Category: reason

A Christmas Miracle: Washington Court Overturns Marijuana Sign Rules That Banned String Lights Spelling ‘Pot’

The continued illegality of marijuana under the federal Controlled Substances Act complicates any attempt to claim that the First Amendment protects a state-licensed pot store’s right to advertise its wares. But state constitutional protections for freedom of expression can still be used to overturn inadequately justified regulations of cannabis-related commercial speech, as demonstrated by a recent King County, Washington, ruling in favor of a marijuana shop that dared to hang Christmas lights spelling out the word POT in its window.

After Hashtag Cannabis in Redmond displayed that festive decoration during the 2017–18 holiday season, the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB) cited the store for violating state restrictions on the size, number, and nature of retail signs. The regulations limit marijuana merchants to no more than two signs “identifying the retail outlet by the licensee’s business name or trade name,” each of which must be “affixed to a building or permanent structure” and no larger than 1,600 square inches. Hashtag already had two regular signs, pot was not part of its trade name, the string of lights was not “affixed,” and it exceeded the allowed size by about 2,300 square inches.

Hashtag challenged the citation on free speech grounds. While the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld prohibitions of commercial speech “related to illegal activity,” King County Superior Court Judge David Keenan noted in his ruling last month, state law allows cannabis sales to adults 21 or older by licensed retailers such as Hashtag. While conceding that “the issue is novel,” Keenan concluded that the cannabis industry’s legal status in Washington means state regulations of marijuana advertising must comply with Article I, Section 5 of Washington’s constitution, which says “every person may freely speak, write and publish on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right.”

In applying that provision to restrictions on commercial speech, Washington courts use the test laid out in the 1980 Supreme Court case Central Hudson Gas & Electric v. Public Service Commission. To be constitutional under the Central Hudson test, a regulation of nonmisleading commercial speech must “directly and materially advance” a “substantial governmental interest,” and it must be “narrowly drawn” to advance that interest.

The LCB defended its rules as a precaution against encouraging minors to consume cannabis. Keenan acknowledged that the state’s asserted interest was “substantial,” as Hashtag conceded. But he concluded that “the advertising restrictions do not directly and materially advance the State’s substantial interest in preventing underage consumption” and “are not sufficiently tailored to advance the State’s interest.”

Keenan reached that conclusion based on seemingly inconsistent aspects of Washington’s advertising rules. “Given other provisions in the advertising restrictions which continue to expose potential underage consumers to marijuana advertising,” he said, “the restrictions are a poor fit with the State’s substantial interest in preventing underage consumption.”

Notwithstanding its picayune restrictions on store signs, Keenan noted, Washington’s rules allow marijuana billboards that are much bigger. In fact, such billboards must be at least 55 square feet, or 7,920 square inches, five times the maximum size for store signs. A marijuana merchant might even rent a billboard right near his store, which would be a far more conspicuous advertisement than Hashtag’s string of lights.

“Hashtag could have a sign using the word Pot if it just registers that business or trade name, and it could conceivably have an entire billboard next door to its store with the word Pot,” Keenan observed. “If the State wishes to minimize the risk of capturing the attention of children, restricting retailers to two permanently affixed signs displaying the business or trade name of no more than 1,600 inches on premises, but allowing billboards off premises, and allowing businesses to register business or trade names such as Pot, does not directly advance that goal.”

Keenan drew an analogy to the old federal rule prohibiting information about alcohol content on beer labels, which the Supreme Court overturned in the 1995 case Rubin v. Coors Brewing. “As the court put it in Rubin, where the government’s asserted interest was to ‘suppress strength wars,’ it made ‘no rational sense’ to prohibit alcohol content advertising on labels, but allow it in advertising, where advertising ‘would seem to constitute a more influential weapon in any strength war than labels,'” Keenan wrote. “As in Rubin, where the state’s asserted interest is to prevent underage consumption of marijuana, it makes no rational sense to restrict advertising in marijuana retailers where underage consumers are not allowed to enter or make purchases, but not restrict billboards, where billboards would seem more effective at capturing the attention of potential underage consumers.”

Although Keenan does not mention it, the Supreme Court overturned state restrictions on outdoor advertising of cigars and smokeless tobacco in the 2001 case Lorillard Tobacco v. Reilly, finding that the goal of preventing underage consumption did not justify rules that severely impeded communications between manufacturers and adult consumers. Hence it seems unlikely that a ban on marijuana billboards aimed at making Washington’s rules more consistent would survive the Central Hudson test.

Hashtag co-owner Logan Bowers told The Stranger‘s Lester Black it cost $30,000 in legal fees to challenge the rules prohibiting his shop’s string of lights. “I was just really pissed,” he said. “We were frustrated with being dicked around. Sometimes doing the right thing costs a ton, and it’s a little bit of a bummer. Even when you win, you still kind of lose, because you have to spend a lot of money, and it means if you don’t have money, you don’t get justice.”

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Apocalyptic Thinking Is Wrong

“Let’s not teach our children that apocalyptic thinking is right thinking,” says Laurence Siegel. Apocalypticism “has always been wrong as a forecast, and it will continue to be wrong.”

