Category: reason

By many accounts, the
Republican leadership (at least in the House, where Speaker John
Boehner bestrides the chamber like a leather-skinned Colossus), is
working to pull together some sort of “immigration reform” that
will doubtless go poorly. Already one wing of the GOP is clamoring
that “Amnesty=Suicide” and the other is…saying that newcomers are
welcome but only after we finish building a 10,000-foot-tall fence
that stretches along the coast from San Diego to Boston’s Logan
Airport.

In my latest Daily Beast col, I suggest that, if the
GOP is actually serious about its limited-government rhetoric, it
should use the immigration issue as a way to talk about reducing
the size, scope, and spending of the federal government –
especially on welfare programs for the native-born folks who have
become increasingly dependent on such handouts since George W. Bush
increased spending on food stamps, disability claims, and unfunded
extensions of long-term unemployment benefits.

Snippets:

Republicans insist that the federal government is too
inefficient and incompetent to deliver the mail or to oversee
health care, but it’s nonetheless qualified to police thousands of
miles of borders and run employment checks on hundreds of millions
of workers? Come on guys, get your story straight.

The simple fact, one that Republicans should embrace, is that
governments don’t really control aggregate immigration flows any
more than they control aggregate consumer demand. Immigration is
the result of far larger forces than even totalitarian governments
can control, including economic opportunity in the destination
country and material conditions in the home country….

In late 2008 and early 2009 – a period in which spending
authority was shared by Presidents Bush and Obama – real federal
outlays shot up to around
$10,000 per capita and show no signs of coming down
anytime soon. Indeed, budget deals these days seem to be little
more than bi-partisan raids on proposed spending reductions such as
the sequester.

If Republicans are really the party of free trade and limited
government – and if they really believe in American exceptionalism
and the lure of the Shining City Upon a Hill – they’ll take this
opportunity to welcome immigrants while rolling back the welfare
state.

Read the whole thing.

By many accounts, the
Republican leadership (at least in the House, where Speaker John
Boehner bestrides the chamber like a leather-skinned Colossus), is
working to pull together some sort of “immigration reform” that
will doubtless go poorly. Already one wing of the GOP is clamoring
that “Amnesty=Suicide” and the other is…saying that newcomers are
welcome but only after we finish building a 10,000-foot-tall fence
that stretches along the coast from San Diego to Boston’s Logan
Airport.

In my latest Daily Beast col, I suggest that, if the
GOP is actually serious about its limited-government rhetoric, it
should use the immigration issue as a way to talk about reducing
the size, scope, and spending of the federal government –
especially on welfare programs for the native-born folks who have
become increasingly dependent on such handouts since George W. Bush
increased spending on food stamps, disability claims, and unfunded
extensions of long-term unemployment benefits.

Snippets:

Republicans insist that the federal government is too
inefficient and incompetent to deliver the mail or to oversee
health care, but it’s nonetheless qualified to police thousands of
miles of borders and run employment checks on hundreds of millions
of workers? Come on guys, get your story straight.

The simple fact, one that Republicans should embrace, is that
governments don’t really control aggregate immigration flows any
more than they control aggregate consumer demand. Immigration is
the result of far larger forces than even totalitarian governments
can control, including economic opportunity in the destination
country and material conditions in the home country….

In late 2008 and early 2009 – a period in which spending
authority was shared by Presidents Bush and Obama – real federal
outlays shot up to around
$10,000 per capita and show no signs of coming down
anytime soon. Indeed, budget deals these days seem to be little
more than bi-partisan raids on proposed spending reductions such as
the sequester.

If Republicans are really the party of free trade and limited
government – and if they really believe in American exceptionalism
and the lure of the Shining City Upon a Hill – they’ll take this
opportunity to welcome immigrants while rolling back the welfare
state.

Read the whole thing.

Progressive America is crestfallen. It
had hoped for better things from President Obama, and he has not
delivered. The dashing of those expectations also ought to serve as
a cautionary tale. The vast gulf between the imagined Obama
presidency and the actual Obama presidency should leave
progressives wondering what a future Democrat might do in the Oval
Office. A. Barton Hinkle asks: Do they really expect another
president to govern more liberally? To show more regard for the
Constitution, for civil liberties, for executive restraint? Do they
think some other Democrat could surpass Obama?

View this article.

Progressive America is crestfallen. It
had hoped for better things from President Obama, and he has not
delivered. The dashing of those expectations also ought to serve as
a cautionary tale. The vast gulf between the imagined Obama
presidency and the actual Obama presidency should leave
progressives wondering what a future Democrat might do in the Oval
Office. A. Barton Hinkle asks: Do they really expect another
president to govern more liberally? To show more regard for the
Constitution, for civil liberties, for executive restraint? Do they
think some other Democrat could surpass Obama?

View this article.

The U.S. Supreme Court was designed to be an anti-democratic
institution, one that would reject what’s politically popular and
instead do what’s constitutionally right. In the words of James
Madison, the judicial branch is supposed to act as an “impenetrable
bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or
executive.” Or at least that’s the theory. In practice, the Supreme
Court has often done something else.

Justice Antonin Scalia
admitted as much on Monday when he told a law school audience
at the University of Hawaii that “you are kidding yourself if you
think” the Court will not someday issue another decision comparable
to Korematsu
v. United States, the notorious 1944 ruling where the
Supreme Court upheld President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime
internment of Japanese-Americans.

“In times of war, the laws fall silent,” Scalia said. “That’s
what was going on — the panic about the war and the invasion of the
Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would
not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no
justification, but it is the reality.”

Unfortunately, he’s right. The history of the Supreme Court is
replete with examples of the Court deferring to the very worst sort
of government actions—and not just in time of war. Buck v.
Bell, for example, a 1927 decision by Progressive
hero Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed the state of
Virginia to forcible sterilize a teenage girl on the eugenicist
grounds that she was “socially inadequate” and an “imbecile.”

As Scalia acknowledged, we’re kidding ourselves if we think
today’s judges are any less susceptible to prejudice or panic, and
would therefore be any less deferential to government power during
trying times. It’s a sobering thought, but one that we are wise to
bear in mind.

But there is one more lesson to be drawn from such history and
it is this: The judiciary has been at its historic best when it
refuses to accept the agendas of lawmakers and presidents. That was
the case in 1917’s Buchanan
v. Warley, when the Court struck down a popularly-enacted
Jim Crow residential segregation law for violating property rights,
just as it was the case in 1952’s Youngstown
Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, where the Court invalidated
President Harry Truman’s unilateral attempt to nationalize the
steel industry during the Korean War.

The Supreme Court was designed to act as a check on the other
branches of government. Our country is better off when it does its
job.

• Four people believed to be connected to the drugs found
  
  Philip Seymour Hoffman’s apartment have been arrested.
• U.S. officials say that the Obama administration has
  curtailed drone strikes in Pakistan as the government there
  works towards holding peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban.
• CVS Caremark pharmacies will
  stop selling tobacco products by Oct. 1.
• Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Mike Rogers
  (R-Mich.) has said that the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has
  been reporting on the information leaked by NSA whistle-blower
  Edward Snowden,
  illegally sold stolen material.
• A grand jury has indicted
  Ross Ulbricht, who is accused of creating Silk Road. CNN
  reports that Ulbricht is charged with “engaging in a continuing
  criminal enterprise, computer hacking, money laundering, and
  operating a narcotics conspiracy.”
• New Jersey Gov.
  Chris Christie plans to embark on a national tour amid the
  so-called “Bridgegate” scandal.

Get Reason.com and Reason 24/7
content widgets for your
websites.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter,
and don’t forget to sign
up for Reason’s daily updates for more
content.

“The judge will actually collaborate with the government in
coming up with hypothetical justifications for a law in order to
bend over backwards and uphold whatever the government is doing,”
says Clark Neily, attorney at the Institute for Justice and author of the
new book,
Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the
Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. “You don’t
get a neutral arbiter.”

Watch Reason TV’s interview with Neily above, or click the link
below for full story, associated links, and downloadable
versions.

Approximately 9 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by
Tracy Oppenheimer, Lexy Garcia, and Gabrielle Cole.

View this article.

“The judge will actually collaborate with the government in
coming up with hypothetical justifications for a law in order to
bend over backwards and uphold whatever the government is doing,”
says Clark Neily, attorney at the Institute for Justice and author of the
new book,
Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the
Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. “You don’t
get a neutral arbiter.”

Watch Reason TV’s interview with Neily above, or click the link
below for full story, associated links, and downloadable
versions.

Approximately 9 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by
Tracy Oppenheimer, Lexy Garcia, and Gabrielle Cole.

View this article.

Under California’s
Armed and Prohibited Persons System, state agents check
databases of gun owners against those of people forbidden to own
guns because they are, allegedly, “felons, individuals with history
of violence (domestic violence/restraining order) or severe mental
illness, wanted persons.” An armed team then proceeds to the
address of record for the prohibited person in question to ask, oh
so nicely, of course, for any weapons to be surrendered. Questions
over the validity of California’s categories of “prohibited
persons” aside, you might ask yourself what happens if the state’s
databases are in the usual, somewhat moth-eaten and incompetently
maintained condition that tends to beset government toys? What
happens to poor bastards who show up in there quite mistakenly—as
happened when a goon squad descended on the home of Michael
Merritt, over a marijuana possession charge from 1970?

Reports Carol Ferguson at
BakersfieldNow.com:

Merritt said that was the night of Nov. 5. Several agents
arrived at his door and started asking questions about which guns
he owned.

“I thought, he’s here to get my guns for some reason,” Merritt
described. “He says, ‘You have a felony here from 1970.’ I said, ‘A
felony? A pot possession charge from 1970.'”

The gun owner said the officers showed him a print-out of the
charge. It lists the offense under a code of 11910, from a Los
Angeles community. Merritt said he remembers the incident from more
than 40 years ago, and he doesn’t think the charge is on the books
now.

“Doesn’t exist anymore,” Merritt argued. “I mean, it’s a ticket
now days.”

Eyewitness News checked the penal code, and 11910 doesn’t show
up.

Merritt also disputed whether the charge was ever a felony.

“I truly, honestly don’t remember pleading guilty to any
felony,” he said. “The jail time was like five weekends.”

He remembered getting probation and a fine of about $100.

APPS agents aren’t allowed to enter homes on their own say so,
but they can play the usual law-enforcement trick if you tell them
to go pound sand: threaten to come back later and really jack you
up.

“We told them to leave the house and go get a warrant, and they
said that’s fine,” wife Karla Merritt said.

“But, when we get the warrant and we come back, you’re going to
jail,” agents reportedly told the couple.

Michael Merritt said he had to get to work, so they let the
agents take the guns.

As it turns out, agents called Merritt a few days later to admit
they’d made a mistake and to say they were returning his guns. The
charge had, in fact, been a misdemeanor. But it had been entered
incorrectly in the system.

Because it would have been totally cool to threaten him and
steal his guns over a 44-year-old marijuana possession charge if it
had really been a felony.

It’s nice—commendable really—that agents bothered to dig through
the records after the fact, and then actually admitted their
mistake. You have to wonder if that’s because the poor quality of
the records isn’t exactly a revelation to officials, and this is
not an unexpected outcome.

But how many screw-ups do they miss? Or just not admit?

And how many people “legitimately” get their guns grabbed
because a politician arbitrarily decided that some relatively
innocent act (pot possession?) should be classified a felony, and
those people got caught doing it back before sideburns were
ironic?

Then there’s mental illness. Does that really belong on the
list? Only about 4.3 percent
of people with a “severe” mental illness are likely to commit
any sort of violence, according to a University of Chicago study.
But among the Californians who have had their guns grabbed is a
woman, Lynette Phillips, who suffers from anxiety
disorder.

This year, California started
registering all gun owners and the guns they buy. As
I’ve written, the ways in which government officials misuse and
abuse gun registration records is an
excellent incentive to ignore the law and keep your guns
unregistered. Michael Merritt might agree.

See Reason TV’s video, below, on the
truth about mental illness and guns.

In 2010 Congress reduced the
arbitrary sentencing disparity between the smoked and snorted forms
of cocaine, but the changes did not apply retroactively, so
thousands of nonviolent offenders continue to serve prison terms
that nearly everyone now agrees are excessive. Last Thursday, the
Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would allow such
prisoners to petition for resentencing under the new rules, and the
Justice Department announced that President Obama, who so far has
shortened the sentences of nine crack offenders, would like to
issue more such commutations. Jacob Sullum says these simultaneous
moves by the legislative and executive branches suggest that,
nearly three decades after Congress created draconian crack
penalties, some of the lives wrecked by that punitive panic may yet
be salvaged.

View this article.