From today’s decision in Jensen v. Minn. Bd. of Med. Practice, written by Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras and joined by Judges James Loken and Lavenski Smith:

Years of investigations by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice caused Dr. Scott Jensen to speak less and spend more. Either would be enough for a court to hear his case, so we reverse….

Like the rest of the country, the COVID-19 pandemic divided Minnesotans. Some public officials, including Governor Tim Walz, pushed for aggressive measures to “stop the spread” of the virus. Others like Dr. Scott Jensen, then a state senator, had a different view. He opposed vaccine mandates and believed it was a mistake to close businesses and schools. He ran on that message as the Republican nominee for governor in the 2022 election.

Not everyone liked what he had to say. So much so that, from the pandemic’s start until mid-2022, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice received 18 complaints about him. The objection was almost always the same: Dr. Jensen was “spreading misinformation” and posed a “danger to public health.” … [T]he 18 complaints led to four investigations. At the start of each one, the Board sent him a letter detailing the allegations. Two asked him to “respond[ ] in writing[ ]” and reminded him that, “as a licensee of the Board,” he was “required to cooperate fully.” When he replied to those, he provided the Board with hundreds of pages of information, including news stories about the pandemic, medical studies, and patient records.

One, which lasted more than a year, took on a life of its own. Like the others, it began with a letter informing him that the Board was investigating an allegation that he had “politiciz[ed] public health.” He cooperated, but the Board waited until after the election to request an “in-person conference.” The notice listed multiple possible violations, including “unethical or improper conduct” and “depart[ing] from or fail[ing] to conform to the minimal standards of acceptable and prevailing medical practice.”

The subject line underscored the high stakes involved: “In the Matter of the Medical License of Scott M. Jensen, M.D.” He hired a lawyer and spent countless hours preparing. After the conference ended, so did the investigation.

Jensen sued, claiming the investigations violated the First Amendment, and the court held that he had standing to raise this claim (even though he was challenging just the investigations, and not any actually implemented disciplinary measures):

Grounded in the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III, standing ensures that the person suing—here, Dr. Jensen—has the “personal stake” necessary for a federal court to intervene. Satisfying it requires “(1) an injury in fact; (2) a causal connection between the injury and the challenged [action]; and (3) a likelihood of redressability.” …

At the motion-to-dismiss stage, “we [must] assume the allegations in the complaint are true and view them in the light most favorable to [Dr. Jensen].” Even “general factual allegations of injury resulting from the defendant’s conduct” are enough because “we presum[e] that [they] embrace those specific facts that are necessary to support the claim.” They can—and often do—lead to plausible inferences that satisfy all three standing requirements.

We have little doubt that Dr. Jensen’s complaint clears these hurdles when it comes to causation and redressability. At a minimum, the alleged “ever-present threat of further investigation,” backed by a list of past investigations, adequately connects his chilled speech and time and money spent responding to what the Board did. Money damages would redress those injuries. And to the extent these past investigations affect his present and future willingness to speak, an injunction would remedy it.

The real battle is over whether Dr. Jensen alleged a sufficiently “concrete and particularized” injury….

A “pocketbook” harm is a “classic” Article III injury. In general, monetary harm is an injury precisely because it is both concrete and particularized. Concreteness comes from the fact that it is “real” and “actually exist[s].” And it is “particularized” because it affected Dr. Jensen “in a personal and individual way.” Once the Board opened the investigations, he had an obligation to “cooperate fully,” including “fully and promptly” answering any questions and “providing copies of patient medical records.”

Even a minor expenditure of “time and resources” counts as an injury. Here, according to the amended complaint, Dr. Jensen did more, far more. For the first few investigations, he was “forced to spend hours of his time” responding. But for the last one, which went on for more than a year, he spent countless hours working on his responses, including compiling documents and eventually hiring a lawyer. These steps, arising out of his [statutory] obligation to “cooperate fully,” led to out-of-pocket expenses and resulted in “lost revenue because he took on fewer patients.” Regardless of whether the Board thinks Dr. Jensen should have taken those actions, they are “classic pocketbook injur[ies].”

{The “pocketbook injury” supports his claim for damages under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Arguably so does the time he lost “communicating with voters on the campaign trail” during the 2022 election. But given the other particularized and concrete injuries he suffered, there is no need to decide whether the harm to his campaign adds another.} …

According to the amended complaint, the investigations also caused Dr. Jensen to change his “message to … constituents” and “decline invitations to public[-]speaking events.” These general allegations are enough to create a plausible inference that his speech was chilled, something he allegedly told the Board in 2020, shortly after the first investigation began. As we have explained, “one type of injury that confers Article III standing” in First Amendment cases is “when a plaintiff is chilled from exercising h[is] right to free expression.” It happens when a “government official’s conduct would cause a person of ordinary firmness to self-censor.” Exactly the situation we have here….

In addition to general allegations that he changed his message and declined multiple invitations, the amended complaint mentioned that he “took great care to make certain that people understood when he was speaking as a candidate and when he was speaking as a family doctor,” something none of his opponents had to do. In the face of professional sanctions, Dr. Jensen believed the risk of speaking “candidly and honestly” about “COVID-19 vaccines and other government interventions in personal-health care decisions” presented too great a risk.

A reasonable person in his position would have reacted the same way. After a steady stream of letters from the Board, anyone in Dr. Jensen’s shoes would have been concerned about a looming and “credible threat of enforcement.” In fact, it would have been unreasonable to ignore the threat given the consequences, which included the potential loss of his medical license.

It makes no difference that Dr. Jensen “tailored his message” rather than abandoned it. After all, changing the “when, where, and how” of speech is an injury. A chilling effect may not be as tangible as a pocketbook injury, but it is still a “concrete and particularized” harm….

The chilling effect he continues to experience also qualifies as an “ongoing” injury supporting injunctive relief. Again a candidate for public office, Dr. Jensen continues to be “active in the media” and interact with “members of the public” with the goal of educating them about how current officeholders mismanaged the pandemic. In other words, he is in the same position as before, seeking to engage in “substantially similar activity” without having to worry about potentially losing his medical license.

It is hard to imagine a situation in which the “threat of future enforcement” could be more credible. After 18 complaints and four investigations, pretty “good evidence” of “past enforcement against the same conduct,” the threat against Dr. Jensen is far from “chimerical.” And the fact that anyone can file a complaint turns him into an “easy target[ ]” for “political opponents.” …

The court sent the case back down to the district court to consider the merits: “[O]ur usual approach in these circumstances is to let the district court have the first crack at them.”

Nicholas James Nelson, Douglas Seaton, and James Dickey represent plaintiffs.

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On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump slammed his own picks for the Supreme Court, condemning them as both cowardly and “highly political.” Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett “are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote on Truth Social. “They are merely a shell of their original selves.”

