Tag: in-the-news

A Mississippi County Has Agreed To Stop Using Illegal Roadblocks in Black Neighborhoods

Two years after a cellphone video showed a white sheriff’s deputy in Madison County, Mississippi, putting his hands around a handcuffed black man’s neck, a federal judge has approved a settlement agreement between the county and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Mississippi that aims to end what community activists say is a generations-long history of unconstitutional and biased policing against minority residents in the rural county.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves on Thursday approved a consent decree—a binding agreement overseen by a federal court—that will require the Madison County Sheriff’s Department (MCSD) to implement new policies, anti-bias training, and data collection, as well as create a community advisory board.

The settlement is notable because most consent decrees over illegal policing have involved major cities like Chicago and Seattle, and those settlements are often spearheaded by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“We think it’s important because a lot of smaller police departments or police departments in more rural areas, certainly throughout the South, have generally flown much farther under the radar and yet often are plagued by many of the same systemic problems that you see in big-city police departments,” says Ezekiel Edwards, director of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. “We hope it sends a message to other police departments in Mississippi and throughout the South that they are obviously just as obligated to comply with the Constitution.”

The consent decree is the result of a class-action civil rights lawsuit filed in 2017 by the ACLU of Mississippi and the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

The lawsuit alleged that Madison County police targeted black residents with unconstitutional checkpoints and warrantless searches, violating their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Specifically, the lawsuit accused the MCSD of setting up illegal roadblocks and pedestrian “checkpoints” outside of majority-black housing complexes, conducting warrantless home invasions, and running aggressive “jump out” squads that targeted young black men doing nothing more than walking down the street.

As Reason detailed in a 2017 investigation, black residents of Madison County have felt under siege from the local sheriff’s department for generations, but they have been almost totally ignored by the county government. 

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Quinnetta Manning, captured video of a Madison County sheriff’s deputy with his hand around the neck of her husband, whose hands were handcuffed behind his back. According to Manning, six deputies barged into their home at 7 in the morning and demanded they sign a false witness statement about a nearby robbery.

Thomas says that after her husband, who walks with a cane due to a chronic nerve condition, tried to assert his rights, the deputies handcuffed him, began choking him, and told them, “You’re either going to be witnesses or suspects.”

When Manning still refused, Thomas says deputies dragged him down the stairs, calling him “Mr. Cripple.” They took him to a police cruiser in nothing but his underwear and beat him until he agreed to sign the statement. His “face was swollen and bruised from the assault, and his wrists were cut and black and blue from the tight handcuffs,” according to the ACLU lawsuit. “Hospital records show that Mr. Manning suffered both a sprained wrist and chest contusions.”

Manning told Reason that, following the incident with MCSD, her son, then five years old, started habitually locking doors in the house out of fear that the police would return and take his parents away.

In a press release following the approval of the consent decree on Thursday, Manning said “this settlement agreement is not only a necessary step in reforming MCSD but a necessary step in returning humanity to the black residents of Madison County.”

“When the Madison County Sheriff’s Department forced their way into my house and choked my disabled husband, they stole a piece of our humanity,” Manning said. “I know that every American citizen has rights, but the Madison County Sheriffs treated us as though we didn’t and made us feel less than American.”

The lawsuit also obtained undisclosed financial settlements for several of the named plaintiffs, including Manning and her husband. 

As part of the settlement, the sheriff’s department did not, however, admit to engaging in “unconstitutional, illegal, or otherwise improper conduct.”

In a statement released following the approval of the consent decree, Madison County Sheriff Randy Tucker said: “We successfully defended the plaintiff’s attempt to make this a class action, the loss of services and to our citizens and cost of defending a second complaint was the deciding factor in this settlement. We have agreed to document more information I feel will show this administration does not target or profile any race.”

During the course of the lawsuit, the ACLU uncovered a 2009 chain email, subject line “‘White’ Pride,” that Tucker, who was elected in 2012, forwarded to several of his Madison County colleagues. The chain email contains such tropes as “How come there’s no White History Month?”

The MSCD also handed over data showing that, on average, the per capita rate of police roadblocks in predominantly black census tracts in Madison County was double the rate in predominantly white census tracts. Despite making up 38 percent of the population of the county, black residents accounted for 77 percent of all arrests, 76 percent of all arrests at roadblocks, and 72 percent of all citations.

One of the other documents turned over to the ACLU and Simpson Thacher was the template case sheet for the MCSD’s narcotics unit. All of the fields on the form were blank, except three that were automatically filled in: “black,” “male,” and “arrested.”

“They really were being harassed and really were being racially profiled. No joke,” says Canton, Mississippi resident Elaine Blair. “They really were doing that. I encountered [roadblocks] two times a day within four or five hours of each other, the same spot.”

In 2007, Blair and her cousin started a group called Concerned Citizens of Canton that ran monthly civil rights training sessions and collected citizen complaints about the MCSD’s use of pedestrian checkpoints and roadblocks. County officials ignored the group and its attempts to get public records from the MCSD.

Under the terms of the four-year consent decree, the Madison County sheriff will prohibit roadblocks or checkpoints within a quarter mile of apartment complexes in black neighborhoods. It will also conduct periodic training on unbiased law enforcement and collect detailed data, including racial demographics, on law enforcement stops and arrests. The community advisory board will also take citizen complaints about policing.

“I feel very good about taking a stand on this, because when you find yourself being mistreated, you have to just say something. I guess some people can say it’s been a long time coming, but at least it’s all out there. Now we’re going to be better because of it.”

