Tag: hit&run

Donald Trump’s remarks about criminal justice reform during last night’s State of the Union address were striking and seemingly heartfelt. He introduced two former federal prisoners, both African American, who had received draconian sentences for nonviolent drug crimes: Alice Johnson, whom he freed last year by commuting her life sentence for participating in a cocaine conspiracy, and Matthew Charles, whose 35-year sentence for selling crack was shortened by the FIRST STEP Act, which Trump championed. “Alice’s story underscores the disparities and unfairness that can exist in criminal sentencing, and the need to remedy this total injustice,” he said. The president added that the FIRST STEP Act, which passed with overwhelming support in the House and Senate after he endorsed it, “reformed sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African American community.”

Charles benefited from a provision of the FIRST STEP Act that retroactively applied penalty reductions approved by Congress in 2010. The 2010 law, the Fair Sentencing Act, was a belated acknowledgment that the crack sentencing scheme created by Congress in the 1980s was a panicky response to the drug menace du jour that proved to be irrational, unjust, and harmful to the very communities it was supposed to protect. Despite agreeing with that critique, Trump seems inclined to repeat the same pattern in response to the “opioid crisis.”

Trump’s references to that subject last night focused on the wall that he mistakenly thinks will stop the “lethal drugs that cross our border and flood into our cities.” But according to the “Opioid Initiative” he unveiled last year, he also wants to “strengthen criminal penalties for dealing and trafficking in fentanyl and other opioids.” Specifically, Trump urged Congress to “pass legislation that reduces the threshold amount of drugs needed to invoke mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers who knowingly distribute certain illicit opioids that are lethal in trace amounts.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)—who, not coincidentally, was a leading opponent of the FIRST STEP Act—introduced such a bill three days later. It would reduce the threshold for a five-year mandatory minimum from 40 grams to two grams of fentanyl and from 10 grams to half a gram of a fentany analog. The threshold for a 10-year mandatory minimum would drop from 400 to 20 grams of fentanyl and from 100 to five grams of an analog. Those weights apply to mixtures containing fentanyl or its analogs, so any detectable amount of either would effectively boost the penalties for selling heroin or other drugs.

The weight thresholds favored by Cotton could easily ensnare low-level dealers or minor participants in small drug trafficking operations, resulting in the same sort of injustices that the president decries in the context of crack sentences. Like the legislators who voted for the crack penalties that nearly everyone now agrees were excessive, Cotton thinks the special hazards posed by these particular drugs justify an especially harsh response.

“Fentanyl is one of the most dangerous drugs there is,” the senator said when he announced the bill. “It killed more than 20,000 Americans last year and has been a driving force behind the opioid crisis in the United States. But while the epidemic has spiraled, our drug laws have been stuck in the past. This bill will make sure, when it comes to opioid distribution and trafficking, the punishment fits the crime.”

Cotton is right that fentanyl and its analogs are involved in a large and rising share of opioid-related deaths—60 percent in 2017, according to the CDC. But the problem is not simply fentanyl’s strength relative to heroin; it’s the variability and unpredictability of black-market drugs. People could consume any of these substances without dying if they knew what they were getting, but prohibition makes that impossible, even as it drives traffickers toward more potent and compact drugs. Cotton’s solution is to double down on an approach that is already making drug use much more dangerous than it would otherwise be.

While the difference between heroin and fentanyl is more significant than the difference between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine, Cotton’s notion that the government needs to hike fentanyl penalties so that “the punishment fits the crime” is highly dubious, even if you agree that voluntary transactions between adults should be treated as crimes. Not only are drug warriors like Cotton complicit in creating the deadly hazards they claim to be combating, but the street dealers they want to wallop with mandatory minimums may be just as much in the dark about the contents of what they’re selling as their customers are. How is the average dealer supposed to know whether the “heroin” he is selling has been mixed with (or entirely replaced by) fentanyl? And if he doesn’t know, subjecting him to extra-severe penalties makes no sense even as a deterrent, let alone as a proportionate punishment.

