Tag: hit&run

Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, by Stuart Schrader. Basic Books, 432 pages, $34

“Everybody else can indulge in politics—every black group, every political party group, every church group,” groused Carl Parsell, then president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, in 1969. “Why are police officers so different?”

The question goes to the heart of Stuart Schrader’s Blue Power, a new book charting how police unions accreted and cemented power in the decades following Parsell’s query.

It’s a ripe subject for review: Police officers’ savvy use of public sector unions and lobbying to largely immunize themselves from oversight is one of the greatest political coups in recent American history. In under four decades, police unions evolved from beer-drinking clubs to organized bargaining units to potent political forces at the local, state, and national levels.

The idea that those empowered to enforce law and order could also leverage their position to gain more power has always sat uncomfortably in a democratic republic. “Who is going to uphold this order?” a San Francisco judge wondered in the 1970s, when striking officers defied his commands to stop picketing while carrying guns. Schrader argues that law enforcement’s victories at the bargaining table and in statehouses have hurt “the very public safety and security that are to be democracy’s police-enforced guarantors.”

Police misconduct settlements cost cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Arbitration makes it hard to fire officers, even for gross misconduct. At their most militant, police unions threaten to remove departments from any external democratic control, and to capriciously withdraw or overapply their power to punish anyone who would oppose them.

Several recent books have explored the history of individual police departments in major cities and the battles to reform them. The Minneapolis Reckoning covered the Minneapolis Police Department both before and after the killing of George Floyd. The Oakland Police Department’s long history of corruption was the subject of The Riders Come Out at Night. Both The Highest Law in the Land and The Power of the Badge examined the unusually powerful office of the county sheriff in American policing and local politics.

But Schrader, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, gives a national perspective, from the birth of police organizing in the 1960s through law enforcement’s emergence on the national political stage in the 1980s, the passage of the 1994 crime bill, and the turbulent Black Lives Matter years. What’s remarkable is how much the police achieved without a national union or top-down campaign.

Police used the titular phrase blue power in the 1960s as a direct response to the Black Power movement. One 1968 assessment called blue power “the political force by which radicalism, student demonstration, and Black Power can be blocked.” (There were less successful efforts to co-opt the language of the Black Power movement, such as when striking Minneapolis officers called for “Pig Power.” ) But police organizing was not simply a backlash. One of Schrader’s insights, and one of the more interesting threads of the book, is that rank-and-file police organizations stoked public fears of radicals and crime as a tactic in a more concrete fight against administrators.

At the end of the Progressive Era, cities began to untangle their police departments from machine politics and turn them into independent agencies focused on crime control. When the Los Angeles Police Department unveiled a new slogan in 1955, “To Protect and to Serve,” it was intended to signal a new era of professionalism. Officers soon discovered that being independent meant having to advocate for their own interests in what they saw as an increasingly hostile world, besieged by radicals on the streets, clueless liberals in Washington, and hostile bosses on the floors above them.

Officers had genuine grievances. Patronage still governed hiring and promotions at several major police departments. In Baltimore in the 1960s, it was normal for police officers to do maintenance and sanitation work around the city while on duty. “Some had been painting walls for so many years they couldn’t remember how to write a ticket,” Schrader writes.

When Detroit police officers began a ticket-writing slowdown in 1967—supported by the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, and the Detroit chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees— they were protesting a much-hated quota for traffic tickets, which city officials wanted to raise to generate more revenue. The slowdown cost Detroit an estimated $583,000.

Police chiefs were autocrats, and officers had no formal grievance or disciplinary processes to turn to. In Baltimore, Commissioner Donald Pomerlau had an intelligence unit that kept tabs on officers and civilians who were of interest to him. (Asked by a reporter if his intelligence unit spied on elected officials, Pomerleau responded, “Just the blacks. Just the blacks.”) Meanwhile, police chiefs used the frequent bribery scandals of the 1960s and 1970s to press for more powerful internal affairs departments.

Schrader’s labor-vs.-management framing shows these competing forces as sophisticated political actors in a multifront battle. Police unions learned early on that they could sell relatively dry policies to the public by presenting them as life-and-death matters. For example, when New York City’s police unions launched a signature drive in 1966 for a referendum to abolish the mayor’s newly created police review board—which would have had no investigative authority or power to make disciplinary recommendations—-the union’s public ad campaign was so effective that conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. personally delivered 40,000 signed petitions to the city clerk’s desk. (“The civilian review board proposed by Mayor Lindsay is an emotional artifact, designed primarily to soothe the unrealistic fears of a small minority of New York voters who worry without objective justification that the police are regularly guilty of the abuse of their powers,” Buckley said.)

