Month: May 2017

• The former FBI director, James Comey, will testify in the Senate next week about his meetings with President Trump. Elon Musk says he’ll resign from his White House advisory council posts if Trump withdraws from the Paris climate agreement.
• The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, says the president and a small group of people know “exactly what he meant” by last night’s now deleted “covfefe” tweet.
• CNN has dropped Kathy Griffin from their New Year’s telecast after controversy over a Trump beheading photo. The president said his 11-year-old son Barron Trump was having a hard time with it.
• Speaking at a coding conference in California, Hillary Clinton says she takes responsibility for every decision she made in the presidential campaign, but that Russia was the reason she lost.
• Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte lashed out at Chelsea Clinton after she criticized comments he made that he would defend abuses by his soldiers even if they “raped three women.” Duterte asked if Clinton reacted the same way to allegations about her father, President Bill Clinton.
• Authorities in South Africa warned that protestors were wrong about foreigners being behind child abductions.
• The mayor of Florence says the city will be hosing down church steps to prevent tourists from eating lunch on them.

Yesterday a circuit court judge in Broward County, Florida, sent 41-year-old Christopher Wheeler to jail for 180 days because he wouldn’t give police his iPhone password. Wheeler, who is charged with aggravated child abuse, insisted that he did give them his password. But the cops say the password he provided doesn’t work, and that Wheeler therefore hasn’t complied with their request. This, the judge decided, put him in contempt of court.

Meanwhile, another Florida circuit court judge—this one in Miami-Dade County—issued a rather different ruling in the case of a couple accused of extorting a social media celebrity over a sex tape. They would not be held in contempt of court for failing to share a phone’s password, the judge decided, because there’s no way to prove that they couldn’t remember their password.

These are just the latest episodes in a broader debate about how Fifth Amendment rights apply to a relatively new technology. Do passwords count as “testimonial evidence,” where protections against self-incrimination apply? Or is it more like a field sobriety test or a DNA swab?

Police in both cases were following a precedent set in Sarasota County last year, when the sheriff’s department wanted to compel a man accused of video voyeurism to give them his iPhone passcode. A trial judge had ruled that this would violate the alleged voyeur’s Fifth Amendment rights, declaring that the man could not be forced to surrender “the contents of his mind.” But a state appeals court rejected that reasoning, citing the 1988 Supreme Court decision Doe vs. U.S. That case centered around whether the feds could force a suspect to sign consent forms permitting foreign banks to produce any account records that he may have. In Doe, the justices ruled that the government did have that power, since the forms did not require the defendant to confirm or deny the presence of the records. The Florida court decided that the iPhone case was analogous: The password to the phone and the contents of the phone were separate subjects.

The Sarasota case is now headed to the Florida Supreme Court. Wheeler is appealing his case too, and is expected to be allowed to post bond.

Every day I could bring you another example of how “human trafficking operation” and “sex trafficking sting” are simply police code for “prostitution bust.” The story never changes: Police arrest sex workers or their clients, slap a catchy title on their efforts, call it a win against “modern slavery,” and blast it out to local reporters, who faithfully frame the whole thing exactly how cops want. To the casual reader, it must seem like law enforcement is doing a seriously good job at stopping sexual exploitation. But all they’re really doing is wasting tons of time and taxpayers’ money to stop consenting adults from having sex.

Here’s a stellar new example out of San Diego. “13 Arrested in Human Trafficking Operation,” the local NBC headline declares. What the headline fails to make at all clear is that not a single one of the arrests were on human trafficking charges, nor was a single trafficking victim recovered. Police simply posed as adult women selling sex and then arrested men who wanted to pay them.

Just how many police officers did it take to take down these 13 nonviolent offenders? According to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, more than 75 law enforcement agents participated. The agencies involved included the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Immigration Enforcement and Removal Operations, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the U.S. Marshals Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Internal Revenue Service. (There’s no word on how many immigrants may have been rounded up in the course of the sting.)

The initiative, dubbed “Operation Big Bad John,” also netted some arrests for drug possession. Police seized “more than 17 grams” of crystal meth and a few Ecstasy pills in this “human trafficking operation” as well.

“Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery” and “the biggest human rights violation of our time,” the sheriff’s department stated in a press release about Operation Big Bad John—a standard non sequitur for such faux-social-justice stings. Because really, who wants to quibble over particulars when modern slavery is involved? Cops know they can count on lazy reporters and a public that’s been spoonfed human-trafficking hysteria for years to simply nod along with whatever new (or age-old) bullshit they’re up to under an “anti-slavery” guise.

Senate Republicans aren’t saying much about what’s in their health care bill, but they have made one thing perfectly clear: They have given up on fully repealing Obamacare. That is not an outsider’s view. It is how Republicans themselves are framing the health care legislation that is now working its way through Congress. And it is one of the reasons why Republicans are continuing to struggle with the legislation now that it has been passed on the upper chamber.

Now that the American Health Care Act (AHCA) has passed in the House and moved to the Senate, Republican lawmakers are being blunt about the limited scope of the legislation they are considering.

The Senate, of course, is still working on drafting its own health care plan, which will reportedly differ from the House plan. No legislative language has yet been released, and few specifics have emerged. The policy and political challenges involved in crafting a bill are significant. And some Republicans are already tempering expectations by saying it won’t be a full repeal of Obamacare.

“You can’t repeal it in its entirety,” Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said this week. “You’ve got to have 60 votes and we don’t have 60 votes at this point,” said her Iowa GOP counterpart, Sen. Chuck Grassley. Instead, Ernst said, Republicans have the opportunity to “tinker around the edges.”

These are statements about the limits of Senate procedure as much as it is one about the willingness of Republicans to eliminate the law entirely. The legislative filibuster effectively sets a 60 vote requirement to pass bills in the Senate. That’s why Republicans hope to overhaul the health care law using a procedure known as reconciliation, which allows for legislation to pass on a simple majority vote. But legislation passed via reconciliation must meet certain conditions, including direct relevance to the budget, meaning that some of Obamacare’s regulations are likely to remain in place no matter what.

But these statements also represent admissions that the years of GOP promises to repeal Obamacare will not be fulfilled. The procedural limitations are only one reason why. Party lawmakers have strong disagreements about how or whether to subsidize coverage in the individual market, about the role of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and about the necessity of maintaining the health law’s preexisting conditions regulations.

At this point, then, the goal for Republicans is to rewrite the health care law rather than repeal it, which invariably means leaving in place many of its essential structural elements.

It is not clear, however, what sort of health policy improvements the GOP would actually accomplish through rewriting. The final Congressional Budget Office analysis of the AHCA found that it would result in 23 million fewer people covered a decade from now. That is the exact same coverage decline the CBO projected as under simple repeal. The initial version of the GOP actually covered even fewer people than a straightforward repeal, according to the CBO. Under all versions, premiums would rise sharply between now and the end of the decade, and would continue to rise afterwards, though less than under Obamacare.

Some of this may be attributed to the quirks of CBO’s model, which probably overstates the effect of Obamacare’s insurance mandate on coverage, and thereby exaggerates the effects of eliminating it. Even still, it suggests that the health law rewrites Republicans envision would do little to lower premiums or make coverage more accessible. Republicans would not be repealing Obamacare, in other words, and it’s not clear that they would be improving on it either.

That helps explain why the bill now appears stalled in the Senate. Just last week, GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is usually businesslike in his optimism about the Republican ability to accomplish legislative goals, admitted that he did not know how Senate Republicans would put together the 50 votes necessary to achieve passage.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the bill will stall forever (although it might). The House version of the bill looked dead after a floor vote was called off. And House Republicans had their issues with that bill too. Days before the House voted to pass the American Health Care Act, Rep. Dave Brat, a Freedom Caucus member and Tea Party favorite who ousted Rep. Eric Cantor in a primary challenged, admitted that the AHCA was “not the repeal bill we wanted.” Although Brat opposed an initial version of the legislation, he voted for its eventual passage.

But Brat’s disappointment remains instructive. Given the limitations of the process, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the AHCA was not a bill that any Republican truly wanted. Nor, as McConnell’s comments suggest, is it certain that such a bill could ever exist. Even if the Senate manages to pass something, it will still have to be negotiated with the House, creating more opportunities for disagreement. The only thing Republicans have agreed on about health care over the last eight years is that they want to repeal Obamacare, which they are now admitting they won’t do.

Some Republicans, then, have started to figure out that they aren’t going to fully repeal President Obama’s health care law. But they still haven’t figured out what they want to do—or why—instead.