Tag: hit&run

In the 2024–2025 school year, 60.2 percent of grades awarded at Harvard were A’s, according to the school’s Office of Undergraduate Education. For context, only a quarter of undergraduates received A’s two decades ago, reported The Harvard Crimson. 

Harvard students are undoubtedly bright, but should professors be giving them that many A’s? According to Harvard’s new grade inflation policy, no. On Wednesday, the school’s faculty voted 458–201 to put a 20 percent cap on A grades starting in the 2027–2028 school year, reports the Crimson. The plan, the outlet reports, would also allow for professors to give four additional A’s per course enrollment. 

A 2025 report attributed Harvard’s “out of whack” (as one faculty member described it) grading system to a few factors, including professors’ unwillingness to be perceived as “demanding” compared to other faculty and “increasingly litigious” students. 

The college also acknowledged that the pressure to inflate grades may come from the school itself, admitting that professors were increasingly expected to provide emotional support to students struggling with “difficult family situations,” “imposter syndrome,” and “stress.” As a result, “requirements were relaxed, and grades were raised, particularly in the year of remote instruction.” Many faculty members wanted to “reverse that shift,” but they reportedly feared whether the administration would “have their back.” Finally, the school shifted from assigning high-stakes exams to giving more, lower-stakes assignments, which many professors found difficult to assess in a “sufficiently differentiated way.”   

Harvard is not the only school struggling with grade inflation. In Yale’s recent report examining why Americans have lost trust in higher education, the school acknowledged that grade inflation was partially to blame. To “restore common grading norms,” the report recommended instituting “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard, so that letter grades can once again be used in a reliable and comparable way.” The report also recommended that Yale transcripts provide context for where students stand “relative to the rest of the class,” so students are not penalized for taking more demanding courses. Reason’s intern Ari Shtein, a current Yale student, has suggested this may be a more sensible, context-based approach to tackling grade inflation than instituting a grading cap.

Princeton recognized the grade inflation problem early, and in 2004, it adopted a grade cap policy. But it “abandoned the system a decade later after criticism that it disadvantaged students in competition for jobs and graduate school admission,” reported the Associated Press. Since then, the problem has resurfaced, with A-minuses, A’s, and A-pluses making up 66.7 percent of undergraduate grades in the 2024–2025 school year. 

Tackling grade inflation always seems to produce some controversy, understandably among students. When Harvard released its October report on grade inflation, several students told the Crimson the report “misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment.”

In a statement released Wednesday, Harvard’s dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said that grade inflation is a “complex and thorny issue.” Still, she encourages other institutions to confront similar issues with “the same level of rigor and courage.”

Harvard is taking a risk by curbing grade inflation, but it is one that others would need to adopt to restore meritocracy across the board. If other schools continue to dole out A’s like Oprah while others assess students more harshly, employers will continue to receive unclear and potentially misleading signals about students’ academic performance. And grades are not just for employers’ eyes; they are for the students to understand how well they have mastered a subject. If the purpose of a university is to pursue truth, students deserve honest feedback from their professors, even if that means receiving lower grades.

The post 60% of Harvard Grades Were A's in 2025. Now the School Is Fighting Grade Inflation. appeared first on Reason.com.

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The U.S. Department of Justice indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro on Wednesday for his 1996 order to shoot down two planes from Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American organization involved in dropping anti-communist pamphlets over Havana.

Why reopen a 3-decade-old murder case now? The Trump administration has made no secret of the fact that it wants to overthrow the Cuban government—and is willing to go to war to do so. While President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio issue thinly veiled threats to Cuba, administration officials have been anonymously telling the press that yes, they mean military action.

The indictment was obviously meant to evoke the recent U.S. operation in Venezuela, in which U.S. special operations forces invaded Venezuela to serve a drug-trafficking warrant against dictator Nicolás Maduro. During the buildup to that operation, which involved U.S. forces seizing Venezuelan tankers, Trump and his advisers also claimed that they were going to avenge Venezuela’s 2007 nationalization of American oil companies by recovering stolen property.

And to justify starting the mother of all undeclared wars with Iran, the Trump administration has brought up a litany of old grievances. Trump’s announcement of the war started with the 1980 storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the 1983 attack on U.S. Marines by a pro-Iran militia in Lebanon, both of which happened before most Americans or Iranians were born.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) unintentionally summed up the administration’s pretzel logic in an interview early in the war: “Iran has posed an imminent risk to the United States for 47 years.” The Islamic Republic was so urgently dangerous that there was no time to ask Congress or the American people for permission to fight it, and also this situation has existed for two generations.

These grievances are not a serious argument about the Cuban, Venezuelan, or Iranian threat. They are a replacement for an argument. Instead of making the case that the costs of war (or whatever euphemism for war the administration is using now) are worth the benefits, the administration wants Americans riled up about injuries to our honor and hungry for revenge.

In fact, bringing up these grievances is a sign that the Trump administration doesn’t see these countries as real, imminent threats. Arguing that the Iran war would not become a “forever war,” former Trump administration official Robert O’Brien called it “the quintessential American punitive expedition,” a campaign of “short, sharp projections of force that punish foreign powers or dictators for their untoward actions.”

O’Brien added that a “key advantage of the punitive expedition strategy is its optionality.…The initiative remains with [the president], so that he determines the pace and tempo of kinetic action, not the enemy.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the president should flex by taking revenge on easy targets who can’t fight back.

Punitive expeditions also help the administration advance its domestic agenda. Vice President J.D. Vance claims that the War Powers Act is “a fundamentally fake and unconstitutional law” that is “not going to change anything about how we conduct foreign policy,” and White House Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller has similar contempt for Congress’ ability to restrain the president. What better way to flex presidential power than to start and stop wars before anyone has a chance to act?

The bet on knockout blows against weak enemies worked out well in Venezuela. The idea of war with Venezuela was highly unpopular in America before Maduro’s overthrow. But the Venezuelan military barely put up a fight; Maduro’s successor kowtowed to U.S. power; domestic objections to the operation in America melted away; and Congress’ concern for war powers was promptly forgotten.

“We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower,” Miller gloated after the Venezuela operation. Vance similarly said that “Maduro is the newest person to find out that President Trump means what he says.” 

That wager did not work so well in Iran. The war dragged on for weeks and is now in a bizarre kind of suspended animation, rousing Congress to finally start asserting its war powers. Precisely because “Iran has gone sideways,” an administration official told Politico, the Trump administration may be looking for more decisive action in Cuba.

