Tag: hit&run

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told Kentucky farmers and business leaders this week that President Donald Trump’s trade policies could create a “slippery slope” that “can’t be good for our country.”

“I’m not a fan of tariffs, and I am nervous about what appears to be a growing trend in the administration to levy tariffs,” McConnell said Tuesday, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Tariffs on steel and aluminum issued last month by President Donald Trump will do significant damage to a wide range of American industries, from farming to housing to manufacturing, that will have to pay higher prices for those materials. Trump followed those tariffs by calling this week for a 25 percent import tax on some 1,300 Chinese-made goods. If approved by the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative, those tariffs will force American businesses and consumers to pay higher prices for almost everything, including necessities like food and clothing. Reciprocal tariffs imposed by China will hurt American farms and businesses a second time, and Trump has already threatened an additional $100 billion in tariffs as a tit-for-tat to China’s response.

No wonder, then, that McConnell says he is “nervous about getting into trade wars and I hope this doesn’t go too far.”

If only he were in a position to do something about it, right? He could, of course, and there’s several ways Congress could push back against the White House’s protectionist trade policies—but there may not be consensus on what to do, and Republican leaders so far seem unwilling to cross Trump, even as he pursues a course that’s unclear in its aims and risks doing serious damage to the economy.

Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the explicit power “to lay and collect taxes, duties,” and the like. Although the legislative branch has delegated much of its authority over trade and tariffs to the executive branch in the past century, it could take steps in the next few months to restore those original powers and check Trump’s dangerous protectionist impulses. It will have at least one major opportunity to do so, thanks to a June 30 deadline for the reauthorization of one such provision delegating trade power to the White House.

Timing is a factor for other reasons too. Republican lawmakers that could face Trump-backed primary opponents are unlikely to want to break openly with the White House on trade. As spring turns to summer and primary season passes, that’s less of a concern.

“Congress will have leverage, but it seems like they’ve been unwilling to use it,” says Dan Ikenson, director of trade policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It has more leverage today than it had a month ago, and that leverage gets stronger as the general election approaches.”

The first round of tariffs—the ones issued in early March and applying to imported steel and aluminum from a variety of orgins—were imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives the president more or less carte blanche to impose tariffs on national security grounds. Officially, the Trump administration says that American weapons of war depend on steel and aluminum supplies, so domestic producers must be protected from international supplies that could be cut-off in the event of a conflict.

That’s a weak rationale for a whole slew of reasons, but it exists, and under Section 232, that’s enough. Congress could threaten to revoke Section 232 or modify it through new legislation. There is precedent for this—Congress overturned Jimmy Carter’s national security restrictions on oil imports in 1980—but it would veto-proof majority and is therefore unlikely to happen.

The newer tariffs, issued by Trump last week and applying to a wide range of Chinese-made products, are a far easier target for Congress if lawmakers want to get serious about preventing a trade war.

The second round of tariffs were issued under Section 302 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the White House to initiate an investigation into supposedly unfair trade practices by another nation and to respond with tariffs if they are deemed appropriate. The United States has not used Section 302 since joining the World Trade Organization in 1995, because membership in the WTO requires that member states bring trade disputes before the organization rather than acting on their own.

Trump doesn’t seem to care that his tariffs will flout WTO rules, but the breadth of tariffs issued last week could trigger political pushback from lawmakers. Unlike tariffs that narrowly target steel and aluminum—politically favored industries that lawmakers running for reelection want to appear friendly towards—the political ramifications of new tariffs on biscuit ovens, airplane parts, sewing machines, brewery equipment, and hundred of other items could swing the other direction, particularly since red states figure to bear the brunt of the tariff impact.

If Congress decided it wants to put the brakes on Trump, the June 30 deadline to reauthorize the president’s Trade Promotion Authority will be crucial. Under TPA, the White House is authorized to fast-track trade deals with other countries by negotiating them without congressional interference. Congress pledges to hold a straight up-or-down vote on the final product, essentially promising that it won’t try to alter or undermine whatever deal the president makes.

Congress granted TPA to President Barack Obama in 2015, and the authority remains in place for six years—but there’s a catch. After three years, Congress can exercise an option to revoke that authority. While revoking Trump’s TPA would not directly block tariffs, it would make it harder for the president to make unilateral trade deals with other countries—something Trump has clearly, and repeatedly, said he wants to do—and therefore could be used as a pressure point against the administration.

A more dramatic option would be to pass Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) Global Trade Accountability Act, which would require congressional approval before tariffs could go into effect. The bill would also give Congress the ultimate authority on whether to withdraw from other trade agreements including NAFTA and the WTO, says Clark Packard, trade policy counsel for the R Street Institute, but would not apply to the steel and aluminum tariffs issued under Section 232.

Even though Trump’s tariffs could do significant damage to the American economy and cause the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, Congress may be reluctant to step in because members believe there is something to be gained from Trump sparring with China.

