Tag: hit&run

Employees of the federal government were warned this week that both praising and criticizing the Trump administration while on duty may be considered illegal. Federal workers are specifically barred from “advocating” for or against impeachment and from expressing support for the so-called “resistance” to President Donald Trump.

Such expressions could be considered violations of the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that largely prohibits federal workers from engaging in political activity while on the clock or in their official capacity as a government employee. In a memorandum released Tuesday, the Office of Special Counsel (no relation to Robert Mueller’s Russia probe) Hatch Act unit explains what kind of speech should be avoided.

There are quite a few nuances. Employees aren’t necessarily barred from praising or criticizing a presidential administration’s policies. “Whether a particular statement constitutes political activity depends upon the facts and circumstances,” the memo reads. But in general, on-duty employees must “avoid making statements directed toward the success or failure of, among others, a candidate for partisan political office.”

That’s where talk of “impeachment” comes in. The Office of Special Counsel says it’s operating under the assumption that federal officials who are impeached and later removed are disqualified from holding office again. As a result, voicing support for impeachment is considered political activity. “Advocating for a candidate to be impeached, and thus potentially disqualified from holding federal office, is clearly directed at the failure of that candidate’s campaign for federal office,” the memo states. The same goes for employees who speak out against impeachment, though the directive does not apply to speech about people who aren’t running for “partisan elected office.”

The memo goes on to warn against activity related to such words and phrases as “#resist,” “the resistance,” and “#resistTrump.” Such terms, the memo points out, are clearly associated with efforts to oppose the Trump administration’s policies. Since Trump has already announced his reelection bid, the Office of Special Counsel assumes that “the use or display of” those terms “and similar statements is political activity unless the facts and circumstances indicate otherwise.” The agency notes that there’s nothing wrong with using those words in a clearly apolitical context.

Some experts have expressed concern that the new directive could infringe on free speech. “This goes beyond past guidance about what partisan political activity is, and is more restrictive of speech of federal employees than past guidance that I’ve been able to find,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, tells The New York Times. “I think their legal analysis is wrong in this attempt to outlaw all discussion of impeachment of Trump in the federal workplace. Maybe that is a good idea, maybe that is a bad idea, but I don’t think that is what the Hatch Act requires.”

Former Office of Special Counsel employee Nick Schwellenbach, who currently serves as director of investigations at the Project on Government Oversight, also thinks the directive “goes too far.” He tells The Washington Post that “once you start talking about more-general political views, you’re starting to infringe upon people’s rights.”

But Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute, isn’t so sure. “This appears to be simply an effort to draw the distinctions that the Hatch Act requires, and that often involves close calls,” Pilon tells Reason. He acknowledges that the directive regarding “resistance” could “involve closer calls.” But “the distinction is drawn with reference to periods when President Trump was not and then, later, was a candidate for office.”

Ana Galindo-Marrone, who leads the Hatch Act unit, doesn’t think this directive is that different from policies already in place. “To me, it’s no different from the language we’ve used before,” she tells NPR.

The success of Game of Thrones has finally sent Hollywood nosing back into the earlier works George R.R. Martin, who wrote the novels on which the series is based. That could have resulted in a screen adaptation of one of two excellent horror novels: Either 1982’s Fevre Dream, in which vampires ply their trade in a 19th-century riverboat, or 1983’s Armageddon Rag, a ghost story in which the phantom is not the spirit of a person but an era, the 1960s.

Instead, Syfy has chosen to go with Nightflyers, a cultish 1980 novella (and some subsequent short stories) about what amounts to a haunted spaceship that Martin wrote to prove that horror and science fiction don’t have to be two separate genres. Authoring a book to settle a feud between rival gangs of genre fanboys is probably not the most uplifting artistic inspiration. And nothing about this messy TV series is likely to challenge that assumption. Television critic Glenn Garvin details the show’s problems.

View this article.

Some criminal justice reformers aren’t waiting for court systems to “fix” bail so that poor people aren’t stuck behind bars even when they’re not flight risks or community threats. Some charitable people have launched community bail fund organizations that collect donations and then use that money to bail out people who cannot afford to cover the costs themselves. If those defendants behave and return to court as promised, the money is returned to the community group and can be used again for others.

One such group is the New Orleans Bail and Safety Fund, whose members say they’ve paid bail for about 200 people since it was founded a year ago.

