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You don’t have to answer the door, but a
solicitor’s right to knock is protected by the First Amendment, as
a
federal court reaffirmed this week. The case comes from an
Indiana town that tried to ban door-to-door canvassing,
fundraising, and peddling before 9 a.m. and “after the hour of 9
p.m. or sunset, whichever is earlier.” The community also
sought to make all canvassers obtain a permit, which would cost
$150 to apply for and $50 per week to maintain.  

The Citizens Action Coalition (CAC) of Indiana—a nonprofit
that relies on field canvassing for about 25 percent of its
revenue—brought the lawsuit in 2013 with the help of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Indiana. The group alleged that the
community of Yorktown’s requirements significantly limited CAC’s
ability to exercise its First Amendment rights. Evenings are when
CAC canvassers are most likely to find individuals home, it noted,
and yet the town’s rules would prohibit all evening canvassing
during certain times of year, when dusk can come as early as 5 p.m.
CAC also said the canvasser permit fees were prohibitively
expensive. Overall, Yorktown’s ordinance was not narrowly tailored
to serve legitimate public safety and privacy interests, the groups
alleged. 

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana
agreed. “Without any substantive evidence establishing an increase
in the crime rate due to door-to-door solicitation,”
wrote Judge Richard Young in his decision, “the Town fails to
show how canvassing after sunset but before 9:00 p.m. poses any
greater threat to its citizens than any other person who may come
to a resident’s door after dark.” 

As for infringing on residents’ right to privacy, Young noted
that the town could easily accomodate “the unwilling listener’s
interest” with a much less restrictive policy. “For example, the
Town Council could include non-commercial advocates in the list of
persons to whom a ‘No Peddlers or Solicitors’ sign is applicable,”
he noted. In addition, an unwilling party could practice the
time-honored tradition of simply not answering the door. 

“Door-to-door canvassing has long played a vital role for the
dissemination of ideas in our country,”
said Gavin M. Rose, a senior staff attorney with ACLU of
Indiana, in a statement. “We are pleased that the Court
recognized that the ability of government at any level to interfere
with this activity is severely limited, and hope that this ruling
will educate other municipalities that might consider similar
legislation.”

Yesterday the
Supreme Court, which last year decided
two important cases involving drug-detecting dogs,
agreed to hear another one. Rodriguez v.
U.S. asks the Court to elaborate on its reasoning in the
2005 case
Illinois v. Caballes, where it said police are free to
use drug-sniffing dogs during routine traffic stops but suggested
stops that are “unreasonably prolonged” to facilitate such
inspections would violate the Fourth Amendment.
Rodriguez poses the question of how long a delay must
be to cross that line.

The case involves Dennys Rodriguez, who was pulled over in 2012
on Highway 275 in Nebraska after he swerved onto the shoulder of
the road (to avoid a pothole, according to Rodriguez). Morgan
Struble, the Valley, Nebraska, police officer who stopped him, gave
him a warning, at which point Rodriguez should have been free to
go. But Struble, after unsuccessfully seeking permission to walk a
drug-sniffing dog around the car, detained Rodriguez another seven
or eight minutes, waiting for a deputy sheriff to arrive. Although
Struble had a dog in his patrol car, he did not want to bring it
out until he had another officer to back him up. After the deputy
arrived, Struble walked the dog around the car, it alerted, and the
cops searched the car, finding a bag of methamphetamine.

In January the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit
ruled
that “the traffic stop was not unreasonably prolonged.” The delay
of seven or eight minutes, it said, had no constitutional
significance, amounting to a “a de minimis intrusion on Rodriguez’s
personal liberty.” The fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear
the case suggests that at least a few justices may disagree.

If so, it would be a welcome deviation from the deference the
justices have almost always shown to police and their canine
collaborators. Last year, in
Florida v. Harris, the Court unanimously ruled that a
police dog’s alert, which may be erroneous, imagined, invented, or
deliberately triggered, by itself is enough to justify a search
unless the defendant can show the dog is unreliable—a tall order
when the evidence on that point is controlled by the police, who
have little incentive to collect it. Combined with earlier
decisions saying police are not conducting a search when they use
dogs to detect contraband and therefore can do so without any
evidence of criminal activity, Harris in practice
gave cops with dogs
a license to search vehicles at will. But since not all cops
have dogs, there is still a practical limit on this power. That
limit will be eroded or eliminated if an officer, after issuing a
warning or citation, can continue to detain a driver until a dog
arrives.

The
forfeiture case I discussed the other day, in which Iowa state
troopers took $100,000 in poker winnings from two players driving
through the state, illustrates the danger. The trooper who stopped
the car did not have a dog, so he had to wait for one. As in
Rodriguez’s case, he dragged out the encounter after issuing a
warning by asking for permission to walk a dog around the car.
After the driver repeatedly said no, the trooper detained him
anyway, ostensibly because the driver seemed nervous (an
all-purpose excuse to detain anyone stopped by police). If the
trooper had let the driver go after issuing a warning, there would
have been no purported dog alert to justify the search that
discovered the money.  

Over the past week or so, we’ve seen two strong hints as to how
the Republican party will handle social issues going forward—the
combined effect of which is to offer reminder of how thoroughly
political coalitions and party power dynamics can change over
time.

The first came from Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who said at
least weekend’s Values Voters Summit, the annual confab of the
GOP’s socially conservative wing, that gay marriage, long a social
conservative priority, is “not an issue. In fact,” she said, “it’s
boring.”

Since then, Bachman has downplayed the remarks,
noting her continuing “belief that marriage should be between
one man and one woman.” The two statements aren’t actually
inconsistent, however. Even if Bachmann, who has in the past
aggressively supported legal prohibitions on same-sex marriage,
maintains her personal opposition to same sex marriage, that
doesn’t mean she’s making an issue of it anymore. Judging by the

scant mentions of gay marriage at the Summit, neither are many
other Republicans.

The second came from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who, in response to
a question about whether Plan B should be legal,
said on Tuesday: “I am not opposed to birth control… Plan B is
taking two birth-control pills in the morning and two in the
evening, and I am not opposed to that.” Paul extended his
remarks to suggest that the vast majority of Republicans would be
with him. “Plan B is taking birth control… I am not against birth
control, and I don’t know many Republicans who would be indicating
that they are against birth control.”

Not surprisingly, that remark angered Tony Perkins, the head of
the Family Research Council, one of the sponsors of the Values
Voters Summit, who tweeted that Plan B’s function “is to create
conditions hostile to human life.” But Paul hasn’t softened his
stance. Instead, his office expressed dismay with Perkins’
criticism. An adviser to the senator
told Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast that Paul’s camp
is “fuming,” especially after Paul spoke about his opposition to
abortion at least week’s Summit. “[Perkins] reaches out when he
needs a speaker for his conferences, but apparently not when he
wants to attack Sen. Paul for no good reason,” the adviser
said to Nuzzi.

What these incidents suggest is that while GOP opposition to
abortion remains strong, and is likely to stay strong for the
foreseeable future, the Republican party wars over same-sex
marriage and contraception are essentially over—and social
conservatives lost.

This is not to say that skirmishes will not continue, that the
debates won’t persist at some level, perhaps even loudly at times.
But it’s clear enough where the arguments are going, and what the
outcomes are likely to be. The GOP probably won’t come out as the
party of gay rights and the pill in time for the 2016 election, but
those issues won’t be front and center. If anything, judging by the
Summit, most Republican politicians are likely to try to avoid
talking about gay marriage whenever possible. And when it comes to
contraception, many will emphasize support for greater access by
making it
available over-the-counter. 

The causes behind the Republican party’s shift are
complex—changing social norms, the shifting demographics of the
electorate, and the decline of religiosity in American life are all
factors. But rather than trace the reasons for the transformation,
I think it’s worth dwelling briefly on how rapid and drastic the
shift on these issues, especially gay marriage, has been, and what
that shift suggests about the stability of internal power dynamics
in political parties.

Go back just a decade, and contraception was barely on the radar
as a national political debate. And far from declaring same-sex
marriage a boring non-issue, Republicans were hoping that
opposition would bolster their political prospects.

In 2004, the Bush White House believed that opposition to
same-sex marriage would help to get out the vote. “To the degree it
energizes people who might otherwise not vote, it tends to help
us,” Bush’s campaign guru Karl Rove said
of a ballot initiative intended to amend the state constitution to
prohibit same-sex marriage. There were 11 such measures that year,
and Bush eventually went so far as to
propose a national constitutional amendment restricting
same-sex marriage. (Whether or not the strategy worked as
well as intended is a matter of some debate, but that was very much
the animating idea.)

This, of course, was around the same time that Rove was famously
imagining a “permanent Republican majority,” an unbeatable GOP for
years to come. And that majority was to be built in no small part
on social conservatives and their strength of their vote, which was
critical in 2004.