Collective bargaining rights and forced arbitration for officers tilted the balance of power away from police chiefs. As police officer unions grew in influence over the 1970s, so did their ambitions and tactics: political lobbying and campaigning, litigation, and retaliatory work actions.

Schrader documents some of police unions’ forays into the culture war, such as when the Houston Police Officers’ Union sued the Houston punk band AK-47 in 1980 for its single, “The Badge Means You Suck,” which listed the names of several people who’d been killed by Houston police in recent years.

But it’s the strikes, riots, and other actions that are the most controversial. In addition to sick-outs (waves of what’s known as the “blue flu”), officers engaged in malicious compliance or noncompliance to punish cities that refused to meet their demands. In the 1970s, the day after San Francisco voters approved a proposition to cut police wages, police issued three times the normal number of traffic citations.

In one notorious 1992 incident, thousands of New York officers, many of them drunk, surrounded City Hall to protest Mayor David Dinkins’ plan to create a civilian review board. They were egged on by future Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and they later marched down the Brooklyn Bridge, blocking traffic. A New York councilwoman said that cops refused to let her enter City Hall and called her the n-word.

Left-wing labor activists have never been quite sure how to square their principles with the existence of right-wing police unions, and Schrader also struggles with this a bit.

“Many public sector unions were militant, but police maintained this militancy long after it had crested among other public employees,” he writes. “Most public sector unions experienced setbacks or stasis beginning in the 1980s, but police unions continued to succeed. To this day, with around 7 million unionized public employees in the United States, it is difficult in most cities to consider other unions as part of the same movement as police unions—only one type of union representative approaches the bargaining table or meeting of a city’s central labor council packing a pistol.”

Of course, other public sector unions such as teachers and sanitation workers know how to apply particular and unpleasant pressure to have their demands met. But the Punisher bumper stickers aren’t the only difference; there’s another one resting in a holster on most cops’ belts. Schrader argues that what makes police different is that they are able to augment their political power—the use of political tactics and channels to advance their interests—with their “operational power,” officers’ authority to use violence and the discretion over when to use it.

At one point, Schrader notes that police unions have saddled municipalities with huge unfunded pension liabilities and other pernicious perks. Sadly, he thinks the problem is that every other public employee doesn’t have the same benefits. “Although all workers should have access to the types of compensations and benefits available to police with powerful unions, the underlying alteration that must occur is to keep this one particular profession from holding primacy in our politics, distorting and dominating the entire sphere.”

Still, Blue Power is a detailed and often interesting history of police organizing that rightly recognizes what officers have known for years: Policing is politics.

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After the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s massive International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs in a case I helped litigate along with the Liberty Justice Center and others, litigation continued over tariff refunds owed to the many businesses that paid illegally collected tariffs under IEEPA – a total of some $166 billion. In March, Judge Richard K. Eaton of the US Court of International Trade – the judge assigned to oversee the refund process – ordered the administration to grant refunds to to all those businesses that were forced to pay the tariffs – including those that had not filed lawsuits seeking refunds. This week, on April 14, in response to Judge Eaton’s court order, the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) submitted a required update on the status of their refund plan. The Hill has a helpful summary:

Roughly 330,000 importers who paid a combined $166 billion as part of President Trump’s emergency tariffs are waiting on refunds after the Supreme Court in February struck down the levies in a blockbuster 6-3 decision.

CBP, the federal agency in charge of collecting tariffs, has warned the immense scale of the refund effort requires time. Officials have been working to launch the first phase of the new system on April 20, though the agency previously suggested importers may need to wait an additional 45 days afterwards to actually receive their funds.

Lord said the system will be able to process electronic refunds for about 82 percent of the affected tariff entries. That accounts for about $127 billion in deposits. More than 56,000 importers have already signed up, and the number continues to grow as the system nears its launch.

Others won’t be able to use that automated process. Some entries that haven’t gone through a formal close-out step called “liquidation” and are subject to antidumping orders must instead go through a manual, administrative process that requires additional steps, Lord noted.

