Category: reason

The table is set. The translators are ready. After a day of taking selfies and touring Singapore’s trendiest hot spots, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is ready to shake the hand of a sitting American president for the first time.

President Donald Trump is clearly basking in all of the glory that this historical summit has to offer. But those who may be anticipating a grand bargain between Washington and Pyongyang that closes the North Korea nuclear file for good shouldn’t put the cart before the horse.

Reports describing difficult pre-summit negotiations at the working level about the contents of a joint communique—even on the most basic question, like what the term “denuclearization” actually means—offer evidence that the result of the Trump-Kim meeting will be modest. And that’s okay.

In lowering expectations over the last week from an immediate nuclear disarmament deal to the start of a U.S.-North Korea relationship, Trump seemingly has no grand illusions about what a 45-minute-long meeting with Kim Jong-un can achieve.

At best, we can hope for a joint statement signed by Trump and Kim that spells out in general terms what both men are hoping to accomplish and how they intend to accomplish it, along with perhaps a grand gesture, like a promise to open a U.S. embassy—or a McDonald’s—in Pyongyang.

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Browse any newsstand or bookstore this week and you’re likely to see illustrations like the ones to the right. “Trump Tries to Destroy the West,” went the headline on today’s New York Times op-ed page. The president’s contentious performance at this weekend’s G7 meeting, and his impetuous approach to the forthcoming North Korea talks in Singapore, has left the western world’s political class noticeably rattled.

Some of this turmoil, particularly on global trade, is pointing in an unpromising direction, argue Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, me, and special guest Zach Weissmueller on today’s editor-roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast. But maybe Trump can break up some diplomatic logjams in Asia, and his preliminary willingness to back a marijuana federalism bill is definitely a big freaking deal. Listen up.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Mark McDaniel.

Relevant links from the show:

“Trump Wants Russia Back in the G7,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Flake: ‘This Is Not Grown-Up Leadership.’ Trump: Flake’s a ‘Flake,’” by Matt Welch

“The Republicans Abandon Free Trade,” by Veronique de Rugy

“Trump: Trade War With Canada Justified Because Brits Burned the White House in 1814,” by Eric Boehm

“As Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. Respond to Trump’s Tariffs, Actions Speak Louder Than Words,” by Nikhil Sridhar

“Have Republicans Turned Against Trade? We Asked Them,” by Zach Weissmueller, Justin Monticello, and Joshua Swain

“Trump Endorses Marijuana Federalism Bill,” by Christian Britschgi

“Cory Gardner and Elizabeth Warren Introduce Bill Largely Abolishing Federal Ban on Marijuana in States That have Legalized it Under Their Own Laws,” by Ilya Somin

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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Have you always harbored a secret desire to lurk at dog parks, tirelessly inspect the dogs’ genitals in order to record their sexes, observe how frequently they hump each other, and ask their owners personal questions?

If so, you might enjoy a new study, “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.” Yes, the paper is about dog-on-dog rape and what it means for feminism and queer theory. Essentially, it posits that studying “rape culture” among animals at the dog park is a useful vehicle for understanding rape among human beings.

The study was recently published in Gender, Place and Culture, a peer-reviewed journal. It is not, as I first suspected, a Sokal-esque hoax, though author Helen Wilson makes clear that it is “mostly qualitative in nature and did not make use of rigorous statistical analysis,” casting doubt on its overall scientific merit. Wilson describes herself as a full-time researcher and part-time diversity activist. The only affiliation she lists is with the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative, which doesn’t even have a website. Nevertheless, there are some actual data in the study, and plenty of academic citations.

The study has drawn much criticism from The College Fix—which called it “intellectually vacuous”—and the Twitter account New Real Peer Review, which tweeted screenshots of several ridiculous-sounding passages.

I read the whole thing and was actually a little surprised. Wilson did indeed gather some interesting, possibly useful data, and she’s occasionally honest about its limitations. She even tackles potential criticism of the idea that dogs can be said to have “raped” each other at all.

“Because of my own situatedness as a human, rather than as a dog, I recognize my limitations in being able to determine when an incidence of dog humping qualifies as rape,” wrote Wilson in the study. “In particular, from my own anthropocentric frame, it is difficult if not impossible to ascertain when canine sexual advances are un/wanted, or when they are rapes rather than performances of canine dominance, which introduces considerable unavoidable ambiguity in my interpretations of this variable.”

