Category: reason

Donald Trump held the third campaign-style of his two-month-old presidency in Louisville tonight, where he boasted that some NFL owners weren’t interested in signing Colin Kaepernick “because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump.”

Trump cited a story from Bleacher Report, which quoted an unnamed general manager who suggested a fear of Trump might be keeping some teams from hiring Kaepernick, who last year declined to stand for the national anthem in protest of the treatment of African Americans in the U.S. as well as the corrupt political system (he knocked candidates Trump and Hillary Clinton last year, calling the former a racist and the latter someone who would be in prison if she weren’t who she were).

“They think there might be protests or Trump will tweet about the team,” Bleacher Report quoted the general manager as saying. “I’d say that number is around 10 percent. Then there’s another 10 percent that has a mix of those feelings.”

The manager went on to tell Bleacher Report the majority of team owners “genuinely hate him and can’t stand what he did,” and that only about a fifth considered Kaepernick, who began last season as a second-string quarterback and ended up starting 11 games for the 2-14 San Francisco 49ers, which he had taken to the Super Bowl just four years earlier. He became a free agent this year in a market with not a lot of good quarterbacks.

Kaepernick was not the only player to protest during the national anthem last year, but he was the first and by far the most prominent. Earlier this month, Kaepernick said he would stand for the anthem this year, arguing the method would detract from unspecified positive changes he believes are happening. He did not vote in November.

Brexit negotiations are on their way. Britian’s government will begin the formal process on March 29, as reported by the Associated Press.

To start the clock, Britain will trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which details how member states can withdraw from the European Union. At that point, both sides will have until March 2019 to agree on a settlement, determining what the relationship between Britain and the E.U. will look like post-Brexit.

The negotiations are crucial in determining future trade relations, travel restrictions, and financial services between Britain and the rest of Europe. There is much at stake, as the kind of deal Britain receives will signal to other E.U. members whether it is worth leaving or not.

“They will all see from the U.K.’s example that leaving the E.U. is a bad idea,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said, according to CNN. “On the contrary, the remaining member states will fall in love with each other again and renew their vows with the European Union.”

Membership in the E.U., as the Harvard Business Review explains, is characterized by four freedoms: the free movement across borders of people, services, goods, and capital. The journal notes that Britain is negotiating for continued tariff-free trade but with the ability to control it own borders.

“The ideal outcome (and in my view the most likely, after a lot of wrangling) is continued tariff-free access,” Brexit secretary David Davis said, per the Harvard Business Review article. “Once the European nations realize that we are not going to budge on control of our borders, they will want to talk, in their own interest.”

The sentiment is not shared by the E.U.

“Half memberships and cherry-picking aren’t possible,” Juncker argued, according to reports from CNN. “In Europe you eat what’s on the table or you don’t sit at the table.”

It was this sort of Euro-centric conformity that fueled pro-Brexit support, as Reason editor at large Matt Welch explained back in January:

Railing against the sovereignty-busting whims of overseas elites isn’t just effective politics, it’s also often right. The E.U. project has been liberating when it comes to free trade, privatization, and the movement of humans within its borders, but planners weren’t content to stop there. They insisted on eradicating monetary sovereignty as well, implausibly lashing together the central banks of Germany and Greece, a system that leaves all participants perpetually (and rightfully) disgruntled. And the downside to pooling and outsourcing immigration policy has been all too clear these past few years, as locals have found some of their cities swollen with hard-to-assimilate migrants and refugees from war-torn Muslim regions of the Middle East and North Africa, without feeling like they had any say in the matter. Throw in what has become almost monthly acts of deadly Islamic terrorism on the continent, and the nationalist political reactions write themselves.

For more Brexit speculation, read Cato Institute policy analyst Marian Tupy’s contribution to Reason on how Britain can negotiate for a better withdrawal settlement.

Authorities charged a Hampshire College student with assaulting a member of Central Maine Community College’s basketball team over a dispute about cultural appropriation. Really.

