Category: reason

With markets tumbling and confirmed cases of coronavirus rising, President Donald Trump is reportedly considering a fiscal stimulus plan. Already the president has urged Congress to pass a payroll tax cut and said the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates beyond what it already has done.

Others are pushing for even more aggressive actions. In an op-ed published Thursday in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Furman argues that Congress should “swiftly” pass a $350 billion stimulus to counter the “mounting economic risks posed by the spread of the novel coronavirus.” While Trump has considered a temporary payroll tax cut to boost the economy, Furman, a former economic advisor to President Barack Obama, prefers straight cash. “Congress should pass a simple one-time payment of $1,000 to every adult who is a U.S. citizen or a taxpaying U.S. resident, and $500 to every child,” he argues—an amount that would be even more generous than the 2008 stimulus passed during the Bush administration.

There are at least three good reasons to question whether any economic stimulus would be a wise response to the coronavirus—over and above the obvious questions about the federal government’s ability to finance a big stimulus while already running a $1 trillion annual budget deficit.

First, the severity of any economic shock caused by the coronavirus is still unknown.

Keep in mind that—despite the president’s obsession with it—the stock market is not a gauge of the economy itself. It’s a gauge of how people think the economy will be in the future. This week’s sell-off reflects pessimism, but that’s not the same as an actual economic shock. If the virus’ impact ends up being less bad than expected, the stock market will recover the lost value.

So far, that unknown seems to be keeping the White House from doing anything too aggressive. In an interview with CNBC on Friday morning, the president’s top economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, said the preference is for a “targeted approach” aimed at “individuals who might lose paychecks” and “small businesses that might get hurt” by the economic disruption expected to be caused by the outbreak. Of course, big businesses like airlines can be expected to have their hands out too if there is any talk of a coronavirus bailout.

Second, there’s the time it would take for any economic stimulus to have an effect.

As Furman conceded, studies show that it takes as much as a full year for monetary policy stimulus—for example, the Fed lowering interest rates—to have a measurable effect on the economy. That’s because lower interest rates encourage people and businesses to borrow money for big purchases (homes, new plants, etc.) but those decisions aren’t made overnight.

If the timing of the crisis rules out monetary stimulus, then what about fiscal stimulus—sending a thousand bucks to every American? That may not work either, partly because of the nature of the disruption that’s expected from the coronavirus and partly because of how fiscal stimulus works.

Most economists are worried about a supply-side shock—that is, a disruption in getting enough goods to market to meet demand. If China’s factories are closed for a substantial period of time or ships are unable to travel from port to port for fear of spreading the disease, global supply chains will be disrupted. The economic effects of the virus are fundamentally different from those of, say, the 2008 recession. Most of the long-term effects of the recession were demand-side problems—not enough people buying houses, for example, or the general slackening in demand that comes when millions of people suddenly lose their jobs. In short, there were too many sellers and not enough buyers.

This is a different problem. If global supply chains are seriously disrupted, there will not be enough goods to sell and too many people wanting to buy. That’s why you can’t find hand sanitizer on Amazon right now.

That’s the third problem with the stimulus idea. Putting more money in the pockets of every American, either by cutting payroll taxes or by mailing checks, would tend to juice the economy faster than cutting interest rates. But that assumes there are goods and services available for them to buy.

“You cannot buy stuff that does not exist,” writes economist Tony Lima. And as he warns, dumping more cash into an economy experiencing a supply-side shock is likely to trigger inflation.

The good news is that history suggests supply-side disruptions tend to pass pretty quickly. Demand usually bounces back quickly too. “You get a V[-shaped recovery] because people now do the spending they didn’t do the last quarter,” Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum and former economic advisor to George W. Bush, tells New York.

In arguing for a stimulus, Furman compares it to the coronavirus vaccine that scientists are working to develop. “It would be nice if there existed a comparably targeted medicine for economic policymakers to administer,” he writes.

Indeed it would. But as doctors will tell you, administering vaccines to patients with weakened immune systems can be disastrous. Given the United States’ already perilous national debt and rising deficit, the White House and Congress should be cautious about spending additional money to avoid a coronavirus-caused recession—especially since the “vaccine” doesn’t seem like a sure bet.

