School choice is a noble cause, writes John Stossel. In much of America, parents have little or no control over where their kids attend school. Local governments assign schools by ZIP code.
Having choice is better. Whether it’s vouchers, scholarships, charters, private schools, or just having options among public schools, choice makes some schools better because educators have to compete for parents’ trust. Competition makes most everything better.
Ashim Mitra, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has resigned following complaints from graduate students from India that he used them as personal servants. The students claim he threatened to have their visas revoked if they didn’t mow his lawn, care for his dog, and serve as staff at his social events. In a lawsuit, the students say the university was aware of this but did not take action because Mitra was so successful in bringing in research money.
After being arrested at the Moscow airport and held for a week without a bail hearing, Nastya Rybka was released by Russian authorities on Tuesday. Her lawyer, Dmitry Zatsarinsk, posted a video of the two of them to Instagram, adding that Rybka was free and more information would be revealed at a press conference Wednesday.
Rybka was being held on suspicion of luring people into prostitution—something that the U.S. has started legally defining as “sex trafficking.” Last week, Rybka pled not guilty to the charge against her, which could come with a six-year prison sentence.
Some worry that should she be convicted, it could lead to a lot worse.
Rybka catapulted to international attention last year for her cameo in the saga surrounding President Donald Trump and Russia. While detained in a Thai prison, the Belarusian model, author, and sex coach claimed to have insider information on a supposed Trump-Russia connection. She also crossed Oleg Deripaska, a controversial Russian oligarch and former business associate of Paul Manafort.
Rybka and her associates were first arrested in Pattaya, Thailand, last February while running one of the “seduction” seminars they’d held there for years, as well as in cities around Russia and other former Soviet Bloc countries. Until this trip, the group had no major run-ins with Thai law enforcement. But acting on an alleged tip, local police raided the workshop and arrested the group for working without a proper visa. Seven of them, including Rybka (legal name Anastasia Vashukevich) and her mentor/lover/boss Alex Leslie (born Alexander Kirillov), would wind up being prosecuted on prostitution charges and imprisoned in Thailand for nearly a year.
Just a few weeks prior to that arrest, Russian journalist Aleksei Navalny publicized photos and videos that Rybka had previously posted to social media. Rybka’s posts—part of a convoluted plot to seduce an oligarch, document it, and then use the evidence to sell her books and Leslie’s pickup schools—revealed that then Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Sergei Prikhodko had been hanging out on Deripaska’s yacht. In one bit of audio, Prikhodko seems to at least mention U.S. politics.
Prior to Navalny’s report, Rybka had released two books about her time with “the oligarch” and written about it extensively on social media, while keeping under wraps the real identities of those involved in these supposedly true tales. Not long after the Navalny report, Rybka wound up imprisoned in Thailand and pleading with the U.S. government for help.
Rybka and Leslie claimed to have information pertinent to potential Russian meddling in U.S. politics. (They did not state whether the information implicated Donald Trump or anyone in particular.) They said they would turn over the dirt if Americans would help them avoid deportation to Russia, where they feared they would face harm. But U.S. authorities were publicly dismissive of their claims, and American media quickly lost interest.
Meanwhile, Deripaska sued for invasion of privacy. Last summer a court ruled in his favor, ordering the still-imprisoned Rybka and Leslie to pay Deripaska 500,000 rubles (about $8,000) apiece.
After pleading guilty to the Thai solicitation charges, Rybka and Leslie were deported from the country on January 17. Upon arriving at the Moscow airport, Russian authorities arrested both of them.
It’s unclear why Rybka was sent to Russia and not her native Belarus. “A spokesperson for the Belarusian Embassy in Moscow said it was looking into the information about the detention,” Radio Free Europe reported last week.
Zatsarinsky said that Rybka had planned to catch a connecting flight to Minsk from Moscow but was detained before she could board. On Instagram, he posted a video of the arrest and announced that he was defending Rybka, whom he said was being illegally detained.
