Category: reason

Can an American citizen or business whose emails were hacked by a foreign government successfully sue the foreign government for damages?

All of a sudden, it’s a bipartisan issue.

The Democratic National Committee garnered headlines earlier this year when it sued Russia in federal court in New York, alleging that Russia had stolen emails from John Podesta, who was the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

And Elliott Broidy, who was deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, is suing Qatar in federal court in California, alleging that Qatar launched a sophisticated cyber-attack on his company’s email accounts and leaked the information it obtained to the press. President Trump had publicly acknowledged and praised Broidy at an event at which Trump also spoke of a U.S.-Qatar “dispute” over Qatar’s funding terrorism.

The legal complaints by both the DNC and Broidy claim that they should be allowed to go forward under existing exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a 1976 law that generally grants foreign states immunity from American courts.

It is hard to defend the proposition that some foreign country, or its agents, should be able to able to hack into the email of a prominent American and make the information public without paying some sort of severe price. It’s not that different from getting away with state-sponsored terrorism, writes Ira Stoll.

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“We’re looking at a destruction of the Constitution of the United States” if Donald Trump gets to pick Supreme Court justices, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) told MSNBC recently. A couple more appointments to the top court, she said to Chris Matthews, and you can kiss abortion rights, integrated schools, and more goodbye.

That completely deranged point of view is reaching a fever pitch today, the day that the president will announce his replacement for retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. On today’s Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and I talk about Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, just how much the Supreme Court matters in the long run, and whether The Donald is a net positive or negative for libertarian-minded Americans. On the one hand, he is deregulating certain aspects of the economy and the administrative state, and he’s been less aggressive than George W. Bush or Barack Obama when it comes to sending troops overseas.On the other hand, he just started a global trade war, acts despicably toward immigrants, and has yet to actually cut spending.

Matt Welch also gives a first-hand report on what he saw at the Libertarian Party convention in New Orleans, and we talk about the legacy of Steve Ditko, the co-creator Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and other more-popular-than-ever superheroes. An ardent Objectivist and Ayn Rand fan, Ditko contributed two comics to Reason in 1969, each of which took aim at “neutralists” who were willing to “compromise” with evil and thus become evil themselves (that’s a rough paraphrase). Read them here and here.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Fuck It’ by Broke For Free is licensed under CC BY NC 3.0

Relevant links to today’s conversation:

“Another Justice Like Gorsuch, Please,” by Jacob Sullum

“8 Reasons Why Obergefell Won’t Be Overturned,” by Jonathan H. Adler

“SCOTUS Shortlister Brett Kavanaugh on Obamacare and Judicial Restraint,” by Damon Root

“SCOTUS Shortlister Raymond Kethledge on Free Speech, Gun Rights, Originalism, and Chevron Deference,” by Damon Root

“SCOTUS Shortlister Amy Coney Barrett on Overturning Precedent and Judicial Deference to Lawmakers,” by Damon Root

“Not So Supreme (Q&A with Mark Tushnet),” by Nick Gillespie

“Trump’s Trade War Officially Begins,” by Eric Boehm

“Trump’s Trade War Targets Second-Most-American Pie Filling,” by Christian Britschgi

“Libertarian Party Rebuffs Mises Uprising,” by Matt Welch

“Controversialist Arvin Vohra Announces 2020 Libertarian Presidential Run,” by Matt Welch

“Ant-Man and the Wasp,“ by Kurt Loder

“Steve Ditko, RIP,” by Brian Doherty

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller was so upset after a bartender followed him out of a restaurant and cursed at him that he threw away $80 worth of sushi, according to The Washington Post.

Miller reportedly told his Trump administration colleagues that when he went to pick up some takeout sushi, a bartender at the restaurant followed him out the door. The bartender called Miller’s name, then cursed him out and flipped him off, prompting an “outraged” Miller to throw the sushi away, the Post says.

