Tag: posts

Dr. Seuss Is Canceled

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The cancel culture bells have tolled for Dr. Seuss, the beloved author of children’s books like Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Oh, the Places You’ll Go.

President Biden declined to mention Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel, in his kickoff speech for Read Across America Day, a national event that promotes literacy and is historically connected with Dr. Seuss. (It even takes place on the author’s birthday.)

While the Biden administration got the #DrSeussIsOverParty started, it’s Seuss’ own publisher who’s really taking things to the next level. Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would cease printing six books that contain vaguely racist imagery: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer.

The books are currently unavailable on Amazon.

This is not the first time Dr. Seuss has come under fire: In 2017, a librarian criticized First Lady Melania Trump’s donation of Seuss books, which are “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.” This year, Loudon County schools in Virginia ordered librarians to stop mentioning Dr. Seuss, citing a study that found there were few racial minority characters in his books. (Most Seuss characters aren’t even human.)

It’s true that Dr. Seuss is a more complicated figure than he first appears. Some of his oldest books do contain problematic illustrations of black and Asian characters. He harbored anti-Japanese sentiments during World War II and produced several cartoons that could be seen as defending U.S. internment camps. But like many people, Dr. Seuss changed his views over time, and he also published cartoons that were clearly anti-racist.

Indeed, Dr. Seuss’s most famous books tend to promote liberal and anti-authoritarian messages. The best-known example is probably The Lorax, a save-the-environment parable, but it’s hardly the only one. The Butter Battle Book is a Cold War satire, and the eponymous villain of Yertle the Turtle is meant to echo the rise and fall of Adolph Hitler.

Nobody has to read Dr. Seuss if they don’t want to. But it’s worth remembering that his books were so popular with children in large part because of the crazy stories and funny pictures. Learning to read was very boring until The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham came along in the 1950s. Problematizing everything that’s different, weird, or uncomfortable won’t get us any place worth exclaiming over.

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Americans Reject Republicans and Democrats in Record Numbers

Wide Me

Half of Americans reject both Republicans and Democrats. Recent polling from Gallup finds 50 percent of respondents identifying as independents, rather than aligning themselves with either Democrats or the GOP.

Gallup’s latest political identification poll, conducted January 20 through February 2, saw just 25 percent of respondents identifying as Democrats and 25 percent identifying as Republicans. Among independents, 41 percent said they lean more Republican and 50 percent said they lean more Democrat. This is quite a change from November 2020 (when the Democrat/Republican/Independent divide was 31 percent, 30 percent, and 38 percent), and from February 2020 (when it was 26 percent, 33 percent, 39 percent). Gallup has been asking this same question myriad times per year since 2004. Party identification numbers tend to fluctuate quite a bit between surveys, but Gallup reports this is the first time the share of independents has reached 50 percent.

In addition, more poll respondents than ever before—62 percent—say that Republicans and Democrats “do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed.” Agreement with this statement is up from 57 percent in September 2020, and a previous record high of 61 percent in 2017.

The first time Gallup asked the question, back in October 2003, only 40 percent agreed. “In several election years—2006, 2008 and 2012—Americans were divided as to whether a third party was needed, but since 2012, Americans have consistently favored the idea,” notes Gallup.

The results should give both parties and their members pause, but belonging to one of America’s two ruling tribes seems to mean never having to engage in self-reflection. Why should they? In cities and states across the U.S., professional Democrats and Republicans have successfully worked the system to keep third parties off ballots and out of office,  while fighting electoral innovations—like ranked choice voting—that allow people to vote their actual preferences rather than simply pick the proverbial lesser of two evils.

And when legal machinations fail, the two parties resort to shaming: Don’t third-party voters know they’re destroying democracy?

That attitude is on full display in some reactions to the recent Gallup polling results. Take Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and political science lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, who shared the poll results yesterday with a warning that “this disaffiliation from the two major parties is very dangerous for democracy.” 