According to the state-owned Sputnik news, the case against Rybka involves seven people total and was initiated by Anastasia Davydova, aka Sasha Travka, a former business associate of theirs. On January 19, a court ruled that authorities could keep them in custody for three days while gathering evidence in advance of their bail hearing.
In a video from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America project Current Time, Rybka said she wanted to personally apologize to Deripaska and Pridhodko. She suggested that people who wanted to do Deripaska harm had taken advantage of her and weaponized her for their own ends, when she had just been trying to attract his attention for personal reasons. She also promised that there would be no more recordings released of her time with Deripaska, and no forthcoming books about the experience.
The Supreme Court of the United States has declined to hear the case of a football coach in Washington state who was fired for praying while coaching.
Joseph Kennedy was placed on leave in 2015 for praying on the 50-yard line after games. At the time, the Bremerton School District cited Kennedy for a violation of “lawful and constitutionally-required directives” to avoid “overt, public religious displays on the football field while on duty as a coach.” The district further argued that Kennedy’s prayer left the district open to legal action as he was violating the federal and state constitutional rights of the students.
Kennedy argued that the disciplinary action was in violation of his own First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. He filed a suit against the district in 2016 in an effort to get his job back.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court, including the two conservative justices nominated by Trump, declined to hear Kennedy’s case. The conservative justices provided a written explanation for the decision.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh noted that their decision was not made in agreement with the lower court, but out of concern for “important unresolved factual questions.” The claim of free speech violations in the case were not immediately clear to the members on the court.
Though Kennedy’s appeal was rejected, the justices questioned the lower court’s understanding of free speech rights of public school teachers. Because of this, the four suggested that the lower court’s reasoning could be open to review in the future.
Kennedy received an outpouring of support across the nation throughout the ordeal. A Facebook page regularly updated primarily conservative and religious followers on the facts of the case. News of his firing even reached President Trump, who called the events “absolutely outrageous” while on the campaign trail.
When the case reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, district judges argued that Kennedy’s argument was flawed. In the appeal, Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr., said that Kennedy had a right to practice his religion while on duty in other ways, including praying in his office while drafting plays, praying “nondemonstratively” with students, and praying in private before and after games. The court believed that the 50-yard line prayer was closer to an “endorsement of a state religion” than the exercise of free speech.
On Day 4 of the Great Covington Kerfuffle, your friendly neighborhood Reason editors—Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch and Peter Suderman—staggered into the recording booth for the Editors’ Roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, and tried to squeeze out any available lessons about journalism, social media, and getting through this great thing called life.
Along the way we talked about Buzzfeed‘s investigatory implosion, the latest in government shutdown, Kamala Harris‘ official announcement that she’s running for president, the wonderful things we learned at LibertyCon, and (of course) Baby Hitler. It might not be the podcast America needs, but certainly the one it deserves.
On Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) announced her intention to run for president in 2020. The announcement spurred celebration from supporters of the former prosecutor, as well as a fair bit of criticism from those who remember her record of protecting dirty prosecutors and cracking down on sex work. Harriss’s successful effort to secure federal funding for California’s disastrous highspeed rail project has received less attention. Let’s fix that.
Prior to being elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris had expressed only qualified support for California’s highspeed rail project, saying that, while she was in favor of it “as part of a broader strategy to invest in our future,” she still wanted it closely monitored for “cost overruns and delays.”
But since taking office, she has changed her tune, saying “infrastructure spending isn’t a transportation issue for most Americans—it’s a human rights issue.”
That framing earned her a lot of derision on social media, but in the Senate—arguably a more important forum—her views earned her a spot on the Environment and Public Works Committee, a position Harris has since used to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for highspeed rail through the Caltrain Electrification Project.
The Caltrain Electrification Project is a long-running $1.9 billion attempt to upgrade commuter rail infrastructure in the Silicon Valley. Though technically a separate project from the California highspeed rail, the upgrades that it would install would also allow highspeed rail trains to make use of those same commuter tracks.
