Category: reason

Constitutional crisis or politics as usual? President Trump’s Monday morning tweetstorm about the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has struck some critical observers as beyond the man’s usual bluster. Trump has long posited as fact an Obama-era FBI conspiracy to eavesdrop on his campaign. This week he demanded that DOJ look into the alleged operation.

“Stop waiting for the constitutional crisis that President Trump is sure to provoke,” writes Eugene Robinson at Real Clear Politics today. “It’s here.”

Robinson sees Trump’s demands for a DOJ investigation as “transparently political” and a “gross misuse of his presidential authority,” designed to cast doubt on special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s probe into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Rather than push back and defend the rule of law,” laments Robinson, “Justice tried to mollify the president by at least appearing to give him what he wants,” while “Republican leadership in Congress has been silent as a mouse. This is how uncrossable lines are crossed.”

Indeed, this “may be the first Department of Justice criminal investigation ordered via Twitter feed,” as Paul Callan writes at CNN.

And yet we’ve seen Trump behave like this quite a few times before, making grand proclamations about everything from transgender troops to world affairs without first consulting his cabinet or going through proper PR channels. In the end, Trump’s wants wound up taking typical bureaucratic, legislative, and/or judicial paths to fruition—when they’ve come to fruition at all. Some people—perhaps including Trump himself—may think the president can change policy via social-media decree, but (so far at least) this isn’t the case.

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 20, 2018

As usual, there are some folks taking issue not with the actual substance of Trump’s demands but the way he made them. CNN’s Callan writes that Trump using Twitter to announce important criminal justice news is “inappropriate” because it “trivializes the entire process.”

Personally, I’d rather Trump keep “saying the quiet parts loud,” so to speak. It gives the public a good insight into presidential priorities; gives Trump a good opportunity to self-sabotage by contradicting carefully crafted legal justifications for things; and sends his advisers and staff scrambling to clean up after or justify the president’s outbursts, which seems like a more benign use of time than whatever else they might get up to in the White House. In a way, it diminishes the importance of presidential declarations. Rather than appearing as an all-powerful authoritarian nightmare, Trump seems an impotent, embittered senior citizen, isolated and ranting from behind his various screens while the machinery of government keeps churning out its typical crap and constitutional checks and balances do their thing.

I may be pathologically convinced that nothing is new and everyone should calm down (whatever it is we’re talking about), but a lot of popular pundits and press have laughably goldfish-like memories when it comes to the president. Here’s The New York Times Editorial Board yesterday:

Putting aside the cartoonish language (“I hereby demand”? Really?), consider the seriousness of the threat posed by a president ordering federal law enforcement officials to investigate the people who are investigating him.

Consider the seriousness! And yet… Trump has been calling for exactly that since he got in office a year and a half ago. On Twitter and just about every other medium. No constitutional crisis yet. Is it just the “cartoonish language” that has everyone so scared this time? (Are they actually scared, or is it a mix of moral performance and economic incentives to scare other people? I can never quite tell.)

In any event, things outside Trump’s Twitter feed seem to be business as usual right now. White House officials announced yesterday that some Republican congressional leaders will be able to view some of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative documents. Specifically, they’ll get a glimpse of dirt related to the FBI informant who fed the agency information on the overseas activities of Trump-world folks in 2016.

Meanwhile, a Monday meeting in the Oval Office between Justice Department officials and the president ended with a promise that DOJ’s inspector general would look into any “irregularities,” according to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Some are reading it as a response to Trump’s tweets, but “the White House characterized the meeting as routine, and said it was scheduled last week,” reports USA Today.

FREE MINDS

Another round of primary races run today. Voters in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas head to the polls today. Texans will re-vote on races where no candidate got a majority in March. The other three states see contests that “include a handful of congressional districts critical to Democrats’ chances to win back the chamber,” points out Politico.

Two battleground districts in particular—in Lexington, Kentucky, and outside Houston—feature examples of the continuing battle between establishment Democrats and insurgent candidates, who are proudly spurning party bigwigs in their efforts to win primaries. Meanwhile, in Georgia, Democrats are poised to nominate an African-American woman for governor five months after winning a special Senate election in neighboring Alabama—a victory the party credits, in large part, to black women, who voted resoundingly for now-Sen. Doug Jones. Former state Rep. Stacey Abrams would be the first African-American woman to serve as a governor, and the first elected African-American governor in the deep South of any gender.

