Category: reason

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department plans to roll back a pair of Obama-era affirmative action decrees that pushed colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions.

The new guidance, which discourages race-based admissions, will essentially reconstitute the approach the federal government took under George W. Bush. The Bush administration had sternly reminded schools that they could consider race in admissions only if they had absolutely no other method of achieving diverse classrooms. This was consistent with Supreme Court precedent that has permitted affirmative action but narrowly limited its use.

But Barack Obama’s administration, in 2011 and 2016, issued recommendations that encouraged schools to think of diversity as a compelling state interest and to embrace race-based admissions as a tool to achieve it. This wasn’t necssarily at odds with Court precedent, but it very well could have sent a message to schools that diversity at all costs was the top priority.

The Trump administration’s decision was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Justice Department—which had been tasked with “re-evaluating” past policies that were considered legally suspect, according to The New York Times—is taking the lead here, though the decision impacts the Education Department. A spokesperson for the Education Department has confirmed to me that the administration is returning to the Bush-era position, per the new guidance.

Progressives will see this move as a deliberate attempt to weaken affirmative action at a time when race-based admissions policies are coming under serious scrutiny. Asian students who say they were denied admission to Harvard because its policies discriminate against them on the basis of skin color have sued the university. That lawsuit recently forced Harvard to pull back the curtain with respect to its admissions information, revealing that officials consistently underrated Asian applicants on subjective criteria like “personality,” even though Asians tend to outperform other applicants in virtually every respect.

The Harvard lawsuit is really just making an uncomfortable truth more obvious: When admissions officials discriminate in favor of one racial group, they must discriminate against other racial groups. This is wrong and legally suspect. It’s an issue a post-Kennedy Supreme Court should certainly revisit. In the meantime, the Justice and Education departments deserve commendation for distancing themselves from a policy that is racially discriminatory to its core. Good riddance.

Imagine it’s sometime in the future, but not so far in the future that you’re not still putting together flat-packed furniture.

You realize you need to drive some screws into the bookcase or whatever it is you’re assembling. Instead of rummaging through your garage or basement for your goddamned electric screwdriver, you tap out “rent a drill” on your a smart phone app. A few minutes later, a package arrives at your door. It contains a drill, you drive the screws, you send the drill back. Total time: 10 minutes. Total cost $2.50.

That’s a scenario from Tomorrow 3.0, a new book by Duke University economist and political scientist Michael C. Munger. Subtitled Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy, it takes a long look at what he says is, after the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, the third great economic revolution in world history—a revolution that is already well under way.

I talked with Munger about the future of work in a gig economy, the possible need for a guaranteed basic income, and why laws and policies designed to preserve the labor status quo inevitably increase the pace and magnitude of disruption. Co-editor of The Independent Review, Munger also explains how he came to his libertarian beliefs and how he designed the arresting cover of his latest book.

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Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit is reportedly among a handful of finalists under consideration by President Donald Trump to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Barrett, 46, was confirmed to the 7th Circuit last October after undergoing a highly contentious confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A committed Catholic who has written frequently about the intersection of faith and law, Barrett was questioned by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) about whether her religion would prevent her from serving as an impartial jurist. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that people have fought for for years in this country,” Feinstein said to the nominee.

Feinstein was undoubtedly referring to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that recognized a constitutional right to abortion. The senator’s implication was that Barrett’s religious views might lead her to limit or even overturn that decision.

Before her judicial appointment last year, Barrett was a distinguished law professor at Notre Dame University, where she produced a highly respected body of scholarly work. Because of her short tenure on the federal bench, that scholarship offers perhaps the best indication of what sort of Supreme Court justice she might turn out to be.

Consider her writings on the crucial issue of precedent. When is it appropriate for the Supreme Court to overturn one of its own prior rulings? And is it ever appropriate for the Court to overturn a precedent simply because a new majority disagrees with the methodological approach of its predecessor? In other words, would it be appropriate for a living constitutionalist Court to overturn a case like District of Columbia v. Heller because the later Court disagreed with the Heller majority’s originalist methodology?