Siegel is a business consultant and the director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. In Fewer, Richer, Greener, he argues convincingly that humanity has spent two centuries rising from our natural state of abject poverty, and that most of the credit for that goes market institutions and democracy. Parsing current trends, Siegel foresees world population peaking and then stabilizing by the end of this century. (Hence the “fewer.”) He argues that economic growth will bring humanity much greater wealth and more adept technologies. (Hence the “richer.”) And thanks to increased urbanization and steadily improving material efficiency, he thinks our species will tred more lightly on many natural ecosystems. (Hence the “greener.”)

Let’s take a closer look at each of those three forecasts.

“High death rates are the cause of high birth rates,” explains Siegel. World population grew very slowly in the Malthusian past because, although people had lots of babies, more than half of them died before reaching adulthood. Modern sanitation and medicine and greater supplies of food meant falling death rates; that combined with still-high birth rates to produce a population explosion, with the number of people in the world rising from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.7 billion now.

The global total fertility rate—that is, the number of children each woman is likely to bear over her lifetime—has fallen from around 5 in 1960 to 2.42 now. The United Nations forecasts that world’s total fertility rate will eventually fall below the conventionally defined replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman; the U.N. says population will then stabilize around 11 billion, and Siegel basically agrees.

So humanity is demographically transitioning from its natural state of high birth and high death rates to a more recent stage of high birth and low death rates to the low birth and low death rates seen in much of the world now. About half of the world’s population currently lives in countries with below replacement fertility. The U.S.’s total fertility rate, for example, has dropped to a record low of 1.73 children per woman.

Why are more people around the world having fewer children? Incentives, explains Siegel. Rearing children in modern societies costs a lot, both in money and in foregone opportunities and pleasures. Given that about 99 percent of kids born in countries like the U.S. will make it to age 20, parents are choosing to spend more resources on fewer children, who will thereby be more likely to enjoy successful lives. “To put it just a little too crassly, in wealthy societies and increasingly in less wealthy ones, children have become a cost center (some would even say a luxury good), not a profit center,” Siegel observes.

Siegel’s projections of future population growth may in fact be excessively high. In a 2018 study, demographer Wolfgang Lutz and his colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis offer an alternative scenario projecting rapid economic growth, rising levels of educational attainment for both sexes, and technological advancement—all factors that tend to lower fertility. They expect that world population could peak at about 8.9 billion by 2060 and then decline to 7.8 billion by the end of the century.

In any case, these trends mean that there will be many more old people in the future. Having worked most of his life in finance, Siegel offers some good advice how to prepare for retirement. He recommends that one “save a predetermined percentage of one’s income escalating over time, until enough money has been accumulated to replace (when Social Security benefits are also included) 70% of the pay rate one has been earning just before retirement.” At retirement he suggests using 15 percent of your savings to buy a deferred life annuity that kicks in at age 85, thus making sure that you still have income once you’ve spent down your savings.

As world population exploded, so too did economic growth, resulting in what the University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment. Siegel cites urbanist Jane Jacobs’ trenchant observation: “Poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”

The economic historian Angus Maddison calculated that global per capita income in 1 A.D. was $467 per year (in 1990 dollars). By 1820, global per capita income had risen to nearly $1,200 per year. Over the next two centuries, per capita GDP in current U.S. dollars rose to $11,300—or, taking purchasing power into account, to nearly $18,000 per person.

Income, of course, is not equally distributed across the world. Some places—Somalia, Niger, Malawi—are sadly stuck in Malthusian traps where per capita incomes are still below that global average from 1 A.D. The good news is that economic growth has taken off in many poor countries in recent decades, so their incomes are rising to converge with those of already developed nations. Inequality between countries is falling, and the global rate of abject poverty (people living on less than $1.90 per day) has fallen from 42 in 1981 to 8.6 percent in 2018. By one measure, half of the world’s population is now middle-class or wealthier.

Siegel provides reams of solid data for similarly heartening global trends. Crop productivity, food availability, life expectancy, and education are increasing; violence is in decline.

So that explains fewer and richer. But is Siegel right that the world will be greener?

Economists have identified an inverted U-shaped relationship—the environmental Kuznets curve—in which environmental conditions initially deteriorate as economic growth takes off, then improve when citizens with rising incomes demand better environmental amenities. For example, research has found that rising incomes eventually lead to falling air and water pollution and the expansion of forests. Generally speaking, richer is cleaner.

These curves do not peak and turn downward by themselves. They do so with a mixture of private and government action, with the details differing from one country to another. In the U.S., the levels of six common air pollutants—soot, ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide—have fallen by an average of 74 percent since 1970. Meanwhile, gross domestic product grew by 380 percent.

Siegel acknowledges that man-made climate change could pose significant problems for humanity as this century advances. But he notes that billions of relatively poor people face more immediate problems, including unsafe drinking water, uncertain food supplies, a dearth of educational opportunities, excessive local pollution, a lack of sanitation, and—importantly—no access to modern energy services. With respect to how best to prioritize between longer term environmental threats and fulfilling urgent needs, he writes, “There is no single answer. Economic growth will help—a lot.”

Siegel sees ecomodernism as the way forward to a greener world. “Intensifying many human activities—particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement—so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts,” states An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a document written by 18 scientists and activists in 2015. “These socioeconomic and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection. Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate global poverty.”

