Category: reason

Organizers of the largest Cinco de Mayo-related annual event held in Philadelphia, El Carneval de Puebla, have canceled the parade over fears it could be targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. “Everyone is offended by the actions of ICE. They did not feel comfortable holding the event,” organizer Edgar Ramirez told the local NBC affiliate of his co-organizers.

ICE recently announced that over a two-week period it had made nearly 250 arrests of illegal immigrants in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware that it said had previous records, as ICE noted in its press release. But such enforcement actions are not new. A week-long operation in the three states last May yielded 84 arrests, and a similar ICE press release highlighting the prior arrest and criminal records of some of those individuals apprehended. A spokesperson at the ICE Philly office, Khaalid Walls, told NBC that ICE “enforcement actions are targeted and lead driven” and that the agency did not “conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately.” Organizers did not say they had a specific warning that their event would be targeted.

While President Trump has described recent immigration enforcement actions as unprecedented, and even as a “military operation,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has resisted such characterizations, insisting recent raids were not different than raids conducted regularly in previous years, and that there would be “no—repeat—no mass deportations” and “no—repeat—no use of military force in immigration operations.”

The Trump administration has relied on hyping up and amplifying news of its raids in order to push other immigrants to self-deport and to discourage migrants from trying to cross the border. The administration says there has been a 40 percent drop in Southern border crossings. As Dara Lind noted at Vox.com, nothing ICE did in raids in early February was unprecedented, but it “feels different with President Trump in the White House.” Lind pointed out that the truth of the raids, which did include practices not used during the Obama administration, like arresting other illegal immigrants found while targeting someone with a deportation order, was nevertheless “sometimes been overshadowed by rumors that sound much worse than anything that’s been documented.”

Arguably, those kinds of rumors, and reporting on immigration raids that conflates increased attention due to the political atmosphere with a marked increase in enforcement, are a powerful tool for the Trump administration. Any effort to deport millions of illegal immigrants will rely in part on self-deportations. Trump, through his rhetoric, has helped to create a climate of fear where that’s more likely to happen. Organizers like Ramirez are doing their part to signal boost that climate instead of resisting it.

You’ll never guess what happened in Palos Park, Illinois, this week: A sex offender drove his car by a school bus stop.

Oh my!

Did he threaten children? Abduct them?

Well, no. He didn’t even get out of his car, actually.

But… the children! They were in danger, right?

Nope. “No students were involved in this incident,” according to the police. (Incident? What was the incident, then?)

So, no kids were involved, but they could have been. Imagine that! It’s so horrifying. Then they would have seen the guy drive right by them.

Apparently some parents noticed an unfamiliar red Hyundai and alerted the cops. Patch.com reports:

The police chief [Joe Miller] said the man’s red Hyundai drew the attention of parents waiting for their youngsters at the school bus stop. The parents noticed the vehicle traveling through the area several times this past week.

“The car looked out of place to them,” Miller said. “We wanted to follow up on it. The car came back registered to a sex offender.”

Miller added that there were no furtive movements. The man did not violate his sex offender registration.

The police questioned the man. Turns out he kept driving by each day for the very creepy and bizarre reason that this happens to be the route to his job.

So the guy did nothing but drive his car down the street. And yet the cops praised the parents for calling the authorities:

“Parents were being alert and vigilant. Something looked out of place and they called police,” the chief added. “They did what they were supposed to do.”

Apparently, that’s what parents are supposed to do these days: freak out at red Hyundais. Naturally, the police proceeded to notify the school district, and naturally, the superintendent notified even more parents.

Now everyone knows about a guy who was not violating his parole, did not get out of his car, and did not encounter any students. But still. Scary.

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee begins confirmation hearings on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gorsuch is a respected legal conservative whose admirers come from across the political spectrum. Not only is he immensely popular among Federalist Society members, he has also earned kudos from the liberal-leaning American Bar Association, which deemed Gorsuch “well-qualified” to serve on the Supreme Court. That is the ABA’s highest rating for a judicial nominee.

