Category: reason

A prison major in Texas has resigned and four guards have been fired as officials investigate claims that guards planted contraband on prisoners. Several other guards have been demoted. The investigation has found the Ramsey Unit in Brazoria County had a quota system in which guards had to write up a certain number of disciplinary actions against prisoners or face disciplinary action themselves.

A primary challenger backed by President Donald Trump successfully unseated incumbent Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) tonight just hours after Trump took to Twitter to attack Sanford for—of all things—the congressman’s marital infidelities.

First-term state Rep. Katie Arrington (R-Dorchester) defeated Sanford, earning more than 51 percent of the vote to Sanford’s 46 percent. She will face Democratic challenger Joe Cunningham in the heavily Republican district this November. Meanwhile, Sanford’s defeat means Congress will lose an advocate for limited government and individual liberty at the end of the current term.

In an interview with Politico last weekend, Sanford suggested that a loss in his re-election bid could cause other Republicans to think twice before speaking out against the Trump administration. Now that he’s lost, his words also serve as a call for his fellow anti-Trump GOPers to keep fighting the good fight.

“I think it’s entirely appropriate to say ‘I agree’ when I agree and ‘I disagree’ when I disagree,” Sanford told Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt. “That’s the American way. That’s what our entire political system is based on, is the fact that we can have dissent.”

Taking down an incumbent is no easy feat in American politics, but this race was really a referendum on the relative strength of the anti-Trump contingent in the Republican Party as it struggles to hold off the #MAGA cult of personality.

Sanford’s dissent to Trump’s takeover of the GOP dates back nearly two years. In July 2016, shortly after wrapping up the Republican nomination and hoping to unify the party before the convention, Trump paid a high profile visit to congressional Republicans on Capitol Hill. Sanford came away from a closed-door meeting less than impressed by Trump’s grasp of the U.S. Constitution.

“I wasn’t particularly impressed,” Sanford told The Washington Post at the time. “It was the normal stream of consciousness that’s long on hyperbole and short on facts. At one point, somebody asked about Article I powers: What will you do to protect them? I think his response was, ‘I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII,’ going down the list. There is no Article XII.”

Since then, Sanford has accused Trump of fanning “the flames of intolerance,” criticized Trump’s use of the word “shit-hole” to describe some third world countries, and most recently called the president’s plan to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports “an experiment with stupidity.” He’s also criticized Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) for not taking a hard enough line against the Trump White House.

Trump appears to have taken notice. As voters were heading to the polls Tuesday, the president took a shot at the incumbent congressman.

Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina. I fully endorse Katie Arrington for Congress in SC, a state I love. She is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes. VOTE Katie!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018

Yes, that reference to Argentina is the thrice-wedded president (who may have had an affair with a porn star) accusing Sanford of being bad at marriage, apparently without a hint of irony.

It’s true that Sanford’s six-day disappearance during July 2009—when he was supposedly hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail, but was actually having an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, María Belén Chapur—changed the course of his political career. An effort was made to impeach Sanford, but South Carolina lawmakers ended up merely issuing a “rebuke” of the governor instead. Sanford finished his term, then got elected to Congress in 2013 (he had previously represented the same district from 1995 through 2001, when he stepped down to honor a promise to serve only three terms).

Prior to La Affaire Argentine, Sanford was regarded as a possible White House contender. In the years after Ron Paul’s 2008 dark horse presidential run, he and then-governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson (along with, of course, Rand Paul) were often identified as the heirs apparent to the libertarian wing of the GOP.

“They’ll say it as if it’s an evil word—like ‘you’re a communist’ or something,” Sanford said in 2009 when he was labeled a “libertarian” by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S,C), whom no one would confuse for a libertarian. “I wear it as a badge of honor, because I do love, believe in, and want to support liberty.”

It is fitting, perhaps, that the Republican Party’s turn towards Trump’s economic nationalism has coincided with Johnson departing the party to become a Libertarian and Sanford being tossed from its ranks.

Will there be a third act for Sanford? One can hope. Whatever you may think of his personal foibles, he’s been a consistently principled voice for liberty and limited government. He opposes bailouts, loves Atlas Shrugged, and disdains political tribalism. And in the age of Trump, a history of adultery is hardly political suicide anymore.

