Tag: in-the-news

Last week, Georgetown University Law School ended its investigation of incoming Center for the Constitution Director Ilya Shapiro. Administrators concluded that they would not discipline him over a poorly-worded tweet about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s qualifications.

But now Shapiro has decided to resign from the position. In a statement, he explained that the university’s rationale—which gave him only a “technical” victory in this matter—would further imperil his teaching and his scholarship.

“After full consideration of the report of the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action (‘IDEAA Report’), and upon consultation with counsel, family, and trusted advisers, it has become apparent that my remaining at Georgetown has become untenable,” he wrote. “You cleared me on a jurisdictional technicality, but the IDEAA Report—and your own statements to the Law Center community—implicitly repealed Georgetown’s vaunted Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy.”

The initial source of all this trouble was the following pair of tweets:

Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart. Even has identify politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?

Because Biden said he’s only consider[ing] black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached. Fitting that the Court takes up affirmative action next term.

Shapiro apologized for them and was right to do so, since the bad phrasing could have left readers with the false impression that he was suggesting black women would make inferior SCOTUS appointees. But clearly, he wasn’t actually saying that: He meant to convey that he believed Sri Srinivasan was the best candidate from a progressive standpoint and would not be chosen due to gender and race considerations.

“Although my tweet was inartful, as I’ve readily admitted many times, its meaning that I considered one possible candidate to be best and thus all others to be less qualified is clear,” wrote Shapiro.

After subjecting Shapiro to a lengthy investigation, Georgetown determined he would go unpunished and should begin work. But the reasoning is key: Law Dean William Treanor said that the tweets had occurred prior to Shapiro taking the job, meaning they were not “subject to discipline.” Quite obviously, this left open the door to punishment in the future, if Shapiro tweeted (or said) something that caused a similar outcry. According to Shapiro:

Regardless even of the “effect” of what I tweeted on January 26, the IDEAA Report found that “if [I] were to make another, similar or more serious remark as a Georgetown employee, a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex likely would be created.” (emphasis added.) On this theory, all sorts of comments that someone—anyone—could find offensive would subject me to disciplinary action. This would be a huge Sword of Damocles over my head as I try to engage in my educational mission.

Shapiro’s letter notes that there is a huge double standard at play here; he provides several examples of progressive faculty members’ statements that could have provoked offense among conservative and Republican students. None of these were investigated by IDEAA.

“All of these tweets were protected under Georgetown’s free-expression policy,” noted Shapiro. “But now they would all merit at least an ‘investigation’ to determine whether they violate the IDEAA’s theory of hostile educational environment that was selectively applied in my case. Apparently it’s free speech for thee, not for me.”

Shapiro has thus resigned his position, after all.

This is a frustrating outcome and one Georgetown could have easily avoided by sticking to its own free speech commitments, which expressly permit students and faculty to engage in broad free expression without fear of sanction. On paper, that commitment is clear: “It is Georgetown University’s policy to provide all members of the University community, including faculty, students, and staff, the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn,” it reads. “It is not the proper role of a university to insulate individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Deliberation or debate may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.”

If Shapiro is not welcome at Georgetown, then that commitment is a hollow one.

The post Ilya Shapiro Resigns From Georgetown University Law School appeared first on Reason.com.

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Seattle’s criminal justice reforms inspired by 2020’s George Floyd protests succeeded in abolishing one aspect of policing, if only accidentally. A bungled transfer of parking enforcement from the police department to its transportation department is forcing the city to waive some $5 million in parking tickets.

The shift of the city’s parking enforcement unit from the Seattle Police Department (SPD) to the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) got unanimous approval from the Seattle City Council in August 2021. It was part of the council’s efforts to spin off more city functions out of SPD and into other departments.

But, as The Seattle Times reported last week, the transfer caused the city’s parking enforcement personnel—who were never police officers—to lose the special commissions that empowered them to issue parking citations.

That oversight was corrected in April 2022, when Mayor Bruce Harrell ordered new commissions to be granted, reports the Times. But the city still had to forgive the 200,000 tickets issued during the prior seven months.