Humanity may already be approaching peak farmland, as we grow ever more food on ever less land. Although Siegel doesn’t mention it, global tree cover has expanded between 1981 and 2016 by 7 percent. That’s a territory of about 865,000 square miles, more than three times the size of Texas.

In 1960, only one third of people lived in cities. This has now increased to 55 percent, making this the first time in history that more folks live in cities than in the countryside. By 2050, nearly 70 percent of people will be city dwellers. Compact cities are much more energy-efficient, in addition to providing people with much better access to economic opportunities, education, and medical care.

While energy efficiency and renewables will play significant roles in helping humanity to decouple from nature, Siegel is also clear-eyed about the need for greater supplies of energy to alleviate poverty through economic growth. His solution: modern nuclear power. “For most applications, nuclear power dominates both fossil fuels and renewables in almost every aspect: efficiency, safety, reliability, carbon neutrality, fuel abundance, and eventually, price,” he argues.

If we can maintain and spread the institutions—free markets, the rule of law, property rights, free speech, and democratic governance—that underpin the Great Enrichment, Siegel’s forecast of fewer, richer, and greener will come to pass.

“Life has improved tremendously in the last 250 years; this book argues that it will continue to improve in almost every dimension; health, wealth, longevity, nutrition, literacy, peace, freedom, and so forth,” he writes. “Without overlooking the many obstacles on the path of progress, my aim is to reinforce and help restore people’s faith in the future—and help them understand why optimism is amply justified.”

(Disclosure: Siegel quotes me in his book. Immodestly, I will note that my book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century addresses many of these same issues and trends.)

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Apocalyptic Thinking Is Wrong

“Let’s not teach our children that apocalyptic thinking is right thinking,” says Laurence Siegel. Apocalypticism “has always been wrong as a forecast, and it will continue to be wrong.”

Siegel is a business consultant and the director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. In Fewer, Richer, Greener, he argues convincingly that humanity has spent two centuries rising from our natural state of abject poverty, and that most of the credit for that goes market institutions and democracy. Parsing current trends, Siegel foresees world population peaking and then stabilizing by the end of this century. (Hence the “fewer.”) He argues that economic growth will bring humanity much greater wealth and more adept technologies. (Hence the “richer.”) And thanks to increased urbanization and steadily improving material efficiency, he thinks our species will tred more lightly on many natural ecosystems. (Hence the “greener.”)

Let’s take a closer look at each of those three forecasts.

“High death rates are the cause of high birth rates,” explains Siegel. World population grew very slowly in the Malthusian past because, although people had lots of babies, more than half of them died before reaching adulthood. Modern sanitation and medicine and greater supplies of food meant falling death rates; that combined with still-high birth rates to produce a population explosion, with the number of people in the world rising from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.7 billion now.

The global total fertility rate—that is, the number of children each woman is likely to bear over her lifetime—has fallen from around 5 in 1960 to 2.42 now. The United Nations forecasts that world’s total fertility rate will eventually fall below the conventionally defined replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman; the U.N. says population will then stabilize around 11 billion, and Siegel basically agrees.

So humanity is demographically transitioning from its natural state of high birth and high death rates to a more recent stage of high birth and low death rates to the low birth and low death rates seen in much of the world now. About half of the world’s population currently lives in countries with below replacement fertility. The U.S.’s total fertility rate, for example, has dropped to a record low of 1.73 children per woman.

Why are more people around the world having fewer children? Incentives, explains Siegel. Rearing children in modern societies costs a lot, both in money and in foregone opportunities and pleasures. Given that about 99 percent of kids born in countries like the U.S. will make it to age 20, parents are choosing to spend more resources on fewer children, who will thereby be more likely to enjoy successful lives. “To put it just a little too crassly, in wealthy societies and increasingly in less wealthy ones, children have become a cost center (some would even say a luxury good), not a profit center,” Siegel observes.

Siegel’s projections of future population growth may in fact be excessively high. In a 2018 study, demographer Wolfgang Lutz and his colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis offer an alternative scenario projecting rapid economic growth, rising levels of educational attainment for both sexes, and technological advancement—all factors that tend to lower fertility. They expect that world population could peak at about 8.9 billion by 2060 and then decline to 7.8 billion by the end of the century.

In any case, these trends mean that there will be many more old people in the future. Having worked most of his life in finance, Siegel offers some good advice how to prepare for retirement. He recommends that one “save a predetermined percentage of one’s income escalating over time, until enough money has been accumulated to replace (when Social Security benefits are also included) 70% of the pay rate one has been earning just before retirement.” At retirement he suggests using 15 percent of your savings to buy a deferred life annuity that kicks in at age 85, thus making sure that you still have income once you’ve spent down your savings.

As world population exploded, so too did economic growth, resulting in what the University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment. Siegel cites urbanist Jane Jacobs’ trenchant observation: “Poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”

The economic historian Angus Maddison calculated that global per capita income in 1 A.D. was $467 per year (in 1990 dollars). By 1820, global per capita income had risen to nearly $1,200 per year. Over the next two centuries, per capita GDP in current U.S. dollars rose to $11,300—or, taking purchasing power into account, to nearly $18,000 per person.

