Tag: in-the-news

Democrats Might Soon Rediscover the Value of the Filibuster


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For much of the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency, progressive Democrats pushed radical ideas to change Senate rules, abolish the filibuster, and enact their agenda with a simple majority.

Even Biden, ever the rusty weather vane of Democratic politics, eventually swung around to supporting the idea. Though he has a long track record of defending the filibuster—killing it would only demonstrate “the arrogance of power,” he said on the Senate floor in 2005—Biden in January officially called for the Senate to abolish the rule requiring 60 votes on most bills. “Let the majority prevail,” Biden said. “If that majority is blocked, then we have no choice but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster.”

For Democrats, however, the stumbling block during the first 15 months of Biden’s presidency hasn’t been the Senate’s 60-vote “cloture” rule or the Republican minority’s use of it. It’s been that Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.) have objected to key parts of the party’s agenda—including the anti-filibuster campaign.

“Eliminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come,” Sinema said on the Senate floor in January, just days after Biden’s call to action.

Looks like she’s about to be proven right.

“Democrats need to wake up, because right now they’re sleepwalking into disaster, with no plan to avert it,” writes Simon Bazelon, an advisor at the liberal political think tank Data for Progress, in a post published Monday on Matthew Yglesias’ Slow Boring newsletter. Bazelon cites polling data and historical midterm election trends to suggest that Democrats are likely to lose three to four Senate seats this year before heading into a potential electoral wipeout in 2024.

Bazelon’s post builds on a tweet from David Shor, a Democratic pollster who has lately played the role of liberal Cassandra, in which Shor suggests that Republicans could be heading for a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority after the next election.

 

It’s probably right to be skeptical that Republicans will be able to swing 10 or more Senate seats in the next two elections—if for no other reason than the fact that politics change rapidly these days, and today’s trends will be in the distant past by November 2024.

Still, a quick look at the Senate maps for the next two elections suggests that Republicans are poised to pick up several seats, even if the party can’t hit the all-important 60-seat threshold. In 2024 alone, Democrats have to defend seats in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. That’s 10 seats that Republicans could, in a very good year, flip. If you assume that Republicans will pick up at least two or three seats currently held by Democrats this year—Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada seem the most likely to flip, and midterm elections are typically unfavorable for the president’s party—then getting to 60 by winning seven or eight of those other races in 2024 is at least within the realm of possibility.

“‘Business as usual’ will result in President Trump or President DeSantis, with somewhere between 56 and 62 Senate seats,” writes Bazelon. “And this is actually worse than it might seem at first. In recent years, Republican senators who have retired (or announced that they are retiring) have skewed heavily toward those who were willing to occasionally stand up to Trump, like Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander, Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, and Richard Burr. If Trump returns to office, he will do so with a median Senator who is far more deferent to his wishes than the last time around.”

Of course, it’s also not difficult to imagine Republicans blowing it despite this favorable electoral terrain. Look no further than the GOP Senate primary in Pennsylvania to see how the GOP, now unmoored from any sense of commitment to principles or specific policies, is inviting voters to take one look and go running back to the Democrats. Grievance politics that lacks a coherent and compelling vision for the future of America will never provide more than a temporary electoral advantage.

But it doesn’t really matter whether Republicans can reach the 60-seat threshold or not. What matters is that they are now overwhelmingly likely to have a Senate majority after this year’s midterms, with a good chance of expanding that majority in 2024 when Democrats have to defend the gains they made during Trump’s midterm defeats in 2018.

When that happens, Democrats, liberals, and anyone else who isn’t thrilled by the prospect of an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party getting to enact its agenda at the federal level will owe a debt of gratitude to Sinema, Manchin, and other Democrats who resisted the urge to blow up the filibuster. Instead of an emerging and permanent Democratic majority, the party is now heading into a cycle where it is likely to be playing defense.

Thankfully, one of the fundamental virtues of the American democratic system is that legislative majorities are not all-powerful. Minorities in Congress rarely get what they want, but they can slow or stop the majority from simply ramming through whatever agenda it wants.

Some Democrats have spent the past year or so acting like that’s a flaw in the system. They were wrong, as they’ll likely learn very soon.

The post Democrats Might Soon Rediscover the Value of the Filibuster appeared first on Reason.com.

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Extending the Mask Mandate for Air Travel ‘Absolutely on the Table’ Says White House COVID-19 Czar


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The federal mandate requiring passengers and personnel to wear masks on airplanes, trains, and buses is set to expire on April 18, but federal health officials are giving every indication that they are willing to extend it once again.

