Category: reason

The hack of emails written by members of the Democratic National Committe (DNC) has produced a great deal of embarrassment so far (go here for a searchable database provided by Wikileaks). The cache of emails, especially ones in which DNC members bandy about the idea of attacking Bernie Sanders in some states for being both Jewish and an atheist, helped push DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz out the door and made it clear that the officially neutral organization was actively working against the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange has pronounced that there are more hacked emails to come from his group, including ones that will “provide enough evidence” to see Hillary Clinton arrested. Well, we’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, you can savor amuse-bouches such as this email in which DNC operatives toss around the idea of creating “a fake craigslist jobs post for women who want to apply to jobs one of Trump’s organizations“:

Seeking staff members for multiple positions in a large, New York-based corporation known for its real estate investments, fake universities, steaks, and wine. The boss has very strict standards for female employees, ranging from the women who take lunch orders (must be hot) to the women who oversee multi-million dollar construction projects (must maintain hotness demonstrated at time of hiring).

Title: Honey Bunch (that’s what the boss will call you)

Job requirements:

• No gaining weight on the job (we’ll take some “before” pictures when you start to use later as evidence)
• Must be open to public humiliation and open-press workouts if you do gain weight on the job
• A willingness to evaluate other women’s hotness for the boss’ satisfaction is a plus
• Should be proficient in lying about age if the boss thinks you’re too old Working mothers not preferred (the boss finds pumping breast milk disgusting, and worries they’re too focused on their children).

About us: We’re proud to maintain a “fun” and “friendly work environment, where the boss is always available to meet with his employees. Like it or not, he may greet you with a kiss on the lips or grope you under the meeting table.

Interested applicants should send resume, cover letter, and headshot to jobs@trump.com

This isn’t particularly clever or funny and it obviously doesn’t come close to rising to the level of, say, Project MK Ultra, the CIA’s secret mind-control experiments. But it’s all pretty foul stuff, especially the way in which the DNC was so clearly putting its thumb on the scale in the direction of Clinton. It’s exactly the sort of behavior that makes people think that—what’s that phrase that both Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren use? Oh yeah—”the system is rigged.” As it stands, faith and confidence in all aspects of government and a lot of other major American institutions are at or near historic lows. That isn’t because we are a particularly cynical bunch. It’s because we are privy to more information about the politicians, the performers, and the priests (among others) who seek to assert moral authority and control over us.

Lack of trust is the wages of transparency, but only if what’s revealed shows bad-faith or really rotten behavior. In fact, in this new(ish) age of transparency, people are by and large forgiving. For all the talk about how the Sony hack or the celebrity-nude pics hack would destroy everybody revealed in them, very little of that happened as a result.

But the general lack of vengeance on the part of the public is matched with pearl-cluting on the part of the media. Indeed, to date, the press has been far more interested in who created the DNC hack rather than what it contains. Despite the publicized role of a hacker called Guccifer 2.0, “all signs point to Russia.” Vladimir Putin, after all, is not just bromancing Donald Trump but has a longstanding dislike of Clinton stemming from her challenging the fairness of Russian elections years ago. Isn’t this all about Russia trying to throw a U.S. election one way or another?

Writing at Slate, for instance, Frankin Foer, the former editor of The New Republic, argues that 

The emails don’t get us much beyond a fact every sentient political observer could already see: Officials at the DNC, hired to work hand in glove with a seemingly inevitable nominee, were actively making life easier for Hillary Clinton. It didn’t take these leaks to understand that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a hack and that the DNC should be far more neutral in presidential primaries.

What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon’s dirty tricksters didn’t mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff.

“We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae,” writes Foer, and there I kind of agree with him. But to the extent that what’s revealed is minutiae, it will be forgotten or excused, even if it includes off-color humor and language. To the extent that the contents reveal more serious problems, they will remain relevant (and are relevant), regardless of the source. But there is something else at work in most media responses to the DNC hack, and Foer illustrates this too: Concern that Hillary Clinton, presumably the preferred candidate of many journalists, will lose to Donald Trump.

The DNC dump may not have revealed a conspiracy that could end a candidacy, but it succeeded in casting a pall of anxiety over this election. We know that the Russians have a further stash of documents from the DNC and another set of documents purloined from the Clinton Foundation. In other words, Vladimir Putin is now treating American democracy with the same respect he accords his own. The best retaliation isn’t a military one, or to respond in kind. It’s to defeat his pet candidate and to force him to watch the inauguration of the woman he so abhors.