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Batwoman and Nancy Drew Get Their Gritty TV Reboots

  • Batwoman. The CW. Sunday, October 6, 8 p.m.
  • Kids Say the Darndest Things. Sunday, October 6, 8 p.m.
  • Nancy Drew. Wednesday, October 9, 9 p.m.

That croaking sound you hear from your television set is the death rattle of the rollout of television’s fall season, dragging itself to the finish line with some of the worst Nielsen numbers since the primordial TV days of shows about crime-busting postal inspectors.

In fact, the final bloc of TV premieres are remakes or rehashes or re-inflictions of shows from those ancient times, all rooted in the 1950s or even earlier. Worse yet, their histories are a lot more interesting than any of the shows.

The teenage-detective hero of The CW’s Nancy Drew, for instance, since 1930 has been the star of something close to 200 novels, six TV shows (not all of which made it to air) and five movies. And that’s not even counting three versions of Veronica Mars, who was essentially an underclass clone of Nancy.

That’s an impressive record given all the opposition to Nancy over the years. Teachers hated her—when a girl in my fourth-grade classroom made the mistake of mentioning a Nancy novel, the instructor erupted into an unhinged tirade about how the books were trash and no decent parent would allow a kid to read one—and librarians generally refused to stock her.

This despite (or maybe it was because of?) the fact that Nancy was unquestionably the coolest girl around. She was much more interested in solving crimes than boys or clothes. She raced around town in a sporty little roadster, fearlessly barged into haunted houses and deserted warehouses and lairs of killer robots.

She sounded much more fun to hang out with than her dorky literary cousins, the Hardy Boys, and that was even before we knew she looked like Pamela Sue Martin.

Newcomer Kennedy McMahon, who plays the title role in The CW’s new version of Nancy Drew, certainly passes the cuteness test. But her Nancy falls short in every other respect. Just as it did in its sullen Archie adaptation Riverdale,  the network has squeezed all the light-heartedness and charm out of its characters in favor of morose despondency and leaden bitchery.

This Nancy is no longer a high-school kid but a kid embittered by the death of her mother, which messed up her SAT scores and left her as a greasy-spoon waitress. Even the curiosity that led to her detective agencies is extinguished. “I don’t go searching in the dark anymore, not after the darkness found me,” she declares in her endlessly self-important narration. She changes her mind only when she becomes a murder suspect herself.

Nancy’s amiable lawyer dad Carson (Scott Wolf, The Night Shift) has turned into a predatory sleaze, and she hates him. Her boyfriend Ned Nickerson (Shakespearian actor Tunji Kasim) now calls himself “Nick” and has turned into an ex-con. She hates him. Her tomboy best friend George (Leah Lewis, Charmed) has unaccountably not turned into a lesbian but Nancy’s irascible boss.  Nancy hates her, and vice-versa. If the lesson of previous Nancy Drews was that girls have the capacity to be much more than mommies and wives, this time around it seems to be that they have the capacity for boundless bile and endless animus.

Batwoman, on the other hand, has an impressive capacity for irony, if you know the backstory. The Batwoman character was born in 1956 after the publication of a scathing attack on the comic-book industry called Seduction of the Innocent,  which claimed, among other things, that Batman and Robin were ticking gay time bombs that would destroy American youth.

DC Comics quickly came up with a love interest for Batman who was neither male nor underage: Batwoman, a former circus performer whose purse was full of what looked like feminine appurtinences like lipstick and charm bracelets but were actually lethal Bat-style weapons. She lasted until 1964, when DC decided her guy was past his homosexual panic and unceremoniously killed her off.

The irony here is that The CW’s revived Batwoman is a lesbian toughie named Kate Kane who got kicked out of a military academy after she was caught kissing her girlfriend. She’s bitter about not just that, but also that her security-consultant father submarined her plans to join a fascist paramilitary unit that’s been protecting Gotham since Batman disappeared for unexplained reasons three years ago.

(We’ll pause for a moment while you try to unpack the politics of that last paragraph.)

The brooding Kate decides to stop by and see her simpatico cousin, Bruce Wayne. But he’s disappeared (also three years ago, just like Batman, though nobody in Gotham City seems to have noticed the coincidental timing). While looking around his stately manor, though, Kate discovers this giant cave underneath it! Filled with Batman suits! And wow, is that lucky, because a saucy new supervillain named Alice (as in Wonderland) has just showed up to seize control of Gotham City.

There are a lot of cross-marriages among the families of these characters that would doubtless create a lot of intra-linear dramatic tensions if you could ever figure out who everybody is, but Batwoman‘s teeming writers’ room (there are 13 writing credits in the first two episodes) is spectacularly inept at exposition. Or practically anything else; everything in Batwoman—the plots, the dialogue, the characterizations—is very comic-booky, in the worst sense of the term.

That’s too bad for Ruby Rose (Orange Is the New Black), who plays Kane and deserves better. Unlike the affectations of everybody in Nancy Drew, the fractures in Kane’s soul crackle with the authentic pain of personal betrayal. She puts on her Batwoman costume not so much because she wants to save anybody, but to prove to the city that it did her wrong. Alas, so did the executive producers.

