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Georgia Bans Handing Out Water to Voters Waiting in Line, Because ‘Election Integrity’


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Republicans rush through a ream of voting restrictions in Georgia. A new law that Georgia’s GOP is peddling as an “election integrity” measure contains a host of problematic provisions, including a ban on handing out water or food to people waiting in line to vote and a ban on taking pictures of completed ballots (even your own).

Under the new law, “it shall be illegal for any person to…photograph or record a voted ballot.” Anyone who does so will be guilty of a misdemeanor crime.

An exception is made for the Georgia secretary of state, who will actually be required to digitize and publicize images of paper ballots. The new law creates “a pilot program for the posting of digital images of the scanned paper ballots created by the voting system.” These scanned images “shall be public records subject to disclosure.”

Those are just two of many questionable new rules for Georgia contained in the bill’s 96 pages. Another provision stipulates that no person shall “give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” to anyone within a polling place, within 150 feet of a building where voting takes place, or “within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.” (Self-service water stations are OK.)

Republicans are calling it the Election Integrity Act of 2021.

Opponents, meanwhile, have dubbed it the Voter Suppression Bill, owing to the range of new restrictions on voting that it lays out. The New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund, and Rise Inc. have already filed a lawsuit against it.

Gov. Brian Kemp and other state Republicans say the new law is necessary to stop voter fraud. But to anyone whose brain hasn’t been melted by partisan politics, it’s a pretty transparent attempt to sway election results, or at least to play to voter fraud fears. Georgia—which President Joe Biden won in 2020—was the site of extensive Trump team bellyaching, investigation, and legal maneuvering, and yet attempts to uncover the fabled widespread voter fraud never panned out.

“The bill passed both chambers of the legislature in the span of a few hours before Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed it Thursday evening,” notes CNN.

State Rep. Park Cannon (D–Atlanta), a lawmaker who knocked on Kemp’s door during the signing of the bill, was arrested and escorted out of the building by state police.

“Cannon was charged with willful obstruction of law enforcement officers by use of threats or violence and preventing or disrupting general assembly sessions,” reports NPR. “The Georgia State Constitution states that lawmakers ‘shall be free from arrest during sessions of the General Assembly’ except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.”

Some of the most controversial earlier elements of the bill—restricting weekend voting hours, requiring an excuse to vote absentee—were nixed before passage. And not all of the measures contained in the massive new bill are controversial.

“Many of the measures in SB 202 will streamline the election administration process at the local level, such as allowing officials to process absentee ballots sooner, require them to count ballots nonstop once the polls close and allow flexibility with voting equipment for smaller, lower-turnout races,” NPR points out. “Poll workers could serve in neighboring counties, after the pandemic saw a shortage of trained workers.” And “precincts with more than 2,000 voters that have lines longer than an hour at three different points throughout the day have to add more machines, add more staff or split up the poll”

But mixed in with these are provisions that seem designed to restrict voting access, complicate the process, or make it easier for state officials to intervene. Some of these include:

  • Increasing voter ID requirements for people mailing in absentee ballots, who now have to submit identification details and a driver’s license number or other forms of government-issued ID when requesting an absentee ballot as well as when submitting it. A vote may be rejected if any ID details don’t match up between the request and the submission.
  • Cutting down on the number of absentee ballot boxes that can be used.
  • Limiting mobile voting stations to emergency use.
  • Requiring that absentee ballots be requested at least 11 days before the election (previously, they could be requested through the Friday before Election Day).
  • Requiring counties to publish the total number of votes cast and by what methods by 10 p.m. on election night.
  • Allowing the State Election Board to “suspend county or municipal superintendents and appoint an individual to serve as the temporary superintendent in a jurisdiction.”
  • Allowing a Georgia voter to challenge the qualifications of an unlimited number of other voters in their county or municipality.

You can read the full thing here.

FREE MINDS

Parler pushes back on claims of indulging Capitol rioters. Parler has been blamed for allegedly allowing “extremist” content in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol riot. But the social network says it referred content to the FBI more than 50 times in the weeks leading up to the riot. From The Wall Street Journal:

Parler in December began alerting the bureau to content suggesting the possibility of violence at the Capitol as Congress met to confirm President Biden’s victory, the company wrote in a letter to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating Parler and its role in the siege.

The social-media site referred a number of posts to law enforcement, including one on Dec. 24 from a user who called for an “armed force” of 150,000 people to “react to the congressional events of January 6,” according to the letter, which included the post and communications with FBI officials among its exhibits and has been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Parler said it forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Jan. 2 a series of posts from a user saying he would be wearing body armor to the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6. “It’s no longer a protest,” Parler quoted the post as saying. “This is a final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill. I trust the American people will take back the USA with force and many are ready to die to take back #USA.”

FREE MARKETS

New York is finally close to easing rules on recreational marijuana. Reason‘s Scott Shackford reports:

At a press conference Wednesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that an agreement was close and that lawmakers were reviewing the final details. The bill may be ready to be voted on as early as next week. The text of the bill is not yet public, but some of the details have been making its way out to New York media outlets….