FREE MARKETS

Cord-cutting consumers happier than cable customers. Cable and internet service providers are among the most disliked companies in the country—a 2014 survey found them at the bottom of the Consumer Satisfaction Index and falling. In spite—or perhaps because—of this, TV and movie streaming services earn extremely high marks from consumers. An April 2017 through March 2018 survey found “video-streaming services scored among the highest in the telecommunications categories tracked by the American Customer Satisfaction Index,” reports Qz.

Twenty-eighteen was the first year the index assessed video-streaming services, and the category debuted with a score of 75 on the scale of 100; scores for both subscription TV and internet services fell 3% in the last year.

The Internet and Subscription TV satisfaction ratings were only 62 each. Faring slightly better (but not as well as streaming services) were “traditional pay-TV services like AT&T’s DirecTV, Verizon’s Fios, and Comcast’s Xfinity,” notes Qz. They got a 68. Among streaming platforms, Netflix, Sony Playstation Vue, and Twitch earned the highest consumer satisfaction marks (78/100), followed by Apple iTunes and the Microsoft Store with a 77, YouTube Red with a 76, and Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Hulu, and Vudu with a 75.

QUICK HITS

• Trump refuses to use a secure phone for personal communications, several White House officials tell Politico. Trump “uses at least two iPhones,” including “one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites.”
• Christian schools get an exemption from the Obamacare birth control mandate.
• Florida city spokesman Ben Kerr would like to “reiterate that Lake Worth does not have any zombie activity currently,” after a middle-of-the-night alert told Lake Worth residents otherwise.
• China is dropping all limits on how many children a family can have.
• Actress Charlize Theron will star as anchor Megyn Kelly in a movie about Fox News founder Roger Ailes.
• Liberal economic logic: “If nannies were taxed the government would have more money to provide nannies with benefits.”
• Ohio lawmakers want to raise the fine for soliciting prostitution from $500 to $2,500 and triple the jail time possible as punishment.
• The Post Office is issuing scratch-and-sniff stamps.

The Justice Department has taken California to court over its status as a “sanctuary state,” a term that refers to places where state and local officials refuse to participate in the enforcement of federal immigration laws. In a speech announcing the suit, Attorney General Jeff Sessions accused the Golden State of creating “an open borders system,” something he denounced as “a radical, irrational idea that cannot be accepted.” Unfortunately for Sessions, his case appears to suffer from a significant constitutional defect, writes Damon Root in the latest print edition of Reason.

View this article.

For 25 years. Meanley and Son Hardware in San Diego has had a popcorn machine and offered free popcorn to customers. That tradition has come to an end thanks to a local health inspector, who found the store was serving food without a license. The inspector ordered store owners to get a license to serve food, which would require installing a three-basin sink, or to remove the popcorn machine and stop giving away the popcorn.

The deaths, in the same week, of the great scholar of the Middle East Bernard Lewis and the great scholar of Russia Richard Pipes are a warning to American conservatives: don’t give up on the universities.

Lewis and Pipes are being rightfully remembered for their influence as advisers to presidents and senators, and as public intellectuals who wrote for newspaper op-ed pages and political magazines. Lewis was Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Pipes was Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University.

These universities and others like them are deeply unpopular at the moment among Republicans in Washington and nationwide. The tax bill enacted late last year by President Trump and congressional Republicans includes a new 1.4% tax on university endowment income, targeting well endowed institutions such as Harvard and Princetone. A 2017 Pew Poll found a sharp increase in the share of Republicans who say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country. An April 2018 study by the National Association of Scholars concluded faculty at liberal arts colleges skewed so overwhelmingly Democratic that “the solution to viewpoint homogeneity may lie in establishing new colleges from the ground up, rather than in reforming existing ones.”

Conservatives complain that today’s universities aren’t producing scholars like Pipes or Lewis, or that those who do manage to get doctorates wind up working at magazines or think tanks instead of finding tenure-track academic jobs at prestigious institutions. If so, the examples of Lewis and Pipes make the case for engagement, rather than writing off academia altogether, writes Ira Stoll.

Read the whole thing.

“Should employees and employers be allowed to agree that any disputes between them will resolve through one-on-one arbitration? Or should employees always be permitted to bring their claims in class or collective actions, no matter what they agreed with their employees?”

That’s how Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch summarized the dispute at the heart of today’s 5-4 ruling in Epic Systems Corporation v. Lewis. Writing for a sharply divided Court, Gorsuch held that employees and employers have the legal right to make employment contracts that include one-on-one arbitration. Gorsuch’s majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.

The legal puzzle in the case was how to best interpret the language of two far-reaching federal statutes. Under the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 (FAA), arbitration agreements made between employers and employees “shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable” by the courts. Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), employees have the right to form and join labor unions and “to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” In other words, if a labor contract that includes an individual arbitration agreement is valid under the FAA, does it become invalid when the NLRA is factored in?

Justice Gorsuch thought not. “In the Federal Arbitration Act, Congress has instructed federal courts to enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms—including terms providing for individualized proceedings,” he wrote. “Nor can we agree with the employees’ suggestion that the [NLRB] offers a conflicting command. It is this Court’s duty to interpret Congress’s statutes as a harmonious whole rather than at war with one another.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, offered a very different view. “Enacted later in time, the NLRA should qualify as ‘an implied repeal’ of the FAA, to the extent of any genuine conflict.” According to Ginsburg, the best reading of applicable federal law in this case is that “employees must have the capacity to act collectively in order to match their employers’ clout in setting terms and conditions of employment.”

Upping the rhetorical ante, Ginsburg then accused Gorsuch of seeking to resurrect the Supreme Court’s pre-New Deal “Lochner-era contractual ‘liberty’ decisions.” Lochner refers to Lochner v. New York, the 1905 Supreme Court ruling which invalidated a state economic regulation on the grounds that it served no legitimate public health or safety purpose. In certain legal circles, to call something Lochner-ian is to dismiss it as tantamount to “judicial activism.” Among those who have deployed the case in this insulting fashion was the late conservative legal thinker Robert Bork, who attacked Lochner as “the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.” Ginsburg favorably cited Bork in her dissent today.

In his majority opinion, Gorsuch responded directly to this critique. According to Ginsburg’s dissent, he observed, “today’s decision ushers us back to the Lochner era when this Court regularly overrode legislative judgments.” Yet as Gorsuch retorted, “instead of overriding Congress’s policy judgments, today’s decision seeks to honor them. This much the dissent surely knows. Shortly after invoking the specter of Lochner, it turns around and criticizes the Court for trying too hard to abide the Arbitration Act’s ‘liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements.'”

As for Ginsburg playing the Bork card against him, Gorsuch responded in kind, citing the liberal legal thinker Laurence Tribe, who wrote, “‘Lochnerizing‘ has become so much an epithet that the very use of the label may obscure attempts at understanding.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis is available here.

President Donald Trump’s decision to ditch the Iranian nuclear deal was supposed to terrify Tehran into surrendering its nuclear program and cleaning up its behavior around the region. Instead the administration’s renewed pressure campaign has provoked no change in Iran’s activities—and now threatens to sour America’s relationship with its European allies.

In early May, Trump terminated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and reimposed the sanctions suspended under the agreement. This was followed last week by additional sanctions on the Iranian central bank, with the U.S. officially designating its governor a terrorist for allegedly funneling millions to the militant group Hezbollah.

In a speech this morning at the Heritage Foundation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued yet more demands for Tehran, including the complete cessation of its nuclear program, an end to its funding for armed groups across the Middle East, the withdrawal of Iranian forces from Syria, and a halt to its development of ballistic missiles.

Should Iran agree, Pompeo promised to lift all sanctions and restore full diplomatic and commercial ties with the country. Failure to comply would mean U.S.-enforced economic isolation.

“This sting of sanctions will be painful if the regime does not change its course,” Pompeo promised. “These will end up being the strongest sanctions in history when they are complete.”

Foreign policy scholars were quick to note how unrealistic Pompeo’s demands were.

“The demands would require that the Iranian leopard not just change its spots but transform itself into a lamb,” writes Barbara Slavin of the Atlantic Council. Emma Ashford of the Cato Institute agrees: “It is basically asking Iran to become Belgium or Switzerland,” she tells Reason.

The idea that sanctions will prompt Iran to cease its nuclear program or cut support for long-time regional allies—both of which it considers vital to its national interest—shows a lack of seriousness from the Trump administation, argues Ashford.

Pompeo’s speech “did really show that there is no new strategy on the horizon,” she says. Yet while a stepped-up pressure campaign is unlikely to force Iran to change its behavior, Ashford adds, it will almost certainly strain relationship with our European allies.

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom were all party to the JCPOA. All three lobbied Trump hard to stay in the deal, and all have expressed a hope to keep the deal alive even without the U.S. on board.

European companies were quick to take advantage of the lessened sanctions ushered in by the JCPOA. The Telegraph, a British paper, reports that the European Union doubled its exports to Iran after the nuclear deal went into effect, exporting roughly $12.7 billion to the country in 2017. After China, Europe is Iran’s biggest export market.

By reimposing sanctions and promising new ones, the U.S. will put itself in position of having to police and penalize European companies that, while complying with their own countries’ rules, will inevitably run afoul of future restrictions. Pompeo acknowledged this in his remarks, saying “we understand that our reimposition of sanctions and the coming pressure campaign will pose financial and economic difficulties to our friends.” He said that the U.S. would be sending teams of specialists abroad to explain the implications of the sanctions “and to listen.”

Rather than getting on board with the Trump administration’s plans, European leaders have been looking for ways to skirt the new sanctions. E.U. Commission President Jean-Claude Junker has floated the idea of routing Iranian-bound investments and payments for Iranian oil through European government banks to avoid America’s restrictions.

The E.U. is also dusting off its old “blocking statute”—first used to avoid America’s Cuba sanctions—which would make it illegal for European companies already doing businesses with Iran to comply with American sanctions and would compensate firms affected by the penalties.

In short: Rather than bringing around an American foe, Trump’s exit from the JCPOA is merely souring relations with some of America’s staunchest allies—while keeping us embroiled in a region that Trump himself has expressed a desire to leave.

The overwhelming majority of students at Pomona College think the campus climate prevents them from expressing ideas that other people might find offensive.

Conservative, moderate, and liberal students are to varying degrees concerned about this trend. But 41 percent of self-described “very liberal” students thought Pomona’s policies on offensive speech had not gone far enough toward making potentially insensitive remarks unutterable.

That’s according to a fascinating survey of Pomona students and faculty conducted by Gallup. About a third of students and two thirds of faculty participated, which makes it a relatively comprehensive snapshot of the school’s attitudes about speech.

It turns out that Pomona students are more inclined than both faculty and students nationally to say that the college should prohibit certain viewpoints. Pomona’s students are evenly split on the question, whereas 63 percent of faculty and 77 percent of students nationwide think permitting all types of speech, even offensive ones, was more important. 28 percent of Pomona students think policies aimed at curbing offensive speech had not gone far enough; just 13 percent of the faculty feel that way.

Perhaps most worryingly, many students express some discomfort with the idea of having conversations with people whose views differ from their own. Only half of surveyed students are “comfortable” or “very comfortable” having such discussions in their classes. The highest comfort level is enjoyed by students on sports teams, where 64 percent say they’re comfortable or very comfortable having tough talks.

Very liberal students constitute 24 percent of the sample size—more than the moderate and conservative students combined (16 percent and 3 percent, respectively). Liberal students make up the other 53 percent.

The ideological breakdown matters, because the school’s very liberal students are far more likely to approve of policies designed to crack down on offensive speech.

“Pomona students’ attitudes about how colleges should govern speech on campus vary dramatically by their political ideology,” write the survey’s authors. “Three-quarters of students who identify as ‘very liberal’ believe it is important for colleges to prohibit certain types of speech, compared with about half (49%) of self-identified ‘liberal’ students. In fact, ‘very liberal’ students are nearly four times more likely than moderate and conservative students to favor prohibiting some types of speech.”

Readers may recall that student-activists at Pomona previously described free speech as “a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions” for the purpose of oppressing the marginalized. These students flatly rejected the idea that the point of education is to pursue objective truth, and they demanded that the administration take action against a conservative campus paper, The Claremont Independent, for daring to criticize their movement.

Is there a free speech crisis at Pomona College? It depends how you define crisis. But it seems like a sizeable number of students are afraid to express their opinions on campus, and a small but powerful contingent of activists wouldn’t have it any other way.

A small St. Louis suburb has agreed to stop trying bankroll its government with a vicious regime of petty fines so excessive that the town has cited more than a third of its population.

Credit goes to the Institute for Justice, which sued the tiny town of Pagedale (population: 3,300) on behalf of a handful of residents in 2015. Amid the outrage over Michael Brown’s death in nearby Ferguson, citizens of these small fiefdoms drew attention to these governments’ propensity to bankroll themselves via exorbitant traffic and code enforcement fines.

Pagedale was one of those communities. In the course of a single year, it handed out 2,000 code enforcement citations—almost twice the number of actual households in the city. It tossed out tickets like confetti for a host of really absurd codes, which banned everything from mismatched curtains to holes in window screens to having your pants below your waist to having a barbecue grill or basketball hoop in your front yard to walking on the left side of a crosswalk.

The town’s budget depended heavily on these fines. In some years, their proceeds made up a quarter of the city’s revenue, according to the Institute for Justice. And the code citations got worse once the state cracked down to stop cities from trying to rake in money from traffic tickets. Eventually, 39 percent of the city’s adult population had been fined for some sort of housing violation.

The courts then deliberately rushed through the cases and made it hard for residents to object or respond, saddling some citizens with thousands of dollars in debt. One of the plaintiffs represented by the Institute for Justice received nearly $3,000 in citations which he was struggling to pay off. And because he was spending the money to pay the fines, he couldn’t afford the repairs the city demanded, resulting in more citations. Eventually the city threatened to raze his home. Another one of the institute’s clients had to turn to payday loans to try to keep up with the fines.

Relief is now on the way. On Friday a federal judge accepted a consent decree from the City of Pagedale to reform its practices. The town has agreed to repeal the parts of municipal code that allowed them to cite citizens for conditions that were not public health or safety hazards. The decree specifically mentions that the aforementioned restrictions on pants, grills, and crosswalk practices will be repealed. The city won’t be able to manufacture some sort of public safety excuse to keep them intact.

Furthermore the city will stop prosecuting current cases like these unless the prosecutor can find good cause to do so; will dismiss any additional fines and fees on citizens who have already paid more than their initial fine for a citation; will stop incarcerating people for these municipal violations if they don’t have counsel and have not agreed to waive their rights; and will make the courts more accessible, with a broader range of hours and a rule limiting the number of hearings per session to seven, as opposed to the more than 200 proceedings that had previously churned through on some days.

The Institute for Justice is celebrating the win:

“Across the country, the government has resorted to using policing for profit to wrest money from individuals who are often the poorest and most vulnerable among us,” said IJ President Scott Bullock. “This case, like IJ’s work in fighting civil forfeiture, is a vital part of IJ’s efforts to end this abusive and short-sighted practice. Because the Constitution forbids the government from using the justice system as a means to raise revenue, IJ will continue this fight across the country.”

Read more about the case here, and read the consent agreement itself here.

An estimated 7 million people—and mayber far —nationwide have had their drivers’ licenses suspended for unpaid traffic tickets and court debts, The Washington Post reports.

Legislators passed license suspension laws to deter scofflaws. But civil liberties and anti-poverty groups argue that such laws instead trap poor residents in a spiral of debt, leaving them unable to drive to work to pay off their fines without a risk of racking up even more debt—or even jail time—for driving on a suspended license.

Forty-one states suspend licenses for unpaid traffic and court debts. The Post notes that its 7 million figure may be a significant undercount, since several states could not or would not release the information. Several states also did not track the reason for license suspensions.

As Reason reported in 2016, nearly 900,000 Virginia residents—roughly 11 percent of the state—had suspended licenses at any given time. The majority of those suspensions were for unpaid court debts. According to the Post‘s analysis, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia alone account for 10 percent of the suspended licenses it found nationwide.

Robert Taylor, a 28-year-old Virginia resident whose license had been suspended, told Reason that he was buried under a small mountain of debt from repeated fines. He was unemployed and unable to find a new job because of his lack of mobility.

“It’s kind of like my feet are cut off,” Taylor said. “I can’t get anywhere. I want a job. I’ll see a job, and when I find one I’m qualified for—I know I could run that store so well—but I can’t get to it. Public transportation just isn’t there. The bus will bring you in, but it won’t take you back out. The only way to do it is to hopefully know someone who will give you a ride. So many of my friends have gotten traffic tickets that they’ve moved closer to town.”

A report released last year from the Legal Aid Justice Center in Virginia found there were 4.2 million suspended drivers’ licenses for unpaid court fines in five states alone. Only four states, the report said, require courts to determine a person’s ability to pay before assessing a fine.

The practice came under scrutiny following the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown. Subsequent media reports revealed that the town padded its budget through the heavy-handed enforcement of petty fines and fees.

In a “dear colleague” letter released in 2016, Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote that “state and local courts are encouraged to avoid suspending driver’s licenses as a debt collection tool, reserving suspension for cases in which it would increase public safety.”

Federal judges have not looked kindly on the practice as of late. In January, a federal judge in Michigan enjoined the practice when it’s applied to the very poor, ruling that suspending licenses without ascertaining the debtors’ ability to pay likely violates due process.

And last year, a federal judge in Tennessee reinstated the drivers’ licenses of two residents in what may have been the first ruling of its kind. As Reason reported:

Those two Tennessee residents are Fred Robinson and Ashley Sprague. According to the lawsuit, Robinson, 32, suffers from serious medical conditions, cannot work, and barely subsists on Social Security payments. Sprague is a mother of five who makes under $3 an hour as a Waffle House server.

Both Robinson and Sprague accrued misdemeanor traffic fines of several hundred dollars, and when they failed to pay, their drivers’ licenses were suspended. Both were also told, when they tried to make partial payments, that no such installment plans were allowed. In addition to their other fines, they must now pay another $200 fee to have their licenses reinstated.

“One needs only to observe the details of ordinary life to understand that an individual who cannot drive is at an extraordinary disadvantage in both earning and maintaining material resources,” the judge wrote in her order. “Suspending a driver’s license is therefore not merely out of proportion to the underlying purpose of ensuring payment, but affirmatively destructive of that end….Taking an individual’s driver’s license away to try to make her more likely to pay a fine is not using a shotgun to do the job of a rifle: it is using a shotgun to treat a broken arm. There is no rational basis for that.”

A similar class action lawsuit challenged Virginia’s license suspension practices in 2017, but it was dismissed on technical grounds.

In response to growing criticism, Virginia announced changes in 2017 that were intended to keep poor residents from having their driver’s licenses suspended simply because of their inability to pay court fines. But a year later, nearly a million Virginians—one out of every six licensed drivers in the state—still had suspended licenses for unpaid court debts, according to the report by the Legal Aid Justice Center.

“It appears that these reforms have done little, if anything, to stem the breathtaking current of Virginians losing their licenses,” the report concluded.

Is President Donald Trump’s plan to enforce a “bright line” separation between Title X funding recipients and even referring to the practice of abortion a good start or a self-defeating political stunt? It depends on who you ask. Including, at least to some degree, within the Reason staff.

On today’s Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and yours truly duke it out over the lines between conscientious objection and hypocritical stunt, between government imprimaturs and nonprofit branding, between fungibility and non. The quartet also tangles over Trump/Russia, post-shooting argumentation, and Reason‘s staff dress codes over the years.

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

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Relevant links from the show:

“Trump Purportedly Planning Grant Ban for Groups That Don’t Disavow Abortion: Reason Roundup,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Mississippi Bans Abortions After 15 Weeks, Faces First Legal Challenge Today,” by Nick Gillespie

“Why Is Planned Parenthood So Popular? Because Government Thwarts Alternatives,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Why I Am a Pro-Life Libertarian,” by Stephanie Slade

“Libertarians Should Look Twice at Planned Parenthood Defunding Efforts,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Abortion & Libertarianism: Nick Gillespie, Ronald Bailey, Mollie Hemingway, & Katherine Mangu-Ward“

“Why Big Government Is Offensive,” by Matt Welch

“Why does Trump get away with corruption? Because Bill and Hillary Clinton normalized it,” by Josh Barro, Business Insider

“What Can Be Done To Stop School Shootings Without Shredding the Constitution?” by Nick Gillespie

“California Cities Are Free to Regulate Gun Stores Out of Existence,” by Declan McCullagh

“2 New Court Decisions Are Quietly Eliminating Californians’ Second Amendment Rights,” by Declan McCullagh

“New York Officials Weaponize Regulatory Power Against the NRA,” by J.D. Tuccille

“New York Politicians Want to Suppress Free Assembly Rights for Gun Rights Supporters,” by Brian Doherty

“Tom Wolfe Is Dead but the ‘Me Decade’ Lives On (and That’s a Good Thing),” by Nick Gillespie

“RIP to Tom Wolfe, whom I met only once,” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Will McCain-Style Conservatism Live On?” by Matt Welch

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

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