Barrett grappled with such questions in a 2013 Texas Law Review article. In it, she sketched out and defended an approach that she called “weak” or “soft stare decisis.” Given the competing interpretive methodologies on the Court, she argued, “a more relaxed form of constitutional stare decisis is both inevitable and probably desirable, at least in those cases in which methodologies clash.”

“Were there greater agreement about the nature of the Constitution—for example, whether it is originalist or evolving—we might expect to see greater (although of course still imperfect) stability,” Barrett wrote. “In the world we live in, however, that level of stability is more than we have experienced or should expect in particularly divisive areas of constitutional law.” Reversing precedent “because of honest jurisprudential disagreement,” she concluded, “is illegitimate only if it is done without adequate consideration of, and due deference to, the arguments in favor of letting the precedent stand.”

As for her own approach, she wrote: “I tend to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it.”

Barrett’s writings also reveal her to be a sharp critic of the libertarian legal movement. In a 2017 article for Constitutional Commentary, Barrett acknowledged that libertarian legal scholars such as Georgetown’s Randy Barnett have a point when they fault conservatives for placing too much emphasis on the notion of judicial restraint. “Deference to a democratic majority should not supersede a judge’s duty to apply clear text,” she wrote.

But Barrett then suggested that the libertarian legal movement has gone too far in the opposite direction by embracing a sweeping theory of economic liberty that is itself unmoored from constitutional text. What is more, Barrett defended the Supreme Court’s current approach in cases dealing with economic regulation, in which the scales are tipped in favor of lawmakers via the highly permissive standard of judicial review known as the rational-basis test. “Deferential judicial review of run-of-the-mill legislation,” Barrett wrote, is defensible on the grounds that such judicial deference “is consistent with the reality that the harm inflicted by the Supreme Court’s erroneous interference in the democratic process is harder to remedy than the harm inflicted by an ill-advised statute.”

Notably, that view not only places Barrett in conflict with the libertarian legal movement, but it also places her in conflict with another possible SCOTUS finalist: Judge Don Willett, who appeared on Trump’s original SCOTUS shortlist and was rumored to be among the finalists under consideration to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. Willett is considered to be in the running yet again for Kennedy’s seat.

In 2015, while serving as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, Willett (who is now a federal appellate court judge) concurred in the case of Patel v. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Willett’s opinion laid out an explicitly constitutional case for the judicial recognition and protection of economic liberty. (Willett favorably cited my book, Overruled, in this opinion.)

“The Fourteenth Amendment’s legislative record,” Willett pointed out, “is replete with indications that ‘privileges or immunities’ encompassed the right to earn a living free from unreasonable government intrusion.” To say the least, Willett displayed little patience for what Barrett has defended as “deferential judicial review of run-of-the-mill legislation.”

If Amy Coney Barrett gets the nomination to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, I look forward to the Senate Judiciary Committee questioning her about these fundamental matters of legal theory and constitutional interpretation.

A new United Nations report shows that the American-backed Saudi coalition in Yemen is responsible for a majority of child casualties in the region. Maybe it’s time Congress paid attention to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the few Republicans who has consistently opposed American intervention in this conflict.

According to the Children and Armed Conflict report, obtained by Al Jazeera, the Saudi-led coalition killed 370 out of the 552 child casualties recorded and also injured 300 more in 2017 in the brutal Yemeni civil war. The report also said that both sides of the conflict utilized child soldiers in battle, documenting 842 cases. Despite being such a destructive war, the strife in Yemen has not garnered much congressional attention outside of a few determined senators committed to restoring the authority to declare war back to the Senate, as ordained by the Constitution.

At a recent talk sponsored by the Fund for American Studies, Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) described the American involvement as “an unconstitutional war.” They faulted the U.S. government for “providing significant military assistance to Saudi Arabia.”

Just last year, Paul distinguished himself from his colleagues by his marked opposition to President Donald Trump’s intention to sell $110 billion of weapons to the Saudi government. While he was unsuccessful in his crusade, it sparked much-needed debate on the future of American policy on supplying arms to violent regimes.

