Category: reason

From yesterday’s letter by FIRE and the Anti-Defamation League, send to Princeton University:

Princeton is stifling … discussions [about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] and newsgathering by its student press, by permitting students who dislike certain speech to be granted no-communication or no-contact orders against other students. While no-contact protocols are important tools to keep students safe from properly defined discriminatory harassment, and threatening, intimidating, or assaultive conduct, Princeton appears to be granting these orders for any student who requests one, so long as minimal procedural prerequisites are satisfied.

These orders are being issued by administrators with disciplinary authority, under threat of punishment, without a modicum of due process, and—most unconscionably—where the student-speaker is not even alleged to have violated any university policy. This practice is deeply chilling, in blatant violation of Princeton’s laudable free expression policies, and must end immediately….

Princeton … [has issued a] no-contact order against a [Princeton] Tory journalist who reported on a student demonstration against Israel. A Tory journalist covered a November 9 protest held by Students for Justice in Palestine. While she was recording footage of the protestors’ chants and signs, a graduate student attempted to block her camera. The graduate student followed the journalist, and remained in close physical proximity to her, despite the journalist voicing her discomfort.

When the journalist reported this to an on-duty Public Safety officer, the officer informed the journalist that she was “inciting something.” Following the officer’s inaction, the graduate student continued to attempt to physically obstruct the journalist from filming, eventually pushing her and stepping on her foot. {The recitation here reflects our understanding of the pertinent facts. We appreciate that you may have additional information to offer and invite you to share it with us.}

After the protest, the graduate student who pushed the journalist obtained a no-contact order against her. The journalist met with her Assistant Dean for Student Life to discuss the order and asked the dean whether she could publish articles written before the issuance of the no- contact order that mention the graduate student’s name. The dean later informed the journalist via email {on file with author} that the university “cannot determine if they would be a violation of the NCO—it is possible that some statements may be interpreted by the other student as an indirect or direct attempt to communicate. The safest course of action in terms of a possible violation of the NCO would be to refrain from writing or to be interviewed for articles that mention the name of the student with whom you have an NCO (or to retract them if that’s possible).” …

This censorship is utterly inconsistent with Princeton’s unequivocal promises that students have the right to engage in even the most challenging conversations. Your Statement on Freedom of Expression, for example, declares “the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.” The Statement further notes “it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” Nor can a desire for “civility and mutual respect … be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.” Likewise, Princeton’s protest policy explicitly forbids students from abusing university systems to “obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.”

Just last week, you observed that despite “[c]ontroversy over the war in the Middle East,” Princeton would “never” censor or discipline students unless their speech “falls under one of the enumerated expressions to [Princeton’s] free expression policy, such as those permitting the University to restrict threats of harassment.” Yet your administration continues to turn a blind eye to the use of no-contact orders to silence students who seek to express their pro-Israel ideas, simply because their peers find these ideas “heterodox, shocking, or offensive.”

Princeton’s commitments to free speech are admirable—but only to the extent to which they are followed. As written, they properly align with First Amendment jurisprudence and prevailing conceptions of free speech and free press principles. Any reasonable student or student journalist reading these policies would be confident they have the right to engage in difficult discussions without worrying they will be slapped with a no-contact order, under threat of discipline. Student journalists are also promised their right to engage in dogged newsgathering, including contacting student leaders in the ordinary course of their reporting. But Princeton has betrayed its promises by allowing students to censor their peers on the basis of subjective offense. These outcomes cannot be squared with the university’s mission or purported commitments….

To be clear, when properly utilized, no-contact orders are an important tool to ensure the safety of victims of physical violence, sexual misconduct, true threats, or discriminatory harassment. But Princeton is allowing students with ideological disagreements to transform no-contact orders into cudgels to silence the “lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation” that Princeton promises all students. This is at least the second time in the last two years [for details on the first time, see the full letter -EV] that a Tory student journalist has been silenced by a no-contact order at the behest of community members offended by his or her pro-Israel journalism. This systematic weaponization of no-contact orders to silence pro-Israel journalism—or any journalism—cannot stand….

The post Princeton Allegedly Told Student Journalist Not to Write About Activist Who Got "No Contact" Order Against Journalist appeared first on Reason.com.

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State and federal agencies routinely issue “guidance” in the form of public statements and private letters that are actually veiled commands and threats of adverse consequences for failure to obey. Interpretive regulations, which supposedly only express an agency’s opinion and are non-binding, may serve the same function. Such communications may be beyond the agency’s legal authority or may be a way to circumvent required notice and comment procedures for formal legislative regulations.  This type of coercion may violate rights under the Second Amendment and other constitutional rights, not to mention required administrative procedures.

This post assesses two cases pending in the Supreme Court in which agency guidance is being used to threaten Second Amendment rights.  National Rifle Ass’n v. Vullo concerns how New York officials threatened commercial entities not to do business with the NRA in an effort to suppress Second Amendment advocacy.  Garland v. Cargill involves the extent to which the executive branch may expand gun crimes beyond what Congress has enacted through supposedly non-mandatory interpretive regulations.

In addition, because agencies often insist that courts defer to their legal and factual conclusions, it is relevant to discuss the pending Loper and Relentless cases in which the Supreme Court will decide whether to tank the Chevron deference rule.

The issue presented in NRA v. Vullo is: “Does the First Amendment permit a government official to threaten regulated entities with adverse regulatory action if they do business with an advocacy organization, where she does so because she disapproves of its political views or because those views are unpopular?”  NRA is represented by two First Amendment super-lawyers – David Cole of the ACLU Foundation and the Conspiracy’s own Eugene Volokh.

Since the Second Circuit upheld dismissal of the complaint for failure to state a claim on which relief may be granted, the NRA’s allegations must be taken as true.  As recounted in NRA’s brief, Maria Vullo, Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, wrote “guidance letters” to the heads of banks and insurance companies that it regulates.  She urged them to cut ties with the NRA based on their legal obligation to consider “reputational risk.” A failure to consider such risk can lead to multi-million-dollar fines.

