Tag: hit&run

Many people warned that the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) would endanger the lives of adults who consensually exchange sex for money. Ten months after its passage, CBS San Francisco reported that the city saw a whopping 170 percent “spike in human trafficking” last year. But there are reasons to be wary of the CBS story and the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) data it relied on.

While ample signs point to negative effects from FOSTA, which made it a federal crime for websites and other online platforms to facilitate prostitution, this probably isn’t one of them. What it does illustrate is that increased police attention to the “problem” doesn’t equate to more people helped or justice served.

According to a year-end report, SFPD opened 40 sex-trafficking investigations in 2017 and around 108 in 2018—there’s the 170 percent spike. But pull back, and it’s unclear whether FOSTA, which became law on April 11 last year, is really to blame. In 2014, for instance, SFPD opened 80 sex-trafficking investigations—double the number from 2017. In 2015, the department either worked on 67 or 169 investigations, depending on which of its sources you consult.

That brings us to another important distinction: An investigation means simply that police looked into something and filed a report. It doesn’t mean that they found forced or underage prostitution, that arrests were made, or that charges were filed. In 2017, just nine investigations were taken to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office for prosecution, and just one of those cases led to an indictment. In 2016, 10 cases were presented to prosecutors and six led to charges.

Last year, city police and prosecutors ramped up efforts to target human trafficking. Additionally, an increase in street-based prostitution in certain neighborhoods—the inevitable result of FOSTA’s targeting of online advertising platforms—meant increased sex-worker visibility. In other words, the level of sex trafficking reported “doesn’t necessarily map to prevalence,” as Notre Dame law instructor Alex Frell Levy pointed out on Twitter. Indeed, an SFPD spokesperson attributes the spike to an “an increase in awareness and reporting,” not an increase in underlying rates.

Nonetheless, a wealth of anecdotal evidence from sex workers, police, health care providers, and others—in the Bay Area and beyond—suggests bad outcomes from government efforts to close online sex-work markets.

At an October 2018 meeting of the city’s Task Force on Human Trafficking, “some members shared their perspective on the impact of FOSTA,” according to the minutes. “An increase in street-based sex work in the Mission District has been observed. Members from the Police Department shared that they have seen a ripple effect after the [April 6] closure of Backpage and that more sites have popped up on the internet. They said that the demand for sex work has not changed with the law.”

In August, SFPD formed a Sex Worker Abatement Unit. Although police have couched recent stings as attempts to stop “pimps” and “traffickers,” much of their efforts end up targeting sex workers or their clients. “Arrests have increased dramatically and noticeably, and as a result sex workers who are victims of violence are intimidated and running from police,” Rachel West of the U.S. PROStitutes Collective told reporters last December.

The city passed a law in 2017 clarifying that officers shouldn’t arrest sex workers reporting crimes, and a bill stating the same has been introduced at the state level. But with police intent on “abating” sex work altogether, these measures likely won’t cut it.

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In the wake of the Mueller report’s release, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has called for starting impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

In a Friday afternoon Twitter thread, the senator and 2020 presidential contender laid out her case for impeaching Trump, saying that his efforts to obstruct an investigation into Russian election interference necessitate his removal from office.

“To ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country,” writes Warren. “The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States.”

The Mueller report lays out facts showing that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election to help Donald Trump and Donald Trump welcomed that help. Once elected, Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into that attack.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 19, 2019

The odds that Warren will get her wish seem slim. Demanding Trump’s head is nonetheless a good publicity stunt for the senator’s flagging presidential campaign.

The latest New Hampshire polls show support for Warren at 8.7 percent. That puts her behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and “No Opinion.” A Monmouth University Poll from last week put Warren at 7 percent among Iowa Democratic voters.

The senator is likely hoping that demanding Trump be removed from office via impeachment might make her attempt to unseat him in a presidential election a little easier.

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According to a vast array of evidence, movie producer Harvey Weinstein is not a good man. After all, dozens of women have accused him of abuses ranging from pressuring women into sexual activity in exchange for movie roles to forcible sexual assault. But Weinstein also isn’t a sex trafficker, under popular or legal conceptions of the term. And treating him as such is both an insult to actual victims of forced prostitution and a dangerous precedent to set.

