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The ability to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate is important, but it does not create a true Senate majority, as I explained here.  Consequently, in those rare instances when the Senate has split down the middle, the parties have traditionally entered into a power-sharing arrangement, in which the party that holds the White House (and thus the tie-breaking vote) gets titular control of committees and the body of the whole, but not the full benefits of a true Senate majority.

Senators McConnell and Schumer have disagreed over the precise contours of a potential power-sharing deal, preventing reorganization of the Senate. This has, among other things, slowed the rate at which some committees hold hearings and votes on Biden Administration nominees, as Republican Senators still hold the gavels, as they will until a new organizational resolution is adopted.

Earlier today, Senators Schumer and McConnell reportedly reached a deal that will largely replicate the 2001 power-sharing arrangement. Membership on committees will be equal, but Democrats will be in charge and will have the ability to force nominations and bills to the floor without constantly relying upon Vice President Harris to break the tie. A new organizational resolution embodying the deal should be passed later today.

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If you send Google a court order that finds certain online material to be libelous, Google will consider “deindexing” that material—essentially making it disappear from Google search results. The order wouldn’t legally bind Google (American court orders gotten against a particular defendant don’t bind third parties who aren’t in league with the defendant); but Google will often choose to act on it, on the theory that a court has determined that the material is false and defamatory. To my knowledge, Google doesn’t do the same for expungement orders, but people sometimes submit those orders to Google in any event.

But any successful system breeds parasites—here, attempts to procure such court orders fraudulently, or even using forgery (see this forthcoming article). Last week, a criminal complaint was filed in New Hampshire against Heidi L. Holt as to one alleged forgery:

And here is the alleged forgery (though you can see it more clearly here):

The alleged forgery was submitted to Google with a deindexing request for these pages:

https://ift.tt/2YJyn2Q
https://ift.tt/3pKYNNz
https://ift.tt/3cEfaYS [note that this article mentioned Holt only in passing as part of an arrest blotter, unrelated to the headline, and the newspaper has by now apparently removed her name]
https://ift.tt/36G97z1
https://ift.tt/3oGfKHX

Holt is charged with forgery and with tampering with public records. For similar cases from past years, see here, here, here, and here.

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Fittingly for someone who spent more than three decades as a member of the U.S. Senate, President Joe Biden holds the so-called world’s greatest deliberative body in high regard.

Biden calls the Senate his “second home” in his 2007 memoir and, as that metaphor suggests, it is often obvious that the relationship is about more than just a physical place. Biden sees the Senate—with its arcane rules and combative but dignified atmosphere—as the embodiment of what government should aspire to be. When Biden stresses that Americans must learn to disagree without disrespecting one another, as he did in his inaugural address, he’s drawing on the ethos of the Senate. “Unity requires you to eliminate the vitriol, make anything you disagree with about the other person’s personality. We have to get rid of that,” Biden said last month.

But when it comes to passing one of the new president’s first major policy initiatives, Senate Democrats are already looking for a divisive shortcut. As part of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, Biden is asking lawmakers to also pass a massive increase in the federal minimum wage—hiking it to $15 per hour from the current rate of $7.25 per hour. It’s both ironic and telling that doing so might require effectively abolishing an arcane rule that’s intended to encourage debate.

No, I’m not talking about the filibuster, though Democrats may eventually decide to do away with the rule that requires a supermajority of 60 votes to cut off debate and bring a bill to a final vote. Instead, they’re turning to an even less well-understood Senate rule: reconciliation.

Reconciliation was invented in 1974 when Congress rewrote its rules for passing budgets. It’s intended to allow Congress to quickly make changes to existing laws governing federal revenue and spending by limiting how long legislators can debate bills filed under the reconciliation process. In effect, it creates a way for a simple majority in the Senate to pass budget bills in certain circumstances without allowing the minority to hold up the process with the threat of a filibuster.

According to the Congressional Research Service, a think tank housed within Congress, the reconciliation process has been used 25 times. You may recall that Republicans recently used reconciliation to get the 2017 tax cuts through the Senate and that they tried (unsuccessfully) to use the process to repeal Obamacare.

Here’s where it gets extra confusing. To use this special filibuster-bypassing loophole, a bill must pass a multi-step test known as the “Byrd rule”—named for the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D–W.Va.), who invented the test as a way to limit the use of the reconciliation process.

Whether a bill comports with the Byrd rule is up to exactly one person: Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who is more or less an unelected mage responsible for interpreting the Senate’s rules and adjudicating disputes over them.

In order to clear the Byrd rule, and thus be eligible to be passed with a simple majority as opposed to 60 votes, a piece of legislation cannot contain elements that are ruled extraneous to the federal budget. There are other aspects of the Byrd rule banning legislation that inflates the long-term federal budget deficit (which is why the 2017 tax bill contained a bunch of gimmicky promises about future tax hikes) and prohibiting any changes to Social Security, but the budget mandate is the key issue at play with the proposed minimum wage increase.