The slip-up, accidental and temporary though it was, is one of the more radical results of the city’s policing reforms.

Following 2020’s raucous protests and riots—where Seattle demonstrators forced the evacuation of one precinct building and established a self-governing, leftist street commune—the city council had considered far deeper cuts to the SPD budget.

Some council members endorsed activists’ demands that the department’s budget, then slightly over $400 million, be cut by 50 percent.

In the end, the city council cut SPD’s budget by 11 percent on net. Spinning off functions from the police to nonpolice departments, including parking and 911 dispatchers, were responsible for a significant portion of those cuts.

The bureaucratic reshuffle of public safety and enforcement functions has gotten mixed reviews from criminal justice reformers at the time.

“Although these efforts to civilianize public safety and shrink the role of the police in our communities are a step in the right direction, it is not the same as what community has been calling for—police divestment and community reinvestment,” wrote Mina Barahimi Martin, a policy analyst for the Washington American Civil Liberties Union, in a November 2021 blog post.

It advocated for shifting more money from public safety into housing, health care, and jobs programs.

One libertarian response to largely left-wing demands to defund the police in favor of other social spending was to instead privatize the provision of public safety. Nowhere would that be easier than parking.

Seattle, like many cities, provides a lot of on-street parking for free. Not charging for those spaces is troublesome from a free market perspective; taxpayers writ large are paying for parking spaces that a smaller subset of drivers use. The rent-free land provided is effectively a subsidy to those drivers.

And because prices aren’t used to ration the space, people instead pay with their time by constantly circling the block looking for a place to park.

As a second-best solution to pricing free spaces, Seattle has a 72-hour rule that prohibits anyone from parking anywhere for more than 72 hours at a time. The rule is supposed to constantly redistribute space among drivers. But enforcing it obviously requires the employ of parking enforcement officers with the power to fine people for violating the rules.

Whether parking enforcement is conducted by the police department or the transportation department changes little about a system of government agents using fines to enforce a system of subsidies and forced rationing.

A better world is possible.

At a minimum, Seattle could expand its decade-old paid parking program—which charges a variable rate for parking spaces in higher-demand commercial areas—to the entire city.

Using prices to ration parking would shift the costs of parking from the public writ large onto individual drivers. It would also hopefully cut down on the need for city parking enforcement. Prices would encourage some people to park in off-street lots. Others could pay a market price for longer-term parking instead of gambling that they won’t get a ticket for breaking the 72-hour rule.

The city’s latest parking report for 2021 shows that even many priced parking areas have average occupancy rates well below the city’s target rate of 70 percent to 85 percent.

That suggests parking is oversupplied and many existing public parking spaces could be sold off to adjacent property owners who could convert them into other uses or converted by the city instead into travel lanes for cars or bikes.

The former option would even earn the city money rather than costing it $5 million.

Indeed, the fact that property rights and prices can be assigned to parking spaces in the first place shows that parking isn’t a public good that needs to be provided in public spaces by the government. Instead, it could all be privatized.

Without any public parking spaces, there would be no need for public parking enforcement. Private property owners would be responsible for charging for its use, controlling access, or converting it to nonparking uses.

That would do more to accomplish the goals of 2020’s criminal justice reform protests than simply shifting parking cops from one department to another.

The post Seattle Accidentally Had To Forgive 200,000 Parking Tickets. It Should Have Privatized Parking Instead. appeared first on Reason.com.

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It appears that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is about to crack down on the labeling of nondairy milk products like almond and oat milks.

It’s all part of the FDA’s silly, condescending treatment of consumers that just so happens to benefit powerful, entrenched agriculture interests using the government to attack competitors.

Wired and Mother Jones report that, based on a draft policy produced by the FDA back in March that has not yet been made public, the agency is preparing to rule that the word “milk” on labels must be confined to animal products. If true, this would mean that almond milk would have to go by another name and cannot be marketed in such a way to suggest that it’s similar to dairy milk.

Of course, there is no evidence that anybody is being tricked or fooled by nondairy milk. Nobody is buying it and consuming it by accident, at least not more than once. Nevertheless, representatives from the dairy industry have been lobbying the government for years now to try to get the FDA to do something about this growing competition. And some lawmakers in dairy-centric communities have been pushing for laws to control the use of the term.