New Orleans District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro isn’t happy about that. Accusing the group of being naïve about the folks it’s dealing with, he tells New Orleans’ Fox affiliate that the fund is “playing a very dangerous game with public safety.”

What drew this sudden attention to the group? It put up the bond for a guy named DeQuan Ayers, who was arrested for possessing two and a half pounds of marijuana. His bond was set for $3,500. Though Ayers’ crimes may seem like small potatoes here, he had a lengthy criminal background and a history of not showing up for court. He was later arrested for allegedly beating up and robbing a tourist in the French Quarter. A magistrate subsequently increased his bond to $50,000.

But when you start looking at the two sides in this debate, they are not entirely opposed to each other. Cannizzaro’s concerns appear to be that the fund is overly reliant on the magistrate’s evaluation of the defendant’s risk. The folks behind the fund say they get recommendations for who to bond out from public defenders and deliberately choose only those with bonds below $5,000, meaning that they are looking for low-risk candidates themselves.

Both sides are fundamentally arguing the same thing: that judges (magistrates, in this case) are not really doing the work of assessing risk when deciding the conditions of release for somebody who has been charged (but not convicted) of a crime, and that they are overly reliant on fixed schedules based on charges. Cannizzaro sees the bail amounts that are too low, making it possible for dangerous people to be able to get out to commit more crimes. The people behind the bail fund see judges relying on these schedules and thus keeping poor people stuck behind bars even though they’re not dangerous.

These concerns are not contradictory. Both problems can be happening at once. They originate with the same underlying problem of lackluster risk assessments and a court system focused on churning through pretrial hearings as quickly as possible.

Bail fund member Jennifer Schnidman Medbery has started speaking out publicly in response to the critique. She says that the fund has seen a 92 percent success rate in getting the people they help to return to court.

More importantly, representatives of the New Orleans Bail and Safety Fund say that in about 65 percent of the cases they take on, prosecutors subsequently refuse the charges. That number matters because criminal justice experts who want to see bail reform note that people who are unable to pay for bail are more likely to plead guilty and more likely to face harsher penalties for crimes. People stuck in pretrial detention have little leverage or negotiating power and feel pressured to accept bad plea deals or even plead guilty if it will end the case. Louisiana, remember, has the second-highest incarceration rate in the country. (For a long time it had the highest, but it was recently overtaken by Oklahoma.)

Cannizzaro disputed the organization’s numbers in that Fox interview, claiming that his office only refuses the charges in 15 percent of felonies. Note that, again, this isn’t actually a contradiction, and both Cannizzaro and the bail fund may be telling the truth. Cannizzaro is referring to a larger pool of arrests (and felonies at that). The bail fund’s representatives are talking about a pool of about 200 people, carefully selected because they seem to be low-risk candidates.

The fund is keeping its pool of beneficiaries under wraps. We don’t know whether the charges would have been dropped anyway or if prosecutors specifically dropped charges because they lost leverage over the freed defendants. If that’s the case, it puts some more perspective on Cannizzaro’s complaining.

Recall as well that two federal judges have ruled in separate cases that the Orleans Parish bail system and its systems of fines and fees are violating defendants’ constitutional rights by being arbitrarily high. The cases also highlighted the fact that the money from these high bails is being used to fund the court system itself, which creates a disincentive for the courts to release people, making the bail fund’s work all the more necessary.

Has the message of anti-racism become as harmful a force in American life as racism itself?

That was the resolution at a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum on November 14, 2018. It featured John McWhorter, associate professor of English at Columbia University, and Nikhil Singh, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

Subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts.

View this article.

In a rarity, a government agency’s gaffe didn’t do any lasting harm. But it sure made for a funny story.

Earlier this month, Gavin and Marina Clarkson were trying to apply for a marriage license in D.C., where Marina lives. But they ran into trouble when several employees forgot (or maybe didn’t know in the first place) that New Mexico is a state, not a foreign country.

“You know you are from flyover country when you are applying for a marriage license, give them your New Mexico driver’s license, and they come back and say ‘my supervisor says we cannot accept international driver’s licenses. Do you have a New Mexico passport?'” Gavin posted to Facebook on November 20. “They went back to a supervisor to check if New Mexico was a state … TWICE!”