Trump seems genuinely torn between a “tough-on-crime” instinct that pushes him toward mindlessly punitive conservatives like Cotton and compassion for people like Alice Johnson and Matthew Charles, which ultimately led him to oppose Cotton and side with reformers such as Jared Kushner, Rand Paul, and (yes) Kim and Kanye in the debate over the FIRST STEP Act. The latter impulse may prevail in any given situation, depending on who talked to Trump last or made more of an impression. What’s missing is an understanding that the policies Cotton favors will inevitably lead to more injustices like the ones the president highlighted last night.

Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) squared off with D.C. Circuit nominee Neomi Rao at her confirmation hearing on Tuesday, asking the potential judge if she has ever employed any LGBT law clerks. While the question raised eyebrows for multiple reasons, the most glaring is that she’s never been a judge, so she’s never had any law clerks—LGBT or otherwise.

But the question itself is suspect: It implies that sexuality should be part of the test for determining an applicant’s suitability for hire. “Um, to be honest I don’t know the sexual orientation of my staff,” Rao said, when pressed by Booker. “I take people as they come, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation.”

It would certainly set an odd and dangerous precedent to grill a potential staffer on his or her sex life. And while LGBT protections vary between state and local governments, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s federal guidelines bar workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They monitor federal government employees for compliance, which would include Rao, both as the current Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and as a potential federal judge. (Although the Justice Department challenged those rules when President Trump took office, the EEOC is still enforcing current guidelines. That could lead to a showdown at the Supreme Court.) Similarly, it’s illegal to probe job applicants about their marriage and family life.

Booker also grilled Rao about whether she thought gay relationships were “sinful.” She replied that her personal views on the subject would not influence her decisions. If this was supposed to be another “I am Spartacus” moment for the 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, it fell just as flat as his last attempt.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted yesterday morning, 2016 Libertarian vice presidential nominee and heretofore presumed 2020 L.P. presidential contender Bill Weld changed his Massachusetts voter registration to Republican on January 17, six days before the Boston media began reporting that Weldworld was considering a potential GOP primary challenge to President Donald Trump.

The party-swap, first reported by Commonwealth magazine Monday night then matched by the Associated Press and the Boston Herald, has served to drum up some national media interest in Weld’s February 15 appearance at the New England Council’s Politics & Eggs event, considered a must-stop for presidential candidates eyeing the New Hampshire primary. If the former Massachusetts governor indeed announces his candidacy there, he’d likely be the first entrant into the longshot #NeverTrump primary sweepstakes that the president and Republican National Committee have been taking extraordinary steps to cut off at the knees.

Weld isn’t talking to reporters until then, so stoking this speculation is clearly part of his strategy. But there are some preliminary warning signs that, even though he potentially stands to gain first-mover advantage in a presidential primary, the carefully worded corporate lawyer may have stunted his own prospects—even among his previous supporters—through his ideologically slippery journey to this point.

Jeff Jacoby, a libertarian-leaning conservative Boston Globe columnist who voted for Weld in both the 1990s and 2016, wrote last week that, “After years of following Weld’s political career, there is only one thing about him I’m sure of: He regards politics as a form of intellectual entertainment, and nothing he says on the subject should be mistaken for conviction.” More:

Weld walked away from his governorship in 1997, bored with the job and angling to become Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Mexico. In 2006, he decided he wanted to be a governor again—not in Massachusetts, but in New York, where he sought both the Republican and Libertarian endorsements. When Republicans decided they weren’t interested in Weld, Weld decided he was no longer interested in the Libertarians. Two years later, he endorsed Barack Obama for president.

There is no point seeking the philosophical thread that connects these meanderings. Weld has no fixed political or electoral outlook; he isn’t consistently conservative or liberal, and he’s certainly no diehard Republican….

A Weld run would enliven the 2020 campaign with erudition and quirky wit. That alone might be reason to hope he jumps in. Remember, however, that when it comes to politics, Weld will say and do just about anything to keep from being bored. He’s not likely to take a Weld candidacy too seriously. We shouldn’t, either.

New England Republicans, meanwhile, aren’t exactly welcoming Weld back into the fold.

“He ran as a Libertarian vice presidential candidate in 2016. As far as we’re concerned he’s a Libertarian and he can’t flip-flop back and forth for political expediency,” New Hampshire GOP Chair Steve Stepanek told Fox News. “We don’t consider him a Republican. We don’t want him back as a Republican.”

“It would be wonderful to have a moderate Republican running against Trump to give other voters in a Republican primary someone to vote for,” former Massachusetts GOP chair Jennifer Nassour told Commonwealth. “The downside for Weld is he left the party and party voters, whether a Republican or Democrat, don’t look too kindly on someone who leaves the party and comes back.”

Even Weld’s own proteges, such as the Trump-averse Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, won’t say anything more encouraging than “Bill Weld and [former Republican governor] Paul Cellucci are individuals that served as role models to both Gov. [Charlie] Baker and to me in our earlier days in public service, and if Bill Weld wants to run for president, that’s his choice, and he may very well do that.”

Potentially narrowing Weld’s lane still further is the curious fact that the main organizational drivers thus far behind the #NeverTrump GOP primary have long track records of distancing themselves from libertarians.

The Trump-challenging 501(c)4 Defending Democracy Together was founded by neoconservative stalwart Bill Kristol, whose recently shuttered Weekly Standard magazine was the anti-libertarian standard-bearer on the opinion-magazine right. Several of the political operatives on the hunt for a primary challenger are former employees of the late John McCain, an outspoken opponent of what he called “the ‘leave us alone’ libertarian philosophy.” And the Niskanen Center, which has been gathering anti-Trump forces for 2020 strategy sessions, sells itself as “rejecting both Trump-style ethno-nationalist populism and libertarian-inflected ‘small government’ conservatism.”

Ironically, given his reputation for ideological shape-shifting, Weld may have further scared off his potential base of support among big-government conservatives through his prior 14 months of trying to impress Libertarians more than centrists. As I wrote after his speech at the Masschusetts Libertarian Party convention less than four months ago,

Weld since 2016 has been tacking noticeably more libertarian—on guns (“I think that anyone who says, ‘We have to do something about gun ownership, including AR-15s,’ is just going to be dead meat, because their position doesn’t make any sense,” he said Saturday), non-interventionist foreign policy (“I’m there with bells on”), and drug legalization.

Is there really room in the #NeverTrump primary for a small-l libertarian, let alone a libertarian-leaner who changes his mind a lot about party affiliation? Looks like we might soon find out.

Over at The Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson has a terrific new column that helps to explain why our leaders don’t give a rat’s ass about the ballooning national debt: Deep down, they know that you can’t keep borrowing forever and ever. But more importantly, “what both Democrats and Republicans actually fear are the highly unpopular steps—spending cuts or tax increases—they might have to take to reduce or eliminate [annual] deficits, which are huge.”

Along the way Samuelson coins a new axiom:

Call it Neuman’s Law after Alfred E. Neuman of Mad magazine fame, whose philosophy is, “What, me worry?” Neuman’s Law postulates that there is never a good time to raise taxes or cut federal spending. This explains why, since 1961, the annual federal budget has been in deficit 52 times and in surplus only five times (1969 and 1998-2001). Unsurprisingly, all the surpluses occurred at the end of economic booms that automatically raised tax revenue and curtailed spending.

He also points to a stunningly bad article in Foreign Affairs written by two Harvard economists, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman. Summers and Furman unconvincingly wave away concerns about growing national debt and the return of trillion-dollar deficits. Interest rates are low, they say, and all that borrowed money is helping to keep the economy afloat. Yet even they admit that “sooner or later, government spending has to be paid for.”

But until then, Summers and Furman typify the “What, me worry?” mindset because tomorrow is always a day away. As does Donald Trump’s chief of staff and budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who recently said that “nobody cares” about deficits and debt.

Trump told supporters 40-50% of speech will be about foreign policy. When asked if the deficit will be mentioned in #SOTU speech, chief of staff Mulvaney said “nobody cares,” per attendee https://t.co/YeBTSdF3HX

— Tara Palmeri (@tarapalmeri) February 5, 2019

Samuelson quickly points out why deficits and debt do matter. As even the most Keynesian-minded economist will tell you, borrowed money needs to be paid back, and that means higher taxes, spending cuts, inflation, or some combination of all three. We’re already seeing a bump up in interest rates and just the vig on the debt will comprise 13 percent of all federal outlays by 2028 (it already accounts for around 6 percent). “If escalating debt raises interest rates,” Samuelson writes, “it could crowd out private investment, undermining the economy’s long-term growth potential. Or some sort of financial crisis might occur if investors become sated with U.S. Treasury bonds.”

There’s another reason to be worried about massive, ongoing debt. Both right-wing and left-wing economists agree that “debt overhangs” correlate strongly with depressed rates of growth.

In a 2012 paper, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff define a “debt overhang” as a situation in which the debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 90 percent for five or more consecutive years. After looking at 26 debt overhangs in 22 advanced economies since 1800, they conclude that “on average, debt levels above 90 percent are associated with growth that is 1.2 percent lower than in other periods (2.3 percent versus 3.5 percent).” These overhangs last a long time—in their sample, the average lasted 23 years—creating a cumulative loss in economic growth that’s “nearly a quarter below that predicted by the trend in lower-debt periods.”

That work has been validated by left-wing economists associated with the University of Massachusetts, who were critiquing an earlier version of Rinehart and Rogoff’s work that had mistakenly found that debt overhangs reduced growth below zero. The critics conclude that “the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent.

Taking a full point off of annual economic growth and compounding it over a quarter century is the difference between a rip-roaring economy and rising standards of living, and what we’ve been witnessing for most this century: Massive anxiety and a cramped, crabby politics that’s all about securing a piece of a shrinking pie.

In the 21st century, “Debt Denialism” is a bipartisan malady, which makes it that much harder to combat. Recall back in 2004, Dick Cheney, a veteran of the hapless Ford administration, uttered the phrase, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” which both Republicans and Democrats have fully taken to heart. Until the effect of persistent debt on the economy gets taken seriously, we can expect to have sub-par growth and all the problems that go along with that. “What, me worry?” is a gag line from a humor magazine, not the basis of budgetary policy.

Related: “Why We Need Less Debt, and Fast!”

The Hoover, Alabama, police officer who killed the wrong man in a mall on Thanksgiving Day won’t face criminal charges for his actions. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office says the officer was “justified” in shooting 21-year-old Emantic “E.J.” Bradford, Jr.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, police had a difficult time getting their story straight. There had been a shooting at the mall that injured 18-year-old Brian Wilson and a 12-year-old bystander, Molly Davis. Bradford was not involved in that shooting, but at some point, he took his gun out. Other shoppers may have done the same, Al.com reported in late November. Bejmanin Crump, an attorney for Bradford’s family, has suggested Bradford was trying to help people in the midst of the chaos following the shooting.

Bradford ended up being shot and killed by a Hoover Police officer who was on duty at the mall. Police initially claimed Bradford was the suspected shooter, and then said less than two days later that he probably wasn’t. Police eventually arrested a different suspect, Erron Martez Dequan Brown, who claims he shot Brian Wilson in self-defense, according to a report Marshall’s office released yesterday.

That 24-page report explains why the unidentified cop who killed Bradford, referred to as “Officer 1,” won’t face charges. “Officer 1 reasonably exercised his official duties, powers, or functions when he shot,” the report reads. “Accordingly, Alabama law declares his action ‘justified and not criminal.'”

The report includes testimony from multiple witnesses and police. Marshall’s office also released partial surveillance footage of both shootings taken from two nearby stores. In describing the footage, the report reads:

Synchronizing these videos suggests the following chain of events, which spans approximately five seconds. Erron Brown shoots Brian Wilson, then along with his companions, runs into JC Penney. E.J. Bradford initially runs in the opposite direction (away from JC Penney), creating a gap between himself and the gunshots. As he creates this gap, Bradford draws his weapon and chambers a round. Bradford then charges back toward JC Penney, gun drawn. Officer 1 shoots Bradford as Bradford is running toward Brian Wilson (the gunshot victim), AC (who is assisting Wilson), Erron Brown (the initial shooter), and several innocent bystanders.