The Hampshire student, 20-year-old Carmen Figueroa, allegedly started a fight because the basketball player had braided her hair in a manner that upset Figueroa. She walked up to the visiting player—during a basketball game—and demanded that the player remove the braids from her hair, according to masslive.com.

Figueroa is a female student of color. The basketball player was a member of the women’s team. Her ethnicity is not stated in news articles, though it seems likely she’s either white, or belongs to some other race whose members aren’t allowed to braid their hair Latina-style, according to Figueroa’s world view.

Here’s how the encounter unfolded. The Daily Hampshire Gazette reports:

When the players did not comply and began to leave the building, Figueroa allegedly initiated a fight towards one of the players. At the same time, another unknown Hampshire College student pulled the hair of a visiting women’s basketball player causing her to fall to the ground, according to court documents.

While the player was on the ground, police allege that Figueroa kicked and stepped on the player causing injury.

Another Maine player attempted to protect her fallen teammate but Figueroa “grabbed her by the head and threw her to the ground,” according to court documents.

In court last Friday, Figueroa pleaded not guilty.

I realize that most accusations of cultural appropriation do not end in violence. (Some do.) But it’s a ludicrous belief, even when not backed up by force. Who is teaching these liberal students that they have the right to bully people for dressing and styling themselves in imitation of other races? Who is peddling the absurd notion that the right to wear braids, or hooped earrings, or sombreros, or geisha costumes belongs to some people, but not to others? Shouldn’t Hampshire College be fostering liberal, cosmopolitan values among its students?

• In a House Intelligence Committee hearing today, FBI Director James Comey confirmed the FBI is investigating the extent of ties between President Donald Trump’s associates and the Russian government and whether anything criminal happened. He also (along with others at the hearing) said he found no evidence that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump tower.
• Hearings for Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court began and are showing themselves to be very partisan, to the surprise of absolutely nobody at all. But he has John Elway’s support!
• Billionaire philanthropist David Rockefeller has died at age 101.
• Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George, is expected be nominated by Trump to lead the Justice Department’s civil division.
• A passenger plane with dozens aboard crashed in South Sudan. The good news is that there are survivors.
• Eric Trump and wife, Lara, are expecting their first child.
• Sesame Street is introducing a muppet with autism. No word on whether Oscar the Grouch will be blaming vaccines for her condition.

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Donald Trump ran for office promising to crush the Islamic State, end the influx of illegal immigration from Mexico, and stop the flight of American manufacturing jobs to China. Now that he’s in office, he seems to be focusing on different set of targets: Public television’s “Big Bird,” poor old people who benefit from “Meals on Wheels,” and history graduate students and scholars of the Founding Fathers who get grants from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH). Some reports even had the Trump administration slashing funding for the Coast Guard. What’s going on here?

The Trump “budget cuts” are best understood in the context of Trump’s home city, New York, suggests Ira Stoll. There, for decades, the mayor would propose draconian “cuts” to popular institutions like museums and libraries, the museums and libraries would dutifully rally their constituencies to fight against the proposed “cuts,” and the City Council would intervene to restore the funding, winning the gratitude of those that had been targeted. This was widely and correctly understood as a kind of theater. No funding was genuinely in jeopardy, other than the personal funds of the taxpayers who wound up eventually footing the bill for the government spending. The mayor got to pose as fiscally prudent. And the City Council got to claim credit for protecting the museums and libraries, which had never really been in danger.

View this article.

Yes, associates of President Donald Trump are the focus of an FBI investigation over potential connections to the Russian government and Russia’s attempts to meddle with the 2016 presidential election, FBI Director James Comey confirmed in a House committee meeting this morning.

Comey would not discuss any details of the ongoing investigation or suggest that they believed that any crimes had been committed as yet. That’s what the investigation was for. The public announcement confirms what had been leaked out from several sources already. Comey did say there would be an “assessment of whether any crimes were committed.”

Furthermore, pretty much everybody participating on both sides of this House Intelligence Committee hearing was on the same side in concluding that Trump’s tweets that he had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama were not supported by evidence. This doesn’t necessarily mean that other types of surveillance might have happened. But parties dismissed the idea that wiretaps were involved, and Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, explained that Obama would not have had the authority to simply order Trump to be wiretapped on his own.