Gavin tells the Las Cruces Sun-News the staffers eventually admitted that New Mexico is a state and accepted his driver’s license. But he was still a bit surprised. “All the couples behind us waiting in line were laughing,” he tells the newspaper.

None of this was caught on video, but I like to imagine the staff’s realization went something like this:

Lest readers think the Clarksons are making the whole thing up, a spokesperson for the D.C. court system confirmed that it happened. “We understand that a clerk in our Marriage Bureau made a mistake regarding New Mexico’s 106-year history as a state,” Leah H. Gurowitz, director of media and public relations for D.C. Courts, tells the News-Sun. “We very much regret the error and the slight delay it caused a New Mexico resident in applying for a DC marriage license.”

The Hill notes that this is not the first time something like this has happened. According to a December 2017 letter from D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton to TSA Administrator David Pekoske, some agents had trouble recognizing D.C. IDs that say “District of Columbia” rather than “Washington, D.C.”

“Mass deaths and mayhem: National Climate Assessment’s most shocking warnings,” blares the headline at CBS News. The story, which discusses the government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), says that the document predicts “an estimated loss of up to 10 percent gross domestic product by 2100.” This same estimate was cited by many other news outlets. For example, the first paragraph of The New York Times‘ article on the NCA4 says that “if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.”

Puzzled by this reporting, I did a rough calculation in my initial reporting on the NCA4. Today’s $20 trillion GDP, growing at a 3 percent rate, would rise to $226 trillion by 2100. With climate change, it would instead rise to only $203 trillion. Americans living at the end of this century would be about 10 times richer on average than we are now, albeit in a much warmer world.

So where did those estimates come from? Basically from a worst-case scenario of temperature increase called in climate-speak Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5). RCPs are four different greenhouse gas concentration trajectories used by climate modelers and adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its fifth Assessment Report in 2014. Each makes different assumptions about population growth, economics, technological progress, and fossil fuel burning. RCP 8.5 implausibly assumes a global population of 12 billion by 2100, plus technological stagnation, slow economic growth, and consumption of fossil fuels at about 3 times current levels, with the result that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reaches 950 ppm, up from 405 ppm now. In RCP 8.5, average global temperature could increase by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

Why choose to focus on the RCP 8.5? “Given this assessment’s emphasis on using a risk-based framework, authors were asked to consider low-probability, high-consequence climate futures,” explain the authors. Fair enough. But it did result in implausible doom-laden headlines.

In any case, this is the scenario that produced the NCA4 estimate of that 10 percent loss. But wait, it gets weirder. The total projected damages in this worst-case scenario add up to just over $500 billion per year in 2100 (see below). If that’s 10 percent of GDP in 2100, that suggests that U.S. GDP will be only $5 trillion dollars (75 percent lower than now). I must be missing something.

“Climate Change Is Affordable,” opines Holman Jenkins over at The Wall Street Journal after parsing these figures. And he’s not wrong, assuming these estimates are ballpark accurate.

Finally, the 10 percent GDP loss figure is apparently derived from an analysis by the Berkeley researcher Solomon Hsiang and his team published in Science in 2017. “Combined uncertainty in aggregate impacts grows with warming, so the very likely (5th to 95th percentile) range of losses at 1.5°C of warming is −0.1 to 1.7% GDP, at 4°C of warming is 1.5 to 5.6% GDP, and at 8°C warming is 6.4 to 15.7% GDP annually,” calculate the researchers. Note that the worst-case assumes an absurdly farfetched increase in average temperature of 8 degrees Celsius (14.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Yet it is from this outlandish scenario that the scaremongering figure of a 10 percent lower GDP in 2100 is extracted.

Whatever the intentions of the NCA4 authors, highlighting a preposterously implausible worst-case scenario does not further the debate over reasonable policy responses to climate change.

If you thought everybody hated Jeff Flake before, check out what they’re saying now that the lame-duck Arizona senator is blocking judicial confirmations until he gets a floor vote on the bipartisan “Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act,” which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee (upon which Flake sits) 14–7 in April but has been stymied since by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“Jeff Flake’s Sad Exit,” runs the headline on The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial. The paper’s argument: “Flake’s stunt will have zero effect on President Trump or Mr. Mueller, and he’s compromising a substantive principle to make a futile political gesture. Mr. Flake is hurting the cause of confirming conservative judges who would enforce the Constitution in the name of a bill that is unconstitutional.”

