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Last night Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), the loudest GOP critic of President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill, invoked the I-word amidst speculation that Trump might fire Robert Mueller:

We are begging the president not to fire the special counsel. Don’t create a constitutional crisis. Congress cannot preempt such a firing. Our only constitutional remedy is after the fact, through impeachment. No one wants that outcome. Mr. President, please don’t go there.

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) March 20, 2018

Then a funny thing happened: Both left and right crapped all over him.

“Stop begging. Pass a law,” scoffed Tommy Vietor, former National Security Council spokesman in the Obama administration. “It’s right there in the Federalist Papers,” a sarcastic New Republic staffer Jeet Heer seconded. “Congress will be able to check the president by going on its hands and knees, begging for lawful behaviour.”

Things weren’t much friendlier on Team Red. “Sounds more like a Jeff Flake crisis than a constitutional crisis,” snorted commentator Dan Bongino. At The American Spectator, Brandon J. Weichert placed Flake in the “chorus of consternation from so-called congressional conservatives.”

This pattern, curious though it may be, is nothing new. Lefties have been giving Flake the (often inaccurate) too-little-too-late speech since before the 2016 election; conservatives have long called him an immigration softy angling pathetically for media applause. And in a state both passionate and schizophrenic about its politics, Flake has been strikingly unpopular since the beginning of his Senate career.

But there are commonalities, too, with the way people shudder instinctively at other NeverTrumper (or Unfitter) Republicans, including ones not otherwise particularly similar to Flake, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich. So is there a common thread of reaction knitting those two rumored 2020 candidates, along with 2016 fifth-place finisher Evan McMullin, plus Flake’s fellow retiring Sen. Bob Corker and whoever else is fragging the president from the GOP big tent? I would suggest three:

1) Sanctimony is inherently off-putting.

As any quick tour through McMullin’s Twitter feed will reconfirm, the distance between principled, same-party dissent and haughty, portentous flag-waving can be vanishingly short.

“These days,” the Washington Examiner‘s Timothy P. Carney wrote last fall, “I find myself regularly wishing I could make McMullin go away. Like almost every McMullin voter I know, I’m embarrassed by his post-election behavior.”

With his upturned eyebrows and Boy Scout earnestness, Flake draws MANY charges of sanctimoniousness.

2) The center has its own, hypocrisy-generating gravitational pulls.

John Kasich, standard-issue conservative, was a routine expander and defender of gun rights. John Kasich, inexplicable media darling, is now a talking head warning a “dysfunctional Congress” to “wake up” on gun control. It was only one month ago that the transforming pol scrubbed from his website the verbiage, “Gov. John R. Kasich continues to be a strong supporter of the right to bear arms and, as governor, has signed every pro-2nd amendment bill that has crossed his desk to defend this basic, constitutional right.”

Flake, too, has changed his tune on guns, in a more mediagenic direction. He now regrets voting against the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) in 2008. Such repositioning might well be heartfelt, but it also gets rewarded by one of the last repositories of Flake enthusiasm: the national media.

3) Those most passionate about Trump want you to pick a side NOW.

Ask late-night comedians how the ratings look in the center of the road. No, better to troll Mike Pence with children’s books about gay bunny rabbits.

It’s not enough for many Democrats that Jeff Flake urged Republicans not to vote for Trump after he’d already sewn up the nomination, or that he wrote a book against Trumpian conservatism in 2017, or that he wrote a check to Roy Moore’s Democratic opponent in Alabama—he voted for the tax cut, man!

And for the pro-Trump brigades in conservative entertainment, Flake is now indistinguishable from Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer.

The center is not a fun or compelling place to be in American politics right now. There’s a reason why many even diehard Libertarians shuddered at the Gary Johnson/Bill Weld formulation about a supposed six-lane highway down the center of the road. It can feel more cautious than principled, and does not resonate well in the emotional spaces where much of politics is consumed.

