Category: reason

A Florida police officer is accused of kicking a pregnant woman with such force that it forced her into labor.

The incident occurred Wednesday, when North Miami Beach Police Officer Amber Pacheco and her sister got into an argument with a couple from Liberty City. (Pacheco was off-duty at the time.) The investigation did not list the cause of the fight, but the confrontation escalated when Evoni Murray’s boyfriend kicked Pacheco’s sister in the face. As Pacheco admitted to an arresting officer, she then “beat the shit” out of Murray.

Following the kick, an arresting officer observed that Murray, who was eight months pregnant, “appeared to be in severe pain and possibly having contractions.” Murray was taken to the hospital and gave birth. The baby appears to be healthy.

Pacheco later said that she kicked someone but wasn’t sure of their identity. She was arrested and charged with battery.

Maj. Richard Rand reports that Pacheco has been suspended with pay while the department conducts an internal investigation. Having been at the department for less than a year, Pacheco is on probationary employment.

Television critic Glenn Garvin finds Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? hilarious at times, but is disturbed by its emphasis on simply finding people to humiliate:

Not every interview is a fair fight. In his Cain-N.Degeocello guise, Cohen calls a “town meeting” with a couple of dozen residents of the desolate western Arizona town of Kingman. The subject: a new development that turns out to be a $385 million mosque that he describes as the world’s biggest outside the Middle East. The grizzled Kingmanites react with predictable hostility and some open racism. (This is not an interpretation. “I’m racist toward Muslims,” yells one of them.)

The chattering classes have seized the Kingman episode as Exhibit A in the Trump Era’s deformation of the American soul. What goes unmentioned: The folks at the meeting were not exactly a cross-section of the city, but more from its busted-luck demographic. Recruited on Facebook in return for a $150 payment, they were either out of work or have the kind of jobs that make it attractive to skip a day of work for $150.

View this article.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis says the nation’s real gross domestic product grew 4.1 percent in the second quarter of 2018. That’s good news, but the looming consequences of Donald Trump’s tariffs mean it likely won’t last.

The GDP numbers, released today, show an improvement over the first quarter’s 2.2 percent growth. It’s the first time the economy has grown more than 4 percent in a quarter since 2014.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses: Residential investment fell for the fourth time in five quarters, meaning that people are putting less money into home construction. But for the most part, the GDP report suggest a strong economy, with consumer spending going up 4 percent and business investment rising 7.3 percent. “The bottom line is that the economy is doing better,” Diane Swonk, chief economist for the accounting firm Grant Thornton, tells The New York Times.

President Trump thinks this is just the beginning. “We’re on track to hit the highest annual growth rate in over 13 years,” he said after the numbers were released. “And I will say this right now and I will say it strongly, as the deals come in one by one, we’re going to go a lot higher than these numbers, and these are great numbers.”

But as the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget explains,

Many analysts believe the second-quarter growth numbers are artificially inflated by shifts in consumption to avoid the new tariffs announced this quarter. Most significantly, China appears to have accelerated purchases of soybeans, crude oil, and other exports before new tariffs went into effect. Pantheon Macroeconomics estimated the soybean surge alone could account for as much 0.6 percentage points of the growth rate. These accelerated purchases mean faster growth now at the expense of slower growth later.

In other words, foreign companies appear to be importing as many goods as they can from the U.S. before their own governments retaliate against Trump’s tariffs with duties of their own. Once those tariffs are in place, American goods won’t be in such high demand, which will hurt future GDP growth.

“We’re getting explosive growth in the second quarter because of trade,” economist Ellen Zentner of Morgan Stanley tells the Times. “You’ve got a big hole on the other side of that.”

The Tennessee branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit against the Memphis police, accusing the department of illegally surveilling Black Lives Matter activists.

The suit stems from the city’s response last year to an open records request. When Memphis released the names of civilians who required a police escort during City Hall visits, several people on the list turned out to be activists who participated in “protests, rallies or other free speech activities in the city.” The ACLU notes that many of these figures “had no criminal record or history of causing disturbances at City Hall.” Nonetheless, individuals on the list could be escorted from certain properties and charged with criminal trespass if they return.

According to the lawsuit, the Memphis Police Department made the City Hall Escort List by tracking the social media posts of “local individuals or groups that were staging protests.” Police Director Michael Rallings allegedly approved the list’s creation in response to a 2016 “die-in” protest in front of the mayor’s home. (No arrests were reported at the die-in.)

