Month: September 2022

The way President Joe Biden tells it, Republicans are already laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 presidential election.

“They’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election-deniers to undermine democracy itself,” Biden warned in an ominous and overtly political speech in Philadelphia last week.

For Biden, former President Donald Trump’s slapdash attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the chaos that some of Trump’s supporters caused at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, are harbingers of what’s to come. “I will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost,” Biden pledged.

In some regards, this worry is a legitimate one. Fealty to Trump and his notions about the results of the 2020 presidential election has become a potent litmus test within the Republican Party. The results of this year’s primary elections have made that much clear.

According to an analysis by data-nerds at FiveThirtyEight, 195 of the 529 GOP candidates running for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state, or attorney general this November have claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump or have taken actions (including filing lawsuits or refusing to certify elections results) that attempted to block Biden’s win. A mere 71 Republican candidates in those same races have said they accept the results of the 2020 election without reservations (and the rest are somewhere in the middle).

A sizable chunk of one of America’s two major parties is now partially defined by its willingness not just to go along with Trump’s election-denying scheme but to actively embrace it. Even if most of those candidates lose in November, those numbers represent a potentially serious problem for the country heading into the presidential election in 2024.

So Biden’s not totally wrong to be sounding the alarm about this. But instead of lecturing voters or trying to score political points, maybe he could try giving that same speech to the Democrats in charge of Congress?

It’s been months since a bipartisan group of senators unveiled the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, which is easily the most important and straightforward way to prevent a repeat of what nearly happened in January 2021. The bill would address the procedural mechanisms that Trump and his allies sought to exploit to overturn the 2020 election. It would head off future attempts by state lawmakers and governors to refuse to certify the results of a presidential election, and it would clarify that the vice president does not have the power to unilaterally reject the Electoral College results (as Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to do).

In short, the bill doesn’t overhaul election rules in partisan ways or tell states how to conduct elections. But it does force states to abide by the results of the elections they conduct.

That’s pretty important, but the bill seems to be getting shifted to the back burner in Congress even as Democrats ramp up their rhetoric about Republicans trying to destroy democracy.

Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine), one of the bill’s sponsors, “would like to see pre-election consideration of Electoral Count Act reform,” Politico reported earlier this week. But, for now, Democrats “are committed to little other than confirming judges and funding the government after a surprisingly fruitful summer session of legislating on firearm access, climate and taxes, microchip manufacturing and veterans’ benefits.” It’s also possible that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) will cancel a two-week session scheduled for October so senators facing re-election this year can stay on the campaign trail, according to the same Politico piece.

Prioritizing winning elections over actually safeguarding them? Yep, that sounds about right. After all, Democratic campaign operations spent heavily to promote some Trump-loving, election-denying Republicans in primaries this year while simultaneously warning that those same candidates are existential threats to American democracy.

Playing those cynical games might help Democrats win a few elections they would otherwise have lost. But if Congress doesn’t find the time to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act before the end of the year, there’s little hope that it will ever reach Biden’s desk—because Republicans are expected to take control of the House, at least, after the midterms.

Biden says Republicans aim to use their attempted subversion of the 2020 election “as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections” in ways that “threatens the very foundations of our republic.” All the more reason for congressional Democrats (and Republicans who refuse to be complicit in Trump’s schemes) to do the important work of shoring up those foundations now, while they still have a chance.

The post Why Are Democrats Dragging Their Feet on the Electoral Count Reform Act? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Taiwanese student Ti “Joyce” Chun-Shan demonstrated English proficiency daily when she came to the United States at age 39. She took college classes in English, maintained good grades and earned a certification in ESL.

Chun-Shan, who finished a massage therapy program and earned an associate’s degree at Chandler Gilbert Community College in Arizona, also spoke English with clients as part of her training.

Nobody complained about a language barrier. Yet when Chun-Shan applied for an occupational license—a formality for most of her classmates—the Arizona Board of Massage Therapy singled her out for extra scrutiny.

State law requires massage therapists who are not native English speakers to demonstrate “communication proficiency.” So regulators told Chun-Shan, who grew up speaking Mandarin, that she would have to take an English test and exceed board-imposed standards in four sections: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

The board sets minimum standards outrageously high. Scores must exceed the median for all groups of test takers, including native English speakers and college graduates. Rather than waste her time and money—up to $325—Chun-Shan refused to take the test.

Other states lay similar traps, sometimes indirectly. Licensing programs and exams, for example, are often available only in English. Washington, D.C., added another barrier to those who don’t speak English fluently in 2016, when the district decided that daycare providers must have an associate’s degree in early childhood development or a closely related field.

The law says nothing about English proficiency, yet a 2018 analysis showed that all qualifying programs at nearby colleges were taught exclusively in English. As part of the coursework, aspiring daycare providers must earn credit in language-intensive subjects like public speaking and composition.

The prospect does not appeal to Ilumi Sanchez, a naturalized U.S. citizen from the Dominican Republic. Sanchez, who held a law license in her native country, can communicate effectively with English-speaking parents and children at her home-based daycare business. But attending college in any language other than Spanish would be difficult for her.

Tuition and lost wages while attending classes would multiply the challenges. So Sanchez responded with a constitutional lawsuit. Our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represented her. Unfortunately, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the onerous education requirement last month.

Pennsylvania and Vermont also impose college requirements for daycare providers, and Georgia tried to mandate college-level courses for lactation consultants. These and similar measures hurt everyone by raising costs and lowering choice, but the burden is especially high for English learners.

Some people who cannot clear the hurdles find themselves working in the shadows. Arif Karowalia, a Pakistani immigrant who runs two eyebrow-threading chains across the Midwest, said a state inspector visited one of his Kansas salons and threatened unlicensed staff members with criminal prosecution. Kristy Béké, an immigrant from Benin, experienced something similar in North Carolina, where she operates three natural hair-braiding salons.

Many people who are not native English speakers either give up or find other work. Research from the Center for Growth and Opportunity, a network of scholars and entrepreneurs at Utah State University, shows that immigrants are 34 percent less likely to obtain government licenses than other groups—and the gap is wider for people with limited English ability.

Some states do make accommodations. Nevada, California, Texas and Washington state offer cosmetology-related exams in multiple languages. And at least 15 states allow the use of interpreters or dictionaries. Other states have eliminated licensing requirements altogether for certain occupations. Idaho freed natural hair braiders from licensing requirements this past spring, joining 32 other states.

Florida passed sweeping licensing reforms in 2020. And Utah has passed several bills in recent years to ease the regulatory burden on service providers. Among other reforms, Utah has exempted hairstylists from cosmetology licensing and reduced the training hours necessary to perform limited massage therapy.

Connecticut is moving in the opposite direction. In 2019, the state restored an abolished licensing requirement for manicurists, an occupation dominated by Vietnamese immigrants. Meanwhile, Louisiana and Oklahoma have dug in—following lawsuits from the Institute for Justice—to protect licensing requirements for eyebrow threaders, an occupation dominated by South Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants.

Unnecessary regulations like these that prevent immigrants from being able to make a living are wrong in any language.

The post English Tests Are Just an Excuse To Block Immigrants From Licensed Professions appeared first on Reason.com.

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The classified documents that the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 included information about a foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities, according to a Washington Post report citing “people familiar with the matter.” The Post adds that “some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them.” The trove of more than 100 classified documents included material with markings so restrictive that FBI agents needed additional clearances to examine them.

Trump lawyer Christopher Kise condemned leaks about the nature of the purloined documents, saying they “continue with no respect for the process” or “any regard for the real truth,” which “does not serve well the interests of justice.” This week a federal judge in Miami approved Trump’s request that a special master be appointed to review the documents with an eye toward material that might be covered by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. Kise said “there is no reason to deviate from that path if the goal is, as it should be, to find a rational solution to document storage issues which have needlessly spiraled out of control.”

The concession that the records seized by the FBI posed “document storage issues” is hard to reconcile with Trump’s claim that he declassified all that material before leaving office. According to Trump, he had “a standing order” as president that automatically declassified anything he removed from the Oval Office to study at his residence in the White House.

Trump has not presented any documentation of that purported policy, which was news to national security officials who should have known about it. But taking him at his word, he decided that all the documents he took with him to Florida did not need to be classified, meaning that allowing general access to them would not pose a threat to national security. If so, it is hard to see why their presence at Mar-a-Lago would raise “document storage issues.”

All told, Trump retained more than 300 documents that were marked as classified: 184 that were found in the 15 boxes that he turned over to the National Archives in January, 38 that his lawyers gave the FBI in June in response to a grand jury subpoena, and more than 100 that the FBI seized during its search last month. The Justice Department says the FBI found 76 of those documents in a basement storage room secured by a padlock, which means dozens were discovered elsewhere. According to the Justice Department, the other locations included desk drawers and “a container” in Trump’s office. The markings on the documents ranged from “confidential” to “top secret,” and the latter included “sensitive compartmented information,” an especially restricted category.

Despite those markings, Trump insists, none of the records were actually classified. But even some of Trump’s reliable allies do not seem impressed by that defense. “Why did he have all that secret stuff at Mar-a-Lago?” Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy wondered during an interview with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem last week. Regarding Trump’s claim about a “standing order” that no one seems to have seen, Doocy noted that it was “news to the agencies that those documents belong to.”

Former Attorney General William Barr, a Trump appointee who alienated him after the 2020 presidential election by rejecting his fanciful claims of systematic voting fraud, is likewise unimpressed by the former president’s excuses. “I can’t think of a legitimate reason why [the documents] could be taken out of government, away from the government, if they are classified,” Barr told Fox News last week. “The driver on this, from the beginning, was loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago. People say [the FBI search] was unprecedented, but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put [it] in a country club.”

Barr noted that Trump’s declassification claim suggests his treatment of sensitive information was remarkably cavalier. “I, frankly, am skeptical of this claim that ‘I declassified everything,'” he said. “I think it’s highly improbable.” But “if in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said, ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse and show such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.” And regardless of the documents’ classification, Barr noted, they “still belong to the government and go to the archives” under the Presidential Records Act.

Whether the FBI’s politically explosive search of a former president’s home was justified, Barr said, depends on the nature of the documents that Trump retained and exactly how sensitive they were. But he said Trump’s handling of the records was “clearly foolish” and “inexplicable.” He added that the Justice Department “may well be able to make a case” that Trump committed federal felonies by retaining the records, resisting the government’s efforts to recover them, and concealing the documents he still had after the handovers in January and June.

Government officials “jawboned for a year” with Trump’s representatives, Barr noted. “They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken. They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel, and the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around. So how long do they wait?”

Barr said the Justice Department needs to ask whether “it really make sense to bring a case as a matter of prudential judgment,” given “the fact that this is a former president,” “the state of the nation,” and “the fact that the government has gotten its documents back.” The answer, he thinks, “will turn on how clear the evidence of obstruction or deceit is. If they clearly have the president moving stuff around and hiding stuff in his desk, and telling people to dissemble with the government, they may be inclined to bring that case.”

In Trump’s view, the evidence either does not matter or cannot be trusted. “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax,” he wrote on Truth Social after the Post published its story, “just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Mueller investigation was a Hoax, and much more. Same sleazy people involved.”

The post Trump's Document Trove Reportedly Included Information About a Foreign Nation's Nuclear Capabilities appeared first on Reason.com.

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In 2015 Canada’s Supreme Court struck down bans on medically assisted suicide as a violation of citizens’ liberty, writing that “An individual’s response to a grievous and irremediable medical condition is a matter critical to their dignity and autonomy. The prohibition denies people in this situation the right to make decisions concerning their bodily integrity and medical care and thus trenches on their liberty. And by leaving them to endure intolerable suffering, it impinges on their security of the person.”

Those quotes, in a nutshell, explain why the ability to end one’s life is an important freedom. Our bodies belong to us, not the government. We should have the power to decide whether we wish to continue living, particularly if we are in constant pain or suffering debilitating or fatal illnesses. In the Supreme Court’s ruling, the judges note that a ban on physician-assisted suicide “is rationally connected to the goal of protecting the vulnerable from taking their life in times of weakness” but that such protections don’t justify a full blanket prohibition on the practice. And so, the court ordered Canada to draft new legislation permitting euthanasia and assisted suicide. The Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) law was implemented in 2016.

