Category: reason

The Treasury Department recorded a federal budget deficit of $74.9 billion in June, an astronomical number that actually represented a significant decrease from the same month last year.

To date, the federal government has racked up a deficit of $607.1 billion in the 2018 fiscal year, which ends on September 30. The budget shortfall has risen about 16 percent from the same period last year, when it was at $523.1 billion. But this June’s deficit was actually 17 percent lower than last June’s shortage of $90.2 billion.

Still, $74.9 billion is a big number. How big? Well, to give you an idea, here are some things you could buy with all that dough:

• 340 million ounces of “medium to high-quality” marijuana in Colorado, which costs about $220 an ounce, according to High Times.
• 187 million Bear Creek Arsenal AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, which currently go for $399 apiece on ClassicFirearms.com.
• A pair of Washington Nationals season tickets at their “most expensive price level” for more than 1 million years’ worth of games, according to The Atlantic (of particular interest if you’re Judge Brett Kavanaugh). One such seat costs about $35,000 per season.
• A 2,565-year stay at the Hotel President Wilson’s Royal Penthouse Suite in Geneva, Switzerland. According to Travel + Leisure, a one-night stay in the suite starts at about $80,000.
• Almost 75 million iPhone Xs, which will set you back $999 a pop.
• 1,070 Gulfstream G-650 private jets, which start at around $70 million each.
• 37.45 billion Bacon McDoubles at McDonald’s. The sandwiches only cost $2 each, which really isn’t bad for two beef patties, cheese, and bacon.

The federal government’s deficit for just one month represents only a small fraction of our national debt, which currently exceeds $21 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office projected last month that the national debt could surpass 152 percent of the annual gross domestic product by 2048, and Social Security will likely be insolvent by 2034.

Maybe Congress should spend less money?

“I’m basically going against the entire tide,” Kyle Kashuv, a 16-year-old survivor of the Parkland mass shooting, told Reason in an interview. “Coming out in support of the Second Amendment right after a school shooting is no easy thing to do.”

Unlike virtually all the other teen activists who have risen to prominence in the wake of the February 14 tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Kashuv is a conservative and a gun rights supporter. His strident Second Amendment advocacy has brought him national fame: he met President Trump, has been mentored by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, and now works at Turning Point USA, a major conservative organization that concentrates on outreach to high school and college students. (Turning Point’s High School Leadership Summit, which features a range of high-profile conservative speakers including United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Donald Trump, Jr., is in Washington, D.C., from July 23 until 26. The organization has offered a scholarship so that interested Marjory Stoneman Douglas students can attend for free.)

But back at school, Kashuv has had a rougher time.

“I lost like 90 percent of all the friends I’ve had because of it,” said Kashuv. “It’s quite saddening because it shows that people just don’t have the ability to be friends with people who have disagreeing opinions with them.”

Kashuv has also been besieged by online criticism since he started publicizing his views on Twitter.

“I get a lot of death threats, I don’t even think I notice them anymore,” he said. “I reached a threshold of hate that there isn’t much more that can be thrown at me that will affect me.”

That’s something he undoubtedly has in common with the rest of the Parkland kids. Fellow survivor-activists David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez have also faced waves of online harassment. In June, Hogg was the victim of a swatting attempt when someone sent police to his house in Florida in hopes law enforcement would mistake Hogg or his family as violent and use force against them.

Kashuv is going back to school in the fall for his senior year. But in the meantime, he’s living the life of a teen activist while trying to learn everything he can about gun control as an issue. (He’s also reading a lot of Jordan Peterson.)

On other subjects, he’s still making up his mind.

“I’m really developing my viewpoint on conservatism,” he said. “I’m just a big Constitution guy.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s also very concerned about free speech in schools—a main issue for Turning Point USA, though other conservatives have accused the organization of being insincere on this front.

