Category: reason

The British National Health Service reports some 4.3 million patients, a 10-year high, are waiting on surgery. They are supposed to have to wait no more than 18 weeks for non-urgent surgery, but 211,434 patients have been waiting more than six months.

The European Union’s antitrust bureaucracy today levied a $5 billion fine on Google, a new European record.

In a statement, the European Commission alleged that Google violated the law in three ways: unlawfully tying its search and browser apps to the Android operating system, paying manufacturers to pre-install Google Search on devices, and making it difficult for device manufacturers to sell “forked” versions of Android, such as versions running Amazon’s Fire OS.

It’s a restatement of the Commission’s preliminary conclusions from 2016, meaning Google’s arguments over the last two years have proven entirely unsuccessful, writes Declan McCullagh.

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The Trump administration’s unquenchable thirst to slam immigrants—unauthorized but also, as I wrote recently, authorized—has now taken an even more ominous turn. It is training its sights on a group largely considered sacrosanct: naturalized citizens.

It is reviving a post-9/11 counter-terrorism program called Operation Janus that was disbanded in 2016. The program’s purpose was to stop terrorists from slipping through the cracks in the naturalization process. But the Trump administration is using it to denaturalize citizens who’ve been living in the United States for decades, are married to American citizens, and have no criminal history.

Last September, the administration filed three complaints in federal courts to denaturalize three men who it alleged had obtained naturalization through “fraud.” All three were South Asians—two from Pakistan and one from India. They had come to the United States without proper papers, were ordered deported but obtained citizenship under different names after marrying American citizens. The rap against all of them is that they did not reveal their other names on their citizenship application or that they had been ordered deported.

The administration apparently doesn’t care that none of this would have necessarily nullified their citizenship petition. A deported person can still obtain citizenship if an American citizen marries him or her, as was the case in all these three instances. And the Supreme Court last year unanimously ruled in Maslenjak vs. United States that merely withholding information (such as past names) or even lying is not sufficient grounds to denaturalize someone. The falsehood has to be material to the citizenship application. (Maslenjak involved a Bosnian-Serbian woman who obtained citizenship after lying to immigration authorities about her husband’s role in assisting the Serbian army’s 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.) Anything less, it noted, would open “the door to a world of disquieting consequences,” in which a lie “would always provide a basis for rescinding citizenship,” even if the lie merely resulted from “embarrassment, fear, or a desire for privacy.”

For example, notes The New Yorker’s Masha Green, when he applied for his citizenship in 1989, immigration law banned “aliens afflicted with sexual deviation,” or those suffering from “psychopathic personality,” from entry to the United States. And when he came to this country as a gay fourteen-year-old in 1981, he was aware of his “sexual deviation.” Technically that meant that he should not have entered. But he did and he decided to append a letter to his citizenship application, informing the Immigration and Naturalization Service that he had done so. He still got his citizenship. But many others in his situation might have chosen not to fess up because their families didn’t know or they were ashamed or because that might indeed jeopardize their application even though it shouldn’t.

Still, one court has acquiesced to the Trump administration’s request to strip the citizenship of the man from India, Baljinder Singh. Singh is a Sikh who came to the United States in 1991 under the name of Davinder Singh a few years after India’s ruling regime presided over a Sikh pogrom. He was ordered deported after he failed to show up for an immigration hearing. However, he subsequently filed for asylum but abandoned his application when he married an American woman who sponsored him and put him on the path to citizenship.

The court, at the administration’s behest, has downgraded his status to that of a permanent resident, which means that if he does not appeal or loses his appeal he would be subject to deportation. The other two cases are still pending.

What’s particularly troubling about Singh’s case is that although the administration claims that it is targeting naturalized citizens with past criminal records, it didn’t outline any such record on his part.

More chillingly, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Francis Cissna claims that under the revived Operation Janus, he has cued up 1,600 cases like Singh’s for prosecution.

Operation Janus was conceived after a Customs and Border Protection employee in 2008 identified 206 people who had received final deportation orders but went on to obtain citizenship under different names. A subsequent 2014 Inspector General report flagged about a thousand more such cases. But because the odds that terrorists were lurking among them were so low, the Department of Homeland Security basically decided to deploy other counter-terrorism strategies. The program was disbanded in 2016.

But the Trump administration revived it within months of assuming office. It has created a task force in the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and is furiously hiring lawyers, the Washington Examiner recently reported. The administration claims that apart from the 1,600 cases like Singh’s it is pursuing legally, there are 315,000 more cases of suspect citizenship approval that it wants to investigate. These cases stem not from any evidence of malfeasance on the part of the applicants. Rather, they’ve been flagged because the DHS is missing their fingerprints. Why? Because the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service failed to digitize all its records.

Stripping people of citizenship is an awesome—and potentially—dangerous exercise of government power. Therefore, it is only right that the Supreme Court has set a rather high bar. Hence it is unclear how many people the administration will eventually succeed in denaturalizing. But what is clear is that it will use a lot of taxpayer resources to sow terror in yet another non-native group without any security upside for anyone. Indeed, since 1990 only seven denaturalization suits on average have been filed per year because it takes too much time and effort put together a credible case.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is the brains behind the effort, is an anti-immigration zealot who doesn’t care about any of this because he doesn’t consider naturalized Americans to be real Americans, notes Dan Kesselbrenner, executive director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. The wait times for obtaining citizenship have doubled in the last few years. But far from tackling that problem, the administration wants to double down on harassing those already here.

Notes Kesselbrenner to Rewire.News:

The Trump administration is so concerned with enforcement in immigrant communities, they’ve chosen to prioritize this operation in ways another administration wouldn’t. It’s one thing to target these people and convict them for hiding serious criminal backgrounds. It’s an entirely different thing to go after people who’ve been citizens a long time because they were dishonest for reasons we don’t even know…It’s vindictive…and it’s totally unreasonable.

Steve Israel, who tried to restrict 3D-printed guns when he was a congressman, is not happy that the Justice Department has abandoned efforts to censor the software required to produce such weapons. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Israel urges his former colleagues to pass legislation aimed at putting this genie back in the bottle. Specifically, the New York Democrat wants Congress to require that “printable weapons have components necessary for their operation that make them detectable.” He addresses possible constitutional objections with this closing non sequitur: “After all, the people who used quills to write the Second Amendment couldn’t comprehend that one day guns would be produced by 3-D printers.”

The Framers probably did not anticipate stun guns or semi-automatic pistols either, but that does not mean the Second Amendment has no bearing on the constitutionality of attempts to ban or restrict them. “Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search,” the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” The Court reiterated that point in 2016, rejecting the premise that a state ban on stun guns raised no Second Amendment issues because Tasers did not exist in 1791.

Israel also mentions the “constitutional free-speech right to share computer codes” asserted by Defense Distributed, the company whose software the DOJ recently agreed to allow online without the threat of criminal charges. But he offers no response to that claim. Presumably he would point out that the people who used quills to write the First Amendment couldn’t comprehend that one day a network of computers would make it possible to communicate electronically with people around the world, let alone that the exchanges might include instructions for making stuff at home with widely available equipment.

By Israel’s logic, Americans have a right to own flintlock rifles, to circulate literature printed on hand presses, and to prevent the government from rummaging through their diaries and personal papers for no good reason. But the Second Amendment does not cover plastic guns made on 3D printers, the First Amendment does not protect speech on the internet, and the Fourth Amendment has nothing to say about the security of information stored on computers, because the Framers knew nothing of such things.

Does San Francisco City Supervisor Aaron Peskin want to tax everything good about the 21st century? He’s pushing a plan to levy new fees on ridesharing companies, internet sales, and driverless cars.

Peskin’s ignoble effort began with a desire to squeeze the San Francisco–headquartered companies Uber and Lyft for more tax revenue. The companies currently pay San Francisco’s gross recipients tax—as does most every business in the city—but California law forbids cities from imposing per-trip fees on ridesharing businesses, forcing Peskin to get creative.

In April he introduced legislation that created a whole new, higher-taxed category of San Francisco’s existing gross receipts tax for “transportation network company services.” It would apply almost exclusively to Uber and Lyft. In late May, city staff projected that the law would raise roughly $32 million a year.

Fearful that this might not pass legal muster, Peskin amended his legislation in June to also include “autonomous vehicle passenger services”—hitting driverless car companies such a Google’s Waymo—and other private transit vehicle services.

The Supreme Court then ruled in South Dakota v. Wayfair that states and localities could in fact tax the internet sales of businesses that had no physical presence in their jurisdiction. So Peskin expanded his legislation again to incorporate any e-commerce businesses that make over $500,000 in sales in the city.

Peskin currently plans to put his proposal on the local November ballot, where it would need to earn only a bare majority to pass. Four supervisors need to approve Peskin’s proposal before August 3 for it to qualify for the November ballot.

Despite the huge amounts of revenue this tax will generate—particularly after the inclusion of internet sales—its specific purpose isn’t entirely clear. The revenue it collects will go straight to the city’s general fund, from which it can be spent without restriction.

Peskin himself suggests that the taxes could pay, basically, for all good things. “It could go toward police enforcement. It could go to street resurfacing. It could go to traffic calming and pedestrian safety that we call Vision Zero. It could go to a whole host of things,” he told local CBS affiliate KPIX earlier this year.

The actual text of his legislation argues that the city must raise taxes to “maintain a high quality of life and continued economic growth.”

With the addition of e-commerce companies to the levy, protectionism has become a justification as well. Peskin legislative aide Sunny Angulo said at a Budget Committee hearing that “these e-commerce, internet businesses have had such a profound impact on our local small businesses, our brick-and-mortar mom-and-pop businesses in San Francisco.” Taxing them would help level the playing field, she suggested.

Observers could be forgiven for calling the proposal a cash grab. And if that is indeed what Peskin’s taxes are, then he has chosen a great means for getting the job done, says Nicole Kaeding of the Tax Foundation.

“For all their flaws, gross receipts taxes…produce a great deal of revenue because their base is much bigger than it would be under a sales tax and it also produces a very stable form of government revenue,” says Kaeding.

The downside is that gross receipts taxes are blunt instruments that raise costs on all aspects of a company’s business.

“That tax is going to get captured somewhere. It’s either going to be through increased prices to consumers or to their labor force,” says Kaeding. Uber or Lyft might choose to “not hire as many people, or not expand as fast in the city, or reduce hours or wages or benefits.”

Ride share companies themselves have argued much the same thing.

“This is a lose-lose proposition for the people of San Francisco, directly costing residents millions of dollars while stifling economic opportunity for thousands of drivers. Living and working in San Francisco is expensive enough already, and this new ridesharing tax will only make it worse,” said a Lyft spokesperson in a statement.

A principle of good government is that you should only ask voters for more money when you have a specific and pressing public need for it. Peskin’s proposal instead operates on the principle that the money flowing to cutting-edge e-commerce businesses, ride-sharing services, and goddamn robot cars would be better spent by bureaucrats.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is drawing criticism on social media for defending his company’s policy of letting cranks operate on the platform. This policy strikes me as perfectly reasonable, even if Zuckerberg tripped over his words a bit when he articulated it.

The remarks came during an interview with Recode:

Zuckerberg: I also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them, “Hey, no, you’re a liar”—that is harassment, and we actually will take that down. But overall, let’s take this whole closer to home…

I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened.

I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think—

[Interviewer interjects:] In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.

It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.”

What we will do is we’ll say, “Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.” But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.

Of course many leading Holocaust deniers are intentionally getting it wrong. They do this because they are anti-Semites, and denying the Holocaust is part of a strategy of making Jewish people less sympathetic and delegitimizing Jewish identity. Others do it because its profitable for them. Infowars, cited as an example of fake news during the Recode interview, might be an example of willful disinformation meant to sell weird stuff. But there are indeed people who naively share Holocaust denial–related content on Facebook without being in on the scam, just as there are gullible people who fall for every other kind of hoax—vaccines causing autism, 9/11 being an inside job, NASA faking the moon landing, etc. Zuckerberg is correct that it’s not always easy to differentiate hucksters from kooks.

In any case, the CEO of Facebook gets to set whatever policies regarding content-sharing on his platform that he likes. As Zuckerberg made clear in the interview, his policy takes its cues from the First Amendment. Facebook users may not advocate violence or plan criminal activities, but merely expressing incorrect opinions is permissible. If Facebook were a public square on public property, it would be obliged to maintain precisely this same approach. (This is actually a good argument for not turning Facebook into some kind of truly public utility, even if you don’t like its fake news policy. A government-run Facebook would be bound by the First Amendment to maintain speech policies that are at least as permissive as its current ones.)

In our modern political discourse, Facebook plays a role very much akin to the public square: a massive one, involving the entire world. The arguments for letting nearly all voices—even deeply evil ones, provided they do not organize direct violence or harassment—be heard on this platform are the same arguments for not taking the European route on hate speech: Policing hate on a very large scale is quite difficult given the frequently subjective nature of offense; we risk de-platforming legitimate viewpoints that are unpopular but deserve to be heard; and ultimately, silencing hate is not the same thing as squelching it.

(Related: “A Bunch of Senators Just Showed They Have No Idea How Facebook Works. They Want to Regulate It Anyway.“)

A Republican running for state Senate in Arizona says he killed his mother in self-defense more than 50 years ago. Now he’s using his experience to campaign against gun control, but the story is muddier than it might initially seem.

Bobby Wilson was 18 in 1963, when he claims his “deranged” mother, Lavonne, shot at him, prompting him to shoot back and kill her. The candidate, who’s written a book about his experience titled Bobby’s Trials, suggested at a Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America forum in Tucson last week that if he hadn’t acted immediately, his mother would have killed him. “[She] was hell-bent on killing me in my sleep one night. At three o’clock in the morning, I woke up to find a rifle in my face—a semiautomatic rifle at that—and the bullets started to fly, and I started diving for cover,” he said.

Speaking to The Arizona Republic, Wilson provided more details about what happened that night. He says after his mother started shooting, she saw a shadow move and swung her gun around, hitting his younger sister with the rifle butt in the process. His sister, Judy, died, and Wilson says an autopsy proved the impact of the rifle butt was what killed her.

Wilson’s mother kept on shooting, and though she didn’t hit her son, she did smash open several glass jars full of gas, he says. At that point, Wilson claims he fired back with his own rifle and killed his mother with a shot to the face. But when he tried to turn on the light, a spark caused the gasoline to ignite and the house exploded.

Wilson was charged with murdering both his mother and sister, and he faced three trials over the course of the next 10 years. He says his case was finally dismissed in 1973 and he received an apology from the district attorney.

As he told the crowd at the Moms Demand Action forum, Wilson thinks his experience shows why a “good guy with a gun” can stop the bad guys. “You can pass all the laws you want to in this world, and when you’ve got somebody out there that wants to harm somebody, they’re going to do it if you don’t stop them,” he said.

But Wilson’s story is more complicated than he’s letting on. He’s trying to focus on the self-defense angle to show off his pro-gun credentials, but he isn’t exactly the best example for the argument.

Newspaper and court accounts reviewed by the Republic cast doubt on parts of Wilson’s account. In the days following the incident, for instance, the Choctaw County Weekly published several articles that contradict the candidate’s current claims. As the Republic summarizes it:

According to the newspaper, the charred bodies of Lavonne and Judy Wilson were found lying together in bed “in a ‘perfectly relaxed’ position, indicating they died in their sleep from suffocation.”

Later, according to the Weekly, Wilson confessed to both murders. Court records show that Wilson later claimed to be suffering from amnesia and thus couldn’t remember what had happened. As a result, the jury agreed to suspend the case, and there were no additional developments until 1973, when Wilson’s attorney successfully argued that the case should be dismissed because his client had been “deprived of his right to speedy trial,” according to the Republic.

Wilson would go on to become a lawyer himself, and he says he eventually remembered how events transpired the night his mother and sister died. But it’s more than a little suspicious that after reportedly confessing to the murders and then forgetting the details for years, he finally recalled a version of the story in which he’s the hero.

Wilson is correct that good guys with guns can stop bad guys, but in this case it’s not clear that he really was the good guy.

When it comes to jury nullification—refusal by juries to convict defendants under laws they consider unjust or wrongly applied—Catherine Bernard may be the winningest attorney in the United States. Perhaps oddly, though, she may be chalking up those wins by not making a big deal about her chosen legal strategy.

On July 12, a jury in Laurens County, Georgia, found Bernard’s client, Javonnie Mondrea McCoy, “not guilty” of the manufacture of marijuana and of possession of drug-related objects, despite his open admission that he had, fact, grown the much-demonized plant. That follows on a similar victory last year in the case of Antonio Willis, who was lured into selling the equivalent of a few joints by an undercover cop. In both cases, Bernard emphasized the humanity of the defendants, of their roles as fallible, but decent people who didn’t deserve to be ground up by the wheels of the penal system. J.D. Tuccille speaks with Bernard.

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President Donald Trump doesn’t think the U.S. is being targeted by Russia, though his director of national intelligence said otherwise just last week.

When a reporter asked Trump today if Russia is still targeting the U.S., he responded, “No.” On Friday, by contrast, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in a speech that Russia is the “most aggressive foreign actor” when it comes to cyberattacks. “And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy.”

Trump’s comments on Russia came after several days of controversy over remarks he made Monday during a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump told the world he accepted Putin’s claim that the Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, even though U.S. intelligence officials have said Russia was responsible for the hack of Democratic National Committee emails. Yesterday, Trump said that he misspoke and that he believed Russia did interfere in the election.

Though Trump has faced criticism for not being tough enough in his dealings with Putin, he insisted today that he’s been tougher on Russia than all of his predecessors. “We are doing very well, probably as well as anybody has ever done with Russia. And there’s been no president ever as tough as I have been on Russia,” the president said. “And I think President Putin knows that better than anybody, certainly a lot better than the media. He understands it and he’s not happy about it and he shouldn’t be happy about it.”

No legal commentator on cable news is more energetic, constitutionally minded, or libertarian than Andrew Napolitano, who has served as Fox News’ senior judicial analyst for nearly two decades. A former New Jersey Superior Court judge, Napolitano is a nationally syndicated columnist—you can read him at Reason—and the author of a shelf full of books about law, history, and race in America.

Reason caught up with the judge at FreedomFest, the annual event held every July in Las Vegas. We talked about Donald Trump’s ongoing makeover of the federal judiciary, whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be good for libertarians, what it’s like to be an ex-Republican, and the imminent return of Freedom Watch, the popular and controversial show that Napolitano hosted on Fox Business from 2006 to 2010.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Garcia, Paul Detrick, & Jim Epstein. Graphics by Austin Bragg.

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