Category: reason

Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against a bill that would make it easier for those considering suicide to get in touch with a mental health professional.

The House voted 379-1 yesterday to approve the National Suicide Hotline Improvement Act of 2017. The legislation would require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to look into creating a three-digit hotline, similar to 911, for those contemplating suicide.

It’s a “good idea,” but it lacks a “constitutional basis,” Amash declared. In a series of tweets last night, the libertarian-leaning Republican explained why. “I swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and I take that oath seriously,” he wrote. “Constitutional limits are meaningless if we ignore them whenever we like the policy outcome.”

Amash then responded to a query from freelance journalist Jim Higdon, who asked where the Constitution prohibits “preventing suicide by hotline.” Amash explained that it’s not a question of where the Constitution prohibits such a hotline, but rather where it authorizes Congress to create one. “We live under a Constitution that grants Congress limited, enumerated powers,” he wrote.

The correct question under our Constitution is: What is the authority for the legislation? We live under a Constitution that grants Congress limited, enumerated powers.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 24, 2018

Higdon went on to ask the Michigan representative if the Constitution is a “living document,” citing the creation of the Air Force, which was not mentioned in it. Amash replied that “Article V provides for the amendment process,” and though “many people” believe the Constitution is a “living” document, “I clearly do not subscribe to that.” He also defended the existence of the Air Force by noting that it “was founded as part of the Army.”

Article V provides for the amendment process. Many people today believe the Constitution is “living” and seek to “amend” the Constitution outside of this process. I clearly do not subscribe to that.

The Air Force was founded as part of the Army.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 24, 2018

Amash summed up his argument against the suicide hotline act by responding to a constituent who wanted to know “in layman’s terms why it’s unconstitutional.” The Constitution, Amash wrote, “grants Congress only limited powers,” including those laid out in Article I and in subsequent amendments. “This hotline is not authorized under any of these powers,” he said.

Our Constitution grants Congress only limited powers. Most are listed in Article I, but some are in amendments to the Constitution. This hotline is not authorized under any of these powers.

Article V provides an amendment process if the people want to give Congress a new power.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 24, 2018

It is quite possible that former Attorney General Eric Holder will throw his hat in the ring in the 2020 presidential election.

April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks tweeted last week that Holder was seriously exploring a run for president. Yesterday, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert asked Holder about the validity of Ryan’s tweet.

“I’m thinking about it,” he told Colbert. Holder informed Colbert that he would “make a determination” early next year.

Holder’s legacy was greatly intertwined with former President Obama’s largest scandals. In 2012, for example, the House of Representatives voted to hold Holder in criminal contempt over “Fast and Furious,” a gunwalking operation that ended in the death of a Border Patrol agent. Holder was also sometimes guilty of “lean[ing] on news reports of issues he should be better versed in,” such as an NYPD spying program that targeted American Muslim neighborhoods. Though Holder’s Justice Department received complaints about the program for months, it did not take action until an Associated Press investigation received attention.

On a more positive note, Holder’s less punitive views on criminal justice issues such as sentencing reform and the rescheduling of marijuana became more prominent in the closing years of the Obama administration.

Bonus link: Matt Welch previously observed how a Holder presidency would benefit Democrats, though perhaps not America.

After nearly two decades of war, occupation, and nation building, Washington may finally be willing to try talking to the Taliban. The Trump administration has directed U.S. diplomats to reach out to Taliban leadership, The New York Times reported Monday, “in the hope of jump-starting negotiations to end the 17-year war” in Afghanistan.

It’s about time, for U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has long since evolved from retaliation for 9/11 into counterproductive morass. It is not makingthe United States more secure or defending any vital U.S. interest. For far too long, Afghanistan has been an enormously costly conflict for America, claiming the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers and adding trillions to our national debt. That price has bought us, at best, a generational stalemate. This is what strategic failure looks like, writes Bonnie Kristian in her latest piece at Reason.

View this article.