“I’ve had personal experience with this,” said Kashuv. “I mean, people have completely tried to shun me and silence me on my high school campus. It’s hard for conservatives to voice their support for the Second Amendment, in general and at Douglas, and I see how important it is to make sure we have free speech.”

Once they know about the pretrial criminal justice system, many Americans supporting reforming it. Unfortunately, many Americans know practically nothing about the pretrial criminal justice system.

Those are the two big conclusions we can draw from the results of a poll released today by the Pretrial Justice Institute (PJI) and the Charles Koch Institute (CKI), which jointly commissioned the survey.

For the 41 percent of you who have never heard of, or have no opinion of, the term “pretrial justice,” that’s a catch-all term for the court systems that manage people who have been charged with crimes but not yet convicted. Paul Manafort, for example, is currently a guest of our federal pretrial justice system. More than half a million more people are being held in some form of pretrial detention. That’s a substantial chunk of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S.

The intent of the PJI/CKI poll was to see how Americans feel about potential reforms that would make more people free prior to the conclusion of their cases. The numbers are encouraging. A whopping 78 percent of Americans believe that the current system of pretrial justice heavily favors the wealthy. That’s partly due to our reliance on cash bail schedules to determine who gets to be free while awaiting trial and who remains behind bars until the court gets to them. Those who can front the money for bail or afford to pay a bail bond company are able to go free. Those who are poorer and thus unable to pay for bail remain behind bars solely for that reason.

When asked about money, 57 percent of respondents said they don’t want to keep people behind bars if they can’t afford bail except in extreme cases. A plurality of 45 percent said they’d like to see money bail replaced with pretrial assessment and monitoring systems. And 72 percent said that “public safety” should be the primary concern when deciding whether somebody should be detained prior to trial.

Defendants who have been merely charged with a crime are supposed to be treated as though they’re innocent until they are proven guilty, but is that how Americans think they should be treated? The answer seems to be yes. When asked whether prosecutors should have to petition for pretrial detention, or whether defendants should have to petition for their freedom, 52 percent of respondents said that prosecutors should have to argue for detention; only 27 percent did not believe that freedom should be presumptive. That’s frighteningly high, but not terribly surprising.

“The bottom line is, the public believes the government must prove an individual belongs in jail before trial—which is the opposite of how the system works now due to the widespread use of money bail,” responded Pretrial Justice Institute CEO Cherise Fanno Burdeen in a prepared statement.

Those polled strongly approved a number of pretrial support mechanisms—like education and counseling, transportation, and court reminders—for defendants who need them. The vast majority would like to see support services for defendants who are victims of domestic violence, have mental health issues, or are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

The most relevant take-away for pretrial justice reformers is that educating the public about pretrial justice issues may be key to fixing them. As they were introduced to alternatives, a good 28 percent of respondents who were opposed to, or undecided about, moving away from money bail came around to the idea. Turns out, people aren’t opposed to more sensible criminal justice policies, they just don’t know they exist.

Read more about the poll results here. Efforts to reform how pretrial justice systems work are the focus of Reason magazine’s August/September cover story, on the stands now. Check it out.

The American Library Association (ALA) is refusing to back down from its stance that hate groups have the right to meet in public libraries.

Last week, the ALA revised its interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights to note that library meeting rooms should be open to all kinds of organizations. “If a library allows charities, non-profits, and sports organizations to discuss their activities in library meeting rooms,” the revised interpretation says, “then the library cannot exclude religious, social, civic, partisan political, or hate groups from discussing their activities in the same facilities.”

While the revision is new, the ALA’s policy is not. In fact, under a section titled “Hate Speech and Hate Crime,” the organization’s website explains that as “sanctuary spaces for First Amendment ideals,” libraries must protect hate speech and “symbols of hate.” Hateful conduct, however, “is not tolerated.”

