Category: reason

President Donald Trump gave a hedged endorsement to marijuana federalism bill this morning while speaking with reporters on the White House Lawn.

The bill in question, known as the Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States or (STATES) act, was introduced yesterday by Sens. Corey Gardner (R-Colo.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), both of whom represent states that have legalized recreational marijuana.

Their legislation would amend the Controlled Substances Act to make it inapplicable in those states, federal territories, and tribal lands that have passed some form of marijuana legalization. It would also open the financial sector to state-legal cannabusinesses, many of whom are unable to access credit, buy insurance, or even deposit cash in banks.

Asked if he supported the bill, Trump said: “I really do. I support Sen. Gardner. I know exactly what he’s doing. We’re looking at it, but we’ll probably end up supporting that, yes.”

Trump’s comment “is a big deal,” says Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), a pro-legalization group. “This legislation is the first bicameral, bipartisan bill ever introduced at the federal level.”

The Trump administration has had a rocky relationship with state-legal marijuana. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been explicit in his hostility to legalization efforts. In January he rescinded Obama-era guidelines that deprioritized enforcement of federal marijuana laws in states that had legalized it.

Gardner was critical of the move at the time. The senator then spent several months in conversation with the White House, attempting to craft legislation that could win the president’s support. The STATES Act is the product of that effort.

“It’s a first step, but it’s a big first step,” says Altieri. “It would essentially codify the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment [which forbids the Justice Department from spending money going after state-legal medical marijuana efforts] but extend that” to states that have legalized recreational pot.

With Trump’s seeming endorsement of the legislation, drug reformers eyes now move to Congress, where either Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or House Speaker Paul Ryan could stall the bill.

“We hope these bills will be given the attention they deserve. If lawmakers base their decisions on the facts, there is no reason they wouldn’t happen,” says Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project.

It looks like Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is continuing his predecessor’s war on leaks, including when it results in secret snooping on journalists.

A former aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee, James A. Wolfe, has been arrested and charged with lying to the FBI about contacts with several reporters. One of them, Ali Watkins, a former BuzzFeed writer now working at The New York Times, had reported for BuzzFeed last year that Russian spies attempted to recruit former Trump aide Carter Page.

The Department of Justice was trying to track down who has been leaking information about these investigations. According to the indictment, Wolfe told the FBI he didn’t have contact with several reporters (including Watkins) who had been writing about Page. That, the FBI says, is not true. Turns out Wolfe had dated Watkins for three years and they had a history of private communications.

The FBI had secretly seized records of Watkins’ communications with Wolfe. According to The New York Times, they didn’t have the contents of Watkins communications, just the metadata showing proof that they were in contact with each other. They do have the content of the communications on Wolfe’s side, showing him sending positive messages to journalists about their reporting on Page. Their knowledge even extends messages sent via the encrypted app Signal. Watkins has said that Wolfe was not the source of the classified information she had received.

Wolfe has not, as of yet, been indicted for leaking. He is charged only with lying to FBI agents.

The media coverage is, predictably, very concerned that the Justice Department secretly collected records of Watkins’ communications. From the Times‘ report:

News media advocates consider the idea of mining a journalist’s records for sources to be an intrusion on First Amendment freedoms, and prosecutors acknowledge it is one of the most delicate steps the Justice Department can take. “Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy, and communications between journalists and their sources demand protection,” said Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman.

Ms. Watkins’s personal lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, said: “It’s always disconcerting when a journalist’s telephone records are obtained by the Justice Department—through a grand jury subpoena or other legal process. Whether it was really necessary here will depend on the nature of the investigation and the scope of any charges.”

If the manner by which the Justice Department pursued these records sounds familiar, it should: Something similar happened in 2013 when the Justice Department collected two months of phone records from Associated Press reporters to try to track down the source of a leak about a CIA operation in Yemen.

President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice set the stage for this behavior, so this isn’t a case of Trump “normalizing” snooping on the press. This was normalized under Obama.

