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President Trump gave a series of interviews with Bob Woodward. Today, the Washington Post published some excerpts concerning the Supreme Court. Most of what Trump told Woodward is standard fare–he repeats the same points over and over again. There were a few new tidbits.

First, Woodward baits Trump by suggesting a statue of him should be built outside the Supreme Court:

Still, remaking the bench with conservatives is one of Trump’s key accomplishments, so much so that Woodward responded with a joke: “Maybe they’ll put a statue of you outside the Supreme Court.”

The president took to the suggestion instantly. “Oh, what a good idea,” Trump said. “I think I’ll have it erected tomorrow. What a great idea. I’ll think I’ll use it.”

But, Trump added, “I won’t say it came from me.”

Woodward is a good reporter. Woodward stroked Trump’s ego so Trump would say something outlandish. And nothing strokes his ego more than statues. Woodward succeeded. I recently watched All the President’s Men for the first time. (It is on HBO Max). Robert Redford captured Woodward well.

Second, Woodward asked Trump about the fact that President Carter had zero appointments. Trump relied, “He deserved none.” The Democrats had 61 seats during Carter’s first term and 59 seats during his second term. Imagine if White or Brennan or Marshall had retired early? Or if Douglas had stuck it out one more year?

It is remarkable how fickle life tenure is. In Trump’s first time, he will make three nominations. Obama had two in his first term, and zero in his second term. W. Bush had zero in his first term, and two back-to-back in his second year. Clinton had two in his first time, zero in his second term. H.W. Bush had two in his first term, and no second term. Reagan had one in his first term, and three in his second term. Carter had zero. Ford had one. Nixon had four in his first term. Had he served a full second term, in theory, he would have had the chance to replace William O. Douglas.

If Trump is able to confirm someone before inauguration day, he will have three appointments in his first term–second to only Nixon in the modern era. Of course, Presidents used to have many more. Eisenhower and Truman had five. FDR had nine. Harding had four. Taft had six. (Can you even name two of them?) Lincoln had five, but he was working with ten seats. (Too soon?). Jackson had six. And of course, GW, the OG, had eleven nominations (if you include John Rutledge’s recess appointment).

Third, Trump “keeps a list of judicial appointment orders displayed, prop-like, on the Resolute Desk — ‘kind of like he was cherishing it.'”

Fourth, Woodward tried to bait Trump on Bostock. Woodward was hoping Trump would criticize Justice Gorsuch, or say something homophobic. Nope:

Woodward also asked Trump about Gorsuch leading the court in a landmark decision on LGBT rights in June, when it ruled against the administration in offering sweeping protections for gay and transgender people against workplace discrimination.

When Woodward noted Gorsuch voted “against your administration’s position,” the president seemed to accept the decision, saying, “Yeah, but this is the way he felt. And, you know, I want people to go the way they feel.”

What a remarkable statement. After thousands of hours of vetting the short list, Trump says meh. “I want people to go the way they feel.” Forget textualism or originalism. Trump favors feelism.

Still, Trump lamented that the ruling “opens the spigots for a lot of litigation.”

He doesn’t say what those spigots are. Presumably, he is referring to the Title IX litigation. I doubt the Equal Rights Amendment litigation is on his radar. Keep an eye on those cases, post-Bostock.

Woodward asked whether Trump would have joined the Bostock majority. What a bizarre question. Again, Woodward was trying to bait Trump. Trump didn’t take the bait.

When Woodward said he believed that Trump might have joined the majority decision if he were on the court in favor of “more freedom,” the president considered the idea, before saying, “Well, I’ll never get that vote.”

Woodward tried to bait Trump one more time with flattery:

“Well, maybe you can appoint yourself,” Woodward joked.

“I am what’s good for the people,” Trump responded. “All people. So, you know, that’s where I am.”

After four years, I still cannot tell if Trump is toying with reporters, knowing they will blow up everything he says out of context.

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9/21/1981: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is confirmed by the Senate, 99-0.

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Occupational licensing reform had another big, bipartisan year in state capitols—but no state cut more red tape than Florida. On the last day of June, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the most sweeping occupational licensing reform bill in modern U.S. history. House Bill 1193 loosened or abolished rules governing more than 30 different professions, including cosmetologists, interior designers, and boxing referees. Once the law is in effect, thousands of Floridians will no longer have to jump through bureaucratic hoops in order to earn a living.

They won’t have to fear the licensing cops either. In 2017, Heather Kokesch Del Castillo was threatened with hundreds of dollars in fines and up to a year in prison when Florida bureaucrats busted her for the crime of giving dietary advice without a license. Florida’s new law specifies that people may provide “information…or advice concerning nutrition” without a license as long as they don’t advertise themselves as medical professionals and as long as the services are not offered to individuals under the direct care of a physician.

The same law also allows barbers and cosmetologists licensed in other states to move to Florida and immediately get to work without going through a lengthy and unnecessary relicensing process. The previous requirement served no purpose other than limiting competition, since barbers do not forget how to safely cut hair when they move across state lines. Thankfully, these “reciprocation” reforms are growing in popularity.

The bill also repealed the occupational licensing requirement for interior designers. Florida had been “one of only six states to license the occupation,” the Institute for Justice, which in 2009 sued over the requirement, said in a press release. “The required license has been replaced with a simpler registration requirement that allows registrants to offer more services.”

Florida isn’t alone. On July 6, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) signed into law a measure allowing workers with an out-of-state license in more than a dozen professions to obtain Missouri’s equivalent without starting from scratch. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature passed and Gov. Tom Wolf (D) signed a bill that strikes down the state’s vague “good character” provisions that often blocked people with criminal records from getting permission to work. Under the new law, licensing boards will be able to block applicants who have been convicted of crimes related to the field in which they wish to work, but they won’t be able to use irrelevant offenses from many years ago as justifications for denying licenses.

Even after the recent spate of bipartisan licensing reforms, many unnecessary, onerous rules are still on the books across the country. State lawmakers everywhere should aim to match—or exceed—Florida’s example.

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Former Bridgeport, Conn., police chief Armando “A.J.” Perez and David Dunn, the city’s acting personnel director, are facing federal charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and making false statements to investigators. Prosecutors say the two men rigged the police chief’s exam two years ago to make sure Perez got the post. They say Dunn gave Perez exam materials, including the oral examination questions. They also say Perez had two other police officers take the written exam for him. Dunn also rigged the grading criteria to favor Perez. Perez resigned hours after his arrest.

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In this month’s issue, we draw on decades of Reason journalism about policing and criminal justice to make practical suggestions about how to use the momentum of this summer’s tumultuous protests productively. Check out Damon Root on abolishing qualified immunity, Peter Suderman on busting the police unions, Jacob Sullum on ending the war on drugs, Sally Satel on rethinking crisis response, Zuri Davis on restricting asset forfeiture, C.J. Ciaramella on regulating use of force, Jonathan Blanks on stopping overpolicing, Stephen Davies on defunding the police, and Nick Gillespie interviewing former Reasoner Radley Balko on police militarization.

“We pay attention when a sports hero gets roughed up or when a video camera films a beating. What happens during the thousands of routine interactions between the police and average folks?”
Rick Henderson
“L.A., Lawless”
May 1991

There’s an emerging consensus within the broad police reform movement in the United States that the proliferation of body-worn police cameras—the most significant legacy of the last round of protests against police violence—has been more or less a failed experiment. The complaints about violent, high-handed police conduct that sent protestors into the streets in 2015 had largely not been remedied by the end of 2019, although the number of officers wearing cameras skyrocketed during the same period.

Studies backed up what residents of overpoliced communities experienced anecdotally: Cops wearing expensive new cameras weren’t any less violent, on the whole, than they had been before. The Axon camera clipped to Derek Chauvin’s chest certainly didn’t stop him from choking George Floyd to death in Minneapolis this summer.

So today, as the loudest voices are calling for a burn-it-all-and-start-over approach to criminal justice, it’s tough to make the case that body cams are still a crucial part of the solution to police misconduct. But giving up on making cops record themselves would be a mistake for reform advocates.

Police reform measures can be grouped into two broad categories: those that aim to prevent misconduct on the front end and those that aim to ensure accountability when it does occur. Of course, there’s some circularity there—we hope that more accountability will mean less misconduct to begin with. But writing off body cameras as a failed policy makes sense only if you assume their purpose is preventive.

It’s understandable to think this way. After all, the huge expenditures required to implement body-cam programs were largely sold to taxpayers with the very promise that’s been shown false—that knowing they were on camera would make officers behave better.

But the real value of cameras comes on the back end. Even if they don’t stop misbehavior in the first place, cameras change the accountability playing field in important ways. The fact that those most likely to suffer from misconduct are often unreliable witnesses or unsympathetic victims—criminal suspects, homeless people, people with mental illnesses, and so on—has long stymied even good-faith efforts to hold police officers accountable for mistreating members of the public. When allegations come down to a credibility contest, judges, juries, police commanders, and others are often unwilling to credit the word of such victims over that of an officer who denies the wrongdoing.

Preserving the tech is important because legal changes alone can’t solve this problem. Even ending qualified immunity—a kind of holy grail for police accountability advocates—won’t help much if civil rights plaintiffs have no objective evidence to refute an officer’s self-serving account of his actions.

Right now, the policy infrastructure around police cameras is largely built on the assumption that their main use is deterrence. Since that model has failed, it’s time to reimagine the cameras as tools to maximize transparency and accountability.

To do this, public access to footage should be radically expanded. Governments should insist, as a condition of continued funding for camera programs, that police release footage on demand to, at minimum, the people it depicts. At present, many states don’t require police departments to release body camera footage in response to freedom of information requests, even when legitimate interests such as privacy and witness safety aren’t implicated. (I learned this the hard way back in 2018 when, as a Reason intern, I took a suburban Virginia police department to court over its denial of my request for footage of an alleged excessive force incident—and lost.) Such restrictions serve no legitimate purpose when the people depicted in the footage have consented to its release, and they hamper both watchdog efforts and academic research.

The agencies that already exist to hold police officers accountable for their actions should also be more aggressive about preemptively reviewing body cam footage for misconduct. Internal affairs departments, civilian review boards, and prosecutors’ offices should have unrestricted access to footage, and these entities should conduct regular audits for compliance with recording policies and other departmental rules, such as use-of-force regulations and requirements to behave courteously. Local governments could also require that departments conduct random audits of their own. Some departments already do this, but several—including problem departments like those in Ferguson, Missouri, and Mesa, Arizona—either don’t bother or explicitly forbid the practice.

For any of this to work, departments must require officers to keep the cameras on and unobstructed any time they’re interacting with a member of the public. They also need to get serious about enforcing those policies. Current penalties for violations are often weak or nonexistent. The handful of “reform” or “progressive” prosecutors who’ve been elected lately, in part on promises of greater police accountability, could help by systematically declining to prosecute people arrested by officers who were supposed to be recording but weren’t.

Body cams make it possible for watchdogs and police leadership to address officer misconduct. But there’s a more basic reason to keep pushing for more cameras and greater access to footage. True transparency and freedom of information mean we don’t need a special reason to find out what the government is up to. The police work for all of us. We have every right to know what they’re doing in our names.

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9/20/1968: The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission denied a certificate of no exterior effect to the Penn Central Transportation Co. The Supreme Court found that the City of New York did not violate the Takings Clause in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York (1978).

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