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The qualifying criteria for the next Democratic debate are out, and they manage to exclude the only veteran and only woman of color left in the race: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii).

This afternoon, Politico reported that the candidates still in the running for the Democratic presidential nomination will need to have earned at least 20 percent of the delegates awarded thus far in order to participate in the March 15 debate hosted by CNN and Univision in Phoenix, Arizona.

That means that only former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who respectively have 48 percent and 41 percent of the delegates so far, will be on next Sunday’s stage.

Despite her strong showing in the American Samoa caucuses where she won two delegates, Gabbard still falls short of that very high threshold.

Had the Democratic National Committee stuck with its criteria for the last debate it held on February 25—which only required each candidate to have won a single delegate—Gabbard would have qualified.

DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa foreshadowed this decision on Super Tuesday, saying on Twitter that “by the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.”

We have two more debates– of course the threshold will go up. By the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.

— Xochitl Hinojosa (@XochitlHinojosa) March 4, 2020

In response to the expected rule change, Gabbard tweeted Thursday about her campaign’s foreign policy focus, and how that can’t be separated from the domestic issues that have gotten the most attention in past debates.

I welcome the opportunity to raise & discuss the foreign policy challenges we face, like the new cold war/nuclear arms race, Turkey's efforts to drag the U.S. into a war with Russia over Syria, the coronavirus, & more. Domestic policy cannot be separated from foreign policy. https://t.co/jgVxSz1huX

— Tulsi Gabbard ???? (@TulsiGabbard) March 5, 2020

Biden and Sanders have sparred in the past over the former’s initial support for the Iraq War, so there is some chance that the two candidates’ contrasting foreign policy visions will be on display come the next debate.

Still, it might have been interesting to have Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, up on stage to offer her own unique perspective on foreign policy. She’s repeatedly argued that rising tensions between the U.S., Russia, and China is putting the country on the road to nuclear war.

A Bernie-Biden smackdown will likely feature less talk of a nuclear apocalypse and a lot more bickering about health care. That’s enough to get anyone running for their fall out shelter.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Six months after seizing the life savings of retired railroad engineer Terry Rolin, 79, the Drug EA announced this week it would return the money. Agents seized the $82,373 from Terry’s daughter, Rebecca, at the Pittsburgh International Airport even though it is perfectly legal to fly with that much cash. Neither Terry nor Rebecca were charged with any crime. Their lawsuit will continue, however, because it includes class action claims seeking permanent nationwide injunctions against both TSA’s and DEA’s cash seizure practices at airports. Click here for more from The Washington Post.

