Tag: hit&run

Liberalism in America is at a record high, according to new study. The country’s “public policy mood,” a “measure of left/right preferences over policy choices in American politics,” was more liberal in 2018 than at any previous point in the history of recording it.

“The annual estimate for 2018 is the most liberal ever recorded in the 68 year history of Mood, just slightly higher than the previous high point of 1961,” wrote James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while sharing his latest findings.

The liberalism mood score for 2018 was about 69.15, according to the data file Stimson shared. In 1961, it was 68.92.

Stimson suggests that the 2018 estimate “represents the expected leftward movement in thermostatic reaction to the Presidency of Donald Trump,” but “should not be taken…as only a personal reaction to Trump because its defining items are the issues of American politics of earlier generations, the New Deal and Great Society agenda. And the estimates do not include Trump’s signature issues of immigration restriction and trade protectionism.”

That last bit is crucial. There are many ways to talk and think about liberalism. A lot of proverbial ink is spilled these days on whether “liberal democracy” or sometimes just “liberalism” is declining globally in the face of various political movements. But those big-picture concerns evoke liberalism in the classical sense (respect for individual rights, political autonomy, free markets, etc.). Meanwhile, “liberalism” as bandied about by mainstream politicians may mean any number of things.

In this study, liberalism and conservatism are measured by levels of support for various government programs. The survey covers a wide swath of policy areas, framed in broad terms. (You can read more about them in a 2012 paper from Stimson, available online with free registration here.)

Stimson developed the Policy Mood measure in 1991, and it’s become a respected indicator used in a lot of people’s research. (Find more of his work here.) Here’s a graph Stimson did a few years of the data up to 2012:

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FREE MINDS

Medical marijuana doesn’t endanger workers. In fact, workplace fatalities are down in states with legalized medicinal weed:

In Medical marijuana laws and workplace fatalities in the United States, researchers D. Mark Anderson, Daniel I. Rees, and Erdal Tekin analyzed data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia between 1992 and 2015.

The goal: to determine the association between MMLs and workplace fatalities.

The researchers used Bureau of Labor Statistics data on workplace fatalities by state and year. Regression models were adjusted for state demographics, the unemployment rate, state fixed effects, and year fixed effects.

Their conclusion: legalizing medical marijuana has actually improved workplace safety—at least for workers aged 25–44.

Workplace fatalities were down in medical marijuana states by 19.5 percent on average.

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FREE MARKETS

Seattle dancers are fed up with booze ban at strip clubs. Katie Herzog takes a look at how Washington state’s liquor laws are hurting workers at Seattle-area strip clubs. Local workers “say that Seattle is one of the most difficult and least lucrative cities to be a stripper, in no small part thanks to the statewide ban on alcohol sales,” Herzog writes.

In other cities and states, strip clubs make the bulk of their money from the sale of booze. In Seattle, clubs make their money off the dancers themselves, who have to pay for the privilege of working. And those house fees are not cheap: At Deja Vu, a local chain with a near-monopoly in the downtown area, dancers are charged $120 to $180 a night—and if they don’t make that money, the club will charge them back rent.

The lack of alcohol also changes the vibe. “Tourists and bachelor parties might come in, but when they realize they can’t get a drink, they leave,” Aubrey said. Unlike in, say, Portland—where strip clubs are allowed to serve booze and food, and where female customers and co-ed groups aren’t an uncommon sight—Seattle strip clubs tend to attract mostly men on their own.

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At least some on left and right are pushing back hard against tech moral panic. David French and Glenn Greenwald both offered some some wise words yesterday on social media deplatforming and demonetizing controversies. Here’s French at National Review:

The regularity of the controversies—combined with the persistence of the overt viewpoint discrimination—is resulting in a demand that government “do something” to solve the problem. But the problem is far too complex and deep-seated for the government to solve. And if the government tries to step in with too heavy a hand, it’s going to violate the law. It’s past time for an honest, realistic look at the true cultural, commercial, and constitutional challenges to social-media fairness.

And here’s Greenwald, who spoke about the subject on the Tucker Carlson show last night:

Since the Media Matters & Vox hall monitors whose job is to take pictures of the TV and post distorted out-of-context clips did that to me tonight, here are my full comments on whether Silicon Valley overlords will benevolently police our discourse to protect the marginalized: pic.twitter.com/0oOoYUc5VW

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 7, 2019

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QUICK HITS

• After Donald Trump threatened new tariffs on Mexican goods coming to the U.S., officials from both countries are reportedly “discussing the outlines of a deal that would dramatically increase Mexico’s immigration enforcement efforts and give the United States far more latitude to deport Central Americans seeking asylum,” according to The Washington Post. But their sources “cautioned that the accord is not final and that President Trump might not accept it.”