Indeed, even as he was scolding the White House for triggering a trade war that will hurt farmers, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) this week defended the idea of imposing tariffs as a way of combating China’s history of abusing trade rules and international norms. “The United States should take action to defend its interests when any foreign nation isn’t playing by the rules or refuses to police itself,” said Grassley. “But farmers and ranchers shouldn’t be expected to bear the brunt of retaliation for the entire country.”

Tough trade talk could be a “healthy shock to the global trading system” that makes China shape up and stop abusing the system for its own economic advantage, says Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Behind all the bluster, this may be the goal that the Trump administration is pursuing. But Trump has so far been unclear about what it is he hopes to achieve—and while his inattention to policy details have has caused problems in the past, the stakes have never been as high as they are now. That’s exactly why Congress should be pressing the White House to limit tariffs, or at the very least to make it clear what terms they would accept from China to deescalate the pending trade war.

“Other than broad complaints about a series of longstanding Chinese practices such as intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers, the administration has not issued any clear demands,” says Alden. “It is vital that Trump officials communicate their goals and intentions clearly and provide a path to a resolution. Otherwise, there is a serious danger that events could spiral out of control.”

Even with clear goals and intentions, Trump’s tariffs chart a dangerous course for the economy. Congressional action on trade does not have to constitute a direct confrontation with the White House, but if Trump is going to lead the country down this reckless path, it is imperative for congressional leaders like McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to exert whatever power than can to limit the damage. Even if there is not consensus on what to do—and there very well may not be a majority in either chamber willing to fight the White House on trade—it is important to make the effort.

Certainly, it requires more than having the most powerful man in the Senate wringing his hands together and muttering about how “nervous” a trade war makes him feel.

The tariffs proposed by Trump already cover about $100 billion out of a $650 billion annual trade relationship. More retaliation from China and another $100 billion in American-imposed tariffs, as Trump suggested this week, would surely represent a point of no return.

“That would kill both economies,” says Ikenson. “It would kill the global economy. It really would be bad news.”

Backpage.com, a site that has long been fighting with federal and state governments over online sex trafficking advertisements, was seized this afternoon by the Department of Justice.

Details are not available as yet. The Department of Justice is planning a press conference at 6 p.m. Eastern. Visitors to the site are greeted with this image:

Elizabeth Nolan Brown has been warning that the newly passed so-called “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (FOSTA) that turned online sex trafficking adds a federal crime would destroy some of the legal liability protections sites had over the content posted by third parties.

It’s not clear yet that there’s any relationship between the passage of FOSTA and Backpage’s seizure. But it’s hard to ignore the timing. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, more on Backpage in Reason’s archives here.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is debating whether to rescind Obama-era instructions to discipline fewer minority students. Would she be right to do so?

It’s complicated. Thanks to zero tolerance policies, many schools are too quick to suspend, expel, or arrest kids for less-than-perfect behavior. But the previous administration’s efforts to combat overzealous punishment were clumsy, and some critics argue that they undermined order in classrooms where harsher disciplinary measures might have been warranted.

Advocates for rescinding the guidance made this argument during a closed-to-the-press meeting with the secretary on Wednesday. Among them was Eileen Sofa, whose son was sexually assaulted in school. Sofa’s story, reported by The Weekly Standard, is compelling:

Schools like San Diego’s Lincoln High, which earned its reputation for institutional laxity long before [Obama-era Education Secretary Arne] Duncan’s guidance, only found fresh incentive to avoid documenting and responding to student-on-student abuses when the federal rule took effect four years ago.

Lincoln had been under investigation already last summer when a teenaged boy with special needs followed a more severely impaired, non-verbal classmate into the restroom and raped him. An aide who found the boys together in a bathroom stall drew up a detailed report—but the school classified the assault as a lesser offense, an “obscene act,” which the victim’s mother, Eileen Sofa, believed for more than a year was a far milder indignity than what had really been done to her boy.

It took a devoted teacher of her son’s, Nate Page, to expose the truth. When he learned what had happened, that the rapist was not expelled and the police failed to follow through, “Nate was livid,” says Nicole Stewart, a former Lincoln High vice principal who resigned in protest. “He is the entire reason that [Channel 7 reporter] Wendy Fry and Eileen Sofa know, or knew that anything had happened.”

But past the point of exposing the school district’s inaction and publicizing the case, Page found he couldn’t ignite the outcry Sofa’s son deserved. “He put together teams of people willing to talk about bad practices at Lincoln, specifically talk about the rape case. He had professors, he had doctors, he had lawyers,” Stewart recalls. But with a non-verbal victim and an unwilling school administration, justice eluded them. “Nate was so defeated, he committed suicide in September.”