CBP says that applies to about $2.9 billion worth of tariff deposits that need refunding.

This seems less bad than the worst-case scenario in which the administration could simply stonewall most victims of the illegal tariffs, through some combination of malice and bureaucratic incompetence. It is also significant that the administration has – so far, at least – not tried to appeal Judge Eaton’s order. In my earlier post on this subject, I indicated they might at least appeal the universal nature of the order, which could potentially be attacked based on the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling Trump v. CASA, Inc. (though I also indicated that I believe Judge Eaton correctly distinguished CASA).

But, as the Hill article notes, the process may still be time-consuming and difficult for many businesses. That is particularly true for smaller importers that have less bureaucratic capacity than bigger firms. Meanwhile, the longer the process drags on, the more interest payments we taxpayers will be on the hook for, a point Judge Eaton rightly stressed in his March ruling.

And, as I pointed out in my previous post, even the most complete possible tariff refund system will not fully compensate many harms inflicted by the illegal tariffs on both businesses and consumers. Among other things, they cannot compensate businesses for lost sales, disruptions in supplier relationships, lost investments, and more. Consumers, of course, will not be compensated for having to pay higher prices.

For these reasons, as also noted in my earlier post, courts made a mistake when they stayed the Court of International Trade injunction against the tariffs issued when we won our initial trial court victory in May 2025. As I noted at the time:

One factor courts consider in assessing a motion to stay is which side is likely to ultimately prevail on the merits….

Another key factor is which side is likely to suffer “irreparable harm” if they lose on the stay issue. We argue that our clients – and thousands of other businesses – will suffer great irreparable harm if a stay is imposed. They will lose sales due to higher prices, good will can be lost, relationships with suppliers and investors will be disrupted, and more. Those harms can’t be made up merely by refunding tariff payments months from now, after the appellate process concludes.

All of the noncompensable harms we warned against came true. And, in addition, the administration has been slow to enact an effective tariff refund system, thereby further exacerbating the harm, and leaving taxpayers on the hook for rapidly growing interest payments.

I hope courts learn from this experience. When and if they strike down Trump’s newest massive illegal tariffs – those imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 –  they should know not to stay any injunction issued against them. Judges should not blindly accept administration assurances that any harms will be promptly remedied by refunds issued after the fact.

NOTE: As I have previously noted, I am no longer a member of the V.O.S. Selections legal team, because my role ended after the Supreme Court issued its decision. Thus, I am not involved in the refund phase of this litigation.

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Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, by Elise Stefanik, Threshold Editions, 256 pages, $29.

Elise Stefanik seems to be stepping away from politics, having suspended her gubernatorial campaign and announced that she will not seek re-election to Congress. The New York Republican’s new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, was presumably intended to advance her political career. It may instead serve as a coda to it.

Central to Poisoned Ivies is a congressional hearing held December 5, 2023, when three Ivy league presidents went viral—and not in the good way—for their response to Stefanik’s question: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct on bullying or harassment?”  

Stefanik excoriates the presidents for the “deadpan” and “nearly verbatim” answers they all gave: “It depends on the context.” Two presidents, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, were out of the job soon after the hearing, and Stefanik laments that MIT President Sally Kornbluth managed to escape the fallout with her title intact. Stefanik suggests that the “hearing heard around the world,” as she repeatedly calls it, is the zenith of her political accomplishments.

As Stefanik emphasizes throughout the book, this was intended as a simple test of good or evil, one that requires only one word: “Yes.” But Stefanik asked these presidents a question about law and policy, then faulted them for not instead answering the unasked moral question about whether they personally condemn pro-genocidal speech. Conservatives have long objected when university bureaucrats blur their personal convictions with their institutional policies to the detriment of neutral speech principles. But here, Stefanik directly demands it.

Despite Stefanik’s claims, the context of speech does actually matter. Without more, a comment perceived as “calling for genocide” is indeed unlikely to meet either the Supreme Court’s standard for peer-on-peer harassment or the limits of First Amendment protection. Later in the book, Stefanik shows her hand and demonstrates why it’s necessary for university leaders to approach such questions with caution: She says the phrase “from the river to the sea” is a “genocidal chant”—presumably one she expects universities to ban.

