Category: reason

Despite attempts to claim otherwise, Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity for any criminal acts committed while president goes far beyond the qualified immunity currently extended to police officers and other government officials. A recent Politifact article (where I and other legal scholars were interviewed) explains why:

As former President Donald Trump petitions the courts to be held legally immune for his actions as president, he’s begun comparing presidents and police officers.

In a Jan.19 Truth Social post, Trump argued that “a president of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function.” He added that immunity is needed even for “events that ‘cross the line,'” though he didn’t specify what he meant.

“You can’t stop police from doing the job of strong & effective crime prevention because you want to guard against the occasional ‘rogue cop’ or ‘bad apple,'” he wrote in all caps….

Legal experts told PolitiFact that whatever the judicial ruling, Trump’s suggestion that he’s seeking what police officers already have is flawed.

“What Trump seeks goes far beyond” the protections police officers have, said Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor….

The legal protection that police officers and other government officials are afforded is known as “qualified immunity.” It is intended to protect officers conducting official duties not only from being held financially liable for their actions but also from being forced to face trial over those actions.

But as the “qualified” denotes, this type of immunity is not all-encompassing for key reasons:

• It applies to civil cases, not criminal charges. “It has nothing to do with criminal liability,” said Joanna C. Schwartz, a UCLA law professor. If officers are charged with a crime, as happened with the officers in the 2020 death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, they can stand trial.
• In civil cases, accused officers have to invoke qualified immunity as a defense, and the judge may or may not grant them protection. The accused officer can still be pursued in a civil lawsuit if the judge decides that that officer acted incompetently or knowingly violated the law….

Schwartz said the qualified immunity defense “is very strong, but it is not insurmountable….”

Trump’s lawyers have said in court that they are seeking much broader immunity than what police officers receive.

Trump “seeks full immunity, not just ‘qualified’ immunity,” Somin said. “And he is seeking immunity for criminal conduct, not just civil violations.”

During oral arguments Jan. 9 before the three-judge federal panel, one judge asked Trump’s attorney, D. John Sauer, whether the president should, hypothetically, be immune from prosecution for ordering U.S. Navy commandos to assassinate a political rival.

Sauer said that unless the president had been impeached first, such a prosecution would be invalid.

If you don’t want to take my word for the difference between the two, you should at least heed that of Joanna Schwartz, who is probably the nation’s leading expert on qualified immunity.

As both she and I have argued in the past, qualified immunity is a badly flawed court-created doctrine that the Supreme Court would do well to reverse. But I must acknowledge QI is at least endorsed by current Supreme Court precedent. The absolute immunity Trump seeks has no such precedent behind it, and would be even more egregious than QI is. It goes much further, and would allow presidents to escape liability for even the most serious crimes. Moreover, unlike a cop on the beat, a president cannot readily argue that he has to make quick decisions on the fly with no opportunity to seek legal advice.

No government official deserves such sweeping immunity. And certainly not the one with the greatest potential to abuse it. Even if you trust presidents of your preferred party with that kind of power, ask yourself if you have similar faith in presidents of the opposing party.

The post Donald Trump's Demand for Absolute Immunity for Crimes Committed While President Goes Far Beyond the Qualified Immunity Police Officers Get appeared first on Reason.com.

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The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes in the aftermath of a March 2021 raid, a panel of federal appeals court judges ruled unanimously on Tuesday.

In doing so, the judges at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed what innocent victims of the raid and their attorneys have been arguing for years: that the FBI overstepped the bounds of its warrant issued in the case and failed to follow proper protocol when federal agents cracked open safe-deposit boxes, ran the contents past drug-sniffing dogs, and tried to seize some of the money and other valuables found in the boxes.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling pivots on a detail of the case that Reason first highlighted more than a year ago: the existence of so-called “supplemental instructions” for the handling of the safe-deposit boxes seized at U.S. Private Vaults in Beverley Hills.

The warrant authorizing the raid expressly forbade federal agents from engaging in a “criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety [sic] deposit boxes.” Under typical FBI procedure, the boxes should have been taken into custody until they could be returned to their rightful owners. But those “supplemental instructions” drawn up by the special agent in charge of the operation told agents to be on the lookout for cash stored inside the safe-deposit boxes and to note “anything which suggests the cash may be criminal proceeds.”

It is “particularly troubling,” wrote Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. in Tuesday’s ruling, that the government was unable to provide any “limiting principle to how far a hypothetical ‘inventory search’ conducted pursuant to customized instructions can go.”

Elsewhere in the ruling, Smith theorized that if a government agency were “given the discretion to create customized inventory policies” for “each car it impounds and each person detained, the ensuing search stops looking like an ‘inventory’ meant to simply protect property and looks more like a criminal investigation of that particular car or person, i.e, more like a ‘ruse.'”

“If there remained any doubt whether the government conducted a ‘criminal search or seizure,’ that doubt is put to rest by the fact that the government has already used some of the information from inside the boxes to obtain additional warrants to further its investigations and begin new ones,” Smith wrote.

“The Ninth Circuit today held that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment rights of hundreds of people by breaking into their safe deposit boxes to try to forfeit everything worth taking,” Robert Frommer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal nonprofit that represented some of the plaintiffs in the case, tells Reason. He said the case should bring renewed attention to a congressional proposal to reform federal forfeiture laws in order to “stop federal cops from continuing to act like robbers.”

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on the ruling and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which did not respond to Reason’s request for comment.

The FBI’s ruse in the U.S. Private Vault’s case seemed to unravel after the district court in August 2021 made public certain details of the raid’s planning stages that the FBI had tried to keep hidden. Those documents, including depositions with agents involved in plotting the raid, revealed that the FBI had planned to use civil forfeiture proceedings against the contents of the safe-deposit boxes but did not provide that information to the magistrate judge who issued the warrant for the raid. (Full disclosure: Reason submitted an amicus brief in the case arguing that the depositions and other documents should be made public.)

District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner later ruled that “there can be no question that the government expected, or even hoped, to find criminal evidence during its inventory.” However, Klausner upheld the FBI’s conduct as being within the bounds of the Fourth Amendment because the improper conduct was not the sole reason why the FBI opened the safe-deposit boxes and searched through their contents.

The Ninth Circuit said Tuesday that Klausner was wrong to reach that conclusion and remanded the case back to the district court.

In the ruling, Smith wrote that the arrangement called to mind the various “writs of assistance” used by the British authorities to conduct nearly limitless searches of private property prior to the Revolutionary War.