Critics swooned when Little Pink House, produced by former Reason TV documentarian Ted Balaker and directed by his wife and business partner Courtney Balaker, hit theaters earlier this year. “Like Erin Brockovich for eminent domain, Little Pink House does well to explain the thorny legal issue at its center without getting bogged down in minutiae,” wrote the Village Voice‘s Tatiana Craine. Writing at Reason, economist Veronique de Rugy wrote, “Little Pink House puts a real face on [eminent-domain] victims and those who abused them, and it shows why we must always fight against this injustice.” The flick currently enjoys an outstanding “fresh” rating of 74 percent at the review-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

Catherine Keener’s portrayal of Susette Kelo, a resident of New London, Connecticut, who didn’t want to sell her house at a sub-market price to a public development agency that would immediately turn over the property to a private developer, anchors a film that enrages as it edifies. The libertarian public-interest law firm the Institute for Justice took Kelo’s case all the way to the Supreme Court in 2005, where she lost. The outcome wasn’t all negative, though. So many people were outraged that a government could so easily abuse eminent domain so easily to condemn, take, and take thriving property and gift it private actors that states around the country started limiting eminent-domain abuse.

Little Pink House is still in theaters around the country (go here for listings or to bring it to your local theater). But it is now available on streaming, on-demand services ranging from Amazon to iTunes to Netflix to Vudu. Finally, you can watch a powerful, heart-breaking movie about government cronies stealing a woman’s home from her in the comfort of your own home!

Reason talked with Courtney Balaker shortly before the movie debuted. Take a look.

In his remarks today at the Turning Point USA High School Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried the cadre of students, “mostly on the hard left,” who seek to silence speakers with whom they disagree.

Sessions reserved particular opprobrium for bias response teams, in existence at hundreds of campuses, which investigate students and staff suspected of committing microaggressions (small offenses or slights).

On this issue, Sessions isn’t just talk. The Department of Justice recently joined Speech First, a new free speech advocacy organization, in suing the University of Michigan over its anti-bias policies, which instructed students to consider their own feelings as the best indication of whether they had suffered a microaggression. A day later, Michigan announced it would change the definition in question. (Speech First is still suing over other aspects of the university’s speech policy.)

According to Sessions, the threat to free speech on campus is “radical and ahistorical”—and is something that the federal government is taking seriously.

“Donald Trump doesn’t believe anyone can tell him how to speak,” said Sessions. “Isn’t that true?”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo indicated that the state might be willing to bail out the struggling New York Daily News, which laid off about half of its staff yesterday.

The Daily News has been in dire straits for some time, having lost about $90 million over the past three years. Though more than 2 million copies of the print edition were distributed daily in the 1940s, daily circulation dropped to about 200,000 by 2017. And last September, the newspaper was bought by media publishing giant Tronc for just $1.

So it shouldn’t have come as any real surprise when staffers at the struggling paper received an email yesterday morning that said Tronc would be “fundamentally restructuring the Daily News.” The newspaper’s business model simply wasn’t working, and changes were needed.

But Cuomo doesn’t think layoffs are the answer, saying in a statement that the cuts “will undoubtedly devastate many households and hurt an important New York institution and one of our nation’s journalism giants.” The Democratic governor claimed the layoffs were made “without notifying the State or asking for assistance,” and noted that his father, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, “came to the aid of the New York Post when it was facing difficult financial times” because he “understood the value of a robust free press.” Cuomo went on to plead with Tronc to “reconsider this drastic move” and said he’s “ready to work with them to avert this disaster.”

“I understand that large corporations often only see profit and dividends as a bottom line,” Cuomo said. “But in New York, we also calculate loss of an important institution, loss of jobs, and the impact on the families affected. I hope Tronc does the same and recalculates its decision. New York State stands ready to help.”

Cuomo’s concern is understandable. As governor of the state, he doesn’t want to see people lose their jobs. But providing the Daily News with a bailout or other form of government assistance probably isn’t the answer.

Like many of the country’s newspapers, the Daily News is struggling to adapt in the age of digital news. Does that mean all those other papers should receive government assistance as well? Of course not. Journalism itself isn’t dying; papers like the Daily News simply need to figure out how to turn a profit, or other outlets that can will take their place.

Cuomo’s statement also raises another issue: A publicly funded press is not a free press. Politico‘s Jack Shafer summarized this concern well when critiquing New Jersey’s experiment in state-funded news earlier this month:

Even if the consortium stays clean, won’t it avoid politically charged stories of great watchdogging potential because it will fear to bite the hand that feeds it? Government-funded news outfits like NPR and PBS, ever fearful of offending their funding sources, avoid hard-hitting government news for this reason. Public media may follow the news pack on a story about government corruption, but generally, they’re too compromised to lead.

The Daily News has stuck around for more than a century, and it’s sad to see the newspaper struggle. But it’s not Cuomo’s problem to fix.

As businesses race to be the latest to abandon plastic straws, there are bound to be a few slip ups. Witness Boba Guys—a San Francisco-based Boba tea chain—which threw its support behind the city’s soon-to-be passed straw ban without realizing that the prohibition would also outlaw all viable replacement straws.

Unlike a lot of drinks, whose consumption is simply made more convenient with the addition of a straw, Boba tea actually requires one. How else are you going to extract all those tapioca pearls at the bottom of the cup that give the beverage its name?

For this reason, Boba tea owners have been leading the opposition to straw bans in places like Vancouver, British Columbia, where tea shop owners have said that the city’s ban, passed in May, would be the death of their businesses.

Boba Guys decided to go the opposite direction and wholeheartedly endorsed San Francisco’s proposed ban. In May, City Supervisor Katy Tang unveiled her new straw ban legislation at a press conference held at a Boba Guys store and with Boba Guys co-founder Bin Chen in attendance.

“We see this as a huge opportunity to lead the way on making sustainable business decisions,” said Bin, as he and assembled city officials sipped the company’s popular drinks using paper straws.

If only Chen had read the fine print.

Following the press conference, Boba Guys started hunting for replacement straws, eventually settling on ones made of polylactic acid (PLA), a kind of bioplastic derived of corn starch.

On a functional level these straws are inferior to their traditional plastic brethren. They cost six times and much, fall apart in high heat (a problem for shipping overseas), and become brittle and unusable after 16 months of storage. Some bloggers have raised concerns about their effect on people with food allergies.

Where they do succeed is on the environmental side of things. Because they’re made from corn, they are compostable. Because they aren’t derived from petroleum-based products, they reportedly break down faster in natural environments and are less toxic when they do.

For this reason, both Seattle’s active straw ban, as well a proposed one in New York City (where Boba Guys has a location) exempt PLA straws. Unbeknownst to Boba Guys however, San Francisco’s does not.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, when Boba Guys co-founder Andrew Chau called up City Hall to relay the good news that the company had snagged replacement PLA plastic straws, he was told that those too would not work out. To make matters worse, the Chronicle reports that there are no commercially available alternatives the company can turn to.

The company Aardvark does make suitable paper straws, but they reportedly have a huge backlog and will not be able to supply Boba Guys with straws in time. Two other potential alternatives—including one made of a seaweed plastic—are in the works, but neither will be ready in the quantities needed by Boba Guys (or the city’s other Boba merchants) by the time San Francisco’s ban goes into effect in July 2019.

Judging by comments made by staff from San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, no one has any intention of amending the city’s straw ban to give the Boba tea community a break. They have instead promised to gently roll out enforcement to give these companies breathing room.

The Boba Guys for their part have continued to support the city’s impending ban, while stressing the need for nuance in thinking about ways to prohibit straws.

Thank you @sfchronicle for such a balanced piece on the straw ban. We are for the ban but there is a nuance to it that few media outlets across the country get right! https://t.co/9NbozOWLGX

— Boba Guys (@BobaGuys) July 23, 2018

Of course, had the company wanted an appropriately nuanced approach to reducing its plastic consumption it could have adopted voluntary and feasible strawless policies. Instead, it opted for endorsing a government-imposed straw ban without doing its due diligence.

Buried inside a carbon tax plan unveiled Monday by a Florida Republican is a plan to create a National Climate Commission and give it virtually unlimited access to government data on American businesses.