“This is a decision that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is going to make,” Ashish K. Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response director, told the Today show on Monday. “I know the CDC is working to develop a scientific framework.”

When host Savannah Guthrie pressed Jha to clarify whether extending the mask mandate was a real possibility, he said “it’s absolutely on the table.”

Technically, the policy falls under the jurisdiction of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rather than the CDC or the White House. But the TSA, like most other COVID-19 compliant authorities, defers almost entirely to CDC guidance. In practice, the power to compel masking belongs to Walensky, who has taken an extremely cautious approach to easing mandates in a variety of circumstances.

But the policy of forced masking on airplanes actually runs counter to what many industry experts say is appropriate: The CEOs of several major airlines have testified before Congress that the air quality on planes is better than the air quality in the ICU. They think it would be extremely safe to let passengers make their own decisions about whether to wear a mask; it is not likely that COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths would surge as a result.

Unfortunately, the responsibility for making this determination does not rest with the individual traveler or even the individual airline: It largely rests with Walensky. This means that even though hospitalizations and deaths remain steady as cases rise, extreme risk-aversion will likely continue to be the law of the land.

For many families with young children, the practical implication is that they cannot travel by airplane at all, since it is difficult to force small kids to wear their masks for entire flights. Masks are not a cost-free intervention for parents in this circumstance, and whatever benefits the CDC thinks this policy yields must be weighed against the very real downsides.

At a time when occasional upticks in cases following new waves and more infectious strains of COVID-19 do not produce appreciably more hospitalizations and deaths, one might be forgiven for thinking that it would be acceptable to let onerous restrictions expire.

The post Extending the Mask Mandate for Air Travel 'Absolutely on the Table' Says White House COVID-19 Czar appeared first on Reason.com.

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Two California Lawmakers Want To Mandate 32-Hour Workweeks


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There’s no crisis that lawmakers can’t make worse, and in California, a state that already has pretty high taxes and minimum wages, two lawmakers have introduced a bill mandating 32-hour workweeks for the largest employers.

State Reps. Cristina Garcia (D–Downey) and Evan Low (D–Cupertino) have introduced A.B. 2932. The bill would require all businesses in the state with 500 employees or more to alter the definition of a workweek to 32 hours instead of 40 hours, meaning that any work over 32 hours would be compensated with overtime.

The bill doesn’t stop there, though. A.B. 2932 also requires that the compensation levels for people covered by the bill remain the same. So, an hourly employee currently working 40 hours a week would have to receive the same amount of pay for working 32 hours a week, essentially forcing employers to raise all their wages.

If the bill is passed into law, it would affect more than 2,600 companies within the Golden State and more than 3.6 million workers. Unsurprisingly, the California Chamber of Commerce is describing the bill as a “job killer.” Ashley Hoffman, policy advocate for the California Chamber of Commerce, notes in a letter to Low that the bill acts as though companies can simply adjust hourly wages with a simple calculation to account for the change from 40 to 32 hours. But that’s not how wages work. An employee’s “rate of pay” as described in the bill includes not just wages but can include commissions and various other bonuses. Hoffman writes:

The regular rate therefore fluctuates significantly depending on how much overtime an employee works and the performance or attendance bonuses or commissions they receive, much of which is dependent on the employee or general performance of the business in any given week, not factors solely under the employer’s control.

Therefore, an employer can end up getting punished by the state under this bill for “violations” that they cannot correct.

Garcia seems fairly oblivious to the bigger consequences of these changes, telling the Los Angeles Times, “We’ve had a five-day workweek since the Industrial Revolution, but we’ve had a lot of progress in society, and we’ve had a lot of advancements. I think the pandemic right now allows us the opportunity to rethink things, to reimagine things.”

And businesses are certainly free to do so and negotiate with their employees for better, more flexible work environments. The tight labor market certainly is giving workers more leverage.

If modernization inevitably leads to people getting as much (or more) work done in fewer hours than they did in the past, then shorter workweeks are an awesome byproduct. We’re certainly not going to complain about people having to work less. That’s one of the great things about innovation. It frees people up to do more with their time, like developing more innovations that may in the future make life even better for us all.

