A video posted to Facebook shows an unnamed El Paso police officer detaining a young boy. When surrounding children criticize the officer, he pulls out his gun and aims it at the crowd. Moments later, a second officer comes to help. The officer then pulls out his baton and begins shoving spectators away from the scene.

About a minute into the video, the gun-pointing officer sets his sights on the guy filming his behavior. The young cameraman says “I’m just recording” before the officer places him in handcuffs. The camera is handed off to someone else in the crowd to capture the second arrest.

The El Paso Police Department released a statement on Saturday, a day after the video was posted. According to the statement, the officers on video were initially responding to a criminal trespass call. The officer, who was identified only as a four-year veteran stationed at the Central Regional Command Center, was reassigned to desk duties while the department’s Internal Affairs Unit investigates the events captured on video.

Assistant City Manager Dionne Mack told reporters at a press conference that one minor and one adult were taken into custody and “charged with interfering with a police investigation.” Mack said the incident was being investigated based on a process that is “clearly defined in our policies and procedures.”

According to USA Today, the department declined to provide specifics about the policies covering handgun and baton use.

In this video, an El Paso cop:

-Assaults children
-Threatens them
-Lunges at them with a nightstick
-Points his gun at them
-Arrests the kid filming thempic.twitter.com/owyzro36JT

— jordan (@JordanUhl) July 9, 2018

Bonus link: Our cover story from January 2011, “The War on Cameras.”

July 9, 2018, marks 150 years of the 14th Amendment. We’re also expected to hear tonight from President Donald Trump about his nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The convergence of these momentous events is appropriate,” writes Jeffrey Rosen at The Atlantic. Kennedy, “more than anyone else in America, has defined the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment for the past three decades.”

(More on Kennedy’s 14th Amendment legacy here. “We cannot forget that he was one of the five justices who joined the Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, setting the stage for massive voter suppression around the country,” writes Sherrilyn Ifill at Politico. “This and other setbacks hurt….But even with his unpredictability on matters of race and equality, Justice Kennedy gave us a reason to hope. To make our arguments. To expect that he might be persuaded to realize the Constitution’s promise.”)

The Fourteenth Amendment—greenlit by a 23rd state (and thus cleared for adoption) on July 9, 1868—says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It was passed to grant citizenship and equal protection to freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War (and three years after the 13th Amendment formally ended slavery).

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment which was designed to give full citizenship to African Americans who had been formerly enslaved. #14thAmendment #CivilRights pic.twitter.com/LCBEtYETAT

— Legal Defense Fund (@NAACP_LDF) July 9, 2018

It’s been at the center of a number of huge (and sometimes hotly contested) Supreme Court cases, including Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Lochner v. New York (1905), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Mapp v. Ohio (1961), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and Loving v. Virginia (1967).

“Today the Fourteenth Amendment stands among the most often cited and most litigated of constitutional provisions,” writes American Bar Association President Linda Klein. It “has supported and inspired landmark civil rights legislation, including laws that bar discrimination in education, employment, and housing. Rarely does a Supreme Court term pass without a major ruling that has its roots in the Fourteenth Amendment, including recent decisions on such noteworthy topics as affirmative action and voting rights. The amendment’s section on public debt has even been cited in debates over raising the federal debt ceiling.”

“An even broader interpretation of the 14th Amendment may reshape American society in the 21st century,” suggests historian and New School lecturer Amanda Brickell Bellows.

But the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t have such an auspicious start at the Supreme Court. It was “originally intended to allow Congress and the courts to protect three fundamental values: racial equality, individual rights, and economic liberty,” writes Rosen.

But the amendment was quickly eviscerated by the Court, and for nearly a century it protected economic liberty alone. Justice Kennedy embraced all three values of the Fourteenth Amendment, invoking it to protect reproductive autonomy and some forms of affirmative action, as well as to establish marriage equality, but also to limit federal economic regulations, such as the Affordable Care Act. His replacement will determine which vision of the amendment prevails for decades to come.

According to the White House rumor mill as reported through myriad publications, Trump’s top picks are:

• Judge Amy Coney Barrett, 46, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
• Judge Thomas Hardiman, 53, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
• Judge Brett Kavanaugh, 53, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
• Judge Raymond Kethledge, 51, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit

“Trump had a strong favorable reaction to Kethledge, while Barrett was seen as a less likely choice. The president’s interview with her was only about 30 minutes—shorter than with the others,” according to Bloomberg.