The lawsuit accuses officers of using activists’ private Facebook posts to track their movements and meetings. Information including pictures, previous arrests, and connections with other activists were presented in weekly PowerPoint presentations. One of the weekly PowerPoints accused local activists of trying to use “legitimate community organizations to advance a radical agenda” and having an “expressed goal” to “embarrass law enforcement in order to undermine the bond between law enforcement and the community.” The PowerPoint contained private social media posts and admitted to the use of undercover officers.

The police apparently followed activists’ activities through a fake Facebook user account, accessed private social media communications, and placed undercover officers at meetings and events. All this, the ACLU argues, violates a 1978 consent decree that banned Memphis city officials from surveilling “constitutionally-protected political activities.”

“Monitoring these public social media posts is simply good police work, which has allowed us to make operations plans to protect both demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, keeping everyone safe without violence,” Rallings declared in a statement. According to The Appeal, he insists his “officers have never interfered with anyone lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Rallings did not address the private communications in question.

That 1978 consent decree exists for good reason. “During the civil rights movement,” the ACLU points out, “Memphis police engaged in the questionable practice of gathering domestic intelligence on demonstrators and activists in an attempt to intimidate people from exercising their right to free speech and assembly.” Now as then, the city’s cops are spying on nonviolent activists exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been trying to force sanctuary cities to help the feds track down and deport illegal immigrants. Unfortunately for Sessions, the courts are questioning the constitutionality of the law he’s invoking.

Chicago is a “sanctuary city”—that is, a place where officials typically do not ask residents’ immigration status in many cases do not cooperate with federal officials in detaining illegal immigrants. Sessions has been attempting to force such cities to be more cooperative by threatening their access to federal grant funds. One of his demands is that these cities affirm their compliance with Section 1373 of the United States code.

Section 1373 doesn’t actually require that cities or states assist the federal government in catching or booting out illegal immigrants. But it prohibits states and cities from doing anything (including passing laws or ordinances) that would stop any local government officials from communicating with federal immigration officials about an individual’s residency or immigration status. Sounds like a pretty powerful tool for Sessions—except that judges are now declaring Section 1373 an unconstitutional imposition on states’ autonomy.

Today the U.S. District Court for the Northeastern District of Illinois Eastern Division ruled that Sessions cannot use Section 1373 to push sanctuary cities into compliace. “In the end,” the court ruled, “Section 1373 requires local policymakers to stand aside and allow the federal government to conscript the time and cooperation of local employees. This robs the local executive of its autonomy and ties the hands of the local legislature. Such affronts to State sovereignty are not countenanced by the anticommandeering principle of the Constitution. Section 1373 is unconstitutional and cannot stand.”

This is not the first federal judge to rule that Section 1373 is unconstitutional. Another one made a similar ruling on behalf of Philadelphia in June. Ilya Somin analyzed that ruling over at The Volokh Conspiracy.

In both cases, a new legal development is contributing to these rulings. Remember back in May, when the Supreme Court decided that the feds don’t have the authority to stop states from legalizing sports gambling? The court ruled that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 overreached and violated the lawmaking powers of the states under the 10th Amendment.

That ruling, Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, is now being used as a precedent to declare Section 1373 unconstitutional for the exact same reasons. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber pulled extensively from Murphy ruling in deciding against Sessions.

This is hardly the last word. The judge’s ruling today came in response to a motion from Sessions to dismiss the case (the judge declined) and a request from the City of Chicago for a partial summary judgment that the Justice Department overstepped its authorities by attempting to tie grant funding to immigration cooperation (the judge granted). The injunction is limited only to Chicago, though the full appeals court will consider a possible nationwide injunction. The case is scheduled to be argued in September.

Read the ruling for yourself here.

Uber and Lyft have gotten too popular too quickly for city councils across the country over. In June, D.C. raised its tax on rideshare trips from 1 percent to 6 percent. A similar proposal is working its way through the San Francisco. And yesterday New York City Council President Corey Johnson threw his support behind legislation to freeze the number of licenses granted to new rideshare drivers for a year. The bill would also restrict when and where they can offer rides in the city.

“This is the plan that we came up with and in my heart I believe it’s the best path forward,” Johnson tells The New York Times. “Our goal has always been to protect drivers, bring fairness to the industry and reduce congestion.”