Other advocates of rescinding the guidance tell dramatic stories of teachers helpless to confront violence in the classroom. Students are hitting teachers and suffering no consequences because schools are afraid the feds will open an investigation, according to The New York Post. The Obama-era policies have been blamed for the mass shooting in Parkland: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) claimed that the guidance “arguably made it easier for schools to not report students to law enforcement than deal with the potential consequences,” the implication being that school authorities did not properly deal with Nikolas Cruz because they were operating under federal constraints. The Broward County school board and the sheriff’s department—run by the blame-dodging Sheriff Scott Israel—had made an agreement to suspend and arrest fewer students.

These examples make the guidance seem incredibly counterproductive. And yet schools probably aren’t any more violence-prone than they were before its implementation. “If you take a step back, what you will find is that the overall rate of violence in schools is declining,” Stephen Brock, a professor at California State University, tells The Atlantic.

The fact that schools are actually very safe is something many conservatives seem to grasp better than many liberals—when the subject is shootings. But when the designated scapegoat is “Obama” rather than “guns,” it’s the right that suddenly frets about an epidemic of violence in schools and it’s the left that’s worried the right’s solution will threaten individual rights, undermine due process, and cause disparate harm.

Speaking of which, it’s well-documented that racial minorities are disciplined at disproportionate rates. A Government Accountability Office study released last month found that “Black students accounted for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but represented about 39 percent of students suspended from school.” That’s a serious problem, since suspended students are more likely to suffer other problems down the road: commit crimes, not attend college, etc.

Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, makes the best case for rescinding the guidance anyway. (Disclaimer: I am a member of the D.C. Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which makes recommendations about what issues the committee should investigate.) In a USA Today op-ed, Heriot writes:

If there was ever an issue best handled locally, it’s school discipline. Teachers and principals know far better than federal bureaucrats whether their students have been misbehaving and what to do about it. No, they’re not perfect. That’s why we elect school boards to keep tabs on them. But they’ll make far fewer mistakes if they’re allowed to use their common sense than if they’re forced to dance to the federal government’s tune.

Even when the edicts of distant bureaucracies are superficially reasonable, by the time they reach the foot soldiers on the ground, they get garbled. If the federal government instructs school districts, “Don’t discipline a student unless it’s appropriate,” they will naturally understand it as “Don’t discipline a student unless you are confident that you can persuade a future federal investigator, whose judgment you have no reason to trust, that it was appropriate.” Administrators therefore require teachers to document in excruciating detail the circumstances of a student’s misbehavior before disciplinary action can be taken. By the time the directive reaches teachers, they hear it as: “Just don’t discipline so many students; it only creates giant hassles.”

Heriot is right: There is no way the federal government can instinctually know what the right number of suspensions is. And while local decision-makers are far from omniscient on these matters, they are more likely to understand what kind of disciplinary regime a certain school needs. Many of the most onerous zero tolerance policies originated at the federal level before trickling down to school districts. The Gun-Free Schools Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, prompted most states to swiftly establish mandatory expulsion policies for students who brought weapons to school. Within a few years, large majorities of schools had zero tolerance policies—not just for weapons, but for alcohol and tobacco possession as well.

The federal government is also largely responsible for the massive increase in the number of discipline enforcers in schools: The feds have spent billions of dollars subsidizing the hiring of school resource officers. Such cops can now be found in two-thirds of the country’s public middle schools and high schools. (For a more detailed look at how federal policy shaped the zero tolerance movement, read my article from the March 2017 issue of Reason, co-authored with Tyler Koteskey.)

It’s possible that schools would have marched lockstep in this direction on their own, but no one can deny that the feds played an important role in the overdiscipline problem. At best, the Obama-era guidance could be seen as an off-target attempt to fix earlier mistakes. A better corrective would have been to cancel the relevant grant programs and repeal laws that precipitated this crisis, though this approach would have required congressional cooperation, and the Obama administration often preferred to govern by executive fiat.

Given the reality of the current situation, it’s possible that repealing the guidance and letting schools address disciplinary issues as they see fit is the correct course of action. It’s also possible that this will unleash a wave of absurd and unnecessary suspensions, and that minority students will be the principal victims.

Since every school is different—and every child has different needs—it should be doubtful that any federally designed policy would strike the right balance. Probably the best thing DeVos could do would be to promote local school choice initiatives, which provide more education options while increasing the likelihood that each family finds the right program for their kid. And of course she can push to rescind the federal programs that fueled the zero-tolerance era in the first place.

Laura Ebke of Nebraska is the Libertarian Party’s only sitting state senator. A bill she introduced to reform her state’s occupational licensing regime got an enthusiastic and lengthy write-up this week in The Wall Street Journal (without, alas, naming the senator or her party affiliation).

The Occupational Board Reform Act (L.B. 299) would change the incentive structure and process by which Nebraska decides the most rational and least restrictive way to ensure consumer safety without unduly harming people’s ability to work.