“It was those very abuses of power, after all, that led to the adoption of the Fourth Amendment in the first place,” Smith concluded.

And it is cases like this one that should remind all Americans why the Fourth Amendment still matters today.

The post Appeals Court: FBI's Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear a case deciding whether Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma death-row inmate, can receive a new trial. Glossip, who was convicted of the 1997 murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese, has long maintained his innocence—and narrowly avoided execution multiple times.

The Supreme Court has rarely heard appeals from death-row inmates in recent years. But Glossip’s case has been mired in an unusual level of controversy. Notably, no one claims that Glossip murdered Van Treese. The murder was instead committed by Justin Sneed, the 19-year-old maintenance man of the hotel where Glossip served as manager. However, Sneed testified that Glossip had actually planned the crime after reaching a deal with prosecutors that would allow Sneed to avoid the death penalty himself.

Glossip’s conviction almost immediately fell under suspicion. He received a retrial in 2004 but was again convicted and sentenced to death. Over the years, Glossip has remained on death row in Oklahoma and narrowly avoided execution nine separate times.

In 2021, a bipartisan group of legislators ordered an independent investigation into Glossip’s case. The resulting report cast serious doubt over the veracity of Glossip’s conviction. The report found that the state had deliberately destroyed evidence before Glossip’s trial and that police had “[elicited] Sneed to mention Glossip’s name” during his interrogation. The report even went so far as to find “additional evidence, never presented to the jury or to any court, that would likely have led to a different outcome in the case,” according to the outside investigators.

Following the release of a second investigation last year, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he was requesting that Glossip’s conviction again be overturned and a new trial granted. 

“After thorough and serious deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot stand behind the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip,” said Drummond in a statement last April. “Considering everything I know about this case, I do not believe that justice is served by executing a man based on the testimony of a compromised witness.”

But an appeals court refused to order Glossip a new trial just three weeks later. Soon after, a parole board denied Glossip clemency—despite Drummond himself testifying in favor of Glossip—and attempted to go forward with Glossip’s execution.

The Supreme Court stepped in last May to halt Glossip’s execution. Now, the Court has agreed to hear a case that could determine whether Glossip receives a new trial. In recent years, the Court’s conservative majority has been hesitant to hear cases from death-row inmates. The particularly glaring issues with Glossip’s cases likely motivated the unusual step.

“We have a situation here where the attorney general of the state, the highest law enforcement officer in the state, has said that Richard Glossip did not receive a fair trial,” Don Knight, Glossip’s attorney, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “And that should be something that we think the Supreme Court should take very seriously.”

The post This Death Row Inmate Says He's Innocent. The Supreme Court Has Agreed To Hear His Case. appeared first on Reason.com.

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This week’s featured article is “Is ESG Already Over?” by Russ Greene.

This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Music credits: “Deep in Thought” by CTRL and “Sunsettling” by Man with Roses

The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Is ESG Already Over? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Matthew Desmond is a Princeton University professor and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and a National Book Critics Circle award. His recent book Poverty, by America—a New York Times bestseller that was ecstatically well-reviewed in many mainstream outlets—attempts to reframe the national policy debate around poverty.

Like the muckrakers of the Progressive Era, Desmond is a master storyteller who gathers firsthand anecdotal material to illuminate social problems. But his novelist’s eye for detail can cause readers to overlook the absence of big-picture analysis or useful solutions.

What causes poverty in America, according to Desmond? He answers with bland, awkwardly worded slogans, such as: “Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.” He says we need “policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival.”

Desmond gets more specific about what doesn’t cause poverty. He dismisses cultural explanations, such as single-parent households and declining marriage rates. He quickly dismisses the idea that the welfare state traps people in cycles of dependency, claiming that these arguments rely on anecdotal evidence, even though there’s a vast systematic literature on the subject. Desmond doesn’t take up political scientist Charles Murray’s basic challenge to explain why it is that between 1949 and 1964 the American poverty rate dropped by 22 percentage points before the government did practically anything to help. After President Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty, the decline leveled considerably.

Desmond approaches his firsthand investigations with the preconception that poverty is a byproduct of capitalist exploitation. Prices aren’t set in a competitive marketplace, in his view; they’re just a projection of greed. It’s “tempting,” he writes, “to blame rising housing costs on anything other than the fact that more than a few of us have a god-awful amount of money and are driving prices higher and higher through bidding wars.”

A chapter on the real estate market titled “How We Force the Poor to Pay More” argues that it’s twice as profitable to be a landlord in the inner city. Desmond doesn’t bother explaining why even more unscrupulous people don’t tap into this lucrative business opportunity.

His evidence for this claim is a 2019 paper he co-authored in the American Journal of Sociology that uses data so crude that it really tells us nothing. It omits important costs—like return on equity capital—and benefits—like real estate appreciation—that strongly bias the results in the direction Desmond wants. It ignores how landlords in poor areas are shamed, sued, occasionally jailed, forced to go to court to evict families, and must routinely travel to dangerous areas. 

Those headaches scare away most investors, which means that those who stick it out can charge more.

The way to reduce costs in poor areas is to do the opposite of what Desmond advocates and make it easier for landlords to do business, such as streamlining the process of evicting tenants who don’t pay rent.

Another chapter attacks government welfare for the rich and middle class, and though he makes some valid points, again Desmond is sloppy with numbers. In 2020, he writes, “the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies,” mostly benefiting “white” people “with six figure incomes” as compared to “$53 billion” for “direct housing assistance for low-income families.”

By limiting his tally of what low-income families get to “direct housing assistance,” he leaves out the entire $260 billion budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And by limiting it to “federal,” he excludes roughly $70 billion in state and local housing subsidies. He also excludes tax breaks, tax credits, and other indirect federal low-income housing subsidies.

The largest share of the $193 billion figure that Desmond counts as “homeowner subsidies” is an income tax that doesn’t exist—an estimate of what people who own their homes would pay if they were taxed on the imputed rental value of their real estate. The logic is that if you buy a house and rent it out, the rent you receive is taxable income, so if you live in the house yourself instead of renting it, you should pay tax on the rental value.

This policy change would do nothing to reduce poverty. If the government started taxing homeowners on imputed rental value, homeowning would be less attractive, and home prices would fall. This would reduce construction jobs and housing supply. Existing homeowners who switched to renting under the new tax regime would not stop occupying homes, so the reduced supply would mean more homeless poor.

