Tag: in-the-news

NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) activists often stop housing from being built. Anti-development groups in New York City might achieve the rare feat of tearing down already existing housing.

Last Thursday, New York Supreme Court Justice W. Franc Perry ruled that up to 20 floors would have to be removed from a nearly complete 112-unit condo building in Manhattan.

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by two community groups who accused the developers of the tower at 200 Amsterdam Avenue of abusing city zoning laws to construct a building that was horribly out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood.

“We hope this decision will be a signal to the development industry that the days of flouting the zoning code in search of greater heights and bigger profits is over,” said Olive Freud, president of the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development (CFESD), one of the community groups that brought the suit, in a press release.

“The directive to partially demolish the building is appropriate given the willingness of the developer to ignore every sign that their project was inappropriately scaled for the neighborhood,” said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Municipal Art Society, another plaintiff.

In April 2018, the two groups sued the developers of the project—a joint venture by SJP Properties and Mitsui Fudosan America—arguing that they had inappropriately assembled partial lots of land in order to get the rights to construct a larger building.

New York City’s zoning code allows developers to build taller, denser buildings on a piece of land provided they also preserve open space on adjacent lots.

According to the complaint from CFESD and the Art Society, the developers patched together a string of tenuously connected parcels of land in order to get enough open space to enable them to build their project.

The size of the new building, they argued in their lawsuit, “would fundamentally transform the character of this historic neighborhood, casting long shadows over the streets and nearby buildings, and further crowding sidewalks that are less navigable every year.”

In 2017, the city’s Department of Buildings issued the developers a permit for a 55-story building. CFESD and the Art Society appealed that permit to the Board of Standards and Appeals, which twice affirmed that the Amsterdam Avenue project was legal.

Thursday’s decision thus came as a shock to the developers, who hadn’t paused construction during the legal challenge, and who’ve already been marketing units that may now have to be dismantled, according to The New York Times.

A lawyer for the developers told the Times that they would be appealing the decision.

New York City, like many growing coastal metros, has been adding lots of jobs post-recession, but not enough new housing units to accommodate all these workers. The result is rising rents and home prices for those who can still afford to live in the city, and longer commutes for those who can’t.

Building new housing is necessary to ensure that New York can continue to be a dynamic city where employers and workers can afford to locate. That includes pricey, luxury developments like the Amsterdam Avenue project. New research suggests that higher-end units take the pressure off housing at the lower ends of the market, making housing more affordable for everyone.

By actively seeking to destroy existing housing, groups like CFESD and the Art Society are making the city a less affordable, less dynamic place.

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Democrats in Virginia, after taking control of the state legislature last year, are delivering on their promise of new gun control laws. So far they have approved bills that will require background checks for all firearm transfers, limit handgun purchases to one per month, allow local governments to ban firearms on public property, and authorize court orders that suspend the Second Amendment rights of people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others. But a proposed “assault firearm” ban supported by Gov. Ralph Northam (D), which was blocked by a state Senate committee yesterday, proved to be a step too far, at least for now.

Such bans, which cover an arbitrarily defined category of firearms that supposedly are good for nothing but mass murder, are substantially less popular than other frequently proposed gun controls. Last year, Gallup found that 92 percent of Americans favored “requiring background checks for all gun sales,” for instance, while only 47 percent thought it should be “illegal to manufacture, sell or possess semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles.”

There are sound reasons to be skeptical of “assault weapon” bans, starting with the observation that the firearms they cover include some of the most popular rifles sold in the United States. Those guns are rarely used in crimes and, when they are, could easily be replaced by equally lethal alternatives. Then there is the far from trivial problem that no one knows what “assault weapons” are until legislators settle on a definition, a task that calls into question the entire enterprise.

The New York Times notes that Virginia legislators “failed to arrive at a consensus definition of what constitutes an assault weapon despite weeks of negotiations.” R. Creigh Deeds, one of four Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted against the bill, said there were “a lot of questions” about which guns should be banned.

Under the original version of the bill, which would have criminalized possession as well as importation, manufacture, and sale, “assault firearms” included semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and have one or more of 12 features—or “any characteristic of like kind,” whatever that means. The forbidden features included folding or telescoping stocks, pistol grips, bayonet mounts, grenade launchers, silencers, flash suppressors, muzzle brakes, and threaded barrels. The final version of the bill, which was narrowly approved by the Virginia House of Delegates last week, eliminated the ban on possession and reduced the list of specific characteristics to 10, ditching silencers and bayonet mounts.

Allowing current owners of “assault firearms” to keep their property was politically prudent, since laws that require people to turn in their guns are highly controversial and widely flouted. At the same time, grandfathering the “assault firearms” that Virginians already own demolishes any claim by the bill’s backers that they are eliminating guns they assert have no legitimate uses.

Striking bayonet mounts and silencers from the list of forbidden features also made sense, since bayonet attacks do not loom large in violent crime and banning rifles with silencers seems redundant once you have already decreed that people may not buy rifles with “a threaded barrel capable of accepting…a silencer.” But those edits also call attention to the remaining features, which allegedly transform a legal rifle into a weapon that is suitable only for mass shootings.

When you replace a rifle’s fixed stock with one that can be folded or adjusted for shooters of different sizes, you have not made the gun any more deadly. A grenade launcher may sound scarier, but it is of little use without grenades, which have long been banned for civilian use. The other supposedly intolerable features likewise have more to do with a gun’s appearance than its effectiveness in the hands of a mass shooter. They certainly do not distinguish “evil” guns used by murderers from “good” guns used by law-abiding people for legitimate sporting, hunting, and self-defense purposes.

Lest you think Virginia’s gun controllers are ready to abandon that vain quest, Gov. Northam plans to try again. “We will be back next year,” his spokeswoman promised.

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A young woman who was arrested and convicted by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice for leaking details about Russian attempts to hack American election systems is now asking President Donald Trump to commute her five-year sentence.

Reality Winner, 25, was arrested in June 2017 after the feds tracked her down as the source of a report published by The Intercept showing that hackers connected to the Russian government attempted to infiltrate an election systems company based in Florida.

The report contained classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA). Winner saw herself as a whistleblower alerting the public about the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. At the time of her leak, there was much less public info about the extent of hacking attempts, and her arrest came about a year before the Department of Justice would actually indict Russian operatives with hacking into the computer networks of the Democratic National Committee and attempting to hack state election systems. Nothing Winner leaked linked Trump or anybody in Trump’s campaign with these Russian efforts.

Winner was denied bail and in 2018 accepted a plea deal for five years in federal prison, the harshest sentence ever handed down to a civilian who leaked info to the media.

On Monday, Winner’s legal team announced that they’re asking Trump to let her out. Winner’s mom says Winner is “losing hope” and is not getting any treatment for her bulimia or anorexia. In the clemency petition (posted by The Intercept and readable here), it notes that she didn’t work with a foreign power or conspire against her country; her “disclosure didn’t jeopardize the security or safety of human lives or strategic information”; and she didn’t seek any compensation for providing the report. She only wanted to inform the public. She has so far served 33 months out of a 63-month sentence.

NBC notes that Trump had previously tweeted that he thought Winner’s sentence was “so unfair,” but the real purpose of that tweet was to needle then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for failing to go after Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t really an indication that Trump actually cared about what happened to Winner.

Winner is obviously not some sort of threat or danger to the public and there’s no reason to keep her imprisoned. Today the White House announced four pardons or commutations:

• Trump pardoned former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr., who was convicted in 1998 in a corruption scandal in Louisiana where then-Gov. Edwin Edwards had demanded $400,000 from DeBartolo in exchange for a riverboat gambling license.
• Trump commuted the sentence former Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, currently serving 14 years for political corruption. He has served eight years so far. The commutation will free Blagojevich but keep his conviction intact.
• Trump also pardoned famous 1980s “junk bond king” Michael Milken, who was convicted for securities fraud, and pardoned former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was convicted for tax fraud.

Why not include Winner in the group? It’s particularly galling to have her sitting in federal prison given that the Justice Department is unlikely to ever get its hands on the Russian government operatives charged with actually attempting the hacking.

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Last week, the long-running and iconoclastic cartoon South Park got dragged yet again, this time for allegedly teaching “a generation of boys…that it was always cooler to be reactionary and contrarian, and anyone who criticizes anything is ‘offended’ and that’s the *real* problem.” A Twitter thread started by novelist, podcaster, and TV writer Dana Schwartz caught enough buzz to get trending on the micro-blogging site. It’s worth pausing over her critique, since it reflects past attacks and, more importantly, is fundamentally wrong in its substance.

Far from inculcating moral nihilism and a shallow “pox on both your houses” mentality, South Park traffics in a smart skepticism toward power in all of its manifestations and provides over two decades worth of lessons on how to be a decent, tolerant, smart, and funny human being despite living in a world that is casually brutal, disgusting, and indifferent to suffering (watch the 2001 episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” a version of Seneca’s horrific Thyestes if you have any doubt).

In retrospect, it seems impossible to overstate the cultural damage done by SOUTH PARK, the show that portrayed earnestness as the only sin and taught that mockery is the ultimate inoculation against all criticism

— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) February 13, 2020

People saying “they make fun of everyone!!!” — that is my point. South Park IS a political show, but one whose message is: both sides are equally terrible so the only correct thing to do is nothing, while mocking it all from your position of intellectual superiority.

— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) February 14, 2020

Schwartz argues that South Park traffics in moral relativism, or perhaps a form of ideological nihilism, because she believes its core message is “the only correct thing is to do nothing.” In her tweets on the topic, she admits in passing that she hasn’t “been watching the show in recent seasons,” which helps to explain why her critique is so wide of the mark.

In the early days of the show, critics were already deriding the show as “dangerous to democracy” and “vile trash” that poisoned young viewers’ minds. But as Barry Fagin wrote back in 2000 for Reason, the show was “loaded with moral content” and taught his then-10 and 12 years old kids valuable lessons, including “it’s good to make fun of people who believe stupid things,” “it’s good to make fun of hypocrisy,” and “things that happen in cartoons aren’t real.”

That last point was particularly important in the 1990s, when both liberals and conservatives were desperately trying to control the information explosion that came along with cable television and the internet. By representing the need for critical consumption of both expertise and information, South Park, like other shows that helped define the ’90s (think The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Mystery Science Theater 3000) helped to develop media literacy in millions of viewers.

I’d go further still and underscore that South Park teaches at least three basic lessons in virtually every episode. The first is that people in authority need to earn our respect rather than assume it. The second is that cultural, moral, and political diversity is both the real state of nature and can only be sustained through honest and open discussion about our differences. The third is that personal responsibility is the key to a flourishing society and the foundation of positive communal action. These points are summarized in this brief video from 2013:

At one point in her tweetstorm about South Park, Schwartz writes, “To be clear, I don’t blame the show itself as much as I do the generation of boys who internalized it into their personalities. Which maybe isn’t the show’s fault!” There’s no question audiences have a mind of their own and consumers of a given text routinely (and legitimately) interpret that text in ways that confound its creator’s intentions. So it’s possible that rather than create an audience that is smarter and more skeptical of information and power, South Park has instead simply created an army of douchebros who act more like Cartman rather than Stan or Kyle. But since South Park first aired back in 1997, the country has become vastly more tolerant toward all sorts of marginalized people and causes and no view of the show could miss what side its creators are on when it comes to out-groups ranging from immigrants to trans people to Mormons. We may indeed be more vulgar as a society, but we’re also generally more tolerant and engaged too (the youth vote for the 2018 midterms was the highest in decades). South Park might not deserve much or even any of the credit, but it doesn’t deserve any of the blame either.

Related: Read the 2006 Reason interview Jesse Walker and I conducted with Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

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Politically-themed murder flick The Hunt is back on the movie release calendar, this time with a trailer campaign that all but screams, “No really, the liberal elites are the villains, guys!”

A violent satire about rich people hunting average people for sport, The Hunt was originally scheduled for a release last September. But the advertisements were yanked after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, and the movie was subsequently subjected to a mass outrage campaign from conservatives—or at least the conservative pundit class.

Even though the initial trailer made it very clear that viewers are supposed to identify with and support the down-to-earth, working-class, likely conservative victims, some people, particularly vocal people at Fox News, were insistent that the movie glorified murdering them. Pundit outrage reached President Donald Trump’s ears, and he even tweeted about it. So the movie was shelved.

But the movie has been rescheduled to hit theaters March 13, a little more than a week after America’s ritual political primary slaughter known as “Super Tuesday.” You may have seen advertisements for it online (perhaps sandwiched between 17 Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, and Tom Steyer ads).

Perhaps in an effort to dampen any potential outrage, the trailer for the movie has been recut to make it painfully obvious that the liberal urban lefties are the bad guys:

According to The New York Times, the movie itself has not been recut at all. It’s exactly the same as it was before. They’re just now making it clear in its ad campaign that this is an over-the-top satire of political and regional ideologies and clashes. Like South Park with real people. Or Get Out with less subtlety.

It was abundantly clear before, but now the trailer practically assaults the viewer with its themes. The new marketing campaign uses last year’s controversy as a source of publicity, with movie posters quoting some of the juiciest outrage coupled with the tagline “The most talked about movie of the year is one that nobody’s actually seen.”

It’s instructive that a week after Universal announced that The Hunt is back on the schedule, there’s actually no outrage to speak of. It’s almost as if the initial uproar was largely a performance, which would explain why Universal is comfortable using last year’s uproar to get butts in seats.

The new poster is honestly pretty tame (a piglet), compared to the wild history of outrage-inducing slasher and horror film advertisements. We’ll see if the strategy works. Unfortunately, it’s too late to recut the film as a clash between Michael Bloomberg supporters and Bernie Sanders supporters.

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This Presidents Day, I am thinking of John Hancock.

Hancock was president of the Continental Congress, the body that named George Washington general of the Continental Army. Hancock was the Michael Bloomberg of his day—a politician simultaneously appreciated for his great wealth and resented for it.

I tell this story in my biography of Samuel Adams. John Hancock had inherited a fortune of what today would be about $15 million from his uncle, the merchant Thomas Hancock. John Hancock may have used some of this money to help Adams, who was poorer, pay off debts Adams owed.

While Adams and Hancock were allies against King George III, they were also rivals in Massachusetts politics. John Adams once reported that Samuel Adams “had become very bitter against Mr. Hancock, and spoke of him with great asperity in private circles.”

In Philadelphia in late 1775, Samuel Adams was annoyed to learn that Hancock had planned a ball, which seemed extravagant and inappropriate under the wartime circumstances. In January 1776, Samuel Adams wrote to his fellow patriot Elbridge Gerry, “I hope our country will never see the time, when either riches or the want of them will be the leading considerations in the choice of public officers.” The letter went on to contend that “giving such a preference to riches is both dishonourable and dangerous to government,” indicating “a base, degenerate, servile temper of mind.”

When John Hancock was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1780, Adams pronounced himself “chagrined” and “disappointed” at the result. Yet the two men eventually reconciled, and Samuel Adams wound up serving as lieutenant governor under Hancock.

When the wealth of presidential candidates emerged as a campaign issue during the previous election cycle, I wrote a column concluding, “Wealth can buy admiration but it can also bring isolation. Samuel Adams had a point when he cautioned against it becoming a big factor in voter decisions. We’d be better off spending less time thinking about how much money the candidates do or don’t have and more time considering how likely their policies are to help enrich or impoverish the rest of us.”

What was true of Trump then is true of Bloomberg now. One hears Blooomberg’s wealth cited as a reason to oppose him. “Michael Bloomberg came in on the billionaire plan—just buy yourself the nomination,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another contender for the Democratic nomination, said recently. Senator Bernie Sanders has made similar statements: “We have an individual worth some $60 billion, who is in an unprecedented way, trying to buy the election….We are going to defeat a billionaire.”

One also hears Bloomberg’s wealth mentioned as a reason to vote for him—it can buy, the argument goes, lots of well-crafted campaign commercials against Donald Trump. That is more anti-Trump commercials than the non-billionaire candidates will be able to afford. Perhaps this higher volume of commercials will increase the chances of defeating Trump, a goal that is dear to Democratic primary voters.

Hancock’s money helped to buy him the presidency of the Continental Congress and the governorship of Massachusetts, but it never made him president of the United States. He died in 1793, his fortune largely diminished by war, inattention, and mismanagement.

Other candidates who followed had greater success in purchasing the office. John F. Kennedy joked at the 1958 Gridiron dinner that he had received a telegram from his wealthy father: “Jack—Don’t spend one dime more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide.” (This is sometimes rendered as “don’t buy a single vote more than necessary.”) That joke was less funny if you were Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon.

In America, journalists and professors may envy or even hate the rich. Most of the rest of the population, though, has traditionally devoted less energy to hating millionaires and more energy to trying to get rich themselves, or at least to emulate their lifestyles.

Bloomberg’s candidacy will be a test, in part, of whether this remains true even of the Democratic primary electorate. Will the voters be bitter toward the billionaire the way that Samuel Adams sometimes was toward Hancock? Or will they appreciate Bloomberg’s willingness, like Hancock’s, to spend his fortune to advance their cause? And if, like Samuel Adams, today’s voters sometimes feel both these emotions at once, how will that translate in the voting booth?

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Venezuelan immigrants start lining up at a storage facility in the Miami neighborhood of Doral every Friday afternoon. After they complete a survey, a team of volunteers guides them through a series of storage units, where they can select from toys, sheets, electronics, holiday decorations, clothes, and other household items.

“This is your new house in this country—it’s the beginning of your future, and that’s why you have to give a touch of love,” says human rights activist and Venezuelan expatriate Patricia Andrade, who started the nonprofit that oversees this operation in 2016.

Andrade pays most of the expenses—including rent on the storage units—for Raíces Venezolanas, or “Venezuelan Roots,” herself.

“When I come to this place and I meet the families,” she says, “I know I’m doing the right thing.”

Produced by Claudia Murray and Jim Epstein. Audio post-production by Ian Keyser. Subtitles by María José Inojosa Salina. Thumbnail by Lex Villena.

Music: “Abakua” and “I Feel Sad” by Scanglobe used under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons License; “Sadie” by Adam Henry Garcia used under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons License.

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Let’s take a moment to spare some pity for Bill Barr. Being the U.S. Attorney General can be a tough gig. It’s a job held at the pleasure of the president, though also attached to a largely unrealistic expectation that the officeholder will act independently. Historically, it’s been a hatchet-man position, doing dirty work through the institutions of the ever-expanding Justice Department on behalf of White House paranoia and prejudices. It’s gotta be hard enough to maintain your self-respect in a position like that without your boss sending you instructions in front of the world via social media.

Only spare a little pity, though. Barr—a loyalist to the president, as anybody in that powerful cabinet position must be—stepped into this situation with his eyes open.

Now, however, Barr complains that President Donald Trump’s off-the-cuff pronouncements and tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.” He told ABC News last week that “it’s time [for Trump] to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”

Barr’s latest complaint comes after the department went against federal prosecutors’ recommendation of a stiff 87 to 108 months in prison for Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted for obstructing a congressional investigation, lying to a congressional committee, and witness tampering.

In and of itself, the sentencing reduction was perfectly justifiable. “A prison sentence of seven to nine years is disproportionate given the nature and consequences of Stone’s crimes,” as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum noted. “I can see why people thought this was an excessive sentence,” chimed in CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

Yet Trump’s very public bitching and moaning about the original recommendation complicates the plot.

“This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” the president tweeted, in what looks like a campaign of overt arm-twisting on behalf of a crony. “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”

Just hours later, the Justice Department moved to recommend a lesser sentence for Stone, giving every impression of scurrying forth to do the president’s bidding. The four prosecutors on the case promptly quit, with one entirely leaving the Justice Department.

For the record, Barr said that President Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.”

“This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” the president responded, in what looks like an effort to further bend his beleaguered top cop over a barrel.

Presidents have frequently deployed their attorneys general for sleazy effect; Trump just does it more publicly.

Thomas Watt Gregory, President Woodrow Wilson’s first attorney general, oversaw oppressive attempts to suppress anti-war sentiment and political dissent. He approved the creation of the pro-Wilson American Protective League to spy on and brutalize Americans who disagreed with the Wilson administration. To make sure there was no doubt about who was behind the snooping and beating, Gregory authorized the group to advertise itself as “Organized with the Approval and Operating under the Direction of the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation.”

Homer Cummings, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first attorney general, authored a court-packing plan that would have allowed the president to stuff the Supreme Court with allies who would approve his blatantly unconstitutional economic legislation.

John Mitchell, who served as attorney general under President Richard Nixon, went to prison for his role in the burglary of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel—but not before he had his own wife kidnapped and drugged to keep the secret. That might have been a bit much even for some of the other creatures who aspire to high office; Mitchell’s successors, Richard G. Kleindienst and Elliot Richardson, resigned rather than obey the increasingly erratic Nixon’s orders.

Barr finds his job rendered “impossible” by Trump’s tweets and has (so we’re told) been complaining about them for “weeks.” But just what did he think was going to happen when he took a hatchet-man job working for a guy who is completely incapable of handing off the hatchet without first publicly brandishing it and threatening to use it against passersby?

Barr can’t claim he was unaware of what to expect from the job—this is his second shot as America’s top prosecutor, after serving as attorney general under President George H. W. Bush from 1991-1993. Before that, he put in years as an assistant attorney general, as a legal policy adviser for the Reagan White House and, while attending grad school and law school, at the CIA.

In 1992, Barr was accused of helping to conceal evidence of illegal arms sales to Iran. “Coverup-General” was columnist William Safire’s nickname for Barr as a result.

A babe in the government woods Barr is not.

Ironically, in light of the current controversy, one highlight of Barr’s first stint as attorney general was the release of a report calling for building and filling more prisons. The report argued that “we are incarcerating too few criminals, and the public is suffering as a result.” (Stone must be grateful that Barr apparently mellowed with time.)

Barr not only knew the ins and outs of the attorney general job, he knew what to expect of his boss. Long before Trump brought him onto the team, Barr defended the president’s conduct in office, including a high-profile endorsement of the firing of Sally Yates and similar support given to the president’s loud calls for investigating his defeated 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“There is nothing inherently wrong about a president calling for an investigation,” Barr said in 2017.

If Barr had no problem with a president fingering who he wants the Justice Department to roughly handle, he can’t be surprised that the same president might publicly name those he wants gently treated.

Barr took the job knowing that, like his predecessors, he would be a hatchet man. Apparently, his big complaint is that he’d like the unfortunate nature of his role to be a little less overt.

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The Democratic presidential field remains one of the most wide-open races in recent political memory, but two of the top campaigns spent the weekend acting like it’s all come down to them. If they’re right, libertarians might want to find somewhere to hide for the next four years.

On Monday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg posted an online ad that criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.)—and his aggressive online supporters, the Bernie bros—for engaging in Trump-like campaign tactics. That ad came after days of stepped-up criticism from Sanders, who has called attention to Bloomberg’s support for stop-and-frisk and accused the former mayor of trying to buy the Democratic nomination.

We need to unite to defeat Trump in November. This type of "energy" is not going to get us there. https://t.co/bPuUZMs2d6 pic.twitter.com/Tdp6mpWjcX

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 17, 2020

Sanders responded by pointing out that Bloomberg has some bros of his own.

https://t.co/XwB74v3u0w pic.twitter.com/UID9vVK1yi

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 17, 2020

 

The increasingly nasty sniping between Sanders and Bloomberg suggests that each man sees the other as his biggest rival. Sanders is coming off strong if not convincing performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, while Bloomberg’s poll numbers are being carried skyward by a golden rocket of advertising. The socialist and the billionaire will square off in Wednesday’s debate in Las Vegas—the first debate for which Bloomberg has qualified after his late entry into the race.

While many other outcomes remain possible, it’s easy to imagine Sanders consolidating the progressive lane and centrist Democrats lining up behind Bloomberg for lack of a better alternative (assuming former Vice President Joe Biden can’t pull out of his current nose-dive).

Facing the prospect of a second Trump term or Sanders’ promised revolution, some voters are understandably tempted to see Bloomberg as the moderate alternative. That, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat warns, dangerously underestimates Bloomberg’s own authoritarian tendencies:

Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are naked on his Twitter feed, but Bloomberg’s imperial instincts, his indifference to limits on his power, are a conspicuous feature of his career. Trump jokes about running for a third term; Bloomberg actually managed it, bulldozing through the necessary legal changes. Trump tries to bully the F.B.I. and undermine civil liberties; Bloomberg ran New York as a miniature surveillance state. Trump has cowed the Republican Party with celebrity and bombast; Bloomberg has spent his political career buying organizations and politicians that might otherwise impede him. Trump blusters and bullies the press; Bloomberg literally owns a major media organization. Trump has Putin envy; Bloomberg hearts Xi Jinping.

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FREE MINDS

Four Democrats broke party ranks to block a so-called assault weapons ban in Virginia. The ban, which was a major priority for Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, prompted huge protests at the state capitol in Richmond last month.

As often happens with these kinds of proposals, there seems to have been some confusion about what weapons, exactly, Northam’s proposal would have targeted. In voting to shelve the bill, state Sen. Creigh Deeds (D–Bath) told the Associated Press “there are obviously a lot of questions about definitions in this bill. Definitions do matter.”

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FREE MARKETS

The U.S. Court of International Trade temporarily ordered customs agents not to collect tariffs on products like nails and steel cables. The court is reviewing a challenge brought by PrimeSource Building Products that seeks to overturn the Trump administration’s expansion of steel tariffs onto finished products that contain steel. That broadening of the steel tariffs—announced in January and implemented on February 8—was supposed to offer some protection to American companies that make steel products. Those companies had been hit particularly hard by Trump’s steel tariffs because the additional import taxes had raised input costs.

But the trade court has looked skeptically on Trump’s use of a 1962 law that grants presidential authority to implement tariffs for national security purposes. When Trump tried to double steel tariffs on Turkey last year during a diplomatic dispute, the same court struck down that action on the grounds that the Trump administration offered no “rational justification tethered to” the law’s national security purpose.

In light of that ruling, it is likely the court will block Trump’s latest tariff actions too, Heritage Foundation economist Tori Smith told Reuters. She said the 1962 Trade Expansion Act’s tariff powers are “a broken trade law that the Trump administration continues to abuse.”

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ELECTION 2020

If you want to be president of a country—any country—it’s probably a good idea to be at least a little bit familiar with the leaders of neighboring countries that are also major economic partners. Unfortunately, both billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) flubbed on-camera interviews with Telemundo when they couldn’t name the president of Mexico: Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Steyer is essentially a presidential campaign tourist booked on the all-exclusive insider experience package, but Klobuchar serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on border security and immigration. And the interviewer did not let her off the hook. Seriously, the full video is brutal.

This is sweet revenge for laughing at Andrew Yang during the debates. I love it! ????????????

"Senator Amy Klobuchar Doesn't Know Mexican Presidents Name"#AmyKlobuchar #Klobuchar2020 #Klobuchar #Democrats pic.twitter.com/yphOCbJKF4

— Keymo Suenos (@KeymoSuenos) February 18, 2020

Being qualified to be president means a lot more than simply rattling off the names of foreign leaders, of course, but this isn’t a good look.

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QUICK HITS

• Remember how Iowa was a total clusterfuck? Nevada Democrats might be preparing for a “hold my beer” moment.
• Republicans should stop making excuses for Trump’s budget deficits.
• Conor Friedersdorf on the evidence that conservative college students do self-censor around intolerant liberals.
• The Boy Scouts of America have filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy as a tactic to halt civil lawsuits over alleged sexual misconduct going back decades.
• Weed worries growing in Napa.
• Whitey Bulger was being secretly dosed with LSD by the CIA.
• Charles Portis, the journalist who authored True Grit, the classic Western about a teen girl seeking revenge against her father’s killer, died on Monday at age 86.

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Here are the questions presented in Fleck v. Wetch, now pending before the Supreme Court:

The Petitioner is an attorney who is required by state law to join and to fund a state bar association as a condition of practicing law. He challenged both compulsory membership and the compulsory funding of the association’s political activities under the First Amendment. This Court vacated and remanded the previous judgment against him for consideration in light of Janus v. AFSCME, 138 S. Ct. 2448 (2018), whereupon the Court of Appeals reaffirmed its prior ruling in all respects, holding that “Janus does not alter our prior decision.” Fleck v. Wetch, 937 F.3d 1112, 1118 (8th Cir. 2019) (App. 13a).

The questions presented are:

1. Are laws mandating membership in a state bar association subject to the same “exacting” First Amendment scrutiny that the Court prescribed for mandatory public-sector union fees in Janus?

2. Does it violate the First Amendment to presume that an attorney is willing to pay for a bar association’s “non-chargeable” political and ideological speech, unless and until that attorney takes steps to opt out?

(The second question, as you might gather, is narrower than the first.) You can also see the responses and the reply brief here. It will be interesting to see whether the Court agrees to hear the case; for Will Baude’s and my thinking on the issue, see pp. 196-98 of our Harvard Law Review article, “Compelled Subsidies and the First Amendment,” which starts with this:

Compulsory bar dues have long been treated the same as public employee union agency fees. In Lathrop v. Donohue, the Court held that lawyers can be required to pay such dues, but in Keller v. State Bar of California, the Court held that the dues couldn’t be used for political advocacy that wasn’t “germane” to “the State’s interest in regulating the legal profession and improving the quality of legal services.” Keller thus tracks the old Abood rule, in which dues could be required but only for certain purposes.

Now that [after Janus] public employees can’t be required to pay money at all to unions [and Abood has been in part overruled], we think the Court will say that lawyers can’t be required to pay it to state bars either. After all, speech by the state bar is as likely as speech by unions to “touch fundamental questions of … policy,” and more broadly to “have powerful political and civic consequences,” even when it just has to do with regulating the legal profession.

Note that the petition doesn’t challenge the state’s power to decide who is allowed to practice law in the state, or to discipline or disbar lawyers. Each state Supreme Court would always have the power to maintain such licensing even without compulsory membership in a bar association.

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