• Adventures in doublethink: “Freedom of speech isn’t the same thing as the freedom to broadcast that speech,” insists April Glaser in an all-around misguided Slate piece calling for internet companies to be regulated more like broadcast networks.

• J.D. Tuccille explores the status of FBI’s new facial recognition database.

• The woke surveillance state welcomes you to Manchester’s Gay Village. “Look fabulous, you’re on CCTV!”

No, I’m not making this up. I wish I were. pic.twitter.com/DpfNu9vmka

— Helen Dale (@_HelenDale) June 6, 2019

• The latest jobs numbers are out and unemployment remains at 3.6 percent.

• In Connecticut,”‘raising women up’ apparently means depriving them of employment opportunities.” Reason‘s Scott Shackford looks at the latest expansion of occupational licensing rules for salon staff.

• Writer Molly Jong-Fast on Reason Editor-at-Large Nick Gillespie: “I’m horrified by some of the stuff he writes, but I am a good friend of his.”

• Unionizing efforts at Vox aren’t going so well.

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I blogged about this case a few days ago, and also asked Prof. Jonathan Nash, the author of a recent Michigan Law Review article on Congressional standing whether he could offer a more expert judgment. He very kindly agreed, and passes along this:

The criminal prosecution in United States v. Nagarwala began traditionally enough, with the federal government, acting through the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), bringing criminal charges.  Specifically, the defendants were charged with implementing female genital mutilation in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 116(a).  The district court dismissed most charges in the indictment on the ground that section 116(a) exceeded the federal government’s enumerated powers and was therefore unconstitutional.  DOJ initially filed a notice of appeal, but then withdraw that notice; DOJ notified Congress pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 530D of its “reluctant[]” decision to concede the statute’s unconstitutionality.

Matters took an unusual turn when the House of Representatives filed a motion to intervene in the case in order to argue on appeal in favor of the statute’s constitutionality.  Prof. Eugene Volokh has previously posted on the dubious nature of the House’s motion on separation-of-powers grounds.  I am grateful for the invitation to add some thoughts on the House’s standing to pursue this course, which I believe is highly problematic.

Two questions are present here: First, does Congress in the ordinary course have standing to assert the constitutionality of a federal statute when the executive branch has decided to abandon that argument?  Second, even if it does, does Congress have standing to do this in a criminal case?

[1.] On the first question, I have argued in favor of a functional approach to congressional standing.  On that understanding, Congress has standing to pursue its interest in information and oversight.  While this is an interest Congress has lately been advancing on numerous fronts with respect to the Trump administration, it has no application here.

A functional approach to congressional standing also recognizes the standing of Congress to challenge vote nullification and process-based changes in institutional bargaining power, i.e., settings where the executive has acted in a way that alters the constitutional balance of lawmaking power between the branches of government.  While this might seem facially to provide a basis for congressional standing here—one might frame DOJ’s action as a unilateral decision to nullify a statute duly enacted by Congress—there are several problems with this argument.

First, I have posited that the argument for congressional standing is stronger where the executive branch acts (i) in a way that results in a substantial change in the balance of power between the branches, and (ii) more unilaterally.  Here, however, the executive branch has simply declared its acquiescence in a court determination that a statute is unconstitutional.  As such, any long-term effect on the constitutional balance of power is low, and the action is hardly unilateral.  Moreover, any concern that DOJ’s action effects a blanket exercise of prosecutorial discretion (thus frustrating Congress’s implicit intent in delegating such discretion on DOJ) is cabined by the fact that future administrations would be free to seek prosecutions under the statute; no reliance rights are conferred on private actors by virtue of DOJ’s action (except to whatever extent the district court decision remains binding authority in that district; and, indeed, it is unlikely that the decision would preclude relitigation of the issue in the same district by a future administration seeking prosecution).

Second, the congressional standing for which I advocate is standing for Congress to challenge the executive branch’s action (or inaction) directly.  Here, Congress does not seek to sue some part of the executive branch, but rather to carry on a criminal prosecution against private individuals in the stead of the executive branch.