• Congressional committee subpoenas Trump’s former White House council Don McGahn to testify. DOJ: McGahn has absolute and total immunity from responding to subpoena. D.C. Circuit (over a dissent): This is really political stuff that courts shouldn’t get involved with. The committee doesn’t have standing. Also, we’re going to be pretty unclear if this would apply in other contexts.
• In 2007, imprisoned Chinese dissidents sued Yahoo for turning over their email account information to the Chinese government, which used the information to prosecute them. To settle the case, Yahoo agreed to create a $17.3 mil fund to provide humanitarian assistance to dissidents and resolve claims by dissidents similarly harmed by Yahoo’s collaboration with the Chinese government. Allegation: But Yahoo depleted the trust, violating its fiduciary duties. Yahoo: Trust? What trust? D.C. Circuit: The law of trusts is complex, but the allegations here are enough for the case to go forward.
• New York City man is arrested at Black Lives Matter march for obstructing traffic and standing in the road. He sues. Allegations: I neither obstructed traffic nor stood in the road; the arresting officer’s account was false. And accepting those allegations as true, says the Second Circuit, his case against the officer and the city can proceed.
• Blogger seeks access to portions of video deposition played to jury, in which a former teacher at a New Haven, Conn. religious school testifies that the principal sexually abused a student; the teacher did not report it; and the teacher was himself the victim of the principal’s abuse years prior during his time as a student. Second Circuit: A transcript is publicly available, and there is no need to release the video—especially since the blogger seems motivated by spite. (In separate opinions, the Second Circuit affirms the $21.7 mil awarded to the victim and an installment plan ordered to aid efforts to collect the debt. The principal is appealing his conviction.)
• The feds give out grants to state and local law enforcement under a program called the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program. May the attorney general withhold grants from so-called sanctuary cities and states that refuse to share information with the feds about, or allow access to, arrested undocumented immigrants? Seventh Circuit (2018), Third Circuit (2019), Ninth Circuit (2019): No. Congress never gave the AG the authority to impose blanket conditions on the program. Second Circuit (2020): Congress gave the AG permission to impose conditions by requiring all grant applicants to comply with all applicable federal laws. Which laws are applicable? That’s for the AG to decide.
• UberBLACK drivers control their hours and can work for Uber’s competitors or for themselves. District court: So they’re independent contractors and not employees, and federal minimum wage and overtime requirements don’t apply to them. Third Circuit: Not so fast—a fact-finder needs to take a look. Uber forces drivers to close the app if they want to work for a competitor or themselves, fires drivers who fall below a 4.7 out of 5-star passenger rating, and limits the number of consecutive hours drivers can drive, all of which and more might indicate that Uber exerts enough control over the drivers to make them employees.
• Police officers knock on door of Richmond, Va. home and smell marijuana smoke when the occupant appears. Moments later, they find a still-smoldering joint atop a trash can. They then get a warrant to search every nook and cranny of the home for drug-related items, yielding more marijuana, along with cocaine and a handgun. Yikes! Occupant: But you already found the source of the marijuana smoke, so the warrant was overkill. Fourth Circuit: The warrant was just fine. Conviction affirmed.
• When Congress created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, it decided that the agency would be led by a single director who could be removed only by the president for cause. A violation of the separation of powers? The Supreme Court heard oral argument on that question on Tuesday. Fifth Circuit (also Tuesday): Well anyway, here’s our opinion on the question: The CFPB’s structure is constitutional. Dissent: Less than a year ago, sitting en banc, we ruled that the structure of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has the exact same structure as the CFPB, was unconstitutional. That precedent controls.
• TSA discovers $39k in an Ohio man’s carry-on luggage. Yoink! We’ll be keeping that. Property owner: That’s my money, give it back. Gov’t: Not unless you answer our questions about how you got the money. Property owner: I’m not doing that; I’m pleading the Fifth. Sixth Circuit: And so there’s no evidence that it’s your money. The gov’t gets to keep it.
• Allegation: Shortly after a black inmate at a Michigan prison objects to a white guard referring to him as “Bubba” and “boy,” the guard “discovers” heroin in the inmate’s pocket. Although his drug tests come back negative, the inmate is tried—and acquitted—of drug possession. The inmate sues for malicious prosecution. Sixth Circuit: And the district court should not have dismissed that claim. There’s enough evidence that the guard lied for this to go to a jury.
• Parents of a transgender child suffering from suicidal thoughts, anxiety, and depression take their child to the hospital, which puts the child under psychiatric evaluation. A week later, the insurance company decides the child is fine and terminates additional coverage. Parents: Great, time to take you home. Hospital: Not without approval from Hamilton County, Ohio child welfare officials. Officials: Not without approval from the hospital. Litigation ensues. Sixth Circuit: The parents have plausibly alleged a due process violation against both officials and the hospital, which may have been a state actor here.
