Tag: hit&run

Millions of K-12 students across the country believe that mathematics is a sadistic discipline—(I should know, I was one of them)—but a new “social justice” training module aims to persuade teachers that maybe the kids are on to something.

The course was designed by Teach for America and is offered through EdX, according to Campus Reform. It presupposes that math could be made more interesting for students if it was infused with socially relevant themes. That’s not a terrible assumption—maybe young people would like math better if it was being taught in a language they understood. (If Olivia eats 10 pieces of avocado toast every day, how long will it be until she can afford to move out of her parent’s house? That sort of thing.)

But Teach for America thinks that language is “social justice,” and has designed a course that makes some startling claims about math.

“In western mathematics, our ways of knowing include formalized reasoning or proof, decontextualization, and algorithmic thinking, leaving little room for those having non-western mathematical skills and thinking processes,” the training course claims.

It continues:

“Mathematical ethics recognizes that, for centuries, mathematics has been used as a dehumanizing tool… mathematics formulae also differentiate between the classifications of a war or a genocide and have been used to trick indigenous peoples out of land and property.”

Math is such a basic building block that one can cherry-pick hundreds of examples of it being misapplied for nefarious ends—but that’s not really math’s fault. Math lacks—to borrow a social justice term—agency.

I’m open to the idea that math—particularly advanced math—is over-valued as a K-12 subject. There’s a good argument to be made that high schoolers should be taking less Algebra II and reading more Shakespeare. But if we’re going to teach math, I’m not sure we should be teaching that it’s mostly just this bad thing Western countries used to subjugate indigenous peoples, as if that’s the main thing you need to know about math.

With the news last week that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is telling federal prosecutors to ramp the war on drugs right back up, expect to see some resistant states publicizing efforts to do the opposite.

That’s happening in California, where the state’s Senate this week approved SB 180, 22-13. Nicknamed the Repeal Ineffective Sentencing (RISE) Act, the bill eliminates a particular drug-related sentencing enhancement under California law.

When a person is arrested for drug sale or possession for drug sale, the state requires their sentence be enhanced by three years for each previous felony conviction for violating similar laws, even if those previous convictions didn’t result in jail time.

SB 180, sponsored by Sens. Holly Mitchell and Ricardo Lara, both Democrats, would eliminate the mandated sentence enhancements, except for one that applies when the felon gets minors involved in the trade.

Even though the legislation was obviously in the works for some time, supporters of the bill cited Sessions’ recent call for tougher drug sentencing on the federal level as a concern, according to the Los Angeles Times.

And yes, apparently Republicans attempted crime fearmongering to try to stop it, pointing to the case of a cop in Whittier killed by a parolee with a lengthy history of crime. But that gentleman had a history of violent criminal behavior and parole violations. He was not a guy solely in jail over drug dealing. The assumption that the mandatory minimums and sentence enhancements are necessary to go after the violent criminals ignores the lengthy history and data showing these laws often swoop up non-violent, low-level criminals for long prison sentences.

The bill has many activist group co-sponsors, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Drug Policy Alliance. Read the bill here. It is on its way to the Assembly now.

• Israel provided the intelligence that President Trump inadvertently shared with Russian officials, The New York Times reported.
• Much ado about avocado toast.
• Must-read story of the week: for decades, a first-generation immigrant’s family kept a woman in their house who could credibly be described as a slave.
• Sen. Rand Paul feels misled by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
• Union Station accidentally showed a pornographic video on a giant screen.
• I’ll take one in teal, please. (Just kidding!)

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA—White-supremacist provocateur Richard Spencer showed up in my town this past Saturday to roil the debate over the city council’s planned removal of statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Spencer and a few score folks carrying flaming tiki torches gathered in Lee Park, a couple of blocks from my house, where they chanted, “What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced,” and “Russia is our friend.” Of course, Spencer and his associates have, as my Reason colleague Robby Soave points out, the constitutional right to their express their views in public.

Spencer and his supporters are, as usual, in the wrong. The time has come to remove from public land the monuments honoring the men who led the Confederacy to defeat. But doing so doesn’t mean we must then move on to purging slave-owning Founders or even memorials for dead southern soldiers. Looking back requires us to balance the good and the bad, and—on balance—Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate leaders simply don’t make the cut.