Cuomo had been circulating his own legalization proposal that would completely forbid New Yorkers from growing their own—even for medical purposes. The draft now circulating would let New Yorkers grow their own weed: six plants at a time for their own use, but only three of which could be matured. Households with more than one adult could grow a maximum of 12 plants. Municipalities would be barred from banning people from growing their own, but they could establish restrictions.

If that part of the bill stays intact, it will be improvement over New Jersey’s recent legalization. New Jersey does not permit its citizens to grow their own marijuana. They have to purchase it from licensed dealers—who then, of course, have to direct a cut to the state via taxes.

New York’s bill will reportedly let cities opt out of allowing retailers, but it will also allow citizens to overrule such bans via ballot initiatives. The law would also permit social consumption sites, cafés where you can enjoy a little weed if you’re, say, a parent frustrated at the absurd corruption of your state’s government and in need of a little relaxation but don’t want marijuana in your house with the kids.

Licensed retail shops aren’t scheduled to begin opening under the current proposal until December 2022. Marijuana products will be taxed at 9 percent, and then an additional 4 percent tax will apply.

QUICK HITS

• A dispatch from the latest Big Tech hearing before Congress, which occurred yesterday in the House Energy and Commerce Committee and was ostensibly concerned with the spread of misinformation online.

• The White House is defending firing staff who admitted to ever using marijuana.

• In 28 states, there’s no minimum age for arresting kids. That needs to change, writes Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella.

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Did Justice Kagan place a “new gloss” on the Court’s personal jurisdiction case law?

Over the past decade, Justice Ginsburg had a lock on most personal jurisdiction cases. The former law professor wrote the majority opinions in Goodyear Dunlop Tires v. Brown (2011), Daimler AG  v. Bauman (2014), and BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell (2017). And RBG also wrote the dissent in J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro (2011). (The Chief assigned Justice Alito the majority in Bristol Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California (2017)).

Now, that torched has been passed to a fellow law professor. On Thursday, Justice Kagan wrote the majority opinion in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial Dist. It is a joy to read. Part II.A summarizes the past century of personal jurisdiction caselaw in the span of three pages. Truly, masterful work. I expect, and hope, that Dean Kagan becomes the new designated hitter for all CivPro cases. She writes with such clarity and ease. Her opinions can be transplanted to a casebook with minimal editing. Really, she should write the FedCourts opinions as well. Last term, I praised her exegesis of 11th Amendment doctrine in Allen v. Cooper.

But did Kagan merely restate doctrine in Ford, or did she do something more? Justice Alito charges that something else is afoot.

My only quibble is with the new gloss that the Court puts on our case law. Several of our opinions have said that a plaintiff’s claims “‘must arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts'” with the forum. See ante, at 6 (citing cases). The Court parses this phrase “as though we were dealing with language of a statute,” Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U. S. 330, 341 (1979), and because this phrase is cast in the disjunctive, the Court recognizes a new category of cases in which personal jurisdiction is permitted: those in which the claims do not “arise out of ” (i.e., are not caused by) the defendant’s contacts but nevertheless sufficiently “relate to” those contacts in some undefined way, ante, at 8–9.

What exactly did Kagan say?

None of our precedents has suggested that only a strict causal relationship between the defendant’s in-state activity and the litigation will do. As just noted, our most common formulation of the rule demands that the suit “arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts with the forum.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 5) (quoting Daimler, 571 U. S., at 127; emphasis added; alterations omitted); see supra, at 6. The first half of that standard asks about causation; but the back half, after the “or,” contemplates that some relationships will support jurisdiction without a causal showing.That does not mean anything goes. In the sphere of specific jurisdiction, the phrase “relate to” incorporates real limits, as it must to adequately protect defendants foreign to a forum. But again, we have never framed the specific jurisdiction inquiry as always requiring proof of causation—i.e., proof that the plaintiff ‘s claim came about because of the defendant’s in-state conduct. So the case is not over even if, as Ford argues, a causal test would put jurisdiction in only the States of first sale, manufacture, and design. A different State’s courts may yet have jurisdiction, because of another “activity [or] occurrence” involving the defendant that takes place in the State. Bristol- Myers, 582 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 6, 7) (quoting Goodyear, 564 U. S., at 919).

Justice Alito flags some serious practical concerns with Kagan’s “gloss” on personal jurisdiction:

Recognizing “relate to” as an independent basis for specific jurisdiction risks needless complications. The “ordinary meaning” of the phrase “relate to” “is a broad one.” Morales v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 504 U. S. 374, 383 (1992). Applying that phrase “according to its terms [is] a project doomed to failure, since, as many a curbstone philosopher has observed, everything is related to everythingelse.” California Div. of Labor Standards Enforcement v. Dillingham Constr., N. A., Inc., 519 U. S. 316, 335 (1997) (Scalia, J., concurring). To rein in this phrase, limits must be found, and the Court assures us that “relate to,” as it now uses the concept, “incorporates real limits.” Ante, at 9. But without any indication what those limits might be, I doubt that the lower courts will find that observation terribly helpful. Instead, what limits the potentially boundless reach of “relate to” is just the sort of rough causal connection I have described.

I would leave the law exactly where it stood before we took these cases, and for that reason, I concur in the judgment.

Kagan did not respond this charge from Alito; though she responded to other aspects of Alito’s concurrence. Plus, Roberts and Kavanaugh said nothing. I suspect Alito is right. He usually is.

