Tag: hit&run

This week’s Democratic debates have gone a long way toward betraying the expressed interests of Democratic Party voters. That’s because they were a showcase for, in the words of countless news outlets, “progressives vs. moderates,” with the progressives always holding the moral and ethical high ground, despite the fact that the majority of Democratic voters say they prefer far more moderate policies.

Pity poor former Rep. John Delaney (D–Md.) for pointing out, correctly, that Sens. Elizabeth Warren’s (D–Mass.) and Bernie Sanders’ (D–Vt.) versions of Medicare for All comprise an “anti-private sector strategy” built on “impossible promises” and “fairy-tale economics,” including the end of non-government medical care.

Sure, Medicare for All might be a political suicide mission but Warren, to great applause in the debate and after, shot back:

I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.

That sort of back-and-forth sums up the tenor of the debates. Delaney is largely correct in saying Medicare for All plans that prohibit private insurance will be too expensive to implement. Rep. Tim Ryan (D–Ohio) is also correct that such plans will be attacked by union members who stand to lose gold-plated private health insurance their leadership fought hard to win. But progressives are the crazy, idealistic dreamers who aren’t going to sit around and be hemmed in by basic laws of political physics. Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), Sanders, Warren, and others simply exclaim, “You just pay for it.”

The problem for the Democrats is pretty simple: Contrary to media narratives and debate-stage dynamics, very few members of the party are actually progressive. As CNN analyst Harry Enten writes,

Moderates and conservatives make up about 50% of all Democrats. In the 2018 midterms, the exit polls found that moderates and conservatives made up 54% of those who voted Democratic. Pew similarly put moderate and conservative Democrats as 54% of all self-identified Democrats and independents who lean Democratic voters in 2018. Gallup’s 2018 figures had moderates as 47% of all adults who self-identified as Democrats.

And what about Democrats who self-identify as liberal? Enten continues:

While liberals make up about 50% of Democrats, many of them are only “somewhat liberal.” In a Quinnipiac University poll taken last month, people who identified as “very liberal” were only 19% of all Democrats and independents who leaned Democratic. Very liberals made up the same 19% of those who said they were voting Democratic in Suffolk University’s final 2018 pre-election poll. The 2016 primary exit polls discovered that about 25% of Democratic primary voters called themselves very liberal.

Put another way: the moderate/conservative wing of the Democratic Party likely still makes up at least 2 times as much of the party’s voters than the very liberal flank.

That helps explain surveys finding that 54 percent of Democrats want a more moderate party while just 41 percent want one that is more liberal. To the extent that Democratic presidential candidates tack further and further to the left—and most of them are—they will only be alienating the rank and file of their own party, not to mention independents and other voters who still predominantly identify as conservative or moderate. That’s a clear advantage for President Donald Trump, who can brag about a strong economy while kicking dirt over his stubbornly low approval ratings and racist tweets.

For those of us who aren’t members of the Democratic Party, there’s a bigger issue still: The framing of the current Democratic race as between progressives and moderates is deeply misleading when it comes to accurately describing the presidential hopefuls, all of whom are calling for massive expansions in the size, scope, and spending of government. In the first debate of this week, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg made a plea for pragmatic solutions that aren’t discussed in ideological terms:

It’s time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say. Look, if it’s true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. So let’s just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.

Along with characters such as Delaney and former Vice President Joe Biden, Buttigieg is considered a moderate because he has criticized identity politics and “free college for all” plans. Yet he also backs national service, packing the Supreme Court with extra justices, doubling the number of unionized workers in the gig economy, and pushing broad new gun control laws. That’s no more moderate than Joe Biden’s calls to massively expand Obamacare (it’s worth remembering, too, that Barack Obama was nobody’s idea of a tightwad when it came to spending).

The conventional wisdom is that candidates take extreme positions in primaries to appeal to the activists who dominate such proceedings. Then, the candidates move to the center for the general election. But sometimes there’s no coming back from the fringes. At this early stage of the Democratic presidential race, the majority of candidates are already way, way out there, and there are plenty of activists and strategists who aim to keep them well beyond anything resembling the center. But the net effect of Dems embracing causes such as the elimination of private health insurance, taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants, a Green New Deal that aims to radically transform the U.S. economy in a few years’ time, and reparations for both African Americans and gay couples may well be to make Donald Trump and Republicans seem less extreme when it comes to their own nutjob positions.

 

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During the Democratic debates this week there was a lot of tough talk.

On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), defended his plan to eliminate gas-powered car sales in the next two decades.

We’ve got to ask ourselves a simple question, “What do you do with an industry that knowingly, for billions of dollars in short-term profits, is destroying this planet?” I say that is criminal activity that cannot be allowed to continue.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), who is running on her record as a prosecutor, answered a question about the Mueller report and possible impeachment or prosecution of the sitting president this way:

There are 10 clear incidents of obstruction of justice by this president, and he needs to be held accountable. I have seen people go to prison for far less.

She might well have said, “I’ve put people in prison for far less.”

Still, if you were feeling generous you could chalk this up to little rhetorical flourish, I suppose.

But leave it to former vice president and America’s wacky Uncle Joe Biden to say the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud.

We should put some of these insurance executives who totally oppose my plan in jail for the 9 billion opioids they sell out there.

Important note: Democrats certainly do not have a monopoly on threating those who oppose them with severe legal sanctions.

In all these cases, the politicians are accusing their targets of having committed crimes. But threatening to prosecute your political opponents as an applause line at a campaign event isn’t good practice in a liberal democracy, and both parties would do well to tone it down.

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For decades, critics of the administrative state have called upon the Supreme Court to enforce limits on Congress’s ability to delegate authority to administrative agencies – and there is little to show for it. For decades, the Court has turned away these arguments, at times suggesting that there is no judicially administrable standard for determining when a delegation of authority goes too far. Some thought Gundy v. United States would be different. Alas it was not.

While four justices in  expressed a willingness to consider judicially enforceable limits on the delegation of power to the executive branch, five justices (those in the plurality and Justice Alito who concurred in the judgment) were unwilling to prevent Congress from  (in the words of Justice Gorsuch’s dissent) “hand[ing] off to the nation’s chief prosecutor the power to write his own criminal code.”

One reason some thought Gundy was a particularly strong candidate for the nondelegation doctrine’s revival was because it did not involve a popular regulatory program or threaten settled expectations about the distribution of authority to any particular administrative agencies. At issue instead was whether Congress could delegate authority to determine whether the requirements of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) apply to those whose offenses predated the act. In this particular case, because the Attorney General decided to apply SORNA’s requirements retroactively to those who had committed prior offenses, Herman Gundy faced a ten-year prison term for failing to register under SORNA. By comparison, Gundy spent only five years in jail for his underlying offense, which, again, he committed prior to SORNA’s enactment.

SORNA’s delegation was upheld only because Justice Alito opted to concur in the judgment. Thus there may still be a nascent majority to revive limits on Congress’s ability to delegate broad authority to executive branch officials – the three dissenters, Justice Alito, and Justice Kavanaugh, who did not participate – but any such assumption may be premature.

Although he joined Justice Gorsuch’s dissent, there are reasons to suspect the Chief Justice might not be willing to be the fifth vote to dramatically change administrative law as we know it. The Chief has written his own “anti-administrativist” dissents, as in City of Arlington v. FCC, but when he’s had the opportunity to cast the fifth vote to alter administrative law doctrine in a significant way (as in Kisor v. Wilkie), he’s trimmed his sails.

The Chief Justice may be particularly reluctant to upset the settled understanding of Congress’s authority to delegate broad power to administrative agencies, particularly insofar as this would require courts to reconsider the constitutionality of long-established programs. He’s likely to be more comfortable with a decision that tells Congress “this far, but no farther,” than with a decision that directly challenges the last half-century of legislative delegations. As Rick Hills suggested at Prawfsblawg, any nondelegation revival may be limited to preventing future excesses at the margin.

All this may mean that hopes for a robust revival of the nondelegation doctrine are misplaced. After all, as Rick notes, the proper boundary between a permissible and impermissible delegation is anything but clear. It’s far easier to declare the principle that Congress cannot delegate legislative power to administrative agencies than it is to demarcate the boundary such a principle should produce.

If delegation is a problem, is there an alternative to waiting for the Court to come around? Perhaps those concerned about delegation focus too much on the courts, and too little on delegation’s source: Congress.

As I noted in a prior post, Chris Walker and I argue in a new paper, “Delegation and Time,”  that it is time to reconsider institutional mechanisms that could encourage Congress to more carefully delineate the scope of legislative delegations. In effect, we argue that Congress may be in a better position to address many delegation concerns than courts have been to date, particularly insofar as one is concerned about broad delegations contained in older, potentially obsolescent, legislation.

While it may be hard for Congress to take the initiative to revisit and revise legislation as a general matter – and the enactment of broad REINS Act-type reforms may be unlikely—it may be possible for Congress to alter the incentives against more regular legislative action through the use of temporary legislation. Congress may not like to legislate, but when given sufficient inducement to act, even recent Congresses have shown themselves capable of acting—and a Congress that acts legislatively on a more frequent basis is a Congress that is likely to be exercising greater oversight and control of how delegated power is being used—or so we argue.

I’ll have more to say on how sunsets and mandatory reauthorizations might induce more responsible legislative action in a follow-up post. In the mean time, if you want more now, check out the paper.

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Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both caught flak during last night’s Democratic presidential debate because of their records on criminal justice. The criticism is both justified and encouraging, and so are the two candidates’ attempts to remake themselves as reformers. The attacks and defenses show that the bipartisan consensus on putting more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time has not only fallen apart but is perceived as a shameful episode from which leading Democratic politicians are eager to distance themselves.

When Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) slammed Biden for his conspicuous role in promoting mass incarceration as a senator, the former vice president said the crime bills he wrote or cosponsored “were passed years ago and passed overwhelmingly.” It’s true!

The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which abolished parole in the federal system, increased drug penalties, established mandatory sentencing guidelines, and expanded civil forfeiture, passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 1. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which imposed new mandatory minimums for drug crimes and created the notorious 100-to-1 weight-based sentencing disparity between snorted and smoked cocaine, got 97 votes in the Senate. Eighty-seven senators thought the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which created additional mandatory minimums, including a five-year minimum for mere possession of crack cocaine, was a swell idea.

Everyone (or almost everyone) was doing it, so why pick on poor Joe Biden? Well, for one thing, not everyone was quite as eager as Biden to be identified with the anti-drug, tough-on-crime, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key agenda. He was the lead cosponsor of the 1984 bill, wrote the 1986 bill, and introduced the bill that became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which created 60 new capital offenses, increased drug penalties yet again, and provided $10 billion in funding for prison construction. Support for the 1994 law, which Biden was still bragging about as recently as 2015, was less overwhelming: It got 61 votes in the Senate.

Still, it’s true that 1994 was “years ago.” Or as Biden complained later in the debate, “We’re talking about things that occurred a long, long time ago.”

Biden noted that he had seen the error of his ways, although he tellingly did not put it that way. “Since 2007, I, for example, tried to get the crack/powder cocaine disparity totally eliminated,” he said. Biden introduced that bill in the midst of his unsuccessful run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, only 21 years after he created the disparity.

Booker was not impressed by Biden’s excuses. “You are trying to shift the view from what you created,” he said. “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that ‘tough on crime’ phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine. This isn’t about the past, sir. This is about the present right now. I believe in redemption. I’m happy you evolved. But you’ve offered no redemption to the people in prison right now for life.”

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another drug warrior turned reformer, likewise got an earful from Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii). “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,” Gabbard said. “But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence  that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep a bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”

I don’t know how sincere Biden and Harris are in their new commitment to a less mindlessly punitive criminal justice system, but it may not matter. The climate of opinion on this subject has changed so dramatically that they feel politically obliged to support sentencing and drug policy reform. Nor is the shift limited to Democrats. It is no longer unusual to hear conservatives decry excessive punishment and mass incarceration, and even Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-crime platform eerily similar to what Joe Biden was saying in the 1980s and ’90s, has intermittently joined their ranks by condemning unjust prison terms, commuting drug sentences (well, just two so far), and supporting the FIRST STEP Act.

It would be going too far to say this trend amounts to a new consensus, since more than a few Republicans are strenuously resisting it. But the old consensus, the one  that Biden tried to hide behind last night, is dead, and it’s a pleasure to see politicians dumping dirt on it.

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Today New Jersey joins California, Vermont, Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Washington state, and Washington, D.C., in allowing residents with terminal illnesses to seek assistance from doctors in order to end their own lives on their own terms.

In March, lawmakers passed the Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed it into law in April. It officially goes into effect today.

The law permits people who are diagnosed with less than six months to live to request medication from doctors to commit suicide. This isn’t like picking up a prescription for antibiotics; there are a number of requirements to meet before a patient will actually receive the drugs. The patient needs request the medication twice (at least 15 days apart), once in writing, and have witnesses sign off on it (including one who is not a relative or entitled to any part of the patient’s estate). The patient must be an adult, a resident of New Jersey, and a person determined capable of making such a decision. The patients must be able to administer the medication to themselves.

It has taken seven years for a bill allowing for assisted suicide to make it through the legislature in New Jersey, and it only barely passed. NBC’s New York affiliate notes that Dan Diaz, husband of cancer sufferer Brittany Maynard—who moved to Oregon in order to legally end her own life in 2014 at age 29—went to Trenton to fight for the bill’s passage.

In much more recent assisted suicide news, professional poker player Kevin “Racks” Roster died just last week. He was a New Jersey resident with terminal cancer, but because the state’s assisted suicide law didn’t kick in until today and Roster’s suffering was getting much worse, he decided to move to California in May. There he lived out his last days, continuing to compete in poker, before ending his own life with medical assistance on July 26.

In June, Roster published an article in USA Today calling for assisted suicide for the terminally ill to be legal in all 50 states. He wrote:

I want to rob cancer of its prize. I want to go out on my own terms. That’s why I want the option of medical aid-in-dying to peacefully end my suffering from the very possible end-of-life scenarios for me: gasping for air or choking on my own blood.

This decision has nothing to do with having a disability. It is not because I am wheelchair-dependent. I can deal with that. I still think life is beautiful, and I want to live every day as long as I can enjoy it. But there’s no reason anyone with a terminal disease should not have the option to avoid intolerable pain and suffering at the very end of life. My loved ones are supportive and plan to be there with me, if and when, I take the medication.

Bonus video: Reason TV explored the issues surrounding assisted suicide in Montana in 2013:

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Should continuing to assert your innocence be seen as a sign of guilt? After issuing a three-semester suspension to football player “John Doe” for sexual assault, Carleton College in Minnesota gave him the option of appealing the verdict. He did so, to no avail.

Then the dean of students wrote to Doe that “the fact you continue to assert that it was okay to engage in sexual activity with a person in [Jane Doe’s] condition is deeply troubling.” John’s suspension was upgraded to a permanent expulsion.

That’s just one of many troubling claims made in Doe’s lawsuit against Carleton College, which was filed in U.S. District Court earlier this month. John alleges that investigators violated his due process rights, ignored evidence that undercut his accuser’s claims, and evinced bias against him at all stages of the process.

The lawsuit stems from the events of April 28, 2017, when John, Jane, and many other students received invitations to join a secret society. They were told to meet at a specific place on campus at 2:00 a.m., where the members of the society instructed them to consume copious amounts of alcohol and then cover the president’s house in toilet paper. On the way to the house, the lawsuit claims, Jane stopped John, whom she had just met, and began kissing him and then touching him below the belt. According to John’s lawsuit, he eventually grew uncomfortable with the public nature of their contact, and suggested they go back to his dorm.

What followed was a sloppy drunken hookup—John vomited both before and after they had sex, and Jane vomited after. But in John’s telling, Jane repeatedly, verbally consented to it—indeed, the whole thing had been her idea. If Jane was an incapacitated victim, then so was John.

By 6:00 a.m., John had to go to football practice. He told Jane she could sleep in his dorm room, and wear any of his clothes. A few minutes after he left, Jane stumbled out of the dorm room wearing nothing but John’s T-shirt and her underwear. She encountered a random male student, and asked to sleep in his bed. Eventually, the authorities were called out of concern for Jane’s well-being, according to John’s lawsuit.

Campus security escorted Jane back to her dorm but decided to call her an ambulance. According to the lawsuit, security personnel “found her alert and oriented” but unable to correctly answer certain questions. She claimed to be a member of a secret society, “like a frat,” which confused the officers, since Carleton doesn’t have any fraternities. Jane vomited on the way to the hospital and “seemed remorseful.”

As Jane sobered up, she became concerned that she had been raped, according to the lawsuit. Later that day, after receiving assurances that she would not face sanctions for reckless underage drinking, she filed a sexual misconduct complaint against John.

County prosecutors also filed criminal charges against John, but these were eventually dropped. The Carleton proceedings were adjudicated under the auspices of Title IX, the gender equality statute that looms large in campus sexual misconduct trials thanks to aggressive guidance from the Obama-era Education Department. John’s lawsuit argues that he had no shot at a fair hearing, since the entire matter was handled by just two administrators: one who produced a report based on the evidence she had gathered, and another who passed judgment.

John was found responsible, and he was given five days to appeal the verdict to the Community Board on Sexual Misconduct. He did so. Prior to the hearing, he was finally allowed to review the administration’s report on the dispute, which contained the Title IX officer’s characterization of interviews with witnesses but not the transcripts of the actual interviews. John was also concerned that key text messages, which portrayed him in a favorable light, were not included in the report.

At the actual hearing, John was told that he could not introduce questions to be asked of Jane, who was questioned separately. He was also told that “witnesses would not be necessary at the hearing, as he would not be allowed to present any.” Unsurprisingly, the committee confirmed that he was responsible for sexual misconduct. After it suspended him, John appealed the decision—as did Jane, who considered it too lenient.

In his appeal, John argued that the committee had not had access to all relevant evidence when making its decision and that “the sanction is inconsistent with the seriousness of the offense based upon the facts alleged.” This apparently irked Dean of Students Carolyn Livingston, who denied John’s appeal. She went so far as to agree with Jane that the punishment was too lenient in light of the fact that John had persisted in asserting his innocence. As a result, John was expelled.

The lawsuit demands that Carleton College pay John $75,000 in damages stemming from mental anguish, deprivation of due process and education opportunities, and loss of future career prospects. It will be interesting to watch the college’s response to these charges.

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In Johnson County, Kansas, a 5-year-old student hid inside a bookshelf in the Bluejacket-Flint Elementary School library. A teacher named Crystal Smith found the girl, angrily pulled her out, waited for another adult who was present to turn away, and, video footage shows, kicked the student in the back.

Former Iowa Department of Human Services social worker Chelsie Gray has been charged with three counts of felony perjury for giving false testimony while recommending to a judge that he remove four children from their mother and father and terminate the couple’s parental rights.

A Ladue, Missouri, police officer has been charged with second-degree assault for shooting an alleged shoplifter who was attempting to flee the scene. An attorney for Officer Julie Crews said she thought she was drawing a Taser, not her gun.

A new law in New South Wales, Australia, could force the Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum to destroy or sell 70 percent of its collection. The law requires all pistols and many other types of firearms to be rendered permanently inoperable. That would require parts to be welded together or a steel rod to be inserted into the barrel of a gun and welded in place. Museum officials say that if they cannot get the law overturned, they will sell the collection overseas.

When Jesus Reyes and his family arrived at the pavilion at a Bexar County, Texas, park that they’d reserved for Easter Sunday, they found Precinct 2 Constable Michelle Barrientes Vela there, in uniform, claiming she had reserved the pavilion. After a park manager confirmed that she had not, Vela and her group moved to a nearby barbecue pit. She then insisted that Reyes pay her $300 for security, which he did.

A judge in British Columbia, Canada, has found Patrick Henry Grzelak guilty of violating the province’s “hands free” driving law, even though Grzelak wasn’t holding his phone. In fact, the phone was properly stored and had a dead battery. But Grzelak had his earbuds in, and they were plugged into the phone. Justice Brent Adair said that makes them part of the phone and that Grzelak was therefore in violation of the law.

An 80-year-old woman in Bootle, England, was handed a 50-pound ($65) fine by code enforcement for walking her dog on a leash that was too long. The officers who cited her warned her the fine would increase to 2,500 pounds ($3,200) if she did not pay it within two weeks. After local media picked up the story, the local council dropped the charge.

Starting in January, the state of Washington will require booster seats for all children until they reach 4 feet, 9 inches in height when they are traveling in vehicles. That will cover many kids until they are around age 12.

Officials with the Pearland, Texas, Independent School District say an administrator has been placed on leave for mishandling a disciplinary action. A student showed up at Berry Miller Junior High School with an M shaved into his hair, a violation of the school dress code. The administrator told the boy he had three options: call his mother, receive disciplinary action, or color it in. The boy ended up with the M colored in with a marker. School officials say that shouldn’t have happened.

More than 3 million Californians may have to go back to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get new driver’s licenses. The federal Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom telling him the new licenses do not comply with Real ID requirements because the state did not adequately verify the residences of applicants.

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A disagreement over a busted taillight fine ended with an Oklahoma police officer tasing a 65-year-old woman.

Body camera footage shows an unnamed officer interacting with the woman, Debra Hamil, during the July 16 traffic stop. The officer presents Hamil with an $80 ticket and asks her to sign it. Hamil protests: “I don’t think that I deserve to pay $80 for something that is fixable—and I can fix it, if that’s all you want me to do.”

The officer tells Hamil that she is under arrest for refusing the ticket and asks her to step out of the vehicle. Hamil says “no,” rolls her windows up, and locks the doors before the officer can open them. Hamil briefly rolls her window down to tell the officer that he’s “full of shit,” then tells him to hand the ticket over so she can sign it. The officer says they’re “beyond that.” She drives off. The officer enters his vehicle.

The footage cuts to the officer approaching Hamil’s truck. He’s eventually able to pull her out of the truck and down the ground. After she refuses to put her hands behind her back and kicks the officer away, he deploys his taser.

Hamil is eventually handcuffed and placed in the back seat.

Hamil was later charged with assaulting an officer (felony) and resisting (misdemeanor).

When KOCO posted the video on Facebook, some of the comments supported the woman and some supported the officer. But one thing is certain: This situation was avoidable.

Traffic stops for busted taillights and other minor infractions just aren’t worth the risks they generate, both for motorists and police officers. Often, the stops are really being used to generate revenue or as a pretense to search for contraband, such as drugs or guns, when an officer otherwise lacks probable cause. Even then, Berkeley law professor Christopher Kutz has argued, the few times police successfully find something “don’t justify the enormous social costs of widespread police interventions.” In the worst-case scenario, a traffic stop could result in death, as the surviving families of Philando Castile and Sandra Bland know well.

If police truly wish to continue to go after low-level crimes, they can cut down on interactions like the one seen in the video by reserving traffic stops for accidents and impaired drivers while using cameras and other technology to enforce minor violations. Though it’s also worth asking how many of those minor violations are worth prohibiting in the first place. Such fines often amount to the criminalization of poverty, especially given that poorer Americans are more likely to drive older cars, which are at a higher risk for finable offenses.

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At the second round of Democratic debates, entrepreneur Andrew Yang criticized Amazon, accusing the online retail giant of “closing 30 percent of American malls and stores.” Yang has a plan to protect dying malls, proposing to direct $6 billion to prop up struggling shopping centers.

But one company is already repurposing many of those suburban behemoths: Amazon. 

In North Randall, Ohio, in 2017, Amazon bought an abandoned building that once had been the largest mall in the world, and repurposed it as a fulfillment center. The move brought 2,000 new jobs to the city, and it put the massive, decrepit building back to good use. As a local Ohio official told The Wall Street Journal, in a report about Amazon’s moves to repurpose old malls around Ohio, turning the dead malls into distribution hubs helps lift local property tax revenue as well. Nationwide, there have been at least 23 former brick-and-mortar retail spaces repurposed for industrial uses since 2016, the Journal reports.

As Daniel Laboe notes in Yahoo Finance, “dead malls” are particularly well-suited to become distribution centers. They’re usually located near highways, making it easy for Amazon to move products from them to the final customer’s home. The new ownership also puts the infrastructure associated with these old malls, from roads to sewage systems to electrical lines, back to work, rather than letting it rot in waste.

Malls might have some nostalgic appeal, but their replacement is just another example of creative destruction at work. The introduction of Sears’ mail-order catalogues challenged mom-and-pop businesses around the turn of the century, and the catalogues were subsequently challenged by big chain stores like Woolworth and A&P. Big box retailers in shopping malls were the villains to scrappy mom-and-pop businesses in the ’80s, and now they’re the ones looking for a bailout. 

The fact is, it doesn’t make sense to try to push consumers back to an old shopping model. At this point, more people seem to prefer shopping online. Amazon’s plan to repurpose dead shopping malls saves resources, broadens local tax bases, and creates jobs in distressed communities.

It’s not without precedent, either. The fate of these old malls is reminiscent of the fate of Sears’ old distribution centers, many of which have been transformed into offices and new retail locations. 

Yang needn’t worry. Dying malls don’t need saving, and the market can handle it. 

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Before the end of the day, a budget-busting, deficit-hiking, $2.7 trillion spending deal will probably be on its way to President Donald Trump’s desk, and he appears willing to sign it.

But you wouldn’t know about that if you watched this week’s Democratic primary debates.

The Senate is poised for a final vote on the budget deal later Thursday—the bill cleared the House with bipartisan support last week, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin hammered out the details last month. The two-year, $2.7 trillion budget deal hikes federal spending by about $320 billion annually and is estimated to add about $1.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. It also shatters budget caps. It actually hikes spending above the pre-sequester baseline that was in place prior to the 2011 budget deal, which temporarily reduced federal spending and brought an end to trillion-dollar deficits for a few years.

That Senate vote was supposed to take place Wednesday, but was postponed a day amid rumors that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) was having a difficult time getting a majority of his caucus to back the plan, Politico reported yesterday. Under longstanding unwritten Senate rules, a so-called “majority of the majority” must approve of legislation in behind-closed-doors meetings before it will be brought to the floor.

So there’s a sliver a hope for fiscal sanity in Washington, D.C., today, with some prominent conservatives openly opposing the deal. Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) says he will vote against the plan because it “perpetuates fiscal recklessness.” Both senators from Florida, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, are on the record in opposition. So are Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Penn.), both well-known as fiscal conservatives.

It’s more likely that the eventual vote will be, as Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) said Wednesday on the Senate floor,  “the last nail in the coffin” of the Tea Party—the grassroots conservative movement that sprung up a decade ago to oppose higher spending and bigger deficits, only to be largely subsumed into the Trump takeover of the GOP. Paul also plans to vote against the plan.

If Republicans can’t muster enough opposition to stop the deficit-increasing budget deal from passing, it’s unlikely that Democrats will. Even with the $2.7 trillion budget deal hanging in the balance, Democratic candidates for president did not utter a single word about the national debt or federal deficit during the debates in Detroit this week.

There was some robust discussion of health care spending—which accounts for about 40 percent of federal outlays—but only in the context of debating how much more of Americans heath care costs the government should cover. Questions focusing on how Democrats would pay for Medicare for All and other health care proposals were mostly brushed off by candidates as “Republican talking points”—a barb that actually gives Republicans far more credit than they deserve, given their recent budgetary track record.

Maybe CNN should take most of the blame for this. Its debate moderators spent more than four hours over two nights grilling 20 presidential hopefuls, yet they did not see fit to ask a single question about the $22 trillion (and growing) national debt—and the candidates, unsurprisingly, did not bring it up on their own.

Considering that several of the candidates on the state are current members of the U.S. Senate, the very legislative body that will vote on the budget deal Thursday, CNN missed an important and obvious opportunity for voters to draw distinctions among the 20-member debate field.

Would any of the candidates have offered even the slightest suggestion that adding trillions more to the $22 trillion national debt might be an error we’ll regret later? Maybe we’ll find out at the next debate in September, but don’t hold your breath.

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