Tag: in-the-news

Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is a big fan of Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. So am I! It’s one of the few things Warren and I have in common (other than support for marijuana legalization, a love of golden retrievers, and both having been law professors). Still, I have several bones to pick with this recent article Warren wrote in praise of the Dragon Queen. Dany is a lot more problematic than Warren suggests—sometimes in ways that reveal the shortcomings of Warren’s own worldview.

Before reading further, you should know the rest of this post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones. Yes, SPOILERS. Those who dare complain about the spoilers despite being duly warned will suffer a dire fate similar to that of the Dragon Queen’s enemies: Dracarys!

Back to Warren and Daenerys:

Warren writes that Daenerys “doesn’t want to be a slave owner or a dictator — and she definitely doesn’t want to become her murderous father.” One of these things is not like the others. It’s too her credit that Daenerys opposes slavery, and has in fact freed many thousands of slaves during her time raising any army on the continent Essos. She isn’t called the Breaker of Chains for nothing.  She also has a genuine desire to avoid repeating the horrific errors of her father,  “Mad King” Aerys.

But Daenerys pretty clearly does want to be a “dictator.”As she herself notes in the most recent episode of the final season of Game of Thrones, the main goal of her life has been to retake the Iron Throne of Westeros. She doesn’t seem to have any objection to the vast scope of powers of monarch’s powers (it’s an absolute monarchy), nor does she believe that the legitimacy of her claim to the throne is dependent on the will of the people. To the contrary, she’s more than willing to use heavyhanded coercion to force resisters to “bend the knee.” She also rules as a despot during her time governing the territories she conquers in Essos (though somewhat less so in the books by George R.R. Martin than in the HBO show based on them).

Perhaps Daenerys cannot be blamed too much for this. Almost everyone in Westeros favors authoritarianism of one kind or another. The cities of Essos are ruled by narrow oligarchies. But Dany is not an exception to the dominant worldview of her society in this respect. Moreover, she clearly does have a strong love of power, even though she is often able to impose some restraint on the selfish impulses that stem from it.

Warren is right to point out that Dany says she wants to “break the wheel” rather than just continue the same old struggle for power that has devastated Westerosi society. But it’s also true she seems to have no notion that doing so requires institutional change, not merely replacing a bad monarch with a good one (preferably herself). I discuss this flaw in her thinking (another she shares with nearly all the other characters on the show) here:

Unlike most of the other rulers we see in the series, Daenerys has at least some genuine interest in improving the lot of ordinary people…

Nonetheless, it is not clear whether Daenerys has any plan to prevent future oppression and injustice other than to replace the current set of evil rulers with a better one: herself. The idea of “breaking the wheel” implies systemic institutional reform, not just replacing the person who has the dubious honor of planting his or her rear end on the Iron Throne in King’s Landing. If Daenerys has any such reforms in mind, it is hard to say what they are.

Daenerys most recently restated her desire to break the wheel in episode 4 of season 7, when she announced it to a group of captured enemy soldiers. Immediately afterwards, she proceeded to execute two of the prisoners, Lord Randyll Tarly and his son Dickon, because they refused to swear allegiance to her. Daenerys orders one of her dragons to burn them to death.

Lord Tarly is a far from sympathetic character, one who has committed significant injustices…. Nonetheless, this is an example of Daenerys ordering a brutal execution of prisoners without any due process, primarily because they refused to “bend the knee” to her…. Life and death are still decided by the word of the king or queen, with no institutional safeguard against the abuse of such arbitrary power.

Daenerys’ indifference to the need for institutional constraints on government power is, to a great degree, shared by Elizabeth Warren herself.  The latter advocates policies that would massively expand government power  over the economy and society, and over online speech, while imposing few if any new institutional constraints.

Warren’s shortcomings in this respect are much less excusable than Daenerys’. Unlike the Dragon Queen, Warren has the benefit of centuries of political and economic theory outlining the need to impose limits on government power and explaining how it can be done.

Warren praises Daenerys’ recognition of the threat to humanity from the zombie-like White Walkers and willingness to prioritize it over her personal goal of taking the Iron Throne. The praise is partly justified.  But in the most recent episode of GOT, Dany says she made this decision out of love for Jon Snow, the King of the North, who urges her to deal with the Night Walkers first. Making this sacrifice out of love for her new boyfriend is not quite the same thing as doing it out of a sense of duty to the people of Westeros (though, in fairness, the latter is probably not completely absent). One wonders whether Dany would have made the same decision if she was not attracted to Jon.