An ill-advised effort by the Department of Justice to stop AT&T from buying out Time Warner for more than $85 billion was rejected by a federal judge today. The merger will move forward. In fact, the judge even warned the Justice Department away from further meddling.

The New York Times reports:

The merger would create a media and telecommunications powerhouse, reshaping the landscape of those industries. The combined company would have a library that includes HBO’s hit “Game of Thrones” and channels like CNN, along with vast distribution reach through wireless and satellite television services across the country.

Media executives increasingly say content creation and distribution must be married to survive against technology companies like Amazon and Netflix. Those companies started making their own programming in just the last several years, but they now spend billions of dollars a year on it, and users can stream their video on apps in homes and on mobile devices, pulling attention from traditional media businesses.

The Times further notes that typically when the Justice Department attempts to use antitrust rules to block a merger, it’s because of a large corporation buying out a competitor. That’s not the case here. AT&T is a service provider buying up a content producer, making a single, stronger company that’s better able to compete. This doesn’t produce less competition in the marketplace.

Last December, Reason Foundation Vice President of Research Julian Morris explained that blocking the merger would actually be what hurts competition:

Consumers are shifting away from the kinds of access and content bundles that so concern the DOJ. And they are doing so because such bundles poorly match their preferences. AT&T recognizes the trend of falling subscription rates for its traditional TV bundles. That’s why it wants to expand into content. It could have done that by licensing legacy content from others, arranging syndication deals for new content, and building its own studio, as Netflix and Amazon have done. It chose instead to merge with Time Warner.

At the heart of the DOJ’s complaint is an assumption that the merged entity would use its market power to raise the price of content currently owned by Time Warner, or threaten to withhold programming, including hit shows such as Game of Thrones and NCAA March Madness. Time Warner could already make such threats, but the DOJ claims it would have greater incentive because it could benefit from some subscribers switching over to AT&T’s networks (DirecTV, U-verse and DirecTV Now).

A merged AT&T-Time Warner could, in principle, refuse to supply content to some distributors in order to drive consumers to purchase its own access and content bundles, but it would not be in the merged company’s financial interest to do so. As Geoff Manne notes in the WSJ:

“More than half of Time Warner’s revenue, $6 billion last year, comes from fees that distributors pay to carry its content. Because fewer than 15% of home-video subscriptions are on networks owned by AT&T … the bulk of that revenue comes from other providers. In other words: Calculated using expected revenue, AT&T is paying $36 billion for the portion of Time Warner’s business that comes from AT&T’s competitors. The theory seems to be that the merged company would simply forgo this revenue in a speculative hope that withholding Time Warner content from distributors would induce masses of viewers to switch to AT&T—and maybe, one day, put competitors out of business. That this strategy would actually work is unfathomable. Game of Thrones is good, but it isn’t that good.”

The merger had also been heavily politicized due to President Donald Trump’s feud with CNN, so we’ll see if the Justice Department attempts to appeal. The head of the antitrust department said he’d have to read the 170-page ruling first.

The Times also notes that the companies have a June 21 deadline to merge and that the judge, Richard J. Leon, of the United States District Court in Washington, flat out told the feds not to try to seek an emergency stay of the decision due to the harms on the defendants who have battling for 18 months to get the merger approved.

Just one day after the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would join a lawsuit challenging the University of Michigan’s anti-harassment policies on grounds they allegedly violate the First Amendment, university officials have decided to revise the policies in question.

“The revised definitions more precisely and accurately reflect the commitment to freedom of expression that has always been expressed in the statement itself,” said E. Royster Harper, vice president of student life, in a statement.

The university prohibits harassment, which it defines as “unwanted negative attention,” and encourages students to report instances of it to the campus’s Bias Response Team. Administrators have pledged, however, to remove language from the code of conduct that claims “the most important indication of bias is your own feelings.”

Federal officials are pleased with this decision.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is committed to promoting free speech on college campuses, and the Department is proud to have played a role in the numerous campus free speech victories this year,” said Justice Department Spokesperson Devin O’Malley.

I have reached out to Speech First, the First Amendment defense group that filed the lawsuit, for comment. This post will be updated when I hear back.

One of the more peculiar politics-adjacent stories of last year was November’s brutal attack on Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Paul’s neighbor Rene Boucher was formally charged for the attack in January.

At the time, pundits hostile to Paul quickly victim-blamed for the vicious assault, which gave Paul five broken ribs and lung lacerations. GQ declared him an “asshole neighbor” who is one of those troublesome “Libertarians [who] don’t want to follow the rules that we as a society have agreed upon, because they feel those rules step on their freedoms.” (Apparently, someone accused Paul of “believ[ing] in stronger property rights than exist in America” because he composts and grows pumpkins on his property.) The New Yorker similarly praised attacker (and Democrat!) Boucher as a “near-perfect neighbor” and looked suspiciously on the libertarian-leaning Paul for thinking all that property rights stuff maybe meant he shouldn’t be sent to the hospital by his “near perfect neighbor” for things he did with his lawn.

Politico saw Paul’s inability to come to a Coasean solution, irrespective of property rights, of whatever grievance prompted his neighbor to break his ribs as a sign that “one or both of them is a jerk. I believe that this is an excellent working hypothesis. I’ve seen Senator Paul up close. He is, let us say, pretty high on himself.” USA Today gave the developer of the two men’s housing association space to condemn Paul, without much in the way of actionable specifics, for wanting to control his own property too much.

Now the specifics of what motivated Boucher—unknown, it should be stressed, by all the above pundits and reporters who were sure it was Paul’s fault—are more well-established in the public record as Boucher seeks probation instead of jail time for his crime.

Boucher was very upset, apparently, by piles of brush on Paul’s property, though within sight of Boucher’s. He had been reacting to these offending brush piles by paying to have them hauled to dumpsters, then by setting a yard fire to destroy them (so carelessly that he gave himself second-degree burns), and eventually by attacking Paul.

In addition to the brush piles in his neighbor’s property, Boucher also insists that Paul’s use of a lawnmower the day of the attack blew some leaves onto Boucher’s property—the only activity of Paul’s that sounds even close to a legitimate complaint, though obviously not a “send neighbor to hospital” level of complaint. Sometimes, even a person with libertarian leanings doesn’t deserve to have five of his ribs broken for believing he has some rights to use his own property.

Less than a month after unanimously passing a literal tax on jobs, the Seattle City Council is looking to reverse course.

Yesterday Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkhan, along with seven of nine city councilmembers, released a statement announcing their intention to repeal the controversial employee head tax.

“It is clear that the ordinance will lead to a prolonged, expensive political fight over the next five months that will do nothing to tackle our urgent housing and homelessness crisis,” reads Monday’s statement. “This week, the City Council is moving forward with the consideration of legislation to repeal the current tax on large businesses to address the homelessness crisis.”

Had the City Council not killed its own head tax, voters might have.

Almost immediately after Durkhan signed the tax into law, an initiative campaign was launched to put the head tax on the November 2019 ballot. Within days the campaign had attracted $300,000 in funding including $25,000 a piece from Starbucks and Amazon. The effort reportedly gathered 22,000 signatures by June 7, comfortably above the 17,000 it needed before its June 14 deadline.

Rather than risk an expensive ballot campaign that public opinion polling suggested would not go its way, the council has decided to pull the tax and try again.

The initial version of the head tax—known as the “Amazon Tax” after its main rhetorical target—would have imposed a yearly $500 levy on every employee at companies grossing over $20 million. This was supposed to raise $75 million annually from 500 to 600 Seattle businesses for homeless and affordable housing services.

That proposal sparked fierce opposition from all corners of the city. Seattle-headquartered Amazon paused construction on an office tower project pending a vote on the tax. Starbucks came out publicly against the tax, as did Alaska Airlines, Expedia, and the CEOs of 129 other Seattle-area companies in an open letter.

The business community was joined in their opposition by the city’s construction unions. Chris McClean of Iron Workers Local 86 told The Seattle Times that “to reduce the jobs only increases the possibility of additional homelessness.” His union brothers shouted down pro-head tax city councilmember Kshama Sawant at one of her anti-Amazon rallies.

The head tax was even too much for former Seattle Mayor Tim Burgess, a champion of such progressive policies the city’s soda and income taxes. Burgess co-authored an op-ed in the Seattle Times calling the head tax a “terrible idea.”