Desmond has a tendency to juxtapose the hardship of the poor and the resources of the rich. But he also concedes that there’s “no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time” and, in fact, “federal relief [for the poor] has surged” even under Republican administrations. He seems to want homeowners to pay more taxes simply because he thinks homeowners are rich and punishing them with higher taxes is a good in itself.

Desmond’s initial celebrity came from his best-selling 2016 book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which was excerpted in The New Yorker. The book argues that eviction is a major cause and exacerbator of misery for poor people. 

The evidence Desmond assembled actually shows that eviction is one thread in a skein of causes—and one of the less tractable ones to address.

Evicted concludes with an epilogue that pushes strident policy views completely at odds with the detailed stories about poor families forced out of their homes which fill the rest of the book. Desmond is an engaging storyteller who manages to convey the experience of his extensive personal interviews and observations—he just doesn’t know how to interpret his own evidence.

“Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty,” is one of Desmond’s most often quoted insights. None of the stories in the book support this contention. All the families he profiles had deep problems prior to their first evictions. Some are drug users or criminals; others are victims of crime; most are unemployed or have insecure low-wage employment without benefits; many have washed out of social programs like public housing and job training. 

There are two heartwarming success stories driven by quitting heroin in one case and getting a good job in another. Neither was triggered by finding secure housing.

Desmond never grapples with the fact that housing is different from other forms of social welfare because it involves neighbors. Many of the tenants in his story are people no one is willing to live next to, so they get kicked out of shelters and public housing and turned down by landlords concerned with their effect on neighborhoods.

If Desmond were a serious housing policy analyst, he would understand the tradeoffs at play. High physical standards for occupancy eliminate much of the low-cost housing stock, but lack of standards can mean people live in unhealthful, unpleasant slums. Allowing bad tenants to stay in good places degrades neighborhoods. Concentrating low-income people in public housing projects can lead to conditions as bad as in any urban slums. Making it difficult for landlords to evict nonpayers, squatters, and vandals reduces the available housing stock as landlords abandon properties or refuse to rent to poor people, and it doesn’t free up units for better tenants.

Desmond’s book actually tells an inspiring story of people working hard to solve these problems, usually with their own time and money. The solutions are never perfect, but lots of people are trying, with patience and skill, to keep everyone housed as best they can.

The book repeats the claim at several points that “the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing, and at least one in four dedicates over 70 percent,” which is another misreading of the evidence. Those numbers come from the American Housing Survey, which yields very low-quality information about family income.

Desmond should have consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, which uses much higher-quality economic data about households and actually covers the population Desmond is writing about.

From those surveys, as of 2021, we find that the poorest 10 percent of the population spends an average of $12,416 per year on housing—including not just rent or mortgage payments but utilities, insurance, taxes, late fees, and other charges. That is 180 percent of their average pre-tax income—$6,916—but only 41 percent of their average annual total expenditures—$30,433—mildly higher than the overall population average of 34 percent.

How do families spend more than four times their pre-tax income? It’s not by taking on debt or dipping into savings. On average, these same families added $5,570 to net assets. Low-income households get more money back from the government than they pay in taxes, and they receive subsidies and in-kind assistance that are not measured in most income numbers, including the American Housing Survey numbers. They also earn cash income in the underground economy.

There are certainly people forced to devote the majority of their financial resources to housing, and that’s a problem worth caring about. But they account for a fraction of a percent of the U.S. population, or much less than what Desmond claims.

Halting all evictions, which some policy makers have called for since the publication of Evicted, would have catastrophic, unintended consequences. It would chase away honest landlords and embolden abusive ones, who will simply change the locks, cut off utilities, refuse essential repairs, or threaten their tenants with violence.

Desmond misinterprets his own evidence and favors moral grandstanding over serious policy analysis. His stories actually point to the conclusion that the biggest cause of poverty is crime. If poor neighborhoods were safe, if middle-class people didn’t fear crime associated with housing projects, if poor people weren’t routinely cheated and abused, poverty would be reduced to a simple problem of lack of money and could be eliminated for far less cost than current social spending.

Desmond’s analysis never goes deeper than his facile assertion that “poverty persists because some wish and will it to.” 

“Abolishing poverty,” as he sees it, means looking inside ourselves and finding the will to act. His books have had such a wide reach, I fear that this simplistic nonsense will cause policy makers to forget the hard-won lessons of the ’60s in favor of policies that leave the American poor worse off than they already are.

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Music:”Human,” by Rex Banner via Artlist; “Knowledge,” by Colors & Carousels via Artlist; “Upward Motion,” by Rex Banner via Artlist; “Hidden Side,” by Russo via Artlist; “Boardwalk,” by Generation Lost via Artlist.

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The post Princeton's Matthew Desmond Gets Everything Wrong About Poverty's Root Causes appeared first on Reason.com.

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From Doe v. Federal Republic of Germany, decided yesterday by Magistrate Judge Gary Stein (S.D.N.Y.):

In brief, Plaintiff, the individual who allegedly leaked the “Panama Papers,” claims that Defendants, the Federal Republic of Germany (“Germany”) and the Bundeskriminalamt of Germany (“BKA”), failed to pay sums due under a contract whereby Plaintiff provided them with access to the Panama Papers for use in identifying tax fraud and other financial offenses.

In addition to allegations regarding Defendants’ purported breach of contract, Plaintiff, in his Complaint and other filings, raises concerns for his safety if his identity were to become public. Plaintiff avers that should his identity become known, his “life would be in immediate peril” and he “would likely be killed.” Plaintiff specifically references a 2017 docudrama aired by Russian news channel RT, which he calls “an explicit and credible death threat” against him.

In a motion filed simultaneously with the Complaint, Plaintiff explains that the Russian Federation, Chinese Communist Party, and Saudi government—the leaders of which were implicated by the Panama Papers leak—”are known for their repressive regimes,” including “extralegal murders and kidnappings.” Plaintiff references several instances of alleged extralegal violence undertaken by Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia on foreign soil (none of which were connected to the Panama Papers), as well as the murders of a Maltese and a Slovak journalist who exposed official corruption in their countries (who allegedly did make use of the Panama Papers). From these assertions, Plaintiff concludes that “[i]t is likely [he] would be treated in similar fashion by such state actors.” He avers, based on the Russian docudrama, that “President Putin wants [him] dead.” Plaintiff further maintains that “identification of [his] true identity would immediately expose dozens of individuals to likely physical harm.”

Based on these safety concerns, Plaintiff filed [a] motion … for leave to proceed under a pseudonym…. [In October, t]he Court … denied, with leave to renew, Plaintiff’s motion to proceed pseudonymously. The October Order noted that Plaintiff filed this action after failing to comply with an order entered by Chief Judge Boasberg in a substantially identical action filed by Plaintiff in federal court in the District of Columbia (the “D.C. Action”) directing him to provide his identity under seal to the court…. The Court concluded that, under the Second Circuit’s decision in Publicola v. Lomenzo (2d Cir. 2022), as well as other authorities, any litigant seeking to avail themselves of this forum must provide identifying information to the court, even if they are granted leave to proceed pseudonymously….

Plaintiff still has not provided his identity to the Court or indicated his willingness to do so. Nonetheless, he filed the current Motion claiming that, despite the Court’s prior rulings, … Plaintiff should be relieved of the requirement to

provide his identity under seal to the Court….

No, said the magistrate judge:

Plaintiff must divulge his identity to the Court if he wishes to proceed with this litigation. The Second Circuit has held that parties cannot shield their identities from the court. See Publicola (finding that a pro se appellant’s “refusal to disclose his identity to the court” warranted dismissal of his case). Furthermore, parties proceeding anonymously in this District are routinely required to reveal their true names (as well as other identifying information) to the Court ex parte and under seal.

Despite this Court’s prior rulings, Plaintiff claims he should be relieved of this “vital” and “well-established requirement.” Publicola. Plaintiff principally argues that “the facts of this … case are not fully addressed by precedent,” and that the “types of risks involved with providing [Plaintiff’s] identity to the Court ‘under seal'” will expose Plaintiff to “substantial” risk. But as Chief Judge Boasberg held when Plaintiff sought an exemption from this requirement in the D.C. Action, courts “routinely require that even pseudonymous filers facing grave and specific threats to their safety file their identifying information under seal.” Doe v. Fed. Republic of Ger. (D.D.C. 2023)

As an example, Chief Judge Boasberg cited Sponsor v. Mayorkas (D.D.C. 2023). There, the plaintiffs, members of a family of Afghan nationals hiding in Pakistan, sued U.S. government defendants for actions taken in connection with the denial of their humanitarian parole applications. Plaintiffs moved to proceed pseudonymously, arguing that “in light of … one Plaintiff’s extensive work on behalf of the United States” and plaintiffs’ minority status, revealing their identities would increase the risks of violent attacks against them in Pakistan by terrorist groups hostile to the U.S. One plaintiff identified “many threats” to his life made “‘by fellow Afghans’ on account of his work” for the U.S. government, “including ‘threatening phone calls and messages at his door.'” Notably, plaintiffs alleged that a terrorist group—the Taliban—”previously used the family’s identification information to issue specific threats that drove them from their home.” Notwithstanding the foregoing, the court (after granting plaintiffs’ motion to proceed pseudonymously) required plaintiffs to file declarations containing their real names and residential addresses ex parte and under seal. Plaintiffs complied.

In a subsequent case, asylum seekers from South and Central America fleeing or hiding from serious threats of persecution brought a lawsuit challenging expedited removal policies issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. M.A. v. Mayorkas (D.D.C. 2023). In accompanying declarations, the plaintiffs “put forth compelling narratives about the risks they face should gangs, paramilitary groups, or former abusers discover their whereabouts and actions.” These included accounts from plaintiffs who had “received direct death threats,” who “identified specific instances of torture,” and who in one instance said that “gang members tracked her down at her parents’ house and continued to return there even after she fled.” Again, while allowing plaintiffs to proceed under pseudonyms, the court required them to file sealed declarations containing their real names and addresses. And again, plaintiffs complied with this requirement.

The threats to the life and safety of the plaintiffs in Sponsor and M.A. appear to have been at least as serious, and at least as concrete, as the concerns raised by Doe here. Doe nonetheless claims that the protections afforded to

those plaintiffs are not good enough for him. Without citing any authority for his position, Doe argues that his safety concerns “must supersede any related precedent.” The reasons he offers in support of this argument are entirely unpersuasive.

First, Doe argues he is entitled to special treatment because he cannot rely on the integrity and competence of the federal judiciary. He questions “the robustness of the sealing process” and “the trustworthiness of the judge and the judge’s staff.” He claims that this Court has already given him reason “to acutely distrust its ability to handle a matter as sensitive as [his] identity.” He contends he was forced to file a duplicative action in this Court because of the D.C. Court’s “inflexibility” and “refusal to acknowledge any shortcomings in CM/ECF.” And he posits that, should Donald Trump—who, according to Plaintiff, “has long been an agent of the Russian Federation (and before that, the former Soviet Union)”—be re-elected as President, “[Trump] could use his malign influence to force or otherwise convince the Court to disclose [his] ‘sealed’ identity,” noting that Trump “appointed numerous judges.”

Suffice it to say that I disagree that this Court would be unable to protect Plaintiff’s identity. Plaintiff is entitled to his own views, and to make his own judgment about whether disclosing his identity under seal to the Court would pose an inordinate risk to his personal safety. But he is not entitled, on the basis of these assertions, to special dispensation from the well-established

requirements of the law.

Second, Plaintiff argues that he should not have to heed the Second Circuit’s command in Publicola unless “it has been conclusively established” that providing his identity to the Court “is absolutely necessary to achieve reasonable judicial objectives such as those described in Publicola.” (Mot. at 3; emphasis added). He then claims that those judicial objectives would not be advanced by disclosure of his identity here. He represents that he is willing to “certify under penalty of perjury” the absence of any potential conflict of interest within the meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 455 (without explaining how he could make such a certification pseudonymously, or how any “penalty” could be imposed or enforced unless he disclosed his identity). He further assures the Court that revealing his identity is unnecessary because “[n]o sanctionable conduct has arisen in this action,” “it is likely that none ever will,” and even if he did engage in sanctionable conduct, the “best and proper sanction” would be dismissal of the action with prejudice. But see, e.g., McMunn v. Mem. Sloan-Kettering Cancer Ctr., 191 F. Supp. 2d 440, 461-62 (S.D.N.Y. 2002) (determining that both dismissal with prejudice and a monetary penalty were appropriate sanctions against pro se plaintiff).

Plaintiff’s argument—based on the premise that, although he cannot trust the judicial system, the judicial system should trust him—fails to show that the underlying purposes of the Publicola rule are not implicated here.

