Category: reason

It’s not really a secret that the FBI is in the business of monitoring social media posts. What’s less clear is why, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked for records related to that surveillance, the bureau refused to acknowledge their existence. That’s just one question a lawsuit filed yesterday by the ACLU and its Northern California affiliate seeks to answer.

Last May, the ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with seven government agencies “seeking the release of records pertaining to the federal government’s social media surveillance,” according to the lawsuit. It’s been nearly eight months since then, and not one of those agencies has complied. The resulting lawsuit seeks “to enforce the public’s right about the Defendant federal agencies’ surveillance of social media and speech.”

“Little information is available to the public on the tools and methods Defendants use to conduct surveillance of social media users and speech, or any policies and guidelines that govern such surveillance,” says the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California-Oakland Division. “The public interest in the release of these records is clear. Because the government’s growing use of social media surveillance implicates the online speech of millions of social media users, U.S. citizens and residents of all backgrounds have an urgent need to understand the exact nature, extent, and consequences of that surveillance.”

Various federal agencies do have a documented history of monitoring people’s social media activity. In some cases, they haven’t been particularly secretive about it.

Consider the FBI. Back in 2012, the bureau published a request for information as part of an effort to enlist contractors to help build a social media monitoring system. In 2016, Vice reported that the FBI was using a tool called SocioSpyder to monitor sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for “incriminating data.” And as the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) noted last June, the FBI is believed to have utilized the contractor Dataminr “to monitor in real-time more than 500 million daily tweets.”

Yet the bureau responded to the ACLU’s FOIA request by saying it “could neither confirm nor deny the existence of records responsive to your request.”

The ACLU is also suing the departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security, as well as three agencies under the DHS umbrella: Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Of particular issue to the ACLU are the government’s alleged efforts to more closely monitor immigrants’ social media profiles. The defendants “have ramped up the monitoring and retention of immigrants’ and visa applicants social media information, including for the purpose of conducting what the Trump administration has called ‘extreme vetting’ or ‘visa lifecycle vetting,'” the suit reads.

For instance, EPIC points out that the State Department has been asking visa applicants to disclose their social media handles. The DHS, meanwhile, said in September 2017 that it wanted to “expand the categories of records” for all immigrants “to include…social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results.”

“There’s a growing trend at the Department of Homeland Security to be snooping on the social media of immigrants and foreigners and we think it’s an invasion of privacy and deters freedom of speech,” Adam Schwartz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News at the time.

The ACLU suit asks the court to search for and release all records related to the defendants’ social media monitoring. “It’s unacceptable for the government to withhold details about this domestic spying,” ACLU attorneys Hugh Handeyside and Matt Cagle write in a blog post about the suit. “The public needs to know how the government is watching us—and we shouldn’t have to think about self-censoring what we say online.”

Insert the “It’s All Happening” gif here, folks. Maybe. A story dropped by BuzzFeed last night about President Donald Trump’s directives to Michael Cohen has the internet and airwaves ablaze with talk of imminent impeachment.

As always, such talk should come with about a hundred caveats, but caution and prudence aren’t this era’s strong suits.

Whatever political stakes may come, however, perhaps the most truly profound part of this story is how mundane Trump’s motives reportedly were. His alleged dealings with Vladimir Putin’s people and, later, alleged orders for Cohen to lie to Congress about it come down to securing the right to build a Trump skyscraper in Moscow, Buzzfeed’s sources say.

For all the cries of collusion, treason, and kompromat; all the speculating about sinister political motives; all the high hysteria we’ve been subjected to from Democrats, cable news, and supposedly serious thinkers…well, here we are: Trump wanted Trump Tower Moscow. He had long wanted to build a hotel there, and when progress on that front finally started happening he wasn’t going to give it up just because he was running for president—a bid that at that point Trump and his campaign did not actually expect him to win.