Still, some people were upset that the ALA would reaffirm the First Amendment rights of hate groups. Many took to Twitter to express their displeasure:

So catching up on this ALA Council…

Hate speech has no place in a library or just society, that that’s not obvious to the council is clear and upsetting

When white supremacists are given a space in your library, you signal that every group/person they target is not welcome

— Netanel Ganin (@OpOnions) July 9, 2018

I’m beginning to wonder what ALA’s views on screaming fire in a crowded library would be?
Oh wait, by having hate groups present, you prevent large swaths of people from every going to the library.#NoHateALA

— Kate Deibel (@metageeky) July 12, 2018

ALA recently updated their interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights around meeting rooms to state that if we allow “charities, non-profits, and sports” orgs that we “cannot exclude…hate groups.” This milquetoast hands-off garbage centrism in pursuit of “neutrality” sucks.

— Tyler Vachon (@tylervachoff) July 9, 2018

Libraries are supposed to be a safe place for patrons and staff, adhering to this bullshit makes libraries unsafe. You want our field to be more diverse, you want our institutions to serve all, yet we continuously do shit that makes those things impossible.

— Natalie (@InkyLibrarian) July 9, 2018

The ALA responded by explaining that while it doesn’t endorse hate groups or speech, the First Amendment leaves no choice in the matter. “Publicly funded libraries are bound by the First Amendment and the associated law governing access to a designated public forum,” read a statement from James LaRue, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “A publicly funded library is not obligated to provide meeting room space to the public, but, if it chooses to do so, under law cannot discriminate or deny access based upon the viewpoint of speakers or the content of their speech.”

It’s encouraging to see that even in the face of criticism, the ALA is reminding libraries that the First Amendment protects everyone’s right to free speech. As the Supreme Court has held on numerous occasions, hate groups can express themselves just like anyone else. What they say might be despicable, but they still have the right to say it.

LaRue may have put it best on Twitter. “Are we so afraid of hate speech that we’d give up all the rest?” he wrote.

Right now, that’s the only legal solution. But most library meeting room uses BUILD community. Are we so afraid of hate speech that we’d give up all the rest?

— James LaRue (@jaslar) July 9, 2018

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is requesting that representatives from D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department not attend a public safety meeting where residents are expected to voice concerns about the agency. The request highlights growing tensions between officers and residents in the nation’s capital, as well as the ACLU’s own rapidly evolving position on balancing speech and assembly rights against concerns about safety and comfort in the public arena.

The meeting was called by the D.C. City Council’s Committee on the Judiciary & Public Safety after an incident occurred earlier in the week between police and a resident of the Deanwood neighborhood on the north side of Ward 7, which is predominantly black. Two police officers identified as Whitehead and Gupton descended upon a residency and began to conduct a questionable search. One was seen peering through a truck window before heading to the backyard. The events were captured by Jay Brown on his cellphone, who asked whether or not they had a warrant to search the home where his sister and niece live.

Brown asked Gupton what he was looking for, and Gupton would not tell him. Police later told the family that they believed a suspect dumped a gun in the area, but surrounding neighbors and children in the area were not alerted.

Brown and his family believe the search was a form of intimidation, as they are currently in the middle of a legal battle with the Metropolitan Police Department. Brown’s nephew, Jeffrey Price, died in May after his illegal dirt bike crashed into a police SUV. Police told the family that Price was speeding and going down the wrong side of the road when the crash ensued. The story was challenged when witnesses and video from the scene indicated that an officer later identified as Michael Pearson pursued Price, which is against police policy, and attempted to cut off the dirt bike with his police SUV, leading to the crash.

Brown said the officers’ search “further traumatized the family.” He added, “There will be no trust in the community unless we have some type of change in the way our police are operating in our city, because right now they’re conducting themselves like a lawless gang with no supervision.”

After the search, the family filed a suit with the ACLU. In turn, the ACLU’s D.C. office delivered a request on behalf of the Public Oversight Roundtable organizers regarding police presence at Thursday’s meeting. A press release asked police to “respect organizers’ request and keep a minimal, if any, presence” at the meeting, which was held in the Deanwood Recreation Center. The request cited “recent events.”