But like ideology, emotions in politics can change on a dime. Should the House and Senate switch back to Democratic control after November, there may be a renewed interest on the right in re-fighting the Battle for the Soul of the GOP. Jeff Flake may be hated now, but people might start returning his calls come December.

A California high school teacher was fired for calling American military troops “freaking stupid” and “the lowest of our low.”

The teacher, Gregory Salcido, is also a city council member. At the time he made his controversial remarks, he was talking with his history class at El Rancho High School about why the wars in the Middle East had dragged on. According to a student’s audio recording, Salcido said: “We have a bunch of dumb shits over there. Think about the people who you know who are over there. Your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever. They’re dumb asses. They’re not like high-level thinkers, they’re not academic people, they’re not intellectual people. They’re the lowest of our low.”

The comments quickly went viral, drawing strong rebukes from veterans—including White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired general, who said, “I think the guy ought to go to hell.”

Salcido’s comments were publicized in January. He was placed on leave pending an investigation. This week, he was fired. El Rancho Board of Education President Aurora Villon said, “the classroom should never be a place where students feel that they are picked at, bullied, intimidated.”

But as far as I can tell, Salcido wasn’t bullying any specific member of his classroom. Is he not allowed to criticize the military, and the endless wars our servicemen are forced to fight? Can we not have such a discussion in a high school history classroom without everyone losing thier minds?

Any conservative who makes fun of liberal students demanding safe spaces, but then turns around and says people who question the troops should lose their jobs, is being awfully hypocritical. This controversy is the Mirror Universe twin of the Amy Wax kerfuffle, in which conservatives defended an educator who was accused of saying racially insensitive things, and liberals called for her head. Political correctness afflicts both sides of the political spectrum.

The U.S. Senate just passed one of the worst bills in recent memory, the so-called “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (FOSTA) that cleared the House of Representatives in late February.

This is the measure that would make online prostitution ads a federal crime and decimate Section 230, the federal provision shielding web publishers and platforms from certain legal liabilities for the things that users post. It’s largely portrayed as a response to Backpage, but its reach goes far far beyond that.

“In the absence of Section 230, the internet as we know it would shrivel,” warned Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) from the Senate floor Wednesday. “Civic organizations protecting their right to free speech could be [ruined] by their more powerful political opponents” and “there would be an enormous chilling effect on speech in America.” That’s why big companies like Facebook like efforts like this to weaken it, Wyden added—”because it would pull up the ladder in the tech world” so new companies couldn’t afford to get in.

Wyden stressed that he’s been highly proactive on measures that could actually helps victims of sexual exploitation. But FOSTA “is not going to prevent sex trafficking [and] it’s not going to stop young people from becoming victims,” he noted. In fact, “the legislation before the Senate is going to make it harder, not easier, to root out and prosecute sex traffickers.”

This isn’t just Wyden’s opinion. The Department of Justice has not only called FOSTA unconstitutional; it says the legislation will “create additional elements that prosecutors must prove at trial,” thereby making it harder to get guilty parties convicted.

“You’re heading in the wrong direction if you [pass a bill] that would raise the burden of proof in cases against sex traffickers,” Wyden chastised his colleagues. He was one of two senators today—along with Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)—to vote against the measure.

Another downside: Under FOSTA, any attempts by a website or app to filter out bad content could lead to more legal liability. The only way for companies to stay safe will be to completely give up on content moderation and trying to stop illegal ads from getting through. An amendment to FOSTA, offered by Sen. Wyden, would have closed this loophole, but it was shot down by a large majority.

And we haven’t even touched on the damage FOSTA will do for sex workers, who could lose their ability to find and screen clients electronically, forcing them back onto the streets or into other situations where they’ll be more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. They could also lose the ability to warn each other about dangerous customers on sex-work message boards.

As Alana Massey noted recently at Allure, “these bills target websites that are widely and inaccurately believed to be hubs of trafficking activity when it is precisely those websites that enable people in the sex trades to do their work safely and independently, at the same time as they make it easier for authorities to find and investigate possible trafficking cases.”