Justice Gorsuch also addressed this issue in his concurrence. He wrote that the phrase “arise out of or relate to” has been understood as a “unit” that require causation.

Today’s case tests the old boundaries from another direction. Until now, many lower courts have proceeded on the premise that specific jurisdiction requires two things. First, the defendant must “purposefully avail” itself of the chance to do business in a State. Second, the plaintiff ‘s suit must “arise out of or relate to” the defendant’s in-state activities. Typically, courts have read this second phrase as a unit requiring at least a but-for causal link between the defendant’s local activities and the plaintiff ‘s injuries. E.g., Tamburo v. Dworkin, 601 F. 3d 693, 708–709 (CA7 2010)(collecting cases); see also Burger King, 471 U. S., at 475 (discussing “proximate[] results”). As every first year law student learns, a but-for causation test isn’t the most demanding. At a high level of abstraction, one might say any event in the world would not have happened “but for”events far and long removed.

May I digress for a moment? The last two sentences in this paragraph encapsulate why Bostock is wrong. This capacious reading of “but for” led Gorsuch astray on Title VII. Digression over.

Gorsuch then makes almost the exact same argument Alito did. Gorsuch cites  including Reiter, and flags the disjunctive conjunction:

Now, though, the Court pivots away from this understanding. Focusing on the phrase “arise out of or relate to”that so often appears in our cases, the majority asks us toparse those words “as though we were dealing with language of a statute.” Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U. S. 330, 341 (1979). In particular, the majority zeros in on the disjunctive conjunction “or,” and proceeds to build its entire opinion around that linguistic feature. Ante, at 8–9. The majority admits that “arise out of ” may connote causation. But, it argues, “relate to” is an independent clause that does not. 

What gives? Why didn’t Gorsuch simply cite Alito? In many cases, he refuses to cite anyone else. There is something strange going on with Justice Gorsuch. I can’t quite put my finger on it. He consistently seems to be broadcasting on his own frequency. Sometimes Justice Thomas tunes in. When a progressive result can be had, Kagan dials in. But otherwise, Justice Gorsuch is singing solo.

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Did Justice Kagan place a “new gloss” on the Court’s personal jurisdiction case law?

Over the past decade, Justice Ginsburg had a lock on most personal jurisdiction cases. The former law professor wrote the majority opinions in Goodyear Dunlop Tires v. Brown (2011), Daimler AG  v. Bauman (2014), and BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell (2017). And RBG also wrote the dissent in J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro (2011). (The Chief assigned Justice Alito the majority in Bristol Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California (2017)).

Now, that torched has been passed to a fellow law professor. On Thursday, Justice Kagan wrote the majority opinion in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial Dist. It is a joy to read. Part II.A summarizes the past century of personal jurisdiction caselaw in the span of three pages. Truly, masterful work. I expect, and hope, that Dean Kagan becomes the new designated hitter for all CivPro cases. She writes with such clarity and ease. Her opinions can be transplanted to a casebook with minimal editing. Really, she should write the FedCourts opinions as well. Last term, I praised her exegesis of 11th Amendment doctrine in Allen v. Cooper.

But did Kagan merely restate doctrine in Ford, or did she do something more? Justice Alito charges that something else is afoot.

My only quibble is with the new gloss that the Court puts on our case law. Several of our opinions have said that a plaintiff’s claims “‘must arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts'” with the forum. See ante, at 6 (citing cases). The Court parses this phrase “as though we were dealing with language of a statute,” Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U. S. 330, 341 (1979), and because this phrase is cast in the disjunctive, the Court recognizes a new category of cases in which personal jurisdiction is permitted: those in which the claims do not “arise out of ” (i.e., are not caused by) the defendant’s contacts but nevertheless sufficiently “relate to” those contacts in some undefined way, ante, at 8–9.

What exactly did Kagan say?

None of our precedents has suggested that only a strict causal relationship between the defendant’s in-state activity and the litigation will do. As just noted, our most common formulation of the rule demands that the suit “arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts with the forum.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 5) (quoting Daimler, 571 U. S., at 127; emphasis added; alterations omitted); see supra, at 6. The first half of that standard asks about causation; but the back half, after the “or,” contemplates that some relationships will support jurisdiction without a causal showing.That does not mean anything goes. In the sphere of specific jurisdiction, the phrase “relate to” incorporates real limits, as it must to adequately protect defendants foreign to a forum. But again, we have never framed the specific jurisdiction inquiry as always requiring proof of causation—i.e., proof that the plaintiff ‘s claim came about because of the defendant’s in-state conduct. So the case is not over even if, as Ford argues, a causal test would put jurisdiction in only the States of first sale, manufacture, and design. A different State’s courts may yet have jurisdiction, because of another “activity [or] occurrence” involving the defendant that takes place in the State. Bristol- Myers, 582 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 6, 7) (quoting Goodyear, 564 U. S., at 919).