The letters cited the NRA’s “gun promotion” advocacy, not any legal infraction. In meetings with insurance executives, Vullo threatened enforcement action for alleged unrelated violations unless they discontinued doing business with the NRA.  Vullo also issued a press release urging insurance companies and banks not to do business with the NRA.

Based on such “guidance,” Vullo then strong-armed Lloyd’s and two other insurers to sign consent orders requiring the payment of multimillion-dollar fines and requiring them to forego any insurance programs with the NRA.

Itself a prolific issuer of guidance documents, the United States filed an amicus curiae brief in support of neither party.  The brief concedes that NRA stated a plausible claim that Vullo violated the First Amendment by coercing regulated entities to terminate their business with NRA in an effort to suppress NRA’s advocacy.

But according to the amicus brief, the first four paragraphs of Vullo’s letter presented no First Amendment issue, and instead simply attempted “to convince, not coerce, private parties to cut ties with [NRA] because of [NRA’s] firearms advocacy.”  The letter decried recent shootings and noted the backlash against the NRA, which “promote[s] guns that lead to senseless violence.” Attacking the NRA for its pro-gun “speech” supposedly did not threaten the letter recipients with sanctions.

It did not matter, the brief of the United States continues, that the letters were issued to regulated entities pursuant to the statutory authority of the Department of Financial Services to provide “guidance.” Agencies need not “limit their public advocacy to discouraging illegal conduct or addressing subjects within the scope of their regulatory authority,” but may condemn practices that they have no statutory or constitutional authority to regulate.

This is an extremely naïve view of reality.  A weaponized agency tells its regulated subjects that the NRA and guns are bad and urges them to cut ties.  This was not a political speech given by the governor to the general public that did not threaten sanctions.  On the contrary, then-Governor Cuomo confirmed the threats by tweeting that “the NRA is an extremist organization,” that businesses risked “‘reputational risks’ with any association with the NRA,” and that New York was “forcing the NRA into financial jeopardy.”

Turning to “guidance” documents at the federal level, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) has long history of issuing what I’ll call “advisories” that had better be followed unless you want to risk license revocation or criminal charges.  These include private letters, classifications of firearms directed to manufacturers and importers, open letters to the public, the FFL Newsletter, and formal ATF Rulings. None of these documents have has the force of law, but can be ignored only at your peril absent a judicial ruling to the contrary.

Because of this coercive practice, Jeff Sessions, the first Attorney General appointed by President Trump, issued a Prohibition on Improper Guidance Documents (2017).  Two of its provisions stated:

• • Guidance documents should identify themselves as guidance, disclaim any force or effect of law, and avoid language suggesting that the public has obligations that go beyond those set forth in the applicable statutes or legislative rules.
  • Guidance documents should not be used for the purpose of coercing persons or entities outside the federal government into taking any action or refraining from taking any action beyond what is required by the terms of the applicable statute or regulation.

That was followed by Executive Order 13891 (2019), which formalized the above policies.  President Biden revoked that order the day he took office on January 20, 2021.

Meanwhile, ATF promulgated a regulation of a type it had never issued before – expanding the definition of a “firearm” in the National Firearms Act (NFA) beyond the definitions enacted by Congress.  It defined bump stocks as “machineguns,” which it previously opined were not machineguns.  Litigants were immediately off to the races.

In Guedes v. ATF, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the denial of a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the new rule.  Strangely, ATF took the litigating position that it had promulgated an interpretive rule which was not entitled to Chevron deference, not a legislative rule, to which Chevron deference applied.  The court found that the rule on its face was legislative, explicitly informing bump-stock owners that their devices “will be prohibited when this rule becomes effective.”

When the government tells you that something is illegal – whether it’s in a “guidance” letter, an informal ruling, or an interpretive rule – you’d better comply or lawyer-up.

The D.C. Circuit accorded deference to the rule, even though the NFA is a criminal statute which does not delegate power to ATF to expand.  It found the definition of “machinegun” to be ambiguous but rejected application of the rule of lenity, which the Supreme Court applied to NFA definitions in U.S. v. Thompson/Center Arms (and which yours truly argued). But as will be seen, the rule of lenity remains alive and well.

In Garland v. Cargill, the Fifth Circuit en banc found that, on the merits, bump stocks are not machineguns, with some judges seeing the statute as sufficiently ambiguous to apply the rule of lenity. Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court granted certiorari.

In its brief, the United States tells the Supreme Court that “this case presents a pure question of statutory interpretation: Whether bump stocks satisfy the definition of ‘machinegun’….” Now for the shocker: “ATF has set forth its position on that question in an interpretive rule, but the government does not contend that the rule has the force and effect of law or that ATF’s interpretation is entitled to deference.”

I’ve litigated cases adversely to ATF for decades, and don’t recall any in which ATF didn’t argue that it was entitled to “the divine right of deference” (the modern version of “the divine right of kings”).  The brief here has the names of my old adversaries who made that argument countless times, Mark Stern and Michael Raab.  Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, I’m shocked, shocked to find that ATF is not arguing for deference.  But there are perhaps two reasons why.

First, as the government’s brief says, “neither ATF’s changes in position nor any asserted defects in its explanation for those changes have any bearing on the Court’s resolution of the question presented.”  If deference is the rule, deference to which ATF opinion?  The consistent opinion that lasted for years before the new rule, or the latest one invented for the rule?

Second, does Garland see the possible handwriting on the wall regarding the Chevron deference rule?  That brings us to Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Dep’t of Commerce, which were argued on January 17.  An agency rule requires the herring industry to bear the costs of federal observers on fishing boats. The issue: “Whether the court should overrule Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.”

If the answer to that question is affirmative, that may condemn ATF’s latest regulations on frames or receivers, pistol braces, and what it means to engage in the business of dealing in firearms.  Congress was very specific in defining the statutory regime on these matters, and delegated no regulatory power for ATF to push the envelope.

