Category: reason

Government officials are planning to move as many as 20,000 illegal immigrants to military bases in order to keep families together, per President Trump’s recent executive order ending automatic separations of children and families. But the administration seems fairly confused as to how this will work, and wasn’t able to confirm whether the 2,300 children who were already separated from their families will be reunited. According to The New York Times:

The 20,000 beds at bases in Texas and Arkansas would house “unaccompanied alien children,” said a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Michael Andrews, although other federal agencies provided conflicting explanations about how the shelters would be used or who would be housed there.

It was unclear whether the military housing would also house the parents of migrant children in families that have been detained, and officials at the White House, Defense Department and Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday they could not provide details.

The confusion is frustrating for folks inside the White House, POLITICO reports:

Frustrated White House aides said the damage created by the herky-jerky policy process is twofold. The president’s sudden decision to sign the executive order threw off a planned House vote that could have set in motion the permanent legislative fix the White House has been seeking.

More importantly, these aides said, the original zero-tolerance policy championed by senior presidential adviser Stephen Miller was not run through the Domestic Policy Council, which Miller oversees. Some in the White House are also unclear whether the executive order is legal, which is something that would have been determined by a regular policy process.

The government has been referring to the existing accomodatons for children under 12 as “tender age” housing. Psychologists say that keeping such young kids away from their parents is emotionally scarring, according to The Huffington Post:

The consequences of this continued separation, especially for infants and toddlers, could be dire. Not only are they separated from their parents — who have loved and cared for them since birth — but shelter caretakers stepping into the void have reportedly been compelled to withhold physical touch from the children.

“We have to recognize that youth makes you more vulnerable. It does not protect you from an event like this,” Ghosh Ippen said. “The No. 1 [priority] is to get these children back into the loving arms of a parent who can help them to calm down and regulate and who can really hold them as they express their feelings.”

Reports from tender-age shelters that hold the youngest migrants reveal that there are toddlers melting down in distress but that the caregivers are not allowed to pick up, hold or hug the children. One shelter staffer quit after being forced to tell children separated from their parents that they couldn’t hug one another.

Not to worry: both Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti are on the case.

FREE MINDS

Legendary conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer died yesterday after a battle with cancer. He was 68.

A frequent Fox News guest and Pulitzer Prize winner, Krauthammer was greatly admired. He survived a debilitating accident in his early 20s that left him paralyzed from the waist down, eventually becoming a psychiatrist, a speechwriter in the Carter administration, and then an editor at The New Republic. While his views moved rightward over time, he was widely respected in liberal circles. Real Clear Politics’ A.B. Stoddard, a close friend who appeared alongside him on Fox for a decade, wrote:

Being on the “Special Report” panel every week with Charles, from May of 2009 until August of 2017, was an honor and a privilege. He had a singular presence there, a towering intellect free of arrogance. But alongside his warmth and calm and ease, Charles concentrated intently because he cared deeply about his contribution to the topic at hand and the words millions would hang on. To focus himself, sometimes he mumbled quietly in French before we went live.

I’ve disagreed with plenty of things Krauthammer has written and said over the years. Still, I’ve found myself wondering what he would have said about the Trump administration over the past few months, had he been in better health. RIP.

FREE MARKETS

A San Francisco couple attempt to raise $1,500 on Facebook for immigrant children who were separated from their families by the U.S. government. In just four days, they raised $10 million. According to VICE:

“Most of us who donated today don’t know each other, but we were brought together by a common sense of what is right and what is wrong,” Charlotte Willner posted to the fundraiser’s page on the night it was launched. “That clear moral commonality is what will sustain us. It transcends almost everything. It is an enduring sense of what America ought to be about.”

Random people, coming together to voluntarily give money to needy children imprisoned by the government: sounds to me like a free market solution to a government failure.

QUICK HITS

• What on earth was First Lady Melania Trump thinking when she donned a jacket bearing the message—”I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?”—for her trip to visit immigrant children? A spokesperson maintained that she wasn’t sending any kind of message, but… come on.
• ABC’s Roseanne will return in the fall, minus Roseanne Barr. The network confirmed that it was working on a new sitcom featuring the various members of the Connor family who who aren’t portrayed by insane racists.
• An inside look at how the Kirstjen Nielsen confrontation was organized.
• The feminist scholar who asked, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” responds to criticism.
• The Federalist‘s Jesse Kelly throws a temper tantrum.

