Category: reason

Seattle’s Democracy Vouchers were supposed to break the hold of special interests on elections and open up the field to outsider candidates.

Instead the program—which awards Seattle voters a total of $100 that they can donate to qualified local candidates—almost all of the 315,000 tax dollars raised prior to the city’s primary election Tuesday have gone to only three candidates, one and incumbent and two politically connected activists.

Regardless of the results of the election, the city of Seattle, as Reason has previously reported is being sued by the Pacific Legal Foundation for promoting a program the foundation says violates the First Amendment of the Constitution.

The first candidate to qualify for democracy vouchers was incumbent candidate for City Attorney, Pete Holmes, who has so far received $46,050.

City Council Position 8 candidate John Grant, a past president of the Washington Tenants Union, has collected the most money, $150,000 so far. Grant, who’s making his second run for at the seat, was the first to register his campaign committee on December 8, 2016, nearly two months ahead of any other candidate.

Teresa Mosqueda, the Political and Strategic Campaign Director for the Washington State Labor Council (the state’s AFL-CIO), has pulled in $104,725, as well as garnering endorsements from influential interest groups like Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, and a several unions.

Evan Blevins, attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, says it’s hardly a surprise the benefits of Democracy Douchers accrue almost exclusively to well-practiced political operatives.

“To receive [the vouchers] you have to leap several hurdles with the Seattle Ethical Elections Commission”, he says, including participation in debates and receiving the contributions and signatures from 400 voters.

Rathering than parceling out the four $25 vouchers, Seattle sends all of them out on Jan. 1, encouraging voters to spend their vouchers all at once on the candidates first to the trough.

“It’s going to the people they know, who already have campaigns active,” Blevins tells Reason. “That’s going to be incumbents or well-funded candidates.”

In total, $78,000 in Democracy Vouchers were assigned by voters to candidates who never received permission to spend that money. Upstart candidates in the Position 8 race have paid a price.

Hisam Goueli, doctor and political neophyte, did not officially register his campaign until February, and according to the rules, didn’t qualify for $14,650 pledged to him until this past Friday, four days before the primary.

“Instead of getting my message out, I’m trying to get Democracy Vouchers,” Goueli told the Seattle Times, which is exactly the opposite way the program is supposed to work.

Likewise, council candidate and civil rights activist Sheley Secrest, was pledged $14,350 in Democracy Vouchers, but failed to meet the qualifications to access that money.

Taxing citizens to pay for campaign donations, and then making those donations available only to a selective number of political candidates certainly violates the spirit in which Seattle’s Democracy Vouchers were sold to voters. According to Blevins, it likely violates the Constitution as well.

“When you are forced to give a certain amount of money to someone who then uses it to contribute it to a candidate, that’s compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment,” he says.

That lawsuit, filed in June, is still a long way from resolution.

Seattleites will go to the polls Tuesday, many of them not realizing the questionable program they have underwritten isn’t helping any of those dark horses on the ballot.

• President Donald Trump reportedly dictated the misleading statement that Donald Trump Jr. issued after news broke of Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer.
• “New White House chief of staff John Kelly was so upset with how President Donald Trump handled the firing of FBI Director James Comey that Kelly called Comey afterward and said he was considering resigning, according to two sources familiar with a conversation between Kelly and Comey.”
• Opposition leaders in Venezuela were reportedly taken from their homes in the middle of the night by government forces.
• Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, has been found guilty of criminal contempt in U.S. District Court.
• Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has reportedly been fired from One America News Network.
• “The United States began removing furniture and equipment from a diplomatic property in Moscow on Tuesday in the first sign of compliance with a Kremlin order to slash its presence in Russia as retaliation for new U.S. sanctions.”

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A desire for fairness has nothing to do with support for redistribution.

