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A little good news on the sin tax front for a change: A proposed
“soda tax” in
Illinois was rejected today, with members of the House Revenue
and Finance Committee voting 7-2 against it.

The one penny per ounce tax on
sugar-sweetened beverages, syrups, and powders would have added an
additional $2.88 in cost to each case and 67 cents to each
two-liter bottle of soda sold in Illinois. Rep. John Bradley
(D-Marion), who chairs the revenue committee, called it a
“middle-class regressive tax” that “really hurts working
people.”

Rep. Robyn Gabel (D-Evanston), who sponsored the “Healthy
Eating, Active Living Act,” championed
it with all of the usual platitudes: It would help fight
the obesity epidemic, encourage healthy living, cut health care
costs, prop up Medicaid, etc.

A study published in the journal Preventive
Medicine in March found
overall support for sugar-sweetened beverage taxes in the
U.S. to be low, with only 22 percent of adults in favor. Democrats,
millennials, and people with generally negative views of soda
companies were more likely to support soda taxes. 

First, Democrats believed that Obamacare would become popular
after the initial furor surrounding the law’s passage died down. It
didn’t die down, and Democrats probably lost the House in the 2010
midterm election as a result. Then the law’s supporters argued that
once the law’s early benefits—for young adults, seniors, and
preventive care—kicked in, public opinion would take a turn. The
benefits went into effect, but public opinion stayed the same.

Finally, the law’s backers argued that once the law’s biggest
benefit, its coverage expansion, took effect, the law would start
down the road to popularity. The coverage expansion kicked in, and
for almost six months now, people have been using the coverage they
have under the law. It’s still unpopular.

An AP-GfK poll released today finds that, while premium sticker
shock is not proving a big problem for those who got coverage under
the law, many more people still oppose the law than favor it. From
the AP’s
news report:

A new
Associated Press-GfK poll finds that public opinion
continues to run deeply negative on the Affordable Care Act,
Obama’s signature effort to cover the uninsured. Forty-three
percent oppose the law, compared with just 28 percent in
support.

The poll suggests both lower support and lower opposition than
other surveys, but in terms of the gap between support and
opposition, it’s not an outlier. Here’s RCP’s
poll average for public approval of the health care law over the
last year: 

As you can see, there was a spike in opposition when the
exchanges crashed on open last fall. That effect seems to have
mostly worn off, but broadly speaking, opposition remains high and
favorability remains low.

Meanwhile, the law’s supporters are basically out of excuses to
explain why it’s not popular now but it will be in the near future.
The public has been pretty clear from the beginning that, overall,
they don’t like Obamacare. Now they’ve spent six months living with
its coverage expansion, and they still don’t. It’s of course always
possible that opposition will moderate at some point, but in the
near term at least it doesn’t seem particularly likely that it
will. The law’s benefits have kicked in, people are experiencing
the effects, and there’s no obvious potential turning point
left. 

In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court
held the execution of “mentally retarded criminals” to be
unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. Today, by a vote of
5-4, the Court extended that ruling to invalidate a Florida statute
governing the use of I.Q. tests in death penalty cases.

At issue today in Hall v. Florida was an appeal filed
by a convicted murderer named Freddie Lee Hall, who maintains that
his capital sentence is illegitimate under that 2002 precedent due
to his intellectual disability. As evidence of this disability,
Hall presented state officials with test results showing his I.Q.
score to be 71. Under Florida law, however, Hall must, as a
threshold matter, score 70 or less on an I.Q. test before any
further consideration may be given to his intellectual disability
case.

Writing today for the majority, Justice Anthony
Kennedy struck down what he called Florida’s “rigid rule” because
it deprived Hall and others like him of a “fair opportunity to show
that the Constitution prohibits their execution.” According to the
Court, “Freddie Lee Hall may or may not be intellectually disabled,
but the law requires that he have the opportunity to present
evidence of his intellectual disability, including deficits in
adaptive functioning over his lifetime.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief
Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence
Thomas, criticized Kennedy for “strik[ing] down a state law based
on the evolving standards of professional societies, most notably
the American Psychiatric Association,” rather than respecting the
judgment of Florida’s voters. “Under our modern Eighth Amendment
cases,” Alito argued, “what counts are our society’s
standards—which is to say, the standards of the American people—not
the standards of professional associations, which at best represent
the views of a small professional elite.”