The idea that a crumbling, poor Cold War relic poses some kind of threat to America is laughable. And an invasion of Cuba is overwhelmingly unpopular with Americans. But that combination is exactly why Cuba would be a tempting place to repeat the Venezuela model, which is why the Trump administration is bringing up ancient feuds now.

The post Why Does Trump Keep Bringing Up Decades-Old Foreign Grievances? appeared first on Reason.com.

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From today’s Ninth Circuit 2-1 panel decision in Doe v. Ventura Unified School Dist., by Judge Richard Paez and Consuelo Callahan:

[1.] To proceed pseudonymously, a “plaintiff must show both (1) a fear of severe harm, and (2) that the fear of severe harm is reasonable.” These are the “two most important factors,” id., because a plaintiff must establish “a need for the cloak of anonymity.”

The district court’s determination that Doe failed to show she reasonably feared severe harm was not an abuse of discretion. Doe’s interactions with public officials do not establish that the media or community members would retaliate against her in a severe manner, and Doe failed to identify other probative evidence rendering her fears reasonable. Rather, she expresses concern about what “could” or “probably would” happen. But bare assertions are insufficient to establish a reasonable fear of severe harm. Likewise, the district court did not abuse its discretion in determining that Doe’s fear of “social stigma” does not amount to severe harm. The prospect of being publicly linked to an unpopular viewpoint alone does not warrant anonymity absent evidence linking disclosure to a severe injury.

[2.] The district court did not abuse its discretion in evaluating Doe’s vulnerability. The district court properly considered the factors suggesting Doe was particularly vulnerable and those suggesting she was not particularly vulnerable, and reasonably concluded that it was appropriate to give “little weight” to her vulnerability.

{The dissent argues that the district court erred by failing to analyze Child 1’s vulnerability as a factor supporting her own pseudonymity and Doe’s privacy interests…. “[F]ear of severe harm is irrelevant if the plaintiffs do not reasonably fear severe harm.” As described, Doe failed to identify probative evidence supporting the reasonableness of her fear of severe retaliation.

Moreover, after oral argument, Plaintiff’s counsel informed the court that Plaintiff and her child do not share the same last name, further attenuating Doe’s fear that disclosure of her name would yield severe retaliation against Child 1.} {The district court properly acknowledged that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2(a)(3) presumptively requires pseudonymizing the names of children, like Child 1, with only initials “[u]nless the court orders otherwise.” This appeal only pertains to Doe’s pseudonymization.}

[3.] The district court’s determination that anonymization “may” result in

prejudice to a Defendant was not based on a clearly erroneous factual finding…. Doe had not affirmatively agreed to disclose her identity to all the Defendants and failed to respond to one Defendant’s objections to anonymization based on the lack of knowledge of her identity. Therefore, the district court’s determination that anonymization might prejudice Defendants was not based on a clearly erroneous assessment of the evidence.

[4.] The district court did not abuse its discretion in weighing the public interest factor against pseudonymity. The court properly invoked precedents describing the “paramount importance of open courts,” which is the source of the presumption that parties will litigate under their real names. Nor does the fact that the public could scrutinize the legal issues in this case without Plaintiff’s identity require that the district court weigh the public interest factor in favor of anonymity.

Moreover, the value of open courts extends beyond permitting public scrutiny of the legal issues in a given case. The public’s interest in having justice delivered openly, not “in a corner nor in any covert manner,” is heightened in cases involving high-stakes, constitutional issues.

Judge Patrick Bumatay dissented:

First, in analyzing “the anonymous party’s vulnerability to … retaliation,” the district court failed to consider the vulnerability of other individuals affected by the litigation—namely, Jane Doe’s minor child. Consideration of vulnerability beyond the plaintiff is a necessary piece of any pseudonymization analysis…. [C]ourts regularly grant anonymity to plaintiffs when “identification poses a risk of retaliatory physical or mental harm to the requesting party or even more critically, to innocent non-parties.”

These concerns are even greater when the litigation involves family members, especially minor children. Courts must recognize “the special, intimate, and loving relationship between parent and child.” And a child is often more susceptible to harm than an adult. So we must give special attention to concerns that the lack of pseudonymity may harm minor family members.

That’s why courts commonly “allow parents who are suing on behalf of their minor children to proceed pseudonymously,” especially “when the case involves highly personal information about the children.” If we didn’t, “the protection afforded to the minor” as a matter of course “would be eviscerated unless the parent was also permitted to proceed using initials.” We thus shouldn’t force parents to choose between pursuing their or children’s rights and risk exposing their children to retaliation or harm. The youth of affected individuals, then, is “a significant factor in the matrix of considerations arguing for anonymity.”

Heightened risk to a minor child is precisely the situation here. Jane Doe is suing on her own behalf and on behalf of her child. This case involves highly personal information about her child, including his vaccination status and his learning disabilities.

Forcing Doe to proceed as a named plaintiff clearly risks all this becoming public. Linking Jane Doe to her child will be easy enough. That Jane Doe does not share a last name with her minor child does not materially affect this analysis. Either way, revealing Jane Doe’s identity would make her child’s identity open to discovery by people in the community, risking the retaliation or abuse that anonymity seeks to prevent. Because the district court failed to consider Jane Doe’s child’s vulnerability, it abused its discretion….

Second, the district court didn’t consider whether pseudonymity should have been granted “to preserve privacy in a matter of sensitive and highly personal nature.” Jane Doe is challenging California’s enforcement of its Compulsory Vaccine Law against her and her child and cites deeply personal—and controversial—religious beliefs as her reason. And “religion is perhaps the quintessentially private matter.”

“[B]y filing suit,” Jane Doe has “made revelations about [her] personal beliefs and practices that,” under the circumstances, could well “invite[] an opprobrium analogous to the infamy associated with criminal behavior.” “This suit—challenging a government activity—forces [Jane Doe] to reveal [her] beliefs about a particularly sensitive topic that could subject [her and her family] to considerable harassment.”

Indeed, Jane Doe has already faced criminal sanction for seeking to adhere to her faith. Thus, the district court failed to appropriately account for the sensitive nature of this litigation…. [A]nonymity is often granted when there is “a combination of both the plaintiff’s religious beliefs and expected public hostility to the specific remedy that the plaintiff is seeking” ….

Few things in recent times can engender as much public hostility as challenges to vaccine mandates. After all, one of the authors of SB-277, which removed religious exemptions from California’s Compulsory Vaccine Law, once posted an article on social media suggesting that “opting out of vaccines should opt you out of American society,” while comparing being “willfully unvaccinated” to being a “drunk driver.” …

The majority doesn’t disagree that the district court should have analyzed Jane Doe’s child’s vulnerability but bafflingly asserts that Jane Doe’s concerns are unreasonable. This ignores the substance of Jane Doe’s complaint. Jane Doe presented probative evidence that her son was excluded from school and that she was targeted for criminal prosecution for her child’s truancy. She was explicit that her objection to vaccination was “based upon her deeply held beliefs as a Christian,” and that she “view[s] her religious beliefs as essentially a private matter.”