In other contexts, there’s been a tendency for people in the media to scream outrage over behavior by the Trump administration that was downplayed when Obama did the same thing. But that isn’t the case here. A lot of the establishment press loved Obama, but not as much as it loved itself. The Obama administration’s ruthless efforts to track down and prosecute leakers (or at least those who leaked without the administration’s approval) got significant media coverage during his administration. And the Times coverage of Wolfe’s arrest does not ignore how Obama got this ball rolling.

Given how leaky the government is under the Trump administration, we may see future arrests like this. It’s an important reminder for leakers and journalists alike to be careful with your communication systems and operational security. If you use encrypted methods to talk to the press (or with sources), make sure you know how they actually work.

Recycling the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by turning it back into fuel would help slow the process of global warming. An earlier estimate calculated that direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide would be prohibitively expensive at least $600 per ton. But now Carbon Engineering, located in the British Columbia, has published a detailed engineering and cost analysis of its pilot DAC plant that suggests that its technology can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for $94 to $232 per ton.

The low-end figure is based on a scenario in which electrolysis using no-carbon energy sources breaks apart water to provide both the oxygen and—crucially—the hydrogen needed to combine with the captured carbon dioxide to produce hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline and diesel. Although a lot of media reports on the study jumped immediately to the happy idea that drivers might one day be able to choose between regular, premium, or carbon-free gasoline, the company does not include in its article an engineering cost estimate for transforming the captured carbon dioxide into liquid fuels.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reported in 2016 that electrolysis using wind power could provide hydrogen at a cost of about $4.50 per kilogram. A very, very rough calculation is that 1,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide is composed of about 270 kilograms of carbon. Carbon makes up approximately 86 percent of the weight of gasoline and hydrogen the rest. So a gallon of gasoline weighs about 3.8 kilograms, of which 0.53 kilograms is hydrogen. Again roughly, it would take about 50 kilograms of hydrogen to transform 270 kilograms of carbon into 320 kilograms of gasoline—85 gallons of gas. The NREL’s cost for that much hydrogen comes to $225 plus the $94 to capture the carbon dioxide. This would imply a cost of $3.75 per gallon.

That’s in the ballpark of the figures offered by Carbon Engineering. The company claims that its scaled-up air-to-fuel system would be able to produce gasoline at about $1 per liter ($3.80 per gallon). It will interesting to see its calculations for the synthetic fuel pilot plant in a future publication. Just for comparison, the price of gasoline in California averages $3.70 and in British Columbia it runs about $4.27 per gallon (in U.S. dollars).

Unabated climate change could become a significant problem later in this century. This prospect encourages a claque of climate doomsters to demand that we degrow the world’s economy in order to avert catastrophe. But climate change will not be unabated forever. Whether or not Carbon Engineering’s DAC system works out, it does indicate how human ingenuity and continued economic growth will likely make most of the problems associated with climate change manageable.

President Donald Trump appears to have heard the applause he received for pardoning Alice Johnson, the 63-year-old who served more than two decades in prison for a nonviolent drug offense before Trump commuted her life sentence this week.

Now Trump says he wants to issue more pardons—not just for politically aligned celebrities but for real people who have been unfairly imprisoned. And he says he wants input from players in the National Football League who have been protesting the national anthem. Yes, really.

“I am going to ask them to recommend to me people that were unfairly treated” by the justice system, Trump said to reporters outside the White House this morning. “And I am going to take a look at those applications.”

If those people have been unfairly treated by the system, Trump said, his administration would seek to “pardon them, or at least let them out.” He said the offer was an opportunity for the national anthem protests to be more than just talk.

It’s worth noting that the anthem protests began two years ago as a way to raise public awareness about innocent African Americans killed by cops. That’s something that even the mighty power of the presidential pardon can’t fix.