Monica Hopkins, executive director of the D.C. office, said that while the organization was pleased that Chief of Police Peter Newsham planned to attend the event, it was equally important “for community members to have an opportunity to share their concerns without feeling pressure from law enforcement.”

We are asking DC police respect organizers’ wishes at tomorrow’s public safety hearing. pic.twitter.com/haFWxIOh4t

— ACLU of DC (@ACLU_DC) July 11, 2018

That Democrats would mount a ferocious opposition to Donald Trump’s nomination to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court was a foregone conclusion: Before the name was released, Democratic strategists publicly discussed the need to oppose the nominee regardless of who it was. After Trump announced that he had picked Brett Kavanaugh, one prominent liberal activist group accidentally sent out an email slamming Trump’s nomination of “XX.” The exact reasons why they would oppose any Trump nominee could come later.

Later is now, and Democrats appear to have settled on a tip for their spear: Although abortion and the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned will no doubt figure prominently in Democratic messaging, the party’s leadership is pushing health care as the primary reason to oppose Kavanaugh. In particular, the notion that he might prove decisive in a vote to overturn Obamacare’s preexisting conditions rules.

“We Democrats believe the number one issue in America is health care and the ability for people to get good health care at prices they can afford. The nomination of Mr. Kavanaugh will put a dagger through the heart of that cherished belief that most Americans have,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said earlier this week.

This is not just a preview of the fight over Kavanaugh, or even of the coming midterm election, although it is certainly both. It is also yet another indicator of how, in the age of Obamacare, all political arguments tend to become health care arguments.

The Democrats’ case against Kavanaugh, as much as there is one, has to do with a legal challenge now working its way through the court system. A group of conservative states led by Texas is challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, arguing that because the individual mandate was upheld as a tax, and was set to zero by last year’s GOP tax law, it no longer raises revenue, and therefore is no longer constitutional as a tax. Furthermore, the challengers argue that because the mandate is central to the law, the entire statute should be struck down. Somewhat unusually, the Trump administration has declined to defend the health care law in court, filing a brief arguing that although much of the law should remain in place, the preexisting conditions rules should be struck down along with the mandate.

The Democratic line of thinking is that should the challenge ever reach the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh, as both a Trump pick and a former senior White House staffer under George W. Bush, would likely side with the Trump administration.

As a legal argument, this is at best a stretch. The Texas-led case is weak enough that it has been criticized by legal experts all over the ideological spectrum. It’s not even clear whether the states have standing to sue. The probability is low that the Supreme Court will ever hear the case.

But even if it did, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion, which states that the “only consequence” of failing to comply with the mandate is triggering a tax penalty, seems to hint that he would not buy the argument that other parts of the law should fall if the mandate is struck down. That means there would likely be five votes to keep the rest of the Affordable Care Act in place, regardless of how Kavanaugh voted.

Kavanaugh’s own record on Obamacare, meanwhile, suggests that he might take a minimalist approach to the law: In a dissent, he wrote that the courts should “respect” the “legislative effort” behind the law, and give significant weight to its “vital policy objectives.”

The Supreme Court is unpredictable. It is impossible to completely rule out the possibility that it will rule in a way that significantly alters or affects the health care law. But the evidence suggests that Kavanaugh is unlikely to be the decisive vote in any foreseeable case.

However, it would be a mistake to see this line of attack merely as Democrats misjudging the viability of the Texas lawsuit. For many Democrats and their supporters, this is about developing a political message designed to unify the party and carry it to victory in the 2018 midterms. It does Dems no good to treat any Republican threat as insignificant.

Organizing around Roe and abortion access would no doubt motivate the party’s base, but it could prove a problematic message for some red state Senate Democrats. The Joe Manchins (D–W.V.) and Joe Donnellys (D–Ind.) of the world, however, will have a far easier time supporting Obamacare and the various forms of coverage it regulates and supports. This is why Sen. Manchin’s response to Kavanaugh’s nomination was to warn that “the Supreme Court will ultimately decide if nearly 800,000 West Virginians with pre-existing conditions will lose their health care.”

