Tag: hit&run

Will the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump already be over by the time you listen to this week’s Reason Roundtable podcast? Not quite, though who the hell knows what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) and his caucus have up their sleeves? So, to mark the occasion 33 months after President Trump canned FBI Director James Comey, thus kicking off the first real talk of the I-word, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and I hand out our awards for Best and also Worst impeachment-related actor to date. Hint: Lotta libertarians among the former, not so many in the latter.

Because that’s not fraught enough, the gang also bandy about Hillary Clinton’s spectacular contribution to the Democratic gender wars over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), dissect Joe Biden (and conservative) anger-bearing over Big Tech and Section 230, and point out that Sanders is pretty freaking weird because HE’S A SOCIALIST.

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

Hidden Agenda by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Relevant links from the show:

“Trump’s Impeachment Trial Will Only Make Us Hate Washington Even More,” by Nick Gillespie

“The Case Against the Slippery Slope Case Against Impeachment for ‘Abuse of Power,'” by Ilya Somin

“The Impeachment End Game, II,” by David Post

“‘It Was Never About Corruption’: Giuliani Associate Says Trump Was Involved in Ukraine Scandal,” by Billy Binion

“By Withholding Funds to Ukraine, Trump Broke the Law,” by Peter Suderman

“Justin Amash on Impeachment: Republicans Are Betraying the ‘Principles and Values They Once Claimed To Cherish,’” by Billy Binion

“Judge Napolitano: Enough Evidence ‘To Justify About Three or Four Articles of Impeachment,’” by Nick Gillespie

“Trump Is Getting Impeached Today. Should His Complaints About the Process Be Taken Seriously?” By Jacob Sullum

“‘Constitutional Conservatives’ Lose Interest in Holding Trump Accountable,” by Matt Welch

“CNN Implicitly Took Elizabeth Warren’s Side in the Unproven Sexism Accusation Against Bernie Sanders,” by Robby Soave

“Warren Accuses Sanders of Saying a Woman Couldn’t Win in 2020,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Watch the Media Manufacture a Dumb Story About Bernie Sanders and Sexism,” by Robby Soave

“Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton Fight for Feminist Crown,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Bill Clinton Accuses Bernie Bros of Sexism. Yes, That Bill Clinton.” By Robby Soave

“Politicians Want to Destroy Section 230, the Internet’s First Amendment,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick

“No ‘Insurrection’ or Violence at Virginia Gun Rights Rally,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

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From practically the moment it was signed into law 10 years ago, Obamacare has been trapped in judicial limbo. The various lawsuits against it—challenging the legality of the individual mandate, the Medicaid expansion requirements, various insurance subsidies, the individual mandate (again), the insurance regulations, and even the entire construct of the law—have kept the law in legal and political purgatory, its fate never quite determined.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, it appears likely that it will stay that way through this year’s election and into next year. The Court today rejected a request by a group of Democratic state officials and members of the House of Representatives to fast-track a decision on the latest challenge to the law, meaning the law’s legal fate probably won’t be determined until sometime next year. 

At the beginning of this year, a coalition of blue states supporting the law had asked the High Court to speed up consideration of the case, the jointly named California v. Texas and House of Representatives v. Texas, which has been working its way through the lower courts for the better part of a year. In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the law’s mandate, which was upheld as a tax in 2012 and then zeroed out by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, was unconstitutional since it no longer raised any revenue. 

The 5th Circuit punted, however, on the broader question of what its ruling meant for the rest of the law, sending it back to a lower court that had previously ruled that, absent the mandate, the entire statute must be struck down. 

In the short term, the 5th Circuit ruling had essentially no practical effect: The mandate had already been functionally eliminated by the 2017 tax law, which reduced its tax penalty to zero. Yet it returned questions about the law’s fate to a judge who had already said he believed the entire statute should go under any reading of the evidence. 

The Democrats behind the petition to fast-track the Supreme Court ruling on the case had clearly hoped to make the issue more salient in this year’s election; the Trump administration made the unusual decision not to defend the law in court, and health care is an issue that helped propel Democrats to victory in the 2018 election. The Trump administration, in turn, filed a brief saying that waiting to hear the case would be fine.

