s much easier, of course, to put a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard—or to organize an anti-racist bake sale. But suburbia is already changing, perhaps more rapidly than Diamond is willing to credit. And as old attitudes are challenged, there’s reason to think the suburbs of the future will be more inclusive—and weirder—than the suburbs of today.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3mIRdBr
via IFTTT
Joe Biden and Donald Trump at the September 30 presidential debate.
If you’re a libertarian like me, elections in the US two-party system often come down to choosing the lesser of two evils. This one is no exception. Both major-party candidates have serious flaws. But Democratic candidate Joe Biden is far preferable to Donald Trump. And that’s true based entirely on ideology and policy—without having to consider Trump’s corruption, his tweets, or his awful personality. Judged from the standpoint of promoting liberty, justice, property rights, and human welfare, the choice is clear. Trump has the edge on a few issues, but they are greatly outweighed by the ones where he doesn’t.
But those who do choose to vote have an obligation should try to make at least a reasonably informed choice. And, at least in most cases, they should vote for the least-bad alternative among those with a realistic chance to win. I defend the morality and rationality of lesser-evil voting in some detail here.
To briefly summarize, Biden has significant advantages over Trump when it comes to immigration, trade, property rights, government spending, and maintaining relationships with liberal democratic allies. These readily outweigh Trump’s edges on judicial appointments and certain types of taxation and regulation. Though I won’t cover it here, Trump’s undermining of liberal democratic norms is also a menace, even if it hasn’t yet led to many concrete policy actions. I explained why in a 2018 post.
This piece admittedly comes late in the election process; I admit I would have done better to write it sooner. But many millions of people still haven’t voted. And I suspect that may include a disproportionate percentage of undecided voters. For those who have already voted, I hope this work might still have value in terms of understanding where the two major parties stand from a libertarian perspective.
The costs to human liberty here are enormous. Trump’s expanded immigration restrictions forcibly consign hundreds of thousands of people to lives of poverty and oppression, simply because they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents or in the wrong place. They also impose huge economic costs on both immigrants and natives. Immigrants make major contributions to American economic growth and innovation. The scale of economic harm caused by the administration’s immigration restrictions greatly outweighed any possible benefit from its deregulatory actions elsewhere—even before the former was ratcheted up during the pandemic.
Nor can these moves be rationalized by analogizing the US government to the owner of a private house who has a right to keep people out for whatever reason he wants. Such analogies are deeply flawed, and—if taken seriously—would justify draconian restrictions on natives’ liberty, no less than that of immigrants. No libertarian—or any kind of liberal—should accept the dangerous idea that the state is entitled to such sweeping power.
Biden is far from perfect on immigration issues. But he plans to reverse pretty much all of Trump’s new immigration restrictions, plus promote further liberalization, such as increasing the refugee cap to 125,000. The latter move alone will save over 100,000 people per year from poverty, oppression, and sometimes death. Freeing over 100,000 per year from a lifetime of oppression is enough to outweigh a multitude of sins elsewhere.
Moreover, virtually all of Trump’s immigration actions are the product of unilateral executive action. Therefore, Biden could reverse them without getting any new legislation through Congress. And, obviously, the odds of immigration liberalization getting through Congress are clearly higher if Biden wins than if Trump is reelected. In the latter case, there would be virtually chance at all.
What is true of immigration is also true of trade. On this quintessential libertarian issue, Trump is the worst president of modern times. In addition to his trade war with China, Trump has also picked trade wars with numerous US allies, including Canada, Mexico, the European Union, and South Korea, among others. The costs include some $57 billion in annual added expenses for American consumers, and massively reduced the value of American businesses, to the tune of hundreds of billions. And, once again, these costs greatly outweigh any plausible estimate of benefits from Trumpian deregulation elsewhere, which even the administration itself estimates at only about $50 billion for Trump’s entire term (thus, about $12.5 billion per year).
Like his immigration restrictions, Trump’s trade wars are almost entirely the result of executive action. Thus, Biden could very easily undo them—though joining TPP would require congressional ratification.
It was in some ways predictable that the Republicans might become an anti-immigration party, and perhaps even that they would turn against free trade. But, a decade ago, I would never have expected them to become worse than the Democrats on property rights. Yet, under Trump, that’s exactly what they have done.
Biden and the Democrats are far from ideal on property rights issues. But Biden would terminate the awful wall-building project. He is also likely to restore Obama-era constraints on asset forfeiture (though it would be preferable to go further than that). On zoning, liberal Democrats have pushed through valuable reforms in several states and localities, with more potentially on the way. Biden would provide some modest federal incentives to facilitate that. At the very least, unlike, Trump he wouldn’t actively oppose deregulation in this vital area.
In fairness, however, things could be even worse if Biden is able to push through all the additional new spending he advocates. However, he might have difficulty doing that. We know from much recent history that congressional Republicans only work to constrain federal spending when there is a Democrat in the White House, as they did under Clinton and Obama. If Biden wins the election, there is a high likelihood that the Democrats will have only a very narrow majority in the Senate, or even (less likely) that the GOP will retain control in that chamber. Working with moderate Democratic swing-voters, the GOP can constrain Biden’s spending plans, and will have every incentive to do so. Indeed, even the mere prospect of Trump’s leaving office has already led Senate Republicans to regain some of their fiscal religion, as they have rejected both Trump’s and the Democrats calls for a massive new $2 trillion “stimulus” package.
I don’t want to paint a rosy picture here. Regardless of who wins, there are likely to be major spending increases, and an exacerbation of our already severe fiscal crisis. But this will be incrementally better if at least one major party works to limit the damage, perhaps in cooperation with moderates from the other. That is more likely to occur with Biden in the White House than Trump.
Biden may not be able to fix all of this. But he would at lest end most of the trade wars, treat the allies with greater respect, and curb many of the Trumpian policies that most damage America’s image. That should matter for libertarians (and liberals of any stripe) because want liberal ideals to advance around the world, not just in one country. And it is important that brutal authoritarian regimes stop gaining influence at the expense of more liberal ones.
The harm Trump causes goes beyond the details of specific policy issues. Hostility to immigration, protectionism, gargantuan spending, damaging relationships with allies, and even undermining property rights, are all facets of the more general trend towards big-government nationalism in the GOP. If Trump wins reelection, we can expect that trend to solidify and continue. Should Trump’s approach succeed politically even in the midst of a dire economic and public health crisis, other Republican politicians (and perhaps even some Democrats) will continue to imitate him. We can expect more of the same from the GOP for years to come.
By contrast, if Trump is defeated and repudiated, there is a real chance the GOP will have to reconsider its approach, and retreat from some of his awful policies. At the very least, that’s more likely in the event of a Trump defeat than if he beats the odds and wins.
On the other hand, a defeat for Biden is unlikely to improve the Democratic Party. To the contrary, it would probably give a boost to the more extreme “democratic socialist” faction led by Bernie Sanders, and others, whom Biden defeated in the 2020 primaries. Defeat for Biden would lend credence to their notion that there is no political payoff for moderation, and that the only way to combat Trumpian right-wing populism is the left-wing version of the same.
Where Trump is Better – And Why it’s Not Enough
While I think a Biden victory is preferable, overall, there are undoubtedly some areas where Trump is better. The two most significant are economic regulation in areas unrelated to immigration and trade, and judicial appointments.
While, for reasons noted above, his achievements in this area have been overstated, there is no doubt Trump has achieved some useful deregulation in some fields. The best—and severely underappreciated—example is Trump’s executive order permitting a wider range of expense compensation for kidney donors, which could save thousands of lives.
By contrast, Biden, if he wins, has a long list of new regulations he would like to enact. Among the worst are a $15 minimum wage (which would destroy thousands of jobs), and a nationwide version of California bill AB 5, which severely restricts “gig economy” employment by forcing Uber, Lyft, and other similar businesses to classify their workers as “employees” rather than independent contractors. Sadly, Trump has said he might support a $15 minimum wage, as well, though he is probably less likely to be serious about it than Biden.
As already noted, Trump’s deregulatory accomplishments pale in comparison to the harm he has done in other areas, such as immigration and trade. Even if Biden undoes all of the former, and adds significant further regulatory burdens, it will still be outweighed by his plans to undue Trump’s immigration and trade policies. Moreover, the more extreme Biden regulatory policies—including the minimum wage increase and a nationwide AB 5—would require legislation to enact. And it is unlikely that swing-vote Democratic senators like Manchin (West Virginia), Kirsten Sinema (Arizona) and Hickenlooper (Democratic candidate in Colorado) would support them, given the vast damage they would do to their respective states (which are heavily dependent on sharing industries and—especially in West Virginia’s case—low-cost labor). By contrast, Biden could probably undo Trump’s horrible immigration and trade policies through executive action alone.
What is true on regulation is also true on taxation. The 2017 tax bill passed by the GOP Congress with Trump’s backing includes some useful provisions, such as limiting corporate taxes, restricting the mortgage interest deduction, and constraining deductions for state and local taxes. Biden’s tax proposals would only partially reverse these measures, but would move us in the wrong direction, nonetheless. However, this too would have to get through Congress, which might moderate it. And the net negative effect is still much smaller than that of Trump’s immigration and trade policies.
As for the more general tax cuts in the 2017 plan (which Biden would repeal for those earning over $400,000 per year), they are—sadly—likely to be negated by irresponsible deficit spending. So long as that continues, if we don’t pay more now, that just means we (and our children) will pay more later (along with accumulated interest). Overpending will probably be a serious problem regardless of who wins. But for reasons already noted, it is likely to be even worse if Trump gets reelected.
Finally, there is the issue of judicial appointments. Here, I have to acknowledge Trump has made substantially better appointments than I expected back in 2016. Some have proven outstanding, like Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, and Judge Don Willett on the Fifth Circuit. Most of the others are, at least, no worse than we could expect from a conventional GOP administration. Essentially, Trump has accomplished this by delegating judicial selection to more conventional conservatives, as opposed to seeking judges who reflect his own distinctive nationalist agenda (as I thought he might do, back in 2016).
Conventional GOP judges are by no means flawless, from a libertarian point of view. But with the extremely important exception of immigration-related constitutional cases, they do tend to better than Democratic-appointed judges in terms of both judicial philosophy, and positions on specific issues (e.g.—property rights, federalism, gun rights, campaign finance restrictions, and some others).
If Trump continues in the same vein in a second term, his appointees would likely be better than those Biden is likely to choose. That said, there are several important caveats, that diminish this advantage.
Second, while Trump has been content to appoint conventional conservatives to the judiciary so far, that can change over time. Already, his most recent Supreme Court list includes several dangerous big-government nationalists deeply hostile to civil liberties, such as Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton. Recent appointee Amy Coney Barrett is not of the same ilk. But her appointment clearly offers more hope to social conservatives and perhaps nationalists than libertarians.
More generally, over time judicial appointments come to reflect a party’s overall ideological priorities. The more big-government nationalism, with an admixture of social conservatism, comes to dominate the GOP, the more that will eventually be reflected in judicial appointments. Even if it doesn’t happen under Trump, it is likely to come to fruition under the next nationalist GOP president, who could easily be either Hawley or Cotton! As discussed above, this dangerous development is more likely to be avoided if Trump is defeated and repudiated.
Even a small chance of court-packing should be taken seriously. But it’s not enough to outweigh all the evil done by Trump. Not even the best possible Supreme Court justices can do enough good to outweigh the hundreds of thousands of lives blighted by Trump’s immigration and trade policies.
I will not try to deal with Biden and Trump’s respective approaches to the Covid crisis. Suffice to say that I am not as confident as many Biden supporters that his policies will work better than Trump’s. At the same time, they can hardly be worse than that of a president who often tries to deny the problem even exists. Ultimately, the best way to end the crisis is to accelerate the development and deployment of a vaccine. I see no reason to think Biden will be worse on that front than Trump, and some reason to hope he might be better. For example, a less nationalistic and xenophobic administration might be more willing to cooperate with allies on vaccine development and distribution.
We end where we began. The election presents with a choice of evils. But Biden is by far the lesser evil of the two. In some key areas, he could even be a positive good. And, as promised, I have defended that conclusion entirely without reference to Trump’s personal behavior, his corruption, or his Tweets. Getting that out of the White House would just yet more icing on cake!
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3kKQTBo
via IFTTT
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ability to dictate the conditions of reopening California’s economy is being challenged in a new lawsuit by small business owners who claim that the governor’s pandemic restrictions have endangered their livelihoods—as well as representative government in the state.
“We’ve been shut down since mid-March and that’s been completely devastating,” says Daryn Coleman, owner of Ghost Golf, who is currently suing Newsom. “I have bills racking up. I have balances building on everything.”
Coleman’s business, a ghost-themed miniature golf and family entertainment center in Fresno, California, was forced to close, alongside all other nonessential businesses in mid-March, when Newsom first issued his emergency declaration.
Since then, he’s been at the mercy of reopening conditions set by the governor and the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), which has kept Ghost Golf closed but for a few days in early June.
The state’s latest reopening criteria don’t give Coleman much hope of being able to open his doors again soon, let alone turn a profit.
The state’s latest Blueprint for a Safer Economy places counties in one of four color-coded tiers based on their number of new cases (case rate), and percent of COVID-19 tests coming back positive (positivity rate). The higher a county’s case and positivity rates are, the fewer businesses and social activities are permitted.
Fresno County is in the second-most-restrictive purple tier. That means Coleman’s Ghost Golf, like all amusement parks in the county, is closed. Gyms, dance studios, and aquariums can open at limited capacity and under certain conditions.
Coleman will have to wait until his county is admitted into the next least-restrictive tier before being allowed to open. Even then, he’ll only be allowed to operate at 25 percent capacity. That could be too little, too late for Ghost Golf.
“I honestly don’t know if I will survive even if I am allowed to reopen,” says Coleman, pointing to those capacity restrictions and the fact that business closures have already cost him busy summer months and the Halloween rush. “We’re a haunted-themed place and I lost October, which is usually a really good month for us.”
On Thursday, Coleman and Nieves Rubio, a restaurant owner in Bakersfield, California, sued Newsom, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Acting State Public Health Officer Erica Pan, and CDPH Director Sandra Shewry. Their lawsuit argues Newsom’s business closures are a usurpation of law-making powers reserved for the state’s Legislature.
“The governor is essentially making law. He has no authority to do that,” says Luke Wake, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which has filed the case on behalf of Coleman and Rubio. “We’re now seven months into what is really autocratic rule, one-man rule.”
Newsom’s orders have invoked the state’s Emergency Services Act, which enables the governor to declare a state of emergency, and gives him sweeping powers to craft regulations and direct state agencies’ actions when responding to an emergency.
While this law consolidates executive power in the hands of the governor, argues Wake, it doesn’t create new executive powers that haven’t already been approved by the state legislature.
“The Emergency Services Act allows the Governor to coordinate all aspects of the executive branch of the state and to exercise all powers already granted to any executive agency of the state,” reads the lawsuit. “It does not grant the Governor the authority to take actions not otherwise authorized by the California Constitution or by statute.”
The legislature, Wake notes, has passed several bills related to the COVID-19 pandemic while contenting themselves to let the governor and public health officials set the pace of the state’s reopening.
The lawsuit PLF has filed on behalf of Coleman and Rubio is asking the court to declare the governor and CDPH exceeded their authority by ordering business closures and to strike down the entirety of the state’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy as unlawful.
During coronavirus, the courts have generally have been loath to strike down lockdown orders and business closures in response to plaintiffs claiming their individual rights have been violated, citing a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case which upheld a mandatory vaccination law as a constitutional exercise of state’s police powers.
Lawsuits alleging that state governors and public health authorities have unjustly assumed powers reserved for state legislatures have proven more successful. State supreme courts in Wisconsin and Michigan shot down their governors’ respective business closure orders for violating the separation of powers.
Every day, Coleman says he gets numerous emails and phone calls asking if his business is open yet. He hopes that this lawsuit will undo the restrictions keeping him from serving these customers, restrictions he considers arbitrary as well as financially ruinous.
“I can go work out at a gym. I can go get a massage if I want. I can go to a movie theater,” he says. “but playing laser tag or indoor miniature golf is too great a risk?”
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3oJAIXq
via IFTTT