Read the whole piece here.

For better or for worse, we live in a world where such hacks or leaks (one man’s leak is another man’s hack, I assume) will happen more and more frequently. That Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time creating a private server system and then misrepresenting what information passed through it will only heighten interest and flavor the interpretation of whatever information might come to light over the next few months.

Edward Snowden, whose character and motivation was attacked the minute his leaks become public, had a more thoughtful response. If Russia is responsible, he tweeted, it should be condemned for doing so. And, he said, if Russia was behind the hack, there’s no question that the NSA would know. “Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists at #NSA, but DNI traditionally objects to sharing,” Politico reports.

And so secrecy begets secrecy, rather than transparency. Until our government and its actors start coming clean and actually changing their behaviors, it will be extremely difficult for them to gain back the trust they have lost over the past 15 or more years.

Related: Edward Snowden Interview on Apple vs. FBI, Privacy, the NSA, and More.

This morning Bernie Sanders urged his followers not to vote for the Green Party’s presidential nominee. Speaking at a breakfast event in Philadelphia, the Vermont senator expressed respect for the Greens but argued that this election was a binary choice, The Washington Post reports.

“If we were in Europe right now, in Germany or elsewhere,” Sanders said, “the idea of coalition politics of different parties coming together—you’ve got a left party, you’ve got a center-left party, coming together against the center-right party—that’s not unusual. That happens every day. We don’t have that.”

What would this election look like if we did have a parliamentary system? It’s an interesting thought experiment, because it’s easy to imagine this as a five- or six-way race. You could have Bernie Sanders leading the Democratic Socialists and Hillary Clinton the New Democrats—the left and center-left parties that Sanders mentioned. The Libertarians would have Gary Johnson (or perhaps someone like Rand Paul, since he wouldn’t have as strong an incentive to present himself as a Republican). Donald Trump would have the old Perot and Buchanan voters, maybe in an America First Party. And the pre-Trump GOP would have a standard-bearer too, a Jeb Bush or a Ted Cruz. Or maybe the Bush Republicans and the Cruz Republicans would be separate operations. The upshot, in any event, is to imagine what it would be like if our political factions were more modular: Instead of struggling for influence and forming alliances within a party, they could compete for votes as parties themselves and then try to form a governing coalition after the election.

My point isn’t to make the case for or against such a system. It’s to imagine how those factions would align and disalign if they had that kind of flexibility. How well would each of those parties do, and what governing coalition might some of them form? Would the left and center-left align, as Sanders imagined, or would the New Democrats prefer to form a Bloombergian coalition with the Bush Republicans? Would the Bush Republicans outpoll the America Firsters, or would they be also-rans? Who would the Libertarians form a coalition with—or would they just refuse to join up with anyone else? And where do we put Jim Webb? Create your own scenario and post it in the comments.

• The strange saga of Alan Grayson continues.
• There’s kissing up to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and then there’s this.
• Donald Trump: our new frontrunner?
• And Bernie Sanders’ revolution dies.
• Michelle Obama received rave reviews for her DNC speech last night.
• “Girls gang up on boys in new cyberbullying craze called ‘roasting,’ experts warn.”
• RIP: Miss Cleo.

In his Hillary Clinton endorsement speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last night, Sen. Bernie Sanders declared, “Donald Trump? Well, like most Republicans, he chooses to reject science.” Sanders was specifically speaking about Trump’s calling man-made climate change a “hoax.” Trump later insisted that his comment that climate change is hoax perpetrated by the Chinese was a “joke.” In any case Trump still says that he’s not a big believer in man-made climate change. (Amusingly, Trump’s minions cite climate change as a reason why the Irish government should give him permission to construct a sea wall to prevent erosion at one of his golf clubs in County Clare.)

In any case, are the Democrats really the Party of Science? Let’s take a look at what the 2016 Democratic Party Platform has to say about the issues of climate change, fracking, nuclear power, energy subsidies, stem cells and genetically modified crops.

Looking through the 2016 Democratic Platform one gets the impression that “science” is largely confined to climate science. The platform states: “Climate change is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. Fifteen of the 16 hottest years on record have occurred this century.” Surface temperature data from NASA and NOAA support the claim that 15 of the 16 hottest years since 1880 have occurred after 2001. Even the researchers at University of Alabama in Huntsville report that 13 of the hottest years in their satellite data records have occurred since 2001. Given the myriad problems with which humanity must cope, it’s an interesting judgement call to say that climate change is the “defining challenge of our time.” Still, based on my reading of the evidence, I have concluded that man-made climate change is an open-access environmental problem that could create significant difficulties for humanity later in this century and so needs to be addressed.

So how do Democrats think that man-made global warming should be addressed? Despite the fact that burning natural gas produces about half of the carbon dioxide emitted by coal, the Democratic Platform declares, “We will streamline federal permitting to accelerate the construction of new transmission lines to get low-cost renewable energy to market, and incentivize wind, solar, and other renewable energy over the development of new natural gas power plants.” In fact, the switch to natural gas produced by means of fracking shale has been the chief cause for the 12 percent reduction in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions since 2005.

What about fracking? Sanders wanted to ban it entirely. The Platform wants the EPA to regulate it and it would allow NIMBY activism to prevent the exploitation of this fuel source. The Platform evidently accepts the activists claim that fracking releases excessive amounts of methane into the atmosphere and pollutes local groundwater. In fact, there is very little evidence for either claim. In 2015, the EPA released a draft study that reported that the agency “did not find evidence that these [fracking] mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” Earlier this year, much was made of a study in Pavillon, Wyoming which found that in the 1990s unlined open pits that stored fluids associated with fracking, along with inadequately lined well-bores may have contaminated groundwater there. In June, the EPA noted that even as the fracking revolution was taking off U.S. emissions of methane fell by 9 percent between 1991 and 2014. In fact, the EPA reports, “During this time period, [methane] emissions increased from sources associated with agricultural activities, while emissions decreased from sources associated with the exploration and production of natural gas and petroleum products.”

The call for more extensive regulation of fracking in the Platform seems to be responding to anti-fossil fuel activism rather than to the findings of researchers.

Democrats are concerned about climate change caused by burning fossil fuels should embrace nuclear power as a source of no-carbon energy. Instead, Sanders wants to phase it out. The Platform is entirely silent on the issue of nuclear power.

With regard to energy subsidies, the Platform states, “Democrats believe the tax code must reflect our commitment to a clean energy future by eliminating special tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies as well as defending and extending tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy.” (By contrast, the Republican Platform declares, “We support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower. Note, however, that the GOPers didn’t mention renewable energy sources as possible competitors in unsubsidized energy markets.) 

Somewhat opaquely, the Democratic Platform also declares, “We will provide assistance to producers who conserve and improve natural resources on their farms and double loan guarantees that support the bio-based economy’s dynamic growth.” Is “bio-based” a dog-whistle to biofuels producers? If so, is it really a good idea to encourage farmers to plow up more land to produce biofuels whose contribution to slowing global warming is likely quite marginal?

The Democratic Platform makes no mention of stem cells. On the other hand, it does state, “Democrats believe we must accelerate the pace of medical progress, ensuring that we invest more in our scientists and give them the resources they need to invigorate our fundamental studies in the life sciences in a growing, stable, and predictable way.” By “invest,” it’s pretty clear that they mean more government funding for research and development.

With regard to private sector scientific progress, the Platform observes, “Democrats are committed to investing in the research, development, and innovation that creates lifesaving drugs and lowers overall health costs, but the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies is simply unacceptable.” The Democrats have somehow overlooked the fact that no government research agency has ever managed to get a new pill or injection to a patient’s bedside. If Democrats are serious about lowering pharmaceutical prices, they should advocate reining in the highly precautionary bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration and encourage the agency to further speed up approvals of generic drugs to boost competition. Still, they are onto something when they oppose “anti-competitive ‘pay for delay’ deals that keep generic drugs off the market.” Patents are awarded for 20 years and that should be enough.

Finally, there is not a word in the Platform with regard to genetically modified crops. This is probably just as well since Sanders is for scientifically unjustified GMO labeling and darkly suggests that “huge food and biotech companies … are transforming our agricultural system in a bad way.”

For my previous analysis of the science policy planks of the Republican Platform go here. See also below the video, “Are Republicans or Democrats More Anti-Science?” by my Reason TV colleagues Zach Weissmuller, Justin Monticello and Joshua Swain.

A big part of the reason Bernie Sanders stuck around in the primary process for as long as he did was to ensure the inclusion of a number progressive issues into the Democratic Party platform that otherwise stood no chance of being included. His stubborn (and often wrongheaded) longevity paid off in a number of ways—he got Hillary Clinton to embrace a $15 minimum wage, for example. But one plank his supporters could not get adopted to the platform was a call for “an end to [Israeli] occupations and illegal settlements” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Though the five Sanders supporters on the platform drafting committee were able to get the language included in the draft, it was defeated 73-95 at a DNC conference earlier this month, and a substantial number of Sanders delegates have been sporting “I Support Palestinian Human Rights” signs, buttons, and stickers at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to express their dissatisfaction with the party’s current policy. 

One of these Sanders supporting delegates, Ayman Eldarwish of Virginia (who described himself as an American-born of Arab descent) told Reason, “We are disappointed that it did not enter the platform of the Democratic Party. We understand the dynamics of our country (but) the justice scale has to find its resting place correctly.” Eldarwish added, “Our unlimited support for Israel is very unreasonable and it distorts the understanding of the reality on the ground. There are people without a land and freedom. They have to find their place on Earth, just like the Israelis want.” 

Walter Conklin from Rhode Island said he thought the U.S.’ position regarding Israel and the Palestinians was “absurd,” and that despite the violence perpetrated by both sides, there needs to better recognition of the fact that Palestinians “are people.”

Wife and husband delegates Aila Amany and Iyad Afalqa of California—both supporters of the democratic socialist from Vermont—were decked out in Robin Hood hats (get it?)—and told Reason of their disappointment with their party’s platform. 

The Jerusalem-born Afalqa says, “Bernie Sanders was the only presidential candidate who acknowledged the human rights of Palestinians. At the same time, he acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, and as a Jewish man that was a big deal.” He added that he believes the U.S. has a responsibility to be an “honest broker” in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and that some of his fellow delegates were considering leaving the party because they see no hope that a Hillary Clinton administration will be that “honest broker.”

Clinton, Afalqa says, will not be a “peace president, she will be a war president,” adding that under her husband Bill’s administration, “we were not at peace.” He cited the sanctions on Iraq as a form of “collective punishment” on civilians and said he would not commit to voting for Clinton in the general election. Afalqa’s wife, the Iranian-born Amany, says one reason she supported Sanders in the first place was because he refused to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress opposing the Iran nuclear deal.

The American political relationship with Israel is currently in a rockier state than it has been in decades, which can be seen not only in the pronounced personal tensions between President Obama and Netanyahu—which could very well have lasting implications for the once-intractable alliance between the two countries—but also because young American liberals are increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian plight and no longer on board with U.S. support for Israel as a default position. 

At this year’s American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Clinton went toe-to-toe with the many Republican presidential contenders in attendance in competition for who could be the most vocal supporter of Israel. In contrast, Sanders skipped the event entirely and gave a fairly measured but still controversial speech which condemned Hamas’ attacks on civilians and its opposition to Israel’s right to exist, but also condemned Israel’s bombing campaigns which disproportionately harmed civilians.

Issues relating to the U.S.’ handling of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are unlikely going to be a dealbreaker for most Sanders supporters come Election Day, but the Palestinian cause has become increasingly important to the Democratic base, and if the unsatisfactory-to-all status quo continues, the issue could end up affecting future Democratic contests.

President Barack Obama will review a year-old executive order prohibiting the transfer of military-grade weapons to police, according to Reuters.

The president signed Executive Order 13688 in May 2015, banning the transfer of certain military equipment between armed forces and police departments. This included such items as tracked armored vehicles, weaponized vehicles, grenade launchers, and camouflage uniforms. The order came as a result of a 2014 government-wide review of military equipment provided to law enforcement agencies, which was ordered in the wake of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

While the order didn’t ban all military equipment—certain explosives and armored vehicles were still allowed—it did restrain how these various items could be acquired. And if police departments wanted an item that was prohibited, they would have to purchase it from a private vendor, often at a hefty price.

All of this may soon change: Eight police organization leaders met with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on July 11—three days after five officers were killed in Dallas—to discuss possible reforms.

Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, was one of the people in attendance. He told Reuters most police departments cannot afford to pay for this equipment, and that this leaves officers vulnerable to attacks. As an example he pointed to grenade launchers, which he said can also be used to launch tear gas into rowdy crowds. “The White House thought this kind of gear was intimidating to people, but they didn’t know the purpose it serves,” he said.

Yet Kanya Bennett, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), says that while police should be able to use this equipment in high-risk situations—such as an active sniper—forces often do not reserve it for such circumstances. “Police departments have been using military equipment to carry out day-to-day operations,” she says. “As we saw with the protests in Ferguson and Baton Rouge, a militarized response only escalates tensions and threatens public safety.”

When protesters marched in Baton Rouge earlier this month to protest the killing by police of Alton Sterling, more than 100 people were arrested despite the fact that they were demonstrating peacefully. Video footage shows officers, decked out in riot gear and holding rifles, pushing protesters onto private property before handcuffing them.

The ACLU released a report in June 2014 detailing the excessive militarization of police departments. The organization notes that this phenomenon tends to disproportionately affect minority communities and undermines civil liberties.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment. A White House official told Reuters, however, that the administration frequently reviews the equipment that can be transferred from the military to police departments to ensure that law enforcement agencies have the materials they need to do their jobs.

The president of France called the beheading of an 86-year-old Catholic priest during a Mass at a Normandy church for which the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility a “cowardly assassination,” saying ISIS had “declared war” on France. “We must win that war,” he told reporters, according to CNN. “We must fight this war by all means, while respecting the rule of law, what makes us a democracy,” Hollande continued.

The two attackers were shot and killed by police after exiting the church, and one of the worshippers they attacked is in critical condition. One of the attackers was reportedly being tracked by French authorities after a previous terrorism-related charge, and was required to wear an electronic bracelet and live with his parents.

“When a priest is attacked, it is all of France that has been hurt,” France President Francois Hollande said in a statement. The number of self-identified Catholics dropped to 51 percent in a 2007 survey, down from about 80 percent as recently as the early 1990s.

France has been in a terror-induced state of emergency since the Paris attacks in November, with the concomitant crackdown on civil liberties. Hollande says he rejects calls by the opposition for even more terror laws. “Restricting our freedoms will not make the fight against terrorism more effective,” Hollande said.

My piece in today’s New York Post will probably surprise folks who think the sex offender registry is filled with middle-aged men arrested for luring kids into white vans with the promise of puppies—or even, in a new twist, Pokemon.

But in fact, the most common age that people are charged with a sex offense is 14. That’s according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. Why so young? I explain:

Because people tend to have sex with people around their own age, which means young people tend to have sex with other young people. And much under-age sex is illegal.

So we keep throwing kids on the registry and labeling them sex offenders, as if they’re incorrigible monsters. But in Britain, a study recently commissioned by Parliament has recommended a totally different course: Trying to understand, treat and refrain from labeling the kids, since children often “make mistakes as they start to understand their sexuality and experiment with it.”

Of course, recognizing that young people experiment would require politicians and law enforcement to also recognize that people can do dumb things, even sexual things, and not be irredeemable monsters. Right now, that’s not a big political talking point. 

So instead, over one fourth of the people we label “sex offenders” get that name when they themselves are juveniles. Considering the registry has over 800,000 people on it, we’re talking about more than 200,000 people who get put on the list while they are in middle school or high school.

What happens when we turn teens and even tweens into sex offenders?

The punishment and stigma can follow them for years, even decades. A study by Human Rights Watch gave the example of Jacob, a boy found guilty of inappropriately touching his sister when he was 11

Because this got him placed on the sex offender registry, he was not allowed to live near other children, including siblings. So he was sent to live in a juvenile home, and eventually placed with foster parents.

Now 26, Jacob is still on the sex-offender registry, still unable to live near a school, playground or park. (Even though study after study has shown these residency restrictions do not make the public any safer.) Meantime, he has had a hard time finding work, because who wants to hire a sex offender?

And so, concluded Human Rights Watch, “his life continues to be defined by an offense he committed at age 11” — an offense that most likely didn’t indicate anything other than a young man in need of guidance.

In my piece, I also describe an incident that happened in New Jersey: Two 14-year-olds pulled down their pants and, disgustingly, sat on two 12-year-olds’ faces. Gross. Reprehensible. But the punishment was even moreso.

Under Megan’s Law, they are now sex offenders, on the registry…for life. 

An appellate court upheld the sentence in 2011, so both young men will be on the sex-offender registry until they die. As 40-year-olds, heck, as 80-year-olds, they’ll be treated as perennial perverts for something they did in junior high.

This is not only horrifying, it flies in the face of what we have learned about sex offenders (and not just the young ones), which is that contrary to public perception, the vast majority of people on the registry never offend again.

In short: Not only is the age that people get on the registry appalling, but so is the registry itself, which has been shown over and over again not to make our kids any safer.

The sex offender laws keep getting more extreme and over-reaching, because pointless excess is an easy way for politicians to act as if they care about kids and safety…while actually ruining people’s lives. Including a lot of 14-year-olds.

Earlier in the year, Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe made a big splash by declaring that he would, as a blanket measure, restore the voting rights of more than 200,000 released felons.

Republicans immediately resisted the gesture. Grotesquely—and predictably—the debate very quickly became about who these released felons would be voting for, as though that should factor in at all as to whether their civil liberties should be restored.

Republicans challenged McAuliffe’s order in the courts, and Virginia’s Supreme Court just recently ruled 4-3 against McAuliffe.

To be clear, the Supreme Court didn’t rule that McAuliffe couldn’t restore the voting rights of released felons who had done their time and were no longer under state supervision. Rather, McAuliffe essentially tried to expand his own power as governor with a blanket gesture, and the state’s constitution did not give him such authority. He just completely screwed up the process and turned the whole effort into a lesson in the limits of executive authority. From the ruling:

All agree that the Governor can use his clemency powers to mitigate a general rule of law on a case-by-case basis. But that truism does not mean he can effectively rewrite the general rule of law and replace it with a categorical exception. The express power to make exceptions to a general rule of law does not confer an implied power to change the general rule itself. The unprecedented scope, magnitude, and categorical nature of Governor McAuliffe’s Executive Order crosses that forbidden line. …

If the anti-suspension provision has no role to play as a check on any of the Governor’s clemency powers, this view, taken to its logical limits, would empower a Virginia Governor to suspend unilaterally the enforcement of any criminal law in the Code of Virginia, based solely on his personal disagreement with it, simply by issuing categorical, absolute pardons to everyone convicted of his disfavored crime. This view would similarly empower a Governor to issue a single, categorical order restoring voting rights to all felons — even those imprisoned, those subject to a supervised criminal sentence, and those released from prison but later civilly committed as sexual predators — thereby eliminating any remaining vestige of the general voter disqualification rule in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia.

Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s choice for vice president and former governor of Virginia, was also referenced in the ruling. When Kaine was governor, he was asked to take a blanket action to restore voting rights but determined that he didn’t have that level of power. His counsel at the time wrote the very “notion that the Constitution of the Commonwealth could be rewritten via executive order is troubling.”

Fortunately for felons in Virginia, this doesn’t mean they can’t get their voting rights back. It just means he has to go case by case and do it the “hard,” but legally correct, way, and McAuliffe says he’s going to do exactly that.

There are additional signs that McAuliffe had handled the whole case poorly as well. He refused to publicly release the list of names of felons who would have had their voting rights restored. But those who had seen the list discovered there were people on the list who shouldn’t be there, including felons who were still in prison, as well a couple of fugitives convicted of sex crimes.

The New York Times notes that in order to restore all these felons’ rights the correct way (where he reviews each case), he’d have to sign 385 orders per day for the rest of his term. This suggests that he might not actually review each case as he’s supposed to and could end up right back in court if Republicans challenge him again. McAuliffe, by the way, dismissed the ruling as an “overtly political action,” even though ruling did not even so much as suggest that McAuliffe couldn’t restore felons’ voting rights, just that he couldn’t do it by a massive fiat declaration.

When then-Gov. Gary Johnson announced that he supported legalizing marijuana back in 1999, he became the first major elected official in the U.S. to say something that the presidential candidates for the two major parties still won’t touch with hazmat gloves 17 years later. The move was enough of a shock that it had repercussions back home in New Mexico, including the resignation of Department of Public Safety Secretary Darren White.

On July 21, the last day of the Republican National Convention, Darren White endorsed Gary Johnson for president on Twitter. New Mexico journalist Andy Lyman has more:

White told NM Political Report that his decision to distance himself from the GOP was a “very difficult decision.”

“At the end of the day I am going to vote for the future of the nation,” White said on Monday.

Johnson said it was “great” that he got White’s support. […]

Johnson told NM Political Report that he is ready to move passed the pair’s previous disagreements.

“I hate to use this term,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “But I forgive him.”
White said any differences they had in the past are minor compared to what’s at stake.
“We’re talking about the presidency,” White said. “It’s a hell of a lot bigger than any disagreement Gary and I had in the past.”

Reason on Johnson endorsements here.