Noticeably absent from Johnson’s stated goals: helping people get around town.

The idea of a cap is not new. In 2015, Mayor Bill De Blasio pushed for a limit on rideshare vehicles but backed down after stiff opposition from city councilmembers (including Johnson). The mayor’s office has issued supportive statements for Johnson’s latest initiative.

A day before Johnson made his announcement, former New York City transportation official and longtime rideshare skeptic Bruce Schaller released a report that purports to show that these services have added 2.8 vehicle miles travelled for every mile of personal auto travel they have eliminated. The report likewise claims that carpooling services such as Lyft Line and UberPOOL add 2.6 vehicle miles for every mile of personal auto travel that they remove.

The reason for this, according to Schaller, is that ridesharing services mostly scoop up riders who would otherwise be biking, walking, or taking mass transit. His report argues for aggressive government intervention to prevent rideshare companies form swallowing cities whole, through higher taxes, possible caps on rideshares, and “space-efficiency” requirements for rideshare fleets. (The latter is basically a mandate to operate buses instead of personal vehicles.)

Ridesharing companies hotly contest these findings. A Lyft spokesperson points Reason to the San Francisco Bay Area, where traffic congestion dropped 5 percent last year while the number of Lyft rides increased by 49 percent. A study from the UCLA’s Institute for Transportation Studies found little evidence that people were making the switch from public transit to ridesharing services in California.

These findings focus on California, not New York City, where both ridesharing and traffic congestion have increased in the past couple years. But if congestion can rise in one city where ridesharing is growing while falling in another, that suggests other factors are at play. Like, say, the New York subway system being in a state of crisis.

Plummeting on-time rates. Constant maintenance problems both at the stations and along the tracks. Sewage pouring from ceilings. The subways are in such terrible shape these days that Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised emergency repairs last year. But as The New York Times noted this week, little progress on these fixes has had been made, “despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on repairs.”

That miserable situation doesn’t just help explain why subway riders would be switching to Uber and Lyft. It shows what a dismal idea it is to put a cap on ridesharing services just when they’re needed the most.

With a cap in place, rideshare drivers would be more likely to confine their trips to the busiest parts of town, where both demand and fares are high. Citizens of the outer boroughs would lose out.

Arva Rice, president of the New York Urban League, made this very point in a May article for Crain’s. A rideshare cap might reduce congestion in the central business district, she notes, but it could also “devastate transportation options in the rest of the city, predominantly communities of color, which have long been underserved and overlooked by transportation officials and independent cab drivers.”

Meanwhile, Uber has rolled out a “De Blasio’s Uber” mode on its app, which tells users there are either no cars available or that there will be a 25 minute wait.

No city in America currently caps the number of rideshare vehicles, and past efforts to impose a cap in New York City have failed. But rideshare companies’ reputation has fallen since then, making the industry an easier target. If this idea takes hold, New Yorkers will get to have two hobbled transportations options instead of just one.

“Our trade deficit ballooned to $817 billion,” Donald Trump said during a speech to steelworkers in Granite City, Illinois, yesterday. “Think of that. We lost $817 billion a year over the last number of years in trade. In other words, if we didn’t trade, we’d save a hell of a lot of money.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the president exaggerated the size of the 2017 trade deficit by 48 percent. But that’s a mere quibble compared to his fundamental misunderstanding of what that number means, which in turn reflects a zero-sum view of economic exchange that does not bode well for the outcome of a tariff war supposedly aimed at promoting free trade.

“If we didn’t trade,” Trump argues, “we’d save a hell of a lot of money.” But that does not mean we’d be better off, since we would not have all the things we buy with our money, which we clearly value more than the money itself, since no one forces us to exchange one for the other. The analysis is the same whether or not the people who sell us things happen to be located in the United States.

“Without trade, we could have piles of money,” Cato Institute trade specialist Scott Lincicome concedes in an interview with The New York Times. “But we’d have no food, clothing, housing, etc. So the money would be worthless, unless you swam in it like Scrooge McDuck or something.”

The president, despite his Wharton degree and business career, frequently seems baffled by this concept, prompting corrective analogies from people with a firmer grasp of economics. “When you’re almost 800 Billion Dollars a year down on Trade, you can’t lose a Trade War!” Trump asserted on Twitter last month. “I’m way down on trade with restaurants, grocery stores, malls, and movie theaters,” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) replied. “I keep buying from them, but they never buy from me. I must be getting ripped off, right?”