• Troubled 14-year-old in Williamson County, Tenn. is arrested after allegedly crashing his mother’s car. After he (maybe) threatens other juveniles in the detention center, jailors put him in solitary confinement for a month. A constitutional violation? Sixth Circuit: You can’t do that to a mentally ill child today. But the law was not clear when this happened in 2013. Qualified immunity.
• Ohio lets unexpectedly hospitalized voters request absentee ballots last minute. Unexpectedly jailed voters? Not so much. Which violates neither the Equal Protection Clause nor the First Amendment, the Sixth Circuit holds.
• When a ref makes a bad call, what is the right response? Yelling at the TV? Taking to Twitter? Or the overreaction of certain Kentucky Wildcats fans to a 2017 loss to the Tar Heels—a harassment campaign involving hundreds of threats to the referee’s family and false reviews of his side business? The ref: A Kentucky sports radio station should pay for fanning the flames. Sixth Circuit: Not so. The broadcasts were ignoble, but the First Amendment protects them all the same.
• Motorist pulled over by Ohio trooper appears nervous; the trooper asks, among other things, to pat him down. The motorist nods slightly, but video is ambiguous as to what he’s nodding to. The pat-down yields a gun (which he is not allowed to have on account of a previous felony). Sixth Circuit (over a dissent): Suppress the gun. Nervousness during a traffic stop does not create reasonable suspicion necessary to conduct a pat-down. And the driver’s consistent confusion is not an unequivocal indication of consent.
• Giles County, Tenn. officials contract with two private probation companies to supervise misdemeanor probation. Probationers: The companies extort money from those too poor to pay probation fees. Companies: Toss the case—we can’t be sued. Sixth Circuit: Oh yes you can. Qualified and sovereign immunity don’t help you here. (The county’s bail system was preliminarily enjoined back in December.)
• Motorist leads police on high-speed chase, is stopped, follows commands to stick his hands out of the window but declines to turn off the engine or exit the vehicle. It is still in drive, and he doesn’t want to get shot if it lurches forward. Nor does he want to get shot for putting a hand back inside. A Southfield, Mich. officer unleashes a dog, which bites the motorist as he is dragged out of the vehicle. Excessive force? The Sixth Circuit says no.
• Douglas County, Neb. officer catches boyfriend and girlfriend with marijuana, separates them, asks the girlfriend—for nearly an hour—what she is willing to do to keep her boyfriend out of jail. (She does some things. The officer goes to jail.) Can the girlfriend sue the sheriff, who didn’t have a sex abuse policy or do any training for his deputies? The Eighth Circuit says no. Previous instances of deputy misconduct included “trading cigarettes for a detainee’s display of her breasts; licking a minor stepdaughter’s nipples during horseplay; asking ‘deeply personal and inappropriate questions’ to members of the public; engaging in verbal sexual harassment; having consensual sexual contact at the office; and abusing work hours to conduct personal business or ask women out on a date. While this behavior is troubling, it is not enough to put a supervising official on notice that a deputy might use his position and authority to separate a woman from her boyfriend at the park and coerce her to engage in sexual contact with him.”
• TV station erroneously reports that Fergus Falls, Minn. car dealership is facing criminal charges for overcharging law enforcement when (oops!) it’s just the car dealership’s former manager. Is the dealership a “public figure” for purposes of Minnesota defamation law? Eighth Circuit: We’re skeptical that the Minnesota Supreme Court really thinks that all corporations are automatically public figures, but we’ve said in the past that it thinks that, so that’s what we’re stuck with.
• Allegation: St. Louis routinely demands bail for pretrial detainees without determining whether each is able to pay, a flight risk, or a danger to the public. Instead, a bond commissioner recommends a certain cash bond be set, the judge on duty usually accepts that recommendation, and those who can pay get out, while those who cannot stay behind bars. Five weeks later, those who are held get a bail review hearing, but still judges routinely fail to tailor bond to arrestees’ individual circumstances. St. Louis: New rule: Courts may not impose cash bail without an individualized assessment of an arrestee’s financial circumstances, and a hearing must happen within seven days of the arrest. Eighth Circuit: Enjoining the old system without considering the new rule was inappropriate.
• In 2017, former Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was found guilty of criminal contempt for willfully violating a court order that prohibited him from enforcing federal immigration laws. After conviction, but before sentencing, the president gave him an unconditional pardon, and the trial court dismissed the case. Sheriff Joe: And the court should have vacated my conviction, too! Ninth Circuit: No need to do that. The final judgment was dismissal; the conviction itself doesn’t cause any harm.
• Federal immigration law says that migrants who arrive in the United States may apply for asylum “whether or not [they arrive] at a designated port of arrival.” In November 2018, President Trump issued a proclamation stripping asylum eligibility from every migrant who crosses into the United States between designated ports of entry. Sensing some tension between these positions, a district court enjoined the new policy. Ninth Circuit: As well it should have. Apart from being an arbitrary and capricious interpretation of federal immigration law, it conflicts with treaty obligations that have existed for more than 50 years.