Even more recently, Sen. Lee teamed up with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in February to push President Trump to end American involvement in the Yemeni conflict. The senators tried to take advantage of the War Powers Act to force a vote on S.J. Res 54, which would have withdrawn American forces from the country, despite stringent opposition from the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. The Senate, however, tabled the resolution with a 55-44 vote.

Notwithstanding these efforts, in the midst of the ethical quagmire that is the Yemeni civil war, the United States continues to help Saudi Arabia furnish its military to fuel the conflict.

In spite of its checkered human rights record, Saudi Arabia has shared a powerful alliance with the United States for over seven decades, held strong by the bonds of oil and bombs, which steadily flow between the governments. This alliance sometimes manifests itself in the form of arms deals and acts of military assistance in Middle Eastern battlefields that are the source of tragically little discourse on the floor of Congress.

In addition to making us at least somewhat complicit in Saudi Arabia’s actions, supplying arms to the Arabian monarchy will make Americans less safe. The blowback effects from crippling an already destitute country with festering Islamic radicalism will haunt America well after the Houthis have been defeated with American weaponry.

“The Saudis have dropped 64,000 bombs. Sometimes they bomb people with uniforms and guns, sometimes they bomb civilians,” Sen. Paul elaborated. “And then we ask ourselves, how are terrorists created?” Combine this with the presence of American troops in Yemen to fight terrorism, and our image in the region suffers greatly.

It’s important to note that America’s Saudi Arabia policy is not unique. It’s part of a broader (and ineffective) policy of attempting to use arms sales to coerce other countries into falling in line with our government’s foreign policy agenda. In a recent paper for the Cato Institute, A. Trevor Thrall, professor at George Mason University, and Caroline Dorminey, policy analyst at the Cato Institute, argue, “arms sales lack a compelling strategic justification, amplify risks, and generate a host of unintended negative consequences.” A new approach to foreign policy is certainly more than warranted.

There is no excuse for congressional complacency while our tax dollars are being used to fund authoritarian regimes that kill and recruit children, especially when it compromises our own national security.

A federal judge has made it very clear in a new ruling that the government can force you to send your kids to school, but you can’t force the government to actually provide an education there.

Judge Stephen Murphy III of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, just dismissed a case originating from Detroit accusing Gov. Rick Snyder and other state officials of doing such a terrible job when the then-bankrupt city was under the control of emergency managers that they deprived students of a right to an education or even basic literacy.

The plaintiffs argued that this extremely crappy non-education violated their Due Process and Equal Protection rights under the 14th Amendment. The State of Michigan argued that this complaint—a demand for “access to literacy”—is not constitutionally recognized. The judge agreed, though he very much sympathized with the students, and dismissed the case.

While the dismissal is prompting some outrage (and the plaintiffs promise to appeal) it should not come as a surprise. The courts have been extremely reluctant to wade into any space where they define what sort of an education anybody has a “right” to, though they’ve certainly been fine with the government forcing kids to attend regardless. A Supreme Court case from 1973, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, held that the U.S. Constitution did not establish a “fundamental right to education.”

But that ruling was about equal access to educational tools and funding mechanisms. The San Antonio case was about whether it was constitutional to use property taxes as a school funding mechanism if it meant that students in poorer communities got worse educations than those in wealthier communities (answer: yes). In this case, Murphy noted, the plaintiffs are simply arguing that they aren’t getting any sort of education at all. Was that a distinctly different enough argument for Murphy to contradict pervious precedents? Is basic “access to literacy” a fundamental right?

In the end, the judge ruled it was not:

Plainly, literacy—and the opportunity to obtain it—is of incalculable importance. As Plaintiffs point out, voting, participating meaningfully in civic life, and accessing justice require some measure of literacy. Applying for a job, securing a place to live, and applying for government benefits routinely require the completion of written forms. Simply finding one’s way through many aspects of ordinary life stands as an obstacle to one who cannot read.