One case that provides some basis for Congress’s standing to step into the shoes of the executive branch to defend a statute’s constitutionality is United States v. Windsor.  There, the Supreme Court relied upon the House of Representative’s efforts to defend on appeal the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) after the Obama administration had conceded the statute’s unconstitutionality.  But there the Court understood that a fundamental disagreement remained between the plaintiffs and the executive branch: While the executive branch agreed with the plaintiffs that DOMA was unconstitutional, it refused to pay the tax refund that the plaintiffs sought.  Thus, Article III standing rested on the ongoing dispute between the plaintiffs and the executive branch.  The Court relied upon the House’s argument in favor of constitutionality in order to overcome prudential objections to hearing the case; indeed, the House made its argument solely in an amicus capacity, not as an intervener (as would be the case here).

[2.] Even if Congress somehow enjoys standing in the ordinary course to step into the shoes of the executive to defend the constitutionality of a statute, the question remains whether that standing extends to the setting of criminal prosecutions.  It is often said that standing is not an issue in a federal criminal prosecution, but Professor Michael Collins and I have argued that is only the case where the executive branch, i.e., DOJ, pursues the prosecution.  Thus, we have argued, state prosecutors might face standing hurdles to pursuing prosecutions under the federal criminal law; and, indeed, the Take Care and Appointments Clauses would pose analogous hurdles.  There is every reason to think that the legislative branch would face similar obstacles in pursuing a federal criminal prosecution.  It is the federal executive branch—not state executive branch actors, and not the federal legislative branch—that executes the federal criminal laws and thus enjoys presumptive standing in federal criminal prosecutions.  And, while Congress has an interest in defending the constitutionality of its laws, that would not seem to rise to the level of interest necessary to sustain the sovereign’s interest in prosecuting a particular criminal matter.

The highly circumscribed scope of congressional standing in the criminal context is evident from the limits on congressional informational and oversight standing.  While Congress can issue subpoenas and hold individuals in contempt for failure to abide by those subpoenas, any power to hold such individuals in criminal contempt lies with DOJ, not Congress.

Perhaps the strongest case supporting congressional standing to appeal the district court’s Nagarwala decision is the Supreme Court’s decision in Maine v. Taylor.  There, the defendant was charged with violating a federal statute that criminalizes the importation of fish in violation of governing state importation statutory restrictions.  The defendant moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that the federal criminal statute here purported to criminalize a state statute that was unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause; with the constitutionality of a state statute now at issue, the state of Maine intervened pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2403.   After the district court denied the defendant’s motion, the defendant entered into a guilty plea conditional on the possibility that he might win an appeal contesting the constitutionality of the underlying state statute.  After the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed—finding the Maine statute unconstitutional—Maine, as intervener, sought review in the Supreme Court, and the Court upheld Maine’s standing to pursue the appeal.

But Maine v. Taylor offers little support for the House’s standing to pursue the Nagarwala appeal.  For one thing, the opinion includes language indicating that the case should not be read to recognize broad federal criminal standing outside of DOJ (“[P]rivate parties, and perhaps even separate sovereigns, have no legally cognizable interest in the prosecutorial decisions of the Federal Government ….”).

More importantly, there are strong reasons to think that the claim to standing of a state to challenge on appeal a decision in a federal criminal case holding a state statute unconstitutional is far stronger than the analogous claim to standing of Congress to appeal a decision in a federal criminal case holding a federal statute unconstitutional.  After all, in a setting like Maine v. Taylor itself, the entity seeking to intervene and appeal the constitutionality of the statute—the state—is precisely the entity that would be precluded from enforcing the statute in question if the case were to go unappealed.

In contrast, in the Nagarwala setting, the House faces no prospect in the future of enforcing the federal criminal statute even if the district court decision is reversed.  While the state in Maine v. Taylor faced future enforcement decisions regarding the state statute at issue, the House’s interest in Nagarwala extends solely to the constitutionality of the statute.  Put another way, the affront in the vertical separation-of-powers context—visited upon the state executive branch by the federal executive branch declining to defend on appeal a state statute against constitutional challenge—is greater than the affront in the horizontal separation-of-powers context—visited upon the federal legislature by the federal executive branch declining to defend on appeal a federal criminal statute against constitutional challenge.

It is hardly surprising that the state in Maine v. Taylor was represented by the state’s Attorney General’s office, not the state legislature.  Indeed, Congress itself seems to have recognized this logic when it drafted section 2403 (the provision that allowed Maine to intervene).  In any case that draws in question the constitutionality of a state statute that addresses the public interest where the state is not already a party, the statute calls for a federal court to notify the state’s Attorney General, not the state legislature, of that fact.  Analogously, notification of a challenge to a federal statute’s constitutionality is to go to the U.S. Attorney General, not the Congress.

