Tag: hit&run

Our national debt is $20.5 trillion and heading to $30 trillion by 2030. You’d think that this would be a wake-up call for Republicans, who control all three branches of government, to finally take spending seriously. Instead, they want to get rid of the spending caps meant to constrain lawmakers’ uncontrollable appetite to spend.

The spending caps were implemented as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. The deal itself was the result of a vigorous debt ceiling battle between those who wanted the unconditional ability to raise the debt limit and those who called for fiscal discipline going forward in exchange for additional debt at the time. In the end, the pro-debt people got their increase in the authority of the federal government to borrow even more money, and the pro-fiscal restraint ones got spending caps. Though the caps weren’t strict enough (they mostly reduced the growth of additional spending, as opposed to imposing actual cuts), they turned out to be the most fiscally responsible policy in decades.

Now, you may say that being the most successful at restraining spending isn’t that impressive when there haven’t been many, if any, real attempts to control spending. Indeed, the Republicans have, time and time again, proved that when they’re in power, they like to spend just as much as Democrats do, writes Veronique de Rugy in her latest column for Reason.

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When Ballou High School, once one of Washington D.C.’s worst performing public schools, announced that all of its 2017 senior class graduated with college acceptance letters, the praise was effusive.

Both NPR and the Washington Post ran stories on the miracle school, praising its miraculous feat of boosting its graduation rate from 57 to 100 percent in a single school year.

Thanks to a joint investigation by NPR and local public broadcaster WAMU we know the miracle was cheating. According to the WAMU story Wednesday, many of the students Ballou graduated had missed so many classes they should have been ineligible for their diplomas.

D.C. Public School policy states students who miss more than 30 days of a course automatically fail that course. Records compiled by WAMU showed 141 graduating seniors had at least 30 days of unexcused absences and 86 had at least 60 unexcused absences. Roughly 20 percent of the graduating class was absent 90 or more times, or more absent than in attendance.

Ballou teachers reported students with woefully inadequate academic skills. Only 9 percent of Ballou students passed D.C.’s standardized test for English last year, and none passed the standardized math test.

“I’ve never seen kids in the 12th grade that couldn’t read and write,” Brain Butcher, a former Ballou History teacher, told WAMU.

Teachers acknowledged to WAMU the Ballou administration brought incredible pressure on teachers to pass students. This included threatening teachers with poor performance reviews should they fail students or encouraging them to give students grades of 50 percent on work that was never turned in.

In initial interviews with WAMU, Jane Spence, chief of secondary schools for the district, downplayed the chronic absences, saying, “we also know that students learn material in lots of different ways. So we’ve started to recognize that students can have mastered material even if they’re not sitting in a physical space.”

Public officials haven’t been as forgiving. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a press conference Wednesday the district was going to “thoroughly review all policies related to attendance, graduation, and credit recovery.”

One would hope so. Ballou High School received some $12.7 million in taxpayer funds in Fiscal Year 2017 for its annual budget.

What the WAMU investigation makes clear, however, is that much of that money is spent on juking stats, a disservice to taxpayers and to students actively incentivized to become worse students with no consequence for their failure.

“If I knew I could skip the whole semester and still pass, why would I try,” Morgan Williams, a former health and physical education teacher at Ballou, asked. “They’re not prepared to succeed.”

“The libertarians at Reason magazine have a fine summation of why the wall won’t work. If only Mr. Trump would read it,” sighed The New York Times in an unsigned editorial this spring. The editorial board was urging the president (and Times readers) to check out Reason‘s cover story containing the “legal, practical, economic, and moral case against Trump’s border barrier.”

Not so long ago, it would have been a complete shock to find The New York Times sending anyone to check out Reason. But nowadays it’s almost normal, thanks to a growing acknowledgment that libertarian voices are sounding pretty good against the stale cacophony of the partisan debate—and Reason staffers’ overall badassery. (Which you can support with your generous webathon donations!)

Why look! Just today the Times ran this barn burner from Associate Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the fall of Matt Lauer:

We’re rightfully concerned about how the internet gives corporations more opportunities to exert power over consumers, but we talk far less about the flip side: We have more power over companies now, too. For better or worse, we’ve all become remarkably effective at mobilizing it to our own causes.

In contrast, look at Washington. If either Representative John Conyers Jr. or Senator Al Franken were in today’s corporate world, they’d be long gone. And just imagine if Roy Moore was a candidate for a C-suite job this month. He’d have no shot.

Instead, at least so far, these politicians have been protected, and whatever happens to them, it’s clear that the political system is structured to insulate men like them from the consequences of their actions and keep their accusers quiet….

As we observe and adjust to the sociosexual storm we’re all in, let’s appreciate the powers and paradigms making it possible: feminism, but also free markets.