But those points do not necessarily make access to literacy a fundamental right. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized, in Rodriguez and elsewhere, that the importance of a good or service “does not determine whether it must be regarded as fundamental[.]”

He noted previous examples where courts have ruled that there’s no fundamental right to water or sewer service and that the Due Process Clause does not compel the state to protect a child from an abusive father or from a bully in school.

So even when the government has the authority to mandate behaviors of the citizens under the law, it’s a one-way street. The judge ruled that the state cannot be affirmatively ordered to provide students even the basic level of education to achieve literacy.

This is not to say the judge’s ruling is wrong. If the courts did rule that schools were constitutionally mandated to provide a certain level of education, imagine the lawsuits that would follow as everybody attempted to make the case for how that level of education should be determined. We already have a constant culture war within the education system itself about what schools are supposed to be teaching. The last thing we need is for the courts to get dragged into figuring out those boundaries.

But what people should take away from this ruling is the importance of competition and choice in forcing schools to improve. If the courts can’t make a school provide a certain level of education, parents and students must be free to pick other schools. Education must be a marketplace. A court can’t order a grocery store to sell certain products, but they know that if they don’t provide what customers need somebody else will and they’ll lose business. Schools should be the same way. And there’s evidence to show that when there’s charter schools and other school choice options around, public schools start to improve.

If the courts lack the authority to force schools to provide a certain level of education, we should make sure that parents have access to school choice to decide what’s best for their own kids.

More than 60 percent of Americans think the Senate should vote on President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy before the November midterm elections, according to a new poll.

An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll conducted between June 27 and July 1 revealed that 62 percent of respondents think the Senate should either confirm or reject Trump’s pick before the midterms. On the other hand, 33 percent think the Senate should wait until after the elections.

Most Republicans and independents—85 percent and 61 percent, respectively—want the Senate to vote on Trump’s nominee before the midterms. However, 55 percent of Democrats don’t want a vote until after the elections. Republicans currently hold a slim 51–49 majority in the upper chamber of Congress, meaning that by waiting until after the elections, the GOP risks losing control of the Senate.

The poll’s results run counter to the message top Democrats have pushed in recent days—that the Senate should wait until a new Congress is seated before voting on Trump’s nominee. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) said on the Senate floor last week that Republicans “should follow the rule they set in 2016, not to consider a Supreme Court justice in an election year.” He added that “millions of people are just months away from determining the senators who should vote to confirm or reject the president’s nominee, and their voices deserve to be heard now.”

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) expressed similar sentiments, as did Sens. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). However, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has indicated he wants to move quickly to vote on Trump’s nominee.

Trump has yet to announce his choice to replace Kennedy, though he said he will do so on July 9. In a tweet early Tuesday morning, he said he interviewed “4 very impressive people yesterday.”

I interviewed 4 very impressive people yesterday. On Monday I will be announcing my decision for Justice of the United States Supreme Court!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018

Americans are sharply divided along partisan lines regarding what kind of justice they want on the Supreme Court. A majority of Republicans—65 percent—want Trump’s nominee to be conservative, while 63 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats think he or she should be moderate.

The NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll also gauged Americans’ opinions on whether or not they want Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion at the federal level, to be overturned. With the retirement of Kennedy, who, in the landmark 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, joined the plurality opinion upholding Roe v. Wade, many people are predicting that Roe could be overturned. According to the poll, though, 61 percent of Americans think Trump’s nominee should uphold the 1973 ruling.

This Fourth of July, when you watch the fireworks, will you think about the Declaration of Independence?

We should, says John Stossel. After all, the holiday is meant to honor the Declaration. It, and the Constitution it led to, help keep us free.

Compare America to Britain, the country we broke away from. There, they sentenced a man to more than a year in jail for making a Facebook live video outside a courthouse.

Getting locked up for something you write on social media is also common; hundreds get arrested for that in Britain every year.

Fortunately, in America, thanks to the First Amendment, we can say most anything without being jailed

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel, his independent production company, Stossel Productions, and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

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The California Supreme Court ruled in favor of online review site Yelp.com after a lawyer attempted to use the courts to have a negative review forcefully removed.