That the House likely lacks standing here does not necessarily preclude congressional action to address female genital mutilation.  Congress could try to craft legislation—whether criminal or civil—that passes constitutional muster.  Indeed, DOJ’s “reluctan[ce]” to abide by the district court’s decision suggests a willingness to enforce laws on the subject that are constitutional.  What Congress likely cannot do is pursue an appeal in this federal criminal matter.

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At a 2017 Riverside rally touting legislation to increase gas taxes and vehicle-license fees to boost California’s infrastructure spending, then-Gov. Jerry Brown was characteristically grandiose.

“Roads are the fundamentals of a civilization,” he said. “Whether it was the Roman Empire or the United States of America, roads are the key to a nation’s greatness.”

As someone who once spent hours driving 50 miles on a decrepit and insanely crowded third-world country’s “highways,” I can attest to the societal importance of a modern, well-maintained freeway system. But the latest news about that gas-tax hike—and the way some cities are using the cash—speaks volumes about our civilization, too. It’s great fodder for an author who wants to chronicle the decline and fall of it.

Senate Bill 1‘s supporters made clear the $5.4 billion a year in additional infrastructure spending would reduce congestion and make getting around much easier. Any normal person would think that meant building new street and highway lanes. This isn’t high-level math: Congestion is caused by too little road space for too many cars, so adding space is the key.

Normal people apparently don’t make transportation decisions. “Two years after state lawmakers boosted the gas tax with a promise to improve California streets, some cities have raised the ire of drivers by spending millions of the new dollars on ‘road diet’ projects that reduce the number and size of lanes for motor vehicles,” according to a Los Angeles Times report.

In November, a majority of California voters opposed a repeal of those gas-tax hikes. People no doubt reasoned that even if they don’t like paying so much extra at the pump, they at least will see tangible improvements in their commutes. In fairness, the tax hike has funded many construction and maintenance projects, but it’s also funded these projects that seem designed to make our awful commutes even worse. It makes no sense.

S.B. 1 is a “landmark transportation investment to rebuild California by fixing neighborhood streets, freeways and bridges in communities across California and targeting funds toward transit and congested trade and commute corridor improvements,” according to the state of California website. That’s a fair description of how its backers described the controversial plan to skeptical taxpayers.

When did anyone ever say anything about “road diets”?

Actually, the law’s fine print promised to add bike lanes and improve road safety. Not many people figured that California cities would do this by building wider, protected bicycle routes and removing the number of traffic lanes in the process. In the city of Sacramento, near where I live, officials have used this strategy. It has turned downtown thoroughfares from a crowded rush-hour mess into total, gridlocked chaos. As humorist Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”

The city realized “the primary collision factor on the streets was unsafe speeds,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said in that news report. “And one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to reduce the speeds is to reduce the number of travel lanes.” The report pointed to a federal study showing that road diets significantly reduce the number of car accidents.  Well, sure—it’s harder to get in an accident when you’re not moving or crawling along. The next time you’re in gridlock, remember that officials did this to make you safer. Gee, thanks a lot.

This is planned congestion—an extreme case of social engineering trumping traffic engineering. These officials, who want us to sit in traffic longer as a means to avoid accidents or frustrate us into taking the bus or rail, are using the recent tax boost to achieve these goals. Californians have been had, although many of us had issued warnings.

Officials actually admit that they do this. It was obvious, though, given increases in traffic and all those new, obtrusive bicycle lanes surrounded by pylons and delineated by white, painted warning figures and lines on the asphalt. These projects also are designed to promote “equity” by “giving people safe alternatives to cars,” as one supporter told the Times. Bicycling is a fine-enough pastime and a reasonable way to get around in cities, but replacing traffic lanes with bike lanes will only make the traffic worse.

When San Jose opened a light-rail station many years ago, transportation officials reportedly considered closing a nearby highway lane to encourage people to take rail. These road-diets are even loopier. We’ve placed transportation planning in the hands of the Congestion Lobby – officials who are so hostile to car usage that they’ll go to great lengths to coerce us to ride bikes or take their slow, dirty and generally unpleasant transit systems.

Jerry Brown had it right. Roads are indeed a key to a society’s greatness. But I’d add that any civilization that raises gas taxes and then reduces road lanes to purposefully increase traffic congestion is insane and probably living on borrowed time.

This column was first published by 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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When it first premiered on the SyFy channel in 2015, The Magicians used the tagline “magic is a drug,” a signal to audiences that despite its kid-friendly premise—a group of millennials enroll in a school for spellcasters and travel to a Narnia-esque fantasy world—this was very much a show for adults. Like its source material, a popular trilogy of novels by Lev Grossman, The Magicians is filled with sex, violence, addiction, and angst. Protagonist Quentin Coldwater (think Harry Potter crossed with Holden Caulfield), who is clinically depressed, discovers that magic can’t fix what’s wrong with him. It may even make thing worse.