The oral arguments are well worth listening to – Paul Clement argued for Loper, Roman Martinez argued for Relentless, and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued both cases for the United States in what seemed to be a sinking ship.

As expected, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh pressed hard against Chevron, which was stoutly defended by the three liberal justices.  The Chief Justice and Justice Thomas asked the intriguing question of whether the courts must defer to agencies regarding constitutional issues, such as whether an activity constitutes interstate commerce.  General Prelogar backed away from defending that radical extension of the doctrine.

The resolution of the above cases will affect the extent to which state and federal agencies infringe Second Amendment rights by use of implied and actual diktats.  As usual, keep your fingers crossed.

The post Second Amendment Roundup: Agency "Guidance," Interpretive Regulations, and Chevron appeared first on Reason.com.

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Art Acevedo, Houston’s police chief from November 2016 to March 2021, has bounced around since leaving that job, serving as Miami’s police chief for just six months before he was fired in October 2021, then as the interim police chief in Aurora, Colorado, a job he left on Monday after serving 13 months. Acevedo was in the news this week for two other reasons, neither of which reflect well on his performance as a top cop.

After leaving Aurora, Acevedo planned to take a $271,000-a-year position as an assistant city manager overseeing police in Austin, where he served as police chief for nine years before moving to Houston following a job-threatening reprimand. But on Tuesday, objections from Austin City Council members and the local district attorney, who highlighted a scandal involving rape kits that went untested during Acevedo’s prior tenure, prompted him to reconsider. The next day, the Houston City Council approved an additional $1.7 million to defend Acevedo and the city against federal lawsuits stemming from a lethal 2019 drug raid based on a fraudulent search warrant, raising the total allocated for that purpose to nearly $3 million.

This Sunday is the fifth anniversary of that raid by the Houston Police Department (HPD), which killed a middle-aged couple falsely accused of selling heroin, resulting in a scandal that The Houston Chronicle described as “one of the worst to hit HPD in years.” It was my introduction to Acevedo, who made a bad impression from the beginning.

‘A Big Teddy Bear’

On a Monday evening in January 2019, plainclothes Houston narcotics officers broke into the house on Harding Street where Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas lived. Acevedo said the cops “announced themselves as Houston police officers while simultaneously breaching the front door.” One of the officers immediately used a shotgun to kill the couple’s dog. Police said Tuttle, who according to his relatives was napping with his wife at the time, picked up a revolver and fired four rounds, hitting one cop in the shoulder, two in the face, and one in the neck—an impressive feat for a frail and disabled 59-year-old Navy veteran surprised by a sudden home invasion. The officers responded with dozens of rounds, killing Tuttle and Nicholas, who was unarmed.

After the Harding Street raid, Acevedo put the blame squarely on Tuttle and Nicholas, whom he portrayed as dangerous drug dealers. They were operating a locally notorious “drug house,” he claimed, and “the neighborhood thanked our officers” for doing something about it. Based on a tip from a resident who “had the courage” to report that “they’re dealing dope out of the house,” he said, the HPD’s Narcotics Division “was able to actually determine” that “street-level narcotics dealing” was happening at the house, where police “actually bought black-tar heroin.”

Acevedo praised the officers who killed Tuttle and Nicholas as “heroes,” paying special attention to Gerald Goines, the 34-year veteran who had conducted the investigation that led to the raid. Goines had been shot in the neck after breaching the door and entering the house to assist his wounded colleagues. “He’s a big teddy bear,” Acevedo gushed. “He’s a big African American, a strong ox, tough as nails, and the only thing bigger than his body, in terms of his stature, is his courage. I think God had to give him that big body to be able to contain his courage, because the man’s got some tremendous courage.”

Acevedo’s story began to unravel almost immediately. Neighbors said they had never seen any evidence of criminal activity at the house, where Tuttle and Nicholas had lived for two decades. Police found personal-use quantities of marijuana and cocaine at the house but no heroin or any other evidence of the drug dealing Goines had described in an affidavit when he applied for a no-knock search warrant. Nor did the search discover the 9mm semi-automatic pistol that Goines claimed his confidential informant had seen, along with a “large quantity of plastic baggies” containing heroin, at the house the day before the raid, when the informant supposedly had bought the drug there. And although Goines said he had been investigating the alleged “drug house” for two weeks, he still did not know who lived there: He described the heroin dealer as a middle-aged “white male, whose name is unknown.”

Within two weeks of the raid, it became clear that Goines had invented the heroin sale. Later it emerged that the tip he was investigating came from a neighbor who likewise had made the whole thing up. Those revelations resulted in criminal charges against Goines, the neighbor, and several of Goines’ colleagues in Narcotics Squad 15, including Steven Bryant, who had backed up the account of a heroin purchase that never happened.

The scandal prompted local prosecutors to drop dozens of pending drug cases and reexamine more than 2,000 others in which Goines or Bryant had been involved. The investigation by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which revealed a “pattern of deceit” going back years, led to the release or exoneration of several drug defendants who had been convicted based on Goines’ plainly unreliable word. One of them, Frederick Jeffery, had received a 25-year sentence for possessing five grams of methamphetamine. The house search that discovered the meth was based on a warrant that Goines obtained by falsely claiming an informant had bought marijuana at that address. It was the same informant who supposedly bought heroin from Tuttle.

In addition to fictional drug purchases, Goines’ search warrant affidavits frequently described guns that were never found. Over 12 years, The Houston Chronicle reported, Goines obtained nearly 100 no-knock warrants, almost always claiming that informants had seen firearms in the homes he wanted to search. But he reported recovering guns just once—a suspicious pattern that no one seems to have noticed.

After Goines was charged with two counts of felony murder for instigating the raid that killed Tuttle and Nicholas, Acevedo said Goines and Bryant, who was charged with evidence tampering, had “dishonored the badge.” But Acevedo remained proud of the other officers who participated in the raid. “I still think they’re heroes,” he said. “I consider them victims.” Acevedo argued that Goines’ colleagues had “acted in good faith” based on a warrant they thought was valid. He even asserted that “we had probable cause to be there,” which plainly was not true.

