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The Supreme Court today ruled that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra violated the First Amendment by demanding that all charitable organizations operating in the state disclose information about their major donors. Given the potential chilling effect on freedom of association and the state’s weak justification for demanding donor information, Chief Justice John Roberts says in the majority opinion, California’s regulation fails to satisfy “exacting scrutiny,” the standard that the Court has applied in other compelled disclosure cases.

The decision vindicates a principle that the Court recognized 63 years ago in NAACP v. Alabama, which involved that state’s demand for the civil rights organization’s membership lists. In that case, the Court noted that such requirements can pose a grave threat to freedom of association, exposing supporters of controversial organizations to the risk of harassment, threats, and violence. “Compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [other] forms of governmental action,” the justices observed in 1958.

Advocacy groups that objected to California’s nosiness argued that it posed a similar danger, and the Court agreed. “The Attorney General’s disclosure requirement imposes a widespread burden on donors’ associational rights,” Roberts writes in an opinion that was joined in most respects by five other justices. “And this burden cannot be justified on the ground that the regime is narrowly tailored to investigating charitable wrongdoing, or that the State’s interest in administrative convenience is sufficiently important. We therefore hold that the up-front collection of [donor information] is facially unconstitutional, because it fails exacting scrutiny in ‘a substantial number of its applications…judged in relation to [its] plainly legitimate sweep.'”

California has for many years officially required that nonprofit groups, as a condition of raising money in the state, submit both IRS Form 990, which includes information about a tax-exempt organization’s mission, leadership, and finances, and Schedule B of Form 990, which lists the names and addresses of individuals who have donated more than $5,000 to the organization in a given tax year. But California did not begin enforcing the latter requirement in earnest until 2010.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center refused to comply, arguing that the disclosure requirement was inconsistent with the First Amendment. A federal judge agreed, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed that decision and upheld the Schedule B requirement. The two groups, joined by a remarkably diverse array of nonprofit organizations spanning a wide range of interests and political viewpoints, asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 9th Circuit’s decision.

Roberts’ majority opinion says the 9th Circuit erred by failing to require that California’s regulation be “narrowly tailored” to serve a compelling government interest—in this case, prevention of charitable fraud. “There is a dramatic mismatch…between the interest that the Attorney General seeks to promote and the disclosure regime that he has implemented in service of that end,” Roberts says, noting that more than 100,000 charitable organizations are registered in California and that 60,000 renew their registrations each year.

“Given the amount and sensitivity of this information harvested by the State, one would expect Schedule B collection to form an integral part of California’s fraud detection efforts,” Roberts says. “It does not. To the contrary, the record amply supports the District Court’s finding that there was not ‘a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a Schedule B did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory or enforcement efforts.'” Should the attorney general decide to investigate a particular organization, Roberts notes, he can always obtain donor information via a subpoena or audit letter.

“California casts a dragnet for sensitive donor information from tens of thousands of charities each year, even though that information will become relevant in only a small number of cases involving filed complaints,” the Court says. “California does not rely on Schedule Bs to initiate investigations, and in all events, there are multiple alternative mechanisms through which the Attorney General can obtain Schedule B information after initiating an investigation. The need for up-front collection is particularly dubious given that California—one of only three States to impose such a requirement—did not rigorously enforce the disclosure obligation until 2010.”

Fears about the consequences of such compelled disclosure are hardly fanciful. The petitioners “introduced evidence that they and their supporters have been subjected to bomb threats, protests, stalking, and physical violence,” Roberts notes. In that context, it is rational to worry that major donors could face similar reprisals, a prospect that might deter them from supporting groups that promote causes they favor.

Compounding that concern, California has been amazingly lax in protecting the donor information it collects, which is supposed to be confidential but in practice is not. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation “identified nearly 2,000 confidential Schedule Bs that had been inadvertently posted to the Attorney General’s website, including dozens that were found the day before trial,” Roberts notes. “One of the Foundation’s expert witnesses also discovered that he was able to access hundreds of thousands of confidential documents on the website simply by changing a digit in the URL. The court found after trial that ‘the amount of careless mistakes made by the Attorney General’s Registry is shocking.’ And although California subsequently codified a policy prohibiting disclosure…the court determined that ‘[d]onors and potential donors would be reasonably justified in a fear of disclosure given such a context’ of past breaches.”