It’s difficult to see the first shooting. However, the footage does show the scene turning chaotic in its aftermath. Brown appears to move away from the scene before starting to go the other way. Bradford only makes it a few steps before he drops to the ground, and a small black object appears to fall from his grasp. The footage can be seen below:

“I observed two males who were not running away, but, instead, were standing near the railing in front of FootAction,” Officer 1 said in a written statement. “Next, I observed an armed suspect quickly moving towards the two males standing near the railing. The suspect was advancing on the two males and had a black handgun in his right hand. I fired my duty weapon at the armed suspect to stop him.” After shooting Bradford, Officer 1 said he “asked the uninjured male…if the suspect was the only shooter. I understood an affirmative response to my last question.”

In spoken testimony, Officer 1 said he thought Bradford “was going to murder Brian Wilson and AC,” according to the report. His body camera was in standby mode until after he shot Bradford.

Officer 1’s partner at the time, identified as “Officer 2,” backed up Officer 1’s testimony. “Officer 2 stated that, at the time, he believed E.J. Bradford had shot Brian Wilson,” the report reads.

The report also cited three civilian witnesses. Two of those witnesses said they believed Bradford to be the shooter, though neither witnessed the original shooting. (They simply heard gunshots.) Both of those witnesses said they heard Officer 1 tell Bradford to drop his weapon three times before shooting him. But according to the report, “Officer 1 stated that he did not give any commands due to the imminent nature of the threat.” The report said it’s “unclear” whether he actually warned Bradford to put his gun on the ground or not. A third witness, meanwhile, simply “stated that she saw a police officer shoot E.J. Bradford three times.”

An official autopsy from the Jefferson County Coroner Medical Examiner’s Office did indeed say Bradford was hit three times, seemingly confirming much of what an independent autopsy had previously concluded. Bradford was shot once in the back of the head, once in the neck, and once above his right buttock, the official autopsy found.

The report said Officer 1 was ultimately justified in shooting Bradford because he “acted as a reasonable officer would have under the circumstances” and because he “acted in accordance with nationally-accepted standards for ‘active shooter’ scenarios.”

But Bradford’s family isn’t buying it. “I’m outraged,” Bradford’s mother, April Pipkins, told The New York Times. “In no way was justice served,” she added. Another witness, Ashlyn McMillan, told the Times that Bradford was helping get shoppers to safety in the first shooting’s aftermath.

“It is outrageous and beyond comprehension that the Alabama Attorney General has concluded that it was reasonable for a trained law enforcement officer to fatally shoot an innocent civilian, one whose only action was an attempt to help protect the public and whose only ‘crime’ was being black,” Crump said in a statement emailed to media outlets. Crump claims the footage released by Marshall’s office does not tell the whole story, and he’s calling for the “full, unedited video” to be “released immediately.”

At a preliminary court hearing earlier this month, Special Agent Pete Acosta of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which investigated the case, testified that Wilson had hit Brown, prompting Brown to shoot him. It’s not clear if Bradford knew Brown, but they appear to have been connected by a mutual friend, Robert Poole, who also testified at the hearing, according to Al.com. Poole said he was with Brown and another friend at the mall when Bradford asked about his whereabouts over Facebook. Bradford and Wilson, who attended the same high school as Poole, then showed up at the mall prior to the shooting.

Clearly, there are still may questions left unanswered about what led to that first shooting. Bradford, however, does not appear to have done anything wrong. And clearly, he was not responsible for the original shooting. According to Marshall’s report, “there is no evidence that” Bradford’s gun “was fired at the incident scene,” though he did chamber a round prior to being shot.

It’s also worth noting that the attorney general’s report suggests Officer 1 was partly justified because of the supposed threat Bradford posed, even though there’s no evidence he had or was about to engage in any wrongdoing. The report reads:

Officer 1’s primary duty and training was to eliminate any threat to innocent civilians and first responders. While it is now known that E.J. Bradford did not shoot Brian Wilson, Bradford still posed an immediate deadly threat to persons in the area. Video evidence suggests that Bradford, who was carrying a firearm, was running toward the initial shooter, Erron Brown, who was also carrying a firearm. Multiple shoppers were nearby, including a mother and child directly in between the two armed men.

In other words, Officer 1 was justified in killing Bradford for exercising his Second Amendment right to carry a firearm. (Alabama is an open-carry state, and Bradford’s father has claimed Bradford has a permit for his gun.) The report suggests that even if Officer 1 did not think Bradford was the shooter, he was right to take him down because he was carrying a weapon. The attorney general’s office is operating under the assumption that citizens should not take action to protect themselves and/or others in situations like these.

We saw this type of thinking play out in Chicago last November. An armed security guard returned fire on an active shooter and eventually pinned him to the ground. But the guard was shot and killed when police arrived on the scene and thought he was the bad guy.

As I’ve previously written, neither man deserved to die, and both actually appear to have been the proverbial “good guy with a gun.” The fact that police shot first and asked questions later just makes their deaths all the more tragic.

In December, a senior policy aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave a presentation to insurance industry representatives telling them not to worry about Medicare for All.

The presentation, reported by The Intercept, outlined a number of problems for single-payer health care, including “cost,” “implementation challenges,” the existence of other spending priorities, the creation of winners and losers, and stakeholder—which is to say, health care industry—opposition. It’s a telling sign of how divided Democrats remain on the issue, and a preview of the looming intra-party war over single payer.

Looked at one way, Democrats are moving quickly to embrace single-payer health care. Much of the party’s 2020 field has embraced the idea, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), whose campaign rollout last month probably received more attention than any of her competitors, has gone so far as to defend the idea that today’s private insurance market should be eliminated, which is essentially what the Medicare for All plan put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) calls for.

But although many of the party’s rising stars are rushing towards the idea, the old guard is hanging back, and acknowledging some of the difficulties of the project. After Harris’ remarks on Medicare for All last week, for example, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who ranks second in Senate Democrats’ leadership, offered a more skeptical assessment, saying, “It would take a mighty transition to move from where we are to that.” Other Democrats, including Harris’ fellow Democratic senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, responded similarly.

Although the Pelosi aide’s insurance industry presentation predated Harris’ remarks, it’s really just a more detailed version of the same set of objections, which is that Medicare for All, as envisioned by Sanders, would be expensive, difficult, and disruptive. The presentation urged a focus on other issues—defending Obamacare, lowering drug costs, slowing the growth of health care spending, and pushing towards universal coverage via the system that is already in place. It was a brief for liberal incrementalism of the kind that supporters of Sanders-style Medicare for All reject.

Blue Cross Blue Shield, the insurer reportedly present at the meeting, would neither confirm nor deny that the presentation happened, but there’s little reason to doubt the story. Not only did The Intercept publish a reproduction of the slide show that accompanied the presentation, it’s essentially what Pelosi herself has been saying in public for years. In 2017, as the story notes, Pelosi warned that the public didn’t like the idea of single-payer, and that it is difficult to implement if you’re not starting from scratch. “This is an idea that if we had a tabula rasa, if we were just starting clean, would be the most cost-effective way to go forward. We don’t have that,” Pelosi said in an interview with Joy Reid. “Over 120 or 150 million people in our country have employer-based access to their health coverage and insurance.”

Which is another way of saying that Pelosi saw, and probably still sees, value in defending the false but politically necessary proposition that President Obama relied on to sell the Affordable Care Act: If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Harris, Sanders, and other proponents of Medicare for All in its strongest form do not.

This is the conflict that will define not only America’s health care debates in the coming years, but much of Democratic Party politics, which has been pulled further and further to the left, and which has elevated health care to the top of the priority list. And while the party’s radicals will not doubt continue to sing the praises of disruptive single-payer plans (an aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted last week that the elimination of private insurance was a “feature, not a bug”), I expect that the party’s more seasoned political strategists will be more hesitant, if not directly opposed.

In the end, that will probably mean embracing the label of Medicare for All, but applying it to something less than full-on single-payer—a Medicare buy-in proposal, or a public option (an insurance plan run by the federal government), which is, notably, what Durbin suggested last week when responding to Harris. Indeed, the specific policy meaning of Medicare for All has already become somewhat ambiguous, with some, like Sanders, using it to denote single-payer, and others repurposing it to describe lesser forms of government-driven coverage expansions. So while Medicare for All will probably win out in the Democratic party as a slogan, I suspect it will not be as the strict single-payer system that Bernie Sanders and his fellow socialists imagine.

