Category: reason

Yesterday the Canadian Senate approved a marijuana legalization bill that had already passed the House of Commons, which means Canada is about to become the second country and the 12th jurisdiction to officially allow recreational use of the plant. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, which had expected legal recreational sales to begin on July 1, now says late August or early September looks more likely because the provinces and territories will need eight to 12 weeks to prepare.

Canada, with a population of about 37 million, is the second most populous jurisdiction (after California) to legalize marijuana so far. It is more than 10 times as populous as Uruguay, the only other country where the cultivation and sale of recreational marijuana has been legalized at the national level. (The Netherlands has a longstanding policy of tolerating marijuana use and retail sales, but the drug is still technically illegal there.) All told, more than 100 million people, including one in five Americans, live in the jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana for recreational use.

Canada’s law allows possession of up to 30 grams (about an ounce) by adults 18 and older, who also may share that amount with other adults and grow up to four plants at home. Those provisions will take effect on a date that the government plans to announce soon.

The federal government is imposing a marijuana excise tax of $1 (Canadian) per gram or 10 percent of the sale price, whichever is higher. The law does not cover edibles, so the options for recreational consumers will initially be limited to flowers and oils.

Provincial and territorial governments have considerable leeway in regulating the newly legal cannabis industry. Some provinces, including Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba, plan to license private retailers, while others, such as Ontario and Quebec, will sell marijuana through the same government-run system that distributes liquor. In some jurisdictions, such as Alberta and Nova Scotia, cannabis will be sold in the same stores that carry alcoholic beverages, while in others, such as Quebec and British Columbia, the two kinds of products will be sold separately.

Alberta and Quebec, where the drinking age is 18, are setting the same cutoff for cannabis. In the other provinces and territories it will be 19, which is the minimum alcohol purchase age in all those jurisdictions except for Manitoba. By comparison, the minimum consumption age for marijuana in all the U.S. states that have legalized recreational use is 21, corresponding to the higher drinking age.

If you think the Department of Justice has more than enough tools to wage the war on drugs, a bill passed by the House would create a fast-track scheduling system that could lead to the criminalization of kratom, nootropics, and pretty much anything that gives you a buzz and isn’t already illegal.

The House of Representatives voted on Friday to create a new schedule of banned drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, called “Schedule A,” and to give Attorney General Jeff Sessions broad new powers to criminalize the manufacturing, importation, and sale of substances that are currently unregulated, but not illegal. The bill is now headed to the Senate, where co-sponsors Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) will likely have little problem whipping votes.

The Stop the Importation and Trafficking of Synthetic Analogs Act, or SITSA, is intended to crack down on drugs that closely resemble currently banned or regulated substances in either their chemical structure or intended effects. SITSA would also empower the attorney general (A.G.) to add drugs to this new schedule with few checks from other branches of government.

As its name implies, SITSA is a response to the increased importation of fentanyl analogs—drugs based on the potent opioid fentanyl and that work similarly in the body, but are slightly different at a formulaic level—which have made their way into the U.S. heroin supply and driven overdose death rates to an all-time high.

The bill also marks the biggest federal effort yet to put the analog genie back in its Chinese bottle.

For more than a decade now, legislators, regulators, and law enforcement have been overwhelmed by the endless stream of analog drugs exported to the U.S. by overseas chemical manufacturers. These compounds are very similar to drugs that Congress has already banned or the prescription drugs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already regulates: Synthetic cannabinoids are designed to work like marijuana; cathinones are supposed to mimic both illicit and prescription amphetamines; 2cb imbues euphoric effects similar to MDMA; and SARMs work kind of like testosterone.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has long bemoaned the fact that clandestine chemists can create these novel drugs faster than D.C. can ban them. The scheduling process is complicated, as it should be when the government makes things illegal: The DEA has to identify an analog’s chemical structure and the scheduled or regulated drug to which it’s most similar, then seek input from experts at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), then publish a scheduling notice in the Federal Register and review public comments. (Democracy can be such a drag!)

