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Remember when
Barack Obama permanently won millennial voters to the side of
Democrats in 2008? As I wrote in my October 2014 magazine feature
story, “The
Millennial Scramble,” experts predicted that Obama had secured
young people forever when he secured the presidency.

Well, that was short-lived. Millennials are as dissatisfied with
the president as everyone else, and are expected to sit this
election out—a major blow to a president who believed initiatives
like Obamacare would be widely appreciated by young people.
According to
The Hill:

Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and
former spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D-Nev.), said that the promise of “hope and change millennials
invested in has hit a brick wall.”

Manley said that this in turn has made young voters “very
cynical about the political process and less likely to vote than
they had in the past.” …

A poll released earlier this year showed a significant
decline in the number of Democratic-leaning millennials
who planned to vote in the midterm elections.

The survey, conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of
Politics, found that young voters are increasingly turned off by
the political environment.

That’s an important distinction, though: millennials aren’t
exactly flocking to the Republican banner. They are “turned off” by
the political environment entirely, and are skeptical that any
politicians have answers to their economic plight.

Does this mean millennials are experiencing some kind of
libertarian awakening? While there’s no definitive answer, Reason’s
Nick Gillespie and Emily Ekins have
argued that the generation is still “unclaimed.” They are
socially tolerant, but their economic views are up in the
air—accordingly, they haven’t bought into a specific party or
ideology yet.

Even so, Democrats have some obvious advantages that make it
comparatively easier for them to recruit young voters. As The
Hill notes, the student loan debt situation has become a cause
celebre of those who would recapture millennial support, including
Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

A DNC official said that they have been building upon their past
success, and that most young voters agree that the Democratic Party
has their best interests at heart, championing issues ranging from
college affordability to equal pay.

“It’s a reflection of what we’re running on more broadly,” said
one DNC official, adding that these issues appeal to voters across
the board and are not simply geared toward the younger set.

At the same time, the official added that millennials understand
that “Democrats have their backs.”

Anyone who doesn’t want to see millennials returning to the
Democratic fold in search of debt forgiveness and tuition subsidies
needs to articulate the case that increased federal involvement in
higher education has
made college more expensive and wrecked it for everyone.

And it should be clear that a Republican Party more in tune with
the libertarian sensibilities of millennials would stand a
significantly better chance at winning some of their votes.

Earlier this week Covered California — the
new Obamacare-inspired insurance exchange — issued some
controversial contracts. “California’s health insurance
exchange has awarded $184 million in contracts without the
competitive bidding and oversight that is standard practice across
state government, including deals that sent millions of dollars to
a firm whose employees have long-standing ties to the agencies
executive director,” reports the Associated Press. This looks
bad, writes Steven Greenhut, especially as Obamacare
supporters fight back an initiative (Proposition 45) on the
November ballot that would give the state’s insurance commissioner
the power to approve or reject health-care rate hikes — the same
power he has with most other types of insurance.

View this article.

Let us not wade into an
argument as to whether Mumia Abu-Jamal is a cop-killer or a victim
of a corrupt justice system. Actually, go ahead and wade into the
argument if you like. Whether Abu-Jamal is innocent is not actually
relevant to this blog post, but the argument surrounding it
certainly is.

Pennsylvannia, the state in which Abu-Jamal was born and where
his crime took place, passed a law this week that essentially
declared that those convicted of crimes
no longer have free speech. That is not the stated intent of
the law (it never is), but it’s absurdly clear it is what has
happened. This week Gov. Tom Corbett signed into law a bill that
allows victims of crime to go to a judge and stop a convicted
criminal from engaging in any “conduct which perpetuates the
continuing effect of crime on the victim.”