Three months later, Goines and Bryant were charged with federal civil rights violations. The indictment also charged Patricia Ann Garcia, the neighbor whose tip prompted Goines’ investigation, with making false reports. Bryant and Garcia later pleaded guilty.

‘Zero Indication’ of a ‘Systemic Problem’

“We have zero indication that this is a systemic problem with the Houston Police Department,” Acevedo said after the state charges were announced. “This is an incident that involved the actions of a couple of people.” He reiterated that take after the federal indictment, dismissing “the chances of this being systemic.”

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg saw things differently. “Houston Police narcotics officers falsified documentation about drug payments to confidential informants with the support of supervisors,” she said in July 2020. “Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented.”

On the same day that Ogg announced charges against three narcotics supervisors, Acevedo finally released the results of a long-overdue internal audit of the HPD’s Narcotics Division, which found widespread sloppiness, if not outright malfeasance. The audit was conducted in 2019, but Acevedo kept the results under wraps for months. Given “the number and variety of errors,” University of Nebraska at Omaha criminologist Sam Walker told The Houston Chronicle, the Narcotics Division “looks like an operation completely out of control.”

In January 2021, relatives of Tuttle and Nicholas filed a pair of federal lawsuits against the city, Goines, Bryant, and various other officers and supervisors. “This untethered operation and its deadly conduct giving rise to this case is shocking, but it was sadly predictable and preventable,” said the complaint filed by Tuttle’s uncle. “The people of the City of Houston deserve better. Dennis and Reggie deserved better. Now Dennis and Reggie deserve justice, as do their grieving families.”

The complaint filed by Nicholas’ mother and brother, which named Acevedo as a defendant, described Narcotics Squad 15 as “a criminal organization” that had “tormented Houston residents for years.” According to the lawsuit, the narcotics officers’ crimes included “search warrants obtained by perjury,” “false statements submitted to cover-up the fraudulent warrants,” “improper payments to informants,” “illegal and unconstitutional invasions of homes,” “illegal arrests,” and “excessive force.”

The plaintiffs complained that the city and Acevedo “have simply removed its two fall guys—Goines and Bryant—to contain the investigation and dodge any meaningful
review or oversight of the corruption that has consumed Squad 15 and HPD.” Although Acevedo was “responsible for the oversight, supervision, discipline, and training of HPD officers, including Squad 15,” the lawsuit says, “HPD never reviewed, evaluated, disciplined, or audited Squad 15 or the Narcotics division.” Instead “the City repeatedly praised Goines in his evaluations and reviews.”

The abuses in Houston came to light only because of a disastrous raid that killed two suspects and injured four officers. If Goines had not been shot during the police assault on Tuttle and Nicholas’s home, he could have planted evidence to validate his false claims, in which case most people would have believed the story that Acevedo initially told. Goines would have been free to continue framing people he thought were guilty. Although several drug defendants had accused him of doing that over the years, their complaints were not taken seriously. “If the magistrate who Goines asked to sign a warrant to permit the raid on Harding Street had known of his history of lies and deception,” Ogg observed in May 2020, “he would not have signed it, and Rhogena and Dennis would likely still be alive today.”

Goines’ “history of lies and deception” began before Acevedo took charge of the department, but it continued on Acevedo’s watch. If supervisors aided and abetted “Goines and others” in “prey[ing] on our community,” as Ogg concluded, the top supervisor of those supervisors surely bears some of the blame. Likewise if “every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented,” as Ogg also found. “Obviously,” says Mike Doyle, an attorney representing Nicholas’ relatives, Acevedo “was not properly supervising and not properly investigating misconduct.”

The two lawsuits against Acevedo et al. have been consolidated, and a trial before U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett is scheduled to begin in September, more than five and a half years after Acevedo’s “heroes” killed Tuttle and Nicholas. So far, Doyle says, he and his colleagues have taken a dozen or so depositions, and Acevedo is scheduled to be deposed on February 8. “Not only will they pay millions to defend the indefensible,” Doyle told The Houston Chronicle, “but it’s going to be over five years that you get to sit at home every holiday with your family with no justice.”

‘Stunning Disregard’

The Harding Street raid is not the only blemish on Acevedo’s career.

In 2004, when Acevedo was an assistant chief with the California Highway Patrol, he faced a sexual harassment investigation. He allegedly “kept sexually explicit Polaroid photographs” of a former girlfriend, also a cop, “in the glove box of his state-issued car and showed them to other supervisors after the affair ended.” Acevedo denied doing that, complaining that the charges were aimed at blocking his promotion to CHP commissioner.

Sexual assault victims who dealt with police in Austin during Acevedo’s time there complained that their cases were neglected. A 2018 lawsuit, the Austin American-Statesman noted on Tuesday, “highlighted concerns that had previously surfaced about a backlog of DNA samples and about mold contaminating some of the evidence.” The city and Travis County settled that lawsuit and another making similar claims, and the city “held a news conference Tuesday to apologize to the plaintiffs.” Acevedo “announced his withdrawal” from the new administrative position “about 20 minutes before the news conference started.”

Acevedo had been hired by the interim city manager, a decision that dismayed Travis County District Attorney José Garza and five city council members who had “serious concerns” about welcoming Acevedo back. “Art Acevedo’s return is a step backward for survivors of sexual assault,” Garza said on Saturday. “His appointment represents a stunning disregard for their pain and our community’s values.” Acevedo attributed the backlash to “politics and power struggles.”

Acevedo’s tenure as Austin’s police chief also ended unpleasantly. A couple of months before his move to Houston, Austin City Manager Marc Ott reprimanded Acevedo for insubordination, fined him five days’ pay, and warned that his job was in jeopardy. The main issue was the complaint that Acevedo had rushed to judgment about a fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager named David Joseph. Acevedo fired Geoffrey Freeman, the officer who killed Joseph, a month after the shooting, saying he had violated department policy. That decision outraged the local police union, and city officials told Acevedo to stop publicly commenting on the case. His failure to do so was the official justification for the reprimand and penalty, although Ott also mentioned unspecified “operation and judgment concerns.”

Acevedo’s problems in Houston were not limited to the Narcotics Division scandal. In 2020, The Houston Chronicle noted that “Houston’s rate of unsolved murders is soaring.” At that point, the clearance rate was just 49 percent, down from 89 percent in 2011. The 2020 rate “lagged those of other Texas cities” and “many of the nation’s other large cities.” The NBC affiliate in Houston reported that the homicide clearance rate had risen to 82 percent by December 2022, about two years after Acevedo left.

Acevedo’s switch from Houston to Miami, a much smaller city, seemed like a downgrade. But when Acevedo was hired in March 2021, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez hailed him as “the best chief in America”—”the Tom Brady or Michael Jordan of police chiefs.” The enchantment did not last. Acevedo was fired that October.

City Manager Art Noriega said Acevedo had managed to alienate pretty much everyone through a series of gaffes, inflammatory statements, and controversial decisions. “The relationship between the chief and the police department he leads—as well as with the community—has deteriorated beyond repair,” Noriega said in a statement announcing Acevedo’s suspension. “Relationships between employers and employees come down to fit and leadership style and unfortunately, Chief Acevedo is not the right fit for this organization.”

Why did Acevedo leave his job in Aurora? He said it was for family reasons.

There was speculation that Acevedo’s departure had something to do with a heated argument between him and Pete Schulte, the public safety client manager at the Aurora City Attorney’s Office, in the rotunda of the city courthouse on January 12, four days before Acevedo announced that he was leaving. Sound-free surveillance video, obtained by the Aurora Sentinel, captured an impassioned Acevedo grabbing Schulte’s collar and poking him in the chest. But Schulte dismissed the encounter as no big deal, and City Manager Jason Batchelor said “there’s no connection between that incident and Art’s departure.”

‘I’m Not Sure I’d Hire Myself’

Given the pattern so far, Acevedo probably will land another job in law enforcement soon. In December 2019, he sat down for a Texas Monthly interview with Keri Blakinger, who as a Houston Chronicle reporter had played a leading role in exposing the abuses and corruption within his department’s Narcotics Division. “I’m not sure I’d hire myself,” he said, “because I’m well-known for speaking my mind.” But Acevedo’s lack of tact is not the only reason to think twice about hiring him.

When Blakinger asked Acevedo about the Harding Street raid, he characteristically patted himself on the back for uncovering Goines’ misconduct. The incident “opened up a huge scar within the department,” he said. “But what would have been more tragic for this community, and for this department, than the incident itself is for the department to have failed to investigate it to the extent that we did.”

Although Acevedo had blamed the travesty on “a couple of bad apples,” Blakinger said, “a recent Houston Chronicle investigation found a number of other instances of officers filing false affidavits and misrepresenting the use of informants. How many bad apples are there?” At this point, Acevedo lost his patience.

“This is the last I want to talk about it; we need to move on to something else,” he said. “When you look at our department and you look at the kind of work they’ve done, I think that on balance, there’s been a lot worse out there.” That was hardly anything to brag about. Nor was this comment reassuring: “I don’t think there’s a policy or a process that can guarantee 100 percent that something like this would not happen.”

Acevedo understandably wants to “move on to something else.” The lawsuits filed by the families of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas nevertheless will force him to explain why he bears no responsibility for their deaths.

The post 5 Years After a Deadly Drug Raid, Houston's Former Police Chief Might Finally Be Held Accountable appeared first on Reason.com.

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I recently completed a swing through Boston, with three events on Section 3.

First, I debated Jed Shugerman at Boston University, moderated by Gary Lawson.

Second, I had a panel with Jeff Pokorak at Suffolk Law School. The event was styled as a Supreme Court roundup, but most of the discussion gravitated to Trump v. Anderson:

Third, I gave a lecture on Section 3, with extended Q&A, at Boston College:

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In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing federal law enforcement officials to cut through razor wire Texas placed at parts of its southern border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement doubling down on claims that undocumented migration qualifies as an “invasion” empowering Texas to ignore federal laws to the contrary:

Under President Biden’s lawless border policies, more than 6 million illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border in just 3 years. That is more than the population of 33 different States in this country. This illegal refusal to protect the States has inflicted unprecedented harm on the People all across the United States.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border. That is why the Framers included both Article IV, § 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.” Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 419 (2012) (Scalia, J., dissenting).

The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense. For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.

The argument that immigration is “invasion” is badly wrong and has dangerous implications that go far beyond the specific details of the razor wire case.

Texas previously made the same argument in a case where the federal government argued the state illegally placed water buoys in the Rio Grande River in violation of federal statutes. Texas’ position was rejected by the trial court and the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, but the case is now under review by the en banc Fifth Circuit.

Abbott and his lawyers would do well to stop citing James Madison to buttress their invasion argument. As I explained in a previous piece on this issue, Madison specifically rejected the idea that immigration qualifies as invasion:

Those who cite Madison in support of equating immigration and invasion ignore the one time he directly addressed this very question: the Report of 1800, which rebutted claims that the Alien Friends Act of 1798 (which gave the president broad power to expel non-citizens) was authorized by the Invasion Clause. There, Madison explicitly rejected the idea that immigration qualifies as invasion, emphasizing that “Invasion is an operation of war.”

Claims that other statements by Madison support the theory do not withstand scrutiny for reasons I summarized here.

If courts were to endorse the idea that illegal immigration qualifies as “invasion,” it would have absurd and dangerous implications. Here’s my brief summary of a key reason why:

[I]f illegal immigration or drug smuggling really do qualify as an “invasion,” then [Article I, § 10, Clause 3 of] the Constitution [the provision cited by Abbott] authorizes states to “engage in War” as a response. In other words, Texas would be authorized to take such actions as sending its National Guard to invade Mexico, in order to attack drug cartels or forestall undocumented migration…. This absurd—and dangerous—implication of Texas’s argument is an additional reason to reject it.

And Texas could then “engage in war” without any congressional authorization, and—if Abbott is right—in defiance of federal statutes to the contrary.

In the water buoy case, federal district Judge David Alan Ezra (a Republican Reagan appointee) described Texas’s position as a “breathtaking” assertion of unilateral state power to start a war. If anything, he understates the point. I would add that Texas and other states could use that claimed authority anytime they want. Since the US began to enact severe constraints on migration across the southern border, there has never been a time when there wasn’t large-scale undocumented migration across it. No president –  Donald Trump included—has ever even come close to stopping it. Large-scale illegal migration is a natural consequence of the combination of severe restrictions on legal mgration, job opportunities in the US, and terrible conditions in the countries most migrants are fleeing. It can potentially be reduced by making legal migration easier. But Abbott is opposed to that.

Much the same point applies to cross-border drug smuggling, which is a natural consequence of the War on Drugs. Since that ill-advised metaphorical war began, there has never not been extensive cross-border trafficking in illegal drugs—including under Trump.

If illegal migration and drug smuggling count as “invasion,” we are always in a state of “invasion” and affected states can “engage in war” anytime they want. Even if there is relatively more illegal migration now than a few years ago, there have long been hundreds of thousands of cases per year. If illegal migration qualifies as an “invasion” at all, it does so all the time, not just when a Democratic president is in office or when there is a spike compared to previous years.

Texas’ reasoning also implies that the federal government can always suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain both migrants and US citizens without charges:

The writ of habeas corpus protects people from being detained by the government without trial. If federal or state officials detain you, the writ gives you the right to challenge the legal basis for that detention in court. But the Suspension Clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 9, Clause 2) states that “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” (emphasis added).

If illegal migration and drug smuggling qualify as “invasion” for purposes of triggering state and federal authority to resist invasion under the invasion clauses, they surely also qualify as such under the Suspension Clause. And there is a significant amount of illegal migration and smuggling of contraband goods going on at virtually all times in modern history. Thus, presto! The federal government can suspend the writ of habeas corpus virtually any time it wants!

Do Gov. Abbott and other Republicans want Joe Biden to be able to claim the power to detain people without charges anytime he wants? That’s where their logic leads! I expand on this point in greater detail here.

If the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution had expected the invasion clauses of the Constitution to have such radical implications, one would expect them to note it at some point during prolonged debate over ratification. But there is no evidence that they did. The habeas corpus issue, in particular, is one that would have raised hackles in the Founding era, as British abuses of habeas corpus were a major grievance during the American Revolution.

Legal issues aside, the drumbeat of rhetoric equating drug smuggling and immigration and invasion has dangerous policy implications aside. An invasion is the kind of thing to which governments usually respond with overwhelming force. The more people think immigration and drug smuggling are equivalent to an invasion, the greater the likelihood there will be political pressure for such draconian measures as killing migrants, family separation (which Trump may seek to revive if he returns to po), and the idea of turning the War on Drugs into a real war by invading Mexico (a dangerous proposal increasingly popular in GOP circles). At the very least, “invasion” rhetoric moves moves  the Overton Window on such ideas  the wrong direction.

For the moment, Abbott’s invasion statement is likely to have only very limited effect. The Supreme Court ruling merely lifts the lower court injunction barring federal officials from cutting the razor wire installed by Texas. It does not actually order Texas itself to do anything, or even to refrain from installing additional wire. Thus, were are left with a weird situation where the feds can cut the wire, Texas can install more, the feds can cut it again, and so on. That may continue unless and until the courts resolve the case more fully.

But Texas’s invasion arguments have dangerous implications for both legal and political reasons. Courts would do well to continue to reject them.

 

The post Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Doubles Down On Dangerous Claim that Immigration is "Invasion" appeared first on Reason.com.

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Two bills advancing through the Florida Legislature would ban cities and counties from forming civilian police oversight boards and dissolve already-existing boards.

The legislation, House Bill 601 and its companion Senate Bill 576, would make it unlawful for a county or municipal government to pass ordinances related to civilian oversight of police misconduct investigations or the handling of misconduct complaints against law enforcement officers.

Currently, the bills have passed several committees, and the Tallahassee Democrat reports they have the support of Republican majorities in both chambers, as well as influential Florida law enforcement groups.

The bill’s text says its purpose is to create a uniform process for how police departments handle misconduct complaints against officers, but it would also leave police departments to hold themselves accountable and eliminate 21 civilian police oversight boards operating throughout Florida.

Speaking on Tuesday shortly before the Senate Criminal Justice Committee voted to advance the legislation, state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R–Spring Hill), the bill’s sponsor, called the boards “divisive.”

“Officers have a very tough job,” Ingoglia said. “It doesn’t make sense to me that we have people second-guessing those decisions.”

There are over 100 civilian police oversight boards around the country. They vary in their scope and power, but, in general, they’re independent boards that investigate, monitor, or audit police department operations. 

In most cases, the boards have limited power. According to a 2016 report by the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services, the majority of oversight boards lacked the ability to subpoena witnesses and documents. Only a few had actual disciplinary power.

New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, for instance, substantiated misconduct allegations and recommended discipline for 146 NYPD officers for actions related to the 2020 George Floyd protests, but as of last year, not a single officer had been fired.

The first oversight boards were created in the 1970s, but there was a surge of new ones after the 2020 police killing of Floyd and the massive protests that followed. 

Conservative backlash also followed. Last year Tennessee enacted a law banning community oversight boards from investigating police misconduct complaints.

Speaking at Tuesday’s committee hearing, Lisa Henning, a lobbyist for the Florida Fraternal Order of Police, said that police are already subject to several layers of accountability, including body cameras, and that public scrutiny drives away police recruits.

“This becomes very redundant, and it’s also very chilling to officers when they are considering what agency they are going to, if they are going to be tried in the court of public opinion in addition to all of the other investigations that they are going through,” Henning said.

There are simpler solutions, of course. If you don’t want to be tried in the court of public opinion, don’t take a public-facing government job.

The post Florida Legislation Would Ban Civilian Police Oversight Boards appeared first on Reason.com.

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In a victory for privacy rights, the country’s leading video doorbell company announced this week that it would no longer give law enforcement agencies direct access to customers’ footage.

Ring, which is owned by Amazon, offers a companion app called Neighbors, which lets users upload and share footage captured by their Ring video doorbells and surveillance cameras. The company touts that Neighbors improves safety and fosters a sense of community.

Ring debuted the Request for Assistance tool in 2021, a Neighbors feature through which law enforcement agencies could “request information or video” from users. Ring noted at the time that “you always have total control over your experience. Request for Assistance posts are opt-in, nothing is shared with any agency unless you actively go through the steps of choosing to do so.” Requests would also be publicly accessible.

Eric Kuhn, who runs Neighbors, wrote on the site’s blog this week that Ring would be “sunsetting the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool.” Kuhn noted that “public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events,” but “they will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app.”

Kuhn didn’t specify why Ring was choosing to shutter the RFA tool, but it was a potential civil liberties nightmare. As Reason noted in July 2022, police departments could access users’ Ring footage without a warrant. While Ring insisted that users had control over who had access to their footage, the Law Enforcement Request page on Amazon’s website included a bright red “Submit Emergency Request” button, and Amazon’s Law Enforcement Guidelines noted that the company “reserves the right to respond immediately to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases involving a threat to public safety or risk of harm to any person.”

In response to a letter from Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.), Amazon admitted in July 2022 that “so far this year, Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times.” While Amazon was apparently proud of its restraint, that it had only granted 11 requests in six months, Jason Kelley and Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that “there is no process for a judge or the device owner to determine whether there actually was an emergency. This could easily lead to police abuse: there will always be temptation for police to use it for increasingly less urgent situations.”

This was especially concerning given how closely the company aligned itself with law enforcement: In major cities like Akron, Ohio, and El Monte, California, Ring donated doorbell cameras for police departments to give out for free. Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, started a cloud-based doorbell camera registry in which citizens could make their recordings easily available to police.

Notably, the RFA program being discontinued is separate from Amazon’s Law Enforcement Request tool; as Ring’s parent company, Amazon may still be able to exert authority over Ring’s disclosure decisions. But it still signals a step in the right direction that police departments will increasingly need to rely on warrants if they want access to your private footage.

Cmdr. Joe Garrett with Illinois’s Merrionette Park Police Department told CBS 2 that he was “a little disappointed” with the change, but added, “We’ll learn to adjust to it. If we have to get search warrants, we’ll have to learn to be a little quicker about it.”

The post Amazon's Ring Will Stop Giving Police Your Doorbell Footage Without a Warrant appeared first on Reason.com.

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Chris Cillizza is a former television pundit and political reporter. Beginning in 2005, he blogged about elections for The Washington Post, focusing on lightning-fast political analysis. In 2017, he joined CNN as an on-air commentator, writer, and all-around politics explainer. His superficial punditry, boldly incorrect predictions, and arbitrarily numbered lists earned him many detractors on both the right and the left, and CNN laid him off in 2022.

I hate to pile on since the man no longer speaks and writes on behalf of a large mainstream media outlet. (He is currently writing for Substack.) But on Wednesday, he made a claim on X—where he has 600,000 followers—that is completely, and instructively, wrong.

It just didn't happen.

And, again, no journalist said "learn to code." And neither did Biden. https://t.co/Tkd6lpvEnt

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) January 24, 2024

Our story begins with Cillizza observing—accurately—that there’s something mean-spirited about rejoicing in another person’s economic misfortune. Specifically, the Los Angeles Times recently laid off 20 percent of the newsroom, a reflection of the difficult times for many journalistic outlets. Conservatives perceive the media as an incredibly hostile enemy, and many on the right are positively giddy at the prospect of journalists facing unemployment.

The media industry does, in fact, have a lot of problems—including, in some cases, biases against nonliberal perspectives that create blind spots—but many individual reporters and editors and entire newsrooms are doing important work. That work often involves shining a spotlight on local issues; calling attention to waste, fraud, and abuse; and investigating corrupt government figures. As the Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney put it, no one is better served by shrinking newspapers than “crooked or inept politicians.” And in any case, even if the media landscape is frequently toxic, it’s cruel to gratuitously champion firings.

One X user responded to Cillizza with a statement of “zero sympathy” because many journalists had applauded layoffs when the victims were unvaccinated and out-competed blue-collar workers. This X user claimed that journalists had derisively advised these workers to obtain new skills—i.e., “learn to code.”

Cillizza responded: “It just didn’t happen. And, again, no journalist said ‘learn to code.’ And neither did Biden.”

Set aside whether the first part is true. The second part is obviously, patently false.

At a 2019 campaign rally in New Hampshire, then-candidate Joe Biden described the possibility of coal miners transitioning to more environmentally friendly labor. “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well,” he said. His remarks were reported by The Washington Post‘s David Weigel and The Hill, the latter making note of the job-retraining aspects of Biden’s platform.

Cillizza’s tweet—or X, or whatever we’re calling them now—is wrong on its face. Reporters and pundits get things wrong all the time; he’s not guilty of some unique transgression. But it’s telling that almost 24 hours after Cillizza first penned it, it’s still up. He’s posted multiple times since. It’s hard to believe he hasn’t seen any of the numerous comments correcting him, since he seems to be the kind of person who reads the replies.

But there’s something else notable about this extremely wrong tweet, and that’s the real reason I decided to write about it: No misinformation experts or fact-checking organizations are springing into action to save social media from the threat of this clearly incorrect claim. Yet it has been corrected, in some sense—not by the self-proclaimed experts, but by the X community—specifically, Community Notes, the platform’s crowd-sourced fact-checking system.

Community Notes, formerly called Birdwatch, predates Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, though Musk is a big supporter of the feature. It allows users to add a contextualizing statement to the bottom of a tweet, and other users can rate the accuracy and helpfulness of that note. It’s not a perfect system, and it doesn’t mean that the platform is going to be free of false information. But letting users make such determinations has a proven track record of success in other scenarios; consider Wikipedia, which certainly has its detractors, but generally functions as a useful compendium of accurate information.

Contrast the Twitter/X approach with the one favored by Facebook, which has deputized third-party activist organizations to do the fact checking on the platform. This has frequently resulted in wrongful fact checks, including of Reason content produced by John Stossel. I tangled with Facebook’s fact-checkers, too: In December 2021, Facebook labeled one of my Reason articles as “false information checked by independent fact-checkers.” According to the label, I had wrongly claimed that masking schoolchildren didn’t work. But I never said such a thing—I had merely made note of an Atlantic article that called into question the validity of a scientific study in favor of mask mandates in schools. (The Atlantic article had received no Facebook fact check, even though my version made the exact same claims.)

Facebook eventually conceded that I was right and removed the inaccurate label. Perhaps the platform needs to hire fact-checkers for the fact-checkers. Better yet, it could try something along the lines of Community Notes.

The post Yes, Biden Absolutely Told Coal Miners To Learn To Code appeared first on Reason.com.

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Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina’s Fundación Libertad, and podcast host, joins Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to watch and analyze Argentine President Javier Milei’s speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. They also discuss the political agenda of the World Economic Forum and the anti-libertarian comments of its founder Klaus Schwab.

They conclude with a conversation about what’s transpired in Argentina since Milei was sworn in as president on December 10. Falcone describes his policy approach as “an offensive against crony capitalism,” which has sparked a massive strike organized by the country’s largest union to protest Milei’s deregulation, labor reforms put on hold by the courts that would allow workers to more easily opt out of union dues, and aggressive proposals to downsize the government.

Klaus Schwab’s anti-libertarian comments at the World Government Summit 2017

Special address by Javier Milei, president of Argentina | Davos 2024 | World Economic Forum

Transcript of remarks by Javier Milei, president of Argentina | World Economic Forum

World GDP over the last two millennia—Our World in Data

Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?—Our World in Data

The post Milei vs. the WEF: Who Wins? appeared first on Reason.com.

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In a thrilling address at the World Economic Forum, Javier Milei, President of Argentina, presented a robust defense of capitalism and a critical examination of all forms of collectivism. His speech, rich in historical context and economic analysis, offers some vital lessons that are particularly relevant for today’s globalized economy. Sadly, these lessons have long been ignored by American politicians on the right and left, whether in Washington or on the campaign trail.

Milei began with a stark warning about the dangers of collectivist policies based on Argentina’s own, sometimes sad, history. Once a beacon of prosperity under a capitalist framework, Argentina’s shift toward collectivism over the past century caused its prosperity to plummet from a leading global position to a much lower rank. Its story illustrates how losing sight of free market principles can result in economic stagnation or even absolute poverty.

This point is crucial. Milei reminds us that no matter how noble the intentions are behind collectivist policies, whether it’s fighting climate change, obtaining justice for all, or enhancing national security—and whether they are pushed, as Milei says, by “communist, fascist, socialist, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists, or globalists”—attempting to solve problems in this way harms the very people who are meant to be helped.

Now, readers may think this historical lesson is irrelevant for the United States. After all, Argentina has been an economic basket case, and America in 2024 is still one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Anyone who has taken, as I have, the naturalization test also knows that the expected answer to “what is the economic system of the United States?” is “free market.” That one made me smile.

Unfortunately, Milei’s warning is relevant to us. While much of our economy remains relatively free, every part of it is subjected to an increasingly intrusive regulatory regime and ineffective, burdensome, and unfair tax code. Furthermore, while Democrats and Republicans fight constantly, their economic policies are strikingly, similarly, and increasingly collectivist.

Both parties have recently become so populist that they could justly be described as modern Peronists who believe that politicians, better than people operating in a free market, can direct investment and determine which industries should succeed and which should fail. It’s no exaggeration to say that America has traveled a significant distance down the “road to serfdom” that Milei warns about.

Milei, an economist by training, doesn’t only criticize collectivism; he offers a compelling, positive case for capitalism. By tracing global economic history, he highlights a pivotal moment: the advent of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. This period marked a departure from centuries of economic stagnation, ushering in unprecedented growth in global per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and a significant reduction in poverty.

The data offered by Milei is striking. The transformation from a near-zero growth world to a rapid economic expansion under capitalism testifies not just to the free market’s efficiency but to its capacity to subsequently improve people’s lives on a massive scale. The fact that poverty and inequality still exist makes Milei’s insights more pertinent, not less. They suggest that the path lies not in abandoning capitalism but in more effectively harnessing its immense potential.

Even better: Economic growth isn’t just an engine of wealth production but also of peace and tolerance. More of that, please.

Milei’s perspective challenges the growing worldwide trend of increased government involvement in economic affairs. He advocates for limited government intervention, where economic freedom, respect for private property, and market mechanisms are paramount. It’s a reminder that the road to prosperity is paved with policies that empower individuals and businesses alike, fostering an environment in which innovation, entrepreneurship, and opportunities for all kinds of people thrive.

Better yet, Milei ended his memorable speech with a poignant “Long live freedom, dammit.” It’s a rallying cry for our times, a reminder of the value of liberty, and a call to defend it against encroaching forces. As we navigate the complexities of the 21st century, his words serve as a beacon, guiding us towards a future where freedom is not just cherished in the abstract but actively protected and nurtured in practice.

Don’t think of Javier Milei’s address in Davos as a historical analysis or economic lecture; it’s a call to action. Let’s reevaluate our approach to economic policy, remember and recognize the proven strengths of capitalism, and be wary of the inescapable pitfalls and proven failures of collectivism. Embracing economic freedom while ensuring responsible governance is surely the key to sustainable prosperity and continued global progress.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.

The post What Javier Milei Could Teach Democrats and Republicans About Capitalism appeared first on Reason.com.

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