Prosecuting drugs that have not gone through this process of analysis and scheduling, meanwhile, requires overcoming what Sessions recently called “cumbersome evidentiary hurdles,” such as chemistry experts who challenge the government’s claims and defendants who say they believed they were importing and selling “potpourri” and “bath salts.” (These hurdles are also known as “due process.”)

While Department of Justice (DOJ) complaints about analogs aren’t new, the rise of fentanyl analogs have inspired Congress to act more aggressively and clumsily than usual. The Senate version of SITSA introduced by Feinstein and Grassley gives the attorney general unilateral and unchecked power to add a substance to Schedule A. It contains no congressional review provision and vests no authority in the Department of Health and Human Services to challenge the DOJ’s scheduling decision.

When SITSA came up for a vote in the House, the House Liberty Caucus released a statement condemning the decision to “cede more of Congress’s legislative authority to the Attorney General and grant the AG more power to fight the war on drugs, which has eroded federalism, eviscerated numerous individual rights, entrenched severe discrimination in our criminal justice system, and failed to meaningfully limit the proliferation of illicit drugs.”

Thanks to the advocacy of Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) and others, provisions were added to the House version of SITSA that appear to constrain the attorney general—though they probably won’t. “Even with the sponsor’s amendment,” says the Liberty Caucus’s statement, “this bill allows the AG to schedule substances permanently without significant input or involvement by the Department of Health and Services.”

More specifically, the Senate bill requires the Attorney General only to notify HHS of a scheduling decision and “take into consideration any comments submitted by the Secretary of HHS.” The amended House bill requires that

if the Secretary [of HHS] has determined, based on relevant scientific studies and necessary data requested by the Secretary and gathered by the Attorney General, that a drug or other substance that has been temporarily placed in schedule A does not have sufficient potential for abuse to warrant control in any schedule, and so advises the Attorney General in writing, the Attorney General may not issue a permanent scheduling order and shall, within 30 days of receiving the Secretary’s advice issue an order immediately terminating the temporary scheduling order.

The House bill also gives Congress 180 days to write and pass legislation reversing a temporary scheduling order, but says nothing about reversing a permanent scheduling order. Why the House would tie its own hands in a matter like this is mystifying.

The bigger issue here is that the data HHS needs in order to make a recommendation will come from the DOJ, which is not exactly an unbiased source. If an A.G. wants a drug to remain in Schedule A, the data DOJ shares with HHS will likely support that preference, just as the data DOJ prosecutors share with jurors supports their preference for conviction. What’s more, there is almost no random-control-trial data for drugs that are not already well into the FDA pipeline. To get that data, researchers would not only have to raise money outside the pharmaceutical system (ask MAPS how hard that is and how long it takes), they’d also have to get the AG’s permission to manufacture or study any substance that has been scheduled using emergency powers. As one might expect, SITSA gives the AG wide latitude in determining what drugs are permissible to manufacture and to study.

As the Liberty Caucus statement suggests, the HHS oversight provision in the House bill is toothless, and absent entirely from the Senate version.

In addition to creating a new class of Controlled Substances, both bills give the Justice Department unprecedented power to criminalize compounds that aren’t regulated by the FDA or already a Controlled Substance. Here’s a brief rundown of provisions common to both versions of SITSA:

• Allow the Attorney General to use emergency scheduling powers to place a substance in Schedule A for up to five years, whereas current emergency scheduling powers allow for a maximum ban length of two years. (The additional length of time matters because temporary scheduling is not subject to judicial review.)
• The bill’s criteria for inclusion in Class A of the Controlled Substances Act is incredibly broad. It includes any substance that is not already scheduled and is chemically similar to any drug in classes I-V (schedule I drugs are illegal save for research that must be approved and supervised by the DEA; drugs in the remaining schedules can be prescribed); has “an actual or predicted” stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect similar to that of any drug in classes I-V. The methods for determining those similarities are pretty vague in both versions of the bill and will almost certainly be interpreted by the DOJ in a way that makes it easiest for them to do what they want.
• If a drug fits the above criteria, and the Attorney General believes that scheduling it under the CSA “will assist in preventing abuse or misuse of the drug or other substance” [itals mine], the A.G. has met all of the criteria necessary to schedule the drug.
• SITSA establishes a statutory maximum of 10 years in prison for Schedule A offenders with no prior drug convictions, and 15 years if ingestion of the substance results in “serious bodily injury or death”; those maximums rise to 20 and 30 years if the offender has a prior felony drug conviction.
• Importers of Class A drugs will face statutory maximums of 20 years (30 years if they have a prior felony drug conviction), and a maximum of life in prison if consumption of the drug they imported results in serious bodily injury or death.
• Despite the use of “synthetic analog” in the bill title, the criteria for inclusion in Schedule A says only “drug or substance.”