Readers can draw their own conclusions about the meaning and impact of this and similar phrases. But under the First Amendment, their legal status is not a hard call: This is protected speech. Separating how you feel about speech from your analysis of whether it’s protected is a First Amendment fundamental that we should expect elected officials to understand.

Poisoned Ivies does highlight some genuinely disturbing incidents that took place on campus in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. A Cornell student threatened to commit a mass shooting at a kosher dining hall, for example, and there were times when students or workers were trapped inside buildings during occupations. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where I work, noted, it does not violate the First Amendment for universities to protect students against actual threats or physical harm. 

But Stefanik does a real disservice to that cause by conflating unlawful conduct, which universities have a responsibility to address, with what she perceives as offensive speech about October 7 and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she expects the universities she herself derides as censorial to censor. There is a difference between what morality may require of us and what limits the law can place upon us. And that chasm exists for good reason: The beauty and promise of living in a free country is our right to pursue our own version of the good without being forced to live by the values embraced by our politicians. One legislator’s “moral rot” is another American’s core beliefs and values.

Stefanik also keeps pairing antisemitism with the hazy concept of “anti-Americanism.” She never bothers to define the second concept, nor does she address the obvious First Amendment questions raised by an elected official’s endeavours to crack down on such an amorphous, subjective concept. But those distinctions require context and nuance, which Stefanik treats as impediments to the moral clarity demanded by these threats. At one point, the list even balloons to include a murky “anti-West” hate.

In these repeated dismissals of “anti-Americanism,” Stefanik derides student bodies who she suggests reject America, its freedom, and its founding ideals. But what is a greater rejection of the founding ideals of the United States than an overreaching federal government trampling the First Amendment? That overreach is exactly what this book celebrates. 

Stefanik calls the Trump administration’s funding freezes to universities like Columbia and Harvard a correct use of “the federal government’s considerable power.” Whether that power is employed lawfully is, once again, a pesky nuance that this book is uninterested in addressing. Nitpicky questions of constitutionality are not welcome distractions in a battle cast in these dire moral terms. Harvard’s reaction to the administration’s strongarming—a lawsuit defending itself—is, she complains, a “vicious[] attack.” She calls President Alan Garber’s assertion of the university’s constitutional rights a result of “radicalized Trump-deranged faculty.”

Stefanik rightly notes the broad challenges posed by academic ties with countries like China and Qatar and the associated risk that foreign governments will instill their censorship preferences onto our universities. There is a serious threat that foreign censorship will diminish our universities in both blunt and subtle ways, and I document how vast the problem is in my book Authoritarians in the Academy. Fears of political retaliation in the form of revoked funding can and have pressured universities to contort themselves to please the governments who are proffering those funds, to the detriment of free expression.

But for a critic so concerned with the threat of censorship levied by foreign governments, Stefanik is curiously eager to see it imposed domestically.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is Stefanik’s celebration of this administration’s crackdown on international students. This includes the newly instituted requirement that their social media accounts be made public so officials can spot “any indications of hostility” to U.S. institutions. (“Rightly so,” she writes.) Poisoned Ivies expresses some valid concerns about some students’ inability to express views unpopular with their peers or administrators, but the book valorizes something far, far worse: an inability to express views unpopular with elected officials, with arrest and deportation as punishment. In the land of the free, international students are forced to swallow their criticisms of the very government threatening to deport them for wrongthink.

Universities are “no longer educating international students, as they once did, into core American principles and values,” Stefanik complains, “because the universities themselves no longer believe in American principles and values.” Unfortunately, some of our elected officials aren’t interested in educating international students in American values such as freedom of speech either.

Poisoned Ivies is a book heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. Stefanik diagnoses universities as partisan, censorial institutions, but her plan for reform is more partisanship and more censorship. Whatever reasonable criticisms Stefanik raises about higher education are drowned out by her advocacy not for institutions that do not censor, but for ones that censor more to her liking.

Stefanik never quite explains what she means by “anti-Americanism.” But readers searching for a definition can find displays of it littered throughout Poisoned Ivies’ pages.

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More alleged drug boat slayings. The U.S. military announced last night that it had bombed another boat it claims was smuggling drugs into the country.

U.S. Southern Command claimed on social media to have killed three male “narco-terrorists” in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The post includes a video of the “kinetic” strike turning the bombed boat into a fireball.