As Reason previously reported, personal-injury lawyer Dawn Hassell of the Hassell Law Group accused former client Ava Bird of defaming her law firm on Yelp. Hassell sued Bird in 2013, but Bird did not appear—it is believed that Bird was never served with court papers. The San Francisco County Superior Court ruled in Hassell’s favor by default and awarded her $557,918. The court ordered Bird to remove the reviews and Yelp to “remove all reviews posted by AVA BIRD under user names ‘Birdzeye B.’ and ‘J.D.,'” despite not having definitively confirmed that Bird used the alias “J.D.”

Though Yelp lawyers said they often comply with such orders, they took issue with the nature of the proceedings, as explained by Yelp Deputy General Counsel Aaron Schur in a blog post:

When Yelp appealed, the Court of Appeal doubled down on the lower court’s decision, ruling that Yelp was not a publisher at all, had no right to a hearing in connection with an order to remove reviews, and was not protected by the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the law Congress passed to protect online publishers to shield them them from responsibility for the speech of others. The CDA gives online platforms the right to publish (or not publish) the ideas and opinions of users without the threat of being held liable for that content or forced to remove it. This allows the internet to flourish. The Court of Appeal held that by avoiding suing Yelp directly (to Yelp, a violation of due process) also allowed the plaintiff to sidestep the CDA’s broad immunity.

On Monday, the California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in favor of Yelp. The justices argued that such orders “could interfere with and undermine the viability of an online platform.” Hassell’s lawyer, Monique Olivier, criticized the ruling, saying that it “stands as an invitation to spread falsehoods on the internet without consequence.”

Several organizations came to Yelp’s defense, including the the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The ACLU filed an amicus brief in 2016, citing, “the danger that the Court of Appeal’s holding posed to online speech.” EFF also filed a brief and argued in 2017 that the two lower courts in the case did not “understand that the First Amendment protects not only authors and speakers, but also those who publish or distribute their words.” EFF also accused both courts of ignoring “the U.S. Supreme Court’s clear holding that issuing an injunction against a non-party is a constitutionally-prohibited violation of due process.”

In the same Yelp blog post citing the CDA, Schur made the following observation about Hassell’s pursuance of Bird:

The Hassell Law Group, which has always been a highly-rated business on Yelp and currently maintains five stars, has spent many years in the court system (and endured the resulting Streisand Effect) in an effort to force Yelp to silence a pair of outlier reviews. As we have observed before, litigation is never a good substitute for customer service and responsiveness, and had the law firm avoided the courtrooms and moved on, it would have saved time and money, and been able to focus more on the cases that truly matter the most—those of its clients.

One of my fonder childhood memories involves igniting a small batch of home-brewed gunpowder on the windowsill in my bedroom. I had vague plans for making my own firecrackers, or cherry bombs, or maybe a cannon—something that would go BOOM anyway. The stuff worked, though not quite so spectacularly as I’d hoped—fortunately.

Also fortunate is that such DIY efforts are often unnecessary in a country where many states feature booming markets in fireworks for such traditional celebrations as Independence Day. Even better, state fireworks laws have long been as fractured and diverse as Americans themselves are now, guaranteeing that, even if your own chosen address is a bit restrictive when it comes to matters pyrotechnic, a border near you likely offers legal refuge to a variety of loud and flammable goods, writes J.D. Tuccille in his ode to all things flammable.

View this article.

Poll shows strong support for Roe v. Wade. Most Americans hope that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement will embrace the abortion status-quo, at least in a broad sense. In a poll conducted last week by Politico and Morning Consult:

• 52 percent of those surveyed said that they hope Kennedy’s replacement on the Court supports access to legal abortion.
• Just 29 percent said they hope the Supreme Court’s newest member will reject legal abortion.
• About 19 percent had no opinion or said they didn’t know what they wanted.

Few surprises here: 73 percent of the Democrats polled said they hope the next Supreme Court justice is pro-choice—14 percent had no answer—while only 31 percent of Republicans want a judge who supports abortion access.