Marian Tupy writes:

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Professors Leda Cosmides and John Tooby from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and their coauthors take an evolutionary look at the issue of income inequality and redistribution. As the authors note,

“Markets have lifted millions out of poverty, but considerable inequality remains and there is a large worldwide demand for redistribution. Although economists, philosophers, and public policy analysts debate the merits and demerits of various redistributive programs, a parallel debate has focused on voters’ motives for supporting redistribution. Understanding these motives is crucial, for the performance of a policy cannot be meaningfully evaluated except in the light of intended ends.”

The authors of the study argue that support for redistribution reflects motivations that evolved for the small-scale world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. “Understanding the economic and political nitty-gritty of redistribution does not come naturally to us,” said lead author Daniel Sznycer, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Montreal. “But humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time. This process built neural systems that motivate us to act effectively in situations of giving, taking, and sharing.”

View this article.

In Pennsylvania, Downington Area School District Superintendent Emilie Lonardi has formally apologized to two students and said their rights were violated when an administrator harassed and cursed them during their pro-life protest on public sidewalk outside the Downington STEM Academy. Zach Ruff confronted the two, threatened to call police if they talked to other students, told them to go to hell and told them that fetuses are not children but cells.

Katherine Stewart has an op-ed in today’s New York Times that purports to expose the sordid history of the phrase “government schools.” The “attacks on ‘government schools,'” she claims, “have a much older, darker heritage. They have their roots in American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism.”

How reliable a historian is Stewart? Not very. Take this passage, for just one example:

One of the first usages of the phrase “government schools” occurs in the work of…the Presbyterian theologian A.A. Hodge….Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools’ secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting “government schools” as “the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”

Here’s a fun fact about Archibald Alexander Hodge: He wasn’t opposed to government schools. His great fear was that the schools would be secularized, and to that end he wanted to keep them under strictly local control. But he didn’t want to detach them from the government. As he wrote in his 1887 essay “Religion in the Public Schools,” he wanted legislators to

let the system of public schools be confined to the branches of simply common school education. Let these common schools be kept under the local control of the inhabitants of each district, so that the religious character of each school may conform in all variable accidents to the character of the majority of the inhabitants of each district. Let all centralizing tendencies be watchfully guarded against.

Since Hodge is supposed to be Stewart’s example of “anti-Catholic sentiment,” I should note that his article actually speaks rather respectfully of Catholics. If you’re looking for a cause with a special appeal to anti-Catholic bigots, look not to the critics of consolidated public education but at the public schools themselves: In that era they were often deliberately used as tools of Protestantization.

So what about those quotes in Stewart’s op-ed? They appear to come from a lecture Hodge wrote around the same time, titled “The Kingly Office of Christ.” The phrase “government schools” appears in it precisely once: “The Protestants object to the government schools being used for the purpose of inculcating the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and Romanists object to the use of the Protestant version of the Bible and to the inculcation of the peculiar doctrines of the Protestant churches.” The other phrase that Stewart quotes comes several pages later:

I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, would be the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.

So it’s not government schools per se that he thinks are the problem; it’s “a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion.” He’s not criticizing the idea of public schools; he’s criticizing centralized, secularized schools. If you’re searching for someone who said “government schools” in a sneering way, this is a dead end.

As it happens, I do know of a 19th-century figure who used the phrase “governmental schools” sneeringly. What’s more, he did it in 1858, three decades before the lecture that Stewart called “one of the first usages of the phrase ‘government schools.'” Here’s what he said:

Question.—Are you in favor of common schools being supported by government?

Answer.—I am opposed to all governmental schools. Compulsory schools are absurd and oppressive. Government should have no concern with education or religion. I would upset the system of governmental schools entirely, if I could. Schools should be supported voluntarily, as churches and ministers are. Compulsory schools are especially oppressive to Catholics.

The speaker? The prominent abolitionist Garrit Smith, in an exchange published in William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. His sentiment shouldn’t be a surprise, given the strong currents of antistatist thought in the abolitionist movement. Stewart did say something about “roots in American slavery”—does this count?