Roberts says “the gravity of the privacy concerns in this context is further underscored by the filings of hundreds of organizations as amici curiae in support of the petitioners.” Those organizations (which include this website’s publisher, the Reason Foundation) “span the ideological spectrum, and indeed the full range of human endeavors: from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Proposition 8 Legal Defense Fund; from the Council on American-Islamic Relations to the Zionist Organization of America; from Feeding America–Eastern Wisconsin to PBS Reno.” Roberts adds that “the deterrent effect feared by these organizations is real and pervasive, even if their concerns are not shared by every single charity operating or raising funds in California.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, faults the majority for deeming California’s requirement facially unconstitutional rather than limiting its analysis to organizations that can demonstrate a well-grounded fear of reprisals. “The same scrutiny the Court applied when NAACP members in the Jim Crow South did not want to disclose their membership for fear of reprisals and violence now applies equally in the case of donors only too happy to publicize their names across the websites and walls of the organizations they support,” she writes.

Sotomayor concedes “there is no question that petitioners have shown that their donors reasonably fear reprisals if their identities are publicly exposed,” although she questions “the likelihood of that happening.” If the Court “had simply granted as-applied relief to petitioners based on its reading of the facts,” she says, “I would be sympathetic, although my own views diverge.” Instead, she argues, “the Court jettisons completely the longstanding requirement that plaintiffs demonstrate an actual First Amendment burden before the Court will subject government action to close scrutiny.”

The Institute for Justice, which backed the petitioners in this case, takes a different view. “Today’s ruling reaffirms vital protections for the rights of privacy and association,” says Institute for Justice senior attorney Paul Sherman. “California required tens of thousands of charities to disclose their most sensitive donor information and then mishandled that confidential information so badly that it was easily available to anyone with an internet connection. The Court correctly recognized what a grave threat this requirement posed to the rights of free speech and association.”

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The state of Pennsylvania has agreed to pay $475,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a man run over by a bulldozer as he was being chased by Pennsylvania State Police. The police had caught Gregory Longenecker growing a handful of marijuana plants on public land. He fled into some dense bushes, and police used a Pennsylvania Game Commission bulldozer to chase him. His body was found beneath the treads of the bulldozer.

Two former mortuary technicians of the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner face federal charges of fraud. Prosecutors say they took credit and debit cards from dead people and made thousands of dollars of purchases. Willie Garcon is accused of using cards from multiple dead people to buy $6,500 worth of items, including plane tickets to Florida. Charles McFadgen allegedly used five dead people’s credit cards to buy $13,500 worth of goods, mostly from CVS stores.

Male students at Brauer College, a public school in Australia that serves grades 7–12, were required to stand during a recent assembly and apologize to female classmates “for the behaviors of their gender that have hurt or offended girls and women,” according to Jane Boyle, the school’s principal. Some parents said they were angry that their sons were forced to apologize for things they did not do. “In retrospect, while well-intended, we recognize that this part of the assembly was inappropriate,” said Boyle.

Salisbury, North Carolina, police officer James Hampton has resigned after a local TV station broadcast video of him lifting his K-9 partner by the leash, slamming the dog into the side of a patrol car, and hitting the dog.

In England, an employment tribunal has ruled that Nuffield Health discriminated against fitness instructor Ali Burton on the basis of her disability. Burton’s disability is a phobia of bodily fluids, including sweat. Burton said she became anxious when a supervisor asked her to pick up some sweaty towels. She said that when she refused, he told her to put on some gloves and pick them up. When she still refused, she said he mocked her by picking them up, holding his arms out, and putting them in the bin.

Bodycam video footage showed several Seattle police officers waking Howard McCay from a nap in his home and ordering him at gunpoint to lift his shirt up to show he had no weapons on his person. Then the officers ordered him to kneel on the floor with his hands on his head, where they handcuffed him. McCay hadn’t done anything wrong. Someone had seen the door to his house open and called 911 for a welfare check. McCay has since filed a lawsuit against the city.

Peel Public Health in Ontario, Canada, has advised parents whose children must quarantine because of at-school exposure to COVID-19 to keep them almost entirely confined to a separate room apart from the rest of the family for 14 days. Other health care experts warned these guidelines are impractical and could cause psycho-logical trauma to any child forced to abide by them.

The Florida Highway Patrol has recommended that prosecutors rescind a $166 ticket issued to a driver who crashed trying to avoid a sofa in the road. The driver was traveling on I-95 when the sofa fell off a truck in front of her vehicle. The driver swerved to avoid the sofa, and her vehicle hit the median and overturned. A trooper ticketed the driver for failure to drive within a single lane.

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On June 6, Peruvians voted in a presidential runoff between Pedro Castillo, a previously obscure teachers union leader with a neo-Marxist agenda, and Keiko Fujimori, a former congresswoman and daughter of former-president-turned-dictator Alberto Fujimori.

Although Castillo won the official count with 50.1 percent of the total—by a margin of just 44,000 votes—Fujimori has tried to have around 200,000 ballots invalidated. Her efforts to overturn the election’s result, however, are likely to fail. If anything, Fujimori’s desperate tactics, which have elicited comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud to justify his 2020 electoral defeat, have lent credence to Castillo’s claims that he faces a political establishment that is not only corrupt—Keiko Fujimori spent time in jail due to a notorious corruption scandal—but also clings to power by any means necessary.

The battle in Peru is no longer about who won the election; it’s about preserving the country’s constitution. Drafted in 1993, the current constitution underpins the free market policies that helped the country reduce its poverty rate by roughly one-half, nearly triple its per capita income, and even slash inequality (as measured by a 12-percentage-point reduction in the Gini coefficient between 1998 and 2019). As Ian Vásquez and Ivan Alonso write for the Cato Institute, during the last decades, “Peruvians have experienced dramatic and widely shared improvements in well-being.”

Peru’s economic success is a rather new development. As recently as August 1990, the country experienced a 397 percent monthly inflation rate. Previously, dictator Juan Velasco Alvarado, a military officer who led a coup d’état in 1968, had nationalized key industries, creating state monopolies in oil and mining, fisheries, and food production, among other key sectors. He also expropriated large tracts of land and severely restricted imports, all according to a five-year plan of national production. Economists César Martinelli and Marco Vega argue that Velasco Alvarado’s statist program cost Peru “sizable losses” in economic growth during two decades, leading to the hyperstagflation of the late 1980s.

Once in power, Alberto Fujimori, who won the presidential election in 1990, took drastic measures to stabilize prices, mainly by restricting the money supply and government deficits. Meanwhile, he deregulated markets and shrank the state’s size by privatizing state-owned companies.

The 1993 constitution strengthened Fujimori’s free market reforms, but it was approved a year after the infamous self-coup or “fujimorazo,” when the strongman dissolved the legislative branch, where opposition parties held a majority, and ruled by decree until he had a new, pro-government Congress elected. Nevertheless, since Fujimori’s resignation and subsequent impeachment in 2000, a series of democratically elected governments have upheld the constitution. In fact, Peru’s Supreme Court tried and sentenced Fujimori for human rights abuses during the war against the Shining Path, a communist guerrilla group, under the existing constitutional framework.

Today, the constitution is the only obstacle in the way of President-elect Castillo’s party platform, which praises Vladimir Lenin and Fidel Castro while promising a back-to-the-past agenda of nationalizing the mining sector and other major industries, expropriating land, and getting rid of Peru’s successful private pension system, which administers approximately USD $40.7 billion in citizens’ savings. Much like Velasco Alvarado, who nationalized news media companies, Castillo’s “Free Peru” party plans to “regulate” the press, claiming that a “muckraking” media is “fatal” to democracy.

The Peruvian Constitution, however, declares private property—including that held legally by foreigners—to be inviolable. It also guarantees free enterprise, foreign investment, market-based competition, and press freedom. Tellingly, Castillo’s “Free Peru” party calls for a new constitution to replace the one in place, which it rejects as “individualist, mercantilist, privatizing, and defeatist” in the face of foreign interests.

Since the election, both Castillo and his allies have insisted on the supposed need to summon a new constitutional assembly once they are in power. However, certain elements in the current Congress, which was elected in 2016 and whose term ends on July 26, have acted to protect the constitution. On June 23, the Constitutional Commission issued a verdict—which still has to be approved by a plenary session—stating that the executive could not use a defeat in a no-confidence vote, which allows the president to dissolve Congress, to carry out constitutional reforms. This method was suggested by Castillo’s political mentor, Vladimir Cerrón, a Cuba-trained doctor who was forced to resign as governor of the Junín province due to a criminal conviction.

According to a recent poll, 77 percent of Peruvians are against doing away with the current constitution. As YouTuber Mirko Vidal remarks, this suggests that a good portion of Castillo’s vote wasn’t pro-Marxist as much as anti-Fujimori.

It remains to be seen whether Peru’s institutions can withstand Castillo’s certain onslaught once he is in power. It would be no surprise if he tried to get rid of term limits, a classic recipe of 21st century socialists such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, caudillos who, like Alberto Fujimori, won an election and changed the rules of the game so as to hold on to power. Another similarity with Chávez and Morales is Castillo’s blend of anti-capitalist dogma with a strong sense of social conservatism; he opposes same-sex marriage, a “gender-focus” in education, and large-scale immigration. Repeatedly, he has promised to expel all illegal immigrants—meaning many of the 1 million Venezuelans who arrived in the country as they fled from Chavista socialism—just 72 hours after taking office. While these stances are electorally savvy, they make Castillo an odd bedfellow of the foreign progressives who praise him with titles such as son of the soil.

Although Castillo is not yet in office, his electoral success has already dented Peru’s economy and its financial markets. The day after his election, the sol, Peru’s currency, sank to its lowest historical level against the U.S. dollar, while Lima’s main stock market index dropped more than 7 percent. As the market opened on June 30, the iShares MSCI Peru ETF, which tracks the country’s underlying index and is heavily weighted toward the copper mining sector, was down more than 20 percent since April 8, three days before the first round of voting. JPMorgan warned about possible capital flight from Peru if Castillo is confirmed as president, but one Miami-based wealth manager noted “significant outflows [of money] from the country” even before the June 6 runoff.

The press has noticed how the Lima elite has begun to withdraw its money from Peru, but this is a familiar story. When Marxists came to power in both Cuba and Venezuela, the rich were the first to remove their assets before emigrating themselves. Under socialism, it’s only a matter of time before the middle class is stricken and, eventually, the desperate masses follow in their wake.

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Donald Rumsfeld is dead at age 88 of multiple myeloma. He held many positions of power and respect in American institutions public and private over the past six decades, including naval aviator in the 1950s, Illinois representative in Congress in the 1960s, ambassador to NATO and chief of the wage-and-price-control-imposing Cost of Living Council under President Richard Nixon, and both chief of staff and secretary of defense to President Gerald Ford in the 1970s. In the private sector, he worked in senior management in companies including pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle (1977–85) and electronics firm General Instrument (1990–93).

But Rumsfeld’s most intense impact on his country and world history, and what he will doubtless be remembered for when all the other details have faded, was his role as secretary of defense under President George W. Bush when the U.S. launched its wars against Afghanistan beginning in earnest in October 2001 and against Iraq starting in March 2003 that overthrew its dictator Saddam Hussein; that war alone left over 4,000 U.S. troops dead and over 31,000 wounded in action.

The War in Afghanistan, 20 years on, is perhaps finally sputtering to a close with little gained and much lost. The Iraq invasion also happened in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the U.S., but Iraq had nothing to do with that. Intervention was justified with rumors of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were said to represent some threat to the U.S., but Rumsfeld was well aware we didn’t really know whether they existed or not, and it seems after all they did not.

Rumsfeld already had placed his reputational weight before 9/11 behind the idea that the U.S. must do something to keep various imagined international foes from getting or having the sort of weapons we had, with the 1998 Rumsfeld Report. Rumsfeld was at least honest enough eventually to be doubtful about whether imposing the precious gift of democracy was a reasonable or worthwhile goal for invading. The invading was to be its own reward when neither WMDs nor democracy was a legitimate reason or excuse, in showing the world’s bad guys they can expect the U.S. to go through any amount of trouble to topple them.

Attempts to topple bad guys in the Rumsfeldian spirit have continued to generate chaos and death in the Middle East ever since. Militias from Iraq, the nation Rumsfeld felt it necessary to ruin at nearly any cost, are inspiring the Biden administration to blow things up and kill people in the Middle East even to the week of Rumsfeld’s passing.

Rumsfeld was intelligent enough to realize about a year in that the U.S. military occupation would take a long time, yet he believed that domestic critiques of his war policies were dangerous to the “ability of free societies to persevere.”

After the GOP’s bruising in the 2006 midterms, Bush finally let Rumsfeld go (though Rumsfeld insisted he tried to resign over the embarrassment of publicity surrounding abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.) While Rumsfeld always purported to be proud of his role in Congress as a co-sponsor and advocate of the original Freedom of Information Act in 1966, he tried along with his old associate then-Vice President Dick Cheney to keep some of the darker facts about U.S. shameful behavior at Abu Ghraib hidden.

Long after departing office, Rumsfeld remained unrepentant and belligerent about the U.S.’s past and future roles on the world stage, and in a Republican context that then had to pay lip service to spending, he insisted that spending on war and preparation for conflict didn’t count.

Rumsfeld was a major figure in the expansion of American wealth and reputation toward war and instruments of war, from his 1970s days in the Ford administration as a voice for new nuclear weapons systems and against arms reduction talks through Iraq and beyond. He never had serious second thoughts in public, and despite the cost in lives and civilization to Iraq over the past decades, he always believed it was the right thing to do, despite likely costs of nearly $6 trillion before the lifespan of those we sent to fight it are over, and 134,000 dead Iraqi civilians.

Like most human beings, Rumsfeld had human qualities that made some admire, appreciate, or love him, including famously helping the wounded into ambulances at the Pentagon on 9/11. In the end, it’s not his fault that a position like “secretary of defense of the United States” and its concomitant power to command lives, technology, and wealth toward personal and civilizational destruction and misery exist, and better or worse men in certain terms may have done better or worse things with that office’s awful power. But it is worth remembering as he passes just how badly things can go when a man has that power, even a man with elements of conventional decency.

Bonus: Check out Reason‘s Nick Gillespie’s illuminating interview with Errol Morris, who made a revealing documentary about Rumsfeld:

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First Amendment protects right of social media companies to boot politicians. Florida’s controversial and authoritarian new social media law has been temporarily blocked by a federal court. The measure—championed and signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May—bans large social media providers from deplatforming political candidates, beginning July 1.

It also prohibits social media providers from suppressing or prioritizing any information “posted by or about a user” who is a candidate for political office, and from suppressing or adding addendums to posts by a “journalistic enterprise” based on the outlet’s content. Those that violate this directive would face fines of up to $250,000 per day (though some of Florida’s favored companies, like Disney, are exempted from the law).

On Wednesday, Judge Robert L. Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida ruled that the law violated the First Amendment.

Florida’s assertion that it is on the side of the First Amendment “is perhaps a nice sound bite,” wrote Hinkle. “But the assertion is wholly at odds with accepted constitutional principles.” 

“The legislation compels providers to host speech that violates their standards—speech they otherwise would not host—and forbids providers from speaking as they otherwise would,” noted Hinkle in his decision. Moreover, “the Governor’s signing statement and numerous remarks of legislators show rather clearly that the legislation is viewpoint-based.”

The social media measure also runs up against provisions of the federal communications law Section 230, which—as Hinkle points out—”expressly prohibits imposition of liability on an interactive computer service—this includes a social-media provider—for action taken in good faith to restrict access to material the service finds objectionable.” 

The judge granted a preliminary injunction against the law, as requested by tech industry associations NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, and ordered the state to “take no steps to enforce” the portions of the law that violate the First Amendment or are preempted by Section 230.

“The legislation now at issue was an effort to rein in social-media providers deemed too large and too liberal,” concluded Hinkle. But “balancing the exchange of ideas among private speakers is not a legitimate governmental interest.”

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FREE MINDS

How Trump lost 2020. An interesting and detailed new report from Pew Research Center dissects the demographics of the 2020 election. “A number of factors determined the composition of the 2020 electorate and explain how it delivered Biden a victory,” notes Pew. “Among those who voted for Clinton and Trump in 2016, similar shares of each – about nine-in-ten – also turned out in 2020, and the vast majority remained loyal to the same party in the 2020 presidential contest.”

Trump did gain in 2020 among women and among Hispanics. But this was offset by Biden’s gains among men, suburban voters, and white non-college-educated voters.

The juxtaposition saw a significant narrowing last year of the voting gender gap seen in 2016:

Biden made gains with men, while Trump improved among women, narrowing the gender gap. The gender gap in the 2020 election was narrower than it had been in 2016, both because of gains that Biden made among men and because of gains Trump made among women. In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points. Trump won a slightly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).

Last year’s election also saw boomers and older voters become a minority:

After decades of constituting the majority of voters, Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation made up less than half of the electorate in 2020 (44%), falling below the 52% they constituted in both 2016 and 2018. Gen Z and Millennial voters favored Biden over Trump by margins of about 20 points, while Gen Xers and Boomers were more evenly split in their preferences. Gen Z voters, those ages 23 and younger, constituted 8% of the electorate, while Millennials and Gen Xers made up 47% of 2020 voters.

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FREE MARKETS

Amazon wants Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan recused. The new FTC head has been a very vocal critic of Amazon in the past, including publicly opining that the company is “guilty of antitrust violations and should be broken up.” In a motion filed Wednesday, Amazon suggests there’s no way Khan can or will be impartial in any antitrust probes into the company.

An Amazon spokesperson, Jack Evans, told CNBC that while “Amazon should be scrutinized along with all large organizations,” it still has “the right to an impartial investigation,” and “Khan’s body of work and public statements demonstrate that she has prejudged the outcome of matters the FTC may examine during her term and, under established law, preclude her from participating in such matters.”

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QUICK HITS

• Ask Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward anything—today on Reddit at 3 p.m!

• The Trump Organization and its chief financial officer have been indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan. “The specific charges against the company and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, were not immediately clear,” The New York Times reports. The indictment is slated to be unsealed later today, after Trump Organization lawyers and CFO Allen H. Weisselberg appear in court.

• Dysfunction inside Vice President Kamala Harris’ office: “In interviews, 22 current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden described a tense and at times dour office atmosphere,” reports Politico. “Ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out. Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.”

• Why aren’t people looking for jobs? In a new survey from job search site Indeed, 25 percent of out-of-work folks without college degrees cited COVID-19 concerns, 20 percent said they had enough financial cushion for now, 20 percent said child care precluded it, and 12 percent said unemployment insurance made it unnecessary.

• The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Biden administration over the transfer to ICE of people being detained at a New Jersey jail.

• Matt Taibbi and Jane Coaston debate the power of Fox News.

• Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have instituted asymmetric criminalization of prostitution.

• Bill Cosby is being released from prison:

BREAKING: PA Supreme Court overturns Bill Cosby's conviction. Orders his release.https://t.co/eQat6K1nhD pic.twitter.com/BFhcm92MX5

— Jeremy Roebuck (@jeremyrroebuck) June 30, 2021

• Starting today, “Virginia becomes the first state in the South where it’s legal for people 21 and older to possess and grow small amounts of pot.”

• New Orleans and North Carolina are also advancing marijuana decriminalization or medical marijuana legalization measures.

• U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.) is pushing back against South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for allowing private funding of a National Guard deployment. “The one thing we’re going to do on the Armed Services Committee is we’re going to put pressure on the secretary of defense and everyone else to say, ‘This should not be happening. How do we make it stop?'” Smith said on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday.

• D.C.’s city council voted this week to ban the sale of menthol and flavored cigarettes.

• New Mexico stands alone:

Oregon and Washington lift their mask mandates today, leaving federal masking (airports, public transit, healthcare settings) as only place they are required. New Mexico is now the last state with mask mandates.

— Maury Brown (@BizballMaury) June 30, 2021

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If you follow the news, you may be under the impression that nothing ever gets done in Congress, and that Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on any serious legislation. You aren’t alone. Look at the inordinate praise the “bipartisan” infrastructure deal is getting. This widespread wonder highlights the mistaken belief that our awful hyperpartisan era brings about discord and gridlock in Washington. This common refrain is simply wrong.

To be sure, Democrats and Republicans don’t enjoy sharing power or being constrained in how much money they can spend or how far they can extend Uncle Sam’s reach into our lives. It’s a fact that gridlock slows things down. But for those of us who still believe that the government should be smaller and more fiscally responsible, slowing things down is almost always a good thing. It certainly doesn’t stop legislation from passing. How else can one explain the tremendous and rapid expansion of our budget, deficit, and debt?

Congress is always glad to pass legislation when it’s in the members’ interests. Just look at the past few months: Could a gridlocked Congress pass $6 trillion of COVID-19 relief dollars? Much of this took the form of subsidies to companies (that were doing fine) and wealth transfers to people (regardless of whether they incurred any pandemic losses). A bipartisan Congress bailed out airlines three times and sent trillions of dollars to the Small Business Administration to help during the pandemic, despite a long record of the agency always responding during disasters. Both Democrats and Republicans supported these efforts. They weren’t party-line votes.

Bipartisanship in the Senate also produced the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, formerly known as the Endless Frontier Act, “industrial policy” legislation that originally was intended to increase funding for applied industrial research and development but ended up being a very long list of corporate welfare handouts to some of the nation’s largest and most profitable corporations with no strings attached.

We have $28 trillion in debt. Even if you ignore the last year, we didn’t accumulate that much debt on a partisan basis. And we didn’t just accumulate it during emergencies or even mostly through tax cuts. It’s the product of many bipartisan agreements on massive government spending, year after year. That includes trillions in subsidies to farmers, loan guarantees for energy, infrastructure, small businesses, and exports. It includes ever-expanding entitlement programs. And most importantly, it includes willful neglect or a conscious disregard for how to pay for it.

Enter the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Everyone is amazed that Republicans, who refused to support President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill, would be willing to compromise at $1.2 trillion. It must be a serious proposal if all these guys agree, right? No, it’s not. It’s just not as terrible as the bigger plan, though that’s pretty much where the praise should end. You see, a dirty little secret in Washington is that Republicans love big government spending as much as Democrats do.

What they disagree on is the way to pay for it. But once they agreed to simply not pay for it, an agreement was pretty quick to reach. There would be no increase to the corporate income tax to make the GOP happy, in exchange for no increase in the gas tax and no fees on electric cars. Deal!

Meanwhile, there’s still plenty of worthwhile legislation to do that none of them want to touch: Reforming our criminal justice system or the Jones Act isn’t on anyone’s agenda. What about asking this president to end his predecessor’s tariffs? How about working on a comprehensive school choice agenda that would extend the ability to choose what school is best for our kids, rather than being stuck in a failing school system? Nobody’s interested.

What we have today—and have had for years now—is not the product of gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for being good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars. The plain fact is that neither party is working honestly to tackle the nation’s most pressing issues, including our fiscal ones. It’s easier to throw money at problems whether it will help or not, especially when today’s intellectuals have produced a convenient narrative that the debt doesn’t actually matter.

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