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President Donald Trump is one of the worst negotiators I have ever seen. One day, he tells House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) that the stimulus talks are over because she insisted on at least a $2 trillion deal and rejected the White House’s offer of $1.6 trillion. The next day, without Pelosi lifting a finger, the president comes back with an offer of nearly $1.9 trillion. Maybe if Pelosi waits, she’ll get her full $2 trillion after all.
Setting the puzzling negotiation tactics aside, this carelessness about American taxpayers’ money is shameful.

I know that everyone is supposedly now a Keynesian, and the refrain inside the D.C. Beltway is that failure to reach yet another so-called stimulus deal would guarantee economic disaster. In spite of evidence that government spending isn’t a miracle cure for the economy and that it’s often a bad investment, many Washington insiders lamented the president calling Pelosi’s bluff by saying that enough was enough and that negotiations were over. Until they weren’t.

So, here we are today. The White House’s new $1.88 trillion offer would reallocate $400 billion of the unspent funds from the previous COVID-19 legislation, for a total cost of about $1.5 trillion. Some Republicans find this apparent surrender by the administration to be incredible, especially because the White House proposal looks almost identical to the Democrats’ bill. As the saying goes, with Republicans like that, who needs Democrats?

Both sides want to send more checks to people. While the spending might not stimulate the economy, there’s no denying that some Americans’ lives will be made easier if they get $1,200 checks. But let’s be honest about this; for some pundits and politicians, sending out these checks isn’t to relieve the pain of a locked-down economy. In fact, many commentators complained that it was a poor political calculation on the president’s part to not send these checks as a preelection gift to voters. Apparently, the president received that message loudly and clearly. The question still unanswered is whether he will also cave and agree to broaden eligibility for a second round to those without Social Security numbers.

As for the rest of the bill, it’s stuffed with programs that promote economic stagnation and even more indebtedness. For instance, both Pelosi and Trump want an unemployment bonus on top of regular unemployment benefits. Pelosi wants to renew the $600 weekly bonus, while Trump wants it to be $400. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the economic impact of each dollar of extended unemployment benefits already extended to Americans since April is roughly 67 cents. The CBO also calculated that if Pelosi’s original $600 benefit were continued, the cost of the bonus plus employment insurance would shrink the economy, due, in part, to disincentives to work.

For the duration of the pandemic, Trump also wants to expand—surely to the delight of Pelosi—the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for people who have lost jobs and hence lost their insurance, to buy insurance through the individual market. Needless to say, many Republicans see this proposal as yet another a betrayal. And they are correct.

They both support another misguided $25 billion airline bailout that will be a waste to taxpayers. They pretend that they want to help airline workers, even though academic research also shows that bailouts benefit mostly shareholders and creditors more than workers. They both want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for state bailouts, too. Pelosi wants over $400 billion for states, cities, and tribal lands, while Trump wants $300 billion. As I’ve argued many times over, bailing out the states would be irresponsible. Why shouldn’t state and local officials have to trim their budgets to adjust to this post-pandemic reality, just like everyone else?

As we prepare to spend many more trillions of dollars in “stimulus,” it’s obvious that Democrats and Trump administration officials resist the reality that the problem with the economy isn’t a lack of demand, so a Keynesian spending bill won’t help much.

Most of the economic issues continue to come from the restrictions on commerce in many states and the fact that consumers are wary of catching or spreading the COVID-19 virus. No level of magical thinking and spending will really boost the economy under these circumstances.

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From People v. Reyes, decided last week by Justice Mark Dwyer (N.Y. trial ct.); seems quite right to me:

Defendant Luis Reyes is charged with Burglary in the Second Degree and related offenses. Defendant moves to preclude trial testimony stemming from the use of facial identification software to identify the perpetrator of the crime in question. Not in issue here is that the burglar could be seen in crime scene videos. The case detective was able to recognize defendant as that individual after he examined a police file containing photographs of defendant.

Defendant’s complaint is that the detective retrieved that file because of an earlier “hit” on defendant obtained by analyzing the crime scene videos with facial recognition software. Defendant asks the court to “preclude the People’s use of the results of any use of NYPD’s facial recognition software.” …

For current purposes the court assumes these facts. On September 29, 2019, defendant committed a burglary at 507 West 113th Street in Manhattan, entering a mail room there to steal packages. Defendant’s actions were recorded by security cameras. The detective assigned to lead the investigation obtained the videos. He made stills from them and sent those stills to the NYPD Facial Identification Section (“FIS”) for analysis.

Using facial recognition software, the FIS located a single “possible match”: one of the burglar’s pictures possibly matched defendant’s mug shot. The FIS returned a report to the detective bearing a prominent statement that the “match” was only a lead. The report specified that the match did not create probable cause for an arrest, which could be produced only by further investigation.

The case detective therefore obtained defendant’s police file. In it he found a copy of the same mug shot along with photos depicting defendant’s distinctive forearm tattoos. After studying those photos, the detective again viewed the crime scene videos and recognized that the burglar indeed was defendant.

He next prepared a probable cause I-card bearing three photos of the burglar taken from the crime scene videos—photos which displayed, among other features, his tattoos. The I-card did not include any other picture or defendant’s name. On October 14, 2019, officers recognized defendant from that I-card and arrested him. {[T]he three photos of the burglar that were the key component of the I-card were in no way products of the software analysis of the crime scene videos.} …

“[F]acial recognition” involves the use of software to analyze the front and perhaps side portions of the head of an unknown person, usually as depicted in a photo or a video still. The software measures the location and contours of facial features, including hair. It next compares the results with those for photos of known individuals—photos that are digitally maintained for these comparison purposes—to select any possible “matches.”

The authorities can then investigate whether the individual or individuals in the selected photos could be the unknown person. The results can show, for example, that an applicant for a driver’s license has had licenses under different names.

To the best of this judge’s knowledge, a facial recognition “match” has never been admitted at a New York criminal trial as evidence that an unknown person in one photo is the known person in another. There is no agreement in a relevant community of technological experts that matches are sufficiently reliable to be used in court as identification evidence. Facial recognition analysis thus joins a growing number of scientific and near-scientific techniques that may be used as tools for identifying or eliminating suspects, but that do not produce results admissible at a trial….

Some uses of facial recognition software are controversial. For example, many people fear that employment of such software will erode First Amendment rights by permitting unfriendly officials to identify and take action against those who demonstrate against government policies. That concern is especially pronounced given the ubiquity of security cameras in many big-city areas.

It may well be that legislative action should be taken to curtail the use of facial recognition techniques for such purposes. And this court understands what a “slippery slope” argument is.

The court notes, however, that these and other common concerns about facial recognition techniques seem dramatically divorced from the use of those techniques to develop leads from photographs of people taken as they commit crimes. And such photos are often obtained from private entities, not governmental ones, who employ cameras precisely to secure their safety from criminals.

That is in fact what occurred in this burglary case. No reason appears for the judicial invention of a suppression doctrine in these circumstances. Nor is there any reason for discovery about facial recognition software that was used as a simple trigger for investigation and will presumably not be the basis for testimony at a trial ….

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In 1977, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went to court to defend the rights of American Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors. The ACLU defended the Nazi’s right to march and won the case on First Amendment grounds, but at a high cost: 30,000 members quit the organization in protest.

The Skokie case cemented the image of the ACLU as a principled, absolute defender of free speech. The following year, Ira Glasser would become the organization’s executive director, a position he would hold for the next 23 years while leading the charge against government regulation of content on the Internet, hate speech laws, speech codes on college campuses, and more. Now Glasser is the subject of a new documentary, Mighty Ira, that celebrates his time at the ACLU and his legacy of protecting free speech.

Retired since 2001, Glasser tells Nick Gillespie that in an age of cancel culture and wokeness, he’s worried not just about the future of free expression but the future of the ACLU, too. In 2018, for instance, a leaked memo offered guidelines for case selection that retreated from the ACLU’s longstanding content-neutral stance, citing as a reason to decline a case “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values.”

The 82-year-old Glasser fears that in becoming more political and less absolutist when it comes to defending speech, the ACLU is shrugging off a hard-earned legacy. “There is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement to justice, to help its movement survive,” he says. “[Former Rep.] John Lewis said that without free speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings. That’s historically and politically true without exception.”

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Jacob Sullum (Reason) writes about this question, beginning with:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) was trying to help out Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett when he asked her whether she owns a gun during her confirmation hearing yesterday. But the premise of his question—that gun ownership might be viewed as disqualifying a judge from dealing fairly with cases involving the Second Amendment—could not be more absurd. Here is the relevant exchange:

Graham: When it comes to your personal views about this topic, do you own a gun?

