Tag: hit&run

As the open spot on their team devours U.S. news, politics, and culture whole, the eight existing justices of the Supreme Court return to work today for the start of a new legal year and a return to 43 pending cases. This month, justices will hear arguments in 11 cases. The issues involved include whether smaller government employers can be guilty of age discrimination; how to treat convicted criminals whose dementia has left them with no memory of their crimes; and what happens when Homeland Security forgets to detain “criminal aliens.”

You can see a full list here of the cases slated to come before the court in October and November.

To kick things off today, SCOTUS will ponder the plight of a Florida tree frog in Weyerhauser Co. v. Fish and Wildlife Service. The case, explains Constitution Daily, “is about the federal government’s power to prevent tree-cutting on 1,500 acres of land that could be home to an endangered species, the dusky gopher frog”; it “involves important principles of environmental and property law.”

Or, as our Reason headline puts it: “Should Dried Up Tree Frog Sex Ponds Limit Property Rights?“

A few notable cases have not yet had a date set for argument. Among them:

• Apple Inc. v. Pepper, which looks at “whether consumers may sue anyone who delivers goods to them for antitrust damages, even when they seek damages based on prices set by third parties who would be the immediate victims of the alleged offense” (via SCOTUSblog);
• Timbs v. Indiana, which considers “whether the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause is incorporated against the states under the Fourteenth Amendment”;
• Nieves v. Bartlett, which is related to probable cause, retaliatory arrest, and the First Amendment; and
• Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Association v. Byrd, which looks at state regulation of retail or wholesale liquor licenses.

The court “has not yet added any blockbuster cases to its nine-month calendar,” notes Axios. But the pending cases include some with “major ramifications, and a confirmation of Trump’s nominee would solidify a conservative majority and ultimately hand Republicans major wins.” And should Trump’s embattled first pick, Brett Kavanaugh, fail to be confirmed, we could have to wait well past this November’s midterm elections for the next nominee.

If Republicans fail to hold the Senate, Axios‘ sources claim, Trump may stall for years on nominating someone new. This would leave the Court to decide cases with four liberal-leaning justices and four conservative-leaning justices.

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“I was the proudest, drunkest virgin you have ever seen…” In its recent season premiere, Saturday Night Live tackled Brett Kavanaugh’s Friday testimony before the U.S. Senate. Kate McKinnon’s impression of Lindsey Graham alone makes the clip worth it, but Matt Damon isn’t half bad as the judge either.

Were but that the only Kavanaugh-confirmation circus development of note in the past few days! Instead, the weekend brought a barrage of new statements from Kavanaugh friends and foes—”when Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive,” one former Yale classmate said—and updates on the FBI’s investigative efforts.

Meanwhile, outside the most conservative circles, the lastest commentary on Kavanaugh has largely coalesced around the idea that even if he isn’t guilty of sexual assault, his stalling, haughty, conspiratorial, and non-sequitur- and falsehood-filled performance last week presents its own case for canceling Kavanaugh’s ascendance.

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Washington takes aim at state “net neutrality.” The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit yesterday to stop the State of California’s new “net neutrality” law, which was ostensibly passed to prevent internet traffic discrimination.

“States do not regulate interstate commerce—the federal government does,” Jeff Sessions declared in a statement. “Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy.”

In other California and markets news, a measure Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law over the weekend attempts to regulate the sex and gender makeup of corporate boards.

QUICK HITS

• A federal judge has struck down Kentucky’s attempt to abolish abortion clinics in the Bluegrass State.
• The American Civil Liberties Union officially opposes Kavanaugh’s nomination.
• FOSTA “provides another tool for silencing people you dislike.”
• The North American Free Trade Agreement is probably safe after all.

Since the “tough on crime” heyday of the ’90s, Florida has rolled back some of its harshest mandatory minimum sentencing laws, but those people sentenced before the law changed are stuck with sentences that are years and—in some cases—decades longer than those given to people convicted of a similar crime today.

A referendum on the ballot in Florida this November could change that, and would be instrumental in reducing Florida’s huge, expensive, and aging prison population.

