The case that the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear on Monday morning, a trademark dispute involving the travel service Booking.com, is probably of little interest to the general public. But the manner in which the justices will hear oral arguments—via a teleconference with a live audio feed for anyone who wants to listen—is unprecedented and could represent a significant step toward the kind of transparency the Court has long resisted.
While the official justification for the unusual arrangement is “public health guidance in response to COVID-19,” the fact that the Court decided to allow online streaming of the oral arguments in 10 sets of cases it will hear from May 4 to May 13 may signal a new openness. As Gabe Roth of the advocacy group Fix the Court notes, “Supreme Court arguments [are] going live,” and “all it took was a global pandemic.”
The Court publishes transcripts of oral arguments on the day they are held and makes audio recordings available at the end of the week. But because it has always rejected requests for video or live audio coverage, anyone who wanted to watch or hear the proceedings as they happened was out of luck unless he could secure a coveted spot in the Court’s public gallery, which accommodates about 250 people.
That arbitrary restriction has created scenes surpassing the queues for openings of blockbuster movies or sales of must-have toys. Before the Court heard arguments in the 2012 Obamacare case, Drexel University law professor Lisa McElroy notes, would-be spectators “slept outside (in the rain) for at least three nights (some more), all to see history in the making.”
At a time when Americans can watch gavel-to-gavel coverage of Congress on C-SPAN and cannot turn on the news or go online without seeing the president in action, the camera shyness of the federal government’s third branch is hard to understand and even harder to justify. Over the years, various justices have offered various reasons for banning cameras from their courtroom, none of them persuasive.
Would cameras inhibit members of the Court, as former Justice Anthony Kennedy worried? Since everything the justices say during oral arguments is already heard by people in the gallery and in any case becomes public eventually, that concern is hard to take seriously.
Would cameras encourage lawyers to grandstand? Since they have strong incentives to avoid antagonizing the justices and focus on substantive points in the limited time they have, that seems unlikely.
Would cameras deprive justices of their “anonymity,” as Justice Clarence Thomas has argued? Since the justices go through a highly visible confirmation process, sit for official photographs, and do not shy away from public appearances, that ship has already sailed.
Would cameras “raise additional security concerns,” as Thomas also claimed? That concern likewise seems overblown, since the justices are protected by their own police force, anyone with an interest already recognizes their faces, and violence against public officials is rare.
Would video of oral arguments encourage the news media to feature misleading excerpts, shorn of context, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia warned? That hazard already exists, since we have transcripts and delayed audio recordings, not to mention reporters in the courtroom.
In Canada and the U.K., where the supreme courts have long allowed cameras, citizens see “able public servants with a complete mastery of difficult materials grappling seriously with matters of surpassing consequence,” observes Adam Liptak, who covers the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times. Such visibility, he suggests, “probably inspires confidence” and “certainly dispels ignorance.”
The issue is “very simple,” as C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb, who for decades unsuccessfully urged the Court to accept cameras, told my Reason colleague Nick Gillespie in 2010. “It’s a government institution that’s funded by the American taxpayers,” Lamb said. “The oral arguments are a public discussion [that] completes the picture that the public could have of the government they pay money to.”
It’s a portrait of contrasts in the age of pandemic…
In the United States, small but passionate protests have broken out in recent weeks as some workers and worshipers chafe at being quarantined – even as most federal and state governments caution against full and abrupt re-openings.
Meanwhile, in the People’s Republic of China, where the coronavirus originated, citizens live in abject fear over voicing the mildest of criticism about their government’s response to the outbreak and aftermath, including government actions designed to place ethnic and religious minorities in harm’s way.
Among the abuses:
Chinese authorities are continuing to operate some factories by forcing Uyghurs, Muslims from a Central Asian ethnic group, to fill in for workers sidelined by COVID-19. To groups monitoring religious freedom, this was merely the latest example of official persecution of the Uyghurs, predominantly Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslims who number more than 10 million and live in the northwest area of the country known as Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region. Uyghurs consider Beijing as a colonizing power and have pushed for a separate homeland or, at least, greater autonomy for their region. In recent years, China has tightened its grip on the region, forcing at least 1 million Uyghurs into 85 identified detention camps.
The pandemic has also increased levels of mistreatment against other groups. African residents of Guangzhou, a manufacturing hub, have been force-tested for the virus, evicted from their homes and hotels, and corralled into quarantined areas with few resources. Images on social media have showed groups of black residents sleeping on a sidewalk, visibly shaking from the cold and wearing surgical masks to protect themselves. Several African ambassadors wrote a letter to China’s foreign minister earlier this month complaining that these people were being mistreated and falsely blamed for the spread of the virus to China.
“The Group of African Ambassadors in Beijing immediately demands the cessation of forceful testing, quarantine and other inhuman treatments meted out to Africans,” they wrote.
Beijing has also used the pandemic as an excuse to crack down on churches that aren’t officially sanctioned by the government. In some regions, officials have removed crosses from Christian church rooftops on the pretext that religious symbols cannot be “higher” than the national flag. In December, as China’s began dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, church leaders reported that government officials told them the crosses were “too eye-catching” and would attract groups of people to gather, undermining the strict lockdowns in place.
Pastor Jian Zhu, who was raised in China and now serves as the director of the China Institute at Lincoln Christian University in Illinois, said persecution against unsanctioned Christian churches in China is “now the worst” he has seen since the late 1970s. The systematic harassment, according to Zhu, has included asking neighbors to spy on one another as well as pressuring schoolteachers, professors and students to sign a statement denouncing their faith.
“They are trying to eliminate Christianity from public life,” he told The Christian Post in mid-April. “Cameras are all over to watch church and Christians go to Sunday services. Families are threatened not to go to church or they will be punished or their relatives could be in trouble.”
Since the reports about forcing Uyghurs into factories began leaking two months ago, China’s systematic efforts to cover up the origins of the coronavirus and sow disinformation about it have sparked international outrage. But neither that indignation, nor the stepped-up persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, stopped the United Nations’ Asia-Pacific group from selecting China to represent the region on the United Nations Human Rights Council Consultative Group. The consultative body consists of five member states tasked with screening applicants to become independent U.N. human rights experts.
China’s selection on April 1 drew immediate condemnation from U.S. human rights advocates.
“The Chinese government is one of the worst abusers of religious freedom and other human rights,” said Gary Bauer of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan federal government entity that monitors international threats to religious freedom. In its 2019 annual report, USCIRF called on the Trump administration to impose targeted sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for severe religious freedom violations, especially Chen Quanguo, the current Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang region.
Other Washington officials see the pandemic as a warning against the natural tendency by those with autocratic impulses to impose top-down, heavy-handed controls.
Police in places as disparate as Kenya and India have beaten citizens avoiding curfew; nations such as Iran and North Korea are believed by health experts to have followed China’s example in vastly underreporting COVID-19 cases; and Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte has used the crisis to threaten declaring martial law.
But the United States has not been immune from these impulses. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was widely criticized for a sweeping stay-at-home order that precluded residents from driving from one house to another and for closing off entire sections of large stores that sell gardening supplies, include plant seeds. And when President Trump said he had “absolute power” over states to determine how and when to re-open their governments, the backslash from both conservatives and liberals was fast and furious. The president quickly backtracked and has allowed governors to make their own decisions, even as Trump has publicly second-guessed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s statewide re-opening of salons, gyms, and bowling alleys.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in early April warned that autocracies will use the crisis “to become more aggressive, deny people their rights,” and “lie more.” He said that “in the end, they do enormous harm to the people of their nation and put the rest of the world at risk as well.”
In Washington, most of the fury at China so far has focused on the government’s delay and dissembling over the source and extent of the epidemic and its unseemly sway over the World Health Organization, which initially minimized the effects the outbreak. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, through her advocacy group Stand for America, last week launched a petition to Congress urging lawmakers to investigate Beijing for its role in the coronavirus crisis and pass measures to halt China’s influence in the U.S. and around the world.
But China’s religious persecution amid the pandemic is also spurring congressional scrutiny.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who has sought to shed a light on the China’s oppression of religious minorities and political dissidents throughout his career, said he planned to amplify the need for several bills he has written aimed at punishing China for the forced Uyghur labor, along with other measures addressing Beijing’s ongoing suppression of medical experts, journalists and political dissidents.
“Those atrocities must be confronted, not just for their own sake but because, as we have now seen through the global spread of COVID-19, they are a direct threat to America’s national security and global public health,” Cruz spokeswoman Jessica Skaggs told RealClearPolitics.
“Once we defeat this pandemic, Sen. Cruz will continue fighting to hold China accountable for its religious persecution of minorities and its broader repression on free expression and medical information.”
Rep. Michael McCaul, the ranking GOP member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said China’s and the WHO’s handling of the coronavirus crisis enabled a regional epidemic to become a global pandemic resulting in innumerous deaths in China and around the world. McCaul, along with 16 other House Republicans, sent a letter to the White House last week asking the president to condition future funding of the WHO on Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ resignation.
“This malfeasance is another example of the CCP’s treatment of their own people and reminds us this is the same regime who puts millions of their own citizens in ‘concentration camps’ and uses them for forced labor,” he said.
“The international community cannot let these appalling abuses go unpunished,” he told RCP.
“We must work together to hold the CCP accountable for these egregious human rights violations, especially amid this public health emergency that they exacerbated.”
This is not solely a Republican concern. Rep. James McGovern, who chairs the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, is calling on the international community to investigate Beijing’s efforts to repress religious and ethnic minorities in the midst of a pandemic. McGovern in March sponsored a bill that would bar the U.S. from importing any goods made in the Xinjiang factories and has urged all American companies, including Amazon, Nike, Apple and Calvin Klein, to investigate their supply chains in China and cease operation if they cannot definitively rule out the use of forced labor. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio wrote a similar Senate bill.
“Forcing Uyghurs and others to work in factories while the risk of infection is high, tearing down Christian symbols and crosses, or condoning discrimination against African migrants is completely unacceptable an should be roundly condemned by the administration and investigated by the international community,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement to RCP.
“The virus exposed what we already knew: The Chinese government is all too willing to violate the human rights of the Chinese people, and its policies pose a real risk to the world’s health as well,” McGovern added.
Visualizing How COVID-19 Consumer Spending Is Impacting Industries
Consumer spending is one of the most important driving forces for global economic growth.
Beyond impacting some of the factors that determine consumer spend – such as consumer confidence, unemployment levels, or the cost of living – Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones notes that the COVID-19 pandemic has also drastically altered how and where consumers choose to spend their hard-earned cash.
Today’s graphic pulls data from a global survey by McKinsey & Company that analyzes how consumers are reining in their spending, causing upheaval across every industry imaginable.
While some industries are in a better position to weather the impact of this storm, others could struggle to survive.
The Link Between Sentiment and Intent to Spend
As consumers grapple with uncertainty, their buying behavior becomes more erratic. What is clear however, is that they have reduced spending on all non-essential products and services.
But as each country moves along the COVID-19 curve, we can see a glimmer of increasing optimism levels, which in turn is linked to higher spending.
India’s consumers, for example, are displaying higher levels of optimism, with more households planning to increase spend—a trend that is also evident in China, Indonesia, and Nigeria.
Meanwhile, American consumers are still more optimistic about the future than Europeans. 37% of Americans believe the country will recover in 2 or 3 months—albeit with optimism levels at the highest for people who earn over $100K.
Strategic Consumer Spending
Globally, consumers continue to spend—and in some cases, spend more compared to pre-pandemic levels—on some necessities such as groceries and household supplies.
Due to changes in media consumption habits, consumers in almost all countries surveyed say they will increase their spend on at-home entertainment. This is especially true for Korea, a country that already boasts a massive gaming culture.
As restrictions in China lift, many categories such as gasoline, wellness, and pet-care services appear to be bouncing back, which could be a positive sign for other countries following a similar trajectory. But while consumers amp up their spending on the things they need, they also anticipate spending less in other categories.
The Industries in the Red
Categories showing an alarming decline include restaurants and out-of-home entertainment.
However, there are two particularly hard-hit industries worth noting that are showing declines across every category and country:
Travel and Transport
The inevitable decline in the travel and transportation industry is a reflection of mass social isolation levels and tightening travel restrictions.
In fact, the U.S. travel industry can expect to see an average decline in revenue of 81% for April and May. Throughout 2020, losses will equate to roughly $519 billion—translating to a broader $1.2 trillion contraction in total economic impact.
According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, a staggering 50 million jobs are at risk in the industry, with 30 million of those jobs belonging to employees in Asia.
Considering the travel and tourism industry accounts for 10.4% of global GDP, a slow recovery could have serious ramifications.
Apparel
Apparel is experiencing a similarly worrying slowdown, with consumption 40-50% lower in China compared to pre-pandemic levels. Both online and offline sales for businesses the world over are also taking a major hit.
As consumers hold back on their spending, clothing brands of all shapes and sizes are forced to scale back production, and reimagine how they position themselves.
“It’s an unprecedented interruption of an industry that has relied on speeding from one season’s sales to the next. And it is bringing with it a new sense of connectedness, responsibility and empathy.”
Clearly the force majeure that is COVID-19 has not impacted every industry equally.
For some, rebuilding their customer experience by appealing to changing values could result in a profitable, and perhaps much-needed revival. For other companies, there is no other choice but to play the waiting game.
Regardless, every industry faces one universal truth: life after the pandemic will look significantly different.
Are we going to allow fear of COVID-19 to fundamentally reshape social behavior for many years to come?
It is hard to imagine a world where we are all afraid to shake hands with one another and where getting close enough to someone to actually have a conversation is deemed a “major risk”.
Yes, this virus spreads incredibly easily, but eventually this pandemic will fade and hopefully a lot of the measures that were instituted to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 will fade away too. For example, I really don’t want Walmart telling me which direction I have to go down the aisle. If I am in serious shopping mode, I want to be able to go up and down a particular aisle as much as I please.
If I get kicked out of a store someday for “going against the arrows” I am going to be really upset.
And I really, really don’t want to have my temperature checked when I go to eat at a restaurant, but that is apparently starting to happen all over the nation…
With staff wearing masks, checking customers’ temperatures and using disposable paper place mats, some of the nation’s restaurants reopened for dine-in service Monday as states loosened more coronavirus restrictions. But many eateries remained closed amid safety concerns and community backlash.
Checking temperatures is not going to stop the spread of this virus, because people can spread it long before they are showing any symptoms at all.
So that needs to stop right now. If you try to check my temperature when I enter your establishment, I will promptly turn around and go get a burger somewhere else.
And it isn’t just businesses that are giving in to the hysteria.
For example, a North Carolina woman named Erin Strine burst into tears when she realized that people would be sitting next to her on a flight that she was taking…
Strine said she was alarmed by how little social distancing was taking place on the packed flight. She expressed concern for her health when she realized she was placed in a middle seat.
‘I really felt like my life and the life of everyone around me was at risk,’ she said. ‘I just sat there silently crying into my mask because I was really overwhelmed by how unsafe I felt.’
I have a really easy solution for her.
If you feel your life is at risk, don’t get on the plane.
This isn’t rocket science.
Her story caused me to recall one particular horrid flight that I once had to endure. Like her, I was in the middle seat, and two extremely overweight individuals were stationed on either side of me. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the person directly in front of me decided to recline their seat all the way.
But instead of whining like a baby, I took my ordeal like a man.
Look, I am not trying to minimize the threat of COVID-19 one bit.
In fact, I was warning about the danger that this virus posed all the way back when the very first reports were coming out of China. Anyone that follows my work on a regular basis can easily verify this.
At this point, there are more than a million confirmed cases in the United States and more than 56,000 people have died.
That is serious.
And things have been particularly nightmarish in New York…
Nearly half of all New Yorkers say they know somebody who has died of coronavirus, a new poll finds, shedding a stunning light on just how deeply the pandemic has hit the Big Apple.
The state-wide survey, carried out by Siena College, discovered that 46 percent of New York City residents personally knew someone killed by COVID-19, as do 36 percent of respondents living in the suburbs, and 13 percent of those living upstate.
Other areas of the country have been hit very hard as well. In fact, the Boston Globe published 21 pages of obituaries on Sunday…
As the total confirmed COVID-19 cases approach one million this week, including over 55,000 deaths — the vast majority of these concentrated in American east coast cities, especially in the tri-state area — newspaper obituaries in the same cities are expanding to unheard of numbers of pages.
As a stunning case in point, The Boston Globe on Sunday included an unprecedented 21 total pages of death notices due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The newspaper said its archives showed on the same day last year, the obit section was at its usual seven pages.
This is the biggest public health crisis that our generation has experienced so far, and anyone that is not taking it seriously is just being stupid.
But it isn’t the end of the world. Much, much worse things are coming, and it is important to understand that.
If we are not able to handle this pandemic, how are we possibly going to deal with all of the stuff that we are going to have to face in the future?
On Monday, I was absolutely horrified to learn that a top emergency room doctor in New York City had committed suicide…
The head of the emergency department at a Manhattan hospital committed suicide after spending days on the front lines of the coronavirus battle, her family said Monday.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,’’ Dr. Philip Breen told the New York Times of his physician daughter, Dr. Lorna Breen, who had been medical director of the NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital amid the pandemic.
I can’t even imagine the horrors that she witnessed on a daily basis, but suicide is never, ever, ever the answer to anything.
And nothing is ever so bad that it should make you want to kill yourself.
In the days leading up to her death, the 48-year-old reportedly recounted to family members a series of traumatic scenes she’d witnessed working in the Manhattan hospital, including an onslaught of patients dying in front of her before they could even be removed from ambulances.
Breen had recently contracted COVID-19 but had returned to work at Allen after a week-and-a-half of rest. After the hospital sent her home, she re-located to Charlottesville to recuperate under the instructions of her father, Dr. Philip C. Breen.
There is always hope. And in her case, she could have certainly walked away from being a doctor and done something else.
Life is such a precious gift, and to see it thrown away so needlessly is absolutely heartbreaking.
Yes, this pandemic is going to be with us for a while.
And yes, a lot more Americans are going to get sick and a lot more Americans are going to die.
Data shows that Americans are suffering from ‘quarantine fatigue’ and are venturing out of the house more often as the coronavirus pandemic continues – as researchers say that 44 states are actually going backwards when it comes to social distancing.
A COVID‑19 mobility trends tool created by Apple shows that an increasing number of people in various major cities are now leaving the house more compared to the beginning of the month.
If you are elderly, have a compromised immune system or are in some other high risk group, you will need to quarantine yourself for the foreseeable future. But the rest of us are going to have to try to start resuming normal activities.
Unfortunately, the “new normal” is likely to look a whole lot different from the “old normal”, and many people are not going to like that at all.
“Corona-Killing” UV Bots Could Be Deployed At Military Bases
Last week President Trump suggested that injecting ultraviolet light into the body could be one method in killing COVID-19. Then, a biotech company, with unproven science, touted it could send a catheter into the throat of a patient, emitting UV rays into the body to defeat the virus.
The push for UV products in today’s public health crisis is expected to increase, thanks to President Trump’s comments. A search trend for “does UV light kill coronavirus” has recently soared:
Now a robotics company is retrofitting war robots with a UV disinfection system to kill the virus in enclosed spaces.
Ralph Petroff, president of the North America branch of Marathon Targets, spoke with Military.com about the four-wheeled autonomous robots that could soon be deployed at military bases for UV disinfecting operations.
“If you need them for target practice, you use them for target practice; if you need them for corona-killing, you use them for corona-killing,” Petroff said.
He said his company has been acquiring UV disinfecting panels. Retrofitting each robot takes a matter of hours, and he said military installations had expressed interest.
Marathon’s specifications of the robot show that it emits 110 watts via a vertical UV mount light fixture. The light takes about one minute to disinfect a surface one foot away and a little over six minutes to sterilize from five feet away.
The science behind UV lights killing COVID-19 is still questionable. Petroff said he has plans to double the wattage of the light fixture to ensure effectiveness.
The market for UV disinfection has been small over the years, but since President Trump touted UVs last week, the market could rapidly grow.
“The UV part is the easy part,” he said. “Trying to get an autonomous robot to walk around without bumping into things and knowing where it is at all times is the hard part. We mastered that a long time ago.”
More than three years after first seriously contemplating it, one year after coming out in favor of impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, nine months after leaving the Republican Party, two months after hitting pause on his congressional re-election campaign, and just 22 days before the Libertarian Party (L.P.) is scheduled to select its own nominee, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, the most libertarian member of Congress, has decided to form an exploratory committee about running for president.
“Americans are ready for practical approaches based in humility and trust of the people,” the congressman tweeted Tuesday night. “We’re ready for a presidency that will restore respect for our Constitution and bring people together.”
The 40-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants (mom is from Syria, dad a Palestinian refugee) now seeks to become the limited-government standard-bearer against septuagenarian big-government competitors Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He would certainly be the most high-profile presidential candidate, and the first to concurrently hold elected office, in the Libertarian Party’s half-century of existence.
Amash, an F.A. Hayek–quoting five-term incumbent from Grand Rapids and former co-founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, became a sustaining member of the L.P. some time over the past two weeks, thus meeting the party’s minimum nominating requirements. He now has three weeks—or perhaps more, should the Libertarian National Committee at its May 2 meeting decide to reschedule a national convention whose physical and legal status is in coronavirus limbo and whose Austin hotel abruptly canceled the event on Sunday—to convince wary delegates for a fourth consecutive election to select a candidate who has won office only as a Republican.
Like former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson in 2012, and former-and-future Texas congressman Ron Paul in 1988, Amash is currently arguably the favorite nationally known politician among both small-l and big-L and libertarians. He has long been touted as the heir successor to Paul on Capitol Hill, has described himself as “the only libertarian member of Congress,” and told Reason back in July 2017 that he prefers the descriptor “libertarian” over “libertarian-leaning Republican.” He has led congressional attempts to deconstruct the surveillance state, restore legislative-branch responsibility, and stand athwart the federal firehose yelling “Stop!“
Yet that does not make him a shoo-in for the nomination.
Future of Freedom Foundation founder Jacob Hornberger, an anti-war/anti-Fed stalwart who has been the dominant candidate thus far in non-binding Libertarian primaries and caucuses, has been withering in his critiques ever since Amash publicized his interest in the party’s potential 50-ballot prize two weeks ago.
“How many LP conventions has Congressman Justin Amash attended in the last year? None,” Hornberger wrote last week, in the fifth installment of a series he titled “Justin Amash, LP Interloper.” “How many LP presidential debates has Amash participated in? None. In fact, the very obvious reason that Amash has not attended LP state conventions and participated in LP presidential debates is that he does not want to subject his conservative positions to scrutiny, examination, and challenge by LP members and the other candidates for the LP presidential nomination.”
Hornberger’s critique reflects his self-interest, but it will nonetheless find resonance among even Amash-enthusiast Libertarians, who have become snippy about the congressman’s long Hamlet act. Anarchist activist Adam Kokesh, for one, has been energetically campaigning for president at least the beginning of 2018.
At the January 2019 LibertyCon conference in Washington, D.C., Amash, with several L.P. officials in attendance, told Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward that the ideal Libertarian candidate “wears Air Jordans” (he was wearing Air Jordans at the time), should not be a “squishy Republican” like controversial 2016 L.P. vice presidential nominee (and later a failed 2020 GOP challenger) Bill Weld, and should be “a person who is persuasive to other people, can bring Republicans and Democrats on board, or bring a large part of the electorate on board, because you can’t just appeal to diehard libertarians and win the election.”
That appearance, as well as several high-profile moments ever since—especially his July 4, 2019, declaration of independence from the Republican Party, which he decorated with such sentiments as that “the two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions”—made L.P. members salivate over the prospect of a long, full-throated presidential campaign by one of the most eloquent and newsworthy members of Congress. Instead, it’s been 15 months of Hornberger, Kokesh, political satirist Vermin Supreme, and more than a dozen other candidates competing to represent the Libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party.
In the only 2020 three-way poll thus far, Morning Consult on April 14–16 found just 1 percent of 1,992 registered voters saying they’d vote for Amash over Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Two national polls in 2019 had Amash averaging 5.5 percent. His potential impact on the presidential swing state of Michigan is something both parties will be looking at with interest, though a highly polarized political climate following a razor-thin presidential election tends to be numerically brutal for minor candidates.
There is no word yet on whether the congressman will officially withdraw from his own re-election campaign, though he cannot seek both offices come November.
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More than three years after first seriously contemplating it, one year after coming out in favor of impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, nine months after leaving the Republican Party, two months after hitting pause on his congressional re-election campaign, and just 22 days before the Libertarian Party (L.P.) is scheduled to select its own nominee, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, the most libertarian member of Congress, has decided to form an exploratory committee about running for president.
“Americans are ready for practical approaches based in humility and trust of the people,” the congressman tweeted Tuesday night. “We’re ready for a presidency that will restore respect for our Constitution and bring people together.”
The 40-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants (mom is from Syria, dad a Palestinian refugee) now seeks to become the limited-government standard-bearer against septuagenarian big-government competitors Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He would certainly be the most high-profile presidential candidate, and the first to concurrently hold elected office, in the Libertarian Party’s half-century of existence.
Amash, an F.A. Hayek–quoting five-term incumbent from Grand Rapids and former co-founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, became a sustaining member of the L.P. some time over the past two weeks, thus meeting the party’s minimum nominating requirements. He now has three weeks—or perhaps more, should the Libertarian National Committee at its May 2 meeting decide to reschedule a national convention whose physical and legal status is in coronavirus limbo and whose Austin hotel abruptly canceled the event on Sunday—to convince wary delegates for a fourth consecutive election to select a candidate who has won office only as a Republican.
Like former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson in 2012, and former-and-future Texas congressman Ron Paul in 1988, Amash is currently arguably the favorite nationally known politician among both small-l and big-L and libertarians. He has long been touted as the heir successor to Paul on Capitol Hill, has described himself as “the only libertarian member of Congress,” and told Reason back in July 2017 that he prefers the descriptor “libertarian” over “libertarian-leaning Republican.” He has led congressional attempts to deconstruct the surveillance state, restore legislative-branch responsibility, and stand athwart the federal firehose yelling “Stop!“
Yet that does not make him a shoo-in for the nomination.
Future of Freedom Foundation founder Jacob Hornberger, an anti-war/anti-Fed stalwart who has been the dominant candidate thus far in non-binding Libertarian primaries and caucuses, has been withering in his critiques ever since Amash publicized his interest in the party’s potential 50-ballot prize two weeks ago.
“How many LP conventions has Congressman Justin Amash attended in the last year? None,” Hornberger wrote last week, in the fifth installment of a series he titled “Justin Amash, LP Interloper.” “How many LP presidential debates has Amash participated in? None. In fact, the very obvious reason that Amash has not attended LP state conventions and participated in LP presidential debates is that he does not want to subject his conservative positions to scrutiny, examination, and challenge by LP members and the other candidates for the LP presidential nomination.”
Hornberger’s critique reflects his self-interest, but it will nonetheless find resonance among even Amash-enthusiast Libertarians, who have become snippy about the congressman’s long Hamlet act. Anarchist activist Adam Kokesh, for one, has been energetically campaigning for president at least the beginning of 2018.
At the January 2019 LibertyCon conference in Washington, D.C., Amash, with several L.P. officials in attendance, told Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward that the ideal Libertarian candidate “wears Air Jordans” (he was wearing Air Jordans at the time), should not be a “squishy Republican” like controversial 2016 L.P. vice presidential nominee (and later a failed 2020 GOP challenger) Bill Weld, and should be “a person who is persuasive to other people, can bring Republicans and Democrats on board, or bring a large part of the electorate on board, because you can’t just appeal to diehard libertarians and win the election.”
That appearance, as well as several high-profile moments ever since—especially his July 4, 2019, declaration of independence from the Republican Party, which he decorated with such sentiments as that “the two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions”—made L.P. members salivate over the prospect of a long, full-throated presidential campaign by one of the most eloquent and newsworthy members of Congress. Instead, it’s been 15 months of Hornberger, Kokesh, political satirist Vermin Supreme, and more than a dozen other candidates competing to represent the Libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party.
In the only 2020 three-way poll thus far, Morning Consult on April 14–16 found just 1 percent of 1,992 registered voters saying they’d vote for Amash over Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Two national polls in 2019 had Amash averaging 5.5 percent. His potential impact on the presidential swing state of Michigan is something both parties will be looking at with interest, though a highly polarized political climate following a razor-thin presidential election tends to be numerically brutal for minor candidates.
There is no word yet on whether the congressman will officially withdraw from his own re-election campaign, though he cannot seek both offices come November.
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Like the rest of the country, although far less than New York, California is suffering through the Covid-19 crisis. But in California, the pandemic seems likely to give the state’s political and corporate elites a new license to increase their dominion while continuing to keep the middle and working classes down.
Perhaps nothing spells the triumph of California’s progressive oligarchy more than Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to off-load the state’s recovery strategy to a task force co-chaired by hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer. A recently failed presidential candidate, Steyer stands as a progressive funder. He is as zealous as he is rich. Steyer sometimes even found the policies adopted by climate-obsessed former governor Jerry Brown not extreme enough for his tastes.
Some conservatives wistfully hope that the pandemic will push the climate crusaders to the side. In California, at least, the corporate aristocrats, the governmental apparat, and the progressive nonprofits have the momentum to impose their ultra-green vision on the state’s residents. Steyer may have made much of his fortune on fossil fuels, including coal, but now, approvingly described as “a reverent Christian,” the Bay Area mogul seems to be eager to repent, both through his political largesse and as operator of a fulsomely organic ranch down the coast from his San Francisco manse.
What Kind of Recovery Will the Oligarchy Allow?
Steyer’s failed, self-funded presidential run was full of extreme notions, such as imposing a “state of emergency” to address climate issues, essentially shutting down fossil fuels; and, as a kind of bonus for those who still can find work, promoting a $22 an hour minimum wage while offering alms for the soon-to-be-eliminated legions of miners and energy workers.
If this is what he wants for the recovery, Steyer will simply accelerate the state’s already poor performance in creating higher-wage middle- and working-class jobs outside those created or subsidized by government. Over the past decade, according to Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the vast majority of jobs being produced in California pay under the median wage, and 40% pay under $40,000 a year. Since 2008, the state has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs.
California’s climate regulatory regime, notes relocation expert Joe Vranich, has been particularly hard on manufacturing. Over the past decade, according to BLS data, California has fallen into the bottom half of states in manufacturing-sector employment growth, ranking 44th last year; its industrial new job creation has been negative, compared with gains from competitors such as Nevada, Kentucky, Michigan, and Florida. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro ranks in the US top ten in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs; but four metro areas—Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego—sit among the bottom ten.
Perhaps nowhere will the pain be worse than in Bakersfield, capital of California’s once-vibrant oil industry. That industry is now slated for extinction by policymakers, even as the state has emerged as the largest US importer of energy and oil, much of it from Saudi Arabia. This ultimate effort at “virtue signaling” will cost California as many as 300,000 generally high-paying jobs, roughly half held by minorities, and will particularly devastate the San Joaquin Valley, where 40,000 jobs depend on the industry.
“Imagine that the state dictated that the entertainment industry be eliminated from Los Angeles, or the tech industry be eliminated from Silicon Valley. That is what removing the oil and agriculture industries from Bakersfield is like. It is an existential threat to the entire area,” says Rob Ball of the Kern County Council of Governments.
Poverty and Denial
In California today, anyone who dissents—even a scientist or respected economist—with the green party line is dismissed as a heretic who is not worth listening to. This treatment is facilitated by a media that tends to embrace the most apocalyptic projections of, for example, coastal erosion, with little attempt to ascertain the facts or look at alternative analyses.
The predictably pious Steyer and his fellow commissioners will no doubt claim devotion to the interests of average citizen. But, as a new lawsuit filed by some 300 civil rights leaders asserts, the policies being backed by Steyer and his fellow commissioners have already had produced disastrous results for millions of Californians. The real collective badge of shame is not California’s GHG emissions but the prevalence of poverty amid enormous affluence.
Critically, economic growth, at least outside asset- and iPhone-price inflation, is itself considered a threat to the planet within the environmental community, which largely hails the Covid lockdowns as a “fire drill” for future actions to promote “de-growth.” The open hope, as a Psychology Today writer puts it, would be to tame “the human beast” by imposing low-consumption lifestyles on hoi polloi, including in developing countries. Such policies might not affect the prospects for social media, search, or import-dependent firms like Apple, but they have already been beastly for millions of Californians.
Even before the lockdowns, which could last until summer, California’s cost-adjusted poverty level was among the highest of any state and remained higher in 2019 than in 2007. Nearly one in five Californians—many who are working—lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate), the highest rate of any state; the Public Policy Institute of California estimates that another 20% live in near-poverty—roughly 15 million people in total.
The lack of upwardly mobile jobs has created poverty rates for California’s Latinos and African Americans, most of them working, and has made them poorer than their counterparts elsewhere, including in Texas, California’s primary competitor for talent, jobs and company locations and a state with a similarly diverse population. More than half of all California Latino households, now a plurality in the state, can barely pay their bills, according to a United Way study. “For Latinos,” notes longtime political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
The loss of jobs, particularly in hospitality and retail, from the coronavirus crisis could further exacerbate this situation further. The most extreme and, most obvious expression of pervasive inequality and economic dysfunction lies is evident on our streets. Indeed, even as homelessness has been reduced in much of the country, it has continued to swell in California. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in either its largest urban region, greater Los Angeles, (its largest urban region) or in iconic San Francisco.
And for Our Next Act: Making the State More Vulnerable to the Next Pandemic
When Steyer and other members of the task force—one can’t help but compare them to the crime commission run in New York City by Charles “Lucky” Luciano—decide to open the economy, they will no doubt claim, as with their climate pieties, that they are acting purely on the basis of “science”—as long as it agrees with their conclusions.
Logic is not a strong point here, since the green lobbies and their developer allies keep pushing density and getting people out of the relative safety of their cars and into mass transit, which, along with entrenched poverty, has done much to deepen the crisis in New York, as the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock observes.
As of April 26, Los Angeles County, with almost 2 million more residents than New York’s five boroughs, had suffered 913 Covid deaths, compared to 12,067 in New York City. The Big Apple accounts for over two-fifths of all US transit ridership, and its subways have repeatedly been singled out, including in a recent MIT report, as incubators of the pandemic.
The key here may be what demographer Wendell Cox has described as “exposure density.” Compared with Angelenos, Cox suggests, New Yorkers tend to work in large, crowded workplaces and are far more mass-transit-dependent. On an average workday, more than 5 million people jostle onto the city’s subway trains – nearly 40 times as many as ride LA’s subway lines and 15 times as many when the lower-capacity light rail lines are added in. The rates of infection and death are far lower in the surrounding areas – even in more dispersed, car-dependent Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties.
Even San Francisco, the nation’s second-densest municipality, with more than 500,000 residents, has been far more successful in controlling the virus’s spread. The city is somewhat less car-centric than greater Los Angeles; and the Bay Area transit commuting rate is about 60 percent lower than that of New York (combined statistical areas, or CSA). San Francisco has a vehicle ownership rate at least 85% higher than in the four most dense New York boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens) and is a much smaller city; San Franciscans are far more able to cab, Uber, or drive their own vehicles, avoiding crowded public transit.
Clearly, some ways to reduce exposure, as well as GHG emissions, would embrace telecommuting, which had been expanding and seems certain to grow in the future. But California, unlike other states, has no interest in adopting telecommuting as a key strategy; instead, it seems eager to embrace the viral formula of New York, which is driving a new exodus from the country’s premier urban center.
They continue to push their transit and density strategy despite concerns about social distancing and a profound resistance from hoi polloi. As in many areas, the greens have no real interest in actual data: despite state climate policies designed to push people onto buses and trains, transit ridership has lagged—in Los Angeles, it is lower than in 1985—and virtually all population growth has taken place on the periphery of large metropolitan agglomerations.
California’s problems won’t end with this pandemic.
Under the leadership of politicians like Newsom and Steyer, however promising the future is for the tech oligarchs and green energy speculators, the Golden State seems determined to offer ever less opportunity for the state’s already struggling middle- and working-class families—except, perhaps, to get sicker when the next pandemic comes along.
Study Finds ‘Historic’ Drop In Math, Reading Scores Since Adoption Of Common Core
Reading and math scores in the US have suffered ‘historic’ declines since most states implemented the Common Core curriculum standard six years ago,according to a new study from the Pioneer Institute.
While Common Core was promoted as improving the international competitiveness of U.S. students in math, our international standing has remained low while the skills of average and lower performing American students have dropped in both math and reading. –Pioneer Institute
The study notes that in the years leading up to common core, fourth and eight-grade reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were rising gradually (2003-2013). After Common Core was implemented, scores for both grades have fallen – with eighth grade falling nearly as fast as it had been rising.
The declines were most severe among the lowest-achieving students, which the Pioneer Institute suggests increases inequality.
Scores for students at the 90th percentile have mostly continued their pre-Common Core trend of gradual improvement. But the farther behind students were, the more substantial the declines, with the biggest drops occurring for those at the 25th and 10th percentiles. –Pioneer Institute
So, Common Core requires more diligence and effort?
“The sustained decline we’re now seeing, especially among our most vulnerable students, simply cannot be allowed to continue,” said Theodor Rebarber, author of “The Common Core Debacle.”
According to the Pioneer Institute, Common Core is the product of ‘misguided progressive pedagogies and biases of the education establishment that developed it.’
“Several of us allied with Pioneer Institute have been pointing out, ever since it was introduced, the deeply flawed educational assumptions that permeate the Common Core and the many ways in which it is at odds with curriculum standards in top-achieving countries,” said the institute in a statement.
According to the report lower scores as a result of Common Core were predicted a decade ago.
“Nearly a decade after states adopted Common Core, the empirical evidence makes it clear that these national standards have yielded underwhelming results for students,” said Pioneer Executive Director Jim Stergios. “The proponents of this expensive, legally questionable policy initiative have much to answer for”
“It’s time for federal law to change to allow states as well as local school districts to try a broader range of approaches to reform,” Rebarber added. “With a more bottom-up approach, more school systems will have the opportunity to choose curricula consistent with our international competitors and many decades of research on effective classroom teaching”
“Everything’s going to be different” is a pretty popular phrase these days. Implicit in that idea, at least in part, is the notion that our day-to-day habits are changing as we work from home, shop more online, Zoom call with colleagues and friends, and order delivery rather than going to restaurants. New normals with new habits have replaced our old routines.
But exactly how long does it actually take for freshly acquired behaviors to really settle in? With capital markets volatility on the wane and a healthy rally today we will spare a few moments to consider the science behind habitualization.
Our starting point: a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz who trained in post-World War I Europe and had a successful practice in 1950s New York. In 1960 he published a book called “Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way of Getting More Out of Life”. In that work he stated that, by his reckoning, it took about 21 days for most patients to get used to their new faces after surgery. And because the book was a best seller and inspired the likes of Tony Robbins and others, the idea that “21 days makes a new habit” is a popular one to this day.
Since most Americans/Europeans have been in some form of lockdown for 3-5 weeks (we’re on Week 6 here in NYC), the 21-day rule says we should be at least somewhat habitualized to a whole range of new behaviors. Yes, once things loosen up we’ll reassemble whatever parts of our old life that can be safely recovered. But we’ll have gotten used to many new activities as well.
Now, if you’re skeptical of the “21 days to a better life” rule, you actually have some good science on your side. The most widely cited academic paper on the topic (+1,200 citations) is titled “How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world” (Lally, Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle, 2009). Here’s the structure of the research and what it found:
96 students at University College London agreed to take part in a study which asked them to pick a new healthy habit to incorporate into their daily lives. Examples: eating a piece of fruit with lunch or exercising daily.
Subjects kept a log for 84 days, measuring whether they had performed the new habit the prior day and how automatic it was to do so.
Finding #1: progress towards making a new behavior a habit is not linear. At first, you really have to force yourself to do it. It is far from natural and requires real discipline to get past the initial inertia.
Finding #2: it takes and average of 66 days to make a new habit essentially “automatic” and among the subjects of the study the range was anywhere from 18 to +84 days.
The bottom line is that new habits take more like 66 days rather than 21, which is basically the difference between consumer behaviors changing dramatically and durably post-COVID versus only when required for safety reasons. Expanding on this point:
Emotion and fear can certainly alter behavior faster and more permanently. In New York City, I have personally witnessed loud arguments among my neighbors over mask wearing and social distancing. That’s because people have a wide array of risk tolerances and those dictate the speed/depth of new habit acquisition.
As US states and countries around the world reopen, we may not see dramatically new consumer behaviors versus pre-COVID life. The study we cited above showed how long it takes to develop just ONE new habit; not a whole slew of them.
The intersection of these 2 ideas: as long as businesses can assuage consumer fear with sensible precautions, they should be able to rely on the fact that consumers have not actually formed many new habits.
Final thought: all this is comforting but we’d be remiss if we did not consider the current economic reality of 15-20% unemployment. There will be many people who want to return to their January 2020 habits but are unable to do so. The good news is that consumers with discretionary spending power should return to their old habits as much as they can. As they do, the US economy should be able to find its footing and rehire many of those recently furloughed, laid off or separated.
In short, it is a very good thing indeed that old habits die hard and new ones are so difficult to develop.