Barrett: We do own a gun.

Graham: OK. All right. Do you think you could fairly decide a [Second Amendment] case even though you own a gun?

Barrett: Yes.

CNN highlighted that exchange in a headline and tweet, noting that “Barrett says she owns a gun, but could fairly judge a case on gun rights.” The Independent also considered the point noteworthy: “Nominee owns a gun, but says she would rule ‘fairly’ on gun control cases.” So did Fox News: “Barrett admits to owning a gun, says she can set aside beliefs to rule on 2nd Amendment fairly.”

Sullum’s analysis strikes me as quite right; a bit obvious, to be sure, but the sort of obvious that people (or at least headline writers) apparently need to be reminded about.

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Trying to sort through the latest developments in the negotiations over another COVID-19 stimulus bill feels a little bit like that childhood logic puzzle in which a farmer is trying to transport a goose, a bag of corn, and a fox across a river in a small boat.

House Democrats have already passed a $3 trillion stimulus bill that’s essentially a grab-bag of progressive agenda items, but Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) absolutely refuses to go along with a stripped-down stimulus bill being pushed by Senate Republicans. Meanwhile, cunning-as-a-fox Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnnell (R–Ky.) says his members will return to the nation’s capital later this week to vote on a $500 billion emergency spending plan. Neither congressional proposal is a perfect fit with the $1.8 trillion package the White House officials are urging Congress to pass in order to goose the economy before the presidential election.

And there’s one more complication that you didn’t hear about as a kid: a hippopotamus is loose in the middle of the river.

At any moment, it might surface and destroy whatever happens to be in the boat right now: Either by announcing that he’s calling off all negotiations until after the election, as President Donald Trump did last week, or by undermining his own team’s official position by urging Congress to “go big or go home,” as President Donald Trump did on Tuesday.

For the moment, all parties involved seem more concerned with blaming someone else for why no one is getting across the river. Pelosi says inconsistent signals from the White House and Republicans’ unwillingness to bail out states and cities are holding up the process.

“This weekend, the Trump administration issued a proposal that amounted to one step forward, two steps back,” Pelosi said in an open letter to her House colleagues on Tuesday. “In fact, in some instances, it makes matters worse.”

McConnell says he’s focused on providing another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provides loans to small and mid-sized businesses that have kept workers on payrolls during the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. Even though there is bipartisan support for providing more PPP funding, McConnell said in a statement on Tuesday, the program has become a “casualty of Democrats’ all-or-nothing obstruction.”

When the Senate returns to session on Monday, McConnell says, it will take up legislation to refill the PPP and provide other “targeted relief to American workers.” The price tag on that bill remains unknown, but will likely be in the neighborhood of the $500 billion plan outlined by Senate Republicans last month.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who has been handling negotiations for the White House, said Wednesday that the prospects of reaching a deal before the election are dimming. “I’d say at this point getting something done before the election and executing on that would be difficult, just given where we are,” Mnuchin told The Washington Post. He’s facing opposition on all sides, as Pelosi has criticized the White House’s proposal for being too small while Senate Republican leaders convened a conference call last weekend to tell the White House it was asking for too much, the Post reported.

You can’t leave the goose alone with the fox or with the bag of corn, of course.

And he has to deal with this, too:

STIMULUS! Go big or go home!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2020

The one thing that no one really seems to be talking about is whether the United States can even afford another massive stimulus bill. The Congressional Budget Office announced this week that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 was a whopping $3.1 trillion—that’s three times larger than the deficit recorded in the previous year. The national debt is as large as the U.S. economy and will continue growing for the foreseeable future.

If there’s any hope for fiscal sanity to be restored any time soon, it may come in the form of Trump’s diminishing prospects for reelection.

“Trump’s current political standing seems to have hurt his ability to persuade Senate Republicans to embrace more deficit spending,” Politico‘s Burgess Everett and John Bresnahan report. “Some on Saturday’s conference call between Senate Republicans, Mnuchin, and [White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows saw the frosty reception for the senior administration officials as a reflection of a party becoming less and less deferential to the president.”

Congress is in the unenviable position of trying to balance the country’s unsteady long-term fiscal status with the still very real threat of a major economic crisis as the pandemic continues to rage. Still, no matter what the final version of the next stimulus bill looks like, getting it across the river might be easier without the hippopotamus.

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