Unfortunately, the philosophical argument for the right to die can also end up colliding with troubling decisions in a country where the government funds and controls access to healthcare. That is reportedly happening in Canada, where some citizens say health officials are actively encouraging people with disabilities and other chronic medical issues to consider suicide.

According to the Associated Press, hospitals are raising the possibility of assisted suicide with patients who hadn’t asked about it. These conversations are not motivated by quality of life but health care costs.

The A.P. notes that Belgium and the Australian state of Victoria, which allow physician-assisted suicide, tell medical professionals not to bring up euthanasia so that it’s not seen as medical advice. In other words, make sure it’s the patient’s idea.

This is not the case in Canada, where health care workers are trained to inform patients that they can choose euthanasia if they have a qualifying condition. This has led to some patients, particularly those with disabilities but not necessarily fatal illnesses, having some unpleasant conversations. One provided a recording to the Associated Press:

Roger Foley, who has a degenerative brain disorder and is hospitalized in London, Ontario, was so alarmed by staffers mentioning euthanasia that he began secretly recording some of their conversations.

In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told Foley that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care.

“Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”

Foley said he had never previously mentioned euthanasia. The hospital says there is no prohibition on staff raising the issue.

That Canada’s health care system is primarily publicly funded and also has very long wait times for certain types of medical care has naturally raised questions about whether health officials are looking out for patients or what’s best for the service providers and government. Over the weekend, this 2017 report on CBC about “potential savings” from assisted suicide was making the rounds on Twitter.

The above-linked report by the Canadian Medical Association Journal was intended to analyze the costs of implementing MAID regulations before the program was rolled out across the country. The report calculated that implementing assisted suicide programs would cost $1.5 million to $14.8 million but could reduce annual healthcare spending by between $34 million to $136.8 million. The report itself wasn’t suggesting physicians encourage suicide. It calculated that less than 4 percent of Canadians would use it and that most would likely be dying when they chose to do so and would see their lives shortened by a month or less.

But looking back at that report five years later and looking at the behavior of Canadian health officials now, it’s easy to sympathize and agree with concerns that the country is using assisted suicide as a way of trying to “handle” those with chronic, expensive medical issues that require extensive treatment. Tristin Hopper at the National Post notes that there are already several horror stories suggesting people are being pressured to die and that there are questions about whether health officials are making sure patients are of sound mind:

Last June, the Medical Assistance in Dying Committee heard from Trish Nichols, whose suicidal and severely mentally ill brother Alan was given assisted death at a Chilliwack, B.C., hospital in 2019, at a time when MAID was still limited only to Canadians with a terminal illness.

Alan had been taken by his family to the hospital only days before to recover from a psychiatric episode, and in the minutes before he received a lethal injection, Trish described Alan screaming uncontrollably, despite the hospital’s assurances that he had opted for a medically assisted death while “of sound mind.”

It should be uncontroversial to note that a person voluntarily agreeing to assisted suicide should not be screaming when it happens.

The lesson here should not be that assisted suicide is bad, but heavy government involvement in health care decisions has an inescapable distorting influence. At the very least, how Canada manages health care access is a massive contributing factor. A survey from 2016 found that Canadians wait longer to access health care services than citizens in 11 other countries. The United States is one of the countries of comparison, but the survey also looks at other countries with government-managed health care systems like the United Kingdom and France. A 2020 study from the Canadian Family Physician journal notes that the country simply provides less freedom and opportunity for people seeking medical care than other countries, even when healthcare is centrally planned:

What these countries do differently than Canada is they allow the private sector to provide core health care insurance and services, require patients to share in the cost of treatment, and fund hospitals based on activity (rather than the global budgets that are the norm in Canada).

In absence of significant “freedom” to pursue individualized health care options, Canada is now potentially violating citizens’ rights in the exact opposite direction than it was before. People have the right to die but also the right to continue living in the face of medical adversity. That Canada’s publicly-operated health care system is unable to efficiently meet the needs of citizens makes all these health worker interactions about euthanasia inherently suspect.

The post Some Canadian Health Care Patients Say They're Being Encouraged To Just Die Already appeared first on Reason.com.

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