However, it’s not something that can be ordered top down via fiat by government officials who don’t have to deal with the consequences. A.B. 2932 doesn’t even have a ramping-up phase or a time-frame. If the law is passed as written, once it goes into effect, businesses will be expected to just change. Even the California Chamber of Commerce’s complaint isn’t fundamentally about having workers work less, though that’s certainly going to be a problem for many businesses, particularly those with lower margins that serve consumers seven days a week. The Chamber’s concern is that this bill is written so poorly and inflexibly that it’s simply oblivious to the consequences.

Also particularly telling is that A.B. 2932 exempts businesses that have collective bargaining agreements with employees, meaning businesses that are unionized. Garcia attempts to explain this away in the Los Angeles Times by saying, “I like to think of this as a floor, and oftentimes our bargaining agreements are better.”

But that explanation doesn’t make any sense. If collective bargaining agreements often lead to better work environments than this, the exemption wouldn’t be needed at all. It seems as though part of the bill’s point is to push large companies into embracing unionization if they want to continue with their usual workweeks.

This isn’t a new thing. Previous efforts to raise the minimum wage in California that are supported by labor unions have often been paired with efforts by the same labor unions to exempt themselves from these rules. It would be a shame if something happened to your company’s business model. Wouldn’t you be better off working with union agreements so you don’t have to worry about having to follow this rigid, poorly written bill?

That’s assuming the bill goes anywhere. It was introduced in February and sent to the Labor and Employment Committee, but no hearings on the bill have yet been scheduled.

The post Two California Lawmakers Want To Mandate 32-Hour Workweeks appeared first on Reason.com.

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Illinois Will Fine Gas Stations That Don’t Advertise Delayed Gas Tax Hike


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Illinois’ new state budget provides some tax relief for consumers and penalizes businesses that don’t advertise that fact.

The $45 billion budget for FY 2023 passed by the Illinois Legislature Saturday eliminates the state’s 1 percent grocery tax for one year starting in July 2022. It also delays an inflation-adjusted increase in the state’s gas tax of 2.2 cents per gallon until January 2023.

The idea, according to Democratic proponents of the budget, is to assist state residents during a time of rising food and fuel costs.

“This budget is for all those who are worried about the rising cost of groceries, which seem ever more expensive each time you go to the store,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat. “It’s for those who can only put $10 at a time into your gas tank, because filling up the whole tank stretches you too thin.”

The pause on taxes and tax increases comes with a catch, however. Both grocery stores and gas stations are required to notify consumers of the changed tax policy. The latter will face fines of $500 for not complying.

Fuel retailers will have to place notices on each pump informing customers of the delay of the state’s inflation adjustment and that “the price on this pump should reflect the suspension of the tax increase.”

“To be forced under threat of fines to post this information, it’s absurd,” says Greg Sharp of the Illinois Fuel and Retail Association (IFRA). “It’s government compelling speech, and it’s unconstitutional.”

The vaguely written policy also leaves some lingering practical questions, including whether fines would be applied per retailer or per pump and whether retailers will be liable for signs removed or damaged by customers, says Sharp.

The signage requirement goes into effect on July 1. Sharp tells Reason that the IFRA will likely file a lawsuit challenging the policy in the next couple of weeks.

Grocery stores will likewise have to alter their receipts to include an announcement that the state’s grocery sales tax will be 0 percent for the next year. If it’s not practical to include that information on receipts, stores can display the information on a sign that’s at least 4 inches by 8 inches.

“Putting it on the receipts is very, very difficult,” says Rob Karr of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association (IRMA). “Those who can will post a sign for consumers to know.”

Grocery stores, unlike gas stations, won’t be penalized for failing to display signs. Karr says the IRMA isn’t considering a lawsuit to challenge the new requirement.

Sharp chalks up the disparate treatment between grocery stores and gas stations to the fact that gas prices are proving politically problematic for the governor, who is running for reelection this year.

“I think our governor is so worried about having to wear the jacket for high gas prices. And he should be worried,” he says. “I think that’s the reason this industry got the mandate from Springfield to do this.”

State governments around the country have passed or proposed a number of populist gambits to mollify voters’ anger at high gas prices. Those range from gas tax holidays to cash rebates.

These all have their drawbacks. Cash rebates are poorly targeted and, in some cases, will outweigh whatever state taxes the recipient paid. Gas tax holidays allow motorists to skip out on paying for the roads they use.

Illinois’ requirement that gas stations actively advertise the state’s tax policies under threat of fines is in a league of its own. Retailers are effectively being forced to promote the political messaging of the governor and state legislators during an election year.

Gas station owners obviously resent being used like this, hence their plans to sue.

The post Illinois Will Fine Gas Stations That Don't Advertise Delayed Gas Tax Hike appeared first on Reason.com.