On April 15, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/EaGDMHmpan

— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) April 16, 2026

The New York Times reports that this is the 51st time the Trump administration has used the military to bomb suspected drug boats. The attacks have killed a total of 177 people.

Though it shouldn’t be, trafficking drugs is a crime. Criminals are normally arrested by the police, instead of being killed by the military. Trump’s use of the military to kill suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean has been legally controversial since the strikes began in September of last year.

The administration has adopted the seemingly contradictory position that it can summarily execute alleged narco-traffickers because they are terrorists engaged in “armed conflict” with the U.S., but that the strikes themselves do not count as “hostilities” that Congress could stop under the War Powers Resolution.

Neither the administration’s designation of drug smugglers as armed combatants at war with the U.S. nor its denial that it is engaged in hostilities makes sense on its own.

Standard definitions of armed conflict and armed combatant can’t be stretched to cover drug smugglers. Blowing up drug smugglers, on the other hand, would seem to very clearly meet the definition of hostilities.

The Trump administration has tried to say it’s not engaged in hostilities that would trigger the War Powers Resolution because the U.S. military personnel blowing up the drug boats are not at risk of being attacked by their targets.

“This argument concedes that the targets posed no immediate threat, meaning Trump authorized the use of lethal force in circumstances where it was morally and legally unjustified,” wrote Jacob Sullum in a recent issue of Reason.

Lawmakers have put forward multiple resolutions to stop the Trump administration from continuing with boat strikes, but all have failed thus far.

As it stands, the president continues to exercise the effectively unchecked power to kill people he alone decides need killing.

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Blockade broadens. Meanwhile, in our other noncongressionally sanctioned conflict, the U.S. military has broadened the scope of Iranian shipping that’s subject to its blockade.

That blockade that began on Monday initially targeted ports and oil terminals along the Iranian coast. Lloyd’s List reports this morning that U.S. Central Command has issued updated guidance asserting a right to board and seize Iran-linked vessels anywhere on the open seas.

The expanded geographic scope of the blockade, when combined with the U.S. military’s wide definition of contraband subject to the blockade, means “almost any industrial cargo bound for Iran could plausibly be intercepted,” the publication notes.

As The Wall Street Journal detailed in a story yesterday, there’s a cat-and-mouse game being played in waters near Iran between the U.S. military and “shadow fleet” ships that have long used various means of deception (like spoofed locations and turned-off transponders) to smuggle sanctioned Iranian oil.

U.S. Central Command claims no Iranian-linked ships have managed to slip its blockade within the first 48 hours. The Journal reports that at least 10 ships, some of which show signs of shadow fleet activity, have managed to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

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More money, more problems. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Unified School District reached an agreement with three employee unions to avoid a strike by raising salaries for teachers and other staff.

Despite shrinking enrollment, Los Angeles’ per-pupil spending has continued to increase at a much higher rate than overall inflation.

Bizarre situation brewing in LA public schools, as reported by WSJ today

Teachers and parents say schools regularly run out of cleaning supplies and toilet paper

But per-student spending rose from $11.7k to $29.3k since 2014 — about 5x the rate of inflation

Notably…. the…

— Rachel Premack (@rrpre) April 15, 2026

As The Los Angeles Times reports, the district will likely have to dip into its already depleting reserves to pay for the pay increases that the unions extracted. Absent aid from the state, district officials are at an apparent loss as to how to pay for the employee raises.

It’s quite possible that L.A. teachers and school staff do deserve a raise. It’s hard to say one way or another when the government is the one setting the price of labor.

But a school district going broke while it spends more and more money educating fewer and fewer students is not something taxpayers, parents, or students should have to accept.

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Scenes from Washington, D.C.: On X, the account Echoes of War shared an early–20th century image of the National Mall and surrounding areas, as seen from the top of the Washington Monument.

The Victorian landscaping and architecture of the Mall looking east from the top of the Washington Monument, showing the influence of the Downing Plan and Adolph Cluss on the National Mall c. 1904. pic.twitter.com/0hVfeiADlw

— Echoes of War (@EchoesofWarYT) April 14, 2026

That generated some complaints about today’s comparatively treeless mall.