Is the Mueller-protection act truly unconstitutional? The best answer to that may be that it would be “vulnerable to constitutional challenge” on separation-of-powers grounds, because by giving special counsels—which currently are allowed to exist not by statute but through internal Justice Department regulations—the ability to appeal their firings to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the bill would transfer some executive branch authority from the president to this awkwardly powerful post. The relevant Supreme Court precedent, 1988’s Morrison v. Olson, is one of the more infamous rulings of the past few decades, known now mostly for Antonin Scalia’s fiery and solitary dissent, which would likely be the argument the current SCOTUS finds most persuasive.

Is that constitutional vulnerability sufficient cause to block a floor vote? Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), one of the more constitutionally grounded members of the body, says so vehemently. But Commentary‘s Noah Rothman, in a piece for NBC News, makes a persuasive case that it’s all more complicated than that. “The naïve might insist that this is an entirely good faith intra-party debate over the constitutionality of the bill,” Rothman writes. However: “The unsatisfying fact is that a careless strike at Trump by Congress would only make the crisis it is trying to prevent more likely.”

Fact is, the legislative branch under GOP rule specializes in three things: not voting on bills, not conducting meaningful oversight of the executive branch, and confirming as many judges as they can while the going’s still good. As lame-duck Sen. Bob Corker (R–Tenn.) memorably pointed out in June, his Republican colleagues are terrified of poking the bear, meaning the erratic, anger-prone fellow in the White House. And as has been pointed out repeatedly by the most libertarian members of each chamber—Justin Amash (R–Mich.) in the House, Rand Paul (R–Ky.) in the Senate—the other governing fear is of attaching names to actual votes.

“People in Congress are protected from voting the wrong way,” Amash told me a couple years back. “Everything’s take-it-or-leave-it, all or nothing. It makes it harder to distinguish among the members of Congress—who’s a good congressman and who’s a bad congressman—because it’s all just a jumble.”

This insight may get closer to the true objections to Flake’s bill. The Journal is correct to point out that the legislation is a non-starter, because even if it was voted on and passed, lame duck House Speaker Paul Ryan (R–Wisc.) would not take it up; the constitutional question would be moot. But the names of those Republicans who dared poke the bear would be written in neon lights at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And should Trump’s situation continue to deteriorate, or if he ends up firing Robert Mueller, an on-the-record vote against protecting the special counsel may prove politically hazardous.

Flake’s gambit not only asks his Republican colleagues to do something they hate but also prevents them from doing something they love—confirm judges. I attended a D.C. fundraiser for Flake in 2017 a week before he announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election, and the special guest star may surprise you: none other than Mitch McConnell. “We’re in the personnel business,” the majority leader said at the outset of his remarks. “There’s over 1,200 presidential appointments that have to be confirmed in the Senate. And the most important ones, obviously, are the…courts….One of the most important things that President Trump will be able to do to change America is putting young, Gorsuch-like people in the courts. And right in the middle of the confirmation process is Jeff Flake and his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee. He’s been a solid supporter.” That was the entirety of McConnell’s testimonial.

This is why Republicans are pissed. “Not productive,” says Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas). “Flake is a selfish narcissist,” snorts Mike Huckabee. Meanwhile, his vote-switch this week from “no” to “present” on controversial Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Jonathan Kobes is producing headlines in the lefty press like “Jeff Flake caves again.”

No wonder the guy is downplaying the likelihood of any presidential bid (“I don’t think that will be me,” he said Sunday). Everybody hates Jeff Flake.

Several St. Louis cops face federal charges for beating a man they thought was a protester and then covering up the encounter. Their victim turned out to be an undercover officer himself.

The incident took place in September 2017, when protests erupted over the acquittal of former police officer Jason Stockley. (Stockley had shot and killed black driver Anthony Lamar Smith following a police chase. Stockley, who claimed self-defense, was tried for murder and found not guilty.) As demonstrators took to the streets, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department deployed officers to work crowd control and to crack down on criminal activity.

According to an indictment filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Missouri, four officers—Dustin Boone, Randy Hays, Christopher Myers, and Bailey Colletta—”encountered” a man they believed to be a protester, identified only as L.H.

Boone, Hays, and Myers allegedly took L.H. to the ground and beat him “while he was compliant and not posing a threat to anybody,” the indictment says. “This offense resulted in bodily injury to L.H. and included the use of a dangerous weapon, that is: shod feet and a riot baton.”