More fundamentally, the argument misconstrues the rule itself. Publicola sets forth a prerequisite for a litigant to seek relief in a federal court, not a balancing test that depends on the facts and circumstances of a particular case or the district court’s assessment of the plaintiff’s credibility. The court’s holding is clear and simple: “court filings must disclose the identity of the filer.”

Accordingly, Plaintiff (like any other litigant seeking relief in this forum) is subject to Publicola’s requirement that he disclose his identity to the Court. The Court adheres to its prior rulings to that effect….

Plaintiff has now made his position clear. In his current Motion, Plaintiff unequivocally “decline[s]” to disclose his identity to the Court under seal. His Motion also confirms what could only be inferred previously: that he abandoned the D.C. Action and filed a duplicative action in this District in the hopes that he could avoid having to disclose his identity to the Court. Yet Plaintiff continues to seek relief from this Court while simultaneously declaring he will not comply with its rules.

The Court has been, and remains, sensitive to Plaintiff’s safety concerns. Those concerns may well justify allowing Plaintiff to proceed pseudonymously (as Chief Judge Boasberg found in the D.C. Action). But (as Chief Judge Boasberg also found in the D.C. Action) they do not justify waiving the “well-established” and “vital” requirement, that Plaintiff disclose his identity to the Court.

Plaintiff has elected to invoke the jurisdiction of this federal court, a public institution that uses public resources to adjudicate disputes in accordance with law. Plaintiff is not obligated to prosecute this case. If Plaintiff believes that the risk of engaging in litigation in federal court outweighs the benefit he might obtain if he prevails on his claims, it is Plaintiff’s prerogative to drop this suit. If Plaintiff wishes to proceed in this forum, however, the law requires that he provide his true name and other identifying information to the Court.

Accordingly, if Plaintiff intends to prosecute this litigation, Plaintiff is directed to submit a letter to the Court by February 8, 2024, indicating his willingness to submit his name and residential address under seal. If Plaintiff submits such a letter, the Court will then provide instructions for submitting a sealed filing outside the CM/ECF process, assuming Plaintiff prefers to submit his filing in hard-copy form. If no such letter is received by the foregoing date, I will recommend to Judge Broderick that this case be dismissed. See Publicola (dismissing appeal after litigant submitted letter indicating his refusal to comply with court’s order to disclose his identity)….

The post Alleged Panama Papers Leaker Still May Not Sue in Federal Court While Hiding His Name from the Court appeared first on Reason.com.

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Homeschooling is surging, as parents want more agency over their child’s education. An estimated 4.7 percent of kids are now homeschooled, up from 2.8 percent in 2019, the most recent year reported by federal data. But with public school enrollment down by nearly 1.3 million students compared to pre-pandemic levels, some are taking notice and calling for more oversight.

The Washington Post editorial board recently made that case, arguing, “It’s not the average home-schooler policymakers should be worried about—it’s the child who is left far, far behind.” In their view, “where there’s no oversight, there’s no guarantee that children will learn skills considered foundational in public education and essential to adult life.”

While more level-headed than many attacks on homeschoolers (Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s call for a presumptive ban comes to mind), the editorial misses the mark.

Homeschool regulations vary across states, ranging from mandating subjects such as math and reading to demonstrating academic achievement on annual tests. New York has some of the most stringent laws, requiring parents to file quarterly reports, maintain hourly attendance logs, and submit annual instructional plans to their local school district, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association.

Michigan, which has few regulatory hurdles for homeschoolers, is in the national spotlight as an example of homeschooling supposedly run amok.

Critics point to the bone-chilling case of Roman Lopez, an 11-year-old boy who was locked in closets, beaten with extension cords, and eventually poisoned with table salts. They claim his father and stepmother, Jordan and Lindsay Piper—who each pleaded no contest to second-degree murder for Roman’s death—took advantage of lax homeschooling laws to hide their abuse from authorities.

Likewise, the cases of Jerry and Tamal Flore and Tammy and Joel Brown have Michigan policy makers calling for more oversight. The two couples allegedly adopted dozens of children in a moneymaking scheme that involved “prolonged, routine and systemic mental and physical abuse,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. According to her, homeschooling gave the Flore family cover to hide the abuse. “There has to be some sort of monitoring so that those children also benefit from those protections,” she says.

In response to the charges, state Rep. Matt Koleszar (D–Plymouth) pleaded for action: “Michigan is one of only 11 states that doesn’t count or register homeschooled children, and abusive parents are taking advantage of that to avoid being found out. It’s time to support all Michigan students and change that. Michigan cannot allow this loophole to continue.”

These stories are horrifying, and registration requirements might seem like a reasonable step to protect kids from abuse. But it’s unlikely any amount of regulations would have prevented these tragedies. In fact, they’d likely cause hardships for the vast majority of homeschool families who do right by their kids.

For starters, the Pipers were reported to child protective services (CPS) by Lindsay’s sister, Chanel Campbell, who suspected abuse in 2016. Despite multiple inquiries by Campbell, there were no records of CPS investigations into the matter, according to The Washington Post.

For their part, the Flore and Brown families adopted or fostered nearly 30 children dating back to 2007, a highly regulated process that’s overseen by the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services (MDHHS). In a bizarre twist, one of the defendants (Joel Brown) actually worked for MDHHS and allegedly used his expertise as a child advocate to hide the couples’ actions.

As it turns out, these stories aren’t about homeschooling at all; the only common thread is incompetent government. All three families were already on the authorities’ radar, and for years MDHHS couldn’t detect an alleged child abuser within its own cubicles.

In fact, The Washington Post‘s Peter Jamison admits, “The few studies conducted in recent years have not shown that home-schooled children are at significantly greater risk of mistreatment than those who attend public, private or charter schools.”

In other words, there’s no evidence that homeschool abuse is even a problem to begin with.

While homeschool regulations might not protect kids from abuse, they do increase administrative burdens, infringe on curricular choices, and subject families to harassment by government officials.

In a particularly egregious case, a public school in New York reported a grandmother to CPS after she was a day late with the mandated paperwork. It’s easy to see why many homeschool families are skeptical of any government oversight, even if it’s just notification requirements.

Instead of worrying about homeschoolers, policy makers should figure out why millions of students are leaving public schools in the first place.

The post Homeschooling Parents Are No Threat to Their Kids appeared first on Reason.com.