It’s not the only time that Miller, who’s faced criticism for his role in crafting the Trump administration’s strict immigration policies, has reportedly been heckled. One neighbor even put up “Wanted” posters featuring Miller’s photograph near his apartment.

Nor is Miller the only Trump official who’s been called out in public. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant last month, just days after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled by protesters while she ate at a Mexican restaurant. And last week, a protester confronted former White House Chief Strategist Steven Bannon at a bookstore and called him a “piece of trash.”

Such incidents are not unique to the Trump administration, according to Karl Rove, political strategist for former President George W. Bush. Rove claims to the Post that hundreds of demonstrators once converged outside his home and started banging on his windows. Aware that protesters were always ready to pounce, Rove explains that “we were very circumspect in Washington.”

This may, however, by the first time a federal official has responded to a heckler by throwing away $80 worth of his own food.

When Donald Trump picked Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court last year, one of the most frequently heard complaints concerned the nominee’s resistance to the doctrine that a court applying an ambiguous statute should defer to any “reasonable” interpretation favored by the administrative agency charged with carrying it out. If Trump chooses Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy, we are likely to hear similar criticism, because the D.C. Circuit judge also has expressed concern about the threat that so-called Chevron deference poses to the rule of law and the separation of powers.

“Chevron has been criticized for many reasons,” Kavanaugh observed in a 2016 book review. “To begin with, it has no basis in the Administrative Procedure Act. So Chevron itself is an atextual invention by courts. In many ways, Chevron is nothing more than a judicially orchestrated shift of power from Congress to the Executive Branch. Moreover, the question of when to apply Chevron has become its own separate difficulty.”

Drawing on his experience in the George W. Bush administration, Kavanaugh wrote that “Chevron encourages the Executive Branch (whichever party controls it) to be extremely aggressive in seeking to squeeze its policy goals into ill-fitting statutory authorizations and restraints.” While “it is no surprise that Presidents and agencies often will do whatever they can within existing statutes,” he said, “that inherent aggressiveness is amped up significantly” by anticipation of Chevron deference. In fact, “executive branch agencies often think they can take a particular action unless it is clearly forbidden.”

As a judge, Kavanaugh has tried to rein in that tendency by developing the “major questions” (a.k.a. “major rules”) exception to the Chevron doctrine, which applies to agency decisions that have sweeping effects but are not clearly authorized. Last year he argued that the Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory imposition of “net neutrality” clearly qualified for that exception:

The FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rule is one of the most consequential regulations ever issued by any executive or independent agency in the history of the United States. The rule transforms the Internet by imposing common-carrier obligations on Internet service providers and thereby prohibiting Internet service providers from exercising editorial control over the content they transmit to consumers. The rule will affect every Internet service provider, every Internet content provider, and every Internet consumer. The economic and political significance of the rule is vast.

Kavanaugh was dissenting from a decision not to rehear a case in which a D.C. Circuit panel had upheld the FCC rule. “Congress did not clearly authorize the FCC to issue the net neutrality rule,” he noted. To the contrary, Congress had debated net neutrality for years without taking legislative action to establish that policy. But if “an agency wants to exercise expansive regulatory authority over some major social or economic activity,” Kavanaugh said, the Supreme Court’s precedents say “an ambiguous grant of statutory authority is not enough.” Therefore, he concluded, “If the Supreme Court’s major rules doctrine means what it says, then the net neutrality rule is unlawful because Congress has not clearly authorized the FCC to issue this major rule.”

As Notre Dame law professor Jeffrey Pojanowski noted at the time, the major questions exception offers a way to curb the problems created by Chevron deference without scrapping the doctrine entirely. “Judge Kavanaugh’s careful explication and reformulation of the ‘major questions’ exception is an important development in its own right,” Pojanowski wrote, “and a rich source for further reflection on the role of the courts in the administrative state.”

His supporters were so enamored with him, then-candidate Donald Trump claimed in January 2016, that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Thankfully, the president isn’t shooting anyone in the street. But Trump’s theory about his supporters’ enduring love is being put the to test in a southern Missouri town where the White House’s trade policy is killing jobs.