The state has been interested in “chipping away at occupational licenses one by one” for a while, Ebke said in a phone interview yesterday. (For example, last year the state eliminated licensing requirements for hair braiders.) Then last year she “was approached by the Institute for Justice to see if I would be interested in carrying some model legislation they had put together, and I was very interested.”

One of the more colorful case studies, described in the Journal story, involves massaging horses, which leaves you open in Nebraska to a possible four years in jail and a $35,000 fine if you do it unlicensed. That issue, Ebke says, has been “under control of the veterinarians medical licensure,” who had lobbying power. Ebke saw it as a teachable moment: “Does it make sense,” she asked her colleagues, “to demand a license to give a rubdown to a 1,200-pound creature?”

The final vote on the measure is expected next week, and Ebke is confident it will make it to the governor’s desk and be signed. One of her main allies in the process is a Nebraska-based free market think tank, the Platte Institute, founded by the sitting governor Pete Ricketts.

A Platte Institute study found that “Many of Nebraska’s licensing requirements are more burdensome than its neighboring states and the rest of the country, making it harder to create many higher-wage jobs in Nebraska. Nearly 25 percent of the jobs in Nebraska require a government license. Even if a particular worker does not need government permission to do their job, many of the services they depend on in their daily life may be more expensive or less accessible because of Nebraska’s unnecessary barriers for workers and entrepreneurs.”

Being a Libertarian, Ebke says, has likely helped the bill’s so-far positive prospects. “Most of the co-sponsors are Republicans,” she says, but “the fact that I’m not a Republican allows some of the more liberal members of the body to come and talk to me.” She says she’s found such members willing to work on getting the bill into a shape that they can support, “and their willingness to do so speaks to the fact that a lot of times I have been with them” on issues where Republicans were not.

Ebke is also proud that the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has been an enthusiastic proponent of the bill, largely because of how it deals with how difficult current occupational licensing laws can make it for those with criminal records to find meaningful work.

The law as written would allow someone with a criminal record to “petition the appropriate occupational board at any time, including prior to obtaining required education or paying any fee, for a determination as to whether the individual’s criminal history would disqualify the individual from obtaining an occupational license.” Right now many Nebraskans with a record waste time and money seeking a certification they will never get.

Also under the bill,

an individual’s criminal history would disqualify the individual only if: (a) The individual has a felony conviction; (b) The felony conviction is expressly listed as a disqualifying offense in the statutes governing occupational licensure by the occupational board; and (c) The occupational board concludes that the state has an important interest in protecting public safety that is superior to the individual’s right to pursue an occupation. The occupational board may come to this conclusion only if it determines, by clear and convincing evidence at the time of the petition, that (i) the specific offense for which the individual was convicted is substantially related to the state’s interest, (ii) based on the nature of the specific offense for which the 1individual was convicted and the individual’s circumstances at the time of the petition, the individual is more likely to re-offend by virtue of having the license than if the individual did not have the license, and (iii) another offense by the individual will cause greater harm than it would if the individual did not have the license.

As the Journal notes, “Recidivism rates are lower in states where former criminals can find gainful employment.”

Six pages of Ebke’s bill are spent listing 172 distinct occupations regulated by its existing occupational regulations, which as the Journal notes includes “63 lower-income occupations that are the labor force entryway for the poor and least skilled.” Ebke’s bill would, the paper reports, allow “the state [to] use alternatives like periodic inspections to guarantee clean and safe hair salons and barber shops. That would spare cosmetologists and barbers some 16 months of training” and in general allow “Legislative committees [to] review 20% of existing licensing requirements annually [and] consider whether a license is really necessary, whether the training requirements are overly burdensome, and whether the certification is abused to exclude competition.”

Since Nebraska state senators are term-limited after eight years, Ebke believes the 20 percent review every year will help “new members realize what their committees have jurisdiction over.” She has found that many senators don’t even know what legacy regulations still clog the state’s laws “until some special interest comes to you.”

Now they’ll be required to rethink the sense of occupational regulations more regularly. “It’s really a process bill, but it has the potential to require legislators to look more objectively at all the licenses in our state”—and would require them to start regulating occupations in the least restrictive way, with full licensing a last resort. She hoped initially to get legislators and their staffs entirely insulated from the process, via a separate office of occupational licensing review, but “the money wasn’t there to create a new office.”

In arguing for the bill, Ebke has found that some citizens are “very protectionist and want to protect their [existing] licenses,” but many Nebraskans are excited for a chance to do meaningful productive work without jumping through unnecessary and expensive hoops.

Two parts of the upcoming 2020 federal Census have gotten a lot of people upset. First, it will ask people if they’re U.S. citizens. Second, it will not ask people if they’re gay, bisexual, or transgender.

In all likelihood, there’s an overlap: People upset about one are upset about the other, despite the contradiction. That’s because they care about the Census to the extent that the answers to the questions can be used to control and influence government. Matt Welch has noted correctly that asking about citizenship is a deliberate effort to undercount illegal immigrants in order to alter the Congressional district map landscape in ways that will be more friendly to Republicans. Democrats and progressives are definitely not happy about that.

