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Over the weekend, President Joe Biden had dinner with First Lady Jill Biden at Fiola Mare, a swanky restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Video footage captured the couple leaving the premises without their masks.

Note that this is a violation of the city’s mask mandate, which requires restaurant customers to wear masks while walking from the door to the table. Masks can only be removed when it’s time to sit down and actively eat or drink. Dining establishments that fail to enforce these rules can face a $1,000 fine, and thus workers can be fairly militant about it. I have been asked to put on a mask while walking to my table, or waiting in line for food, at a dozen different places—from fancy restaurants to grab-and-go sandwich shops.

But Democratic political figures whose mask mandates remain in effect in many major cities routinely fail to follow their own rules. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has flouted her mask mandate at parties, weddings, and public events, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed clearly thinks it’s crazy to enforce masks to the degree required by her own mandate. Most recently, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was caught maskless in a photo at a Women’s National Basketball Association game; according to a witness who was at the game with her, the mayor only removed her mask for the photo. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but the mask mandate does not include reasonable exceptions.

And that’s what should really irritate people about Biden failing to mask up while making a quick exit. He isn’t worried about his health during those few seconds; he probably knows that it’s pointless to require masking under some circumstances while groups of unmasked people are eating, drinking, and talking for hours. The government’s strict mask policies are so stupid that everyone who can get away with ignoring them already does so, yet they remain in place. Not for safety, or because of the science, but because our elected leaders can’t be bothered to tweak the rules.

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The Supreme Court on Monday issued two opinions awarding qualified immunity to police officers accused of brutality, overturning lower court decisions that came to the opposite conclusion. The Court has thus prohibited the alleged victims from seeking accountability in civil court.

The doctrine of qualified immunity shields government actors from civil suits if the ways in which they are said to have misbehaved, and the exact circumstances surrounding the events in question, have not yet been spelled out as unconstitutional in a prior court ruling.

It can be a low bar. Previous recipients of qualified immunity include two cops who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant, more than 24 cops who damaged an innocent man’s house during a drug raid on the wrong residence, cops who shot children, and cops who used force against subdued suspects and those who had surrendered—not because their conduct was necessarily permissible but because no court precedent had yet said the precise components of each case violated the Constitution.

Monday’s decision adds a few more to that list, including a cop in Union City, California, accused of injuring a man after pressing his left knee into the suspect’s back, as well as two officers in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, who shot and killed a man wielding a hammer.

Whether or not those officers deserve to pay damages to their accusers is not a question I have the answer to. But it’s a question that should be answered by a jury of their peers, who are constitutionally tasked with taking on that duty—and not a few judges sitting on high. Should the Supreme Court have agreed with the lower courts’ decisions and decided to withhold qualified immunity, neither plaintiff would have necessarily been awarded damages: They would simply have been legally permitted to argue their case before a jury, which they will now not have the privilege of doing.

In the first case, Officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas responded to a 911 call from a 12-year-old, who was afraid that Ramon Cortesluna, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, would hurt her and her family. When Rivas-Villegas apprehended Cortesluna on the ground, he allegedly injured him by digging his knee into his back for eight seconds. According to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, it was already clearly established law that an officer violates the Fourth Amendment when he acts in such a way with “suspects who were lying face-down on the ground and were not resisting either physically or verbally, on whose back the defendant officer leaned with a knee, causing allegedly significant injury.”

The Supreme Court disagreed, writing that there was no preexisting court precedent quite similar enough to exactly what happened between Rivas-Villegas and Cortesluna such that the officer would have been on notice that his conduct was unconstitutional.

In the second case, Officers Josh Girdner, Chase Reed, and Brandon Vick responded to an emergency call when Dominic Rollice’s ex-wife said he was drunk and would not leave the house. Upon arriving at the scene, the officers cornered Rollice in the garage, at which point he grabbed a hammer and appeared like he might throw it at one of the officers. Girdner and Vick then shot and killed Rollice.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit concluded that, although the shooting may have itself been reasonable, a jury could find that the cops created the situation when they cornered Rollice in the garage, and that such a move violated previously established law. The Supreme Court again disagreed, declining to determine if Rollice’s constitutional rights were violated but writing that the precedents were too disparate from the exact situation at hand.

Most troubling in today’s decision was the Court’s reiteration that it “is especially important in the Fourth Amendment context” to find identical court precedents when examining qualified immunity cases. That standard is what has made it so difficult for victims of government abuse to have a remote chance at holding the culprits accountable, including, for instance, the mother of the 10-year-old boy who was lying on the ground when Coffee County Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Vickers shot him. The cop was instead trying to kill a nonthreatening dog, who was a mere foot and a half away from the boy.

While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit admonished Vickers, it did not allow the boy’s mother to sue for the money she lost to her son’s medical treatment, as she was unable to find a court ruling that mimicked that nightmarish day to a T. The odds are bleak.

Supporters of qualified immunity often say that without the doctrine, state officials would be inundated with vacuous lawsuits. Such a theory contradicts reality. Without qualified immunity, plaintiffs would still be required to prove that the government affirmatively violated their rights before going to trial. Qualified immunity is only the second piece, which then necessitates that a victim locate a matching court ruling. And the Supreme Court’s decision today is another reminder of why that process is a frustrating one: The justices specifically demurred at the opportunity to decide if the alleged victims here had their constitutional rights violated. We’re told that they need to find that perfect precedent, and then the courts often decline to establish those precedents when given the chance.

Today’s decision also represents somewhat of a departure for the Court. Though it has avoided the opportunity to conduct a wholesale reevaluation of qualified immunity—a legal principle it legislated into existence decades ago—it had seemingly taken steps over the last year to send the message that the lower courts were being too specific with their qualified immunity jurisprudence. That first step came in Taylor v. Riojas, a case that saw the justices claw back qualified immunity from a group of prison guards that threw a naked inmate in cells filled with sewage and feces, and the second was in McCoy v. Alamu, where the Court overturned a qualified immunity grant to a prison guard who pepper-sprayed an inmate without provocation. Clarence Thomas, the Court’s most conservative justice, and Sonia Sotomayor, one of the more liberal justices, have both recently taken aim at qualified immunity.

But victims of government abuse will have to wait longer still. “What these two decisions illustrate is that the Supreme Court—despite its decisions last term in Taylor v. Riojas and McCoy v. Alamu—does not seem interested in making any fundamental alterations to the doctrine of qualified immunity,” says Jay Schweikert, a research fellow with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice. “To the contrary, both these decisions clearly reinforce the idea that overcoming qualified immunity generally requires a prior case with nearly identical facts.”

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University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot was to deliver the Tenth Annual John Carlson Lecture at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on October 21. As a result of a pressure campaign, he was disinvited from delivering that lecture because of his views on diversity and inclusion initiatives in American higher education. He will instead be delivering his remarks virtually (on planetary climate and the prospects of life on exoplanets) on October 21 at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. The Academic Freedom Alliance issued a public letter rebuking MIT for caving in to such pressure.

The provost at MIT has subsequently publicly released an email he sent to the faculty about the incident and minimizing the damage that had been done by the disinvitation. The Academic Freedom Alliance has now released a second public letter, this one directed to the provost at MIT and responding to the points raised in his email.

As I note in that letter:

You note in your letter that the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences “had to make a difficult decision” when an organized petition campaign was launched to pressure the Institute to disinvite Professor Abbot. It is true that universities are sometimes put in the difficult position of upholding their values of academic freedom and open inquiry when particular instances of speech become controversial and universities are being pressured to suppress speech. Identifying the correct principle and the university’s proper responsibilities in such circumstances is not difficult, however.

The university’s duty is clear – once a university has extended an invitation to a speaker to speak to members of the campus community, the university must not rescind that invitation because some object that the speaker or ideas that the speaker has expressed are unacceptable. The Institute seems to have lost sight of that very basic principle in this case, and in doing so has subverted its own institutional mission to foster the free exchange of ideas.

You can read the whole thing here.

I should add that the MIT president has now posted a public letter to the campus community about the incident here.

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Today, the New York Public Design Commission will vote to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from City Hall. The seven-foot tall bronze statue will be loaned to the New York Historical Society. Annette Gordon-Reed criticized the move.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard Law School professor and a Jefferson expert, objected to the idea of taking down the Jefferson statue, but described its likely move to the New-York Historical Society, where she serves as a trustee, as the best-case scenario.

“This represents a lumping together of the Confederates and a member of the founding generation in a way which I think minimizes the crimes and the problems with the Confederacy,” Ms. Gordon-Reed said.

Later this year, the famous Theodore Roosevelt statue will be removed the Museum of Natural History.

Thankfully, Mt. Rushmore is not in Manhattan. At least three of the faces would be effaced.

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