If the revival of the hetero-norming Batwoman character as broadcast TV’s first gay superhero protagonist seems odd, ABC’s revival of Kids Say the Darndest Things is utterly inexplicable. The show goes all the way back to the days of radio, where it was a brief interlude on Art Linkletter’s talk-variety show House Party. When Linkletter moved to TV in 1949, so did the kids, where they stayed until his retirement in 1967.

As a five-minute segment in which Linkletter questioned suburban 7-year-olds who seemed scarcely aware of where they were or why, Kids was often quite funny. (Linkletter: “What does your mommy do?” Kid: “She does a little housework, then sits around all day reading the racing form.”) And when it wasn’t, well, five minutes is mercifully brief.

ABC’s version, though, is a full squirmy hour, with kids who’ve been studying YouTube since before they were weaned. Producer-host Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) tries hard, but these children brim with a smarmy precocity that makes me long for a TV version of another candid-kiddie work, National Lampoon‘s old “Children’s Letters To The Gestapo.”

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Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle Will Receive $50,000 to Speak at the University of Florida

The University of Florida (UF) speakers bureau has invited Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle—a political strategist, former Fox News host, and girlfriend of Don Jr.—to speak on campus later this month.

Many progressive students are not happy about it, and this time it’s a little easier to see where they are coming from. That’s because the couple will receive $50,000—and the students are footing the bill.

The University of Florida has something called the ACCENT Speakers Bureau, which is part of the student government. The bureau collects mandatory fees from students, then uses this money to hire speakers to come to campus. According to its website, ACCENT is “the largest student-run speakers bureau in the nation. It has been part of campus for over 40 years and has provided the University of Florida with a plethora of big names, including past Presidents, Prime Ministers, media moguls, business leaders and sports legends.”

Some students are now discussing ways to disrupt the event, or at the very least prevent others from attending it, Campus Reform reports.

UF’s administration put out a statement in defense of ACCENT’s right to bring the speakers to campus and urging the students to be civil in response:

The University, in its statement on freedom of expression, has committed itself to ensuring that a wide variety of viewpoints are heard on campus as well as to protecting the First Amendment rights of all those in attendance. The University believes it is an essential component of its academic mission to foster an environment where divergent ideas, opinions and philosophies, new and old, can be rigorously discussed and critically evaluated.

To maintain this environment, the University strives to ensure that individuals are treated with respect. At the same time, the University recognizes the right of members of its community to analytically and respectfully challenge ideas so long as such challenges are conducted in a civil manner that does not stifle the open expression of the opposing ideas. Thus, such challenges must not interfere with speakers’ ability to speak or with their audience’s ability to hear the speakers.

UF is a public university, and thus its administration is correct to insist that invited persons be allowed to speak there, even if these persons hold views that are anathema to some students.

But it’s one thing to allow speech. It’s another to force students to subsidize it.

That’s what the mandatory fees are for, of course, and as long as the student government is in the business of collecting them, it should use them to fund an ideologically diverse range of speakers. But I can’t really fault students for balking at their fees being spent in this manner.

It’s hard to argue against the position taken by student Zachariah Chou in the student newspaper:

I understand that many of these people have been invited to share perspectives not often heard, and to debate ideas worth being debated on a liberal college campus.

But if you asked me what I thought of Trump Jr. coming to campus, I’d probably respond by saying I wish Ben Shapiro was coming back for round two instead.

I get that universities are supposed to be like Candyland for free speech and stuff, but I really take issue with Trump Jr. coming to campus.

Compared to some of the other conservative speakers SG has brought to campus, Trump Jr. has little to sell in the marketplace of ideas.

The fees of conservative speakers are sometimes paid by outside groups or alumni. And in some cases, either the group or the university must pay obscene security costs—essentially a fine imposed by illiberal students who want these kinds of event shut down. In the UF case, though, students are being specifically obligated to subsidize speech by two people who are most notably Trump campaign operatives. If ever there was a case for abolishing such student fees, this feels like it.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Labor Plan Would Be Terrible For Workers

“We cannot have a truly democratic society with so little power in the hands of working people,” presidential contender Elizabeth Warren wrote in her lengthy labor plan, which she released Thursday in advance of a candidate forum hosted by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “That’s why returning power to working people will be the overarching goal of my presidency.” But under the guise of empowering the working class, the Massachusetts senator’s plan actually gives an awful lot of power to the federal government—and harms workers in the process. 

Warren wants to end “worker misclassification as ‘independent contractors,'” by making misclassifying workers a violation of federal labor law. If she gets her way, she could kill ridesharing and other gig economy businesses.

Warren’s plan proposes a federal version of California’s A.B. 5, which classified Uber drivers and other gig workers as employees, not contractors. Since it wouldn’t be a Warren plan without heavy union emphasis, she also notes that gig workers will be able to unionize once they’re properly classified.

Backers of the California law call it a win for gig workers, arguing that workers are now guaranteed sick leave, overtime pay, and the minimum wage. Yet in practice the law makes it harder for workers to set their own hours, use a gig job as supplemental income, or work for multiple companies at once. Survey data show that these are all reasons why Uber drivers choose such work.

One result of such laws is that drivers for ridesharing services become more expensive to keep on because they now require benefits. The pool of drivers to hire would also shrink, since many people want an Uber gig for the flexibility it provides; many people are looking for an ad hoc arrangement, not full-time work. Beacon Economics LLC, a public policy research firm, estimates that a company like Lyft might hire 300,000 fewer workers in California alone due to the cost increases caused by such laws.

The costs associated with upending the ridesharing business model will also be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. With higher prices, fewer workers, and less flexible gigs, the entire ridesharing business model could collapse.

Much of Warren’s proposal is framed as an attempt to ensure workers can confront unsafe, unfair, or contract-violating labor conditions. But her solution is to create a federal government that has far more authority to meddle in private arrangements. It’s less about empowering workers and more about empowering federal bureaucrats.

For example, under Warren’s proposal, companies that make $1 billion or more annually would be forced to add workers to their boards until they comprise 40 percent of the overall body. A corporate board is supposed to protect and maximize shareholders’ assets; workers do not always have the same incentives or specialized knowledge necessary to carry out that fiduciary duty.

Warren would also raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, including for tipped workers. Warren’s plan frames the new minimum wage as a way to boost worker earnings. But the most likely outcome of a national $15 minimum is that restaurants and bars—which already operate on ultra-thin margins—would pay for the higher wages by laying people off and aggressively upping menu prices.

Many workers who make the majority of their salary via tips actually want to keep it that way. When Washington, D.C., raised the tipped wage to $15 an hour, many of the city’s service industry workers objected on the grounds that it would actually cost them money. The plan was eventually overturned.

Warren’s plan tries to address a variety of smaller issues too, including allowing graduate students to unionize, guaranteeing fairer scheduling practices, and banning both public and private employers from asking workers about their salary history (a measure that has already been implemented in more than a dozen states). Noncompete contracts would be prohibited under a Warren presidency. These parts of the plan are basically a grab bag of policy proposals that for the most part invite even more bureaucratic intrusion into private companies’ inner workings, dictating in rather specific terms what workers should want.

Warren has a whole section of her plan entitled “Increasing Worker Choice and Control” but for the most part her plan just increases the federal government’s control. Workers shouldn’t anticipate more choice at all, especially if they enjoy a flexible work schedule as an Uber driver or make the majority of their income via (hard-earned!) tips as a bartender. Consumers will lose out, too, in the form of higher costs for many of the services that make their lives easier and better—if those companies stay in business at all.

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7 More Cases Everyone Should Know From the Roberts Court

Here is another preview of the 11-hour video library from our new book, An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know. This post will focus on the second batch of cases from the Roberts Court.

Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin I (2013)

U.S. v. Windsor (2013)

NLRB v. Noel Canning (2014)

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014)

Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)

Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin II (2016)

Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016)

 

You can also download the E-Book or stream the videos.

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Pornography Is Protected by the First Amendment

The specter of pornography is once again haunting the minds of certain American conservatives. “Let’s ban porn,” Ross Douthat of The New York Times declared last year. Porn is “just a product,” he wrote, “something made and distributed and sold, and therefore subject to regulation and restriction if we so desire.” The Daily Caller‘s Zak Slayback recently doubled down on Douthat. “Unlike a Scorsese film or a newspaper, both of which are consumed for artistic enjoyment,” he wrote, “pornography is consumed with one outside end in mind: orgasm and masturbation. Its primary purpose is not entertainment (in any colloquial sense of the word) or enlightenment. In that sense, pornography is just a tool, like any other product, and can be regulated like any other product.” Slayback added: “Don’t let the pornography lobby and libertarians frame this as a free speech issue. It’s isn’t.”

But of course this is a free speech issue, as the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, even in cases in which the Court allowed certain restrictions on “obscene” material to stand.

For more than half a century, the Supreme Court has drawn a line between pornography, which enjoys the protections of the First Amendment, and obscenity, which does not. The distinction between the two shows why any sort of all-encompassing government ban on porn would run afoul of the Constitution.

In A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Attorney General of Massachusetts (1966), the Supreme Court considered a state effort to have a sexually explicit book declared obscene and therefore banned under state law. Not so fast, the justices told the Bay State. Even a “patently offensive” pornographic work, the Court held, is still protected by the First Amendment. “A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value.”

Seven years later, the Court revised its obscenity test in a landmark ruling that continues to hold sway in all legal debates over porn and censorship. According to Miller v. California (1973), “state statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited.” A state may only prohibit a work for being obscene if the work meets all of the following criteria:

(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest…(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Court applied the Miller test a year later in Jenkins v. Georgia (1974), a case which centered on the obscenity conviction of a movie theater manager who screened the film Carnal Knowledge, which featured nudity but would hardly qualify as pornographic by today’s standards. Writing for the majority, Justice William Rehnquist—nobody’s idea of a liberal squish—struck down the conviction.

Although the Georgia Supreme Court had upheld the theater manager’s obscenity bust on the grounds that “the First Amendment does not protect the commercial exhibition of ‘hard core’ pornography,” as Rehnquist put it, he took a different view—literally. “Our own viewing of the film,” Rehnquist wrote, “satisfies us that ‘Carnal Knowledge’ could not be found under the Miller standards to depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way.” One can only imagine the sort of conversations that Rehnquist and his colleagues had in chambers that day.

As these cases illustrate, the question of whether sexually charged material rises to the level of potentially prohibitable obscenity turns in significant part on the specific contents of the work at issue. If the government wants to ban the sale or distribution of a particular dirty movie, in other words, the government must be able to convince the courts that the movie “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Otherwise, it is protected by the First Amendment.

A one-size-fits-all government ban on pornography, by contrast, necessarily avoids all such case-by-case determinations and thus violates both the Supreme Court’s precedents and the broader First Amendment principles they endorsed.

Like it or not, the debate about porn is always a debate about free speech. The hands of every would-be government censor are still bound by the First Amendment.

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Trump Does Not Need Alligators in Moats for a Draconian Anti-Immigration Crackdown—He’s Already Outdoing Ike’s Harsh ‘Operation Wetback’

President Donald Trump has denied a New York Times report that he fantasized about building an electrified wall with spikes that “pierce the human flesh” surrounded by a snake- and alligator-filled moat. He is also disputing that he suggested shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down—a part of the story that ABC News separately confirmed. Of course, he is on the record advocating lethal force (not just maiming) against rock-throwing migrants.

He doesn’t deny that he wants to get a whole lot tougher on immigration. And he doesn’t deny that he fired Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who deployed tear gas against the approaching Central American migrants and defended separating children from migrant parents, after she balked at some of his other demands.

At this stage, Trump has already exceeded the harshness even of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, one of the most draconian deportation programs in this country’s history—a policy that Trump for years has espoused as a “humane” and successful model.

From 1942 to 1947 the U.S. government barred Texas farmers from using the bracero guest worker program, which allowed farmers elsewhere in the country to legally hire Mexican help. That meant that the Lone Star state faced labor shortages just when its agriculture industry was expanding, thanks to the rise of large-scale farming. Predictably, thousands of Mexican workers started swimming across the Rio Grande to avoid border agents, arriving all wet into the eager arms of Texan farmers.

This upset the Mexican government, which didn’t like losing too many able-bodied Mexican men to better-paying gringos. Meanwhile, American labor unions did not like to see their members’ wages undercut by unauthorized Mexicans. And nativists opposed the immigrants just because they were brown. Even some churches and progressive social groups jumped on the enforcement bandwagon, thinking this would rescue the immigrants from exploitative employers. The Teamsters exploited Cold War worries to whip up fears that “more than 100 Communists a day” were flooding the country from the unregulated Mexican border, just like President Trump has been baselessly claiming that terrorists are streaming over America’s southern border.

So successful was the campaign to vilify unauthorized immigrants that the University of Chicago’s Louis Leal, who was also chairman of the Mexican American Council of Chicago, declared: “One of problems is that of wetbacks coming to Chicago.”

Eisenhower was ordinarily a champion of civil rights, and he was actually quite generous to refugees, at least of the white European variety. But facing mounting public pressure, he listened to Border Patrol chief Harlon B. Carter—a convicted murderer—and in 1954 he asked Attorney General Herbert Brownell to ramp up immigration enforcement. The result was Operation Wetback.

Carter had previously tried to deploy the National Guard in rounding up and ejecting immigrants. But it was illegal to use the military to enforce domestic laws—so when Brownell launched Operation Wetback, he instead just appointed a general to run the program using military tactics. Jeeps and planes would swoop in on farms and factories and round up all the brown-skinned folks on the premises, even if they were there legally. Some of them were sent into detention camps pending deportation, just like now. The conditions in these camps were abysmal, and many of the detainees died while being held. In one particularly gruesome incident, 88 Mexicans died of a heat stroke as result of a roundup that occurred while it was 112°. Those who survived were subjected to all kinds of indignities, such as having their heads shaved to make it easier to spot them if they tried to re-enter anytime soon.

Some migrants were airlifted to the Mexican interior. (About three planeloads were flown out of Chicago alone every week.) But as historian Mae M. Ngai has documented, about a quarter were herded into cargo ships—which a later congressional investigation compared to 18th century slave ships and “penal hell ships”—at Port Isabel, Texas, and taken way south in Mexico, so that it would be harder for them to return.

Mercifully, the program was shut down after only a few months. General revulsion at its inhumane tactics sapped support, and Congress refused to renew funding.

Trump and other anti-immigration hardliners sometimes claim that Operation Wetback solved the illegal immigration problem by deporting over 1.3 million Mexicans and putting the fear of God in future illegal migrants. But actually what solved the problem wasn’t Ike’s crackdown—it’s the fact that he reformed and expanded the bracero program, allowing migrants to legally enter the country. President Lyndon Johnson ended that program about a decade later, once again sowing the seeds for unauthorized immigration whose fruits we are witnessing today.

Eisenhower created so much havoc over a few months with only 1,000 border patrol agents. Trump has close to 20,000 agents, about 16,000 on the southern border. He does not need alligators in moats to outdo even the damage done by Operation Wetback.

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Treason (!), Sedition, and Trump Derangement Syndrome

I understand that actually taking seriously what the President of the United States says and writes brings with it the risk of being accused, at least by the more vigorous of Trump’s defenders among our readers, of having succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome.  (More about that below.)

But he is, as his stoutest defenders continually remind us, the duly elected president, and they might be more persuasive in their defense if they treated him as such, and not as some bumbling nincompoop whose says meaningless and nonsensical things that we shouldn’t be getting so bent out of shape over.

Here are a few of the things, repeated verbatim (italics added), that Trump has tweeted, or said, in the last few days:

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?

Why isn’t Congressman Adam Schiff being brought up on charges for fraudulently making up a statement and reading it to Congress as if this statement, which was very dishonest and bad for me, was directly made by the President of the United States? This should never be allowed!

His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason…..

Adam Schiff made up my conversation, every word of it, and then read it to Congress as though I said it.  I’ll tell you what, he should resign from Congress … he’s a low-life, he should be forced to resign.  He took a perfect conversation, realized he couldn’t read it to Congress, it was a perfect conversation … He took that conversation, which was perfect, he said: “I can’t read this.”  And he made up a conversation and said it to Congress and to the American people.  And it was horrible, what he said.  And that was supposed to be coming from me, and it was all fabricated.  He should resign from office in disgrace, and frankly they should look at him for treason, because he is making up the words of the President of the United States, it’s a disgrace and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

Congressman Adam Schiff should resign for the Crime of, after reading a transcript of my conversation with the President of Ukraine (it was perfect), fraudulently fabricating a statement of the President of the United States and reading it to Congress, as though mine! He is sick!

One hardly knows where to begin to dissect the venality and stupidity of these remarks.  Arrest for Treason?  No, you cannot arrest Adam Schiff for treason.

Let’s begin with the Speech and Debate Clause of the US Constitution (Art. 1 Sec. 6), shall we? The President, who has sworn and oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, appears not to be aware of its existence.  It provides that members of Congress “shall not be questioned in any other Place” for “any Speech of Debate in either House.”  If Rep. Schiff “fraudulently fabricated” a statement of the President and “read it to Congress as if it was [his]”—a ridiculous charge (see below), but let that pass for the moment and assume it is true—it is not a crime (or even a “Crime”), and he cannot be arrested for it.

Second: Schiff’s speech does not and could not possibly, by any remote stretch of the imagination or any remotely plausible interpretation of the law, constitute treason. Another clause of the Constitution that the President appears unaware of is in Art. I Sec. 3:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

Notice, among other things, the requirement of an “overt Act”—you cannot be guilty of treason for speech alone. So even if Rep. Schiff made up a conversation that he purported was Trump’s, and even if he were not protected by the Speech and Debate Clause, he’s not committing treason by doing so.

And the notion that Rep. Schiff’s statement—even if totally fabricated and bearing “NO relationship to what [Trump] said on the call”—constitutes “levying War” on the United States, surely, is too ridiculous to need serious rebuttal, no?  Donald Trump is not the United States, and an attack on him is not an attack on the United States.  And the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to

” … write, print, utter, or publish, … any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States …

was repealed some time ago—in 1801, to be exact.  Having flirted with the idea, embodied therein, that the government and the nation were one and the same, and that an attack on the one is an attack on the other, we rid ourselves of that idea, and it is deeply unfortunate that Trump is resurrecting it now.

And finally, on the actual merits of Trump’s claim.  Here is the portion of the statement read by Rep. Schiff at the start of last week’s hearings that the President of the United States asserts is a “Crime,” a “FRAUD,” and, possibly, “TREASON”:

“It reads like a classic organized crime shakedown. Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates. We’ve been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don’t see much reciprocity here. I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you though. And I’m going to say this only seven times so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand. Lots of it. On this and on that. I’m going to put you in touch with people, not just any people, I am going to put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States, my Attorney General Bill Barr. He’s got the whole weight of the American law enforcement behind him. And I’m going to put you in touch with Rudy. You’re going to love him. Trust me. You know what I’m asking. And so I’m only going to say this a few more times. In a few more ways. And by the way, don’t call me again. I’ll call you when you’ve done what I asked.

This is in sum and character what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine.” (italics added)

Was what Schiff said a fair characterization of what Trump said?  Reasonable people can, I suppose, disagree about that—the way that reasonable people disagreed about whether AG Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report was, or was not, a fair characterization of that document.

But bear in mind, please: we don’t know what Trump said.  All we know is what Trump’s White House said he said—a “Memorandum” that states, on the first page of the document:

CAUTION: A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place.

We don’t know what Trump actually said because he has not released a full transcript or recording of the call.

It is somewhere between outrageous and laughable for Trump to claim, on the one hand, that Schiff’s characterization constitutes not just a crime but quite possibly a capital crime, while simultaneously not releasing the actual transcript of the conversation so we can judge for ourselves.

Here’s my characterization of what he’s doing now:  “Trust me.  I’ve given you my version of the conversation.  It was perfect. Trust me.  Saying otherwise is criminal and possibly treasonous.”

Moroever, no reasonable person could possibly think, listening to Rep. Schiff or reading his remarks, that he was giving us a verbatim account of the Trump call—”putting words in the mouth of the president.” He couldn’t have been much clearer: This is the “essence,” in “not so many words,” the “sum and character” of the conversation. It’s not what he said verbatim, it’s what I think he meant to say.

Does anyone—anyone?—not see Trump’s tirade here for what it is: a transparent (and rather clumsy) attempt to distract our collective attention away from Trump’s own behavior? It is difficult for me to how anyone—whatever grievances one may have with the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, the Squad, etc. etc.—can fail to call it out as unbefitting a president of the United States.

Finally, regarding Trump Derangement Syndrome: I’m getting rather tired of the phenomenon whereby anyone who examines and tries to comprehend what our president has done or said and to have a rational conversation about it is accused of suffering from TDS.  Let’s change that narrative, shall we?  A number of diseases or syndromes are named after well-known sufferers from the disease—Lou Gehrig’s disease being best known in this category. We’ve been thinking about Trump Derangement Syndrome all wrong! It refers, actually, to the particular form of derangement from which our president appears to be suffering.  I invite readers to read what I have written about the Ukrainian Affair and what Trump has written about the Ukrainian Affair (additional excerpts from Trump’s Twitter feed are below, and the rest can be found here), and to ask yourself: who’s the deranged one here?

 

**************************

More verbatim excerpts from the President’s Twitter feed:

Rep. Adam Schiff fraudulently read to Congress, with millions of people watching, a version of my conversation with the President of Ukraine that doesn’t exist. He was supposedly reading the exact transcribed version of the call, but he completely changed the words to make it sound horrible, and me sound guilty. HE WAS DESPERATE AND HE GOT CAUGHT,” Trump wrote. “Adam Schiff therefore lied to Congress and attempted to defraud the American Public. He has been doing this for two years. I am calling for him to immediately resign from Congress based on this fraud!”

As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!

The congratulatory phone call with the Ukrainian President was PERFECT, unless you heard Liddle’ Adam Schiff’s fraudulently made up version of the call. This is just another Fake News Media, together with their partner, the Democrat Party, HOAX!

To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!

The Fake News Media wants to stay as far away as possible from the Ukraine and China deals made by the Bidens. A Corrupt Media is so bad for our Country! In actuality, the Media may be even more Corrupt than the Bidens, which is hard to do!

Very simple! I was looking for Corruption and also why Germany, France and others in the European Union don’t do more for Ukraine. Why is it always the USA that does so much and puts up so much money for Ukraine and other countries? By the way, the Bidens were corrupt!

WHO CHANGED THE LONG STANDING WHISTLEBLOWER RULES JUST BEFORE SUBMITTAL OF THE FAKE WHISTLEBLOWER REPORT? DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Again, the President of Ukraine said there was NO (ZERO) PRESSURE PUT ON HIM BY ME. Case closed!

 

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Trump Brazenly Suggests Ukraine, China Should Do Opposition Research for His 2020 Campaign

L’état, c’est moi. A recurring theme throughout Donald Trump’s presidency has been his inability to distinguish between the interests of the country and the interests of Donald Trump. This has manifested itself in myriad ways, from the use of Trump hotels for official state business to Trump’s insistence that negative news coverage violates libel laws. A different strain of the same logic has consumed the Republican Party and conservative media, which increasingly are organized not around principles or interest groups but around the interests of Trump above all else.

Now, as the president braces against a possible impeachment, he seems ready to deploy this same untruth as an explanation for possible misdeeds. The state is me. I am the state. Therefore, my interests are those of the United States.

Consider what Trump tweeted late on Thursday night:

That tweet capped a crazy day that began with Trump, during an impromptu press conference in the White House driveway, raising the prospect of Ukraine (and China) opening investigations into former vice president (and possible Democratic presidential nominee) Joe Biden. You know, the exact same request Trump made during a phone call in July with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a request that has caused a flurry of renewed speculation about impeachment. And here was Trump, standing in front of TV cameras, suggesting once again that foreign governments should help his re-election bid by digging up dirt on the Democratic primary front-runner.

Then came the news that Trump had dismissed Marie Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal reported that this was because “she also had been an obstacle to efforts to push Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden and his son Hunter,” citing none other than Rudy Guiliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, as the source of that info.

Before the day was out, CNN had reported that Trump raised the prospect of China investigating Biden during a phone call with Chinese trade officials in July. In the same call, Trump reportedly promised not to condemn China’s crackdown on Hong Kong.

The request reportedly befuddled Chinese officials, who mistakenly believed they were on the phone with the president in order to hammer out a trade deal between the two countries, not to engage in American domestic politicking. “One Trump ally outside the White House described receiving a message from Chinese government officials asking if Trump was serious when he suggested China open an investigation into Biden,” CNN reported. “The response: investigating corruption is an easy way to earn goodwill with Trump.”

The theme repeated later Thursday night, when the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight committees released the first trove of documents lawmakers have been reviewing related to l’affaire Ukraine. A series of text messages between William Taylor, a top U.S. diplomat in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, seems particularly damning.

The pattern that’s now emerging suggests Trump routinely intertwined his reelection effort with official state business—either implicitly (“an easy way to earn goodwill”) or explicitly (“WH meetings are conditioned on investigations”).

Which brings us back to Trump’s late-night tweet. Now that Trump is openly admitting he solicited foreign assistance to investigate Biden, he’s pivoted to claim that all this was in the best interest of the country. He’s just trying to uphold the law! If you buy that argument, ask yourself how you’d respond to President Barack Obama openly declaring that China should investigate Mitt Romney.

Clearly, the United States has an interest in tamping down corruption abroad—particularly when it may involve Americans currying favor, as Joe or Hunter Biden may have done. That does bear investigating. But Trump hardly seems interested in investigating corruption, broadly speaking. He has a singular focus on implicating a domestic political opponent in corruption. And he’s clearly willing to leverage his office to convince foreign governments to do opposition research for his campaign, and to do it all via diplomatic backchannels.

And he is unwilling or unable to grasp that distinction.

Is all of this impeachable conduct? That’s for Congress to decide. But it’s obviously inappropriate, completely at odds with a constitutional system that makes the president the head of state but not the state itself, and probably illegal. Oh, and Republican senators are already normalizing it.

FREE MINDS

Facebook feeds your friends fake news, but you’re too smart for that. An expansive new survey from the Pew Research Center examines Americans’ attitudes towards social media. It finds that only 28 percent of Americans say they “often” get their news from social media. Despite that, most Americans believe social media have too much influence over what everyone else is seeing.

Pew’s survey found that 62 percent of Americans say social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have “too much control” over the mix of news people see, and that 82 percent believe those social media sites “treat some news organizations differently than others.” Self-identified Republicans are far more likely to believe social media have too much control over news content than self-identified Democrats.

This is what a fertile ground for government intervention looks like.

FREE MARKETS

I was told there would be no trade-offs. When the minimum wage increases, employers often cut non-wage benefits such as flexible leave, health insurance coverage, tips, and employee discounts, according to a new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.

“The negative economic tradeoffs for minimum wage workers, unfortunately, cancel out most of the paycheck gains,” says Ryan Young, a senior fellow at the institute and the author of the report.

QUICK HITS

  • A constituent—apparently a follower of the late Lyndon LaRouche—has a modest proposal for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y):
  • Trump won’t have Rick Perry to kick around much longer. The Secretary of Energy will resign next month.
  • In a speech from Florida’s massive retirement community, The Villages, President Donald Trump promised to “save” Medicare from Democrats. But can he save it from itself?
  • Who will Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) wreck at next week’s Democratic primary debate?
  • “With or without Trump, any world order that depends for its survival on the whims of a single person in a single branch of gov­ernment in a single country is simply untenable,” write three foreign policy experts at the Cato Institute.
  • Chicago is holding this grandmother’s car for a $6,000 ransom, even though she didn’t commit any crimes.
  • Good luck getting a ride at Los Angeles International Airport after October 29:
  • More than 5,000 inmates die in the Philippines’ national penitentiary every year.
  • MGM will pay an $800 million settlement to victims of last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas.
  • Hong Kong is banning masks.
  • Yes, your dog really does love you.

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Vaping Panic Ignores How E-Cigarettes Save Lives

During a public meeting of California’s official tobacco committee, formed largely to divvy up the proceeds of a large tobacco-tax hike approved by voters in 2016, commissioners bemoaned the small number of smokers who took advantage of official Food and Drug Administration-approved products that help smokers quit their deadly habit. Some people use nicotine gum, patches, and nasal sprays, but not enough to satisfy the regulators.

The next item on their agenda was vaping. Large numbers of ex-smokers do in fact use these e-cigarettes and vape pens, which are 95 percent safer than combustible cigarettes, according to a well-respected British public health agency. Without any sense of irony, the commissioners sought ways to stamp out this menace—and one insisted that vaping was just another form of smoking. I chalked it up to a frustrating Puritanism among health officials.

The great Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” The rub against vaping, and other smokeless tobacco products, is that people enjoy it. Nicotine addicts get their nicotine buzz, have an excuse to take a break from work and chat with other “smokers,” yet avoid most of the ill effects of smoking. It’s a great example of how the marketplace promotes public health better than government hectorers.

Indeed, California lawmakers, at the state and local level, have been waging a war against vaping products for several years. San Francisco has outright banned the sale of e-cigarettes, even as it embraces marijuana retailers and promotes safe-injection sites for hard-core drug users. Other localities target vaping by forbidding flavored-tobacco sales. Because virtually all vape liquids are flavored, this becomes a de facto ban. Los Angeles County now is advancing such a measure.

The latest news has energized health activists who already want to banish vaping. More than 500 people have contracted a lung-related disorder tied to vaping, with 90 of them in California. Eleven people have died nationwide and two have died in our state. This troubling news has led officials in Michigan and New York to temporarily ban sales of vaping products. It even led the Trump administration, which usually is immune to such hysteria, to direct the FDA to ban vape sales.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see California officials take an unusually restrained approach. “There are numerous unknown factors at this time, and due to the uncertainty of the exact cause, it is our recommendation that consumers refrain from vaping until the investigation has concluded,” said Acting Health Officer Charity Dean. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order directing state health officials to launch a public awareness campaign to educate people “about the health risks of vaping nicotine and cannabis products.”

That’s exactly what health officials should do. They’re not supposed to insist on abstinence for all products and behaviors that are less than ideal, but to urge caution while researchers figure out what is going on. The new illnesses aren’t necessarily tied to commercially available vaping products, but may be the result of people who use vape pens in ways that they weren’t designed to be used.

Investigations theorize that the illnesses might be related to—and, yes, I’m hedging because no one knows anything definitive yet—black-market vape cartridges that use marijuana-based oils. “Illegal cannabis dispensaries sell unregulated and untested cannabis products and absolutely should not be used,” according to a statement from the California health agency. It’s absurd to ban legitimate vaping products if illegitimate ones are to blame.

If cities, counties, and states ban the sales of commercially tested products, then underground products will become more prevalent. We apparently have to constantly relearn the lessons of Prohibition. When the sale of spirits, wine, and beer were criminalized, people bought underground hooch. They often got sick and died. We wouldn’t blame legal spirits for illnesses caused by bathtub gin.

What about the epidemic of teen vaping?

It’s a serious problem, but not that different than what teens have been doing forever. When I was a teen-ager, my friends snuck outside of school to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and smoke joints. We don’t outlaw the sales of wine and flavored vodka—or firearms or marijuana, for that matter—to adults because young people might get them from older siblings or friends. I’m not downplaying concerns, but the best approach is to enforce age-limit laws and try to teach our kids not to do insanely stupid things.

Let’s calm down and see where the evidence takes us. But one part of the debate needs to remain in focus: vaping is a safer—not safe, but safer—alternative to smoking cigarettes. Nearly a half-million people die a year in the United States from tobacco-related illnesses. We should not eliminate one promising way to slash that depressing number, even if vaping does give consternation to health nannies who prefer that we inhale nothing but air.

This column was first published by the Orange County Register.

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