If voters had second thoughts about bouncing California state Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) from office in a high-profile recall election held during the June 5 primary, his self-centered stem winder on the Senate floor should disabuse them of any such regrets.

this is wrong, this is an abuse of the recall process,” Newman said, comparing the recall to a “crazy dream.” He complained that some colleagues sat “idly by” while others “actively abetted” the recall. “Getting someone recalled, getting someone thrown out of their job, getting somebody like me who only wanted to serve, expelled—it’s pretty personal.”

Despite claims by the Democratic majority, which went all in to save a seat that gave them a Senate supermajority, there was nothing deceptive or unclear about the purpose of the recall. Newman cast a deciding vote in favor of a much-maligned and dramatic increase in gasoline taxes and the vehicle-license fee, writes Steve Greenhut.

View this article.

A 13-year-old hauled into the principal’s office for not serving his detention may end up with the biggest detention of all: a felony conviction. That’s because the kid recorded the conversation on his phone.

The incident took place last February at Manteno Middle School, which is about an hour outside of Chicago. Young Paul Boron was arguing with Principal David Conrad and Assistant Principal Nathan Short.

About ten minutes into the meeting, which was held with the door open, Boron told the men he was recording it. At that point, the principal told Boron he was committing a felony and ended the conversation. But then, according to the Illinois Policy Center:

Two months later, in April, Boron was charged with one count of eavesdropping – a class 4 felony in Illinois.

“If I do go to court and get wrongfully convicted, my whole life is ruined,” said Boron, who lives with his mother and four sibling…”I think they’re going too far.”

…. Members of the Manteno Community Unit School District No. 5 board, Conrad and Short have not responded to requests for comment on the incident.

Unfortunately for Boron, there is a law against recording people without their consent in Illinois. There’s even a rule against it in the student handbook. But the handbook also says that it is fine for the school to have video cameras monitoring the public areas of the building. In other words, it’s fine to keep the kids under constant surveillance, just not the administrators.

Illinois law is tough on citizens who “eavesdrop.” For example, the Policy Center reports, “Michael Allison was charged with a felony for recording his own court hearing after the court did not provide a court reporter”—a case crazy enough to bring Orwell storming back from the grave.

At one point, the state’s law saying all parties who are being recorded must consent was struck down. But a new eavesdropping law popped right back up with a carve-out for citizens recording police encounters.

All of which means Boron’s middle school misbehavior could end up on his permanent record. Sometimes the law is neglectful of liberty, and no friend to tech savy 13-year-olds. It would be a terrible tragedy if Boron was forced into the criminal justice system for such a silly infraction.

A remote tropical island, you say? The crumbled remains of a once-celebrated tourist park? A surrounding jungle teeming with pissed-off lizards?

Yes, we’ve been here before. In this fifth installment of the Jurassic franchise, which was launched by Steven Spielberg 25 years ago, not a lot has changed. Enormous and generally unfriendly dinosaurs clomp and snarl and knock each other around; they stalk, stomp and nibble at whatever humans may happen along; and generally endeavor to hold our attention as the novelty of digital dinos continues to wane, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

In Massachusetts, officials at Saugus High School suspended six lacrosse players and one baseball player from post-season play for smoking cigars after their graduation ceremony. The school bars smoking on school grounds and also forbids student athletes from even being near drugs, alcohol, or tobacco.

Yesterday, President Trump reversed his hideous policy of snatching kids from the breasts of migrant moms. But he swore he’d continue his zero tolerance policy on border enforcement. He even wrote that into his executive order barring separations.

This meant that asylum-seeking parents caught crossing the border between ports of entry would still be criminally (instead of civilly) prosecuted and thrown into government cages with their kids—even though first time unauthorized entry is just a misdemeanor akin to a traffic violation.

What is particularly diabolical about criminal prosecutions is that border patrol agents have actually been going out of their way to entrap migrants. Robert Moore of the Texas Monthly found several instances when immigrants tried to surrender at a regular port of entry as required by law but were told that there was no holding space for them, a total lie evidently, and turned away, forcing these parents to find another route. One woman rebuffed was a badly sunburnt mother with a baby and a 16-year-old girl.