Amendment 11 would allow the state legislature to retroactively change sentencing laws. The legislature is currently barred from doing so by a more than 100-year-old provision in the state constitution known as the “savings clause.”

Greg Newburn—the director of state policy for FAMM, an advocacy group that opposes mandatory minimum sentencing, and the chair of the Yes on 11 campaign—says FAMM’s support for the amendment essentially comes down to fairness. If the legislature changes the laws, admitting they initially imposed too harsh a penalty, why shouldn’t that admission extend to those directly affected by it?

“We fight for fair and proportional sentencing laws,” Newburn says. “And when we’re successful in making those changes, we think that basic fairness means the stories that we use to help change the laws, the people who are living those stories day-to-day, shouldn’t be left behind by the law.”

Last year, Reason investigated the effects of Florida’s draconian opioid trafficking laws, which put thousands of low-level offenders in prison for what often amounted to a single bottle of pills.

One such case is Cynthia Powell, a woman sentenced to a mandatory 25 years in prison in 2003, at age 40, for selling a bottle of pills to an undercover police officer. She had no prior arrest record.

In 2014, the Florida legislature passed a modest increase to the weight threshold necessary to trigger these harsh sentences for trafficking oxycodone and hydrocodone. The new rules were put in place in response to reports that the state’s opioid trafficking laws were mostly ensnaring low-level offenders like Powell, not the drug kingpins that legislators originally said the laws would put behind bars.

However, because of the savings clause, the legislature can do nothing for inmates serving time under the old thresholds. As Reason reported:

For inmates sentenced before the 2014 mandatory-minimum revisions, their punishment now seems all the more capricious and arbitrary.

That includes people like James Caruso, who in 2002 was sentenced to a mandatory 25 years in prison for trafficking hydrocodone, plus a $500,000 fine. “Under the new law I would be subject to a seven-year prison term and $100,000 fine,” he writes in a letter to Reason. “I have served more than twice that and owe five-times the fine. A person in Florida could literally do the exact same thing today that I did in 2002 and still get out of prison before me…And if you believe the police reports, I was just a lookout.”

And it includes Cynthia Powell. If she were convicted under the new thresholds, she would’ve received a 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence, and would have already been released. Instead, she has over 6 more years to go before she’s projected to be released, by which time she’ll be 61 years old.

Amendment 11 was taken off the ballot by a state judge, who ruled that the bundled amendment—it includes other measures, such as one that would remove racist language from the state constitution—was unconstitutional, but the Florida Supreme Court is currently reviewing that decision.

Florida is facing an incarceration crisis. Its state prison system holds 98,000 inmates, and without major changes to sentencing law, that number is unlikely to decrease much. As The Florida Times-Union reported earlier this month:

In a state where the prison population remains near its all-time high despite nine years of falling inmate admissions, reducing sentence lengths are the primary way the number of inmates can decline.

Last week, when the American Civil Liberties Union released a plan for Florida to cut its incarceration levels by 50 percent by 2025, the plan was dependent on the ability to reduce inmates’ sentences. Without Amendment 11, there are alternative ways to try to reduce sentences such as re-instating parole or allowing inmates to earn more gain-time for good behavior, but it’s unclear if the courts would allow those reforms. The Urban Institute researchers who worked alongside the ACLU said that without the savings clause repeal, it would be much harder to imagine the state managing to cut its prison population in half.

Amendment 11 has been endorsed by the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Melba Pearson, the deputy director of the Florida ACLU, told WLRN that it could also apply in future drug legalization measures.

“[L]et’s say, for example, we pass a full legalization of marijuana in the state of Florida,” Pearson said. “This as a hypothetical—that from today forward you cannot be arrested for possession of a certain amount of marijuana. But what about all the people who are now currently sitting in jail for that marijuana charge that is now legal? Shouldn’t they be released from jail and have that removed from their record because this is no longer a crime?”

It’s week two of fall premieres, and television critic Glenn Garvin is not impressed with three new sitcoms: Happy Together, I Feel Bad, and The Neighborhood:

Not all modern television technology has been for the better. I, for one, much preferred the days when sitcoms aired with manufactured laugh tracks rather than the sound of dying pigs screaming in Hell, which is mostly what I hear when watching this week’s new fall comedies.

Some of them are one-note. Some of them are no notes. Some of them have flat lead characters; others have lead characters you’ll want to mount on a spit and roast over open coals before using the toxic carcass to poison your neighbor’s yappy little dog. None of them will tempt you to laugh, though you may feel a sharp desire to send death threats to their producers.

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A Belgian motorist was fined for driving 696 kilometers per hour (432 mph) in a 50 kph zone. At least that’s what the ticket generated by a traffic camera said. After the man protested the ticket, officials said there had been a computer error, and he had only been driving 60 kph.

For decades, California has kept police misconduct records exempt from public records requests, denying citizens (and even prosecutors and defense attorneys in court cases) easy access to information about law enforcement behavior.

Now that secrecy is coming to an end. This afternoon Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law S.B. 1421, sponsored by state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D–Berkeley). S.B. 1421 changes the rules to call for the release of police conduct (and misconduct) records in certain situations: if the officer discharged his or her gun in an incident; if the officer was involved in an incident that led to death or great bodily injury; if the officer had been found to have engaged in sexual assault with a member of the public (this includes any sexual act while on duty); and if the officer had been found to have engaged in dishonest practices, such as committing perjury, falsifying reports, or destroying or concealing evidence.

Today was the last day for Brown to sign or veto bills passed during the 2018 legislative season. He had been keeping mum about whether he’d sign on to this reform. He was responsible for signing the original bill back in 1978 that exempted police conduct reports from public view. What spooled out from that initial bill was an environment where citizens simply were not able to find out if an officer involved in a violent or otherwise controversial confrontation had a history of disciplinary problems. Even prosecutors and defense attorneys had to beg judges for information from the conduct records of officers put on the stand as witnesses.

This legislation represents a huge shift in the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the public in California. Police unions have fought for years to keep officers’ bad conduct out of the public eye. They’ve been succeeding for a long time. This change will bolster pushes for transparency in other states (such as New York) that similarly conceal bad cop behavior from the public.

But there’s more! Brown also signed A.B. 748, which will establish that police body camera footage is a public record under state law. As body cameras began to be implemented across the state, there wasn’t an official state policy determining to what extent the public would be allowed to see the footage. So law enforcement agencies were making their own rules, and as you might expect, they typically decided to conceal what they had.

A.B. 748 will allow police to withhold body camera footage for 45 days if there’s an ongoing investigation, and it puts a process into place to keep footage sealed longer if there is a good reason. It also puts guidelines into place to redact or edit footage that could violate the privacy of witnesses or victims. But the assumption now is going to be that all police body camera footage will eventually become public records.

Peter Bibring, director of police practices for the ACLU of California, shot out a celebratory statement this evening:

Together, SB 1421 and AB 748 will shine a much-needed light on police violence and abuse. Specifically, SB 1421 restores the public’s right to know how departments investigate and hold accountable those officers who abuse their power to frame, sexually assault, or kill members of the public. AB 748 will ensure law enforcement agencies throughout the state release police recordings of serious uses of force, including body camera footage, which are valuable tools for civilian oversight at a time of growing concern with police violence.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh mentioned beer 28 times during his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, inviting mockery and semiotic speculation. The reason the subject came up was pretty clear: Christine Blasey Ford, the California research psychologist who says he tried to rape her when they were both in high school, described him as very drunk at the time, and one possible explanation for his seeming sincerity in denying her charge (in addition to the possibility that he is innocent) is that he honestly does not recall the episode because alcohol clouded his memory.

In response to repetitive questioning on the subject, Kavanaugh said no fewer than 10 times that he has never experienced alcohol-related memory gaps. But the discussion of Kavanaugh’s drinking during high school and college ranged beyond that narrow issue, and his responses were by turns defiant, evasive, implausible, and misleading. The tenor of those exchanges was partly due to Kavanaugh’s resentment of questions he deemed nosy and irrelevant. But it also reflected the clash between official expectations and the reality of adolescent drinking in America, a contradiction that he and his interlocutors seemed keen to ignore.