Wilson spent 100 hours in three dog parks, where she made note of a whole bunch of times when one dog humped another. When the humping was male-on-male, owners intervened in the overwhelming number of cases. But when the humping was male-on-female, owners were far less likely to stop it. This, the study suggests, might say something about the owners’ internalized homophobia and their willingness to overlook female victims of sexual assault.

Unfortunately, this quasi-interesting conclusion is buried under heaps of jargon and obfuscation. See if you can parse these passages:

While this research primarily involves applying theoretical considerations from feminist and queer theory, and draws inspiration from applications of Black criminology, to non-human animal observations collected over the course of a year in urban dog parks, the inherent relationship between human, dog, and dog parks brings the question into the realm of human (specifically feminist) geography….

Metaphorically, however, we are now better positioned to answer the question, “What specific and thematic lessons can be learned from dog parks that have the potential to further equity, diversity, inclusion, and peaceful coexistence and improve human-animal spaces?” The answer is that the lessons from this study can be taken as heuristics that contribute to different ways of conceptualizing and interrupting masculinist hegemonies.

I’m not sure we are better positioned at all, and what was that about “interrupting masculinist hegemonies”? This is the problem with so much social psychology research that cloaks its findings in the borderline-incomprehensible language of social justice: oppression structures, feminist geographies, etc. This study found that people don’t do anything when male dogs hump female dogs but quickly intervene when male dogs hump other male dogs, maybe because they aren’t cool with gay dogs. I don’t mean to pick on Wilson, but the paper is many pages longer than it needs to be to get that information across, because she feels the need to break out all the usual bells and whistles relating to the interrogation of power structures, intersectional frameworks, and assorted gobbledygook. Inevitably, she overreaches:

By publicly or otherwise openly and suddenly yelling (NB: which was also effective at stopping dog rape/humping incidents) at males when they begin to make sexual advances on females (and other males in certain non-homosocial contexts), and by making firm and repeated stands against rape culture in society, activism, and media, human males may be metaphorically “shocked” out of regarding sexual violence, sexual harassment, and rape culture as normative, which may decrease rape rates and disrupt rape culture and emancipate rape-condoning spaces.

Wilson is essentially saying here that since yelling at dogs was a good way to get them to stop committing rape, yelling at men—while railing against rape culture—might work too.

She concedes, however, that unlike dogs, men cannot be leashed. That wouldn’t be “politically feasible,” she explains. The disappointment is palpable.

The Trump administration has spent months trying to construct a rather flimsy argument that steel and aluminum imports from Canada and other close American allies constitute a national security threat. More than a handy way to drum up public support for trade barriers, the “national security” claim is a crucial bit of the legal rationale for letting the president impose tariffs on those goods without congressional approval.

Then, as he was departing this past weekend’s G7 summit, Trump took to Twitter to air some grievences with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In doing so, the president may have significantly kneecapped that legal argument.

PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, “US Tariffs were kind of insulting” and he “will not be pushed around.” Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2018

The last sentence of Trump’s tweet is the one that really matters.

The White House slapped a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum by invoking Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives the president legal authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval when it’s for the sake of national security. That line of argument, outlined by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a February report, says that America needs aluminum and steel to make weapons of war, and that protecting the domestic steel and aluminum industries is the only way to ensure the country will be able to defend itself if attacked.

That is pretty weak, as I (and others) have written before. But as long as Trump makes that claim—no matter how strained the logic might be—the law seems to be on his side. Invoke “national security” and the president can do what he wants with trade.

Except now Trump seems to have admitted that it’s not about national security at all. His tweet plainly states that “our Tariffs [sic] are in response to his of 270% on dairy!”

“This makes plain that it’s not about national security and it never was about national security,” says Clark Packard, a trade policy analyst for the R Street Institute, a free market think tank in Washington, D.C.

This is more than a rhetorical point. Without the “national security” argument, Trump’s authority to unilaterally impose tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum is called into question. It doesn’t mean Trump will back down, says Packard, but the tweet could create leverage for other entities—Congress, the courts, perhaps the World Trade Organization—to challenge them.

There are two plausible ways to interpret the tweet. The president could mean exactly what he says: that the steel and aluminum tariffs are a direct, tit-for-tat response to Canadian dairy tariffs. It’s also possible that he’s implying the steel and aluminum tariffs are a negotiating tactic—something he’s using as leverage to get Canada to ease up on the import taxes it charges for American milk. But neither seems to comport with the administration’s months-long effort to paint tariffs as a matter of national security.

Will that admission be enough to rouse Congress to action? Even before Trump’s weekend tweets, some Republican senators said Trump was abusing his Section 232 authority.

“Making claims regarding national security to justify what is inherently an economic question not only harms the very people we all want to help and impairs relations with our allies but also could invite our competitors to retaliate,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) wrote in a series of tweets on June 6. “If the president truly believes invoking Section 232 is necessary to protect the United States from a genuine threat, he should make the case to Congress and to the American people and do the hard work necessary to secure congressional approval.”

Corker has introduced legislation that would require the president to submit proposed Section 232 tariffs to Congress for a 60-day review period before they could be enacted. Corker’s bill would grant expedited consideration to tariff proposals, but congressional review would apply not only to future tariffs but to all Section 232 actions taken during the past two years—making this a direct attempt to rein in Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

“Imposing them under the false pretense of ‘national security’ weakens our economy, our credibility with other nations, and invites retaliation,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) said in a statement.

Corker’s bill has garnered support from both sides of the aisle and has been endorsed by a variety of interest groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation, and trade associations representing several manufacturing industries. But so far it has not been scheduled for a vote. The legislation could be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act, a major military bill that must be approved by Congress each year, The Washington Post reports.

Even if Congress does not seize the opportunity to act, there’s a chance the Trump administration could end up in court or in front of the World Trade Organization and be asked to defend the legal authority for the tariffs.

Could this end up playing out like Trump’s so-called travel ban, the first iteration of which was blocked by the court system in part because of comments and tweets from the president himself?

“Yeah, I think that’s certainly possible,” says Packard. “I hope so.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is in the headlines for joining with Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colo.)to introduce the Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States Act. That legislation would, as Warren put it in a tweet, “let states, territories, & tribes decide for themselves how best to regulate marijuana—without federal interference.”

Justice Clarence Thomas is Warren’s natural ally on the issue. He wrote an emphatic dissent in the 2005 Supreme Court case Gonzalez v. Raich. Gonzalez was President George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, and Angel Raich is an Oakland, Calif., woman who used locally grown marijuana for medical reasons.

The dissent by Thomas focused not on the advantages or disadvantages of marijuana use but on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. That clause states, “The Congress shall have Power…To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States.”

The Thomas dissent begins: “Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

Warren’s marijuana bill is a fine example. The left now loves states’ rights, or city’s rights, when it comes to immigration (“sanctuary cities”) and marijuana. Some state and local governments are also raising minimum wages, restricting access to firearms, or taking environmental measures such as banning plastic bags.

Yet the left’s support for local control is highly situational, writes Ira Stoll.

Read the whole thing here.

Last April the photographer Nan Goldin staged an anti-opioid protest at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which she targeted because of its namesake’s connection to Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin. Yet Arthur Sackler, a psychiatrist and pioneer in medical advertising, died in 1987, at which point his interest in the company that would become Purdue Pharma was sold to his brothers, Raymond and Mortimer. That was eight years before OxyContin was introduced, and Arthur’s heirs never saw a dime of profits from sales of the drug. According to Thessaly La Force, who profiles Goldin in The New York Times today, the artist is unfazed by these facts: “She says that Arthur Sackler, who ran an advertising agency that successfully marketed the drug Valium in the ’60s, essentially created the model that was later used by his brothers…to sell OxyContin for profit, ultimately at the expense of lives.”

Journalists who cover Goldin’s activism, which she attributes to an OxyContin prescription that went horribly wrong, show a similar slipperiness, gliding over the biographical details that complicate the misleading and pernicious narrative of an “opioid epidemic” driven by the accidental addiction of drug-naive patients treated for pain. La Force, unlike her Times colleague Colin Moynihan, at least acknowledges Goldin’s long history of substance abuse, which includes intermittent addiction to heroin beginning in the early 1970s, more than two decades before OxyContin existed. La Force also notes that Goldin was well aware of OxyContin’s reputation in 2014, when she received a prescription for it to treat wrist pain while living in Germany. “I had heard it was a really evil drug, but I didn’t think it would do me,” Goldin tells La Place. “I thought I had a lot of control.”

It is hard to see why, given Goldin’s earlier experience with addiction to pain pills. In 2014, the same year she received that OxyContin prescription, Goldin told The Guardian‘s Sean O’Hagan she had experienced “a few relapses” since entering rehab in 1988, “including a ‘major’ one in 2000, when she was prescribed strong painkillers for a serious injury to her hand.” La Place does not mention that episode, which shows that Goldin knew she had trouble controlling her use of pain medication long before the OxyContin prescription that she says propelled her down a path that led to a nearly fatal fentanyl overdose and into a new career as an anti-opioid activist.

