Last week, the Trump administration proposed to significantly overhaul several federal regulatory agencies. Food-safety oversight is one of the key elements of the proposal. The Trump administration says the food-safety proposal, part of its larger plan to consolidate various agency responsibilities, would shift thousands of current FDA and USDA employees and billions of dollars into a new Federal Food Safety Agency.
The need for reform is real. The USDA and FDA currently operate under completely different food-safety laws and regulations. When it comes to food safety, which agency oversees what foods (and what the agency’s process is for regulating those foods) has long seemed arbitrary. One classic example is that frozen cheese pizzas sold at your local grocer are regulated by the FDA, while frozen pepperoni pizzas are regulated by the USDA.
That’s a charming distinction. But, as Baylen Linnekin writes for Reason, overlapping USDA and FDA jurisdiction, responsibilities, staff, and duties can help spur dangerous delays and other problems that have real-world consequences.
Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), one of just three House Republicans to vote against a Department of Defense appropriations bill on Thursday, called out his party for overwhelmingly supporting the wasteful legislation.
The $675 billion spending bill easily passed in the House of Representatives by a 359–49 vote. Aside from Amash, Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and Ken Buck (R–Colo.) were the only Republicans to vote no.
Despite the fact that Republicans—who do indulge in small government rhetoric from time to time—control both houses of Congress and the presidency, government spending has only gone up, Amash noted in a Twitter post on Friday. This will always happen, he said, when “all of government” is controlled by one political party.
“Whenever one party controls all of government, spending goes up like crazy. This Congress is no exception,” Amash wrote. “Yesterday, I was one of only three House Republicans to oppose the massively wasteful DoD appropriations bill—one of the most bloated bills ever.”
Whenever one party controls all of government, spending goes up like crazy. This Congress is no exception. Yesterday, I was one of only three House Republicans to oppose the massively wasteful DoD appropriations bill—one of the most bloated bills ever. https://t.co/KcGWk1mmif
Ever since he became a member of Congress in 2011, Amash has made it clear he won’t stand for wasteful government spending. In March, after his congressional colleagues passed a 2,300-page omnibus bill, he called the legislation “one of the worst—and most costly—pieces of legislation ever to become law.”
“That’s why I voted no,” Amash tweeted at the time.
Amash has never shied away from criticizing both Republicans and Democrats for not being fiscally responsible. “There is such a level of stupidity right now in the way we spend money,” he said in April.
After Saudi Arabia’s June decision to lift the driving ban against women, at least one is celebrating her new freedom with the power of song.
A rapper named Leesa created a music video for a song titled “We Are Driving.” The video features Leesa driving behind the wheel of a car telling audiences, “today I can serve [drive] myself.” Other lyrics include “I don’t need anyone to take me” and “I put the seatbelt over my abaya,” the name for the robe worn by Saudi women when they appear in public. She also leaves a warning for her passengers not to slam the door, threatening to tie them up with her seatbelt if they’re too rough with her car.
The video has received tens of thousands of likes on her Instagram page. Others compared the themes in Leesa’s music video with the once-controversial 2012 music video for “Bad Girls” by M.I.A., which highlights women behind the steering wheel while men perceived to be Arab look on. When asked why she shot the music video in Morrocco, M.I.A. explained that she “didn’t want to go to jail.”
While Leesa raps in celebration, other women have chosen to take advantage of industries that they were once unable to access. According to Time, Ohoud Al Arifi became the first woman in the country to drive for Uber, just hours after the ban went into effect. Al Arifi previously obtained her driver’s license in California and also works as Uber’s marketing manager for Saudi Arabia. Al Arifi said that her first rider was a woman who was inspired to ask how she might become an Uber driver as well.
Not every Saudi woman is benefitting from the change. Several activists who fought the ban remain in government detention. One such detainee is Loujain al-Hathloul, who was arrested in 2014 after she attempted to drive herself in her own vehicle across the border from the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia. Al-Hathloul was also arrested in 2017 and again in March 2018 after she and other activists defied the driving ban.
Despite a lack of enthusiasm from some White House and Pentagon officials, the Department of Defense has begun planning a military parade ordered by President Donald Trump, according to NBC News.
The parade does not yet have a budget, but officials have set a date (November 10, though it was originally planned for November 11) and proposed a route. They think it should start at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., and stop at the National Mall.
Trump proposed putting on a military parade last September during a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at the United Nations General Assembly. In July, Trump attended France’s annual Bastille Day parade, and he was impressed.