Fans of the herbal opioid remedy kratom have expressed concerns about SITSA, as have nootropic users and research chemical enthusiasts. The combined vagueness and broadness of this bill should worry all of them. While the immediate justification for the bill is fentanyl, the legislation is so much broader than that. Were coffee and booze not historically entrenched in our culture, this bill would absolutely allow the DOJ to add both caffeine (as a stimulant) and alcohol (as a sedative) to Schedule A of the Controlled Substances Act.

The race to develop drugs that can briefly exist in a legal grey area—not scheduled at the formulaic level, but similar to things that are—is a genuine problem. The cat-and-mouse game between the DOJ and clandestine chemists has led to a downward spiral in quality, safety, and predictability. Batches of spice and K2 that flooded drug stores and head shops in the early 2000s, for example, could be hit or miss; but the synthetic cannabinoids floating around the U.S. now that those early versions are illegal have caused mass hospitalizations.

More potent and deadly than any drug we’ve seen before, fentanyl analogs are easy to make, cheap to buy, discreetly packaged, and difficult to detect at U.S. ports of entry. While the libertarian response to this phenomenon would be to make safer opioids available to people who want them in conjunction with lifting federal regulations on medications like methadone, naloxone, and buprenorphine, Congress very seldom does the libertarian thing.

What will illicit chemical manufacturers do if SITSA passes? Will they stop exporting to the U.S.? Will they change their packaging and labeling strategies? What will the new race to the bottom of the chem barrel look like? These are questions Congress should be thinking about now. After all, legislators wrote this bill as a response to the crisis they helped create when they encouraged law enforcement and regulators to crack down on prescription pills without considering users might substitute heroin and fentanyl.

Several years ago, Britain passed a similar law banning what SITSA calls Schedule A drugs. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Pharmaceutical Journal reported last year that many users of what were once called “legal highs” in the U.K. have since switched to more historically illegal drugs. That substitution effect shouldn’t surprise anyone: it explains why people who once crushed pills now shoot fentanyl. And we should expect to see it here if Congress empowers Sessions to add whatever drugs he wants to the Controlled Substances Act.

Calvin Harris has the temerity to tell you to suck less.

The 34-year-old Scottish DJ and one-time Taylor Swift paramour announced Monday that he is teaming up with luxury hotel and nightclub company Hakkasan Group to fight the scourge that is the single-use plastic straw.

“We want to reduce the impact of harmful plastics, so we decided to take action. I am grateful to Hakkasan Group for supporting us and helping us make a difference,” Harris told Variety of his wholly altruistic activism. He then went on to cite the since-debunked statistic that Americans use 500 million straws a day.

Harris’ activism is as groundbreaking as his artistic endeavors. In the past few weeks any manner of celebrities, governments, and corporations have teamed up to take on plastic straws.

Earlier in June, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady encouraged people to make the switch to reusable metal straws in an Instagram video. “Next time you see a plastic straw like this, say, ‘No, I’m not falling for your ruse, straw,'” instructed Brady.

McDonald’s announced Friday that it would be testing out paper straws at select U.S. locations later this year. They’ve been joined in their corporate activism by Ikea, Royal Caribbean Cruises, and SeaWorld, all of whom have pledged to ditch single-use plastic straws.

And today Portland, Oregon, is expected to pass an anti-straw measure of its own. OregonLive reports that the city council will instruct its Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to come up with a plan to cut back on the Rose City’s use of straws and other single-use items by October 1.

The West Coast has led the way with anti-straw policies. Both Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. have banned straws outright, while California cities like Long Beach and San Luis Obispo have taken to passing straw-on-request laws.

Whatever form Portland’s straw law takes, it is unlikely to do much good for the environment.

Straws make up a small percentage of America’s waste, which itself is responsible for a tiny percentage of the plastic in the world’s oceans. The U.S. is responsible for about 1 percent of marine plastic waste.

Experts and environmental researchers stress that tackling the problem of plastic in the oceans begins in places like China, India, and the Philippines, where waste collection systems have yet to catch up to the population’s growing use of the stuff.

Celebrities, corporations, and local governments have proven steadfastly resistant to this message, choosing instead to chide Americans for their own unproblematic straw usage. In doing so they manage to bring out the worst in themselves and each other.

Artists, athletes, and actors taking up the fight against straws only encourages politicians to jump on the bandwagon by passing petty bans and restrictions. The prospect of legislation in turn adds a veneer of seriousness to an otherwise vain celebrity environmental crusade. Both groups give corporations moral cover to cut costs and reduce consumer convenience in the name of saving the planet.

The everyday people lining up behind these anti-straw initiatives are suckers of a different kind—they’re being misled by celebrities and politicians looking to burnish their own images without actually taking a dent out of the problem they’re trying to solve.

On Sunday, immigrants and their supporters rallied at Phoenix’s Central United Methodist Church against the Trump administration’s policy of criminal prosecution of border-crossers and the resulting separation of thousands of children from their families. Instead of concessions from the administration, though, they got the dispatch of Wisconsin National Guard troops to bolster Customs and Border Patrol agents.

Good for the protesters. But they might be well-advised to redirect at least some of their efforts away from demonstrations and instead put resources into more effectively and humanely smuggling migrants into the country past the border checkpoints, writes J.D. Tuccille.

View this article.

Today is World Refugee Day, which is when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) releases its grim annual Global Trends report about people driven from their homes, and the world’s politicians issue grave-sounding statements about all the work they’re doing to ameliorate the crisis.

So what did the UNHCR find for 2017? A record number of displaced people: 68.5 million. And a record number of refugees leaving their home country: 25.4 million, or 2.9 million more than 2016, making it “the biggest increase UNHCR has seen in a single year.” There are currently “44,500 people being displaced each day, or a person becoming displaced every two seconds.” The main generators of refugees are, in order, the wars in Syria, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and South Sudan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commemorated the occasion with a statement asserting that “the United States will continue to be a world leader in providing humanitarian assistance and working to forge political solutions to the underlying conflicts that drive displacement,” and that “the United States provides more humanitarian assistance than any other single country worldwide, including to refugees.” That leadership, however, is not reflected in the number of refugees the U.S. now takes in.

From October 1, 2017 to June 15 of this year, America has brought in 15,383 refugees. That puts the country on pace to accept just under 22,000 for this fiscal year, which would easily be the lowest number since the Refugee Act of 1980. (In Fiscal Year 2002, which began right after the September 11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration took in 27,131). Measured across presidencies, Bush took in an average of 48,000 refugees per year, Barack Obama 70,000, Ronald Reagan 82,000, Bill Clinton 89,000, Jimmy Carter 94,000, and George H.W. Bush 119,000.

We are contracting admissions right as the world is dramatically expanding people seeking shelter outside their home countries. The global population of refugees (minus the 5.3 million registered with the U.N. Relief and Work Agency for Palestinians in the Near East), was stable between 2008–2012, at between 10.4 million and 10.6 million, but since then we’ve seen this:

2013: 11.7 million

2014: 14.4 million

2015: 16.1 million

2016: 17.2 million

2017: 20.1 million

The last time the world experienced such a sharp spike in refugees, the Carter and Reagan administrations took in about 1 out of every 70 global refugees. The Trump administration is on pace right now to accept 1 out of 900.

Pompeo in his statement nodded both to those prior eras of generosity, and Donald Trump’s new era of America First stinginess: “Since 1975, the United States has accepted more than 3.3 million refugees for permanent resettlement—more than any other country in the world. The United States will continue to prioritize the admission of the most vulnerable refugees while upholding the safety and security of the American people.”

Or as the president himself said Monday, “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Won’t be. You look at what’s happening in Europe, you look at what’s happening in other places; we can’t allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.”

Relevant video from the archives:

In deciding not to decide on two major redistricting cases, the U.S. Supreme Court this week signalled that it would not wade into the fight over partisan gerrymandering—but the justices did leave the door open to revisiting the issue, and perhaps soon.

The high court released two highly anticipated redistricting decisions this week—one challenging a Republican-drawn map in Wisconsin and one challenging a Democrat-drawn map in Maryland. In the Maryland case, the court merely issued a per curiam (unsigned) order sending the matter back to a lower court. In the Wisconsin case (Gill v. Whitford), though, the court ruled the plaintiffs lacked appropriate standing. Despite the lack of a substantive ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts took the opportunity to author a unanimous opinion outlining where the court stands on the question of gerrymandering.

Roberts’ opinion makes it clear that a successful challenge to partisan redistricting must rest on the disenfranchisement of individual voters, rather than on the claim that one political party has been harmed.

“It is a case about group political interests, not individual legal rights,” Roberts wrote of the Wisconsin challenge. “This Court is not responsible for vindicating generalized partisan preferences.”

The Wisconsin case included four plaintiffs who argued that their votes had been diluted by “the manipulation of district boundaries” in the Republican-drawn state legislative district maps.

One of those plaintiffs, William Whitford, a retired law professor at the University of Wisconsin, admitted that the Republican map had not changed the outcome of the elections in his own legislative districts. He lives in Madison, after all, and it’s about as solidly blue a place as you’ll find in the Midwest. Instead, he claimed he suffered a harm that extended beyond his own vote and his own legislative districts.

“The only practical way to accomplish my policy objectives is to get a majority of the Democrats in the Assembly and the Senate, ideally in order to get the legislative product I prefer,” Whitford told the district court that first heard the case.

This had always been a weakness of the Wisconsin challenge, and the plaintiffs knew it. In similar court cases that successfully challenged racial gerrymanders (an area where federal courts have been more willing to engage, while they’ve largely avoided political gerrymandering), courts have always focused on the specific harm to voters in specific districts, rather than on statewide unfairness. To make the broader argument, the Wisconsin challenge relied on a metric known as the Efficiency Gap.

The Efficiency Gap was developed, in part, as a response to a previous Supreme Court ruling. In 2004, after hearing a challenge from a group of Pennsylvania Democrats who claimed they were unfairly harmed by a GOP-drawn map, the Supreme Court ruled in Vieth v. Jubelirer that it could not adjudicate claims of political gerrymandering for lack of a “workable standard” for identifying it.

The Efficiency Gap was supposed to solve that problem. As I wrote earlier this year for Reason:

The Efficiency Gap attempts to measure the number of “wasted” votes in each congressional district, defined as any vote for a losing candidate at all and any vote for a winning candidate above and beyond the number needed to secure a victory. The formula attempts to highlight partisan imbalance among all the districts in a state, with the underlying assumption being that districts should be as competitive as possible to reduce the number of “wasted” votes.

Working in its favor is this system’s simplicity: No software is needed, just election results and basic math. But there are gaps in the Efficiency Gap. For one, it requires that elections be held before it can be employed. That makes it useful for determining whether districts are fair after they’ve been drawn and put to use, but it doesn’t offer much help for how to go about drawing boundaries to avoid such problems in the first place. For another, the Efficiency Gap relies entirely on election results, which can be misleading. A blowout win in one district means lots of “wasted” votes for the victorious party under the Efficiency Gap model, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the map was designed to bring about that outcome. A particularly bad opponent, a national electoral wave, or any number of other factors could give a false positive if the Efficiency Gap is the only metric you’re using to decide whether a district is unfair.

In this week’s ruling, Roberts blows some serious holes in the idea that the Efficiency Gap can serve as a sort of Holy Grail for redistricting reformers.

“The difficulty for standing purposes is that these calculations are an average measure. They do not address the effect that a gerrymander has on the votes of particular citizens,” Roberts writes. “Partisan-asymmetry metrics such as the efficiency gap measure something else entirely: the effect that a gerrymander has on the fortunes of political parties.”

That the Supreme Court unanimously backed this anti-partisan view is a welcome sign. That unanimity, though, tells only half the story. While all nine Justices agreed that the Wisconsin plaintiffs did not have standing for a broad challenge, the four liberal justices signed a concurring opinion by Justice Elena Kagan that likely foreshadows the next round of redistricting challenges. Once there is sufficient standing established, Kagan argues, then statewide evidence (such as the Efficiency Gap metric) and a statewide remedy could be on the table.

When gerrymandering inevitably comes back to the Supreme Court, that’s where the battlelines will be drawn, says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“There’s something I find very satisfying about the fact that the center has held. All of the justices, including the most liberal ones, agree about the role of the Supreme Court,” Olson told Reason. But Kagan’s concurrence, he says, “preserves as a possibility, at least in their minds, the outcome that the liberals were hoping to get.”

There is one other question worth considering: Is gerrymandering a problem the courts should solve? The plaintiffs in the Wisconsin case seemed to think so, calling the Supreme Court “the only institution in the United States” that could solve the problem.

Roberts seems unconvinced. “Such invitations must be answered with care,” he wrote. “Failure of political will does not justify unconstitutional remedies.”

Indeed, a better solution to America’s gerrymandering crisis would be for state legislatures to impose upon themselves—or to impose upon state redistricting commissions, where they are used—some sort of limitation for how much partisan mapmaking is tolerable.

Alternatively, states could move to fully outsource the redistricting process to tech firms capable of creating dozens or hundreds of different maps based on relatively simple sets of parameters—such as requirements that districts score below certain thresholds on different measurements. But it’s probably right to be skeptical of the idea that state lawmakers and political parties would give up their ability to influence the redistricting process. These attempts to change the rules of redistricting are just another round of the same game. Beat us in the legislature and we’ll beat you in the courts, is the message that Wisconsin Democrats seemed to be telegraphing throughout this process.

But courts should not be involved in giving partisan advantage to one team or the other. Roberts makes this point repeatedly, pointing to the fact that none of the plaintiffs in the case could prove they were directly harmed by the redistricting plan, and choosing to argue instead that they were harmed by how the redistricting plan affected the electoral chances of Wisconsin Democrats in general.

“That is a collective political interest, not an individual legal interest,” writes Roberts. “And the Court must be cautious that it does not become a forum for generalized grievances.”

President Donald Trump met with congressional Republicans last night to discuss options for addressing the routine separation of immigrant families who enter the country illegally. But nobody is quite sure what Trump wants, which is a problem. Republicans don’t want to do anything without his stamp of approval, and Democratic leadership appears to be in no hurry to fix a problem that could significantly damage Republican chances in the midterms.

“There’s no need for legislation,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) said yesterday, explaining why he opposed a bill from Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Tex.) that would add additional immigration judges so that asylum cases could be heard more quickly. “Mr. President, you started it, you can stop it, plain and simple.”

Top Senate Dem preemptively comes out against all GOP proposals on family separation issue. “Schumer said they want to keep the focus on Trump.”

Rejecting compromise solutions looks cynical amid humanitarian crisis. Is this about the kids, or Trump? https://t.co/y0oom8ayYH

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 19, 2018

Some Republicans, though, agree that the best short term fix is a presidential decree, rather than new legislation. “The White House could change it in five minutes and they should,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R–Tenn.) “It’s a mistake. It’s a change in policy by this administration.”

Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard University law professor who has often defended Trump in the context of the Russia investigation, told Fox & Friends that the president absolutely had the authority to end the separation policy, and should do so immediately.

More than 2,000 immigrant children are currently being held in detention facilities, away from their parents who are awaiting asylum hearings or deportation. That’s because the Trump administration has taken a zero-tolerance approach to enforcing immigration law, and has pledged to prosecute every single person who enters the country illegally.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen dealt with some blowback while she was having dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., last night. Activists with the D.C. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America confronted her while she was eating. “You can’t enjoy your dinner until you reunite all of those families!” they shouted at her.