Doesn’t matter what Buzzfeed alleges about Trump: impeachment is a political act, as is the decision to convict and remove from office. It is not automatic. Either roughly 20 Republican senators flip to vote with the Democrats or Trump isn’t going anywhere.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) January 18, 2019

The “Moscow Project” has been public for a while, thanks to Cohen’s prosecution for lying about it. (Cohen claimed that work securing Russian authorities’ approval for the hotel ended in January 2016, though it continued at least through that June.) BuzzFeed‘s biggest new reveal is that Trump personally told Cohen that he should lie about it to Congress, according “to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.”

BuzzFeed also reports that, contrary to his debate claims, Trump was directly egging on the hotel deal during part of his campaign, and that the Trump children were much more involved in the hotel project than they have let on.

Why did people have to go with this fantastical version of Trump where he’s a secret double agent with sinister America-subverting motives and not just the reality which is he’s a big dumb crook who’ll do big dumb crimes with anyone anywhere if he thinks there’s money in it

— Molly (@dignified_n_old) January 18, 2019

To quote Reason‘s Scott Shackford, “despite all the crazy conspiracy theorizing, everything that’s coming out about Trump is very, very Occam’s Razor simplest explanation.” Trump likes shiny towers with his name on them, he blurts things out, and he expects everyone around him to cover for him when these things aren’t true.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s response to the new allegations: “If you believe Cohen I can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Rudy is actually not joking. He has believed he owns the Brooklyn Bridge for several months. Mostly folks humor him. “That’s a fine bridge, all right” they say. “And no, you never said anything about the campaign colluding.”https://t.co/lKnWi5MMZT

— NeverSaid”Hat” (@Popehat) January 18, 2019

The House Intelligence Committee says it will begin an investigation.

FREE MARKETS

California’s 6-Month Paid Leave Program is Not as Popular as You Think https://t.co/0V2VKEsCzG via @CatoInstitute #CatoPolls pic.twitter.com/UshWMdZwon

— Emily Ekins (@emilyekins) January 16, 2019

QUICK HITS

• The Chicago police officers who helped cover up the killing of Laquan McDonald were acquitted.
• Rep. Justin Amash calls out Trump’s attorney general nominee for his stance on FISA:

While many GOP politicians and pundits feign outrage over FISA (there were few who objected as Congress recently reauthorized the worst parts of FISA), @POTUS‘s own nominee for attorney general, William Barr, wishes FISA were even more awful: https://t.co/juimpQTgKy

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 17, 2019

• “Many in Congress do not appear to understand how Section 230 works, what it protects, or the potential damage that carving out too many exemptions could do.”
• This is the song that never ends…

Facebook/Twitter content-moderation loop:
(1) Demand for better moderation.
(2) Companies respond by censoring inconsistently.
(3) Complaints about lack of moderation or inconsistent moderation.
(4) Presumption that the companies could do more and better.
(5) GOTO (1).

— Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) January 17, 2019

Unusually for an M. Night Shyamalan project, the real plot twist in Glass comes not at the end of the movie but about halfway through, when you realize it won’t be getting any better and is in fact getting worse by the minute.

A sequel to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable has been tantalizing fans for nearly 20 years. Unfortunately, the director always had better things to do. (If only he had done them, instead of making the wretched Lady in the Water and After Earth.) Then, two years ago, at the conclusion of Split, the psycho-thriller that brought him back to the box-office bigtime, Shayamalan tacked on a tiny scene that featured Unbreakable protagonist David Dunn (Bruce Willis) making ominous mention of that earlier movie’s villain, Mr. Glass, who had been played by Samuel L. Jackson, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

A revision to Canada’s criminal code allows cops to demand a breath test from anyone they suspect has been driving under the influence even if they aren’t behind the wheel. The cops can go into bars, restaurants, and even homes up to two hours after someone has been driving and demand a breath test, and they don’t even need to have reasonable suspicion.”If you start to drink after you get home, the police show up at your door, they can arrest you, detain you, take you back to the (police station) and you can be convicted because your blood alcohol concentration was over 80 milligrams (per 100 milliliters of blood) in the two hours after you drove,” said defense attorney Paul Doroshenko.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is pushing behind-the-scenes for the White House to reduce its tariffs on China, and news of the effort appears to have sent the stock market soaring on Thursday afternoon.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Mnuchin has raised “the idea of lifting some or all tariffs” in a series of meetings as senior administration officials chart a course towards a crucial March 1 deadline in the ongoing trade spat between the United States and China. Mnuchin believes that reducing or eliminating some of the tariffs imposed last year may advance trade talks with China and could convince the Chinese government to make concessions—though other top trade officials, including U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, remain unconvinced and worry that rolling back tariffs could be a sign of weakness, according to the Journal.

Atop a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum, which apply to all nations, the Trump administration has slapped a 10 percent tariff on an estimated $200 billion of goods imported annually from China. Those Chinese tariffs were set to increase to 25 percent on January 1, but Trump decided in November to postpone the hike until March 1 in the hopes of reaching a trade deal with China in the early part of this year.

Those tariffs—which are really just taxes paid by American consumers and businesses—have already had an effect on the American economy. At the end of the third quarter, dozens of major American companies said trade issues and tariffs were red flags for future earnings. Worse may be coming. Over a full year, the tariffs will reduce gross domestic product, a short-hand measure for the overall size of the economy, by about $30 billion, while also depressing wages and costing more than 94,000 jobs, according to an analysis by The Tax Foundation.

If you need more immediate evidence of the impact of Trump’s tariffs, just take a look at what happened to the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the two hours since The Wall Street Journal reported the slightest rumblings of tariff skepticism in the White House. The story went live online at 2:40 in the afternoon:

Sure, the exuberence didn’t last, but that’s not an insignificant rally for the Dow Jones—which, at 24,300, is still more than 600 points lower than where it was on March 1, 2018, when Trump launched the first volley of his trade war.

Lowering the tariffs will require convincing the “Tariff Man” himself that they are a bad idea, of course, but if Mnuchin is serious about making that argument, he just got more ammunition.

Harris County, Texas, has essentially been ground zero in the fight to reform how cash bail works in America. Civil rights lawyers have successfully sued the county in federal court for locking up indigent arrestees and requiring them to pay cash bail, even for minor crimes and in cases when they are neither dangers to the community nor flight risks.

The county has been ordered by federal judges to reform its practices so that money is not the determining factor of whether somebody is free or detained prior to trial. But judges and county leaders—many of them Republican—have been resisting these demands, and Harris County has spent an estimated $9 million since 2016 fighting the lawsuits.

Then the blue wave came in November and pretty much all of those resistant judges were tossed from office and replaced with Democrats. Credit or blame straight-party voting for the outcome. Democrats and Republicans turned out to vote in equal percentages in Harris County, but a higher percentage of voters, 42 percent to 33 percent, took the straight party option to vote for each Democrat on the ballot rather than for a few Republicans a la carte.

The new crop of Democratic judges are supporting bail reform. Earlier in January, not long after being sworn into office, these judges dropped the county’s efforts to appeal federal rulings ordering changes to the system.

This week, that same crop of new judges, working in tandem with prosecutors and the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, are announcing new bail guidelines intended to eliminate the dependency on cash bail as a determinant for pre-trial release in misdemeanor cases. From The Houston Chronicle:

County Court at Law Judge Darrell Jordan, the presiding judge, estimates that 85 percent of people arrested on misdemeanors will now qualify to be released after arrest on no-cash bonds, with a few exceptions for people who must await a hearing—for up to 48 hours—for bond violations, repeat drunken driving offenses and domestic violence charges. At that point, they may also qualify for personal recognizance bonds.

“What it means is that no one will be in jail because they cannot afford to get out,” Jordan said. “The only people who will be detained and have to speak to a judge are a very small subset who will be processed through the Harris County Jail and those carve outs are aligned with best practices from around the country.”

To be clear here, these changes are only for misdemeanor crimes. Nobody is likely walking free without bail after being charged with armed robbery or attempted murder.

The changes, unfortunately, will come too late for Tracy Whited, who was arrested on Saturday in Harris County for misdemeanor charges from a fight with an ex-boyfriend and a subsequent attempt to leave the jail while she was being booked. Her bail was set for $3,000. She was found hanging by a sheet in her cell on Monday and died in the hospital on Wednesday. She’s the fifth suicide in that jail in two years, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Body camera footage obtained by Reason appears to show a now-fired Florida sheriff’s deputy blatantly lying about the results of a roadside drug test during a traffic stop last year.

The video shows the April 17, 2018, traffic stop of Florida resident Steve Vann by former Jackson County Sheriff’s deputy Zachary Wester. Vann was subsequently charged with possession of methamphetamines and paraphernalia as a result of the traffic stop, but state prosecutors later dropped those charges as part of a review of more than 250 cases that Wester was involved in since his hiring in 2016.

State prosecutors have dropped criminal charges in more than 100 cases involving Wester after body cam footage released last September showed the officer allegedly planting drugs in a car during another traffic stop. A Florida judge also vacated the sentences of eight people whose convictions were based on evidence and testimony by Wester. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched an investigation into Wester, and several people have filed federal lawsuits against him.

In the body cam footage obtained by Reason of Vann’s arrest last year, Wester searches Vann’s truck after pulling him over for a traffic violation and appears to find a small plastic baggie in the vehicle’s center console.

“Honesty is going to go a long way with me,” Wester tells Vann, holding up the baggie. “Have you ever seen this before?”

“No, no what is that?” Vann says. “Where’d you get that?”

“The center console,” Wester says as he walks back to his cruiser to perform a roadside test of the baggie for methamphetamines.

“There ain’t no way, man,” a distraught Vann says. “Oh my god, you gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Wester then uses a Nark II field test for methamphetamines and MDMA. According to the manufacturer, the field test “will develop an IMMEDIATE (within 2 seconds) Dark Blue color as a positive reaction after breakage and agitation of the 3rd ampoule. If the color development is an immediate Pink slowly transforming to Lavender, you DO NOT have either Methamphetamine or MDMA.”

Wester shakes the field test for about 10 seconds, checking it several times, but it remains red. Looking right at the small bag of pinkish red liquid, Wester then says “blue” and returns to Vann to tell him the substance tested presumptively positive for methamphetamines. The field test occurs at roughly the 3:45 mark in the video above.

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Reason that it uses the Nark II field test and that a positive result for methamphetamines should turn the solution blue.

Wester presses Vann to admit that he knew the meth was in his car, but Vann, breaking into tears at several points, continues to deny knowing where it came from. He appears confused and devastated throughout the exchange.

“I’m going to have to take your vehicle, too,” Wester tells Vann. “Listen buddy, I don’t think you’re a bad guy.”

At one point, at around 11 minutes 50 seconds into the footage, Wester drops some of Vann’s personal effects into the trunk of his police cruiser, at which point he picks up the field test and looks at it again. It’s still clearly red.

The Tallahassee Democrat first reported last September that local prosecutors were dropping dozens of cases involving Wester after body cam footage appeared to show him planting a small baggie of meth in a woman’s car during a traffic stop.

The Democrat later published accounts by several other people who claimed they were framed by Wester during traffic stops. Before joining the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, Wester was fired from his previous job at the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office for for inappropriate relations with women, the newspaper reported.

In 2016, The New York Times reported that the $2 roadside field tests that Wester and countless other police officers around the country use to establish probable cause to arrest someone for drug possession are unreliable and easy to misinterpret:

There are no established error rates for the field tests, in part because their accuracy varies so widely depending on who is using them and how. Data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab system show that 21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all. In one notable Florida episode, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies produced 15 false positives for methamphetamine in the first seven months of 2014. When we examined the department’s records, they showed that officers, faced with somewhat ambiguous directions on the pouches, had simply misunderstood which colors indicated a positive result.

Such tests are not admissible evidence in court in most jurisdictions in the U.S. Instead, samples are sent to state forensic labs for verification.

Many of Wester’s victims had prior criminal records for things like drug possession. They were, in other words, easy targets. No one would believe their word against a police officer’s. If Wester hadn’t been wearing a body cam, and if he hadn’t of been sloppy enough to film his amateur sleight-of-hand attempts and lies, all of their charges would likely stand, and he would still be patrolling the streets.

On Tuesday evening, one of the newest and most controversial Democrats in Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.), asserted breathlessly on Twitter that the explanation for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) careening so violently in his approach toward Donald Trump between 2015 and now is that some nameless but powerful “they” have “compromised” the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

They got to him, he is compromised! https://t.co/m8sB3EmElg

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 16, 2019

Challenged on CNN this morning to back up her startling claim with evidence, Omar instead employed a sloppy circumstantial standard we’ve seen all too often in American political discourse these past four years: Well, what else explains behavior and policy positions I don’t like?

“Over the last three years we have seen many times where Senator Lindsey Graham has told us how dangerous this president could be if he was given the opportunity to be in the White House,” Omar said. “And all of a sudden he’s made not only a 180 turnaround, but a 360 turnaround. And so I am pretty sure that there is something happening with him, whether it is, ah, you know, something that has to do with his funding when it comes to running for office, whether it has something to do with the polling that they might have in his district, or whether it has to do with some sort of leadership within the Senate. He is somehow compromised, he’ll no longer stand up for the truth, and to make sure that he is fighting to protect that oath that he took in serving the American people.”

Emphases mine, to illustrate how easy it is for the rhetorically reckless to journey via the transitive property from political hypocrisy to possible treason.

Repeatedly prodded to provide a more factual case, Omar closed with this smiley little hand-wave. “The evidence really is present to us, it’s being presented to us, in the way that he’s behaving,” she said. “My tweet was just an opinion based on what I believe to be visible to me, and I’m pretty sure there are lots of Americans who will agree on this.”

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Lindsey Graham—today, tomorrow, 20 years ago, last week (when I did twice). But it requires neither a lurid imagination nor a loose smear to locate a theory for what might be happening with the senator. Like many Republican elected officials, including his longtime antagonist Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Graham is trying to navigate his political career and relationship with a mecurial president he once competed against, in such a way to further his policy goals and preserve his job. The process is definitionally degrading—look what has happened to the House Freedom Caucus, for example—and involves not-infrequent compromise, philosophical switcheroos, and embarrassment. And it’s how Washington politics have worked for pretty much my whole adult life.

But that explanation’s no fun, amirite? Apparently rather than entertain the possibility that Lindsey Graham is a not-very-principled opportunist like most politicians on Capitol Hill, various anti-Trump members of the political class would rather take a page out of 1950s politics and hint heavily about Graham’s possibly deviant sexuality. Here’s Jon Cooper, chairmain of The Democratic Coalition (“the nation’s largest grassroots Resistance organization”), going right there earlier this week:

By the way, as an openly gay man myself, I couldn’t care less about Lindsey Graham’s sex life (gay, straight or otherwise). However, Graham is the Senate Judiciary Chair and there’s a strong likelihood that he’s being blackmailed by the Russians. If so, that needs to be revealed.

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) January 14, 2019

These are some dark roads we’re hurtling down, America.

Not a day goes past in these fraught times without a gold-plated member of the #Resistance—such as former FBI director James Comey earlier this week—invoking the famous 1954 quote from Army attorney Joseph Welch to commie-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” To which one might append to its 2019 quoters, “Have you forgotten sir, at long last, that McCarthy’s biggest sin was making false, career-damaging accusations that people were in cahoots with the Kremlin”?

So John McCain accuses Rand Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.” Daily Kos Political Director David Nir criticizes 2020 presidential contender Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) for her “adoption of Putin’s talking points.” NBC News asserts that two-time Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein “has long been criticized for her support of international policies that mirror Russian foreign policy goals.” In his “18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset,” the Washington Post‘s Max Boot includes, among the more serious details that have emanated from the Mueller investigation, a bunch of foreign policy emphases indistinguishable from those of Trump’s ideological precursor, Pat Buchanan:

— Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do. […]

— Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

— Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

This is what happens when you degrade evidentiary standards at a time of heightened political emotion. Not only do powerful individuals get hit with proofless accusations, the policy preferences of us plebes, too, are increasingly viewed through the heavily distorting lens of whether Moscow would cheer them on. “How do we know this is not a Putin shutdown,” asked former Nixon White House counsel John “Worse and Worser Than Watergate” Dean this week. “[I]t is difficult to believe Trump isn’t doing it to impress Putin, and give him hard evidence of the failure of democracy.” Now do the 20 shutdowns before Trump.

I’m not convinced that the best way to contain Vladimir Putin is by seeing his shadow every time an American politician does something even half-unusual under the sun. Nor is lowering the bar for public accusations of being compromised. America is on the verge not just of individual injustice, but of a haphazard, bad-faith narrowing of what policy ideas and political alliances can be acceptably spoken out loud.

We can do evidence-based discourse and criminal prosecutions, even in the midst of a panic. We’re going to have to keep reminding ourselves how.

The Oregon Legislature isn’t even in session yet, but already lawmakers are toying with some pretty draconian gun control proposals. That would include SB 501, which reads like a grab bag of all the latest gun control ideas, turned up to 11.

The bill would require a person to obtain a license in order to own a gun, keep said gun locked and secured in the home once acquired, and submit to a background check anytime they buy ammunition for it.

Speaking of ammunition, firearm owners would be limited to buying only 20 rounds every 30 days unless they’re purchasing them at a gun range. That would allow you to go load four five-round magazines—the largest magazine allowed by SB 501.

There would also be a two-week waiting period for gun sales. Folks who don’t report a stolen or missing gun in 24 hours would be guilty of a Class C misdemeanor, and could face up to 30 days in jail and a $1,250 fine.

The bill was introduced by Sen. Rob Wagner (D–Lake Oswego), but the specifics were crafted by Students for Change, a high school student group formed in the wake of the Parkland shooting to agitate for new gun control measures.

Wagner says the legislation may be a stretch, but, well, he just can’t say no to kids.

“[It’s] probably a long shot that something like this passes in whole cloth,” he told the Statesman-Journal. “We told [Students for Change] that this is your movement, and we want to support you as representatives.”

A companion bill has been introduced in the Oregon House by Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-Lake Oswego).

Any number of its provisions would be vulnerable to constitutional challenges, says Michael Hammond, the legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America. He argues that some of the restrictions are so onerous as to effectively ban the use of common firearms.

“By going to a five-round magazine, you’re dealing with a magazine that probably isn’t amenable to most of the firearms that take magazines. So therefore, you are basically outlawing firearms that take magazines. I can’t conceive that’s constitutional,” he tells Reason.

A provision of New York’s SAFE Act that banned gun owners from having a magazine with more than seven rounds in it—passed in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting—was ruled unconstitutional in 2013.

Hammond says it’s a similar problem with the 20-round monthly purchase limit, which he says is so low as to effectively prevent a person from using their firearms.

Other provisions are on sounder constitutional footing, including requiring a license to own a firearm—a policy states like Illinois already have in place.

The extreme nature of SB 501 will likely make it a tough sell. Other gun control bills in the Oregon legislature might stand a chance, however. That would include HB 2251, which would ban those under 21 from owning semi-automatic rifles. (A similar policy passed by ballot initiative in neighboring Washington state with 59 percent of the vote in 2018.)

Another bill, HB 2505, would require firearms to have a trigger lock or be stored in a locked container.

The passage of any of these would be another step back for Oregon, which once had some of the country’s saner gun laws, but has in recent years embraced everything from background check requirements for private gun transfers to extreme risk protection orders—which empower law enforcement to confiscate guns from otherwise law-abiding citizens who are feared to be a harm to themselves or others.

That is part of a wider polarization of gun laws in the country, where blue, rural states like Oregon and Vermont embrace stricter firearms regulations, while deep red states like Arizona or Kansas have allowed permitless concealed carry.

This year, California was supposed to be making a historic shift away from the use of cash bail to determine whether people who get arrested are freed or detained in jail prior to their trials.

Instead, the changes probably won’t happen until 2021, and only if the voters agree. Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced this week that the reforms, passed via legislation last fall, have been pushed to a referendum to be held the fall of 2020.

SB10, signed into law in August, was intended to eliminate the use of cash bail in the state entirely. Cash bail has come under fire as a pretrial system because courts often apply it thoughtlessly, resulting in poor people being stuck in jail awaiting their day in court not because they’re dangers to the community or flight risks, but because they cannot afford to pay. Such people are statistically more likely to plead guilty and receive harsher punishments than they would have had they been free to fight.

Instead of cash bail, California courts would be required to implement an extensive (and possibly expensive) pretrial assessment and monitoring system. Arrested defendants would be evaluated to determine the risks of release, and conditions would be established to keep track of them. If a defendant is deemed to be too dangerous to release, he or she would be detained in jail prior to the trial. Money would no longer be a condition.

None of this sat well with bail bondsmen and the insurance industry that underwrites them. New Jersey has shifted to a system where cash bail is almost completely absent, and that has decimated the bail bond industry. Their representatives fought bail reform in California extensively, and after SB10 was signed into law, they immediately went to work gathering signatures to try to force it to a public vote.

In November those reform opponents declared they had gathered enough signatures, more than 400,000 of them, to push SB10 onto a referendum. This week Padilla validated that they qualified. This means SB10 cannot legally be implemented until after the public vote.

Given current criminal justice reform trends, I’d put the chances of the bail bond industry succeeding here as low. California voters have slowly been scaling back the state’s harsh sentencing laws, not to mention legalizing both medical and recreational marijuana use. Furthermore, New Jersey’s bail reform experiment has been fairly successful so far. They’ve got fewer people being detained in jail yet the state has not seen an increase in crime.

But the bill passed in California has some significant differences from what was passed in New Jersey. In California, the judicial branch and the court system has significant amount of control over how these new systems will be implemented, and the law has been written in such a way that it will give judges wide latitude to order defendants to be detained. In New Jersey, the system operates on the presumption that defendants will be released unless prosecutors can make a clear case to a judge that they are too dangerous or a flight risk.

Because of these changes, several criminal justice reform groups that initially helped craft California’s bill turned against it, worried that it will actually lead to increases in pretrial detentions. Representatives from the bail bond industry argue that citizens have a right to cash bail, though federal courts don’t actually agree with that as long as there is some sort of pretrial evaluation system. But if the end result is for more people to be detained and not be able to get out at all, the case to allow for cash bail as an option grows stronger.

Not that we should expect such nuances from the extensive advertising campaign that will be coming down the line in 2020. Instead we’ll see lots of emphasis from both sides on when pretrial decisions lead to bad outcomes—either when a harmless person is subjected to overly harsh pretrial detention because he or she had no money, or alternatively, when a person who is released without having to pay cash bail turns out to be dangerous.

It’s worth noting that the temporary suspension of SB10 doesn’t stop California communities and court systems from reforming bail on their own or in their own way right now. Currently, Compton is experimenting with a system where judges agree to reduce cash bail demands in exchange for concessions from the defendant, such as an agreement to go a drug or alcohol treatment center while awaiting trial.