A 2019 letter from the National Milk Producers Federation to the FDA shows what’s really happening here is that greater numbers of substitute milk products have been coming to the market each year. And the dairy industry contends that consumers are “being misled about the nutritional content of plant-based imitators relative to real dairy products, creating marketplace confusion and inappropriately blurring well-defined standards of identity.”

The nutritional contents of dairy milk are obviously different from the nutritional contents of nondairy milk, and the Federation argues that consumers don’t understand this and many think that this “fake” milk is healthier and “more nutritious” than dairy milk. From a reasonable perspective, this would seem to be a matter of opinion or interpretation, but the Federation insists that their product is objectively healthier and that this “confusion,” no joke, “creates a public health issue by causing harm to our nation’s children and, potentially, other consumers.”

While one definition of milk is a fluid excreted by an animal’s mammary glands, it has for centuries also applied to some of these other substitutes. Almond milk may seem like a new trend, but it in fact dates back centuries.

It would, of course, be crass to blatantly demand that the federal government pursue a regulation just for the purpose of attempting to suppress a competitor, and so there are these attempts to manufacture a public health crisis over which drink is more “nutritious” and which, therefore, should have control over the term.

No, this makes no sense. But this is the result of allowing the federal government to control not only the labeling of the foods we consume but also the proper “identity” of those foods. We’ve seen the silliness of the FDA’s overregulation of food contents in debates over what should be in French dressing and how many cherries should be in frozen cherry pies (and only frozen cherry pies).

In May, a small but bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency that would have received the FDA’s guidance letter back in March, arguing that there’s no justification for getting involved in a fight over what gets to label itself “milk.” The authors, Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), Rep. Julia Brownley (D–Calif.), and Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.), note that the FDA does not use nutritional value as part of its “standards of identity” and point out that dairy milks can vary wildly in its contents based on the animal of origin.

“[The] FDA has not previously asked producers to disclose other wide variations in nutritional components—including among milks derived from different animals. Goat milk, for example, has less folate, zinc, riboflavin and vitamin B12 than cow milk. Buffalo milk has twice as much saturated fat as cow milk, as well as considerably more calcium,” they write. They argue that it would be discriminatory to apply these standards to plant-based milks as a justification for regulating their labels if they’re not going to do the same to animal milks.

We’ve seen examples of the dairy industry doing exactly this as well, though. In Florida, the state (encouraged by the dairy lobby) attempted to stop a small dairy company from calling its skim milk “skim milk” because it didn’t add vitamin A to its skim milk. To be clear, the milk was the very definition of skim milk, but the state’s standard of identity for it to legally be called “skim milk” required the added Vitamin A. The dairy company fought this attempt, with the assistance of the Institute for Justice, and eventually won in federal court.

If members of the dairy industry are so worried about the competition from the growth in plant substitutes, they can always buy an almond orchard and make their own brands. Using the federal government to try to police the product with absurd claims that there’s a crisis and that people are being tricked is utter nonsense. These competitors market their products on the very fact that they aren’t dairy milk. That’s the whole point, and everybody knows it.

The post Do We Really Need the Federal Government To Tell Us What Milk Is? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Today is the anniversary of D-Day, and also of the Somin family’s arrival in the United States, way back in 1979. I posted some reflections on that event on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary in 2019. I repost that short piece  below, as I think the points made remain relevant, especially in an age of ill-advised pandemic-era migration restrictions, some of which have yet to be lifted:

In addition to being the 75th anniversary of D-Day, today is the 40th anniversary of the Somin family’s arrival in America! I wrote about our experience of immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States in this 2010 memoir, written for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which helped us gain admission to the US, and continues to assist refugees from many parts of the world, to this day.

Reflecting on this experience, I am profoundly grateful to my parents for making the decision to come to the US, and also to those who fought at D-Day, Gettysburg, and elsewhere to establish, expand, and protect the freedoms that make America a haven for immigrants seeking liberty and opportunity from around the world.