So between the Democrats’ successful opposition to last year’s GOP repeal effort, and the role they want Obamacare to play in the 2018 midterm, it would appear that the future of American politics will increasingly revolve around health care policy—even when the connection is more a product of partisan convenience than real concern. That will be especially true for Democrats, who are likely to find the issue favorable for as long as Republicans continue to treat health care mostly as an afterthought.

The dominant role of health care policy in national politics has of course long been a fixture in many other Western nations, and of course U.S. politics have often touched on health care as well. But the passage of Obamacare in 2010 elevated and amplified those debates here in the U.S., rendering the issue permanently prominent.

In many ways, that is the fundamental nature of Obamacare and a significant part of its political legacy. By adding subsidies and regulations to individual plans operating in the private market and expanding Medicaid, the law solidified the idea that health care is primarily the responsibility of government, and that frustrations with the delivery and provision of care should be resolved in the public sphere. It did not socialize the nation’s health care system, but it did socialize the debate about health care.

In the process, it all but ensured that numerous future political fights, like the one over Kavanaugh, would be fought on the terrain of health policy. And although the coming battle over single payer on the left could change this dynamic somewhat, it seems more than likely that health care will remain a convenient, catch-all reason for doing or opposing “XX.”

Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) blasted congressional leadership Wednesday for failing to take meaningful action in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff madness.

The Senate overwhelmingly approved a measure earlier in the day limiting the president’s power to impose tariffs for national security reasons. But the nonbinding measure won’t actually do anything, and was seen as more of a symbolic gesture than anything else.

That’s not good enough for Amash, who voiced his displeasure in a pair of tweets. The libertarian-leaning Republican blasted the Senate’s action as “weak,” calling on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R–Wisc.) to “defend Congress’s powers with real legislation, not symbolic gestures.” In a follow-up post, he wondered why McConnell and Ryan even “want to be congressional leaders if all they intend to do is outsource their jobs to the president.”

I can’t relate to why they’d want to be congressional leaders if all they intend to do is outsource their jobs to the president.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 12, 2018

The Senate’s vote came the same day the Trump administration said it was imposing 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of imports from China. The White House claimed this measure was a response to tariffs imposed by China on American goods, though China’s tariffs were retaliation for an earlier round of Trump tariffs. Though Congress has yet to address this trade war with meaningful legislation, the Senate’s vote could be sign of things to come. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm noted yesterday:

The nonbinding vote is, for now, mostly meaningless. Still, the bipartisan support for limiting the president’s ability to abuse the Section 232 tariff authority is the first sign that Republicans in Congress might be willing to stand up to Trump as he continues escalating an unnecessary trade war.

Amash, meanwhile, has previously voiced his disdain for Trump’s tariffs. In March, not long after Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the United States, Amash called such tariffs “corporate welfare.”

Steel and aluminum tariffs are corporate welfare. They benefit the few through a tax imposed on all Americans.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 1, 2018

2018 will forever be remembered as the year that hating plastic straws went mainstream. Once the lonely cause of environmental cranks, now everyone wants to eliminate these suckers from daily life.

In July, Seattle imposed America’s first ban on plastic straws. Vancouver, British Columbia, passed a similar ban a few months earlier. There are active attempts to prohibit straws in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco. A-list celebrities from Calvin Harris to Tom Brady have lectured us on giving up straws. Both National Geographic and The Atlantic have run long profiles on the history and environmental effects of the straw. Vice is now treating their consumption as a dirty, hedonistic excess.

Not to be outdone by busybody legislators, Starbucks, the nation’s largest food and drink retailer, announced on Monday that it would be going strawless.

“This is a significant milestone to achieve our global aspiration of sustainable coffee, served to our customers in more sustainable ways,” said Starbucks Kevin Johnson CEO in a press release announcing the move.