Progressives no doubt bristle at finding Democratic leadership making essentially the same criticisms of single-payer that critics on the right have made for years—that the legislative price tag would be too high, that it’s too disruptive and too politically risky. But the problem for Medicare for All boosters is that for all their enthusiasm, virtually all of the evidence suggests these criticisms are right.

In his State of the Union speech last night, President Trump cited routine sexual abuse of migrant women making the journey north as one reason to support reduced illegal immigration—by building a wall, or by other means.

“Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate—it is cruel,” said Trump. “One in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.”

This statistic is dubious. As The Washington Post explained, it comes from an unrepresentative sample of just 56 migrant women, 31 percent of whom said they were “sexually abused” during their journey. Just 10 percent said they experienced sexual violence. The study does not clarify the difference between “abuse” and “violence,” but suggests that abuse is some lesser category of unpleasantness—nonconsensual sexual contact that does not rise to the level of violence, and trading sex for food, I would guess. In either case, this was a small number of victims.

Another statistic frequently cited by immigration hawks contends that 60 percent of migrant women suffer sexual violence as they make their way to the United States. This figure is even more seriously flawed, and is not based on anything current or reliable. It “comes from interviews conducted a quarter-century ago, making it irrelevant now,” writes The Post’s Glenn Kessler.

Trump is citing bad data in service of a bad cause, and people should be aware. But while we’re on the subject of outdated statistics being used to advance an illiberal policy agenda, I can’t help but notice some similarities between misleading claims about sexual assault among migrant women and misleading claims about sexual assault among campus women.

After all, many politicians, activists, and journalists have advanced the idea that as many as one-in-five female students will be victims of sexual assault while on campus—many of them at the hands of serial predators, who commit rape over and over again until they are apprehended. And while The Washington Post has been much more evenhanded and nuanced in its approach to campus rape reporting than other mainstream publications, a 2015 survey co-sponsored by the paper and the Kaiser Family Foundation that offered support for the one-in-five statistic failed to make distinctions between forced assault and nonconsensual touching—precisely the kind of error committed by Trump last night (assault vs. abuse).

Similarly, if we should be skeptical of the 60 percent rate of abuse for migrant women because the figure is 25 years out of date, we should also be skeptical of the data that undergirds the serial predator theory of campus sexual assaults, which was collected at a commuter school—the University of Massachusetts at Boston—during the 1990s.

Under the Obama administration, dubious sexual assault statistics were used to justify new policies that eviscerated due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct and also imperiled free expression. The new administration, to its credit, is working hard to undo these changes.

Trump is far from the only authority figure to cite bad data in order to guilt-trip the public into supporting his ill-conceived policy ideas. It’s important to call out the president, but keep in mind that there are plenty of other “zombie statistics” in our midst.

New York City’s health department is cracking down on bakeries and restaurants that are putting the marijuana derivative cannabidiol (CBD) in foods and drinks, even as the state approaches the possibility of legalizing pot.

CBD lacks the psychoactive components to get users high, but it has become a trendy additive in foods among people who say it helps calm them and relieve stress. Whether this is actually true or just marketing nonsense remains to be seen (Mike Riggs wrote a lengthy piece about CBD’s actual benefits and the current foodie trends in Reason‘s February issue).

There’s an almost comical twist in how and why the city is cracking down on the additive. It’s actually not really about whether CBD itself is legal or illegal. The New York Daily News says that CBD derivatives are legal in New York City, but it’s a bit more complicated and depends on whether the oil originates from marijuana or hemp. And then there’s the matter that the Drug Enforcement Administration believes it’s all illegal because marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug.

But that’s not what’s going on here. The issue is that the New York City Health Department has not given local businesses permission to add CBD to food and drinks. It is not an “approved” addition. New York City health nannies declare that they have policy-making powers to veto individual food ingredients. From the New York Daily News:

While CBD is legal, the Department of Health says it runs afoul of rules prohibiting restaurants from adding additives to food and drink — a policy change the city made with little or no public notification.

“Restaurants in New York City are not permitted to add anything to food or drink that is not approved as safe to eat. The Health Department takes seriously its responsibility to protect New Yorkers’ health. Until cannabidiol (CBD) is deemed safe as a food additive, the Department is ordering restaurants not to offer products containing CBD,” a health department spokeswoman said.