Reflection also inspires humility. I am vastly better off than my peers who remained in Russia. But virtually all of that difference is the result of the difference between American  institutions and Russian ones, not any merit of mine. We should strive to ensure that more people are able to enjoy liberty and opportunity unconstrained by arbitrary circumstances of ancestry and place of birth.

At its worst, America is susceptible to the same types of ethnic, religious, racial, and nationalistic prejudices as all too many other nations. But at its best, it is the nation where freedom and opportunity can be yours regardless of who your parents were, or where you were born; the nation where immigrants are accepted more fully than in almost any other.

In our time, it is fashionable to assume that only people who are themselves members of a particular identity group can truly understand its experience. If so, perhaps only immigrants can fully grasp the value of immigration. Thus, some readers may assume that my work on the importance of  “voting with your feet” and migration rights is an outgrowth of my personal experience.

But, in truth, it began with my engagement with the political economy literature on federalism (which helped me grasp the importance of domestic foot voting). Later, the writings of scholars such as Bryan Caplan, Michael Clemens, and Joseph Carens, helped me see that international migration is an even more significant pathway to expanding human freedom and opportunity; not just one liberty among many, but one of the great issues of our time. To my knowledge, all of them are themselves native-born citizens of western liberal democracies. Yet it was they who enlightened me about the broader significance of migration rights, rather than vice versa.

It is a small, but perhaps telling example of how understanding often comes through logic and evidence, not just personal experience accessible only to members of a particular group. It also offers a measure of hope that we can expand liberty for both immigrants and natives with the help of many who never personally experienced the injustices they seek to end.

The post The Somin Family's D-Day appeared first on Reason.com.

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It took Georgetown University Law Center four months, longer than most Supreme Court nominations take to get to the finish line, to investigate a single tweet from Ilya Shapiro. Everyone understands what was going on: the tweet was clearly protected by Georgetown’s free expression policy and Georgetown could not in good faith punish Shapiro, but the law school wanted to wait until students were off-campus to avoid protest.*

Yet instead of robustly (or even meekly) defending its own policies, Georgetown found in Shapiro’s favor on the technicality that his purportedly harassing tweet was tweeted before he was employed by Georgetown. Finding that he did not yet have employee status also provides a convenient way for Georgetown to deny him access to its grievance procedures.

In any event, Georgetown’s report suggesting that he would be under intense and continuing scrutiny, and that if Georgetown constituents were offended by additional “similar” speech of his, he would be subject to termination.

Today, Shapiro announced the Wall Street Journal that he has resigned: “Fundamentally, what Mr. Treanor has done—what he’s allowed IDEAA to do—is repeal the Speech and Expression Policy that he claims to hold dear. The freedom to speak is no freedom at all if it makes an exception for speech someone finds offensive or counter to some nebulous conception of equity.”

After noting that Georgetown law faculty have not been punished for some rather egregious opinions, Shapiro continues:

It’s all well and good to adopt strong free-speech policies, but it’s not enough if university administrators aren’t willing to stand up to those who demand censorship. And the problem isn’t limited to cowardly administrators. Proliferating IDEAA-style offices enforce an orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices. Even the dean of an elite law school bucks these bureaucrats at his peril.

What Georgetown subjected me to, what it would be subjecting me to if I stayed, is a heckler’s veto that leads to a Star Chamber. “Live not by lies,” warned Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

I won’t live this way.

*(As readers may remember, in an awkwardly phrased tweet, Shapiro suggested that Sranivisan should have been nominated to the Supreme Court, but because President Biden had pledged to appoint a black woman (which Sranivisan is not), a “lesser” black woman would be appointed instead. Despite an apology and explanation from Shapiro, who asserted quite reasonably that his tweet meant to suggest that Sranivisan was the “best” candidate but would not get the job due to Biden’s promise, critics insisted that he was asserting that no black woman would be competent to be on the Supreme Court. To say that this is an uncharitable reading of the tweet and his subsequent explanation is an understatement. My own view on such matters is that everyone should be given a fair opportunitiy to apologize for and explain a badly phrased message; only people who double down deserve a worse fate. If Shapiro, in response to the controversy, had said that he indeed meant that no black woman could ever be qualified for the Court, that might still be speech protected by Georgetown’s policies, but he would deserve the criticism he has received for not saying that.)