People labeling themselves and voting according to their own preferences and beliefs instead of whatever hogwash they’ve been force-fed is not dangerous to democracy—many functional democracies in the world have third and fourth and fifth parties, who govern in coalitions thanks to proportional representation. But this disaffiliation trend is dangerous to establishment politicians and staid political institutions who think they’re too big to fail and thus immune from having to actually act like democratic leaders. To which I say:

And according to Gallup, a whole lot of Americans feel similarly.

FOLLOWUP

A picture is worth… After two former staffers of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo accused him of sexual harassment, another woman has come forward saying that Cuomo made unwanted sexual advances:

FREE MINDS

Liberalism is not inevitable. Canadian political scientist Jacob T. Levy, author of The Multiculturalism of Fear and Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, talked to The Signal‘s Phoebe Maltz Bovy about “the cult of now”:

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: In your Vox article on the idea of moral progress, you wrote, “Before we attribute magical moral powers to the passage of the next 50 years, we should look backward in 50-year increments and ask: How many old moral errors keep coming back? How many new ones get introduced?”

I want to ask specifically about the “new ones” part. Because if I understand you correctly, you’re arguing that it’s not just that progress can be slow, in a two-steps-forward, one-step-backwards sense. It’s also that things are not necessarily getting better, or as you quote Martin Luther King, Jr., “‘time itself is neutral.'” Are there ways this moment is less enlightened than, say, ten years ago?

Jacob T. Levy: I think there’s been what’s referred to as liberal-democratic backsliding, compared with certainly before the 2008 financial crisis. Broadly speaking, the stability of liberal and constitutional democracy looks less clear and less entrenched. That’s what comes to mind most obviously.

Bovy: Are you referring to Trump, and to Trump-like leaders worldwide?

Levy: I mean the rise of generally nationalist, populist authoritarianism, with associated challenges to the separation of powers, minority rights, and federalism. This precedes Trump. The standard exemplar from before that was Viktor Orbán, Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, and Netanyahu in important ways in Israel. The time horizon for the decay of Venezuelan democracy is somewhat longer than that, but you’re still seeing instances around the world in different kinds of political systems, different regions, the Philippines, Brazil, where what had looked like relatively stable, relatively entrenched, liberal, constitutional democracy, starts to look a lot less so, and in some cases, I’d argue both Hungary and Turkey, falling out of the category altogether.

Read the whole interview here.

FOLLOWUP

The state budget apocalypse that wasn’t. “Throughout the debate over stimulus, one question has produced repeated deadlock in Washington: Should the states get no-strings federal aid?” notes The New York Times. Over the course of the pandemic, Democrats have continually argued yes, and still are saying as much, arguing that this is absolutely essential to keep states—and their residents—financially afloat. But evidence suggests otherwise. More from the Times:

State aid could well be a stumbling block for President Biden’s $1.9 trillion federal stimulus bill, which contains $350 billion in relief for state and local governments and narrowly passed the House this past weekend. It faces a much tougher fight in the Senate.

As it turns out, new data shows that a year after the pandemic wrought economic devastation around the country, forcing states to revise their revenue forecasts and prepare for the worst, for many the worst didn’t come.

[…] By some measures, the states ended up collecting nearly as much revenue in 2020 as they did in 2019. A J.P. Morgan survey called 2020 “virtually flat” with 2019, based on the 47 states that report their tax revenues every month, or all except Alaska, Oregon and Wyoming.

QUICK HITS

• The U.S. Marshals Service, a wing of the Department of Justice, “have been acting like local police—only with more violence and less accountability, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project and the USA TODAY Network.” The investigation found that “on average, from 2015 to late 2020, they shot 31 people a year, killing 22 of them.”

• Refugees are being turned away from the U.S. due to President Joe Biden’s inaction. “Three weeks after announcing that this year’s refugee cap would be modified, Biden has yet to sign the determination making it official, leaving refugees abroad in limbo,” reports CNN. “Last week, 60 refugees were unbooked from their flights and this week, more than 200 refugees have had their trips postponed, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.”

• A good thread out of Sweden on how the Nordic Model of criminalizing customers of sex workers but not the selling of sex—a model that some U.S. groups and celebrities have been trying to misleadingly label as the “equality model,” or even simply as decriminalization—still leads to really bad outcomes for sex workers:

• Well, this is despicable:

• Instagram has a new rival.