“My friends and I sometimes got together and had parties on weekends,” Kavanaugh said in his opening statement. “The drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school and was 18 in D.C. for all of my time in high school. I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer. But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out, and I never sexually assaulted anyone.” Later he added that “the drinking age, as I noted, was 18, so the seniors were legal, senior year in high school, people were legal to drink.”

As several news outlets pointed out, the drinking age for beer and wine in Maryland, where Kavanaugh lived and went to school, was raised from 18 to 21 in July 1982, seven months before his 18th birthday. In other words, it was not legal for him to drink in Maryland at any point during his high school years. It would have been legal for him to buy and consume beer in D.C., which did not raise its drinking age from 18 to 21 until 1986, for most of his senior year, but it sounds like the parties to which he refers generally happened in Maryland. The fact that “the drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school” no doubt made it easier for underage students like Kavanaugh to obtain beer, but it did not make it legal.

Once Kavanaugh started attending Yale in the fall of 1983, the legal picture was more complicated. The drinking age in Connecticut at that point was 20, an age Kavanaugh did not reach until February 1985. It rose to 21 that September, but Kavanaugh would have been grandfathered, since he had already turned 20. In other words, it was illegal for Kavanaugh to drink as a freshman and the first semester or so of his sophomore year, a period when he, like most of his peers, nevertheless drank.

I was born the same year as Kavanaugh (1965), and I had a somewhat similar experience at Cornell. The drinking age in New York initially was 19, but it rose to 21 as of December 1985. Unlike Connecticut, New York did not give a pass to people who were already drinking legally at that point. So I entered college an underage drinker, became legal in September 1984, and a year later became illegal again, a status that lasted for a year. Since I have given up all hope of a Supreme Court nomination, I can readily admit that the varying legality of my alcohol consumption had no impact on it, except that I sometimes relied on older friends to buy liquor for me.

What’s true in college is also true in high school: It is quite common for students to drink, even though it’s illegal. In last year’s Monitoring the Future Study, 56 percent of high school seniors reported drinking, down from 87 percent when Kavanaugh was in his last year at Georgetown Prep. When Kavanaugh says “almost everyone” his age was drinking, he is right. Underage drinking was the rule, not the exception, when Kavanaugh was in high school, and it would be strange to hold it against him. But instead of saying that, he misleadingly implied that his beer drinking complied with the law.

Kavanaugh did admit that he sometimes drank too much, but he was evasive in explaining what that meant. “What do you consider to be too many beers?” asked Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor posing questions on behalf of the committee’s Republican members. Kavanaugh’s response beggared belief: “I don’t know. You know, we—whatever the chart says, a blood-alcohol chart.”

It is, of course, laughable to imagine Kavanaugh and his high school buddies consulting “a blood-alcohol chart” before deciding whether to have another brewski. But even if we take Kavanaugh to mean that he was careful not to drive while intoxicated, that does not really answer the question. For someone who is not planning to drive, the question of how many beers are too many has little to do with the legal standard for DUI. A good rule of thumb might be that you’ve drunk too many beers if you find yourself vomiting or waking up with a hangover. Young people learn their limits through practice, and those limits vary from person to person.

How often Kavanaugh drank to excess in high school and college, and exactly how drunk he was on those occasions, is a matter of some dispute among people who knew him then. But it is safe to assume that he drank a lot, as was (and is) common for high school and college students. It does not follow that he experienced blackouts, that he became aggressive, or that he assaulted Ford (or anyone else). I drank a lot in college, too much on more than a few occasions, but never found myself in a situation where I could not remember what had happened the night before or needed other people’s help to piece it together. Nor was that a common experience in my social circle, although I can’t speak for Kavanaugh’s.

Whatever did or did not happen between Kavanaugh and Ford, this much we know: As a teenager and young man, Kavanaugh drank illegally, and sometimes he drank too much. In those respects he was not at all unusual compared to his peers, who officially were not allowed to drink, did it anyway, and sometimes “had too many beers.”

You might even think there is a relationship between illegality and excess, since prohibition pushes drinking underground and makes it harder for young people to learn from older drinkers who might know a thing or two about how to stop short of too many beers. Instead high school and college students bumble along, learning from mistakes they might have avoided. Nowadays almost none of them are legally allowed to drink, even though many of them are considered adults in almost every other respect. They therefore drink on the sly, which is not conducive to moderation or responsibility. That perverse situation was the unacknowledged subtext of all the beer talk at Thursday’s hearing.

Work within institutions or start something entirely new? Reason‘s Bob Poole and Max Borders hash out these competing strategies for spreading liberty in the latest issue of Reason. Check out the whole article at the link below.

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The Supreme Court hears the first case of its new session tomorrow. The subject of Weyerhaeuser Company v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a shy, endangered frog, known among biologists for a call said to resemble an old man snoring.

Only about 150 dusky gopher frogs survive in the wild, and all of them are in southern Mississippi. That didn’t stop the Fish and Wildlife Service from designating about 1,500 acres of private property in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, as critical habitat for the species in 2012. The designated acreage lies within the frog’s historical range, but it’s now part of dense commercial timber plantation that is nothing like the open-canopied habitat the amphibian needs, writes Tate Watkins in his latest piece at Reason.

It wasn’t just elevator-activists Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher who were furious at Jeff Flake Friday morning, after the soon-to-retire Republican senator from Arizona began arguably the craziest day of his tumultuous past two years by announcing that he intended to vote “yes” to confirm embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

“I wish I could say I am surprised by Jeff Flake,” Washington lifer Norman Ornstein tweeted. “Sadly, I am not. Party wins again….He failed the moral test.” In blue-checkmark land Flake was a “coward,” a “poisonous jellyfish that looks harmless because it has no spine yet still manages to sting you.” The clickservative right, meanwhile, rallied temporarily to one of its least favorite senators. “I have plenty of disagreements with @JeffFlake but I am so proud that he is taking a stand and voting yes on Brett Kavanaugh,” wrote Candace Owens. “Stay strong!”

As we know, Flake did not stay strong, at least by #MAGA measurements. Instead he played Hamlet, dramatically delaying a Senate Judiciary Committee vote (during which Twitter lit up with cracks like, “Would any serious writer even dare invent a character called Senator Flake who can’t seem to make his mind up whether to back his own side?”), before finally announcing his initially confusing deal to send Kavanaugh’s confirmation to a full Senate vote in exchange for spending up to one additional week on an FBI investigation into existing allegations into Judge Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault as a youth.

Now, as Flake prepares for a joint 60 Minutes interview Sunday with his friend and compromise partner Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), most partisans on both sides have retreated to their usual position: Hating Jeff Flake. He’s an “out of touch narcissist,” said Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham. Countered Linda Stasi in the New York Daily News, “While it looks like Sen. Jeff Flake found a backbone, the truth is, he did exactly what every Republican did so successfully during the entire ugly, disgraceful hearing of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—he tried to appear both empathetic and strong while acting every inch the coward.”

There is no place more despised in American politics right now than the center. Not the ideological center, necessarily, but the temperamental center. That space inhabited by people who recoil instinctively from bloody-knuckled partisanship and the collectivist demonization it requires, who lament the erosion of democratic norms and the delegitimization of mediating institutions. At a moment of intense polarization, when the time for choosing was yesterday, who has the patience for such scoldy fence-sitters?

You can find a lot of libertarians in this unhappy camp, averse as they usually are to the tribal political hysterics of the day. Flake is among the most libertarian members of the Senate; in the House, arguably the most temperamentally centrist member is the one who prefers describing himself with the (as-yet lower-case) l-word: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.). Amash’s Twitter feed these days is filled with such cheery observations as, “Political discourse today is driven almost entirely by tribalism and bias and very little by principles and truth. We’ve come to a sad and dangerous place. Liberty cannot survive without virtue.”

But you can find a lot of anti-libertarian people in the temperamental center as well. Bill Kristol. John Kasich. Benjamin Wittes. The late John McCain, and the D.C. establishment that mourned him (and its own receding power) for a week last month. There is a whole cadre of anti-Trump conservatives who have not yet come to grips with the way their support for war, surveillance, spending, bailouts, and wink-nudge populism helped discredit their precious establishment in the first place.

Jeff Flake is coming from a more consistently principled position. In 2006, when many of today’s noisy #NeverTrumpers were in the Bush administration governing poorly and doubling the national debt, Flake, then a congressman, was keeping it real with Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward: “You look at any measure of spending—overall spending, mandatory, discretionary, non-defense discretionary, non-homeland security spending—whichever way you slice it, the record looks pretty bad.”

Pox-on-both-houses centrism, even with some libertarian flavoring, does not always lead to wisdom. Setting your own coordinates by the position of the other two poles is reactive, unsteady, a recipe for squishiness. (This is one of many reasons why, even though there are many of libertarians who can be found in the temperamental center, there are a lot of other, more anarchistic libertarians who positively hate that place and the people associated with it.)

As I recounted in a column last December, “Flake moved to confirm as attorney general Jeff Sessions and, before that, Loretta Lynch. Both are abysmal on civil asset forfeiture, a form of government theft the senator has long decried. He voted in favor of the authorization for use of military force in Iraq, though he later turned against the war. He advocated missile strikes on Syria in September 2013 and again when President Trump lobbed some in April 2017.” His hands are not spotless.

But after a week as ugly as the one America just experienced, there is value in having a sensitive soul near the levers of power. “The U.S. Senate as an institution—we’re coming apart at the seams,” Flake told The Atlantic‘s McKay Coppins. “There’s no currency, no market for reaching across the aisle. It just makes it so difficult.”

Just these last couple of days—the hearing itself, the aftermath of the hearing, watching pundits talk about it on cable TV, seeing the protesters outside, encountering them in the hall. I told Chris [Coons], “Our country’s coming apart on this—and it can’t.” And he felt the same.

Cue a million cynics playing their tiny violins, and 10 million partisans finding holes in the Flake-brokered settlement. And yet.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), one of the few senators on the Judiciary Committee to not completely beclown themselves this week, made a persuasive point Friday. It was this: “The question is not if it’s messy—Senator Flake himself said yesterday, this is not a good process, but it’s all we’ve got. The question is, what do you do when it happens, when you’re in a position of power? What do you do when it happens? You may not like how this came in at the last minute—I would have liked to know about it earlier, too, but I didn’t. The question is, what do you do when it happens?”

The Republican position, until Flake intervened, was the one articulated forcefully by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday: Democrats sat on the confidential allegation by Christine Blasey Ford until the last minute, deployed it cynically (and in violation of Ford’s desire for confidentially) only as a last-gasp measure, then used the resulting media storm to delay, delay, and delay some more. “If you vote no,” Graham snarled at his Republican colleagues, “you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.”

This was both persuasive argument and ominous warning. It is damn near impossible to view the two-party divide in America right now and imagine it getting anything but much worse. Might, not right, is the rule of the day. Inconvenient individuals will be like cockroaches on a steamroller. Meanwhile—not a small point, this—a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court hangs in the balance less than 24 hours after searing testimony that made the accuser look more credible and the accused somewhat less so, while also underlining that corroborating evidence was practically non-existent (in part because the committee inexplicably ruled out subpoenaing alleged witness Mark Judge).

So what to do?

Commentators in the temperamental center—Timothy P. Carney, Megan McArdle, Ross Douthat—proposed variations on the same theme: Just investigate a bit longer, clear up some of the more soluble disparities, and schedule a prompt vote. The non-grandstanding Democrats on the committee (basically Klobuchar and Coons) articulated a similar bargain.

But it took a haunted-looking Flake, reportedly operating on zero sleep, normally handsome face puffed up with five extra pounds of frown, to make that reasonable and de-escalatory framework a reality. The libertarian wing of the temperamental center delivered a result that at least temporarily forestalled the worst of American smash-mouth politics.

The resulting FBI investigation is already being circumscribed and contested. The chances of votes being significantly changed look preliminarily small (Flake himself has said that he hopes to vote yes). It’s always a safe bet that each new week of American politics will be worse than the last.

Which means only one thing: Sooner rather than later, voters can get back to hating Jeff Flake. And wishing there were more like him.

Is intellectual property necessary for innovation or just another grant of state privilege? Tom G. Palmer and James V. DeLong debate this question in the latest issue of Reason.

Check out the whole debate at the link below.

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