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Why Johnny Depp Is Suing Amber Heard in Virginia


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On Monday, April 11, Johnny Depp’s lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard will move forward in a Virginia courtroom. The case is likely to involve allegations from the couple’s troubled marriage, which ended in 2017 amid accusations of abuse from both parties. But regardless of the details or the outcome of the trial, the suit could set a bad First Amendment precedent.

The suit stems from a December 2018 op-ed that Heard wrote in The Washington Post. In the brief article, Heard refers to herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” Though she never refers to anyone by name, Depp claimed in a defamation lawsuit filed in early 2019 that “[t]he op-ed’s clear implication” was that he was her abuser. In the filing, Depp asked for $50 million in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages and attorney’s fees.

What makes the suit peculiar is not the facts but the venue: Depp filed the lawsuit in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia. Depp and Heard each live in California, they lived in California as a married couple, and the article in question ran in a newspaper based in Washington, D.C. In fact, in a motion filed in 2019, Heard claimed that “To the best of my knowledge, I have never traveled to Virginia in my life.”

It is not immediately clear how Virginia factors into the equation at all, until you consider the state’s weak anti-SLAPP law.

SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. It refers to a specific type of defamation claim filed with the intent to shut down or intimidate someone for their speech even if it is not actually defamatory. These suits are relatively inexpensive to file but can be ruinously expensive to defend against. A defendant without considerable resources may end up acquiescing to the lawsuit’s demands just to avoid the hassle.

Anti-SLAPP laws are intended to counterweight such suits. Anti-SLAPP laws are state laws that tend to allow defendants to cut off frivolous lawsuits early without having to go through the lengthy and expensive process of taking such a case to trial, if they can demonstrate that the suit is unlikely to prevail. Some even allow the defendant to be reimbursed for attorney fees by the person who filed the bogus lawsuit.

Depp faces an uphill battle: To prove defamation against a public figure requires demonstrating that the speaker was motivated by “actual malice,” meaning either knowingly lying or demonstrating “reckless disregard” over whether what they were saying was true. Regardless of Depp’s intentions in filing the suit, winning would require proving that Heard had reckless or ill motivations in writing an op-ed which never mentioned him by name.

California, where both Depp and Heard primarily live and work, has a very robust anti-SLAPP statute. As does Washington D.C., home base of the paper that ran Heard’s op-ed. Virginia, on the other hand, has an anti-SLAPP law which the Public Participation Project describes as merely “adequate,” with no provision allowing a defendant to stop the proceedings early. In recent years, Virginia lawmakers who attempted to strengthen the law were repeatedly unsuccessful. Therefore, if Depp can make even the most narrow justification for why the case should be tried in Virginia, it is much more difficult for Heard to get the suit thrown out or moved to a different venue in a state with more aggressive anti-SLAPP laws. As it happens, Depp successfully argued that Virginia is the proper venue because The Washington Post maintains web servers, as well as a printing plant, in the state.

Depp is not the first person to take advantage of Virginia’s comparatively toothless anti-SLAPP statute: In 2019, then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.) filed numerous lawsuits against tech companies, news organizations, and even parody Twitter accounts, in Virginia courts, despite none of the defendants having direct ties to the state. Nunes had little success: In one ruling, Judge Robert Payne of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia transferred Nunes’ lawsuit against CNN from Richmond to New York City, bemoaning that Virginia “cannot stand as a willing repository for cases which have no real nexus to this district.”

Nunes’ lawsuits, if successful, would have been injurious to free speech and a free press. Depp’s suit carries the same danger, undermining decades of Supreme Court precedents that hold that it should be more difficult to prove defamation against a politician or public figure so as to promote free and open debate on matters of public interest. In fact, Heard will be allowed to argue during trial that she should be protected from Depp’s suit because her op-ed concerned a matter of public importance. But Virginia’s lack of a robust anti-SLAPP law means that future defendants without Heard’s resources may not have that option.

The post Why Johnny Depp Is Suing Amber Heard in Virginia appeared first on Reason.com.

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Texas Prosecutors Blatantly Ignored the Law When They Charged a Woman With Murder ‘by Self-Induced Abortion’


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A Starr County, Texas, grand jury last month indicted a 26-year-old woman, Lizelle Herrera, on one count of murder in connection with “a self-induced abortion.” As Starr County District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez conceded yesterday, no such charge exists under state law. Yet somehow Ramirez’s office presented that nonexistent charge to the grand jury, which resulted in Herrera’s unlawful arrest last Thursday. She spent two nights in jail before she was released on Saturday after posting a $500,000 bond.