The coffee giant says that by 2020 it hopes to have eliminated all single-use plastic straws at its 28,000 stores worldwide. It will now top all its cold drinks with fancy new strawless lids that the company currently serves with its cold brew nitro coffees. (Frappuccinos will still be served with a compostable or paper straw.)

As is to be expected, Starbucks’ decision was greeted with universal adulation.

The World Wildlife Fund and Ocean Conservancy both provided ebullient quotes for Starbucks’ press releases. Liberal magazine The New Republic praised the move as an “environmental milestone.” Slate hailed the Starbucks straw ban as evidence of as a victory for a bona fide anti-straw movement, one that would hopefully lead to bans of more things plastic in years to come.

Yet missing from this fanfare was the inconvenient fact that by ditching plastic straws, Starbucks’ will actually be increasing its plastic use. As it turns out, the new nitro lids that Starbucks is leaning on to replace straws are made up of more plastic than the company’s current lid/straw combination.

Right now, Starbucks patrons are topping most of their cold drinks with either 3.23 grams or 3.55 grams of plastic product, depending on whether they pair their lid with a small or large straw. The new nitro lids meanwhile weigh either 3.55 or 4.11 grams, depending again on lid size.

(I got these results by measuring Starbucks’ plastic straws and lids on two seperate scales, both of which gave me the same results.)

This means customers are at best breaking even under Starbucks’ strawless scheme, or they are adding between .32 and .88 grams to their plastic consumption per drink. Given that customers are going to use a mix of the larger and smaller nitro lids, Starbucks’ plastic consumption is bound to increase, although it’s anybody’s guess as to how much.

In response to questions about whether their strawless move will increase the company’s plastic consumption, a Starbucks spokesperson told Reason “the introduction of our strawless lid as the standard for non-blended beverages by 2020 allows us to significantly reduce the number of straws and non-recyclable plastic” as the new lids are recyclable, while the plastic straws the company currently uses are not.

This is cold comfort given the fact that even most of the stuff that is put in recycling bins still winds up at the dump. The company did not address, nor did it dispute, that its transition to strawless lids would increase its overall plastic consumption.

The weight of plastic—not the raw number of plastic objects used, or whether those objects are recyclable or not—is what should really concern environmentalists.

Pictures of turtles with straws up their noses are certainly jarring. However most plastic, whatever form it enters the ocean as, will eventually be broken up into much smaller pieces known as micro-plastics. It is these micro-plastics that form those giant ocean garbage patches, pile up on the ocean floor, and leech into the stomachs and flesh of sea creatures.

Reducing the amount of micro-plastics in the ocean thus requires cutting down on the aggregate weight of plastics entering the ocean each year. It cannot be stressed enough that straws, by weight, are a tiny portion of this plastic.

At most, straws account for about 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of plastic that are estimated to enter the ocean each year, according to the Associated Press; or, .02 percent of all plastic waste. The pollution problem posed by straws looks even smaller when considering that the United States is responsible for about one percent of plastic waste entering the oceans, with straws being a smaller percentage still.

As countless experts have stressed, truly addressing the problem of marine plastic pollution will require going after the source this pollution; namely all uncollected litter from poorer, coastal countries that lack developed waste management systems.

Straw banners have proven stubbornly resistant to this logic. Instead, they have chosen to rely on either debunked statistics (such as the claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day, which was the product of a 9-year-old’s research) or totally unproven notions (like the theory that straws are a “gateway plastic”) in order to justify petty prohibitions on innocuous straws. And they have been helped along by an uncritical media. Coverage of Starbucks’ strawless move saw The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic all cite the 500-million-straws-a-day figure.

By adopting a myopic focus on banning straws, environmentalists, city councils, and conscious capitalists are, at best, having no significant impact on the overall problem of marine plastic waste. At worst, they are pushing expensive prohibitions on consumer choice that are counter-productive—at least in the case of Starbucks’ ban—and come with all sorts of unintended consequences.