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Housing news happens all across the country, but this week’s Rent Free is a little more California-centric. Our stories include:

• An L.A. judge stopping Beverly Hills from issuing any building permits (unless they add new housing) until the city comes into compliance with state housing law.
• California Forever releases the language of a ballot initiative legalizing the company’s plans to build a new city in rural Solano County.
• Neighborhood activists in Alexandria, Virginia, are suing to overturn the city’s recently passed zoning reforms.

But first, our lead story about zoning laws once again coming for the Good Samaritan.

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Pastor Criminally Charged With Zoning Violations for Sheltering the Homeless

Since March 2023, Chris Avell’s church, Dad’s Place, in Bryan, Ohio, has been keeping its doors open 24/7 for anyone who might stop by to use the church’s kitchen, get food for themselves or their pets from its pantry, or join in church services.

When the homeless shelter next door is full, Dad’s Place will take in some of those people too. Avell considers all these activities a core part of his church’s mission. The city of Bryan, however, considers his sheltering of people an illegal, residential use of a commercially zoned property.

This past New Year’s Eve, when Avell was arriving at the church to preach that Sunday morning, a police officer served him with 18 criminal charges related to violations of the town’s zoning code. Avell pleaded not guilty to those charges earlier this month.

Churches’ charitable activities often don’t fit neatly into zoning codes’ definitions of commercial and residential uses. For that reason, they often get dinged with code violations for doing things like operating a soup kitchen in a residential area or sheltering people in a commercial zone.

The fact that churches are also serving the poor and homeless can make them a target of nuisance complaints from neighbors and extra scrutiny and enforcement from local officials as well.

Bryan’s decision to criminally charge Avell is nevertheless unusually punitive.

“It’s a rarity that a city and a mayor would press criminal charges against a church period. I’m not aware of a mayor anywhere in the country prosecuting a pastor for having his church open. That seems to be the very definition of religious discrimination,” says Jeremey Dys, an attorney with the First Liberty Institute who is representing Avell.

City officials hit Dad’s Place with an escalating series of complaints before it filed criminal charges.

In early November 2023, city police and fire personnel visited Dad’s Place, where they interrogated people inside and recorded a number of alleged violations of the zoning and fire code. They gave the church 10 days to fix the code violations and stop letting people use the church as a residence.

After those ten days had expired, the city’s zoning administrator also visited the church, where he observed more allegedly illegal residential activity including people sleeping in chairs and makeshift bedrooms and preparing food in the church’s kitchen. The administrator’s report recommended charges be filed against Avell.

Dys argues that the city is using an unfairly narrow definition of what counts as church activity to persecute Avell and Dad’s Place.

“It may not look like St. Paul’s cathedral, but it is in every sense a church,” he says. “Mayor [Carrie] Schlade has in her mind that churches meet at 10 a.m. to noon on a Sunday morning and then they lock the doors and go away for the rest of the week.”

The city objects to the idea that they’re discriminating against Dad’s Place.

“Pastor Avell never requested, nor was approval given, to use Dad’s Place as a residence or homeless shelter. The city enforces its zoning code equally against all. A church does not have special rights under the zoning code,” reads a city press release from last week.

A subsequent fire department investigation this month also discovered a gas leak and other fire code violations, says the press release.

Dys says that the church is eager to provide a safe environment but that city officials are unfairly targeting Dad’s place and that they are giving the city shifting demands on what needs to be done to the building. He notes that the pastor of the previous church that had occupied Dad’s Place’s building lived on site.

Attempts to negotiate with the city have gone nowhere, says Dys. “It’s been ‘kick everyone out and then we’ll talk’.”

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L.A. Judge Says Beverly Hills Can’t Issue Non-Housing Building Permits Until It Complies with State Housing Law

Beverley Hills, California, property owners are the collateral casualties in a war between the city and activists suing over its failure to allow new housing construction.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge had blocked the city from issuing new building permits for projects that don’t add new housing. That means anyone in Beverly Hills wanting to expand their business or dig a pool in their backyard now can’t.

The order comes in a lawsuit brought by the non-profit Californians for Homeownership against Beverly Hills for adopting what they allege is a housing production plan that doesn’t meet state requirements.

For background, California gives cities targets of how many housing units they should be permitting to keep up with job and population growth. Localities are required to produce “housing elements” outlining where this new housing can go. The state reviews and certifies these housing elements.

One trick cities have long used to perfunctorily comply with the law while avoiding actually having to allow new housing is to identify existing, profitable businesses as the site of future housing. The city can say it’s planned for new housing, even though it’s exceedingly unlikely the business will actually be redeveloped.

State housing officials accused Beverly Hills of doing just this when it submitted a draft housing element for review. When Beverly Hills went ahead and adopted the housing element, Californians for Homeownership sued the city.

Courts have a lot of discretion to craft remedies and block cities’ ability to issue permits if they’re out of step with state housing law, says Chris Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But they’ve generally used these powers sparingly. A complete moratorium on all building permits, but for those that involve adding new housing, is possibly unprecedented, he tells Reason.

Pro-development “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) legislators and activists have cheered the ruling.

“Ignoring state housing law has consequences,” said California Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) on X (formerly Twitter).

To be sure, the city has invited these consequences by flouting pretty clear warnings from state officials about the inadequacy of its housing element. It’s true too that Beverly Hills’ restrictions on new housing production crush property owners’ ability to improve their land and make the city more unaffordable than it otherwise would be.

Still, the people suffering consequences of Beverly Hills’ NIMBYism and irresponsibility aren’t really the city government but residents who don’t have any direct ability to force their city government to do anything.

Supporters of the courts’ moratorium say an inability to get permits will encourage these residents to pressure their local leaders to get into compliance with state law. That also strikes me as overreach. It’s an attempt to coerce people into supporting local policy changes by taking away their private rights to improve their property.

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New Ballot Initiative Would Legalize California’s Newest City

Far away from Southern California’s wealth, growth-hostile enclaves, development company California Forever has released the language of a proposed ballot initiative it’ll need to pass to build a new, urbanist-inspired city in rural Solano County.

The 83-page initiative, which is intended to appear on the November 2024 county ballot, would amend the county’s existing zoning laws and urban growth boundaries to allow a new community on 18,600 acres of land owned by California Forever’s subsidiary company Flannery Associates.

The initiative would require the company to abide by a number of community benefits agreements—including paying $500 million for scholarships, affordable housing, and parks, as well as another $200 million to invest in existing downtown areas in the county’s existing communities.

The California Forever plan for a new city has been controversial since before it was even unveiled. The mysterious Flannery Associates’ land acquisitions led to lawsuits between existing landowners and the company. Congress held hearings on whether the company’s land purchases near Travis Air Force Base was some sort of Chinese spy plot.

The New York Times eventually uncovered that the land purchases were not an act of espionage, but something even more insidious: a tech-billionaire-backed plan to build a whole new city.

The company has done its best to frame its new city plans as something sustainable and desirable, but not necessarily radical. “All cities were once ‘new’ cities,” California Forever says in some of the pitch material on its website.

California Forever’s plans have received a frosty reception from Solano County residents in community meetings thus far. Should it pass, the ballot initiative would also require an exacting level of environmental review to be done of the proposed new community. That could open up the company and the county to years of environmental litigation from project opponents claiming this or that environmental impact wasn’t studied enough.

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Another Day, Another Lawsuit Trying to Overturn Zoning Reform

Speaking of excessive litigation, neighborhood activists in Alexandria, Virginia, have filed a lawsuit to undo a suite of zoning reforms the city passed late last year.

The suburban D.C. community’s reforms allowed at least four units on all residential lots, housing in industrial zones, reduced parking minimums near transit, and expanded a density bonus program for affordable housing.

A lawsuit filed by the Coalition for a Livable Alexandria and several individual members, and posted online by WTOP, claims the city failed to show that allowing more housing in the city will improve housing affordability. By not establishing that link, the city had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner, they argue.

The group’s lawsuit also argues that the zoning reforms violate the Virginia Constitution’s equal protection guarantees because they leave private restrictive covenants in place. Anti-development activists managed to block Montana’s zoning reforms using that same argument.

The Livable Alexandria lawsuit also seems to argue there’s an equal protection violation inherent in upzoning single-family neighborhoods because some single-family homeowners are black. The city’s abolition of single-family zoning “deprives Plaintiff Phylius Burks, an African American, of equal protection by moving the goal post as to land ownership after Plaintiff Phylius Burk purchased a single-family home” reads the lawsuit.

We’ll have to wait and see if that argument sticks.

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Quick Hits

• Montana housing advocacy group Shelter WF is petitioning to intervene in a lawsuit brought by anti-zoning reform group Montanans Against Irresponsible Densification  (MAID) against the state for several housing laws that passed last year. MAID convinced a Gallatin County judge to block two state laws allowing duplexes and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single-family neighborhoods. Shelter WF argues that ADUs and duplexes are some of the most accessible forms of housing. “This package of legislation urgently and responsibly addresses the challenges Montanans are facing in seeking homes that are affordable and decent, and Shelter WF looks forward to defending it in court,” said Shelter WF President Nathan Dugan in an emailed press release.
• The Atlantic‘s Jerusalem Demsas covers the civil war raging between pro- and anti-zoning reform environmentalists in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A lawsuit from two environmentalist groups there managed to overturn that city’s first-in-the-nation abolition of single-family zoning.
• Chris Arnade muses at Unherd about how American cities manage to have a lot of laws and a lot of lawless squalor. His diagnosis? We’re a high-regulation, low-trust society that’s banned ordinary people from making nice things.
• Dad’s Place isn’t the only church whose provision of shelter has upset zoning officials. Church of the Rock is suing the city of Castle Rock, Colorado, after it ordered the church to stop letting people sleep in two trailers on church property.
• The Marin County Board of Supervisors did pass new restrictions on short-term rentals—which Rent Free had previously covered—earlier this month. The passed ordinance has a higher cap on short-term rentals than the original proposal, although short-term rental operators are still critical of the measure. The ordinance will now be reviewed by the California Coastal Commission, which must also approve it.
• New Mexico housing activists held a rally in favor of rent control on Saturday in Santa Fe. Lawmakers who support rent control told the local press it’s unlikely they’d be able to pass such a policy during the short, 30-day legislative session. A number of other states are considering rent control bills during their 2024 legislative sessions.
• While the Marin County government cracks down on short-term rentals for allegedly eating up long-term rental housing stock, a local developer is having to fight tooth-and-nail with the wealthy, incorporated Marin town of Belvedere to get approval for a 40-unit development.

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Regulation of the Week

The occupancy limits of Fort Collins, Colorado, allow a family to live with an exchange student or a nanny. A family living with an exchange student and a nanny is prohibited. Maybe this is why more sitcoms aren’t set there.

The post Zoning Bans the Good Samaritan appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Supreme Court heard argument last week in two cases seeking to overturn the Chevron doctrine, which requires courts to defer to administrative agencies in interpreting the statutes that the agencies administer. The cases have nothing to do with cybersecurity, but Adam Hickey thinks they’re almost certain to have a big impact on cybersecurity policy.  That’s because, based on the argument, Chevron is going to take a beating from the Court, if it survives at all. With Chevron weakened, it will be much tougher to repurpose existing law to deal with new regulatory problems. Given how little serious cybersecurity legislation has been passed in recent years, any new regulation is bound to require some stretching of existing law – and thus to be easier to challenge.

Case in point: Even without a new look at Chevron, the EPA was balked in court when it tried to stretch its authorities to justify cybersecurity rules for water companies. Now, Kurt Sanger tells us, EPA, FBI, and CISA have combined to release cybersecurity guidance for the water sector.  The guidance may be all that can be done under current law, but it’s pretty generic; and there’s no reason to think that underfunded water companies will actually take it to heart. Given Iran’s demonstrated interest in causing aggravation and maybe worse in that sector, Congress is almost certainly going to feel pressure to act on the problem.

CISA’s emergency cybersecurity directives to federal agencies are coming fast and furious. That’s a bad sign, since they are a library of flaws that are already being exploited. As Adam points out, they also reveal just how quickly patches are being turned into attacks and deployed. I wonder how sustainable the current patch system will prove to be. (In fact, it’s already unsustainable; we just don’t have anything to replace it.)

Here’s some good news. The Russians have been surprisingly bad at turning cybersecurity flaws into serious infrastructure problems even for a wartime enemy like Ukraine. Additional information about Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s largest telecom provider suggests that the cost to get infrastructure back was lower than expected and mostly consisted of spending to win the victim telco’s customers back.

Companies are starting to report breaches under the new, tougher SEC rule, Adam tells us, and Microsoft is out of the gate early.  Russian hackers stole the company’s corporate emails, Microsoft says, but it insists the breach wasn’t material. I predict we’ll see a lot of such hair splitting as companies adjust to the rule. If so, Adam predicts, we’re going to be drowning in 8ks.

Kurt notes recent FBI and CISA warnings about the national security threat posed by Chinese drones. The hard question is what’s new in those warnings. A question about whether antitrust authorities might want to investigate DJI’s enormous market share leads to another about the FTC’s utter lack of interest in getting guidance from the executive branch when its jurisdiction overlaps with a national security concern. Case in point:  After listing a boatload of “sensitive location data” that should not be sold, the FTC had nothing to say about the personal data of people serving on US military bases.  Nothing “sensitive” there, the FTC seems to think, at least not compared to homeless shelters and migrant camps. I’m gobsmacked, which naturally leads to a new Cybertoon.

Michael Ellis takes us through Apple’s embarrassing failure to protect users of its Airdrop feature. It comes on top of Apple’s decision to live down to the worst Big Tech caricature in handling the complaints of app developers about its app store. Michael explains how Apple managed to beat 9 out of 10 claims in Epic’s lawsuit and still end up looking like the sorest of losers.

Adam is encouraged by a sign of maturity on the part of OpenAI, which has trimmed its overbroad rules on not assisting military projects.

Michael takes us inside a new US surveillance court just for Europeans, and we end up worrying about the risk that the Obama administration will come back to impose new law on the Biden team.

Adam explains yet another European Court of Justice decision on GDPR.  This time it’s a European government in the dock.  The result is the same, though: national security is pushed into a corner, and the data protection bureaucracy takes center stage.

Finally, we end with a sad disclosure. While bad cyber news will continue, cyber-enabled day drinking will not. Uber has announced the end of Drizly, its liquor delivery app.

Download 488th Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets

The post High Court, High Stakes for Cybersecurity appeared first on Reason.com.

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Bipartisan consensus: A deal is emerging in the Senate, supported by both Republicans and Democrats, that would reduce the number of migrants granted asylum and beef up immigration enforcement. Republicans have stipulated that a border-securing package be agreed to for Democrats to get additional Ukraine funding passed. More proof that whenever both parties agree on something, the resulting policy tends to be suboptimal from a libertarian standpoint. “It will be, by far, the most conservative border security bill in four decades,” Sen. James Lankford (R–Okla.) told NBC News.

The bill will most likely restrict the president’s ability to admit asylum-seekers via what’s called “parole.”

“Parole authority, which has existed since the 1950s, allows the government to extend migrants a special status to remain in the United States for a certain period of time,” explains The New York Times. “It was designed to be used only in cases of humanitarian need, or if there was a public benefit to allowing a migrant into the country. But administrations have interpreted that guidance in different ways, sometimes ushering in whole groups of migrants under the authority.”

State of play: On one hand, Republicans are correct to critique the expansion of executive power in this way. On the other, parole “serves an array of humanitarian purposes, including allowing foreign nationals without visas access to emergency or specialized medical care; allowing beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and green card applicants to travel internationally; or allowing undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens to regularize their status,” notes The Hill.

But Republicans broadly disagree with the “catch and release” method where immigration authorities briefly detain someone who has come to the country, but then grant parole and allow them to have free rein inside the country as they await a court date. They also tend to favor axing group-based parole programs (the Biden administration has, for example, allowed many Afghans to come here following the U.S. pullout there in August 2021) and policies that force detained migrants to stay in facilities on the Mexican, not U.S., side of the border.

The Franceification of California: Teachers at all 23 campuses that comprise the California State University system walked off the job yesterday as part of a five-day strike. Roughly 29,000 employees will be part of this strike, affecting some 460,000 students. The picketers are demanding pay raises of 12 percent, instead of the mere 5 percent offered by university officials in the bargaining room. 

“University leaders said the system already spends 75 percent of its operating budget on staff compensation and cannot afford to increase salaries at that level,” reports The New York Times. “The California State University Board of Trustees last year approved 6 percent annual tuition increases over five years because system officials said they could not balance their budget otherwise.” 

Essentially, this is all a continuation of the trend we saw for much of last year: Workers demanding ever-larger paychecks yet remaining broadly oblivious to the economics of the broader institution. Case in point: the autoworker strikes, during which massive numbers of employees demanded that the Big Three carmakers appease them with more money, even though said carmakers are worried about how to make a pivot to electric vehicles and automated vehicles happen, and how to stay competitive in the future.

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Scenes from New York:

A bunch of marching Nazis bumping into one another as they try to figure out Metrocards on their way back to Hoboken is a Mel Brooks scene https://t.co/WOqc5ryaB5

— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin) January 21, 2024

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QUICK HITS

• All signs are pointing toward a big Donald Trump win over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire tonight. Ron DeSantis’ supporters, now that the Florida governor has dropped out, mostly seem like they’re picking Trump over Haley.
• Israel and Hamas are fighting in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, worsening the humanitarian crisis there. Ambulances are struggling to reach the injured, and hospitals are not equipped to save those who have been wounded.
• Kayak.com now has a flight filter that allows travelers to exclude certain aircraft models from their search results—likely a response to a few recent high-profile flight mishaps.
• Autoworker unions make cars more expensive, right after securing their pay raise (lol):

The UAW has asked the Biden administration to raise tariffs on imported cars (from everywhere (MFN), not just China): https://t.co/AfYP9gu88I pic.twitter.com/gJjAhPaJaS

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) January 22, 2024

• New reporting from Israel, courtesy of Nancy Rommelmann (whose whole globetrotting Reason archive you should check out).
• “The introverts have taken over the U.S. economy” announces a headline over at Bloomberg. “During the pandemic, a lot of Americans had to stay home—and many discovered that they preferred staying in to going out.” I would theorize that the “takeover” is probably somewhat attributable to inflation—nights out got harder to afford—and also somewhat attributable to neuroses being indulged and fostered during the COVID era, during which virtue was made out of being a shut-in.
• Nick Gillespie interviewed Coleman Hughes on the separation of race and state. It’s a must-listen if you’re interested in colorblindness, rolling back DEI, and questions of which activist techniques actually result in meaningful change.
• And you thought we were getting deepfake porn! Instead, we’re getting deepfake Joe Biden.

Who’s behind this?

NBC News reports that residents in New Hampshire are getting robocalls with a deepfake of Biden’s voice telling them not to vote in the state's Tuesday primary. pic.twitter.com/xEsumlLamv

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 22, 2024

• Reminds me of AOC at the Met Gala:

I still think about this pic.twitter.com/n9TMv649Pt

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) January 22, 2024

The post Massive Migrant Reduction appeared first on Reason.com.

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