Whether Trump’s offer helps reduce tensions between the president and professional football players has yet to be seen. It’s also somewhat beside the point. If it opens a dialogue, great. The more important development here is Trump’s apparent willingness to embrace the presidential pardon as the ultimate check on America’s runaway incarceration problem (even though the president has, at other times, embraced ideas that cut the other way).

Even without input from NFL players, Trump will likely be issuing more pardons in the near future. The administration has prepared the pardoning paperwork for at least 30 people, CNN reported Wednesday.

“There will be more pardons,” Trump said Friday morning. Specifically, Trump said he was considering a pardon for the late boxer Muhammad Ali—who already had his conviction for draft evasion overturned by the Supreme Court—along with “some others, some folks who have sentences that are unfair.”

“We hope the president acts boldly here,” says Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

Ring praised Trump for doing the right thing by commuting Johnson’s sentence. “There are thousands of others who received excessive sentences, who pose no threat to public safety any longer, and deserve the same chance to rejoin their families and resume their lives,” he tells Reason.

Trump has spent most of his first year and a half in office being frustrated by the limits of presidential power. Even though the modern presidency is far more powerful than the Constitution appears to allow, Trump has learned repeatedly that his word isn’t always law. Executive orders can be held up in court, repealing Obamacare or overhauling the tax code requires congressional assent, and shifting trade policy requires investigations, reports, and hearings. For all the ink that has been spilled about Trump upending the rule of law, the systems designed to check presidential ambitions (at least the ones that Congress hasn’t deliberately kneecapped over the years) still work pretty well.

But the power of the pardon is different. It’s a virtually unchecked—and completely constitutional—tool of the presidency. Trump can wield it pretty much however he chooses, as he seems to be figuring out. (For now, let’s set aside the question of whether Trump has the authority to pardon himself, something he reiterated this morning that he thinks he has the authority to do.)

“The pardons are a very positive things for a president,” Trump said Friday. “The power to pardon is a beautiful thing.”

Already, the media is thick with conspiracy theories about Trump’s sudden interest in the power of the pardon. Maybe Trump is doing this to create a better case for pardoning anyone caught up in Robert Mueller’s investigation. Maybe he’s doing this to impress Kim Kardashian. Maybe he’s doing it to piss off Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

I don’t know. And I’m willing to bet that if the name of one of your loved ones was on the list Trump says he’s reviewing, you wouldn’t care.

These days, it’s accepted wisdom that—after 20 years of political and demographic changes—California is a one-party state and that Republicans can do well only in a narrowing group of legislative and local races. New figures show that Republicans now trail independents in the registration game, which has got to hurt the party’s image. And, most strikingly, the GOP has a tough time fielding top-tier candidates to run for the plum governor’s spot.

California did have a two-term Republican governor named Arnold Schwarzenegger, who preceded Jerry Brown’s return to power in 2011. That was fewer than eight years ago, although Schwarzenegger was an outlier—a moderate Republican movie star who won a free-for-all election after a bizarre recall of a sitting governor. Even then, however, it was already an accepted belief that the GOP needed big-name celebrity candidates to have a shot any more.

This year, ironically, it’s a buttoned-down, little-known businessman named John Cox who is shaking up the race in a relatively new “top two” system that had everyone fighting for the second spot. (The top two vote-getters in the June primary face off in the November general election, regardless of their party affiliation.) Cox surged past former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and on Tuesday and gained the right to challenge Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, despite massive spending on attack ads by a Super PAC funded by Villaraigosa backers. Newsom had 33 percent of the vote, with Cox gaining 26 percent. Villaraigosa was in third with less than 14 percent.

Stephen Greenhut sat down with Cox this week to ask whether the Republican has a hope of winning the governorship this year.

Read the whole thing here.

Anthony Bourdain, host of the food and travel shows Parts Unknown and No Reservations, author of the imminently readable memoir Kitchen Confidential, and friend of this magazine, was found dead of an apparent suicide Friday in a hotel room in France. He was 61.

The reactions on social media seem—for now, at least—to be universally sorrowful, which speaks to the joy and intensity and courage he exuded as an ambassador for both American brashness and a unique kind of culinary cultural relativism.

He was a proponent of peace and free exchange who used his platform to redirect America’s attention to the places we ravaged and then forgot about. He loved Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; he despised Henry Kissinger.

Bourdain was also a friend of liberty at home and, in his later years, an increasingly empathetic person. In an interview he gave to Reason shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, he expressed not just displeasure with the outcome but compassion for people who felt Trump could save them from something:

When people are afraid and feel that their government has failed them they do things that seem completely mad and unreasonable to those of who are perhaps under less pressure. As unhappy and surprised as I am with the outcome, I’m empathetic to the forces that push people towards what I see as an ultimately self-destructive act. Berlusconi, Putin, Duterte, the world is filled with bad choices, made in pressured times.

In that same interview he gave a nuanced response to the animal rights activists who have chided him for his nonjudgmental approach to cultures where animals are treated poorly:

One thing I constantly found in my travels, which is ignored by animal activism, is that where people live close to the edge, they are struggling to feed their families, and are living under all varieties of pressures that are largely unknown to these activists personally. Where people are suffering, animals who live in their orbit are suffering terribly. In cultures where people don’t have the luxury of considering the feelings of a chicken, they tend to treat them rather poorly. Dogs do not live good lives in countries where people are starving and oppressed. Maybe if we spent a little of [our] attention on how humans live, I think as a consequence many of these people would have the luxury to think beyond their immediate needs, like water to drink and wash, and food to live. A little more empathy for human beings to balance out this overweening concern for puppies would be a more moral and effective strategy.

In the last year, he became a staunch supporter of women who have survived sexual assault and harassment, not because he’s a saint but because he “met one extraordinary woman with an extraordinary and painful story, who introduced [him] to a lot of other women with extraordinary stories and suddenly it was personal.” His alignment with the #MeToo movement came with a healthy dose of public regret about the times throughout his career in which he turned a blind eye to female friends and coworkers who were mistreated by men in the food industry.

He also believed in the First Amendment, regardless of what the speaker had to say. “I support your inalienable right to say really stupid, offensive shit and believe really stupid, offensive shit that I don’t agree with,” Bourdain said when Boston Mayor Tom Menino pledged to ban Chik-fil-A from his city because company president Dan Cathy opposed same-sex marriage. “I support that [right], and I might even eat your chicken sandwich.”

He despised food nannies, telling Reason contributor Baylen Linnekin in 2006 that Chicago’s foie gras ban was a waste of concern. “You know, we’re force-feeding people in Guantanamo Bay and there are people worrying that we’re feeding a duck too much?” (Check out our Bourdain archives here.)

In 2007, he spoke with Reason.tv about the government’s efforts to “infantilize” consumers via food regulations and his “libertarian instincts.”

Bourdain also praised the immigrant work ethic—another reason it is so devastating to lose him now. In 2000’s Kitchen Confidential, he wrote about the essential role immigrants have played in the evolution of America’s food scene and how America has benefited by providing opportunities to people fleeing war and poverty. The “exile” class of line cooks—”Refugees, usually emigres and immigrants for whom cooking is preferable to death squads, poverty or working in a sneaker factory for two dollars a day”—were some of his favorite characters in the kitchen. He even preferred them to culinary masterminds:

When a job applicant starts telling me how Pacific Rim cuisine turns him on and inspires him, I see trouble coming. Send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. I can teach him to cook. I can’t teach character. Show up at work on time six months in a row and we’ll talk about red curry paste and lemongrass. Until then, I have four words for you: “Shut the fuck up.”

There’s so much more to say about Bourdain’s legacy, but I think I’m going to heed his advice. He never was one for self-aggrandizement.