In the narrow sense, this is probably a victory for President Trump and Republican critics of the law. But by leaving the case’s final resolution up in the air, it nevertheless keeps it alive as a political issue, and gives Democrats who support the law an argument to make against Republicans, particularly Trump, who support the administration’s decision not to defend it in court. 

Unlike several of the previous legal challenges to the health law, I believe this particular case rests on a largely flimsy argument. Other staunch critics of Obamacare have also said it lacks legal merit. 

Yet the fact that the law is still in court, its entire fate hanging in the balance nearly a decade after passage, is a reminder of its fundamental political weakness. An unusually complex statute predicated on dubious constitutional notions and passed on a party line vote without majority support from the public was nearly certain to be under constant threat from legal attacks—some with merit, some perhaps without. The law’s supporters assumed that it would amass political support over time, insulating it from threats. It is true that Obamacare has become more popular under Trump (probably in part because of GOP attempts to weaken it). But thanks to both the lasting partisan backlash to the law and the convoluted legal rationales for upholding it, the legal challenges have continued, and its future remains in doubt. Obamacare was born into limbo, and there it is likely to stay. 

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) on Tuesday revised key parts of the roadmap for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial after his initial proposal received a bipartisan backlash.

Both parties will now have 24 hours each over the course of three days to present evidence, as opposed to the two days that were originally allotted. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) called the first iteration a “national disgrace,” as the compressed schedule would have forced much of the trial to take place in the middle of the night. 

McConnell also altered a rule that would have blocked House evidence unless the Senate voted to admit it. Now all relevant documents will be automatically entered into the record and barred only if the Senate votes to exclude them.

The majority leader fielded bouts of criticism after straying from his promise to adhere to the Clinton impeachment model, where the Senate had 24 hours to present evidence but no constraints on the number of days it took to do so. Schumer led the Democratic charge, but several Republicans also voiced concerns, including Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.).

“I think that adhering to the Clinton model would have been my preference,” Hawley told NBC News. 

Collins’ spokesperson, Annie Clark, echoed those sentiments. “She and others raised concerns about the 24 hours of opening statements in 2 days and the admission of the House transcript [in] the record,” Clark said in a statement. “Her position has been that the trial should follow the Clinton model as much as possible. She thinks these changes are a significant improvement.”

In December, the House impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over his alleged role in attempting to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into publicly announcing investigations into Trump’s political rivals. The changes to the trial blueprint notwithstanding, Democrats and Republicans continued to spar Tuesday over subpoenas for documents held by the White House and the need for additional witnesses. In any case, Trump’s trial is heading for almost certain acquittal as Democrats would need at least 20 Republicans to convict the president of an impeachable offense.

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Houston has been held up as a rare example of an American city that is both large, thriving, and cheap, thanks to the minimal restrictions it places on building new housing. But is this affordability just a myth?

On Friday, Texas Monthly published an article with the provocative headline, “Houston is now less affordable than New York City.” The piece argues that once the costs of transportation are factored into the equation, auto-dependent Bayou City becomes much less of a bargain.

“While the seemingly endless suburban growth has traditionally offered the city the veneer of affordability, the sprawl has also spiked transportation costs, so much so that the city’s combined transportation and living costs now place it on par with New York City,” writes Texas Monthly‘s Peter Holley.

“When considering housing and transportation costs as a percentage of income,” Holley continues, Houston, with its lower median income, appears “significantly less affordable than cities with much more expensive housing, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.”

Holley is relying on a new report from the Citizens Budget Commission, a New York-based non-profit. Its January-released “Rent and Ride” report used data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to compare the affordability of 20 large American cities. It found that when median housing and transportation costs are added up, Houston is just barely more affordable than New York City. When median income is taken into account, Houston becomes much less affordable.

This counterintuitive conclusion was polarizing, to say the least. Public transit advocates felt their complaints about “auto-dependency” were vindicated.

Wait, hold on, you're saying it costs money to own and operate a car? And that this might factor into a city's affordability, and by extension, that almost everything Americans think they know about cities is wrong? https://t.co/PhUPpC2Rjv

— David Klion???? (@DavidKlion) January 20, 2020

The auto lifestyle isn’t cheap https://t.co/Snr4svaoxB

— Nick Riccardi (@NickRiccardi) January 21, 2020

Others were a bit less credulous.

this is an absolute crock https://t.co/sKka4RZIHp

— J. Arthur Bloom ???????? (@j_arthur_bloom) January 21, 2020

This headline's so stupid, I'm making myself not click.

But could someone summarize the piece? Are they really arguing that a city w/ $189k home price medians has higher COLA than one w/ $649k medians, just because you have to own a car?https://t.co/dIvHudLa2y

— Market Urbanism Report (@sbcrosscountry) January 20, 2020

Indeed, a closer look at how affordability is measured by HUD reveals some serious problems with the Texas Monthly article’s analysis, suggesting that the traditional view of Houston as a big, affordable place to live still holds up.

That’s largely because the way HUD calculates transportation costs actually understates the costs of taking public transit, biasing its affordability measurements against auto-heavy cities like Houston.

HUD measures a city’s cost of living by using a Location Affordability Index (LAI), which estimates median household housing and transportation costs down to the census block group level.

To calculate transportation costs, the LAI adds up the costs paid by motorists to own and operate their vehicles, as well as the fares that transit riders pay.

The trouble is that while it does a good job of capturing most of the costs commuters pay to get around by car, HUD’s LAI does a bad job of calculating the costs that transit users pay for their transit trips.

With the exception of tolls and parking fees (which obviously can be substantial in some cities), HUD’s calculation of auto ownership is pretty comprehensive, including the costs of fuel, “drivability” or maintenance, financing, and depreciation.

However, when measuring transit costs, HUD only looks at the fares commuters pay. Right away, that presents a problem, as fares cover only a portion (and sometimes a tiny portion) of the cost of each transit trip.

In New York City—which has one of the best farebox recovery ratios in the country—fares only cover about 40 percent of the subway’s operating costs, and less than 30 percent of the operating costs of the city’s bus service.

The difference is made up by taxes, including a special payroll tax, real estate transfer tax, and a surcharge on taxi and rideshare rides. The city and state also chip in additional tax-funded subsidies. These taxes are ultimately part of the transportation costs riders pay, but they are missed by HUD’s affordability index.

The result is that HUD’s LAI understates the transportation costs in transit-heavy cities like New York, while giving a more accurate picture of the transportation costs for motorists in Houston, who pay the full cost of operating their own vehicles (if not the roads they drive on).

Taken to extremes, New York could become the most “affordable” city in the country by just replacing private expenditures with tax-funded transportation subsidies. Conversely, Houston gets no credit for the money its low tax rates save residents, a point noted by Tory Gattis in a blog post published on the Houston Chronicle‘s website.

“If you move from NYC to Houston and spend the tax savings on a better house and car, your life got worse because their percentage of your income went up!” he writes.

Taxes aren’t the only thing HUD’s affordability index misses. Gattis’ post, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, also points out that Houstonians have higher buying power than their New York cousins.

Additionally, both the Texas Monthly article and the Citizens Budget Commission report weigh an already skewed measure of affordability by median income, which only distorts the relative affordability of Houston and New York City even more.

The median income in Houston is $61,000, while the median income in New York City is $69,000. That means each dollar a median-earning Houstonian spends on his housing or transportation is going to be a larger percentage of his income than the median-earning New Yorker, making Houston look more expensive by comparison.

What this misses is that Houston has a lower median income, in part, because it’s a more affordable place to live, and therefore is able to attract lower-income people who’ve been priced out of more expensive metros.

New York City, meanwhile, has experienced a 40,000-person net population decline in both 2017 and 2018, with the high cost of living being cited as one of the reasons for the outflow.

Provided that the bulk of the people moving out of the city are low- and moderate-income earners, their departure would raise New York City’s median income, thus making the city look more affordable on paper, even if it’s actually getting more expensive in reality. If these same low- and moderate-income earners moved to Houston in search of a lower cost of living, they’d make that city look less affordable by lowering the city’s median income.

So despite what a cursory look at HUD’s LAI might have one believe, Houston in all likelihood still deserves its reputation as a success story of urban affordability.

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Clearview AI, a tech startup, has created an app that enables law enforcement agencies to match photographs to its database of over 3 billion photos scraped from millions of public websites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Venmo. For comparison, the FBI’s photo database contains only 640 million images. According to The New York Times, some 600 law-enforcement departments, including federal, state, and local agencies, have already used Clearview AI’s technology. “You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared,” explained the Times.

Moreover, Clearview AI’s technology doesn’t need straight-ahead mugshots to work effectively. “With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Detective Sgt. Nick Ferrara of the Gainesville, Florida, police department told the Times. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.” No outside tests for the app’s accuracy have been publicly reported, but the company claims in a 2019 FAQ to users that it:

…has the most accurate facial identification software in the world, with a 98.6% accuracy rate. This does not mean that you will get matches for 98.6% of your searches, but you will almost never get a false positive. You will either get a correct match or no results. We have a 30-60% hit rate, but we are adding hundreds of millions of new faces every month and expect to get to 80% by the end of 2019.

The current Clearview AI app works basically as an investigative tool helping police identify perpetrators or victims after a crime has occurred. The company is, however, developing facial recognition software that would make it possible for wearers of augmented-reality glasses to ID folks walking down a street in real-time. Of course, such a technology could easily be harnessed to networked surveillance cameras so that government agents could track where a citizen is and with whom that citizen is interacting.

“Facial recognition is the perfect tool for oppression,” write Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University, and Evan Selinger, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It is, they persuasively argue in Medium, “the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented.” Real-time deployment of facial recognition technologies would essentially turn our faces into ID cards on permanent display to the police.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Clearview AI investor David Scalzo told The New York Times. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

In fact, several cities have already banned police use of facial recognition technologies. And members of Congress are also now waking up to how the widespread use of this technology could impair our civil liberties. “In November [2019], Sens. Mike Lee (R–Utah) and Chris Coons (D–Del.) introduced the Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act,” reports Reason’s Scott Shackford. “The bill would require federal officials to seek a warrant in order to use facial recognition technology to track a specific person’s public movements for more than 72 hours.”

Permitting police to track a person using facial recognition for less than three days without a warrant seems constitutionally questionable to me. After all, in Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court required that the police obtain a warrant in order to search a person’s cell phone location data. “A cell phone—almost a ‘feature of human anatomy’—tracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.” Since faces are actual features of human anatomy (no ankle monitors needed), surely a warrant should be required for police to track citizens by their faces.

Harvard cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier argued in a recent New York Times column that merely banning facial recognition is not enough to protect ourselves from government snooping. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. “In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control,” he wrote. “In countries like the United States, it’s being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.”

The data exhaust constantly emitted by our cell phones, license plates, digital payments, and credit cards is an intimate and comprehensive record of our lives. Right now easy government access is hampered by the fact that the myriad private databases tracking us are disparate and unconnected. However, it is not hard to imagine how automated authoritarianism could arise quickly in the wake of a massive terrorist attack as frightened citizens set aside concern for civil liberties and give in to government demands for access to all of the data that has been privately collected on each of us.

Given the growing prevalence of both government and private surveillance, Schneier argued, we Americans “need to have a serious conversation about … how much we as a society want to be spied on by governments and corporations—and what sorts of influence we want them to have over our lives.” To forestall a dystopian future, setting strict limits on government use of facial recognition technology is a good place to start.

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In aiming a series of personal attacks at Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and his supporters, Hillary Clinton achieved little more than once again demonstrating her own poor political instincts and lingering bitterness over her 2016 electoral loss.

Clinton, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote an upcoming Hulu documentary about her career in politics, blasted Sanders and his supporters for what she called “relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.” She also declined to answer whether she would support Sanders were he to win the 2020 Democratic nomination.

In the documentary itself, Clinton went after Sanders in an even more personal way, saying “nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done,” while also characterizing Sanders’ decades-long career in the Senate as “just baloney.” Asked by The Hollywood Reporter if she stands by that assessment, Clinton said she does.

The comments are bound to make waves in the Democratic primary, just weeks before the first votes are cast in Iowa. Sanders’ recent rise in the polls has sent some mainstream Democrats into a tizzy. Meanwhile, the Vermont senator is fending off an attack from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who has accused Sanders of telling her privately that a woman could not win the presidency. Sanders has denied making that claim.

Me too, says Clinton.

“This argument about whether or not or when he did or didn’t say that a woman couldn’t be elected, it’s part of a pattern,” Clinton told The Hollywood Reporter. “If it were a one-off, you might say, ‘OK, fine.’ But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me.”

That’s a huge mischaracterization of Sanders’ own attack on Clinton during the heated 2016 primaries. Sanders did explicitly question whether Clinton was qualified to be president—after she had aimed similar attacks at him—but Sanders’ critique of Clinton’s record was based on policy, not gender.

Here’s how Sanders put it in April 2016, just prior to the crucial New York primary that effectively sealed the nomination for Clinton:

“My response is if you want to question my qualifications, then maybe the American people might wonder about your qualifications Madame Secretary,” he said.

Sanders added: “When you voted for the war in Iraq, the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in the history of America, you might want to question your qualifications. When you voted for trade agreements that cost millions of Americans decent paying jobs, and the American people might want to wonder about your qualifications. When you’re spending an enormous amount of time raising money for your super PAC from some of the wealthiest people in this country, and from some of the most outrageous special interests … Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you’re raising millions of dollars from Wall Street whose greed and recklessness helped destroy our economy?”

Whether you agree with Sanders on that list of policies or not, there’s no denying that he was making a substantive argument about Clinton’s record—not suggesting that a woman is unqualified for office merely because she is a woman. Indeed, there are many reasons to believe Clinton would have been a bad president, and none of them have to do with her gender—just as there are many reasons to believe Sanders would be a bad president, regardless of his.

Clinton’s most recent attack on Sanders’ mirrors claims she’s made before, most notably in her 2017 book, What Happened. In it, she accused Sanders of “impugning my character” during the 2016 primaries, and said that Sanders’ criticisms contributed to her general election defeat to President Donald Trump.

But by refusing to say whether she will endorse Sanders should he clinch the nomination, Clinton is effectively doing what she accuses Sanders’ own supporters of doing to her in 2016: refusing to be team players and support the eventual nominee. She knows better than most how that kind of thinking can damage the eventual Democratic pick—regardless of who it is—and yet she’s encouraging it. Whatever Clinton may think she is accomplishing here, she’s not helping the Democrats’ cause.

Sanders, for what it is worth, seems to be handling this issue about as well as possible.

I also asked Sanders why he thinks Clinton is still talking about 2016. “That’s a good question. You should ask her,” he said.

— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) January 21, 2020

When you get right down to it, this whole debate over who is “qualified” to be president seems quaint and not a little ridiculous in 2020—just take a moment to remember who is the current occupant of the White House.

Remember also that Sanders is an avowed socialist who has palled around with Soviet leaders, admired the economic achievements of Cuba under Fidel Castro, advocated for the nationalization of “utilities, banks, and major industries,” disdained private charity, and become a multi-millionaire while delivering a message about the importance of government-enforced equality.

If mainstream Democrats can’t find something in all of that to criticize, they don’t deserve to beat him in the primaries.

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A Kentucky lawmaker wants to grant police in his state the power to detain a person for two hours if he or she declines to offer up identification or answer an officer’s questions while they’re investigating possible criminal activity. Lawyers? Miranda warnings? Forget about them.

The bill was introduced by state Sen. Stephen Meredith (R–Leitchfield), and civil rights lawyers are warning that it could open a big, nasty, easily abusable, unconstitutional can of worms.

The bill states that the person who is being detained by police in this process is not considered under arrest, which appears to be a mechanism to try to keep a person from demanding a lawyer. It could also get people to incriminate themselves by making them answer police questions or face temporary detention.

While police are obviously empowered to investigate criminal activity, this bill, SB 89, seems designed to give police the power to target individuals for harassment for the sketchiest of reasons. Meredith told the Lexington Herald-Leader that one of the incidents that inspired the bill (which he acknowledges was pushed forward at the urging of local police) was a man lingering outside an apartment complex, which made neighbors nervous. They called the police, but the man refused to answer their questions and left. They found out later that he had outstanding arrest warrants.

But Rebecca DiLoreto, who lobbies for the Kentucky Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, noted that the police could have tagged this guy for violating the state’s loitering laws, and then they could have used that actual allegation of criminal activity to demand ID and check for warrants.

DiLoreto warns that SB 89’s passage would lead to an environment where police would be able to detain people for up to two hours without having to keep official records because these people aren’t technically arrested. She tells the Herald-Leader:

“The idea that we can detain people because we find them to be suspicious and we think they might commit a crime, that crosses a dangerous line. Now, unfortunately, it has been known to happen. Sometimes it’s in a mostly white community where someone spots a black person walking down the street and they get suspicious and call police.

The ‘crime’ in this case is basically that you’re here and we don’t think, from looking at you, that you should be here. The potential for abuse in that seems obvious.”

It would also most certainly violate people’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

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The Florida Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion last week condoning a state law that prohibits residents with felony convictions from voting if they owe outstanding fines and court fees. Opponents of the law say it undermines a ballot initiative that was slated to restore the voting rights of an estimated 1.4 million Floridians and that it is also unconstitutional.  

Passed by a popular vote in November 2018, Amendment 4 changed the Florida constitution to restore the voting rights of former felons. “Complications emerged almost immediately,” Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella noted last year. “The language of Amendment 4 said that voting rights would be restored ‘upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation,’ but it did not say whether ‘all terms’ included financial obligations imposed by courts.”

The Republican-led state legislature chose to interpret “all terms of sentence” as including fines, restitution, and court fees associated with the felony conviction. Both chambers of the state legislature enshrined that interpretation in SB 7066, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law on June 28, 2019.  

Almost immediately, civil liberties groups representing impoverished former felons sought an injunction against the state in federal court, claiming that SB 7066 essentially imposed a poll tax in violation of the 24th Amendment. In October 2019, Judge Robert Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida issued a temporary injunction, writing that “each of these plaintiffs have a constitutional right to vote so long as the state’s only reason for denying the vote is failure to pay an amount the plaintiff is genuinely unable to pay.”

“The court’s decision is clear: The right to vote cannot be denied to anyone based on their inability to pay,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, in a statement. “The state must create a clear and unencumbered process that provides Florida’s returning citizens the ability to vote.”

In August 2019, while the ACLU suit was before Hinkle’s court, Gov. DeSantis sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court asking that it interpret the constitutionality of SB 7066 under Florida law. The Court issued an advisory opinion on January 16 in which it answered only the question of whether “all terms of sentence” includes “legal financial obligations” (LFOs) imposed by a sentencing court. In its advisory opinion, the Florida Supreme Court says both that LFOs are covered by the amendment’s “terms of sentence language,” and that the amendment’s sponsors made that clear to the Court in 2017 during a hearing to determine whether Amendment 4 could be included on the 2018 ballot: 

In its brief to this Court arguing in support of Amendment 4 being placed on the ballot, Amendment 4’s sponsor, Floridians for a Fair Democracy (the Sponsor), asserted: “Specifically, the drafters intend that individuals with felony convictions, excluding those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense, will automatically regain their right to vote upon fulfillment of all obligations imposed under their criminal sentence.” [Emphasis used in the opinion]

During the oral argument, counsel for the Sponsor stated—consistent with the Sponsor’s brief—that the operative language in Amendment 4 “means all matters—anything that a judge puts into a sentence.” As noted in the Governor’s letter, that oral argument involved discussion of LFOs—including fines, costs, and restitution—as well as the process for confirming payment of LFOs. Counsel for the Sponsor summed up by reiterating that Amendment 4 was intended to be “a restoration of voting rights under these specific conditions.” It is beyond dispute that the Sponsor expressed the intention that “all terms of sentence” include all LFOs ordered by the sentencing judge.

“It is our opinion,” the Florida Supreme Court concluded, “that the phrase ‘all terms of sentence,’ as used in article VI, section 4 [of the state Constitution], has an ordinary meaning that the voters would have understood to refer not only to durational periods but also to all [legal financial obligations] imposed in conjunction with an adjudication of guilt.”

Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella, who has covered the restoration effort, reported that felony offenders collectively owe hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and fines. The Florida Court system, which is funded almost entirely by fees and fines, has about “115 different types of fees and surcharges, the second-highest number in the country,” per the Fines & Fees Justice Center.

In an interview with The Appeal, Miami-Dade public defender Carlos Martinez observed that many fees and fines are not listed on sentencing documents. He estimated that 90 percent of those facing outstanding fees and fines in his county were affected by the practice.

On Friday, the Cato Institute and the R Street Institute filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th District arguing that “SB 7066, insofar as it excludes people who cannot afford to pay criminal court debt from participation in the democratic process, perhaps permanently, violates the bedrock guarantee of equal rights that every citizen enjoys.”

Cato and R Street, who ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th District to uphold its injunction, write in their brief that “the unprecedented and growing imposition of fines, fees, court costs, and other financial obligations by state criminal courts has created an enormous class of citizens in debt to the government” and asks that the court “closely
scrutinize any law that purports to condition the ability to vote on payment of court
debt.”

They add that “as a constitutional matter, this case falls squarely within the line of cases
beginning with Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12 (1956), which have held that a state denies equal protection of the laws when it conditions a right or benefit solely on the ability to pay.” While Florida argued that felons have no “fundamental right” to vote, Cato and R Street argue that “once the state chooses to re-enfranchise that class, it may not discriminate on the basis of wealth absent a compelling government interest and narrowly tailored means.”

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Today is the day that the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump gets underway. Proceedings start around 1 p.m. in Washington (go here for places to watch) and are expected to last anywhere from a week to a month (Bill Clinton’s trial in 1999 lasted five weeks). In a vote that proceeded along party lines, President Trump has been charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He is widely expected to be found not guilty by the Senate, in a vote that will also proceed largely, if not completely, along party lines.

Come February, or whenever the pompously self-declared “world’s greatest deliberative body” votes on the matter, we will be right back to where we started, only a little bit more in debt, a little angrier, and a little more behind schedule on nuts-and-bolts things like passing a real budget for the current fiscal year, figuring out how to pay for entitlements, and discerning whether we’re technically at war with various countries.

The impeachment process thus perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong with the federal government. From start to finish, the impeachment is almost purely partisan and political rather than substantive, and it accomplishes nothing other than driving down even further any form of trust or confidence in the presidency, Congress, or even the Supreme Court (Chief Justice John Roberts will preside over the Senate trial). To be fair, impeachment is designed to be a political, rather than legal, process. It’s not about discovering the truth of what happened, or even fully explaining what happened, as you’d expect in a real trial. As Gerald Ford noted just a few years before becoming president himself after the resignation of Richard Nixon (who was faced with his own impeachment trial), an impeachable offense “is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

It’s only fitting, then, that being found innocent will be an equally partisan exercise. Indeed, that seems especially fitting in an election year in which the incumbent shows some of the worst approval numbers in history and still seems to have an excellent shot at winning a second term.

I’ve documented over the years how far and fast trust and confidence in various parts of the federal government has fallen. In 1964, for instance, 77 percent of Americans agreed that they trusted “the government in Washington always or most of the time.” As of last year, that figure stood at 17 percent. When it comes to the presidency, trust has toppled from 73 percent in 1972 to 45 percent.  For Congress, the drop is even worse, plummeting from 71 percent in 1972 to 38 percent in 2019. Trust in the Supreme Court has followed the same general trend, even if its numbers are better. In 1988, 56 percent had a high degree of trust in the Supreme Court but thirty years later, that figure clocked in at 37 percent.

It’s unlikely that the purely partisan impeachment process will do anything but accelerate those trends. For libertarians, this might on its face seem a blessing, as evacuating trust and confidence in the federal government is surely a precondition for radically reducing its growth and power.

But that’s not how things work. Again and again—and in countries all over the world—declines in trust of government correlate strongly with calls for more government regulation in more parts of our lives. “Individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt,” explain the authors of a 2010 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper. That’s certainly the case in the United States, where the size, scope, and spending of government has vastly increased over exactly the same period in which trust and confidence in the government has cratered. In 2018, I talked with one of the paper’s authors, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist who grew up in the Soviet Union before coming to America. Why do citizens ask a government they don’t believe in to bring order? “They want regulation,” he said. “They want a dictator who will bring back order.”

Counterintuitively, the relative size and spending of government in the United States actually flattened or dipped during periods when trust and confidence in government picked up:

From 1994 to 2001, Pew data show upticks in the number of people who trust the government to mostly do the right thing…. Using inflation-adjusted dollars, the feds spent about $250 billion more in [Bill] Clinton’s last year than in his first, a small increase compared to the spending surges seen under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Viewed as a percentage of GDP, federal spending fell significantly during that period. In 1991, it equaled 21 percent. By 2001, it equaled just 17.5 percent.

There were many reasons for minor increases in trust and confidence in government during the 1990s. The end of the Cold War, the rise of the internet, and continual economic expansion all played important roles (especially the latter). While Washington got shriller—virtually all modern forms of hyper-polarization were present or birthed in the ’90s—it also became less important to more people. Clinton famously acknowledged that “the era of big government is over” even as Congress worked in a bipartisan fashion to change welfare, cut capital gains taxes, and slash defense spending. That sort of rapprochement is unimaginable in the current moment.

You can argue that Trump richly deserves to be the third president to face an impeachment trial, that we should be impeaching all the presidents all the time, or that Trump is actually the victim of a coup. You might even win those arguments. But none of that matters if you really care about restraining the size of government. Come the end of the Senate trial that starts today, Trump will almost certainly still be in office, Democrats and Republicans will hate each other even more, and trust and confidence in Washington will be even lower than it already is.

And the spending of the federal government, what Milton Friedman said was the purest measure of its power, will continue to set new records. All impeachment will have done is add more fuel to the perpetual dumpster fire that is Washington and pushed the calendar back a month or so when it comes to the fiscal reckoning that awaits us in the new decade.

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Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his entire cabinet resigned last week in the wake of what The New York Times‘ Andrew Higgins calls “sweeping constitutional changes.” This is the first major alteration of Russia’s constitution since the 1990s, and it would effectively secure President Vladimir Putin’s control of the state.

At a glance, it’s clear that Putin’s intention is to stay in power after 2024, the year he’s constitutionally required to step down after two consecutive terms. But his changes also indicate a methodical plan to conserve power in the executive branch, which sets a dangerous international precedent.

In his address to the Federal Assembly, Russia’s national legislature, Putin proposed to move some key powers from the executive branch to the Duma, Russia’s parliament, and the State Council, an advisory body that handles issues deemed of the highest importance to the state. The most significant constitutional changes would allow the Duma to appoint members to the prime minister’s cabinet and allow the State Council to oversee the appointment of the heads of Russia’s security agencies.

In addition to giving the State Council constitutional status, Putin also intends to limit the supremacy of international law.  The amendments would ban foreign citizenship and foreign residency permits for judicial and legislative officials and require presidential candidates to have had permanent residence in Russia for at least 25 years.

“Is this a coup? Absolutely,” says Elena Lukyanova, law professor at Russia’s Higher School of Economics. She adds that the amendments would allow the Russian government to refuse to fulfill its obligations under international treaties.

But why has Putin taken a more subtle approach to maintaining his autocracy as opposed to simply removing term limits from Russia’s constitution? Maria Snegovaya, post-doctoral fellow at John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, compares Putin’s transfer of power to that of Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president, in 2019. Nazarbayev had distributed some elements of presidential authority to the Kazakh Senate and Security Council. Nazarbayev then put his daughter in charge of one body and himself in charge of the other.

“Putin’s goal is to avoid concentrating too much power under a singular institution outside of his control, lest it diminish his authority or even threaten his rule,” Snegovaya writes.

Peter Dickinson, editor of Atlantic Council’s Ukraine Alert, notes that Putin’s constitutional proposals clearly indicate his intentions to retain control while also creating an illusion of change:

Putin’s last constitutional conjuring trick, which saw him return to the presidency in 2012 after a farcical four-year handover to Dmitry Medvedev, sparked mass protests in Moscow that left the regime rattled. With his approval rating currently in the doldrums, Putin knows he must tread carefully as he seeks to extend his reign beyond 2024. Much will now depend on the public reaction to Putin’s plans. Large-scale protests are unlikely but cannot be ruled out as Russians face up to the reality of a stagnating economy and the prospect of Putin in power for another generation.

Putin’s actions should alarm the international community. They pose a grave threat to the rule of law.

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