In the waning days of the Obama administration, the Federal Transit Administration gave tentative approval to $647 million in federal grants for Caltrain Electrification, but the election of Donald Trump—who brought with him a decidedly less rail-friendly agenda—cast uncertainty on the project’s funding.
California’s Republican congressional delegation sought to capitalize on Trump’s skepticism by sending a letter to Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, in which they drew an explicit link between Caltrain electrification and highspeed rail, asking her to deny final approval for federal funding.
According to Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation analyst with the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit which publishes this website, that should have been the end of it.
“Typically when one party or the other of representatives from the state is totally opposed to something, that something doesn’t get funded,” he says.
Given her commitment to every human being’s right to receive millions in transportation grants, however, Harris could not let the issue die.
In her own letter to Chao, signed by the rest of California’s Democratic congressional delegation, Harris pleaded with the Secretary to approve a final grant agreement for Caltrain Electrification.
Then, when Chao appeared before the Environment and Public Works Committee, Harris—in what was by all accounts a testy exchange—pressed Chao on the highspeed rail funding she so desired.
“I would urge your department, under your leadership, to help us resolve this…Because again, we are talking about thousands of jobs and infrastructure concerns that California has around transportation,” said the clearly aggravated senator.
When Chao proved noncommittal during questioning, Harris went on the offensive, issuing tweets and press releases demanding that the Trump administration sign a grant agreement for this most crucial project.
In the end, her advocacy proved decisive. The Trump administration signed a Full Funding Grant Agreement for Caltrain Electrification one week later.
“It looks to me to be mostly a political decision,” Feigenbaum said of the grant agreement. “I think it was a decision that it was just not worth the political risk for the Trump administration.”
Harris herself was quick to claim credit, telling the San Francisco Chronicle that she thought her exchange with Chao helped persuade her to approve the grant.
As the Democratic primary race heats up, scrutiny of Harris’ record on issues like criminal justice and free speech will no doubt increase. But it should never be forgotten that that the senator played a pivotal role in securing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for what is arguably the most wasteful and poorly conceived transportation project of the last decade.
Speaking at an event held yesterday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) explained why she believes younger Americans are in favor of radical action when it comes to combating climate change:
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'” Ocasio-Cortez told interviewer Tanehisi Coates at an “MLK Now” event in New York.
She continued: “This is our World War II.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s 12-years-til-the-Apocalypse timeline is likely inspired by a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last fall which argued that unless carbon-based fuels were completely abandoned by 2030, global temperatures would increase more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels agreed upon in the Paris Climate Agreement. That report doesn’t say the world will end if temperatures increase more than that, but it does estimate damage to global GDP (more on that in a moment).
Here’s an interesting fact about World War II: We did in fact pay for it directly and in all sorts of ways, including rationing of goods, near-complete federal control of the economy and resources, massive tax hikes, and the sale of war bonds.
As Peter Schiff (via Marginal Revolution) explains:
To a degree that will surprise many, the US funded its World War II effort largely by raising taxes and tapping into Americans’ personal savings. Both of those avenues are nowhere near as promising today as they were in 1941. Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult. The “Victory Tax” of 1942 sharply raised income tax rates and allowed, for the first time in our nation’s history, taxes to be withheld directly from paychecks. The hikes were originally intended to be temporary but have, of course, far outlasted their purpose. It would be unlikely that Americans would accept higher taxes today to fund a real war, let alone a pretend one.
That leaves savings, which was the War’s primary source of funding. During the War, Americans purchased approximately $186 billion worth of war bonds, accounting for nearly three quarters of total federal spending from 1941-1945. Today, we don’t have the savings to pay for our current spending, let alone any significant expansions.
In 1944, writes Cecil Bohannon for the Mercatus Center, government spending accounted for a record-high 55 percent of GDP.
All of which might help explain why Ocasio-Cortez consistently shies away from talking about the cost of her big-ticket plans. Discussing her calls for Medicare-for-All, forgiveness of student debt, free college for all, and a federal jobs guarantee—a package estimated to cost $40 trillion over 10 years—Ocasio-Cortez brushed aside any serious discussion of costs in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper and refused to explain where the money would come from. Last fall, in an interview with Jorge Ramos, she said:
People often say, like, how are you going to pay for it and I find the question so puzzling because ‘How do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent?’ You just pay for it.”