• Federal immigration law says that the government is prohibited from removing an alien to a country if the alien convinces the attorney general that his or her life or freedom would be threatened. The Trump administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” prohibit asylum screening officers from asking asylum seekers whether they fear that their life or freedom would be threatened upon being returned to Mexico. Instead, “[t]he MPP requires asylum seekers—untutored in asylum law—to volunteer that they fear being returned to Mexico, even though they are not told that the existence of such fear could protect them from being returned.” Ninth Circuit: Which is a really, really clear violation of the law. The MPP is enjoined throughout the Ninth Circuit.
• Last year, DHS and DOJ issued the “Third Country Transit Rule,” under which noncitizens who try to enter the U.S. at the southern border after that date are ineligible for asylum unless they also applied for asylum in some other country, such as Mexico, that they passed through on their way here and … y’know what, you can probably guess where the Ninth Circuit is going with this one.
• In 1889, railroad company builds railroad through Swinomish Indian reservation (a 15 sq.-mile reservation on the Puget Sound in Washington) without permission. After much litigation, the company finally obtains an easement in 1991 allowing it to run a max of one train of 25 cars in each direction per day. Yikes! Among other violations of the agreement, the railroad runs trains with more than 25 cars (including 100-car trains), sometimes more than once per day. Railroad: Federal law preempts the easement agreement. Ninth Circuit: It does not. And we regret that the railroad’s attorneys’ misrepresented case law in their brief.
• For over a decade, one of the Big Three credit reporting agencies incorrectly placed terrorist alerts on the front pages of consumer credit reports and then sent those consumers confusing and incomplete information about how to remove said alerts. They knew this was illegal. Jury: $60 mil in damages. Ninth Circuit: The agency’s conduct was reprehensible—but not so egregious as to justify such a high punitive damages award. $32 mil instead.
• Fresno County, Calif. school system pays female math consultant less than male counterparts. Ninth Circuit (2018, en banc): Overruling precedent, we now say the fact that the male counterparts made more at their previous jobs is not a defense against her Equal Pay Act claims. SCOTUS (2019): Vacated. Judge Reinhardt died before the opinion was released, so his vote shouldn’t have counted. Indeed, “federal judges are appointed for life, not for eternity.” Ninth Circuit (2020, same en bancpanel but now with Bea instead of Reinhardt): What we said last time.
• Allegation: Colorado inmate who adheres to Buddhism, vegan diet develops a severe case of gout after being fed exclusively pinto beans and steamed rice for lunch and dinner for months. He’s transferred to a new prison where the “vegan patty” (served 19 of every 28 days) stinks, causes stomachaches, diarrhea, vomiting. Tenth Circuit: His claims about the vegan patty should not have been dismissed.
• Current and former alien detainees at a privately owned immigration detention center file a class action, alleging that the private contractor’s “voluntary work program” is actually slave labor. Contractor: The federal prohibition on slave labor doesn’t cover private contractors or alien detainees. Eleventh Circuit: Actually, it covers both.
• A 27-year-old Army sergeant is convicted of grisly 1985 Fayetteville, N.C. rape and triple murder, sentenced to death. The state supreme court overturns the conviction due to the prosecutors’ extensive use of graphic photos; he’s acquitted at a new trial. He reenlists in the Army and serves for many years before retiring. In 2006, a cold case review tests previously untested sperm samples from one of the victims. It’s a match. But the state is stymied by double jeopardy—what to do? In steps the military, which recalls him to active duty, court-martials him for murder. The Fourth Circuit (2012) refuses to put a stop to the proceedings. He’s convicted and sentenced to death. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (2020): Conviction affirmed. (Via CAAFlog. Get your longform journalism here.)
• Wyoming police seize $470k cash during a traffic stop but wait nine months to initiate any formal forfeiture proceedings. Which violates the Due Process Clause, says the Wyoming Supreme Court. The state must return the currency. (Click here for some commentary on the decision.)
• Allegation: After woman declines Kansas City, Kan. officer’s sexual advances, the officer frames the woman’s 17-year-old son for murder—part of a decades long pattern of misconduct that was well known to the officers’ superiors, in which he coerced sex from vulnerable women, used them as informants, and framed innocent people for crimes committed by drug dealers. Can the then-teen (who spent 23 years in prison before being exonerated) sue the officer, a bevy of other officers who participated or failed to intervene, and the municipality? D.Kan.: Yes. Yes, he can. (h/t: @pebonilla)
• After the director of a cabinet-level agency resigns, federal law requires the position of acting director to go to the resigned director’s first assistant (until a new director can be confirmed by the Senate). So in 2019, when the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services resigned, his first assistant, Mark Koumans, became acting director—for nine days. On the 10th day, officials created a new position said to be above the old first assistant, allowing Ken Cuccinelli to leapfrog Koumans into the acting director role. Cuccinelli then issued directives making it more difficult to seek asylum, which five Honduran asylum seekers challenge. D.D.C.: Cuccinelli is not legally in charge of USCIS, and the new rules must be set aside.
• St. Paul and Minneapolis both require landlords to provide voter registration info to tenants. Unconstitutional compelled speech? D.Minn: Indeed so. The cities provided no evidence that the ordinances boosted voter participation or that alternative, voluntary methods were insufficient, and we are not going to take their word for it.