A 75-year-old woman who needs a cane to get around was jailed in Marietta, Georgia, this week for threatening to report a code enforcement officer to his superiors.

At least that’s what Gloria Walker told WSB-TV’s Matt Johnson. Marietta Police Department Officer Chuck McPhilamy has a different perspective: He claims that Walker was making “terroristic threats.” That’s what she’s been charged with—making terroristic threats.

“Certainly, we aren’t looking to charge someone who is 75 years old who is reaching out for help,” McPhilamy told Johnson, “but it’s also a day and age where we can’t simply ignore someone making threats.”

The dispute between Walker and the code enforcement officer occurred on May 29. Walker, who says she calls code enforcement a lot to complain about her neighbors, got into an argument with the man and said, “I’m getting someone to get you.”

Here’s Walker to Channel 2:

“He said he was an ex-police officer,” Walker told Channel 2 Action News. “I would be stupid to say anything terroristic against an ex-police officer.”

“I said, ‘I told you I’m going to take care of that little matter,'” she said. “And he said, ‘Are you threatening me?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not threatening you. You threaten me all the time.'”

Walker sounds like a cantankerous pain in the ass, and people who narc on their neighbors to code enforcement are often crummy neighbors themselves. But between Walker’s description of events, the police department’s tepid defense of the charges, and the pictures and footage that WSB-TV published, arresting Walker—to say nothing of charging her with terroristic threats—was an abuse of power and a waste of resources.

So she calls code enforcement too often? Put her number on a list and tell dispatchers to wave her off. So she gave a code enforcement officer guff? Let her call his supervisor. The department clearly knows she’s abusing the system. But putting an elderly hobbled woman in jail for being a cranky nuisance is obscene. Did she have a history of affiliating with terrorists or making terroristic threats? What evidence, exactly, does the Marietta Police Department have that shows Walker poses a danger to anyone? My guess is none, because if they had even a shred beyond her cryptic remark—which Walker denies making—we’d have heard it about it by now.

This looks like is a textbook case of trying to teach someone a lesson. Walker likes to push city employees around? Let’s show her the inside of a jail cell and see if that fixes her attitude. Maybe the city plans to ask a judge to put Walker on probation, and to make a prohibition on calling code enforcement be one of her conditions. (If a judge can order an adult defendant to stop smoking cigarettes, surely they can ban calling a city office.)

Regardless of what the city plans to do—I’ll be shocked if they don’t drop the charges before the case goes to court—this is an irresponsible use of police power that suggests a lack of patience and maturity on the part of city employees. You could say the same thing about Walker’s incessant complaining, but she doesn’t have the power to throw people in a police cruiser, haul them to jail, make them post bail, and publish their mugshots online. The standards for the government are and should be higher.

One of the most notable things about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion this week in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission is the fact that it denied everybody what they wanted most.

Masterpiece Cakeshop owner and operator Jack Phillips wanted the Court to say that his right to religious liberty prevents the state from compelling him to create same-sex wedding cakes, since that would force him to violate his deeply held religious beliefs. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission wanted the Court to make clear that Phillips’ argument for religious liberty cannot and indeed must not trump the state’s anti-discrimination laws. If Phillips wants to sell wedding cakes, the state maintained, he must sell them to all comers regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Kennedy’s opinion said none of those things. Here is what it did say:

The Court’s precedents make clear that the baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, might have his right to the free exercise of religion limited by generally applicable laws. Still, the delicate question of when the free exercise of religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power needed to be determined in an adjudication in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor in the balance that the State sought to reach. That requirement, however, was not met here. When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission decided this case, it did not do so with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires.

Translation: Phillips won, but he did not come anywhere close to winning on the principal legal argument that he advanced. What is more, Phillips’ principal legal argument might well lose in a future version of the case (or then again it might not) so long as the government’s proceedings against him manage to avoid the taint of anti-religious bias. The real fight has been postponed until an unknown later date.

This result has left both sides feeling disappointed. But here’s the thing about that: Disappointing everybody is a classic Kennedy move. Indeed, it’s one of the hallmarks of his jurisprudence. Over the years, Kennedy has managed to dash the hopes and dreams of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike.

Consider his rulings on abortion.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Kennedy famously co-authored the plurality opinion that is widely credited with saving Roe v. Wade (1973) from being overturned. Casey both reaffirmed that abortion is a fundamental right and held that government regulations may not “impose an undue burden on the right.”

Abortion rights advocates cheered that ruling and gave kudos to Kennedy. Yet in 2007 those same advocates were left reeling by Kennedy’s majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act signed by President George W. Bush. They felt like Kennedy betrayed them.

Anti-abortion advocates were of course pleased by the result in Carhart, though they too felt the Kennedy sting. That’s because Carhart reaffirmed the central holding of Casey. As Kennedy declared in his Carhart ruling, the government may not impose “an undue burden, which exists if a regulation’s ‘purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.'” Kennedy disheartened the anti-abortion forces even as he handed them a victory.

As for libertarians, Kennedy’s tie-breaking fifth vote in favor of eminent domain in Kelo v. City of New London still rankles. “The most frustrating justice for us was Kennedy,” Institute for Justice lawyer Scott Bullock told me. Bullock represented Susette Kelo and the other property owners in their fight against the government land grab. “I felt like I was just not making any progress with him during the [oral] argument, and he just did not seem to be really troubled by this.”

Bullock expected Kennedy to be more receptive because Kennedy’s previous jurisprudence had been generally hawkish in defense of property rights. In United States v. James Daniel Good Real Prop. (1993), for example, Kennedy had declared, “individual freedom finds tangible expression in property rights.” But that version of Kennedy was totally AWOL from Kelo. As far as libertarians were concerned, Kennedy stabbed them in the back.

So Masterpiece Cakeshop is hardly the first time that Justice Kennedy has managed to disappoint everybody. The question is whether it will be the last time. Rumors of Kennedy’s retirement are currently circulating around Washington. Should he step down later this month, Masterpiece Cakeshop would be one of his final opinions. As a swan song for his mercurial career on the bench, Kennedy could do worse.

As Trump heads to the G7 meeting, he’s still obsessing about Russia. After heckling Canada about the War of 1812 earlier this week, President Donald Trump is headed up to our northern neighbor to meet with other world leaders for the G-7 summit. It is not expected to go smoothly.

The American President may not mind being isolated, but neither do we mind signing a 6 country agreement if need be. Because these 6 countries represent values, they represent an economic market which has the weight of history behind it and which is now a true international force https://t.co/UA86fcjozs

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 7, 2018

Please tell Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron that they are charging the U.S. massive tariffs and create non-monetary barriers. The EU trade surplus with the U.S. is $151 Billion, and Canada keeps our farmers and others out. Look forward to seeing them tomorrow.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2018

This morning, however, Trump seemed to be in high spirits about the day’s events:

Canada charges the U.S. a 270% tariff on Dairy Products! They didn’t tell you that, did they? Not fair to our farmers!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2018

Looking forward to straightening out unfair Trade Deals with the G-7 countries. If it doesn’t happen, we come out even better!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2018

I am heading for Canada and the G-7 for talks that will mostly center on the long time unfair trade practiced against the United States. From there I go to Singapore and talks with North Korea on Denuclearization. Won’t be talking about the Russian Witch Hunt Hoax for a while!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2018

But Trump himself couldn’t stop talking about Russia on Friday morning, suggesting to reporters that it was unfair to exclude Vladimir Putin from the gathering:

It doesn’t matter what you call it. It used to be G-8, now Russia is out. Why are we having a meeting without Russia? Would recommend Russia should be a part of it.

The summit, which takes place in the Quebec town of La Malbaie, has drawn a wave of Quebec City protests that are being reported alternately as “mostly peaceful” and as a night of “violent protesters throw[ing] flares and burn[ing] flags in standoff with police.”

FREE MARKETS

The final nails in pot prohibition’s coffin? The “Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States” (STATES) Act, introduced by Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) yesterday, would “amend the Controlled Substances Act to provide for a new rule regarding” marijuana. Under the bipartisan proposal, the federal ban on weed would “not apply to any person acting in compliance with State law relating to the manufacture, production, possession, distribution, dispensation, administration, or delivery of marihuana.”

At a press conference, Gardner complained that cannabis entrepreneurs in states where weed is legal “can’t get a bank loan or set up a bank account because of the concern over the conflict between the state and federal law. We need to fix this public hypocrisy.”

See Gardner and Warren’s full statements below:

It’s time to reform American’s outdated marijuana policies. Watch live as @SenCoryGarder and I discuss our new legislation that would let states, territories, & tribes decide for themselves how best to regulate marijuana – without federal interference. https://t.co/BVcvxomhld

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 7, 2018

FREE MINDS

The first known DoJ seizure of email and phone records of a reporter in the Trump era is of a NYT reporter. The seizure went back to an email account associated with her college years. https://t.co/tYurANaIFT

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 8, 2018

“A former Senate Intelligence Committee aide was arrested on Thursday in an investigation of classified information leaks where prosecutors also secretly seized years’ worth of a New York Times reporter’s phone and email records,” the Times reported on Thursday.

QUICK HITS

• The Trump administration filed a court brief yesterday calling the preexisting conditions provision of Obamacare unconstitutional.
• The U.S. is ramping up aggression in Afghanistan again. “The Afghan government’s unilateral halt to attacks on the Taliban is giving U.S. counterterrorism forces a chance to intensify combat operations against Islamic State-affiliated extremists,” reports The Washington Post on Army Gen. John Nicholson’s Friday remarks.
• In Norwalk, Connecticut, bail for prostitution is set 100 times higher than bail for a marijuana charge.
• Crime in Louisville, Kentucky, is down despite massive cuts to the number of police officers on patrol.
• Maryland gubernatorial candidate Richard Madaleno just delivered America’s first TV campaign ad featuring a same-sex kiss.
• President Trump: “You have a lot of people in the NFL in particular … they’re not proud enough to stand for our national anthem … I’m gonna ask all of those people to recommend to me … people that they think were unfairly treated by the justice system and… I’m gonna take a look at those applications.”
• Happy Friday! If you need a recipe for cannabis-infused cocktails, classic pot brownies, or prison hooch this weekend, we’ve got you covered.

Almost every president in the last 40 years has declared zero-tolerance for something or the other to advance his pet cause. For most people, this is a feel-good slogan that doesn’t mean much. That, however, is mistaken.

Zero tolerance is a uniquely horrible approach that has wreaked havoc wherever and whenever it’s been deployed whether to fight drugs (Ronald Reagan), school violence (Bill Clinton), or, now, immigration (Donald Trump). (Colleges and companies too have ruined lives and upended livelihoods by taking a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment, racism etc.)

Its fundamental premise, I note in The Week, is that the cause these policies aim to advance is so righteous that authorities have impunity to go after minor offenses with maximal force. It hands those in position of power carte blanche to act lawlessly themselves to make everyone else live by the rules: Rule of law for ordinary mortals, but more power for them, the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen in a democratic republic.

Hence, toddlers who bring toy guns to schools—or non-violent drug offenders like Alice Johnson whose life-sentence Trump just commuted because Kim Kardashian was moved by her plight—get savagely prosecuted while the authorities make out like bandits through civil asset forfeiture laws.

So no one should be surprised that when the world’s most powerful leader deploys these policies against the world’s most powerless people—migrants—the results are deeply ugly as people fleeing violence and poverty are treated like Pablo Escobar, thrown in detention camps, their kids ripped from them.

Go here to read the whole thing.