FREE MINDS

Library group disassociates from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Over the past six decades, 23 people have been awarded the American Library Association’s prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder award, which “recognizes authors and illustrators whose books have created a lasting contribution to children’s literature.”

But going forward, the award will no longer bear Wilder’s name. The author of the Little House on the Prairie series, Wilder’s work “holds a significant place in the history of children’s literature and continues to be read today,” said the ALA’s Association for Library Service to Children Board (ALSC) in a statement.

Wilder’s books are a product of her life experiences and perspective as a settler in America’s 1800s. Her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities. ALSC works within the context of our society as a whole, where the conversations taking place inform our work and help us articulate our core values and support of diverse populations.

The late-June move has since sparked sympathy and indignation, along with a range of more nuanced grappling with Wilder’s legacy.

FREE MARKETS

Federal employee unions vs. Trump. Executive orders issued in May will be implemented today, and are “likely to escalate tensions” between federal employee unions and the Trump administration. Though the rules are ostensibly “an effort to streamline a bloated bureaucracy and improve accountability within the federal workforce”—a cadre of some 2.1 million people—they’re obviously being viewed with hostility by federal employee union officials. From The Washington Post:

The administration wants agencies to reopen collective bargaining agreements to reduce the on-duty time union representatives spend representing employees. Managers are directed to “monitor and carefully report” on the time and make the information publicly available. And agencies are directed to move swiftly to fire poor performers, renegotiating any contracts that allow for progressive discipline. The conflict appears headed for a showdown, either in federal court, where the unions have filed numerous lawsuits challenging the orders, or in Congress. The administration and the unions have courted Capitol Hill allies, with Republicans supporting Trump’s tactics and Democrats backing the unions, a key constituency.

QUICK HITS

• The U.K. is considering its own version of “FOSTA/SESTA,” the U.S. legislation making online prostitution ads a federal crime.
• An El Paso cop was caught on camera pointing his gun at a group of children. “We have assigned additional resources to ensure the investigation can be completed expediently,” said El Paso Deputy City Manager Dionne L. Mack.

DOJ Racks Up 90% Failure Rate In Inauguration Protest Prosecutions, Dismisses Final Defendants https://t.co/DD2jdIxmo7

— AMERICA’S LOUDEST PATRIOT (@TimCushing) July 9, 2018

• National Review executive editor Reihan Salam explores whether Americans should “really want a truly independent FBI,” and whether an “independent FBI in keeping with America’s constitutional order.”
• New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait goes all-in on Trump-Russia collusion.
• Sex workers and Amnesty International are fighting an attempt to make prostitution illegal in Switzerland.
• “Thirty-three pregnant Cambodian women hired to act as surrogate mothers were formally charged with surrogacy and human trafficking offenses.”

No hockey, no bikes, no chalk drawings, you name it: This B.C. neighbourhood has declared a war on fun https://t.co/Zxkly7RnEC pic.twitter.com/7mfa2eK65I

— Ottawa Citizen (@OttawaCitizen) July 9, 2018

What could explain the tumbleweeds rolling through the corridors of my wife’s usually bustling pediatric practice for one week each May? It’s entrepreneurial spirit.

Few things motivate the local kids to suppress their usual sniffles and complaints like the annual fair, when their longtime 4-H and FFA (formerly Future Farmers of America) projects come to fruition. All that time, sweat, and energy expended by them (and, too often, their suffering parents) in raising rabbits, lambs, goats, poultry, and steers find their reward at the livestock auction, from which the kids depart with hard cash and the buyers end up with freezers full of meat. It’s a demonstration not just of animal husbandry but of an entrepreneurial spirit that’s at odds with the Hillbilly Elegy–esque dysfunction we’re told to expect of locales outside city limits, writes J.D. Tuccille in the latest issue of Reason.

View this article.

TV broadcaster Shireen al-Rifaie has fled Saudi Arabia after the nation’s broadcasting authority began investigating her for wearing indecent clothing. A clip of her reporting on women drivers in the nation shows that her abaya is open, clearly exposing the blouse and trousers underneath.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is reportedly among the handful of finalists under consideration by President Donald Trump to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh, 53, attended Yale Law School and clerked for Justice Kennedy at SCOTUS. His record includes stints as associate counsel in the office of Independent Counsel Ken Starr as well as numerous positions in the George W. Bush administration, including staff secretary to the president and senior associate counsel to the president. Bush appointed him to the D.C. Circuit in 2006.

What sort of Supreme Court justice might Kavanaugh turn out to be if he gets the nomination and is successfully confirmed by the Senate? His 2011 dissent in the case of Seven-Sky v. Holder offers some potentially significant clues.

At issue was the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Specifically, the case asked whether Obamacare’s individual mandate requiring every American to have health insurance was a legitimate exercise of Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. It was one of several constitutional challenges to Obamacare then working their way towards the Supreme Court.

Seven-Sky was a victory for the Obama administration. A divided three-judge panel upheld the mandate’s constitutionality on Commerce Clause grounds. Judge Kavanaugh dissented, though not because he necessarily disagreed with the majority’s Commerce Clause analysis. Rather, Kavanaugh dissented because he thought the federal courts had no business hearing the case in the first place.

“For judges, there is a natural and understandable inclination to decide these weighty and historic constitutional questions,” Kavanaugh wrote. “By waiting, we would respect the bedrock principle of judicial restraint that courts avoid prematurely or unnecessarily deciding constitutional questions.”

In Kavanaugh’s view, the D.C. Circuit should have been guided by the Anti-Injunction Act, an 1867 law that says, “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court.” In other words, a tax cannot be challenged until it has been assessed and paid. And in Kavanaugh’s view, Obamacare’s individual mandate deserved to be counted as a tax, even though the law’s authors called it a “penalty.” “The Anti- Injunction Act precludes us from deciding this case at this time,” he wrote.

Kavanaugh then pivoted to a broader discussion of the judiciary’s role in this high-stakes constitutional showdown. The courts should be “cautious,” he wrote, “about prematurely or unnecessarily rejecting the Government’s Commerce Clause argument.” That is because “the elected Branches designed this law to help provide all Americans with access to affordable health insurance and quality health care,” which he described as “vital policy objectives.” He added: “This legislation was enacted, moreover, after a high-profile and vigorous national debate. Courts must afford great respect to that legislative effort and should be wary of upending it.”

If the idea of the federal courts being “wary” of “upending” Obamacare because the law was enacted by the “elected Branches” after “vigorous national debate” sounds familiar, that is because it is so similar to the 2012 argument made by Chief Justice John Roberts when he upheld the Obamacare’s constitutionality.

“The Government asks us to interpret the mandate as imposing a tax, if it would otherwise violate the Constitution,” Roberts wrote in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. “Granting the Act the full measure of deference owed to federal statutes, it can so be read.” He concluded: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

Many observers have suggested that President Trump will try to replace Justice Kennedy with a jurist “in the mold” of Antonin Scalia, or perhaps of Scalia’s successor, Neil Gorsuch. If Trump nominates Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he may well end up with a jurist in the mold of John Roberts.

Related:

• SCOTUS Shortlister Raymond Kethledge on Free Speech, Gun Rights, Originalism, and Chevron Deference
• SCOTUS Shortlister Amy Coney Barrett on Overturning Precedent and Judicial Deference to Lawmakers

Perhaps you’re old enough to remember back when the zoos kept animals in cages, but people were free to roam about.

No more. The National Zoo in Washington, D.C., is going to close 10 of its 13 entrances and, perhaps inspired by the top dog in the White House, build a border wall. Or, as it’s being called, “supplemental perimeter fencing.” The idea is to keep out cars intent on ramming into the zoo like an angry rihinocerous.

This is strange logic, though. A determined driver could ram anyone else, any time, any place. Should we build walls separating the sidewalk from the street?

The Washington Business Journal reports that the wall is just the beginning and “the days of strolling into the zoo unwatched will eventually come to an end.” Instead of pleasantly streaming into the zoo, as families, joggers, and tourists do today, visitors will have to pass through “screening pavilions.”

The problem with the fortressing of the zoo is what it represents: security overkill. Once you start looking for danger, you will see it everywhere. Which means that once you decide a particular place could be a target and start imagining how to protect it, you go down the prairie dog hole of preventing something that isn’t likely to happen.

And yet, you never truly feel secure. Think of the TSA, grabbing cans of Diet Sprite from diabetic 90-year-olds in wheelchairs because somehow they presented a threat. There’s no evidence these intrusive security measures make anybody safer. But they will make visiting the zoo much more of a hassle.

This week saw the end of the period set aside for the public to comment on a set of oft-delayed rules which may govern the state of genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling around the country for years to come.

The National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard is extraordinarily troubling. One of the key problems with the law is that—though it was billed as a compromise that would put an end to years of ongoing GMO-labeling controversies and litigation—the law instead will likely trigger years (if not decades) of controversy, confusion, and needless lawsuits.

One needn’t look further than the USDA’s proposed mandatory GMO labels, writes Baylen Linnekin, to see the law is a harbinger of bad policy.

View this article.

Steve Ditko, the comic book artist who is also the most influential popular artist specifically and deeply influenced Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, was found dead in his New York apartment late last month at age 90.

His greatest claim to fame was his co-creation of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange with writer Stan Lee. Ditko’s fertile imagination is to this day keeping thousands of people employed and multi-millions of dollars flowing through the Marvel cinematic universe’s reliance on his concepts.

Not that Ditko worried about that sort of thing; he had done the work he had done, for hire, and had let go any public sense of being owed anything for it. He did want it on the record that he had co-created those characters when he saw Lee seeming to imply otherwise, but never publicly fought for any monetary recompense for it. But he deserved, and to a large degree got, the adoration of generations of comics fans, who he avoided, almost never appearing in public or allowing himself to be interviewed.

Ditko was also, once upon a time, a Reason contributor, in our early days. Our September 1969 issue featured his energetically Randian 10-page story “The Avenging World,” blaming the world’s evils on equivocating “neutralist” compromisers who refuse to take firm and decisive sides between right and wrong.

The Watchmen protagonist Rorschach was Alan Moore’s take on Ditko’s DC Comics character The Question and, as I argued at Reason, Moore’s attempt to present what a thoroughgoing Objectivist hero would be like in real life. (Rorschach also drew on Ditko’s self-owned Objectivist hero Mr. A

When Reason contributing editor Peter Bagge wrote and drew a Spider-Man comic book for Marvel, he re-imagined Peter Parker as Bagge’s own version of a character consumed, as Ditko was, by Objectivism.

Ditko was one of the very few sui generis cartoonists. While Jeet Heer in a thoughtful summation of his career and influence at New Republic notes Ditko being inspired by Jerry Robinson, Will Eisner, and Joe Kubert, to my eyes be the late 1950s, in his science fiction and weird mystery work for Charlton and Marvel Comics, Ditko was drawing in as explosively unprecedented a manner as anyone in comics history, with an endlessly rich and startlingly fresh way of representing the human imagination, quirky and eldritch and distinct and everywhere exhibiting a mind that was just not like everyone else’s. No one in the superhero field even tries to get close to Ditko’s style anymore, though as Heer also notes Ditko’s draftsmanship and character design sense can be detected in some “alternative” cartoonists as Dan Clowes, Ben Katchor, and Gilbert Hernandez

He walked away from his big Marvel creations in 1966 and while he continued to work for many other publishers, including Marvel again in the 1970s and ’80s, Ditko abandoned the commercial comic industry by the end of the 1990s. Even in the late 20th century he mostly indulged in his own curious near-outsider-art presentations of his philosophy and thoughts. As comics critic and historian Douglas Wolk put it in his book Reading Comics, Ditko in his later years reduced (or possibly refined) his work to “pure nerve-wracking style: arguing faces, abstract doodles, hectoring moralism.”

I noted at Reason his 85th birthday with many links of Objectivist interest. The nature of his post-Marvel career has been likened by some to Rand’s Fountainhead hero Howard Roark working in the quarry, or Atlas Shrugged‘s John Galt taking his genius from the masses, doing whatever honest work he could even if not able to work to the height of his abilities and powers as a creator for the general public. He was willing to not be recognized by the world as long as it meant keeping his creative integrity intact. For reasons of personal integrity known only to him, he refused to sell any of his own original art pages which could have made him a rich man.

The book Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics) details how Ditko in superhero comics such as blue Beetle and Hawk and Dove worked Objectivist themes of the corruption of modern art, the necessity for rigorous rationalist , and how evil works often through the “sanction of the victim” who refuses to recognize, name, and stand up for what’s right.

Ditko’s most Randian characteristic, though, is that he worked to the best of his unique individualistic creative powers, and in doing so shook up the world, making himself, if not the, at least a sustaining fountainhead of modern comics art.

Criminal charges against the 39 remaining Inauguration Day protesters still being prosecuted were all dropped today by federal prosecutors, as reported today in The Washington Post.

Originally 234 people alleged to be part of a protest called “DisruptJ20” were arrested on that day, 21 of whom later pleaded guilty.

A protest organizer, Lacy MacAuley, noted to the Post that in situations like this, justice delayed is in a real sense justice denied, since the defendants have had their lives disrupted merely waiting over a year enough under criminal charges. “How do you plan for your job and family and personal life when you are facing decades in prison?” MacAuley said.

Two sets of the arrested that day went to trial previously and were not convicted; jurors never felt the government had proven these specific people committed any specific criminal act.

Mark Goldstone, who represented two of the defendants, told the Post that the government “overreached in terms of their legal theory…that a person is responsible criminally for any destruction and violence incurred by someone in the same vicinity because of the clothes they wore — and because of that, a person is facing seven years in jail because of someone else’s actions — that absolutely preposterous.” The failed attempt to prosecute was then “a waste of time and a waste of taxpayers’ resources.”

C.J. Ciaramella reported on an earlier wave of failures to convict on what has been known as the “J20” arrests, which many found infringed on First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Many of the arrestees, as the jurors in previous cases noted, had no provable connection to any actual property destruction that occurred during the D.C. Inauguration Day protests. The government tried to argue that merely being at the protest—that is, exercising their First Amendment rights—marked the arrested as members of a criminal conspiracy to aid the rioters. The Justice Department’s investigation on these crimes including trying to access organizers’ Facebook accounts and IP addresses for visitors to a protest website.

Ciaramella quoted an ACLU attorney at the time of those earlier acquittals saying the failure to convict on these arrests “reaffirms two central constitutional principles of our democracy: first, that dissent is not a crime, and second, that our justice system does not permit guilt by association.”

Today’s action rightly does so more firmly.

Necessary steps in resolving the fate of thousands of children being held captive by the U.S. will be delayed at least another couple of days because a government attorney has dog-sitting responsibilities out of state and can’t attend a weekend court status conference.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California, Julia Ainsley of NBC News reported, “said he would agree to delay the [July 10] deadline for reunifying the youngest children if the government could provide a master list of all children and the status of their parents by 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday. A government lawyer said she could not attend a status conference over the weekend because she had out-of-town dog-sitting responsibilities.” Daily Beast reports that “Sabraw initially asked the government to provide her with a list on the status of all the young children and their parents by 5 p.m Saturday” until the dog-sitting intervened.

As Reason‘s Jesse Walker tweeted: “You have to understand that dogs get really upset when they’re separated from the most important people in their lives.”

That bitterly ironic details isn’t the worst of what’s going on with the adjudication of the child-separation situation on the border. The government admitted today in court that “they cannot locate the parents of 38 migrant children under the age of 5.” For half of those 38 kids, the parents were already deported; half the parents are no longer in government custody but the government doesn’t know how to find them.

Government officials feel aggrieved in general at the stress caused by their practice, now halted, of separating parents and children in enforcing misdemeanor border-crossing crimes. Yesterday Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar complained of the rush to review the cases of the almost 3,000 child detainees to meet the court-imposed deadline. As reported also by Julia Ainsley of NBC, Azar said “It’s important to remember that information from children can at times be unreliable.” The method they are trying to use is cheek-swab DNA tests from all the captive children.

Judge Sabraw’s original deadlines for reunification were July 10 for kids under 5, and July 26 for those 5-17. Azar laments some of their traditional vetting processes may have to be abandoned in the fact of what he calls such “extreme” deadlines.

Reason’s past coverage on this issue.