Finally, Warren is also right to note that Dany is a much better person, with more admirable motives, than Cersei Lannister, the current occupant of the Iron Throne. But that is damning with faint praise. It is a little like saying Warren herself deserves credit for being a better person than Donald Trump.  She is. But Trump and Cersei are ridiculously low standards of comparison.

Despite her flaws, I still think that Dany is probably the least bad plausible contender for the Iron Throne (assuming the institution of the monarchy continues). Jon Snow, the understandable favorite of many fans,  is—to my mind—disqualified by his egregious incompetence as a political and military leader. In that sense, Warren is right to cheer Daenerys’ bid for the throne. But, ultimately, we would do better to place our faith in institutional constraints on government power rather than in seemingly heroic leaders—or in politicians who promise to solve all our problems if only we bend the knee.

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President Donald Trump’s tariffs on washing machines resulted in consumers paying an extra 12 percent, on average, to buy a new dryer last year, new data show.

Yes, you read that correctly. Tariffs on imported washing machines ended up increasing not only the retail price of washing machines but dryers too—despite the fact that dryers were not subject to the new import taxes imposed by the Trump administration in January 2018. Research from a trio of economists at the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve show that retailers made the decision to hike the price of both washing machines and dryers (since they are frequently bought together) after the tariffs took effect.

All told, those tariffs raised about $82 million for the U.S. Treasury but ended up increasing costs for consumers by about $1.2 billion during 2018 economists Aaron Flaaen, Ali Hortacsu, and Felix Tintelnot conclude. Although the trade policy did cause some manufacturers to shift production from overseas to the United States in an effort to avoid the new tariffs, the 1,800 jobs created by Trump’s washing machine tariffs cost consumers an estimated $820,000 per job.

The new working paper provides yet more evidence that consumers, not Chinese-based companies as the president has often claimed, are paying the costs of tariffs. The increase in retail prices for dryers also demonstrates how some businesses have taken advantage of the Trump administration’s trade policy to soak consumers a second time.

“Given that many consumers buy these goods in a bundle, the price increases were partially hidden by raising the price of dryers,” Tintelnot told The New York Times. “That’s very clearly visible.”

Indeed, the price of both washers and dryers spiked in the months after the Trump administration tariffs took effect, ending what had been a years-long decline in retail prices for both appliances.

Similarly, American washing machine manufacturers—which are not subject to tariffs, obviously—decided to hike their prices after the tariffs increased prices on foreign-made washers, the economists found.

“Companies that largely sell imported washers, like Samsung and LG, raised prices to compensate for the tariff costs they had to pay. But domestic manufacturers, like Whirlpool, increased prices, too, largely because they could,” writes the Times‘ Jim Tankersley. “There aren’t a lot of upstart domestic producers of laundry equipment that could undercut Whirlpool on price if the company decided to capture more profits by raising prices at the same time its competitors were forced to do so.”

When the Trump administration imposed tariffs on imported steel last year, the same thing happened: American companies raised their own prices. There are other similarities too. For example, a December 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a union-backed think tank, found that Trump’s aluminum tariffs had created about 300 jobs at American aluminum manufacturers—at a cost of about $2.3 million each.

The numbers change but the bottom line remains the same: Tariffs are taking consumers to the cleaners, and promised benefits are getting washed away by the costs.

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“Political risk” used to be something American investors worried about in connection with foreign countries. It had to do with assessing the likelihood that a dictator would seize power and decide to nationalize the oil industry or the banks. Or that a war would break out and close shipping lanes.

Increasingly, though—and especially headed into the 2020 presidential election—political risk is looming over the U.S. domestic economy and financial markets.

I’m not talking about the risk of President Trump starting a trade war with China, Canada, Mexico, or Europe, though investors have reacted to that threat at times, too.

The bigger concern is the chance that a Democrat will spook the stock markets by appearing likely to defeat President Trump. In a worst-case scenario for Trump, this can even be a self-fulfilling prophecy: the stock market declines in anticipation of his potentially losing, and the decline then undercuts one of Trump’s best re-election selling points, the strong economy.

A big part of the story is taxes. An underappreciated political fact of the past 30 years in America is that every president has changed the tax rates. In the three decades between 1988 and 2018 America had six presidents. The best of them, Ronald Reagan, left office with the top individual income tax rate at the lowest level: 28 percetnt. George H.W. Bush raised it to 31 percent. Bill Clinton raised it to 39.6 percent. George W. Bush lowered it to 35 percent. Barack Obama raised it back to 39.6 percent. Donald Trump lowered it to 37 percent.

Those top marginal rates don’t tell the whole tax story. Clinton and congressional Republicans cut the capital gains tax to 20 percent from 28 percent. George W. Bush cut taxes on dividends and long-term capital gains to 15 percent. And Trump cut the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent.