In a lengthy Senate floor speech on Monday, bill sponsor Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told a series of whoppers about U.S. sex trafficking, starting with an assertion that “there is a federal law that now permits trafficking online.”

There isn’t. And when it comes to federal law enforcement, Section 230 doesn’t even apply. Without any changes to existing law, those who commit federal crimes such as sex trafficking of children, sex trafficking via force/fraud/coercion, knowingly advertising a victim of trafficking, paying for sex with someone under age 18, forced labor, debt bondage, and all sorts of related activities are fully prosecutable, and Section 230 has nothing to say about it.

In defense of his bill, Portman also cited an increase in the number of “sex trafficking cases” reported to a national hotline run by Polaris Project—an entity that counts any call, text, or email as a “case” of sex trafficking (even though the vast majority are simply requests for information or unsubstantiated “tips”) and that has spent the past decade lobbying for state laws requiring all sorts of businesses to post the number.

But the worst part of Portman’s defense was this attempt at an argument:

Unbelievably, for years, these websites have gotten away with [sex trafficking] because when parents…file a lawsuit for damages to try to stop what is going on, they are told: We are immune. When the prosecutors in these local communities step up and ask: “How could this illegal activity be going on? This is illegal to do on the street corners, certainly it is illegal to do online,” the judges say: We are immune.

And yet, Portman isn’t introducing legislation to hold the street corners—or the government entities who own them—accountable as sex traffickers when prostitution takes place there.

The bright side is that there’s a strong chance this bill will run into trouble in the courts. “Unlike the SAVE Act, which prohibits the knowing advertisement of trafficked sexual services, this statute implicates constitutionally protected speech,” points out Notre Dame law instructor Alex F. Levy. (Read Levy’s guest post at Eric Goldman’s blog for all the legal nitty gritty on why.)

“The challenge for libertarians is to explain to people that you don’t get all the good stuff we like—the Netflixes, the Whole Foods, the Ubers—without having certain free-market and live-and-let-live institutions, ideas, and temperaments in place.”

Today I appeared on Ricochet‘s podcast Michael Graham in the Morning to discuss whether Donald Trump killed libertarianism, if the president’s idiotic push for killing drug dealers will work, and whether there are any principled Republicans or Democrats left. Spoiler alert: Most of my answers involve some variation on the word no.

Go here to listen via iTunes. And go here to stream on Ricochet’s site. My appearance kicks in at 26:40.

And while you’re podcasting out, don’t forget to subscribe to the Reason Podcast, our thrice-weekly audio program featuring a no-holds-barred conversation every Monday with me, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and Peter Suderman (plus exciting guest stars such as this week’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown); interviews with leading politicians, authors, and newsmakers (such as tomorrow’s with Steven Pinker); and downloads of Reason events and talks (such as yesterday’s Soho Forum debate about “rape culture” on college campuses).

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At a time when President Donald Trump, the National Rifle Association, and others on the right are blaming video games for promoting violence—with nary a shred of credible evidence—a new book has leveled a completely different criticism at the gaming industry: “toxic meritocracy.”

According to Christopher Paul, chair of the Department of Communication at Seattle University and author of The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture is the Worst, video games promote individuality, reward skill, and encourage players to do their best in order to win. These are supposedly bad things.

“Games are based on leveling up and getting stronger,” Paul tells Campus Reform. “We expect the most skilled, hardest working player to win. The typical narrative in a game is a rags to riches story where the player propels the character into a key role and perhaps even attains god-like status.”

“All those things shape our expectations and focus players on individuals, rather than the collective,” he added. “As actualized meritocracies, video games quickly become really toxic spaces where players are focused on individual glory, rather than creating positive spaces for interaction.”

Not all is bad, Paul notes, pointing out that games like Mario Kart and Mario Party are more cooperative and based on “luck, contingency, and serendipity,” elements that he hopes game developers will prioritize more in the future.