For the LGBT question, the exact opposite is happening: People who want a head count of gays and transgender people believe the data will then be valuable in influencing federal policies and spending on projects that benefit LGBT people—or, more accurately, to benefit certain LGBT organizations.

I blogged about this when the outrage first hit a year ago, but now there’s a new round of complaints (much of it from people not checking the dates on the stories they’re linking to) and some insultingly bad headlines. The Daily Beast claims “Gay and Single? Bisexual? Transgender? The 2020 Census Still Erases You.” No. It doesn’t. The census is still counting you. It’s just not asking your sexual orientation, unless you’re in a same-sex relationship. Your body will still be used to determine how many seats your state gets in Congress.

I remember back in the day when it was religious conservatives who wanted to treat gay people as though we were nothing more that our sex lives. What the hell happened here?

It’s about the money. Here’s how NPR is covering the lack of LGBT questions:

“If this is about how resources are spent or given to communities and we are talking about the LGBTQ community, not everyone is married or in a relationship,” says Ronald Lewis, an out gay man who is currently single.

So I guess I won’t be getting some check from the feds for being a single gay man. But that was never going to happen anyway. We’re talking about lobbying for federal funding for particular projects. This is about pork-barrel spending.

Here’s a paragraph in that same NPR piece that’s worth picking apart:

But the questionnaire won’t have a space for him and other LGBT people who are not living with a spouse or unmarried partner to indicate their sexual orientation. That means for now, there are no reliable national data about how many LGBT people live in the U.S. that can inform public policy.

No, that’s just simply not true. First, there is a lot of scientific polling—extensive amounts of polling—about LGBT populations across the United States. Some of it is even by the federal government, via the National Health Interview Survey. You can look at some of the data on this Wikipedia page.

To the extent that those data are not reliable, they’re not going to be any more reliable than data gathered by the U.S. Census. That’s for the exact same reason that the data the Census collects on citizenship is sketchy: It’s only as accurate as people’s responses. Many people are not comfortable with telling the government their sexual orientations and will see it as a breach of their privacy.

But this isn’t about getting an accurate count. It’s about using data to push for policies or funding for groups who claim to represent LGBT people, regardless of whether they actually do.

Count this gay dude out. I’m not going to have my body used to lobby for spending that I probably don’t agree with. If they ever add sexual orientation questions to the Census, I won’t be answering. The purpose of the Census is to determine congressional representation. Beyond that, feel free to “erase” me from whatever other spending plans you have in mind.

Television Critic Glenn Garvin dives into new BBC America action comedy Killing Eve and a documentary on the deadly Waco siege on the Smithsonian Channel:

Eve Polastri works for MI-5, the British equivalent of the FBI, but her job—personal assistant to a mid-level bureaucrat in charge of security for visiting dignitaries—is mundane and her life terrifyingly boring. Literally: She awakes screaming from a dream that she’s fallen asleep on both of her arms at once. She amuses herself by reading case files on female killers and plotting ways to get murder her husband without getting caught.

But then, this cockeyed line of feminist thinking leads to her accidental involvement in the investigation of an apparent political murder. (Thinking aloud in front of a boss, Eve correctly guesses that the killer must be a woman.) And now she finds herself living out both sides of her fantasy in a kill-or-be-killed pursuit of a gorgeous but quite insane Russian assassin named Villanelle in BBC America’s comic suspense thriller, Killing Eve.

View this article.

If Jesus was right about how ye shall know them by their fruits, then we might have a good test case for gleaning what the journalism establishment (such as a thing exists) considers an important threat to a free press.

In one corner we have a must-run cookie-cutter anti-“fakc news” promotional video ordered up by the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group to its most-in-the-nation 193 local-TV-news outlets, at a time when the company’s controversial merger with Tribune Co. is being held up by anti-trust regulators at the Justice Department. In the other we have a Sex Trafficking Act passed overwhelmingly by Congress (388-25 in the House, 97-2 in the Senate) despite being vociferously opposed on free speech grounds by the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and reliable civil libertarians such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the latter of whom warned that “Civic organizations protecting their right to free speech could be [ruined] by their more powerful political opponents” and that subsequently there could be “an enormous chilling effect on speech in America.”

So: The act of an individual company possibly flattering its regulator while mandating politically tinged content, versus the act of the federal government knowingly limiting speech in such a way the Justice Department has warned might be unconstitutional, and that has already prompted some prominent websites to self-censor. The choice seems clear to me.

As a stand-in for what the journalism class prioritizes, I’ll use newspaper editorials. Searching both Nexis and Google News on “editorial” and “sex trafficking act” and “Sinclair,” here is what I found over the past couple of months:

* Sex Trafficking Act: 3 newspaper editorials, 2 of them in favor.