“I was your guest at Bastille Day, and it was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen,” Trump told Macron in September. “It was two hours on the button, and it was military might and, I think, a tremendous thing for France and the spirit of France.” He also said he would like the United States to “top” France’s parade.
In February, Trump put his words into action, officially directing Defense Secretary James Mattis to begin planning for such a parade in Washington. But ever since March, when a Pentagon memo revealed some details about the parade, there hasn’t been much information forthcoming about the impending pomp and circumstance. That’s because the military has had “more pressing” matters to deal with, NBC reported, citing a senior defense official.
Now the Pentagon has turned its attention to planning the parade, but that doesn’t mean officials are excited about it. “There is only one person who wants this parade,” a senior U.S. official told NBC. That one person, of course, is Trump.
Aside from a general lack of interest among officials, the parade faces another major hurdle: It’s not clear where the money is going to come from, as neither the Pentagon nor the White House has set aside any funds for the event, which Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney estimated could cost between $10 million and $30 million.
Some of the money is sure to come from the Defense Department’s training budget, but that doesn’t answer the question of who will pay the Secret Service agents and police officers providing security, or who will pay for the parade’s setup.
According to a National Security Council spokesperson, “the Department of Defense will provide options to the White House for a decision.” But even if the Trump administration can figure out who’s going to foot the bill, that doesn’t take away from the fact that the parade itself is seen by many as a waste of money.
“A parade of this kind would represent a significant waste of tax dollars. At a time when Congress is wrestling with how best to recapitalize our military and better protect the force after 17 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, resources should be deployed to enhance military readiness and warfighting, not wasted on such a pointless display,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.), a Marine veteran, said in a statement in February. “No one in the world doubts the strength of our military or the professionalism of our men and women in uniform. A parade will not alter that perception. Instead, it will likely prompt ridicule from our friends and foes alike.”
Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) used the parade to criticize the American military’s involvement in foreign wars. “I’m all for a parade if it’s to celebrate bringing our young men and women home from these unauthorized wars overseas,” Amash tweeted.
In February, a poll of Military Times readers showed that 87 percent of respondents opposed the idea of the military parade.
New York politics, you may have heard, can be passionate and unpredictable. Democratic Socialists topple senior House incumbents, TV personalities escalator into and out of our lives, and a kind of low-level pressure of resentment constantly builds in the vicinity of the unloved machine politicians who reliably misgovern the place. At a time when Trumpism and the resistance to it are rubbing emotions raw, this mix of a frustrated populace and an entrenched political class is inherently volatile, as Rep. Joe Crowley (D–N.Y.) can certainly testify.
So why the hell aren’t third-party candidates being polled for New York governor?
Former Sex in the City co-star Cynthia Nixon, for example, is running an in-your-face, headline-generating progressive challenge to incumbent Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Nixon is currently gathering petitions to compete in the Sept. 13 Democratic primary, but is already guaranteed a spot on the November general election ballot due to her nomination in mid-April by the Working Families Party (New York has six minor parties with automatic ballot access; the Libertarian Party is on track to gather the necessary signatures to get Larry Sharpe on there as well).
And yet when Siena College Research Institute conducted a general-election gubernatorial poll June 4-7, the choices were: Republican, Democrat, “wouldn’t vote,” “someone else,” and “don’t know/no opinion.” Nixon’s name only appeared as a Democratic alternative to Cuomo, and neither Sharpe nor Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins—who received 4.8 percent of the vote in 2014—were anywhere to be found. With the exception of gauging the comparative strengths of Cuomo and Nixon as Democratic nominees, how is this even a remotely useful poll?
Quinnipiac at least included Nixon as a third-party candidate in an April 26-May 1 survey—in which she pulled a close third place with 20 percent, behind GOP nominee Marc Molinaro’s 23 percent, and Cuomo’s 40 (this compares to a 57-26 percent split when it’s just Cuomo vs. Molinaro). But even there, no Hawkins, and nothing about Sharpe, who was the second-biggest fundraiser in the race as of January 2018, and is a rising star in the country’s third-largest political party capable of generating Politico headlines like “A New York rarity: A serious Libertarian candidate.”