The post Ilya Shapiro Reinstated at Georgetown Law, then Resigns appeared first on Reason.com.

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Angeli Gomez is the mother of two kids who attend school at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. On the day of the horrific mass shooting there that claimed the lives of 19 children and two adults, Gomez’s kids both had graduation ceremonies. Gomez is a farm worker; she attended the ceremonies, hugged her kids, and then went back to her job.

Shortly thereafter, she learned that an armed gunman—18-year-old Salvador Ramos—was attacking the school. She sped back, going 100 miles per hour.

In an interview with CBS that aired this weekend, Gomez explained how she was able to enter the school and rescue her two children despite the cops’ active efforts to thwart her. The entire interview is a damning indictment of law enforcement’s mishandling of the shooting, but one new detail bears particular emphasis: According to Gomez, the police subsequently contacted her and said that the media attention she was generating for criticizing them could lead to obstruction of justice charges. (Gomez is on probation for unspecified though decades-old charges.)

“She was holding back from sharing her story until now because a judge told her she was brave and her probation would be shortened,” reported CBS’s Lilia Luciano.

 

So not only did the police fail to do anything meaningful to stop the shooter for more than an hour, and not only did they obstruct, handcuff, and arrest parents who understandably tried to take matters into their own hands, but they also allegedly tried to cover their tracks by intimidating this mother into silence.

Peter Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who coordinated the pathetic police response, is no longer cooperating with the investigation into what went wrong.

The post Uvalde Cops Reportedly Tried To Silence the Mom Who Rescued Her Kids and Criticized the Police Response appeared first on Reason.com.

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Tariffs raise prices. That is literally the thing they do.

Politicians often try to obscure that basic fact by talking about tariffs’ second-order effects. They say that applying taxes to imported goods will help protect domestic manufacturers—by raising prices on foreign-made goods, making them less competitive. Or, as former President Donald Trump frequently did, they might say that tariffs can promote national security—by making foreign goods more expensive, encouraging investment in domestic industries.

The extent to which any of those second-order effects actually happen is subject to debate, and the past few years suggest that the trade-offs involved are not worth it. But if you leave aside that political debate, there’s still a basic, inescapable fact: Tariffs, by design, raise prices.

After nearly 16 months in office, facing historically high price increases, the Biden administration seems to have finally discovered how tariffs work.

Asked Sunday on CNN’s State of the Nation whether the administration would consider rolling back some tariffs to fight inflation, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo admitted that it “may make sense” to do that.

Don’t get too excited. With her previous breath, Raimondo suggested that the Trump-imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum would remain in place “because we need to protect American workers and we need to protect our steel industry; it’s a matter of national security.”

There’s that typical tariff obfuscation. What Raimondo is really saying is that the administration believes mandating higher prices for steel and aluminum—and thus higher prices on every American, and every American business, that consumes steel and aluminum—is more important than helping to bring down inflation. And that’s just days after her boss assured us that he would “take every practical step to make things more affordable for families.”

Still, Raimondo added that “there are other products, you know, household goods, bicycles, et cetera, and it may make sense. And I know the president is looking at that.”

The set of tariffs imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden—including those on steel and aluminum, along with a host of imports from China—is applied to approximately $280 billion of imports every year. Those import taxes add about $51 billion annually to Americans’ consumer costs, according to an analysis by the American Action Forum, a pro-market think tank:

As the above chart shows, the tariffs imposed on goods imported from China under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 are much costlier than the more well-publicized tariffs on steel and aluminum (and on their derivative parts). They also apply to a far wider range of consumer goods than most people probably realize, covering everything from bicycles to car parts, camping gear to children’s toys, sports equipment to clothing, and a whole lot more.

About two-thirds of all imports from China are now subject to tariffs when they enter the United States, with the average tariff being 19.3 percent. That’s six times higher than the average tariff on Chinese-made imports before Trump’s haphazard trade war began.

Thanks to all those tariffs on consumer goods, the federal government has collected record levels of tax revenue from tariffs in recent years. And American consumers have seen huge price increases.