On today’s podcast, Reason’s Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and Andrew Heaton discuss the trans military ban, Trump’s management casualties, and free speech on Twitter.

The president is making a lot of noise and staff shuffling, but not much legislative progress. Good news? Yes and no.

“A big upside for [libertarians] is that Trump seems to be not very good at executing these [illiberal] maneuvers,” says Mangu-Ward, citing the travel ban. But low trust in government “oddly doesn’t seem to lead to calls for less government.”

They also discuss whether Twitter is the new battleground for free speech.

And should we add Trump to Mount Rushmore or just blow it up?

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudon County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors, banned Brian Davison from her Facebook page for just 12 hours. But according to a federal judge in Alexandria, that brief banishment in February 2016 was enough to violate Davison’s First Amendment rights. The ruling, published last week, reinforces the logic of a recent federal lawsuit claiming that Donald Trump engages in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination when he blocks critics on Twitter.

Randall banned Davison, a local gadfly, from her “Chair Phyllis J. Randall” Facebook page after he posted a comment suggesting that members of the Loudon County School Board had taken official actions that benefited their relatives. “If the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence makes anything clear, it is that speech may not be disfavored by the government simply because it offends,” writes U.S. District Judge James Cacheris, a Reagan appointee, in his decision siding with Davison. “The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards. By prohibiting Plaintiff from participating in her online forum because she took offense at his claim that her colleagues in the County government had acted unethically, Defendant committed a cardinal sin under the First Amendment.”

Cacheris rejected Randall’s contention that her Facebook page “is merely a personal website that she may do with as she pleases.” He notes that she and her chief of staff created it shortly before she took office, that it it lists her official position and contact information, and that she uses it primarily for official purposes such as describing the supervisors’ work, implementing their policies, documenting her appearances as a representative of the county government, and communicating with her constituents. “I really want to hear from ANY Loudoun citizen on ANY issues, request, criticism, compliment, or just your thoughts,” she says in one post. “However, I really try to keep back and forth conversations (as opposed to one time information items such as road closures) on my county Facebook page (Chair Phyllis J. Randall) or County email (phyllis.randall@loudoun.gov).”

Randall’s posts are generally addressed to “Loudon”—i.e., the general public in her county. The forum that she created on Facebook was open to everyone except for Davison, who by her own account offended her by criticizing her colleagues on the school board. “Plaintiff is the only person Defendant has ever banned from her Facebook page,” Cacheris notes. Since Randall reconsidered that decision the next day, “the consequences of Defendant’s actions were fairly minor.” Even during the 12 hours when Davison was banned, he could still read and share Randall’s posts, although he could not comment on them or send direct messages to her.

Cacheris nevertheless thought Randall’s violation of the First Amendment was clear enough to grant Davison the declaratory judgment he requested. “Defendant acted under color of state law in maintaining her ‘Chair Phyllis J. Randall’ Facebook page and banning Plaintiff from that page,” Cacheris concludes. “Defendant’s actions violated Plaintiff’s right of free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, § 12 of the Constitution of Virginia.” Although Cacheris did not say so explicitly, Davison’s temporary exclusion also seems to implicate the First Amendment right to petitition the government for a redress of grievances, since she blocked him from one of two channels she identified for that purpose.

Donald Trump’s Twitter account is similar to Randall’s Facebook page is several significant ways. Although he created it years before he was elected president, the profile now identifies him by his public position and official address, and he uses the account mainly for official purposes, including the announcement of decisions, such as the appointment of a new FBI director and a ban on transgender soldiers, before they have been revealed elsewhere. Administration officials help maintain the account, which they explicitly describe as a way for Trump to communicate with his constituents.

All are welcome to participate in this forum except for the disfavored few who have said something that offended Trump, which is clearly a form of viewpoint discrimination. Like Davison when he was banned from Randall’s Facebook page, the critics Trump blocks on Twitter can still see what he says, but they cannot directly participate in the debate it provokes on that platform. In short, if Cacheris is right that Randall’s banishment of Davison was unconstitutional, it is hard to see how Trump’s blocking of disfavored Twitter users can be legal.