Justice Alito flags some serious practical concerns with Kagan’s “gloss” on personal jurisdiction:

Recognizing “relate to” as an independent basis for specific jurisdiction risks needless complications. The “ordinary meaning” of the phrase “relate to” “is a broad one.” Morales v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 504 U. S. 374, 383 (1992). Applying that phrase “according to its terms [is] a project doomed to failure, since, as many a curbstone philosopher has observed, everything is related to everythingelse.” California Div. of Labor Standards Enforcement v. Dillingham Constr., N. A., Inc., 519 U. S. 316, 335 (1997) (Scalia, J., concurring). To rein in this phrase, limits must be found, and the Court assures us that “relate to,” as it now uses the concept, “incorporates real limits.” Ante, at 9. But without any indication what those limits might be, I doubt that the lower courts will find that observation terribly helpful. Instead, what limits the potentially boundless reach of “relate to” is just the sort of rough causal connection I have described.

I would leave the law exactly where it stood before we took these cases, and for that reason, I concur in the judgment.

Kagan did not respond this charge from Alito; though she responded to other aspects of Alito’s concurrence. Plus, Roberts and Kavanaugh said nothing. I suspect Alito is right. He usually is.

Justice Gorsuch also addressed this issue in his concurrence. He wrote that the phrase “arise out of or relate to” has been understood as a “unit” that require causation.

Today’s case tests the old boundaries from another direction. Until now, many lower courts have proceeded on the premise that specific jurisdiction requires two things. First, the defendant must “purposefully avail” itself of the chance to do business in a State. Second, the plaintiff ‘s suit must “arise out of or relate to” the defendant’s in-state activities. Typically, courts have read this second phrase as a unit requiring at least a but-for causal link between the defendant’s local activities and the plaintiff ‘s injuries. E.g., Tamburo v. Dworkin, 601 F. 3d 693, 708–709 (CA7 2010)(collecting cases); see also Burger King, 471 U. S., at 475 (discussing “proximate[] results”). As every first year law student learns, a but-for causation test isn’t the most demanding. At a high level of abstraction, one might say any event in the world would not have happened “but for”events far and long removed.

May I digress for a moment? The last two sentences in this paragraph encapsulate why Bostock is wrong. This capacious reading of “but for” led Gorsuch astray on Title VII. Digression over.

Gorsuch then makes almost the exact same argument Alito did. Gorsuch cites  including Reiter, and flags the disjunctive conjunction:

Now, though, the Court pivots away from this understanding. Focusing on the phrase “arise out of or relate to”that so often appears in our cases, the majority asks us toparse those words “as though we were dealing with language of a statute.” Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U. S. 330, 341 (1979). In particular, the majority zeros in on the disjunctive conjunction “or,” and proceeds to build its entire opinion around that linguistic feature. Ante, at 8–9. The majority admits that “arise out of ” may connote causation. But, it argues, “relate to” is an independent clause that does not. 

What gives? Why didn’t Gorsuch simply cite Alito? In many cases, he refuses to cite anyone else. There is something strange going on with Justice Gorsuch. I can’t quite put my finger on it. He consistently seems to be broadcasting on his own frequency. Sometimes Justice Thomas tunes in. When a progressive result can be had, Kagan dials in. But otherwise, Justice Gorsuch is singing solo.

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Outrage Over Handcuffed Children Leads States To Consider Raising Minimum Age of Arrest


rochester

A 6-year-old boy charged with a crime for picking a tulip. An 8-year-old whose wrists were too small for a pair of handcuffs. A 9-year-old girl handcuffed and pepper sprayed in the back of a police cruiser.

News stories and viral videos of small children being arrested and physically restrained have illustrated a disturbing fact about the American criminal justice system: In most states there’s no limit on when a small child can be considered a criminal. Now legislators around the country are pushing bills to raise the minimum age at which kids can be arrested.

Lawmakers in Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, and North Carolina have all introduced bills to restrict the arrests of small children, ban their handcuffing, and otherwise reduce interactions between kids and the criminal justice system. Mississippi enacted a law earlier this month raising the minimum age for juvenile detention from 10 to 12.

In North Carolina, an investigation by the Raleigh News and Observer revealed this month that children as young as 6—too young to comprehend what was happening in the courtroom—had been charged with crimes. The story’s lead anecdote involved a six-year-old boy charged with destruction of property for picking a tulip. 

The News and Observer reports:

Other cases have involved young children who have broken windows at a construction site with older friends and stood on a chair and thrown a pencil at a teacher, attorneys said. Another case involved sexual exploration with another child, attorneys said.

One of Mitchell’s youngest clients was a 9-year-old with autism whose response to a teacher resulted in him being found guilty of assault on a government official.

A North Carolina mother filed a civil rights lawsuit last October against a policeman who handcuffed and held her autistic 7-year-old son prone on the ground for nearly 40 minutes. 

Twenty-eight states have no minimum age for juvenile delinquency, while others set the bar low. North Carolina’s, for instance, is at age 6. TechDirt reports that North Carolina’s Juvenile Justice Division supports legislation that would raise the minimum age for criminal prosecution to 10.

In New York, where the minimum age of arrest and prosecution of children as juvenile delinquents is 7, public defender groups have sent a letter to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and party leaders pushing for passage of legislation to hike the age to 12. The push follows the release of body camera footage showing police in Rochester, New York, pepper spraying a handcuffed 9-year-old girl. 

A bill introduced in the New York Senate would also prohibit sending kids under 13 to juvenile detention.