Once word got around that authorities were taking away children if they were caught between ports of entry, asylum seekers came up with creative work-arounds. One mom boarded a bus to Texas from Mexico. When a border agent asked her for her documents at the port of entry, she requested asylum. He could do nothing but process her request as required by law. Still, there must be some special place in hell for officials who act illegally in order to force vulnerable individuals into illegal actions in order to entrap them. Talk about disobeying the rule of law!

But the Washington Post reported today that the administration might in fact be backing away from its zero tolerance policy: “We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody,” one official said. The Department of Justice (DOJ) is denying the Post’s report. The DOJ insists that it is continuing to prosecute 100 percent of the cases referred to it by the Department of Homeland Security.

But that’s totally misleading. What’s happening is that the DHS is no longer referring everyone to the DOJ, allowing the DOJ to both claim that it is practicing zero tolerance while actually abandoning it. (It’s possible that the administration totally botched its internal communication—but who’d have imagined that!) Indeed, why else would federal prosecutors unexpectedly drop charges against 17 immigrants due to be sentenced for improperly entering the country, as AP is reporting they just did in McAllen, Texas.

The DHS statement implies that its suspension is a temporary step to give ICE time to build more detention facilities—read prisons—to house families together. But the truth is that the administration also faces major legal problems if it replaces family separation with family internment.

Under the 1997 consent decree known as the Flores settlement, Uncle Sam can’t keep children in immigration detention for more than 20 days. In 2016, a federal judge extended this rule to families as well. But if the administration continues to criminally charge the parents, then it cannot let them leave as required by Flores without running afoul of other laws. If it does not charge them, however, it can’t put them in detention without running afoul of Flores. The House is considering legislation that would let it detain families for more than 20 days, effectively overruling Flores, but that is unlikely to pass. So the administration is somewhat stuck. There is something to be said for contradictory laws when they entangle the government in a web of its own making!

The Trump administration claims that its criminal prosecutions of illegal border crossers were meant to stop the practice of “catch and release” because once released, these asylum seekers don’t return for their scheduled court hearing. But that might have something to do with just how onerous, fraught, and unfair the asylum process is. There is not a single migrant who would rather stay in the country illegally if they had the option of doing so legally.

The rational and humane response would be to streamline the process and give people a fair shot at getting asylum, not put impossible hurdles in their way. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions is doing the precise opposite: He has reversed long-standing precedent and stopped granting asylum to abused women escaping domestic violence, something that will make the problem of absconding asylum seekers illegally staying in the country only worse—setting the stage for a future amnesty battle. (As I’ve noted in the past, under Sessions’ regime, even conservative darling Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose Muslim family was trying to force her into an arranged marriage, would not have qualified for amnesty).

But if stopping catch-and-release is the administration’s real motive instead of incarcerating these people to give the appearance of toughness, then there are other options short of warehousing families in government cages in abject conditions.

And make no mistake: These conditions are brutal, as CNN’s pictures last week from a Customs and Border Protection detention facility in McAllen, Texas, showed. There were 1,100 people crammed in 30×30 wire-mesh, chain linked cages. It’s a facility ripe for disease and mental breakdown.

There are far more cost-effective and humane methods short of erecting prison camps including electronic monitoring, periodic check-ins by caseworkers at homes where the migrants are staying and bonds. Indeed, about 83 percent of those released on bonds typically show up for their hearings, a rate that could be improved even more when combined with the other methods.

As I’ve noted before, zero tolerance policies have lead to monstrous results wherever and whenever they’ve been tried. So there was no reason to expect that the outcome would be any different when applied to the border. In fact, it would be much, much worse given that these policies were invoked by the most powerful administration against the most powerless and vulnerable people: fleeing migrants.

The administration’s reversal on child separation was a small victory for good sense and humanity. Totally ditching zero tolerance will be the real victory.

There are few bipartisan projects in Congress these days, but Republicans and Democrats have no trouble joining together to feed more money into the Pentagon’s gaping maw.

By a vote of 85-10 on Thursday morning, the Senate approved the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—technically known as the “John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act” because you wouldn’t vote against something named after an American hero, right? It serves as the budget for the U.S. military, which this year is receiving $716 billion, an increase of $82 billion from last year. That increase was agreed upon in March as part of an overall two-year budget deal that smashed Obama-era spending caps and boosts military spending by $165 over the next two years.

It’s not just that military spending crosses party lines, but that it smooths over nearly every political division in Washington today. Democrats have shown virtually no interest in Trump’s major policy priorities, but only seven Democrats plus Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats, voted against Trump’s new nukes. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) were the only Republicans to vote against the NDAA. An attempt by Sander, Lee, and some other senators to include an amendment prohibiting the Pentagon from continuing to participate in an unauthorized war in Yemen was defeated.

The spending increase will allow the Pentagon to buy more fighter jets, to create “cyberwarfare units,” and to develop new, smaller nuclear weapons. There is, however, no Space Force. The extra $82 billion will “bring us back to a position of primacy,” Defense Secretary James Mattis said in February.

To put the Pentagon’s $82 billion funding increase in perspective, consider that Russia’s entire military budget totals only $61 billion. China, which boast the next most expensive military in the world after the United States, plans to spend about $175 billion this year.

Maybe the problem isn’t how much funding the military receives, but how the money it already gets is spent. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about that because the Pentagon has still not been subjected to a full scale audit, despite the fact that all federal agencies and departments were ordered to undergo mandatory audits in 1990. A preliminary audit of one office within the Pentagon found more than $800 million could not be located. Auditors said the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA)—described as “the military’s Walmart” because it’s responsible for processing supplies and equipment—has financial management “so weak that its leaders and oversight bodies have no reliable way to track the huge sums it’s responsible for.”

Whether it’s investing in bomb-sniffing elephants, paying $8,000 for something that should cost $50, or the famous $640 toilet seat, there’s no shortage of absurd waste in the Pentagon. A Reuters probe in 2013 found “$8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out to the Pentagon since 1996 … has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s economic output [for 2012].”

“To give the Defense Department more money without making sure the waste is addressed is foolish and strategically unwise,” wrote Bonnie Kristian, a fellow at Defense Priorities, wrote for Reason earlier this year.

But Congress and the White House have no such qualms about handing the Pentagon more money to burn.

Nearly every country in the European Union is failing to live up to its Paris Agreement on climate change commitments to reduce their carbon emissions, a new report reveals. The report makes clear how difficult it is for countries with advanced economies to substantially reduce carbon emissions, even with political systems that are strongly committed to doing so.

Twenty-three out of the 28 European Member states score poorly with respect to honoring their commitments under the Paris Agreement, according to a new report from the environmental activist group Climate Action Network Europe (CAN Europe.)

The folks at CAN Europe note that the E.U. adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015 and committed to pursue efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C over the pre-industrial global average temperature by 2100. Their researchers find that E.U. Member “contributions proposed at the Paris talks are nowhere close enough to keep temperature rise below this threshold.” Under the Paris Agreement, the E.U. has promised a 40 percent cut in its emissions below their 1990 levels by 2030.

In its ranking of E.U. countries, CAN Europe finds that “all E.U. countries are off target: they are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal. No single E.U. country is performing sufficiently in both ambition and progress in reducing carbon emissions.” This is not to say that EU countries have not cut their carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade.

Overall, according the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 report, the E.U. carbon dioxide emissions are down by 12.4 percent since 2007. Interestingly, emissions since 2014 have been going up in 14 out of the 19 larger E.U. countries listed by BP. These countries include Germany, France, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands. For Europe as a whole carbon dioxide emissions increased by 2.5 percent in 2017.

In contrast, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions continue their downward trend, dropping by 15.2 percent since 2007. In 2017, they fell by 0.5 percent. It is worth noting that a new report by the Rhodium Group consultancy suggests that the U.S. is on track to meet earlier Obama adminstration promises under the earlier Copenhagen Accord to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent below their 2005 levels by 2020. The Rhodium Group report further noted that between 2005 and 2016 almost 80 percent of the reductions in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions came from the electric power sector as coal-fired plants were closed down and utilities switched to burning lower carbon natural gas to generate electricity.