The National Climate Commission would meet once every three years, be staffed with a mix of academics and scientists “with expertise in the economy, energy, climate, or public health,” and charged with setting new carbon tax rates “that reflect the latest scientific findings of what is needed to avoid serious human health and environmental consequences of a changing climate.”

Opponents of carbon taxes are worried about the role the commission could play in future tax policy, and are raising red flags about potential privacy issues. On page 69 of the 71-page bill, the commission is granted authority to secure “unrestricted information” from “any executive department, bureau, agency, board, commission, office, independent establishment, or instumentality of the government.” If the federal government has any information, it could be obtained by the members of the National Climate Commission.

“Potentially, there is a problem here because it doesn’t say anything about confidential or proprietary business information,” Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, tells Reason.

Lewis says that this omission could be intentional or inadvertent. It wouldn’t be difficult to fix—an additional clause specifying that the commission would not have access to private information shared between companies and other government agencies for regulatory reasons would be enough to cover it, he says.

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who introduced the carbon tax—the Market Choice Act—to much fanfare on Monday, admitted his bill was unlikely to pass but said he was confident that legislation similar to it would become law someday.

“It will spark an important debate about investing in our country’s infrastructure, the way we tax and what to do to protect the environment,” he said in remarks Monday at the National Press Club.

The bill would repeal existing federal taxes on gasoline and aircraft fuels. In their place, it would introduce a $24-per-ton tax on industrial carbon-dioxide emissions. The tax would increase by 2 percent annually, with other adjustments possible depending on fluctuations in the consumer price index and national carbon emission goals outlined in the bill.

A carbon tax is not a fundamentally un-libertarian idea. Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law (and Volokh Conspiracy contributor), has argued for the use of carbon taxes as part of a market-based approach to tackling climate change. “If the global atmosphere is a global commons owned by us all, why should not those who use this commons to dispose of their carbon emissions pay a user fee to compensate those who are affected,” he wrote in a 2012 article for The Atlantic.

Properly applied, a carbon tax would have Americans paying for the full costs of their energy usage, rather than dumping those costs into the atmosphere to be dealt with by future generations. Certainly, that’s a more market-oriented approach to the carbon problem than more heavy-handed approaches that require the government to ban certain industries or activities.

But Curbelo’s bill reveals some of the difficulties in striking the right balance. Any carbon tax is likely to be a highly technocratic exercise, but how much power do you give the technocrats? And who might those technocrats be?

Curbelo’s bill authorizes the commission to hire “experts and consultants,” but that means “all of the left wing activist groups/NGOs/Soros types can get on the ‘experts and consultants’ gravy train, and all of their activist work is given an official government imprimatur,” says John Kartch, vice president of communications for Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes the carbon tax proposal.

The creation of the National Climate Commission is likely not the most concerning aspect of Curbelo’s bill. That honor would go to the fact that the carbon tax is likely to hike household energy bills by more than $600 annually—that’s according to a Columbia University analysis of his proposal—or to the fact that the IRS would be authorized to impose massive penalties, up to 300 percent of the unpaid tax, on any person who “failed to comply with” the new tax.

To make matters worse, the National Climate Commission would incorporate pro-tax interests into the federal government while also giving global warming warriors access to any information they wanted from any American business. That seems like maybe not the best idea.

“A lot of lobbyists, a lot of consultants worked on this bill,” says Lewis. “Would they be eligible to serve on the commission they helped create? That should be clarified.”

The U.S. backlash to Trump’s all-caps Iran tweet continues…as U.S. mounts Iranian propaganda mission. Trump “taunted an aspiring nuclear power with some of the harshest words we’ve heard from an American president,” writes CNN’s Chris Cillizza, scolding that “Twitter diplomacy—which is one of the many things that Trump has ushered in as president—isn’t a tried-and-true approach to geopolitics.”

Trump “won’t be able to play [the same] game with Iran” as he did North Korea, writes Jarrett Blanc at Politico. And “despite what Trump may hope, there won’t even be a Gulf version of the Singapore Summit: a made-for-TV drama that lowers hostilities without addressing underlying problems. Two obstacles stand in the way: us and them.”

But all this focus on Trump-induced Twitter drama ignores what’s actually happening in Iran and the actual actions the U.S. has taken there recently: namely, running a massive propaganda mission and once again backing potential terrorists to own the admins we don’t like.

The Trump folks have “been ramping up rhetoric about what [the administration] calls Iran’s ‘malign’ behavior in the region,” notes NPR. “Administration officials also seem to be trying to encourage Iranians to rise up against their government.” More:

Protests have mounted in recent weeks in Iran, as the country struggles with an economic crisis that has grown more severe since President Trump’s decision in May to pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions on the country.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been tweeting about the protests — sometimes exaggerating them. He’s trying to show Iranians that the Trump administration backs those opposing the Iranian leadership.

We’ve also been seeding stories, social media accounts, and other communication vehicles that push America’s preferred version of events as well as generally attempt to foment anger and unrest among the Iranian people.

Axios reported earlier this month that Israel and the U.S. had “formed a joint working group a few months ago that is focused on internal efforts to encourage protests within Iran and pressure the country’s government. “Nobody is seriously thinking about regime change,” an Israeli on the team told Axios, “but this team is trying to see if we can use the internal weaknesses of the Iranian regime in order to create more pressure that will contribute to changing Iranian behavior.”

Here’s how Reuters put it last week:

The Trump administration has launched an offensive of speeches and online communications meant to foment unrest and help pressure Iran to end its nuclear program and its support of militant groups, U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.

When Russia tries this with us, we call it “hacking” our elections and charge them with criminally meddling in our politics. But America has always been the queen of do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do. And picking winners and losers in other country’s politics is kind of one of our things, even if this sometimes means giving arms and support to violent extremists who have the same strategic enemies. The situation with the Trump administration and Iran is stacking up to be another one of these.

John Limbert, a former U.S. ambassador who served as assistant secretary of state to Iran and was trapped there during the Iran hostage crisis, told NPR that, “he worries about the influence of an Iranian exile group that advocates the overthrow of the Iranian government and was included on the U.S. terrorist list until 2012.”

The group is called the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, which means People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, also known by its initials MEK. “Their message is that the place is on the verge of overthrowing the Islamic Republic, which has been a claim for the last 40 years and that they, in particular, are the logical democratic, pluralistic replacement. Now, if you believe that, I have some Florida real estate I could sell you,” he said.

Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton is a supporter of the MEK. And U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley retweeted a video posted last week on an official MEK account.

But nevermind who MEK is—let’s do some destabilizing in the Middle East! It’s been so long, and the Iraq-War cheerleaders are getting so restless…

FREE MARKETS

“Tarriffs are the greatest!”

Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that – and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the “piggy bank” that’s being robbed. All will be Great!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2018

QUICK HITS

COMPLETELY EXCLUDED from this conversation, both in the event and in the reporting on it? ACTUAL SEX WORKERS, who know more about what sex workers need than anyone else. But funny how no one ever wants to hear from us while they try to “solve the problem” of our existence. https://t.co/t3RQNPJvTd

— Mistress Matisse (@mistressmatisse) July 24, 2018

• Fact Check: “President Trump tweeted a series of false or misleading claims over four days, ranging from the Russia investigation to NATO funding to North Korea to the price of soybeans.”
• Some 463 migrant parents separated from their children by U.S. agents are no longer here, with many having been deported before being reunited with their children, officials admitted Monday.
• Democrats like Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) are ready to resist Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—until it might hurt them at the polls.
• Florida’s stand-your-ground law is at the center of another controversy, this time after one man killed another in a dispute over a parking spot.

Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman was the son of Hungarian immigrants who was a great champion of immigration. Yet enemies of immigration have deployed him on their side to make the case for closing the borders. They are even using him to justify Trump’s border crackdowns. How? By taking his observation about the incompatibility of open borders with the welfare state out-of-context and repeating it like a mantra till it has assumed the air of truth.

But Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia sets the record straight about what Friedman really thought and said. “He would never have been on their side,” she concludes.

View this article.