On Wednesday, leftist Iván Cepeda conceded the Colombian presidential election to his opponent, Abelardo de la Espriella, putting another right-leaning populist in charge of a Latin American country.

De la Espriella, who won by a margin of less than 1 percent, ran a brash, MAGA-reminiscent (and MAGA-endorsed) campaign blending laissez faire economics with traditionalist machismo social policy and a commitment to crack down harshly on violent crime and drug smuggling.

De la Espriella’s platform borrowed from other Latin American presidents, including Nayib Bukele of El Salvador—de la Espriella has promised to build mega-prisons just like his—and Javier Milei of Argentina—whose budget-slashing he has pledged to repeat in Colombia. Milei called himself “the lion.” De la Espriella goes by “the tiger.”

When his term begins on August 7, de la Espriella will be taking charge of a Colombian economy more dependent on the state than ever. Under the leadership of Gustavo Petro, the incumbent left-wing president, Colombia has drastically expanded social programs for the poor. While it has reduced poverty, the spending meant more debt and higher taxes on financial institutions, accumulated wealth, and the fossil fuel industry. Inflation, which is down from a post-pandemic high of 13 percent, has begun to rise modestly, jumping from 5.68 percent in April to 5.84 percent in May (the largest increase since August 2024). And although unemployment has dropped below 9 percent, Petro’s labor regulations—enacted in June 2025—threaten to “limit the pace of formal job creation and partially offset the gains observed over the past year,” according to a Deloitte analysis.

In 2025, the International Monetary Fund suspended a $9.8 billion line of credit in response, citing Colombia’s “widening fiscal deficit.” Over the course of Petro’s tenure, foreign direct investment dropped by a third.

De la Espriella’s running mate told The Financial Times that they plan to “return Colombia to its historic position of macroeconomic stability,” and de la Espriella has made a priority of bringing investors back to Colombia. To do that, however, he’ll need to deliver not only fiscal responsibility, but also security from Colombia’s notorious and powerful Marxist militias.

For decades, the most prominent of these, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), rampaged across the countryside, displacing hundreds of thousands annually. In 2016, the government brokered a permanent peace, and FARC formally disarmed in 2017. But in their absence, other militias have flowered—the largest of which is the National Liberation Army—and “illegal armed groups have roughly doubled their membership in the last five years,” according to the BBC.

The burgeoning left-wing militant scene has coincided with a rise in political violence. Last year, right-wing presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe was assassinated. Colombian authorities blamed the killing on a FARC-spinoff called Second Marquetalia, but presented no hard evidence linking the group to the act. That was the event which roused de la Espriella—who had been living with his wife and four children in Florence, Italy, for a year—and brought him back to “save” Colombia. After returning and announcing his candidacy, de la Espriella campaigned behind bulletproof glass and promised to wage war on the militias.

His presidency will also have the cartels to deal with; taken together, it’s estimated that they produce and export nearly $200 billion worth of cocaine every year. Organized drug-smuggling poses an additional problem, but one that cannot be neatly separated from the partisan paramilitary issue—ideological militants raise their funds through the drug trade too.

In short, the new president has got his work cut out for him. It won’t be easy to rein in wasteful spending on popular programs, maintain peace between all the dozens of active armed factions and the government, and build out a bunch of mega-prisons, while preserving Colombians’ economic and political freedoms. Though it doesn’t seem like de la Espriella is too concerned about those freedoms. He made the culture war a second focal point of his campaign, railing against “gender ideology” and opposing same-sex adoption rights: “a child needs a father and a mother, those roles,” he said.

Yet another South American country has put a populist with authoritarian tendencies and a nominally laissez-faire economic policy in charge. De la Espriella has promised to protect Colombians from violent militias and to return the country to economic health. But there are aspects of his platform reminiscent of an old kind of Latin American macho-man—a kind that can be more trouble than he’s worth.

The post What To Expect From Colombia's New President appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/HxYP3TU
via IFTTT

Last week, nearly every elite men’s tennis player skipped one of London’s marquee tournaments. Only one of the world’s top 10 showed up at Queen’s Club, the traditional Wimbledon warmup; stars including Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev, Taylor Fritz, and Ben Shelton were playing 300 miles away in Halle, Germany. A culprit was likely Britain’s tax code, which doesn’t stop at taxing prize money earned on British soil.

It also taxes a slice of a player’s global endorsement income, prorated by how many days of the year they happen to spend in the U.K. Fail to advance far enough in the tournament, and the tax bill on your sponsorship deals can exceed your payout. So, the players who get to choose where they compete are now choosing somewhere else.

“It’s not about the money for playing,” retired superstar Rafael Nadal once explained. “They take from the sponsors….This is very difficult. I am playing in the U.K. and losing money.”