And more than just her experience with Defendants, she reasonably pointed to “prevailing attitudes towards anti-vaxxers” and “the potential implications of her case for the California” public in asserting her fear that unwanted media attention and other negative public attention would cause her son social stigma, harassment, and threats. Publicly filing this lawsuit would also expose her son’s private medical information to the public, including his vaccination status and, potentially, his other disabilities.

Jane Doe thus credibly presented evidence of real potential harm to her and her child in the form of unwanted attention and stigmatization, which she alleges would exacerbate her son’s disability and harm his social development. All this harm to Jane Doe’s child—yet Defendants would suffer no prejudice because all but one of them know who she is, and she has offered to disclose her identity to all of them. Nothing is unreasonable about these concerns….

For these reasons, we should have reversed the denial of pseudonymity. We should have given greater consideration to the risk of harm to Doe’s minor child and to the public opprobrium against her deeply personal religious beliefs. I respectfully dissent.

The post No Pseudonymity for Parent Suing Over School Vaccination Mandate appeared first on Reason.com.

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There are several weird aspects to the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” established by President Donald Trump’s settlement of his lawsuit against the IRS. Perhaps most puzzling of all, the amount of taxpayer money allocated to the compensation fund, $1.776 billion, is plainly arbitrary, which is consistent with the mysterious math that Trump has deployed in his long history of frivolous litigation.

The lawsuit that provided the pretext for this arrangement, which was provoked by an IRS contractor’s illegal leaking of Trump’s tax returns, pitted the president against two agencies he oversees: the IRS and the Treasury Department. Those defendants were represented by a Justice Department that Trump has not hesitated to use in pursuit of his personal vendettas. That strange situation prompted a federal judge to question whether the case featured a genuine controversy between adverse parties, as would have been required for the lawsuit to proceed.

Trump avoided that glaring problem by dropping his lawsuit in exchange for an IRS apology, immunity from IRS audits, and the $1.776 billion fund, which is supposed to compensate people who have “incurred harm” from “lawfare” and “weaponization” of government. It is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit by agreeing to pay unidentified “individuals, groups, and entities” whose grievances have nothing to do with the plaintiff’s claims.

The board charged with doling out the money will be appointed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and its members will serve at the president’s pleasure. So it seems likely that the main beneficiaries will be people aligned with Trump, such as the 1,600 or so supporters who were prosecuted (and later pardoned by Trump) for assaulting the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, whom the president has often described as victims of government persecution.

When all is said and done, the DOJ figures, $1.776 billion should cover it. But while the reference to the nation’s founding year is surely patriotic, it has nothing to do with any estimate of the sum that will be required to pay claims from purported victims of “lawfare and weaponization” between now and January 1, 2029, when the fund is scheduled to stop operating. In other words, the dollar figure is totally disconnected from reality. In that respect, it resembles the numbers that Trump routinely deploys in lawsuits seeking compensation for the injuries allegedly inflicted by his enemies.

The complaint in Trump v. Internal Revenue Service, which was filed on January 29 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, says Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization “incurred substantial financial and other damages” as a result of news reports based on the leaked tax information. How substantial? The damages, according to the lawsuit, total at least $10 billion, about 50 percent more than Trump’s estimated net worth.

Trump likes that number. For reasons that are hard to fathom, his calculation of damages in several cases involving widely varying allegations arrives at exactly the same result.

In his July 18 defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, which a federal judge dismissed last month without prejudice because it failed to allege “actual malice,” Trump claimed the newspaper’s reporting on his alleged birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein caused “overwhelming financial and reputational damages” that were “expected to be in the billions of dollars.” The complaint averred that the combination of compensatory and punitive damages should be “not less than $10 billion.” Trump did not even try to explain how he arrived at that preposterous figure.

Last December, Trump sued the BBC for editing the speech he gave before the Capitol riot in a way that suggested he had urged his supporters to literally “fight like hell.” Unlike most of Trump’s lawsuits against news outlets, this one at least cites a genuine example of journalistic malpractice. Trump argues that the BBC defamed him and violated Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. Each of those counts, he figures, is worth at least $5 billion, which conveniently adds up to a familiar total.

In October 2024, Trump sued CBS in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas because he did not like the way 60 Minutes had edited a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. By making Harris seem slightly more cogent, he claimed, CBS had violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. According to his original complaint, the network’s “false, misleading, and deceptive conduct” had inflicted damages “reasonably believed to be at least $10,000,000,000” in Texas alone. A footnote claimed that “CBS’s distortion of the 60 Minutes Interview damaged President Trump’s fundraising and support values by several billions of dollars, particularly in Texas”—a completely unsupported assertion that, even if taken at face value, would not come close to justifying Trump’s estimate of damages within Texas.

In case that was not absurd enough, an amended complaint that Trump filed on February 7, 2025, a few weeks after he started his second term, doubled his estimate of the damages inflicted by CBS. The revised complaint added a claim under a provision of the federal Lanham Act that applies when someone “misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person’s goods, services, or commercial activities.” By violating that provision, Trump asserted, CBS had cost him an amount “reasonably believed to be no less than $10,000,000,000″—a pretty striking coincidence.

In the end, Paramount, apparently keen to appease the president while its merger with Skydance Media was pending, settled that ridiculous lawsuit for $16 million. That was 99.9 percent less than the amount Trump had claimed was minimally adequate.

Trump used similarly inscrutable math in his September 15 defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, which complained that the newspaper’s reporting had deflated his self-image as an astute businessman. That 85-page complaint was so full of bragging and invective that a federal judge struck it four days after it was filed, saying it was “decidedly improper and impermissible.” Trump’s lawyers tried again on October 16, filing an amended complaint that was less than half as long. But they did not change their estimate of the damage that the Times supposedly had caused, which they said was “not less than $15,000,000,000.”

Trump did not specify compensatory damages when he sued CNN in October 2022, arguing that the news outlet had defamed him by calling his claim that former President Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election “the Big Lie.” But he asserted that CNN should have to pay “punitive damages in the amount of $475,000,000.” In the end, Trump got $0, because a federal judge dismissed his lawsuit in July 2023, noting that he had failed to allege any false statements of fact.

CNN’s sins evidently were less serious than the tort that Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp supposedly committed by slamming one of Trump’s real estate projects. Gapp had called a Manhattan skyscraper proposed by Trump “aesthetically lousy” and “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.” When Trump sued Gapp for defamation in 1984, he demanded $500 million in compensation for those insults. Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to about $1.6 billion today.

Trump was even more upset when financial journalist Tim O’Brien dared to suggest that he was not worth as much as he claimed. In a 2006 defamation lawsuit, Trump said that offense, which was similar to the one that the Times would later commit, justified $5 billion in damages, about $8.4 billion in current dollars. Like the lawsuit against Gapp, that claim was laughed out of court.

Trump was more circumspect when he sued The Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer in December 2024. By conducting and publishing a pre-election poll that erroneously gave Harris a lead in Iowa, he claimed, the defendants had violated the state’s Consumer Fraud Act. As a result, the complaint claimed, Trump “sustained actual damages due to the need to expend extensive time and resources, including direct federal campaign expenditures, to mitigate and counteract the harms.” Uncharacteristically, the lawsuit did not offer an estimate of those purported expenses. But based on Trump’s prior experience with such matters, I would guess the damages amount to at least $10 billion.

The post The $1.776 Billion in Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Fits a Pattern of Fanciful Figures appeared first on Reason.com.

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The case, Brown v. Young, just settled; the government employer (the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) agreed to pay plaintiff $275K ($40K in back wages + $235K in compensatory damages) + $210K in attorneys’ fees and costs. The Commission also agreed to give plaintiff a neutral reference in any future employment inquiries, and (to quote the ACLU press release), “to permit her to interact with FWC staff and resources on the same basis as any other external partner or volunteer, preserving her ability to continue her conservation work through partner organizations.”

In exchange plaintiff resigned, dropped the case, and released her claims, including those related to sanctions that were awarded last week; here’s an excerpt from the sanctions (read the whole sanctions decision for more):

This Court concludes that Plaintiff is entitled to attorneys’ fees based on Ms. Tucker’s and defense counsel’s1 objectively unreasonable multiplication of proceedings in continuing to defend the Tucker declaration once it became clear that Ms. Tucker lacked personal knowledge to make the false statements identified above. Fees shall be split between Ms. Tucker and defense counsel and will be assessed at the conclusion of this case. To be clear, there must be a sanction for Ms. Tucker and her prior counsel’s continued efforts to ignore the obvious—that Ms. Tucker lacked the personal knowledge necessary to make certain statements in her declaration and that such statements were, in fact, false—and defend the indefensible once that lack of personal knowledge and falsity became clear following Ms. Tucker’s deposition.

Here are the details on the First Amendment issue in the case, from my Nov. 2015 post on the court’s decision to deny a preliminary injunction to plaintiff:

[* * *]

Brown, who worked at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reposted this item from an Instagram account that “posts satirical social commentary from the perspective of a whale”:

This was apparently a reference to Kirk’s comments that part of the price of the Second Amendment is that there would be “some gun deaths“:

[At an event] held days after three children and three adults were killed in a school shooting in Nashville … Kirk [was] asked by an audience member how to make the point that protecting the Second Amendment is important. Kirk responded that the amendment “is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government.” But “having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty,” he said.

“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death,” Kirk later said. “That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”

(This is of course similar to the arguments that rights supporters routinely make when other rights lead to some amount of foreseeable deaths—the Fourth Amendment, the privilege against self-incrimination, the right to bail in many case, and so on. Characterizing it as “not caring at all” about the deaths strikes me as a poor argument, but that’s a separate matter.)

This post became broadly seen (through the “Libs of TikTok” account) and led to lots of criticism, including criticism sent to plaintiff’s employer, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which fired her. Plaintiff sued, seeking a preliminary injunction ordering her reinstatement. Judge Mark Walker’s decision [Nov. 13] in Brown v. Young (N.D. Fla.) denied that preliminary injunction.

Generally speaking, a government employee’s speech is protected against employer retaliation if (1) it’s said in the employee’s capacity as a citizen and not as part of the employee’s job, (2) the speech involves “a matter of public concern,” and (3) the speaker’s “free speech interests outweighed [the employer’s] interest in effective and efficient fulfillment of its responsibilities.” (This third element is often called the Pickering balance, after the case in which it was articulated.)

The court correctly concluded that the first two elements were satisfied, and that “it’s not a close call”:

First, it is no answer that Plaintiff’s Instagram post, itself, is not original content. Courts have long recognized that re-posting memes or other content from other creators, without further comment, is akin to one’s own speech.

Nor can Defendants immunize themselves by recharacterizing Plaintiff’s speech as mere “association” with another’s speech. Plaintiff spoke when she re-posted the third-party’s speech as her own on her Instagram story. Full stop.

Likewise, there is no contention that Plaintiff’s Instagram story amounts to unprotected government speech that owed its existence to her job at FWC or was even remotely related to the work she performed … [which was] monitoring imperiled shorebirds and seabirds ….

Defendants also contend that Plaintiff’s Instagram story did not touch on a matter of public concern because it conveyed only “personal disdain” and did not contain any “civic commentary.” … [But a] public employee’s negative opinion about a public figure who has nothing to do with their job is generally not the sort of speech touching on a “personal interest” that garners no protection under the Pickering framework. [See, e.g.,] Rankin v. McPherson (1987) (holding that employee was speaking on a matter of public concern when she told a coworker that if another attempt was made on the president’s life, she “hope[s] they get him”) ….

It is also no answer that Plaintiff’s speech was arguably satirical, sarcastic, or insensitive. “Humor, satire, and even personal invective can make a point about a  matter of public concern.” Indeed, “[t]he inappropriate or controversial character of a statement is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern.” Rankin.

But the court held that plaintiff hadn’t [sufficiently clearly] met her burden “to show that her free speech interest outweighs FWC’s interest in the effective and efficient fulfillment of its responsibilities”:

Defendant Tucker[‘s unrebutted declaration] provides evidence that there was a swift and largely negative reaction from the public concerning Plaintiff’s Instagram story which “disrupted agency operations, required diversion of staff resources to manage responses, and raised legitimate concerns about the agency’s credibility and public trust.” While Plaintiff understandably argues that this declaration is short on specifics and largely conclusory, Plaintiff also chose not to seek expedited discovery to depose Defendant Tucker or cross-examine her at the hearing to explore flaws in Defendants’ position.

Without more, this Court cannot conclude on this sparse record that the public’s negative reaction was not disruptive enough to justify the action FWC took…. “The government’s legitimate interest in avoiding disruption does not require proof of actual disruption. Reasonable possibility of adverse harm is all that is required.” …

It’s still possible that, after further discovery, and perhaps after a trial, plaintiff will be able to show that the public reaction was less disruptive than the government says it was, and that plaintiff’s “free speech interests outweighed” the disruption (however such weighing is to be done).

But the basic principle still remains: Under government-as-employer doctrine as it’s currently understood, speech is protected only until it draws enough public condemnation. Once the speech (whether left-wing, right-wing, or any other) is publicized enough that enough people complain to the employer, the Pickering balance comes out in favor of allowing the firing.

I discussed this in a post about the subject right after the Kirk murder. As I noted, if one looks at court cases over the last several decades, they have routinely turned on whether the speech created enough public controversy. When the government is administering the criminal law or civil liability, such a “heckler’s veto” is generally not allowed: The government generally can’t shut down a speaker, for instance, because his listeners are getting offended or even threatening violence because they’re offended. But in the employment context, the Pickering balance often allows government to fire employees because their speech sufficiently offends coworkers or members of the public. (The analysis may differ for public university professors, though it’s not clear how much; see this post for more.)

This conclusion by lower courts applying Pickering might, I think, stem from the judgment that employees are hired to do a particular job cost-effectively for the government: If their speech so offends others (especially clients or coworkers) that keeping the employees on means more cost for the government than benefit, the government needn’t continue to pay them for what has proved to be a bad bargain. Maybe that’s mistaken. Maybe it’s so important to protect public debate, including on highly controversial matters, that public employers should have to keep on even the most controversial employees (see this article by Prof. Randy Kozel, which so suggests in part). But that appears to be the rule.

We see this, for instance, with statements that are allegedly racist, sexist, antigay, antitrans, etc.: If they cause enough public hostility, or seem highly likely to do so, then courts will often allow employees to be fired based on them. But if they largely pass unnoticed except by management and perhaps just a few people who file complaints, then courts are much more likely to hold that the firings may violate the First Amendment (see, e.g., this post and this post, though there are many other such examples).

There are other factors that courts consider, to be sure: For instance, if the employer can show that a person’s speech shows they are unsuited to the job, that makes it easier for the employer to prevail. But even there the magnitude of public reaction is relevant, because one common argument is that one trait required for certain employees is the ability and willingness to instill confidence and respect in coworkers and clients, rather than to produce outrage and hostility.

This creates an unfortunate incentive: Like any heckler’s-veto-like rule, it rewards would-be cancellers, if they only speak out often enough and with enough outrage. But rightly or wrongly, that is how these cases generally shape up.

[* * *]

Carrie McNamara, Daniel Boaz Tilley, Michelle Morton, and Samantha Jo Past (ACLU Foundation of Florida) and Gary Edinger (Gary S. Edinger & Assocs.) represent Brown.

The post $485K Settlement in Government Employee Speech Case Stemming from Comments About Charlie Kirk's Death appeared first on Reason.com.

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When Missouri legalized recreational marijuana in 2022, it put laws on the books to prevent monopolization of its weed market. Now, one cannabis provider is allegedly skirting these regulations to take over the state’s market and establish a monopoly, according to two recent lawsuits filed within weeks of each other. 

The first suit was filed in April by Local Cannabis and VIBE, two Missouri cannabis wholesalers, accusing Arkansas-based marijuana company Good Day Farm of using its employees and 48 different LLCs to circumvent Missouri’s marijuana licensing cap. The second case, filed in May by Damon Frost Jr., a Missouri resident and recreational cannabis user, alleges Good Day Farm engaged in “anticompetitive and unlawful conduct” to gain its market share.

Both suits accuse Good Day Farm of owning and operating 61 of Missouri’s 229 dispensaries, about 27 percent of the state’s total. This would violate Missouri law, which prohibits any single entity from owning “more than ten percent” of the total number of dispensary, cultivation, and manufacturing licenses. Moreover, Local Cannabis and VIBE allege that Good Day Farm also controls “upwards of 40%” of wholesale cannabis purchases in Missouri.

Both have petitioned the court for an injunction that would void any agreements made by Good Day Farm, as well as monetary damages, “including restitution” and “disgorgement” of the company’s alleged illegal holdings. 

But it’s unclear whether Good Day is, in fact, violating the state’s law. 

In the 2018 constitutional provision that legalized medical marijuana, the state prohibited any entity under “substantially common control, ownership, or management,” defined as having “the power to direct or cause the direction of the management or policies of a facility,” from owning more than five dispensary licenses. Following the 2022 amendment legalizing recreational use, Missouri dropped the “common control” language and instead said that no single entity can own 10 percent of the state’s licenses, reports the Missouri Independent.

This change, while largely unnoticed by the public, “helped create an opening for Good Day Farm” to expand in the Show-Me State, says the Independent. Indeed, in documents included in the court records, the company touts the “limited license nature” of Missouri’s marijuana laws as “one of the foundational reasons” for its heavy investments in the state. 

As a vertically integrated company that owns or controls multiple stages of the legal marijuana supply chain, including cultivation, manufacturing, and retail, Good Day Farm navigated the language change by establishing several LLCs as separate legal entities. They did so by filing each vertical with the Missouri secretary of state. 

While each LLC has its own investors and board of directors, they’re all tied to Good Day Farm or one of its verticals and share the same address as the company’s corporate headquarters. For instance, Alex Gray, Good Day Farm’s chief strategy officer and president of sales, holds 19 dispensary licenses operating under the Good Day Farm brand and another 14 dispensary licenses operating a Good Day Farm vertical called CODES. That would give Gray 14 percent ownership of the total dispensary licenses issued in Missouri. 

Angela Irby, the former head of investor relations at Good Day Farm, registered the fictitious name CODES CANNABIS. She is also listed as the organizer of two other LLCs, Bon Vert Ventures and 3 Leaf Health, that control nine dispensary licenses.

This wasn’t a veiled strategy; in its presentations to potential investors, Good Day Farm acknowledged that it couldn’t assure regulators wouldn’t “take issue with the number of marijuana dispensaries [it] operated or supervised,” Lisa Cox, communications director at the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (which regulates cannabis in the state) tells Reason. 

Additionally, Cox confirms that the Division of Cannabis Regulation within the Health Department reviewed each application under question by the plaintiffs for a license and the accompanying documentation. The agency has “no upcoming legal action” planned against the company, says Cox. 

Irby, Gray, Good Day Farm, and attorneys for both class action suits did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment at the time of publication.

Owning 27 percent of the dispensary market may seem like a lot to Good Day’s competitors, but it hardly means that the company is a monopoly. Instead, it seems to indicate that Good Day has tapped into something and is offering a superior product that more consumers enjoy. 

Taking into account the potential for market growth (the state saw over $1.5 billion in cumulative sales in 2025 and $506 million already so far in 2026) the lawsuits by local cannabis providers read as sour grapes at losing their hometown market to an out-of-state company. In Frost’s case, with 168 recreational marijuana retailers in Missouri unaffiliated with Good Day Farm, he could simply shop at a different store.

The post Lawsuits Accuse Corporate 'Cartel' of Monopolizing Missouri's Weed Market appeared first on Reason.com.

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An excerpt from today’s long decision by Judge Thomas Cullen (W.D. Va.) in Doe v. Va. Polytechnic Inst. & State Univ.:

In the fall of 2024, Plaintiff John Doe (“Johnny”), then a student at Virginia Tech (“VT” or “the university”) and member of its Corps of Cadets, was accused by two female students of sexual assault.

Johnny’s first accuser, Pauline Poe, with whom he previously had at least two consensual sexual encounters, claimed that Johnny had continued to engage in sexual intercourse with her after she withdrew consent. A couple weeks later, Jane Roe, a fellow member of the Corps of Cadets, complained that Johnny, with whom she had previously been intimate, had sex with her after a night of heavy (underage) drinking. Jane, who claimed to have no memory of this encounter, later alleged that it amounted to sexual assault on Johnny’s part because she was incapacitated.

After receiving these two complaints, VT officials sprang into action. The same day that Jane reported Johnny to VT’s Title IX office—over five weeks after their allegedly non-consensual encounter—the university issued a campus-wide alert about the purported sexual assault. VT’s email did not identify Johnny or Jane by name, but it provided the specific location of the alleged incident and noted that the parties involved knew each other. Although no one from the Title IX office had yet to investigate Jane’s claims—let alone get Johnny’s side of the story—the campus-wide email characterized him as “the offender” and Jane as “the survivor.” The following day, a VT official placed Johnny on interim suspension, which resulted in his being evicted from his dorm room, pending the outcome of separate Title IX and student-conduct investigations.

VT officials investigated Pauline’s and Jane’s claims over the next six months. Johnny, who vehemently denied sexually assaulting anyone, maintained his innocence throughout the process, and he desperately tried to present abundant evidence that he claimed substantially undermined his accusers’ claims and their credibility.

As to Pauline Poe, Johnny pointed out—to the investigator, to the hearing officers, and to anyone else who might listen—that her roommate (whom Pauline had initially claimed would confirm her account) largely refuted it. Johnny also noted that a local judge, who denied Pauline’s request for a permanent protective order against Johnny, characterized key aspects of her account as “extremely unique, if not bizarre.”

Johnny also alleged that Pauline withheld—and even doctored—various text messages they had exchanged the night of the alleged assault. He also claimed that Pauline omitted a critical detail of her later accounts to VT investigators—specifically, her allegation that Johnny had threatened her with a knife before they had sex—when she initially reported the encounter to local police.

Finally, Johnny presented a report from a forensic nurse who examined a photograph that Pauline gave to VT investigators. According to Pauline, this photograph depicted a bruise that she suffered during their non-consensual encounter. The forensic nurse, however, opined that it depicted no such thing.

Regarding Jane Roe’s sexual-assault claim, Johnny alleges that he presented substantial evidence that disproved her account. He pointed out that Jane had initially waited more than five weeks to report him to VT’s Title IX officials, and that she only did so then to receive immunity from a charge of underage drinking that stemmed from her imbibing on the night of the alleged assault. According to Johnny, this underage-drinking charge was Jane’s second serious disciplinary infraction while a member of the Corps of Cadets, and a conviction could have resulted in Jane losing her ROTC scholarship.

Although Jane later downplayed her disciplinary exposure for underage drinking, she filed her Title IX complaint against Johnny the day before she was scheduled to stand trial on that charge (and, according to Johnny, shortly after she had discussed matters with Pauline). As soon as Jane accused Johnny of sexual assault, VT granted her immunity for underage drinking and the disciplinary proceeding that may have resulted in the loss of her scholarship was dropped.

What’s more, Johnny marshalled considerable evidence to refute the notion that Jane was incapacitated—the required mental state for a victim of sexual assault under these circumstances based on VT’s policies—when they had sex. He presented detailed written testimony from a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who regularly advises the accrediting body for university Title IX investigators.

In her report, this expert, who examined the record evidence, explained that, although Jane was likely intoxicated at the time she had sex with Johnny, Jane had not—based on her own account of the night in question, the accounts of multiple eyewitnesses who interacted with her at the time, and other evidence—exhibited any signs incapacitation. Specifically, the psychologist noted that, just prior to climbing into her bed with Johnny, Jane had walked another student back to his dorm, sent several coherent text messages, cleaned up after another student who had become ill from drinking, and changed her clothes.

Johnny also pointed VT investigators to Jane’s conduct towards him in the days and weeks following this alleged sexual assault. Not only did she wait over five weeks to accuse him, but, in the interim, she sent Johnny several friendly text messages, including one in which Jane described herself as his “sugar baby,” and another in which she asked to travel with him over the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. And three weeks after the alleged sexual assault (but before she had accused him of it), Jane had Johnny back over to her dorm room for another night of underage drinking.

Johnny’s efforts to disprove these accusations ultimately proved futile. The VT officials who investigated both incidents allegedly gave short shrift to this exculpatory and impeachment evidence and ultimately substantiated Pauline’s and Jane’s claims of sexual assault. They submitted their written findings to disciplinary tribunals for formal adjudication. Although Johnny claims that he attempted to present this same exculpatory evidence at the ensuing hearings, his defense largely fell on deaf ears.

The hearing officers, applying preponderance-of-the-evidence standards, ultimately concluded that it was more likely than not that Johnny had sexually assaulted Pauline and Jane. Based on their determination in Jane’s case, the hearing officers recommended that Johnny be expelled from VT. Johnny appealed those decisions, but his appeals were summarily denied. Consistent with Virginia law, once the expulsion was considered final, VT officials placed a notation on his official transcript indicating, for posterity, that he had been expelled for committing sexual assault.

According to Johnny, all of this was preordained given the deep-seated anti-male bias of the VT officials who investigated and adjudicated Pauline’s and Jane’s sexual-assault claims, as well as inherent anti-male bias in VT’s Title IX policies, the combination of which made it nearly impossible for him to defend against false accusations of sexual assault. Johnny contends that by imposing arbitrary, inconsistent, and shifting standards for evaluating the sexual-assault claims, denying him a meaningful opportunity to confront and cross-examine his accusers at those hearings, and effectively ignoring substantial evidence that largely refuted the purported victims’ accounts, VT and its officials violated his rights under the Constitution and federal anti-discrimination law, specifically Title IX….

The defendants correctly point out that the constitutional rights Johnny alleges VT administrators violated were not clearly established by United States Supreme Court or Fourth Circuit precedent at the time his investigations occurred. As such, the doctrine of qualified immunity unquestionably bars his claims against these individual defendants for money damages.

But that does not end the inquiry—far from it. Johnny has alleged abundant facts that, if true, raise grave concerns about the way VT, through these administrators, conducted the investigations of Pauline’s and Jane’s sexual-assault claims, as well as the ultimate outcomes of those inquiries. Simply put, Johnny has alleged facts that, if true, raise a plausible inference the VT discriminated against him in these investigations because he is male and, in so doing, violated Title IX. Accordingly, Johnny’s claims against the university will be allowed to proceed, as well as a single official-capacity claim against one of the administrator defendants.

The post Lawsuit Against Virginia Tech Alleging Anti-Male Bias in Title IX Proceedings Can Go Forward in Part appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Supreme Court issued a resounding victory for donor privacy and free speech last month in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport, but it is cold comfort to the hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations around the country that must continue handing over similar information to the IRS every year.

First Choice reaffirmed that the First Amendment strongly protects the privacy of nonprofit supporters. The case arose after New Jersey’s attorney general issued a sweeping subpoena to First Choice, a Christian, pro-life medical nonprofit serving pregnant women, new mothers, and fathers. The subpoena demanded the names and addresses of nearly all of First Choice’s donors. The Supreme Court unanimously held that such demands inflict real and immediate harm because they deter people from associating with disfavored groups—even if the government promises to keep the information confidential.

This outcome should not be surprising. Nearly 70 years ago, in NAACP v. Alabama, the Supreme Court recognized the “vital relationship” between the First Amendment and privacy. Few people might be willing to donate to a controversial or dissident group if that information might fall into the wrong hands. And NAACP v. Alabama was a perfect example: the Alabama attorney general tried to obtain a list of the NAACP’s members in a blatant move to discourage people living in the Jim Crow South from supporting the civil rights organization. The Supreme Court blocked the effort because the attorney general failed to show that Alabama had an important need for such sensitive information.

Drawing on this precedent, First Choice once again explained that demands for donor information inevitably chill First Amendment freedoms. And that’s true, the Supreme Court held, the moment the demand is made. Organizations can therefore go straight to federal court to protect their privacy without waiting for a state court to order them to comply.

First Choice will have implications far beyond one New Jersey subpoena. To its credit, the federal government recognized as much, filing an amicus brief urging the Court to rule in the nonprofit’s favor.

But it’s a much different story for the federal government in Buckeye Institute v. Internal Revenue Service, a case that our organization, the Institute for Free Speech, is litigating in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

In Buckeye, the IRS is defending a broad disclosure regime that requires hundreds of thousands of nonprofits to disclose donor information to the federal government every year. Five years ago, in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the Supreme Court held that disclosing this information—which appears on a tax form called a Schedule B—creates a “real and pervasive” chilling effect on the First Amendment. But the IRS claims that because donors to Buckeye can receive a tax deduction for their charitable contribution, Bonta doesn’t apply.

On the same day the Supreme Court announced its decision in First Choice, the IRS was in the 6th Circuit arguing that courts should not second guess the government’s claimed need to stockpile a treasure trove of sensitive donor data.

The central question in Buckeye is what standard courts must apply to evaluate the law. The Supreme Court’s decision in First Choice reaffirmed that “any demand” for donor information requires the government to satisfy “exacting scrutiny.” That means the government cannot compel organizations to reveal their donors without first proving that collecting this information is necessary to further an important government interest.

But in Buckeye, the federal government has urged the court to adopt a far more deferential approach on the theory that nonprofit organizations can avoid the disclosure requirement simply by forgoing tax-exempt status. This interpretation would allow the government to condition valuable tax benefits on a willingness to surrender one’s fundamental rights.

Buckeye is far more than a technical dispute about tax forms. At stake is whether the federal government can systematically collect the identities of tens of thousands of nonprofit donors—year after year, across the entire country—despite no suspicion of wrongdoing, and without even a second glance from the courts.

First Choice recognizes how critical associational privacy is to the freedoms we all cherish. But those freedoms mean nothing if the courts do not apply the scrutiny to government overreach that the Constitution demands.

The post The Supreme Court Protected Donor Privacy. The IRS Didn't Get the Memo. appeared first on Reason.com.

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While addressing a crowd of manufacturing workers in Missouri this week, Vice President J.D. Vance detailed how his staff is tirelessly working to root out fraud in the federal government.

“There is a simple principle that I have, which is: If you are committing fraud against the American people, you should go to prison,” Vance said.

After waiting for the cheers to die down, he continued, “If you are a public official, and you are not fighting against fraud, you ought to have your money taken away, because [officials] should not be able to steal from all of you.”

Yes, if there is one thing the Trump administration simply will not tolerate, it is the theft of public money or government officials getting rich off such fraud.

But, wow, that sure seems to be happening a lot these days.

On the same day that Vance was speaking, the White House and the federal Department of Justice put the finishing touches on an agreement that will transfer nearly $1.8 billion from American taxpayers to President Donald Trump.

Officially, the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” will provide payments to “redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”

In reality, this is a massive taxpayer-funded slush fund that Trump will be able to distribute to his friends and allies—including those who rioted at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. The fund will be controlled by a five-member board, with all five appointed by the attorney general and removable by the president at any time without cause.

This should be one of the biggest scandals in presidential history. Trump sued himself, then agreed to settle the lawsuit with an amount of taxpayer money that his lawyers determined. It’s so brazenly corrupt that it feels absurd. Plenty of politicians engage in self-dealing, but you’d have a hard time finding an example of one who grabbed the cookie jar so directly and stuck his hand inside, in full view of the public.

“The entire affair reeks of corruption,” wrote Reason‘s Joe Lancaster earlier this week.

In this administration, that stench is becoming overwhelming. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is merely the most blatant example (so far) of Trump’s corruption, but it is just one part of a cavalcade that’s happening right in front of everyone’s faces.

Government records show that Trump bought and sold millions of dollars in stock in companies that contract with or are regulated by the federal government, as first reported last week by investigative outfit Sludge. Disclosures filed earlier this month with the Office of Government Ethics show that Trump made more than 3,600 stock trades during the first three months of the year.

A few really stand out. Trump bought stock in the tech company Palantir just before it inked a massive government contract. He also bought $680,000 worth of stock in Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical company. “The timing of Trump’s purchases coincides with several favorable government decisions benefiting the drugmaker’s GLP-1 business, including progress toward a long-held goal: qualifying the drugs for reimbursement from Medicare, the government health insurance program primarily serving seniors, when they are prescribed for weight loss,” reported KFF Health News.

The White House has denied that there is any conflict of interest in those decisions, but the potential for one seems obvious.

And, like with Vance’s comments this week, the gulf between what the administration says and does is vast. During the State of the Union address in February, Trump called for a ban on members of Congress trading stocks. Conservatives have complained for years about former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and other high-ranking officials using their positions and insider information to enrich themselves.

Instead of draining that swamp, Trump is now engaged in the same behavior.

Then, there are the foreign entanglements, many of which seem to involve Trump’s children and their spouses. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, is one of the administration’s top negotiators in the Middle East. He also runs a private equity firm that accepted a $2 billion investment from the government of Saudi Arabia in 2024, and he’s reportedly been soliciting other investments while negotiating an end to the war with Iran.

The Gulf States, in particular, are threatened by a long-term war, which could further destroy their oil and gas infrastructure. How much would they be willing to pay Trump’s family to make the war go away sooner rather than later? This is gangster-type stuff masquerading as diplomacy.

Meanwhile, Trump’s sons have reportedly been given a stake in a Kazakh mining company that recently won a $1.6 billion contract from the administration. Separately, the U.S. Air Force has agreed to buy drones from a company partially owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

And the hypocrisy is rank. Republicans drew up articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden because of the corrupt links between his son, Hunter Biden, and a Ukrainian oil company. Now, the Trump administration is seemingly mocking the Bidens for not thinking big enough.

Asked in January about his family making money on business deals while he’s president, Trump told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he limited such behavior during his first term.

“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” he said. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”

“The president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it,” wrote journalist Isaac Saul in an exhaustive, 6,000-word essay at Tangle earlier this month.

What can be done? For starters, administration officials should follow the example of Treasury Department general counsel Brian Morrissey, who resigned this week, apparently in response to the creation of the $1.8 billion slush fund.

The “Anti-Weaponization fund” is so egregious that it might actually get some Republicans in Congress to rediscover their spines. “We’re gonna try to kill it,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R–Pa.) when asked about the fund. “You can’t do that.”

“We are a nation of laws, you can’t just make up things whole-piece,” Sen. John Cassidy (R–La.), who lost a primary election earlier this month, told The Hill. “It is as if somebody sued themselves and agreed upon a settlement with themselves that’s going to be funded by the rest of us. If that’s the case: What?!”

The ultimate remedy to this pattern of behavior is impeachment. That power was given to Congress for specifically this type of misconduct, so that lawmakers could address “the abuse of violation of some public trust,” as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65.

Outright public corruption is a problem on its own terms, of course. It means fewer tax dollars are available for public services, and causes capital investments to be misallocated because of cronyist considerations.

It also undermines the norms and institutions that are supposed to prevent corruption—and, thus, encourages more of it. Sure, roll your eyes at the “norms” all you want, but there doesn’t appear to be any law or rules that prevent a president from suing his own Justice Department and then settling the lawsuit and pocketing a ton of taxpayers’ money. Dozens of other men have held the presidency without doing that. Now that one has, it becomes easier for the next to do it too.

This is a slide that must be stopped before it gets worse. Conservatives who hand-wave Trump’s corruption with whataboutism, focused on Biden or Hillary Clinton or anyone else, are doing the opposite of that. Ignoring Trump’s corruption will invite more and worse from him and others.

And the next time Vance talks about how this administration is focused on reducing fraud in government, he should be booed and laughed off stage.

The post Trump's Corruption Is Brazen, Obvious, and Costly. Will Enough Republicans Try To Stop Him? appeared first on Reason.com.

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A 56-year-old Haitian man being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Arizona died from complications from an untreated tooth infection, a medical examiner’s report released earlier this month found.

Emmanuel Damas died on March 2 after being transferred to a local hospital from the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center, a private correctional complex that houses ICE detainees. A report by the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office, obtained through a public records request, concluded that Damas “died as a result of Complications of Necrotizing Mediastinitis with Neck and Retropharyngeal Abscess in the setting of Severe Dental Caries and Periodontal Disease.”

Mediastinitis is a life-threatening chest infection. A retropharyngeal abscess is a large, life-threatening collection of pus at the back of the throat, also resulting from a severe infection.

The autopsy results, first reported by the Arizona Mirror, come as deaths in ICE custody have reached an all-time high and allegations of abuse and neglect continue to pour out of federal detention centers.

For example, after Geraldo Lunas Campos, a detainee at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Texas, died on Jan. 3, ICE initially claimed that he committed suicide, but the El Paso Medical Examiner’s Office ruled his death a homicide by asphyxiation. Multiple detainee witnesses told news outlets that guards choked Lunas Campos to death after he refused to stop asking for his medication.

Reason also previously reported on the case of Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian national who died last April of a heart attack at a private detention facility in Broward County, Florida. Blaise’s son told a county investigator that his mother said in a phone call with him on the day she died that staff refused to let her see a physician for chest pains. Detainees who witnessed Blaise collapse told human rights groups there was also a slow staff response, and guards initially ignored them when they yelled for help.

Damas was transferred to ICE custody last September after being arrested and charged in Buffalo, New York, with assault and battery, according to an ICE report on his death. The report says Damas “received regular medical and dental evaluations” and that he declined recommendations for tooth extractions.

On Feb. 19, Damas was transferred to a hospital where he was diagnosed with acute respiratory failure due to septic shock. He remained ventilated and on life support until he died on March 2.

However, Arizona Family reported that Damas’ brother, Presley Nelson, said Damas told medical staff at the detention center that he had a toothache in mid-February, but he was not sent to a dentist. The outlet wrote that Nelson “believes the staff at the facility did not take his brother’s complaints seriously, even though it was a treatable condition.”

In response to the medical examiner’s findings, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D–Ariz.) said in a press release that “a toothache should never escalate into a fatal medical emergency, especially while someone is in government custody and entirely dependent on detention staff for access to care.”

In March, Grijalva and two other Arizona Democrats demanded an investigation into Damas’ death and the release of his full medical records. Grijalva said that her office has yet to receive the “full records, transparency, or accountability that his family deserves.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post An ICE Detainee Died from a Tooth Infection, Autopsy Report Says appeared first on Reason.com.

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