In Maryland, state lawmakers are considering legislation that would divert children younger than 13 who commit nonviolent misdemeanors away from the criminal justice system. And legislators in Kentucky have introduced a bill that would ban kids 12 and younger from being tried before a judge.

Meanwhile in Florida, legislators are trying once again to raise the minimum age of arrest, after similar bills failed last year. The Sunshine State has been the site of several viral stories of small children being arrested. Last August, body camera footage emerged showing officers in Key West trying and failing to handcuff an 8-year-old boy, whose wrists were too small for the cuffs. An Orlando school cop made national headlines in 2019 when he arrested a 6-year-old girl.

A bill introduced by Democratic state Sen. Randolph Bracy would forbid arrests of children under age 7, except in cases involving a forcible felony. That bill passed out of a committee this month, following testimony by Meralyn Kirkland, the grandmother of the 6-year-old Orlando girl.

“Little babies have been arrested,” Kirkland said. “She was not comforted. She was not consoled. She was not spoken to. Instead of hugs and expressions of love, she received pain, confusion, the absolute terror of being yanked away from people she knew, the school administrator. She had no family members, no parents, guardians.”

The youngest juvenile arrests in Florida in fiscal year 2019–2020 were a 5-year-old boy charged with felony vandalism and a 6-year-old girl charged with misdemeanor assault, according to data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

Reason reported last year on concerns from parents and civil liberties groups over the significant increase in the number of school resource officers in Florida, where the legislature reacting to the mass shooting in Parkland by requiring an armed officer or guard in every K-12 school in the state. Civil liberties groups say juvenile arrests and restraints disproportionately impact minority youth and children with disabilities.

Those fears were backed up by a study published last September that found the number of school arrests in Florida—which had been declining for years—suddenly started to rise after the passage of the law. There was also a sharp increase in the use of physical restraint against students. 

Lawmakers in Colorado have introduced a bill that would ban the handcuffing of elementary school students, along with measures to reduce school suspensions and raise the hiring standards for school resource officers.

“I am so glad to see this bill come to reality because growing up I saw the way the school-to-prison pipeline affected my siblings,” said Natalie Perez of Stand With Children, an advocacy group that supports the legislation. “I knew if my brothers would of had the education they deserved their lives would have been completely different.”

Earlier this month in Colorado, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Douglas County School District and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office for allegedly handcuffing an 11-year-old boy with autism and leaving him in the back of a police cruiser for two hours while he banged his head.

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Expanding Government Power Won’t Defeat Poverty


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In the run-up to the 2016 election, Ohio-based writer J.D. Vance became a national celebrity for his book—and now a movie—called “Hillbilly Elegy,” which detailed the social dysfunction among his kin in Appalachia. The book became a media sensation because it helped explain the rise of Trumpism, which was born out of endemic poverty in rural white America.

Leftists viewed the tome as poverty porn—an effort to blame the poor for their predicament. Indeed, Vance wrote about “too many young men immune to hard work.” He wrote about the cultural aspects of poverty—rampant drug abuse and out-of-wedlock births. Even after people in his Kentucky hometown made all the wrong choices, they felt like someone had victimized them.

Before the last election, I ventured into Appalachia to attend my mother-in-law’s funeral. Along the two-hour drive through winding two-lane roads, we saw an uncountable number of Trump signs. We talked politics in hushed tones—realizing that our relatives weren’t eager to hear from out-of-touch Californians. Looking at her declining hometown, we saw what Vance was describing.

The good news is that conservatives are now paying attention to the issue of poverty, which had long been a focus among progressives. The bad news is populist Republicans have embraced many of the same misbegotten reflexes that have energized Democrats. They’ve forgotten that poverty isn’t only about material deprivation. They seem to have forgotten that government can do more harm than good.

In recent years, Vance has become an advocate for an activist style of conservatism. In a 2019 speech touching on his book’s theme, he took a gentle jab at libertarians: “Libertarians are not heartless…I think they often recognize, but they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it solve or even address some of these problems.”

Well, yes, libertarians remain skeptical about using political power. It’s our defining characteristic. We’ve watched politicians use government to “solve” poverty, homelessness and other problems—and yet those problems haven’t gotten much better. No one looks at Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s-era War on Poverty, which marshalled the full force of the federal behemoth, and ruminates over its success.

The problem isn’t solely the cost of those policies (trillions of dollars in public spending over several decades), but the erosion of self-sufficiency in the inner city and now rural America. Conservatives would no doubt use government differently than liberals, but libertarians have good reason to doubt that the results will be better.

I’ve often recounted on these pages the follies of California Democrats, who believe the key to lifting people out of poverty is increasing government transfer payments, raising taxes to fund new government agencies and imposing new regulations that force businesses to pay higher wages or provide employees with more benefits.

As an entertaining aside, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new “special advisor for economic mobility and opportunity” is former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, whose claim to fame is his program to provide a Universal Basic Income—direct payments that recipients can use any way that they choose. Everyone likes extra walking-around money, but this is no blueprint for long-term economic uplift.

Those policies, along with other progressive priorities—featuring a host of environmental and slow-growth rules—have mainly ramped up the cost of living here to preposterous proportions. Even if a working-class family has the best work ethic in the world, it could never afford the tab for a median-priced home in any of California’s coastal metropolises.

As a result, our state has the highest poverty rate in the nation, using the Census Bureau’s cost-of-living-adjusted model. Californians pay more than people in other parts of the country for virtually everything. Thanks in part to our regulations, electric customers pay as much as 80 percent more than the national average, according to a new CalMatters report.

It’s simple math. Government-mandated increases in the costs of the basics—housing, utilities, taxes, food, transportation—mean that people must earn more to stay above the poverty line. Excessive labor regulations make it harder for businesses to create new jobs. People deserve a chance to make their way in the world, and not just tap a larger trove of handouts.

Maddeningly, populist conservatives haven’t detailed a specific agenda (beyond tariffs, which are basically large tax increases on businesses, which drive up prices for consumers), but excuse me for thinking that their policies will have unintended consequences, too.

Obviously, a high cost of living isn’t the only thing that keeps people down. Appalachia remains poor even though in my wife’s hometown one can still buy a decent home for less than the cost of a new car. Now that everyone seems serious about addressing poverty, it’s time to readjust our thinking—and recognize that handing people money and giving bureaucrats power isn’t the solution.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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Outrage Over Handcuffed Children Leads States To Consider Raising Minimum Age of Arrest


rochester

A 6-year-old boy charged with a crime for picking a tulip. An 8-year-old whose wrists were too small for a pair of handcuffs. A 9-year-old girl handcuffed and pepper sprayed in the back of a police cruiser.

News stories and viral videos of small children being arrested and physically restrained have illustrated a disturbing fact about the American criminal justice system: In most states there’s no limit on when a small child can be considered a criminal. Now legislators around the country are pushing bills to raise the minimum age at which kids can be arrested.

Lawmakers in Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, and North Carolina have all introduced bills to restrict the arrests of small children, ban their handcuffing, and otherwise reduce interactions between kids and the criminal justice system. Mississippi enacted a law earlier this month raising the minimum age for juvenile detention from 10 to 12.

In North Carolina, an investigation by the Raleigh News and Observer revealed this month that children as young as 6—too young to comprehend what was happening in the courtroom—had been charged with crimes. The story’s lead anecdote involved a six-year-old boy charged with destruction of property for picking a tulip. 

The News and Observer reports:

Other cases have involved young children who have broken windows at a construction site with older friends and stood on a chair and thrown a pencil at a teacher, attorneys said. Another case involved sexual exploration with another child, attorneys said.

One of Mitchell’s youngest clients was a 9-year-old with autism whose response to a teacher resulted in him being found guilty of assault on a government official.

A North Carolina mother filed a civil rights lawsuit last October against a policeman who handcuffed and held her autistic 7-year-old son prone on the ground for nearly 40 minutes. 

Twenty-eight states have no minimum age for juvenile delinquency, while others set the bar low. North Carolina’s, for instance, is at age 6. TechDirt reports that North Carolina’s Juvenile Justice Division supports legislation that would raise the minimum age for criminal prosecution to 10.

In New York, where the minimum age of arrest and prosecution of children as juvenile delinquents is 7, public defender groups have sent a letter to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and party leaders pushing for passage of legislation to hike the age to 12. The push follows the release of body camera footage showing police in Rochester, New York, pepper spraying a handcuffed 9-year-old girl. 

A bill introduced in the New York Senate would also prohibit sending kids under 13 to juvenile detention.

In Maryland, state lawmakers are considering legislation that would divert children younger than 13 who commit nonviolent misdemeanors away from the criminal justice system. And legislators in Kentucky have introduced a bill that would ban kids 12 and younger from being tried before a judge.

Meanwhile in Florida, legislators are trying once again to raise the minimum age of arrest, after similar bills failed last year. The Sunshine State has been the site of several viral stories of small children being arrested. Last August, body camera footage emerged showing officers in Key West trying and failing to handcuff an 8-year-old boy, whose wrists were too small for the cuffs. An Orlando school cop made national headlines in 2019 when he arrested a 6-year-old girl.

A bill introduced by Democratic state Sen. Randolph Bracy would forbid arrests of children under age 7, except in cases involving a forcible felony. That bill passed out of a committee this month, following testimony by Meralyn Kirkland, the grandmother of the 6-year-old Orlando girl.

“Little babies have been arrested,” Kirkland said. “She was not comforted. She was not consoled. She was not spoken to. Instead of hugs and expressions of love, she received pain, confusion, the absolute terror of being yanked away from people she knew, the school administrator. She had no family members, no parents, guardians.”

The youngest juvenile arrests in Florida in fiscal year 2019–2020 were a 5-year-old boy charged with felony vandalism and a 6-year-old girl charged with misdemeanor assault, according to data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

Reason reported last year on concerns from parents and civil liberties groups over the significant increase in the number of school resource officers in Florida, where the legislature reacting to the mass shooting in Parkland by requiring an armed officer or guard in every K-12 school in the state. Civil liberties groups say juvenile arrests and restraints disproportionately impact minority youth and children with disabilities.

Those fears were backed up by a study published last September that found the number of school arrests in Florida—which had been declining for years—suddenly started to rise after the passage of the law. There was also a sharp increase in the use of physical restraint against students. 

Lawmakers in Colorado have introduced a bill that would ban the handcuffing of elementary school students, along with measures to reduce school suspensions and raise the hiring standards for school resource officers.

“I am so glad to see this bill come to reality because growing up I saw the way the school-to-prison pipeline affected my siblings,” said Natalie Perez of Stand With Children, an advocacy group that supports the legislation. “I knew if my brothers would of had the education they deserved their lives would have been completely different.”

Earlier this month in Colorado, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Douglas County School District and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office for allegedly handcuffing an 11-year-old boy with autism and leaving him in the back of a police cruiser for two hours while he banged his head.

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Expanding Government Power Won’t Defeat Poverty


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In the run-up to the 2016 election, Ohio-based writer J.D. Vance became a national celebrity for his book—and now a movie—called “Hillbilly Elegy,” which detailed the social dysfunction among his kin in Appalachia. The book became a media sensation because it helped explain the rise of Trumpism, which was born out of endemic poverty in rural white America.

Leftists viewed the tome as poverty porn—an effort to blame the poor for their predicament. Indeed, Vance wrote about “too many young men immune to hard work.” He wrote about the cultural aspects of poverty—rampant drug abuse and out-of-wedlock births. Even after people in his Kentucky hometown made all the wrong choices, they felt like someone had victimized them.

Before the last election, I ventured into Appalachia to attend my mother-in-law’s funeral. Along the two-hour drive through winding two-lane roads, we saw an uncountable number of Trump signs. We talked politics in hushed tones—realizing that our relatives weren’t eager to hear from out-of-touch Californians. Looking at her declining hometown, we saw what Vance was describing.

The good news is that conservatives are now paying attention to the issue of poverty, which had long been a focus among progressives. The bad news is populist Republicans have embraced many of the same misbegotten reflexes that have energized Democrats. They’ve forgotten that poverty isn’t only about material deprivation. They seem to have forgotten that government can do more harm than good.

In recent years, Vance has become an advocate for an activist style of conservatism. In a 2019 speech touching on his book’s theme, he took a gentle jab at libertarians: “Libertarians are not heartless…I think they often recognize, but they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it solve or even address some of these problems.”

Well, yes, libertarians remain skeptical about using political power. It’s our defining characteristic. We’ve watched politicians use government to “solve” poverty, homelessness and other problems—and yet those problems haven’t gotten much better. No one looks at Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s-era War on Poverty, which marshalled the full force of the federal behemoth, and ruminates over its success.

The problem isn’t solely the cost of those policies (trillions of dollars in public spending over several decades), but the erosion of self-sufficiency in the inner city and now rural America. Conservatives would no doubt use government differently than liberals, but libertarians have good reason to doubt that the results will be better.

I’ve often recounted on these pages the follies of California Democrats, who believe the key to lifting people out of poverty is increasing government transfer payments, raising taxes to fund new government agencies and imposing new regulations that force businesses to pay higher wages or provide employees with more benefits.

As an entertaining aside, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new “special advisor for economic mobility and opportunity” is former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, whose claim to fame is his program to provide a Universal Basic Income—direct payments that recipients can use any way that they choose. Everyone likes extra walking-around money, but this is no blueprint for long-term economic uplift.

Those policies, along with other progressive priorities—featuring a host of environmental and slow-growth rules—have mainly ramped up the cost of living here to preposterous proportions. Even if a working-class family has the best work ethic in the world, it could never afford the tab for a median-priced home in any of California’s coastal metropolises.

As a result, our state has the highest poverty rate in the nation, using the Census Bureau’s cost-of-living-adjusted model. Californians pay more than people in other parts of the country for virtually everything. Thanks in part to our regulations, electric customers pay as much as 80 percent more than the national average, according to a new CalMatters report.

It’s simple math. Government-mandated increases in the costs of the basics—housing, utilities, taxes, food, transportation—mean that people must earn more to stay above the poverty line. Excessive labor regulations make it harder for businesses to create new jobs. People deserve a chance to make their way in the world, and not just tap a larger trove of handouts.

Maddeningly, populist conservatives haven’t detailed a specific agenda (beyond tariffs, which are basically large tax increases on businesses, which drive up prices for consumers), but excuse me for thinking that their policies will have unintended consequences, too.

Obviously, a high cost of living isn’t the only thing that keeps people down. Appalachia remains poor even though in my wife’s hometown one can still buy a decent home for less than the cost of a new car. Now that everyone seems serious about addressing poverty, it’s time to readjust our thinking—and recognize that handing people money and giving bureaucrats power isn’t the solution.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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Review: Ecstasy


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In her dreamlike first feature, Brazilian director Moara Passonni uses action—especially the noisy street demos of her country’s recent political past—as background. The movie’s unswerving focus is a quiet young girl named Clara, who on the cusp of puberty is sinking into extreme anorexia. “This week Manu got her period and she cried her heart out,” Clara says of a classmate early on. “I can’t imagine myself with breasts.” Why does no one notice what’s happening to this person? “My body is like a scream,” she says

Passoni’s story, set in São Paulo around the end of the 1980s, is autobiographical. (The director herself was once seriously anorexic but lived to tell.) Clara’s mother is a former nun impelled toward social action in the backwash of the country’s 20-year military dictatorship. She runs for the National Congress and wins, and soon moves with Clara to the country’s sleekly soulless capital of Brasilia. (“How could this place be home?” Clara wonders, taking in the city’s cold concrete vistas.)