All the pushback was enough to prompt Durkhan to float a compromise head tax of only $275 per employee per year, which would have raised $47 million annually. This saving measure proved ineffective at quelling the passions stirred over the tax.

As columnist Knute Berger wrote at Seattle news site Crosscut, “the mayor had forced an unsavory compromise by signing a head tax that was less than originally proposed yet still too much to win Amazon’s support or tolerance, and a spending plan that was not well-devised before the vote.”

The Amazon tax is not the first example of the Seattle city council putting the cart before the horse. The city-level progressive income tax passed last year by the council was ruled illegal in November 2017 on the grounds that Washington state law explicitly forbids cities from imposing an income tax. A city appeal of that decision is still pending.

The reaction to Monday’s about-face suggests that while the fight over the head tax is over for now, the tensions it kicked up have not dissipated.

Seattle’s hard left was positively incensed at the reversal. “Councilmembers who said they agree w/ big biz tax to fund affordable housing now want to repeal Amazon Tax coz blatant lies by big biz have impacted public opinion,” tweeted out Sawant who says she was left out of the loop on the decision to ditch the head tax.

For their part, business owners stressed that the city needed to spend the money it has more effectively before it goes around asking for more. “I strongly believe that there is a better way forward, one that improves current spending efficiency and effectiveness all while encouraging economic growth and job creation,” said Denise Moriguchi, chief executive of Seattle grocery company Uwajimaya, to The Seattle Times.

With Monday’s press release from Durkhan and the councilmembers still emphasizing the need for “progressive revenue sources,” these battles are not likely to disappear any time soon.

The New York governor’s race this fall has garnered outsized national attention partly because a well-known actress is mounting a left-wing challenge to the two-term Democratic incumbent, who just happens to be the son of a past governor, a one-time Kennedy family in-law, and a cabinet secretary during the Bill Clinton administration.

Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda on the long-running show Sex and the City, is an unrepentant progressive who has been attacking Andrew Cuomo hard from the left. She’s pushing for a higher minimum wage, state-wide rent subsidies, and massive tax funding for New York City’s failing subway system. Her stances have won her the endorsement of The Nation, which credits her with pushing Cuomo to the left.

But there’s another candidate running for governor who’s worth a longer look than either Nixon or Cuomo. Libertarian Party candidate Larry Sharpe is a New York City native, former Marine, and an entrepreneur who came within 32 votes of being Gary Johnson’s vice-presidential candidate for the 2016 election. When Reason asked his rival Bill Weld how the LP could become more successful, Weld replied, “You want to get out more candidates like Larry Sharpe.”

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Keep an eye on Maine’s gubernatorial primary today not to see who wins (because we might not actually have a winner declared this evening) but to see how the winners are selected.

Today’s primary marks the launch of Maine’s use of ranked-choice voting for determining the winners of several state-level elected offices. It will be used to decide which Democrat and which Republican will face off in November (along with several independent and third-party candidates).

In ranked-choice voting, rather than just picking a single winner, voters can rank their preferences. In order to win a ranked-choice vote, the top candidate must get a majority of the vote among all the candidates. Getting a plurality is not enough—it has to be more than 50 percent. If no candidate gets a majority, the candidate with the least votes is ejected. Then the votes are tallied again, but the votes from those who went to the ejected candidate now go to their second-ranked choice. And so it goes until one candidate claims more than 50 percent of the vote. That candidate is the winner.

There are four Republicans and seven Democrats duking it out for the governor’s race (incumbent Republican Gov. Paul LePage is getting term-limited out), so determining the outcome may get pretty complex.

A handful of cities use ranked-choice voting for local elections (San Francisco just used it to determine its mayor). Maine is the first place to implement it for state races. In addition to the governor’s race, one congressional primary on the Democratic side and one state lawmaker race on the Republican side have enough candidates to call for ranked-choice voting.

Voters approved ranked-choice voting in a ballot initiative in 2016, but there’s been a fight with state Republicans over implementing it (LePage didn’t get a majority vote in either of his elections). The state Constitution specifically requires only a plurality of the vote to determine the winner. The state’s Supreme Judicial Court warned in an advisory opinion that a constitutional amendment would be necessary or the outcomes of ranked-choice voting could potentially lose a court challenge. There have been both legal and legislative fights. A judge ruled in March to allow ranked-choice voting for this primary, but its future in Maine is still muddled. To try to resolve the conflict, also on the ballot today in Maine is an initiative that would overrule a lawmaker’s attempt to delay implementation of ranked-choice voting and potentially repeal it if the state’s constitution is not amended. So essentially Maine voters today have to also approve ranked-choice voting again or potentially lose it.