Of course, President Trump has started the process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement under which the Obama administration set the target of reducing by 2025 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions between 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels. The Rhodium folks report that the current pace of U.S. decarbonization is insufficient to meet that goal. On the other hand, the E.U. at its current of rate of decarbonization seems unlikely to meet its goal of cutting emissions relative their 1990 levels by 40 percent by 2030, much less achieve even deeper cuts implied by the goal of keeping temperatures from rising 1.5°C above the pre-industrial global average.

Even if President Trump’s new order keeps immigrant families at the border from being torn asunder, we will still live in a country where the government can seize children from perfectly loving, competent parents. It happens all the time, and not just to immigrant families—American citizens deal with these injustices as well, thanks to the actions of child protective services.

In a single year, 2016, the number of children placed in foster care was 273,539. As the National Coalition for Child Protection put it, “the number of children separated from their parents at the border since April is almost equal to the number taken by U.S. child protective services (CPS) every three days.”

In many of those cases, CPS intervention is justified in order to protect children, or provide them care they aren’t getting at home. But not always.

Take the case of “Cassie.” Cassie was mom to Hannah, a one-year-old, and Maya, an 8-year-old. When Cassie noticed Hannah not putting weight on her left leg, she called her pediatrician, who said to give the girl Tylenol and bring her in the next day.

Too anxious to wait, Cassie took the girl to the emergency room at Central DuPage Hospital in suburban Chicago, where an X-Ray revealed a fractured tibia and fibula. The Family Defense Center, which took the case, reports:

Because Cassie couldn’t say for sure how Hannah got the fracture, the hospital staff called the DCFS. Only later did the family learn from two pediatric orthopedics and medical literature that the sort of injury Hannah had is considered to have “low” suspicion for abuse and it is hardly uncommon for parents to witness the incident that caused the fracture(s) to occur.

Unfortunately the x-ray findings, which naturally concerned the parents, marked just the beginning of the family’s nightmare. Without even interviewing [Cassie’s husband] Nate, or talking to the hospital’s own child abuse pediatrician, and without Hannah being seen by a single orthopedist (for whom injuries like Hannah’s are fairly routine), DCFS decided to take both children into State protective custody.

They did this by going to the family’s home, waking Maya, and taking her and her sister to the home of a relative who would serve as foster parent. It was the first time either child had slept away from their parents:

The next day — still without talking to the hospital’s child abuse pediatrician, the family pediatrician, other the family members or friends, or Maya’s teachers — DCFS filed a petition to take custody of both children.

After a three-month legal battle, the parents regained custody of their kids, and the state admitted it had had no case. That alone seems to indicate how easily even a simple visit to the doctor can turn into a child removal case—as it did for the Minnesota mom with the coughing child I wrote about last week. When she took the child home before she was officially dismissed by the doctor, it was considered “neglect.”

Parents are also being thrown in jail—the ultimate in tearing families apart—on the sketchiest medical charges. Watch The Syndrome, a devastating documentary on Shaken Baby Syndrome, to see how hundreds of moms and dad ended up in prison thanks to the “indisputable” evidence that they shook their babies—a conclusion that relied upon junk science.

And then there are the cases of “neglect” that are utterly baffling.

A Florida couple I interviewed a few years back had their sons taken away after someone called CPS to report that their son, 11, was playing basketball by himself in the backyard. Normally one of the parents would have been home, but both had been delayed that day. Also, normally one doesn’t think of playing in the backyard for 90 minutes as something akin to torture.

But the cops swung by, anyway. They found the boy was technically without food, shelter, water, or a bathroom—because he didn’t have a key to the house—and child protective services packed him and his younger brother, age 4, off to foster care.

It wasn’t until a month later, in court, when the 11-year-old begged the judge to let him and his brother go back to their parents that the court returned the boys home. This story was so hard to fathom that some readers thought I made it up, until I provided Reason editors with the court papers to review.

Worst of all are the cases where a mom who has been beaten by her partner has her child taken away because the kid was exposed to violence. That practice was rampant in New York City until the federal court put a stop to it in the landmark case of Nicholson v. Scoppetta.