Other than those two major news hooks, much of the rest of the questioning from the House committee, at least in the earliest stages, ping-ponged back and forth between the two parties’ attempts to spin this entire scandal their way. For Democrats, this meant a heavy focus on Russia’s potential meddling in the election. Though there has still been no evidence that Russian hacking altered the results of the election in any way, committee ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) spent a good 15 minutes detailing the entire background of the targeting of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign pre-election for hacking and timed releases of private email discussions.

For Republicans, much of the focus was, first of all, pointing out that there was no evidence the election results themselves were altered by hackers, and then attacking the leaks coming out of the intelligence community, particularly wanting to track down and punish whoever it was who leaked to the press that Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security advisor, had been talking to a Russian diplomat and—more importantly—had apparently lied to now-Vice President Mike Pence about it. The emphasis on the crimes of the leaks themselves may well have reached its strangest place when Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) made a show out of refusing to say Flynn’s name when asking questions after making a big deal about how these intel leaks have the potential to violate the privacy of Americans.

There’s a secondary goal here by pro-surveillance conservatives that helps make the line of questioning make a little more sense. It’s not necessarily about protecting Trump and Trump’s associates. It’s about protecting the intelligence community’s surveillance authorities. Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Florida), and other Republicans raised concerns that these leaks could compromise efforts to renew Section 702, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that details some authorities and restrictions on overseas or international surveillance that also ends up scooping up conversations or data from Americans.

Section 702 is going to sunset this year unless Congress takes action on it. Privacy and civil liberties groups have called for reforms to Section 702 to provide greater protections for Americans from having their information collected, stored, and used in domestic crime investigations without warrants. Surveillance advocates and the Trump administration itself do not want any reforms to 702 and want it renewed as it is. So the perception among Republicans on the panel was that the leaks revealing Flynn’s name jeopardize the renewal of 702 because it shows that the American people can’t trust that their privacy actually will be protected by the intelligence community.

It’s yet another example of how people in position of power don’t grasp the consequences of the abuse of authority until it’s against them or their friends. Even so, there was little evidence the Republicans were concerned at all that the collection and use of the private communication was itself a problem but rather that the information was leaked.

And ultimately the partisan split in the discussions here presents us with a false choice. There’s no reason why Americans shouldn’t be concerned by a foreign power’s breach of a political party’s communications in an attempt to influence the election and at the same time worry about the dangers and long-term consequences of the intelligence community using agenda-driven links to attempt to damage the leaders of the executive branch (a.k.a. their bosses).

Conservative starlet Tomi Lahren is facing a heap of backlash from her usual supporters after an appearance on ABC’s The View in which she defended the decriminalized status of abortion. Lahren, who hosts a popular show (Tomi) for Glenn Beck network The Blaze and is a frequent guest on Fox News programs, said that as someone who “loves the Constitution” and believes in limited government she can’t support the government “decid[ing] what women do with their bodies.”

“I’m pro choice,” Lahren admitted, calling it hypocritical to profess support for small government yet want to ban abortion. “I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.”

Contra Lahren’s critics, this is a perfectly coherent position, and one that was once perfectly respectable within the mainstream conservative movement. There’s only tension between believing abortion should be legal—which is all being “pro-choice” means—and the Constitution’s prescription of “life, liberty, and property” protection for all if you believe that personhood begins at conception. But one needn’t believe this, nor even be a Christian at all, in order to champion conservative political philosophy.

And even if one does believe that abortion is an immoral practice, it doesn’t necessarily follow that one must wish it banned completely. There are plenty of pro-life Americans who believe a blanket ban on abortion is not the best way to end the practice, given how black markets work. They instead strive to end abortion through changing hearts and minds, advocating better pregnancy-prevention methods, working to expand adoption options, and things like that. Again, this might seem horrific to people who believe that aborting an eight-week old fetus is the exact same as murdering a 2- or 20- or 80-year-old, but that’s a matter of moral or religious perspective. Many others who believe abortion is wrong are simultaneously able to hold that it’s not the same degree of wrong as ending a life outside the womb, or that the competing rights of pregnant women make abortion morally justifiable in some circumstances.