For investors, though, a U.S. tax increase has a similar effect to a third-world dictator seizing a previously profitable private enterprise. It amounts to the government taking property away from the people who had previously thought they owned it. That does not inspire confidence. Instead, it erodes it.

Ideally, property rights are fixed and based on a predictable rule of law. The oscillating tax rates instead feed the perception that how much of what you earn the government will allow you to keep is dependent on which political party happens to occupy the White House.

One needn’t be an expert soothsayer to predict that if a Democrat defeats Trump in the 2020 presidential election, taxes will increase. Joe Biden was vice president during the Obama tax increases. Bernie Sanders is a self-described socialist who ran in 2016 with a plan to raise the top federal individual income tax rate to 54.2 percent and to tax dividends and capital gains as ordinary income. Pete Buttigieg has said “Tax cuts for the wealthiest…some of ’em are gonna have to be reversed.” Elizabeth Warren has proposed raising taxes by $2.75 trillion over ten years with a new “wealth tax.”

Beyond the overall threat posed by tax increases, the Democrats also could endanger specific sectors of the economy.

A “green new deal” or similar efforts to combat climate change by rapidly changing American energy policy might be good for electric car companies, solar-panel installers, and wind-turbine technicians, but trouble if you own an oil or gas pipeline, refinery, or drilling company.

Medicare-for-all or similar pushes for increased government involvement in health care could hurt profits of health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. Axios reports that even Republicans are getting ready to gang up on the drug companies, raising the possibility of a bipartisan deal this year on the issue. The New York Times paraphrased a Goldman Sachs analyst, Stephen Tanal, as saying that “fear of government intervention would probably weigh on health care share prices ‘perhaps until the presidential election itself.'”

Democrats respond to these concerns by citing analyses that the stock market does well in Democratic administrations, or by warning that Republican tax cuts, if “paid for” by borrowing to cover deficits, could eventually precipitate a financial crisis. Some of them also argue that the stock market or the overall economy is driven by business cycles largely unrelated to marginal tax rates.

What the studies about stock market performance during Democratic administrations don’t account for, though, are expectations-based sell-offs that precede those administrations. So, for example, looking at the performance of the stock market during President Obama’s term would ignore the nearly 20 percent plunge that took place after Obama was elected but before he was inaugurated, and it’d give Obama credit for the 6 percent rise between when President Trump was elected and when Trump was inaugurated. Control of Congress matters, too—some of the stock market gains during the Clinton and Obama years were racked up when Republicans in Congress put some constraints on Democrats in the White House.

U.S. politics aren’t the only factor affecting stock prices. Monetary policy and global trends matter, too. Long-term savers think about periods longer than a presidential term. If Trump is re-elected, the tax plans of Sanders and Warren will be irrelevant. But until Election Day, investors who entirely ignore U.S. political risk do so at their own peril.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of JFK, Conservative.

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Now that the smoke has cleared from the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump’s suspected (and now-disregarded) criminal conspiracy with Russia and his potential obstruction of the investigation thereof, there are many questions that still remain, including: Should we be alarmed by the role that counterterrorism-investigation leaks played in kickstarting this investigation? Are there specific trims to government power that this whole episode suggests, and if so why aren’t they being discussed? Is it useful to have conversations about having conversations about conversations?

All of these riddles and more are hotly debated on this week’s Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, betwixt Katherine Mangu-Ward,  Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. The episode also features a name-that-Democratic-candidate pop quiz, a quick round of Biden-kicking, and—yes, nerds (sigh)—some discussion of that television show from last night.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Lies Rise’ by Cullah is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Relevant links from the show:

“What’s Really in the Mueller Report,” by Scott Shackford

“Trump May Not Be Guilty of Obstruction, but He Is Guilty of Arrogant Stupidity,” by Jacob Sullum

“Trump May Not Have Obstructed the Mueller Investigation, but It Sure Looks Like He Tried,” by Peter Suderman

“In Defense of Trump Obstructing Justice (When There’s No Underlying Crime),” by Nick Gillespie

“If Either Party Cared About Limiting Executive Power, Trump’s Presidency Would Be Toast,” by Eric Boehm

“Standing on the Shoulders of Tyrants,” by Gene Healy

“The CBO Was Created to Provide a Check on Executive Power,” by Peter Suderman

“Joe Biden Is Probably Running for President. He’s Got a Lot of Baggage.” by Christian Britschgi

“Joe Biden Says He Didn’t Do Anything Wrong, Will Do Better From Now On,” by Christian Britschgi

“Hair-Sniffer Joe Biden Should Apologize for His Whole Career,” by Matt Welch

“All the Top Democrats Running for President Favor Legalizing Marijuana,” by Matt Welch

“Elizabeth Warren Wants You To Know She Totally Loves Game of Thrones. Especially Daenerys. Yay, Women!” by Robby Soave

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[I’m continuing to serialize my forthcoming Penn Law Review article on Anti-Libel Injunctions.]