• God help all Angelinos: The Summer Olympics will be returning to Los Angeles in 2028.
• Anthony Scaramucci is already out as President Donald Trump’s communications director. I hadn’t even memorized how to spell his name yet.
• The son of Nashville’s mayor died of a drug overdose over the weekend.
• Former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been found guilty of criminal contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop his immigration round-ups.
• Qatar has filed a legal complaint with the World Trade Organization about the boycott other nations have launched against it.
• Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Sam Shepard has died at age 73.
• Hackers were quickly able to breach an electronic voting machine and reprogram it to Rick-Roll folks at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.
• Hackers also got their hands written material from several HBO shows, including apparently the next episode of Game of Thrones.

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In some cities, police are deploying bulldozers and aerial surveillance to combat the illegal activity of riding dirt bikes and ATVs through city streets. Despite few urban deaths from biking, law enforcement justifies their war by calling riders “malicious” and saying the sport poses serious danger.

Motorized dirt bikes and ATVs (all-terrain vehicles) are typically not street legal because they lack the necessary safety features to be driven on public roads like turn signals and brake lights. They are usually ridden in parks or rural areas.

Riding dirt bikes on city streets is also an inner-city trend found in D.C., Baltimore, New York City, and other major municipalities. Police claim that most bikes used for urban riding are stolen and/or not registered.

The hobby persists despite police crackdowns. Bikers claim that riding is part of their culture and that biker groups act as a sort of diversion program to keep members from spending money on drugs and guns.

Further, police are often not allowed to chase bikers, which seems to create a game of cat and mouse. As a result, bikers can ride in large “gangs” and disrupt traffic, often without any immediate consequence.

Just last month, bikers reignited their war with police when an estimated 100 bikes weaved through traffic in National Harbor, just outside of D.C. in Maryland. There were no injuries, but law enforcement accuses the drivers of wreaking havoc for about 30 minutes. Prince George’s County Deputy Police Chief George Nichols gave bikers an ominous warning: “This will not be tolerated. Don’t think you just got away with it. … You’re not safe. We are coming for you.”

A few weeks later, D.C. police crushed 62 dirt bikes and ATVs. Police Chief Peter Newsham told bikers that demolitions will continue “as long as they continue endangering the lives of everyone on our streets.” D.C. police told Reason that the bikes were crushed to keep them from returning to the streets and because they would be difficult to store.

While dirt bike riding can be dangerous and has been disruptive, there is little evidence that it’s a crisis. D.C. police told Reason that there were no casualties involving dirt bikes in 2015, 2016, or so far in 2017. There was only one crash that resulted in serious injury over that three-year period. Other crimes have been committed by dirt bike riders, but crushing bikes seems unlikely to prevent shootings or other dirt bikes from being stolen.

The war on dirt bikes is not isolated to the capitol. New York City tried to combat street biking last year with a publicized crushing of bikes. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton waved a checkered flag before a bulldozers decimated 69 of them. After the demolition, he justified the strange spectacle: “We want to send out a very strong message to the nitwits and knuckleheads who insist on operating these illegal vehicles … creating extraordinary danger not only for themselves but more importantly for the public.”

Bratton makes serious accusations against bikers, but does not have data to support his claims. The NYPD told Reason that they do not keep any data on accidents or fatalities involving ATVs.

Nearby Baltimore has tried many different tactics to combat riders. The city launched a four-man dirt bike task force last year, which they claim led to 45 arrests and 200 confiscated bikes. Previously, the city tried to end these illegal rides by shutting down popular roadways and using undercover cops. And calling this crackdown a war on dirt bikes is hardly an exaggeration—the police department uses an aerial surveillance system, technology meant for the Iraq War, to track down riders.

Some locals think the crackdown is working, others interviewed by The Baltimore Sun, have not seen a decrease in ridership. Again, fatalities resulting from dirt bikes hardly justify military technology: The Baltimore police told Reason that there were three deaths in 2015, two in 2016, and so far none this year.

In addition to police overemphasizing the safety risks of city riding, bikers and those that have spent time with them claim that they have also been falsely identified as thugs. A dirt bike documentarian, Lofty Nathan, told The Atlantic that dirt biking is a sort of “escape” for Baltimore’s inner-city riders:

“It’s simultaneously wholesome and meaningful, but also reckless and destructive. It depends what side you look from. What is important, is that in the context of the city, it is actually constructive for some of these kids…Marginalized communities will react to certain conditions, and they are just going to need to do something…It has to be rebellious but at the same time it could be a lot worse. In this community, it’s almost wholesome like the boy scouts.”

This sentiment was echoed in a five minute mini-documentary called “Wheelz Up” that chronicles dirt bike riders in D.C. The video is narrated anonymously by a rider who also says he works two jobs while finishing high school. According to the narrator, bikers are “just trying to have fun” and have been stereotyped by police. He says he paid for his bike in cash and continues to invest money in it instead of buying drugs.

While law enforcement in New York City, D.C. and Baltimore continue to wage war on bikers, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson recognizes that “people who ride dirt bikes are not all thugs.” The city is building a dirt bike and ATV park for riders, similar to a skate park.

Lawmakers in Seoul are reportedly mulling the idea that South Korea should develop its own nuclear weapons. This is partly a response to apparent advances in North Korea’s missile technology, and it is partly a response to signs that the United States may want to take less responsibility for the region’s security. And it could well be a good thing.

It is popularly believes that nuclear proliferation increases both the risk of conflict and the potential damage of those conflicts. But this may be a misconception. The most prominent example of nuclear proliferation in the post–Cold War era is on the Indian subcontinent. India and Pakistan fought several wars with each other after they won independence, but since 1998, when both came out as nuclear powers, the two countries have not had any major military conflicts. They still have points of contention and occasional border clashes, but the nuclear holocaust predicted by anti-proliferationists is unlikely to come to pass.

As Jonathan Tepperman, now the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, wrote in Newsweek years ago, there is a compelling case that nuclear weapons make the world safer, not more dangerous. A big part of this is the fact that no two nuclear states have gotten into a full-fledged non-nuclear war with each other, let alone a nuclear one.

“To understand why—and why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same way—you need to start by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level,” Tepperman wrote. “Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they’re pretty sure they can get away with them.”

Writing in The Nonproliferation Review last year, Michael D. Cohen pointed out that “proliferation pessimists have failed to specify how and when nuclear proliferation precipitates conflict” and that the dangers of proliferation are “substantially weaker than usually assumed.”

The case of South Korea poses other important questions, namely how long the United States is expected to guarantee security on the Korean peninsula. While President Trump has sounded more skeptical than any other postwar president about America’s proper role in maintaining peace around the world, his administration frequently rattles its rhetorical sabres over North Korea’s nuclear weapons. It has also tried to draw China, and even Russia, into the Korean peace process. This has taken a dark turn recently: American expectations of what China can do exceed Beijing’s capabilities, and the U.S.’s continued involvement in the issue deincentivizes China from making more of an effort.

The U.S. might do well to encourage South Korea—and Japan—to explore their options for taking responsibility for their own self-defense vis a vis North Korea. Pyongyang has been adept at playing the various regional powers, plus the United States, against each other and finding a space to survive in the daylight between this countries.

The Korean War ended 64 years ago this month, and the U.S. has maintained a military presence on the peninsula ever since, alleviating the pressure on regional powers to work toward a solution while placing more costs on the United States. America’s security commitments should not be perpetual. As World War 2 recedes further into history, its influence on U.S. international relations remains firm. It is past time for Americans, South Koreans, and others to re-evaluate the wisdom of the current order and work toward reforming it.