When it comes to paying for her “Green New Deal,” which would include government-financed projects to speed up and enforce the transition to renewable energy (though not nuclear) along with tag-along favorites such as a universal basic income, she is equally vague.
Many will say, “Massive government investment! How in the world can we pay for this?” The answer is: in the same ways that we paid for the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs, the same ways we paid for World War II and many other wars. The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments, new public banks can be created (as in WWII) to extend credit and a combination of various taxation tools (including taxes on carbon and other emissions and progressive wealth taxes) can be employed.
In addition to traditional debt tools, there is also a space for the government to take an equity role in projects, as several government and government-affiliated institutions already do.
Quartz, which is sympathetic to Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda, notes that “Green Party leader Jill Stein estimated that her version of the Green New Deal, which is less ambitious than the one presented by Ocasio-Cortez, would cost $700 billion to $1 trillion annually.”
Ocasio-Cortez is hardly alone in not even pretending to care about paying for her favored plans. In the 21st century, both Republican and Democratic majorities have at various points hidden the costs of their spending and both parties are dedicated to endless borrowing to cover any year’s expenses (call it “Government by Groupon”). Mounting debt is surely one of the factors in our generally slower-than-usual economic growth and the worst parts of the bill are still ahead of us.
If Ocasio-Cortez waves away questions of how to pay for her plans to avert the end of the world, she is also exaggerating the threat posed by climate change. Climate change is not World War II and we should resist and refute the analogy, with its strong implication not simply of massive increases in government spending and taxes but the regimentation of all aspects of day-to-day life.
As Ronald Bailey wrote last fall when the IPCC report came out, fears about the impact of sea-level rises, increases in extinctions and extreme weather events, and more have generally been overstated. So have the economic benefits of keeping global warming below 2°C:
So what, according the IPCC report, will it cost to transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar? “Global model pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C are projected to involve the annual average investment needs in the energy system of around $2.4 trillion [in 2010 U.S. dollars] between 2016 and 2035 representing about 2.5% of the world GDP,” states the report. For comparison, the International Energy Agency recently observed that “total energy investment worldwide in 2016 was just over $1.7 trillion, accounting for 2.2 percent of global GDP.” Of that, only $297 billion was spent on renewable energy sources.
So how much economic damage will pursuing the IPCC’s fast transition to a no-carbon energy system spare us? The report asserts that if no policies aimed specifically at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are adopted, then average global temperature is projected to rise by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in global GDP loss of 2.6 percent from what it would otherwise have been. Comparatively speaking, in the 2°C and 1.5°C scenarios, global GDP would only be reduced by 0.5 percent or 0.3 percent respectively.
Concretely, the global GDP of $80 trillion, growing at 3 percent annually, would rise to $903 trillion by 2100. A 2.6 percent reduction means that it would only be $880 trillion by 2100. A 0.3 percent decrease implies a loss of $2.7 trillion resulting in a global GDP of $900 trillion. Note that the IPCC is recommending that the world spend between now and 2035 more than $45 trillion in order to endow $2.7 trillion more in annual income on people living three generations hence. Assuming the worst case loss of 2.6 percent of GDP in world with a population of 10 billion that would mean that they would have to scrape by on an average income of just $88,000 per year (the average global GDP per capita now is $10,500.)
Bailey further notes that since the Paris accords are voluntary, it’s unlikely any signatory will stand by them in the face of economic adversity. Catastrophic climate change is possible and can be hedged against without cratering the economy or refusing to name the cost of one’s preferred path forward.
An agreement has been reached that could end a week-long strike by some 30,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), though details will not be released until after union members vote on the deal later Tuesday.
If approved, teachers could return to the classroom as soon as Wednesday, the Associated Press reports.