Nonetheless, a federal judge has ruled that a class action lawsuit accusing Weinstein of sex trafficking may proceed. The civil suit, first filed in 2017, involves 10 named defendants seeking damages for events that allegedly occurred from 2004-2013.

On Thursday, U.S. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein dismissed all but one of the claims in the 18-count lawsuit, including all claims against defendants other than Weinstein (The Weinstein Company, Miramax Films, The Walt Disney Company, and others had also been named). However, Hellerstein denied Weinstein’s motion to dismiss the claim brought against him for alleged violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000.

The TVPA created a new federal criminal category for trafficking in persons, an umbrella offense that includes forced labor (a.k.a. labor trafficking); forced or coerced prostitution (a.k.a. sex trafficking); and any prostitution involving anyone under 18 years old (a.k.a. child sex trafficking). Over the past two decades, well-intentioned fervor for fighting these horrific happenings has ballooned into a massive mandate to stop all prostitution, even when it’s between consenting adults. (Just look at the Florida massage parlor stings that ensnared Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft for one recent example.)

And lately, we’re seeing a new distortion: “sex trafficking” being used as a catch-all criminal charge against anyone accused of any sort of bad sexual behavior or alleged sexual crimes.

Actress Allison Mack and other members of the NXIVM “empowerment group”/cult were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges last year, even though no one in the group alleges any sort of prostitution happening. In both the NXIVM case and this one, proposing sexual activity that may be beneficial beyond the sex itself is enough groundwork for a sex trafficking claim.

In the NXIVM case, the feds claimed that Mack was guilty of sex trafficking because she tried to persuade some female members to sleep with the group’s leader, Keith Raniere, and may have moved up the NXIVM ranks or received other in-group benefits if they did.

In the suit against Weinstein, defendants say that he promised them film opportunities or career advancement if they engaged in sexual acts with him; that he assaulted or attempted to assault them when they refused; and that because Weinstein’s handlers and employees sometimes coordinated meetings between him and defendants, they were all part of a sex-trafficking enterprise together. Weinstein is apparently the “john” in this scenario, the women both the victims of trafficking and the recipient of its rewards (so, both victim and trafficker); and those who helped with Weinstein’s scheduling are accomplices.

It makes no sense.

Sexual assault and rape are bad enough on their own, of course. So why the need to force these cases into a framework that doesn’t fit?

Because the sex trafficking framework allows for a lot more prosecutorial possibilities. Anyone who is even remotely aware of potential trafficking can be wrapped into racketeering, money laundering, and conspiracy counts, which isn’t the case with sexual assault or rape charges. A rape case against Weinstein couldn’t have snared Disney, too. Nor could Allison Mack and others be indicted if Raniere was simply accused of assault.

“Sex traffickers” can be sued in federal court, while cases against rapists must go to state court. Sex trafficking convictions bring an array of mandatory fees and fines for both the government and victims; sexual assault charges do not. And proving that someone powerful offered commercial benefits for sex may prove easier than proving assault took place, especially if many years have passed.

Plus, sex trafficking is such a buzzword that cases employing it are guaranteed to get more attention.

But it’s one hell of a slippery slope. If cases like these succeed, we can expect to see a whole lot more trumped-up trafficking cases, which could not only lead to unjust outcomes for those accused but also take resources away from prosecuting cases of labor exploitation and sexual abuse. Nobody will be helped by us further blurring the definitions and boundaries around things like sex trafficking, sexual assault, rape, prostitution, coercion, and consent.

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Andrew Yang wants you to know: he’s not a socialist.

The businessman is among the crowded field of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders and is campaigning almost solely on a universal basic income (UBI) proposal. Nicknamed his “Freedom Dividend,” it promises to give $1,000 a month to every adult between the ages of 18 and 64.

It’s a plan that reeks of pie-in-the-sky idealism. But, perhaps ironically, Yang’s campaign is colored by his affinity for capitalism, particularly as the founder of a nonprofit—Venture for America—that trains young entrepreneurs. And he touts his pragmatism in what is almost certainly an attempt to sway skeptics.

“I’ve looked at the numbers…” Yang said repeatedly at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Monday evening, eliciting loud cheers from supporters who fervently waved signs that said “MATH.”

“By putting more people in position where they can actually participate in a free market, we actually make the market much more dynamic, as opposed to an economy where people are stuck,” the presidential hopeful told Reason.

UBI has a bevy of full-throated critics on both sides of the aisle. In 2016, Oren Cass wrote in National Review that it is “a logical successor to the worst public policies and social movements of the past 50 years.” Eduardo Porter of The New York Times said it provides a “non-negligible disincentive to work” and that government aid would become “less generous over time.”

But it’s also had an unlikely array of supporters over the years, like Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr.—not to mention famed libertarian economists Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Charles Murray.

“The good news is that a well-designed UBI can do much more than help us to cope with disaster,” Murray wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2016. “It also could provide an invaluable benefit: injecting new resources and new energy into an American civic culture that has historically been one of our greatest assets but that has deteriorated alarmingly in recent decades.”

Murray and Yang approach the UBI discussion from a similar vantage point: Automation is picking up speed, and it’s coming for your job. “We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were,” says Murray. Similarly, Yang calls his Freedom Dividend a “tech check”—an homage to the retail workers, call center employees, and truck drivers who may increasingly find themselves without work in the coming years.

But Murray and Yang diverge considerably when it comes to how they would pay for a UBI—as well as how it would interact with the welfare system. Murray champions the burn-it-all-down approach, financing the stipend by eradicating all social safety net programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, as well as housing and agricultural subsidies.

Yang sees it differently. He proposes centralizing health care costs and taxing tech giants like Amazon, who he says are automating jobs into oblivion and driving some stores across the country into the ground. Emboldened by the Freedom Dividend, recipients will spend their money in their local communities, facilitating a “trickle up economy.”

And while he pictures welfare dependence waning, Yang maintains that it has its rightful place in society. “You don’t want to take away benefits that hundreds of thousands of Americans are literally relying upon for their very survival,” he told Reason. “The goal is to create more positive incentives.” Over time, he says that welfare enrollment would decline with a rise in empowered consumers, “because many people in the Dividend would never find themselves in those programs.”

The jury is certainly still out on UBI, and objections to Yang’s Freedom Dividend are not without merit. Some research lends credence to the idea that a guaranteed check will discourage employment and overall productivity. Others counter that those fears are unfounded, citing Alaska’s Permanent Fund: The state sends a yearly stipend to residents and has not experienced significant dips in aggregate employment. The latter claim is a bit harder to stomach, as Alaska paid residents $1,600 in 2018—hardly enough to quit your day job. Yang proposes $1,000 per month, although some argue it will help people pursue their professional goals by lowering barriers to entry.

Yang is also backing Medicare for All, the decriminalization of opioids (including heroin and fentanyl), as well as the regulation of social media companies to encourage healthier habits.

“We have the smartest engineers in the country trying to turn supercomputers into dopamine delivery systems for teenagers,” he told Reason. To address this, he suggests that social media developers be required to encourage moderation; according to Yang, an alert system that tells users to “find a human” or “go outside” would be a start. “Financial incentives of their companies will never suggest that they do this, and so they need a hand,” he said—although the long-term benefit of such initiatives would likely be dubious.

Although Yang’s candidacy is a long shot by most standards, he considers himself the perfect foil to President Trump.

“Donald Trump is our president today because he got a lot of the fundamental problems right,” he said at his Monday night rally. “When he was going around saying, ‘Hey things are not great,’ and then the counter was ‘Things actually are great,’—that was not the right response.”

But Yang says that, while Trump may have diagnosed the problem, he’s prescribing the wrong medicine. “His solutions are that we have to turn the clock back,” he said. “Time only moves in one direction. I want to accelerate our economy and society. I want to prepare us for the true challenges of the 21st century.”

“And I’m the right man for the job, because the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math!”

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Today the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency, which processes citizenship applications and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, released a policy alert saying that consuming state-legal marijuana could still be grounds for denying someone’s citizenship application.

“Since 1996, a number of states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to decriminalize … both medical and non-medical (recreational) marijuana in their respective jurisdictions,” reads USCIS’s alert. “However, federal law classifies marijuana as a ‘Schedule I’ controlled substance” meaning its sale or possession is a still a violation of federal law.

Therefore, says the agency, admissions of past marijuana use—even if said use occurred in a state or country where it was legal—could be a bar to establishing an applicant’s “good moral character,” a requirement immigrants need to meet in order to become citizens.

With the policy alert, smoking pot explicitly joins the many other vices that could be used to deny aspiring Americans full citizenship. Current federal policy also considers polygamists, adulterers, prostitutes, and “habitual drunkards” to be unworthy of naturalization.

As the Cato Institute’s David Bier points out, the new policy goes further than just barring immigrants who’ve been convicted of marijuana offenses or otherwise admitted to consuming it.

Reads the USCIS policy alert, “even if an applicant does not have a conviction or make a valid admission to a marijuana-related offense, he or she may be unable to meet the burden of proof to show that he or she has not committed such an offense.”

“In other words, even if an immigrant attempting to become an American has never been convicted of using marijuana and won’t admit doing so, they could still be denied U.S. citizenship,” writes Bier.

Deeming stoners to be “immoral” is obviously a pretty antiquated view, particularly given the fact that a full 65 percent of Americans think marijuana should be legal. And while a lot of progress has been made on that front on the state and local level, USCIS’s policy alert is a helpful reminder that federal prohibitions are still doing a lot of damage.

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The Limits to Growth in 1972 featured calculations of “exponential reserve index” for important nonrenewable resources that assumed exponential growth rates in consumption while multiplying known reserves of each resource fivefold. After crunching the numbers, the authors reported, “The effect of exponential growth is to reduce the probable period of availability of aluminum, for example, from 100 years to 31 years (55 years with a fivefold increase in reserves). Copper, with a 36-year lifetime at current usage rates, would actually last only 21 years at the present rate of growth, and 48 years if present reserves are multiplied by five.”

Let’s consider copper. The World Bank reported that world reserves of copper stood at 154 million tons in 1960, rising to 451 million tons in 1976. At constant levels of consumption, the World Bank calculated that 1960 reserves would have lasted only 37 years and the 1976 reserves would be exhausted in 59 years. At a 2 percent annual growth rate, reserves would be depleted 28 and 40 years respectively.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reports, 47 years after the publication of The Limits to Growth, that world known reserves of copper stand at 830 million tons as of 2018. Furthermore the USGS notes that identified resources contain about 2.1 billion tons of copper, and undiscovered resources contain an estimated 3.5 billion tons. Evidently, the book’s calculation that humanity should have been about to run out of copper in the next year or so turned out to be completely wrong.

Economist Julian Simon from the University of Maryland understood that the authors of The Limits to Growth were vastly underestimating human ingenuity operating under the rule of law in free markets to solve problems such as impending resource exhaustion. Simon challenged the gloomy prognostications made by the authors of The Limits to Growth in his brilliant books The Ultimate Resource in 1981 and the magisterial The Resourceful Earth, co-authored with Herman Kahn, in 1984.

This led to Simon’s famous bet with population doomster Paul Ehrlich. In October 1980, Ehrlich and Simon drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich the same quantities that could be purchased for $1,000 of five metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) 10 years later at 1980 prices. If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. There was no note in the letter. The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.

Inspired by Simon’s pioneering analyses, Marian Tupy,* editor of Human Progress at the Cato Institute, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University-Hawaii have devised the Simon Abundance Index. Tupy and Pooley use data on 50 different commodities to track their price trajectories over the past 37 years from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The index measures the timeprice of commodities and change in global population to estimate overall resource abundance. They find that the planet’s resources became 379.6 percent more abundant between 1980 and 2017.

At 11:00 a.m on Monday, April 22, to mark the 49th anniversary of Earth Day, the Cato Institute is holding a public event to unveil the Simon Abundance Index. Besides Tupy and Pooley, the event will feature as speakers Julian Simon’s son David M. Simon and techno-utopian George Gilder, author of Life after Google. Folks in the Washington, D.C. area can go here to register to attend the event or sign up to see it online.

Happy Earth Day!

*Disclosure: Marian Tupy and I are working together on book that tracks and explains nearly 100 global population, income, commodity, and environmental trends.

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To ignore the countless slaves who were victims of rape would be a travesty. To say that Ancestry is doing that very thing with their latest slavery-era ad is reaching.

Ancestry is a popular genealogy website based out of Utah. For years, people of all backgrounds have used the information to learn more about lost family histories. Recently, Ancestry thought to advertise its services with a commercial depicting an interracial couple escaping from the South.

ooooh my god LMAOOO who approved this ancestry commercial??? pic.twitter.com/Isy0k4HTMA

— manny (@mannyfidel) April 18, 2019

A white man is seen trying to convince a black woman named Abigail, presumably a slave, to run away to the North with him, presumably so they can be married and live the rest of their lives together. Abigail begins to question the idea before he tells her that there’s a place “across the border” where they can be together. After asking her to leave with him, the screen cuts to pictures of the couple and a marriage certificate.

The website was quickly accused of whitewashing history and romanticizing sexual exploitation. The outrage over the commercial was so severe that the ad was removed altogether.

“Ancestry is committed to telling important stories from history. This ad was intended to represent one of those stories. We very much appreciate the feedback we have received and apologize for any offense that the ad may have caused. We are in the process of pulling the ad,” the company tweeted.

Let me start by saying that I share the same sentiments about cutesy depictions of slavery. Far too often, the uncomfortable parts are glossed over in favor of a good Hollywood story. Just watch the slave scenes in The Patriot or Brad Pitt, whose studio produced 12 Years a Slave, grace the screen.

However, the mere existence of past atrocities and bad storytelling does not mean that the Ancestry ad deserved the outrage that it received.

For one thing, there’s no possible way a viewer would assume that the commercial is showing exploitative sexual abuse. At least one user questioned if Abigail belonged to the man trying to get her to run away with him. It’s a safe assumption that the characters are forbidden lovers and nothing further.

Others criticized the commercial for having the white love interest suggest that they run north, either to another state or to Canada, to be together. While it’s true that northern states enjoy a sort of ahistorical absolution for their imposition of segregation on free blacks, it’s also not completely far off to have this couple look for hope in the North. After all, we praise the bravery of Harriet Tubman and other conductors of the Underground Railroad, which was designed to help slaves in the South escape to the North to access better and freer lives.

Most importantly, there is no universe in which a single romance discounts the very real suffering of rape victims. Had the commercial insinuated that many historical rapes were actually just romances, then this point would be legitimate. But it’s also likely that consensual interracial relationships existed in this climate. These are no less worthy of a story. In fact, The New York Times did a profile on the descendant of this very kind of union in 2018.

Social media brigades like this one have led to some pretty big blunders.

Only two years ago, the world was doubled-over in laughter when a young girl waltzed right into her dad’s live interview. The dad giving the live interview was a white professor named Robert E. Kelly. Once the internet was given enough time to whip up some hot takes, social media users criticized Kelly as a father and employer after assuming that the Korean woman who frantically rushed into the room after the young girl was his terrified nanny. As it turns out, the “terrified nanny” was actually Kelly’s mortified wife and mother of the young girl. Critics were soon called out for relying on poor stereotypes to deny even the slightest possibility that this was a legitimate family unit.

When critics went after black British filmmaker Amma Asante’s Where Hands Touch, a fictional love story between a biracial German girl and a member of the Hitler Youth, Asante maintained that the accusations of Nazi romanticization were unfounded. Not only is their violence and bigoted rhetoric quite present in her film, but Asante has also made it known that she is on a professional mission to highlight untold black stories in her work, like the existence of biracial Germans during the Holocaust.

“When stories are hidden, and they haven’t been told, I think that when we hear about them, we have an expectation that they should sit more firmly with experiences that we know and we recognize,” she told IndieWire amid the controversy. “I interviewed people who have experiences, and those experiences weren’t necessarily comfortable ones, but it’s their truth, and it’s not our right to challenge that.”

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Last month, federal auditors revealed the DEA had secretly spied on Americans who bought money counters. With a reach so expansive it alarmed even the FBI, this sweeping surveillance program helped the DEA seize over $50 million in cash and real estate. Yet auditors found “the vast majority” of those under surveillance “were never shown to be connected to illicit drug-related activities.” Over at Forbes.com, IJ’s Nick Sibilla has more.