Certainly, this was the understanding within segments of the
media at the time. Rove drove Bush to election with “an army of
Christian foot soldiers,”
declared a 2005 PBS Frontline documentary. That same report
quoted Dana Milbank of The Washington Post saying that
“evangelicals didn’t just come out and vote for him, they were his
campaign.” The thesis of the documentary, explained by the
announcer in its introduction, was that “it took 40 years, but
[Rove] changed the political landscape” in his quest for endless
Republican victories.

This was the widely-if-not-universally assumed future of the
Republican party: electoral dominance as far as the eye could see,
driven by the votes of committed social conservatives.

A decade later, essentially the opposite is not only true, but
obviously so. The Republican party is weak nationally, and
the conventional wisdom is that it will remain weak for years to
come. Meanwhile, the influence of social conservatives has dwindled
to the point where a likely presidential candidate such as Rand
Paul does not back down when criticized by a prominent social
conservative leader, and even hardcore social conservatives will
barely discuss an issue—same-sex marriage—that just a decade ago
was assumed to be a surefire political winner for the GOP.

All of which is to say that the factors that look likely to push
a party into permanent majority status can just as easily dissolve
and become weaknesses in a relatively short time, and that the
factions that look certain to maintain a heavy influence within a
party may not have as tight a grip as widely believed.

This is a lesson for Republicans, obviously, as they attempt
rethink and reshape the party image in a post-Bush, post-Obama era.
But it’s also a cautionary tale for Democrats, many of whom now
project a similar sense of certainty and confidence about the
party’s chances at political dominance going forward—and a reminder
that victories which may initially seem inevitable can quickly and
unexpectedly turn into certain losses. 

I
suppose on some level it’s always a good thing when a Real
Housewives couple gets sent to jail. But in the case of
Teresa and Joe Giudice, who starred in The Real Housewives of
New Jersey, it seems particularly appropriate.

Convicted of conspiracy and bankruptcy fraud, Joe will be going
away to federal prison for 41 months. Teresa will be sent packing
for 15 months.

The couple had pleaded guilty in March, admitting they hid
assets from bankruptcy creditors and submitted phony loan
applications to get some $5 million in mortgages and construction
loans. Joe Giudice also pleaded guilty to failing to pay taxes
totaling more than $200,000.

Despite the admonitions, the judge gave Teresa Giudice a
sentence below the agreed-upon range in her plea agreement, 21 to
27 months. She cited “significant mitigating circumstances”
including the Giudices’ four daughters, Teresa Giudice’s aging
parents and the fact that she had a lesser role in the conspiracy
than her husband.

Press reports indicate that Joe got a sentence in the middle of
his range, partly because he did charitable work in the aftermath
of Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Irene.

Yet this part of the saga bothers me a bit:

“We prosecute a lot of white-collar crime,” [U.S. Attorney Paul
Fishman] said. “The fact that she’s a celebrity played no role in
what her punishment was. But we do believe that when people like
Teresa Giudice and Giuseppe Giudice are investigated, prosecuted
and sentenced for these types of crimes that it does send a message
to everyone who’s watching.”

More here.

What is it that movie mogul Sam Goldwyn used to say? “If you
want to send a message, call Western Union.”

I’m dubious that this sort of case sends much of a message (and
given that one of the defendants got less than her plea deal, it’s
far from clear what the message might be). It’s always appalling,
of course, when celebrities or well-connected folks get away with
stuff the rest of us would get nailed for, but the idea that such
weird, rare, and random events as a trial of reality TV stars will
change criminal behavior strikes me as pretty sketchy.

Indeed, it smacks of the same sort of delusional myth-making by
which Happy Days auteur Gary Marshall claimed that
requests for library cards increased “500
percent” after Fonzie applied for one in an episode of the
show. Sorry, guys, but that just ain’t how
television (or press coverage of trials) work.

“Despite the skepticism of experts and criticism
by naysayers, there is little doubt that we are heading into an era
of unlimited and almost free clean energy,” the Stanford technology
maven Vivek Wadhwa declared in the Washington
Post last month. The technology that most inspires his
enthusiasm is solar energy—and while solar isn’t close to “almost
free” yet, it is indeed getting cheaper. The prices of solar
photovoltaic (PV) modules have fallen steeply by more than 80
percent since 2008. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald
Bailey parses current solar power price trends trying to discern
where the future might lead. 

View this article.