* Sinclair Broadcast: 15 newspaper editorials, 14 of them critical of Sinclair, 5 supporting federal government intervention, and exactly 1 criticizing Sinclair while telling the feds to back off.

Let’s reward the good behavior first. Here is an Orange County Register editorial concluding that the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) is “well-meaning” but “wrong.” Sample:

FOSTA’s penalties not only use the precautionary principle to justify a sweeping suppression of consensual communication, they also force private online companies like Craigslist to unwillingly shoehorn the precautionary principle into their business model.

On top of these flaws, FOSTA commits one more sin. Now that websites face a one-strike-you’re-out law on precautionary grounds, the door is open to more laws doing the same. In a free society, that’s impermissible. FOSTA is a big mistake.

That’s it! There’s your one American newspaper editorial criticizing a probably unconstitutional clampdown on free speech. By contrast, this Kansas City Star mastheader does not even mention that a free-speech objection exists, instead exulting in the “bipartisan win,” and how “this fight was worth it”:

Ever since the wildly lucrative world of sex trafficking moved from the streets to the internet, market leaders in commercial sex advertising like Backpage have hidden behind an antiquated section of the Communications Decency Act. The act provided Backpage with what [Sen. Claire] McCaskill called “complete and total immunity from being held accountable for their bad behavior.”

As for the Sinclair dogpile, I previously pointed out the Boston Globe‘s remarkably shortsighted conclusion that political slant itself is one good reason for the federal government to block the company’s expansion. But don’t sleep on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “In reality, the eerily Orwellian video, which quickly went viral, makes the case against the Sinclair-Tribune deal,” the paper wrote. “Trump told a verified average of 5.6 public lies per day in his first year in office. Yet Sinclair avoids questioning his veracity. Talk about dangerous for democracy.” Talk about non-hyperlinked assertions!

Sinclair is already “too big” (The Riverdale Press), its proposed merger is “chilling to contemplate” (Chicago Daily Herald) and downright “dangerous” (Modesto Bee), “not just because it’s anti-competitive but because it represents a danger to ethical broadcast journalism.”

Demonstrating an apparently rare ability to separate journalistic revulsion from a will to government power was the Richmond Times Dispatch, in an editorial headlined “The Sinclair story just got worse, thanks to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin.” Excerpt:

Sinclair’s mistake was to turn a platitude into creepy Orwellian propaganda.

But some things are worse than creepy Orwellian propaganda. Actual Orwellian behavior by government officials, for instance.

The other day Sen. Dick Durbin sent a letter to Sinclair. “I’m calling on Sinclair to explain itself,” Durbin tweeted. Durbin is upset that Sinclair told Durbin’s staff it doesn’t dictate local content. In other words, Sinclair lied. (Members of Congress would never do such a thing themselves, right?) Durbin instructs Sinclair to “clarify” its policies concerning both content and personnel.

Stop right there. […]

We’re no fans of Sinclair’s message or its methods. But principles of press freedom matter more than petty spats. So we hope Sinclair will tell Durbin to go jump in a lake. We’d be glad to give him directions.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

As ever, I don’t expect my former colleagues at newspaper editorial boards to share my idiosyncratic policy ideas. But to the extent that they hold themselves up to be passionate and alert defenders of free speech—and they really, really do—it would be considerably more convincing if they could muster interest in, let alone objection to, a piece of legislation that such reliable First Amendment warriors as the Electronic Frontier Foundation characterize as “an unprecedented push towards Internet censorship,” rather than erupt in predictable spasms against a conservative media company acting political.

Though my parents were hardly gun nuts, our family did keep on hand an old semi-automatic .22 rifle with a fixed 14-round capacity magazine.

A magazine that size added convenience to the two or three days a year that we would go target shooting, as it reduced the number of times one would have to pause and reload—a laborious process that required rounds to be fed individually into the rifle’s tubular magazine.

What was a convenient target shooter for us is a now deadly assault weapon in Deerfield, Illinois.

This Monday, the Village of Deerfield—a suburban town some 30 miles north of Chicago—passed a sweeping ban on any semi-automatic weapons that come with a fixed magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds. Also banned are semi-automatic rifles that both accept “high capacity magazines” and feature an adjustable stock, muzzle brake, or pistol grip.

The bill specifically bans AR-15s and a number of pistols and shotguns. After June 13, anyone caught within the town limits with one of these prohibited weapons will face up to $1,000 in daily fines per violation until said violation is corrected.

From USA Today to CNN, most media reports on the bill describe it as an “assault weapon” ban, which is perhaps understandable given that is how the authors themselves describe it. Few bother to note the incredibly common weapons that Deerfield officials have chosen to lump into this category. Weapons like my parents’ rifle.

The sweeping nature of the law is matched by the sweeping social change the bill’s authors expect it to engender. The legislation’s text confidently declares it “may increase the public’s sense of safety by effecting a cultural change which communicates the normative value that assault weapons should have no role or purpose in civil society.”