What happens when you put all five leading candidates in the same poll? Sharpe commissioned Gravis Marketing to find out June 4-7, and the polling firm came up with this:
42.8 percent Cuomo
17.8 percent undecided
14.9 percent Molinaro
14.6 percent Nixon
5.5 percent Sharpe
4.2 percent Hawkins
This is no doubt a smaller overall number than the energetic Sharpe would like to see, though there are reasons for optimism in the cross-tabs. But even with the caveat that third-party candidates historically get oversold in pre-election polls (a factor you can and should adjust for), the important thing here is that Sharpe, Nixon, and Hawkins—and possibly former Syracuse mayor Stephanie Miner, a decently powerful Democrat who just threw her hat in the ring as an independent—should be in any poll that claims to tell us something useful about the New York gubernatorial race. With three serious left-of-center contenders going after an unlovable legacy Democrat, this race in a heavily blue state could get weird in a hurry.
As FiveThirtyEight number-cruncher Nate Silver said in the spring of 2016 about listing Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson in polls, “Some pollsters don’t like to include third-party candidates because, for a variety of reasons, polls sometimes overstate their numbers. But it’s not a pollster’s job, in my view, to take that choice away from the voter when they’ll have it on the ballot. They can always ask the question both ways, too—with Johnson and without.” (FiveThirtyEight‘s final forecast for Johnson was 4.8 percent; he ended up with 3.3.)
Over at Newsgrowl, Steve Goodale recently asked polling companies why they weren’t including Sharpe and Hawkins. The results were pretty interesting.
Siena College Research Institute spokesperson Steven Greenberg gave Goodale a particularly unsatisfying answer: “We only did head-to-head, Democrat vs. Republican, matchups as the rest of the ballot is still in flux.” This despite Hawkins and Nixon already being on the ballot, and the near-certainty that Sharpe will get there.
Greenberg did send us a copy of a poll from the 2014 race that included Hawkins, and pointed out that, “not atypical for a minor party candidate in pre-election polling—he polled at nearly twice what he wound up receiving at the ballot box.”
Again, per Nate Silver, the traditional third-party fade is not a sufficient reason to ignore that many voters will in fact vote for smaller-party candidates. Gravis has a combined 24.3 percent going to non-traditional candidates even without including Stephanie Miner. Chop those results by a third and you still have a sizable chunk of the electorate. By not including candidates who stand to have measurable impact, “pollsters are putting their thumb on the scale,” FiveThirtyEight‘s Harry Enten has argued. It’s free and misleading publicity for the front-runners.
Marist, which has yet field a general-election poll, told Goodale that the general custom is to “include ballot status candidates,” a category that won’t kick in for Sharpe until he collects enough signatures. But even then: “In instances when we poll with a media partner, candidate inclusion is determined at the discretion of the media partner.” As Goodale notes:
In practice, their media partners tend to prefer sticking with just Democrats and Republicans.
But Marist had media partners (NBC 4 New York and the Wall Street Journal) and was forced (presumably kicking and screaming) to drop any mention of Hawkins by name from the poll. Respondents were not even given an option for “other”—the only choices were Democrat Andrew Cuomo, several possible Republican candidates (Rob Astorino, Carl Paladino, or Donald Trump—yes, that’s right), or undecided.
Anthony Fisher wrote about the media-partner dodge in June 2016. I ranted a bit that cycle about the distorting effects of not including Gary Johnson and even Evan McMullin. And Nick Gillespie recently sat down with Larry Sharpe:
Few TV shows—especially few political shows—can compare to Firing Line, the talk show hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. In its original incarnation, it ran for 33 years and over 1,500 episodes and featured guests ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ronald Reagan to Jack Kerouac to Milton Friedman to Mother Teresa.
The show went off the air in 1999, but now it’s back on PBS with Margaret Hoover in the host chair.
Business had been good at Jack’s Ornamental Iron. So good, in fact, that co-owners Greg Schow and Tina Pardue were planning to expand into a larger workspace and hire 25 percent more employees.
But those plans have been canceled, they told a local Salt Lake City television station this week, because President Donald Trump’s tariffs have imposed huge new costs on the metalworking company’s supplies of steel and aluminum. Schow says the business purchases roughly $1 million worth of steel every year, so the 25 percent import tax on imported steel means Jack’s Ornamental Iron will face about $200,000 in new overhead costs.
Jack’s Ornamental Iron does a wide range of metalworking, buying raw steel and turning it into everything from boat propellers to railings and metal staircases for apartment buildings. The sudden increase in the price of steel has created big problems for Jack’s because the company has several contracts that were signed before the tariffs were announced.
“So once they give us that contract at the very beginning, we’re locked in and we can’t change your pricing,” Pardue told KUTV. “On our current jobs we have right now, we’re just having to eat it.”