For instance, straw bans will likely hurt disabled people who lack the motor skills necessary to pull off a flawless cup-to-lip motion. While reusable straws exist, they are hard to clean and not always handy when one needs them. “What if you decide on the spur of the moment to go have a drink with friends after work but forgot your reusable straw that day? [That] doesn’t leave a lot of room for spontaneity—something nondisabled folks get to largely take for granted,” Lawrence Carter-Long of the national Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund told NPR. Senior citizens and parents with young children will likely be affected for the same reasons.

Why not use more eco-friendly disposable straws? Because they are terrible. Paper straws are known to collapse halfway through a drink. Compostable straws cost six to seven times more than their plastic alternatives, don’t keep for long, and fall apart when exposed to high heat.

Straws, although not essential for most people most of the time, are still a wonderful convenience that help people enjoy a drink on the go, preserve their carefully-applied lipstick, or save their teeth from the corrosive effects of some beverage. Just yesterday, we as a nation celebrated 7-Eleven’s ‘Free Slurpie Day’, a holiday that can’t hope to survive in a strawless world.

Giving up on free slurpies and dignity for disabled people in the pursuit of totally illusionary environmental benefits seems like a poor trade-off, yet that is the trade-off straw prohibitionists are forcing the rest of us to accept.

A Tampa, Florida, man is in jail for contempt of court because he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) unlock a pair of cell phones to comply with a search warrant.

The case of William Montanez, first arrested on June 21, got some attention last week when Tampa’s Fox affiliate reported that a judge tossed him in jail for contempt because he couldn’t remember the passcodes on two phones deputies wanted access to.

Beyond the issue of whether courts can force a person to provide the passcode to their phone, there’s another issue here of why, exactly, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department is demanding access in the first place.

Montanez’s attorney, Patrick Leduc, spoke to Reason Wednesday and provided copies of all the police reports and warrants in the case. Montanez was initially pulled over by a deputy who was monitoring his car on outdoor surveillance footage and saw him leave a gas station and drive onto the street without coming to a full stop first. This is a traffic violation in Florida.

The report doesn’t indicate why the deputy was monitoring Montanez in the first place, but the deputy used the traffic violation to pull Montanez over. Then things get a little sketchy. According to the deputy’s report, he requested a drug-sniffing dog to come to the scene before even approaching Montanez’s vehicle.

Montanez’s own behavior was a little sketchy as well. He did not have his driver’s license, registration, or proof of insurance in the vehicle. The deputy also reported smelling a “strong odor of a freshly sprayed masking cologne.” The drug-sniffing K9 was brought in to check the car, and the dog indicated the presence of drugs.

This led to a search where deputies found some marijuana in a plastic baggie in a hidden compartment in the car and some burnt roaches. Montanez acknowledged that the marijuana was his and for his own use. The amount of marijuana found constituted merely a misdemeanor under Florida law. The deputy also found two bottles of oil, which when field-tested, came back positive for THC. Possession of any amount of cannabis concentrate in Florida is a felony. They also found a gun the glove compartment of the car, which even if the gun is legally owned and licensed, counts as a charge of possessing a gun firearm during the commission of a felony because of those two bottles of THC oil. And they also found $1,203 in cash on Montanez. Possessing cash is not a crime, and Montanez has not been charged with any crimes in relation to having all that cash on hand.

None of this explains why police wanted to access Montanez’s phones. According to the police reports, the deputy was attempting to power down Montanez’s phones. While doing so, a text message popped up that said “OMG, did they find it?” The report states that the text message arrived after the traffic stop, leading the officer to believe that there was evidence on the phone. So the deputy seized the phones. He asked Montanez for the passcodes and Montanez declined. They submitted a search warrant to compel Montanez to supply the passcode and allow them to access all the content on both the phones.