If magic is a drug, strictly regulating sorcery proves just as unwise as the drug war. The fourth season, which concluded in April, begins with a new world order: A bureaucratic organization called “the Library” has taken literal control, forcing all would-be magicians to fill out the proper forms—in triplicate—whenever they want to cast spells. It doesn’t take long for the Library to go full NSA and start using its newfound surveillance powers to hunt down unlicensed magic users. In a development that hardly even counts as a spoiler, the Library’s upper leadership is revealed to be using magic for a nefarious plot that could destroy the entire universe.

One of the show’s most satisfying arcs involves a prominent Librarian realizing the truth and turning against her masters. The plot is ultimately foiled, but it results in a death as shocking as any in recent TV memory—one a polarized fan community is still processing.

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There are several things wrong with Dark Phoenix. I’m tempted to say everything is wrong with it, except that the picture is largely in focus and the credits appear to be correctly spelled. Other than that, though…

If Disney really wanted to throw $200-million up on the screen and flick a match at it, it would make sense that they would hire Simon Kinberg to direct this movie. Kinberg has labored long in the X-Men vineyards, as both writer and producer. In fact, he cowrote X-Men: The Last Stand, the widely reviled (but not unprofitable) 2006 entry in the series. That movie attempted to incorporate within its tumult the tale of Jean Grey, the Dark Phoenix, a hallowed story arc in the Marvel comics universe. Kinberg has since admitted that the script he coauthored (with Zak Penn) failed in this regard. So when it was decided to take another whack at the Phoenix story, who better to bring in to write it—all on his own this time—than Simon Kinberg? And who better to direct the movie than, again, Simon Kinberg—a man who has never directed any sort of movie before, let alone one of the big galumphing blockbuster variety.

Here we have the result of those unfortunate decisions. The picture has a sometimes cheesy look—at one point there’s an exterior sequence, situated on a suburban street, that might have been shot somewhere just off the New Jersey Turnpike, so lacking is the setting in any sort of visual interest. We’re also treated, yet again, to the sight of an angry super-mutant towering up into the air with a menacing scowl, preparing to rain down havoc on the lesser characters gibbering away below. And while we’re long past the point where complaining about an over-reliance on digital effects in these movies will be greeted with anything but mockery, there can be no ignoring the mistily unconvincing CGI with which this film is so generously endowed. (There’s one strong action sequence toward the end, set on a train, but it’s hard not to think of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer while you’re watching it.)

The actors are fine, but their characters, after 19 years of wearing out their welcome, seem as weary as we are. (They may soon be getting some overdue R&R now that Disney, which owns Marvel, has also engulfed Fox—which owned the X-Men, along with the pitiful Fantastic Four—and will presumably be stirring its newly acquired mutants into Marvel’s well-established MCU.) Peacenik Professor Xavier (James McAvoy), still serenely gliding around in his wheelchair, is now so tight with once-hostile humanity that he has a hotline to the U.S. president installed in his office. (When something goes wrong out in space, Xavier rallies his forces and then tells NASA, “Not to worry, Mission Control, help is on the way.”) Meanwhile, Xavier’s brooding frenemy Eric Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) has moved his rival Brotherhood of Mutants to a commune in the woods, along with his kooky Magneto helmet, which he keeps tucked away in a box.

Back at Xavier’s mutant school in upstate New York, we find a new generation of young oddballs thronging the halls—something the OG X-Men are noticing, too. In fact, one of them, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), has decided it’s time to move on and she wants Hank McCoy—her furry blue squeeze, Beast—to come with her. The familiar contingent of other super-folk is also on hand—snowy-haired weathergirl Storm (Alexandra Ship), super-speedy Quicksilver (Evan Peters), blue-tailed teleportist Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and laser-eyed Cyclops (Tye Sheridan). But these ancillary X-Men are given little to do. This is, after all, a movie purportedly about Jean Grey (Sophie Turner, of Game of Thrones), the telekinetic telepath known, in her more dangerous moods, as Dark Phoenix.

