Tag: hit&run

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“The best-case scenario [in terms of the Trump-Russia investigation] is that the executive branch gets harassed by the legislative branch,” says Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch. “Let’s have more investigations because [members of] the executive branch have too much damn power, and they should be forced to explain themselves more fully.”

On today’s episode of the Reason Podcast, Welch joins fellow Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward to discuss Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey (“is this the moment where the wheels come off 20th century political institutions?”); how Trump is reshaping the conservative movement; whether the Rock has a shot at becoming our 46th president (“the logical conclusion of the increasingly empty vessels in which we pour our hopes and dreams”); Jeff Sessions’ terrifying decision to re-escalate the drug war (is the attorney general “the only person in Washington who knows what he wants?”); and the petty tyranny of the latest vaping crackdown in Austin and Laguna Beach (“getting fined for walking down a public sidewalk and breathing out”).

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Photo by John Cena (Creative Commons).

Democrats and Republicans are pivoting on issues faster than a bipolar swing dancer on a merry-go-round. Republicans are now big government protectionists. Democrats support free trade and states’ rights. It’s like the two parties switched bodies! It’s almost as if… they were FREAKY-FRIDAYED!

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Privacy and cybersecurity experts and activists have been warning for ages that governments have their priorities all wrong. National security interests (not just in America but other countries as well) comparatively spend much more time and money attempting to breach the security systems of other countries and potential enemies than they do bolstering their own defenses. Reuters determined, with the information from intelligence officials, that the United States spends $9 on cybersurveillance and government hacking for every $1 it sends on defending its network systems.

The “WannaCry” Malware attack that spooled out over the end of last week and into the weekend, implicates both sides of this problem. The ransomware, first of all, allegedly originated from vulnerabilities and infiltration tools developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) they had been hoarding and keeping secret from technology companies whose defenses they were breaching. All of this secrecy was to facilitate the NSA’s ability to engage in cyberespionage and to prevent technology companies from building defenses that would have inhibited government surveillance. The NSA lost control of these infiltration tools and they were publicly exposed by the hacker group known as the “Shadow Brokers” last month.

So this WannaCry attack or something like it (and probably many more) was incoming, and attentive information technology specialists were aware and hopefully prepared. Microsoft had already released a patch to address the vulnerabilities. Except not everybody downloaded it.

The non-downloaders included parts of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), the socialized, taxpayer-funded healthcare system that covers the entire population there. The NHS had been warned that computers using old Microsoft operating systems were vulnerable, but several hundreds of thousands of computers had not been upgraded, according to the BBC.

So on the one hand, we have a government agency refusing to disclose cybersecurity vulnerabilities it had discovered in order to take advantage of them, potentially leaving everybody’s computers open to attacks. And then, on the other hand, we have a government agency refusing to properly prioritize cybersecurity to protect the data and privacy of its citizens (they blamed it on not having enough money, of course).

This poll from Pew from last year shouldn’t be a surprise, then. Consumers have less confidence in the federal government to protect their data than cellphone companies, email service providers, and credit card companies:

That the government has been terrible on both ends of this problem makes this op-ed response at The New York Times by Zeynep Tufekci all the more confusing: She blames Microsoft and tech companies for apparently wanting to be paid to continue fixing and updating old, outdated operating systems. While she acknowledges that there are costs involved in such behavior, she seems to think that Microsoft should just suck it up and shell out. This is a rather remarkable hot take (and she’s most certainly not alone in it):

[C]ompanies like Microsoft should discard the idea that they can abandon people using older software. The money they made from these customers hasn’t expired; neither has their responsibility to fix defects. Besides, Microsoft is sitting on a cash hoard estimated at more than $100 billion (the result of how little tax modern corporations pay and how profitable it is to sell a dominant operating system under monopolistic dynamics with no liability for defects).

Has anybody seen a demand for free goods and services couched in an argument as fundamentally dumb as “The money hasn’t expired!” before? Why does The New York Times continue to charge year after year to subscribers? The money readers paid the first time hasn’t expired!

Note that she also takes aim at those evil corporations and their money “hoards.” Earlier in the column she described the NHS, a massive government juggernaut of a bureaucracy as “cash-strapped.” The NHS blows through an equivalent of Microsoft’s “hoard” and then some every single year. Its most recent budget is around $122 billion for a year and is predicted to continue growing. It’s disingenuous to portray Microsoft as Scrooge McDuck and the NHS as a beggar on a street corner with a sign and a hat.

If nothing else, perhaps NHS’s poor financial prioritizations and lack of responsibility will warn Americans against socialized single-payer healthcare systems? No, probably not.

Tufecki’s piece isn’t all terrible—she, too, recognizes the NSA’s culpability in this breach by prioritizing offense over defense. But she nevertheless thinks that the problem is not enough government, despite the fact that this disaster all around is a direct result of poor government behavior:

It is time to consider whether the current regulatory setup, which allows all software vendors to externalize the costs of all defects and problems to their customers with zero liability, needs re-examination.

Whatever new regulations that may be brought to bear against Microsoft will not stop these costs from being “externalized.” That’s how consumer markets work. If the government mandates that software vendors must continue covering, updating, and protecting its consumers, guess what’s going to happen to the price of software? It’s going to go up.

Hold the government accountable for all these screw ups, not Microsoft. They’re the ones responsible. And Microsoft is not happy about the NSA’s behavior either. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, called out the feds for its responsibility for these threats to citizens:

The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call. They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world. We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits. This is one reason we called in February for a new “Digital Geneva Convention” to govern these issues, including a new requirement for governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.

What’s the proper method for interpreting the U.S. Constitution? Should it be viewed according to its original meaning? Or should the document be viewed in the light of contemporary conditions? If you answered no to the second question and yes to the third, you may be a living constitutionalist.

As Georgetown law professor Larry Solum explains in a fascinating new article at his Legal Theory Blog, “living constitutionalism is the view that the legal content of constitutional doctrine does and should change in response to changing circumstances and values.” This view has been around for a long time. According to Solum, the phrase itself apparently dates back to a 1927 book titled The Living Constitution, though it was the influential progressive historian Charles Beard who first took the phrase and really ran with it. “Since most of the words and phrases dealing with the powers and the limits of government are vague and must in practice be interpreted by human beings,” Beard wrote in 1936, “it follows that the Constitution as practice is a living thing.”

If you have any interest in U.S. legal history, Solum’s article is well worth your time. But I was surprised to find that Solum made no mention of Woodrow Wilson, who must surely rank as one of the most important early theorists of living constitutionalism. For example, in his 1885 book Congressional Government, Wilson argued that the Constitution must be able to “adapt itself to the new conditions of an advancing society” or else it would be worthless to that society. “If it could not stretch itself to the measure of the times,” Wilson wrote of the Constitution, it “must be thrown off and left behind, as a bygone device.”

The idea of throwing off the Constitution as a bygone device proved to be extremely influential on Wilson’s intellectual heirs during the New Deal period. For example, in 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act on the grounds that Congress’s power “to regulate commerce…among the several states” did not extend so far as to allow Congress to regulate certain economic activities that never crossed any state lines whatsoever. According to the Court’s 9-0 ruling in Schechter Poultry Co. v. United States, “extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power.”

In response to that decision, President Franklin Roosevelt took a page from Woodrow Wilson and blasted the Court for adhering to the out-of-date constitutional limits originally set by the Commerce Clause. “The country was in the horse-and-buggy age when that clause was written,” Roosevelt complained. As far as FDR was concerned, the justices should be using a very different method of legal interpretation, one that would “view the interstate commerce clause in the light of present-day civilization.” In short: living constitutionalism.

To make a long story short, Roosevelt lost that case but his (and Wilson’s) views prevailed in the long run. For better or worse, living constitutionalism is now one of the dominant methods of legal interpretation in American law.

State troopers posted in New York City have written nearly 800 percent more tickets this year than they did in all of 2016, according to The New York Post; state troopers had written just 4 tickets in 2015 and none in 2014. State troopers also made nearly 50 percent more arrests this year than in all of last year, with 63 people arrested so far—there were none in 2015.

New York’s governor, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, sent 150 state troopers into New York City in December, with The Post reporting that the deployment had two goals: “to haul in revenue to state coffers, and rankle ­rival Mayor de Blasio, ­according to observers.”

The Post estimates that the state troopers have raised more than $3 million from writing tickets in the city—speeding tickets are $203, with $88 going to the state, while tickets for using a cellphone while driving are $288.

The governor’s office insists the extra deployment of troopers in New York City was because of “worldwide terror threats that targeted infrastructure and to catch scofflaws when the state moved to congestion alleviating cashless tolling,” as Richard Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the governor, told The Post. A state police spokesperson, meanwhile, said that the “simple answer to why there are more tickets is we weren’t on bridges and tunnels and now we are.”

A criminology professor, Eugene O’Donnell, pointed out to The Post that “putting primarily rural and traffic-oriented. . . troopers into an urban environment should be done with the greatest care and collaboration” and not for “political point scoring,” likening Cuomo’s actions, “using law enforcement to do political machinations,” to those of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R).

Azzopardi insisted to The Post that O’Donnell, who he called”a so-called expert,” didn’t know “the first thing about state police training because there are state troopers in other cities in New York. New York City has 8 million residents. The next largest city in New York is Buffalo, with a population of 261,130. Azzopardi’s suggestion that policing in both cities would involve the same kind of training is troubling.

h/t Chad

Finally, Republicans have come up with a decent plan to fix immigration, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia. Or at least some of them have. Wisconsin’s Sen. Ron Johnson introduced a bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee to give states more authority in recruiting foreign workers and Colorado’s Rep. Ken Buck in the House. Their bills, which are modeled after Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program, would give states a set quota to sponsor foreigners that best meet their local labor needs. They are modest, to be sure. But they are still a giant step in the right direction because they at least eschew the zero-sum logic of fences and walls. They also sidestep Washington’s messy politics that have stymied reform and let states make their own bets about immigrants.

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“Black voter turnout rate declined sharply in 2016, dropping below that of whites” reads the ominous headline at Pew Research’s “Fact Tank” site. The sentiment—and the whisper of voter suppression by white Republicans—is mirrored in dozens of news stories covering the topic. How quickly we forget what is likely to happen when the two major parties run candidates who were historically disliked, distrusted, and dismissed by the public: You get less voters. As Pew notes in passing, overall voter participation, the percentage of eligible voters who bothered casting a ballot, was lower in 2016 (61.4 percent) than it was in 2008 (63.6 percent).

That’s not a sexy story, though, is it, especially in a country overseen by a brute who is the least-popular president in recorded history?

So what is the simplest explanation for the drop in black-voter turnout between 2016 and 2012? Surely it’s Hillary Clinton, as the GOP share of the black vote hasn’t cracked more than 15 percent since 1960. Her enthusiasm gap among all voters was widely noted and understood, even as Barack Obama’s support among African Americans was sky-high.

The Pew writeup is interesting less for what it tells us about voting trends and more for how the media frames things. “A record 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election,” begins Pew’s account, even as the authors acknowledge later that fewer eligible voters showed up, despite increasingly easy ways to cast ballots. Raw numbers in a country whose population is growing are essentially meaningless, but leading with them does work to make the reduction in black-turnout numbers seem troubling (turnout for women, Latinos, and Asians was essentially unchanged). However, if you put aside Obama’s two campaigns, blacks turned out in the same percentage as they did in 2004, when John Kerry was facing one of the least-popular incumbents in the past 50 years and last year, blacks turned out in higher percentages than they did in every election since 1992, a generational-change election featuring a young Southern governor from Arkansas who reached out to minorities in a potent and purposeful way.

The real story about turnout in 2016 is that despite the scorched-earth tactics of both major parties and candidates, voters didn’t flock to the polls to stave off impending doom. That’s a result that makes me hopeful that 2016 was indeed the final election of the 20th century, an ugly fistfight between old baby boomers who have no idea of what the world is like anymore. For all their attacks and jawing, neither Clinton nor Trump brought anything substantively new to the table in terms of policy and forward-looking vision. Clinton and her main Democratic rival Bernie Sanders were essentially calling for a return to 1970s-style governance big on expert rule. Whether he’s talking about nonexistent crime waves, coal mining, or industrial jobs that peaked as a part of the economy decades ago, Trump is frankly nostalgic for the world in which he grew up.

I submit that many of us intuited that whichever person got elected, we understand we are in a pause before the federal government starts to seriously reflect the massive and ongoing changes that have dramatically remade our commericial, cultural, and personal lives so much for the better. We do not have an inexhaustible amount of time on our side—old-age entitlements are bankrupting the country and autopilot deficit spending is already muffling economic growth—but the pickings were slim last fall, at least among major-party candidates. Here’s pushing for 2020 to have a better cast of characters who will offer a reason to vote in larger numbers. And, while I’m making wishes, media that analyze trends more dispassionately.

“Black voter turnout rate declined sharply in 2016, dropping below that of whites” reads the ominous headline at Pew Research’s “Fact Tank” site. The sentiment—and the whisper of voter suppression by white Republicans—is mirrored in dozens of news stories covering the topic. How quickly we forget what is likely to happen when the two major parties run candidates who were historically disliked, distrusted, and dismissed by the public: You get less voters. As Pew notes in passing, overall voter participation, the percentage of eligible voters who bothered casting a ballot, was lower in 2016 (61.4 percent) than it was in 2008 (63.6 percent).

That’s not a sexy story, though, is it, especially in a country overseen by a brute who is the least-popular president in recorded history?

So what is the simplest explanation for the drop in black-voter turnout between 2016 and 2012? Surely it’s Hillary Clinton, as the GOP share of the black vote hasn’t cracked more than 15 percent since 1960. Her enthusiasm gap among all voters was widely noted and understood, even as Barack Obama’s support among African Americans was sky-high.

The Pew writeup is interesting less for what it tells us about voting trends and more for how the media frames things. “A record 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election,” begins Pew’s account, even as the authors acknowledge later that fewer eligible voters showed up, despite increasingly easy ways to cast ballots. Raw numbers in a country whose population is growing are essentially meaningless, but leading with them does work to make the reduction in black-turnout numbers seem troubling (turnout for women, Latinos, and Asians was essentially unchanged). However, if you put aside Obama’s two campaigns, blacks turned out in the same percentage as they did in 2004, when John Kerry was facing one of the least-popular incumbents in the past 50 years and last year, blacks turned out in higher percentages than they did in every election since 1992, a generational-change election featuring a young Southern governor from Arkansas who reached out to minorities in a potent and purposeful way.

The real story about turnout in 2016 is that despite the scorched-earth tactics of both major parties and candidates, voters didn’t flock to the polls to stave off impending doom. That’s a result that makes me hopeful that 2016 was indeed the final election of the 20th century, an ugly fistfight between old baby boomers who have no idea of what the world is like anymore. For all their attacks and jawing, neither Clinton nor Trump brought anything substantively new to the table in terms of policy and forward-looking vision. Clinton and her main Democratic rival Bernie Sanders were essentially calling for a return to 1970s-style governance big on expert rule. Whether he’s talking about nonexistent crime waves, coal mining, or industrial jobs that peaked as a part of the economy decades ago, Trump is frankly nostalgic for the world in which he grew up.

I submit that many of us intuited that whichever person got elected, we understand we are in a pause before the federal government starts to seriously reflect the massive and ongoing changes that have dramatically remade our commericial, cultural, and personal lives so much for the better. We do not have an inexhaustible amount of time on our side—old-age entitlements are bankrupting the country and autopilot deficit spending is already muffling economic growth—but the pickings were slim last fall, at least among major-party candidates. Here’s pushing for 2020 to have a better cast of characters who will offer a reason to vote in larger numbers. And, while I’m making wishes, media that analyze trends more dispassionately.

President Trump’s recent tweet warning former FBI Director James Comey that their conversations may have been recorded was widely described as a “threat” or even a form of “blackmail,” but that is not the way I read it. “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump said. To me that sounded like Trump was suggesting Comey should not try to misrepresent what either of them said, since there might be an audio record to contradict him.

That is the explanation Trump himself offered in a Fox News interview that aired on Saturday. Trump told Jeanine Pirro he “won’t talk about” whether the hypothetical recordings to which he referred actually exist. “All I want is for Comey to be honest,” he said, “and I hope he will be and I’m sure he will be—I hope.” In particular, Trump was annoyed by reports from unnamed associates of Comey who say the president, during a January dinner at the White House, demanded a promise of loyalty that the FBI director refused to give. Trump told Pirro that never happened, although “I don’t think it would be a bad question to ask.”

It might seem strange that Trump, who after firing Comey was likened over and over again to Richard Nixon (a comparison his defenders deem absurd), would invite continued criticism in that vein by talking about surreptitiously recorded White House tapes. And if I had to say which of the two participants in these conversations would be more likely to lie about them, it surely would not be Comey. But from Trump’s perspective, the tweet makes perfect sense, since it creates the appearance that he is confident he did not say anything embarrassing and might make Comey think twice about “leaking to the press.”

Meanwhile, two Republican senators say the recordings, if they exist, should be turned over to Congress. On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the dinner conversation between Trump and Comey might shed light on the president’s motivation for firing him—in particular, whether Trump was trying to impede the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election, including the Trump campaign’s possible involvement.

“Did the president ever say anything to the director of the FBI that would be construed as trying to impede the investigation?” Lindsey asked. “I think it’s time to call the [former] FBI director before the country and [have him] explain what happened at that dinner and, if there are any tapes, they have to be turned over. You can’t be cute about tapes. If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over. I doubt if there are. But we need to clear the air.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) agrees. “If, in fact, there are such recordings,” Lee said on Fox News Sunday yesterday. “I think those recordings will be subpoenaed, and I think they will probably have to turn them over.” Lee alluded to Nixon and Watergate. “There have been instances in the past in which other presidents have made recordings of conversations that have taken place at the White House,” he noted. “It doesn’t always turn out well. It’s not necessarily the best idea.”