Its authors likewise assert that the weapons they ban are “not reasonably necessary to protect an individual’s right of self-defense.”

A lot of the weapons that this ordinance would affect are not so much unnecessary for defense purposes as wholly inadequate for them. That includes my family’s old rifle, which thanks to the small rounds it fired and the time it took to load would be pretty useless in scaring off home invaders.

Those same things that make the rifle a poor tool for defense also make it a poor tool for offense. Prohibiting it is both petty and overreaching.

Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA), made this point in response to the Deerfield ban, stating that “enacting bad public policy for the sake of ‘doing something’ is not the answer. Lawful citizens should not be forced to pay penance for the misdeeds of others.”

The ISRA, in conjunction with the Second Amendment Foundation, filed a lawsuit against Deerfield yesterday, seeking to overturn its “assault weapons ban” as unconstitutional.

Should they succeed, the safety of Deerfield residents will not be diminished. But a few more families will be able to own an infrequently used sporting device without risking thousands of dollars in fines.

The old-fashioned belief that free expression is the best way to buttress political freedom, further the quest for truth, and sharpen civic and personal mental acuity is being increasingly abandoned, from thought-leader popular magazines to prominent daily newspaper beat reporters.

Such speech skeptics believe—and they are not wrong!—that free expression can harm either specific people or the culture at large, and thus deserves to be squashed in some circumstances. That idea animates a fascinating though infuriating new book that tells the story of a publication forced to recant, then be utterly financially ruined, for publishing something true: Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, and the Anatomy of Intrigue (Portfolio Penguin) by marketing guru Ryan Holiday.

This is not a First Amendment story, but it is a story about the power of U.S. government to suppress speech via its tort system. The web publication Gawker was destroyed via lawsuit for invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress on wrestler Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea). Gawker published something true—a 1:41 portion of a video of Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife (at said friend’s invitation) that Hogan did not know was being shot—and he sued over it.

A Florida court in March 2016 granted Hogan $140 million in compensatory and punitive damages against the publication, its publisher, and one of its writers. (While Gawker could not afford to appeal because a quirk of Florida law requires putting up a bond for the full award pending appeal, the parties eventually settled for smaller amounts that still annihilated Gawker.)

A detail not made public until after Hogan’s paralyzing bodyslam to Gawker: Hogan’s suit was financed by controversial tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He had his reasons, as Holiday explains via long exclusive interviews with the often press-shy Thiel; mostly, he was mad Gawker outed him as gay in 2007. Thiel was, Holiday concluded from his interviews, consumed with “anger at the unfairness of it…the needless impoliteness of it.” Thiel was, says Holiday, a man who “venerated privacy” and considered Gawker literal terrorists for regularly publishing facts about famous (and sometimes not famous) people that those people were embarrassed by.

Was Thiel’s righteous anger sincere? It seems unlikely, given that Palantir, a company Thiel founded, happily sells its data-mining services to help the government deport people; or to harass short-term apartment renters; or help cities do “predictive policing.”

Holiday’s central polemical point doesn’t rely on Thiel’s sincerity; it is merely that Gawker‘s publishing the video shamed and hurt Hogan. “No civil society would allow something like this to go unpunished,” Holiday concludes.

Was Hogan harmed? Most humans with a hint of empathy would agree he was. Does that settle it? No. Many harms we permit to go legally unpunished. Going into competition with someone’s business can harm them. Choosing to start, or leave, a romantic partnership can harm both prospective partners and third parties. Doing something with your own property that violates expectations built around them, even as simple as enjoying it aesthetically, can harm. Deciding to go to the same beach as someone else can harm their enjoyment of that beach. As foes of “political correctness” (which Thiel considers himself) recognize, speaking certain truths or sincerely held opinions related to gender roles or politics, can, in the perception of those who hear them, harm. But a post-Enlightenment westerner should not be quick to think the harm of “violating privacy” should equal “sued out of existence.”

It’s conceptually untenable to claim a fact (even a fact like “what it looked like while you had sex with a friend’s wife”) belongs to you because it is about you. Once it is knowledge in someone’s mind, or a video in someone else’s possession, enforcing such a “right” involves controlling what other people do with their mind, or their property.

A famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy,” by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren, launched serious consideration of privacy as worthy of legal protection. The authors rejected the libertarian premise that my right to free speech trumps your right to not be spoken of. Their influential article seems designed to be entered as evidence in the Hogan/Gawker trial, with its complaints that “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade…To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread.” Brandeis and Warren thought it could be fine to shut up or punish the press to defend “the more general right of the individual to be let alone.”