And former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski came under fire for his jarringly callous response to news that a 10-year-old with Downs syndrome had been separated from parents.

FREE MINDS

The College Fix has a writeup of Heterodox Academy’s inaugural “Open Minds Conference,” which featured panel sessions about free speech and open inquiry on college campuses:

A long, wide-ranging discussion about free speech and campus politics featured academics like Alice Dreger and John McWhorter, the latter of whom observed that, around 2014, open discussions became harder in his classes.

“It got to the point that a certain minority of students could swerve or even staunch discussion with what’s called the social justice warrior ideology,” he said. That ideology, McWhorter said, has become “a religion.”

Dreger, who resigned her position at Northwestern University rather than withdraw a controversial article from a bioethics journal, has for years advocated ideological pluralism in higher education.

“What we need is a new kind of branding in universities, where the brand is about diversity of opinion and diversity of viewpoints,” Dreger said.

Heterodox Academy was started by New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, a contributor to Reason.

FREE MARKETS

D.C. voters approved Initiative 77, which would raise the minimum wage for restaurant workers. Many in the industry—including many workers—stridently opposed the move, because tipped employees can actually earn well above the minimum wage, absent government interference. According to The Washington Post:

Restaurant associations and owners who bankrolled the opposition campaign said that the tipped-wage system helps them stay open in an industry where profit margins are slim and that the passage of Initiative 77 could lead to higher prices, layoffs and shuttered businesses. Perhaps surprisingly, hundreds of workers agreed that a higher base wage could threaten their livelihoods and mobilized against the measure.

“I can’t lie, I am disappointed. I trust that the council will listen to the tipped employees of D.C. and take action to protect our voices, which have been loud and clear,” said Dawn Williams, a 32-year-old server at Daikaya who said she makes more than $30 an hour. “The intentions seem good on paper, but it will hurt us and our burgeoning, diverse restaurant industry.”

All is not lost for opponents of the measure, however: the city council could vote to void it. Ten of 13 city council members came out against Initiative 77, as did Mayor Muriel Bowser.

QUICK HITS

• #sobrave: The co-creator of Fox’s TV series Modern Family will be leaving the network in protest of Fox News’ evilness—as soon as he’s done making bank.
• Embattled FBI agent Peter Strzok was escorted out of the building yesterday.
• Trump couldn’t resist taking one more swipe at Mark Sanford.
• George Mason University’s Tyler Cowen explains why it’s also wrong—and often unnecessary—to separate American families while parents await trial.
• Behold:

that terrible racism dog account had to delete this tweet, because that’s not the kind of racism their followers are interested in pic.twitter.com/Vt8NnXqcnP

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) June 19, 2018

At a press conference on Monday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen indignantly rejected the suggestion that her department’s practice of forcibly separating illegal border crossers from their children was intended as a deterrent. “I find that offensive,” Nielsen said, “because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that?”

Nielsen’s mentor and predecessor, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, has explained why, describing family separation as a way of discouraging people from entering the United States without the government’s permission. But even if we take Nielsen at her word, Jacob Sullum says, the Trump administration cannot escape responsibility for the predictably cruel consequences of its “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

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Upset because Facebook and Google invade your privacy? Be glad you don’t live in China, writes John Stossel.

Facebook and other Western apps are banned there. The government views their openness as a threat. So the Chinese use platforms like WeChat and Alibaba.

Now the Chinese government takes data from those platforms to assign all people who use them a “social credit score.”

In other words, the government monitors your web activity and gives you a grade. Your purchases, social interactions, and political activity will determine what privileges you get.

View this article.

In this handy how-to, J.D. Tuccille teaches readers how to break out of handcuffs. A snippet:

That I know a few tricks for getting out of handcuffs is probably less surprising than how I learned those skills. After all, my family has some experience with shackles of various sorts. One of my father’s earlier memories of his old man was seeing the latter peering through the barred rear window of a paddy wagon. Then his turn came. Jails on three continents provided unwelcome (though temporary) accommodations to my dad once he achieved his own adulthood. Things get more interesting when you include extended family, several of whom have been hosted at state expense and others of whom should have been.

View this article.