In 2014, after his wife received a red-light camera ticket, Mats Järlström began to research yellow-light timing and determined that the equation traffic engineers have used worldwide since 1965 is incomplete, leading to too-short yellow lights. Mats presented his findings to the media, to traffic engineers and physicists, and to government officials, which drew the ire of Oregon regulators, who fined him for practicing engineering without a license. In 2018, a federal court ruled that that violated the First Amendment. And last week, the Institute of Transportation Engineers announced that Mats was right all along and voted to adopt his updates to the 1965 equation, which will improve safety at traffic lights worldwide. Click here for the technical details. And click here for more about the case.

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Council of Dads. NBC. Tuesday, March 10, 10 p.m.

You can say this for network programmers: They may occasionally, accidentally comprehend what makes a television show work, but once aware of their lapse into coherence, they keep bravely and tirelessly trying until they get it wrong. In 2016, NBC debuted This Is Us, a well-written, well-acted soap about a family wracked by the death of a dynamic young father that was a smash with both viewers and critics. In 2018, ABC followed with the wildly derivative but finely crafted soap A Million Little Things, about a concentric ring of family and friends shattered by the suicide of the magnetic but cuckolded young husband at the center. It was adored by critics even if viewers were a bit standoffish.

Encouraged, apparently by the negative ratings response, the programmers returned to their lair to mull over their work. Their inevitable conclusion was that success of these shows had nothing to do with the excellence of their casts and scripts. What viewers really want, they concluded, is dead dads.  So now we’ve got NBC’s Council of Dads, the latest and feeblest member of the This Is Us/A Million Little Things bloodline: hacky and hammy, lacking a single coherent thought in its politically correct head—but with a dad (do I really need to say spoiler alert here) who’s deader than a doornail. Let the Nielsen points begin racing to the cliff!

If your TV remote breaks and tunes in Council of Dads, and then you accidentally tie yourself to the couch, and your prankish cat clothespins your eyes open—the only set of circumstances under which I can remotely imagine anybody watching this show—do not collapse in disappointment to find that the dad in question, restauranteur Scott Perry (Tom Everett Scott, That Thing You Do) is still metabolically active for the first 45 minutes or so. That cancer in his leg that he learns about in the opening scene is gonna get him, sooner rather than later, and he’ll be Deady McDeaderson—much deader than the dads in This Is Us or A Million Little Things, because—novelty alert—Council of Dads has no flashbacks. The only way you’ll see Tom Everett Scott again is if the long-awaited sequel That Thing You Do: The Thrash Metal Years finally gets made.

The reason Scott’s demise is so eminently foreseeable is that the whole time his cancer is in remission, he talks incessantly of appointing a blue-ribbon commission of men—though Council of Dads sounds much nicer, right?—to take his place if he doesn’t make it. They’ll impart values to his kids, a task his wife Robin is apparently not up to. (That sounds sort of, I dunno, patriarchal, but Robin is played by Sarah Wayne Callies, plotting to withhold food from undocumented aliens in Colony, so maybe she’s not the best role model. And just because the aliens were from Mars and the food was us doesn’t excuse it.)

The kids in question are uber-diverse. One, from an earlier marriage, is half-black. One, adopted, is Asian. (And maybe Jewish? She’s currently living in her closet in solidarity with Anne Frank, whose diary she read in school.) One is the token white guy and naturally prone to temper tantrums and screaming jags. And the fourth, a first-grader—well, you’ll see. Let’s just say he checks all the remaining diversity boxes.