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via IFTTT

Impeachment and the First Amendment, Revisited

We are now two weeks removed from the Senate impeachment trial. Already, that enervating saga has faded into our polity’s rear-view mirror. I hope that this distance provides an opportunity for calm reflection on the legal arguments raised in those proceedings. Specifically, I’d like to address the First Amendment and the impeachment process. 

Prior to January 6, 2021, most people never considered the interaction between the First Amendment and the impeachment process. I had. In 2017, I wrote a widely-read Lawfare post on obstruction of justice and the presidency. (Trump’s lawyers would cite this post). I argued that the Constitution imposes certain limits on Congress’ powers to regulate the presidency. And I argued that these particular limitations apply with respect to civil laws, criminal laws, and even the impeachment process. That is, Congress could not impeach the President for conduct that complies with the Constitution. And this limitation cuts in two directions. Congress could not impeach the President for exercising a specific power delegated by Article II. And Congress could not impeach the President for conduct that is expressly protected by the Bill of Rights.

My Lawfare series caused a stir. Critics argued that the Constitution does not limit the impeachment process: Congress could impeach the President for just about any reason—even if the President was complying with the Constitution. Other critics accepted my general premise, but countered that Trump’s conduct was not consistent with the Constitution. Still, I did not think my position was frivolous. I wrote that the 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson implicated the freedom of speech. At the time, I didn’t dig through the records, but I presumed that Johnson’s acquittal was based, at least in part, on the First Amendment.

My presumption was correct. Several prominent Senators stated that the President has First Amendment rights, and that the Senate could not convict the President for exercising those rights. The views of these Senators were not monolithic. But we are not dealing with a judicial proceeding in which there is a single decision-maker who reaches a single final answer to a constitutional question. Different senators expressed different views. But the position I held was held at least since the 1860s. 

My position may be right or wrong, but it cannot be frivolous. To say my position is frivolous is to charge with incompetence those who framed the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, the records of these debates have been carefully examined for more than 150 years. As far as I am aware, no one ever suggested that these members of Congress were wrong. Indeed, one prominent impeachment scholar favorably cited these sources. I encourage everyone to read Professor Kate Shaw’s article, Impeachable Speech, in the Emory Law Journal. She suggested that the First Amendment, and the Brandenburg test in particular, could constrain the impeachment process. Professor Shaw published this article behind the proverbial veil of ignorance in mid-2020, long before January 6. Trump’s lawyers favorably cited her work.

Before January 6, no one had ever argued that the views of these senators articulated during the first presidential impeachment trial were frivolous. What changed after January 6? This position did not suddenly become frivolous. Rather, this argument got in the way of a movement. And it had to be squashed. 150 scholars signed an incoherent statement that didn’t even acknowledge the history from the Johnson impeachment. Yet, the press and the House Managers dutifully cited this letter as a definitive statement about the First Amendment. 

The willingness to charge the Framers of the 14th Amendment with incompetence reminds me of a similar willingness to charge our first President with incompetence, or worse. To this day, the key to the Bastille hangs on the wall at Mt. Vernon. The Marquis de Lefayette gave that famous key, and a painting, to President Washington. Countless generations of scholars and schoolchildren have walked past that key. 

Until 2016, we are not aware that anyone suggested that Washington’s acceptance of that foreign state gift violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Yet, after President Trump’s elections, some people were content to suggest that our first President violated the Constitution he helped to define.

For some time, I have thought that the entire Constitution, including the First Amendment, constrains Congress’ impeachment powers. My position became mightily inconvenient after January 6. But the Constitution often imposes inconvenient constraints. In his classic book about presidential impeachments, Grand Inquests, Chief Justice Rehnquist observed that, during times of conflict, “[p]rovisions in the Constitution for judicial independence, or provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech to the President as well as others, suddenly appear as obstacles to the accomplishment of the greater good.” The Chief Justice was right. 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3uNpOmr
via IFTTT

Americans Reject Republicans and Democrats in Record Numbers

Wide Me

Half of Americans reject both Republicans and Democrats. Recent polling from Gallup finds 50 percent of respondents identifying as independents, rather than aligning themselves with either Democrats or the GOP.