Nobody in DC in the summer is glad there's a wide treeless mall instead of this shady park. https://t.co/02MYzyNbX5

— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) April 15, 2026

can they put trees on the national mall again, it’s unbearable to go on for half of the year https://t.co/R1vT38aXyT

— meowtown (@hieywieyneue) April 15, 2026

 

All things considered, I think today’s mall functions pretty well as a summertime park. The walking paths themselves are all tree-lined. Today’s open spaces allow people to use the mall for sports, kite flying, and other fun activities that would be difficult to pull off in an urban forest.

The real upgrade that the mall needs is a few more permanent bathrooms and water fountains that actually work.

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QUICK HITS

• A woman who was arrested for wearing a penis costume to a No Kings protest in Alabama has been found not guilty on all charges.
• Tom Palmer at Reason says good riddance to Viktor Orbán.
• Also read Scott Alexander on how Orbán was still bad, even if he wasn’t a full-on dictator.
• Make World Cup attendees pay for their bus trips.
• In the wake of Eric Swalwell’s exit from the California governor’s race, Tom Steyer surges.

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Just learned this largely legalese word today; it means, according to Black’s Law Dictionary,

1. The carrying on of trade along a country’s coast; the transport of goods or passengers from one port or place to another in the same country….

2. The privilege of carrying traffic between two ports in the same country.

3. The right of a foreign airline to carry passengers and cargo between airports in the same country.

Black’s also offers this quote:

“Some writers maintain [that cabotage] should be applied only to maritime navigation; in this context one can distinguish between petit cabotage — transport between ports situated on the same sea (e.g. Bordeaux-Le Havre) — and grand cabotage — transport between ports situated on different seas (e.g. Bordeaux-Marseille). However, the term is also properly applied to transport between two inland points on an international river within one State, although the term grand cabotage is sometimes incorrectly applied to transnational transport between the inland ports of different riparian States on the same waterway. River cabotage properly so called is sometimes also referred to as local transport. Finally, the term has also been adopted to describe commercial air transport between airports situated in the same State.” Robert C. Lane, “Cabotage,” in 1 Encyclopedia of Public International Law 519–20 (1992).

Pedantic disclaimer: Yes, I know that the post title should probably technically have said “Cyrillic” and not just “Russian,” but I thought “Russian” would be clearer to many readers.

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My coauthors Cassandra Robertson, Zoe Robinson, and I just published an article entitled “Can Speech Policy Protect Public Health?” in the Utah Law Review. Here is the abstract:

Government speech shapes public health outcomes, yet political incentives often lead officials to either remain silent about emerging threats or subordinate scientific evidence to partisan goals. This Article examines how three factors interact to influence public health: the constitutional status of health-related speech, the political economy of public health policymaking, and the modern information environment. Drawing on insights from public choice theory, we demonstrate how misaligned incentives lead political actors to avoid communicating about health risks or spread misinformation that serves their short-term interests at the expense of population health. The conventional tools of public health policy were developed when official sources could effectively shape public understanding, but today’s fragmented information landscape demands new approaches to health communication. 

This Article analyzes both the constitutional framework governing health-related speech and the practical dynamics that complicate effective public health messaging. We propose specific mechanisms to combat harmful misinformation while creating stronger incentives for accurate government communication about health threats. Throughout, we move beyond binary debates about censorship versus free speech to develop approaches that reflect the complex relationship between information flows, political incentives, and public health outcomes. The history of public health challenges—from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to today’s emerging strains of avian influenza—shows how institutional responses often falter. Understanding these dynamics can help shape better responses to current and future health crises. 

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From last week’s decision by Judge Virginia Kendall (N.D. Ill.) in Obi v. Cook County:

The Court strikes Plaintiff’s motion [to alter or amend the judgment dismissing her complaint] for violating Local Rule 7.1 and sanctions her $5,000 for violating Rule 11.

Plaintiff’s motion is 10.5 pages single-spaced and her core argument runs six straight pages in a single paragraph. 10.5 single-spaced pages is 21 pages double-spaced. Plaintiff’s reply briefs are 23 pages single-spaced (46 pages double-spaced) and 13 pages single-spaced (26 pages double-spaced). Plaintiff never sought leave to file such voluminous papers. The lack of table of contents is also problematic because, as discussed below, many of Plaintiff’s citations are fictious. Plaintiff violated Local Rule 7.1. “Neither a motion nor brief in support … shall exceed 15 pages without prior approval of the court.” Any brief that exceeds 15 pages “must have a table of contents with the pages noted and a table of cases.” “Any brief … that does not comply with this rule shall be … subject to being stricken by the court.” The Court “strictly enforce[s]” this rule. The Court therefore strikes Plaintiff’s motion and replies.