Because, yes, tariffs raise prices. That’s what they do.

Of course, ending tariffs on Chinese imports won’t single-handedly solve the inflation problem. There’s some debate over the extent to which tariffs are contributing to inflation. Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. Trade Representative who is currently the vice president and director for trade and global markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank, pegs the figure at about 0.5 percent annually. Experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a trade-focused think tank, say it’s about 1 percent.

But there’s general agreement that tariffs are having some effect, even if a marginal one, on prices. “Tariffs make imports more expensive; importers often pass these additional costs through to consumers, leading to higher prices and inflationary pressure,” PIIE concludes in its analysis of the link between tariffs and inflation.

In a speech last month, Biden promised that corralling inflation was his “top domestic priority.” If that’s true, the tariffs have to go. All of them. No more obfuscation about the alleged merits of steel and aluminum protectionism versus higher prices. Either combating inflation is truly the administration’s top priority, or it isn’t.

Raimondo’s comments on Sunday suggest it isn’t yet. But at least the White House is finally, slowly, admitting that tariffs raise prices.

That’s the thing they do.

The post Tariffs Are Adding to Inflation. Biden's Commerce Secretary Says Repealing Some 'May Make Sense.' appeared first on Reason.com.

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From Josh Gerstein (Politico):

“To say the least, we have not solved the campus free-speech problem, but we started to realize if we wanted to save free speech on campus we have to start earlier and we have to do things not on campus,” the group’s president, Greg Lukianoff, said.

Lukianoff said FIRE has raised $28.5 million for a planned three-year, $75 million litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.

“There’s a very strong belief in not just the First Amendment, but a culture of freedom of speech that — black or white, liberal or conservative — that most Americans think you should be entitled to your own opinion and not have to lose your job over that,” Lukianoff said. “The voices that think of free speech as a dirty word on campus or on Twitter are actually a pretty small minority.” …

The new initiative includes $10 million in planned national cable and billboard advertising featuring activists on both ends of the political spectrum extolling the virtues of free speech, officials said.

One TV spot includes a former Emerson College student, K.J. Lynum, whose conservative group was suspended by the school’s president for circulating “China kinda sus” stickers promoting the theory that a Chinese government lab caused the oubreak of Covid-19. “Freedom of speech is our right as Americans and we must do everything we can to protect it,” Lynum says over images of Martin Luther King Jr. and a young anti-abortion activist.

Another ad features a Montana State University student, Stefan Klaer, who was ordered to take down a Black Lives Matter banner from his dorm room window. “If you silence people, you never get to hear the other side,” Klaer says….

[Former ACLU executive director Ira] Glasser, who serves on a FIRE advisory board, said in an interview that he “strongly encouraged” FIRE to broaden its free-speech work in part because the ACLU seems to be abdicating that role….

“This is a welcome development,” [the current ACLU executive director Anthony] Romero said in a statement. “Challenges to free speech are proliferating from both the left and the right, and the nation needs more organizations dedicated to upholding our most fundamental right.” …

Among those endorsing FIRE’s expansion are former ACLU President Nadine Strossen and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

The FIRE press release adds that FIRE is

• Seeking off-campus free speech legal case submissions. Americans who believe their free speech rights were violated can submit their case to FIRE at thefire.org/alarm.
• Hiring additional staff in support of its current and expanded mission. FIRE currently has 14 open positions. Principled free speech advocates can apply at thefire.org/jobs.

Over its 23 years of advocacy, FIRE has won more than 500 direct advocacy victories on behalf of college students and faculty members (with thousands more resolved behind-the-scenes), secured 425 campus policy changes affecting 5 million students, helped pass rights-protective legislation in 20 states, and drove a nationwide reduction in the prevalence of the most restrictive kinds of campus speech codes, from 75% in 2007 to 18% today.

Defending individual rights in higher education remains one of FIRE’s core competencies.

“Our defense of freedom of speech and inquiry on campus will remain core to what we do and will grow in the coming years,” said Lukianoff. “But we have come to realize that defending the First Amendment and a culture of free speech off-campus is essential to protecting those values on-campus, just as much as fighting for those values on-campus is essential for preserving them off-campus.