In a press release he posted on Facebook yesterday, Ramirez announced that he would “immediately dismiss the indictment against Ms. Herrera,” because “it is clear that Ms. Herrera cannot and should not be prosecuted for the allegation against her.” He reached that conclusion after “reviewing applicable Texas law,” which you might think his office would have done before seeking an indictment. Its failure to do so, aside from its implications for the abortion debate, was an egregious example of prosecutorial misconduct that flouted the rule of law and violated Herrera’s constitutional rights.

The March 30 indictment against Herrera says she “intentionally and knowingly cause[d] the death of an individual” on or about January 7 “by a self-induced abortion.” The indictment does not cite the statute that supposedly authorized this charge, but the language tracks with Title 5, Chapter 19 of the Texas Penal Code, which deals with “criminal homicide.” It defines “knowingly and intentionally” causing an individual’s death as murder, a first-degree felony punishable by life in prison.

Crucially in this context, Chapter 19 says it “does not apply to the death of an unborn child if the conduct charged is…conduct committed by the mother of the unborn child.” Evidently the prosecutor who presented the charge against Herrera did not read that far, and the grand jurors did not bother to check the statute under which they ostensibly indicted Herrera. It looks like they applied their own moral intuition that self-induced abortion is tantamount to murder, even though Texas law explicitly says it is not.

At a protest on Saturday outside the jail where Herrera was held, Rockie Gonzalez, founder of the abortion rights group La Frontera Fund, said “she miscarried at a hospital and allegedly confided to hospital staff that she had attempted to induce her own abortion, and she was reported to the authorities by hospital administration or staff.” Ramiez said “it is clear that the Starr County Sheriff’s Department did their duty in investigating the incident brought to their attention by the reporting hospital.” But since it should have been clear from the outset that “the incident” was not a crime under Texas law, what was there to investigate?

If the sheriff’s department had done its duty, it would have quickly determined that the allegation against Herrera did not amount to a crime. Instead it referred the matter to local prosecutors, who likewise failed to do their duty and instead presented the case to grand jurors, who failed to do their duty and instead approved a baseless criminal charge. As Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told the Associated Press when it covered the case on Saturday, “There is no statute in Texas that, even on its face, authorizes the arrest of a woman for a self-managed abortion.”

There are only two possibilities here. Either the sheriff’s department, the district attorney’s office, and the grand jury did not know that, which is appalling enough, or they willfully disregarded the law, which is worse.

“Although with this dismissal Ms. Herrera will not face prosecution for this incident,” Ramirez said yesterday, “it is clear to me that the events leading up to this indictment have taken a toll on Ms. Herrera and her family. To ignore this fact would be shortsighted. The issues surrounding this matter are clearly contentious, however based on Texas law and the facts presented, it is not a criminal matter.”

That is not exactly an apology to Herrera, who was deprived of her liberty, had to hire a lawyer and raise bail (with help from La Frontera Fund), and had her life upended for no valid legal reason. In fact, Ramirez’s statement can be read as an apology to abortion opponents who might wish that her conduct was a crime. The contentiousness of abortion has nothing to do with the question of whether Herrera did anything that justified her arrest. The answer to that question should have been obvious to everyone who had a hand in putting Herrera through this ordeal.

The homicide statute’s exception for women who obtain or induce an abortion is of a piece with the general approach that Texas has taken to this issue. S.B. 8, which took effect last September, authorizes “any person” (except for government officials) to sue “any person” who performs or facilitates an abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected (typically around six weeks into a pregnancy). But the law explicitly says it does not authorize lawsuits against women who obtain prohibited abortions.

S.B. 4, enacted last July, made it a felony to provide abortion pills outside the restricted circumstances in which Texas allows their use. That law likewise says “a pregnant woman on whom a drug-induced abortion is attempted, induced, or performed in violation of this subchapter is not criminally liable for the violation.”

As a matter of policy, in other words, the Texas legislature has decided that pregnant women who obtain or induce prohibited abortions are not civilly or criminal liable for doing so. Some abortion opponents—evidently including the hospital staff member(s) who reported Herrera, the sheriff’s department investigators who received that report, at least one prosecutor in Ramirez’s office, and the grand jurors who approved the indictment—may disagree with that policy. But that is the law in Texas, and their personal convictions are not a license to pretend otherwise.