Gorsuch is perhaps best known in legal circles as a leading critic of the doctrine known as Chevron deference, which takes its name from the Supreme Court’s hugely important 1984 ruling in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. According to Chevron, when the federal courts are tasked with interpreting the meaning of an “ambiguous” federal statute, the courts should adopt the statutory interpretation favored by the federal regulatory agency charged with enforcing that statute. What that means in practice is that federal judges are now routinely tipping the scales in favor of such executive branch agencies as the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Board of Immigration Appeals.

To put it mildly, Gorsuch is no fan of the Chevron approach. In his 2016 concurrence in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, for example, Gorsuch denounced Chevron deference as a “judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.” As far as Gorsuch is concerned, “under any conception of our separation of powers, I would have thought powerful and centralized authorities like today’s administrative agencies would have warranted less deference from other branches, not more.”

Gorsuch has also been critical of judicial deference to law enforcement agencies. His 2016 dissent in United States v. Carloss, for instance, lambasted the majority’s view that police officers had the “implied consent” to enter private property for a warrantless “knock and talk” on a homeowner’s front porch when that homeowner had placed numerous “No Trespassing” signs on the property, including on the front door itself. Yet according to the majority’s gloss on the Fourth Amendment, Gorsuch remarked, “a homeowner may post as many No Trespassing signs as she wishes. She might add a wall or a medieval-style moat, too. Maybe razor wire and battlements and mantraps besides. Even that isn’t enough to revoke the state’s right to enter.” In Gorsuch’s view, “this line of reasoning seems to me difficult to reconcile with the Constitution of the founders’ design.”

As I’ve previously written, “Gorsuch demonstrated admirable and reassuring judgment in these cases. Not only did he cast a principled vote against overreaching law enforcement, he cast a principled vote against the overreaching executive branch. It’s not difficult to imagine Gorsuch imposing the same severe judicial scrutiny against the misdeeds of the Trump administration.”

Many unanswered questions do still remain about Gorsuch’s legal views. For example, he has never written a major opinion in an abortion rights case. Likewise, his views on the full scope of presidential power, including the president’s authority to direct immigration policy via executive order, remain unclear. Needless to say, there will be plenty of questions about these and other hot-button issues from the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

To get you up to speed in preparation for today’s start to the Gorsuch confirmation hearings, here is a selection of Reason‘s ongoing coverage of the SCOTUS nominee.

• Trump Nominates Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court
• 3 Questions for SCOTUS Nominee Neil Gorsuch
• What Neil Gorsuch’s Book on Assisted Suicide Reveals About His Views on Abortion Rights
• Neil Gorsuch Follows Justice Scalia’s Footsteps on Criminal Justice
• Gorsuch’s Track Record Suggests He Won’t Be Trump’s Rubber Stamp
• Neil Gorsuch Benchslaps Donald Trump, Calls President’s Attacks on Judiciary ‘Demoralizing’ and ‘Disheartening’
• Everything You Need to Know About Neil Gorsuch: Q&A with Randy Barnett

• Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch begin today. FBI Director James Comey, meanwhile, will testify before the House intelligence committee about President Trump’s claim the Trump Tower was wiretapped by President Obama.
• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson finished his first trip to Asia with a meeting with the president of China.
• A man was arrested at the White House after telling Secret Service agents he had a bomb.
• The FBI made an arrest in connection with an alleged assault by gif, via Twitter, of Kurt Eichenwald.
• The prime minister of Russian-controlled Crimea, said he wants Vladimir Putin to be president for life.
• Security in Mogadishu was ramped up as the chair of the African Union arrived for meetings with Somali leadership.
• Shaquille O’Neal says he believes the Earth is flat.
• Chuck Berry died over the weekend, aged 90.

A dispute between a Wisconsin family and their local government could set an important precedent for how the federal government must compensate states when taking land.

The case, Murr v. Wisconsin, goes before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday for oral arguments. The Murr family owns two adjacent plots of land along the banks of the St. Croix River in western Wisconsin, and wants to sell one of the parcels (with an estimated value of $400,000, the family claims) to pay for maintenance on the recreational cabin that sits on the other parcel. The county government, acting under the terms of a 1975 state law, prohibited the family from selling the second parcel and declared the two parcels are effectively a single parcel—a regulatory ruling that the Murr family claims has reduced the value of their land by as much as 90 percent.