• While presiding over the Department of Justice’s military prosecution of the alleged mastermind of the U.S.S. Cole bombing, this Air Force Colonel was simultaneously gunning for a job as an immigration judge with . . . the Department of Justice. An improper appearance of bias? D.C. Circuit: Indubitably. All 460 of his written orders in the case are vacated. Be more careful next time.
• Eight voting citizens of Greensboro, N.C. successfully challenged a 2015 law that redrew their City Council district and got an injunction prohibiting the County Board from enforcing the law. Can they recover their attorney’s fees from the Board? District Court: The Board didn’t write the law, it declined to defend the law, and it stipulated to a bunch of facts to streamline the litigation; special circumstances justify denial of fees. Fourth Circuit (over a dissent): Fee awards are about compensating the attorneys, not punishing bad actors. Pay up.
• Hattiesburg, Miss. doctor might be overprescribing opioids. So the medical board gets an administrative warrant and allegedly sends nine agents to his office to search through medical records. They allegedly detain him for hours, often at gunpoint. One delivers the charming line “[i]f you don’t sit down I will put you down.” Fifth Circuit: That’s unreasonable for an administrative search. And now that we’ve settled that—qualified immunity!
• Abilene, Tex. prison guards seek to extract from his cell a prisoner who prefers to stay. Guards contend they used the minimum force necessary, which involved spraying a chemical into the cell and restraining the prisoner’s arms and legs. The prisoner contends it was much worse—after guards handcuffed him on the floor, they punched him, squeezed and twisted his genitals, and stuck a finger in his anus. Video fails to allay confusion. Fifth Circuit: Could be excessive force. Need a trial to figure that out.
• El Paso, Tex. police respond to 911 call at dusk, discover unarmed man in the process of hanging himself from basketball hoop. Police demand he show his hands. When he fails to comply, they tase him, and he immediately goes limp. They remove him from the hoop and begin CPR, but he dies at the hospital. District court: No qualified immunity. Fifth Circuit: If the officer wanted us to address the question of whether he had qualified immunity, he should have briefed it. He didn’t (he addressed other issues in his brief instead), so the case can go on.
• Hunt County, Tex. sheriff’s dept.: Welcome to our Facebook page; please say only nice things about us or we will ban you. Fifth Circuit: Well, that’s called viewpoint discrimination, and it’s generally frowned upon.
• In June 2016, Omar Mateen pledged his allegiance to ISIS, entered the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Fla. and opened fire, killing 49 people and injuring another 53. Can the victims and their family members bring suit under the Anti-Terrorism Act against Twitter, Facebook, and Google for providing the platforms through which Mateen became self-radicalized? Sixth Circuit: “We sympathize with Plaintiffs—they suffered through one of the worst terrorist attacks in American history. ‘But not everything is redressable in a court.'”
• It’s nearly impossible for out-of-staters to get a concealed-carry permit in Illinois. Only residents of Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia can do it because those are the only states that do the kind of criminal and mental health reporting that Illinois is comfortable with. Is that constitutional? Seventh Circuit (2016, over a dissent): Yup. Gun rights are limited. Seventh Circuit (just now, in the same case, over the same dissent): Still true.
• Immigrant from Iraq is detained for a year and a half while an immigration judge decides whether to send him back to the Middle East. The man sues to get out of custody. District judge: He’s locked up under a statute that operates only for the time reasonably necessary to get a decision. A year and a half is too long. Let him out. Eighth Circuit: Those words are not in the statute. But the district court should address the man’s constitutional claims. [Ed. note: If there’s time. Because—well—there’s a preliminary order to send him back to Iraq.]
• A trio of California laws meant to protect immigrants from the feds go into effect, says the Ninth Circuit. No preliminary injunction to stop law that requires employers to notify employees before federal immigration inspections. No preliminary injunction (for the most part) for state-imposed inspection requirements on facilities that house certain federal detainees. And no preliminary injunction for law that limits state and local law enforcement from cooperating with the feds, even though it “may well frustrate the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts.”
• Jury rules for defendants. Judge 1 throws out verdict, grants judgment as a matter of law for the plaintiff. Defendants move to change the verdict back. Judge 1 says no. Defendants move to change the verdict back again. Judge 1 retires, and Judge 2 goes back to ruling for the defendants. Tenth Circuit: We’re going with Judge 1 on this. Plaintiff wins.
• Opa-Locka, Fla. 911 caller reports man trying to get through window of a neighbor’s house. Officers respond, see man matching the caller’s description, point guns at him, handcuff him, pat him down, reach into his pocket, and find a single bullet. Eleventh Circuit (2018): The police were allowed to pat the man down to find a weapon, but they crossed the constitutional line when they reached into his pocket to get the bullet. Eleventh Circuit (en banc, by a 7–5 vote): No, no. His conviction for being a felon in possession of ammunition (and pistols discovered nearby) is affirmed. Judge Jordan, dissenting: The majority fails to adequately grapple with the man’s originalist arguments. (More on that from Josh Blackman.)