Using force of law, criminal or tort, to punish expression (always a core element of Western liberty) means the law is not respecting the speaker or publisher’s “right…to be let alone.” Brandeis and Warren do recognize the distinction between punishment for expressing truly private facts and those of “general or public interest.” Brandeis and Warren’s instincts match an average Americans’ more than they do the average free speech absolutist, but that’s why restrictions on expression were supposed to be taken off the table of democracy via the Bill of Rights. (To argue in the alternative like a good lawyer, even if you do believe that the emotional harm of exposing a private fact deserves legal punishment, perhaps some sense of proportionality should be involved such that driving a thriving journalism enterprise out of business should not be the result.)

Even Brandeis, in his 1927 Supreme Court Whitney v. California concurrence, recognized that our Founding Fathers “valued liberty both as an end, and as a means…Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech….To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one.”

Brandeis was able to square his belief in punishing “privacy-violating” speech with that bold paean to the glories and necessities of free speech by believing in a sharp, meaningful line between utterances of public and political relevance and sheer privacy-violating trash. But, as Holiday himself relates, the destruction of Gawker shut up not just pure prurient delight in Hogan’s private sexual acts but also lots of journalism of more obvious public importance, including exposing cults, corrupt politicians, and abusive celebrities, stories Holiday admits “the rest of the media would come to seem embarrassingly late on reporting.”

The Supreme Court granted in the 2001 decision Bartnicki v. Vopper that a radio commentator should not be legally punished for broadcasting the contents of an illegally intercepted phone conversation (which involved labor unions and a teachers strike and was seen as unambiguously in the public interest). In his opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens admitted that “As a general matter, state action to punish the publication of truthful information seldom can satisfy constitutional standards” and noted “this Court’s repeated refusal to answer categorically whether truthful publication may ever be punished consistent with the First Amendment.”

But really, a nation with the First Amendment and the philosophical base from which it arose should not find that question hard to answer. Similarly, the power of the state to enforce tort decisions that destroy news publications might also be rethought. Some free speech fans see the principle in the Gawker verdict as so limited—you can’t publish a sex tape without permission, big whoop!—that it’s not worth fretting over. But that’s just the specifics of this case. The principle at issue is whether six people carefully picked by clever lawyers to destroy journalists should be able to do so.

Holiday sloughs over the fact that numerous courts on the way to Hogan’s jury victory in Florida saw his case as undeserving. Federal District Judge James D. Whittemore for instance, decided that Gawker‘s actions were “in conjunction with the news reporting function.”

Gawker founder Nick Denton, Holiday’s villain, said in deposition in the case: “I believe in total freedom and informational transparency…I’m an extremist when it comes to that. That’s why I love the U.S. I love the presumption that expression is free and I want to make fullest use of that liberty that the internet provides.” That very free-speech fanaticism, Holiday relates, was key to helping the Florida jurors wonder “what planet do [the Gawker] people come from?” and decreased any sympathy they might have for them.

Because Denton angered Thiel and Hogan, by expressing facts about them they did not want expressed, an entire journalistic empire was murdered. This should not be how America works; the only way to ensure that the whims of judges or juries don’t choose what is or isn’t legitimate public business (with the literal fate of publications in the balance) is to recognize that even through the tort system, speaking the truth should not leave you open to legal destruction. That a mass market book can uncomplicatedly think the opposite is a sad sign about the cultural state of free expression.

There’s not much good news for those with six months to live, but what if you could plan for your last moments to happen on a tropical island paradise?

You can. Yesterday Hawaii’s governor signed a bill allowing for medically assisted suicide in the Aloha State. When the law takes effect next year, Hawaii will join five other states—California, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, and Washington—and the District of Columbia in allowing terminally ill people to request and receive life-ending medication.

Mind you, people can’t just fly into Hawaii, buy some pills, plop down on a beach, and end it all while watching the sun set over crystal blue waters. First of all, you have to establish yourself as a resident of the state. Then you must be diagnosed with a terminal disease that will kill you within six months. Then you must make two oral requests (20 days apart) and one written request (with witness signatures) for a prescription for life-ending medication. And you have to prove you’re of sound mind. So don’t expect a rush of suicide tourism to Hawaii.

It’s good news whenever a state formally gives permission to treat people as though they own their bodies and can decide when to end their own suffering.

Assisted suicide is one of those issues—like marijuana legalization—where government policy has lagged significantly behind public polling. Surveys show that nearly three out of four Americans approve allowing terminally ill patients to end their own lives. Yet as Governing notes, New York’s Supreme Court recently upheld a ban on assisted suicide, while 27 other state-level efforts just last year failed even to make it to a vote by lawmakers. In three of the five states where assisted suicide is legal, it took ballot initiatives from the citizens to force the state’s hand.

So the struggles continue. Below, ReasonTV delved into a fight to bring assisted suicide to Montana back in 2013. Technically Montana is a sixth state that allows medically assisted suicide, but that’s due to a state Supreme Court ruling and not an affirmative law. There have been efforts in Montana both to formally permit medically assisted suicide and to ban it entirely: