Category: reason

How is the political class responding to a Donald Trump budget blueprint that utterly fails to cut spending even while including many dramatic regulatory-state cuts that Congress will never, ever approve? With about as much sober perspective as you would expect:

Reading through the Trump budget, I feel as the Romans must have felt in 456 AD as the barbarians conquered and ushered in the dark ages.

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 16, 2017

Here is a helpful reminder for that side of your universe busy losing their shit: During this woefully misgoverned 21^st century of ours, with its sluggish economic growth and serially disastrous wars, panics, bailouts and stimuli, combined U.S. federal, state, and local government expenditures have zoomed from around $3.2 trillion in fiscal year 2000 ($4.5 trillion in today’s dollars) to north of $7 trillion this year, according to Christopher Chantrill’s useful aggregator USGovernmentSpending.com. During that time the U.S. population has grown from an estimated 281 million to 324 million, so even after adjusting for inflation, government spending has grown more than three times as fast as Census numbers.

And yet here is the type of headline we will be reading all season long: “Trump’s plan to dismember government.” That, from CNN on Tuesday, was no mere headline hyperbole—here’s the opening section from senior enterprise reporter Stephen Collinson:

President Donald Trump plans to dismember government one dollar at a time.

His first budget — expected to be unveiled later this week — will mark Trump’s most significant attempt yet to remold national life and the relationship between federal and state power.

It would codify an assault on regulatory regimes over the environment, business and education

Italics mine, for future death-metal band names.

Here are three iron rules of political-class reactions to any whiff of budget cuts: 1) Every previous budget ratchet will be ignored, yet taken as the minimum acceptable baseline. 2) If even 1 percent of a to-be-reduced bloc of spending can be described as keeping granny from starving to death, that will be precisely how the whole bag of money is characterized. 3) It will all be about the president, even though the president writes no budgets.

This will be this century’s third sustained round of media histrionics about the supposedly “annihilating” effects of “savage budget cuts.” The first concerned the zombie-apocalypse of unsupervised skating and threatened (though never quite delivered) mass teacher-firings during the 2009-2010 state budget crisis. (Which was routinely blamed on brutal austerity instead of the massive spending run-up just before the financial bubble burst in 2008.) The second, in 2012-13, warned of the poisoned meat, reduced travel perks and a generation’s worth of lost science (no really) resulting from the totally modest and all-too-temporary budget sequestration.

After those two near-death events it’s a wonder that we still know how to breathe.

Trump’s military boost will almost certainly be approved. His 25 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency almost certainly will not. He’s a historically unpopular president currently risking what political capital he has on a deeply (and rightfully) unpopular Obamacare reboot; you think that the congresscritters who are currently fleeing constituent townhalls like rats from an ice floe are prepping themselves to face down the next few months’ of “Congress Rapes the Environment to Please the Rich” headlines?

The net result, in an era when Congress doesn’t even make budgets anymore and both parties are in thrall to debt denialists, is that the federal government during Trump’s first year in office is likely to spend and borrow even more than he’s proposing today. That is the real scandal, if one unlikely to break through the purple-faced rage of media hyperventilation.

Entertainment Weekly reports on unseemly acts of eco-terrorism in Oakland, California: Somebody is chopping up perfectly good trees to mirror the selfless act of the titular character in Shel Silverstein’s classic 1964 picture book, The Giving Tree.

Let’s not mince words. Written by a Playboy mansion habitue and composer of “A Boy Named Sue,” The Giving Tree is about a female tree that literally gives up every aspect of her existence to please a spoiled, uncaring boy. By the end of the volume, the tree is reduced to a stump where the boy, now an old man, can park his ass. Decades past the Sexual Revolution, it’s damn nigh impossible to read The Giving Tree as anything other than sublimated male anxiety over the rising tide of unfettered feminine sexuality and freedom. Wouldn’t it be great, the book effectively asks, if women on the cusp of societal emancipation, would sacrifice every aspect of their being for jerk guys?

You don’t have to be an Ayn Rand fan to read the book this way (though it helps). In 2013, Reason interviewed novelist Arin Greenwood about her excellent YA title Save the Enemy, in which the teenage girl protagonist is searching for her kidnaped father, a weirdo with libertarian sensibilities.

From the book:

Your dad probably read you books like The Giving Tree when you were a kid. My dad did read me The Giving Treeonce, calling it “evil” in that it “promotes the immoral destruction of the self.” (I was four.) He preferred Atlas Shrugged, which is basically about how rich people shouldn’t pay taxes. He has explained to me a lot over the course of my seventeen years that taxes are “slavery.”

Though no libertarian herself, Greenwood nonetheless told us, “Personally, I am a little creeped out by The Giving Tree.”

As are we all, Ms. Greenwood, as are we all.

Watch The Giving Tree vs. Ayn Rand: YA Author Arin Greenwood on Save the Enemy:

Although it is obvious that Jeff Sessions does not like pot, it is still unclear how that attitude will affect his work as attorney general, nothwithstanding his statement yesterday that the Justice Department’s policy regarding state-licensed marijuana suppliers during the Obama administration was largely “valid.” Sessions was referring to the 2013 memo in which James Cole, then the deputy attorney general, suggested that such businesses needn’t worry about federal prosecution or asset forfeiture as long as they complied with state law and did not impinge upon federal “enforcement priorities.” But the Cole memo is highly ambiguous and elastic, so Sessions’ semi-endorsement of it should not be read to mean that he has no plans to crack down on the cannabis industry in the eight states that have legalized the drug for recreational use.

“The Cole memorandum set up some policies under President Obama’s Department of Justice about how cases should be selected in those states and what would be appropriate for federal prosecution, much of which I think is valid,” Sessions told reporters after a speech in Richmond. He added that he “may have some different ideas myself in addition to that” but noted that the Justice Department does not have the resources to take over enforcement of marijuana prohibition from police and prosecutors in states that have opted out of it. “We’re not able to go into a state and pick up the work that the police and sheriffs have been doing for decades,” he said.

The Huffington Post portrays Sessions’ comments as reassuring. Under the headline “Jeff Sessions Suggests a Crackdown Isn’t Coming for Legal Weed,” reporter Matt Ferner says, “Attorney General Jeff Sessions hates marijuana, but it appears unlikely that he’ll send the federal government to war against states that have legalized it.” Yet what Sessions said yesterday is essentially the same as what he said at his confirmation hearing in January, where he described “some” of Cole’s criteria as “truly valuable in evaluating cases.” He tellingly added that “the criticism I think that was legitimate is that they may not have been followed.”

The Justice Department’s failure to properly implement the Cole memo was the theme of the April 2016 Senate hearing at which Sessions said “the Department of Justice needs to be clear” that “marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.” The title of the hearing, which was held by the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, asked, “Is the Department of Justice Adequately Protecting the Public from the Impact of State Recreational Marijuana Legalization?” Sessions clearly did not think it was.

Cole listed eight enforcement priorities, including prevention of interstate smuggling, distribution to minors, and “adverse public health consequences related to marijuana use.” Any one of them could easily be cited as a rationale for seriously disrupting the newly legal cannabis industry, if not shutting it down entirely. U.S. attorneys could wreak havoc simply by sending threatening letters to state-licensed cannabusinesses, their landlords, or anyone else who facilitates their federal felonies. The DOJ also could challenge state licensing systems in federal court, arguing that giving an official stamp of approval to marijuana suppliers violates the Controlled Substances Act. Nothing Sessions has said precludes any of that. It all comes down to his interpretation of the Cole memo, which made no promises and left federal prosecutors lots of leeway to target state-legal marijuana businesses.

If the Trump Administration gets its way in ending federal funding for public broadcasting (see the budget proposal out today), it wouldn’t spell the end of NPR, PBS, or the radio and television programs that many Americans cherish. The biggest impact would be on rural stations that rely on government dollars for a large share of their operating budgets. Several reporters have noted that these rural stations “serve” communities that skew heavily Republican, claiming irony. “[D]efunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” the Washington Post’s Callum Borchers writes, “would mean hurting the local TV and radio stations that a whole lot of Republican voters watch and listen to.”

We don’t actually know how many Republican voters (or anyone for that matter) watch and listen to NPR or PBS in these rural communities because the networks keep that information private. If saving the rural stations is the main reason to maintain federal funding, don’t taxpayers have a right to see multi-year ratings data? In a press release responding to the budget cuts, PBS merely cites its old talking point that public broadcasting costs each citizen just $1.35 per year. Just because something’s comparatively cheap doesn’t make it worth buying.

The notion of a television station “serving” a community is outdated. You don’t hear Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu boasting that they “serve” one area of the country or another. As I argued in a recent video, the mean reason to end federal funding to these stations is that the media landscape looks nothing like it did in 1967, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act:

When the Public Broadcasting Act became law, maintaining a network of regional stations was the only way to insure that every American household had access to public television and radio content. Today, this decentralized system isn’t necessary because it’s possible to stream or download NPR or PBS content from anywhere in the world. As audiences moves online, the regional stations supported by the federal government are becoming unnecessary.

Watch the video:

Yes, President Donald Trump’s budget is awful for all the reasons Nick Gillespie explained earlier: This isn’t a reduction in the size of government. It’s a trick shifting money away from domestic spending to jack up military spending.

But a certain amount of “Oh no, we’ve chosen guns over butter!” outrage should inspire spit takes from people who pay attention to how federal spending actually plays out in the real world. In particular, a lot of media attention is focused on how Trump’s budget proposal eliminates the federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. Here’s how CNN anchor Jake Tapper described it in a Tweet (while linking to New York Times reporting):

On chopping block: $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds programs like Meals on Wheelshttps://t.co/oVNX4V0B2z

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) March 16, 2017

The big problem here is that “We help fund Meals on Wheels” is how the government sells the CDBG program, but how it actually operates in the cities and communities that get the money is far different. The CDBG program is chock full of cronyism and corruption and should be eliminated. Much like the corrupt city redevelopment agencies, what actually ends up happening is that this money gets funneled by politicians to friends with connections for various projects that aren’t really about helping the poor at all.

Type “Community Development Block Grant corruption” into Google and the very first match is this critique of the program by the Reason Foundation from 2013. Victor Nava described the program as a breeding pit for “waste, fraud, and corruption.” Nava’s piece focuses on corrupt CDBG expenditures in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He notes:

[I]n June, HUD found that the City of Pine Bluff, Arkansas improperly spent nearly $200,000 in CDBG funds and failed to properly document an additional $279,000 in expenditures. The city is accused of spending more than 20% of CDBG funds on “administrative costs”, purchasing properties without redeveloping them, disbursing funds to contractors before receiving bids, and not following federal project documentation guidelines.

Instances like this happen all too often when it comes to the CDBG program, as private interests jockey for every last bit of taxpayer money from the hands smarmy local politicians who are in charge of distributing it. Cuts to the CDBG program, while welcomed, won’t end the cronyism and corruption inherent in the program. The best solution is to just eliminate the program. The latest cuts bring us halfway there, so now is the time to just go all the way and end the crony capitalism once and for all.

The money often is not going to Meals on Wheels or even to the neediest communities. As a Reason Foundation analysis also from 2013 shows, wealthier communities get the larger chunks of the money, particularly counties that—what a coincidence!—are in proximity to Washington, D.C.

Here’s an example of how this grant money is actually used:

In 2011, Comstock Township, Michigan decided to grant Bell’s Brewery $220,000 in CDBG funds to help pay for a two-year expansion project. This is an even more blatant crony capitalist use of community development subsidies. The brewery benefits from the government subsidies at taxpayers’ expense, but it also benefits from a financial advantage over competing breweries—such as the Arcadia Brewing Company one town over in Battle Creek and even alternative products such as liquor made by Big Cedar Distilling Inc. down the road in Sturgis, neither of which are receiving any block grant money. Other small craft breweries may struggle to compete with a brewery like Bell’s when the government is subsidizing its expansion.

Tad DeHaven has a list of some of the projects that have snagged CDBG funds instead of things that actually help the poor:

• $588,000 for a marina in Alexandria, Lousiana
• $245,000 for the expansion of an art museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania
• $147,000 for a canopy walk at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens in Georgia
• $196,000 for expanding the Calvin Coolidge State historic site in Vermont
• $294,000 for a community recreational facility in New Haven, Connecticut
• $196,000 for the construction of an auditorium in Casper, Wyoming
• $441,000 to replace a county exposition center in Umatilla, Oregon
• $98,000 for the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts in Spring, Texas
• $245,000 for renovations to awnings at a historical market in Roanoke, Virginia
• $294,000 for the development of an educational program at the Houston Zoo in Texas

DeHaven also noted how a good chunk of the funds of the program get siphoned out due to administrative costs. A good quarter of the funding goes to the various multi-level government bureaucracies to actually operate the grant process. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the CDBG program are the people who operate the program.

As a small-town newspaper editor I witnessed this reality play out in the real world years ago in the California desert. In the rural community of Barstow, due to the administrative challenges of landing the grants, in the end, the local homeless shelter received somewhere around $2,000 from this program, a pittance that accomplished little. The rest ended up going to the city itself, who used the funds to repave the parking lots for local parks.

Check out this audit from Riverside County, California, for their CDBG expenditures for 2016, and there’s neither a meal nor a wheel to be found. Of the $761,744 the county received, nearly all of it went to improve a playground and the sidewalks of a single local elementary school. And note that the reason they were audited by Housing and Urban Development was because they hadn’t provided proper documentation of their expenses.

It’s truly a shame that Trump’s suggestion to cut the program entirely isn’t tied to a commitment to push that revenue back to the states to handle. The budget proposal says that these community activities should be handled by states and local governments, which is true, but given that Trump isn’t actually cutting the budget at all and merely shifting spending around, they’re not getting the funds to do so. That means even the parts of the program that aren’t corrupt get hosed because the states won’t be getting to keep that revenue to deploy to help the poor.

Three Indian Americans have been shot in the U.S. in the last few weeks, two fatally. But if most Americans aren’t aware of that, they can be forgiven given that press coverage has been relatively muted. In the press in India, on the other hand, there has been wall-to-wall coverage along with purple condemnations of President Trump’s vitriolic anti-immigration rhetoric, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia points out.

Is the Indian press overreacting or the American press underreacting? India’s blanket coverage is irrational, but understandable. America’s apparent blissful ignorance is rational but less understandable, she notes. The fact of the matter is that Indian Americans, like other folks who look like Muslims, face a triple threat in America. And communities that feel threatened don’t calibrate their response in a perfectly rational way based on data and stats.

View this article.

President Donald Trump has released what was being touted as a “skinny” budget, meaning that it would put federal spending on a diet. Would that that were true. The blueprint, which doesn’t engage with entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security and other forms of “mandatory” spending at all, simply balances cuts to various parts of the government with increases to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In fiscal 2017, the government plans to spend around $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending (this is spending that is voted on every year; the rest of the federal budget is essentially on autopilot). Under Trump’s plan, it will spend that much again in 2018. Overall federal spending will still come in around $4 trillion.

Let’s call this what it is: Unacceptable.

Federal spending remains at historically high levels both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP. Since 2008, outlays have been higher than 20 percent of GDP, well above the post-war average and most of the 1990s. While revenues have soared to record levels in absolute dollars, they come nowhere close to matching outlays, the result being continuing deficits and growing national debt, which is already greater than annual GDP. Because of the automatic spending increases built into “mandatory” programs such as Medicare and Social Security, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects growing debt over the next decade. Given the well-established correlation between persistent, high levels of national debt and reduced economic growth—“debt overhangs”—this is not simply bad news but ruinous. Left-wing economists affiliated with the University of Massachusetts found “the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is…2.2 percent.” That’s the same sluggish growth found by more market-friendly economists Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, and Vincent Reinhart: “On average, debt levels above 90 percent are associated with growth that is 1.2 percent lower than in other periods (2.3 percent versus 3.5 percent).” Indeed, in 20 out of 26 debt-overhang cases studied by Reinhart, Rogoff, and Reinhart, the period of reduced growth lasted a quarter-century, substantially reducing GDP and living standards (see chart to right).

As it stands, CBO is already projecting historically low rates of economic growth over the coming decade. Earlier this year, CBO said it expects the economy to grow by just 1.8 percent annually through 2027, well behind post-war rates of 3 percent or higher. And that already meager growth comes after eight years of just 1.4 percent on average per year. In a conversation with Matt Welch and me at the 2016 International Students for Liberty Conference, George Will observed that the difference between 2 percent annual growth and 3 percent annual growth is the difference between a positive, forward-looking country in which politics recede from everyday life and a Hobbesian nightmare in which interest groups slug it out over a barely growing pie. Note that he was talking about 2 percent annual growth, which seems positively aspirational in the 21st century.

That’s not to say that Trump’s budget blueprint, which he has already signaled is merely the start of negotiations with Congress, doesn’t have some positives. Indeed, it’s bracing and good to see a plan that takes a hacksaw if not a chainsaw to various federal departments (even as I suspect most cuts will be bargained away in order to secure the hikes he wants). Here’s Table 2 of his plan, which summarizes how departments and agencies would be affected:

In percentage terms, there are double-digit cuts to cabinet departments such as Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Interior, and Transportation. The EPA takes it on the chin, facing a 31.4 percent budget cut. The howls of indignation from supporters of the status quo are already sounding around the internet and cable news programs, but there’s every reason to believe that such savings can be accomplished with little to no impact on public safety or essential government functions. Another way of saying this is that government is a lagging indicator in American society and just as every business, household, and individual has spent the last decade-plus becoming more efficient, productive, and economical, now it’s the feds’ turn.

The fact of the matter is that while discretionary government spending has been relatively flat over the past several years, there were major, across-the-board increases pushed through during the Bush years and the early Obama years. As Mercatus Center economist and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy has documented, spending ballooned by 53 percent in real terms under George W. Bush and has never gone down to anything like pre-9/11 totals. And we need to underscore that, on balance, Trump spends exactly as much as last year’s discretionary budget. This is where he loses any credibility with libertarians. There is no reason to think that the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security could not function with the same sort of double-digit cuts the president levies on other departments and agencies. If Trump were truly a foe of the administrative state in any sort of principled way, I’d expect him to be abolishing Homeland Security, a widely criticized agglomeration of power that has few supporters outside of those drawing food from its trough. “The President’s 2018 budget ends the arbitrary depletion of our strength and security, and begins to rebuild the U.S. Armed Forces,” reads the blueprint. It’s good, I suppose, that the White House recognizes that all the wars of the past 15 years were in some way “arbitrary,” but the way to stop depleting our military is to stop sending it all over the globe in fruitless endeavors that have turned Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places into danger zones. In the same breath, Trump’s document brags that the $52 billion increase he seeks above current levels of defense spending “exceeds the entire defense budgets of most countries.” Do we really need it then? Worse still: De Rugy and Harvard economist Robert Barro found that “a dollar increase in federal defense spending results in a less-than-a-dollar increase in GDP when the spending increase is deficit financed.” If government spending is rarely stimulative under the best of circumstances, the sort of defense hike Trump is pushing actually shrinks an already wizened economy.

To this point, we’ve only been talking about discretionary spending, which accounts for only about one-third of the federal budget. The rest covers mandatory spending on Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlements along with interest on the debt. If Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was, any plan to seriously reduce government spending and debt service and thus hack away at the administrative state must confront entitlements. Trump has been unambiguous in saying that he doesn’t want to touch Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid, which are already the two biggest-ticket items in the federal budget and will only grow over the coming years due to the aging of the baby boom generation.

To date, all of the baby boom presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—punted on serious entitlement reform, stoking instead generational warfare between relatively young and poor Millennials and relatively old and wealthy boomers. Trump, who may well be the last boomer president (here’s hoping), shows every indication of putting his cohort’s interests before those of his children and grandchildren. Although basic budgetary realities will sink old-age entitlements sometime around 2030 and inflict 25 percent or more cuts in benefits, the Democrats and Republicans writ large have refused to seriously address the iceberg on the horizon.

Many of Donald Trump’s supporters evinced an interest in “burning it down,” in razing Washington figuratively as the British did during the War of 1812. In his first budget blueprint, their champion has not only failed to do that, he hasn’t even really thrown a good first punch. Despite offering significant reductions to parts of the federal budget, he hasn’t even submitted a plan that would reduce overall outlays after a decades-long spending spree that has purchased little but debt, deficits, and economic malaise.

On Monday the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin confirmation hearings on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gorsuch is a highly respected federal judge with admirers across the political spectrum. But there are still some major unanswered questions about his jurisprudence. Here are three questions that I would like to hear Judge Gorsuch address as he faces the Senate Judiciary Committee next week.

1. Congressional Power

The use of recreational marijuana is currently legal in eight states. Yet Congress continues to ban marijuana on the federal level, and the Supreme Court has upheld the federal marijuana ban as a lawful exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The Supreme Court did this in the 2005 case of Gonzales v. Raich, despite the fact that the medical marijuana at issue in that dispute was both grown and consumed entirely within the state of California.

I’d like to hear Judge Gorsuch, a self-described constitutional originalist, explain his views on the proper scope of congressional power under the Commerce Clause. Does he think that the federal authority to regulate interstate commerce is broad enough to allow Congress to ban a local activity that is legal under state law and that never crosses any state lines?

2. Executive Power

The federal courts are currently hearing arguments about the constitutionality of President Trump’s newly revised executive order banning travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries. In February the Trump administration told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that Trump’s first executive order on this matter was effectively beyond the reach of “even limited judicial review.” In fact, according to the Trump administration, the federal courts have no business taking “the extraordinary step of second-guessing a formal national-security judgment made by the President himself pursuant to broad grants of statutory authority.”

I’d like to know if Judge Gorsuch agrees that the president’s executive orders are beyond the reach of judicial review if the orders are ostensibly connected to the president’s “formal national-security judgment.” How deferential must the federal courts be to president when he is acting in the name of national security?

3. Unenumerated Rights

The Constitution lists of a number of individual rights that the government is forbidden from violating, such as the right to free speech and the right to keep and bear arms. But the Constitution also refers to rights that it does not expressly list. For example, the 9th Amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Likewise, the 14th Amendment says, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The Supreme Court has recognized and protected a number of unwritten rights over the years, such as the right to privacy, the right of parents to educate their children in private schools, and the right to gay marriage. None of those rights appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution.

In his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, Judge Gorsuch sharply criticized the Supreme Court for protecting unenumerated rights via the Due Process Clause, claiming that the clause is “stretched beyond recognition” when it is held to be “the repository of other substantive rights not expressly enumerated in the text of the Constitution or its amendments.”

Judge Gorsuch has apparently rejected the idea of defending unenumerated rights under the Due Process Clause. But what about the 9th Amendment? And what about the Privileges or Immunities Clause? Regrettably, his book did not address those provisions. I’d like to hear what Judge Gorsuch has to say about them. What is his view of the 9th Amendment? What does he think the Privileges or Immunities Clause means? Does he believe that either one protects any rights that are not listed in the Constitution? And if not, does he think the Supreme Court should reverse its prior decisions and eliminate the unwritten right to privacy?

The American people deserve to hear what Judge Gorsuch has to say about these crucial constitutional issues. The Senate Judiciary Committee should ask him about them during his confirmation hearings next week.

Related: What you need to know about SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch

• A federal judge in Hawaii temporarily suspended President Trump’s new travel ban. At a campaign rally in Tennessee where he praised Andrew Jackson as his hero and a reflection of him, the president called the decision “judicial overreach.”
• Republican House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes says there’s no evidence the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower, but President Trump says he’ll have more on the claim soon.
• Sen. John McCain accused Sen. Rand Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin” for opposing the accession of Montenegro into NATO.
• The Interior Department plans to rewrite a 2015 anti-fracking rule.
• Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte appears set for a second term after his party finished first in parliamentary elections.
• A report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia accused Israel of imposing an “apartheid regime” on Palestinians.

The First Amendment Lawyers Association (FALA) is asking new Attorney General of California Xavier Becerra to end the “abuse of governmental power” perpetuated by predecessor Kamala Harris against current and former executives of the classified-ad site Backpage.

On March 14, FALA—a nonprofit membership association launched in the late ’60s that has boasted some of the country’s top constitutional lawyers—sent a letter to Becerra condemning “the abusive prosecution of individuals associated with the online classified advertising website Backpage.com, and also the use of expansive search warrants seeking vast amounts of constitutionally-protected material, including personally identifiable information about all of the website’s users.” In the letter, FALA President Marc Randazza says he can identify “no theory under the First Amendment that would countenance such an abusive use of prosecutorial discretion or such a dragnet demand for information.”

Kamala Harris’ crusade against Backpage began last fall, when she had current chief executive Carl Ferrer and former owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larson arrested for pimping and conspiracy. The premise of the charges was that Backpage—a user-generated advertising site much like Craigslist—received payment for “escort” ads that eventually resulted in prostitution, thereby making Ferrer, Lacey, and Larkin the “pimps.” But it’s an argument that California Judge Michael Bowman rejected, on the grounds that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) prohibits the criminal prosecution of web publishers for content posted by users. “The protections afforded by the First Amendment were the motivating factors behind the enactment of the CDA,” noted Bowman, whose decision to dismiss the indictments is consistent with numerous other cases against classified ad sites like Backpage.

As the FALA letter points out, “at least seven other courts have expressly rejected the assumption underlying the California indictment that ads for escorts or those posted in an adult services section involve illegal speech, and none have concluded otherwise.” Given this, and the fact that Harris previously signed a letter acknowledging Section 230’s limit on Backpage prosecutions, “it is alarming that the State sought to bring a prosecution in the first place,” writes Randazza.

But it didn’t stop there: after Bowman’s ruling, Harris’ office filed another criminal complaint against Backpage, this time asserting the same pimping and conspiracy charges and adding a few counts of money laundering, too. The new complaint simply restates the previously rejected arguments for why Ferrer, Lacey, and Larkin are guilty of criminal activity.

Note that the normal process would have been for the state to appeal Bowman’s final ruling, but instead, Harris—who is now in the U.S. Senate—and her office tried to simply bring the same failed criminal case in another court. This sort of “forum shopping” is “a gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion and a serious violation fo the First Amendment,” FALA alleges. And that’s still not all:

Beyond the fact of the prosecution itself, the methods employed by the prosecutors also exhibit an utter disregard for established First Amendment limits. We have learned that a subpoena was served on Backpage.com that calls for the production of massive amounts of information for a several-year period, including copies of all advertisements posted (in all content categories), all billing records, the identities of all of the website’s users and their account histories, all internal communications, and even the source code for the operation of the website. This goes beyond the despised “General Warrants” that prompted the Constitution’s Framer’s to adopt the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches, and violates numerous Supreme Court decisions limiting such demands for materials protected by the First Amendment.

Randazza told Becerra that FALA members are encouraged by the new attorney general’s pledge to guard against civil liberties abuses in California. While seeking confirmation, Becerra said he would “vigorously defend the First Amendment” and hold police and prosecutors accountable for misconduct, ensuring that abuses committed by law enforcement would be “addressed and remedied transparently and without undue delay.”

The FALA letter asks Becerra to take these principles seriously when it comes to the prosecution of Backpage. “To the extent you have not previously been briefed on the facts of this case,” they write, “we hope that you will review them and take the steps necessary to ensure that the rule of law is followed in the State of California.”