“We need to remind older Americans that freedom of speech is still a value worth fighting for, and we need to teach younger Americans that everything from scientific progress, to artistic expression, to social justice, peace, and living authentic lives requires the staunch protection of freedom of speech for all.”

Disclosure: FIRE engaged me to consult on some matters related to this expansion; but I wasn’t asked to put up this post, and, as readers will note, I have been writing about FIRE’s cases for a long time—I have long thought it does excellent and important work, and I’m very glad to see that it has taken on this broader mission (though one entirely consistent with its original mission).

The post FIRE Branches Out to Free Speech Beyond Universities, Planning $75M Litigation and Public Education Campaign appeared first on Reason.com.

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Tempe police watched a man drown while refusing to offer assistance. “I’m not jumping in after you,” one of the officers says in a transcript of body-cam footage from the encounter, which took place at Tempe Town Lake around sunrise on Saturday, May 28.

The man, Sean Bickings, repeatedly asked the officers for help. After the Tempe Fire Department’s dive and rescue team pulled him out of the water, he was pronounced dead.

Body-cam footage released by the Tempe Police Department shows the lead-up to Bickings’ death, in which Tempe police officers responded to some sort of altercation between Bickings and a woman named Susan. She tells the officers they had been having a “conversation,” not a physical confrontation, and that Bickings “didn’t do anything wrong.”

Police then go to talk to Bickings, who after several minutes climbs over a railing that leads to the lake. Asked what he’s doing, Bickings says: “I’m gonna go for a swim. I’m free to go, right?” The officers tell him he’s not allowed to swim in the lake, but Bickings keeps swimming. Eventually he stops and treads water under a pedestrian bridge.

Video shows police discuss the situation from the shore, with one officer telling the others to keep watching Bickings while he calls for a boat. It’s unclear if he actually does call for a boat at this time.

Two officers slowly walk up the bridge. Then Bickings can be heard yelling before the video cuts out. “Due to the sensitive nature of the remaining portion of the recording, a transcript of the sensitive portion of the event is being provided for full transparency,” a video placard states. A local CBS affiliate has published the transcript.

“So what’s your plan right now?” asks an officer.

“I’m going to drown. I’m going to drown,” says Bickings.

The officer tells him “No, you’re not.”

Bickings repeats the he is drowning.

“OK, I’m not jumping in after you” says one of the officers.

“Please help me. Please, please, please,” says Bickings.

Police keep instructing him to swim to a pylon as he continues to ask for help.

Police then argue with Susan, who has approached the bridge. “Stop. Get off of me. He didn’t do nothing wrong,” she says in the transcript. “I love, I love him. Please stop being so aggressive.”

They tell her to “chill out” and “get off of the bridge.”

“Oh my God, is he OK? Stop, why are you doing this? I’m trying to help my fucking, please don’t [inaudible],” Susan continues. She says she’s trying to go over to help Bickings. “He’s drowning, he’s drowning,” she says.

“If you don’t calm down, I’m going to put you in my car,” says one of the officers.

After several more back and forth, one of the offices “OK, the officer is going to get the boat right now.”

It’s unclear what exactly is happening, but one officer in the transcript says to someone “we got the female” who “was trying to jump over the railing.”

“No, I was worried about him. He’s drowning down there,” says Susan. “I’m just distraught because he’s drowning right in front of you and you won’t help.”

One of the officers says, “Mark that he went underneath and hasn’t come up since about 30 seconds ago.” Then the officers continue arguing with Susan.

The whole thing is disturbingly reminiscent of police behavior during the recent mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Police stood around outside the school while the shooter killed children inside and aggressively prevented parents of school children from going in to help.

Police have no legal duty to risk their lives to save lives (“regardless of the fact that most citizens believe that is precisely what all those tax dollars are being spent to ensure,” writes Michael Schaus at The Nevada Independent). Both the Uvalde killings and Bickings’ death serve as disturbing reminders of that. What’s especially chilling is how police in both instances not only fail to help themselves but actively attempt to stop bystanders from helping.