Adolescence turns Clara increasingly inward. Her mother, seeing her daughter shunned after kissing another girl on the mouth, enrolls her in ballet school, where the importance of body weight looms large and Clara begins surreptitiously dumping food rather than eating it. She seems weird to the other girls and remains friendless.

By the age of 15, Clara weighs 64 pounds and has stopped menstruating. Doctors put her on lithium, then administer a “light” course of electro-shock, but nothing reels her back from the edge of impending collapse. Attempts at force-feeding only puncture her intestines. “If I have a problem,” she says, “it’s the less I eat, the more energy I have.” This regimen keeps her in a constant state of counterfeit ecstasy to which she desperately adheres. Nothing dispels her loneliness, though. “I’m making a cage of bones to keep my heart inside,” she says. A doctor tells her, “If you don’t eat, you’ll die.” Clara happily signs a waiver to get out of the hospital, so she can continue slowly killing herself without outside interference.

Director Passoni and her cinematographer, Janice D’Avila, wreathe the story in a retrospective haze that gently draws us into this melancholy tale. And the actors who play Clara at different ages give unusually affecting performances. (They include Victoria Maranho, Gigi Paladino, Alice Valares, and Susana Prizendt.) The silent nightmare of anorexia is straightforwardly portrayed and not sensationalized. We see Clara wordlessly contemplating her naked body as if it were a hostile foreign land. We watch as she fantasizes trimming “fat” off her abdomen with a pair of scissors, and we look on in alarm at a photo parade of real-life anorexic women, whose bones serve mainly as armatures for the bags of skin their bodies have become.

Even within Clara’s cramped world of morbid self-deprivation, life’s traditional distractions still beckon. There’s a boy, and a nightclub, and hints of sex and love. But Clara won’t be drawn in too deep. “The problem with allowing myself pleasure,” she says, “is that it creates desire.” What she most wants, we’re told, is “to be 100 percent autonomous, like a statue.”

Ecstasy will be streaming as part of the MoMA Doc festival from March 28 through April 2). You have to become a member, though. The film doesn’t have U.S. distribution yet, but keep an eye out.

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Review: Ecstasy


Webp.net-resizeimage (6)

In her dreamlike first feature, Brazilian director Moara Passonni uses action—especially the noisy street demos of her country’s recent political past—as background. The movie’s unswerving focus is a quiet young girl named Clara, who on the cusp of puberty is sinking into extreme anorexia. “This week Manu got her period and she cried her heart out,” Clara says of a classmate early on. “I can’t imagine myself with breasts.” Why does no one notice what’s happening to this person? “My body is like a scream,” she says

Passoni’s story, set in São Paulo around the end of the 1980s, is autobiographical. (The director herself was once seriously anorexic but lived to tell.) Clara’s mother is a former nun impelled toward social action in the backwash of the country’s 20-year military dictatorship. She runs for the National Congress and wins, and soon moves with Clara to the country’s sleekly soulless capital of Brasilia. (“How could this place be home?” Clara wonders, taking in the city’s cold concrete vistas.)

Adolescence turns Clara increasingly inward. Her mother, seeing her daughter shunned after kissing another girl on the mouth, enrolls her in ballet school, where the importance of body weight looms large and Clara begins surreptitiously dumping food rather than eating it. She seems weird to the other girls and remains friendless.

By the age of 15, Clara weighs 64 pounds and has stopped menstruating. Doctors put her on lithium, then administer a “light” course of electro-shock, but nothing reels her back from the edge of impending collapse. Attempts at force-feeding only puncture her intestines. “If I have a problem,” she says, “it’s the less I eat, the more energy I have.” This regimen keeps her in a constant state of counterfeit ecstasy to which she desperately adheres. Nothing dispels her loneliness, though. “I’m making a cage of bones to keep my heart inside,” she says. A doctor tells her, “If you don’t eat, you’ll die.” Clara happily signs a waiver to get out of the hospital, so she can continue slowly killing herself without outside interference.

Director Passoni and her cinematographer, Janice D’Avila, wreathe the story in a retrospective haze that gently draws us into this melancholy tale. And the actors who play Clara at different ages give unusually affecting performances. (They include Victoria Maranho, Gigi Paladino, Alice Valares, and Susana Prizendt.) The silent nightmare of anorexia is straightforwardly portrayed and not sensationalized. We see Clara wordlessly contemplating her naked body as if it were a hostile foreign land. We watch as she fantasizes trimming “fat” off her abdomen with a pair of scissors, and we look on in alarm at a photo parade of real-life anorexic women, whose bones serve mainly as armatures for the bags of skin their bodies have become.

Even within Clara’s cramped world of morbid self-deprivation, life’s traditional distractions still beckon. There’s a boy, and a nightclub, and hints of sex and love. But Clara won’t be drawn in too deep. “The problem with allowing myself pleasure,” she says, “is that it creates desire.” What she most wants, we’re told, is “to be 100 percent autonomous, like a statue.”

Ecstasy will be streaming as part of the MoMA Doc festival from March 28 through April 2). You have to become a member, though. The film doesn’t have U.S. distribution yet, but keep an eye out.

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