And the crazy thing is, Trump might be right—so far, at least.

The Kansas City Star dispatched a reporter to Poplar Bluff, home to America’s largest manufacturer of nails, to find out how the steel tariffs were affecting Trump-supporting residents. Trump won 79 percent of the vote in Butler County, where Poplar Bluff is located. But the town of 17,000 could be decimated by the closure of the Mid Continent Nail Corporation, whose owners have warned that they may have to lay off hundreds of workers or even close their doors entirely as Trump’s tariffs increase the price of steel—a rather fundamental fixed cost when you’re in the business of making steel nails.

“This company, I think, couldn’t be a better example of the kind of damage that’s being done to America’s manufacturing jobs as a result of this extremely misguided policy,” company spokesman James Glassman told CNN last week.

Yet the Star’s reporter found residents who would “never hold the loss of those jobs against Trump” even as they acknowledge that his trade policies could cause serious problems not only for the workers at Mid Continent but for the town and region as a whole. Even though tariffs are “going to drive up the cost of everything, people are still going to stand behind him,” a chef named Eric Turner tells the Star.

And then there is this telling, and slightly terrifying, passage:

Sean [Foust] said if his friends who work there do lose their jobs, “I don’t think it will turn them” against the president, even if “on the surface, it’s going to look bad.” Why is that?

Mostly, tribalism. “There’s nothing he could do,” the son said, to alienate Republicans. And the same holds true for Democrats, since “everyone’s so set in their ways.”…

Nearby in the downtown parking lot, in between the train tracks and the farmers market, a man wearing a shirt emblazoned with a red, white and blue peace sign, who only gave his first name, John, said he’s “pretty worried” since two of his friends have already been laid off. But more important to him is that “there were so many illegals in the area taking jobs away.” And Trump “is better than the Muslim we had in the White House.” For him, a real threat to jobs is less frightening than an imagined one.

Could tribalism—or Trump’s cult of personality—be such a powerful force in national politics that it overturns one of the oldest rules in the political book: that people vote with their wallets? Polls continue to suggest that Republican voters mostly support Trump’s tariff agenda, even as analysis after analysis shows that the costs of the tariffs (and of the reciprocal tariffs launched by China and Europe) will overwhelmingly hit manufacturing and farming jobs—which is to say, jobs where Republicans and Trump supporters are over-represented.

Those polls, in turn, decrease the likelihood that Republicans in Congress will step up to stop Trump’s trade agenda.

That people often vote against what seems to be in their own self-interest is not new. From Kansas to the West Side of Manhattan, it is a phenomenon that has been the subject of many a think-piece. There’s probably something good—or at least vaguely noble—in the idea that voters can set aside pure self-interest to support what they see as policies aimed at the greater good, even if we might disagree, strongly, about what that greater good is.

When it comes to tariffs, though, it’s not at all clear what greater good is being achieved with the sacrifice of jobs in places like Poplar Bluff. The Trump administration has not outlined a clear plan for what it is trying to accomplish. Officials in China, the nominal target of Trump’s bellicose trade policies, are “absolutely confused” about what the Trump administration wants in terms of concessions, Politico reported last month. It is, of course, difficult to reach an agreement when neither side seems to know what the other side wants.

And it’s not like people in Poplar Bluff have a lot going for them. Median household income is just above $30,000, and more than a quarter of the town’s population lives below the poverty line. Butler County, where Poplar Bluff is located, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. One in seven residents work in manufacturing jobs, including the 500 or so employed by Mid Continent Nail Corporation. Who knows how many other non-manufacturing jobs are supported by the existence of a large business like that, and could be lost if it shuts down.

Mid Continent is one of thousands of companies to ask the Commerce Department for a special waiver that will allow it to avoid paying the higher taxes created by Trump’s tariffs. Without the waiver, the 60 employees laid off in June could soon have company. Another 200 will be fired by the end of this month unless things change quickly, company executives tell U.S. News and World Report.