(For more on the details and background of the case, check out my previous reporting here.)

The whole thing seems very narrow and technical—it’s almost so provincial that it makes you wonder why the Supreme Court is involved at all—but the key detail is not the fight over whether the Murr’s own one 2.5 acre parcel of land or two 1.25 acre parcels of land. No, the real question here is whether the state government has to compensate them for the loss of value.

Usually, this is fairly clear cut. The U.S. Constitution says governments must compensate property owners when land is taken for public purposes. In this case, though, the land wasn’t necessarily taken, but rather the use of the land was significantly restricted by state regulations regarding where structures can be built relative to waterways, and by the separate decision to merge the two parcels into one without the Murr’s consent.

The case before the Supreme Court will deal mostly with the question of whether the simple fact of having two adjacent parcels owned by the same person can allow the government to reduce the value of those parcels without having to pay compensation—something the government would not be able to do if the two parcels had different owners.

“However you come down on the question of whether there is a taking in [the Murr’s] case or not, the answer shouldn’t depend on the fact that the owners of one lot also happen to own the lot next door,” said Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University, during a forum on the Murr case hosted Friday by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Somin has called the case “by far the most important property rights case to come before the Supreme Court this term, and probably the most important in at least two or three years, if not longer.”

It’s the question of compensation that has attracted the interest of several states that are not directly involved in the dispute. Eight western states, led by Nevada, filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court in support of the Murr’s claim. If the state can combine the Murr’s parcels of land and not have to compensate the family for the lost value, those states argue, then similar reasoning could leave states vulnerable to large-scale uncompensated encroachment by the federal government.

“If regulators do not have to pay compensation to affected property owners in cases where the latter happen to possess contiguous lots, they will often have little incentive to fully consider the costs and benefits of proposed regulations, and prioritize those with the greatest likely beneficial impact,” they argue. “Aggregating contiguous parcels under common ownership into a single super-parcel will undermine traditional notions of property rights, have deleterious economic consequences, and encourage the undisciplined regulation of individuals’ and states’ property.”

The states are not concerned with whether Wisconsin should have to compensate the Murr family for the reduced value of their property, but rather with the way in which the government executed the merger of the two parcels. If governments are allowed to do that—to decide that two adjacent parcels of land with the same owner can be treated as a single parcel under the law—then it creates several perverse incentives for individuals, states, and the federal government.

At the Cato forum on Friday, Somin, who authored the amicus brief on behalf of those several western states, outlined some of those potential perverse incentives:

• If property owners know that contiguous parcels can be merged together by governments, without compensation, they will have an incentive to NOT get common ownership. That creates other problems with efficiency, as property owners find ways to get around it, such as by creating other parties for a transaction purely to avoid legal problems.
• It would make it harder to collect parcels of land for a large building project, either public or private.
• States will have incentives to redefine parcels to avoid liabilities under the constitution’s takings clause, and regulators will be able to undermine property values without having to worry about paying compensation
• Many state governments own contiguous lots and large bodies of water near areas owned by the federal government (military bases, national parks, etc). Takings rules apply to land taken by the federal government from state government, but if you can say contiguous lots are merged, then the federal government would be able to impose severe restrictions on state land and wouldn’t have to pay consequences.

The last point is the one that most concerns the states that are watching the Murr case closely. If the federal government is able to merge state-owned parcels and reduce access to them or otherwise regulate them to the point where they become unusable, the feds would normally have to compensate the state for the loss of access to its land. Depending on the outcome of the Murr case, that might change.

(The Reason Foundation, which publishes this blog, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in defense of the Murr family’s claim).

Illicit drug use is an old phenomenon, and Jeff Sessions has an old solution: take off the gloves. “We have too much of a tolerance for drug use,” the attorney general complained to an audience of law enforcement officials Wednesday, promising more aggressive policing. “Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad,” he declared. “It will destroy your life.”

That claim will fall on a lot of deaf ears among the 100 million Americans who have used marijuana—most of whom found it did not destroy their lives and some of whom found it made their lives better.

He is right, though, that tolerance is rampant. A Gallup Poll last year showed that 60 percent of Americans think pot should be legalized for recreational use—as eight states and the District of Columbia have done. Medical marijuana is allowed in 28 states and D.C. But in his prepared remarks, Sessions insisted cannabis is “only slightly less awful” than heroin. Steve Chapman explains what Sessions is getting wrong.

View this article.

The Russian government has barred children under 16 from seeing the new version of Beauty and the Beast because it has a gay character. Russian law bars what it calls gay propaganda aimed at minors.

The issue of abortion is guaranteed to come up this week when the Senate Judiciary Committee begins confirmation hearings on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a federal judge, Gorsuch’s record on abortion is basically silent. He has not had the opportunity to write an opinion in a major abortion rights case. But his scholarly record is a different matter. Gorsuch’s non-judicial writings contain several powerful clues about his views on the constitutionality of abortion.

In his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, for example, Gorsuch rejected the case for legalizing assisted suicide on the grounds that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and the taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” That language seemingly points in an anti-abortion direction.

Furthermore, in that same book, Gorsuch questioned whether the Supreme Court had any business defending any sort of unenumerated constitutional rights under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Drawing on the work of conservative legal scholar Robert Bork, Gorsuch argued that the Due Process Clause has been stretched “beyond recognition” when the Court interpreted it to be “the repository of other substantive rights not expressly enumerated in the text of the Constitution or its amendments.”

The most famous modern cases dealing with “substantive rights not expressly enumerated in the text of the Constitution or its amendments” are Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which recognized a constitutional right to privacy, and Roe v. Wade (1973), which said the right to privacy included “a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Both cases cited the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment as a supporting authority.

Gorsuch’s arguments about the Due Process Clause strongly suggest that he believes both Griswold and Roe were wrongly decided. The unanswered question is whether or not he believes those decisions should be overturned by the Supreme Court in future cases.

The Senate Judiciary Committee should ask him about that during this week’s confirmation hearings.

Related: Questions for Neil Gorsuch on Congressional Power, Executive Power, and Constitutional Rights

During the lame duck session in December, Congress did something amazing: It actually passed a criminal justice bill. Tucked among the provisions of the bipartisan law were new state reporting requirements on prison rape. While that’s great, there’s a lot more that could be done if the federal government is serious about stopping this heinous crime.

Back in 2003, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions worked across the aisle with Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy to pass the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Evangelical Christians, led by Chuck Colson—the former Watergate conspirator who turned to prison ministry after his own stint on the inside—were instrumental in whipping GOP support. But the Justice Department didn’t adopt national PREA standards until 2012. Four years after they went into effect, the Associated Press reported that only 12 states were in full compliance with them.

A nationwide inmate survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that in 2011–12 an estimated 4 percent of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2 percent of jail inmates reported being sexually victimized by another inmate or a member of the staff. In 2013, Eli Lehrer wrote at National Review that “PREA has reasonably few real teeth and, as a result, truly awful prisons and jails can still get away with allowing rampant sexual abuse. Cultural attitudes towards prison rape, distressingly, haven’t changed much.”

One major requirement of the law is that juveniles and other vulnerable inmates be segregated from the general adult population, writes C.J. Ciaramella.

View this article.

Sometime in 2017, the total U.S. national debt will hit $20 trillion—more than the total gross domestic product (GDP) of the country in a year. That figure is projected to keep growing over time, thanks to rising annual deficits. Debt held by the public, a measure that counts all federal securities sold to individuals, corporations, and state and local governments, plus foreign investors, currently clocks in around $14 trillion. That figure is expected to hit $23 trillion in 2026.

There are risks to carrying a debt burden this big. It increases the nation’s susceptibility to a fiscal crisis if interest rates rise, and it limits the sorts of projects government can take on in a constrained fiscal environment. The greater the debt, the greater these risks become, writes Peter Suderman.

View this article.