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FREE MINDS

FIRE moves beyond campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is rebranding as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (still FIRE) and expanding its effort to fight for free speech. The new FIRE will “promote greater acceptance of a diversity of views in the workplace, pop culture and elsewhere,” reports Politico. “Part of the push may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union’s primacy as a defender of free speech.”

So, I’m sad to announce the end of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education…but excited to announce the beginning of the Foundation for Individual Rights & EXPRESSION! https://t.co/Ta5SopQQdp see this report @politico by @joshgerstein

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) June 6, 2022

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FREE MARKETS

Congressional Democrat proposes a 1,000 percent excise tax on semiautomatic rifles. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Don Beyer (D–Va.), told Insider that the bill—still in draft form—is intended to “provide another creative pathway to actually make some sensible gun control happen.” The bill could raise the price of AR-15s and similar guns from around $500–$2,000 to around $5,500–$22,000, a recipe for a booming black market.

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QUICK HITS

• “Federal data suggests the rate of breakthrough COVID infections in April was worse in boosted Americans compared to unboosted Americans—though rates of deaths and hospitalizations remained the lowest among the boosted,” reports CBS. “For the week of April 23, it said the rate of COVID-19 infections among boosted Americans was 119 cases per 100,000 people. That was more than double the rate of infections in those who were vaccinated but unboosted, but a fraction of the levels among unvaccinated Americans.”

• Can a post-“takeover” Libertarian Party improve on its historical run of 2012–20? asks Reason‘s Matt Welch.

• Prosecutions like these could become more common if Roe v. Wade is overturned, the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) warns. “A lot of people don’t realize that pregnant people are already facing criminalization all across the country, including in blue states like California. All it takes is a rogue district attorney,” NAPW attorney Emma Roth told The Guardian.

• After two hung juries, the feds are taking chicken processors to court on antitrust charges for a third time. Even U.S. District Judge Philip A. Brimmer has questioned the government’s decision, saying at an April hearing: “What if the trial goes a third time and it hangs once again? How many times does the department say, ‘We believe in our case,’ as opposed to, ‘Let’s look at the evidence. Let’s look at the fact that, you know, we know how it plays out because the jury hangs every time.'”

• “A growing number of corporate executives want to put an end to the work-from-home revolution,” suggests Axios. “But workers have gotten used to the flexibility, and they have the leverage to demand it.”

• “Ohio lawmakers approved a particularly intrusive trans school sports ban” last week, writes Reason‘s Scott Shackford. The “Save Women’s Sports Act” would not only stop Ohio schools and colleges from allowing “individuals of the male sex” to participate in girl’s and women’s sports but also “give people the power to dispute the sex of an individual athlete. Then it falls upon that athlete to prove their sex by going to a physician and getting a signed statement confirming the athlete’s sex.”

• “There is no compelling evidence” that San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin’s “policies have made crime significantly worse in San Francisco,” and “overall crime in San Francisco has changed little since Mr. Boudin took office in early 2020,” reports The New York Times. But Democrats are far from immune from the crime panics that plague conservatives, and Boudin is serving as their scapegoat.

The post Tempe Police Watch as Man Drowns appeared first on Reason.com.

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From Justice Holmes’ dissent in Pahnandle Oil Co. v. Knox (1928), an argument that the Court shouldn’t worry too much about slippery slope concerns:

[C]ertain dicta of Chief Justice Marshall [about prohibitions on certain forms of taxation] … were founded upon his often quoted proposition that the power to tax is the power to destroy. In those days it was not recognized as it is today that most of the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree. If the States had any power it was assumed that they had all power, and that the necessary alternative was to deny it altogether.

But this Court which so often has defeated the attempt to tax in certain ways can defeat an attempt to discriminate or otherwise go too far without wholly abolishing the power to tax. The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits. The power to fix rates is the power to destroy if unlimited, but this Court while it endeavors to prevent confiscation does not prevent the fixing of rates. A tax is not an unconstitutional regulation in every case where an absolute prohibition of sales would be one.

The post Slippery Slope Counterarguments in History: Justice Holmes appeared first on Reason.com.

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