Thirteen percent of Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans want a judge who will not uphold Roe v. Wade.

Independents are pro-choice by two-to-one margin: Among those who identified as political independents, more than twice as many folks were in favor of a pro-choice justice (49 percent) as those opposed (24 percent).

Same-sex marriage enjoys support similar: The poll also asked about Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country. Again, 52 percent were in favor of upholding the (new) status-quo here. A little under a third (27 percent) said they hoped a Kennedy-less Court would overturn Obergefell.

Midterm mayhem? Poll respondents indicated that their midterm-election votes could depend on how legislators would vote on President Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

But some suggest this concern for the Court and Roe is overblown. “It is settled law and it is a precedent whether you like it or not,” analyst Andrew Napolitano said on Fox News Monday. “I don’t think it’s going to be overturned no matter who the president appoints.”

Check out this week’s Reason podcast to hear Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Damon Root debate the future of the Supreme Court and of Roe v. Wade.

FREE MINDS

Proud to be an American? About that… For the first time in 18 years of polling, a majority of Americans polled by Gallup say they are not “extremely proud to be Americans.” In 2003, 70 percent of survey respondents considered themselves extremely proud Americans. By last year, the number had fallen to 51 percent and, in this year’s poll, only 47 percent described themselves thusly.

Male respondents have always expressed higher levels of extreme American pride than their female counterparts, but the disparity is growing. In 2013, 59 percent of men and 55 percent of women said they were extremely proud to be Americans. This year, it was 51 percent of men and just 44 percent of women.

Extreme national pride was also much higher among whites (54 percent) than non-whites (33 percent), and much higher among older Americans (58 percent for the 65+ crowd and 56 percent among 50-to-64 year olds) than among the youngest Americans (33 percent for 18-to-29 year olds and 42 percent for 30-to-49 year olds).

FREE MARKETS

Introducing Lyft Bikes. Ride-sharing company Lyft is now getting into the bike-sharing business. The company announced yesterday that it had acquired Motivate, which operates D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare, New York City’s Citi Bike, and San Francisco’s GoBike program, along with bicycle sharing schemes in Boston, Chicago, Columbus (Ohio), Jersey City, Minneapolis, Portland, and St. Paul. It’s unclear at present whether Lyft Bikes plans to launch bike-sharing services in other cities.

In a statement, Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer said that “bringing together Lyft and Motivate will accelerate our collaboration with cities and deliver even better experiences to our passengers and riders.”

BLUNDERING BUREAUCRATS

Postal Service can’t tell real Statue of Liberty from Vegas version. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) was just ordered to pay $3,554,946.95—plus interest—to sculptor Robert S. Davidson, whose Statue of Liberty image USPS used on stamps instead of an image of the real Statue of Liberty. Davidson’s work appears outside the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

QUICK HITS

• Meet Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who has emerged as one of Trump’s top picks to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Amazonian psychedelic ayahuasca could help treat depression.

NEW: President Trump has declined a request from the mayor of Annapolis to lower American flags to honor five Capital newspaper employees who were fatally shot last week, the Baltimore Sun is reporting https://t.co/e7AfXeqtc6

— Laura Litvan (@LauraLitvan) July 3, 2018

• “Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now,” warns CNBC.
• Vladimir Putin said he’s willing to have a one-on-one meeting with Trump.
• A federal judge has once again blocked enforcement of an Arkansas law that would ban non-surgical abortions.

Two notes from the latest Quinnipiac (which lines up with most polls preceding it):

-There IS an unusually large gender gap in midterm preference (women are D+25, men are R+8)

-There is NOT all that much of a gender gap on support for Roe vs. Wade (women are +35, men are +29)

— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) July 2, 2018

• Rachel Dolezal, who made headlines several years ago for her claims to be “transracial,” was just booked on welfare-fraud and perjury charges in Washington state.
• Harvey Weinstein is now facing even more sexual assault charges.
• RIP Vinnie Paul Abbott.