The immediate impetus for that rant was the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Trump administration’s application for an emergency stay. Trump wanted the Court to block a preliminary injunction against implementation of a U.S. Postal Service plan to screen mail-in ballots, the result of an executive order he issued in March. That plan was necessary, he said, as “a solution to our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-In voting ‘disaster,’ which is a laughing stock all over the World.” But while he was on the subject of “horrible” Supreme Court decisions, he reiterated his complaints about its rulings against his “emergency” tariffs and his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship.

Trump’s latest tirade against his nominees reflects his general attitude toward judicial review, which he sees as an illegitimate obstacle to his policy agenda and personal whims. As the president tells it, Trump appointees do not rule against him because they honestly disagree with his legal positions. Rather, they are “totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America” because they “are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats.” It is a character defect, as opposed to a careful consideration of the facts and the law, that explains their failure to side with him.

That take is counterintuitive, to say the least. According to Trump, it requires courage for justices to agree with the president who appointed them, while cravenness is the only possible explanation for failing to do so.

“The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the
District Court’s preliminary injunction,” the Supreme Court said on Monday, when it declined to issue a stay in U.S. Postal Service v. California, the mail-in ballot case. “And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.”

That brief order was unsigned, but the only dissenters on record were Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Kavanaugh wrote a short concurring statement. Although “there is at least a fair prospect” that the Postal Service would win on the merits, he said, “applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

Seven justices, in other words, did not think a stay was appropriate, either because the Postal Service had probably exceeded its legal authority or because trying to implement the rule now would disrupt the elections. But according to Trump, those rationales were disingenuous.

As he explained after the tariff ruling in February, the three Democratic nominees on the Supreme Court “automatically vote no” because they are “against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again.” And the Republican nominees who vote against him are, if anything, even more contemptible: They are “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical-left Democrats.” They “may think they’re being politically correct,” but “they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” Or as he put it in Tuesday, they are “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”

At the same time, Trump described the order in the Postal Service case as “highly political.” How so? “It is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself,” he said, because it “makes cheating by the Radical Left ‘Dumocrats,’ on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do.” The implication that the Republican appointees (presumably including Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Trump’s nominees) were eager to facilitate such Democratic chicanery seems inconsistent with the equally implausible claim that they were intimidated into compromising their party’s interests.

For Trump, the main point is that his nominees, regardless of their motivation, have betrayed him, which means they have betrayed their country. “Their horrible decision on Tariffs will be costing the U.S.A., for many years to come, Trillions and Trillions of Dollars,” he said. “Likewise, the Supreme Court’s Decision on Birthright Citizenship is a complete and total disaster for America.”

This Court “will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” Trump declared. Those “shockingly bad rulings,” he said, are “of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”

Do Trump’s nominees care? They do not! “The damage done to America is incalculable, and they know this, just as everyone else does,” he said. “It is an irreparable and unrecoverable harm! The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History.”

It seems unlikely that historians will rank the Supreme Court’s decisions rejecting Trump’s illegal tariffs and his assault on the 14th Amendment alongside Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States. But they probably will be struck by this president’s open contempt for the crucial role that an independent judiciary plays as a safeguard against tyranny.

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Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week, we have two stories on the revenge of rent control.

In the midst of San Francisco’s AI boom, Mayor Daniel Lurie and the Board of Supervisors are proposing a raft of new laws to tighten the city’s rent control policies and prevent evictions.

Meanwhile, in Providence, Rhode Island, incumbent Mayor Brett Smiley, who had vetoed a rent control ordinance earlier this year, lost the Democratic primary to pro–rent control state Rep. David Morales.

One could consider Lurie and Smiley as more moderate liberal mayors of very blue cities. 

It’s notable then that neither has proven capable of stopping the leftward drift of housing policies in their respective jurisdictions. 

In the midst of a cost crisis, Lurie is supporting even more price controls in a city that is already heavily rent-controlled. Smiley attempted to hold the line on good policy and vetoed a rent control ordinance. For his efforts, voters kicked him out of office. 

Other liberal municipal politicians who are undecided on whether to back the next rent control policy in their city may well take an unfortunate lesson away from these two examples. 

Better to play it safe and just support the price controls that most big-city voters say they want, even if it comes with terrible consequences for housing supply and quality. 

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San Francisco’s Mayor Declares a Rent Emergency 

Headlines about San Francisco housing lately have focused on the upward pressure the city’s AI boom is putting on rents and home prices. Median rents are up 26 percent, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Newly minted millionaires are having a hard time finding a mansion. 

In response, Lurie has declared a rent emergency and announced, along with members of the Board of Supervisors, a list of policies intended to limit evictions and sudden rent increases.  

“We have lived through booms before—this time, we have an opportunity to build a recovery that is broad-based and lasting, where San Franciscans can put down roots and participate in our city’s success,” said the mayor in a statement on Thursday when announcing his rent emergency reforms. 

On paper, San Francisco already has a lot of policies to suppress sudden rent hikes. 

An estimated 170,000 units (roughly 76 percent of the city’s rental housing stock) built before 1980 are covered by the city’s rent control law, which typically limits annual rent increases to around 2 percent per year. 

A state rent control policy that caps rents at 10 percent for units that are 15 years or older covers another roughly 33,000 units, or 15 percent of the rental housing stock. 

That leaves a little under 10 percent of rental units in San Francisco where tenants could see their rents rise as much as the market can bear. 

Additionally, in 2024, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction in the country to prohibit property owners from using algorithmic software when setting rents and occupancy limits on the theory that landlords were using this software to hoard vacant units and drive up prices. 

Apparently none of that has been enough to constrain prices during San Francisco’s latest economic boom. 

To further suppress rents, the mayor is supporting a long list of new policies. 

He’s backing legislation that would increase the relocation expenses tenants are owed when their landlord takes their unit off the rental market. For rent-controlled units, he’d also cap “banked” rent increases (that is the annual rent increases a landlord saves up to charge at a later date) at 10 percent per year. 

Additionally, Lurie is proposing to spend another $3 million on legal services for tenants facing eviction and supporting a proposal by socialist Supervisor Jackie Fielder to forbid nonpayment evictions when a tenant owes less than one month’s rent. 

All things considered, these are relatively marginal updates to the city’s long list of tenant protections and rental price controls. 

The fact that the tenant protections and rent control policies San Francisco already has in place are not adequately suppressing today’s rent spike would suggest that a marginal tightening of those policies won’t solve the problem either. 

In fact, it could make it worse. 

Traditional economic theory suggests that rent control will drive up the price of uncontrolled units by increasing demand to live in the city and encouraging tenants to hold onto their below-market-priced units. 

In San Francisco, the small 10 percent slice of non-rent-controlled units must absorb most of the upward pressure on rents being generated by the AI boom. 

That’s already resulted in double-digit increases in median rents. If Lurie’s proposed reforms succeed in limiting evictions that bring units back onto the market, reducing rent increases at already rent-controlled properties, or creating new market-rate condominiums, an even smaller share of units will have to absorb the AI-fueled increase in demand.

A more sustainable, long-term approach to housing affordability would be to eliminate regulatory barriers to new construction. Rising rents should, ideally, be a signal to builders to construct more units in the city. 

Under Lurie, San Francisco has adopted a handful of pro-supply reforms. It’s cut the number of affordable units new housing developments must include. The city also passed a citywide upzoning initiative. 

Even so, those deregulatory moves have done little to boost construction. The number of completed homes in the city is in the hundreds this year. 

Pro-supply housing activists have pressed Lurie to go further on supporting new home construction. Some have challenged his rezoning plan in court, alleging that it does not go far enough to satisfy state laws requiring cities to plan for housing. 

Certainly, one shouldn’t expect a few hundred additional units a year to moderate a rent spike driven by a major economic boom. Nor should one expect the list of proposals in the mayor’s rent emergency package to do much good either. 

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Mayor Who Vetoed Rent Control Defeated By Pro–Rent Control Primary Challenger 

When Smiley vetoed a 4 percent annual rent cap in Providence, Rhode Island, that the city council had approved, he did so on explicitly pro-supply grounds. 

The key to making Providence affordable was building more housing, not imposing more price controls, he argued. 

“Rent control doesn’t lower anybody’s rent,” said Smiley during an August debate against his pro–rent control Democratic primary challenger, Morales. “There are people struggling today. The root cause of that is a shortage of housing.” 

In that debate, Smiley invoked Saint Paul’s disastrous experiment with rent control. After voters approved a very strict rent control policy, developers walked away from projects, and building plummeted. Something similar could happen in Providence, he argued. 

That didn’t prove to be a winning message. On election night this past Tuesday, Morales captured over 52 percent of the vote. He’s vowed to revive the city council’s rent control proposal. 

Read my full take on the election and the dueling arguments it featured over rent control here.

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Quick Links 

• In New Hampshire, tenants of a federally funded low-income housing provider, Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority, have sued to challenge the authority’s installation of technology that can monitor for cigarette smoke, noise, and even the number of people in a unit. 
• Mortgage rates rise to a two-year high of 7.17 percent. 
• Airbnb is investing in home construction now.
• Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is proposing tax abatements for already-approved developments whose construction has stalled. How many more projects are not being proposed because of those same taxes?
• A new study on the massive disparities in construction timelines between cities. 

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Last year the Trump administration shut down a national database of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers. Now it’s facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for refusing to release records about that decision.

A coalition of civil rights and police accountability groups filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 4 after waiting 10 months for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release records about why it pulled the plug on the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a nonpublic database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.

The Justice Department launched NLEAD in 2023 to assist federal agencies with hiring and oversight. However, in one of his first acts after returning to the White House in 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the department to delete it. In a written statement to The Washington Post, the White House said former President Joe Biden’s executive order creating the database “was full of woke, anti-police concepts.”

Before the DOJ scrapped NLEAD, it had logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers—more than 70 percent of them Bureau of Prisons (BOP) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees.

Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and National Immigration Project, says the lawsuit is not seeking the misconduct data itself, but rather records “about how and why the government dismantled its own accountability tool.”

“You can’t build a national misconduct database, watch federal agencies run 10,000 searches against it in eight months, shut it down, and then tell the public that there’s nothing urgent about explaining why,” Enriquez says.

The Kennedy Human Rights Center, along with the National Police Accountability Project, Black Lives Matter D.C., and National Immigration Project, filed a FOIA request last October seeking records concerning the creation, operation, and decommissioning of NLEAD, as well as whether the data was preserved or destroyed.

The Justice Department first agreed to fast-track the FOIA request based on the heightened public interest in the records, but then reversed its decision. The coalition’s FOIA lawsuit says the department has been sitting on their request for 10 months now.

Civil liberties groups have called for the creation of centralized databases of police misconduct because, traditionally, poor information sharing between departments and lax background checks have allowed problem officers to hop from one department to another, leaving a string of misconduct, rights violations, and expensive lawsuits.

“This was about giving people more information to make smart hiring decisions,” Enriquez says. “Just as you always check someone’s recommendations whenever you’re hiring for your department, we want to do that with people who are entrusted with public safety before we put a weapon in the hands of someone and give them the authority to arrest or even use deadly force. We want to make sure that they don’t have a record of abusing that authority.”

Federal law enforcement unions opposed NLEAD, arguing that it included minor administrative infractions and didn’t give officers due process channels to dispute their inclusion.

The decommissioning of the NLEAD database preceded a massive hiring spree by the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign last spring. To reach its recruitment goals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fast-tracked training and lowered standards. Public concerns over who ICE is putting on the street with a mask, badge, and gun rose considerably after several fatal shootings by immigration officers.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that ICE is now quietly firing new recruits with red flags in their backgrounds that should have been caught with adequate vetting.

“Not only are we seeing a massive expansion of hiring,” Enriquez says, “but we’re also seeing very high-profile abuses of authority—shootings, killings, of U.S. citizens on the streets by DHS officers—so the urgency for this type of information is greater than ever.”

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The article is here; the Introduction:

In 1909, Urban Walter, a 28-year-old mail clerk, founded a small magazine with large ambitions. According to its masthead, the Harpoon was “a magazine that hurts.” It was founded in pursuit of one goal: to oppose the Post Office Department’s imposition of a “gag order” on any discussion of the train wrecks that killed scores of railway mail clerks annually and maimed many hundreds more. These gag orders, first promulgated by the Postmaster General in the late 19th century and later expanded by executive orders issued by Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, prohibited civil servants from petitioning or giving information to Congress, or advocating for improved pay or working conditions except through their departmental head. The Harpoon defied the order, promising to give the “fullest publicity” the dangerous conditions—both physical and organizational—of the work.

Walter was frequently ill with respiratory issues, exacerbated by moldy mailbags and the dusty, lamplit conditions on the mail car. To explain why he spent his precious “lay-off” time in a small print shop in Phoenix, Arizona, Walter invoked the highest of constitutional ideals. “No public official is great enough to take away the guaranteed rights of American citizenship,” Walter explained. “The very constitutional rights” of “lesser public servants” were abrogated by an order that, under penalty of swift removal, prohibited a clerk from discussing his working conditions publicly and from complaining to Congress. Under what Walter saw as the pretext of maintaining “efficiency of service,” postal officials had robbed 15,000 railway postal workers of their right to speech and right to petition the government. In so doing, officials had also undermined the public good by keeping Americans ignorant of the conditions under which their mail was delivered.

Urban Walter and the railway postal clerks who read and wrote for the Harpoon understood their fight for speech rights not in individualistic and expressive terms, but as a precondition for public accountability. Because of the transient, hidden nature of railway postal work, disclosure of the clerks’ working conditions was the public’s window into a job that also bore upon public safety. In 1909 alone, 27 railway mail workers were killed, 98 “seriously injured,” and 617 “slightly injured”—the highest number of deaths on record. Under Walter’s framing, the disclosure of dangerous working conditions implicated the “public good,” and not just the narrow interests of an individual worker.

At the same time, Walter and other railway postal workers saw these gag orders not as a blunt instrument of “efficiency,” but as an explicitly anti-union tactic designed to forestall the organization of an effective railway postal workers organization. Walter and other postal clerks fought to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) through a breakaway faction of the Department-dominated Railway Mail Association (RMA). Many of those clerks were fired—dismissed for the “good of the service,” or because of their “pernicious activity.” Walter was one such worker. He sent Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock “an advance copy” of Harpoon’s first issue, instructing the economy-minded Taft appointee to “carefully peruse” the enclosure. In response, the Department’s informed him that his (untendered) resignation had been accepted. A clerk sent Walter a dead rat that he had found inside the drinking water of his car. A photo of the rat appeared in the Harpoon. The clerk was also fired. Other supporters of the magazine were threatened with dismissal—which intensified the newspaper’s support, producing a culture of insubordination in defiance of executive orders and in support of public employee speech.

A fired worker is dangerous, a fired worker with access to a printing press doubly so. No longer facing a gag, Walter devoted himself full-time to the job of gadfly publisher and labor advocate. Less than three years after the Harpoon’s founding, Walter himself appeared before Congress, urging the passage of a single bill that would repeal the gag orders and protect the organizing rights of postal workers—speech goals that were to be linked legislatively as they had been in Walter’s protest. In his testimony, Walter accused the Postmaster General of “misinforming the committee” outright on the age and safety of mail cars. Because clerks were prohibited from disclosing information to Congress, legislators remained ignorant. The committee was thus forced to confront its own powerlessness in the face of executive branch orders. As Samuel Gompers, the president of the AFL, was quick to observe, a decade of executive orders prohibiting federal employees from disclosing information to Congress “may just as well have been an inhibition to the Members of Congress … to ask for this information.”

With the institutional prerogatives of Congress and the material interests of organized labor aligned, the Lloyd-La Follette Act became law in 1912. The Act had four discrete provisions: “no person in the classified service of the United States shall be removed therefrom except for such cause as will promote the efficiency of said service”; a requirement that a fired civil servant be furnished with written charges and an opportunity for responding to them; protection against removal or retaliation for postal employees who belonged to societies, associations, or unions—so long as the organization imposed no “duty to strike”; finally, the Act affirmed civil servants’ right to petition Congress “either individually or collective” and to “furnish information to either House of Congress, or to a committee or Member thereof.” This latter provision constituted the first statutory protection for whistleblowers, later expanded by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989.

But taken together, the Act’s provisions reflected organized labor’s view of the value of speech, Congressional oversight, and government service. While not requiring the examination of witnesses or a trial-type hearing, the Act still afforded new tenure protections for hundreds of thousands of government employees, moving government employment firmly away from an at-will model. Though paltry in comparison to later procedural safeguards, the requirement that government employees be provided with reasons for their dismissal and an opportunity to contest those reasons nonetheless reflected both a skeptical view toward the state and an adversarial view toward management. This due-process culture that defined private sector organizational governance in the second half of the 20th century was first imagined, in thin form, by civil servants and their labor advocates. And, of course, the affirmation of the right of postal employees to unionize—also subtly suggested by the right to petition Congress collectively—is testament to labor’s vision of public employee speech. In the early 20th century, a person may have possessed no constitutional right to be a postal worker, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes. But once he became one, Congress created a modest protection for him to air his dissatisfactions—and to belong to worker organizations that incubated and emboldened complaint.

The purpose of this essay is twofold: I seek to contextualize the passage of the Lloyd-La Follette Act, a curiously understudied piece of legislation. In so doing, I situate the Act within the history of the civil service and the development of an increasingly powerful presidency. Secondly, I highlight the labor origins of whistleblowing. The AFL was an early opponent of the gag orders that silenced civil servants. It was responsible for drafting the Act itself, and even approved its only substantial amendment—a prohibition on membership in unions that required a strike. Institutionally, it was a beneficiary of the law, as tens of thousands of postal workers joined unions affiliated with the AFL in the latter half of the 1910s. The labor history of the Act has been obscured by its modern-day admirers, who view it primarily as an embodiment of the separation of powers. Understanding this earlier history of struggle for speech in the federal workforce can help scholars and citizens appreciate the role that labor organizations have played in safeguarding core democratic values like transparency and accountability.

Despite its significance to the history of the civil service and democratic accountability, the Lloyd-La Follette Act is surprisingly understudied by historians. Scholars of American political development who have studied the Act and its politics have understood it largely in terms of what it revealed about the relationship between Congress and the executive branch for control of the administrative state. Little attention has been paid to the underlying speech-related grievances of gagged civil servants. Part of this lacuna lies in the fact that labor historians, as a rule, have tended to focus on the private sector at the expense of the public—particularly in studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But even a study of public sector unionism like Joseph Slater’s Public Workers begins with a historiographical lament at the marginalization of public employees within labor history before moving swiftly to the Boston police strike of 1919. Attention to the history of labor agitation within the railway mail service reveals the centrality of public employee speech and petition rights to the overall political vision of the AFL at the turn of the century.

Legal historian Laura Weinrib has argued that the labor movement has played a neglected role in the development of civil liberties consciousness. Civil liberties, and especially the right to speech, were linked to a “right to agitation”—an economically redistributive vision that “sought to counter the consolidation of capital with organized power of their own.” Weinrib’s study, particularly her focus on the free speech commitments of the political left in the years before the First World War, has shaped my own. The quest for civil servant speech—a right that labor partisans framed as constitutional, rejecting any distinction between rights and privileges or public and private employment—was part and parcel of labor’s vision of the First Amendment as a weapon of the weak against the powerful in the class war. By speaking and organizing without fear of reprisal, organized government employees could also enlist noncombatants into the fight, as Americans might also come to understand their own health, safety, or timely receipt of the mails as implicated by conditions within the railway mail service. This labor history of public employee speech sensitizes us to organized labor’s role in envisioning, expressing, and safeguarding the public’s right to hear information that bears on matters of public concern.

The ideas and language ultimately enshrined in the Lloyd-La Follette Act were developed in response to the constitutional interpretation implied by a decade of gag orders and directives from the Postmaster General. The railway mail service of the early 20th century sheds light on scholarly debates on “administrative constitutionalism,” or the ways that agency officials implement and interpret constitutional rules and norms. The Post Office has long been recognized as a site where officials exercised broad authority over policies with constitutional dimensions—such as suppression of abolitionist literature and a “virtually unreviewable” discretion to censor “obscene” materials. Regulation of speech by postmasters and postal inspectors—in other words, administrative censorship—was pervasive well into the 20th century. Working conditions within the postal service—an instance of a bureaucracy’s “internal rules,” to use Mashaw’s formulation—reveals the Postal Department’s power in attempting to determine the meaning of speech rights in practice. With no input from courts, advocacy by railway mail clerks and their allies in the AFL also refashioned ideas about speech, due process, and separation of powers in the early 20th century.

The Lloyd-La Follette Act also represented a vindication of Congressional prerogative. The history of the gag orders issued under such self-consciously “strong” presidencies as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft illustrates the perils of presidentialism. Indeed, an important goal of the orders was to maintain “tranquility” in the government’s relationship with railway companies by keeping the public ignorant. Civil service unions have furthered democratic accountability by protecting workers who transmit information to Congress. The twinned history of speech and labor rights suggests that a unionized civil service can serve as a check on presidential power. The flip side of this coin is that a diminution of labor rights and speech rights within the civil service redounds to the benefit of the executive at the expense of democracy.

I begin by sketching the relationship between civil service reform and organized labor in the late 19th century. Reform of the spoils system reshaped the postal service more than any other division of the federal bureaucracy, and by the late 19th century the Railway Mail Service (RMS) was the most important and prestigious branch within the postal system. It was also the most dangerous, spurring clerks to invigorate worker organizations and, eventually, to attempt to affiliate with the AFL. I then turn to the promulgation of agency and executive gag orders intended to suppress the dissemination of grievance, prevent disclosure of information to Congress, and, eventually, to thwart union organizing amongst the clerks. Next, I examine the organized response to the gag orders, as well as the Postal Department’s weaponization of its bureaucracy to ferret out and fire dissident clerks—a move that backfired, resulting in still more unrest and publicity. Finally, I examine Congressional support for the speech rights of postal workers, which culminated in the passage of the Lloyd-La Follette Act, legislation that braided together the interests of railway mail clerks, organized labor, and Congress itself.

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If you are someone who gets their news primarily from the New York Times and NPR, as many liberal-leaning Americans do, you often get a distorted picture of what is going on the US and the world. This is often less because of outright errors in reporting, and more about what isn’t said.

For example, each outlet barely covered the widespread nationwide rioting that accompanied Black Lives Matters protests in summer 2020. I still meet people who think the the primary violence that summer was from police manhandling protestors, and are completely unaware of the deaths, injuries and massive property damage attributable to rioters.

Similarly, I keep encountering people who have no idea that there was widespread antisemitic violence, intimidation, and threats on college campuses after Oct. 7, 2023, and instead think that university officials and later the Trump administration had no justification for clamping down on what they perceive as peaceful “pro-Palestine” protests. And that’s because they are being misinformed by sources like the Times and NPR.

Case in point: In a puff piece in yesterday’s New York Times about a lawsuit filed by Mahmoud Khalil, alleging discrimination by Columbia University against Palestinian students and their “pro-Palestine” allies, the Times reports: “The 2023 and 2024 protests divided the Columbia campus, with thousands joining in, and others, including some Jewish students, saying they were too disruptive or made them feel unsafe.”

Here, relying on a recent article of  mine, is some of what happened at Columbia, limited to violence, threats, and intimidation–and this involves only the incidents that were publicly reported:

In October 2023, an Israeli Columbia student was assaulted in front of Butler Library by a former student who was no longer affiliated with the university. The assailant allegedly struck the student with a stick; police arrested and charged the suspect. During a separate student walkout “for Palestine,” a Jewish student was allegedly shoved by a Columbia classmate wearing a keffiyeh and subsequently swarmed by protesters.

Another incident outside Butler Library was more explicitly antisemitic. According to a subsequent civil-rights complaint, an individual confronted a Jewish student while yelling “Free Palestine” and “Fuck the Jews.” The assailant allegedly made the motivation explicit, telling the student that he had singled him out “because you are a Jew.”

Other physical incidents followed. Columbia student Jonathan Lederer was assaulted while carrying Israeli flags on April 20, 2024; the source cited in my article reports that a suspect threw a rock at him. Lederer was assaulted again on December 11, 2024, while once again carrying an Israeli flag; this time, the assailant reportedly punched him and called him a “Nazi.” In another incident, a Jewish Columbia student wearing a kippah was spat upon and told, “I hope you guys suffer.”

These individual confrontations occurred against a background of increasingly intimidating mass protests. Demonstrators at Columbia shouted “Fuck the Jews,” “Death to Jews,” and “Fuck Israel,” attempted to instigate fights, and screamed at a rabbi who was praying with students.

At one demonstration, protest organizer Mohsen Mahdawi used a megaphone to direct protesters to push back a small group of pro-Israel students. Columbia officials themselves later acknowledged that the campus had experienced “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

Protesters also targeted a Columbia class dealing with Israel, distributing flyers bearing such slogans as “The enemy will not see tomorrow” and “Burn Zionism to the Ground.” Jewish organizations characterized the messages as incitement.

Perhaps the most notorious individual episode involved Columbia student protest leader Khymani James. James publicly declared that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and said that people should be “grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Columbia suspended him, and even the White House condemned his statements.

What happened afterward is also significant. Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the umbrella organization for anti-Israel groups on campus (and to which Khalid was attached), initially apologized for James’s statements. It subsequently withdrew the apology and expressly endorsed “armed resistance.” James likewise disavowed his expression of regret.

There was another feature of the protests that mattered to many Jewish students: anonymity. At Columbia, as elsewhere, many demonstrators concealed their identities with masks, keffiyehs, and other face coverings while participating in protests that included rhetoric such as “Globalize the Intifada.”

Whatever one’s view of that slogan in isolation, its effect can be different when it is shouted by anonymous demonstrators amid actual incidents of assault and intimidation. Students encountering such protesters cannot necessarily know whether the masked people endorsing violent “resistance” are strangers, classmates, or people living in their own dormitories.

The situation escalated dramatically during the spring 2024 encampment, when students blocked up a section of campus.

The escalation culminated in the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Protesters broke into the building, vandalized it, and held two custodians against their will, while calling them “Jew-lovers.”

Columbia’s own findings provide important evidence about how this environment affected Jewish students.

The university’s Task Force on Antisemitism reported that Jewish students described not only verbal harassment and social ostracism, but also being physically targeted and feeling unsafe in their dormitories.

By April 2024, the situation had become sufficiently alarming that a Columbia campus rabbi advised Jewish students to leave campus and return home as soon as possible because of concerns about their safety.

To recap, Jewish and Israeli students were assaulted. A student wearing a kippah was spat upon. A Jewish student was told explicitly that he was being targeted because he was Jewish. Demonstrators shouted “Death to Jews,” attempted to instigate fights, and pushed pro-Israel students backward. A prominent student leader had declared that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and said others should be grateful he was not murdering them. Protest organizations embraced “armed resistance.” Masked demonstrators participated in increasingly lawless protests. And eventually protesters broke into a university building, vandalized it, and held employees against their will. Columbia’s own antisemitism task force found Jewish students reporting that they had been physically targeted and felt unsafe even in their dormitories.

We that in mind, we can see that the Times’ description–The 2023 and 2024 protests divided the Columbia campus, with thousands joining in, and others, including some Jewish students, saying they were too disruptive or made them feel unsafe–is not  itself inaccurate. It’s what it leaves out that leaves reader uninformed.

Bonus: The article also reports: “In a statement, Adam Guillette, the president of Accuracy in Media [a defendant], said his group had ‘repeatedly delivered accountability to Columbia’s pro-Hamas radicals,’ using language that echoed the Trump administration’s description of pro-Palestinian campus protesters.”

The leaders of Columbia’s anti-Israel protests defended Oct. 7 within days, and were led by Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro-Hamas organization. So while not every protestor was pro-Hamas, the protestors, writ large, were indeed pro-Hamas radicals, but the Times wants you to think that this is just a Trump thing.

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I’ll never get tired of quoting the geographer Trevor Paglen: “One of the contradictory things about the United States is that an incredible amount of the government is dedicated to doing things in secret. At the same time, it’s one of the world’s most open governments.” America is one of the best places to be a national security journalist, because there’s both a bloated surveillance state and a legal right to pick at its secrets. 

In a recent article about being detained at the border, I mentioned that I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to find out what files the agency had on me. “However long it takes for CBP to respond, and however heavily they redact the documents, I’m legally entitled to a response. And so are you,” I wrote. Some readers reached out asking exactly how they could do the same. So here’s a guide that I’ve written for your benefit.

FOIA is a powerful tool, but it requires knowing exactly how to use it. Requesters can’t force the government to create new documents, only to hand over documents it already has. A request has to be directed at the right agency and include specific enough instructions for its archivists to find the records in question. The guy who famously asked the National Security Agency (NSA) for “everything you’ve got” did not, in fact, get everything it’s got. 

Requesting your own file both makes the matter simpler and more complicated. On one hand, it significantly narrows down the types of records requested and the agency to request them from. On the other hand, FOIA requests for personal information on living human beings overlap with the Privacy Act and require the consent of the subject. And unlike regular FOIA requests—which anyone can file, no questions asked—FOIA/Privacy Act requests can only be filed by U.S. citizens or green card holders.

The FBI, which receives reams of these requests, makes the process quite simple. The bureau has a handy online portal that allows Americans to put in their personal information for a FOIA request and electronically sign a statement that they are the person requesting it. For those who prefer to send a request through snail mail, the FBI also provides a form letter and a printable standard consent form. Remember to sign and mail both together. The bureau tends to say up front when it doesn’t have files on you.

Other agencies are not so straightforward. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has many different subcomponents for you to direct your request to. The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, its main spy agency, tends to “neither confirm nor deny” that it has records on any specific individual. CBP, the DHS agency that Americans are most likely to interact with, is a little more forthcoming.

CBP, unlike the FBI, doesn’t include a ready-made form letter for requesting records on a person. Some people have had success with simple one-line requests: “All records of border crossing, secondary screening, and interactions with CBP with” a specific person. For my own request, I wrote a long letter listing known CBP watch lists and databases, just to make sure. Feel free to use my template. CBP and other DHS agencies accept requests through the online Secure Release platform. Simply select the agency, paste the text of your request letter, and upload your signed proof of consent.

Although filing a FOIA request is free, agencies may or may not charge a fee for photocopying documents, and requesters have to indicate up front how much they are willing to pay. Requesters also have an option to request fee waivers and expedited processing. Privacy Act requesters are typically exempt from most fees. Expedited processing is usually for life-and-death situations, and requesting it can ironically slow down the process, because agencies will take their time answering the request for expedited processing before moving on to the request itself.

FOIA allows agencies to withhold information under nine exemptions, which the FOIA nonprofit MuckRock outlined in a handy guide. Frustratingly, the government can also refuse to confirm or deny that a document exists in the first place, a tactic known as the Glomar exemption, named after a FOIA lawsuit about the spy ship Glomar Explorer. Along with the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the CIA and NSA tend to give Glomar responses to requests for individuals’ files. FOIA gives requesters an opportunity to file an administrative appeal to these denials and to sue in court if the appeal isn’t satisfactory.

The same FOIA techniques can work on any three-letter (or longer) agency you can think of, with some light changes in language to target the specific kinds of records that these agencies hold. And although you can’t request the records of other living people without their consent, the dead don’t have such privacy protections in the eyes of the law, so long as you can provide proof of death. Some of my best scoops have been from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) files on famous immigrants who have passed away.

Finally, all 50 states have their own public records laws modeled on FOIA, with slightly different rules for each. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press publishes a state-by-state guide to these laws, and MuckRock offers a paid service for filing and managing records requests across jurisdictions.

Asking for your own file is a great, low-stakes exercise in keeping the government honest. Whether you have a clean record or an impressive rap sheet, you’ll get familiar with your rights on paper and the mechanisms for demanding those rights. And who knows what those investigative skills might come in handy for in the future?

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From Nada v. United Arab Emirates, decided by Judge Amy Berman Jackson (D.D.C.) today:

Plaintiffs Hazim Nada and his privately owned oil company, Lord Energy SA (“Lord Energy”), brought this action seeking more than a billion dollars in damages from a number of defendants, including the United Arab Emirates (“UAE”), a Swiss investigative firm and its founders and employees, a Swiss journalist, and an American academic.

They allege that defendants conspired to eliminate Lord Energy as a competitor to the UAE’s state-owned oil company in the spot market for light crude oil exported to Asia. Plaintiffs claim that the alleged association of individuals and entities, which they refer to as an “enterprise” as that term is defined by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c), “managed, directed, and bankrolled a years-long ‘dark’ public relations campaign” in which they falsely linked Lord Energy to the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda.

As a result, plaintiffs claim, financial institutions refused to lend them money, and Lord Energy and its U.S. subsidiary, Americas Lord Energy, went bankrupt. They filed the lawsuit to recover damages for the economic harm that the alleged campaign caused to their business and reputations….

[T]he Court will GRANT the UAE’s motion to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction since the UAE is immune from suit in the United States under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and no statutory exception applies; it will GRANT the Alp defendants’ and Besson’s motions to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction; and it will GRANT Vidino’s motion to dismiss because the sole count against him fails to state a claim that he joined the alleged conspiracy. Given those rulings, the Court need not take up the merits of the extravagant and problematical claims brought under the Lanham Act, RICO, and the Sherman Act.

The Court finds that notwithstanding its length and unnecessary detail, the amended complaint is nothing more than a defamation case in search of a legal theory.

It is also an action in search of a basis to require a foreign sovereign and other foreign entities and individuals to defend themselves in the United States. There are no allegations of commercial activity in the United States or commercial acts in the United States in support of commercial activity abroad, and to the extent plaintiffs suggest that defendants’ activities abroad were directed at the United States, the complaint does not allege any direct effect in the United States which forms the gravamen of any claim.

As for the one individual based in the United States, the allegations against him fail to state a claim. Nothing in this opinion is meant to suggest, though, that the knowing dissemination of false accusations of connections to the Muslim Brotherhood or other terrorist organizations could not cause real harm or that would be is an appropriate tactic….

Here’s the court’s discussion of the one American defendant over whom there is personal jurisdiction, George Washington University Prof. Lorenzo Vidino:

Defendant Vidino, the American journalist {[and] academic expert [on] the Muslim Brotherhood} …, is charged in only one count: Count Three, which alleges that all of the defendants conspired to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. Putting aside defendants’ arguments that both the conspiracy and substantive RICO claims should be dismissed because at bottom, this is a defamation case, and plaintiffs have not alleged the necessary predicate criminal acts to invoke RICO, the Court finds that the complaint does not include facts to give rise to a plausible inference that Vidino was a member of whatever alleged conspiracy there may have been. {This means that the Court need not reach Vidino’s objection to the claim on First Amendment grounds.}

Section 1962(d) of the RICO statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1962(d), provides that it is “unlawful for any person to conspire to violate” a substantive RICO provision…. “[T]he complaint must allege that (1) two or more people agreed to commit a [RICO] subsection (c) offense, and (2) a defendant agreed to further that endeavor.” A defendant does not have to agree to be the one who commits the predicate acts, and his liability does not depend on his personal participation in the operation of management of the alleged enterprise. But the complaint must include facts to support a finding that the defendant himself “adopt[ed] the goal of furthering or facilitating the criminal endeavor.”

The complaint here contains nothing of the sort. In their opposition to the motion to dismiss, plaintiffs point to paragraph 40 of the amended complaint, but it says nothing about Vidino’s knowing agreement to pursue the alleged co-conspirators’ unlawful goal.

Vidino was hired by Alp as a contractor to provide leads on new targets and research and analysis on the Muslim Brotherhood. Alp routinely directed Vidino to obtain information it could then use in connection with its viral communication campaigns. He typically was paid between $2,000–$4,000 for each discreet assignment he completed for Alp. Vidino routinely communicated with Brero, Badal, and another Alp employee via WhatsApp….

The enterprise also funneled information to Vidino and relied on him, and his academic credentials, to legitimize the false and misleading statements the enterprise published to discredit, disparage, and destroy its targets…. When Alp uncovered Facebook posts, it passed them on to Vidino and told the UAE that Alp ‘channeled our findings to the academic expert Lorenzo Vidino,’ who shared them with a journalist at The Times. Alp noted that using Vidino as an intermediary ensured that Alp would remain ‘completely confidential.’

See also Am Compl. ¶ 126 (alleging Badal and Brero “intended to use Vidino as an American analogue to Besson—a credible and highly-credentialed intermediary who was willing to say whatever they wanted in exchange for money”); ¶ 129 (“On January 24, 2018, Vidino signed a contract with Alp to provide ‘[i]nteresting leads/rumours regarding the subject of investigation organisations/individuals/funding in Europe’ and a ‘[l]ist of alleged members of the first tier organisations in European countries.’ Alp agreed to pay Vidino 3,000 Euros for this work.”); ¶ 186 (“To add a thin veneer of legitimacy to spurious claims, [Alp’s] Wikipedia entries quoted Lorenzo Vidino.”); ¶ 281 (quoting an article that appeared in the German newspaper Der Spiegel in 2023 reporting that “[a]n Italian American scholar named Lorenzo Vidino played an important role in the campaign … Since 2018, he has repeatedly performed work for Alp Services ….”). Even if one reads these factual assertions in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, they may say something about Alp’s state of mind, but they do not reveal anything about Vidino’s.

Plaintiffs’ opposition maintains that Vidino “met with Alp employees on multiple occasions, including at a lavish dinner in Geneva in January 2018,” and “routinely exchanged WhatsApp messages with Brero, Badal, and another Alp employee,” and that “the volume and frequency of Vidino’s communications with Alp evince a closeness that provides evidence of Vidino’s agreement to further the enterprise’s racketeering activities.”

But plaintiffs’ rhetoric is not supported by their own complaint, even as it has been amended. There are allegations about exactly one meeting, the dinner, and the allegedly “routine” WhatsApp communications are not quoted in any other paragraph of the complaint. This is not enough to add up to knowing consent to advance the goals of the alleged co-conspirators. Vidino’s alleged expression in a WhatsApp message after the fact of “his belief that Credit Suisse withdrew its line of credit to Lord Energy because of an article the enterprise had published” does not serve that purpose either.

Nor does the complaint supply facts to support an inference that Vidino knew that the point of his work for Alp was to advance the goals of the UAE. The best plaintiffs could come up was a statement Vidino made after the fact to the author of an article in The New Yorker in 2024 that the UAE was the most “realistic client,” and that quotation lifted his words out of context….

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Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) says he will force the House of Representatives to vote on impeaching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Massie filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth on Tuesday. The charges include his handling of the ongoing Iran war, the Department of Defense’s extrajudicial killings of suspected drug traffickers, and Hegseth’s attempt to illegally retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.), among other things.

In a statement, Massie said Hegseth was “abusing the power of his office to ignore congressional war powers resolutions, to kidnap foreign leaders, and to intimidate critics of the Trump administration by retaliating against them for exercising free speech.”

The impeachment effort is unlikely to pass in the Republican-controlled House, but the chamber’s rules allow members to bring impeachment resolutions directly to the floor at any time. That means Massie could force all members to put their opinion of Hegseth’s conduct on the record.

The first three articles of impeachment against Hegseth are related to the War Powers Act of 1973, which gives presidents 60 days to obtain congressional authorization for an ongoing conflict. That deadline has come and gone.

Massie claims Hegseth violated the War Powers Resolution by launching the war without evidence that the United States faced an imminent threat, continuing the war after Congress passed a resolution ordering the conflict to end, and ignoring the withdrawal deadlines Congress set in that order. Hegseth has “treated mandatory statutory deadlines as discretionary,” the articles claim.

Two other articles of impeachment focus on American strikes in Iran and near Venezuela. Massie claims that Hegseth ignored laws that are meant to minimize civilian casualties—largely related to the February 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School. Pentagon officials ignored warnings about outdated intelligence in the lead-up to that attack, which killed dozens of civilians, many of them children.

“Secretary Hegseth willfully and systemically refused to comply with laws and directives mandated for the protection of civilians during the commission of armed conflict, chilled and rendered ineffective such components to prevent and mitigate harm to civilians, and therefore, foreseeably effected the death and injury of over 200 civilians, to the manifest injury of the United States,” the article reads, in part. “Such conduct reflects not merely a failure of judgment, but an extraordinary abuse of the powers entrusted to the Secretary of Defense and a profound disregard for the civilians his Department was obligated to protect and the service members he was entrusted to lead.”

A subsequent article references the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea, which have killed more than 200 people. Those strikes are summary executions, carried out without any charges or convictions, and they have not slowed the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.

That conduct shows that Hegseth “will remain a threat to civilians and the laws of war, the integrity of United States diplomacy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office,” the articles allege.

The sixth article of impeachment against Hegseth alleges that he violated Kelly’s constitutional right to free speech by trying to retaliate against the senator. A federal judge has already ruled that Hegseth acted unlawfully when he tried to strip Kelly of his rank and part of his military pension after Kelly reminded military members that they have an obligation to refuse illegal orders.

The last two articles of impeachment have to do with American military conduct in Venezuela and Yemen. Massie alleges that the kidnapping of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was carried out without constitutional or legal authority. Similarly, he objects to the ongoing American strikes in Yemen, which have killed civilians and were not authorized by Congress.

“If we are to remain true to our oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States,’ Congress must not turn a blind eye to Secretary Hegseth’s unconstitutional and illegal actions,” said Massie in a statement.

Indeed, the Constitution is clear that Congress has final authority over wars and military operations. It is also quite clear about the role that Congress plays in holding executive branch officials accountable for violating the law. Impeachment is the proper remedy for Hegseth’s brazen disregard for civilians’ lives and the limits of his own powers.

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Civil libertarians and longtime Reason readers are no doubt familiar with police raids, often at the hands of SWAT teams, that inflict considerable damage on the properties and psyches of innocent people.

In its upcoming term, the U.S. Supreme Court has the opportunity to consider whether police owe compensation for damage they cause while raiding an innocent person’s home. A new report tries to demonstrate how much, or how little, that would actually cost.

“In recent years, there have been a number of prominent news stories about SWAT teams inflicting major damage on innocent people’s property while pursuing fugitives,” the Institute for Justice (I.J.) announced in a press release. “And often neither the local government nor the owner’s insurance will pay for the damage.”

I.J. calls its new report on the subject “the first national study to quantify how often property owners seek compensation from local governments for damage caused by law enforcement—and how often governments honor those requests.”

Because both federal and state governments enjoy sovereign immunity, meaning they can’t be sued without their consent, insurance companies typically don’t pay out when governments cause damage. That puts the onus for reimbursement on those same jurisdictions that caused the damage in the first place.

The Fifth Amendment says that one’s property may not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Most often, this happens when governments seize private property for a public works project.

I.J. argues that pursuing a suspect through an innocent person’s home invokes a similar principle. “Much like people are due just compensation if the government decides it must take their home to build a road or school,” the report says, innocent property owners “are due compensation when law enforcement deliberately damages or destroys their property—in effect, ‘takes’ it—for the public good, such as apprehending a fugitive.”

But how often does this happen, and what does it cost? Between 2015 and 2023, the report’s authors—former I.J. research analyst David Warren, data scientist Jason Tiezzi, and I.J. assistant director of strategic research Mindy Menjou—identified “more than 2,700 claims for law enforcement property damage across 222 local jurisdictions,” a subset of the “1,027 local jurisdictions home to the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies with SWAT teams.”

Results varied across jurisdictions, but certain trends emerged. “Most claims involved residential damage from routine law enforcement activities, though 12% involved tactical raids,” per the report. Claims “involving vehicle damage were more likely to be paid than not, especially when spike strips were involved. Meanwhile, claims for residential damage resulting from tactical raids and general residential damage were nearly three times more likely to be denied than paid.”

“Among all claims where the outcome could be determined, 60% were denied,” the researchers determined. “In nearly a third of denials (31%), the government either gave no reason for denying claims or the reason could not be determined from the records provided. In another 48%, the government’s sole reason for denial was that the law enforcement officers’ actions were legal and within the scope of their employment or that the government was immune.”

“More than 90% of claimants were not the target of the law enforcement action that led to the damage, and more than 70% of those had no relationship to the target,” the report reveals. “Still, local governments denied 41% of these owners’ claims.” Claims were less likely to be paid out if the claimant was the target of the investigation, though cities also paid out only 24 percent of claims filed by family members, 21 percent filed by landlords, and 16 percent of claims filed by those with some other relationship to the suspect.

Yet even the officers themselves fully expected the government to pay out: “We found hundreds of examples of officers telling owners how to file claims after damage had occurred and in some cases even suggesting the municipality would pay for the damage.”

Despite the high denial rate, these are often not exorbitant claims. “The median claim amount was $1,260, a tiny amount in the scheme of municipal budgets but more than most Americans have on hand to cover an emergency expense,” the authors wrote, citing a Bankrate report finding that less than half of Americans could cover a sudden $1,000 expense. “Some claims are far costlier: About 1 in 10 claims sought $10,000 or more.”

Earlier this year, Reason‘s Billy Binion reported on Amy Hadley and Carlos Pena; in each case, police damaged their property while searching for a suspect that turned out not to be inside. Hadley’s home suffered $16,000 in damage, while the damage to Pena’s business totaled more than $60,000, requiring him to relocate.

In each case, police declined to reimburse for the damage caused, even though the property owners had done nothing wrong. And in each case, federal courts determined that police had no obligation to pay reimbursement so long as they were acting “reasonably” or in a “lawful” manner.

In 2020, when a fugitive barricaded himself inside a Texas woman’s home, police drove an armored vehicle through the front door—even though they had the keys, gate code, and garage door opener. Again, police refused to reimburse for the damage. In May 2026, after years of legal wrangling, a court finally ruled in the homeowner’s favor and awarded her $60,000 plus interest.

Even when accounting for the higher claim amounts, cities could easily afford to pay out. “In a given year, the average jurisdiction faced just one or two property damage claims,” the I.J. authors found. “On average, if the municipalities in our study had to pay every property damage claim in our dataset, the average jurisdiction would have been on the hook for only about $6,500 per year.” That’s also assuming every claim is paid out, when some might be denied for unrelated reasons or settled for a lower amount.

Besides, the researchers found little correlation between denials and claim amounts, suggesting money was not the determining factor in whether to grant reimbursement.

Of course, it’s worth noting that in each of these cases, police departments are damaging the homes of people who are not accused of committing a crime and then refusing to reimburse them.

This practice could change in the near future. I.J. is representing Hadley and Pena, and it has asked the Supreme Court to take up their cases.

“The Fifth Amendment requires that the government provide just compensation when it damages someone’s property for a public good, like getting a criminal off the streets, and this report makes it clear that doing so would not bankrupt local governments,” says I.J. senior attorney Jeffrey Redfern. “The Supreme Court has a great opportunity to make sure governments are providing just compensation during these instances by granting our petitions.”

The post Study: Reimbursing Victims of Police Property Damage Would Cost Very Little appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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