What could that possibly mean? It has to do with Abu-Jamal
giving a pre-recorded commencement speech to graduates at Goddard
College in Vermont. This apparently shocked the conscience of
Pennsylvania’s legislature and Maureen Faulkner, the widow of slain
officer Daniel Faulkner. So they’ve introduced a
victim’s veto. If you’ve been convicted of a crime in
Pennsylvania, you can’t say or do anything that makes the victim or
victims feel “a temporary or permanent state of mental
anguish.”

The wording of the law is vague—but makes sure to note that
redress involves collecting “reasonable attorney fees and other
costs associated with the litigation.” Does it mean that a
convicted person who continues to protest his innocence in media
interviews is breaking the law? The law criminalizes conduct, not
just speech. Would asking the Innocence Project for help
with your case violate the law? Would doing anything outside of the
standard appeals process “perpetuate the continuing effect of the
crime”?

The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union
is
not impressed:

“This bill is written so broadly that it is unclear what
behavior is prohibited,” said Reggie Shuford, executive director of
the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “Essentially, any action by an inmate or
former offender that could cause ‘mental anguish’ could be banned
by a judge.

“That can’t pass constitutional muster under the First
Amendment.”

They note that that the bill could also put the kibosh on
efforts by imprisoned criminals to engage in political advocacy and
criminal justice reform, which I suspect is a feature, not a bug.
The state’s victim advocate, Jennifer Storm, nevertheless insists,
“We’re not limiting one’s free speech. That is not what this bill
is about.” That is literally what you are doing. This law was
passed for the expressed purpose of censoring criminals.

When an Ebola-afflicted man collapsed in Nigeria’s Lagos
airport, Nigerian authorities didn’t call the Western aid hotline demanding mulah and
manpower. They hunkered down and took aggressive steps to prevent
the contagion from spreading.

By contrast, Liberia started holding press conferences and
calling Western aid organizations when it belatedly detected the
disease. The outcome? Ebola is raging through this sad, sad
country, attacking over 300 people last week alone.

What’s the difference between Liberia and Nigeria? Liberia is
among the most indebted nations in Africa, I note in my column at
The Week, and Nigeria is the least. It’s capital Monrovia
is crawling with NGOs and the U.N. is already spending $500 million
to maintain a peacekeeping force. As one African put it: “The virus
has managed to escape from a country that has one of the largest
concentration of ‘helpers’ in the world.”

 With Western aid like this, developing countries don’t
need drones and bombs.

Go
here to read the whole thing.

Insisting “It is well established that jury
nullification is neither a right of the defendant nor a defense
recognized by law,” the New Hampshire Supreme Court this morning
eviscerated a law
that was openly intended and
widely interpreted as a
shot in the arm for the right of jurors to consider the law as
well as the facts in criminal cases. It did nothing of the sort,
the court sniffed. It just codified existing law allowing the jury
to give some thought to the way in which laws are applied.

Yeah. That’s why legislators battled and prosecutors fretted
over the law’s passage.

In the case at hand,
The State of New Hampshire v. Richard Paul. Richard
Paul was convicted of selling marijuana and LSD. During closing
arguments, his attorney urged nullification. By the court’s
description, the prosecutor acknowledged the jury’s nullification
role, but argued that the jurors should convict based the law—an
understandable back and forth between prosecution and defense.

Then, the judge issued “jury instructions that effectively
contravened his ‘jury nullification defense.'” Paul appealed his
subsequent conviction.

Honestly, the law had been watered down in the course of its
passage through the New Hampshire legislature, from a version that,
the court concedes, instructed the jury to “judge the law” and
“nullify any and all actions [the jurors] find to be unjust.” The
enacted
version reads, instead, “In all criminal proceedings the court
shall permit the defense to inform the jury of its right to judge
the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts
in controversy.”

At the time of passage in 2012, Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute
said it was “definitely a step forward,” but he was
worried about the dilution the measure had suffered.

