Category: reason

A Santa Fe, New Mexico, county
sheriff’s deputy has been charged with murder after
allegedly shooting
another deputy in a drunken fight. Tai Chan reportedly
shot Jeremy Martin at a Las Cruces hotel, where they were staying
after extraditing a prisoner to Arizona.

Mickey Stone faces up to a year
in jail for buying
a lottery ticket. Stone won $900 on the ticket, which he said
he bought at a store in Huntington, Indiana. But he actually bought
the ticket at the liquor store he works at in Winchester. He has
been charged with violating a state law banning employees from
buying a ticket from the store in which they work.

Before you dare vote today, for you non-early-voters, consider
that Campaign for Liberty, the grassroots activist group in the Ron
Paul tradition and chaired by the former congressman himself,
surveyed candidates for both federal and state level offices on
their stances on 20 matters of concern to Paul fans, including:

1. Will you cosponsor and support efforts for roll call votes on
Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill, designed to bring transparency to
the Federal Reserve (H.R. 24/S. 209 in the 113th Congress)?

2. Will you support legislation removing capital gains and sales
taxes on gold and silver coinage?

3. Will you vote to oppose any legislation that allows the
federal government to prohibit the sale, use, or carrying of
firearms?…..

9. Will you support legislation to shut down the Transportation
Security Administration and place airport security back into
private hands?

10. Will you oppose using military action without a declaration
of war?

11. Will you support and cast every vote for legislation that
will repeal or defund ObamaCare?

12. Will you oppose any legislation that will force online
businesses to collect sales taxes and increase costs on the
American consumer, whether it is the so-called “Marketplace
Fairness Act” or any other Internet sales tax scheme?

13. Will you support legislation that would prevent the
indefinite detention of American citizens and would ensure full
Fifth Amendment rights to due process?….

15. Will you oppose federal power grabs like roving wiretaps and
warrantless searches and oppose Patriot Act renewal that includes
such items?

16. Will you support efforts to end the NSA’s unconstitutional
domestic spying program?

17. Will you oppose any legislation that requires states and
citizens to participate in a National Identification program,
including mandatory E-Verify?

18. Will you support keeping our Internet free from government
control and intrusion, including opposing power grabs such as SOPA,
CISPA, or any other bill that mandates more government intervention
in the Internet?

See those candidates who dared answer, and how they answered,
here.

From the hip-and-happening
Meet the Press (“these third-party candidates, are going
to be making a lot bigger of a difference come November 4th than we
thought”) to the staid old-fashioned
Vice (“these political interlopers smell blood”), not to
mention
right here at your favorite news and commentary site, everyone
is talking the potential importance to this midterm of the Libertarian Party.

Not necessarily as actual victors (nearly impossible), but at
least as an ideological
swing vote wider than the difference between the two major
party candidates, and perhaps most important of a sign that growing
numbers of Americans are willing to defy the wasted vote syndrome
and express both dissatisfaction with government writ large and
with our political choices in the most direct way they can.
(Granted, musing about the sudden surprise rise of Third Parties
is
a perennial for those who have a professional obligation to
write many words about elections.)

With that in mind, it often isn’t worth that much thought
parsing out the specifics of the candidates running under the L.P.
label. It is overwhelmingly likely that for the most part, the
Libertarian voter is voting the Party, not the person.

In that case, does it matter to a libertarian-leaning voter that
not even all people bearing the Libertarian Party label will seem
either the type of person you’d want holding elective office, or
even one who stands for everything you like about the Libertarian
message? The latter point might be vital if you really
believed that the candidate is going to win the office—but almost
certainly, if you are a sane L.P. voter, you don’t think that.

So some of the recent media follies surrounding L.P. candidates
seem less important than the L.P. itself does as an outlet for
small-state, anti-two-party expression for those who choose to
vote.

It’s a common plaint from party higher-ups that the L.P. must,
alas, go to battle with the candidates they have, not the
candidates they might ideally want. L.P. National Committee
Executive Director Wes Benedict was especially thrilled at the

unprecedented vote percentage last year of Robert Sarvis,
successful tech entrepreneur, in its potential to attract more
well-established humans to run with the L.P.

Sarvis himself is back in the fray, this time running for
federal Senate, and emphasizing, the media reports, economic
growth and fiscal responsibility—some areas where he might be
able to outflank Republican Ed Gillespie, and without any stench of
disagreeable social conservatism/busybodism (although Sarvis is

not polling that strongly, and not tending to beat the spread
between a generally behind Gillespie and leading Democrat Mark
Warner.)

While those who imagine that Libertarians are just there to
outdo Republicans on the shrinking government message might image
that fiscal responsibility is one of their main cards, that’s not
true of one of the most talked-about L.P. Senate candidates,
longtime Party hand, pizza deliverer, and antiwar candidate Sean
Haugh for North Carolina Senate.

Haugh is a living reminder that not all people immersed in this
libertarian thing think alike, and that a more “left” orientation
is both a real, and apparently really attractive to many, part of
the current slightly bigger tent of both Party and movement.

Haugh is such a rebel that when he made comments about his
sincere dislike for “dark money,” I at first
assumed that he must be kidding, since a firm belief that
anyone should be able to spend any money they want to speak out
about or support politics or candidates is pretty widespread among
libertarians as a free political speech matter. But Haugh exhibited
a more old-fashioned civic republicanism and condemned the Kochs,
and by presumption any rich person’s “ways of influencing elections
and policy at all, very corrupting & anti-republic….”

Although Haugh got very mad at my colleague Stephanie Slade

for writing about it, for reasons he will not go on record
about to her (and did not return my call seeking clarification
either), Haugh was also not kidding when he spoke up against
rampant Medicaid cuts, charging that they cause people to suffer.
Although he condemned the Weekly Standard article
reporting on this, Haugh said effectively the same thing in one of
his own
videos on his own web site, tut-tutting harsh cost-cutting
policies that could lead to grandma being “thrown out on the
street.”

Now, Ron Paul also told me that when trying to shrink
government, payments that directly helped the indigent aren’t the
wisest or kindest place to go slashing first. Haugh represents an
understandable and real modern trend in what goes out under the
name libertarian; though he’s old school, having worked with the
L.P. since 1980, he has a new-generation tinge in his approach to
the Libertarian message.

I cannot defend this proposition chapter and verse, but I’ve
noticed a very real tendency among younger libertarians to stress
much more, and in some cases even to seem to only believe in, those
aspects of the libertarian message that are on the surface and
agreeably “nice”—that is, about the areas where the state (or even
an individual) is clearly doing things, from war to drug war to
surveillance to police abuse to racism and discrimination, that
harm innocent, or at least not so guilty as to deserve
that, people.

They shy away—and Haugh deliberately walks away—from the parts
of the Libertarian message that might mean the state must stop
doing things that do in fact help some people, even if as part of a
complicated roundrobin system of theft and subsidy. We libertarians
can and will point to studies that indicate that, say, on the whole
access to Medicaid seems to have
little positive effect on actual health. (The mistaken conflation of health care
with health is a category error that has damaged our public
policy for decades, at least.) But to those of a more genteel
disposition, the mere ability to guarantee access to doctors and
health care services without risking penury is something worth
fighting for, unabashedly a good thing, and the last step on any
path to a night watchman, or less, state. This sort of “nice”
libertarianism is something that activists both within and without
electoral politics involved in the movement need to grapple with,
because it is showing signs of changing the tenor of the
movement—perhaps not as radically as the meaning of liberalism
changed from 1870 to 1930, but in a similar direction.

Haugh is not the only prominent L.P. candidate taking a leftish
tack; see also Lucas Overby, running for a Florida House seat in a
race with no Democrat, talking simultaneously
about tax reform and veteran care as primary issues,
self-identifying
as a left-libertarian and at least months ago polling as high
as 31 percent.

As a non-voter I reserve the right
not only to complain but also
to advise voters how to vote, and to vote Libertarian if you
must vote. It is not alas, for the reason that L.P. National
Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark
wrote here on Reason the other day, that it has
“Libertarian” in the name. As Haugh shows, not even that name
guarantees modal libertarian views on all issues. (A candidate for
Senate as antiwar as Haugh is worth considering for the Senate
regardless.)

Especially when you can be confident that your vote is not
actually going to propel any specific candidate to office, you can
rest assured in another point Sarwark made: that “Voting
Libertarian is the only clear message you can send.”

The Libertarian message is still strong, and still appealing,
even if every candidate doesn’t seem to fully grasp it, or
otherwise seems someone unwise to put forward for public
office.

Maybe, as the
Chicago Tribune complained about Illinois’ L.P.
gubernatorial candidate Chad Grimm (who is beating
the spread between his opponents in polls), some L.P.
candidates aren’t good at coming across like sufficiently wonkishly
knowledgeable about policy and government when talking to newspaper
editors. (I’ll have to take their word that most other major party
candidates do, since my own experience as a reporter talking to
actual congresspeople makes me doubt that all the “real” candidates
come across with high levels of competent understanding of the deep
workings of policy and government, combined with ideological
sharpness.)

Maybe L.P. candidates will be, like Idaho L.P. Governor’s
candidate John Bujak, someone who has the unattractive as a
candidate traits of a series of
professional ethics complaints and
contempt of court charges for unpaid child support .While this
doesn’t mean he wouldn’t govern, from a libertarian perspective,
better than his opponents, it does alas make it harder for many
people to take voting for him, or for a party that endorsed him,
seriously.

But as said earlier, when it comes to candidates, the L.P. is
largely stuck with whoever is willing to take the trouble to run.
And a vote for the Libertarian Party says something loud and clear
that no other vote does: that business as usual government is
dangerous, damaging, and unacceptable, far more so than some
minuscule chance of sending a possibly inappropriate, in ideology
or deportment, candidate to office.

Tonight’s episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
with re-airs three hours later), being the last before
the most important election ever about nothing, will start with
a last-gasp Senate-numbers breakdown from Fox Business Network
Washington Correspondent Rich Edson. Party Panelists
Julie Roginsky (Fox
News contributor, Democrat) and Ellison Barber
(Washington Free Beacon writer, non-Democrat) will assess
each side’s level of desperation, assign sexism points to Tom
Harkin’s
Taylor Swift-boating of Joni Ernst, and bask in the glory of

Rock-the-Voters who don’t vote.

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist will make
his case that
libertarians should vote Republican if the election is close.
Longtime right-of-center journalist and commentator John Fund will make the case
that if the election is close,
Democrats may well cheat. The co-hosts will provide a scorecard
to a whole host of late-breaking campaign comments about race. And
if all that’s not enough to get you reaching for the Hydrocodon,
the show will end with a discussion of Brittany Maynard’s
suicide.

Online-only aftershow begins at http://ift.tt/QYHXdy
just after 10. Follow The Independents on Facebook at
http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and
click on this page
for more video of past segments.

In tomorrow’s midterms, third-party candidates are shaking up
key governors races in Alaska, Florida, and Maine. 
Independent and libertarian candidates have managed to peel off
both conventional Democratic and Republican voters leaving major
party candidates scrambling to appeal to the
independent-minded.

Odd things happen when third party candidates enter a
competitive race. Examining Alaska, Florida, and Maine we find tea
party favorite and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin endorsing a
Democrat and Independent, tea party-backed candidates courting the
support of so-called establishment Republicans, Democrats
supporting a social conservative and Republicans nearly criticizing
them for doing so.

Here are the key governor races with influential third party
candidates to watch tomorrow:

Alaska

The Alaska governor’s race has taken an
unconventional turn with Democratic candidate Bryon Mallott
dropping out to the race to form a “unity ticket” with socially
conservative Independent candidate Bill Walker, Democrats then
supporting a social conservative, and Republicans
criticizing them for it.

The incumbent Republican governor Sean Parnell was the expected
front-runner until the third-party candidate teamed up with the
Democrat. Parnell has also had difficulty with voters for several
reasons. First, as governor he has run up deficits, dipped into the
state reserves, refused to accept Medicaid expansion, and some
believe he has mishandled the Alaska National Guard sexual assault
case. In addition, voters perceive Parnell to have doled out
special favors to oil and gas special interests, leading former
Republican Gov. Sarah Palin to endorse the Walker-Mallott ticket
saying Republican Parnell was “suckered” by “crony capitalists.”
The political dynamics of the race are all over the board. Along
with Sarah Palin’s endorsement, Walker-Mallott also received the
AFL-CIO’s endorsement.

Independent Bill Walker used to
be a Republican, remains socially conservative, and is a deficit
hawk promising to cut spending and raise taxes on somebody to
balance the budget. So this put Democrats in a curious position of
supporting a social conservative in order to break into Alaska’s
Republican-dominated state house. Moreover, Republicans find
themselves walking the fine line of pointing out Walker’s stances
on abortion and gay marriage to Democrats without offending
socially conservative Parnell voters.

Florida

In Florida a former and current governor are in a tight race
tomorrow, with enough irritated voters that the libertarian
candidate pulls about 7 percent of the likely vote.
Polls show former governor Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie
Crist with an average of 42 percent of the vote, incumbent
Republican Rick Scott with 41.2 percent and libertarian candidate
Adrian Wyllie with 7 percent.

Voters are disillusioned with both candidates,
perhaps because neither can claim outsider status having both
filled the office before. Moreover, both Scott and Crist are
underwater on their favorables (Scott 48 to 41, Crist 47 to 40).
Consequently, the race has considerably more undecided voters than
usual. Political Science Professor Susan MacManus
argues that ultimately voters will decide the Florida
governor’s race based not on whom they like, but whom they dislike
less.

While undecided voters and independents tend
to tilt toward Crist in this race, libertarian candidate Wyllie
pulls voters from both Crist and Scott, although
slightly more from Scott. For instance, a St. Leo University
poll
finds Crist with 43 percent, Scott with 40 percent, and Adrian
Wyllie with 8 percent. However, if no libertarian candidate were in
the race, Scott would receive a 5-point bump and Crist a 2-point
bump, tying at 45 percent each. Interestingly, while Scott
struggles with a major gender gap (35% to Crist’s 50%) men and
women are equally likely to support the libertarian (about 7%).
White and Hispanic Americans are also equally likely to support the
libertarian (9 percent). Young people (14%) are twice as likely as
those over 40 (7%) to favor Wyllie. However, with Wyllie out of the
race, most of these younger voters choose Scott over Crist.

Rick Scott was initially swept into power riding the 2010 tea
party wave, and has managed to keep grassroots conservatives only
marginally pleased with his tenure. In contrast to the several toss
up senate races, Scott has not enlisted the help of tea party
favorites like Sen. Ted Cruz and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Instead, he has sought the support of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal,
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, indicating he’s trying to reach more
moderate voters.

Charlie Crist has sought the help of Vice President Joe Biden on
the campaign trail, and Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson
signaling his attempt to turn out more left-of-center voters.

Maine

Unlike most other races with third-party
candidates, Maine’s independent candidate Eliot Cutler is siphoning
off votes primarily from Democratic Rep. Mike Michaud, who is in an
extremely tight race with Republican incumbent Paul LePage. Real
Clear Politics
shows LePage with an average of 41.2 percent, Michaud with 39.8
percent, and Cutler with 12.3 percent.

Rather than having distinct issue positions, Cutler’s views tend
to align with the Democratic candidate Michaud, however he’s proven
himself a formidable campaigner and debater. Cutler is socially
liberal, supports universal health care and college education,
campaign finance reform, and repealing “outdated” regulations.
Indeed, polls have
found that on average, 64 percent of Cutler voters would pick
Michaud as their second choice, and 36 percent would pick
LaPage.

In efforts to win back some of these potential Michaud voters,
Maine Democrats have sought to point out how Cutler is not liberal
enough on public sector unions, taxes, the minimum wage, and
criticized
him for calling free college tuition a “gift.” Michaud has
brought in Democratic heavy weights, such as President Bill Clinton
as well as President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama in order to
court Cutler voters.

Without gaining serious traction in the polls, Cutler
held a press conference last week telling his supporters to
vote for someone else if they don’t think he can win. This prompted
Independent Sen. Angus King to shift his support to Democratic
candidate Michaud.

Key Takeaway

Third party candidates in tight governors races reveal that such
candidates can peel off voters from both Democratic and Republican
mainstream candidates. In the last minute scramble to pick up swing
voters and re-capture third party voters, partisan activists resort
to crossing party lines and positions in efforts to win.

On July 22 of this year, two federal appellate courts issued
clashing decisions within hours of each other on the meaning of a
key provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In
Halbig v. Burwell, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia Circuit
held that the plain text of Obamacare forbids the granting of
tax credits to individuals who purchased health insurance on health
care exchanges operated by the federal government. In King v.
Burwell, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reached
the opposite conclusion, holding that while the relevant Obamacare
provision might appear to cut against the federal government, the
I.R.S. rule allowing tax credits via federal exchanges is
nonetheless entitled to the benefit of the doubt from the federal
courts. As that court
put it, “we must defer to the IRS rule.”

Both sides of the dispute promptly filed appeals. The Obama
administration, which lost Halbig, asked the D.C. Circuit
to rehear the case with a full panel of judges. The D.C. Circuit
agreed to do so. The losing side in King, meanwhile,
petitioned the Supreme Court to take up its case and overturn the
4th Circuit. On Friday (Halloween) the Supreme Court met in private
conference to decide whether or not to do so. Today the Court
issued its orders
from that conference. Yet those orders made no mention of King
v. Burwell. It was total silence. A short while later, the
Court’s
docket announced that King had been relisted for
another round of private discussion among the justices at this
Friday’s conference.

What does this mean? Why didn’t the Court simply agree to hear
or reject the case? At SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denniston
sketches four possible explanations:

First, it could mean that one or more Justices seemed to
simply want some more time to ponder the case, especially since
there is at present no split among federal appeals courts on the
subsidy question.

Second, it could mean that the case has not drawn the support of
four Justices in favor of reviewing the dispute, but that the
case was put over to see if more votes might be forthcoming.

Third, it could mean that the Justices just will not
take any action on the controversy until a split does
develop among federal appeals courts.   The rescheduling
for another look this week would not seem to support that
prospect.

And, fourth, it could mean that the Court is inclined to grant
review, but is simply following in this instance its apparent new
policy of not granting any new cases the first time it examines
them at a Conference.  This is a policy that emerged last
Term, to try to head off the chance that a case seemingly worthy of
review turns out not to be on closer examination.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Case Western University law professor
Jonathan Adler, whose legal arguments have played a central role in
these two challenges to the health care law,
lays out the reasons why the Supreme Court may soon agree to
hear King v. Burwell:

The justices often like to wait and let questions “percolate.”
 So whether the Court agrees to
hear King will likely depend on whether the
justices (or, more precisely, four of the justices) believe that a)
this is a question that will (or should) eventually fall on their
plate, and b) this is a question that should be
resolved sooner rather than later. …

Does King satisfy both criteria?  It might.
 In King there is a serious argument that
it would be better to resolve the underlying question of
statutory interpretation sooner rather than later.
 The resolution of this litigation
will alter the calculus for many political and private
actors considering how to respond to the PPACA, and the statute
contains various deadlines and timeframes that may become harder to
navigate the longer this litigation drags on.  Among other
things, states may wish to reconsider whether to create their own
exchanges and seek additional support grant. Some states that
created their own exchanges are planning to shift to a federal
exchange; Oregon’s transition is already underway.  A victory
for the plaintiffs in King could force them to
reconsider. It might also prompt HHS to develop rules to facilitate
the state waiver process that begins in 2017.  The more time
they have to do this, the easier it will be. Further, the longer
the IRS rule remains in place, the more disruptive it will be
should the Supreme Court ultimately decide that rule is
illegal, a point made by the petitioners in their briefing and
highlighted by the WSJ. Of note, it appears some insurers
are making contingency plans to prepare for the possibility that
the King or Halbig plaintiffs
prevail.

In other words, stay tuned next Monday for developments from
this Friday’s SCOTUS conference.

• When the dust settles tomorrow,
  the Republican Party’s margin of control over Congress could be its
  
  widest since 1929. Democrats’ last ditch effort is to
  distance themselves from President Obama. Well, that or
  this
  viral campaign trail photobomb by Bill Clinton.
• Obama is having his
  first-ever one-on-one meeting with Federal Reserve Chair Janet
  Yellen today. They’re talking about the U.S.’s long-term economic
  outlook.
• The Maine nurse who treated Ebola victims has
  settled with the state. She is allowed to travel freely, but
  has to closely monitor her health. She said that she was
  quarantined because of an “abundance
  of politics.” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon
  today criticized
  “unnecessarily” strict quarantine guidelines in certain places.
  Even if you survive Ebola, you might have “post-Ebola
  syndrome.”
• U.S. allies in Iraq are
  not having an easy time holding off ISIS.
• Ready your hashtags, because there’s renewed fighting in
  #BENGHAZI.
• The crash of Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft was deadly due to a
  safety device deploying too early.
  Sir Richard Branson says
  the show must go on.
• World Trade Center One is open for
  business.

Follow Reason and Reason 24/7 on
Twitter, and like us on Facebook. You
can also get the top stories mailed to you—sign up
here.

The Controlled Substance Act, passed in 1970 and signed by
President Nixon as a part of a “comprehensive” plan on drug abuse
prevention, made marijuana an illegal substance in the United
States, the culmination of decades of increased regulation and
prohibition of marijuana and other narcotics around the country.
Some states followed up federal efforts with draconian laws of
their own, like New York, whose governor, Nelson Rockefeller, gave
his name to some of the harshest anti-drug laws in the country. By
1978,
New York and nine other states had set up some kind of
decriminalization of marijuana—in Alaska via a state supreme court
decision that found Alaskans had a right to privacy that
protected using marijuana in the home but in other states via
legislation.

But then nothing happened until a few states passed medical
marijuana laws beginning in the late 1990s. Over the last decade,
buoyed by a steady and significant shift in
public opinion toward marijuana, several states have moved
toward more decriminalization and, where pushed hardest by voters,
to legalization. In 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado
approved initiatives to legalize marijuana in the state. Tomorrow,
voters in Oregon, Alaska and D.C. do, while voters in Florida and
Guam vote on medical marijuana.

Check out the graphic below:

For larger still images, check out:

1970-1989 | 1990-1999 | 2000-2009 | 2010-2014 

The new Congress hasn’t even been elected
yet, but it’s already under pressure to add billions of dollars in
new government spending to pay for “infrastructure.” According to
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, “We
have huge infrastructure needs, especially in water and
transportation, and the federal government can borrow incredibly
cheaply…. So borrowing to build roads, repair sewers and more
seems like a no-brainer.” In response, Ira Stoll offers nine
reasons why a burst of federal borrowing or taxing to pay for
roads, bridges, sewers, and airport terminals would be a disastrous
idea.

View this article.