Listen, I am not glorifying abortion. I don’t personally advocate for it. I just don’t think it’s the government’s place to dictate. https://t.co/qRjbAtJdo7

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) March 19, 2017

These are all positions that can convey coherent internal logic and political/moral belief systems. You may think folks like Lahren—who says she is personally against abortion, even though simultaneously pro-choice—are wrong, and that abortion is always the gravest of transgressions or never so, but it’s erroneous and unfair to brush aside their beliefs as simple stupidity, hypocrisy, opportunism, or cowardice. It’s exactly this kind of reflexive dismissal of differing beliefs and moral gray areas that keeps us locked in the stupidest kind of culture war over abortion, one that manifests in it being the most important litmus test for acceptance into political movements on the right and left and results in a host of high-profile, symbolic battles that all lead back to the same status quo.

Anyway, a lot of conservatives have been calling for Lahren’s head since her View appearance, insisting it’s an embarrassment and an outrage that such a pro-choice harpy could be a public face of Republicanism. As with Milo Yiannopoulos—who said all sorts of horrible things about women, Muslims, transgender people, etc., but was only ousted from polite conservatism after joking about pedophilic priests—it’s telling (if predictable) that tepidly pro-choice views are the dealbreaker for the right with Lahren, while things like calling Black Lives Matter activists “the new KKK,” referring to the Middle East as a “sandbox” that needs to be bombed, and defending the shooting of unarmed black men by cops never really rustled Republican jimmies.

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has something in common with both Justice Clarence Thomas and with the late Justice Antonin Scalia. All three jurists are known as proponents of originalism, which is the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning at the time it was adopted.

Yet despite their shared affinity for originalism, Thomas and Scalia disagreed on some fundamental questions of constitutional law. Most notably, Thomas and Scalia disagreed about whether the Supreme Court should revive and enforce the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. I’d like to know where Neil Gorsuch stands on this crucial divide.

Here’s the deal. According to the 14th Amendment, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” What are the privileges or immunities of U.S. citizens? According to Republican Congressman John Bingham of Ohio, the author of that section of the 14th Amendment, “the provisions of the Constitution guaranteeing rights, privileges, and immunities to citizens of the United States” include both those enumerated rights that are specifically spelled out somewhere in the Constitution—such as in the Bill of Rights—as well as other fundamental rights that are not enumerated in the document. Among the fundamental unenumerated rights that are secured against state abridgment, Bingham told the House of Representatives, was the “constitutional liberty…to work in an honest calling and contribute by your toil in some sort to the support of your self, to the support of your fellowmen, and to be secure in the enjoyment of the fruits of your toil.”

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. The Supreme Court first ruled on its meaning five years later in a dispute known as The Slaughter-House Cases. At issue was the granting of an exclusive and highly lucrative slaughterhouse monopoly to a private corporation by the Louisiana legislature. According to a number of New Orleans butchers, the monopoly law was an act of pure special interest cronyism that violated their fundamental rights to economic liberty under the 14th Amendment.

The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling 5-4 in favor of the state and its corporate beneficiaries. According to the majority opinion of Justice Samuel Miller, to view the Privileges or Immunities Clause as a guarantee of individual rights against any sort of state law or regulation would “fetter and degrade the State governments” and transform the Supreme Court into “a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States.” Miller’s opinion effectively gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

The principal Slaughter-House dissent was filed by Justice Stephen Field, who argued that the majority had just trashed the original meaning of the 14th Amendment. “It is to me a matter of profound regret that [the monopoly’s] validity is recognized by this court,” Field wrote, “for by it the right of free labor, one of the most sacred and imprescriptible rights of man, is violated.” In Field’s view, “the fourteenth amendment does afford such protection, and was so intended by the Congress which framed and the states which adopted it.”

From the standpoint of constitutional originalism, Field had the winning argument. But he failed to carry the day at SCOTUS. Slaughter-House remains what lawyers call “good law” to this day.