Eater notes that when a bakery was ordered to stop selling CBD-infused cookies and pastries, its owners called the health department and claimed that two staffers at the department couldn’t explain what was wrong and apparently didn’t even seem to know what CBD was.

Eater also notes a similar issue taking place in Maine. State health officials there are saying that CBD has not been approved to as a food additive and cannot be sold in cookies and snacks.

However, in both states, it’s largely legal to sell and consume the CBD oil itself (or to vape it). So these health departments are just imperiously acting as though something magical happens when it gets put into food or drink.

The argument here is particularly nannyish—they’re saying that people who want to put CBD into food have to prove to health agencies that it’s safe. Freedom should require the exact opposite: If the Health Departments wants to forbid businesses from adding an ingredient to food, shouldn’t the onus be upon them to prove that it’s not safe?

This blanket ban has the potential to harm the bottom lines of many restaurants and bakeries attempting to survive in a tough marketplace and capitalize on current trends. It’s a knee-jerk, intrusive response to something that might just be a flash-in-the-pan gimmick anyway.

A federal lawsuit that Defense Distributed and Second Amendment groups filed late Tuesday is challenging New Jersey’s attempt to rid the internet of information about how to make 3D-printable firearms.

The First Amendment lawsuit is a response to New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal’s ongoing campaign to restrict firearm-related manufacturing instructions, which escalated to a threat of criminal prosecution on February 2. A new state law, which Grewal hailed as a win for “public safety,” makes it a crime for “a person to distribute by any means, including the Internet… digital instructions in the form of computer-aided design files or other code or instructions… that may be used to program a three-dimensional printer to manufacture or produce a firearm, firearm receiver, magazine, or firearm component.”

This is a remarkably broad prohibition: it goes beyond banning the manufacturing of firearms and instead criminalizes information about how to manufacture firearms, writes Declan McCullagh for Reason.

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis voted last week to place economic sanctions on Airbnb after the company stopped listing properties in the West Bank, which was perceived by some as a pro-Palestine stance.

“It was a dumb policy,” said DeSantis. “I think they made a mistake. Sometimes you have to look in the mirror and admit you made a mistake and move on.”

But it would seem the company isn’t necessarily pro-Palestine—or at least isn’t anti-Israel. A quick search on their website returns listings for Israeli properties all across the country: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Yafo, and more.

“There are over 20,000 Airbnb hosts in Israel who open their doors and showcase the best of Israeli hospitality to guests from around the world, which boosts local families, businesses and communities,” wrote Robert Chestnut, Airbnb’s general counsel, in a letter to the State Board of Administration. “Our community of hosts in Israel has already welcomed more than 1 million guests and we will continue to invest in Israel.”

Airbnb says it removed its West Bank properties in November because both Israel and Palestine claim ownership over the contested territory. It’s the same reason the company doesn’t have a presence in Crimea, which is disputed territory between Ukraine and Russia.

Even if Airbnb did harbor some internal anti-Israel sentiment, it would seem fairly obvious that it is not part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, an effort to hold the country accountable for mistreating Palestinians. But why should it matter if they’re BDSers in the first place? Businesses often vote with their dollars, investing in causes that resonate with them and snubbing those that don’t. Consumers do the same. BDS, however, strikes a chord with many lawmakers nationwide.

Half of all states have passed laws that prohibit public agencies from doing business with companies or individuals who openly associate with BDS. What’s more, the Senate approved a measure this week—pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)—that would restrict Israel boycotts on a federal level. The bill, which now heads to the House, is largely supported by Republicans but has divided top Democrats.

“While I do not support the BDS movement, we must defend every American’s constitutional right to engage in political activity,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement last week. “It is clear to me that this bill would violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.”

Whether the boycott is actually effective is another question entirely—its impact is likely negligible. But that makes the national crackdown all the more puzzling, as it draws more attention to BDS.

In any case, Gov. DeSantis has made promises to live up to after wooing the Jewish community during his campaign. “If we’re not the most pro-Israel state in the country, we will be on January 8,” he said at the Israeli American Council National Conference, referencing his inauguration date. But the governor also promised to defend First Amendment rights, which should apply across the board—regardless of political persuasion.