“Moving away from merit allows communities to be developed on different terms, giving an opportunity to build something else, something new, something that has features other than the endemic toxicity that comes with meritocratic systems,” Paul contends.

Speaking as someone who played a whole lot of Mario Kart and Mario Party growing up (and in college…and as an adult…), I will say that the luck-based elements are sometimes a lot of fun, but they’re also infuriating. In the Mario Party games in particular—where the “luck” aspect can be overwhelming and game-breaking—my play-group often came away thinking, “Well, that was a terrible game.” The mini-game comes to mind where Bowser appears, forces you to pick a random color, and then relieves you of your hard-won coins and stars if you choose wrong.

If that’s your thing, more power to you. Play all the Mario Party you want. But I don’t think it’s “toxic” for more serious gamers to prefer games with clearly defined rules and a skill-based system that rewards good gameplay. Gamer culture has its problems, but promoting meritocracy isn’t one of them.

At least Paul doesn’t want to regulate away the aspects of gaming he doesn’t like. The person who wants to do that is the president of the United States.

In homage to Dad Joke videos everywhere, Reason‘s Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg try their hand at one-liners, cornball punchlines, and “comedy.”

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When Seattle officials claimed that a proposed one-mile streetcar extension would boost ridership by more than 400 percent and would cover half its costs with ticket sales, some ordinarily transit-friendly city council members wondered whether those numbers were too good to be true. They were.

Last week The Seattle Times published a memo by the King County Metro Transit Division, which is contracted to operate the streetcar. The memo says those projected operating costs for the Center City Connector (C3) project were 50 percent below Metro’s estimates. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) concealed Metro’s numbers when shopping around for money from local and federal officials.

“To find out that that information may have been, if not inaccurate, at least disputed—we should have known what these disputes are—is maddening,” Seattle Councilmember Mike O’Brian said at a briefing.

SDOT projected that it would need 70 staff members to operate its streetcar network after the C3 expansion, which would cost it some $16 million a year. Metro calls this a significant underestimate, saying the new streetcar line will need 136 total staff and cost $24 million annually to operate.

On Monday, Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered an independent review of streetcar costs, sidestepping her own transportation department entirely.

The C3 project—which started construction late last year—has had a rocky recent history, repeatedly overshooting cost estimates while coming under fire from city politicians.

In 2014, SDOT released a detailed evaluation report for the C3 project that estimated its capital costs at between $108 and $115 billion in estimated 2017 dollars. A 2015 evaluation by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) pegged the total capital costs at $134.88 million. A year later this was revised upwards again, to $166 million. Now the project is said to cost $177 million.

By 2017, councilmembers were starting to raise doubts about the utility of the new streetcar line and the financial risk it posed to the city.

In June of that year, the council voted to accept the first $50 million of a $75 million grant from the FTA’s Small Starts program on the condition that SDOT come back to the council with a detailed plan of the operating costs in the fall. At that time, SDOT was already working on such a plan for FTA, which it submitted in July without any review from its partner agency, Metro—which, remember, would be the actual agency operating the streetcar.

When Metro got wind of SDOT’s plan, its staff was shocked at how low the budget estimates were. They told the department repeatedly throughout August that it was lowballing the amount of money it would need. According to the memo, these concerns were ignored or waved away.

When it came time to present that report on the operating costs, SDOT submitted the same low estimate to the City Council.

Already SDOT was predicting that ticket fare would cover an incredible 56 percent of the operating costs of its new line, far above what most other streetcar systems in the country manage. New operating cost estimates coming to light make these projections seem even more fanciful.

This is hardly surprising given how often streetcar projects overshoot their budgets and underperform on ridership.

Transit agencies rarely pay a price for missing the mark like this, given the commitment cities have already made by the time the cost overruns start turning up. They don’t want to pull the plug that far into the project, and so the increased costs are passed on to local taxpayers, who are asked to shell out more money or accept reduced services for what is ultimately more of a fashion statement than a real transportation solution.

Legislation aimed at improving background checks for gun buyers, which may be included in a must-pass spending bill that Congress is expected to approve tomorrow or Friday, is facing a surprising amount of resistance for a measure that has broad support among Republicans as well as Democrats and even has the backing of the National Rifle Association. Some of the resistance to the bill, which would encourage data sharing with the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), is tactical. Democrats, perceiving an opportunity to enact broader gun control following last month’s mass shooting at a Florida high school, worry that if the Fix NICS Act passes by itself, Congress will do nothing more. But there are also substantive concerns about Fix NICS that have been raised by supporters of gun rights, who rightly worry that it will help block firearm sales to people who pose no threat to others.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced Fix NICS last November in response to the mass shooting that killed 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The perpetrator of that attack, Devin Kelley, had been convicted by a general court martial of assaulting his wife and stepson while serving in the Air Force, which disqualified him from owning guns under federal law. That record should have prevented Kelley from passing a background check when he bought the rifle he used in the attack, but the Air Force failed to share the information with NICS.

Cornyn’s bill aims to prevent that sort of screw-up by requiring federal agencies to certify twice a year whether they are sharing “all relevant records” with NICS and submit plans for improving compliance. Agencies that fail to follow through on their plans would be ineligible for bonus pay. Fix NICS also would encourage sharing of local and state records, which the federal government cannot directly mandate without running afoul of the 10th Amendment, by giving agencies that demonstrate “substantial compliance” preference for Bureau of Justice Assistance grants.

Fix NICS, which Donald Trump supports and the House approved in December as part of a bill that also would make each state’s concealed-carry permits valid throughout the country, has 76 cosponsors in the Senate, including 32 Republicans. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who has due-process objections to the bill, is not one of them.

Lee argues that the Department of Veterans Affairs wrongly identifies veterans as “mental defectives,” which disqualifies them from gun ownership, when they need help managing their benefits. In a March 18 Townhall essay co-authored by Mark Geist, Lee says about 168,000 veterans have lost their Second Amendment rights as a result of that policy. “Our veterans should not have to worry that their civil rights will be violated if they seek help from the very federal agency that was designed to help them,” Lee and Geist write. Lee favors an amendment “requiring a judge to determine that a person is a danger to [himself] or others, or meets similar criteria, before being labeled a ‘mental defective.'”

Gun Owners of America shares Lee’s concern and raises another objection to Fix NICS. The group notes that current law requires the attorney general to “immediately” correct mistakes when he learns that people have been erroneously included in the NICS database. Fix NICS would give the attorney general 60 days to act, and there are no consequences if he fails to do so.

The broader problem with Fix NICS is that it aims to improve a system that blocks gun sales to people based on criteria that are unfairly and irrationally broad. Those people include millions of Americans who have never shown any violent tendencies. Congress has decreed that any felony, no matter how long ago it was committed and regardless of whether it involved violence, is enough to strip someone of the fundamental right to armed self-defense. So is any record of court-mandated psychiatric treatment, even if the involuntary patient never posed a threat to anyone else; unlawful use of controlled substances, including taking medication prescribed for a relative and smoking pot in states where it’s legal; and living in the United States without the government’s permission, which (contrary to what the president seems to think) is by no means an indicator of violent intent. To the extent that “better” background checks prevent peaceful people from buying firearms, they do not qualify as an improvement.

Former Minneapolis Police Officer Mohamed Noor has now finally been charged with shooting and killing Justine Damond last July after the woman had called the police to report a possible rape.

Noor faces third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter charges. He has turned himself in and has been booked into jail with a $500,000 bail. he faces a potential prison sentence of 25 years.

Damond’s shooting ended up as international news last summer, as she was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia. The case symbolized to the world the trigger-happy behavior we’ve come to see in many American police. The incident took place not long after a jury found a police officer not guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of Philando Castile, also in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

Here’s what officials say happened: Damond called 911 to report somebody possibly being raped our assaulted behind her home last July. Noor and his partner, Matthew Harrity, inspected the alley behind her home in their patrol car. They found nothing, and apparently were backing out of the alley when Damond surprised them in their vehicle by possibly thumping on the car on the driver’s side. Harrity, who was driving, reacted with surprise, and reached for his gun. But Noor apparently beat him to the punch, reached across and shot Damond in the abdomen.

Neither men had their body cameras on at time, but both turned them on immediately after the shooting. Here’s how County Attorney Mike Freeman described Noor’s snap decision to shoot Damond:

Freeman said the investigation of the shooting uncovered no evidence that Noor “encountered, appreciated, investigated or confirmed a threat that justified the decision to use deadly force.”

“Instead, officer Noor recklessly and intentionally fired his handgun from the passenger seat, a location at which he would have been less able than officer Harrity to see and hear events on the other side of the squad car,” Freeman said.

The shooting showed evidence of “a depraved mind,” as the charges are defined, and “culpable negligence,” Freeman said, though he acknowledged that proving that to a jury is “a daunting task.”

It took so long to charge Noor, Freeman explained, because police refused to cooperate with the investigation. Even though he had previously said he would no longer go through secret grand juries to charge police with crimes because he wanted to improve transparency over the process, he said he had no choice this time because police refused to talk. The union responded that the officers were merely advised of their rights. Something to remember next time a police officer asks you questions.

As the Noor prepares for his court appearance, we unfortunately have another questionable police shooting playing out in Sacramento. On Saturday police shot and killed Stephan Clark, 22. Clark was suspected by police of breaking into cars, and officers were responding to a 911 call about it. He fled from police, and when they cornered him, police claim he turned toward them and advanced on them, holding an object in front of him. He was shot 20 times by two police officer. Then it turned out the object he was holding was a cellphone.

The two officers were wearing body cameras and as per city policy enacted in 2016. The footage of the shooting will be eventually released so the public will be able to see the circumstances of Clark’s shooting.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions encouraged federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty “when appropriate” in order to combat the opioid crisis, in a March 20 memo first obtained by NBC. The instructions came a day after President Donald Trump called for capital punishment for some drug offenders.

To combat the opioid crisis, Sessions writes, “federal prosecutors must consider every lawful tool at their disposal,” such as working with the Department of Justice Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit and bringing civil and criminal actions against opioid makers and distributors. U.S. Attorneys should also seek the death penalty when the law allows:

Federal prosecutors have been allowed to seek the death penalty for certain drug offenses since 1994, Politico reports, thanks to a law signed by President Bill Clinton. Yet Politico also reports that no prosecutor has sought death for a federal drug offense in the 24 years since Clinton signed the bill into law, and civil liberties groups argued after Trump’s speech on Monday that the Supreme Court has ruled against using the death penalty in cases where the defendant did not commit murder.

But that makes it a strategically brilliant policy for Sessions and Trump to endorse. Trump said Monday that most big drug dealers do only 30 days or a year in jail (which is not true), and Sessions wants longer sentences for drug offenses, propped up with mandatory minimums. Between the two of them, something like a 15- or 20-year mandatory minimum for importing or dealing illicit fentanyl would probably hit the spot. That would be unlikely to pass the Senate as an opening offer, but it looks a lot more generous when you compare it to executing people. Never mind that the statutes Sessions sites aren’t all that relevant to the opioid debate, which involves more online activity and accidental overdoses than it does armed scuffles over drug turf.

Seeking the death penalty under existing laws, meanwhile, could still net life and de facto life sentences.

By throwing fuel on the fire Trump started, Sessions is priming the chattering class and the media to see single and multi-decade sentences as a humane alternative to execution. Those sentences are more humane, but only when compared to capital punishment. Trump and Sessions have rapidly and unapologetically shifted the Overton Window on drug penalties. With the most barbaric option on the table, punishments that are simply cruel and excessive are destined to seem more tolerable.

You can read Sessions’ entire memo after the jump.