Mark Tramo is an associate adjunct professor of neurology at UCLA. Whether he will remain in that position is unknown. A sign-wielding woman has reportedly camped herself outside the building where he works, and has demanded that UCLA fire him.

“I screamed by myself for an hour,” she said in a video that went viral on social media.

Tramo’s crime? He is, under the incredibly broad definition popularized in media reports on this subject, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein.

This is not to say that he is accused of sex crimes against underage women. On the contrary, no one has accused him of any crime whatsoever. His moral failing, according to his critics, is that he emailed Epstein with some frequency over the years, including about his scientific research and areas of academic interest. In one such email, he mentioned reading a study that found “a newborn will suck on a pacifier more vigorously” if the baby hears his own mother’s voice rather than some other woman’s.

Judging by the reaction on X, social media users have found this email highly incriminating. It’s what the woman with the sign referenced when she screamed at the department that Tramo should lose his job. The conservative writer Rod Dreher is with her, writing: “God bless this woman! What kind of monster must Mark Tramo be?”

People seem to have imagined that Tramo was giving Epstein advice about something very graphic. But this notion is patently absurd.

Tramo was a professor of neurology and of music. He had coauthored articles on the effects of music on premature babies. He had received funding from Epstein to create a research institution for the study of music and the brain. The idea that he was assisting Epstein in the sexual abuse of babies—instead of just sharing an interesting fact related to his area of academic expertise—is extremely far-fetched. Frankly, the idea that Epstein would have been interested in this knowledge for disgusting sexual reasons is also quite doubtful. (Epstein was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls; there is no evidence he was sexually attracted to babies.)

Nevertheless, since Tramo’s communications with Epstein continued after the disgraced financier’s 2008 incarceration for sexual misconduct, he is among the names of people considered to have associated with a known abuser. In statements to the media, Tramo denied having knowledge of Epstein’s specific crimes, saying that he thought Epstein had been convicted of prostitution.

“I myself had not heard anything [about] statutory rape or minors being involved, I never saw him with young girls, never visited the island, never flew in his planes,” he said. “I was introduced to him by the Harvard Provost—he donated several millions to Harvard and was dangling a lot more.”

It is unclear if UCLA is taking any action against Tramo, though the university website did remove his profile page from its media list of designated field experts. UCLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the meantime, Tramo tells Reason that he has been besieged with hate mail, including death threats.

“My wife and I have received many threatening and malicious emails, texts, and voicemails the past several days,” Tramo wrote in an email. “Some include death threats and many accuse me of being a pedophile who conspired with Epstein to sexually abuse infants.”

But His Emails

Tramo’s situation was on my mind as I watched Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller interview Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who is one of the most libertarian-leaning members of Congress, and also the foremost advocate—along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.)—of releasing the Epstein files. He has regularly made appearances alongside purported survivors of Epstein and demanded that the Department of Justice (DOJ) provide information on sexual abusers who participated in Epstein’s crimes. Massie and Khanna accused the feds of failing to properly disclose documents relating to Epstein, a violation of the law, either due to incompetence or maliciousness.

It seems clear that unlike so many other political actors who have taken up the cause of Epstein disclosure for self-serving partisan reasons—namely, a quest to disparage the reputations of the Clintons and/or Donald Trump, depending on one’s own partisan valence—Massie and Khanna are engaged in a sincere effort to arrive at the truth. Their complaints that the DOJ has mishandled Epstein transparency are well-taken. Attorney General Pam Bondi previously claimed that she had the Epstein client list “sitting on her desk”; in Epstein parlance, this was taken to mean that there was a list of elite political figures, academics, and businessmen for whom Epstein procured underage girls. But no such document has ever been released, and FBI Director Kash Patel subsequently stated that there is no one else involved in Epstein’s sex crimes.

Most people demanding more answers about Epstein have alleged a vast and sinister conspiracy, involving not just Epstein but other powerful abusers. At yesterday’s House Judiciary hearing, lawmakers accused Bondi of failing not just Epstein’s victims, but also hundreds of young women victimized by Epstein and his associates.

“Those are just some of the hundreds of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s global sex trafficking ring who are demanding that the truth be told and are demanding accountability for the abusers who trafficked and raped them,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.).

If there are other men who sexually abused underage girls, the public ought to know about it. But that remains an open question, since none of the files substantiate the idea that Epstein procured underage girls for a cabal of sexual abusers.

The files do, however, reveal the names of people who met with Epstein, took money from Epstein, or continued to email with Epstein over the years. These people are not accused of crimes; in many cases, including Tramo’s, the idea that the named individual did something particularly bad seems to spring from a misconception. In other words, releasing the files has resulted in some real-world harms.

Tramo, for what it’s worth, asserts that he did not have specific knowledge about the nature of Epstein’s crimes, the details of which were mostly unknown to the public until a 2018 expose in The Miami Herald.

Massie does not find this persuasive. Weissmueller asked him directly whether he was worried about a “witch hunt” effect. In response, Massie said: “I haven’t seen a single person in the United States suffer any consequences from this.”

Massie also contends that people who interacted with Epstein after his incarceration may in fact deserve any reputational harm that is coming their way.

“If you were associated with Jeffrey Epstein after 2008, you were associating with a known convicted sex offender who had wild parties,” said Massie. “He’s not the most savory character.”

---

This Week on Free Media

Niall Stanage and Amber Duke joined me to discuss—what else?—the Epstein files and Massie and Khanna’s claims.

---

Worth Watching

I just finished reading my first Miss Marple mystery: The Murder at the Vicarage. I found the mystery a bit underwhelming and the solution predictable—and I miss Poirot!—but I am moving right along to the next one, The Body in the Library.

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Pam Bondi snaps at Congressmen. Over the course of five hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Pam Bondi gave increasingly agitated responses to members’ questions about the Epstein files her department recently released.

She called ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.) a “washed-up loser lawyer” and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) a “failed politician” with “Trump derangement syndrome.”

At the hearing, members pressed Bondi on a range of things related to Jeffrey Epstein and her department’s release of documents related to the dead, disgraced financier. In particular, representatives pressed Bondi on why material on Epstein’s associates was redacted, but the names, pictures, and other sensitive information of victims were not.

For the most part, Bondi did not give direct answers, preferring instead insults and odd nonsequiturs about how the stock market was at record heights.

On the one hand, one can understand some of Bondi’s frustrations. Committee hearings like yesterday’s are largely political theater.

A lot of Democrats’ “questions” were really just partisan grandstanding, like when Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.) asked Epstein victims in the audience to stand so that Bondi could apologize to them for failing to redact their names.

Bondi wasn’t wrong when she said several times that Democrats did not care that much about Epstein when Joe Biden was president and Merrick Garland was attorney general.

Still, even when Democrats asked more measured, substantive questions, like when Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.) pressed Bondi on whether some of Epstein’s emails suggested that there were still coconspirators left to prosecute, the attorney general still resorted to evasions and insults.

A problem of one’s own making. Generally, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for Bondi at all. The debacle over the Epstein files is one of her own making.

It was Bondi who seemed to say in an interview that she had Epstein’s (probably mythical) client list sitting on her desk waiting to be released, before walking it back. It was Bondi who made a big show of giving right-wing influencers binders labeled “Epstein files” filled with redacted or already public documents.

That game of promising more transparency on Epstein while offering none has spectacularly backfired. In the end, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in a near-unanimous vote. When asked follow-up questions about those files, Bondi broke down.

Even in the face of partisan, showy committee questions, it would be nice to have an attorney general who was modestly professional and interested in transparency.

---

Scenes from D.C.: The latest war of religion has broken out on X about whether America’s youth is becoming more Christian and, more specifically, more Catholic.

Researcher and former pastor Ryan Burge says not really. Per Burge, 2023’s surge in Catholicism was an outlier. Every year since then has shown a steady, stagnant percentage of Catholic Zoomers.

There is no surge of Catholicism among Gen Z.

The 2023 Cooperative Election Study showed a surge in Catholic numbers.

It was clearly an outlier.

The 2024 data was right back to baseline – 15%. pic.twitter.com/fYphTIYYRj

— Ryan Burge ???? (@ryanburge) February 11, 2026

I’d really encourage everyone to listen to Burge’s recent appearance on Ross Douthat’s podcast, where he breaks down America’s religiosity in more detail.

But a stagnating church is not the case in Washington, D.C., says Robert Schmad in response to Burge’s post.

We have a lot of data points confirming there is no national mass Catholic conversion among American youths.

Staffers in DC, however, certainly think it's happening. That's because – among them specifically – there absolutely is an ongoing conversion movement.

At social… https://t.co/Roqgf9Gbkl

— robert schmad (@RobertSchmad) February 12, 2026

My own anecdotal experience matches Schmad’s take. My 150-year-old D.C. parish has welcomed record numbers of converts in recent years. Long-time parishioners tell me that Mass attendance has exploded.

Perhaps that’s just more evidence of Catholic decline: A shrinking number of faithful are concentrating in fewer, more vibrant parishes.

Or maybe not. The next Great Awakening has to start somewhere. Perhaps centralized nodes of intense religiosity are what’s necessary to revive true religion in America.

---

QUICK LINKS

• James Van Der Beek, a man of apparent Dutch ancestry and an actor on T.V.’s Dawson’s Creek, died at age 48.
• Larry Sharpe is running for public office again.
• Johnathan Haidt is in The Free Press taking a victory lap for popularizing the case against youths’ smartphone use.
• The Federal Trade Commission chairman warns that Apple News’ alleged political bias might be an antitrust violation in a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
• The House votes to stop President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
• The FBI tracked down an anonymous 4chan conspiracy theorist because of claims he made about Epstein.

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From Roe v. Gowl, decided yesterday by Judge Jesse Furman (S.D.N.Y.):

The Court previously ordered Plaintiff, who is currently proceeding without counsel and has been temporarily granted leave to proceed under the pseudonym “Jane Doe,” to either consent to electronic service via ECF or move to participate as an ECF filer no later than February 10, 2026. On that date, the Court received a communication from Plaintiff, attached here, indicating that she had been advised that she could not create a PACER account under the pseudonym “Jane Doe” and asking the Court for guidance.

The undersigned spoke with members of the Clerk’s Office, who explained that creating a PACER or ECF account in the name “Jane Doe” is not feasible because of the volume of “Jane Does” in the ECF system. To resolve this issue, permit Plaintiff to maintain her anonymity (as long as she is permitted to proceed pseudonymously), and ensure that Plaintiff receives filings in a timely fashion as long as she is proceeding without counsel, the Court will change Plaintiff’s pseudonym to “Marcia Roe.” Plaintiff should create a PACER account using the name “Marcia Roe” for the purposes of this litigation. Plaintiff should also create a new email address using that name to open that PACER account….

This reminded me of my broader concerns with the overuse of Doe (and for that matter Roe), which led me to publish an article in Judicature called “If Pseudonyms, Then What Kind?” You can read the PDF here and the text here; here are the opening sections:

[* * *]

Writers may have their noms de plume; revolutionaries may have noms de guerre. Here, though, we will speak of (to coin a phrase) the noms de litige, and ask: When pseudonymous litigation is allowed, what sorts of pseudonyms should be used? In particular, how can we avoid dozens of Doe v. Doe precedents or Doe v. University of __, all different yet identically named? This piece discusses some approaches to achieving the twin goals of pseudonyms: protecting privacy and avoiding confusion.

The Options

Courts generally disfavor pseudonymous litigation, but sometimes allow it.¹ Indeed, they sometimes themselves pseudonymize cases for publication, even when the party names remain in the court records.² Both courts and parties also sometimes pseudonymize the names of nonlitigant witnesses and victims. But what kinds of pseudonyms should be preferred? There are many options, including:

1. Traditional pseudonyms, such as John and Jane Doe, Richard Roe, Paul and Pauline Poe (or even Francis Foe, Walter Woe, or Xerxes Xoe³), XYZ Co., Anonymous, or the archaic Noakes or Stiles.⁴ Unsurprisingly, there are other names that are used in other Anglophone legal systems, for instance “Ashok Kumar” for unnamed defendants in Indian copyright litigation, and that are likely to make their way into American court one day.⁵
2. Fictitious pseudonyms, unrelated to the party’s name, such as Wesley Goffs.⁶
3. Fictitious first names-plus-initials, such as Wesley G.⁷
4. Fictitious initials, such as W.G.⁸
5. Common names, such as Smith.⁹
6. Pure initials of the party, such as E.V.¹⁰
7. First names plus initials of the party, such as Eugene V.¹¹
8. Names based on the party’s initials, perhaps following the new Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals preference for the military alphabet or the Greek alphabet, such as “Dr. Alex Foxtrot” or “Colonel Donna Whiskey” for, say, Alan Franks or Diane Walters.¹²
9. Neutral descriptive pseudonyms, such as Pseudonym Taxpayer, Rose and David Septuagenarian, or Hmong I.¹³
10. Potentially argumentative pseudonyms, or more broadly ones that are likely to arouse sympathy, such as Jane Endangered and Jane Imperiled, Whistleblower, Victim A, or Navy Seal.¹⁴
11. Famous-name pseudonyms, such as Publius,¹⁵ Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, Gertrude Stein, or Marie, Joseph, and Carol Danvers from the Ms. Marvel/Captain Marvel comics.¹⁶
12. Even likely puns, such as Femedeer (doe, a deer, a feme deer).¹⁷

(I focus here on pseudonyms chosen for the purpose of litigation; when parties already have well-established pseudonyms, for instance as authors, there may be reason to retain them, assuming that such pseudonymity in litigation is found to be allowed.¹⁸)

The Costs and Benefits

Each option, unsurprisingly, has its strengths and weaknesses.

Traditional pseudonyms strongly signal that the party is pseudonymous (though there are of course many thousands of real people with those names¹⁹); so do neutral descriptive pseudonyms. But both of these approaches make it harder to uniquely and clearly identify cases, especially when the other party is a frequent defendant, such as the federal government, a university, or a fellow Doe.²⁰

That’s of course already a risk with common real names, such as Johnson,²¹ but it’s especially serious with Doe cases. To give just one example, there are six Doe v. Trustees of Indiana University cases just from 2020 to 2022 that have yielded opinions available on Westlaw, all in the same field (higher education law).²² These seem likely to be joined by new cases each year, and they will remain potentially citable for decades to come.

Common names (such as Smith or Johnson) have some of the problems of Doe, without the advantage of quickly signaling that the party is pseudonymous.

Pure initials avoid these problems, but can “make[] for poor readability” and be “dehumanizing” (or, perhaps more precisely, “depersonalizing”²³) — “human beings are the subject of … cases, not acronyms.”²⁴ This is likely even more true of alphanumeric combinations that occasionally appear in such cases, such as P3, V7, or JA-836 Doe. The initials of different people in the same case are also fairly likely to coincide, especially when the parties share a last name.²⁵

First-name-plus-initial can be less ambiguous and less depersonalizing, but might be too revealing of the parties, especially when “the names … are fairly unusual.”²⁶ Indeed, even pure initials can be identifying, when coupled with other indications, such as the small school that the party is attending.²⁷

Famous pseudonyms can be distracting, and can also bring political spin that might subtly influence the judge or jury, as with Hester Prynne (the name of the heroine in The Scarlet Letter,²⁸ who was publicly shamed for adultery, used in a challenge to a sex offender registration law). Some descriptive names, such as “Jane Endangered,” can have the same effect. So can descriptive names that are professional designations, such as “Navy Seal 1” — while a party’s occupation and accomplishments will of course often be part of the record, indicating them as part of the party’s name might sometimes give the party an unfair, if slight, advantage.

Arbitrary names can risk inadvertently implicating someone else who has that name. To give one example from the Ninth Circuit:

The plaintiffs in this case previously were denominated “James Rowe, Jane Rowe and John Doe.” One of the many persons genuinely named “James Rowe” wrote to the court while the appeal was pending, and said that his reputation was harmed by a newspaper story about the appeal, because careless readers might think erroneously that he is a convicted sex offender…. It is preferable for lawyers and courts to avoid harm to the reputations of real persons by using … traditional references for pseudonyms.²⁹

A Presumptive Solution?

Perhaps the best solution for a solo pseudonymous party is the one used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its decisions dealing with discrimination by federal employers: It uses an arbitrary first name (generally matched to the gender of the party but not to any other characteristics, such as ethnicity) coupled with an arbitrary initial, such as “Christopher M.”³⁰ Court opinions including such names would presumably need to note that they are pseudonyms, since at least at first the public would assume otherwise. But once that is done, using such pseudonyms ought to avoid the bulk of the problems noted above.

This approach may be less effective when there are several pseudonyms that need to be used (either for parties or for witnesses or victims), since that may end up too confusing for some participants. As one court described,

Evidence already submitted highlights the problems pseudonyms might pose in the present action, and the confusion it can produce. At least two women [among the litigants] use the pseudonym “Gertrude Stein,” and nine women are referred to simply as “Guerrilla Girl.” One woman cannot remember “her Guerrilla Girl pseudonym” so she has adopted the name “Chansonetta Stanley Emmons” for this litigation. Other women “changed their minds about their pseudonyms” and adopted new ones part of the way through their association with the Guerrilla Girls.

Plaintiffs and defendants have conflicting accounts of the involvement of “Romaine Brooks” (Susan Doe 4) and “Zora Neale Hurston” (Susan Doe 5) in this litigation. The woman that plaintiff Erika Rothenberg knows as “Romaine Brooks” informed her in March 2004 that she had not agreed to participate in the present litigation, but the defendants have submitted an authorization dated October 2003 by “Romaine Brooks” permitting them to include her in it. Similarly, in March 2004 Rothenberg spoke to the woman she knows as “Zora Neale Hurston” and was told that “Hurston” had not agreed to sue, but defendants have submitted an authorization dated October 2003 and a declaration dated June 2004 from “Zora Neale Hurston” in support of her involvement in the litigation. To conduct a trial in such an atmosphere, all the while using only pseudonyms, promises trouble and confusion.³¹

Real-first-name-plus-initial (e.g., Erika R. if Rothenberg had wanted a pseudonym) would be much clearer, though at the price of increasing the risk that the plaintiff could be identified. Real initials (e.g., E.R.) might likewise have been clearer. And it would have been clearer still if the parties had appeared under their real names, which is what the court ultimately insisted on. Nonetheless, if there is just one pseudonymous party, there should be much less risk of such confusion.…

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2/12/1965: Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s birthday.

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Carl McCain won $800 on a lottery ticket, but when he went to claim his prize, North Carolina officials told him the money was being taken to pay debts he owed to Lenoir County and Wayne County. North Carolina law allows the state to seize winnings to cover state or local debts, but McCain said the debts weren’t his and that he had never been to those counties. He called county officials and found the debt belonged to someone with a similar name, but their records listed McCain’s Social Security number, causing the mix-up. Still, nothing happened for over a month. Finally, after he reached out to a TV reporter, officials corrected the error and McCain received his winnings in the mail.

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Your representatives may finally grab the feared “third rail” of U.S. politics. When the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out in the early 2030s, the law is clear: Benefits must be slashed. That would mean a roughly 24 percent cut to Social Security checks and an 11 percent cut to Medicare benefits. But Congress almost certainly won’t let that happen.

The easy, though irresponsible, political path may seem obvious: Change the law, keep benefits whole, and pay by borrowing the money. This way legislators won’t have to cast unpopular votes for spending cuts or tax hikes. This makes sense only if the consequences won’t become clear until much later, after voters have forgotten all about it.

What most people are missing is that this time, the consequences may show up quickly. Inflation may not wait for debt to pile up. It can arrive the moment Congress commits to that debt-ridden path.

Unfortunately, this part may not be so obvious to legislators looking at projections.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, borrowing to cover Social Security and Medicare shortfalls would push federal debt to about 156 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2055. These shortfalls account for roughly $116 trillion, including interest, over those 30 years. In spite of all this debt, the projections assume inflation stays low for decades and interest rates only go up very slowly. That calm outlook is misleading.

Think of government debt like shares in a company, which have value based on what investors believe they will earn in the future. Government debt works the same way: Its value depends on whether those who buy it believe future primary surpluses—revenue minus spending, excluding interest—will be sufficient to pay for that government’s promises and obligations.

When the belief weakens, markets don’t just sit around and wait for the reckoning. They adjust immediately. And in the United States, that adjustment usually shows up as inflation.

We saw this happen just a few years ago, between 2020 and 2022, when Congress approved about $5 trillion in debt-financed spending with no clear payment plan. Households received pandemic stimulus checks, spent them quickly, and saw no reason to expect higher taxes or fewer services. They were right. The post-pandemic era didn’t bring austerity.

Inflation followed, and not simply because the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply. People realized the new debt lacked a credible plan behind it. The dollar’s buying power weakened until the real value of government debt fell back in line with the expected future primary surpluses available to back it. By the time inflation peaked at 9 percent in 2022, federal debt equaling about 10 percent of GDP had effectively been erased through higher prices.

Voters hated the inflation, and they made that clear at the ballot box in 2024.

The entitlement deadline could trigger an even stronger reaction. Senators elected this year will be tempted to borrow everything needed to preserve benefits. But without serious reform, new revenue and spending restraint, investors may not wait to see whether some future Congress eventually finds a way to pay.

If they reprice U.S. debt right away, prices could rise much faster than official forecasts suggest—perhaps almost immediately. Not because the debt is huge (that’s already true), but because people no longer trust the plan behind all that future debt.

At that point, the Fed would be in a terrible position. Raising interest rates to fight inflation would also immediately drive up government borrowing costs on debt that must be rolled over quickly. Paying higher-interest bills with even more debt would be like paying off one credit card with another. The Fed would be forced to choose between tolerating inflation or triggering a deeper fiscal crisis.

Either way, the costs would be severe.

Inflation is a silent, unvoted-on tax. It eats away at savings, pensions, and fixed incomes. It hurts retirees who did everything right and relied on safe assets. It squeezes workers whose paychecks don’t keep up with rising prices. It pushes families to spend more on groceries, rent, energy, and health care. And it distorts the entire economy by rewarding speculation over productive investment.

No one escapes. Not the poor. Not the middle class. Not even the wealthy. It’s the most painful way to finance government promises.

Legislators know this, but reform is hard. The temptation is to borrow, avoid conflict, and let others clean up the mess when political prospects are better. But this time, inflation could break out on the same legislature’s watch. The reckoning will not be postponed, and neither will accountability. As in 2021, voters will pay first, and then they will assign blame.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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Yesterday, I testified against the proposed “Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act” at a hearing before the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government. This proposed legislation would bar or deport virtually all non-citizen Muslims from the United States by  mandating that “”Any alien in the United States found to be an adherent of Sharia law by the Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security, or Attorney General shall have any immigration benefit, immigration relief, or visa revoked, be considered inadmissible or deportable, and shall be removed from the United States.”

My written testimony is available here. In it, I explained why the proposed law violates the Free Exercise and Free Speech clauses of the First Amendment, and why – if enacted and upheld by the courts – it would set a dangerous precedent, cause great harm to many thousands of innocent people, and damage US national security by giving a propaganda victory to radical Islamist terrorists.

I embed the video of the oral testimony and hearing below. The hearing featured lots of political grandstanding, as is perhaps to be expected, so I can well understand if some readers decide watching the whole thing isn’t worth their time. For those interested, my own opening statement runs from about 1:03 to 1:08:

 

Notably, the GOP members on the Subcommittee and the other three witnesses (all called by the Republicans; the minority party is allowed only one witness, in this case me) mostly didn’t even try to defend proposed bill. Instead, they focused on various issues with Sharia law that – even if valid – would not require mass deportation or exclusion of migrants to address.

At one point, California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock asked all four witnesses if any of us disagreed with the point that it is unconstitutional for the government to penalize people on the basis of religious belief. Everyone indicated they did not. But such discrimination on the basis of religion is exactly what the proposed legislation would do.

I won’t try to go over the testimony of the other three witnesses in detail. Many of the concerns they raised were hyperbolic, often to the point of ridiculousness. No, there is no real threat that Sharia law is somehow going to take over the US legal system or that of the state of Texas (the focus of much of the testimony). And it is no grave threat to American values if some Muslims plan to establish a private compound where they live in accordance with their religious laws, especially since it turns out the compound in question will not actually enforce Sharia law on residents. Other religious groups do similar things all the time.

On the other hand, there may be some merit to Stephen Gelé’s concerns that US courts sometimes enforce judgments issued by Sharia courts in Muslim dictatorships, in cases where they should not, because it would have harmful or illiberal consequences (e.g. – child custody rulings). The solution to such problems, however, is not to deport Muslim immigrants, but to alter the relevant legal rules on comity and conflict of laws. And, in fairness, Gelé’s testimony did not recommend deportation and exclusion as a fix. If Texas courts are giving too much credence to some types of foreign court decisions, the GOP-dominated Texas state legislature can easily fix that problem!

Finally, the opposing witnesses and others who fear the supposed spread of Sharia law and the impact of Muslim immigrants often act as if Islam and Sharia are a single, illiberal monolith, irredeemably hostile to liberal values. In reality, as noted in my own testimony, there is widespread internal disagreement among Muslims about what their religion entails, as is also true of Christians and Jews. Most Muslim immigrants in the US are not trying to impose Sharia on non-Muslims, or establish some kind of Islamic theocracy.  Indeed, many are themselves refugees from the oppression of radical Islamist dictatorships, such as those in Iran and Afghanistan.

My Cato Institute colleague Mustafa Akyol – a prominent expert on Islamic political thought – makes some additional relevant points on the diversity of Muslim thought in a recent article.

Some Muslims do indeed have awful, reprehensible beliefs on various issues. But there are lots of ways to address any danger that poses, without resorting to censorship, discrimination on the basis of religion, mass deportation, and other unconstitutional and repressive policies. The most obvious solution is to simply enforce the First Amendment’s prohibitions on the establishment of religion, and persecution and discrimination on the basis of religious belief.

This was the third time I have testified in Congress. The other two times were at the invitation of Senate Republicans (see here and here). The issues at the three hearings were very different. But in each case, I tried to defend limits on government power that are essential to protecting individual rights to life, liberty, and property. I doubt my testimony had any great impact. But perhaps it made a small difference at the margin.

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I was very pleased that the new issue of the Harvard Law Review includes a book review of my 2025 book, The Digital Fourth Amendment.  The review, by Jennifer Granick of the ACLU, is here: Fourth Amendment Equilibrium Adjustment in an Age of Technological Upheaval.

If you want to buy the book, you can get it here. If you want to listen to the first hour of the audiobook for free, you can listen that here (the book starts 75 seconds in, after an introduction by the audio book company).

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A small faction of Republicans broke ranks and voted Wednesday night to terminate President Donald Trump’s “emergency” tariffs on many imports from Canada.

The 219–211 vote in the House is the first significant rebuke of Trump’s tariff policies (and the emergency powers Trump has claimed to impose them) to emerge from the lower chamber of Congress. It may not be the last, as Democrats have threatened to put forward several resolutions to block various tariffs imposed, now that a procedural block on those votes has been lifted.

“I know tariffs are a tax on American consumers. I know some disagree. But this debate and vote should occur in the House,” Rep. Don Bacon, one of the Republicans who supported the resolution on Wednesday night, wrote on X earlier in the day.

Shortly before the vote on Wednesday evening, Trump warned that “any Republican” who voted to revoke the tariffs on Canadian imports would “suffer the consequences come Election time.”

That threat was not enough to hold all Republicans in line. In addition to Bacon, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R–Pa.), Jeff Hurd (R–Colo.), Kevin Kiley (R–Calif.), Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), and Dan Newhouse (R–Wash.) voted for the measure. Rep. Jared Golden (D–Maine) was the sole Democrat to vote against it.

“We got it passed. We broke the Republican blockade,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D–Wash.), who has headed the Democratic efforts to repeal the tariffs since shortly after Trump announced them last February.

The Senate has voted several times to terminate national emergencies underpinning Trump’s tariffs on imports from Canada, Brazil, and elsewhere.

Still, Trump will probably have the final say: Even if the House-passed resolution makes it to his desk, he could veto it. Actually blocking the tariffs would require a veto-proof two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress.

On Wednesday, Politico reported that the White House was working to limit the number of Republican defectors in order to prevent a future veto override. An unnamed administration official reportedly told Politico that the “baseline House Republican position” is tariff skepticism.

If that’s true, it was not reflected in Wednesday’s vote totals. As long as Trump continues to hold most House Republicans under his thrall, this vote will be only a symbolic victory for tariff critics.

Still, it is also an important acknowledgement of reality.

The “national emergency” underpinning the Canadian tariffs has never made much sense. The White House claims that the tariffs are part of an effort to block the flow of fentanyl into the United States, but little fentanyl is smuggled across the border from Canada. And even if that wasn’t true, it’s illogical to tax legal goods in order to stop the flow of illegal ones.

Trade between the U.S. and Canada is plainly not a national security threat by any definition of the term, and the tariffs have accomplished little besides raising taxes on Americans. The Congressional Budget Office was the latest to confirm that reality, reporting Wednesday that American consumers have borne 95 percent of the costs from Trump’s trade barriers.

The post The U.S. House Just Voted To Stop Trump's 'Emergency' Tariffs on Imports From Canada appeared first on Reason.com.

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