Category: reason

American political titles should not be treated like titles of nobility.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

The protesters and rioters who have been swarming streets are right: Donald Trump is not their president.

He is not your president, either. He won’t be until Jan. 20.

This might seem like a petty quibble, but it shouldn’t. It gets to a point that has fallen out of favor in recent years, and needs reviving.

The late Robert Peniston was a Richmonder who had served as navigator aboard the presidential yacht during Harry Truman’s administration. According to Peniston, he dropped in on the retired Truman in Independence, Mo., some years later. When he addressed Truman as “Mr. President,” Truman corrected him. There is only one president of the United States, Truman insisted: the one in the Oval Office. Peniston could call him “Mr. Truman.”

This comes as news to the folks at the Truman Library, who say others often addressed Truman as Mr. President without any objection from him. Still, it’s an appealing story—one that speaks to our general belief in the equal dignity of individuals regardless of rank or social class.

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As expected, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will replace the retiring Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as Senate Minority Leader.

Reason fans will surely remember Schumer being immortalized as one number 41 on our “50 Enemies of Freedom” list, where his career as a serial over-legislator earned this tribute:

If (bad) conservative screenwriters set out to create a smugly liberal, lens-hungry New York senator, they’d come up with Charles Schumer—and they’d be criticized for creating a strawman. But Schumer is, somehow, real. He crusades sneeringly against guns, drugs, breakfast cereal, cybercurrencies, and caffeinated powders while supporting security-state legislation and cozying up with crony capitalists on Wall Street.

As Nick Gillespie once wrote of Schumer, “No issue is too stupid or inconsequential for Schumer to weigh in on, inevitably calling for a ban or regulation that serves no other possible purpose than to shine a light on the glory and grandeur of Chuck Schumer.”

Although, in fairness to the senior senator from my home state, he once led Congressional efforts to oppose legislation while still a member of the House of Representatives in 1996. The issue at hand: a federal database to keep track of police officers who had lost their certifications to practice law enforcement because of things like abuse or corruption, which was intended to prevent said officers from finding law enforcement jobs in other states.

In a Reason feature on the renewed efforts to create such a database, I wrote of Schumer’s rare moment of legislative restraint:

During hearings before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, police union representatives compared the proposed legislation to the “witch hunts of Salem.” Their congressional allies, most notably now–Sen. Charles Schumer (D–N.Y.), worried aloud during a hearing in July 1996 that the database would create “a major administrative burden” and be a “major invasion of privacy of police officers.”

Schumer has proposed legislation on everything from energy drinks to maple syrup to e-cigarette flavors. During the hearings he said “I’m a little dubious of legislating” a bill that would assist in the prevention of hiring armed agents of the state who are granted the right to use lethal force that have been banned from working as cops elsewhere.

Click here to check out Gillespie’s exhaustive (but by no means comprehensive) list of Schumer’s most “stupid or inconsequential” attempts to control the lives of everyday citizens through the brute force of law.

Writing in The Hill, former Democratic National Committee press secretary, Gary Johnson media advisor, self-styled libertarian Democrat, and Reason contributor Terry Michael has some tough words for Donkey Party progs such as Elizabeth Warren:

Dumb? Democrats nominating one of the most disliked politicians in America as their presidential candidate, perhaps the only opponent Donald Trump could have beaten. Dumber? The Senate Democratic caucus cluelessly anointing “I’d walk a mile for a camera” Charles Schumer as its public voice.

Chuck Schumer, the senator from Wall Street. Chuck Schumer, who joins Trump and the right wing leadership of Israel and its American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in opposing President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

What. Were. Senate. Democrats. Thinking?

Where were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, avowed enemies of the Wall Street billionaires, who apparently thought they were atoning for their absence-without-leave by joining Schumer in playing identity politics, by endorsing left-liberal, African American, Catholic-converted-to-Muslim U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison for chairman of the Democratic National Committee?

In what used to be called the greatest deliberative body in the world, were Democrats doing any serious reflection at all on the results of the recent election? Was the exclusive club of forty-eight men and women just hell-bent on ignoring the toxic crony capitalism that Sanders excoriated during his race for the 2016 nomination against Hillary Clinton?

Read the whole thing.

Sure, give the Democrats a moment or three or grief over the surprise election of Donald Trump and the increasing Republican domination of statehouses around the country. But if the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Ted Kennedy ever wants to update its agenda for the 21st century, it might start by cutting loose terrible, terrible buttinskies like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who is so backwards, trivial, and bought-off that he once tried to regulate the price of breakfast cereal and led a successful charge to decaffeinate Four Loko. And note that when it comes to Wall Street bailouts, Schumer couldn’t do enough to make sure that his fat-cat pals were made whole. As Michael notes, he’s also generally terrible on foreign policy as well as economic policy and basic lifestyle issues too. From virtually any perspective (certainly from a libertarian one but also from a progressive one, too), Schumer’s policies on just about everything are objectionable.

For progressive Dems such as Warren and progressive kinda-sorta Dems such as Bernie Sanders to have no problem with Schumer is a massive tell that such commitments are a distant second (at best) to party unity and tribal loyalty.

If the rancid 2016 election proved anything, it’s that both the Republican and Democratic parties are stuck in various decades of the 20th century, with each group looking back fondly on different versions of elite control. And that the American people, who turned out in smaller percentages than in 2012 and couldn’t decide cleanly between the two-most-hated candidates in U.S. history, are ready for something different. At this point, the Dems should be trying to chart a new direction, one that might actually put individuals and autonomy first. With the Republicans controlling the White House and Congress, the odds are fair-to-great that the Party of Lincoln will once again go on a massive, ruinous spending spree, just like they did the last time they had such power. If Democrats were smart, they would tack libertarian and pursue targeted spending that actually helped people in need while also going after crony capitalism and military buildups and wars that have failed to make the world a safer place.

Instead…Chuck Schumer.

Good luck with that, Dems, because if he’s your idea of a party leader for a 21st century America that’s still angry over bank bailouts and attempts to crush the sharing economy and get in the way of people creating new ways of living without government approval, you’re going nowhere fast. Even if the Republicans—who have lost the popular vote in four of the last five presidential races and even less-liked than your party—are your opponents.

Watch Buzz Bowl I: Four Loko vs. Joose, featuring Sen. Schumer, now!

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“Not my president” is the theme of the protests that have been staged in dozens of cities across the country since Donald Trump was elected last week. “I share the sentiment,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum writes. But while Trump will not be his president, “neither is Barack Obama, and neither were any of the eight other men who have occupied the White House since I was born,” he adds.

The phrase “my president” smacks of subservience, as in “my liege,” “my lord,” or “mein führer.” In our constitutional republic, the person selected for the job that Trump will assume on January 20 presides over the executive branch of the U.S. government, not over you or me, writes Sullum. So, if there is an advantage to electing a preening, petty, thin-skinned, whiny, vindictive, vacuous, mendacious, boorish bully to that office, it may be that he prompts a reconsideration of the absurd hopes and cultish veneration that surround the presidency. Perhaps a ridiculous president will encourage Americans to take the presidency less seriously.

View this article.

Ensconced in the deep-blue state of California, James Poulos cast his presidential ballot for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson. In a new column for Reason, Poulos explains:

I did so for one big reason—almost for one reason alone. Freed by single-party rule in the Golden State to vote artistically, it struck me that libertarians carry a special importance today, one that ought to be stressed and encouraged wherever helpful to do so. Because without it, our prospects for political life in America seem poised to sour even more.

The key is this: more than anyone else, libertarians most admire humanist visionaries outside politics. And as a matter of habit, they often take that admiration, and the patterns of thinking it fosters, into the practice of politics. What they attain is important, of course, but not as important, I think, as what they avoid: namely, the kinds of distorted visions that now wield too great an influence over Republican and Democratic politics alike.

View this article.

Last March a panel of experts organized by The Lancet condemned the war on drugs and recommended that countries “move gradually towards regulated drug markets.” This week another esteemed British medical journal, The BMJ, followed suit, urging governments to “investigate more effective alternatives to criminalisation of drug use and supply.”

The BMJ editorial notes that consumption of psychoactive substances is an ancient and persistent aspect of human behavior and that attempts to suppress it have had horrendous consequences, including crime driven by artificially high drug prices, promotion of blood-borne diseases, deaths linked to unpredictable potency and unreliable quality, and “appalling violence” in countries such as Mexico and the Philippines. “Too often the war on drugs plays out as a war on the millions of people who use drugs,” the editors say, “and disproportionately on people who are poor or from ethnic minorities and on women.”

In response to these costs, says The BMJ, “many countries have removed criminal penalties for personal drug possession,” while “jurisdictions such as Canada, Uruguay, and several US states, now including California, have gone further, to allow regulated non-medical cannabis markets, retaking control of supply from organised crime.” Because doctors “have ethical responsibilities to champion individual and public health, human rights, and dignity and to speak out where health and humanity are being systemically degraded,” the editors argue, they “should use their authority to lead calls for pragmatic reform informed by science and ethics.”

• Twitter announced new plans to get tough on “hate speech,” including tools that give users more control over what content they see and an apparent “purge” of alt-right accounts.
• “Unlike past presidents who took office with considerable wealth,” reports Politico, “the setup Trump is creating for his financial assets—leaving his three oldest adult children and a ‘team of highly skilled executives’ in charge while he’s in the Oval Office—appears likely to expose large numbers of people the president hires to an unprecedented set of conflicts spanning his entire federal government.”
• Will Steve Bannon, Trump’s newly-named White House chief strategist, be able to pass the standard background check needed for a security clearance?
• Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country will drop out of the International Criminal Court designed to try war crimes.
• Trump wants us “to believe both that he’s ‘pro-life’ and that he won’t actually stop anyone from getting an abortion, at least not anytime soon.”
• White women apparently “voted for Trump in 2016 because they still believe white men are their saviors.”
• Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford were getting it on while shooting Star Wars.
• Tens of thousands of fish have died since Donald Trump was elected president.

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During the presidential campaign, Rudy Giuliani argued (correctly) that Hillary Clinton could be charged with a federal felony for mishandling classified information through her sloppy email practices as secretary of state even if she did not intend to break the law. But there is also a strong case to be made that the former New York City mayor, who reportedly is in the running for attorney general or secretary of state in the Trump administration, committed multiple federal felonies by assisting Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that the State Department listed as a terrorist organization until September 2012.

“My ties to them are very open,” Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, recently told The New York Times. “We worked very hard to get them delisted.” But under the broad understanding of the federal ban on “material assistance” to terrorist groups that the Supreme Court upheld in 2010, that work was pretty clearly a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The “material support” statute, 18 USC 2339B, prohibits the provision of “training,” defined as “instruction or teaching designed to impart a specific skill”; “expert advice or assistance,” defined as “advice or assistance derived from scientific, technical or other specialized knowledge”; “personnel,” which means any person, including oneself, who works under the organization’s “direction or control”; or any other “service,” which is not defined at all. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court said the law covers volunteer work aimed at helping listed organizations resolve their grievances through nonviolent means. While such advice and advocacy would ordinarily be protected by the First Amendment, the Court said, “the government’s interest in combating terrorism” justifies the speech restrictions imposed by the ban on material support.

Notably, the Supreme Court refused to read the law as requiring an intent to further a terrorist organization’s illegal activities. As long as someone knows he is assisting a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO), it is no defense to say he only meant to promote its lawful activities. Giuliani, who “worked very hard to get [the MEK] delisted,” obviously knew the group was considered an FTO.

Nor is it necessary that someone providing material support to an FTO receive compensation in return, although Giuliani apparently was paid handsomely for his speeches on behalf of the MEK. According to the Court, the difference between protected and prohibited advocacy is not whether money changes hands; it’s whether the advocacy is “performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization.” By announcing that “my ties to [the MEK] are very open,” then, Giuliani is effectively confessing to a crime.

I am not saying Giuliani should go to prison for his efforts to rehabilitate the MEK. The State Department’s list is arbitrary and shaped by political considerations, the MEK had a strong argument that it should no longer be considered an FTO, and in any case peaceful advocacy of lawful activities should never be treated as a crime. Knowingly providing material assistance to an FTO (which Giuliani did) is not necessarily the same as knowingly providing material assistance to terrorism. For the sake of fairness and freedom of speech, the law’s mens rea requirement should be stronger.

The same goes for 18 USC 793, which Clinton arguably broke by allowing classified information to be removed “from its proper place of custody” through “gross negligence,” a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. A conviction under that law should require more than negligence, because it should not be possible to accidentally commit a crime. That is the main reason Comey gave for declining to recommend charges against Clinton: Although the law does not require criminal intent, justice does.

But Giuliani was not willing to cut Clinton any such slack. As far as he was concerned, she violated the letter of the law, so she should have been prosecuted. It did not matter whether she realized she was breaking the law. By that same reasoning, Giuliani should be prosecuted for providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. It does that matter that he did not view the MEK as a terrorist group; it’s enough that the State Department did. Nor does it matter that he did not intend to promote terrorism, since the law does not include any such mens rea requirement. If Hillary Clinton belongs in prison, so does Rudy Giuliani.

The tragedy of American mass incarceration isn’t just a problem causing the country’s prisons to be inhumanely overcrowded. Our local jails—even in our nation’s capital—are also afflicted.

In a feature article in the December issue of Reason, criminal justice reporter C.J. Ciaramella writes:

In 1976, a new D.C. jail opened its doors—the one still in use today. The old one was emptied and eventually torn down. Its stones were used to restore the venerable Smithsonian Castle; they had been mined from the same quarry a century before. But the new facility’s troubles began before the ribbon cutting: The maximum capacity when it opened was 960 inmates. The average daily population of inmates that year was 1,218. In other words, D.C. built an institution that was overcrowded before the first resident bunked down for the night.

The story of the D.C. jail is a tale of the repeated triumph of hope over experience. District politicians have always wanted to lock up more people than they’re willing to pay to incarcerate. Even in the capital city, with all the resources of the federal government to draw on and the best possible chance to influence national policy, the District of Columbia seems incapable of building and running its single jail effectively. Without a re-evaluation of who we’re keeping in jail, why we’re keeping them there, and what we expect them to do during and after their incarceration, history looks very likely to repeat itself.

View this article.

The University of Louisville has suspended several cheerleaders for tweets they posted on election night. The only cheerleader who has been identified by the media, Brynn Baker, told one person to “stfu about racism, sexism, whateverism” and told to someone “to take a pill yo. You’re so pressed for nothing lmfao. You act like you came off a boat.”