Normally the Court, recognizing Plaintiff’s pro se status, would offer leeway and consider Plaintiff’s briefs despite violating Local Rule 7.1. Plaintiff’s egregious, repeated, and ongoing Rule 11 violations, however, foreclose any such possibility. Plaintiff generated each brief using AI. Plaintiff’s motion is riddled with AI hallucinations, made up cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact. [Citing filing] (identifying 13 hallucinated cases, quotes, and statements of law)….

This is not the first time Plaintiff has done this. In a prior filing, Plaintiff’s brief contained at least 17 instances of fake cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact from AI hallucinations. The Court then gave Plaintiff grace—Plaintiff has exhausted that leniency. Plaintiff’s replies suffer from similar Rule 11 violations….

The severity of Plaintiff’s Rule 11 ongoing and repeated violations warrants sanctions. “Pro se status does not shelter plaintiffs from sanctions pursuant to Rule 11.” “When a self-represented party files a document in federal court, that party is certifying to the court that the legal contentions contained in it ‘are warranted by existing law.'” “‘Carelessness, good faith, or ignorance are not an excuse for submitting materials that do not comply with Rule 11.'” Plaintiff “must ensure that the case citations and representations she presents to the court are accurate and are supported by valid precedent; the fact that she is representing herself does not relieve her of that duty.”

“Filing a document that contains citations to nonexistent cases, quotes language that comes from no real case, or that contains arguments wholly unsupported by the record violates Rule 11.” Plaintiff did just that repeatedly. “This demonstrates that [Plaintiff] failed to make a reasonable inquiry into the supporting law or facts. This wastes both the parties’ and the Court’s time attempting to locate nonexistent cases and unpack made up factual assertions.” The Court sanctions Plaintiff $5,000 for filing false cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact to the Court in violation of Rule 11.

 

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What if I told you that the U.S. government once imprisoned a filmmaker for making a movie about the American Revolution because it depicted British troops in an unflattering light?

In today’s edition of the Injustice System newsletter, let’s talk about censorship, freedom of speech, and the infuriating—if aptly named—1917 case of United States v. “The Spirit of ’76.”

When President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. to war against Germany in 1917, he also vowed to crush all enemies that arose closer to home. “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit,” Wilson declared, “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life….[T]he hand of our power should close over them at once.”

Congress responded to this call for domestic repression by passing the Espionage Act, which made it illegal to “cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States.” In effect, the Espionage Act made it mostly illegal to speak out against American involvement in World War I.

Perhaps the most famous victim of this notorious law was the socialist politician and labor union leader Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for the “crime” of giving an anti-war speech to an audience at an afternoon picnic. In Debs v. United States (1919), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction. “One purpose of [Debs’] speech, whether incidental or not does not matter, was to oppose not only war in general but this war,” stated the majority opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “The opposition was so expressed that its natural and intended effect would be to obstruct recruiting.”

The ruling in Debs echoed Holmes’ earlier decision in Schenck v. United States (1919), which upheld the Espionage Act conviction of a socialist who had been arrested for distributing anti-war pamphlets. “When a nation is at war,” Holmes declared, “many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.”

Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was also targeted by federal prosecutors at this time under the Espionage Act. But his saga is not as famous in free speech lore as it should be, probably because his case never made it to the Supreme Court.

Goldstein’s “crime” was producing a silent film about the American Revolution titled The Spirit of ’76. Among other things, the film reportedly contained scenes that depicted British troops bayoneting women and children. Because Britain was then an ally of America’s in the First World War, the U.S. government quickly suppressed the film and prosecuted Goldstein for interfering with the war effort. “History is history, and fact is fact,” conceded the trial judge. But “this is no time” for “those things that may have the tendency…of creating animosity or want of confidence between us and our allies.” Goldstein was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Two years later, his conviction was upheld on appeal.

Tragically, it seems that Goldstein never recovered from this persecution by the U.S. government. According to Michael Innam of the New York Public Library’s Rare Book Division, “upon his release [from prison], Goldstein moved to Europe and attempted without success to reestablish his film career. After being expelled from Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s, he returned to the United States where, so far as is known, he died in obscurity.” As for the “offending” motion picture itself, Inman noted that The Spirit of ’76, “like a great many films of the silent era…is now considered lost, with no print known to survive.”