Before delving a more deeply into the Confederate memorial controversy, let me set out my Southern bona fides. I was born Texas and reared on my family’s dairy farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia. Our county schools were racially integrated in 1963 when I was in the third grade. My third grade Virginia history book referred to the Civil War as the War Between the States and asserted that that conflict was chiefly over state’s rights. Virginia Generals Lee, Jackson, and Stuart were portrayed as honorable and heroic defenders of Southern rights.

My high school’s team name was the Rebels and our fight song was Dixie. It was not uncommon to see the Stars and Bars being waved in stands during football games. It is, however, worth noting that in a school in which African Americans made up less than 10 percent of the student body, my class elected a black senior as our homecoming queen.

As a student at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, I learned that many parts of the Commonwealth had not actually desegregated until 1971. At UVA I belonged to a literary and debating society whose members drank a great deal and often sang songs commemorating the Lost Cause including The Bonnie Blue Flag and Carry Me Back to Old Virginia, but also Yankee tunes like The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I remained largely unconscious of how offensive Confederate symbols were to some people. That changed when my black roommate Dwayne Morris took a small Stars and Bars out of the coffee mug in which it was standing in our apartment, broke its staff in two and threw it in the trash. Several subsequent long boozy conversations ended any residual sentimental attachment to the Lost Cause that I may have retained from my earlier schooling.

Still, as a young Virginian I never gave much thought to what the Confederate monuments and memorials that appear in nearly every southern town represented. After Reconstruction, Ladies Memorial Associations (LMAs) in the South sprang up to advocate for and oversee the repatriation the remains of Confederate soldiers and to commemorate their deaths by erecting generic war memorial statues. Ultimately, the LMAs joined together for United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1894.

It is, however, plain historical fact, that most of those memorials to the Confederate dead and monuments to Confederate leaders were erected between 1890 and 1925 when Jim Crow racial apartheid was being established in the South. They were meant and served as powerful symbols of resurgent white supremacy. For example, the monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis that was just taken down in New Orleans was dedicated in 1911 during a “Whites Only” ceremony featuring a living Stars and Bars formation that sang Dixie. (The Louisiana House of Representatives just passed a bill that would block the removal of Confederate monuments without a referendum.) In Charlottesville, the Lee statue was erected in 1924 and the Jackson statue in 1921.

Frankly, I don’t much worry about the generic memorial to the Confederate dead. They largely signify sorrow for the men who died in battle, an appropriate sentiment even if they died for a bad cause.

The monuments celebrating specific Confederate leaders are different. Here I turn to a perceptive distinction between monuments and memorials made by philosopher of art Arthur Danto. Cited by University of Richmond philosopher Gary Shapiro in a recent New York Times op-ed, Danto observed, “We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget.” Monuments, Danto wrote, “commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends.” Obviously, monuments have multiple meanings, but the fame of Confederate leaders unavoidably implicates their tireless efforts to maintain millions in slavery.

Rather than remove the monuments to Confederate leaders like Lee, Davis, and Jackson, Shapiro would prefer to “contextualize” them, perhaps by including additional monuments celebrating those who resisted racism and Jim Crow. At the forefront of the crusade against Confederate monuments are many fierce proponents of political correctness. Given how much I loathe the shibboleths and moral grandstanding of contemporary purveyors of political correctness, Shapiro’s suggestion is initially attractive proposal, but ultimately insufficient.

In his insightful 2001 essay, “Old Times There Are Best Forgotten: The Future of Confederate Symbolism in the South,” in the literary journal Callaloo, Emory University English professor Lucas Carpenter notes, “Contemporary Confederate sympathizers want free use of Confederate symbolism because they say it represents their ‘heritage.’ It does, of course, but it is heritage chiefly characterized by its brutal oppression of slaves and their ‘free’ descendants. The most important thing to know about the South is that until recently it was a region ruled by slavery and apartheid.” If you think that Carpenter is overstating his case, contemplate for just a moment what your life would have been like had you been subjugated under Jim Crow.

Carpenter, whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy, argues that “the only circumstances under which a government-funded agency or institution should display Confederate symbols is when their use is required to identify historic sites or otherwise convey historical information.” Think Civil War battlefields, museums, and cemeteries. Carpenter, quite properly, asserts that the private display of Confederate symbols should not be suppressed by the state. After all, that would violate the free speech protections of the First Amendment. In the main, Carpenter, more or less, agrees with me that a Confederate memorial to the Civil War dead on a Southern town square can remain, but that “we must learn to see it as a reminder of what really used to be.”

Since there is no end to what can offend the politically correct, where does the iconoclasm stop? After all, some faculty and students at the university that Thomas Jefferson founded as the first secular university in the world are offended that its current president quotes him in emails. Why? Because the author of the Declaration of Independence was a slave owner. Slavery was a great moral evil, and one that Jefferson himself occasionally acknowledged. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism,” he wrote. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”

How should we deal with the fact that many of the Founders were slave owners? Should the Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument be torn down? Washington, D.C. and Washington State renamed? “The Founders deserve commemoration because the evil they did was outweighed by other, positive achievements, such as establishing the Constitution,” argues George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. Once established in this country by the Founders, the logic of equal liberty became ineluctably extended to all individuals, no matter their race, creed, or sex. The Founders are rightly honored for creating a political system that over time enlarged the rights of its citizens.

I do believe that the vast majority of the folks who oppose removing and relocating Confederate monuments from public land sincerely do mean it when they say that they are defending “heritage, not hatred.” Nevertheless, Carpenter is right when he writes, “It is, quite simply, self-destructive for democratic governments to employ divisive symbolism.” No one is trying to “erase” Confederate leaders and the cause for which they fought from the historical record, but as Somin argues, “We should certainly remember them, and continue to study their deeds. We just should not honor them.”

It’s going to be tougher than usual in St. Louis to measure the impact of the increase in the minimum wage. The measure lasted a week.

The Missouri Legislature undid the work of Democrats and labor activists, voting Friday to overturn a sharp increase passed in 2015 by the City Council that has seen repeated court and legislative challenges.

Given the ambivalence of Republican Gov. Eric Greitens, who has been non-committal on whether he’ll sign the bill, union officials are pressuring Greitens for a veto.

“Unemployment is a problem facing St. Louis city and urban Kansas City,” said Missouri Chamber of Commerce President Dan Mehan to the Kansas City Star after the bill passed. “It makes no sense to mandate a minimum wage that makes that problem worse.”

Cities that have stayed the course on minimum wage increases have experienced a predictable decline in jobs and job growth, as Reason has reported.

Washington D.C. shed 1,600 restaurant jobs after adopting a $15 minimum wage in 2016, while San Diego wound up with 4000 fewer restaurant jobs than projected after hiking its minimum wage from $10 to $11.50 per hour.

The evidence has given some cities pause.

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh vetoed a $15 minimum wage hike sent to her by the city council, despite having supported such an increase on the campaign trail. Her stated concern was the economic health of the city.

Similarly, the city of Flagstaff, Arizona agreed to slow the pace of a voter-approved minimum wage increase in March after protests from local businesses and workers. The Flagstaff raise will now go from $10 to $10.50 in June, as opposed to the originally scheduled $12.

Not so in the city of St. Louis, which has an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent. Kansas City’s rate—which has a minimum wage hike on the ballot for August—sits at 4.2 percent. Missouri’s state-wide unemployment rate is 3.9 percent.

David Cook of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 655 in St. Louis called out Greitens for his supposed reliance on “millions in dark money from shadowy billionaires.”

To pressure the governor Cook’s union devised two scripts on their website. “I work very hard and I’ve earned the right to make a higher minimum wage,” the site suggests affected workers to tell the governor. The other suggests unaffected workers get involved, too, demanding the governor veto a bill that “would cut pay for tens of thousands of my fellow hard-working Missourians.”

So far, the UFCW also reports 373 of these form letters have been sent.

Democratic lawmakers are also exercised.

State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed (D–St. Louis) described the state’s current wage of $7.70 as inhumane for those living the St. Louis area, and staged a less-than-marathon two-hour filibuster of the minimum wage preemption bill.

“They literally took money out of the pockets of individuals,” said the senator who has supported tax increases on zoos and cigarettes.

St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson, a Democrat, has vowed to do the same, fuming at the Missouri Legislature for frustrating yet another local despotism. “The state has preempted cities from enacting laws on many issues, including guns, cold medicine and now our minimum wage,” she said in a statement, adding “$7.70 is not enough. I will work with others to get an increase in the minimum wage on the ballot since our state legislature won’t address it.”

Already twelve different minimum wage petitions have been approved for circulation by the Missouri Secretary of State, six of which aim to raise the wage to $15 an hour.

Should any of these make it to the final ballot, they stand a good chance of success. A majority of voters, often blind or dismissive to the consequences of the minimum wage, usually support these kinds of initiatives.

Four states—Arizona, Washington, Colorado, and Maine—had put similar initiatives before voters in 2016, all of which passed with comfortable margins.

Although nearly impossible for a politician, Greitens should ignore the public and heed the evidence. Workers laid off by employers who can’t afford arbitrary government-imposed pay increases are eligible to vote, too. At least in theory.

Let us not engage in overwrought responses to the likelihood that President Donald Trump abruptly revealed classified information from an ally to a couple of Russian officials who were in the Oval Office last week. There is a lot to chew over, and there are a lot of people with a lot of competing agendas who either want to scream that Trump is going to bring about a literal apocalypse or alternatively want to insist that everything is just fine and Trump didn’t do anything wrong. This morning National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster held a press briefing and repeated several times that everything Trump said was “wholly appropriate” in the context of his meeting.

Rather than turning to the now established drum circles that accompany every outrageous Trump story (and the beating is particularly loud with this one), let’s instead apply a healthy dose of Occam’s razor both in analyzing what happened with Trump’s disclosures and what likely consequences may come. Let’s dispense with conspiracy theories and Nth-dimensional chess games and keep things simple.

The president likely said things he should not have.

While President Trump has the authority to declassify and release all sorts of information (including, by the way, any evidence that he was actually wiretapped or surveilled by the feds), some connected to the intelligence community are particularly concerned that Trump revealed extremely secretive operational activity provided by an ally that has the potential to reveal to the Islamic State where we’re getting information and potentially jeopardize the identities of people involved.

It’s also worth noting the history of freak-outs from the intelligence community and its advocates that every piece of leaked information—even from whistleblowers—is a threat to somebody’s life, even when that turns out to be untrue or unprovable. That’s what we were told about both Edward Snowden (who is still stuck in Russia to avoid federal charges) and Pvt. Chelsea Manning (who gets out of prison tomorrow). We are really not in a position to determine that Trump’s disclosures actually threaten anybody’s lives or that the Russians have any interest in jeopardizing anti-ISIS efforts.

The president is dumb, is boastful, and lacks any sort of discipline.

There really is no point in trying to pretend that what’s obviously true about Trump is otherwise. He brags constantly, claims utterly bizarre things (like that he invented the economic metaphor “priming the pump”), has little attention span to speak of, and understands little of how government actually functions. There is no point in pretending he’s not a severe narcissist even if you agree with some of his policy proposals (like deregulation). There are still consequences for these personality flaws that have to be analyzed.

The alarm bell being rung here is therefore a warning that, yes, Trump is very capable of causing a heck of a lot of damage without even being aware of what he’s doing. The follow-up story on Trump’s babbling is not so much on “OMG, more evidence of Russian collusion!” And thank God for that. Rather the concerns here are that Trump’s loose lips will sink intelligence relationships with other countries and intelligence sources. They may be reluctant to share information with the United States and this could potentially make it harder to fight terrorism.

But that itself still falls within the area of speculation, and honestly many American allies in these political hotspots are dependent on the United States as the 500-pound gorilla in the room with the capability of magnifying force. Are countries like Egypt and Jordan really going to share less with the United States because of Trump’s mouth? It’s really hard to imagine that happening. But there’s a much simpler, and perhaps more dangerous, potential consequence.

Trump will be cut out of intel and decision-making, and that’s dangerous.

There were news reports already that the intelligence community is deliberately withholding information from Trump for fear he will leak it. The relationship between Trump and the intelligence community is, well, extremely strained. At the press conference this morning, McMaster said that America’s national security was being put at risk not by the president, but by those who leaked the information to the Washington Post. But he also acknowledged that Trump decided on the spot during the discussion to reveal whatever information he chose to reveal without any sort of advanced vetting. He also said Trump was unaware of who the source even was of the information he was revealing.

At the same time, Trump is backing off on playing the kind of active role in military decisions played by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and leaving such calls to the generals and to the Pentagon.

It would be a major mistake to think that Trump’s flailing about might result in the weakening in the power of the executive branch or even the presidency. Cutting Trump out of the loop and potentially out of decision-making puts us all in the position where a huge chunk of our own government is separated from the fundamental elements of a democratic republic. Like him or not, Trump was elected president (and no, the Russians didn’t install him). He’s the part of the executive branch responsible directly to the public.

If Trump’s incompetence leads to an inability to actually oversee the parts of government he’s responsible for, this does not make those parts of government weaker. It instead makes it less accountable. We will still have military strikes. We will still have surveillance. While it’s useful to be rid of the technocratic worship of Obama as the “right man in charge,” the massive expansion of executive power under Obama and previous administrations has remained, now being distributed downward through the chain of command.

Ultimately, that should be a deeply disturbing outcome from looking at this conflict logically. Trump lacks discipline and doesn’t understand the complex issues involved and makes very poor decisions about what to say in sensitive environments. As a result, there are parts of the executive branch that may well be operating independently of him, and it’s not the leaks that are the problem. It’s the lack of responsibility. Trump’s attempt to crack down on leakers will likely fail (thank God) because he’s not terribly competent, and frankly it looks like he wouldn’t have a staff afterward if they got them all.

There’s nothing about the electoral process that guarantees that we’ll get anywhere near some mythical concept of the “right person” in charge. We have a president who is wealthy, nasty, powerful, and not terribly smart. It may well have been inevitable at some point. And yet, there’s still very little discussion or interest in scaling back the power of the executive branch in any way, even after Trump’s administration weighs attacks on the free press. So far the best thing Trump has done, according to many pundits and newspapers (and to be very clear, not Reason), was a pointless, violent military strike on Syria.

Trump may be a particularly bad man and somehow both very stubborn yet also prone to manipulation, but his behavior and the consequences of it highlight the flaws of the power of the executive branch of the government. Do not make the mistake of ignoring the threats that come from this expansive level of power with any unique threats that come from Trump.

Shortly after multiple outlets published reports last night that President Donald Trump had shared highly sensitive, classified information about an ISIS plot with Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting last week, White House officials stepped up to respond with denials. The denials were hard to believe because Trump has destroyed the credibility of his office.

The most extensive denial came from national security advisor General H.R. McMaster. “The story that came out tonight, as reported, is false,” he said. “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.”

One reason the denial is difficult to completely buy is because it is so precisely worded. McMcaster does not actually deny the core of the initial report in The Washington Post: that President Trump conveyed classified details of an ISIS plot, shared by a foreign intelligence partner, including the location from which those plot details emerged. As a post at Lawfare notes:

These are both very carefully worded statements that leave open the possibility that classified information was disclosed other than sources and methods or that classified information was disclosed which might be used as a basis to infer sources and methods not directly disclosed. Typically, policies related to the safeguarding of classified information treat both sources and methods information and information pertaining to or related to sources and methods in the same category.

Perhaps tellingly, McMaster delivered the statement from a prepared text, and did not take questions. The format in which it was delivered, in other words, left no opportunity for expansion, clarification, or follow-up.

McMaster’s denial is also difficult to believe irrespective of the particular wording. That’s because both President Trump and senior White House officials have demonstrated over and over again that they will lie to the press and the public.

Consider the story that the White House spun last week after the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Press Secretary Sean Spicer initially said that the firing was a direct result of a memo sent by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein outlining Comey’s faults, and a related recommendation from Attorney General Jeff Sessions that Comey be terminated.

“It was all him,” Spicer said, referring to Rosenstein. “No one from the White House. That was a DOJ decision.” This explanation was repeated by Vice President Mike Pence and Senior Advisor Kellyanne Conway. Pence also denied that the ongoing FBI probe into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia were in any way related to the firing.

But within days, Trump himself made clear that none of this was true. The Russia investigation was on his mind when he made the decision to fire Comey. “When I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,'” he said in an interview with NBC.

Trump also stated flatly that the Rosenstein memo was irrelevant to the firing. “I was going to fire regardless of recommendation,” Trump said during the NBC interview. “[Rosenstein] made a recommendation, but regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.”

The story that Trump’s senior staff and surrogates had fed to the press in order to explain the president’s actions was not true. Trump had revealed his staff to be liars.

In another way, this was less a revelation and more a confirmation of what we already knew about Trump and his communications style.Whether on important issues, such as the Comey firing, or on more trivial matters, such as Trump’s inaugural crowd size or the continued existence of a Trump-branded steak business, neither President Trump nor his representatives can be trusted. The Trump team has constantly misled the public, and appears to have done so knowingly.

At this point, then, it is impossible to believe anything the White House says about any story of any level of importance without further confirmation. The White House has lost all claim to the presumption of truth.

There may be a useful lesson in this for a press corps that, in previous administrations, has sometimes been too willing to passively accept statements made by administration officials as accurate, when they are obviously shaded or shaped to serve those in power. There is some value in maintaining a level of distrust between the president and the press, and in hammering home the idea that powerful politicians should not—and indeed cannot—be trusted. Trump is building a much-needed incredulity into the media.

And yet there is also a real danger in a White House that is so patently untrustworthy, and a president who lies so frequently and so carelessly.

On a granular operational level, Trump’s lack of credibility is a hindrance to effective governance and policymaking, to making government work in a way that is more honest, more transparent, and less corrupt. Trump styles himself a dealmaker, but creating lasting working relationships of the sort that make a difference in the world of policy and politics requires committing to a level of trust and openness that Trump and those in his employ have utterly decimated.

The same goes for Trump’s relationship with the public, which is, in an important way, a negotiating partner in any democratic government. Trump, as the senior most figure in American government, is not only destroying faith in his own word and policies, but in the American system itself. His lies help sow systemic distrust that goes beyond his own words.

Trump’s disdain for the truth makes him a poor partner, both and at home and abroad, since those he works with can have no expectation that he will keep his word, or that what he is saying at any given moment is accurate.

This should cut across partisan lines. Those who were (justly, in my view) outraged by the lies President Obama told about his health care law should be equally outraged by the Trump administration’s even balder and more frequent falsehoods now.

All of this is further compounded by Trump’s demonstrated ignorance about both the issues and procedures he must engage with as president. Yesterday’s reports about Trump’s Oval Office disclosures have generated speculation that they were somehow the product of hidden connections between Trump and Russia. But it is just as possible that Trump, who reportedly ignores the multi-page briefing sheets intended to prepare him for such meetings, did not understand the importance of the information he revealed, or the procedures that typically govern the release of classified information.

Which means that we must contend with the possibility that Trump’s relationship with the truth is even more disconnected than more common forms of politically expedient evasions, exaggerations, and lies. Trump may make false statements because he simply does not know or care what the truth is.

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad on Monday signed a bill to expand access to medical marijuana in his state, but it might take as long as 18 months before patients with cancer and other diseases can get the drug in Iowa, as the state has to find growers and license distributors.

In the meantime, Iowans might be able to travel to Minnesota to obtain medical marijuana, under a proposed agreement that would be the first of its kind in the country.

“Iowa is trying to provide an innovative path to help patients obtain relief while the state gets its own system up and running,” says Kate Bell, an attorney with Marijuana Policy Project, a national pro-legalization nonprofit.

A component of the bill signed by Branstad directs state official in Iowa to contact Minnesota’s Department of Health with the intention of opening a sharing agreement between the two states. Iowa Speaker of the House Linda Upmeyer (R-District 54) told the Associated Press last week that a deal between the two states could allow Iowans to have access to medical marijuana while the state is going through the process of setting up its own network of growers and distributors.

“It’s providing access to Iowans and doing it as quickly as we can,” Upmeyer told the AP. “I just want to be sure if we have a tough time finding a grower, we have another source available.”

Minnesota would have to agree. A spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health’s medical cannabis program told Reason that the state legislature would have to change the rules to allow Iowans to access the drug in Minnesota. Minnesota Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt (R-District 31A) told the AP that he sees the potential for a sharing agreement with Iowa that would be “mutually beneficial thing” because it would allow manufacturers in Minnesota to find more customers.

If Minnesota changes its rules along the lines of what has been floated by Upmeyer, the bilateral agreement between the two states would be unique, but it would not be the first time that a state has allowed out-of-state residents access to medical marijuana. According to the Marijuana Policy Project, 14 of the 29 states with legal medical marijuana allow some form of “reciprocity” to accept out-of-state marijuana prescriptions. The MPP says it’s important for states to include reciprocity agreements in their medical marijuana laws so patients can safely obtain the drug while visiting a different state or, as is the case in Iowa, while waiting for dispensaries to be licensed and become operational in their home states.

Despite the fact that medical marijuana is now legal in a majority of states, marijuana remains on the federal government’s Schedule I list—a classification given to drugs with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. There are concerns about a potential crackdown on state-level legalization efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice, particularly in the wake of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ comments last week encouraging prosecutors to seek harsher penalties for drug traffickers.

But moving medical marijuana from Minnesota to Iowa is unlikely to get you in any more trouble than if you’d been transporting it within Minnesota. That’s because of a 2005 Supreme Court ruling (Gonzalez v. Raich) that gave Congress the authority to regulate even intra-state non-commercial cannabis activity.

“So the fact that it’s interstate doesn’t make it ‘more illegal,'” Bell told Reason via email.

Since patients can go directly from one state to the other—without having to pass through any states where medical marijuana is illegal—there should be limited law enforcement issues, she said.

Since legalizing medical marijuana in 2015, Minnesota has seen steady growth in the number of patients accessing the drug. As of March 2017, there were more than 5,100 patients actively enrolled in the state’s registry. The Minnesota Department of Health reports that 3,421 residents visited one of the state’s four cannabis distribution centers in March, the most recent month for which data is available. That’s the highest total for a single month so far, nearly five times the total from March 2016.

One of Minnesota’s distribution centers is in Rochester, about 40 miles north of the Iowa state line.

Iowa’s new rule does not add to the number of states with legal medical marijuana because Iowa had already legalized cannabis oil for the treatment of seizures in 2014. The law signed by Branstad on Monday expands access to include people suffering from cancer, chronic pain, and multiple sclerosis, among other conditions. Patients with terminal illnesses would also be allowed to access oil derived from cannabis. Patients must be over 18 years old, must have written permission from their doctor, and must register with the state. Only cannabis oils and other derivatives may be used, and they may not contain more than 3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive compound found in marijuana.

Smoking marijuana is still illegal in Iowa, even if done for medical reasons. The same is true in Minnesota, where the drug is available only in oils, tinctures, and other non-smokable forms.

Branstad, in a statement issued after he signed the bill into law, said he had concerns about some parts of the bill, but not enough to warrant a veto. Instead, he urged state lawmakers to add additional rules prohibiting anyone with misdemeanor drug violations from working for Iowa’s cannabis oil manufacturers or distributors.

Kali Su Schram did not cause the crash that killed Ralph Martin, a 64-year-old bicyclist who rode into her path as she was driving on Seaway Drive in Muskegon, Michigan, on the morning of November 26, 2015. She will nevertheless serve six months in jail as a result of the accident, thanks to Michigan’s unjust and unscientific definition of drugged driving.

Schram, now 20, had a detectable amount of THC in her blood at the time of the accident. There is no evidence that Schram was impaired by marijuana, let alone that it contributed to the crash, and she was not at fault, since she had the right of way when Martin suddenly appeared in front of her at an intersection. “If you read the police report,” Schram’s lawyer, James Marek, told the Muskegon Chronicle, “she could not have done anything to avoid this particular accident.”

None of that mattered, because in Michigan it is illegal to drive with “any amount” of a Schedule I controlled substance in your body. According to the Michigan Supreme Court, an inactive metabolite of marijuana does not count as a Schedule I drug, but THC does, even at levels too low to impair driving ability.

“Like a person who operates a car without a driver’s license,” explained Muskegon County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Timothy Maat, “a person who illegally has a controlled substance in their bloodstream is not legally allowed to drive a car. When a death results from an accident when a defendant could not legally drive, it is then left to the judge to decide an appropriate sentence depending on the facts and circumstances of each case.” But for the restraint shown by Martin’s family, the Chronicle says, Schram could have gone to prison for more than two years, even though she did nothing wrong that contributed to Martin’s death.

The Chronicle cites a similar Muskegon County case from last year in which a driver named Donovan Wilson received a six-month sentence because of a crash that killed his pregnant girlfriend, who was sitting beside him as they returned from a shopping trip. “His THC amount was low,” the paper notes, “and the couple had been driving on an unfamiliar road.” After the accident, Muskegon County Sheriff Dean Roesler said he did not think drugs were a factor.

The arbitrariness of Michigan’s law was compounded by People v. Koon, a 2013 case in which the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state’s medical marijuana law protects patients from prosecution for “internal possession” of cannabis while driving unless they are “under the influence,” as demonstrated by evidence of impairment. As Maat, the prosecutor, put it, “Whether a person appears to be under the influence of THC is not an element we are required to prove unless the person has a valid medical marijuana exception.” That exception only underlines the injustice inflicted on drivers like Schram and Wilson, who can be convicted of driving under the influence even when they’re not, based on the pretext of traffic safety.

While zero tolerance laws like Michigan’s are especially objectionable, since there is not even a pretense of an impairment-based standard, similar injustices arise under laws like Washington’s, which makes any driver whose blood THC concentration exceeds five nanograms per milliliter automatically guilty of driving under the influence. That standard ensnares many regular users whose THC levels may exceed the legal threshold even when they are not measurably impaired.

The lack of a scientific basis for linking a particular THC level to impaired driving ability does not justify setting the cutoff at zero. Requiring evidence of impairment, as Michigan does for medical marijuana patients, obviously makes the jobs of police and prosecutors harder. But the alternative is routinely treating innocent, harmless people as if they are menaces to public safety.

Friday’s order by Attorney General Jeff Sessions for federal prosecutors to pursue maximum sentences on drug crimes drew a swift rebuke from the most libertarian member of the United States Senate, Rand Paul (R-Kentucky):

Today I released the following statement in response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. http://pic.twitter.com/P3uo04xF0M

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) May 12, 2017

Paul expanded on those comments in a CNN op-ed yesterday:

Mandatory minimum sentences have unfairly and disproportionately incarcerated a generation of minorities. Eric Holder, the attorney general under President Obama, issued guidelines to U.S. Attorneys that they should refrain from seeking long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

I agreed with him then and still do. In fact, I’m the author of a bipartisan bill with Senator Leahy to change the law on this matter. Until we pass that bill, though, the discretion on enforcement — and the lives of many young drug offenders — lies with the current attorney general. […]

I urge the attorney general to reconsider his recent action. But even more importantly, I urge my colleagues to consider bipartisan legislation to fix this problem in the law where it should be handled. Congress can end this injustice, and I look forward to leading this fight for justice.

Important words. But the first response to Paul’s original tweet is worth considering as well, summing up as it did what many libertarians were feeling:

@RandPaul you knew who he was and what he would do when you voted to confirm him. You didn’t care.

— Richard Lawler (@rjcc) May 13, 2017

Paul’s answer to such criticism at the time was fourfold: 1) Sessions affirmed to him that the president has no right to drone non-combative Americans to death on U.S. soil; 2) the A.G. “agrees with the president” on law-enforcement issues, and therefore so would any potential replacement nomination; and anyways 3) “Democrats made it much more certain that I would vote for him by trying to destroy his character,” so therefore 4) “if people want to apply a purity test to me they’re more than welcome, but I would suggest that maybe they spend some of their time on the other 99 less libertarian senators.”

But in an interview at Rare yesterday with his former employee and co-author Jack Hunter, Paul unveiled another reason for his vote:

“I spoke with Sessions last when he was up for nomination, which makes this move by him even more disappointing now, because it was different from what I was led to believe,” Paul said via phone, indicating that at Sessions’ confirmation, the senator walked away believing the new attorney general would not be pursuing this issue.

Seeing as how Sessions’ drug-related punishment notions were of primary concern to Paul’s fellow civil libertarians (here’s just a sampling of Reason writing on the issue: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11), it would have been nice to know then what he had been misled to believe. One hopes that the skeptical senator will now cease granting the benefit of the doubt to Trump nominees for, say, FBI director. At any rate this paraphrase from the Rare interview sounds preliminarily positive:

Paul said that in addition to the legislation he has sponsored with Sen. Leahy, he has been talking with Republican Senator Mike Lee and also Democratic Senators Corey Booker and Kamala Harris on other ways to diminish the damage done by these federal laws.

Listen to Nick Gillespie’s December interview with Rand Paul at this link.