Earlier this month, I argued in the Sunday Review that our terrible tax system is the root of our political dysfunction:

People hate taxes because they hate to be pushed around. But politicians love taxes because it’s their job to push people around, and taxes are a powerful tool to do just that. A “tax return you can fill out on the back of a postcard” — long promised by the Republican Party — would essentially be a decision by the political class to unilaterally disarm itself.

Associate Editor Robby Soave has defended teen texters:

By all means, let’s empower teachers to confront harassment and refer troubled teenagers to mental health professionals. But we don’t need to broadly criminalize teen cruelty to do that. Nor should we continue down the path of pretending that the First Amendment’s ironclad protection of hateful expression is voided whenever someone says (or texts) something that makes us squirm.

Features Editor Peter Suderman has been a repeat guest, generally embroidering on the topic of the GOP’s failures on health care reform: But one of his opinion contributions in particular drew this irate response from one of his neighbors on the page:

On the same day, Peter Suderman calls for Republicans to scrap their current effort and go full libertarian 2/ https://t.co/g2B97sxcDf

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) July 7, 2017

Obviously, it’s not all sunshine and kumbaya when it comes to Reason and the Times. Their editorial line and our diverge in important ways. Not to mention that the Times continues to have trouble classifying us: In the paper’s online left-and-right reaction roundup feature, Reasoners (while always correctly identified as libertarians) have been filed under both right (Jacob Sullum on background checks), and center (me on free speech for fascists).

Reason pulls no punches when it comes to our inky-fingered brothers. You may recall in 2015 when Reason TV’s Jim Epstein took on the Times’ reporting about labor practices in Korean nail salons. (He wound up eliciting a response from the public editor, who agreed with several of Epstein’s criticisms.)

As the Times Magazine famously asked in 2014: “Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the Overton Window certainly does seem to have opened up a bit in our direction.

And it’s surely a good thing if New York Times readers occasionally hear from Reason staffers about the issues of the day, regardless of whether they love us or hate us. A libertarian point of view is too often a rarity on the opinion pages of major newspapers (R.I.P. John Tierney’s op-ed slot) and we’re delighted that editors and readers at the Times are more open to Reason‘s voices than every before.

If you like seeing your pals from Reason in the pages of The New York Times, why not hit us with a bitcoin, baby? (Well, a smidge of a bitcoin anyway.) Or dollars. We definitely also take dollars.

• “Britain’s ambassador to the United States has conveyed the government’s concerns to the White House over Donald Trump’s promotion on Twitter of material created by far right group Britain First.”
• Matt Lauer says that he is “sorry” and that he is “soul searching” after being fired from NBC over allegations of sexual misconduct.
• Roy Moore says a conspiracy of “liberals, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, and socialists” are to blame for the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him.
• A fifth woman has accused Sen. Al Franken of sexual misconduct.
• Senate Republicans remain divided over the GOP tax plan.
• Investigators working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller have reportedly interviewed Jared Kushner about the meeting between Kushner, Michael T. Flynn, and Russian Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak.

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The House Subcommittee on the Environment held a hearing yesterday on what its chairman called “one of the biggest federal overreaches in modern history.”

The Waters of the United States rule, passed by administrative fiat in June 2015, gave the federal government jurisdiction over nearly every river, lake, creek, estuary, pond, swamp, prairie pothole, irrigation ditch, and intermittent rivulet in the U.S.

It’s a regulation that can force a rancher to spend $40,000 trying to get permission to grade a road through a dry wash that carries water only during occasional summer rainstorms—and then give up rather than pour more resources into the fight.

After the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the rule, 33 states and more than 70 private sector organizations immediately challenged it in the courts for being too broad. In October 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a nationwide stay on implementing the regulation.

The purpose of the subcommittee meeting was to hear testimony on the current status of federal water regulations, their impact at the state level and to examine options for improving them going forward.

Chairman Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday, “Not only did the rule’s flimsy definitions and underlying science mean that the agency had the ability to regulate private land, but it also placed significant financial burdens on some of our country’s hardest workers.”

In her opening statement, subcommittee ranking member Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) noted that the 1972 Clean Water Act was adopted because many states had failed to meet their responsibilties to keep their rivers, streams, lakes, and estauries clean, allowing them to become “dirty and polluted”; some waters, she noted, had even “caught on fire.”

She cited a January 2015 EPA study, Connectivity of Streams and Wetlands to Downstream Waters: “The scientific literature unequivocally demonstrates that streams, individually or cumulatively, exert a strong influence on the integrity of downstream waters. All tributary streams, including perennial, intermittent, and ephemeral streams, are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers via channels and associated alluvial deposits where water and other materials are concentrated, mixed, transformed, and transported.” In other words, we all (intermittently) live downstream.