Most aspects of Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill would be eligible for passage under reconciliation. Boosting emergency spending or offering tax breaks to offset individuals’ and businesses’ losses due to the pandemic—regardless of whether they are fiscally smart policies or not—pretty clearly meet the Byrd rule’s threshold.”Bry

But does hiking the federal minimum wage? That’s debatable.

Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) are making a roundabout argument that increasing the federal minimum wage can be done via reconciliation because it would have some knock-on effect on federal tax revenue. In other words, forcing businesses to pay hourly workers higher wages will translate into higher taxable income for those workers and thus more tax revenue for the government. Additionally, the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, argues that a $15 federal minimum wage would decrease dependence on federal welfare programs by at least $13 billion annually.

But approaching the Byrd rule in that manner makes it effectively null and void. In strokes that broad, any major change to federal policy could have knock-on effects that impact tax revenues or future expenditures.

For example, if Biden were to propose that the federal government mandate every household adopt a dog within the next six months, one could argue that the corresponding uptick in demand for dog food and chew toys would force businesses that produce those products to hire more workers, and that hiring (and paying) more workers would impact federal tax revenue down the road. You might even be able to argue that the resulting increase in happiness would reduce future government health care expenditures (or perhaps that it would increase them since dog owners statistically live longer).

All those things might be true, but that wouldn’t make the Puppy Mandate of 2021 directly linked to the federal budget in a way that the reconciliation rules were crafted to allow.

But wait, there’s one more wrinkle—because this is the Senate and nothing is ever straightforward. If MacDonough rules that the minimum wage hike can’t be passed via reconciliation, the Senate can still overrule her decision.

Doing so would require a supermajority of 60 votes, so that’s probably not feasible—unless Vice President Kamala Harris, in her role as president of the Senate, unilaterally acts to overrule MacDonough. That’s never been done before, but The New York Times notes that it is technically allowed under Senate rules.

For now, this whole debate could be somewhat moot. Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) says he won’t support a $15 national minimum wage. Instead, he’s proposing to hike the minimum wage to $11 per hour. And if Democrats can’t get unified support from all 50 of their members on this issue, then the reconciliation route is useless.

All of this procedural analysis ignores the strong policy-based arguments against raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour across the entire country. Including that wage hike in what is ostensibly a COVID-19 relief bill, as Reason‘s Billy Binion pointed out last week, is particularly bizarre since many businesses that would be subject to the higher labor costs are just struggling to keep their doors open right now. The Biden administration is touting a Congressional Budget Office report showing that a $15 national minimum wage would lift about 1 million workers out of poverty, but it is conveniently downplaying the fact that the same study says the change would eliminate 1.3 million jobs.

It’s certainly possible that Democrats will ignore that and try to ram the higher minimum wage—either $15 per hour or $11 per hour—through Congress using reconciliation. “We’re not going to take ‘no’ for an answer” is how Sanders described the effort to CNBC last week.

If so, we could be treated to the spectacle of the Biden administration’s second-in-command unilaterally overturning the Senate’s rules in an unprecedented way that virtually guarantees the Byrd rule no longer serves as a significant impediment to passing any legislation via the reconciliation process—and doing it so a controversial policy change can be implemented with the support, maybe, of just 50 senators plus the vice president.

After preaching about the value of unity and promising to end an era of political norm-breaking, that would be a heck of a way for Biden to demonstrate that he doesn’t much care about any of those things.

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According to reports, the new Biden administration and our allies in NATO are inclined to break the agreement to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by May. The change in direction is attributed to recent violence in the country, but almost 20 years into this forever war, it’s obvious that there will always be enough turbulence in the region to justify intervention for those who want it. With the U.S. military presence at a tantalizingly low level after two decades of fighting, ignoring the withdrawal deadline threatens to become a missed opportunity for cutting our losses and trying something different.

Since many of the troops now serving in Afghanistan were born after the U.S. invaded the country, it’s worth pointing out that the intervention was a response to the Taliban regime’s support of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Taliban was formally deposed by the end of 2001 and replaced by a nominally democratic, western-allied government. But the new rulers appear incapable of holding power without outside support and the fighting has never ended.

“Although almost exactly a year ago the United States entered with some fanfare into a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, peace talks between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban have so far yielded few substantive results,” the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s 50th quarterly report to Congress noted just last week. “There has been no cease-fire agreement and high levels of insurgent and extremist violence continued in Afghanistan this quarter despite repeated pleas from senior U.S. and international officials to reduce violence in an effort to advance the peace process.”

As a result, a NATO official told Reuters that “conditions have not been met. And with the new U.S. administration, there will be tweaks in the policy, the sense of hasty withdrawal which was prevalent will be addressed and we could see a much more calculated exit strategy.”

The Biden administration had earlier promised “to review the February 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement” negotiated by the Trump administration with an eye to halting or reversing the Trump administration’s draw-down of troops to the lowest levels since the 2001 invasion. The new president will “assess whether the Taliban was living up to its commitments to cut ties with terrorist groups, to reduce violence in Afghanistan, and to engage in meaningful negotiations with the Afghan government and other stakeholders.”

The Department of Defense appears to have already made a decision.

“The Taliban have not met their commitments,” Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby announced on January 28. “Without them meeting our commitments to renounce terrorism and to stop the violent attacks on the Afghan National security forces and by dint of that the Afghan people, it’s very hard to see a specific way forward for the negotiated settlement.”

But we’ve been here before. Eight years after the initial invasion of Afghanistan, the Obama administration deployed tens of thousands of new troops to the country as part of an overall increase of the American presence. As vice president at the time, Joe Biden vowed, “we will leave in 2014.” Instead, then-President Obama kept troops in place and even expanded their authority to fight the Taliban.

Almost five years later, 20 years into the invasion, after thousands of U.S. military and over 100,000 civilian casualties, there’s still no convincing plan to turn Afghanistan into a stable and peaceful country. Maybe it’s time to try a different approach.

“There has been growing public interest in rethinking the U.S. role in the world,” RAND Corporation analysts noted in a recent and very timely report. “Under one option, a realist grand strategy of restraint, the United States would adopt a more cooperative approach toward other powers, reduce the size of its military and forward military presence, and end or renegotiate some of its security commitments.”

The RAND report discusses some specific recommendations for leaving Afghanistan no matter the country’s continuing turbulence. Despite early hopes to the contrary, it points out, “advocates of restraint have long accepted that the Taliban will play an important role in the future of Afghanistan.” One cited expert with that opinion is John Glaser, the Cato Institute’s director of foreign policy studies.

“Even as America announces her impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, she still helplessly clings to the very fantasies that have kept her bogged down in this quagmire for nearly 20 years,” Glaser wrote last March. “We have not remade Afghan politics. We have not established a stable, democratic, independent government in Kabul. We have not defeated the Taliban.”

“Exiting the war should be the priority, regardless of conditions on the ground,” Glaser adds.

Importantly, the RAND analysts don’t discuss restraint only in relation to Afghanistan, but as part of a big overall shift away from military intervention. While the arguments for restrained foreign policy predate recent events, they’ve become more urgent as “the United States is facing several national security challenges at the same time that the federal budget is under pressure because of public health and infrastructure crises.”

That is, the forever war in Afghanistan may be an especially pressing example of the case for reducing America’s expensive—in lives and money—military commitments. But the same arguments apply to dealings in other regions and with other conflicts, and these arguments “have taken on new urgency because of the direct costs and broader economic effects of responding” to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Undoubtedly, it’s frustrating for policymakers to concede defeat and walk away from messes partially of their own making. But two decades of failure should be evidence enough that an approach won’t work—especially when it was first attempted at a time of greater resources than are now available.

The U.S. and its allies have a deal in place for, finally, getting out of Afghanistan. After 20 years of intervening without remaking the place, it’s time for the U.S. to cut its losses and leave the country’s people to decide their own fate.

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Milwaukee police officers left a 4-year-old girl in an impounded car overnight after arresting the girl’s mother on suspicion of drunk driving. On Tuesday, lawyers for the family filed a lawsuit against the city and the police sergeant of Milwaukee, as well as five officers involved in the incident, which occurred in November 2018.

Police had responded to a call about a minivan pulled over on the side of the road and wound up taking the girl’s mom into custody. The girl, identified by the initials F.K., was sleeping in the back of the van—and her aunt told police this, the suit against the city claims.

But police ordered the aunt (who had also been in the vehicle) to leave the car and did not bother checking for the child, according to the girl’s lawyers. Instead, the officers—who did not have their body cameras turned on—let the vehicle be towed to a nearby impound lot, on a night where the temperature dropped below freezing.

The girl was discovered the next day when someone working in a nearby tow lot heard her “very upset and crying,” said Jeff Polenske, a city engineer, at a press conference about the incident. She was taken to a local hospital emergency room.

Polenske added that city protocols for impounded vehicles were being reviewed. Not checking the car apparently went against city protocol, which says Milwaukee cops must “thoroughly” search a vehicle at the scene before it is towed and that the city tow lot operator should also inspect the vehicle.