Goldin herself does not mention her decades of polydrug use in her Artforum and Time essays explaining the roots of her activism. Given the way she describes her OxyContin-triggered addiction and ensuing brush with death, most readers undoubtedly will assume she fits the profile that the government presents as typical: A patient unwittingly takes a “highly addictive” drug prescribed for pain and is hooked before she knows it. “I didn’t know they’d be this addictive,” say the addicts portrayed in the federal government’s new anti-opioid ads, who deliberately injure themselves so they can get prescriptions for pain pills. “I didn’t know how far I’d go to get more.”

But the truth is that prescription opioids are not “this addictive” for most people, as this exchange between Goldin and La Place illustrates:

Goldin asked if I ever tried an opioid. I told her that in college, I took OxyContin once; it made me feel sick. She nodded. I asked her what opioids felt like for her. “They make everything all right. They’re like a padding between you and the world,” she said. “It’s this round warmth that’s covering you.” She looked away. “Everything is bearable suddenly.”

Goldin had a background of psychological trauma, emotional sensitivity, and addiction that predisposed her to abuse pain medication. But even patients with risk factors usually can take pain medication as directed without becoming addicted. As Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and A. Thomas McLellan, a former deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, noted in a 2016 New England Journal of Medicine article, “Addiction occurs in only a small percentage of persons who are exposed to opioids—even among those with preexisting vulnerabilities.”

It is accurate to present Goldin’s experience as representative of opioid addiction in the sense that her drug use involved multiple substances, predated her abuse of pain medication, and was driven by psychological problems that made life inside a warm cocoon appealing. But omitting those details reinforces the myth that the average patient who takes opioids for pain faces a high risk of addiction, which makes it harder for people to get the medicine they need to make their own lives bearable.

First California took billions of taxpayer dollars to build an unneeded, overpriced (but underbudgeted) bullet train through the middle of the state. Now, even though an operating train line doesn’t even yet exist, part of it has to be rebuilt.

For the past several years, the state has been building its first segment of a high-speed rail line near Fresno. Late last year, the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) ordered one of its contractors to stop construction of a bridge over a street and start it all over.

This apparently was all done fairly quietly. Los Angeles Times reporter Ralph Vartabedian (who has been doing excellent work documenting exactly how this gaping money pit has been growing larger and larger) just found out and wrote about the situation late last week:

In a statement, the authority said the Avenue 8 bridge design did not meet its “level of quality for a work product” and showed “signs of distress.” Some time after last September, the authority had [contractor] Tutor Perini start on an entirely different design, agency documents show. The decision has not been previously reported.

The rail authority said it is discussing who will bear the cost of the rework.

I’m guessing…Californians? The head of Tutor Perini insists that the CHSRA previously approved the bridge structure, then changed its mind. Apparently the first bridge was made with retaining walls filled with carefully packed earth and concrete support pillars. The new version they want would use poured concrete instead of soil, which is less likely to fail.

It’s also, obviously, going to be more expensive. Reason has been reporting the financial ups and downs of this train boondoggle for years. Californians may recall that the bullet train’s boosters sold it to taxpayers by getting the purported price down to $68 billion. Critics have been warning all along that the agency had dramatically underestimated the cost of building the train; this incident is a good illustration of how that happened.

The train agency has now finally admitted that the project is going to cost billions more than estimated, possibly as much as $98 billion. Oh, and it’s going to take longer to construct as well. Set your calendar for another decade, Californians! Seriously, it’s not expected to be in service until 2029. By then we’ll all have self-driving vehicles (I exaggerate—but maybe not as much as I think).

This giant boondoggle is a reminder that inflexible and expensive rail systems are not the right way to approach transit needs in a dynamic society like ours.

Unfortunately, one attempt to try to rein in the rail was just defeated at the polls. Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers have been using funds appropriated from an environmental cap-and-trade program to keep the construction going. (Voters authorized only $9 billion for the train in a ballot initiative passed in 2008.) An initiative on last week’s primary ballot would have changed the rules to require two-thirds majority approval in the legislature to distribute money from the cap-and-trade program. The ballot initiative failed miserably, meaning lawmakers still need only a basic majority vote to allocate the money.

Ass covering is the sine qua non of politics. So it is not surprising that vulnerable Republican Congressmen in blue districts have gotten off their asses before the mid-term elections to make a last ditch attempt to bypass their hardline colleagues and pass a bill legalizing Dreamers, immigrants brought here as children without proper authorization. But what is surprising is that instead of helping them, retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan, who promised Dreamers last year that he would do everything in his power to “find a way to make sure” they can “get right with the law,” is more interested in covering President Trump’s ass.

Trump last year suspended DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the Obama-era program that gave a temporary reprieve from deportation to qualified Dreamers, and told Congress to pass legislation if it wanted protections for Dreamers. That wouldn’t have been so terrible if he hadn’t then also worked with immigration hardliners to undermine Congress by demanding all kinds of poison pills—including a 40 percent cut in legal immigration—in exchange. The DACA protections expired in March and Dreamers would have been up for mass deportations had courts not intervened and forced the administration to maintain the program for now.

The Supreme Court may eventually agree to hear the case if Congress continues to dither, but in the meantime Republicans like Rep. Jeff Denham from California and Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, who are hanging by a thread in their seats, have to fight midterm elections in November.

Denham, an Air Force veteran who endorsed Trump in 2016 and has since voted with the president 97 percent of the time, including funding the wall, is particularly vulnerable. He won this Central Valley district, where Latinos are over 40 percent of the population, by a narrow 3 percentage points in 2016—and is now facing massive pushback. Papier-mache effigies and “Dump Denham” signs follow him everywhere in this Republican leaning district that is now considered a toss up.

Meanwhile, Curbelo, who is seeking a third term in a district that Hillary Clinton won by 16 points, is even more vulnerable even though the Democrat he will face in November is a virtual unknown.

So the duo has led a rebellion in the House where immigration hardliners have killed all sensible immigration reform for 12 years if it contained even the whiff of so-called amnesty, even though majorities in the House and Senate were ready to pass them—and President Bush and Obama were ready pen in hand to sign them—creating the unfortunate situation now.

They are using a rare parliamentary maneuver called the discharge petition to get four of the many DACA bills currently trapped in committee released for an up or down floor vote against the wishes of the House leadership that has shown no interest in controlling the hardliners. The bill that gets the maximum number of votes – called the Queen of Hills bill – is considered to have passed the House and is sent to the Senate. This maneuver has been used only 25 times since 1935, the last time in 2015 to revive the Ex-Im Bank, America’s enduring monument to crony capitalism, after its charter expired. If 218 lawmakers sign the discharge petition, that’ll clear the way for a floor vote. There is a very good chance that the DACA bill that’ll go forward from among the four will be one that hands the president money for some enforcement in exchange for legalizing 1.5 million or so Dreamers with an eventual path to citizenship. Among the other bills that would be up for a vote would include one that Speaker Ryan would get to pick (which, heaven forbid, would force him to actually take a position!), and another rather draconian bill favored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, that would only offer about 700,000 DACA beneficiaries—not all Dreamers—a three-year renewable nonimmigrant visa in exchange for funding for a wall, enhanced enforcement and cuts in legal immigration—in other words a nativist version of comprehensive immigration reform.

But 218 votes seemed like a tall order for a while especially since the House currently has only 428 as opposed to 435 members when it is at full strength. However, everything changed a few weeks ago when the Denham and Curbelo teamed up initially with 190 Democrats (all but three of the 193) and 23 Republicans to scrape together 213 votes for the discharge petition. Then last week, they got another two Democrats (who had been waffling because they did not want to set up a bill that might fund a border wall that would run through their districts) for a grand total of 215 votes.

There are plenty of Republicans who can make up the three-vote deficit (even if the last Democratic holdout does not hop on board) to reach the 218 threshold. These include Rep. Darrel Isa of California who has decided to retire—and Reps. Dan Donovan of New York, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Rep. Frank LoBiono of New Jersey—all of whom are middle-of-the-roaders who, along with 79 percent of Americans—and 66 percent of Republicans, support a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers.

Hence, a panicked Ryan pleaded with the discharge petition backers to hold off until he huddled with House Republicans on Thursday to see if he could rally enough of them around a bill that the president would sign. But the two-hour confab seemed to have brought the hopelessly divided Republicans no closer to a consensus because the notion of restricting legal immigration is deeply unpopular with many of them. And the POTUS, who after initially saying he’d sign anything Congress sent his way to legalize Dreamers, pulled a Trump Tower-sized switcheroo and declared that he won’t sign anything that doesn’t cut family-based immigration and end the diversity visa lottery program along with other assaults on legal immigration. And if the logjam doesn’t break today, Dunham and Curbelo are expected to go ahead and obtain the remaining signatures in the next 36 hours to move the petition forward. This will allow them to give the requisite notice to hold the petition vote on June 25.

This is Ryan’s nightmare scenario that he has done everything to avert. Indeed, by House rules, discharge petitions can only be held on the second and fourth Mondays of every month. So he reconstituted the House calendar this week so that the House met not today, June 11, but Friday so that petition backers would get only one shot this month to move their bid forward.

But why is Ryan going to such great lengths to thwart a cause that he is openly sympathetic to?

It is true that even if a Dreamer bill advances through the House, it will face an uphill battle in the Senate where the Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has, like Ryan, decided to take a stance against it. But if the House, that has distinguished itself by its decade-plus hostility to humane and pro-growth immigration policies that Reason has long championed, manages to push this bill through, McConnell’s opposition will become far less sustainable. It will put moderate Republicans in the Senate on the spot and they might well demand a vote, which, if the bill gets, it will pass.

If Trump vetoes the bill at that stage, he will further energize Democrats to the polls in November. It could well undo the recent uptick in his approval ratings thanks to the improving economy (which his trade wars with friends and foes alike are already in the process of undoing). Hence, Ryan would rather help Trump cover his ass now than put Republican control of the House in even greater jeopardy.

But it is terribly myopic to set the policy of a party based on the whim of a capricious president.

Ryan, no doubt partly because of the difficulty of working with the president, is retiring at the end of the year. If there were ever a good time to put principle above party and support the newly woke Denham and Curbelo in finally doing the right thing, this would be it. This is especially the case given that in the long run this would help take the GOP back from nativists and restore its pro-immigrabt bona fides, giving it a fighting chance to win in a rapidly diversifying America.

That he does not have the backbone to do so suggests that it is no tragedy he is leaving.

Today, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) repeal of Obama-era “net neutrality” regulations goes into effect. Critics of the repeal, passed in December, claim that these regulations were necessary to prevent abuse to consumers by big internet service providers such as as Comcast and Verizon.

Proponents of net neutrality quickly mobilized for the overturn of the FCC’s repeal, and last month, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would scrap the FCC’s decision and retain net neutrality rules. The measure passed the Senate by a 52-47 margin with Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), John Kennedy (R-La.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) voting with Democrats to pass the measure.

Activists are hoping for a similar outcome in the House of Representatives, utilizing a process known as the discharge petition to pass the House’s version of the Senate’s resolution. In most circumstances, a bill does not reach the floor of the House of Representatives until voted out of the committee in which it was assigned. But a discharge petition lets a bill get to the full floor faster by bypassing the committee process.

A discharge petition requires a total of 218 signatures from House members. As of last week, 170 expressed their support.

A statement by the pro net-neutrality group Fight for the Future declared: “June 11th will serve as the kick-off for intense campaigning focused on House lawmakers, who will be under tremendous pressure to support the [net neturality measure] ahead of the midterm elections, given that voters from across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support restoring these rules.”

Supporters of the FCC measure, such as Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota), are confident that any effects on the upcoming midterm elections will be minimal. “The fact of the matter is nothing is going to change,” Thune told Reuters after the Senate’s vote. “I don’t know how that animates people to vote if their Netflix is working.”

A coalition of pro net-neutrality organizations has named Monday, June 11, as “Neutrality Action Day,” and they’re encouraging members to spread their messages on social media and contact their local representatives in the House.

Yet in spite of these mobilization efforts, their chances of getting the FCC measure overturned remain slim. Even if the bill passes the House of Representatives, it heads to the White House where chances are nearly impossible that President Trump signs the resolution eliminating the first major act of deregulation of his administration.

“There is no Republican Party,” said former House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, at a recent policy conference in Michigan. “There’s a Trump Party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

On Tuesday, Virginians will find out how accurate Boehner’s statement is here. The GOP Senate primary has boiled down to a contest between Nick Freitas, a hardcore conservative and former Army Ranger, and Corey Stewart, a braggadocious blowhard so intemperate the Trump campaign fired him. (A third candidate, E.W. Jackson, also is running.)

Freitas served two tours in Iraq with one of the most elite fighting units the world has ever seen. On issue after issue, he takes a resoundingly conservative position. In early March, he infuriated Democrats when he gave a speech (since viewed more than 11 million times) objecting to their linking gun rights with Nazism and racial segregation. If Democrats really want an “open and honest debate” about guns, he said, then they should “start with a certain degree of mutual respect.” A. Barton Hinkle discusses the race.

View this article.