Which brings us back to Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.

In 2010 the Supreme Court finally had the opportunity to revisit The Slaughter-House Cases. At issue in the case of McDonald v. City of Chicago was whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies against state and local governments via the 14th Amendment, and if it does apply, is that because the right to keep and bear arms is a privilege or immunity of U.S. citizenship, or because it is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment (“nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”).

During the March 2010 oral arguments in that case, Justice Scalia openly mocked the idea of reviving the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. “Why are you asking us to overrule 150, 140 years of prior law?” Scalia asked the libertarian lawyer Alan Gura, who was representing Otis McDonald in his gun rights fight. “Why do you undertake that burden,” Scalia went on, “instead of just arguing substantive due process, which as much as I think it’s wrong, I have—even I have acquiesced in it?”

It was a jaw-dropping moment. For decades Scalia had attacked the idea of using the Due Process Clause to protect substantive individual rights, denouncing it as a “judicial usurpation” and as an excuse “to render democratically adopted texts mere springboards for judicial lawmaking.” Yet here was Scalia, a self-professed originalist, failing to practice what he preached in a major case dealing with the original meaning of the 14th Amendment.

Clarence Thomas kept quiet that day, as he usually does during oral arguments. But he spoke up loud and clear in his written opinion. Whereas Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Chief Justice Roberts joined the majority opinion of Justice Alito, which applied the Second Amendment against the states via substantive due process, Justice Thomas filed a lone concurrence that argued for applying the Second Amendment against the states via the Privileges or Immunities Clause and thereby restore the long lost original meaning of that provision. Thomas also strongly implied that Slaughter-House should be overruled. “The mere fact that the [Privileges or Immunities] Clause does not expressly list the rights it protects does not render it incapable of principled judicial application,” Thomas wrote.

In short, Justice Thomas stood up for the original meaning of a core constitutional provision while Justice Scalia “acquiesced” to an approach that Scalia himself described as un-originalist and “wrong.”

Where does Neil Gorsuch stand on the matter? Does he side with Justice Thomas and favor the judicial enforcement of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, or does he side with Justice Scalia and support maintaining the substantive due process status quo? The Senate Judiciary Committee should ask him about these fundamental constitutional issues during this week’s confirmation hearings.

Tasers are supposed to be a step toward more humane policing, but because they are (usually) non-lethal, tasers might actually make excessive force more likely rather than less. In Virginia, a man was burned alive by a cop who may have been too quick to use a taser.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Let’s get one thing clear at the outset: Miles November acted like an idiot.

November could have killed someone the night of February 7, 2015, when—driving on a suspended license, with a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit—he led police officers on a high-speed chase in Chesterfield that ended when he rolled his car several times and crashed. A few months ago he pleaded guilty to drunken driving, running away from the cops, and driving on a suspended license.

For such behavior, he deserved a long stretch in a hard cell—especially given his long record of prior offenses for DUI and assaulting officers. Rosa Parks he ain’t. Few people would dispute that. But only a demented sadist would contend that, for his crime, November should have been burned alive.

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“Good day to you,” Jimmy Breslin told the crowd of cops. “I’d like the record to state that I’m here without a lawyer.”

It was 1969. By this time Breslin, who died yesterday, was already a well-known newspaper columnist, but he wasn’t giving a talk about journalism. He was campaigning to be president of the New York City Council. His running mate, Norman Mailer, was aiming to be mayor. The place was the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Breslin was about to deliver what Mailer’s campaign manager, Joe Flaherty, would later describe as “the best speech he would deliver during the campaign.” (It went over better than Mailer’s turn with the crowd, which featured lines like “there were years when I hated some of you guys so much it wasn’t funny” and “I’m as yellow as any good cop.”) After some opening jokes, Breslin got down to the heart of his pitch: Elect his ticket, and “there will be no more New York Police Department as we know it”:

Our idea is to have this city become a state, have the various sections of this city become cities right inside the state, and let them run their own police. Let’s get the wisdom of the neighborhoods, give them the power, and let them run with it. I say the plan is far better from a police viewpoint than the way we’re going, because in my estimation policemen today are being used. The police get all the mistakes of all the people who are supposed to be more important and smarter than us.

The argument that followed mixed lines a Black Panther could love (“Those days are gone when white people can rule the black neighborhoods”) with sentences calculated to appeal to people afraid of Panthers (“I think the time also should be gone that we should ask a white person to go in there”). Breslin called for the radical decentralization not just of the police but of the schools, and he wrapped up with a joke about knowing a guy who could come in to teach a class on bookmaking. After the official event was over, the candidates found themselves shooting the shit with some beat cops who had skipped the lecture. One of them told Breslin he had “doubts about you with your long, curly hair.” Breslin shot back that he “wouldn’t want to walk into a piss house with you alone either, baby.”

By this time Mailer and Breslin weren’t a conventional ticket so much as a double act, with each candidate taking the spotlight in front of different audiences. Breslin, a more natural populist, was better with Catholics and cops, Mailer with Jews and intellectuals; when they spoke before an audience of feminists, they both bombed. It never was completely clear how serious a campaign they were running. Breslin told one audience that “anyone who runs for office in this city, with the shape this city is in, and takes it as a joke, is committing a mortal sin.” But it didn’t take Flaherty long to decide that Breslin saw his candidacy “as a brief and witty exercise to discredit the regular pols, then an exit before the real campaigning began.”

The duo definitely believed that stuff about decentralization and community control. But they were prone to pitching proposals that were satiric, utopian, or maybe both: banning cars from Manhattan, inviting gangs to fight jousting matches in Central Park, holding a stickball World Series on Wall Street. Mailer took to promoting an idea he called Sweet Sunday—one day a month when, in his words, “New York would stop for 24 hours. Everything would stop running. Electricity, cars, planes, trains, name it. If nothing else, it would give New York a chance to clear itself once a month. And people would hear themselves think for a change.” Pressed on whether he’d permit hospitals to run their generators on Sweet Sunday, Mailer backed down slightly and said he’d allow it. And air conditioning? There he held firm, though he acknowledged that the people wouldn’t like the results: “On the first hot day the populace would impeach me.”

Put another way, Mailer and Breslin liked to bullshit. But they also cultivate the aura of men who told impolitic truths. It wasn’t for nothing that one of their campaign slogans was No bullshit, and it wasn’t for nothing that another slogan was The other guys are the joke. You were supposed to take them seriously but not always literally, to borrow a slightly curdled phrase.

If anything, they ODed on authenticity. One of the most notorious moments of the ’69 campaign came when Mailer drunkenly railed against his own supporters at a fundraiser in a Greenwich Village club, telling his followers that they were “nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs” and yelling “shut up” and “fuck you” at anyone who interrupted his speech, even if they were yelping their agreement. The speech also included a tipsy rant about Jews, with Mailer, an unmistakable Semite, declaring that he was entitled to include it “because I’m one of them.” In the aftermath, at 4 a.m., a shell-shocked Breslin called Jack Newfield. “Why didn’t you tell me I was running with Ezra Pound?” he asked.

Mailer got about 41,000 votes in the Democratic primary—a little over 5 percent. Breslin got around 66,000 in the other contest, or just under 11 percent. Besides failing to win, they mostly failed in Mailer’s dream of assembling “a hip coalition of the left and right.” The initial meeting at Mailer’s house to discuss the race had drawn in figures ranging from Noel Parmentel of National Review to Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, but once the campaign got underway almost all of the ticket’s supporters hailed from the left end of the spectrum. (They did pick some libertarian support, with Murray Rothbard endorsing the duo and some of his circle following suit. But this was when Rothbard was in his New Left phase.) Needless to say, they also failed to decentralize New York City, though it wasn’t many years after their campaign that Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues conducted some studies that suggested devolving police work to the neighborhoods wasn’t a bad idea. That speech at John Jay College may have gotten a little wild, but it turns out to have had some sense to it.

But the biggest failure was a matter of moral principle. Looking back, Breslin declared himself “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed.”