Tag: hit&run

Three years ago this month, George Will, America’s foremost conservative newspaper columnist, officially quit the Republican Party over its acquiescance to Donald Trump. “This is not my party,” he said then. It’s even less so now.

Yet the erudite author and television commentator is not ready to give up on conservatism just yet. In his career-punctuating new book The Conservative Sensibility, Will makes the forceful argument that the natural rights-based classical liberalism of James Madison is the antidote to authoritarianism found on both the Trumpian right and progressive left.

In an interview with Reason’s Matt Welch, Will talks about the importance of rehabilitating America’s withered constitutional architecture, ponders what the punditry class got wrong in 2016, and reminisces about what it was like for a conservative columnist to criticize an erratic Republican president way back in 1973.

Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Todd Krainin. Camera by Jim Epstein.

Photo Credits:

Ralf Hirschberger/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom

Jacques Witt/SIPA/Newscom

GEORGE BRIDGES/KRT/Newscom

‘Running Waters‘ by Jason Shaw is licensed under CC BY 3.0

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Thousands of protestors took to the streets of Hong Kong this week. Police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray against the umbrella-wielding crowds gathered near the province’s legislature to protest a bill that would allow extradition to mainland China.

Residents of Hong Kong see the extradition bill as a major erosion of the city’s quasi-independent status. Since Great Britain returned it to China in 1997, Hong Kong’s justice system has been fully independent from its parent country’s. That has made the city an appealing destination for those fleeing prosecution in China. While Hong Kong’s judicial system is widely regarded as one of best in the world, China’s ranks 82nd out of 126 nations in the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, scoring particularly poorly for “fundamental rights.” Prosecutors in mainland China achieved a 99.9 percent conviction rate last year, which should explain why Hongkongers are worried.

“Even if we’re not doing anything drastic—as simple as saying something online about China—because of such surveillance they might catch us,” a 25-year-old protestor told Agence France Presse.

If the proposed bill becomes law, it would compel Hong Kong judges effectively to rubber-stamp extradition requests to mainland China—even if the charges are bogus. Martin Lee, the founder of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, warns that this could have consequences that reach beyond the tiny island. “If this extradition law is passed, Americans, Canadians and many other nationalities could become potential hostages to extradition claims driven by the political agenda of Beijing,” he writes in The Washington Post. The U.S., like Hong Kong, does not have an extradition agreement with mainland China.

In Washington, D.C., a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill Thursday affirming Hong Kong’s autonomy. If passed, the measure would allow the U.S. to freeze assets and deny travel visas for anyone “involved in forcibly removing people from Hong Kong,” Bloomberg reports.

At least 79 people were injured in violent clashes with police on Wednesday. On Thursday, Hong Kong police said they had made 11 arrests in connection with the protests. One of those arrested is a 22-year-old man who runs an encrypted chat service via Telegram, according to CNN, which also reports that he was charged with “conspiracy to commit public nuisance.”

Some surreal things happening now in Hong Kong protests pic.twitter.com/JDDrGHgjO7

— Strategic Sentinel (@StratSentinel) June 12, 2019

Organizers say more than a million Hongkongers have taken to the streets since last weekend. Civil Human Rights Front, the group organizing the protests, is planning to hold another major demonstration on Sunday.

FREE MINDS

“It is not possible to articulate a similarly simple level or rate of marijuana consumption and a corresponding effect on driving ability,” the Congressional Research Service concludes in a report released Thursday.

There is evidence that driving while high increases the likelihood of a car accident (don’t do it, kids), but the fact that there is no clear or consistent relationship between THC in the blood and THC in the brain has short-circuited the development of a “weed breathalyzer,” a sort of holy grail for cops in states with legal marijuana.

Nevertheless, many states do impose legal limits on THC in the blood. According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws,

Six states—Illinois, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington—impose various per se limits for the presence of specific amounts of THC in blood while twelve states (Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota Utah, and Wisconsin) impose zero tolerant per se standards. In those states, it is a criminal violation of the traffic safety laws to operate a motor vehicle with any detectable levels of THC in blood. Colorado law infers driver impairment in instances where THC is detected in blood at levels of 5ng/ml or higher.

FREE MARKETS

It’s time for Congress to revoke presidential authority over trade (and more!), Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) writes in USA Today:

From trade to energy to health care to transportation, Congress has given far too much legislative power to the executive branch. Instead of taking the time and responsibility to make hard choices and take tough votes, Congress has instead chosen to avoid accountability by giving power to faceless bureaucrats in Washington.

In January, Lee introduced the Global Trade Accountability Act, which would require congressional approval of any trade action taken by the president. He says that would help restore the balance of powers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly gives Congress authority over trade and tariff issues.