Gallup’s latest political identification poll, conducted January 20 through February 2, saw just 25 percent of respondents identifying as Democrats and 25 percent identifying as Republicans. Among independents, 41 percent said they lean more Republican and 50 percent said they lean more Democrat. This is quite a change from November 2020 (when the Democrat/Republican/Independent divide was 31 percent, 30 percent, and 38 percent), and from February 2020 (when it was 26 percent, 33 percent, 39 percent). Gallup has been asking this same question myriad times per year since 2004. Party identification numbers tend to fluctuate quite a bit between surveys, but Gallup reports this is the first time the share of independents has reached 50 percent.

In addition, more poll respondents than ever before—62 percent—say that Republicans and Democrats “do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed.” Agreement with this statement is up from 57 percent in September 2020, and a previous record high of 61 percent in 2017.

The first time Gallup asked the question, back in October 2003, only 40 percent agreed. “In several election years—2006, 2008 and 2012—Americans were divided as to whether a third party was needed, but since 2012, Americans have consistently favored the idea,” notes Gallup.

The results should give both parties and their members pause, but belonging to one of America’s two ruling tribes seems to mean never having to engage in self-reflection. Why should they? In cities and states across the U.S., professional Democrats and Republicans have successfully worked the system to keep third parties off ballots and out of office,  while fighting electoral innovations—like ranked choice voting—that allow people to vote their actual preferences rather than simply pick the proverbial lesser of two evils.

And when legal machinations fail, the two parties resort to shaming: Don’t third-party voters know they’re destroying democracy?

That attitude is on full display in some reactions to the recent Gallup polling results. Take Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and political science lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, who shared the poll results yesterday with a warning that “this disaffiliation from the two major parties is very dangerous for democracy.” 

People labeling themselves and voting according to their own preferences and beliefs instead of whatever hogwash they’ve been force-fed is not dangerous to democracy—many functional democracies in the world have third and fourth and fifth parties, who govern in coalitions thanks to proportional representation. But this disaffiliation trend is dangerous to establishment politicians and staid political institutions who think they’re too big to fail and thus immune from having to actually act like democratic leaders. To which I say:

And according to Gallup, a whole lot of Americans feel similarly.

FOLLOWUP

A picture is worth… After two former staffers of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo accused him of sexual harassment, another woman has come forward saying that Cuomo made unwanted sexual advances:

FREE MINDS

Liberalism is not inevitable. Canadian political scientist Jacob T. Levy, author of The Multiculturalism of Fear and Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, talked to The Signal‘s Phoebe Maltz Bovy about “the cult of now”:

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: In your Vox article on the idea of moral progress, you wrote, “Before we attribute magical moral powers to the passage of the next 50 years, we should look backward in 50-year increments and ask: How many old moral errors keep coming back? How many new ones get introduced?”

I want to ask specifically about the “new ones” part. Because if I understand you correctly, you’re arguing that it’s not just that progress can be slow, in a two-steps-forward, one-step-backwards sense. It’s also that things are not necessarily getting better, or as you quote Martin Luther King, Jr., “‘time itself is neutral.'” Are there ways this moment is less enlightened than, say, ten years ago?

Jacob T. Levy: I think there’s been what’s referred to as liberal-democratic backsliding, compared with certainly before the 2008 financial crisis. Broadly speaking, the stability of liberal and constitutional democracy looks less clear and less entrenched. That’s what comes to mind most obviously.

Bovy: Are you referring to Trump, and to Trump-like leaders worldwide?

Levy: I mean the rise of generally nationalist, populist authoritarianism, with associated challenges to the separation of powers, minority rights, and federalism. This precedes Trump. The standard exemplar from before that was Viktor Orbán, Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, and Netanyahu in important ways in Israel. The time horizon for the decay of Venezuelan democracy is somewhat longer than that, but you’re still seeing instances around the world in different kinds of political systems, different regions, the Philippines, Brazil, where what had looked like relatively stable, relatively entrenched, liberal, constitutional democracy, starts to look a lot less so, and in some cases, I’d argue both Hungary and Turkey, falling out of the category altogether.

Read the whole interview here.

FOLLOWUP

The state budget apocalypse that wasn’t. “Throughout the debate over stimulus, one question has produced repeated deadlock in Washington: Should the states get no-strings federal aid?” notes The New York Times. Over the course of the pandemic, Democrats have continually argued yes, and still are saying as much, arguing that this is absolutely essential to keep states—and their residents—financially afloat. But evidence suggests otherwise. More from the Times:

State aid could well be a stumbling block for President Biden’s $1.9 trillion federal stimulus bill, which contains $350 billion in relief for state and local governments and narrowly passed the House this past weekend. It faces a much tougher fight in the Senate.

As it turns out, new data shows that a year after the pandemic wrought economic devastation around the country, forcing states to revise their revenue forecasts and prepare for the worst, for many the worst didn’t come.

[…] By some measures, the states ended up collecting nearly as much revenue in 2020 as they did in 2019. A J.P. Morgan survey called 2020 “virtually flat” with 2019, based on the 47 states that report their tax revenues every month, or all except Alaska, Oregon and Wyoming.

QUICK HITS

• The U.S. Marshals Service, a wing of the Department of Justice, “have been acting like local police—only with more violence and less accountability, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project and the USA TODAY Network.” The investigation found that “on average, from 2015 to late 2020, they shot 31 people a year, killing 22 of them.”

• Refugees are being turned away from the U.S. due to President Joe Biden’s inaction. “Three weeks after announcing that this year’s refugee cap would be modified, Biden has yet to sign the determination making it official, leaving refugees abroad in limbo,” reports CNN. “Last week, 60 refugees were unbooked from their flights and this week, more than 200 refugees have had their trips postponed, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.”

• A good thread out of Sweden on how the Nordic Model of criminalizing customers of sex workers but not the selling of sex—a model that some U.S. groups and celebrities have been trying to misleadingly label as the “equality model,” or even simply as decriminalization—still leads to really bad outcomes for sex workers:

• Well, this is despicable:

• Instagram has a new rival.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3bUJzjn
via IFTTT

Impeachment and the First Amendment, Revisited

We are now two weeks removed from the Senate impeachment trial. Already, that enervating saga has faded into our polity’s rear-view mirror. I hope that this distance provides an opportunity for calm reflection on the legal arguments raised in those proceedings. Specifically, I’d like to address the First Amendment and the impeachment process. 

Prior to January 6, 2021, most people never considered the interaction between the First Amendment and the impeachment process. I had. In 2017, I wrote a widely-read Lawfare post on obstruction of justice and the presidency. (Trump’s lawyers would cite this post). I argued that the Constitution imposes certain limits on Congress’ powers to regulate the presidency. And I argued that these particular limitations apply with respect to civil laws, criminal laws, and even the impeachment process. That is, Congress could not impeach the President for conduct that complies with the Constitution. And this limitation cuts in two directions. Congress could not impeach the President for exercising a specific power delegated by Article II. And Congress could not impeach the President for conduct that is expressly protected by the Bill of Rights.

My Lawfare series caused a stir. Critics argued that the Constitution does not limit the impeachment process: Congress could impeach the President for just about any reason—even if the President was complying with the Constitution. Other critics accepted my general premise, but countered that Trump’s conduct was not consistent with the Constitution. Still, I did not think my position was frivolous. I wrote that the 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson implicated the freedom of speech. At the time, I didn’t dig through the records, but I presumed that Johnson’s acquittal was based, at least in part, on the First Amendment.

My presumption was correct. Several prominent Senators stated that the President has First Amendment rights, and that the Senate could not convict the President for exercising those rights. The views of these Senators were not monolithic. But we are not dealing with a judicial proceeding in which there is a single decision-maker who reaches a single final answer to a constitutional question. Different senators expressed different views. But the position I held was held at least since the 1860s. 

My position may be right or wrong, but it cannot be frivolous. To say my position is frivolous is to charge with incompetence those who framed the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, the records of these debates have been carefully examined for more than 150 years. As far as I am aware, no one ever suggested that these members of Congress were wrong. Indeed, one prominent impeachment scholar favorably cited these sources. I encourage everyone to read Professor Kate Shaw’s article, Impeachable Speech, in the Emory Law Journal. She suggested that the First Amendment, and the Brandenburg test in particular, could constrain the impeachment process. Professor Shaw published this article behind the proverbial veil of ignorance in mid-2020, long before January 6. Trump’s lawyers favorably cited her work.

Before January 6, no one had ever argued that the views of these senators articulated during the first presidential impeachment trial were frivolous. What changed after January 6? This position did not suddenly become frivolous. Rather, this argument got in the way of a movement. And it had to be squashed. 150 scholars signed an incoherent statement that didn’t even acknowledge the history from the Johnson impeachment. Yet, the press and the House Managers dutifully cited this letter as a definitive statement about the First Amendment. 

The willingness to charge the Framers of the 14th Amendment with incompetence reminds me of a similar willingness to charge our first President with incompetence, or worse. To this day, the key to the Bastille hangs on the wall at Mt. Vernon. The Marquis de Lefayette gave that famous key, and a painting, to President Washington. Countless generations of scholars and schoolchildren have walked past that key. 

Until 2016, we are not aware that anyone suggested that Washington’s acceptance of that foreign state gift violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Yet, after President Trump’s elections, some people were content to suggest that our first President violated the Constitution he helped to define.

For some time, I have thought that the entire Constitution, including the First Amendment, constrains Congress’ impeachment powers. My position became mightily inconvenient after January 6. But the Constitution often imposes inconvenient constraints. In his classic book about presidential impeachments, Grand Inquests, Chief Justice Rehnquist observed that, during times of conflict, “[p]rovisions in the Constitution for judicial independence, or provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech to the President as well as others, suddenly appear as obstacles to the accomplishment of the greater good.” The Chief Justice was right. 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3uNpOmr
via IFTTT

New Colorado Bill Would Create Commission to Restrict “Hate Speech,” “Fake News,” “Conspiracy Theories” on Social Media Platforms

The bill, introduced Friday, would create a state “digital communications division” and “digital communications commission” that would, among other things, “investigate and … hold hearings on claims … that a digital communications platform”—which includes “social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and media-sharing platforms like YouTube and Twitch”—”has allowed a person to engage in one or more unfair or discriminatory digital communications practices on the platform,” including

  • “practices that promote hate speech;
  • undermine election integrity;
  • disseminate intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news; or
  • authorize, encourage, or carry out violations of users’ privacy.”

None of these terms are defined in the bill. And the bill is all about suppressing the “unfair or discriminatory” speech:

If the adjudicator at the hearing determines that the respondent engaged in an unfair or discriminatory digital communications practice, the commission may issue and cause to be served on the respondent an order requiring the respondent to cease and desist from the practice and to take action that the commission orders.

 

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via IFTTT

New Colorado Bill Would Create Commission to Restrict “Hate Speech,” “Fake News,” “Conspiracy Theories” on Social Media Platforms

The bill, introduced Friday, would create a state “digital communications division” and “digital communications commission” that would, among other things, “investigate and … hold hearings on claims … that a digital communications platform”—which includes “social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and media-sharing platforms like YouTube and Twitch”—”has allowed a person to engage in one or more unfair or discriminatory digital communications practices on the platform,” including

  • “practices that promote hate speech;
  • undermine election integrity;
  • disseminate intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news; or
  • authorize, encourage, or carry out violations of users’ privacy.”

None of these terms are defined in the bill. And the bill is all about suppressing the “unfair or discriminatory” speech:

If the adjudicator at the hearing determines that the respondent engaged in an unfair or discriminatory digital communications practice, the commission may issue and cause to be served on the respondent an order requiring the respondent to cease and desist from the practice and to take action that the commission orders.

 

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via IFTTT