File this story under “how people dodge taxes by leaving.” Evidence for the phenomenon was piling up long before California billionaires began their high-profile relocations to Nevada and Florida ahead of a proposed wealth tax on the ballot this November. And it’s not the only reason these taxes disappoint.

When Norway raised its top wealth-tax rate by just one percentage point in 2022, economist Christine Blandhol documented a wave of business owners leaving for Switzerland, helped by a treaty between the two countries that precluded being double-taxed during the move. Norway lost tax revenue while the firms that business owners left behind, now run from a distance, saw their outputs decline.

Switzerland’s own cantons—26 subdivisions that have taxed wealth since the 1800s at rates from about 0.1 percent to 0.9 percent—give researchers a natural experiment. The wealthy move steadily from high-rate Bern to low-rate Lucerne.

The people pushing California’s wealth tax know this. Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley—a frequent coauthor with fellow French economist Emmanuel Saez, whose revenue estimates underpin the campaign—has spent the past couple of years engineering around it.

Zucman wants a coordinated global minimum tax on billionaire wealth, designed explicitly so that there’s nowhere left for the superrich to move. He admits frankly that the whole point of his international coordination plan is to defeat the mobility problem. If wealth taxes are global, the thinking goes, they finally work as intended.

Not so fast. It’s easy to count up lost tax revenue after taxpayers move away. There is also a less visible, but no less real, behavior change from people who stay home (by choice or because there’s no better option).

The effect showed up in Denmark, where decades of tax records—covering people who by and large stayed put during its wealth-tax era—show dwindling levels of wealth accumulation when more of it is taxed away. Nobody had to leave the country for the effect to show up; the incentive to save and build wealth in the first place had simply shrunk.

Inside the businesses of the wealthy, there’s an avoidance channel that requires no moving van. When a wealth-tax bill comes due, the owner of a closely held company will often pull out a larger dividend to cover it. Once that money has left the company, it doesn’t go back into payroll or business expansion.

Make no mistake, the non-wealthy will suffer from this tax too. As wealth taxes diminish saving and reinvestment, the capital stock that workers depend on for tools, equipment, and business expansion stops growing as quickly as it should. Wages rise when there’s more capital for each worker to use, so the slower buildup eventually means smaller paychecks for people who would never pay a wealth tax. This effect compounds for decades, so a modest annual drag turns into a substantial gap by the time anyone notices it in the data.

The same dynamic can show up even without a wealth tax. We saw it with another aggressive California levy. When the state raised its top income-tax rate by three points in 2012, Stanford economist Joshua Rauh went looking for the revenue. He found that the people who stayed and bore the tax increase deferred bonuses, retimed asset sales, and restructured how they got paid, shifting income away from the year the higher rate applied. Within two years, those reporting changes had erased most of the revenue gain the tax increase was supposed to deliver.

Income and wealth are taxed differently, but the lesson is the same: Raise the price of an activity and people do less of it, restructure how they report it, or, if they can, leave the jurisdiction entirely.

These are the responses that even a global wealth tax can’t reach, because mobility was never the sole problem. The result is less tax revenue than pro-tax advocates project, and less economic activity too. Ultimately, everyone, not just the rich, will be poorer for it.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

The post Even a Global Wealth Tax Can't Solve This Problem appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3Wmkq4Z
via IFTTT

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of the manufacturer of the popular weed killer Roundup, blocking tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging that the herbicide caused their plaintiffs’ cancers.

The case before the Supreme Court stems from John Durnell’s 2019 lawsuit against Monsanto in which he claimed that he had developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, because of his use of Roundup for two decades. In his lawsuit, he argued that Monsanto should have included a cancer warning label on Roundup. In 2025, the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed a state jury’s award of $1.25 million to Durnell based on the plaintiff’s failure-to-warn theory.

The thousands of similar lawsuits now claiming that glyphosate causes cancer trace back to the scientifically contested and controversial 2015 monograph by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that classified the herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

In the years since the IARC monograph, numerous safety and regulatory agencies have repeatedly found that the weed killer is safe when used as directed. These include including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, Canada’s Pesticides Regulatory Directorate, and Australia’s Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority.

In its 7–2 decision announced in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA’s safety determination and warning label requirements preempt the Missouri state court’s finding that the company should have added a cancer warning label.

“In accordance with EPA’s view that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans, EPA has not required glyphosate-based pesticides like Roundup to include a cancer warning on their labels,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the majority opinion. “Therefore, as a matter of federal law, Monsanto legally must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until EPA approves or requires a change.”

Disagree with federal preemption if you will, but the Court correctly decided that the vagaries of toxic tort litigation are not the right way to balance benefits and risks in this case.

The post Supreme Court Quashes Scientifically Bogus Lawsuits Against Roundup Herbicide appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/Mgm2rzc
via IFTTT

Are the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) surging to victory in New York City because foreigners and immigrants are smuggling this ideology into the U.S.? That seems to be the takeaway for many conservatives bemoaning that “Third World-ism”—i.e., the nominally communist brand of authoritarianism that is prevalent in some African and Latin American countries—is winning at the ballot box. Their solution, unsurprisingly, is to curb all categories of immigration, legal and illegal.

The victories of Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in Tuesday’s Democratic House primaries are indeed lamentable. Avila Chevalier is a modern campus radical who has aligned herself with far-left activist groups that wish to “eradicate Western civilization.” She wants to abolish borders, police, private property, etc. Valdez is no less extreme.

But do they represent the triumph of Third World migration to the U.S.? Matt Walsh, who is typical of conservatives on this, thinks so. He writes: “Third world communists are the enemy. They’ve taken over our greatest American city. They’re taking over one of our two major political parties. They hate this country. They hate white people. They hate our heritage and traditions. This is the fight. Get in the game or go away.”

Reality is much more complicated. As Batya Ungar-Sargon notes, Chevalier’s base of support is not specifically immigrants or even minorities—it’s the affluent.

“Chevalier, who won a district that includes the Bronx, actually lost the Bronx part of the district by 30 points,” writes Ungar-Sargon. “She also lost predominantly Black and Hispanic areas, and she lost lower-income areas by 10 points. She won with young voters and higher income voters, and won majority college educated areas by 20 points.”

The comparison with the Bronx is instructive. The South Bronx is represented by Democrat Ritchie Torres, who is not a democratic socialist and staunchly supports Israel; he easily won re-election in a district that is disproportionately black and low income. Chevalier did slightly better with black people than her opponent did, but she got crushed when it came to the Hispanic vote.

The point is that this view of socialism as a specifically Third World ideology conquering the U.S. because of mass migration isn’t true. Affluent, native-born white and black people are just as likely, or by some measures, more likely to support left-wing politics than many categories of immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants. If right-wing immigration hardliners had their way and restricted citizenship to just people who can trace their lineage back to colonial times, we would be no safer from socialism. In fact, the category most likely to support socialist policies is the highly educated.

The democratic socialists like to stress that their movement is populist and working class, though their adherents are disproportionately rich and credentialed. It remains to be seen whether this kind of politics can be successful outside of select enclaves in New York City; for now, the DSA remains an elite phenomenon.

---

This Week on Free Media

I’m joined by Amber Duke to discuss Europeans loving America during their World Cup trips, Joy Reid’s lack of patriotism, and more.

You can also catch a special Jason Russell episode of Freed Up. (Christian Britschgi will be back next week.)

---

Worth Watching

I know I’ve talked about it a bunch already, but I just cannot get Backrooms out of my brain. I think I might go to the theater and see it a second time, which is something I almost never do.

In case you somehow missed this discussion, Backrooms is a debut horror film from Kane Parsons about a man who discovers a labyrinth of secret rooms and hallways that go on forever, becoming weirder and weirder the deeper he goes. Much of the movie is in a “found footage” shaky camera style (which I like), and the concept comes from a YouTube series that Parsons made as a teenager (he’s only 20 years old now). The idea is based on old internet posts about abandoned shopping malls and storage facilities—overlooked, “liminal” spaces.

What’s so brilliant about the film is that the dialogue is very sparse, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps and impart meaning to what we’re witnessing. I read the film as a cautionary tale about AI’s shortcomings; the backrooms, and the monsters that inhabit them, are cheap imitations of reality. The Wall Street Journal‘s Jack Butler saw it as a lamentation for the lost pre-smartphone era of our youth, when it was more common for teenagers to go out and explore the world.

When I saw the film, I thought of Crystal City, a neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, with a sprawling underground mall. I lived there in 2010, during my internship at Reason. Since I had three roommates and little privacy back in those immediate post-college days, I would often explore the mall at night—it connected to the metro, so it was open all hours—and make phone calls. At the time, there was a monster down there, too: If you took a wrong turn, you would accidentally run into an incredibly freaky life-sized Ronald McDonald statue. That McDonald’s, which was entirely underground and did not connect to the outside at all, closed in 2013.

What I’m saying is, I have been to the backrooms.

The post Democratic Socialism Remains an Elite Phenomenon appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/HaLw9cv
via IFTTT

Starting in July, Hawaii will begin earnestly enforcing some of the strictest hemp regulations in the country. One dispensary owner is suing to stop it.