Meanwhile, 661 American businesses and trade associations signed a letter urging the White House to avoid escalating the trade war with China. The letter warns that “both sides will lose.”

QUICK HITS

• Sarah Huckabee Sanders will step down as White House Press Secretary at the end of the month. President Donald Trump thinks she should run for governor of Arkansas. There is no word yet on who will replace her as the administration’s mouthpiece, though there are many contenders.
• The House rejected an amendment by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) that would have removed barriers to medical research on marijuana and on psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin. More on the proposal here.
• Democrat-turned-Libertarian-turned-Democrat Mike Gravel appears to have fallen short of the threshold to qualify for the first Democratic primary debates, scheduled for June 26 and 27 in Miami. Here’s hoping his top-notch social media team live-tweets the event in his absence.
  

  Bennet, Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, de Blasio, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris, Hickenlooper, Inslee, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Ryan, Sanders, Swalwell, Warren, Williamson, and Yang — see you in Miami. ????

  Be the 1st to know who debates which night: Text ‘DEBATE’ to 43367

  — The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) June 13, 2019

• State lawmakers in Pennsylvania have passed a massive expansion to an existing school choice scholarship program. The only question is whether Gov. Tom Wolf will sign it.
• The Southeastern Conference (SEC) is lifting a ban on serving alcohol in football stadiums.
• Who owns the Moon?

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Delegates to the California Democratic Party convention last weekend drew national attention after they booed a presidential candidate, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, for saying that “socialism is not the answer.” Conservative writers were aghast. Look at those crazy California Democrats, they insisted, who get upset at a few jabs at an ideology that’s long been associated with collectivism and misery.

Yes, there’s a deep rift within the Democratic Party between its traditional-liberal and progressive wings, with the latter moving in some troubling ideological directions. But Republicans, who have gleefully warned the public about Democratic flirtations with socialism, shouldn’t be quick to gloat given the emergence of an anti-freedom movement on the Right.

While Democrats were airing their internal strife in San Francisco, Republicans were having a knock-down, drag-out ideological battle in a couple of journals read mostly by intellectuals. The fault lines are strikingly similar. Two factions are fighting for the soul of the party, with one side proposing that the GOP scuttle—or strongly soften—its historic support for pluralism, freedom and markets.

The first volley was lobbed by Sohrab Ahmari, in a May 29 column in First Things called “Against David French-ism.” Few people know that obscure religious journal and even fewer have heard of “French-ism.” Even French, the target of the piece, seemed bemused by the term. Both are conservatives. Both are pro-life Christians. French is a lawyer who has filed religious-liberty cases. Yet Ahmari, an editor at the New York Post, tarred him as an ideological softy who is too interested in “individual autonomy” to fight the culture war with sufficient zeal.

French fired back at Ahmari, arguing that “there is no political ’emergency’ that justifies abandoning” a political order that goes back to our nation’s founding. He found it odd that Ahmari would tout the libertine Trump as the key to restoring traditional values.

This looked like some insider blog debate, but it garnered wide attention among conservatives. Even mainstream media writers in the New York Times and Vox wrote about the dust up. That’s because the argument wasn’t really about two conservative writers, but about the future of the conservative movement and the visions each of them represents.

French holds to the classical tradition that champions liberty, market economics, civility and decency in the public square. I disagree with him on many issues (foreign policy, for instance), but agree strongly with the traditional American idea that government should try to neutrally protect individual rights—rather than be used to advance cultural preferences.

Ahmari believes Americans are fighting a “cultural civil war” and, “The only way is through—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” It’s a bizarre argument given that cultural conservatives lose every culture war that they fight.

Ahmari essentially complains that the Left is doing to the Right (re-ordering the public square) exactly what the Right would like to be doing to the Left. That makes me more committed than ever to this neutrality thing. Maybe neither side should be using the government to force its culture on others?

Ahmari never specifies what policies he would endorse once his allies grab control of the levers of power – perhaps because such policies might seem authoritarian to the average American. But one needn’t take too many leaps to see where this populist-religious conservatism is headed.

“Government intervention will not be the answer to every social ill,” Ahmari writes. “In many instances, free markets and individual enterprise can best serve the common good, albeit indirectly.” So, Ahmari won’t use big government to control everything. He might allow some individual enterprise provided, of course, the rulers believe that it conforms to the “common good.” Well, that’s a relief.

That nebulous term, “common good,” drives me crazy. It means whatever people in charge of the government say it means. Those of us in the classical-liberal and libertarian camps believe that each individual can figure that out on their own without government mandate. They can do as they please even if we might not personally approve of their decisions. But Ahmari wants “to enforce our order and our orthodoxy” on society. Creepy, no?

Even creepier is this reality: Many influential conservatives no longer value liberty or the marketplace. Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently praised some of leftist Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s economic agenda and blasted Republicans as “libertarian zealots,” controlled by banks and who yammer about entrepreneurship. Conservatives might have a problem if some of their thought leaders start channeling Warren and Huey Long.

The Democrats are dealing with a socialist-friendly Left that despises economic freedom, but Republicans are facing a resurgent nationalist Right that shares many of the same hostilities. There’s a clear and present danger on both horizons.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

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A girl cartwheeling on the beach. A row of sidewalk newspaper vending machines. A man sitting alone in a subway car, a bright red MAGA beanie atop his head. These images are all part of Freedom: Art as the Messenger, the Cato Institute’s first art exhibit. Currently on view in Washington, D.C., it aims to explore the importance and complexity of American freedom—even as that word’s definition seems to continually morph into something new.

Whether the exhibit suffers or benefits from the absence of image captions is up to the individual viewer. The pieces range from the direct (a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial, for instance) to the abstract (an acrylic painting of Life Saver candies). The former is one of the more iconic symbols of American exceptionalism, whereas the latter’s relevance appears limited to the fact that it’s an American brand.

Perhaps that’s the point. With a vast swath of images and characters brought to life by a diverse set of artists, Cato’s exhibit shows that freedom—our ability to act and transact as we please—is ubiquitous in American life, filling in cracks and crevices not always immediately visible to the naked eye.

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Twenty-two years after the launch of their original series, the Men in Black are back. But why? Well, yes, the Earth is still home to a plenteous undercover population of intergalactic space aliens, and they still need herding. And some of them still pose existential threats to the planet, and so require sterner attention. But as we see in this fourth MiB film, the franchise faces an existential threat of its own: irrelevance.

There have of course been insurmountable losses since the first Men in Black. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, the Agent J and Agent K who powered the original film with their comedic chemistry, are gone and pretty surely not coming back. Also missing is Chief Zed, the agency boss played in the first two films by the wonderfully acerbic Rip Torn, who was replaced in the third picture by Emma Thompson’s milder-mannered Agent O (who returns here, overseeing Liam Neeson’s “High T,” head of the agency’s London branch).

Taking the approximate place of Smith and Jones are Chris Hemsworth as Agent H and Tessa Thompson as new recruit Agent M. Hemsworth’s character is a showboating veteran resting on his laurels in the London office and Thompson’s is a woman who had a childhood encounter with the Men in Black, evaded their mind-wiping neuralyzers, and is now H’s new partner. This should have been a great team—Hemsworth and Thompson’s own chemistry was clearly displayed in Thor: Ragnarok. But here they strike not a single spark—a fun-deficit that has to be laid at least in part at the feet of director F. Gary Gray (The Fate of the Furious). Gray also manages to goose the story around from Paris to Marrakech to an island off of Naples without persuading us that he’s shooting anywhere other than a studio soundstage.

The story is a low-energy mishmash. Yet another doomsday dingus is in play, and it’s being avidly sought by an evil interplanetary outfit called The Hive, which is personified by Laurent and Larry Bourgeois, a pair of famous French hip-hop dancers. (This is a little weird, but whatever.) There’s also a guy with an alien beard (it unfurls and speaks) and a three-armed weapons dealer in a semi-Sia wig (Rebecca Ferguson) who triggers an elaborate fight scene that’s not bad. To make things almost interesting, there’s a mole inside the MiB.

Naturally, there are callbacks from the fondly remembered first Men in Black film. The gibbering worm aliens slink around MiB headquarters once more, and Frank the Pug (the dog-world Don Rickles) gets a passing line, too. There’s the usual complement of big shiny weapons (is that a Series 7 De-atomizer?) and a new chart of secretly alien celebrities (with Elon Musk and Arianne Grande replacing the old-school Danny DeVito and Sylvester Stallone). And of course those nifty neuralyzers are still being whipped out to cloud the minds of inconvenient witnesses.

But with its unfortunate combination of rote plotting and retread visual elements, the movie never attains comic liftoff. And if it weren’t for Kumail Nanjiani, who gives the film’s most entertaining performance, there’d be few real laughs. Nanjiani voices the last surviving member of a tribe of alien chess pieces, a tiny character saddled with the clunky moniker Pawny. Having lost his queen in a calamitous battle, Pawny yearns to find a new sovereign. “Are you a queen?” he asks Thompson’s Agent M. “Well,” she says, “to the extent all women are.” (Among Thompson’s duties in this movie is some light grumping about the sexism of the franchise’s title—Men in Black. Happily, Hemsworth gets to play this trite messaging—crafted by two male screenwriters—for a small laugh at another point.)

So what next for the Men in Black? Laurie MacDonald and Walter F. Parkes, who’ve produced these movies from the start, might be hoping for yet another sequel. Viewers of this film, however, may be more than ready to move on.

The Dead Don’t Die

Nothing in Jim Jarmusch’s new zombie-com is as undead as the movie itself. This is a sad thing to have to say about a film that stars Bill Murray, Adam Driver, and Tilda Swinton. Especially since Jarmusch’s previous genre exercise, the 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive, was such a wildly original piece of work. But The Dead Don’t Die is listless and dull; it’d be more fun if it were dumber, and even a little bit witty—which, believe me, it isn’t.

The movie is set in a nowhere burg called Centerville (“A Real Nice Place,” says a sign at the town limits), which is filled with barely sketched-in characters doing boring things that never tie together into an actual story. Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi in a MAGA-style “Make America White Again” cap) is missing a chicken. Police chief Cliff Robertson (Murray) suspects the thief is forest-dwelling Hermit Bob (Tom Waits, in a role that could be excised from the movie with no disruptive effect at all). Cliff and his deputy, Ronnie Peterson (Driver), notice that their watches have stopped working and there’s no more cell-phone service and daylight seems to be lasting much longer than it should. Soon fellow cop Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) is sharing their concern.

Meanwhile, three kids at the local juvie lockup learn from TV newscaster Posie Juarez (Rosie Perez) that the earth has been knocked off its axis by “polar fracking.” Presumably for this reason, the dead in the municipal cemetery have begun rising from their graves. Two of these creatures (Jarmusch vet Iggy Pop and the director’s partner Sara Driver) make their way to the town diner, where they chow down on two employees and then avail themselves of coffee, the beverage they so loved in life. (The movie is well-stocked with film-culture references, and this notion of zombie consumerism echoes George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead—although here we have zombies wandering the streets in search of wi-fi and Chardonnay. Which is admittedly pretty funny.)

What else? Well, everybody is weirdly wild about the movie’s title song, a country fiddle ballad by Sturgill Simpson that keeps turning up on random CDs and car radios. We see gas station owner and comic-book connoisseur Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones) trading zonked dialogue with deliveryman RZA and acting as oddly as you might expect from a character played by Caleb Landry Jones. Over at the Moonlight Motel, three youths (Selena Gomez, Austin Butler and Luka Sabbat) are fearfully bracing for the zombie apocalypse. And out on the road, Deputy Ronnie is getting all meta with Chief Cliff. (Asked how he knows this story won’t turn out well, as he keeps predicting, Ronnie says, “Jim showed me the script.”)

Then there’s the incomparable Tilda Swinton, who plays Zelda Winston, Centerville’s samurai undertaker (let’s leave it at that). Swinton is never boring, and she’s not boring here, either. But while I’ve always thought she could redeem even the lumpiest, unworthiest movie…after seeing this one, I’m not so sure.

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Female defense attorneys in Jackson County, Missouri, say they suddenly have been told to take off their underwire bras before jailers at the detention center will allow them in to see their clients. It’s part of a new security protocol imposed by Sheriff Darryl Forte. Public Defender Ruth Petsch says her office was not given any warning about the new requirements.

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From Peruto v. ROC Nation, a federal district court case decided yesterday by Judge Gerald Austin McHugh (E.D. Pa.):

[1.] In common parlance, when someone regrets words spoken in haste, the speaker of such words often follows up by saying: “I take that back.” This is a case that tries to give legal force to that expression, as Plaintiff here seeks to replevy the contents of a recorded interview to keep embarrassing statements he made from being included in a film documentary. Courts have been virtually unanimous in limiting the remedy of replevin to physically tangible property. Putting to one side the profound First Amendment implications of Plaintiff’s proposed relief—in the nature of a prior restraint—I conclude on technical legal grounds that replevin is not an available remedy for a dispute of this nature….

This dispute arises out of an interview Plaintiff gave in May 2018 for a documentary series entitled #FreeMeek. Defendants Roc Nation, Amazon Alternative, IPC Television, Josh Miller, Patrick Reardon, Eli Holzman, and Janet Kim are all involved in the production of the documentary. The focus of the series is rapper Robert Rihmeek Williams, better known as Meek Mill. It intends to address, at least in part, Meek Mill’s experience with the criminal justice system, including his interactions with Judge Genece Brinkley of the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. Judge Brinkley has overseen Mill’s criminal case for more than a decade and became the subject of some controversy when she re-imprisoned him for probation violations. Facing public criticism, Judge Brinkley retained Plaintiff A. Charles Peruto, Jr. as her counsel.

On May 30, 2018, Mr. Peruto sat for an interview related to the #FreeMeek documentary series, which is the source of this dispute. The interview concluded with Peruto explaining why he believes Meek Mill does not represent an example of the problems in the criminal justice system. When Peruto finished, the interviewer and one of his colleagues indicated that they had no further questions. Peruto then said, “Let me tell you something,” at which point the camera turned off. The audio, however, continued recording as Peruto went on to say, “That was hard to do because defending this judge is now becoming—why doesn’t she just grant this fucking thing?” A conversation ensued—caught on the still-operating lavalier microphone—in which Peruto said critical things about his client and her handling of the Meek Mill case.

The audio recording reflects that, despite his assertions to the contrary in both the Second Amended Replevin Complaint and the Second Amended Wiretap Complaint, Mr. Peruto never instructed anyone to go “off the record,” nor did anyone present state that they had stopped the audio recording.

After Mr. Peruto was given the opportunity to hear the full recording as a part of this litigation, he alleged that it had been edited and did not accurately portray the interaction. Accordingly, I ordered the parties to agree upon an expert who could evaluate the authenticity of the recording. A team of two experts, Catalin Grigoras and Jeff Smith, has since confirmed that the recording is authentic. At oral argument, no party disputed its authenticity….

Mr. Peruto obviously did not intend for his disparaging statements to be shared widely, let alone become part of the #FreeMeek documentary series. Unfortunately for Mr. Peruto, his comments were leaked to the press along with portions of the recording….

[2.] Plaintiff brings a novel replevin claim seeking sole possession of the digital version of his oral communications…. Peruto’s replevin claim does not seek possession of the equipment originally used to record him or the device on which the recording is stored, but rather possession of the data and files that contain the recordings of his voice…. Plaintiff [cannot establish] a viable claim for replevin by showing [as is required] that (1) the recording constituted a property interest subject to replevin, and (2) he had title and exclusive right to possess the property….

[3.] Replevin is a common law remedy dating back centuries. Historically it has taken the form of an action to regain possession of goods and chattels. Traditionally, only tangible property has been recoverable in actions for replevin or the related tort of conversion. The law has expanded only slightly beyond the bounds of tangible property, but the Pennsylvania Superior Court has noted that “[t]he process of expansion has stopped with the kind of intangible rights which are customarily merged in, or identified with some document.” In such cases, there is some intrinsic link between the physical item retrieved and the property interest it signifies. For example, items such as deeds or stock certificates are recoverable in replevin and conversion actions, but other intangible property remains outside the bounds of a replevin claim.

The computer data and digital files Peruto seeks represent intangible property beyond the reach of replevin. A stock certificate is a specialized instrument signifying a particular ownership interest. Hard drives, portable “thumb” drives, and data “cards,” in contrast, store information of every conceivable form, encompassing audio, video, photos, spreadsheets, calculations, and every variety of text. The computer data and digital files that Peruto seeks to replevy represent one form of information, stored by various methods, none of them emblematic of the content of the data.

The computer data and digital files containing the recording of Peruto’s oral communications are therefore unable to support a replevin action….

[4.] Even if Mr. Peruto could assert a property interest properly subject to replevin, however, he cannot claim title and an exclusive right to possess the property in question…. Here, Peruto has simply asserted that he “has title and exclusive right to possess the computer data and digital file containing the illegally obtained audio recording,” without citing the basis for such entitlement. He claims that his “oral communications” constituted his property, which Defendants “illegally obtained and made permanent as ‘digitized communications.'” He appears to argue that the act of (purportedly) unlawful recording is what gives rise to the ownership interest he asserts. But Plaintiff offers no legal authority supporting the conclusion that Defendants’ conduct in some way endows him with exclusive rights to the words spoken.

Understandably so. Claiming exclusive possession of words knowingly communicated to others presents an inherent contradiction. Once words have been expressed to another, the speaker would seem to have forfeited the exclusive right to “possess” them, as they then exist in both parties’ memories. If someone present creates a record of what was said, the physical means they employ to do so—whether written notes or electronic device—would have a tangible existence that could be appropriate for replevin. But the means of preservation are distinct from the words themselves.

Mr. Peruto further argues that, even if he cannot claim an exclusive right to words spoken in the presence of others, his voice is uniquely his, and Defendants cannot appropriate the sound of his voice in their documentary. On a different record, this argument might raise profound questions of privacy and personal identity. Here, the fatal flaw is that, in agreeing to cooperate with Defendants, Peruto expressly agreed in writing to allow them to record and use his voice. Although Plaintiff might argue that the release has limited applicability, his having signed it certainly forfeits any claim of exclusivity as to the sound of his voice….

Replevin is not a vehicle through which Mr. Peruto can “take back” what he said.

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White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is leaving her post, President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday.

“After 3 1/2 years, our wonderful Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be leaving the White House at the end of the month and going home to the Great State of Arkansas,” the president wrote. “She is a very special person with extraordinary talents, who has done an incredible job! I hope she decides to run for Governor of Arkansas—she would be fantastic. Sarah, thank you for a job well done!”

After 3 1/2 years, our wonderful Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be leaving the White House at the end of the month and going home to the Great State of Arkansas….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2019

Sanders, who is the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R), assumed the role after Sean Spicer’s departure in July 2017, making her one of the longest-serving members on Trump’s staff. Her tenure was marked by an adversarial relationship with the press and allegations that she lied or skewed reality to defend Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks and erratic decisions. The Mueller report confirmed that Sanders categorically lied when she claimed that FBI employees had told her the “rank-and-file of the FBI had lost confidence in” then-FBI Director James Comey:

“I’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision,” Sanders said from the podium. “And I think that we may have to agree to disagree. I’m sure that there are some people that are disappointed, but I certainly heard from a large number of individuals—and that’s just myself—and I don’t even know that many people in the FBI.”

Sanders later told Mueller’s team that her remark was a “slip of the tongue.”

In recent months, Sanders has all but stopped holding White House briefings. “A lot of the times when we don’t come to the podium it’s because the president has addressed the American people himself,” White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told Fox News in January. Trump echoed those sentiments, adding that “the press covers her so rudely & inaccurately,” so he “told her not to bother.”

Trump has yet to name Sanders’ replacement.

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More and more, police have been using “biometric” technologies—facial recognition, DNA matching, forensic genetic genealogy, and other techniques that are supposed to discern and verify people’s personal identities. As civil libertarians worry about such identification techniques’ effects on our constitutional rights, the techniques themselves are improving, the databases are getting larger, and the technologies are starting to converge. (It will soon be possible to match faces to DNA found at crime scenes.) What limits do we need to put on how the police use these new powers?

Courts have ruled that the cops can compel arrestees to submit to fingerprinting and DNA cheek swabbing. These data are matched with profiles cataloged in growing biometric databases. The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System contains fingerprint records from more than 70 million accused or convicted criminals, plus 31 million non-criminal fingerprint records such as those of federal employees. And the agency’s National DNA Index contains nearly 14 million offender genetic profiles, 3.5 million arrestee profiles, and 1 million forensic profiles as of April 2019.

Forensic genetic genealogy is the latest way for police to use biometric information to identify persons of interest. Paragon Nanolabs, one of the leading commercial practitioners of this art, defines the field as a “combination of genetic analysis with traditional historical and genealogical research to study family history.” It works by comparing a DNA sample from a crime scene with database of DNA from volunteer participants to determine whether the source of the sample has any relatives in the database and how closely related they are. Genealogists then cross-reference those data with traditional genealogical sources, such as census records, birth and death certificates, and so forth.

Forensic genetic genealogy first gained wide public attention last year, when California police used it to trace, identify, and arrest Joseph James DeAngelo. DeAngelo is alleged to be the so-called Golden State Killer, who committed a series of rapes and murders in the 1970s and 1980s. Since that case, police across the country have resorted to the technique to identify suspects in scores of once-moribund criminal cases.

Some 26 million Americans have taken direct-to-consumer genetic tests to find out more about our health and our ancestry. For example, 23andMe tells me that I have 1,216 genetic relatives, including two first cousins of whom I know nothing. Furthermore, I have posted my genetic test information in public where anyone can take a look. So any of my relatives tempted by a life of crime should really reconsider that path.

Police in the Golden State Killer case used genetic information made publicly available by users of the GEDmatch service. The cops collected DNA from crime scenes and submitted the genetic test results to GEDmatch, hoping to identify his distant relatives. Connecting the family trees pointed to DeAngelo as a suspect. Police then collected his DNA from discarded items, which were found to match the crime scene DNA.

In the wake of the Golden State Killer case, many of the genetic genealogy companies worried that clients would become reluctant to use their services and changed their police access policies. At GEDmatch, for example, users are now required to affirmatively opt in to let law enforcement see their genetic test results and relative matches.

No limits so far have been set on how, when, and where police may use forensic genetic genealogy. Jesse Bjerke, who is accused of rape in Virginia, has been identified as a suspect by means of forensic genetic genealogy. His attorneys argue that the DNA evidence should be thrown out because the police violated his privacy rights by surreptitiously collecting his DNA without a warrant. They argue that a warrant is required because Bjerke did not knowingly expose his DNA to public view.

In that case, police submitted DNA collected from two rapes to Parabon Nanolabs, which matched it to users of a genetic ancestry tracing site, who turned out to be Bjerke’s cousins. Police then monitored Bjerke and eventually obtained his DNA from discarded beer cans and straws. This evidently matched DNA found at the crime scene. Among other things, Bjerke’s attorneys argue that Bjerke did not knowingly expose his DNA to public view by leaving his DNA in public.

Many courts have ruled, citing cases involving photographs and fingerprints, that the Fourth Amendment does not give us a reasonable expectation that the police will not pick up any stray DNA that we happen to leave in public. Some scholars argue that loading suspect DNA into open-source public databases violates innocent relatives’ right to privacy in their own genetic data. On the other hand, those relatives have already exposed their genetic test results by uploading them into public databases themselves. (A November 2018 study in Science calculated that so many white people have uploaded their DNA test results that soon 90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from DNA through genealogy sites.)

While we’re working out that constitutional tangle, facial recognition is presenting us with yet another set of questions. This technology works by scanning photos or videos to create face prints based on the unique geometry of individuals’ facial landmarks. The face prints are distilled to a mathematical formula that police then compare to a database of known faces. At a recent congressional hearing, the FBI acknowledged it has access to more than 640 million headshots. Courts have ruled that people in public can be photographed without their permission because they have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill argues that police use of facial recognition makes us safer. The technology, he notes, matches photos or videos collected at crime scenes with a database consisting solely of arrest photos.

Using face prints in that way does seem little different from using fingerprints to identify criminal suspects. But civil libertarians fear that the technology will not stop there. As the Chinese social credit scoring scheme shows, facial recognition technology can be deployed as a real-time mass surveillance system. Each of us leaves lots of DNA and fingerprints in our wakes, but those biometric data exhausts do not enable real-time surveillance. Such concerns have led some jurisdictions to ban police use of the technology for now.

Now genetic and facial recognition biometrics are beginning to converge. A new study in Nature Communications reports that a team of researchers is trying to combine genetic identification with facial recognition. Under this system, police who have a DNA crime sample that does not match any genetic database profiles would check it against a database of faces. Instead of going from DNA to face, researchers go from face to DNA: Special software measures each face and checks whether any is a possible outcome based on the crime-scene DNA sample left by an unknown person.

Parabon currently offers a converse service: DNA phenotyping that translates genetic information from an unknown individual’s DNA sample into predictions of ancestry and physical appearance traits, such as skin color, hair color, eye color, freckling, and even face morphology. While not identifying specific individuals, this process can exclude suspects and provide additional leads. It is not too farfetched to imagine police feeding such DNA-derived faces into real-time facial recognition surveillance systems in hopes of identifying and apprehending suspects on the streets. In the future, eyewitness police sketches could be superseded by rapid DNA scans inputted into facial phenotyping algorithms.

Biometric identification contains an inherent tradeoff. Right now, police generally cannot compel you to identify yourself or show identification in public without a reasonable suspicion to believe you’re involved in illegal activity. Adopting ever more effective and overlapping biometric identification technologies will amount to the moral equivalent of compelling citizens to carry ID cards and show them on demand to law enforcement agents. And while that’s good to the extent that it’s used to identify, catch, and gather evidence against rapists and killers, it can obviously be abused as well.

So what must be done? A bill in California would ban police use of realtime facial recognition technology; that seems a good first step. Although the court precedents for fingerprint evidence are not promising, legislatures should perhaps pass laws requiring police to obtain warrants to access other types of our biometric data exhaust, such as DNA in shed skin cells. In any case, when police use these biometric identification technologies, their actions must be made transparent and subject to audit by outside public interest groups.

Back in 2014, when the biggest civil libertarian concern was the revelation that federal spy agencies were secretly keeping track of our telephone conversations, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board warned that this information could “be misused to harass, blackmail, or intimidate, or to single out for scrutiny particular individuals or groups.” The “danger of abuse may seem remote,” the board noted, but “given historical abuse of personal information by the government during the twentieth century, the risk is more than merely theoretical.” That same warning applies at least as strongly to biometric policing.

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Joe Biden made headlines this week for calling President Donald Trump “an existential threat to America.” But in that same speech in Iowa, the Democratic frontrunner also made some comments on trade policy that were both less hyperbolic and more important.

“Trump doesn’t get the basics,” Biden said. “He thinks the tariffs are being paid by China. Any beginning econ student at Iowa or Iowa State could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs.”

How many farmers in Iowa, Biden asked, are losing sleep at night because of the reciprocal tariffs imposed by China? How many manufacturing businesses are being choked by higher input costs? Trump “thinks he’s being tough,” the former vice president said. “Well, it’s easy to be tough when someone else is feeling the pain.”

Biden had already staked out a relatively pro-trade position within the large field of candidates seeking to replace Trump in 2020. But his remarks this week represent his most direct attack yet on Trump’s trade policies. They are a welcome sign for anyone hoping the 2020 election will become a referendum on Trump-style economic nationalism, and it may signal to other Democrats that they should step up their criticism of the president’s bellicose trade rhetoric.

As Biden ramps up his criticism of Trump’s tariffs, some other candidates are similarly adjusting their message in a more pro-trade direction. Take Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.). Less than a month ago, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, the candidate criticized Trump’s “irresponsible” preference “for conducting trade policy, economic policy, foreign policy by tweet,” but she refused to condemn the president’s use of tariffs. Now Harris is sounding a different note.

Trump’s trade policies are “taxing American consumers,” she told Noticias Telemundo in an interview last week. “When we look at the trade policy he is conducting in terms of China, now with Mexico, it’s going to result in people here paying billions of dollars more a year for consumer products.” In an NPR interview this week, Harris took an even stronger stance against what she called “the Trump trade tax.”

“As a result of his trade policy by tweet, the American people on a monthly basis are spending $1.4 billion—with a ‘b’—more on groceries, on clothing, on washing machines,” she said. “We’ve got farmers in Iowa who have soybeans rotting in bins. Farmers who over a decade bilt up relationships with a market in China and now, guess what? When you leave the people, people will find other players. So now we’re looking at our farmers in Iowa trying to compete with people in Brazil, who are selling substandard products.”

Other Democrats may have a harder time making that shift, particularly those on the party’s left flank. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has already published a trade platform that calls for more “Buy America” programs and, as Trump often does, criticizes America’s trade deficit. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has criticized Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs for not being protectionist enough, and she opposes Trump’s NAFTA rewrite for the same reason. Both Vox and The New Republic have described her strategy as trying to “outflank” Trump on trade.

But those Democratic candidates who are shifting their stance on trade are following where their prospective supporters are leading. A 2015 Monmouth poll found that only 24 percent of Democrats believed free trade agreements were good for the United States. But when Monmouth asked the same question last month, the pollster found that support for trade deals has risen to 55 percent among Democrats. The Pew Research Center says that 72 percent of Democrats believe the North American Free Trade Agreement has been beneficial for the United States.

And as Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg has pointed out, Trump’s approval rating has been sinking in states where the trade war has been most damaging—electorally important states such as Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

The New York Times‘ Neil Irwin outlines how Democrats can make an anti-tariff pitch to voters without appearing soft on China:

You can imagine a trade pitch from the 2020 Democratic nominee that goes something like this: “I’ll work with allies to keep pressure on China over its unfair practices—but not with open-ended tariffs on thousands of goods that are a tax on American consumers and invite retaliation against American farmers. I won’t use tariffs against countries that are our close partners. And I’ll use trade policy to try to boost well-being for American workers, rather than using it as a cudgel on unrelated issues.”

That seems to be exactly where Biden wants to go. In his Iowa speech on Tuesday night, Biden acknowledged that China is “a serious challenge to us, and in some areas a real threat.” (That’s a bit of a flip-flop. Last month Biden laughed off worries about China “eating our lunch” at an Iowa campaign event.) He said the United States should “build a united front of allies to challenge China’s abusive behavior.”

That was more-or-less the approach that the Obama administration was taking with the  Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was seen as a way to counter China’s influence in Asia and across the Pacific. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election ended the United State’s participation in the trade deal—a decision that he may not have fully understood, and one that almost certainly made it more difficult for the U.S. to confront China.

Some of the shift in the Democratic electorate is likely a function of partisanship: Trump is bad; Trump loves tariffs; ergo, tariffs are bad. You shouldn’t mistake that for a sudden embrace of free markets.

What’s true for Democrats generally is also likely true for Biden specifically. Elsewhere in his speech on Tuesday, the former veep spoke glowingly about the auto industry bailouts approved during the Obama administration—”one of the proudest moments in the White House,” he said. Elsewhere, Biden touted his support for high speed rail, “clean energy infrastructure,” and higher taxes on the wealthy.

But to the extent that Biden is grasping toward a Clintonesque (the Bill variety) view on trade and an Obama-era desire to work with allies to solve problems like China’s illiberal policies, he has the opportunity to offer a direct retort to Trump’s utterly umoored approach.

And to the extent that he expresses that viewpoint while lapping the rest of the Democratic field, perhaps he can convince others to join him.

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