A. The Hybrid Preliminary Injunction

If I am right that the hybrid permanent injunction is constitutional—because it gives defendants all the First Amendment protections offered by valid criminal libel laws, and does so with less of a chilling effect on nonlibelous speech—then hybrid preliminary injunctions should be constitutional, too. They would adequately protect defendants, while giving plaintiffs the opportunity to deter libels starting shortly after they file a lawsuit, rather than having to wait until after the lawsuit is adjudicated.

Let us return to Paula and Don, and imagine that Paula gets a preliminary injunction. Shortly after she files her lawsuit, a judge concludes that she is likely to succeed on the merits: Don’s statement that Paula cheated him is likely true.

This is just a tentative decision, the judge acknowledges, based on limited time for briefing and likely no discovery. But that’s what the judge thinks, so the judge issues an injunction: “Don shall not libelously state that Paula cheated him”; and, as with the hybrid permanent injunction, the injunction provides that any criminal contempt trial for violating it shall be before a jury,

Like the hybrid permanent injunction, the hybrid preliminary injunction would provide all the procedural protections offered by criminal libel law: Don can’t be convicted of criminal contempt unless the criminal jury finds, beyond a reasonable doubt, that his post-injunction statements about Paula are indeed libelous; and Don would be entitled to a court-appointed defense lawyer to argue that the statements weren’t libelous. They thus lack the primary defect of specific preliminary injunctions—the punishment of speech without a prior finding on the merits that the speech is actually constitutionally unprotected.

Also like with the hybrid permanent injunction, Don would also be exposed to criminal punishment only for repeating specific statements. Unlike with the hybrid permanent injunction, those would be statements that the judge found libelous based on the abbreviated preliminary injunction process rather than after a full trial. But despite that, the hybrid preliminary injunction would still have less of a chilling effect than a catchall injunction or than a criminal libel law, which would put Don in jeopardy as to any libelous statements.

But unlike with the hybrid permanent injunction, the hybrid preliminary injunctions opens the door to criminal punishment—and therefore helps deter future libels—near the start of the lawsuit, rather than years later.

Hybrid preliminary injunctions, like hybrid permanent injunctions, haven’t yet been tested in appellate courts, or even issued by trial courts. But I think they would be consistent with the First Amendment, and often a good idea.

Indeed, one recent preliminary injunction does seem to lean in this direction. In 2 Sons Plumbing, LLC v. Herring, 2 Sons claimed that Romare Harring had criticized 2 Sons only while falsely claiming to be a customer (in some places) and a former employee (in others); they sued for, among other things, violating California law that bars such impersonation. The District Court concluded that there was enough to their claim to justify a temporary restraining order. But it crafted the injunction so that any impersonation would still have to be shown at a criminal contempt hearing, rather than treating his preliminary conclusion as binding in such a hearing:

(2) Defendant Romare Herring is barred, prohibited, and restrained from posting reviews of 2 Sons Plumbing, LLC and/or Joe’s Plumbing Co. claiming that Defendant was a customer of such business when Defendant was not actually a customer;

(4) Defendant Romare Herring is barred, prohibited, and restrained from posting on the Internet a webpage claiming to be affiliated with 2 Sons Plumbing, LLC and/or Joe’s Plumbing Co. if Defendant is not affiliated with those businesses.

If it turns out that Herring is indeed affiliated with 2 Sons or Joe’s, and he repeats that statement, the terms of provision (4) wouldn’t make him liable; likewise if he was indeed a customer, and posts reviews of 2 Sons or Joes so stating. The order isn’t as precise as it could be; for instance, the “when” in (2), unlike the “if” in (4), could be read as a statement that the court is conclusively finding that Herring wasn’t actually a customer, rather than a provision that the order applies only under the circumstances (to be found conclusively later) that Herring wasn’t a customer. Moreover, provisions (1) and (3) require the takedown of earlier posts without any such condition. Still, the order, and especially provision (4), points towards the approach that I describe here.

B, The Hybrid Ex Parte Temporary Restraining Order

In principle, even temporary restraining orders—including ones obtained ex parte—could be permissible so long as they only ban libelously repeating certain statements.

Such an order would, as with the hybrid preliminary injunction, punish no more speech than a criminal libel law would, since any criminal contempt punishment would be contingent on the jury finding (after a full trial) that the statements were indeed libelous. By its very terms, it would be limited to constitutionally unprotected speech; and whether any particular statement is unprotected and therefore forbidden would have to be determined at an adversary criminal contempt hearing. [Footnote: This makes such hybrid orders unlike the ex parte order in Carroll v. President & Comm’rs of Princess Anne, 393 U.S. 175 (1968), which by its terms prohibited speech that would generally be constitutionally protected, without an adversarial hearing at which the defendants could respond to the plaintiffs’ arguments that this protection should be lost on the facts of the case.]

But while such hybrid ex parte TROs may be constitutional, they should be avoided. The advantage of hybrid injunctions over catchall injunctions is that they are limited to speech that a judge has concluded is likely false and defamatory. This judicial conclusion doesn’t itself suffice for forbidding the speech outright, since the defendant should have an opportunity to argue his case to a jury (which is the advantage of hybrid injunctions over specific injunctions); but the conclusion is still an important protection for speakers. Any injunction should be entered based on the judge’s hearing both sides’ factual theories, both sides’ legal analyses, and both sides’ analyses of how the injunction should be crafted.

Sometimes, of course, such an adversary presentation is impossible, for instance if the defendants are anonymous and can’t be identified using reasonable pre-injunction discovery, or if they simply refuse to show up. But plaintiffs should be required to at least try to serve defendants and give them an opportunity to be heard before even a hybrid injunction is issued.

[You might also read my earlier posts on the subject,

• Anti-Libel Injunctions and the Criminal Libel Connection
• The First Amendment and Criminal Libel Law
• The First Amendment and the Catchall Permanent Injunction
• The First Amendment and the Specific Preliminary Injunction
• How Specific Anti-Libel Injunctions Underprotect Speech
• The First Amendment and the Hybrid Permanent Injunction
• Restricting Injunctions to Libels on Matters of Private Concern?
• The Limited Role of Mens Rea in Hybrid Anti-Libel Injunctions

Or you can read the whole article, which is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, in PDF.]

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Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday, Rudy Giuliani made some valid points about the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between a Russian lawyer offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and top Trump campaign figures. But as usual, the president’s lawyer overstated his case and spoke out of both sides of his mouth.

Giuliani told CNN’s Jake Tapper “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians” who may have obtained it illegally, although he would have advised against it “just out of [an] excess of caution.” Giuliani is right that there was nothing clearly criminal about the meeting, which figures prominently in the Mueller report. But “nothing wrong” goes too far, especially in light of Trump’s subsequent efforts to disguise the nature of the meeting, which included his son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman. It seems clear that Trump himself thought the meeting would look bad and reinforce the impression that the Russian government helped him win the presidential election.

“There’s no crime,” Giuliani said. “You’re assuming that the giving of information is a campaign contribution. Read the report carefully. The report says we can’t conclude that, because the law is pretty much against that.”

It would be more accurate to say it’s doubtful whether such information would qualify as an illegal foreign campaign contribution. Such fuzziness is a hallmark of campaign finance rules and a strong argument against concluding that Donald Trump Jr. et al. knowingly broke the law by agreeing to the meeting, during which no actual derogatory information about Clinton materialized.

The relevant statutory provision applies broadly to “anything of value.” Under Federal Election Commission regulations, that category includes at least some kinds of information, such as “membership lists” and “mailing lists.” The Mueller report cites cases in which courts have held that “anything of value” and “thing of value,” phrases that appear in other federal statutes dealing with crimes such as bribery and theft of government property, can include intangibles such as “confidential information about a competitive bid” or “law enforcement reports that would reveal the identity of informants.”

Those decisions, the report says, “would support the view that candidate-related opposition research given to a campaign for the purpose of influencing an election could constitute a contribution to which the foreign-source ban could apply. A campaign can be assisted not only by the provision of funds, but also by the provision of derogatory information about an opponent. Political campaigns
frequently conduct and pay for opposition research. A foreign entity that engaged in such research and provided resulting information to a campaign could exert a greater effect on an election, and a greater tendency to ingratiate the donor to the candidate, than a gift of money or tangible things of value.”

At the same time, however, “no judicial decision has treated the voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research or similar information as a thing of value that could amount to a contribution under campaign-finance law.” The report notes that “such an interpretation could have implications beyond the foreign-source ban,” such as limits on campaign contributions by Americans, and “raise First Amendment questions.”