I am concerned, however,  that this language does not go
far enough.   We don’t know how much pressure trial
judges will exert on defense counsel.  As noted above, if the
attorney’s argument is “too strenuous,” the judge may reprimand the
attorney in some way or deliver his own strenuous instruction about
how the jurors must ultimately accept the law as described by
the court, not the defense.  I’m also
afraid what the jurors hear will too often depend on the
particular judge and, then, what that judge wants to do in a
particular case.

That’s pretty much exactly what happened here. Insisting “Were
[the law] interpreted to grant juries the right to judge or nullify
the law, there would be a significant question as to its
constitutionality,” the New Hampshire Supreme Court said Paul got
more than he was entitled to when the judge in his case allowed his
attorney to mention nullification before issuing contrary
instructions.

So Paul is out of luck. And defendants in the state can no
longer rely on the state’s jury nullification law, because the
state’s highest court says that law doesn’t mean what everybody
knew it meant.

Below, Reason TV on a happier outcome from a jury.

HT: Kirsten Tynan

Imagine you’re a health insurer
participating in Obamacare’s exchanges. There are some things you
don’t like: The back end of the federal exchange, which is supposed
to handle payments to insurers, still isn’t finished. There are
some things you’d like to see changed: Insurers currently aren’t
allowed to offer plans below a certain actuarial value—the average
amount of medical expenses covered for people in the plan—although
there are currently proposals to change this.

But even still, it’s not a bad arrangement: Americans are
generally required to buy the product you sell, they are heavily
subsidized by the federal government, and if your expenses for
exchange-based plans come in more than a bit higher than expected,
the federal government will cover a significant percentage of your
overage.

All in all, you’ve got a fairly generous setup. But you probably
have some worries. For instance, what about those
lawsuits contending that, because the text of Obamacare only allows
subsidies in state-established exchanges, only state-established
exchanges should be allowed to disburse subsidies? Imagine what
would happen if those crazy legal challenges were actually
successful. That might be a problem for insurers, given that the
majority of exchanges were established by the federal government,
not states. 

Now, many of the health law’s supporters have argued that the
challenge is an extended legal joke—an error in wording, not a
serious legal challenge. Only an anti-Obamacare cynic, a
text-obsessed nihilist, could think that when Congress wrote and
passed legislation specifying that subsidies would be available in
state-established exchanges that Congress actually meant this
literally. Or, well,
Jonathan Gruber, who helped draft the federal health law and
the Massachusetts health reform it was based on. But that’s neither
here nor there.

If you’re an insurer, however, you might not be so sure. You see
this Gruber fellow
saying, all the way back in 2012, that “if you’re a state and
you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get
their tax credits.” (He’s since changed his mind, and says he
previously misspoke on multiple occasions.) And you see a
couple of court decisions that seem to buy into the odd notion
that the plain, unambiguous text of the law is the clearest
expression of congressional intent. You notice that, even when a
court disagrees with the challengers, it agrees that they kind of
have a point,
as the Fourth Circuit did when it admitted that “a literal
reading of the statute undoubtedly accords more closely with their
position.”

Sure, one of the decisions in favor of the challengers has now
gone to a full court review, which is
expected to be more favorable to the administration. But
overall, the whole situation looks kind of dicey.

And so, since you’re an insurer, you’d probably want, well,
insurance against the prospect that these oddball legal
literalists, who think the law should be implemented in the
explicit way that the text of the law states, and not some
impressionistic way that better fits the administration’s purposes,
might actually win.

As CNBC notes,
that’s just what insurers sought and eventually got from the Obama
administration in the latest round of health exchange
contracts:

These insurers will sell you some Obamacare—at least as long as
the government is footing the bill for most of their customers.

Insurers doing business on HealthCare.gov will be
allowed to terminate their health plans if there’s a halt on
federal tax credits that help most Obamacare customers buy the
coverage, according to new language for 2015
contracts.…The language in the contracts, without saying so
overtly, recognizes that there is a chance that those challenges
could succeed.

In other words, if you’re an insurer, you might be worried. And
you might have good reason to be.