Kennedy, by contrast, had the following to say about the
deference due to the I.Q. threshold set by Florida lawmakers: “The
States are laboratories for experimentation, but those experiments
may not deny the basic dignity the Constitution protects.”

The Court’s opinion in Hall v. Florida is available
here.

Just
hours after Elliot Rodger
stabbed and shot six people in Isla Vista, California, before,
apparently, belatedly ending his own wretched existence on this
Earth, an as-yet unidentified gunman
murdered four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium. The usual
round of pundits immediately started pointing fingers at their
favorite political targets in the United States as the
real culprits. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker
found an opening to blame gun owners.

Wrote
Gopnik:

Christopher died because of craven, irresponsible politicians
and the N.R.A. That’s true. That the killer in question was in the
grip of a mad, woman-hating ideology, or that he was also capable
of stabbing someone to death with a knife, are peripheral issues to
the central one of a gun culture that has struck the Martinez
family and ruined their lives.

I’m not sure why the means of killing half of the victims is
“peripheral” if the means of killing the other half is a core
concern. And let it be noted that misogyny
has also been called out as the real culprit by other pundits
with other axes to grind.

But Gopnik isn’t alone. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) also
wants to “end
the insanity” and tighten gun restrictions in the United States
until they’re…What? As restrictive as those in Belgium? Maybe he
just wants national laws as tight as those in Connecticut, where
new restrictions
promptly met mass defiance and turned tens of thousands of
residents into instant felons.

But back to Belgium. That country has rather tighter
laws than those in most of the United States, including
licensing and registration. Ammunition purchases are restricted
along with gun ownership. Backgrounds are checked, including for
mental health issues. Owners are required to justify their purchase
of guns with a rationale, whether it’s hunting, collecting, or the
like.

That this hasn’t prevented amok murders like Saturday’s shooting
at the Jewish Museum of Belgium is obvious. Nor did such laws
prevent the 2011
mass murder in Liege, which took the lives of five people.

Laws aren’t magical barriers against bad things. Really, nobody
ever thought that Belgium’s restrictive laws had disarmed the
country. In 2003, the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey estimated that
the country’s 11 million people had stashed
2 million illegal firearms to accompany the legally registered
458,000 in civilian hands.

The residents of Belgium and Connecticut would seem to have
something in common.

Laws may define the limits of legally accepted behavior and the
penalties for those who are caught crossing those limits, but they
don’t prevent those limits from being crossed.

And, sadly, researchers have yet to find
any effective means of preventing spree killings. The
Congressional
Research Service is among the bodies that concluded that
popular public health and law enforcement efforts show no promise
in preventing such crimes.

That’s not reassuring news to those of us who want to see an end
to such killings, and to such killers. (Although it’s encouraging
that such crimes
do not seem to be on the rise.) But if nothing else, it’s
obvious that the restrictive laws peddled as instant solutions
don’t just threaten liberty, they’ve failed to live up to their
advertising where they’ve already been tried.

Remind me: Where have we seen
this sort of tip-toe routine before? Was
it here?

Reader Ken
Constantino emailed this tip our Hit & Run box with
the succinct phrase “Shit” in the text field.

Via the Wall Street Journal comes this news:

In a commencement address at the United States Military
Academy at West Point on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will signal backing
for the new training effort by saying he intends to increase
support to the armed Syrian opposition, including by providing them
with training. Mr. Obama isn’t expected to provide details about
how, or where, that training would be accomplished.

“The president will make clear his intention to expand our
support to the moderate Syrian operation and increase our support
to Syria’s neighbors, who are dealing with the terrorist threats
emanating from the situation Assad has created in Syria,” a senior
administration official said….

Under a new arrangement still under discussion within the
administration, the U.S. military would overtly conduct most of the
training, and the CIA would take the lead in providing arms
covertly.

Defense officials say legislation would be required to authorize
the military to conduct a training program for the opposition. Last
week, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved such a measure,
authorizing the Pentagon to provide equipment, training and
supplies to aid vetted members of the Syrian opposition.

Read the whole thing.

“Everything that was ‘too big to fail’ in 2008 is bigger and
more dangerous today,” says New York
Times bestselling author James Rickards. “We’re
waiting for the catalyst that will cause this catastrophe to come
tumbling down.”

“‘The Death of Money’: Q&A With James Rickards” is the
latest video from Reason TV. Watch above or click on the link below
for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and
more Reason TV clips.