Jean’s backstory is sketched in quickly. (One good thing to be said for this picture: it clocks in at less than two hours.) At the beginning, in 1975, we witness the catastrophe that deprived little Jean of her parents and led her into the sheltering arms of Professor Xavier. Years later, in 1992, when Xavier dispatches the X gang on that aforementioned space mission (the real-life U.S. Space Shuttle Endeavour is being besieged by a fierce CGI force of some sort), Jean is chosen to board the distressed ship and stabilize it. Unfortunately, she is attacked by the intergalactic entity, which sets up shop in her mind, to chaotic effect. (One of the main characters will not be bouncing back from a violent encounter with this Dark Phoenix manifestation of Jean’s personality.)

Jean’s unhinged behavior soon draws the attention of a detachment of wandering aliens whose homeworld has been destroyed by the same “Phoenix Force” that is afflicting Jean. The leader of this group is an icy character called (in the credits, at least) Vuk, played by Jessica Chastain in white hair and white eyebrows. (She seems primed for some serious Edgar Winter cosplay.) Despite her deep-space origin, Vuk has a sadistic dislike of the weak and the hobbled that has an unpleasantly terrestrial familiarity. Badmouthing Xavier, whom Jean holds in such affectionate regard, Vuk asks, “Are you a scared little girl who answers to a man in a chair? Or are you the most powerful person on the planet?” Subsequently confronting Xavier himself, Vuk tells him, “She’s not your little girl anymore.” (If I may slip into spoiler territory for a moment, there follows here a scene of such baffling and repellent sadism with Vuk using her mind to lift Xavier to his useless feet and fling him around in a transport of pain—that defies understanding. There’s no payback for this later in the film, and there’ll be no sequel in which to address it, and it’s hard to imagine an explanation for this scene’s inclusion in the movie that wouldn’t be entirely insufficient.)

There are in addition some inane girl-power flourishes (in a script written by a man). These reach a peak in an exchange between Xavier and an angry Mystique, who’s tee’d off that the professor has turned into a fame whore and no longer does any of the hard work of guarding the world. “The women are always saving the men around here,” she says. “You might wanna think about changing the name to ‘X-Women.'”

In significant ways, the story here is as much about Xavier as it is about Jean Grey. Burdened with bad makeup (Turner’s heavily penciled eyebrows have a presence all their own), Jean makes her way through the story only rarely displaying the turbulent emotions that are said to trigger the Dark Phoenix. (Kinberg is clearly not an actor’s director.) Xavier, on the other hand, is taken to task at length for his long-ago protective behavior toward Jean (as he saw it), which is now being reevaluated as manipulative and sexist. For a movie that’s set back in the ’90s, this one feels clangingly up-to-date.

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It took almost seven years, but the Chicago Police Department has finally fired an officer who tried to solicit sex from an underage girl in return for helping get her mother’s impounded car back. Darius Alexander was placed on desk duty with pay in June 2012 after the girl’s mother alerted the department of his actions. But the police board didn’t receive charges against him until August 2018. At that point he was suspended without pay until the board could consider the department’s recommendation to fire him. Alexander spent almost half of his 13-year career with the department on desk duty.

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In case you were wondering (as I have been wondering) how our president can simply snap his fingers and impose tariffs (of up to 25% on all goods) on imports from Mexico without even informing, let alone getting legal authorization from, Congress, an excellent essay by Scott Anderson and Kathleen Claussen over on Lawfare lays out the relevant legal framework.

The bottom line: while earlier instances of unilateral tariff impositions by the Trump Administration (on goods from China, on all steel and aluminum imports, etc.) were all premised on broad presidential authority granted in various trade-related statutes (e.g. Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act), Trump is basing his power to impose the new Mexican tariffs (scheduled to go into effect on June 10) on “the authorities (sic) granted to me by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).”

The IEEPA [full-text here] kicks in once a national emergency has been declared with respect to an “unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” The IEEPA then gives the president facing such emergency the power to:

regulate … or prohibit … any … transportation, importation, or exportation of … any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest … or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

Though the IEEPA has apparently never been invoked before in connection with tariffs on imported goods, more typically being used for the imposition of economic sanctions or for freezing bank accounts, it does appear that such an action would fit within the scope of the statutory authorization (which has, as Anderson and Claussen explain, been given broad readings by the courts in the few cases in which it has been challenged).  The President, you will recall, has declared a national emergency with respect to migrants at our southern border, and though Congress voted to rescind the emergency declaration, Trump vetoed the measure and there were not enough votes to override the veto.

The statute, though, does raise some tricky “delegation doctrine” questions; there are some limits to Congress’ power to delegate its law-making functions to others (including members of the Executive Branch), though locating the line which Congress may not cross has proven, over the years, to be an enormously difficult enterprise.

But putting aside the constitutional questions, one has to hope that at some point Congress will return to its senses and re-assert its fundamental law-making powers by either repealing or, perhaps more sensibly, providing for a 15- or 30-day “sunset” provision that will nullify the presidential actions unless during that period Congress approves them via legislation, by majority vote in each chamber. There are certainly times, in the face of true national emergencies, when the Chief Executive has to act quickly and decisively; that is as true for economic warfare as for ordinary on the ground military warfare.  But there is no good reason for allowing the president to entirely avoid the need (and the constitutional requirement) to obtain a majority of each house of Congress in order to declare economic war (or, for that matter, to declare ordinary war).

I suspect that because this issue is now seen as being all about Mr. Trump and is all entangled in the Trump/Anti-Trump miasma, there’s probably no chance of any revision in the law until a new Chief Executive is in place. But one can still hope.

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Thirty-seven children between the ages of 5 and 12 were left in vans for up to 39 hours in the Texas heat last July, according to a report from NBC News. They were separated from their parents as part of President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy to deter migrants from crossing the border.

The children were driven to the Port Isabel Service Processing Center, an immigration detention facility near Los Fresnos, Texas, on the afternoon of July 15, 2018, to be reunited with their families. Instead, they waited. The majority of children spent a minimum of 23 hours in the vehicles, and it wasn’t until after two nights that every child met with their parents.

Andrew Carter of the Bureau of Child and Family Services said that the lack of preparation on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) delayed the process. “The children were initially taken into the facility, but were then returned to the van as the facility was still working on paperwork,” Carter told NBC. “The children were brought back in later in the evening, but returned to the vans because it was too cold in the facility and they were still not ready to be processed in.”

I emailed the Administration for Children and Families, a division within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to ask some additional questions. “Thanks for reaching out,” a communications officer responded. “We have nothing further to add.”

The situation is yet another example of the Trump administration’s failure to control a situation it created with its “zero-tolerance” approach, which has fueled chaos as migrants continue to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border. A recent review by the Office of Inspector General (OIG)—released in January—found a number of problems with the government’s oversight of family separations, including the fact that the separations continued even after U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw ordered an end to the practice in June 2018. The report also identified “the lack of an existing, integrated data system to track separated families across HHS and DHS,” the absence of which put many families in limbo and prevented officials from determining where some children had been placed.

This mismanagement is corroborated by private emails sent between HHS and ICE.
“[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful,” an official from HHS wrote in an exchange with a top official at ICE on June 23, 2018. “We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children.”

That the federal government is still struggling to reunite families should come as no surprise considering how haphazardly we’ve acted at the border. Reuniting these families would be less of a challenge if we had not broken them apart in the first place.

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has a lot on his plate right now, having to both run the government of the country’s largest city while also campaigning for the country’s highest office. Neither responsibility, however, has interfered with the Democratic presidential candidate’s ability to execute a major crackdown on ice cream trucks.

On Wednesday, New York launched Operation Meltdown, seizing 34 ice cream trucks and filing a lawsuit against their owners alleging that they engaged in a fraudulent corporate shell game to avoid paying millions in traffic and parking fines. Another 12 targeted ice cream trucks escaped the sweep and are currently being hunted down.

“No New Yorker is above the law—especially those who try to ignore public safety laws,” said de Blasio in a Wednesday press release. “This seizure marks the end of the road for these scofflaw ice cream vendors.”

The city’s lawsuit targets six ice cream vendors who, between them, own and operate a fleet of 76 trucks. Together, these trucks racked up some 22,495 traffic violations between 2009 and 2017, resulting in $4.5 million in unpaid fines. The city is only going after the 46 trucks that racked up more than $10,000 in fines. A few of these trucks had unpaid fines in excess of $100,000, according to the city’s lawsuit.

In its complaint, filed Wednesday, the city alleges that the ice cream truck owners played an elaborate game of corporate hot potato. After earning a sufficient number of traffic tickets, a truck would be transferred from one dummy corporation to another (all of which have names like Twirly Twirl Ice Inc. or Minus Below Inc.) in an alleged attempt at foil city debt collectors.

“The collection division of the Department of Finance attempted to collect this debt through traditional means of demand notices and information subpoenas to banks, but was unsuccessful,” reads the city’s press release. “The Department found the debtors never had bank accounts, and any trace information to the corporate defendants no longer existed by the time the Department attempted to reach them.”

In addition to the alleged fraud, the city argues these “scofflaw ice cream vendors” are also a danger to public safety.

“Defendants’ trucks create dangerous situations and disrupt City traffic flow by stopping, standing, or parking in crosswalks (846 violations) or adjacent to fire hydrants (1,192 violations); defendants’ trucks ignore red lights (93 violations), and block access to pedestrian ramps (63 violations),” reads the city’s complaint. Those instances represent about 10 percent of the traffic tickets these trucks are said to have accumulated.

City law currently bans selling merchandise—including food—from metered parking spaces. Since virtually every parking space in the city is now metered, tickets for that offense have become a routine cost of doing business, says Ben Goldberg, CEO of the New York Food Truck Association (NYFTA), a business group.

Food trucks “have to legally get tickets in a way because there are no locations in New York that are good that are not metered. The trucks understand that it’s just a cost of doing business,” Goldberg tells Reason while stressing that NYFTA members are required to pay any parking tickets they receive.

The constant fines are a major burden on vendors. Goldberg says that any food truck business that is looking to expand or grow their operations has to look away from servicing city streets and focus on working special events where parking isn’t an issue.

In this context, the city’s ice cream raids seem to have less to do with public safety, and more to do with enforcing outdated parking regulations that bedevil all mobile food vendors.

Many of the workers of these ice cream trucks are certainly no better off after yesterday’s seizures.

“This is not good. I’m trying to make some money. I got a family, I have to support them,” one driver said to the New York Post.

“I’m just angry because I’m not going to have a good summer. I work seven days a week for three months (in the summer). In the winter I’m going back to college…Now all my plans have changed,” another driver told the Post.

That’s not to say that the defendants are noble victims. Provided the city’s claims are true, they’ve engaged in blatant fraud.

They have also potentially been screwing over their workers. One ice cream truck worker affected by the truck seizures told the Post that he’d been assured the tickets he’d accrued were being paid and that his wages were garnished to cover the fines.

Goldberg says that regardless of vendors’ frustrations with the current regulations, the best way the food truck industry can affect change is through normal, perfectly legal lobbying.

I think that’s right. Nevertheless, one can’t ignore the role that existing parking regulations play in incentivizing some bad actors in a tight market to color outside the lines.

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This morning’s opinion is here.

1. The florist had argued that the First Amendment barred the government from compelling her to speak, and flower arranging should qualify as protected expression for First Amendment purposes. But the court concluded in 2017 (and reaffirmed now) that flower arranging isn’t sufficiently expressive to qualify.

2. The florist had also argued that the state of Washington’s Constitution had been interpreted to presumptively exempt religious objectors from legal requirements that would violate their religious beliefs. But the court concluded in 2017 (and again now) that, even if this rule applied here, the presumption was rebutted: The government had a compelling interest in “eradicating barriers to the equal treatment of all citizens in the commercial marketplace” (even if same-sex couples could easily get the same floral arrangements from other florists).

3. After last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back to be reviewed in light of that decision. But though some Justices would have generally recognized a First Amendment right of wedding cake bakers (and thus likely florists as well) to refuse to serve same-sex weddings, the majority’s decision was much narrower: Based on the particular actions of the government authorities in that case, the Court held that Masterpiece Cakeshop had been unconstitutionally discriminated by the state adjudicative agency against based on its religion.

In today’s decision, the Washington Supreme Court concluded that there was no evidence of such religious discrimination by any adjudicative agency or court against Arlene’s Flowers. And it saw no occasion to revisit its free speech and religious exemption analysis, because the Masterpiece Cakeshop majority reasoning didn’t affect that analysis.

4. Presumably Arlene’s will now petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision again, and it’s possible that the Court will agree to consider the case. Or the Court might instead want to wait for a case where the free speech issue seems to be more clearly teed up, such as the calligrapher or videographer cases that are likely to be decide soon by state and federal appellate courts. (Calligraphy and videography are more likely to be seen as inherently expressive than cake baking, or than flower arranging, though perhaps flower arranging might be somewhere in the middle.)

My view is that writers, singers, artists, photographers, videographers, printers, and calligraphers should generally have a Free Speech Clause right to refuse to create or perform material they disapprove of, including by refusing to do things

• for same-sex weddings (even if that violates state bans on sexual orientation discrimination),
• for Scientology events (even if that violates state bans on religious discrimination),
• for Democratic or Republican events (even if that violates some cities’ bans on political affiliation discrimination), and the like.

I don’t think that extends to cake bakers (at least so long as they aren’t asked to write particular words or include any conventionally understood symbols). I’m not sure about florists. The Washington Supreme Court would, it seems, reject all such claims, and at least the florists’. We may soon see what the U.S. Supreme Court says.

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