Month: March 2021

Are you sitting down? Well, maybe you shouldn’t be, given the risks posed by America’s stock of dangerously unregulated furniture. A new bill in Congress aims to prevent deaths from tipped-over dressers.

“The furniture industry has been allowed to self-regulate for too long—and with tragic consequences, as a child is injured by tipped furniture every 17 minutes,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) in a press release promoting the Stop Tip-overs of Unstable, Risky Dressers on Youth (STURDY) Act. “As kids spend more time at home due to the pandemic, unanchored or top-heavy furniture poses a greater than ever risk.”

Sens. Blumenthal, Bob Casey (D–Penn.), and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) introduced the STURDY Act last Thursday. The legislation would require the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to develop more rigorous standards for dressers and other free-standing “clothing storage units” to prevent them from tipping over.

Deaths from falling furniture have attracted increased attention recently. According to the CPSC, which has released a series of reports on these incidents, 571 people, including 451 children, have died in the last 20 years from accidents involving unstable TVs, furniture, and appliances.

Most of these fatalities involved either falling TVs or falling furniture. Incidents involving only a tipped-over dresser or bureau, the subject of the STURDY Act, have produced 115 deaths in two decades.

“The nation’s furniture tip-over epidemic is particularly insidious because the danger is all around us, inside our homes—unless parents, grandparents, and other caregivers use special kits to strap or anchor furniture to wall,” wrote Consumer Reports in its 2018 investigation of the topic.

In that investigation, Consumer Reports conducted tip-over tests on 17 commercially available dressers. They found that nine of these dressers could fall over when a 50-pound weight was hung from the open top drawer. Only five dressers managed to withstand a 60-pound weight being hung from an open top drawer. (The idea was to simulate a child pulling on the front of a dresser.)

Blumenthal’s bill would require dressers and other “clothing storage units” to undergo similar simulations of a 60-pound child pulling on the dresser, as well as other real-world uses that could result in tip-over. It would also require new warning requirements to inform consumers of the danger of these collapsing cabinets.

The STURDY Act was first introduced in 2019. It passed the House but never made it through the Senate.

That same year ASTM International, an organization that develops voluntary technical standards for testing materials and products, revised its dresser stability standard to cover clothing storage units as short as 27 inches. The old standards covered only dressers that were 30 inches or taller.

The American Home Furnishings Alliance (AHFA) has raised a number of issues with the STURDY Act, saying the vague language in the bill would give furniture makers and sellers no clear guidance on how to comply with the new rules. The group also suggested several amendments to the bill, including a proposal that its requirements be limited to products intended for children.

Every preventable death is a tragedy, particularly when the victim is a child. It is nevertheless worth noting that approximately five of the 50 million children in the U.S. under the age of 12 die each year from falling furniture, according to a 2020 CPSC report.

The costs of the new regulations would meanwhile be borne by millions of consumers, including those who don’t have children. Four of the five dressers that withstood Consumer Reports’ 60-pound test cost more than $500. All dressers that cost less than $100 failed the 60-pound test.

A $150, 30-inch-tall dresser from IKEA did pass the 60-pound test, prompting Consumer Reports to say this proves that “a stable, affordable dresser at this height is possible.” But if such a dresser already exists on the marketplace, regulations mandating it into existence are unnecessary. The primary effect of stricter rules would be to eliminate the cheapest products. Would safety be ill-served by allowing childless adults on a budget to continue to purchase those?

Parents concerned about rickety dressers also have the option of securing furniture to the walls with straps and furniture anchors. Since 2015, the CPSC has run an “Anchor It!” educational campaign to encourage parents to do just that. Given the rarity of deaths from wobbly wardrobes and the existence of safe, affordable alternatives, it would be wise for legislators to shelf their STURDY Act proposal.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3bRfv8r
via IFTTT

In America, “judgment” remains the sharply dominant spelling, by a factor of more than 10 to 1. The divide was even greater before about 2010:

(The graph shows the ratio of uses of “judgement” divided by the uses of “judgment,” and it’s under 10%.) The divide is likewise stark in American legal sources; a quick Westlaw search over the last week reported 2800 cases mentioning “judgment” and 72 “judgement.”

Curiously, in England, “judgement” has recently become a pretty common variant, being used for a few decades at at least half the rate of “judgment” (so that, of uses of both, a third are with the extra “e”).

I suspect that makes both standard in normal British English (I can’t speak to British legalese), much as “grey” and “gray” are both standard equivalents. But that’s only in Britain; in America, “judgment,” unusually spelled as it may be, is the dominant form, and using the spelling “judgement” is particularly likely to be seen as a mistake.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/380EEwd
via IFTTT

President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill took its first major step toward passage over the weekend. But political circumstances and the current state of the pandemic suggest that Congress ought to reconsider this approach.

In comments to reporters on Saturday, Biden urged the Senate to take “quick action” to pass the bill after the House of Representatives passed it in the early morning hours that same day.

“We have no time to waste,” Biden said, according to a pool report. “If we act now decisively, quickly, and boldly, we can finally get ahead of this virus. We can finally get our economy moving again. And the people of this country have suffered far too much for too long. We need to relieve that suffering.”

Biden has been pushing this message since before he was inaugurated—the basic framework of this $1.9 trillion stimulus bill was announced in early January. He and congressional Democrats have touted the package as an urgently needed response to a still-out-of-control pandemic, a necessary step to getting schools reopened, and a way to help jobless Americans make ends meet until a full recovery is achieved.

That message is at odds with much of the bill itself, which is larded up with things like an increase to the federal minimum wage, funding for a new subway in San Jose, California, and billions of dollars in supposedly urgent school funding that wouldn’t actually be used for years to come. About $312 billion of the bill’s overall spending has nothing to do with the pandemic at all, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), including changes to tax credit programs for parents and an expansion of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance subsidies.

The package would also spend about $500 billion bailing out state and local governments, far in excess of what would repair COVID-19 budget holes. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, estimates that states and local governments need about $100 billion in direct aid, while the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, has called for $225 billion in aid. Part of the discrepancy is due to the fact that the Biden plan was built around the assumption that state budgets would be facing an 8 percent decline in revenue this year. The Wall Street Journal reports that state tax revenue declined by a mere 1.6 percent instead.

Beyond all that, a clear-eyed assessment of how the federal government should respond to COVID-19 in March 2021 must also take into account the fact that the pandemic is clearly ebbing. This weekend saw new daily records for vaccinations and the approval of a third vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration, a development that promises even more vaccine supply in the weeks and months ahead. New cases, current hospitalizations, and daily deaths have fallen to levels not seen in months. It’s not over yet, of course, but the current situation seems significantly different from where things stood in early January.

Senate Democrats appear willing to make some changes to the bill before putting it up for a vote. The much-discussed minimum wage increase is likely to be removed now that Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has ruled that the wage hike could not be passed with a simple majority via the reconciliation process. Meanwhile, CNBC reported on Monday that Senate Democrats are abandoning plans to include a backdoor minimum wage hike that could have been accomplished by revoking tax breaks from businesses that pay workers less than $15 per hour.

It’s good to remove a job-killing proposal that’s completely unrelated to the pandemic. Still, more could be done. Given current economic and COVID trends, Congress could revisit a smaller, bipartisan proposal that Democratic leaders rejected in early February for being insufficiently expensive. That earlier plan would have spent about $618 billion, with the funding focused on direct payments to many Americans, expanded unemployment benefits, and money aimed at reopening schools.

Now Rep. Peter Meijer (R–Mich.) is touting a revamped version of that proposal as the Direct Dollars Over Government Excess (DOGE) plan. (Yes, it’s named for that dog meme.) Meijer contrasts it with the Biden bill, which he calls a “grab bag of gifts for special interests.”

Meijer’s plan would send direct payments of up to $2,400 to individuals who earned less than $50,000 last year and households that earned less than $100,000. That’s $1,000 more per person than the Biden plan would provide, but with payments phasing out at lower levels. The DOGE plan would also extend the boosted federal unemployment payments of $200 per week (down from the current level of $300 per week and Biden’s proposal of $400 per week) through the end of July.

Meijer says his proposal would cost about $992 billion. That means removing the chaff from the House-passed relief bill could save as much as $1 trillion from being added to the national debt—and every little bit helps, considering that COVID-19 emergency spending has already added about $3.3 trillion to the deficit, according to the CRFB.

Needless to say, Senate Democrats are unlikely to seriously consider any alternative to the House-passed bill at this stage. We’re likely instead to see some much more modest tinkering, after which the Senate will send the Biden plan back to the House, which will then pass the new version and send it to the president’s desk.

And you can expect that to happen pretty quickly now. The longer Congress delays, the more apparent it will become that the need for a major bill has evaporated.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2PjmQG5
via IFTTT

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) has reintroduced a bill to end qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that makes it difficult for the public to hold government officials accountable for alleged misconduct.

Former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) originally unveiled the Ending Qualified Immunity Act in June 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. Pressley signed on as cosponsor a few days after, though the bill died without ever receiving a vote.

The Ending Qualified Immunity Act of 2021, which Sens. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) are cosponsoring in the Senate, endeavors to do the exact same thing as its predecessor: abolish qualified immunity for all state actors.

The American public maintains the right to sue civil servants who violate their rights under Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code. But the Supreme Court has radically limited that right over the years. First, there was the decision in Pierson v. Ray (1967), which held that public officials may avoid civil suits if constitutional violations were made in “good faith.” In Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), the high court took that a step further: Victims may not sue state actors for misbehavior unless that misbehavior was “clearly established” in previous case law.

In other words, in order to have the right to bring a case before a jury, a plaintiff must be able to point to a court precedent that explicitly describes the situation in question to a tee. Qualified immunity has protected two cops who stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant, a cop who damaged a man’s eye after allegedly kneeing him 20 to 30 times after he had been subdued, a prison guard who hid while an inmate raped a nurse, two cops who beat and arrested a man for standing outside of his house, a cop who ruined a man’s vehicle during a bogus drug search, a cop who shot a 10-year-old, and a cop who shot a 15-year-old.

In all of those cases, the victims were left with no avenue for recompense.

“It is the sense of the Congress that we must correct the erroneous interpretation” of Section 1983, the bill says, “and reiterate the standard found on the face of the statute, which does not limit liability on the basis of a defendant’s good faith beliefs or on the basis that the right was not ‘clearly established’ at the time of the violation.”

The Supreme Court has demurred at the opportunity to fundamentally reevaluate the doctrine. But it has started to send messages to the lower courts that the current application of qualified immunity no longer cuts it. In November, it overturned an appeals court decision that awarded qualified immunity to a group of correctional officers who forced a naked inmate into two deplorable cells, one teeming with sewage and the other with “massive amounts” of human feces. And just last month, it reversed another appeals court decision that gave qualified immunity to a prison guard who had pepper-sprayed an inmate without provocation.

Lawmakers are poised to vote soon on the Justice in Policing Act, a reform bill that would end qualified immunity for cops. Pressley’s bill eliminates it for all public officials—a relevant tidbit, when considering that the last two SCOTUS decisions on the issue pertained to correctional officers, not police officers. Moderate Democrats have begun backing away from that provision, however, in some cases because they face tough re-election challenges and want support from police unions.

Meanwhile, the GOP has largely resisted such reforms. Sen. Mike Braun (R–Ind.) did introduce a bill last summer that would have effectively paralyzed qualified immunity, but he abandoned it after scuffling with Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Amash’s bill only boasted one Republican cosponsor, Rep. Tom McClintock (R–Calif.).

But the American public is on board. The majority of the country supports reform, with high-profile attempts gaining steam. Citing Reason‘s reporting on the issue, players from the NFL, MLB, and NBA urged Congress to support Amash’s bill last June.

One big hurdle at the time was then-President Donald Trump, who said that qualified immunity reform would merit an automatic veto. Will President Joe Biden, who has said that he isn’t ready to end the doctrine, be any better? His national press secretary told me during the campaign that he wants to see it “severely reined in.” He did not provide details as to what that meant.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3b4kmE0
via IFTTT