The post Texas Prosecutors Blatantly Ignored the Law When They Charged a Woman With Murder 'by Self-Induced Abortion' appeared first on Reason.com.

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Texas Woman Accused of Self-Induced Abortion Was Jailed for 2 Nights Before Murder Charges Were Dismissed


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Texas continues its bid to be the worst state in the nation for abortion access, jailing a woman on murder charges for an alleged self-induced abortion. Lizelle Herrera was arrested Thursday, charged with murder, and held in a Rio Grande city jail for two nights before Starr County District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez said he would dismiss the charges.

While a state law passed in Texas last year bans performing an abortion on another person after six weeks pregnancy, it does not apply to self-induced abortions, nor does it allow for criminal charges. Its mechanism of enforcement is through civil lawsuits brought by citizens, not agents of the state.

“In reviewing applicable Texas law, it is clear that Ms. Herrera cannot and should not be prosecuted for the allegation against her,” said Ramirez in a Sunday statement announcing that his office would file a motion to dismiss the charges on Monday. “It is my hope that with the dismissal of this case it is made clear that Ms. Herrera did not commit a criminal act under the laws of the State of Texas.”

But Ramirez stopped short of condemning the Starr County Sheriff’s Office for arresting and charging Herrera. “In reviewing this case, it is clear that the Starr County Sheriff’s Department did their duty in investigating the incident brought to their attention by the reporting hospital,” said Ramirez. “To ignore the incident would have been a dereliction of their duty.”

He also included this weird bit of line-toeing:

Although with this dismissal Ms. Herrera will not face prosecution for this incident, it is clear to me that the events leading up to this indictment have taken a toll on Ms. Herrera and her family. To ignore this fact would be shortsighted. The issues surrounding this matter are clearly contentious, however based on Texas law and the facts presented, it is not a criminal matter.

Lots of things “take a toll” on people and their families without prosecutors considering it “shortsighted” to ignore them or decline to file criminal charges.

Precise details of what happened with Herrera’s pregnancy are not clear. But “what is alleged is that she was in the hospital and had a miscarriage and divulged some information to hospital staff who then reported her to police. And then she was arrested and her bail was set at half a million dollars,” Rockie Gonzalez, founder of the abortion rights group La Frontera Fund, told journalist Pablo De La Rosa in an interview he posted to Soundcloud.

FREE MINDS

An index of school book bans. PEN America has put together a document detailing book bans in U.S. school libraries and classrooms between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022. “This is the first time PEN America has conducted a formal count of books banned,” the group says. During the nine-month period, PEN America found 1,586 instances of books being banned, for a total of 1,145 individual books targeted in 86 schools districts spread across 26 states.

“This encompasses different types of bans, including removals of books from school libraries, prohibitions in classrooms, or both, as well as books banned from circulation during investigations resulting from challenges from parents, educators, administrators, board members, or responses to laws passed by legislatures,” explains PEN America. “These numbers represent a count of cases either reported directly to PEN America and/or covered in the media; there may be other cases of bans that have not been reported and are thus not included in this count.”

“It is not just the number of books removed that is disturbing, but the processes–or lack thereof–through which such removals are being carried out,” suggests PEN America. “Of 1,586 bans listed in the Index, PEN America found that the vast majority (98%) have involved various departures from best practice guidelines outlined by the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the American Library Association (ALA).”

An alarming number of these bans—41 percent—stem from directives from government officials. “This is an unprecedented shift in PEN America’s long history of responding to book bans, from the more typical pattern in which demands for book removals are initiated by local community members,” the group points out.

The most frequent themes in banned books were race, sexual orientation, gender, or sexual activity:

Of the titles in the Index, 467 contain protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color (41%), and 247 directly address issues of race and racism (22%); 379 titles (33%) explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes, or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ+; 283 titles contain sexual content of varying kinds (25%), including novels with sexual encounters as well as informational books about puberty, sex, or relationships. There are 184 titles (16%) that are history books or biographies. Another 107 titles have themes related to rights and activism (9%).

FREE MARKETS

President Joe Biden is expected to announce new gun regulations today. That sentence seems wrong, no? Isn’t making gun laws a job for state or federal legislators? How can the president just unilaterally declare restrictions on buying or owning a legal good? But that is, alas, the current state of executive power in the U.S. In this latest round of executive overreach, Biden is expected to announce new regulations on gun-making parts and kits. The fruits of these kits are often referred to as “ghost guns.” From CNN:

Following a 2021 directive from the Biden administration, the ATF proposed a rule in May last year to allow the bureau to classify the building blocks that often make up ghost guns as firearms. The rule has been winding its way through the federal regulation process since then.

The ATF rule addresses a key problem in tracking and regulating ghost guns because certain frames and receivers used to assemble the guns are often purchased online and not classified as firearms by the bureau.

The rule would also require manufactures who sell parts to assemble ghost guns to be licensed and to run background checks on potential purchasers of the kits used to assemble the products.

The Justice Department has also launched a national ghost gun enforcement initiative, which will “train a national cadre of prosecutors and disseminate investigation and prosecution tools to help bring cases against those who use ghost guns to commit crimes,” according to the White House.

Biden is also expected to nominate Steve Dettelbach as the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

QUICK HITS

•  Politico does a deep dive into U.S. Food and Drug Administration failures.

• “Two measures that severely restrict abortions were halted on Friday, one by Kentucky’s governor and a second by Idaho’s supreme court,” notes the Guardian. “In Kentucky, Democratic governor Andy Beshear vetoed a Republican-priority bill on Friday that would ban abortions in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy and regulate the dispensing of abortion pills.” The Idaho court temporarily blocked enforcement of a law that would allow family members of an aborted fetus to sue if doctors performed the abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

• Walmart is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges that the retailer falsely advertised rayon products as being made of bamboo.

• California continues its bid to drive big employers out of the state. Under legislation “winding its way through the state Legislature … employers would be required to provide overtime pay for employees working longer than four full days,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

• An opportunity to end discrimination against religious schools, or a blurring of the separation of church and state? The Supreme Court will decide in a case involving Maine school vouchers.

• Lab-grown meat companies are experimenting with cultivating exotic meats including elephant and tiger.

• Checking in on the French presidential election:

The post Texas Woman Accused of Self-Induced Abortion Was Jailed for 2 Nights Before Murder Charges Were Dismissed appeared first on Reason.com.

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Erwin Griswold On The Importance Of Time Limits For Law School Exam

On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court decided New York Times v. United States. The so-called Pentagon Papers cases was rushed through the Courts. Justice Harlan’s dissent lays out the chronology:

Both the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rendered judgment on June 23. The New York Times’ petition for certiorari, its motion for accelerated consideration thereof, and its application for interim relief were filed in this Court on June 24 at about 11 a.m. The application of the United States for interim relief in the Post case was also filed here on June 24 at about 7:15 p.m. This Court’s order setting a hearing before us on June 26 at 11 a.m., a course which I joined only to avoid the possibility of even more peremptory action by the Court, was issued less than 24 hours before. The record in the Post case was filed with the Clerk shortly before 1 p.m. on June 25; the record in the Times case did not arrive until 7 or 8 o’clock that same night. The briefs of the parties were received less than two hours before argument on June 26.

During oral argument, Solicitor General Erwin Griswold–the former Dean of Harvard Law School–weighed in on the compressed briefing schedule:

The items filed by the Post and the Times, I do not believe are marked top secret, but they are marked in-camera in the caption of the items. I repeat, all three have also filed regular briefs except not printed, only the American Civil Liberties Union seem to have the resources to produce a printed brief for this case. I am told that the law students of today are indignantly opposed to final examinations because they say that no lawyer has asked to work under such pressure that he has to get things out in three or four hours. I can only say that I think it’s perhaps fortunate that Mr. [William] Glendon and Mr. [Alexander] Bickel and I went to law school under an earlier dispensation.

Agreed. All law students should learn to deal with tough time constraints.

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Innovation Can Bring Food Prices Back Down to Earth


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If you’re a compulsive doom-scroller (and who isn’t, these days?) you probably have your eyes on rising food prices with the threat of further hikes to come. Supply-chain disruptions, pandemic lockdowns, and economic sanctions had the price of fertilizer soaring even before Russia invaded Ukraine, threatening grain exports as well as the availability of fertilizer for crops. It’s an international headache that bodes poorly for budgets in wealthy countries and threatens hunger in poor ones. But price pressures may spur the development of soil-enriching products old and new that could, eventually, help offset expense while diversifying the marketplace in the future.

“From South America’s avocado, corn and coffee farms to Southeast Asia’s plantations of coconuts and oil palms, high fertilizer prices are weighing on farmers across the developing world, making it much costlier to cultivate and forcing many to cut back on production,” The Wall Street Journal warned in January even before the horror show in Ukraine. “That means grocery bills could go up even more in 2022, following a year in which global food prices rose to decade highs.”

Since then, troops from Russia, a major exporter of wheat, crossed into Ukraine, another important grower of grain, tightening the availability of food around the world in general, and especially in countries in Africa and the Middle East that traditionally rely on those sources. Prices rose 12.6 percent just in March, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization Food Price Index. Worse, Russia and Belarus are important exporters of fertilizer and of precursor chemicals for making the stuff, driving costs even higher for farmers around the world.

“In addition to being one of the largest producers of wheat, Russia has enormous resources in terms of nutrients,” warns Svein Tore Holsether, president and CEO of fertilizer giant Yara International. “Plants need nitrogen, phosphate, and potash to grow.…In total, 25% of European supply of these three nutrients come from Russia” and Belarus supplies 20 percent of the world’s potash.

But farmers grew crops long before the world relied on commercial fertilizers and international suppliers of precursor chemicals. Manure produced from animal feces was long a preferred means of enriching soil but was largely displaced for use in large-scale agriculture by more-consistent modern materials. Now, the literal waste product is being put back to its old use.

“Limited supplies and higher prices for commercial fertilizers have increased demand for manure,” AgWeb reported last week. “In the past, some farmers have had trouble giving it away. Now they have crop farmers calling them, some of them having waiting lists.”

The result of increased demand for manure has been, as you’d expect, higher prices. “Prices for good-quality solid manure in Nebraska alone have reached $11 to $14 per ton, up from a typical price of $5 to $8 per ton,” Reuters notes. That could well bring more suppliers to the market for a product that, just recently, people were often paying to have removed.

But everything has its tradeoffs. Manure production takes time to ramp up, it’s difficult to transport, and large quantities of animal waste pose potential contamination dangers to streams and groundwater. As a result, it’s heavily regulated. “Livestock farmers say it’s a heavy lift to meet all the government rules and track how manure is applied,” Reuters adds.

The same considerations, cautions included, can apply to compost—decomposed organic material (especially when it includes the carcasses of, for example, millions of chickens culled because of an outbreak of avian flu). As with manure, demand for compost is rising. New Hampshire’s WMUR notes “the rising costs of fertilizer and fuel are forcing many [farmers] to switch to manure and compost.” 

Demand for compost may actually save some jurisdictions from their own good intentions. California, for example, now requires people and businesses across the state to separate food and other organic materials from inorganic garbage with the intention that it would be recycled for new uses such as compost. What the law couldn’t do was create a market for rotting table scraps.

“The regulations don’t require that the newly generated compost be used on farmland, include funding for costly transportation to farms, or mandate that compost be of a quality that would make it appealing to farmers and ranchers,” Gosia Wozniacka observed in March for Civil Eats. Under the circumstances, “a jurisdiction could potentially pay for low quality compost and let it sit in an empty lot,” she added.

Farmers are now looking for organic material to add to their fields, and suppliers will oblige them at the right price. Rising demand and resulting improved profit potential may accomplish what red tape can’t in terms of creating an actual market for usable compost in the place of feel-good mandates.

But likely predating the use of manure and compost for enriching soil was slash-and-burn agriculture. While torching entire fields in order to enrich soil is frowned on these days, ash still improves crops through the use of biochar, a charcoal-like material that replaces slash-and burn. “Biochar is gaining attention as a sustainable product that may help decrease the need for fertilizers while also helping to reduce carbon emissions,” Michigan State University researchers commented in 2020.

Intriguingly, one way to produce biochar is with woody material removed from public lands during the process of reducing the danger of wildfire. While forest-thinning usually consumes resources, biochar is a potentially profitable product that might help to make forest maintenance pay for itself in the process of benefiting agriculture.

“Black gold,” Kraig Kidwell, regional timber contracting officer for the U.S. Forest Service told the Capital Press in 2020 of a demonstration biochar project in the Mt. Hood National Forest. “We’re taking a waste product and creating something usable.”

At the time, there was little demand for biochar because fertilizer was cheap. That has obviously since changed, and biochar, like manure, compost, and any other material that can replace or just reduce the need for expensive fertilizer looks a lot more attractive than in the past. In time, signaled by high fertilizer prices, the market will work to find substitutes and alternate sources.

But finding those substitutes won’t happen immediately. Ultimately, innovation will bring new products and materials to market to enrich soil and feed the hungry. But, as has happened so often in the past, people will pay the toll for bad policy and military aggression until human ingenuity can step in to alleviate the suffering.

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