That’s why the expansion and new hiring are on hold.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) highlighted the Salt Lake City company’s plight at Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, where a number of senators sharply criticized Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for the administration’s tariff policies.
“These companies are small, Mr. Secretary, but they are important,” Hatch said, referring to Jack’s Ornamental Iron and another Utah-based metalworking firm. “They are important sources of jobs in our communities, and they are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of tariffs.”
Even after being mentioned in a Senate hearing, it’s unlikely that stories about businesses like Jack’s Ornamental Iron will get the sort of coverage that, for example, Harley-Davidson received this week when the iconic American motorcycle manufacturer announced that it would be moving some production jobs overseas to avoid tariffs. It’s unlikely that Jack’s Ornamental Iron will get trashed by the president on Twitter—as Harley-Davidson did—for canceling plans to hire more workers.
The decisions made by each of these businesses illustrate the consequences of the White House’s bellicose trade policy. Steel prices have spiked since the tariffs were announced (just like how prices for lumber and washing machines spiked after earlier Trump tariffs went into effect), increasing production costs for myriad American businesses while leaving those same businesses at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors. Ultimately, consumers pay the price.
But what’s happening at Jack’s Ornamental Iron also speaks to the difficulty of assessing the real economic impact of the tariffs. When companies lay off workers as a way to offset the higher costs of their materials, it’s possible to count those job losses. The same is true when a company like Harley-Davidson says it is going to move some jobs overseas to avoid the tariffs. Schow’s and Pardue’s decision to cancel plans to hire more workers won’t get included in those counts, but it’s still a loss—both for the economy as a whole and for the individuals who would have gotten those jobs that now won’t exist.
There are plenty of seen, measurable consequences for tariffs. The unseen costs matter too.
Television critic Glenn Garvin tunes into Netflix’s Cooking on High, a show that’s exactly what the name says:
It’s obvious—hilariously, bizarrely, sometimes painfully obvious—that everybody involved has sampled and then oversampled the recipes. Consider this judge’s verdict on a pot-infused grilled cheese sandwich: “The best goddamn sandwich I ever ate in my whole life. It tasted great. But I’m also high as a motherfucker. [Face looming freakishly into camera.] Look at the eyes, kid!”
Sort of an unhinged love child of Iron Chef and Reefer Madness, Cooking on High features two marijuana chefs—this sounds like a joke we would have made over Cheez Whiz and saltines when I was in college, but now it’s an actual thing—being handed a handful of weed and told to poach it or fry it or whatever into an edible dish within 30 minutes.
Gabrielle Giffords, founder of the eponymous gun control group Giffords, blames Congress for the shooting that killed five people at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, yesterday. But it’s not clear what Congress should or could have done to prevent the shotgun attack on the Capital Gazette by a man with a longstanding grudge against the paper.
“Reporters shouldn’t have to hide from gunfire while doing their jobs,” says Giffords, a former U.S. representative who was gravely injured in a 2011 shooting that left six people dead in Tucson. “A summer intern in the newsroom shouldn’t have to tweet for help. We shouldn’t have to live in a country where our lawmakers refuse to take any action to address this uniquely American crisis that’s causing so much horror and heartbreak on what feels like a daily basis.” But Giffords’ indictment of her former colleagues does not identify any legislation they could have enacted that would have made a difference for the victims of yesterday’s attack:
Time and time again, those representing us in Congress have failed to show the courage we need to keep us safe. Bump stocks are still legal. Background checks are still not mandatory for all gun sales. Americans are demanding that their lawmakers pass effective laws that can protect our communities and stop dangerous people from accessing guns, but this Congress refuses to listen. We should be outraged. And we should be making plans to hold them accountable. I’m ready to stand with voters and make our voices heard loud and clear in November.
Bump stocks, which the Trump administration plans to ban by creatively reinterpreting federal law, played no role in yesterday’s crime or any other mass shooting, with the exception of last year’s attack in Las Vegas (and it’s debatable whether they increased the death toll there). Nor did the Annapolis shooter use anything that would qualify as an “assault weapon,” another favorite target of gun controllers. Police say Jarrod Ramos, the man charged with carrying out the attack, legally bought the pump-action shotgun he used sometime in the last 18 months, which means he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record. Mandating background checks for gun sales that don’t involve federally licensed dealers, as Giffords recommends, plainly would not affect someone who can pass a background check.
As for “effective laws that can protect our communities and stop dangerous people from accessing guns,” Giffords might have in mind gun violence restraining orders (GVROs), which prohibit people deemed to be dangerous from possessing firearms. Maryland’s GVRO law, enacted in April, takes effect in October, so that option was not available to use against Ramos, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment of a former high school classmate in 2011 and unsuccessfully sued the Capital Gazette for defamation after it covered the case. Ramos had a history of using the internet to pester and insult members of the paper’s staff. “I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” Thomas Marquardt, the Capital Gazette‘s publisher at the time of the libel suit, toldThe Baltimore Sun. “I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.'”
The Sun reports that Marquardt “called the Anne Arundel County police about Ramos in 2013, but nothing came of it.” Marquardt also “consulted the paper’s lawyers about filing a restraining order, but decided against it.” Given that background, it’s not clear that police would have sought a GVRO if that option had been available at the time. In any case, Congress does not have the power to authorize GVROs in Maryland or any other state, although a bill introduced last year by Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) would provide grants to states that enact such laws. The failure to enact that bill, which manifestly was not necessary for Maryland to pass a GVRO law, seems like a pretty thin pretext for blaming the Annapolis attack on congressional inaction.
“I remember telling our attorneys, ‘This is a guy who is going to come in and shoot us,’ ” Marquardt told the Sun. The actions that led to Ramos’s criminal harassment conviction, which included emails urging the victim to kill herself and contacts with her employer that she believes led to her dismissal, reasonably aroused concern that his behavior might escalate. When you combine that history with Ramos’s frivolous lawsuit and his online taunts of Capital Gazette staff members, it is not hard to see why Marquardt was worried about him, although the fact that Marquardt decided not to seek a restraining order suggests his fear may have been magnified in retrospect by the knowledge of what Ramos ultimately did.
Under Maryland’s new law, law enforcement officers, mental health professionals, and various relatives, intimates, and associates can seek GVROs. A temporary GVRO, lasting up to a week, can be issued without giving the respondent a hearing if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe he poses “an immediate and present danger” to himself or others. A judge can extend that order for up to six months “to effectuate service of the order where necessary to provide protection or for other good cause.” A final GVRO, which lasts up to a year and can be extended for another six months, can be issued after a hearing based on “clear and convicing evidence” that the respondent poses a danger to himself or others.
In practice, getting a temporary GVRO against Ramos would have been easy, especially since he would have had no opportunity to rebut the claims against him. It also seems plausible that a police officer could have obtained a final GVRO, which would have prevented Ramos from legally buying a gun for as long as it was in effect. If police had sought a GVRO in 2013, when Marquardt contacted them about Ramos, the order might have lasted until 2015 or so, assuming it was extended. According to police, Ramos bought his shotgun in 2017 or 2018.
In short, it’s not at all clear that a GVRO could have stopped Ramos, and the fact that the option was not available at the time had nothing to do with any failure on the part of Congress. Reflexively blaming congressional inaction for every mass shooting may be emotionally satisfying, but it does nothing to advance a rational discussion of policies aimed at preventing gun violence.
Just because a law is impossible to follow is not enough of a reason for a court to throw it out. So California’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
On the face the ruling sounds utterly absurd, but there’s a deeper explanation that makes it a little less silly and much more deeply concerning about the deference granted to lawmakers.
Some context: California passed a law a decade ago that demanded gun manufacturers implement microstamping technology that would imprint identifying information on bullets as they were shot from semi-automatic weapons. Gun manufacturers say the technology hasn’t advanced enough to comply with the law. Smith & Wesson announced in 2014 that they would be pulling some guns from the market in California rather than complying with the law (a cynic might theorize that this is the law’s actual intent).
The National Shooting Sports Foundation sued to block the law. California’s Civil Code contains a section that simply reads, “The law never requires impossibilities.” So the question the state’s Supreme Court was addressing was whether the courts can invalidate this law because it is impossible for people to comply with it.
Not only did the California Supreme Court rule that it cannot invalidate the law, but it ruled so unanimously. To be clear: The court does not suggest that people can face punishment for being unable to comply with impossible laws. Instead, the court says, “impossibility can occasionally excuse noncompliance with a statute, but in such circumstances, the excusal constitutes an interpretation of the statute in accordance with the Legislature’s intent, not an invalidation of the law.” Essentially, it’s not unconstitutional to pass impossible laws, but the courts can exempt people from the consequences of those laws without overturning the laws themselves.
Strip away the absurdity, and it’s essentially a very technical ruling. The court acknowledges its role in making sure that people are not punished for being unable to comply with a law because it’s impossible—that would be an unconstitutional violation of a person’s rights. It just can’t use that basis for invalidating the law itself.
This is all of interest because California lawmakers regularly pass terrible laws that interfere with markets and individuals’ choices for the expressed purpose of controlling how the state develops. Often the laws are impractical in the current environment and are designed to push technological development in certain directions that appeal to certain political (and politically connected) constituencies.
The most obvious example is California setting extremely high renewable energy goals by law in order to control how the market develops. It may be currently impossible for the state to get all its energy from renewable sources, but because these laws exist, it necessarily means that the state’s public and private development is going to be deliberately focused in such a way that compliance eventually becomes possible, and then mandatory.
Indeed, Attorney General Xavier Becerra made it clear in his statement praising the ruling that this is entirely the point. Lawmakers pass laws that have currently “impossible” technological standards for the purpose of controlling what the private sector develops and how the private sector is regulated.
“Today’s ruling confirms that California can create incentives for the gun industry to make products that serve the public’s needs,” Becerra said in a prepared response. “Innovation and technology will continue to drive California to be a leader. We will not go backwards. The California Department of Justice is committed to reducing gun violence and improving the ability of law enforcement to fight crime and hold accountable those who commit firearm murders and assaults.”
California is far from alone in the attitude that technological development should be directed to serve political constituencies. The result is that various interests lobby the government to control how these goals are set so that they are likely able to meet them and cash in—and perhaps their competitors are not.
There are costs borne by the public due to these impossible laws. For example, California passed a law in 2006 calling for the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly by 2020. No, this isn’t an “impossible” law on its face, but the result was a whole host of regulatory and policy changes implemented to make what was impossible in 2006 much more possible in the future. That goal was one of the ways the terrible high-speed rail boondoggle was sold to Californians. The state claimed it would reduce greenhouse gases. Those claims are very dubious, but Californians are still, at the moment, stuck with an expensive, unneeded train proposal that will cost more than $100 billion and won’t be finished for decades. The state’s citizens are getting bilked due to the costs of meeting this arbitrary goal.
And what if some companies are able to innovate to reach these “impossible” goals and others are not? That’s what we’re seeing in the European Union as it implements a vast, confusing data-privacy law that may well end up being impossible for some businesses to comply with. Big names like Google and Facebook—with all their money and lawyers—are able to comply. Smaller businesses are not, or at least it is much more difficult for them to do so. When the government sets impossible goals in order to force businesses to make the government’s future agenda possible, some firms are going to be left behind. It’s another way for the government to choose winners and losers.
Laws that are “impossible” to comply with do, in subtle ways, threaten the livelihoods of citizens as they struggle to adjust to these demands. They do challenge our freedom as citizens by attempting to force markets and innovators to dance to the government’s tune—or the tune of the people with powerful government connections. There’s a saying: “Nothing’s impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.” Some of those people have the power to enshrine the impossible as law and leave the rest of us figuring out how to adapt.
Last week, the Trump administration proposed to significantly overhaul several federal regulatory agencies. Food-safety oversight is one of the key elements of the proposal. The Trump administration says the food-safety proposal, part of its larger plan to consolidate various agency responsibilities, would shift thousands of current FDA and USDA employees and billions of dollars into a new Federal Food Safety Agency.
Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), one of just three House Republicans to vote against a Department of Defense appropriations bill on Thursday, called out his party for overwhelmingly supporting the wasteful legislation.
Despite a lack of enthusiasm from some White House and Pentagon officials, the Department of Defense has begun planning a military parade ordered by President Donald Trump, 
New York politics, you may have heard, can be passionate and unpredictable. Democratic Socialists topple senior House incumbents, TV personalities escalator into and out of our lives, and a kind of low-level pressure of resentment constantly builds in the vicinity of the unloved machine politicians who reliably misgovern the place. At a time when Trumpism and the resistance to it are 
Business had been good at Jack’s Ornamental Iron. So good, in fact, that co-owners Greg Schow and Tina Pardue were planning to expand into a larger workspace and hire 25 percent more employees.
Television critic Glenn Garvin tunes into Netflix’s Cooking on High, a show that’s exactly what the name says:
Gabrielle Giffords, founder of the eponymous gun control group Giffords, blames Congress for the 
Just because a law is impossible to follow is not enough of a reason for a court to throw it out. So California’s Supreme Court