Friends, this week IJ’s Center for Judicial Engagement released Episode 5 of the Bound By Oath podcast, which dives tolerably deeply into the history and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. This episode: the Equal Protection Clause, featuring African-style hair braiders, Georgetown law prof and IJ alum Evan Bernick, and also space aliens in invisible and undetectable craft. Available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, Google Play, TuneIn, and other fine podcasting apps.

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Frontline: The Abortion Divide. PBS. Tuesday, April 23, 10 p.m.

In 1983, in its first season, Frontline aired The Abortion Clinic, documentarian Mark Obenhaus’ matter-of-fact chronicle of daily life (or, depending on your view, the daily taking of life) at a clinic in Darby, Pennsylvania.

Though the show created a stir by showing (albeit in a non-grisly fashion) two abortion procedures, mostly it was notable for demonstrating the flat disconnect between abortion supporters and opponents.

Thirty-six years later, Obenhaus is back in Darby (this time with co-producer Elizabeth Leiter) to take another look at the clinic and the pro-life demonstrators who cluster outside every day. His conclusion: When it comes to abortion, Darby is “even more bitterly divided than it was 36 years ago.”

The “bitter” part is not so apparent—The Abortion Divide is mostly free of the muzzle-velocity rhetoric that dominates this issue—but the division is plain. The two sides, essentially, don’t hear one another at all.

The pro-choice folks, in measured tones, suggest their opponents represent the eternal white male imperative to be the boss of everything and everybody. The pro-life people, on the other hand, think the places they’re picketing are post-modernist Treblinkas and Auschwitzes.

“It’s barbaric to chop a baby up, put it in a little canister, take it out and count the pieces,” says one of the pro-life chiefs. “What kind of world have we entered into, where we do this to our children?”

There is no compromise between these two positions, and perhaps there shouldn’t be. If you believe a fetus (or “pregnancy tissue,” as some of the clinic personnel call it) is just an undifferentiated appendage like a tonsil or an appendix, then why should anybody else have any say about what you do with or to it?

And if you think it’s a tiny person with a small heart but a full-sized soul—the Darby pro-lifers are virtually all devout Catholics—how could you ever countenance what happens to it inside an abortion clinic?

The Abortion Divide, scrupulously even-handed, makes no attempt to sort out the moral questions here, merely recounting their continued existence. And if the show were nothing more than a heat check on the debate—oh, man, they’re still all mad—there would be little point to it. But Obenhaus and Leiter persuaded some of the women, both at the abortion clinic and a nearby facility for unwed mothers run by the pro-lifers, to talk about their feelings as they work through the question of what to do. Their thoughts are startling, sometimes maddening and nearly always touching.

A homeless woman at the unwed-mother refuge is something of a poster child for unlearned lessons; a recovered-for-the-moment drug addict, she has five children in foster homes, two living with her sisters, and a burbling new one in a crib by her side. “Now we’re trying again,” she says. “He’s pretty special—ain’t nobody taking this one.” It’s hard not to want to shake her and shout, “Grow up!” And harder still, watching mother and baby beam at one another, to not believe, just a little bit, in Carl Sandburg’s axiom that “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”

Yet bad decisions do not respect socioeconomic boundary lines. Down the street at the abortion clinic, another woman, 30-ish and seemingly well-educated and well-heeled, has just learned she’s carrying twins. With a palpable air of embarrassment, she admits the pregnancy is the result of a single act of unprotected sex and an unexpectedly hard-ass universe: “Surely, one time, I’d get some kind of a grace period on that.”

She’s hoping for better luck with the babies themselves—”a sense of peace … with these two beings I’ve chosen not to bring into the world.” She imagines a chat with them before the abortion in which she tells them, “Thank you, and I’m honored to be given this gift of life. Unfortunately, I can’t do it right now.” The twins, alas, were not available to recount their their side of the conversation.

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I haven’t read the Mueller report and I don’t plan to any time soon. I don’t feel like I would gain much by sifting through what’s already been widely acknowledged to be 400-plus pages of Rorschach test. The main point of the “Russia probe” was to figure out whether there was any sort of hanky-panky going on between the former (future?) Soviets and the Trump campaign, and we now know that there was not.

But of course now the story shifts from dark worries about “collusion” to unrestrained outrage over the president’s ham-fisted attempts to “obstruct justice” by unduly influencing the investigation by lying in public and private, firing key players, leaning on witnesses, or otherwise gumming up the works. I trust my Reason colleagues (Scott Shackford, Peter Suderman, Jacob Sullum, and Eric Boehm), each of whom argues to varying degrees that if President Donald Trump isn’t technically guilty of obstruction, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s mostly because his subordinates either refused to follow his orders or screwed things up while trying to do his bidding.

But you know what? I don’t care that much that Trump was trying to obstruct justice in this instance. Certainly, if there is no underlying crime, you shouldn’t get in trouble for lying to the feds, even though it’s technically illegal. Section 1001 of Title 18 of the United States Code makes it a crime to

“knowingly and willfully … make[] any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” in the course of “any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch” of the federal government.

But should it be? We’ll come back to the White House in a moment, but the way this sort of usually plays out for the little people is that, as Jim Talent observed last year in National Review,

The FBI gathers information about a person, finds facts that the person might want to conceal — not because the facts prove a crime but because they are embarrassing for some other reason — then asks about those facts in an interview, on the expectation that the person will lie and thereby incriminate himself.

As Popehat blogger (and Reason contributor) Ken White has detailed extensively, FBI agents are trained to get you to lie, thereby being able to arrest you or squeeze you however they want. As White wrote for Reason a year ago,

In the old westerns, rather than take the trouble of hauling mustachioed miscreants to desultory trials, lawmen would often provoke them into drawing first, thus justifying shooting them down where they stood. A modern federal interview of a subject or target is like that. One purpose, arguably the primary purpose, is to provoke the foolish interviewee into lying, thus committing a new, fresh federal crime that is easily prosecuted, rendering the original investigation irrelevant. Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001, which makes it a felony to lie to the feds, is their shiny quick-draw sidearm. This result not an exception; it is the rule. It happens again and again.

Consider George Papadopoulos. The special counsel secured his guilty plea not for improper contact with the Russians but for lying about that contact to the FBI. Consider Michael Flynn. He too pled guilty not to unlawful contact with Russians but to lying to the FBI about that contact. Consider Scooter Libby, or Martha Stewart, or Dennis Hastert, or James Cartwright, all taken down by the feds not for their alleged original misconduct but for lying about it. Even when catching someone in a lie isn’t enough to force them to plead guilty, it can add charges to a case. Consider Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, charged not just with substantive crimes but with lying to the FBI about them.

There is arguably no person on the planet less sympathetic than Donald Trump. He is a reflexive liar, a blowhard, a bully, and the goddamned president of the United States. He should be a better person on all fronts and there’s no doubt that he should set a better example than he does. But when it comes to obstructing justice, at least when there was no underlying crime, he shouldn’t be in any trouble whatsoever.

Far more important, the rest of us shouldn’t be when we get set up to lie by the FBI or other law enforcement folks who have a tremendous amount of power. At The New York Times, David Brooks suggests that one of the great messages of the Mueller investigation is that it reveals

Trump doesn’t seem to have any notion of loyalty to an office. All power in his eye is personal power, and the government is there to serve his Sun God self. He’ll continue to trample the proper systems of government.

There’s much truth to that formulation, which has been echoed by many of the president’s critics. But there’s a bigger takeaway worth underscoring, one that is vastly more important than Donald Trump who, truth be told, is acting how most presidents have acted in the past and will act in the future.

The bigger takeaway is that the federal government exercises vast and nearly unchecked power over virtually every aspect of our lives. As civil libertarian and Three Felonies a Day author Harvey Silverglate has told Reason, there are literally hundreds of thousands of federal regulations under “each of the federal criminal statutes … [and] you’re just assumed to know [them] and you can be picked up and you can be charged and these are real criminal violations.” And if that doesn’t work, the feds can snag you simply by talking to you. Contempt for Donald Trump shouldn’t obscure that brutal reality, which will outlive the Mueller report and probably most of us, too.

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