L.H. was not actually a protester. He was an undercover detective and 22-year veteran of the police department. His full name is Luther Hall, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, and he apparently suffered severe injuries. His jaw muscles became inflamed after he was kicked in the face, causing him to have trouble eating and lose 20 pounds. He has also had issues with his tailbone, neck, and back, with the latter two requiring surgery.

After realizing L.H. was a cop, Boone, Hays, and Myers allegedly proceeded to cover up their actions. They’re accused of falsely claiming that he resisted arrest, as well as trying to persuade him not to report their actions. The three officers also allegedly lied to potential witnesses in an effort to influence their testimony. Myers stands accused of destroying L.H.’s phone in another attempt to obstruct the investigation.

Colletta, who was romantically involved with Hays at the time, allegedly saw her fellow officers arrest L.H. She’s accused of lying, both to investigators and to a grand jury, about what happened.

The indictment also includes text messages from Boone, Hays, and Myers that seem to show they were looking forward to beating up on protesters. “[L]et’s whoop some ass,” Myers wrote. “It’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight,” Boone responded. “But it’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these shitheads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart.” Two days later, Boone wrote to Myers that it’s “a blast beating people that deserve it.” Several weeks after the incident involving L.H., Hays said in a message to Boone that “going rogue does feel good.”

The four officers, who have been placed on unpaid leave, are being represented by the police union’s lawyers. If convicted, each could face decades in prison. “We encourage elected officials, the media and the public to allow them their day in court without speculation about their guilt or innocence,” St. Louis Police Officers’ Association business manager Jeff Roorda tells the Post-Dispatch.

Allegations of police abuse were widespread during the Stockley protests. In September, 14 lawsuits were filed on behalf of people arrested and/or pepper-sprayed during the protests, including several journalists.

The Rev. Darryl Gray, who helped organize the demonstrations, hopes the alleged assault of an undercover cop will help people understand there’s a problem. “Maybe this police officer getting beat up by three of his own, who deliberately went out to hurt someone who was compliant and not resisting, maybe this is what is needed in this country and this city and this region to finally say, ‘We have not gone far enough to hold police accountable,'” Gray tells The Washington Post.

An alarming number of New Jersey cops have used excessive force, but the state has done very little to track these incidents. In an effort to promote accountability and transparency in policing, NJ.com has taken up the gauntlet.

The Force Report, released this week, is a database based on 506 public records requests and 72,607 use-of-force reports from 2012 to 2016. With this information, New Jersey residents in any town can see the rates of excessive force in their town.

In Newark, for example, there were 2,580 use-of-force incidents over the course of five years—28.6 incidents for every 1,000 arrests made. That’s the largest number of these incidents in the state.

The report also allows residents to see the relevant officers’ names. Louis Weber, for example, has been identified in at least 36 excessive force incidents in Newark. In 2014, Weber was accused of planting drugs on a suspect to justify excessive force in his arrest.

The report’s metadata covers the racial breakdown of incidents, the poor incident reporting system, and the different types of force used. To read the whole thing, go here.

For all the talk of his deal-making prowess, President Donald Trump has precious little to show for it during his nearly two years in office. Unless his administration takes quick action to get the rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) before Congress, even that mild accomplishment may be relegated to legislative limbo.

This morning Trump held a high-profile signing ceremony with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at the G-20 summit in Argentina. The leaders of the three countries put their signatures to the final version of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), but the deal must still be ratified by each domestic government.

If the Trump administration wants to get the USMCA through Congress solely with Republican votes, the clock is running out. Realistically, today is the deadline for getting the proposal in front of Congress. Under the terms of what’s known as “Trade Promotion Authority,” Congress granted Trump the power to unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA, but the legislative branch must ratify the agreement with an up-or-down vote after a mandatory 30-day review period. The current session of Congress ends on January 3. After that, Democrats will control the House.

The approaching Democratic takeover does not foreclose the possibility of Congress voting to ratify the USMCA, but certainly complicates the pact’s path forward. Politically, of course, Democrats may hold up the passage of the USMCA merely to deny Trump a policy win. Practically, Democratic leaders may demand changes to the agreement that Senate Republicans or the Trump administration (or the governments of Canada or Mexico) will not abide.