Lance Alyas, a Hawaii resident who owns four hemp dispensaries, alleges that the state’s hemp laws violate “federal constitutional and statutory law, including the Supremacy Clause, the Dormant Commerce Clause, and the Due Process Clause.” Alyas tells Reason he’s the victim of “selective regulation” by state officials who favor the medical marijuana industry over hemp. 

Under Hawaii’s Act 269—passed in July 2025 and effective January 2026—all retailers and distributors of manufactured hemp products, including online and out-of-state sellers, must register their business with the state. The bill also tasks Hawaii’s Health Department and its Office of Medical Cannabis Control and Regulation with enforcing existing regulations for hemp businesses, including registration and product compliance.

State officials gave business owners until July 1 to come into compliance with regulations, after which they would be subject to penalties, including fines of up to $10,000 for “each separate offense.” The Health Department, the attorney general, and law enforcement will also be empowered to seize and destroy any prohibited product found. 

Hemp and marijuana are the same species of plant. The 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp nationwide, drew the line for marijuana at 0.3 percent delta-9 THC—the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis—with anything below counting as legal hemp, including “all derivatives, extracts, [and] cannabinoids,” containing less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC. The bill also legalized hemp-derived products containing delta-8 THC, an isomer with similar effects to delta-9 THC.

Alyas argues that federal statutes preempt Hawaii’s hemp laws. But the 2018 Farm Bill specifically states that nothing in its text “preempts or limits” state regulation of hemp production so long as the regulations are consistent with the law and do not interfere with interstate commerce.

Geraldo Scatena, an attorney who has practiced cannabis and marijuana law in Hawaii, tells Reason the state has the “right” to regulate hemp so long as it stays within the bounds of the Constitution. As to Alyas’ claims of selective enforcement, Scatena says there’s “no statute of limitations” on Hawaii’s hemp laws, meaning the state is free to enforce them at its discretion.

Still, Alyas hopes to find favor with the Hawaii District Court, though it seems unlikely he’ll prevail. Two federal courts, the 4th and 8th Circuit Courts, have already concluded that the Farm Bill did not preempt state laws restricting the sale of hemp products. The most favorable ruling has come from the 9th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Hawaii, in AK Futures LLC v. Boyd Street Distro (2022), when it found that hemp-derived delta-8 THC fit within the legal definition of hemp so long as it contained less than 0.3 percent of delta-9 THC. But even that appears to offer little hope; the 9th Circuit’s ruling only dealt with the legal definition of hemp, not the products sold.

After the Farm Bill passed, Hawaii spent the next several years narrowing its definition of hemp, using the authority afforded it in the legislation.

In 2021, Hawaii’s Department of Health implemented expansive new rules that prohibited the sale of any oral hemp products not in pill, powder, or liquid form—including gummies—and any cannabinoid-infused food and beverages, vapes, hemp flowers, and cigarettes. In 2022, the state banned the use of delta-8 and delta-10 THC as ingredients in hemp products.

In 2024, roughly a year before Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R–Ky.) amendment banning the sale of any “hemp-derived cannabinoid product” with more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC passed, Hawaii broadened its definition of total THC to include delta-8 THC as part of the equation, sweeping in many of the same hemp products McConnell hoped to ban. 

The stringent regulations on hemp are in part due to lobbying efforts from Hawaii’s medical marijuana industry, which views businesses like Alyas’ as illegitimate competitors. Hawaii was the first state to legalize medical marijuana through its state Legislature in 2000, but it caps the number of licensed dispensaries at eight. Alyas has tried to get a medical marijuana license, but he says the state’s cap on dispensaries makes that “impossible.” 

Alyas tells Reason he knows state law bans the majority of his products. Still, they are “so similar” to those of the medical marijuana retailers that he finds the difference negligible.

Despite the restrictions, Alyas has built his hemp business into the No. 1 cannabis dispensary in the state, based on Google reviews. However, it appears Hawaii’s medical marijuana industry isn’t eager to entertain the competition. In emails to the Health Department, Karlyn Laulusa, CEO of Noa Botanicals—one of the eight dispensaries licensed to operate in the state—asks state officials to intervene and enforce the law against “illegal dispensaries” that are “out of compliance.”

So far, Alyas has been unable to substantiate his core claims in court. In December, he voluntarily filed a motion to dismiss his lawsuit, and Judge Jill Otake granted it without prejudice. She also noted that Alyas and his legal team had already “taken numerous bites at this apple” and wasted the court and defense counsel’s time in the process, warning them that the court would take any prior mistakes in the case into account in future decisions. 

The state’s attorney general’s office has framed the dismissal as a win, telling Reason in an email that the department “prevailed in the prior case” and has now filed a motion to dismiss Alyas’ follow-up suit for a preliminary injunction. The court will consider Alyas’ suit for a preliminary injunction to stop enforcement of state laws against his businesses, as well as the state’s motion to dismiss, on July 2.

The dismissal may be a win for the state’s eight legal dispensaries, but not for its consumers, who overwhelmingly turn to the black market for more affordable products. Alyas’ products may not be popular with his competitors or their defenders in the state government, but Hawaii’s residents seem to have made their choice. The least regulators could do is respect it.

The post Lawsuit Argues Hawaii's Harsh New Hemp Regulations Will Stifle Competition appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/sCDbrqO
via IFTTT

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 Thursday in favor of the Trump administration’s decision to strip Haitian and Syrian nationals of a legal protection that had allowed them to lawfully remain in the United States because it was too risky for them to be deported to their home countries.

The case is Mullin v. Doe. It centers on the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, in which executive branch officials are authorized to designate qualifying countries based on the existence of certain conditions that make those countries especially dangerous, such as military conflicts or natural disasters. Once designated, foreign nationals from such countries may remain lawfully in the United States without fear of deportation since the U.S. government has determined that it would be too dangerous for them to return.

Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court affirms the Trump administration’s authority to end TPS protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals.

Under the TPS statute, “there is no judicial review of any determination…with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.” According to the majority opinion of Justice Samuel Alito, that language was sufficient to dispose of most of the case, as it “squarely bars all of respondents’ non-constitutional claims.”

Turning then to the constitutional claims, Alito dismissed them as well. “Citing statements made by President Trump and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem,” Alito wrote, “one set of respondents advances an equal protection claim that Haiti’s TPS designation was terminated because of the racial makeup of that country’s population.” But that argument failed, according to Alito, because, “ironically, one of respondents’ other arguments undermines the equal protection claim by offering a strong, race-neutral explanation for Haiti’s termination: namely, that the current administration, which has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, maintained that the TPS statute actually does allow “judicial review of whether the Secretary adhered to the procedures it mandates—which is what the plaintiffs dispute here.” And Kagan likewise rejected the majority’s claim that race likely did not motivate the government’s actions. “The evidence [the Haitian plaintiffs] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected,” Kagan wrote, “that the majority declines to put them in print.”

The upshot of this decision is that hundreds of thousands of people who have been residing lawfully in the United States have now lost a key legal protection against deportation while the executive’s control over the immigration system has been strengthened.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Mullin v. Doe is available here.

The post Supreme Court Lets Trump End Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian Nationals Residing in U.S. appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/oTB0I5u
via IFTTT

A 6–3 conservative majority of the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the U.S. government can turn away asylum seekers who arrive at the border without processing their claims.

The case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, was one of the closely watched immigration cases of the current Supreme Court term. It concerned whether an alien who is stopped on the Mexican side of the U.S.–Mexico border “arrives in the United States” under the meaning of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which states that an alien “who arrives in the United States …may apply for asylum” and be inspected.

The decision reverses and remands a ruling last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which held that the law “encompasses those who encounter officials at the border, whichever side of the border they are standing on.”

However, writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the ordinary, commonly understood definition of “arrives in” meant that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had no obligation to inspect asylum seekers until they set foot in the country.

“The running back does not arrive in the end zone (and six points do not go up on the scoreboard) when he is tackled at the 1-yard line by the defense,” Alito wrote. “The guest does not arrive in the house when the homeowner locks the door right before the guest tries to open it. The army does not arrive in the city when the city’s defenders repel the attack outside city limits. And the letter does not arrive in the mailbox when a dog assaults the carrier a step away from the mailbox. A person arrives in a destination only when he enters it, and that conclusion does not change because someone or something blocks entry. A person arrives in the United States, then, only when he enters it.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the Court’s other two liberal Justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the majority’s “fixation” on the word “in” had led it to ignore the legislative history and context that suggested that the INA was clearly intended to include noncitizens in the process of arriving. To hold otherwise would give the government free license to avoid its statutory obligations altogether.

“It does not make sense to say an asylum seeker’s arrival depends on whether she has taken a step across the border or her foot has not yet landed, or whether her hand is outstretched across the threshold or is still by her side; she is arriving in the United States for purposes of seeking admission,” Sotomayor wrote.

The case was precipitated by the surge in asylum seekers in 2016. In response to the wave, the U.S. government began a policy of “metering” how many asylum seekers it would process at a time, allowing agents to turn some back at the border.

In 2017, the immigrant rights organization Al Otro Lado and 13 asylum seekers sued the U.S. government, claiming that the INA requires CBP to process asylum applications and inspect aliens who reach the Mexican side of the U.S.–Mexico border. In addition, Al Otro Lado alleged that the “metering” was not based on actual capacity problems; the government turned away asylum seekers even at uncrowded ports of entry.

The Biden administration rescinded the turnback policy. The Trump administration has not restarted it, but argued it should have the power to do so if necessary. The Trump administration argued in its briefs to the Supreme Court that the ordinary meaning of “arrives in” should guide the Court.

“An alien on the Mexican side of the border may be ‘close to the United States,'” the government argued in its brief seeking review, “and may even have ‘arrived at the United States border,’ but he has not ‘arrived in the United States.'”

The case attracted a wide range of amicus briefs in support of Al Otro Lado’s position from civil and human rights groups, as well as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), all of which argued that reversal would inflict life-threatening harm on vulnerable asylum seekers fleeing persecution.

The USSCB wrote that the turnback policy “was devastating to asylum seekers while it was in place, and giving the government free rein to implement it again would be catastrophic.”

“USCCB writes to underscore that the flaws in the turnback policy run much deeper than plain text,” the bishops wrote. “The policy violates the obligation to care for refugees—a fundamental legal and moral principle that runs through nearly two millennia of Catholic faith, an international humanitarian consensus, and this Nation’s history.”

The post Supreme Court Slams the Door on Asylum Seekers at the Border appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/AFzaJ7y
via IFTTT

After the Supreme Court upheld the right to bear arms in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, several states made it easier to obtain carry permits but much harder to use them. Even as they eliminated requirements that applicants demonstrate a “special need” to carry guns in public for self-defense, they banned firearms from long lists of “sensitive” locations. On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected a variation on that theme: Hawaii’s default rule against guns on private property open to the public.

After a federal judge in Hawaii enjoined enforcement of that rule in 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit overturned her order, deeming the law consistent with the Second Amendment. Not so, the Supreme Court says in Wolford v. Lopez.

“This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives,” Justice Samuel Alito writes in the majority opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. “We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”

For many years, Alito notes, Hawaii “made it almost impossible to obtain a license to carry a firearm.” After Bruen, the state “responded by replacing its old law on carry permits with new laws that achieved a similar result. On a large portion of the land
within the State’s boundaries, possession of a firearm is now flatly prohibited. And the law now before us severely burdens the ability to carry a firearm in much of the rest of
the State by prohibiting firearms on private property without the express and affirmative consent of the property owner.”

That law, Alito says, “departs sharply from the standard common-law rule on access to private property held open to the public. Under that rule, everyone, including those lawfully carrying firearms, may enter unless expressly prohibited from doing so. By contrast, under the new Hawaii law, no one carrying a firearm may enter without the property owner’s express authorization. The effect of this new rule is to impose severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the State’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit.”

Those restrictions make daily life difficult for people attempting to exercise the right recognized in Bruen. “When these permit holders leave home in the morning,” Alito notes, they not only must “take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright.” They also will find that they are “barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats.”

Under Hawaii’s law, armed carry permit holders are allowed to enter such businesses only if the owner has posted “clear and conspicuous signage” allowing guns or granted “unambiguous written or verbal authorization.” But business owners may be reluctant to announce gun-friendly policies “for fear of alienating other customers,” Alito notes. Even if they are happy to welcome customers who are legally carrying concealed handguns, they “may only be willing to consent discreetly to the entry of permit holders who make the effort to inquire.” The requirement that gun carriers obtain such explicit permission before entering businesses vastly complicates their ability to engage in quotidian activities.

Under Bruen, Hawaii was required to justify that burden by showing that it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Toward that end, the state cited 18th-century laws that barred people from carrying guns into “the improved or inclosed lands of any plantation” without the owner’s permission. But as Alito notes, those laws “principally targeted unauthorized hunting,” and “their coverage differed sharply from that of the Hawaii law now before us.”

The laws that Hawaii cited “applied to land where game could be found, not retail establishments that residents of cities and suburbs frequent as part of their daily routines,” Alito writes. “They had little if any impact on the Second Amendment’s central objective: protecting the fundamental right to self-defense. And their obvious aim was to prevent the distinctive harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.”

These purported analogs are not “relevantly similar” to Hawaii’s law, Alito says. Even if “it was accepted that prohibiting unauthorized hunting on private land was consistent with the Second Amendment right,” he says, it does not follow that “it is also consistent with that right to ban a person who is lawfully carrying a concealed handgun for self-defense from entering a gas station, coffee shop, grocery store, or other private property open to the public without express and unambiguous consent.”

Hawaii also cited an 1865 Louisiana statute that made it illegal to “carry fire-arms on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor, other than in lawful discharge of a civil or military order.” That law, Alito notes, was one example of the “Black Codes” that Southern states enacted between the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, which aimed to “perpetuate the subjugation” of newly emancipated slaves. “The statute Hawaii cites was part of Louisiana’s Black Code,” Alito writes, and “it provided a tool for disarming blacks and thus leaving them defenseless against attacks.”

During oral argument in Wolford last January, Gorsuch noted that Hawaii was relying “heavily” on the Louisiana law, which it claimed was enough evidence on its own to meet the Bruen test. He described that as “quite an astonishing claim,” expressing dismay that “a lot of people” who support gun control “like to cite the Black Codes,” which ordinarily would be like “garlic in front of a vampire” to them.

Even leaving aside “this provision’s pedigree,” Alito writes, “it has no probative value for present purposes. As we have said, in considering the probative value of a historical analogue, we must consider whether it was widespread, well-known, and widely accepted. Because this statute was neither widespread nor widely accepted, it carries no weight.”

Even more implausibly, Hawaii claimed its own history of strict gun regulation should count as justification for the law at issue in Wolford. Contrary to that argument, “the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” Alito writes. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple…or the Windy City.” Those are references to New York’s severe restrictions on carrying handguns, which the Court overturned in Bruen, and the local handgun ban that it rejected in the 2010 case McDonald v. Chicago.

No matter what the Hawaii Supreme Court might think, the Second Amendment “applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8% of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59%),” Alito says. “Merely local attitudes can neither shrink nor inflate the meaning of fundamental Bill of Rights guarantees that apply to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Hawaii’s law “violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” Alito concludes. “Therefore, the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

In a concurring opinion, Barrett focuses on Hawaii’s claim that the case is about property rights rather than the Second Amendment. Here is how she summarizes that argument: “No one has the right to enter private property—let alone to bring firearms onto it—without the owner’s consent. Whether consent can be implied or must be express depends on local custom and property rules, which States have always had authority to modify. By requiring express consent, Hawaii has simply modified a default rule of property law. And because the [Second Amendment] did not require any particular default rule, Hawaii’s law does not even implicate the Second Amendment.”

Two of the dissenters, Justices Kentanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, found that argument persuasive. But as Barrett notes, it glosses over the significance of Hawaii’s law. “No one doubts that all property owners in Hawaii could bar the carry of arms on their respective premises, if they wanted to,” she writes. “But the Second Amendment does not apply to private parties. It does apply to the States. And when a State enacts a property law that regulates arms-bearing conduct, that law implicates the Second Amendment.”

Barrett notes the troubling implications of Hawaii’s logic: “What if a State made it a crime to wear religious head garb (say, a hijab) onto private property open to the public without obtaining express authorization? Could that statute evade constitutional scrutiny? On Hawaii and the principal dissent’s logic, the answer is apparently yes: No one has the right to enter another’s property without permission, and the State has merely adjusted the default to require permission to be clear. But that is plainly wrong. Because the law regulates religious and expressive conduct, its enactment is state action that triggers First Amendment scrutiny.”

The same goes for Hawaii’s law, Barrett says: “Property laws, no less than other laws, are subject to constitutional limits. So when a property law ‘restrict[s]’ the bearing of arms, the State must prove that the law abides by the limits of the Second Amendment.”

This decision means that similar rules adopted by California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York are likewise unconstitutional. It also suggests that location-specific gun bans enacted by those states may be inconsistent with the Second Amendment when they cover a lot of territory.

“New York adopted [its] law first, and the governor of New York said the express reason they were doing that was to undermine the Bruen opinion,” Alan Beck, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs in Wolford, told the Supreme Court during oral argument. California’s governor likewise presented that state’s new gun restrictions as a response to the Supreme Court’s “very bad ruling.” Given such statements, Beck said, “there’s a clear body of evidence here that this was done to undermine Bruen and to undermine the Second Amendment right.”

The post SCOTUS Overturns Hawaii's Default Rule Against Guns on Private Property Open to the Public appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/j5yD0Gf
via IFTTT

On June 18, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Hemani. The case was 9-0, though was fragmented. Justice Thomas concurred, finding that possession statute exceeded Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause. Justices Jackson and Sotomayor repeated their view that Bruen was wrongly decided. And Justices Alito and Kagan concurred in judgment, though I still am not entirely sure what they disagreed with the majority about.

Today, the Supreme Court decided Wolford v. Lopez. There was a time when we had to wait more than a decade for the Supreme Court to decide a Second Amendment case. This year, we get two victories in the span of a week! Here, the Court split 6-3, finding that Hawaii’s “vampire” law violates the Second Amendment.

Justice Alito, who did not join Hemani, wrote the majority opinion in Wolford. Part I of Alito’s opinion offers an extremely thorough, nine-page discussion of Heller, McDonald, Bruen, and Rahimi. This is a perfect capsule summary to teach students about how the doctrine has developed since 2008. But something very significant is missing: Hemani. Indeed, Justice Alito writes that Rahimi was “our most recent Second Amendment.” What about Hemani, decided seven days ago? Alito does not cite Hemani at all. But Justice Barrett’s concurrence and Justice Jackson’s dissent does cite Hemani.

What’s even stranger is the sequencing. Justice Alito’s opinion should have been released first, as it laid out all of the Second Amendment doctrine, and then Justice Gorsuch’s opinion could have come out second, and cited back to Alito. But Hemani came out first.

Something feels off here. Maybe Wolford was supposed to come out first, but the Chief wanted to force out the 9-0 Hemani to send a signal of bipartisanship, so the ordering was flipped? I don’t like that theory as there were no other blockbusters last Friday. I don’t think the majority opinion flipped in Hemani. The only person who didn’t write from that sitting was Justice Thomas, and his view on the Commerce Clause was never going to command a majority.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something happened with Hemani and Wolford.

The post Something Feels Off About <i>Hemani</i> and <i>Wolford</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3WX1x2P
via IFTTT

Today the Trump Administration completed its clean sweep of the non-birthright-citizenship immigration cases at the Supreme Court. Some of these decisions are quite significant. This highlights that the current Court is quite sympathetic to aggressive executive branch action in the immigration sphere–aggressive action often expressly authorized by Congress–even if it is likely to reject the Administration’s unlawful attempt to unilaterally rewrite the law of citizenship.

The first immigration decision today was Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, in which the Court held, 6-3 in an opinion by Justice Alito, that an alien seeking to enter the United States from Mexico does not “arrive in the United States” unless and until the alien actually enters the country. This matters because an alien cannot apply for asylum until arriving in the country, and thus allows the federal government to turn away potential asylum applicants before they may seek asylum.

The second immigration decision today was Mullin v. Doe, in which the Court held, again 6-3 in an opinion by Justice Alito, that the statute authorizing “Temporary Protected Status” bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims challenging the revision or rescission of such status. Finding the sole constitutional claim raise in the litigation unlikely to succeed, the Court vacated the district court order postponing the termination of temporary protected status for aliens from Syria and Haiti pending legal challenges to the termination.

On Tuesday, the Court decided Blanche v. Lau, another 6-3 decision (this one by Justice Thomas) concluding that the Immigration and Naturalization Act does not require a border officer to have “clear and convincing evidence” that a lawful permanent resident has committed a crime of moral turpitude before deeming that individual an “applicant for admission” when re-entering the country. Thus a lawful permanent resident who has committed such a crime, but has not yet been convicted, can be required to reapply for admission after temporary foreign travel. (In this case, Lau had been charged with trademark counterfeiting but was still awaiting trial.)

Not all of the Trump Administration’s immigration victories were 6-3, however. Earlier this spring the Administration prevailed in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Jackson. Here the Court concluded that the INA requires application of the fairly deferential substantial-evidence standard to the government’s conclusion as to whether a given set of undisputed facts rises to the level of “persecution” for asylum applicants. (The applicants had advocated for de novo review.)

The Court also sided with the Trump Administration in its per curiam opinion in Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, rejecting the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s attempt to bypass the channeling requirements of the Civil Service Reform Act (based upon issues the parties had not even raised).

Taken together, these opinions show that the current Court is quite willing to embrace broad assertions of executive power over immigration policy, particularly given the expansiveness with which Congress has delegated such authority. It also shows the Court interpreting statutes narrowly, and without regard for broader policy considerations–considerations a majority of the justices believe are for Congress to resolve.

This string of immigration law victories is unlikely to extend to the birthright citizenship case, which should be decided next week. In that case, the Trump Administration is attempting to rewrite the law of citizenship unilaterally. Even if one is sympathetic to the Administration’s constitutional argument (and I am not), it is hard to argue that the EO is consistent with the longstanding interpretation of the applicable federal statute.

While Section 1401 echoes the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, it should be interpreted in line with the public understanding of those words at the time it was adopted (Cf. Justice Alito’s Bostock dissent), and such an interpretation is wholly incompatible with that offered by the Trump Administration. Thus even if one thinks the conventional interpretation of the citizenship clause is mistaken, Section 1401 would control. So, just as the Court has hewed closely to what Congress has authorized in the immigration cases already decided this term, it should reject the Administration’s birthright citizenship arguments on statutory grounds.

The post Trump Administration Sweeps All of the (Other) Immigration Cases at SCOTUS appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/NwYzplH
via IFTTT