Income, of course, is not equally distributed across the world. Some places—Somalia, Niger, Malawi—are sadly stuck in Malthusian traps where per capita incomes are still below that global average from 1 A.D. The good news is that economic growth has taken off in many poor countries in recent decades, so their incomes are rising to converge with those of already developed nations. Inequality between countries is falling, and the global rate of abject poverty (people living on less than $1.90 per day) has fallen from 42 in 1981 to 8.6 percent in 2018. By one measure, half of the world’s population is now middle-class or wealthier.

Siegel provides reams of solid data for similarly heartening global trends. Crop productivity, food availability, life expectancy, and education are increasing; violence is in decline.

So that explains fewer and richer. But is Siegel right that the world will be greener?

Economists have identified an inverted U-shaped relationship—the environmental Kuznets curve—in which environmental conditions initially deteriorate as economic growth takes off, then improve when citizens with rising incomes demand better environmental amenities. For example, research has found that rising incomes eventually lead to falling air and water pollution and the expansion of forests. Generally speaking, richer is cleaner.

These curves do not peak and turn downward by themselves. They do so with a mixture of private and government action, with the details differing from one country to another. In the U.S., the levels of six common air pollutants—soot, ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide—have fallen by an average of 74 percent since 1970. Meanwhile, gross domestic product grew by 380 percent.

Siegel acknowledges that man-made climate change could pose significant problems for humanity as this century advances. But he notes that billions of relatively poor people face more immediate problems, including unsafe drinking water, uncertain food supplies, a dearth of educational opportunities, excessive local pollution, a lack of sanitation, and—importantly—no access to modern energy services. With respect to how best to prioritize between longer term environmental threats and fulfilling urgent needs, he writes, “There is no single answer. Economic growth will help—a lot.”

Siegel sees ecomodernism as the way forward to a greener world. “Intensifying many human activities—particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement—so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts,” states An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a document written by 18 scientists and activists in 2015. “These socioeconomic and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection. Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate global poverty.”

Humanity may already be approaching peak farmland, as we grow ever more food on ever less land. Although Siegel doesn’t mention it, global tree cover has expanded between 1981 and 2016 by 7 percent. That’s a territory of about 865,000 square miles, more than three times the size of Texas.

In 1960, only one third of people lived in cities. This has now increased to 55 percent, making this the first time in history that more folks live in cities than in the countryside. By 2050, nearly 70 percent of people will be city dwellers. Compact cities are much more energy-efficient, in addition to providing people with much better access to economic opportunities, education, and medical care.

While energy efficiency and renewables will play significant roles in helping humanity to decouple from nature, Siegel is also clear-eyed about the need for greater supplies of energy to alleviate poverty through economic growth. His solution: modern nuclear power. “For most applications, nuclear power dominates both fossil fuels and renewables in almost every aspect: efficiency, safety, reliability, carbon neutrality, fuel abundance, and eventually, price,” he argues.

If we can maintain and spread the institutions—free markets, the rule of law, property rights, free speech, and democratic governance—that underpin the Great Enrichment, Siegel’s forecast of fewer, richer, and greener will come to pass.

“Life has improved tremendously in the last 250 years; this book argues that it will continue to improve in almost every dimension; health, wealth, longevity, nutrition, literacy, peace, freedom, and so forth,” he writes. “Without overlooking the many obstacles on the path of progress, my aim is to reinforce and help restore people’s faith in the future—and help them understand why optimism is amply justified.”

(Disclosure: Siegel quotes me in his book. Immodestly, I will note that my book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century addresses many of these same issues and trends.)

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The Strategic Advantages of Defaming the Dead

Once again last week, President Trump defamed a dead man, cheekily suggesting at a rally Wednesday that the late congressman and WWII veteran John Dingell might currently be burning in hell. To understand the practical effect of the tactic, take a quick roll call of the handful of elected Republicans bold enough to criticize the president’s remark.

Start with the congressional delegation from Dingell’s home state of Michigan, where Trump’s counter-impeachment rally was held. There was Paul Mitchell, who called the comments “dishonorable” and “unacceptable.” There was Fred Upton, who termed them “crass.” And there was Justin Amash, who tweeted to Dingell’s widow and replacement, “Debbie, we are here for you.”

How did they muster the courage to speak out? Mitchell is one of the near-historic number of Republicans in the 116th Congress who have announced they won’t seek reelection. Upton has been rumored all year to be next on the retirement list. Amash left the GOP on July 4 and voted this week for impeachment.

As has been the case the last three years, nothing loosens the Republican tongue quite like relaxing one’s grip on power. Among the still-ambitious, the Dingell comment drew little criticism from his party.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R–Texas), the popular eyepatch-wearing veteran most famous for his moment of cross-partisan civility on Saturday Night Live, bucked the trend, tweeting that Trump’s comments “were totally unnecessary.” And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – S.C.), who has gone through several cycles of presidential disparagement of his late friend John McCain, bracketed his criticism with praise for his White House golf partner.

“When it came to John Dingell, he made sure he was honored appropriately. He did admire John Dingell’s service,” Graham told Fox News. “But this joke he made last night, he’s made it several times, it’s just not funny.”