All of which leaves the impression that support for Trump’s tariffs is not something generated by a sense of a greater good. It’s not about voters agreeing to take a hit now because they understand it is necessary for something beneficial down the road. It seems to be, mostly, about tribalism. About the fact that our guy is “better than the Muslim we had in the White House,” even if his policies cost my job.

At least that’s how it seems for now. Once more jobs are actually lost, and perhaps once it becomes clear that the tariffs aren’t accomplishing whatever goals Trump has, perhaps that will change. The partisan hatred might not go away, but maybe voters will stay home.

Until then, parts of so-called Trump country seem to be fine with their man destroying their jobs to own the libs.

At its best, the #MeToo movement has smashed open what had been a closed, whispered conversation, mostly occurring between women, about the prevalence of male sexual harassment and assault. It has exposed serial violent predators like Harvey Weinstein and serial abusive creeps like Louis C.K., and it has apparently led at least some men to rethink their own actions and the boundaries of acceptable behavior. “The #MeToo era has changed my work,” the psychotherapist Avi Klein wrote in a New York Times column. “If therapy has a reputation for navel gazing, this powerful moment has joined men in the room, forcing them to engage with topics that they would have earlier avoided.”

But with any movement, there’s a point where the initial excitement and sense of shared purpose fades a bit. It’s time to discuss exactly what the movement is for—what it’s trying to accomplish and which goals it should seek. No set of #MeToo allegations better highlights the importance of answering these questions clearly than the story of Junot Díaz, writes Jesse Singal.

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How would you feel if your government paid more than half a million dollars to help cover the costs of production for a really lame reality television show?

Ask the people of Virginia. The state’s tourism agency paid $536,000 to bring an episode of The Bachelorette to Richmond, of all places, in exchange for some promotion of the state’s “Virginia is for Lovers” tourism motto.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch got the details. The Virginia Tourism Corp. gave $300,000 to the show itself. It gave another $236,130 to “defray the costs” of meals, rooms, and production space at two hotels where the show’s staff stayed during filming.

These are direct subsidies to the private sector. They aren’t even tax credits. In exchange, the state of Virginia got “exposure.” Specifically, it got an in-show shot of a “Love” sign, a reference to the “Virginia is for lovers” motto, and some other minor mentions. Even the Times-Dispatch news story casts a bit of shade on the idea that this is significant “exposure” by putting the words in quotation marks.

The justification for giving Virginia citizens’ tax dollars to a Hollywood production company is that this “exposure” will increase tourism to the state, a claim that would be a challenge to prove. The story is full of typical marketing buzzword blather from tourism officials (you may check “branding opportunity” and “thinking outside the box” off your bingo cards). An official claims with a completely straight face that the state received $47 million in “publicity value” for that single episode of the show, which was viewed by 5.22 million people.

Virginia, like many states, gives out all sorts of direct subsidies, tax credits, and other benefits to TV shows that shoot there. They justify this by insisting that the spending pays off in economic activity within the state—the same argument used to justify giving money to private sports stadiums. Virginia offers $700,000 in subsidies and $6.5 million in tax credits to the television show Homeland, then turns around and claims more than $75 million in “economic impact.”

Economic experts tend to think this is bullshit. When somebody tells you it’s possible to get $47 million in “publicity value” off a single episode of a reality television show revolving around painfully artificial romances, you should probably question his other financial figures. Another episode of the show went to Lake Tahoe, where the producers got another plum deal, though the details were not made public. In that case, the president of the local visitors’ bureau said they saw “a spike in web traffic, newsletter subscriptions, social media followers and wedding inquiries.” That’s some nicely vague analysis of the benefits that doesn’t actually indicate “economic activity.” It does, however, read like what’s going to end up on an end-of-year report justifying this visitors’ bureau’s work.