The dads appointed to make sure the kids retain their values, including a propensity to break out into cheers for Ruth Bader Ginsburg at random moments (seriously: “RBG! RBG!”), are equally diverse. In fact, the senior member, Scott’s cancer surgeon Dr. Oliver Post (J. August Richards, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) is practically a one-man diversity committee: black, gay, but not so gay that he didn’t try to pork Robin when they were in med school together, raising the possibility of bisexual diversity points in the future. He’s joined by crusty 12-step fascist Larry Malvern (Michael O’Neill, Rectify) and Scott’s oldest friend, hail-fellow-well-tattooed Anthony Lavelle (Clive Standen, Taken), each of them a veritable 21st-century Dear Abby when it comes to racial sensitivity, grief counseling, transgender creationism and all the other stuff modern families crave.

If Council of Dads sounds more like a classroom exercise in social engineering than a television drama, that’s because it absolutely is. The dialogue is little more than a recitation of ethnic and gender quotas, the plot points a collection of algorithmic hot flashes: Of course Scott gets the news his cancer has returned at the exact moment his new baby is born. The baby, by the way, is named Hope. “That is a little cheesy,” concedes Scott. “But we’re cheesy.” Where are the rats when you really need them?

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President Donald Trump opined this week that the U.S. death rate from COVID-19 would turn out to be “a fraction of 1 percent.” At least one authority—University of Pennsylvania vaccine expert Paul A. Offit—agrees. “I think he’s right,” he told FactCheck.org, adding that there has been a “wild overreaction” to the disease largely because it is new. “We’re more the victim of fear than the virus,” he said.

Are Trump and Offit right?

Confirmed novel coronavirus cases in the U.S. number around 250 so far, and 14 people have died of the COVID-19 respiratory disease caused by the virus. Crudely, these data would yield a truly frightening mortality rate of more than 5 percent. In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that the current death rate from this season’s influenza epidemic is between 0.05 and 0.10 percent. The global case fatality rate for the most severe pandemic in recent history, the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, was between 3 and 6 percent; the rate was around 2.4 percent in the United States.

So are we facing an epidemic comparable to 1918 or something more like a severe flu season? “Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected,” declared World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus earlier this week. According to the latest data, more than 100,000 cases of COVID-19 around the world have been confirmed, resulting in 3,408 deaths so far. Simple math yields the 3.4 percent death rate cited by Dr. Tedros.

If that’s the right figure, then we’re headed toward Spanish flu death rates. But before dousing yourself continually with Purell, note that the critical caveat is “reported” COVID-19 cases. Most experts believe the number of unreported cases is large. So far it appears that at least 80 percent of infected people exhibit mild or even no symptoms, and thus are unlikely to have come in contact with medical surveillance systems.

The fact that the U.S. lags in testing for the virus means that public health officials do not have a good idea of just how many Americans are already infected. That makes it difficult to estimate the disease’s real mortality rate. In contrast, South Korea has been more aggressive, testing more than 140,000 people for the virus. Doctors there have confirmed more than 6,000 cases, yielding a fatality rate of 0.6 percent.

Interestingly, if the estimate that as many as 1,500 cases are currently undetected in Washington state, the 14 deaths (8 of whom were residents of the Life Care nursing home) reported there yields a case-fatality rate of just over 0.9 percent. Aboard the once quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship, 707 passengers contracted the illness and so far 6 have died, yielding a death rate of 0.85 percent. That rate is unlikely to be representative, since COVID-19 is much riskier for older people and the ages of cruise passengers skew older.

A new report by researchers in Hong Kong estimate a symptomatic case-fatality rate of 1.4 percent. This is considerably lower than the WHO’s 3.4 percent death rate. And again, it does not account for infected folks whose symptoms are mild or absent.

A preliminary modeling study by European researchers estimated that the undetected rate of coronavirus infection could be 20 times higher than the number of confirmed cases. If this is so, they write, that yields “a much lower mortality rate, which according to our computations is of the order of 0.15%.” That would make the death rate for a coronavirus epidemic similar to that of a severe flu season.