Giuliani noted that Russian hacking of emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee, while illegal, produced accurate, newsworthy information that was widely reported by journalists. “The information that was gleaned and disseminated, every newspaper printed it,” he said. “Why did The Washington Post print the information that came from a foreign source, when they knew it was hacked? Aren’t they just as wrong for doing that as the campaign wanting to use it?”

To the extent that Giuliani is making an argument about ethics, he is on pretty solid ground. As he noted, political campaigns are always eager to obtain information that can be used against the other side, and they have the same First Amendment right to share that information with the public as news outlets do, even if the information was originally obtained illegally. But Giuliani also implied there is something shady about that practice.

Referring to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who on Friday reacted to the Mueller report by saying he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office in the land, including the President,” Giuliani said, “I’d like to take a good look at Romney’s campaign and see if there were any immoral or unethical things done by the people working for him that he didn’t know about. If there weren’t, then it was the only campaign in history, because he’s maybe…holier than the holiest one. There’s no campaign in history that hasn’t done that.” It seems to me Giuliani is conceding too much here, since there is nothing “immoral or unethical” about sharing truthful, relevant information about your opponent, regardless of its provenance, as long as you did not commit a crime (such as stealing emails) to obtain it.

The president’s critics, of course, argue that Trump Jr. et al. did commit a crime when they agreed to the Trump Tower meeting, even if it did not produce the anticipated “dirt.” In that respect, they were situated differently from The Washington Post, which is not a political campaign and therefore is not constrained by the ban on foreign contributions. And the fact that Giuliani says he would have cautioned against the meeting “out of [an] excess of caution” suggests he would have anticipated that legal argument, even if he considered it dubious.

It seems unlikely that the president, who says he was not aware of the meeting when it happened, was well enough informed about campaign finance law to worry about that risk. But when news of the meeting broke in July 2017, Trump tried to obscure the motivation for it. “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign,” Trump Jr. said in the original version of the statement. Trump instructed his communications director, Hope Hicks, to excise any reference to such information from the statement, and the version released to the public said the meeting focused “primarily” on Russia’s suspended foreign adoption program. “The statement did not mention the offer of derogatory information about Clinton,” the Mueller report notes.

Trump’s editing of his son’s statement does not necessarily indicate he understood the potential legal implications of the meeting. More likely, it was part of his efforts to counter the narrative that he managed to defeat Clinton only because he had the Russian government’s help—a claim that, as the Mueller report shows, drove Trump crazy. But it is hard to reconcile Trump’s subterfuge with Giuliani’s claim that “there’s nothing wrong” (as opposed to nothing illegal) “with taking information from Russians.” If so, why try to hide it?

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said Monday he plans to crack down on “the classic glass and steel skyscrapers” because of their energy inefficiencies. While de Blasio does not appear to have plans to impose a blanket ban on glass and steel skyscrapers (i.e. all of them), he does intend to impose burdensome regulations that will hurt many building owners and discourage new construction.

De Blasio was asked on Morning Joe by co-host Joe Scarborough how New York’s “Green New Deal” can “provide a road map” for members of Congress looking to implement policies that will fight climate change. Congressional efforts—led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and others—to pass a Green New Deal made headlines in February, though the measure failed in the Senate last month by a 57–0 vote.

“We’re actually making the Green New Deal come alive here in New York City,” de Blasio told Scarborough. “It’s three very basic ideas. One, the biggest source of emissions in New York City is buildings. We’re putting clear, strong mandates, the first of any major city on the Earth to say to building owners: ‘You gotta clean up your act. You gotta retrofit. You gotta save energy.'”

Building owners will have until 2030 to implement these changes, he added, or else face fines of up to or exceeding $1 million. That’s where the part about the skyscrapers came in. “This mandate is going to ensure that we reduce emissions,” he said.

“We’re going to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers which are incredibly inefficient,” de Blasio said. “If someone wants to build one of those things they can take a whole lot of steps to make it energy efficient, but we’re not going to allow what we used to see in the past.”

.@NYCMayor on the city passing a municipal “Green New Deal”: “We are going to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers, which are incredibly inefficient.” pic.twitter.com/XtYNvMRCt0

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 22, 2019

NYC’s government, de Blasio went on to say, will become completely reliant on renewable energy “in the next five years.”

The mayor’s remarks came four days after the New York City Council approved legislation that imposes new emissions standards on buildings bigger than 25,000 square feet (about the size of a grocery store, according to CNBC). The city, which wants to cut its carbon footprint by 80 percent in the next three decades or so, is hoping that big buildings will lower their carbon emissions 40 percent overall by 2030. Different types of buildings won’t be allowed to exceed various emissions caps. De Blasio planned to sign the legislation on Monday.

About 50,000 buildings will be affected, CNBC reported. Religious structures and hospitals will not have to meet all of the standards, and rent-controlled buildings will have more time to comply. Public buildings and low-income housing will also receive some exemptions.

There’s no question that the legislation will cost building owners a pretty penny—$4 billion in total, Mark Chambers, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, told The New York Times. And with so many buildings receiving exemptions, the costs will be borne by a smaller group of landowners.

“The real estate industry and other stakeholders support the goal of reducing carbon emissions 40 percent by 2030,” Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) President John Banks told Crain’s New York. “The bill that passed today, however, will fall short of achieving the 40-by-30 goal by only including half the city’s building stock.”

Building owners may also be hesitant to lease space to tenants who might use more energy. “The approach taken today will have a negative impact on our ability to attract and retain a broad range of industries, including technology, media, finance, and life sciences,” Banks told Crain’s New York.

“There’s a clear business case to be made that having a storage facility is a lot better than having a building that’s bustling with businesses and workers and economic activity,” REBNY general counsel Carl Hum added to the Times.

There’s also the issue of how realistic it is for some buildings to meet the new legislation’s stringent standards. Ed Ermler, the board president of a group of landlords that owns 437 apartment units in Queen, told the Times he’s already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to improve energy efficiency in those buildings. “To get down to even 20 percent from where I am today, with the technology that exists, there’s nothing more that I can do,” he said. “It’s not like there’s this magic wand.”

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What’s more cringe-inducing than Jaime Lannister coming face-to-face with the kid he pushed out a window in order to cover up the fact he was banging his sister? This article by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), titled “The World Needs Fewer Cersei Lannisters,” for starters.

Warren’s 2020 Democratic presidential nomination isn’t going so well, which has forced the senator to make desperate bids for attention. Her The Cut article is more of the same, ham-handedly name dropping a bunch of Game of Thrones characters and plot points in an eye-rolling, how-do-you-do-my-fellow-kids sort of way.

“Daenerys ‘Stormborn’ Targaryen has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire,” writes Warren. This is like saying George Washington is your favorite president, The Godfather is your favorite movie, and if you could have dinner with any person living or dead you would pick either Albert Einstein or Jesus. Yawn.

Why does Warren love Daenerys? Because she’s “a queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful … a ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known.” But this is quite a stretch. Aside from her campaign to abolish slavery in Essos—a crusade that destabilized an entire region, claimed the lives of thousands of people, and may very well have failed (sound familiar?), Daenerys is mostly a conventional monarch with conventional entanglements, goals, and tactics. She counted the extremely wealthy Tyrell family as among her most powerful allies until enemies wiped them out.

Warren also loves Daenerys because she sees something of herself in the strong female politician who has dared to play a man’s game. But she doesn’t love that other strong female politician: Indeed, much of the piece is about why Queen Cersei is bad. Banks! Too big to fail. Privatization! Seriously:

Unlike Dany, Cersei doesn’t expect to win with the people — she expects to win in spite of them. When Cersei’s brother (and lover) Jaime begs her not to wage a war — arguing that they don’t have the warrior strength of the Dothraki or the allegiance of the other houses, she replies with all the confidence in the Seven Kingdoms: “We have something better. We have the Iron Bank.” Rather than earn her army, Cersei’s pays for it. She buys 20,000 Golden Company mercenaries — though they arrive without their legendary elephants — with funds from the Iron Bank. But Cersei has no intention of sending her private army north to help defeat the army of the dead — that’s Jon and Dany’s problem. No, Cersei’s army will sit back and wait for whatever comes their way. Cersei’s betting on the strength of the bank to get her through the biggest fight of her life. It never crosses the mind that the bank could fail, or betray her.

Cersei is a tyrant who burned most of her enemies alive. But Daenerys has also roasted a lot of people—including some who already surrendered and were no longer a threat to her, as Samwell Tarly tearfully reminded viewers in the season premiere. If Daenerys displaces Cersei and captures the Iron Throne, for many inhabitants of Westeros it will feel a lot like swapping one tyrant for another. The same could be said, of course, in the event that Warren defies the odds and captures her own Iron Throne.

Related: “Of Course Hillary Clinton Identifies with Cersei Lannister. They Are the Same Person.”

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Lesbian, gay, and transgender activists have been working for decades to try to have sexual orientation and gender identity added to federal civil rights anti-discrimination protections. Now the Supreme Court is going to determine if those protections are, in fact, already there.

Today the Supreme Court agreed to combine and consider three cases that revolve around an unresolved legal question: Does the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964’s ban on employment discrimination on the basis of sex also forbid discrimination against somebody for being gay or transgender?

For many, the immediate response would likely be, no, sexual orientation and gender identity are different from sex. That’s why activists and friendly lawmakers have for years been introducing and reintroducing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and now the Equality Act to try to have those two classifications added.

However, it’s actually not that simple. In a Supreme Court decision from 1989, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the justices ruled that discrimination on the basis of sex-based stereotypes counts as discrimination. That case revolved around a woman who claimed she was denied partnership in the accounting firm because she did not behave or dress femininely enough for them.

From that court precedent a new argument was crafted: Discriminating against somebody for being gay or transgender is similar to discrimination on the basis of whether a person exhibits “stereotypical” traits of a sex. After all, much of the workplace discrimination faced by transgender people is based on how they present themselves.

This argument has found legal traction in federal cases going all the way back to 2005. Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) accepted and endorsed this position, and that’s what ultimately informed the administration’s position that public schools can’t tell transgender students which bathrooms they can use.

But the Supreme Court hasn’t truly established this interpretation as law, and so there’s been conflict on the federal level (and in federal courts). Under President Donald Trump’s administration, the DOJ reversed its position, stating that the Civil Rights Act’s sex discrimination protections don’t extend to gay or transgender discrimination. But the EEOC maintained its position, causing a split of attitudes in the executive branch of the federal government. Likewise, federal court rulings have been contradictory here. Two federal courts have ruled that federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex also cover discriminating against somebody because they’re gay or transgender. But a third court has disagreed, creating a split and plenty of federal confusion over the limits of the Civil Rights Act’s protections.

The Supreme Court had previously turned away requests to step in and rule on the conflict. But today they finally decided that they would hear three cases. Two of them involve workers alleging workplace discrimination for being gay. The third involves a transgender woman who was fired by the funeral home she was working at because she wanted to start wearing women’s clothing to work. The owner of the funeral home said it would “violate God’s commands” and would not accommodate the transgender woman’s clothing requests.

This ruling, whichever way it goes, is going to be politically significant due to efforts to pass the Equality Act, which would end the conflict by explicitly adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act. A ruling favorable to LGBT workers and students would end the pressure to pass the law. A ruling that the Civil Rights Act does not include sexual orientation and gender identity would most likely turn passage of the Equality Act into an election issue.

Read more about the cases involved here.

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Forest Expansion: Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016, reported researchers at the University of Maryland in a September 2018 study in ​Nature​.

Using satellite data to track the changes in various land covers, they found that gains in forest area in the temperate, subtropical, and boreal climatic zones are offsetting declines in the tropics.

Tree canopy in Europe, including European Russia, has increased by 35 percent—the greatest gain among all continents. The researchers attribute much of that increase to the “natural afforestation on abandoned agricultural land,” which has been “a common process in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” The tree canopy in the U.S. and China has increased by 34 and 15 percent respectively.

Simon Resource Abundance Index: Data for 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals was collected by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund between 1980 and 2017. Adjusted for inflation, the prices for 43 commodities declined, two remained equally valuable, and five commodities increased in price. On average, the real price of 50 commodities fell by 36.3 percent.

Between 1980 and 2017, the inflation-adjusted global hourly income per person grew by 80.1 percent. Therefore, in terms of the amount of work required, commodities became 64.7 percent cheaper. Put differently, commodities that took 60 minutes of work to buy in 1980, took only 21 minutes of work to buy in 2017.

U.S. Air Pollution Trends: The Environmental Protection Agency reports that between 1980 and 2017, U.S. gross domestic product increased 165 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 110 percent, energy consumption increased by 25 percent, and U.S. population grew by 44 percent. During the same period, emissions of carbon monoxide fell by 72 percent; lead by 99 percent; nitrogen oxides by 61 percent; compounds from automobile exhaust associated with ozone by 54 percent; sulfur dioxide by 89 percent, and particulates by 61 percent. During the same time period, total emissions of the six principal air pollutants dropped by 67 percent.

Peak Farmland: Global arable land (annual crops like wheat and corn) and permanent crops (such as coffee and cocoa) were planted on 1,371 million hectares in 1961. That rose to 1,533 million hectares in 2009. Rockefeller University researcher Jesse Ausubel and his co-authors project a return to 1,385 million hectares in 2060, thus restoring at least 146 million hectares to nature. This is an area two and a half times that of France or the size of ten Iowas. While cropland has continued to expand slowly since 2009, the World Bank reports that land devoted to agriculture (including pastures) peaked in 2000 at 4,918 million hectares and had fallen to 4,862 million hectares by 2015. This human withdrawal from the landscape is the likely prelude to a vast ecological restoration over the course of this century.

Happy Earth Day!

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