Meanwhile, try to imagine what it must feel like to be working at any of the hotels in Richmond that didn’t get to play host for a show. Their competitors got a direct infusion of money from the state. Virginia has a hotel occupancy tax of 5 percent, and most of that goes to the state. Fundamentally this means that all the other hotels of Richmond helped pay for the costs of the production crews of The Bachelor to stay in hotels that they have to compete with to stay in business.

Critics note that the benefits from the subsidies often go to people outside the state. More than half of the money spent for this episode went to the production company. And so those who support these types of subsidies lean heavily on that “economic impact” claim, using the concept of economic multipliers—that the money spent during the production in Richmond filters back out into the community and is magnified when it gets passed along for other market needs.

But this ignores the opportunity costs. What could have been done with the money had it not been spent on a single episode of a television show? Are there no infrastructure improvements the state could be paying for instead? Oh, but that might involve taking some of the $26.8 million away from the state’s tourism budget.

States don’t just exaggerate the benefits; they conceal the costs. Did the citizens of Virginia truly get a good value from spending nearly a quarter of a million dollars reimbursing a couple of hotels in Richmond? Probably not. In fact, these shows are the ones that go shopping around, seeing where they can get the best deals from municipal and state tourism organizations. This competition between cities to attract television and film crews creates an environment where the government keeps funneling more and more of the citizens’ tax dollars to the production companies.

In The Bachelor‘s terms, city and state tourism and film bureau officials are begging drunkenly in the courtyard for a rose and then trying to convince us in camera confessionals that they’ve got the perfect plan and are sure they’re going to win. The idea that cities desperately pleading with production companies to come film there are also at the same time getting great deals for the taxpayers is as absurd as thinking that anybody on The Bachelor is in love with anything other than the prospect of becoming famous.

An Egyptian court sentenced a Lebanese tourist to eight years behind bars on Saturday. Her crime: posting a video to Facebook in which she complained of sexual harassment and slammed Egypt’s people and leadership.

Mona el-Mazbouh originally posted the video near the end of her vacation in Egypt. In addition to her allegations of harassment, she said she was robbed during a previous visit to the nation, according to Reuters. She called Egypt a “son of a bitch country,” claimed Egyptians are the “dirtiest people,” and said Egypt is “the country of pimps…of beggars,” the Associated Press reports. And she called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “unjust,” though she also suggested the Egyptians deserve him: “I hope God sends you someone more oppressive than Sisi,” she said.

Arrested at an airport in Cairo before she could leave the country, Mazbouh was charged with “deliberately broadcasting false rumors which aim to undermine society and attack religions.” Despite posting an apology video, she was still sentenced to prison and slapped with a fine.

An appeals court will hear the case later this month. “Of course, God willing, the verdict will change. With all due respect to the judiciary, this is a severe ruling. It is in the context of the law, but the court was applying the maximum penalty,” Mazbouh’s attorney, Emad Kamal, says in the Reuters report.

In an attempt to free his client, Kamal has even tried to blame Mazbouh’s actions on her health. According to Reuters:

Kamal said a surgery Mazboh underwent in 2006 to remove a brain clot has impaired her ability to control anger, a condition documented in a medical report he submitted to the court. She also suffers from depression, he said.

Mazbouh’s sentence is ugly but unsurprising. For years, Egyptians have not been able to express themselves freely, and things haven’t gotten better under Sisi’s regime. Just last month, the country’s parliament approved legislation forcing government supervision on “social media accounts, blogs and websites with more than 5,000 followers,” the AP reports.

President Donald Trump’s trade policies are leaving no iconic American industry unscathed. Having scared away motorcycle manufacturers and eaten into the profits of the country’s brewers, he now threatens another cherished American product: the cherry.

On Friday, the Trump administration levied tariffs on some $50 billion of Chinese goods, including everything from x-ray tubes and aircraft tires to ultrasound machines and agricultural equipment. China retaliated with its own tariffs on imported Americans cars, meats, and produce.

The most immediate victims of this breakdown in trans-Pacific trade are the agribusinesses who risk being cut off from their best export market.

“Every time there is a trade friction, the first thing that gets hit with retaliatory tariffs are the fresh products,” says Steve Reinholt, export sales director for the Washington-based agricultural export company Oneonta. “We pack and ship things within 48 hours. If you have a bit of a slowdown, it can effect things quickly.”

Hardest hit, says Reinholt, are the cherry growers his company buys from, who over the past decade had been doing steadily increasing business with China.

As recently as 2005, the U.S. sold almost no cherries to China. Last year, the country was the largest foreign buyer of the fruits. Of the 20 million 20-pound boxes of cherries produced in the U.S. in 2017, 3.2 million went to China.

Those numbers will not be matched by this year’s sales, says B.J. Thurlby of Northwest Cherry Growers, a trade association. He puts the blame squarely on the new tariffs.

“We’re very much expecting to have less volume to China this year,” says Thurlby. “Historically we would ship two million boxes in July alone. There’s just no way we see that happening this year, not with the amount of tariffs we’re talking about.”

Exporting to China had always been a challenge for the 2,500 or so Pacific Northwest growers that Thurlby’s organization represents. In the past, these growers have had to contend with a flat 10 percent import tax as well as a 13 percent value added tax.

Trump’s trade policies have only made things worse.

In response to the U.S.’s protectionist drift, China has upped tariffs on U.S. produce twice in the last three months, once in April and again last week, getting us to the 50 percent tariffs growers now have to pay.

Chinese officials have other means of making agricultural exporters’ lives miserable, too. All fresh produce entering the country has to be inspected, and Chinese authorities have been known to hold fruits and vegetables at ports until they rot.

California cherry growers report that Chinese authorities have held shipments five days for inspections. More such tactics could be on the horizon should trade relations between the two countries deteriorate further.

Fortunately, says Reinholt, this year has seen a smaller, high-quality crop of cherries and robust domestic demand, so growers can survive a brief trade spat. But “if it continues or gets worse between now and next season, that could be a real problem.”

Thurlby agrees. Cherry growers require good years of high profits to offset leaner seasons where low prices see farmers break even or not even harvest at all. “We need every market, every year to stay viable,” he says.

The outbreak of a trade war with no end in sight has left growers feeling like their industry is being ignored—or, worse, sacrificed for wider trade objectives.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that cherries are part of the big picture or even on the radar,” says Thurlby. “I have 2,400 frustrated growers across five states that aren’t happy with the direction of these trade wars at all.”

Jesus wouldn’t have any issue with gay marriage, former president Jimmy Carter said Sunday.

In an interview with HuffPost Live, Carter, a born-again Christian, was asked about his personal views on homosexual marriage. “That’s no problem with me,” the Democratic former president replied. “I think that everybody should have a right to get married, regardless of their sex.”

Later on in the interview, Carter said he believes Jesus would “approve” of gay marriage, though he doesn’t “have any verse in Scripture” to back that up. “I think Jesus would encourage any…love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else,” he said.

Though Carter supports gay marriage, he doesn’t think the government should “force” churches that oppose it to perform such ceremonies.

Carter’s faith has led him to disagree with his party on at least one controversial issue. “I have had a problem with abortion,” he said. “I have a hard time believing that Jesus, for instance, would approve abortions unless it was because of rape or incest or if the mother’s life was in danger. So I’ve had that struggle.”

Carter took office in 1977, four years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973) that legalized first-trimester abortion at the federal level. However, his “oath of office was to obey the Constitution and the laws of this country as interpreted by the Supreme Court, so I went along with that,” he said.

Though many presidential scholars don’t look very favorably on Carter’s four years in office, a look at what he actually did reveals it wasn’t all bad. Not only was his record on nonmilitary federal spending better than that of the five president who came before him, but he also worked to deregulate the oil, railroad, trucking, and airline industries. And by ’70s standards, Carter’s record on gay rights wasn’t bad: In 1978, he publicly opposed an amendment to California’s constitution that would have banned gay people from teaching.