For that matter, it’s not clear that the USMCA would pass even with Republicans in control of both chambers. That’s because some congressional Republicans disagree with the Trump administration on trade issues and correctly see the USMCA as moving North America further from free trade.

“On balance, it leaves us with diminished trading opportunities, rather than expanded trading opportunities with Mexico and Canada,” says Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Pa.), who has emerged as Senate Republicans’ most vocal critic of the USMCA. Toomey says he would be a “no” vote on the USMCA as currently written.

His objections are good ones. The USMCA imposes new requirements for the origin of cars and car parts, mandating that at least 75 percent of cars’ content must be produced in North America and at least 40 percent must be produced by workers earning $16 an hour (or the equivalent in other currency) in order to cross national borders tariff-free. That’s likely to raise the cost of making cars in North America and could lead automakers to move more production overseas. The agreement also sets quotas for imported cars from Canada and Mexico, and raises the threat of further automotive tariffs. Finally, Toomey objects to the USMCA’s sunset provision, which would see parts of the agreement expire automatically after 16 years. “It’s a bad idea to have a trade agreement that’s designed to go away,” Toomey says, citing the need for investor certainty.

While Toomey is alone in putting his vote on the USMCA on the record, he’s not the only senator to raise concerns with the deal. Ben Sasse (R–Neb.) has said the greement appears to be “empowering government bureaucrats rather than markets to determine the components in cars and other goods.” Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) took his complaints about “how bad the new trade deal with Mexico is for Florida” to Twitter on Wednesday—though Rubio appears to be seeking more protectionism, not freer trade.

Still, threading the needle on the USMCA will only become more difficult after January 3, when the current Congress ends.

If Democrats are willing to consider the trade deal at all—keep in mind that Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) killed a Bush-era trade deal with Colombia in 2008 by refusing even to schedule a vote on it—they may try to move it in a more protectionist direction. Some of Trump’s priorities, like the minimum wage rule and import quotas, align more closely with Democrats’ long-term views on NAFTA, but Democrats are likely to push for even more changes to avoid giving Trump an easy win and to appeal to their own progressive base. Remember, Democrats running for president in 2016 unanimously opposed the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership deal (even Hillary Clinton, who had previously supported it), while every major Republican candidate except Trump favored it.

Rep. Richard Neal (D–Mass.), who is in position to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in January, may have tipped the Democrats’ hand in October when he said that “the bar for supporting a new NAFTA will be high” and that he was “not confident at all” that the deal would clear Congress. And that was before the Democrats won the election.

As The New York Times has outlined, Democrats’ opposition to the USMCA will likely focus on upping the effective minimum wage rate for automakers, indexing it to inflation, and setting stricter environmental regulations across all three countries.

Even if Trump goes along with those demands, any changes to the USMCA that erect further barriers to trade would make pro-trade Senate Republicans more likely to jump ship.

It’s tempting to think that the USMCA falling apart in Congress is for the best. While it does include some improvements over NAFTA—freer trade of Canadian agricultural products, some sensibly updated rules for technology—the USMCA is, on the whole, a more protectionist framework than what it would be replacing. Just let it die, right?

Toomey disagrees. If the White House is unable to get the USMCA through Congress next year, he worries the president will do what he’s long threatened to: Unilaterally yank the United States out of NAFTA without a replacement ready. That would be disastrous for the economy, Toomey warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. It could also send Washington spiraling into another constitutional crisis, because it’s not clear whether Trump would have the authority to do that without congressional approval.

Still, if Trump wanted to get his NAFTA rewrite through Congress quickly and easily, the best choice would have been to dial down the protectionism and seek approval soon after a deal with struck with Canada and Mexico last month. At this late moment, the chances that the USMCA will be approved before Democrats take the House are slim to none. Getting it passed in December is “probably, sadly impractical,” Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) tells The Weekly Standard‘s Haley Byrd. The Trump administration, Cornyn says, does not seem to have any sense of urgency to get the deal done.

Depending on how cynically you view Trump, it’s possible to conclude that the president is trying to create Toomey’s nightmare scenario—where lack of congressional agreement on the USMCA gives Trump the impetus to act alone on killing NAFTA, something he wanted to do soon after taking office only to be dissuaded by aides who urged the renegotiation approach.

“The path to getting this ratified, if the administration chooses to wait, is not at all clear to me,” says Toomey. “It almost certainly means it moves in a more protectionist direction.”