One caution: A higher percentage of the population would be vulnerable to coronavirus infection, since flu epidemics are blunted by the fact that millions of us get our annual vaccinations. There will be no vaccine against this virus for at least 12 months.

“The best estimates now of the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1 percent and 1 percent,” said Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, at a press conference yesterday. The good news is that as more testing data comes in, the lower the mortality rate for COVID-19 falls.

Disclosure: As I report this, I am self-isolated with a bad cold which could well be caused by one of the four human coronavirus strains that are thought to be responsible for about 15 percent of adult common colds.

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A federal judge yesterday criticized Attorney General William Barr’s “misleading public statements” about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, said Barr’s “lack of candor” makes it impossible to trust his claim that the redactions in the publicly released version of the March 2019 report were legally justified. Walton concluded that he needs to review the unredacted report before ruling on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by BuzzFeed and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which want to see the full report.

Walton’s assessment of Barr’s credibility echoes complaints by the president’s critics that the attorney general, by trying to shape the public’s impression of Mueller’s findings, acted like Trump’s personal lawyer rather than the federal government’s chief law enforcement official. Like Barr’s intervention in the sentencing of Roger Stone, his damage control in connection with the Mueller report seems to contradict his self-portrayal as a straight shooter committed to the rule of law above all.

“The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report,” Walton wrote in his opinion. “The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”

If so, Walton said, it is plausible to suggest that the Justice Department’s redactions may have been influenced by Barr’s pro-Trump spin. “These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically,” he wrote, “call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and in turn, the Department’s representation” that the redacted information “is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions.”

In Walton’s view, “Attorney General Barr’s representation that the Mueller Report would be ‘subject only to those redactions required by law or by compelling law enforcement, national security, or personal privacy interests’ cannot be credited without the Court’s independent verification in light of Attorney General Barr’s conduct and misleading public statements about the findings in the Mueller Report.” He added that “it would be disingenuous for the Court to conclude that the redactions of the Mueller Report pursuant to the FOIA are not tainted by Attorney General Barr’s actions and representations.”

Walton questioned Barr’s decision to publicly summarize Mueller’s conclusions on March 24, 2019, nearly a month before the redacted report was published. In a four-page letter to Congress that was made available to the public, Barr said “the Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” which included social media activity and hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. And although Mueller pointedly chose not to say whether Trump had illegally obstructed the Russia investigation, Barr concluded that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

As Walton noted, Mueller himself objected to Barr’s summary of the report. “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller said in a March 27 letter to Barr. “We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

While Mueller did not specify the nature of that “public confusion,” Walton cited several ways in which Barr’s summary was misleading. “Attorney General Barr distorted the findings in the Mueller Report,” he wrote.

Specifically, Barr did not mention that Mueller “identified multiple contacts—’links,’ in the words of the Appointment Order—between Trump [c]ampaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.” Nor did he note that Mueller’s conclusions about “coordination” were based on a narrow definition of the term, drawn from conspiracy law, requiring “an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump [c]ampaign and the Russian government on election interference,” as opposed to merely “two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.” While Mueller’s definition was appropriate in determining whether campaign officials had done anything illegal, Barr’s general denial that the campaign “coordinated” with Russia may have left the mistaken impression that there were no contacts or that Russia’s assistance was unwelcome.

Walton also noted that Barr “failed to disclose to the American public” that Mueller did not reach a conclusion regarding obstruction because he accepted the Office of Legal Counsel’s position that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Yet Mueller strongly implied that the evidence of obstruction was more substantial than the evidence of an illegal conspiracy with Russia.

“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” the report said. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Walton also expressed concern about Barr’s remarks at a press conference on April 18, 2019, the day the redacted report was finally published. Barr not only reiterated what he had said in his letter to Congress but emphasized that Trump “was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.” The White House nevertheless “fully cooperated” with Mueller’s investigation, Barr said, and Trump “took no act” that “in fact deprived” Mueller of relevant documents and witnesses. The “evidence of non-corrupt motives,” he said, “weighs heavily against any allegation that the president had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.”

In short, Walton suggests, Barr tried to persuade the public that Trump did nothing wrong and in fact was commendably patient and cooperative given the circumstances. According to the Mueller report, Trump “told advisors that he wanted an Attorney General who would protect him.” In this case, Barr surely did not disappoint his boss.

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