The case for ranked-choice voting is that it’s an alternative to our more common winner-takes-all system that sometimes pushes voters to feel like they have no choice but to support the two major parties or discourages them from voting entirely. It encourages third-party and independent votes because you’re no longer “throwing your vote away” by voting Libertarian, or Green, or any other party. You can rank a Libertarian Party candidate first, then pick a Democrat or a Republican that comes closest to your belief system as your second choice. If the Libertarian Party candidate performs poorly, your vote wasn’t a wasted effort. It also means that if lots of people rank a Libertarian candidate as their second choice behind a Democrat or a Republican but the major party candidate doesn’t get a majority of the vote, the Libertarian has a better chance of coming out on top than he or she would ever have had in a traditional election.

So ranked-choice voting is popular among those who want to encourage alternatives in races and to break the stranglehold by the two major parties and by those with the most party influence. The Washington Post interviewed a taxi driver in Maine who thinks LePage would never have been elected governor in the first place if the state had ranked-choice voting.

The Washington Post notes that the Republican candidates are still resisting ranked-choice while the Democrats are embracing it (two Democratic candidates are collaborating and encouraging voters to select them both, similar to what happened in San Francisco’s mayoral race). The Republican Party in Maine says it thinks ranked-choice voting is “confusing” and will lead to lower voter turnout.

The data doesn’t back them up there. FairVote, an organization devoted to pushing ranked-choice voting, observes:

Voter turnout in cities that have adopted RCV is comparable to, and often higher than, turnout in other cities. In elections using RCV in the Bay Area in 2014, voter turnout decline was less than in other parts of the state and voter turnout was generally higher than past non-RCV elections.

Professor David Kimball, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has studied voter turnout under RCV. His study finds that RCV in American local elections has a limited impact on turnout, with more important influences on turnout including a competitive mayoral election, other races on the ballot (including initiatives) and the use of even year elections. However, Professor Kimball’s study shows that, when compared to the primary and runoff elections they replace, RCV general elections are associated with a 10 point increase in voter turnout.

California’s overall voter turnout in last week’s primary election was miserable. It’s not finalized as yet, but the current participation rate based on county reporting is a mere 27 percent of all registered voters. But in San Francisco County, the participation rate jumps all the way up to 48 percent. Only a couple of other counties had a higher participation rate, and some of them are lightly populated areas like Sierra County that have a tiny pool of voters.

Ultimately, once Maine votes today, the question will be whether voters turn up and whether they’re satisfied with the outcome, even if their preferred initial candidate lost.

An update on the ranked-choice mayoral race in San Francisco: Last week it appeared that ranked-choice voting may lead to the candidate who came in second in the first round of votes, Mark Leno, overtaking frontrunner London Breed as the lower-ranking candidates were eliminated. Now that more votes have been tallied, however, Breed has retaken the lead from Leno. But her lead is only 1,600 votes and there are still more than 17,000 ballots to tally.

At the G-7 summit meeting in Quebec, President Donald Trump reportedly suggested the idea of totally free trade to the leaders of Canada, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. “Ultimately that’s what you want, you want tariff free, no barriers, and you want no subsides because you have some countries subsidizing industries and that’s not fair,” Trump said. “So you go tariff free, you go barrier free, you go subsidy free, that’s the way you learned at the Wharton School of Finance.” Let’s call that insight waging trade peace.

Well, hooray! Tariffs and other trade barriers are taxes on consumers and protections for the profits of uncompetitive corporations. So how high are tariffs now? According to the World Bank, U.S. tariffs applied to all products average about 1.6 percent. That happens to be the identical rate for Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Japan’s average is 1.3 percent and Canada’s is the lowest at 0.8 percent. In other words, we and our allies are well down the path toward totally free trade.

Trump’s salutary sentiment in favor of totally free trade was, however, swept away in a fit of Twitter pique at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who rather mildly suggested that Canadians would retaliate against Trump’s new tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. Miffed at the pushback from Trudeau, Trump tweeted, “Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!” As my Reason colleague Eric Boehm astutely points out, this tweet undermines the president’s specious national security rationale for steel and aluminum tariffs.

The president’s smart call to eliminate not only tariffs but also subsidies complicates his complaint about Canada’s tariffs on American dairy products because the U.S. dairy sector is massively subsidized by the federal government. Americans for Tax Reform reported in 2012 that as a result of the federal government’s system of dairy price supports the “U.S. prices for butter are twice that of world market prices, while cheese prices were 50 percent higher, and nonfat dry milk prices were 30% than world averages.” Despite this distortion of market prices, U.S. dairy exports to Canada amount to about $300 million annually, or just under 0.09 percent of $341 billion in U.S. goods and services exported to Canada. Overall, the U.S. ran a trade surplus of $8.4 billion with our northern neighbor last year.

Eliminating tariffs, quotas, and subsidies would hugely benefit consumers not only in the U.S. but around the world. For example, a 2010 study by European economists estimating the effect of totally eliminating all trade barriers between the United States and the European Union found that that would boost incomes in the E.U. by as much as $86 billion and incomes in the U.S. by as much $82 billion annually. A 2016 study on the economic effects of broader free trade under the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (rejected by Trump) found that its adoption would have resulted in an increase in annual real incomes in the United States by $131 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP, and an increase in annual exports by $357 billion, or 9.1 percent of exports, over baseline projections by 2030.

On the other hand, a 2017 World Bank study on the costs of protectionism estimated what would happen if countries around the world all increased their tariffs to the legal limits allowed under the World Trade Organization’s rules. If that happened, global average tariff rates would more than triple from 2.7 percent to 10.2 percent. That increase would result in real income losses of 0.8 percent or more than $634 billion relative to baseline estimates after three years. In addition, global trade would fall by 9 percent or more than $2.6 trillion relative to baseline estimates by 2020. Overall, average incomes in the U.S. would be 0.4 percent lower in 2020 than they would otherwise have been.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump threatened to impose a 45 percent tariff on foreign goods. In order to raise tariffs that high, the U.S. would have to withdraw entirely from the World Trade Organizaiton. In a 2017 study, Chinese economists modeled how such a huge across-the board-increase in tariffs would impact the U.S. economy. The results are not pretty. “The U.S. experiences the biggest welfare loss, and its real wages will drop by 2.2 percent,” they estimated. In contrast, the real wages in China would fall a negligible 0.03 percent.

The evidence is conclusive that the U.S. loses hugely if the president launches a trade war and wins big if he chooses instead to wage trade peace.

The most important fact about the Trump-Kim summit is that less than a year ago both of these men sounded like they were ready to launch a nuclear war. For anyone who gives a rat’s ass about the millions of people who would die in such a conflict, the difference between then and now is as welcome as it is stark. If you’re not pleased with that shift—if you’re firing off tweets about what a “propaganda victory” it is for Kim to share a stage with a U.S. president (as if such trivial status games are what’s important here) or why Donald Trump is supposedly Neville Chamberlain (because Munich is one of the two or three moments in diplomatic history that you’re vaguely aware of)—then your priorities are desperately askew. The deescalation we’re seeing now is infinitely preferable to the needless escalation we witnessed last summer.

Is it gross for a president to flatter a vile dictator? Yes. But let’s be clear: Presidents flatter vile dictators all the time. (Google “Saudi Arabia.”) At least in this case there’s the hope of cooling off those nuclear tensions, and of boosting rather than undermining South Korea’s push for peace. Trump is even skylarking about perhaps one day pulling America’s troops out of the peninsula. I’ll believe that when I see it, but it’s surely better to have it on the rhetorical table than to have it be as unthinkable to the president as it is to the foreign-policy Blob.

Yes, the Bolton-Pence sabotage caucus could still crash this in countless ways. None of this is irreversible, and we may reach a day when the Korean peace process is as depleted as the diplomatic initiatives Trump smothered in Iran and Cuba. But for now the trajectory is in the right direction. The issue that last year looked like it could turn into the worst legacy of the Trump presidency now has a chance to be the bright spot. If nothing else, there is at least one way that life in June of 2018 is better than life in August of 2017.