As with many things the president says, his comments about trade raise the question of whether he really is as clueless as he seems or is playing dumb as part of some Machiavellian strategy. The answer matters because Trump intermittently says he understands the value of trade and ultimately aims to promote it with his can’t-lose war, which he claims will encourage reciprocal reductions in tariffs and other barriers. This week he bragged that his tariffs on European imports had led to negotiations aimed at virtually eliminating trade barriers between the U.S. and the E.U. “I love trade,” he declared on Fox News last month. “Trade has always been my thing.”

During the presidential campaign Trump also would alternate between portraying trade deficits as inherently bad and praising the principles that make them inevitable. “I love trade,” he insisted during a 2015 Republican debate. “I’m a free trader, 100 percent. But we need smart people making the deals, and we don’t have smart people making the deals.”

Trump has been saying the same thing for at least two decades. “You only have to look at our trade deficit to see that we are being taken to the cleaners by our trading partners,” he wrote in The America We Deserve, published in 2000. “Our long-term interests require that we cut better deals with our world trading partners.”

Maybe Trump has been putting on a show all this time, so that when he was finally elected president he would be in a stronger bargaining position because foreign leaders would think he was crazy and confused enough to actually believe that “tariffs are the greatest” or that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” But the evidence suggests Trump means what he says.

As Veronique de Rugy noted here a couple of weeks ago, “This is one policy area where he’s been remarkably consistent over the years.” Even when Trump pays lip service to free markets, she observed, it’s with the aim of increasing exports and reducing imports so as to bring down the number he thinks crystallizes our failure and lack of resolve. Trump is not talking like a mercantilist in service of free trade; he is talking like a free trader in service of mercantilism.

It’s been a few years since the last media scare about prediction markets. So we were overdue for this week’s handwringing about Augur, digital currencies, and assassinations.

Augur, which has been under development since 2015 and launched this month, is a set of smart contracts built on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s intentionally decentralized, meaning that anyone can use it to propose wagers, anyone can bet on the outcome, and human judges known as reporters have a financial incentive honestly to decide whether the event happened or not. No central authority exists to reject unacceptable, or illegal, wagers, writes Declan McCullagh in his latest piece at Reason.

View this article.

President Donald Trump expressed his support today for the Dallas Cowboys’ national anthem policy. To judge from his comments earlier this week, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones might not be very happy about the endorsement.

Jones said at a press conference Wednesday that everyone on his team must stand for the pre-game playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In other words, don’t protest police brutality or anything else by kneeling during the anthem. The Cowboys are instituting this rule even though the National Football League announced last week that it was suspending a policy requiring players on the field to stand.

The Cowboys are now the only team with such a rule in place. Trump thinks the rest of the league should follow suit:

Way to go Jerry. This is what the league should do! https://t.co/yEP1jK57xi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2018

But Jones seems to wish Trump would stay out of it, calling Trump’s interest in the issue “problematic” and “unprecedented.” Jones says he wants the entire debate would simply “go away.”

Trump, by contrast, has gone out of his way to ensure the controversy doesn’t die. Ever since last September, when he said the “sons of bitches” who kneel should be “fired,” the president has tried to rile up his supporters by coming down hard on the NFL. Last month, for example, he disinvited the Philadelphia Eagles from the White House after they won the Super Bowl, citing a disagreement over the anthem controversy. And last week, the president suggested some punishments for players who kneel:

The NFL National Anthem Debate is alive and well again – can’t believe it! Isn’t it in contract that players must stand at attention, hand on heart? The $40,000,000 Commissioner must now make a stand. First time kneeling, out for game. Second time kneeling, out for season/no pay!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 20, 2018

At this rate, the battle will rage on through 2020. And that, no doubt, is exactly what the president wants.

When President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Randy Barnett—a libertarian legal scholar, Georgetown Law professor, and Volokh Conspiracy blogger—praised the choice, writing that “Kavanaugh’s appointment would move the Court in the direction of textualism and originalism. He’s very interested in the separation of powers in general and with respect to the administrative state in particular.”

In a new Reason Podcast recorded at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas, Barnett fleshes out his assessment of Kavanaugh, including areas in which the judge is not so good from a libertarian point of view (think Fourth Amendment). Barnett also talks about the history of Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the radical departure things took with the nomination of Robert Bork to the high court in 1987.

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Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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