But, the question remains, why? The warrant application explains the contents of the phone could provide evidentiary information related to the four charges filed against Montanez. But they already have the literal physical evidence for the charges they’ve filed. They’ve got the drugs and the gun. Montanez is not charged with anything connected to drug trafficking.

Leduc sees a deeper motive in trying to get access to Montanez’s phones.

“It’s basically a fishing expedition,” Leduc says. “This is an intel operation. They’re seeking to get into his cellphone to see what data-mining they can do.”

Leduc notes that the deputy who pulled Montanez over isn’t some general patrol officer. The deputy himself notes on the warrant request that he’s part of a street crimes team that investigates drug and narcotics cases. In short, it’s unlikely that the stop leading to the discovery of drugs was any sort of coincidence. And the desire to search Montanez’s phone may be for something bigger than securing a conviction for the charges Montanez is facing.

Regardless of whether Montanez has a deeper connection to drug trafficking—he has previous arrests for marijuana possession but no felonies—Leduc doesn’t believe an arrest for drug possession should logically lead to the police being permitted to search all your technology.

“There’s no limiting principle here,” Leduc says. “If the state’s theory is correct, if you’re a dude on a street corner, smoking a joint, they can demand your phone. If I enter a home, if I see marijuana, should I be able to search their laptops?”

Unfortunately for Montanez, the judge who handles first court appearances lacks the jurisdiction to quash a warrant even if he or she were inclined to and could only consider whether to hold Montanez in contempt for not complying. Judge Gregory Holder ordered Montanez to unlock the phones. Montanez said he could not remember the passcodes and was unable to do so. So Holder found Montanez to be in contempt and detained him.

Leduc has submitted an emergency petition for a hearing in order to fight the contempt order. Montanez could be held for up to six months unless he unlocks the phone or unless the court frees him. Leduc’s petition challenges whether deputies established probable cause to search the phone and asks the court to declare that Montanez does not have to give up his passcodes.

President Donald Trump reportedly isn’t happy with some aspects of the planes that carry him around the globe. But his issues with Air Force One have nothing to do with things like safety or performance. Rather, he wants a “more American” paint job and a bigger and better presidential bed, according to Axios.

Trump met earlier this year with executives from Boeing, including CEO Dennis Muilenburg, and the two parties agreed Boeing will develop two new Air Force One planes at a cost of roughly $3.9 billion. Trump also detailed his curious specifications for the planes. According to Axios:

We’re told that Trump wants a color scheme that “looks more American” and isn’t a “Jackie Kennedy color.” He doesn’t think the current blue (technically “luminous ultramarine”) represents the USA.

Some Air Force officials disagree, arguing that the current color scheme is “known around the world,” Axios reports. Doesn’t matter. Trump wants his planes to be red, white, and blue. He also wants Air Force One’s presidential bed “to be larger and more comfortable,” like the bed on his personal plane.

Ironically, Trump might not be able to experience the changes in person. The new planes aren’t going to be ready until 2021 at the earliest, so he would have to win reelection if he wants to enjoy them. And it could take an additional three years for the Air Force to test the planes, CNN reported in February, meaning they might not be good to go until 2024. But Trump is reportedly keen on the process being completed before he leaves office, with a source telling CNN that the president “wants to fly on that new plane.”

At the end of the day, paint jobs and presidential beds likely won’t increase the final cost of the new planes very much. But if the current Air Force One fleet isn’t broken, why is Trump ordering new ones ahead of schedule?

This order seems like the latest sign of a troubling trend where politicians not only treat the government like a piggybank, but do so without the slightest hint of shame. In February, The New York Times revealed that Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson ordered a brand new, taxpayer-funded $31,000 dining room set for his office. Scott Pruitt’s tenure as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which ended last week, was plagued by similar financial scandals, from installing an expensive soundproofed telephone booth in his office, to regularly traveling first class on airlines and taking a security detail on personal trips.

Politicians and policymakers have always played fast and loose with other people’s money. It’s what they do. But doing it so boldly and publicly normalizes some gross behavior.