Is there a lesson to be learned from this terrible story of injustice? Perhaps this: Sometimes all three branches of the U.S. government come together for the purpose of trampling upon the Constitution. Be alert.

The post When the U.S. Censored a Movie About the American Revolution and Imprisoned Its Producer appeared first on Reason.com.

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4/16/1962: Justice Byron White takes oath.

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For the better part of a decade, Republicans ran on a single mantra when it came to health care: repeal and replace Obamacare. When the slogan was conceived, it made political and strategic sense.

But Republicans never had a plan for what to replace it with. Multiple proposals at various levels of completion circulated, but there was never any agreement about even the broad outlines of a GOP health care plan, much less the myriad complicated specifics.

When pressed, Republicans often defaulted to vague, poll-tested language to describe their ideas, such as “personalized” and “patient centered”—or, in the case of President Donald Trump, “great” and “terrific.” In debates leading up to the 2016 election, Trump stumbled over phrases like “lines around the states,” likely a reference to allowing interstate purchase of insurance, and praised European socialized medicine. When asked about his health care policy ideas during his 2024 campaign, he claimed to have “concepts of a plan.”

In January 2026, Trump finally delivered something he dubbed “The Great Healthcare Plan.” Whether it’s great might be a matter of debate. But it is in no way, shape, or form an actual plan.

Trump’s health care proposal consists of a single page laying out four big goals: “lower drug prices,” “lower insurance premiums,” “hold big insurance companies accountable,” and “maximize price transparency.” Each item gets a few brief bullet points’ worth of explanation.

And that’s it.

These are not inherently problematic goals: Cost reduction is always welcome, health care is indeed beset by opaque pricing, and while big corporations aren’t the biggest problem with American health care, accountability is generally a good thing.

But these slogans give no clue as to how Trump actually thinks the system should work. The closest thing to a major proposal in the document comes in the accountability section: “Send the money directly to the American people.”

“The money” that this is presumably referring to is the roughly $35 billion a year that, since 2021, had been spent on topping up Obamacare’s subsidies for private individual insurance. Actually doing so would require legislation, which doesn’t exist, and policy details, like how to allocate those funds, which also don’t exist. Spending that money on direct transfers would mean persisting with tens of billions in unnecessary health care spending on top of the existing system.

But even this level of analysis treats Trump’s pseudo-proposal too seriously. The rollout of the Great Healthcare Plan was attended by little more than a brief Oval Office speech and a handful of online posts. It generated little notice, even among Republicans in Congress, who barely seemed to register that it existed. Trump briefly mentioned the plan in his State of the Union, but there was certainly nothing like a floor debate or a push for a vote—because, well, there wasn’t anything to vote for or against.

That’s because legislation, much less a debate about the details that legislation would entail, wasn’t the point. The point was to have a piece of paper that Republicans can point to when asked about health care policy. Trump has a plan, they can now say, and it’s great. It says so right in the name!

The fact remains that American health care needs serious surgery. Decades of subsidies, spending, and tax system distortions have rendered it a confusing, frustrating, bloated, and—for taxpayers as well as individuals—increasingly unaffordable mess. Health care spending is the biggest single driver of long-term debt and deficits, and one of Medicare’s main funds (itself a sort of accounting fiction) is set to become insolvent in under a decade. But since Trump was first elected, Republicans have explicitly promised not to touch Medicare.

Quality, substantive policy ideas do, in fact, exist; Cato Institute Health Policy Studies Director Michael Cannon has long touted a system of very large health savings accounts that would radically shift not only how health care is financed but how health care decisions are made. Republicans don’t want to master the wonky details, and they don’t want to be seen as disrupting the status quo, unsustainable as it is.

That’s how, more than a decade and a half after the passage of Obamacare, Republicans ended up with Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan, a proposal so empty it makes nothingburgers look like they have the calorie count of the entire dessert menu at a Cheesecake Factory. There’s no there there. But rest assured—it’s probably “patient centered” and “terrific.”

The post Trump's 'Great Healthcare Plan' To Replace Obamacare Isn't Much of a Plan appeared first on Reason.com.

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