But even that didn’t stop states like Illinois from taking Rochelle Vermeulen‘s twins away. Rochelle was beaten and choked by the twins’ dad, and so she fled with the kids. But when the dad’s relative called the child protection authorities, Rochelle was told her kids must either stay with a relative of the abuser or go to foster care, even though Rochelle offered to go to a domestic violence shelter with them. For seven weeks, Rochelle was not allowed to see her twins except in supervised visits. Dad, on the other hand, was allowed unlimited contact.

Family defenders like Diane Redleaf, whose book, They Took the Kids Last Night: How Child Protective Services Puts Families At Risk, comes out in October, say that children are routinely taken from their parents, even when there’s no evidence of abuse. In one of the stories in Redleaf’s book, for example, a toddler who fell out of his crib was taken from his parents even though the CPS investigator reported he was healthy and happy at home.

And what about the dad in Michigan whose 7-year-old was taken away when he accidentally bought the boy a Mike’s Hard Cider at a Detroit Tigers game?

Research by Professors Vivek Sankaran and Christopher Church has shown that even children quickly returned to parents can suffer long-term harm from the separation. As the border separations continue to grip our attention, we should also reconsider policies that allow child protective services to take children from their parents without compelling evidence of neglect or abuse.

Two years ago, conservative commentator George Will left the Republican Party over Donald Trump. Today, Will hinted strongly that he will give preference to the Libertarian Party if it endorses Bill Weld.

“Can this libertarian restore conservatism?” asked the headline on Will’s Washington Post column. (The erudite Cubs fan is frequently described as the most syndicated newspaper columnist in the country, so these words will be relayed from coast to coast.)

Will’s basic argument: Weld embodies “what a broad swath of Americans say they favor: limited government, fiscal responsibility, free trade, the rule of law, entitlement realism and other artifacts from the Republican wreckage.” Therefore, “If in autumn 2020 voters face a second consecutive repulsive choice, there will be running room between the two deplorables. Because of its 2016 efforts, the Libertarian Party will automatically be on 39 states’ ballots this fall and has a sufficient infantry of volunteers to secure ballot access in another nine. So, if the Libertarian Party is willing, 2020’s politics could have an ingredient recently missing from presidential politics: fun. And maybe a serious disruption of the party duopoly that increasing millions find annoying. Stranger things have happened, as a glance across Lafayette Square confirms.”

This positive publicity for the L.P. does not arrive without a couple of elbows. The party “sometimes is too interested in merely sending a message (liberty is good),” Will writes, and maybe the 2016 ticket should have been switched: “Gary Johnson…was too interested in marijuana and not interested enough in Syria to recognize the name Aleppo. Weld, however, is ready for prime time.”

The column certainly blows some wind in the sales of Weld, an always-controversial figure within the party who has nevertheless been busy laying the groundwork for a 2020 presidential run, though he has not yet officially declared. “I think that’s a race that has some real potential to go the distance, and the sooner we all wrap our minds around that, the better,” he told me in an interview seven weeks ago. It will be interesting to see what kind of enthusiasm for and blowback against Weldmentum emerges at the June 30-July 3 Libertarian Party national convention in New Orleans. (I’ll be moderating some debates and panels, including a post-mortem on the 2016 election that Weld will participate in.)

It’s a sign both of the Libertarian Party’s steep growth curve and of the weird major-party political moment we’re living through that respectful mainstream attention is being paid to the L.P.’s presidential considerations more than two years before the election. (So far the most well-known declared candidate for the job is the in-your-face libertarian political activist Adam Kokesh.)

Will’s column also comes at a moment when other Trump-averse conservatives are agonizing openly about whether to stay in the GOP. Longtime Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt (a senior advisor on the John McCain campaign in 2008), announced this week that he is bolting to become an independent, rather than see his party go the way of the Whigs. This is also a favorite analogy of Weld’s—last November he told me, “As you recall, I spent a lot of last year predicting that the Republican Party was going to split in half like the Whigs in the 1850s. And it didn’t quite happen then, but you could argue that it’s kind of happened with the Republican Party this year, in that you have the party of the president and those who follow him, and then you have many people who are Republicans who differ with the president, either on program or on style.”

Both Weld and Will have been tacking more libertarian in recent years—Weld on issues like guns, drugs, and foreign policy; Will on nation-building, judicial engagement, and the liberty movement. You can read conversations Nick Gillespie and I had with Will from 2016 and 2013, and watch the latter one below: