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As the Senate majority prepared to abolish the filibuster in order to advance its political agenda, a long-tenured member of the chamber issued a stern warning.

“We should make no mistake. This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power. It is a fundamental power-grab by the majority party,” then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.) said during a speech delivered on May 23, 2005, from the Senate floor.

Calling it “the single most significant” vote he would cast in more than three decades as a member of the Senate, Biden admonished Republicans for trying to blow up the filibuster to get judicial nominees confirmed with a simple majority. “Folks who want to see this change want to eliminate one of the procedural mechanisms designed for the express purpose of guaranteeing individual rights and they also, as a consequence, would undermine the protections of the minority point of view in the heat of majority excess,” he said.

The times, they sure have changed.

During a Thursday press conference, now-President Joe Biden indicated publicly what he has reportedly been saying behind closed doors for a while: that the Senate’s filibuster rules should be changed—perhaps even abolished, allowing legislation to pass with a simple majority, though he continues to hedge on that point.

“It’s being abused in a gigantic way,” Biden said of the filibuster, before suggesting that the Senate ought to return to the pre-1971 rules that required senators to actually stand on the floor and speak if they wanted to prevent a vote on a bill.

But, moments later, Biden suggested that he’d be willing to go further if the Senate’s Republican minority blocks the passage of legislation—including a possible $3 trillion infrastructure bill, a gun control bill, and other progressive agenda items. “If there’s complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about,” he said.

Far from being a procedural mechanism meant to protect individual rights and guard against the tyranny of the majority, Biden says he now agrees with former President Barack Obama that the Senate’s filibuster rules are “a relic of the Jim Crow era”—a line that has become the go-to explanation for progressives who would like to see the 60-vote requirement swept aside. (Obama, by the way, also defended the filibuster during the 2005 debate over the so-called nuclear option.)

But the history of the filibuster predates the Jim Crow era by several decades. In fact, the filibuster was accidentally invented by none other than America’s first political villain: Aaron Burr. As vice president in 1805, Burr suggested that the Senate abolish a rule that allowed a simple majority to cut off debate on a bill. That same rule—technically a “motion to previous question”—still exists in the House today. Without that rule, however, the Senate could not pass any bill until every senator agreed to move forward.

That’s an untenable arrangement for obvious reasons. The Senate used a variety of different mechanisms to stop debate and allow a vote over the years, but the current system of invoking “cloture”—the thing that requires 60 votes today, even though the number was originally higher—dates back to 1917.

The idea that the filibuster is a holdover from the Jim Crow era—an idea that is suddenly popping up all over left-wing politics and media—stems from the fact that filibusters were relatively rare until the past few decades. “It was used rarely and almost always for the purpose of blocking civil-rights bills,” explains New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “The filibuster exception to the general practice of majority rule was a product of an implicit understanding that the white North would grant the white South a veto on matters of white supremacy.”

There is no question that the filibuster has been wielded for racist purposes. Sen. Strom Thurmond (D–S.C.) spoke on the Senate floor for more than 24 hours—still the longest filibuster on record—in a failed attempt to block a final vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for example. The bill passed anyway.

But the filibuster is better understood as the product of the Senate’s arcane procedural rules. As such, it is not inherently racist (and, by extension, abolishing it won’t make the Senate as an institution anti-racist). If it was used by racists to advance racist goals, the racists are to blame. Presidents have used the annual State of the Union address to advance all manner of terrible policy, but we rightfully blame them (and the Congress that eventually votes to enact such policies) and not the speech itself.

The debate over the filibuster, like all of the tedious debates over procedural mechanisms in legislative chambers, is really about power. That power can manifest itself in the perpetuation of racist and discriminatory systems, of course, but not exclusively.

“Short-term, pragmatic considerations almost always shape contests over reform of Senate rules,” Sarah Binder, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration last year. She was referring to the history of the filibuster and its evolution over the decades, but the same lesson applies to what’s happening right now.

Today, the filibuster is also something of a scapegoat. As James Wallner, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, wrote for Reason in January, there are plenty of other ways for the minority to use the Senate’s rules to hold up legislation. Abolishing the filibuster will merely change the dynamics of this debate, but it won’t end it.

The better question to be asked is whether allowing the Senate to pass bills with a simple majority would improve government. Considering that Democrats are trying to shove it out of the way to speed through questionably constitutional gun control bills and even more spending, it’s difficult for anyone who believes in limited government to cheer the filibuster’s potential demise. But this is a debate that requires clarity, not misplaced accusations of racism.

For what it’s worth, Biden and the Democratic minority won the debate over the filibuster in 2005. A bipartisan group of senators—the Gang of 14 led by then-Sens. John McCain (R–Ariz.) and Ben Nelson (D–Neb.)—reached a deal in which the Republican members agreed not to deploy the nuclear option while Democratic members agreed not to block confirmation votes for future judicial nominees.

It was an agreement that held up until 2013, when Democrats nuked the judicial filibuster to push through some of Obama’s picks. When Republicans retook control of the Senate in 2014, they happily used the new rules to push through dozens of conservative appointees to the federal bench—something that Democrats and progressives now routinely complain about.

There’s a lesson here for Democrats in 2021. Nuking the legislative filibuster—especially when you have a majority so slim that a single election could flip control of the Senate back to the GOP—seems like a decision Democrats will regret sooner rather than later.

It’s a lesson Biden should know well.

“Whenever you’re in the majority, it’s frustrating to see the other side block a bill or a nominee you support. I’ve walked in your shoes. And I get it,” Biden said in that same 2005 speech. “There’s one thing I’ve learned in my years here. Once you change the rules and surrender the Senate’s institutional power, you never get it back.”

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In January 2016, the University of Farmington was born. By 2018, more than 600 students had enrolled, paid tuition, and matriculated. Come January 2019, the entire student body received formal correspondence from the college: The school was not actually a school at all.

It was a ruse, conceived by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), allegedly to crack down on “visa fraud.” Richly ironic is that the fraudulent operations were set up and maintained by the government itself, which duped immigrants into applying for student visas that would then be revoked when the curtain came up on the scheme. In the same letter, the students—who had just found out they were not, in fact, real students—were given one last instruction. They would need to leave the country immediately, or face arrest and deportation.

“I was in complete shock. I didn’t understand what to do,” says Suraj, whose name has been changed to protect his anonymity. He moved to the U.S. in 2015 to attend Northwestern Polytechnic University, where he earned a degree and nabbed a job as an IT business consultant. With his student visa set to expire, he decided to apply for a master’s program, which is when he found Farmington, located in southeast Michigan near where he lived at the time.

He applied and was accepted, shelling out $15,000 in tuition and fees—money that was pocketed by the government. He has not recouped any of those funds.

In September 2020, many such victims filed a lawsuit in federal claims court. The Trump administration sought to dismiss it. In February, the Biden administration took the same position.

Yet President Joe Biden campaigned on making the U.S. immigration system “humane” again. Perhaps the deepest schism on the 2020 campaign trail between then-candidate Biden and former President Donald Trump was on immigration policy—a division the former repeatedly furnished as proof of his upstanding values. Vice President Kamala Harris was very much in agreement. As a presidential candidate herself, she specifically turned her attention to the Farmington debacle:

DHS created a fake university & accepted immigrants on student visas. When it was shut down, DHS tried deporting some of these students because they weren’t enrolled in school.

This isn’t just cruel, it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars. Officials must be held accountable for this. https://t.co/7A5m3L7LV7

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) November 30, 2019

How things change. In a motion to dismiss filed February 24, the Biden administration claimed sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine that protects the federal government from certain sorts of lawsuits unless they consent to being sued. 

“It might be business as usual to just defend the government, even when the government has done horrible things,” says Anna Nathanson, an attorney with the Norris Law Group, who is representing Farmington victims in their class-action suit. “But that’s not what’s right. That’s not what is just. Is that what we can expect from the Biden-Harris administration, this type of abuse of people and the lack of willingness to correct the government’s mistakes when the government causes grave harm to people?”

As Shikha Dalmia reported in Reason in 2019, Farmington’s operation pulled out all the stops. Its now-defunct website boasted various bachelor’s and master’s programs, a 10:1 student-faculty ratio, and accreditation by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges. Most importantly, it claimed the university was officially approved by DHS’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP)—the stamp of approval that a school is recognized by ICE—leaving people like Suraj little reason to believe that they had applied to a fake college.

“Located in the heart of the automotive and advanced manufacturing center of Southeast Michigan, the University of Farmington provides students from throughout the world a unique educational experience,” reads the site. “Our dynamic business administration and STEM curriculum allows students to rapidly apply their knowledge; preparing them to succeed in an ever-globalizing economy. Our education model combines traditional classroom instruction and distributed learning with a cooperative educational experience, including externships, professionally based research, and practical training.”

Though the students came to the U.S. on legal student visas—with some even transferring into Farmington from actual universities—about 250 of them have been arrested in connection with the fake school since January 2019. Many have been deported and will face an extreme uphill battle if they ever want to enter the U.S. again. A handful attempted to fight their removals, while others voluntarily left the country in hopes of maximizing a chance of return.

Suraj was one of the latter. “I had so many investments going on,” he tells Reason, including a job and a home, which he upped and left the very next day. “Everything came crashing down. I had to start everything from scratch.”

Within 24 hours, he had returned to India. Curiously, with the exception of one Palestinian individual, every student caught up in the ordeal also came from India. Perhaps there’s a reason for that: “The sense I got was that there’s some anti-Indian bias at ICE, where they felt that Indian people in general were taking advantage of the student visa program,” notes Nathanson. “I think the ICE definition of ‘taking advantage of the program’ is using the program…I don’t know why the response to that is to make a university which looks totally legitimate, and have people pretextually violate the visa program.”

Suraj says that he’d like to come back to the U.S. At the very least, however, he’d like his $15,000 back, a financial burden he is still struggling with, notwithstanding the fact that he never received any actual education from the University of Farmington.

Should the victims lose, Nathanson forecasts some dire implications. “They’re being crushed by that student debt. A lot of them used their families’ savings to pay the Farmington tuition, and that’s causing a financial burden on their families,” she says. “It’s also pretty devastating emotionally and mentally to be tricked like this. And for some people, they were also physically deported, put through jail, put through detention. Everyone I’ve spoken to is unfortunately having really severe mental health consequences still. People are really depressed. People tell me this made them suicidal. It’s really, really bad.”

But the effects of a decision deferential to the government would likely have an impact on far more people than the Farmington students: “It would mean that law enforcement agencies could make any contracts they want and then violate them,” adds Nathanson, making it even harder to sue the government and government agents than it already is.

I ask Suraj how this has affected his mental health. Is he one of the students Nathanson alludes to? “Emotionally, I don’t know how I can describe it,” he answers. “I had planned a future in the U.S.” In 2019, he had also planned his present: the job, apartment, and community he was forced to abandon overnight. Suraj won’t get that back. But he can still have that future—should the Biden administration choose to live up to its most basic promises.

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There are reasonable arguments to be had over whether Amazon or other internet companies are too big, have too much power, are insufficiently responsive to consumers, or engage in anti-competitive behavior. Such concerns may justify governmental action.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, sees other reasons why the federal government should cut Amazon down to size: So they don’t “heckle Senators with snotty tweets.”

I didn’t write the loopholes you exploit, @amazon – your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did. But you bet I’ll fight to make you pay your fair share. And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets. https://t.co/3vCAI93MST

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 26, 2021

The attitude this tweet displays is quite disconcerting. Indeed, it’s positively Trumpian. Thank you, but we’ve had more than enough of that already. If you’re capable of being a Senator, you’re more than capable of handling some mean tweets, even from Amazon.

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• Tina. HBO. Saturday, March 27, 8 p.m.
• The United States of Al. CBS. Thursday, April 1, 9:30 p.m.

Tina Turner has spent the last 40 years of her life trying to be done with the behind-the-music fable of the nearly two decades she spent as her husband Ike’s punching bag. With HBO’s authorized documentary Tina, she’s failed again. Ike is still there, blackening her eyes, whipping her with clothes hangers, hammering her with his fists as a prelude to sex.

But Tina offers much more than a retread. No TV show or movie has ever put together a more torrid collection of clips of Tina on stage: whirling, spinning, leaping, frantically cavorting like Mick Jagger before Mick Jagger existed, glistening with sweat and sexuality, while crying out in a banshee voice that seems equally capable of calling God or Satan. A montage of TV appearances in which Tina performs Phil Spector’s stirring masterpiece “River Deep – Mountain High” is probably the most insanely thrilling bit of rock and roll ever committed to film, the very definition of the phrase “You rock!”

Tina‘s tale is by now a familiar one, related in epic detail in the book I, Tina (co-authored by Reason film critic Kurt Loder in a previous existence) and the film it spawned, What’s Love Got to Do with It: her lonely childhood in a home headed by ferociously violent parents who deserted her at a young age; her professional break when the scuffling R&B maestro Ike Turner (who arguably invented rock’n’roll) wearily gave in to her pleas and let her sing one from the audience; her years in the electrifying but little-known Ike & Tina Turner Revue, doing four shows a night, eight months a year, on the chitlin’ circuit under the direction of the increasingly brutal Ike.

The breakout moment for the band came in 1966 when Spector signed Tina and (a mostly absentee) Ike to cut “River Deep — Mountain High” in front of the famed Los Angeles session players known as the Wrecking Crew. The record unaccountably flopped (and sent Spector into a deep psychological spiral from which he never really recovered). But to hear Turner’s voice soaring over Spector’s monstrous Wall of Sound production was a revelation. “That was so big,” she muses in an interview for Tina, “and I sounded so different.”

It took five years, but Ike and Turner finally scored a bonafide hit with a zapped-up cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” That proved disastrous for Tina. Ike used the royalties to open his own studio along with bankrolling a prodigious drug habit, running up bills that could only be paid with an even more intense touring schedule and even more savage pummeling of Tina. After a final beatdown during a Dallas cab ride, she disappeared into the night on foot with a gasoline credit card and 36 cents.

The first half of Tina is devoted to the Ike and Tina years, a story she says she never wanted to tell and would love never to repeat again. Her two big reveals—a confessional 1981 interview with People magazine, and her book deal with Loder—were both intended to put the Ike years behind her: the People interview to assure record companies that she was on her own, the book in hopes that journalists would finally let the story go.

The latter was spectacularly unsuccessful; nothing written or produced about her—certainly including Tina—has ever failed to dwell her hellish years with Ike. Now, as her story nears its end—the 81-year-old Tina hasn’t toured in a decade or recorded in two—she concedes it couldn’t have been done any other way. “It wasn’t a good life,” she says of the years before she escaped. “I was living a life of death. I didn’t exist.”

Veteran documentary directors T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay did their own interviews with Tina but also got access to a number from the archives, including tapes from both the People magazine and Loder interviews. There’s a vivid contrast in her tone over the years. In the People interview, before her story was well known, she’s almost combative in her insistence that she was married to a vicious son of a bitch. As the years go by, her words mellow, though the details of what happened to her never do.

Nor does her explanation of why she stayed 18 years with a man who savagely abused her. Ike, scarred by years of ripoffs and betrayals on the chitlin’ circuit (including, most notably, being robbed of the credit for his seminal rock’n’roll record Rocket 88), was in the early days obsessed with the idea that she would make a reputation with his band and then leave him. “I promised that I wouldn’t leave him,” she says. “And in those days, a promise was a promise.”

PS: I’ve implied that, however spectacular its archival footage, there’s not much new in the details of Tina. There’s one notable exception. It turns out that Tina’s ironic comeback hit “What’s Love Got to Do with It” was actually recorded first by a British group called Bucks Fizz, a sort of blandified version of ABBA. Life spoiler alert: If you click on this link, you’ll never be able to unhear it.

Meanwhile, in a dispatch from the frontlines of cancel culture, social justice warriors are campaigning for the summary execution of the new CBS sitcom The United States of Al. Created and written by David Goetsch and Maria Ferrari and executive-produced by Chuck Lorre, their boss for many years on The Big Bang Theory, Al is about a Marine back from Afghanistan who browbeats the State Department into giving a visa to the Afghan who served as his unit’s Pashto translator.

Hardly any members of the of the lynch mob that’s chasing Al has actually seen the show. Their open-and-shut case against it is that the translator is played by Adhir Kalyan, an ethnic Indian from South Africa. To put it more succinctly, Kalyan is not an Afghan. No matter that this didn’t seem to matter to anybody when he played a Pakistani teenager in The CW’s charming immigration comedy Aliens in America. No matter that there are four other certified grade-A Afghans in the cast. And especially no matter that no one ever complained that HBO didn’t hire an actual Baltimore ghetto narcotrafficker to play the murderous heroin merchant in The Wire, but instead not only employed a Brit, Idris Elba, one of dozens of racist British carpetbaggers to take roles in which they inauthentically portray Americans.

I, however, have actually watched Al and can tell you it’s a sharply written comedy of the culture clash that results from an Afghan tribesman who finds himself suddenly plunked down in suburban Ohio. “Why do you people invade other countries when you can just stay here and eat?” he wonders after his first bedazzled visit to an American supermarket where he tries to haggle with the checkout clerk.

While the first couple of episodes of Al are mostly purely comical, there are hints of darker moments to come. Al’s ex-Marine host Riley (Parker Young, Suburgatory) shows troubling signs of PTSD. And Riley’s sister Lizzie (Elizabeth Alderfer,  A.P. Bio) seems anything but recovered from the combat death of her boyfriend in Afghanistan. Al is not exactly Friends—in particular, it sometimes worries a joke to death—but that’s not unusual for a new series. With a talented cast and writing staff and a truly original premise, it might really turn into something exceptional—if the American Taliban doesn’t put it to death first.

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In a unanimous California Supreme Court decision, the state’s top justices ruled Thursday that courts must consider a defendant’s ability to pay bail before setting exorbitant demands that keep many people locked up in pretrial detention.

Cash bail is intended to be a mechanism of making sure that people who have been charged with crimes eventually return to court and keep their noses clean while they’re free. In reality, the practice has become a system where many people, particularly poor people, are stuck in jail not because they’re flight risks or deemed dangerous, but simply because they cannot pay what’s asked of them. These people essentially end up serving the equivalent of jail sentences before ever being convicted.

“The common practice of conditioning freedom solely on whether an arrestee can afford bail is unconstitutional,” Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar wrote early in the 29-page ruling for the court. “Other conditions of release—such as electronic monitoring, regular check-ins with a pretrial case manager, community housing or shelter, and drug and alcohol treatment—can in many cases protect public and victim safety as well as assure the arrestee’s appearance at trial. What we hold is that where a financial condition is nonetheless necessary, the court must consider the arrestee’s ability to pay the stated amount of bail—and may not effectively detain the arrestee ‘solely because’ the arrestee ‘lacked the resources’ to post bail.”

California has been trying to negotiate bail reforms since 2018, in part due to the case behind this ruing. Kenneth Humphrey, 66, was arrested in 2017 for attempting to rob a 79-year-old man in the victim’s San Francisco apartment. The victim had little money. Humphrey left with $7 and a bottle of cologne. He also had some prior strikes dating back to the 1990s but had no arrests for the past 14 years.

Nevertheless, the prosecutor requested, and the court agreed, to set bail for Humphrey at $600,000, later reducing it to $350,000. Humphrey filed a writ of habeas corpus in the state’s Court of Appeal, arguing that demanding bail from a defendant knowing that he cannot afford the amount is the equivalent of a pretrial detention order. And if the state is going to demand that a defendant be detained prior to trial, the courts need to establish that the detention is necessary to protect public safety.

Eventually, the court did order Humphrey’s release with a bunch of nonfinancial conditions, which included electronic monitoring, orders to stay away from the victim, and participation in a substance abuse program for seniors. San Francisco’s then-District Attorney George Gascon supported bail reform (as does current D.A. Chesa Boudin) and asked the Supreme Court to review the state’s bail conditions. The justices agreed.

While all that was winding through the courts, lawmakers passed a bill in 2018, S.B. 10, that eliminated cash bail entirely. Representatives from the bail bond industry objected and collected signatures and forced the reforms to a referendum in November 2020.

While bail reform is a big criminal justice concern for many civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, these groups saw big flaws in the changes the lawmakers passed. It did eliminate bail, but it also gave judges wide authority to order pretrial detention. Many criminal justice reformers feared that the way California eliminated cash bail could result in more people being stuck in pretrial detention rather than fewer. They refused to support the bill and voters tossed it out in November’s referendum.

But even though voters rejected S.B. 10, that doesn’t mean all prospects of bail reform are dead. The state’s Supreme Court decision here is essentially reiterating a constitutional principle about due process and presumed innocence and is telling the state’s courts to fix their systems. The court’s order will not eliminate cash bail, so it’s not actually attempting to force S.B. 10 back into action. The justices are, however, ordering that courts must consider a defendant’s ability to pay when establishing bail amounts, and that’s at least a pragmatic shift that will hopefully reduce unnecessary pretrial detentions.

Bail is supposed to serve as a financial backstop to make sure defendants behave and return to court. It’s not supposed to decide who gets to walk free and who gets stuck behind bars while waiting for the exceedingly slow gears of justice to turn.

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