The Clean Water Act instructs the EPA to “prepare or develop comprehensive programs for preventing, reducing, or eliminating the pollution of the navigable waters.” Central to the fight over federal jurisdiction is the definition of just what “navigable waters” are. Under the rules promulgated under the Obama administration, the EPA thinks it’s pretty much any water at all. Most people would interpret the phrase more narrowly.

In February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order instructing the EPA to “consider interpreting the term ‘navigable waters’…in a manner consistent with the opinion of Justice Antonin Scalia in Rapanos v. United States.” Scalia’s opinion noted that before the Clean Water Act passed, the courts had “interpreted the phrase ‘navigable waters of the United States’ in the Act’s predecessor statutes to refer to interstate waters that are ‘navigable in fact’ or readily susceptible of being rendered so.” He then argued that “on its only plausible interpretation, the phrase ‘the waters of the United States’ includes only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water ‘forming geographic features’ that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams[,]…oceans, rivers, [and] lakes.'”

Just how far the feds reached under prior administrations was illustrated in testimony by James Childton Jr.—the Arizona rancher who wanted to grade that road. His environmental consultant warned him that this might require an Army Corps of Engineers permit, and eventually he abandoned the project due to mounting legal and other fees.

“The $40,000 I had spent was entirely the result of the vague and expansive requirements of EPA and the Corps of Engineers; not a penny went to a constructive or productive agricultural need,” Chilton testified. “It was all for a permit writing expert, consultants, an environmental assessment and engineering report, a survey, and attorney fees.”

The dry wash on Chilton’s property is located 270 miles away from the Colorado River, the nearest navigable body of water. After the Rapanos decision came out, Chilton decided to risk building a culvert over another dry wash without seeking a permit. Now he’s worried about possible criminal liability if the Obama-era rule stands.

At yesterday’s hearing, Pacific Legal Foundation senior attorney Reed Hopper offered a reasonable proposal on how to clarify and limit the jurisdiction of the federal government over the waters of the United States. He suggested that the term “waters of the United States” should include only:

1. Those waters that are navigable-in-fact and currently used or susceptible to use in interstate or foreign commerce. These waters include the territorial seas.

2. Permanent, standing or continuously flowing streams, rivers, and lakes directly connected to navigable-in-fact waters described in a.1. Continuously flowing means an uninterrupted flow except in extreme weather conditions such as drought. These waters do not include groundwater or channels through which waters flow intermittently or ephemerally, or channels that provide only periodic drainage, such as from rainfall.

3. Those wetlands that directly abut and are indistinguishable from the waters described in a.1. and a.2. Wetlands are those areas inundated or saturated by surface or groundwater at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions. Wetlands generally include swamps, marshes, and bogs. Wetlands are indistinguishable from the waters described in a.1. and a.2. when the wetlands and waters have merged so there is no clear demarcation between the two.

Basically, if what ordinary folks would identify as a creek or swamp flows into a river on which a boat will float, then the feds would have jurisdiction.

We all live downstream. But how much harm is caused when someone modifies an intermittent stream bank, fills in a small wetland, or digs a drainage ditch are questions better decided by state and local water quality authorities better suited for monitoring and regulating such activities.

Donald Trump will demand money for more border patrol agents in December when Congress takes up the appropriation bill to fund the government. But a new study by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute finds that the agency is riddled with severe discipline and corruption problems. Till it fixes it, Congress shouldn’t even think of acquiescing to Trump’s demand.

He notes:

From 2006 through 2016, Border Patrol agents had the highest termination rate of any large federal law enforcement agency. On the whole, they were 2.2 times as likely to be terminated for discipline or performance as federal law enforcement officers in general and 49 percent more likely than Customs officers, 54 percent more likely than guards at the Bureau of Prisons, six times as likely as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, 7.1 times as likely as Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and 12.9 times as likely as Secret Service agents.

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Under pressure from city officials, Malibu United Methodist Church has ended twice-weekly dinners for the homeless. Officials say the dinners were just attracting more homeless and making the problem worse. Some homeless people say residents were complaining because many of the homeless coming in were black and the city is 90 percent white.

Fans of the Fourth Amendment got a rare treat today at the U.S. Supreme Court. During oral arguments, both the liberal and conservative sides of the bench delivered a thorough pummeling to the government lawyer charged with defending the practice of warrantless cellphone data collection and tracking.

At issue today in Carpenter v. United States was whether the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when it obtained, without a search warrant, 127 days’ worth of historical cellphone records about a suspected armed robber named Timothy Carpenter. Thanks to those records, the government identified the cell towers that handled Carpenter’s calls and then proceeded to trace back his whereabouts during the time periods in which his alleged crimes were committed.

According to Michael R. Dreeben, the deputy solicitor general in President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, this sort of warrantless law enforcement activity is perfectly constitutional.