The girl’s mother was criminally prosecuted for child neglect and driving under the influence and sentenced to 10 months in prison. She was also ordered to have no contact with her children. Local news reports at the time portrayed the girl’s abandonment in the vehicle overnight as the mother’s fault.

Heading to a hearing this afternoon for the Mom whose 4-y/o daughter was left in a freezing minivan overnight at the #Milwaukee tow lot. Blair Springfield was arrested and charged with DUI and child neglect for the Nov. 12th incident and a similar one in Sept. #WISN12 at 5. pic.twitter.com/bzfDnOZB1f

— Nick Bohr (@NickBohrWISN) November 27, 2018

Two Milwaukee police officers received suspensions over the incident. James Collins—one of five officers named as defendants in the lawsuit, along with Fabian Garcia, Antonio Dorsey, Emily Markert, and David Paszkiewicz—was suspended for 25 days, according to TMJ4 Milwaukee. Garcia was suspended for 10 days.

“Collins was the same officer involved in the controversial arrest of Sterling Brown, the former Milwaukee Bucks player,” notes TMJ4. The city wound up paying $750,000 to Brown, who was tased by police responding to a report that Brown was parked illegally.

FREE MINDS

Texas police accidentally sent out an Amber Alert featuring a Chucky doll. Chucky was described as a 3’1″, 16-pound, 28-year-old male “wielding a huge kitchen knife” who was suspected of abducting a 5-year-old, 6-pound male named Glen—a character who in the Chucky universe is Chucky’s son.

“While the alert appeared to be a mistake, it was sent out via email three separate times to subscribers of the Texas Alerts System Friday morning,” noted San Antonio news station KENS5.

KENS 5 reached out to DPS, the agency that manages the alert system, for comment and received this response:

“This alert is a result of a test malfunction. We apologize for the confusion this may have caused and are diligently working to ensure this does not happen again.”

FREE MARKETS

Remote working will outlast the pandemic, predicts Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, noting that constraints on remote work’s popularity have long been more social or cultural than technological.

According to the economist David Autor, remote work suffered from a “telephone problem.” Seven decades after the first telephone was patented in the 1860s, fewer than half of Americans owned one. Behavior dragged behind technology, because most families had no use for a telecom machine as long as none of their friends also owned one. In network theory, this is known as Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a communications network rises exponentially with the number of its users.

The same has been true of remote work. In 2018, it was weird and rude to ask a boss to move a meeting to Skype, or to tell a business partner to fire up a Zoom link because you can’t make lunch. The teleconference tech existed, but it was considered an ersatz substitute for the normal course of business.

“The most important outcome of the pandemic wasn’t that it taught you how to use Zoom, but rather that it forced everybody else to use Zoom,” Autor told me. “We all leapfrogged over the coordination problem at the exact same time.” Meetings, business lunches, work trips—all these things will still happen in the after world. But nobody will forget the lesson we were all just forced to learn: Telecommunications doesn’t have to be the perfect substitute for in-person meetings, as long as it’s mostly good enough. For the most part, remote work just works.

All of this could have huge implications for not just where people choose to live but politics and the distribution of employment opportunities, too, which Thompson teases out in his piece. One particularly interesting tidbit:

According to U-Haul’s annual review, California lost more people to out-migration than any other state in 2020, and the five largest states in the Northeast—New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland—joined California in the top 10 losers. Rents have fallen fastest in “pricey coastal cities,” including San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York City, according to Apartment List. Zillow data also show that home values in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., are growing below the national average.

States seeing the most one-way U-Haul truck rentals to them during the pandemic were Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia.

“California ranks last by a wide margin, supplanting Illinois as the state with the greatest net loss of U-Haul trucks,” the company reports. “California has ranked 48th or lower since 2016. Illinois has been 49th or 50th since 2015, when U-Haul began ranking states based on annual net gain.”

QUICK HITS

• “Atomization and sentimentality exacerbate each other, after all: you break the bridges of connection across society, and then give each island a fairy tale about its uniqueness.” The New Yorker looks at Joan Didion’s newest collection of (old) essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean.

• Santa Clara University law student and researcher Jess Miers explores “must carry” laws related to Section 230, including the new Protecting Constitutional Rights from Online Platform Censorship Act. “The overall point of these ‘must-carry’ reforms remains the same: websites must-carry any and all First Amendment protected speech. It sounds great in theory, especially for zealous speech advocates. But in practice, it’s a boon for online trolls.”

• “Transgression has been replaced by trauma as the cultural concept of the hour: making rules rather than breaking them has become the signature aesthetic move,” writes feminist author Laura Kipnis in the new journal Liberties.

• A resolution introduced in the Rhode Island House of Representatives last week would create a study commission to study the criminalization of commercial sex.

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2/3/1812: Justice Joseph Story takes oath.

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