Every time Trump drives a bulldozer through the guardrails of political decorum, the Republican Party becomes more Trumpy and less decorous. Michigan’s Mitchell chose to retire this July in reaction to the president’s grotesque suggestion that four congresswomen of color “go back” to their home countries, even though three were born in the United States. “We’re here for a purpose,” Mitchell told the Washington Post, “and it’s not this petty, childish bullshit.”

For millions of voters, Trump’s norm-shattering crassness is the whole point. He is the Elephant Man you bring to the beauty pageant, the foam middle finger you wear to the coronation.

Just look at who’s clutching pearls over a mild joke about the longest-serving congressman in history: Fake News CNN! “Swamp mistress” Nancy Pelosi! Meghan McCain! How many more “civil” politicians do we really need to wage one disastrous policy after another?

None of that makes it any more fun for Republican officials to be “badgered with questions” every day about the president’s latest outrage. You could power the entire Eastern Seaboard with the teeth-gritting smiles GOP lawmakers are constantly forced to display on Capitol Hill.

Those Trump-weary Republicans who self-deport from office tend to either be replaced by loyalists to the president — as Bob Corker was by Sen. Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee — or by Democrats, as in the Arizona senatorial swap of Jeff Flake for Kyrsten Sinema. Either way, the remaining GOP looks and sounds more like its leader, while the alienated defenders of civility spin off into the impotent margins.

This dynamic was laid bare during last Wednesday’s House impeachment debate, when Republican after Republican echoed Trump’s distinctive brand of insult comedy — “witch hunt,” “massive cover-up,” “Schiff Show.”

Meanwhile, far away from the corridors of power, veterans of past political campaigns for the likes of John McCain and George H.W. Bush were busy this week launching likely futile attempts to loosen Trump’s iron grip on the party they once helped lead.

The Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans opposed to “Trump and Trumpism,” announced its formation last Wednesday with the portentous proclamation that “Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics.” To defeat him at the ballot box, they’ve got only 85 percentage points to make up!

The president’s makeover of the GOP will almost certainly lead to his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, assuming we get one. But the problem with producing a bunch of mini-me’s is that career politicians lack Trump’s facility for and experience with pro wrestling-style rhetoric.

When Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) produced outrage-headlines last month by saying about Nancy Pelosi, with Trump standing right behind him, that “it must suck to be that dumb,” the occasion was a Keep America Great rally for Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone. Rispone then lost the election in a Republican-dominated state.

John Dingell won’t be the last dead congressman Donald Trump defames. But he may not have many more opportunities as president.

This article originally appeared in the L.A. Times.

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The Strategic Advantages of Defaming the Dead

Once again last week, President Trump defamed a dead man, cheekily suggesting at a rally Wednesday that the late congressman and WWII veteran John Dingell might currently be burning in hell. To understand the practical effect of the tactic, take a quick roll call of the handful of elected Republicans bold enough to criticize the president’s remark.

Start with the congressional delegation from Dingell’s home state of Michigan, where Trump’s counter-impeachment rally was held. There was Paul Mitchell, who called the comments “dishonorable” and “unacceptable.” There was Fred Upton, who termed them “crass.” And there was Justin Amash, who tweeted to Dingell’s widow and replacement, “Debbie, we are here for you.”

How did they muster the courage to speak out? Mitchell is one of the near-historic number of Republicans in the 116th Congress who have announced they won’t seek reelection. Upton has been rumored all year to be next on the retirement list. Amash left the GOP on July 4 and voted this week for impeachment.

As has been the case the last three years, nothing loosens the Republican tongue quite like relaxing one’s grip on power. Among the still-ambitious, the Dingell comment drew little criticism from his party.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R–Texas), the popular eyepatch-wearing veteran most famous for his moment of cross-partisan civility on Saturday Night Live, bucked the trend, tweeting that Trump’s comments “were totally unnecessary.” And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – S.C.), who has gone through several cycles of presidential disparagement of his late friend John McCain, bracketed his criticism with praise for his White House golf partner.

“When it came to John Dingell, he made sure he was honored appropriately. He did admire John Dingell’s service,” Graham told Fox News. “But this joke he made last night, he’s made it several times, it’s just not funny.”

Every time Trump drives a bulldozer through the guardrails of political decorum, the Republican Party becomes more Trumpy and less decorous. Michigan’s Mitchell chose to retire this July in reaction to the president’s grotesque suggestion that four congresswomen of color “go back” to their home countries, even though three were born in the United States. “We’re here for a purpose,” Mitchell told the Washington Post, “and it’s not this petty, childish bullshit.”

For millions of voters, Trump’s norm-shattering crassness is the whole point. He is the Elephant Man you bring to the beauty pageant, the foam middle finger you wear to the coronation.

Just look at who’s clutching pearls over a mild joke about the longest-serving congressman in history: Fake News CNN! “Swamp mistress” Nancy Pelosi! Meghan McCain! How many more “civil” politicians do we really need to wage one disastrous policy after another?

None of that makes it any more fun for Republican officials to be “badgered with questions” every day about the president’s latest outrage. You could power the entire Eastern Seaboard with the teeth-gritting smiles GOP lawmakers are constantly forced to display on Capitol Hill.

Those Trump-weary Republicans who self-deport from office tend to either be replaced by loyalists to the president — as Bob Corker was by Sen. Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee — or by Democrats, as in the Arizona senatorial swap of Jeff Flake for Kyrsten Sinema. Either way, the remaining GOP looks and sounds more like its leader, while the alienated defenders of civility spin off into the impotent margins.

This dynamic was laid bare during last Wednesday’s House impeachment debate, when Republican after Republican echoed Trump’s distinctive brand of insult comedy — “witch hunt,” “massive cover-up,” “Schiff Show.”

Meanwhile, far away from the corridors of power, veterans of past political campaigns for the likes of John McCain and George H.W. Bush were busy this week launching likely futile attempts to loosen Trump’s iron grip on the party they once helped lead.

The Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans opposed to “Trump and Trumpism,” announced its formation last Wednesday with the portentous proclamation that “Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics.” To defeat him at the ballot box, they’ve got only 85 percentage points to make up!

The president’s makeover of the GOP will almost certainly lead to his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, assuming we get one. But the problem with producing a bunch of mini-me’s is that career politicians lack Trump’s facility for and experience with pro wrestling-style rhetoric.

When Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) produced outrage-headlines last month by saying about Nancy Pelosi, with Trump standing right behind him, that “it must suck to be that dumb,” the occasion was a Keep America Great rally for Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone. Rispone then lost the election in a Republican-dominated state.

John Dingell won’t be the last dead congressman Donald Trump defames. But he may not have many more opportunities as president.

This article originally appeared in the L.A. Times.

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The Corruptions of Power

The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir, by Samantha Power, Dey Street Books, 592 pages, $29.99

Less than 100 hours before 2008’s critical Super Tuesday vote, Samantha Power, the Pulitzer-winning author of ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, stared plaintively into the eyes of Armenian-American YouTube viewers and delivered a heartfelt testimonial to a “true friend of the Armenian people,” Barack Obama.

Past presidents have shied away, she said, from the “sometimes hard truth telling” of calling the Armenian genocide a “genocide.” But not the junior senator from Illinois, as evidenced by his “very forthright statement on the Armenian genocide, his support for the Senate resolution acknowledging the genocide all these years later, his willingness as president to commemorate it.”

Fourteen months after Power’s promise, Obama finally got his big chance to deliver. And he whiffed. “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed,” the new president said on April 24, the National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man. He did not elaborate further.

A promise broken that brazenly could be a teaching moment for the “humanitarian interventionists,” of whom Power—Obama’s first-term human rights honcho on the National Security Council and his second-term ambassador to the United Nations—is arguably the leading light. Did the woman who is as likely as anyone alive to be the next Democrat-appointed secretary of state ever consider that mobilizing U.S. force to halt genocide inevitably requires such grubby logistical concerns as making sure not to piss off the owners of the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey? Might there be a corrupting paradox in protecting human rights at the point of a gun?

Power’s new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, includes a whole chapter titled “April 24,” complete with an O. Henry twist at the end. But whether it’s the war of words she lost on that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day or the far more consequential war in Libya that she successfully helped argue America into, the muddled track record of applied Powerism occasions little introspection from its intellectual architect.

“He was the President of the United States,” Power exhaustedly concludes, after detailing her failed attempts to get Obama to utter the word genocide in 2009. “No matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to put myself in his shoes, or appreciate the variables he was weighing.” So much for the self-styled “genocide chick.”

As with most champions of the “just do something” approach to governance, what haunts the memoirist the most is not “What did we do wrong?” but “Why couldn’t we do more?” Thus, the central dilemma in the book is Obama’s refusal to enforce his “red line” against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in 2013, not the allegedly genocide-preventing overthrow of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi two years earlier.

Since Libya was the application of Power’s ideas and Syria the unmet aspiration, you might think she would be interested in a comparative analysis of actions taken and not. After all, both countries plunged into an instability whose effects are still being felt today, including the largest refugee crisis since World War II. The disastrous intervention in Libya materially contributed to the public backlash against striking Syria, a fact Power tacitly acknowledged while trying to rally support at the liberal Center for American Progress: “This will not be Iraq, this will not be Afghanistan, this will not be Libya.”

So what education did the idealist glean from a genocide prevention gone wrong? One strikingly similar to that learned by neoconservatives after Iraq: that we didn’t try hard enough to win the peace.

“Once it became clear that European efforts to shore up the transition were falling short,” she concludes, “the US government could have exerted more aggressive, high-level pressure on Libya’s neighbors to back a unified political structure and cease their support for the competing opposition factions.” Still, “neither at the time nor presently do I see how we could have rejected the [pro-intervention] appeals of our closest European allies, the Arab League, and a large number of Libyans.” After all, “we had run out of further nonmilitary steps.”

And Americans wonder why we’re constantly at war.

I have some familiarity with the milieu from which Power sprang. Our life trajectories as sports-fanatic college newspaper reporters were both radically redirected by the same event: an anonymous Chinese man stopping a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. (Her recollection—”For the first time, I reacted as though current events had something to do with me”—mirrors my reaction precisely.) As a direct result of the ensuing revolutions of 1989, each of us wound up the next summer in both celebratory Prague and fracturing Yugoslavia. When Power returned to the latter region a few years later to try her hand at being a war stringer, one of the key figures helping her was my ex-girlfriend.

The Western Gen Xers who flooded into post-communist Europe tend to have a very different view of the exercise of U.S. power than do normies back home or even expats in other parts of the globe. We basked in the populations’ idealized appreciation for American moral leadership against the “evil empire” of Soviet communism rather than encountering far more mixed verdicts in Africa or Central America. While most Americans were eyeing peace dividends and bickering over half-baked expeditions in Somalia and Haiti, we were horrified on a daily basis by Western inaction in the face of the slaughter in Sarajevo. “I found myself rooting for the first time in my life for the United States to use military force,” Power recalls.

Many books are yet to be written about how America in the 1990s transformed so quickly from uncertain international actor to uncontested global cop, but Yugoslavia, as it has been so often in its unhappy history, was central to an empire’s story arc. From the outbreak of hostilities in Slovenia in the spring of 1991 through the summer of 1995, Washington clearly wished that a rapidly integrating Western Europe would clean up the mess in its own backyard. Instead, Paris and Bonn and London took turns making diplomatic pratfalls. It was only when America fired up the fighter planes that the participants in the Yugoslav wars became motivated to negotiate a settlement.

The lesson was learned, or so many of us thought: America has to lead. Force can be effectively applied, with minimal U.S. casualties, to halt the organized mass murder of civilians. In a world otherwise getting more free, democratic, prosperous, and peaceful by the minute (hey, it was the ’90s!), some well-timed interventions can nip potential catastrophes in the bud. Democratic internationalists and Republican neoconservatives were in basic agreement—if “never again” is to be taken seriously, America needs to draw some red lines and to punish those who cross them, national sovereignty be damned.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see where this road map leads: to one war after another, especially the disaster in Iraq. Power, to her credit, did not support the Iraq invasion, arguing correctly that it “would render the world a much more dangerous place.” But she did fall prey to some of the same myopia as the Bush administration. “I actually think that it’s going to be a relatively clean intervention,” she said in February 2003. “I may be in the minority in the human rights community in feeling that way, but having seen the Kosovo and the Bosnia and the Afghanistan interventions, I have some sense of that.”

Worse, Power spelled out a doctrine for being more, not less, promiscuously interventionist: “My feeling is that an intervention in Iraq, even a unilateral one, is undoubtedly going to make Iraq a more humane place,” she said. “As somebody who has looked at the relationship between state power and sovereignty on the one hand, and individual rights on the other, I have to say to myself if the human rights movement meant anything it meant that sometimes sovereignty can’t be a shield, a protection for regimes that forfeit their claim to that privilege.”

Some realism has crept into the worldview of 2019 Samantha Power. In her new book’s afterword, gazing into the confusion of populist uprisings at home and abroad, she bemoans the interventionist default of foreign policy.

“Military force is seen as the ‘go-to’ tool in the US toolbox,” she laments. “Such a heavy reliance on our military is neither sustainable nor desirable. It is emblematic of a militarization of US foreign policy that concerns people across the political spectrum.”

America’s journey toward a more humble foreign policy has been thwarted time and again by the size of its toolbox. It’s a lesson all of us idealists need to keep relearning.

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The Corruptions of Power

The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir, by Samantha Power, Dey Street Books, 592 pages, $29.99

Less than 100 hours before 2008’s critical Super Tuesday vote, Samantha Power, the Pulitzer-winning author of ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, stared plaintively into the eyes of Armenian-American YouTube viewers and delivered a heartfelt testimonial to a “true friend of the Armenian people,” Barack Obama.

Past presidents have shied away, she said, from the “sometimes hard truth telling” of calling the Armenian genocide a “genocide.” But not the junior senator from Illinois, as evidenced by his “very forthright statement on the Armenian genocide, his support for the Senate resolution acknowledging the genocide all these years later, his willingness as president to commemorate it.”

Fourteen months after Power’s promise, Obama finally got his big chance to deliver. And he whiffed. “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed,” the new president said on April 24, the National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man. He did not elaborate further.

A promise broken that brazenly could be a teaching moment for the “humanitarian interventionists,” of whom Power—Obama’s first-term human rights honcho on the National Security Council and his second-term ambassador to the United Nations—is arguably the leading light. Did the woman who is as likely as anyone alive to be the next Democrat-appointed secretary of state ever consider that mobilizing U.S. force to halt genocide inevitably requires such grubby logistical concerns as making sure not to piss off the owners of the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey? Might there be a corrupting paradox in protecting human rights at the point of a gun?

Power’s new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, includes a whole chapter titled “April 24,” complete with an O. Henry twist at the end. But whether it’s the war of words she lost on that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day or the far more consequential war in Libya that she successfully helped argue America into, the muddled track record of applied Powerism occasions little introspection from its intellectual architect.

“He was the President of the United States,” Power exhaustedly concludes, after detailing her failed attempts to get Obama to utter the word genocide in 2009. “No matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to put myself in his shoes, or appreciate the variables he was weighing.” So much for the self-styled “genocide chick.”

As with most champions of the “just do something” approach to governance, what haunts the memoirist the most is not “What did we do wrong?” but “Why couldn’t we do more?” Thus, the central dilemma in the book is Obama’s refusal to enforce his “red line” against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in 2013, not the allegedly genocide-preventing overthrow of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi two years earlier.

Since Libya was the application of Power’s ideas and Syria the unmet aspiration, you might think she would be interested in a comparative analysis of actions taken and not. After all, both countries plunged into an instability whose effects are still being felt today, including the largest refugee crisis since World War II. The disastrous intervention in Libya materially contributed to the public backlash against striking Syria, a fact Power tacitly acknowledged while trying to rally support at the liberal Center for American Progress: “This will not be Iraq, this will not be Afghanistan, this will not be Libya.”

So what education did the idealist glean from a genocide prevention gone wrong? One strikingly similar to that learned by neoconservatives after Iraq: that we didn’t try hard enough to win the peace.

“Once it became clear that European efforts to shore up the transition were falling short,” she concludes, “the US government could have exerted more aggressive, high-level pressure on Libya’s neighbors to back a unified political structure and cease their support for the competing opposition factions.” Still, “neither at the time nor presently do I see how we could have rejected the [pro-intervention] appeals of our closest European allies, the Arab League, and a large number of Libyans.” After all, “we had run out of further nonmilitary steps.”

And Americans wonder why we’re constantly at war.

I have some familiarity with the milieu from which Power sprang. Our life trajectories as sports-fanatic college newspaper reporters were both radically redirected by the same event: an anonymous Chinese man stopping a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. (Her recollection—”For the first time, I reacted as though current events had something to do with me”—mirrors my reaction precisely.) As a direct result of the ensuing revolutions of 1989, each of us wound up the next summer in both celebratory Prague and fracturing Yugoslavia. When Power returned to the latter region a few years later to try her hand at being a war stringer, one of the key figures helping her was my ex-girlfriend.

The Western Gen Xers who flooded into post-communist Europe tend to have a very different view of the exercise of U.S. power than do normies back home or even expats in other parts of the globe. We basked in the populations’ idealized appreciation for American moral leadership against the “evil empire” of Soviet communism rather than encountering far more mixed verdicts in Africa or Central America. While most Americans were eyeing peace dividends and bickering over half-baked expeditions in Somalia and Haiti, we were horrified on a daily basis by Western inaction in the face of the slaughter in Sarajevo. “I found myself rooting for the first time in my life for the United States to use military force,” Power recalls.

Many books are yet to be written about how America in the 1990s transformed so quickly from uncertain international actor to uncontested global cop, but Yugoslavia, as it has been so often in its unhappy history, was central to an empire’s story arc. From the outbreak of hostilities in Slovenia in the spring of 1991 through the summer of 1995, Washington clearly wished that a rapidly integrating Western Europe would clean up the mess in its own backyard. Instead, Paris and Bonn and London took turns making diplomatic pratfalls. It was only when America fired up the fighter planes that the participants in the Yugoslav wars became motivated to negotiate a settlement.

The lesson was learned, or so many of us thought: America has to lead. Force can be effectively applied, with minimal U.S. casualties, to halt the organized mass murder of civilians. In a world otherwise getting more free, democratic, prosperous, and peaceful by the minute (hey, it was the ’90s!), some well-timed interventions can nip potential catastrophes in the bud. Democratic internationalists and Republican neoconservatives were in basic agreement—if “never again” is to be taken seriously, America needs to draw some red lines and to punish those who cross them, national sovereignty be damned.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see where this road map leads: to one war after another, especially the disaster in Iraq. Power, to her credit, did not support the Iraq invasion, arguing correctly that it “would render the world a much more dangerous place.” But she did fall prey to some of the same myopia as the Bush administration. “I actually think that it’s going to be a relatively clean intervention,” she said in February 2003. “I may be in the minority in the human rights community in feeling that way, but having seen the Kosovo and the Bosnia and the Afghanistan interventions, I have some sense of that.”

Worse, Power spelled out a doctrine for being more, not less, promiscuously interventionist: “My feeling is that an intervention in Iraq, even a unilateral one, is undoubtedly going to make Iraq a more humane place,” she said. “As somebody who has looked at the relationship between state power and sovereignty on the one hand, and individual rights on the other, I have to say to myself if the human rights movement meant anything it meant that sometimes sovereignty can’t be a shield, a protection for regimes that forfeit their claim to that privilege.”

Some realism has crept into the worldview of 2019 Samantha Power. In her new book’s afterword, gazing into the confusion of populist uprisings at home and abroad, she bemoans the interventionist default of foreign policy.

“Military force is seen as the ‘go-to’ tool in the US toolbox,” she laments. “Such a heavy reliance on our military is neither sustainable nor desirable. It is emblematic of a militarization of US foreign policy that concerns people across the political spectrum.”

America’s journey toward a more humble foreign policy has been thwarted time and again by the size of its toolbox. It’s a lesson all of us idealists need to keep relearning.

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Brickbat: Don’t Die Here

In France, only doctors can pronounce someone dead, not coroners or pathologists or nurses as in many other countries. Only doctors. With a growing shortage of physicians, especially in rural areas, that means the families of those who die at home may have to wait hours or even days for their loved ones to be pronounced dead. And by law, the body can’t be removed from the home until a physician pronounces death, so the families have to keep the bodies until a doctor arrives. The problem has grown so severe, The New York Times reports, that one town has banned people from dying at home.

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