That stance, however, evidently did not sit well with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who came out swinging against the government lawyer. “Most Americans, I still think, want to avoid Big Brother,” she informed Dreeben. “They want to avoid the concept that government will be able to see and locate you anywhere you are at any point in time.”

Sotomayor then suggested that the government’s position in the case was at odds with the bedrock protections secured by the Fourth Amendment. “The Constitution protects the rights of people to be secure,” she observed. “Isn’t it a fundamental concept, don’t you think, that that would include the government searching for information about your location every second of the day for months and months at a time?”

Shortly after this drubbing by Sotomayor, Dreeben found himself on the receiving end of a verbal thrashing by Justice Neil Gorsuch. “It seems like your whole argument boils down to if we get it from a third-party [such as a cellular service provider] we’re okay, regardless of property interest, regardless of anything else. But how does that fit with the original understanding of the Constitution and writs of assistance?” Gorsuch pressed.

“You know,” he told Dreeben, “John Adams said one of the reasons for the war was the use by the government of third parties to obtain information.” The British forced those third parties “to help as their snitches and snoops.” Why isn’t today’s warrantless cellphone snooping, Gorsuch demanded, “exactly what the framers were concerned about?”

In other words, after charging the government lawyer with ignoring the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment, Justice Gorsuch then all but accused that lawyer of dishonoring the memory of John Adams. I suspect that today will not go down as Dreeben’s all-time favorite day in federal court.

It is never a good idea to try and predict the outcome of a Supreme Court case based on the tenor of the oral arguments. But today’s events do at least demonstrate that the Fourth Amendment still has a few fans left on the High Court.

Related: Use a Cellphone, Void the Fourth Amendment?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Robert Patterson, acting administrator for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), announced new efforts to address opioid overdoses in America today.

In line with his insistent (and mistaken) belief that what America needs to stop deaths is an escalation of the failed drug war, Sessions called for increased funding and staff for the purposes of arresting and prosecuting more people.

Here are the basics of what he and Patterson announced today:

• More than $12 million in grant funding to state and local law enforcement agencies specifically engaged in investigating and arresting those involved in illicit opioid and meth manufacturing.
• A new DEA field division office in Louisville, Kentucky, focusing on drug enforcement in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. This action expands an existing district office, and again, the goal here is investigating and arresting people for drug trafficking.
• A new “opioid coordinator” for each U.S. attorney’s office in the United States to be named by mid-December. The memo from Sessions to these offices makes it clear that the emphasis for this coordinator is to provide legal advice to each attorneys’ office to prosecute more opioid cases and calls for the office to keep track of opioid prosecution statistics from their offices.

Separately, and somewhat mystifyingly, the administration announced that White House adviser Kellyanne Conway will be its lead representative in the opioid fight. Conway was already playing this role, previously saying the administration supports efforts to change the way doctors measure pain to keep drug-seekers from faking it in order to land prescriptions.

Given that the Trump administration has been trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act as an intrusive government intervention into our healthcare, it’s a bit hypocritical to see support for such a paternalistic and authoritarian meddling in people’s personal pain management.

The role prescription opioids have played in the overdose crisis has been misunderstood and exaggerated. As Jacob Sullum noted recently, the number of opioid users who ultimately become addicted any given year is relatively small (one to two percent) and the rate of fatal overdoses among users with prescriptions is even smaller.

Overdose deaths are more likely to come from people combining drugs or combining opioids with alcohol, and these problems are actually exacerbated when you force people with drug addictions into the black market, where they’ll end up taking opioids of unknown origins that may be laced with other drugs. That’s exactly what will happen with an expanded anti-opioid effort.

Alternatively, more and more scientific evidence is showing that medical marijuana is useful for helping people manage chronic pain and avoid addiction to opioids. But Sessions is completely opposed to marijuana use and the Justice Department is considering how or whether they’re going to continue taking a hands-off approach toward state-level legalization.

In short, the Department of Justice’s current approach and attitude toward fighting opioid overdoses is incoherent and bound to make the problems worse. These are “tools” to cause more harm and pain to people’s families, not to ease them.

• President Trump took to Twitter to revive a conspiracy theory about Joe Scarborough killing an intern.
• Garrison Keillor has been fired from Minnesota Public Radio over accusations of sexual harassment.
• “Ralph Nader might have saved the Democratic Party.”
• A computer glitch at American Airlines led to every pilot on staff getting Christmas off.
• Two American men honeymooning in Thailand were arrested after they posted photos to Instagram of themselves showing their butts at a temple.
• Former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher called Jeremy Corbyn a “communist” and called politicians “fucking idiots.”
• Controversy over footage of a naked game of tag filmed at a Nazi gas chamber in Poland that was part of an art installation.

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