As you might expect, the strike is ultimately a disagreement over money. The union is demanding a 6.5 percent pay increase for all teachers, while the district has offered a 3 percent raise this year followed by another 3 percent raise in 2020. But the union is also asking for the LAUSD to spend larger sums of money on non-teaching staff and to hire more teachers in order to reduce class sizes. District administrators say that giving into those demands would hasten the LAUSD’s descent into insolvency.
On its current trajectory, the school district will face a $422 million shortfall by 2020, driven in large part by its $15 billion in unfunded health care benefit liabilities for current workers and retirees. A task force that studied the district’s fiscal condition in 2018 concluded that the structural deficit “threatens its long-term viability and its ability to deliver basic education programs.”
Even if the district was not facing those massive bills for pension costs and retiree healthcare, the call for more hiring should be greeted with skepticism at a time when LAUSD is seeing enrollment decline. The total student enrollment in LAUSD schools has dropped from around 700,000 in 2005 to just over 500,000 last year, according to the district’s own comprehensive annual financial reports.
Meanwhile, hiring has been on the rise—the LAUSD has seen a 16 percent jump in administrative staffers since 2004—and per pupil spending has been marching steadily upwards.
These numbers include only students enrolled in district schools and the district’s spending on those schools. In other words, charter school students and the costs of running charter schools are excluded.
“The district is spending close to $17,000 per student—about 50% more than it was at the beginning of the decade,” says Marc Joffe, an education policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this blog. “If this money was more fully directed to the classroom, it should be enough to provide adequate teacher compensation and reasonable class sizes.”
Spending more money to cut class sizes when student enrollment is already falling seems like a mistake. The decline is driven by a combination of factors, including the explosive growth of charter schools in Los Angeles and a growing number of families that are leaving the district to seek education in other public schools. Those are trends that are unlikely to be reversed by the LAUSD digging a larger hole for itself by hiring additional employees—all of whom will be owed pension and health care benefits, the two costs that are already dragging the district down.
Spending more money is not a surefire way to improve schools. As Stan Liebowitz and Matthew Kelly, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas, explained in a recent Reason cover story, student performance is not correlated with per-student expenditures.
Indeed, holding down pay in a district where the average teacher already earns more than $84,000 may have kept the LAUSD out of this fiscal hole in the first place. If raises for LAUSD teachers had been held to only 1.5 percent since 2014 (when the most recent contract between union and district was signed), Los Angeles public schools would now have an extra $352 million dollars a year to spend on education, according to an analysis by the California Policy Center, a center-right think tank.
The district could save $300 million per year by shifting retirees onto Medicaid—an imperfect solution that would move those costs from district taxpayers to federal taxpayers, but one that would save the LAUSD money nonetheless.
Any of those options should be on the table as the LAUSD tries to get back on track. About the only thing that the district should not consider, given the current trajectories for student enrollment, long-term costs, and per-pupil spending, is hiring more workers on the public’s dime.
The lawsuit challenges New York City laws that restrict—unreasonably so, to the plaintiffs—the right of licensed New York handgun owners to carry their guns outside city limits. As I wrote back in 2014, the city’s law “demonstrates the picayune restrictions on a core constitutional right that localities still indulge in after Heller—even when the laws in question will reduce the safety of citizen gun ownership, in this case by making gun training and practice more difficult.”
The law being challenged before the Supreme Court this term, as I wrote, “prohibits licensed handgun owners from taking guns almost anywhere outside of city limits. You cannot take your gun to your second home outside the city; you cannot take your gun to shooting practice outside the city; you can only travel with your gun within the state upon receiving a separate hunting permit. In the city, you can only take it to the shooting range…”
As the issues in the case are explained in the petition for certiorari to the Court from September 2018:
New York City prohibits its residents from possessing a handgun without a license, and the only license the City makes available to most residents allows its holder to possess her handgun only in her home or en route to one of seven shooting ranges within the city. The City thus bans its residents from transporting a handgun to any place outside city limits—even if the handgun is unloaded and locked in a container separate from its ammunition, and even if the owner seeks to transport it only to a second home for the core constitutionally protected purpose of selfdefense, or to a more convenient out-of-city shooting range to hone its safe and effective use. The City asserts that its transport ban promotes public safety by limiting the presence of handguns on city streets.
But the City put forth no empirical evidence that transporting an unloaded handgun, locked in a container separate from its ammunition, poses a meaningful risk to public safety. Moreover, even if there were such a risk, the City’s restriction poses greater safety risks by encouraging residents who are leaving town to leave their handguns behind in vacant homes, and it serves only to increase the frequency of handgun transport within city limits by forcing many residents to use an in-city range rather than more convenient ranges elsewhere.
The question presented is: Whether the City’s ban on transporting a licensed, locked, and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range outside city limits is consistent with the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause, and the constitutional right to travel.
Preventing a permit-holding citizen from practicing and competing in shooting proficiency, the suit argues, furthers no substantial government interest. In addition to an unreasonable restriction on the Second Amendment, the cert petition gives the Court an opportunity to shoot down the law without considering the Second Amendment at all (though one hopes the Court will not continue to avoid thinking further about the neglected Amendment): “By restricting the use of lawfully purchased handguns to in-city shooting ranges, the ban violates the Commerce Clause, for the law clearly ‘deprive[s] citizens of their right to have access to the markets of other States on equal terms.’ Granholm v. Heald…(2005). And the ban violates the fundamental right to travel by conditioning such travel on the forfeiture of a separate, but equally important, constitutional right.”
So far, both a district court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have upheld New York’s laws. As the cert petition sums up, “Purporting to apply ‘intermediate scrutiny’ but, in fact, applying something recognizable only as rational-basis review, the [district] court held that the transport ban is reasonably related to the City’s interest in public safety and crime prevention” and that the transport ban is a “reasonable … time, place, and manner restriction[] on the possession and use of a firearm.”
The Second Circuit also believed that the constitutional right to keep and bear arms pretty much only counts in the home, and thus these transport laws do not harm its core purpose. “Purporting to apply intermediate scrutiny,” the cert petition says, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals “held that the City had carried its burden to justify the encroachment on protected Second Amendment activity. The court identified the City’s interest as protecting public safety and concluded that the City had presented sufficient ‘evidence supporting its contention’ that the regulation protects that interest. The sole evidence on which the court relied in reaching that conclusion was a single affidavit from the former commander of the state licensing division hypothesizing, without any evidentiary support, that transporting an unloaded handgun, locked in a container separate from its ammunition, may pose a public safety risk in ‘road rage’ or other ‘stressful’ situations. The court did not explain how requiring city residents to spend more time transporting their handguns to inconvenient in-city ranges furthers the City’s professed interest in reducing the in-city transport of unloaded, locked-up handguns.”
The reason why the Supreme Court should disagree with the lower courts and knock down New York City’s laws are summed up in the cert petition handily:
the only plausible theory under which the City’s novel transport ban could be understood to further its professed public safety interest in decreasing the transport of unloaded, locked-up firearms is if the ban discourages people from transporting their handguns to shooting ranges at all. But it would be utterly irrational for the City to enact a restriction for the express purpose of making it harder for individuals to gain proficiency in the use of the handguns that the Constitution entitles them to possess.
More to the point, a restriction that is expressly designed to make it harder to exercise core Second Amendment rights cannot plausibly withstand any level of constitutional scrutiny. Courts would not countenance for one moment a prohibition on leaving 11 city limits to get an abortion—and certainly not if there were only seven locations in a city of 8.5 million people at which to obtain one. A prohibition on leaving city limits to exercise core Second Amendment rights should fare no better.
The Court has avoided the issue of whether the right enshrined in the Second Amendment and ratified by the Court in its 2008 Heller decision, and extended to the states in its 2010 McDonald decision, cover anything at all other than the bare right to have some sort of commonly owned weapon for self-defense in the home. Many Americans believe that their constitutional right to self-defense should not be canceled once they leave their domicile, and now the Court has decided it will consider the extent to which that might be true.
As always, their decision, whatever it is, will apply merely to the specific New York law at issue and won’t in and of itself have power to change any other of the many existing state and local laws that restrict the ability to possess a legally owned weapon outside the home. But whatever they decide will provide guidelines that other federal courts in future such challenges would be obligated to follow, or pretend to try to.
At a speech in Washington, D.C. observing Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged the devastating consequences of his role pushing the drug war into harsher and harsher sentencing when he was a senator.
Most particularly, Biden said he regretted championing legislation in 1994 that ultimately led to the mass incarceration crisis that we’re still trying to unwind. The Violent Crime and Control Act of 1994 ordered more severe mandatory minimum sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine than powder cocaine under the panic-driven—but ultimately untrue—belief that crack was somehow different and nastier.
“It was a big mistake that was made,” he said Monday. “We were told by the experts that ‘crack, you never go back,’ that the two were somehow fundamentally different. It’s not. But it’s trapped an entire generation.”
During President Barack Obama’s first term, those regulations were fixed under the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The bill reduced the federal sentences for crack cocaine crimes so that they matched those of powder cocaine.
But changes in sentencing for federal crimes are often not retroactive. Obama did use pardons toward the end of his presidency to extend some mercy to many federal prisoners serving drug sentences. It took the FIRST STEP Act, passed just before Christmas last year, to make it so that the remaining federal prisoners currently serving time for crack sentences could have them reduced.
Biden is currently mulling over a presidential run, along with every single other Democratic politician you might have heard of. And while one who just formally announced on Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, also has a background of harsh approaches to criminal justice, probably no potential candidate on the left side of the aisle can match the sheer amount of legislation in which Biden has played a role. He’s even partly to blame for the expansive authority of the Department of Justice to use civil asset forfeiture to take people’s property and keep it for themselves or distribute it to local law enforcement agencies without ever actually having to convict these people of crimes.
Biden should have more than a few regrets. But at least he has finally gotten around to acknowledging the harms his policies have had on poor families and minorities. The same apparently cannot be said of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was at this same event as Biden and is reportedly considering a presidential run himself.
The New York Timesnotes that Bloomberg declined to talk about his support for stop-and-frisk searches that police used to, without any sort of probable cause, detain and search citizens, particularly young black and Latino males. A judge declared it unconstitutional and his successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, declined to defend it.
And amazingly, given the current trajectory of political action, Bloomberg is still against marijuana legalization, demanding that the government do more research first (even though it has been the federal criminalization of marijuana that has been standing in the way of research for decades).
If there’s ever a sentence that explains why we’ve called Bloomberg one of Reason‘s “45 Enemies of Freedom“, as well as 2009’s “Nanny of the Year,” it’s this quote from a speech at the University of Toronto in Canada a week ago explaining his continued opposition to marijuana legalization: “This mad, passionate rush to let everybody do things without any research just isn’t something we would do in any other way.”
This “rush”? America has been locking people up for marijuana use for decades. In order to actually change the laws, it has taken years and years of activism and growing evidence that whatever harms marijuana might cause in long-term consumption is nowhere near the harms caused by incarcerating people for smoking.
If Harris’ background as attorney general can jeopardize her presidential chances, it’s fascinating that Biden and Bloomberg think they could ever survive public scrutiny of their records.
School choice is a noble cause, writes John Stossel. In much of America, parents have little or no control over where their kids attend school. Local governments assign schools by ZIP code.
Ashim Mitra, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has resigned following complaints from graduate students from India that he used them as 
Meanwhile, Deripaska 
The Supreme Court of the United States has declined to hear the case of a football coach in Washington state who was fired for praying while coaching.
On Day 4 of the 
On Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) announced her intention to run for president in 2020. The announcement spurred celebration from supporters of the former prosecutor, as well as a fair bit of criticism from those who remember her record of 
The draft text of her legislation includes a section answering the question “
An agreement has been reached that could end a week-long strike by some 30,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), though details will not be released until after union members vote on the deal later Tuesday.
At a speech in Washington, D.C. observing Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden