Tag: in-the-news

Jonathan Kotler is suing the California Department of Motor Vehicles for denying his request for a personalized license plate that would read “COY-W.” Kotler is a fan of the British Fulham soccer club. The club wears white jerseys, and fans chant “Come on you whites,” which is often abbreviated COYW. The DMV says the slogan could be perceived as racist. But Kotler notes that the team’s owner Shahid Khan uses the phrase and that at least half the team is non-white.

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It is certainly possible that the Mueller Report to be released on Thursday will constitute a blueprint for impeaching President Trump on obstruction of justice charges.  My speculation is based mostly on the aggressiveness with which the lawyers on the Mueller team did their investigation and their keeping the Russia-Trump investigation open long after they had to know there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Andrew McCarthy has been particularly insightful on what was happening:

The collusion probe came to Mueller primarily as an obstruction case. Since it was obvious from a very early point that there had been no collusion, the question of whether there was a prosecutable obstruction case was really the only one Mueller had to answer. In the end, he defaulted.

It is almost certain that Mueller knew by autumn 2017 that there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy. Trump railed about the investigation for public consumption, but the White House and his lawyers (especially the first team, led by John Dowd) provided sweeping cooperation, including hours of interviews with White House counsel Don McGahn and well over a million documents (among them, contemporaneous notes of McGahn’s meetings with the president). Though he could easily have claimed executive privilege to withhold this information from prosecutors, Trump never did. . . .

A nagging question persists: Why did Mueller allow the investigation to continue for well over a year after it must have been patent that there was no collusion case? . . . Why did neither Mueller nor Rosenstein issue an interim report? That would have enabled Trump to govern without a cloud of suspicion that he might be a clandestine agent of Russia, yet permitted the overarching inquiry into Russia’s operations and even the obstruction probe to continue. The country deserves an answer.

McCarthy gives some background about the likely reason that Mueller failed to decide whether to prosecute, ultimately punting the decision to Barr:

As for the obstruction inquiry, after 22 months of investigation, Mueller finally declined to make a prosecutorial judgment, dumping the matter in Barr’s lap. . . .

There is no doubt that a president may be cited for obstruction based on corrupt acts that tamper with witnesses and evidence (recall the Clinton and Nixon precedents). But no patently illegal acts were alleged against Trump. In their absence, Mueller’s team pursued a novel theory: An obstruction charge might be premised on lawful exercises of the president’s Article II prerogatives (e.g., firing subordinate officials, weighing in on the merits of investigations, considering pardons) if a prosecutor — the president’s subordinate — later deduced that the acts had been improperly motivated. . . .

As is not uncommon for former top officials, [Barr] had weighed in on important policy matters from time to time over the years.

So it was on obstruction.

In June 2018, Barr had submitted an unsolicited 20-page memo to Rosenstein. Citing the legislative history of the obstruction statutes, leading case law, and longstanding Justice Department policy, he contended that Mueller’s apparent theory of obstruction was legally untenable and practically unworkable. Putting the president aside, the theory would subject to possible prosecution any Justice Department supervisor who made a routine personnel decision during a case (say, reassigning a lawyer from one investigation to another) if some prosecutor later suspected an improper motive. Barr further made what should be an incontestable point: Given the damage such a prosecution can do to the nation’s governance, a president should not be prosecuted in the absence of something all reasonable people can agree is a clear, serious violation of law.

Once Barr was confirmed, Mueller had to see the handwriting on the wall: The new AG was not going to approve a dubious obstruction charge. The special counsel thus had a choice: concede that Barr was right on the law, or fight for the controversial theory his staff had pursued — i.e., recommend an obstruction charge and dare the AG to nix it. But Mueller shrank from making the decision, choosing merely to summarize the evidence and leave the prosecutorial judgment to Barr.

In consultation with Rosenstein, Barr found no prosecutable case. . . .

In the meantime, [Mueller] let the president chafe under the yoke of suspicion long after it was manifest that there was no collusion case. All the while, the special counsel’s staff considered an unsound reinterpretation of obstruction law in order to nail Trump — after the Justice Department had bent over backwards in order to avoid charging Hillary Clinton with mishandling classified information, a concrete criminal allegation that was supported by weighty evidence.

Although political predictions are wrong nearly as often as they are right, I would expect that the Mueller Report released on Thursday will give plenty of ammunition for Congressional Democrats who might want to impeach Trump for obstruction under a theory that the Mueller team thought plausible enough to have spent nearly two years pursuing.

I hope that the report will also reveal when the investigation of the Trump campaign began and on what basis, as well as which current and former foreign agents or governments were used by the Clinton campaign, the FBI, or the CIA to surveil or gather information on members of the Trump campaign, the transition team, or the administration.

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Excessive partisanship and endless acrimony are common complaints lodged against the political class. There’s a lot to be said in favor of this narrative, but bipartisanship isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, either. As evidence, consider the latest attempt to extend corporate handouts for electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers.

The Driving America Forward Act was recently introduced to extend the existing EV tax credit well beyond its current limits. Unsurprisingly, its sponsors include both Michigan Senators, Democrats Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, as well as Republican Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Susan Collins of Maine. A companion version was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Dan Kildee, also a Democrat from a district in Michigan.

Under current law, a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 is available to consumers of the first 200,000 vehicles sold by each manufacturer, after which the credit is phased out. Both Tesla and General Motors have exceeded the cap, a fact that has driven a lobbying frenzy to extend the benefit. This wouldn’t be the first time the credit was expanded, as the original incarnation of the credit applied only to the first 250,000 electric vehicles sold across all manufacturers.

This new legislation will allow for the purchase of an additional 400,000 vehicles to be eligible for a $7,000 credit, but it might as well be permanent. If Congress passes the bill and it’s signed into law, Washington will be sending a clear signal to manufacturers that the gravy train may never end. All the EV makers must then do is flood Washington with lobbying and campaign donations once the next deadline approaches and the cycle could no doubt continue.

The current credit is expected to cost $7.5 billion in federal revenue from last year through 2022, according to the Congressional Research Service and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The costs of the newly expanded credit are not yet available but would be considerably higher.

Almost 80 percent of those utilizing the EV tax credit have incomes over $100,000, making it not just a corporate handout but also a transfer from all workers to wealthier Americans. And despite its advocates’ claims, the EV tax credit fails to reduce the alleged threat of climate change.

Because all personal vehicles in the United States account for only a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions, even an unrealistic influx of electric vehicles would prove to be negligible. Besides, standard internal combustion engines emit far less pollution today than they have in the past. Simply replacing older cars can do as much or more to benefit the environment than even entirely switching over to electric vehicles.

This is at least the third major push to extend EV tax credits over the last year. The persistence of the issue is indicative of a political reality less obvious than the typical Republican versus Democrat framework. In economic parlance, it’s called concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The benefits are conveyed to EV manufacturers and those few consumers (most of whom make over $100,000), but the costs are spread out across the larger population.

While the manufacturers and relatively wealthier consumers of electric vehicles have a strong incentive to support the tax credits, the average cost per taxpayer is low and thus of little political concern. Yet, when all the crony handouts that come about because of this same dynamic are added up, it represents a more significant sum and is a more obvious problem. But translating that burden into a political force that’s capable of resisting the well-funded pleading of special interests is extremely difficult.

In this case, the fact that the handouts are already set to end if Congress just does nothing should benefit the taxpayers. That’s often not the case, and it explains why the special interests have failed several times already in their attempts to preserve their benefit. Unfortunately, it’s readily apparent that they’re going to keep trying again and again to enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpaying public.

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Judge William Shubb, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush, does not mince words in his decision concerning the civil denaturalization process that the government initiated against Christian Oribello Eguilos. The opinion, available at 2019 WL 1643234, begins with a bang:

This court must once again dispel the commonly held misconception that all American citizens are afforded the same rights of citizenship. See United States v. Dang, No. 2:01-cv-1514 WBS DAD, 2004 WL 2731911, at *1 (E.D. Cal. Nov. 15, 2004). Through the denaturalization process, Congress has created two distinct classes of American citizens. The first class of citizens includes those whose mothers happened to be physically present in the United States, whether legally or illegally, at the moment they were born, and those whose parents were American citizens. See 8 U.S.C. § 1401 et seq. These citizens are forever secure in their citizenship. It can never be taken from them, no matter what they may have done in the past or what they may do in the future.

The second class of citizens, and the focus of this case, consists of those individuals who acquire their citizenship through naturalization. See 8 U.S.C. § 1421 et seq. To even qualify for naturalization, an individual must meet a long list of criteria. They must wait at least five years after establishing permanent residency, pass a citizenship test, truthfully answer questions posed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), be a person of good moral character, and swear allegiance to the Constitution. These requirements, unique to those applying for naturalization, demonstrate only the beginning of the substantial burdens this country places on these second-class citizens.

Once a naturalized citizen completes this arduous process, their American citizenship still hangs in the balance, at the mercy of government officials.

Judge Shubb goes on to cite Cassandra Robertson‘s and my forthcoming work:

And once the government starts the denaturalization process, these civil proceedings are replete with procedural shortcomings given the important right at stake. See Cassandra Robertson & Irina Manta, (Un)Civil Denaturalization, 94 N.Y.U. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2019) (manuscript at 49-54), https://bit.ly/2uMeBow (cataloguing the due process deficiencies of civil denaturalization). Defendants often do not have the right to a court-appointed attorney nor the money to hire one. It is within this unfortunate backdrop that this matter comes before the court as the defendant in this case, Christian Oribello Eguilos, is part of this second class of American citizens.

Eguilos’s case concerns whether the government can denaturalize him for committing (allegedly both undisclosed and concealed) sexual abuse against minors–for which he later entered a no contest plea–before being naturalized. Judge Shubb denied most of the counts in the defendant’s motion to dismiss, but one can see in the opinion his honest struggle to follow the law while condemning the unequal and insidious treatment of naturalized citizens.

Our beliefs in due process and its protections are virtually always tested the most when dealing with unsavory individuals such as Eguilos appears to be. The Constitution does not cease to apply, however, because someone is immoral or a criminal; indeed, that is usually when its applicability becomes relevant at all.

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From Seven Days Vermont (Molly Walsh):

Middlebury College officials cancelled a forum Wednesday that would have featured conservative Polish politician and academic Ryszard Legutko, saying they were concerned that they could not guarantee people’s safety as protestors organized.

Legutko was to speak on The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, and seems to be a pretty serious scholar:

Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades — and he fought with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. But having now lived for three decades under a liberal democracy, he argues that western democracy has over time crept towards the same goals as communism, albeit without Soviet-style brutality. Both systems, says Legutko, reduce human nature to that of common man, who is led to believe himself liberated from the obligations of the past. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty. And both systems refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideological prejudices.

Mr. Legutko is a Member of the European Parliament.  He has served as the Republic of Poland’s Minister of Education, Secretary of State, and Deputy Speaker of the Senate.  As a Member of the European Parliament, he chairs the Parliamentary Group of European Conservatives and Reformists and serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee.  He has been an active participant in recent debates over Brexit in the European Parliament.

Under communist rule, Legutko served as editor of the illegal samizdat publication, Arka. After the collapse of the communist regime, he co-founded the Centre for Political Thought in Kraków. One of Poland’s foremost public intellectuals, Mr. Legutko is Professor of Philosophy at Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland).  As a specialist in ancient philosophy and political theory, he has translated and written commentaries to Plato’s Phaedo (1995), Euthyphro (1998), and Apology(2003). He is the author of several books, including Plato’s Critique of Democracy (1990), Toleration (1997), A Treatise on Liberty (2007), An Essay on the Polish Soul (2008), and Socrates (2013).  

He had been invited by the Alexander Hamilton Forum, a faculty-run program, and his talk had been cosponsored by the Department of Political Science and the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. But he drew opposition from faculty and students who argued that his views were “homophobic, racist, xenophobic, [and] misogynistic”; and the College administration canceled the lecture, writing (I quote here the Washington Free Beacon (Alex Griswold)):

In the interest of ensuring the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members, the lecture by Ryszard Legutko scheduled for later today will not take place. This decision was not taken lightly. It was based on an assessment of our ability to respond effectively to potential security and safety risks for both the lecture and the event students had planned in response.

At least some of the organizers of the planned protest against Legutko say they weren’t trying to prevent Legutko from talking:

“In light of the recent announcement by the Middlebury College administration to cancel the Legutko event this afternoon, we are reiterating that it was never our intention to shut this event down, nor prevent the speaker from speaking,” Taite Shomo wrote.

But the administration did prevent it.

(Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.)

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In this recent podcast, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Christopher Robichaud interviews me about a variety of burning issues related to the politics of Game of Thrones. The podcast is part of his This Week in Dystopia series. Among the many pressing issues covered are the institutional flaws of Westeros’ political system, possible explanations for the continent’s longstanding economic stagnation, why the politics of science fiction and fantasy worlds matters, and why Jon Snow is an absolutely terrible political and military leader (though he is undoubtedly a brave and decent man).

For those interested, this post has links to my previous writings on the politics of Game of Thrones.

 

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It’s a fast food innovation that could give new meaning to “special sauce.”

Burger chain Carl’s Jr. announced Wednesday that it will offer burgers infused with cannabidiol (CBD) oil at one Denver, Colorado, location on April 20. The special “Rocky Mountain High: Cheese Burger Delight” will cost $4.20, natch.

The burgers won’t actually contain any CBD, CNBC reports, but about 5 milligrams of the cannabis-derived oil will be mixed into a special version of Carl’s Jr.’s “Santa Fe Sauce” that tops the burger (along with jalapenos and pepper jack cheese).

Still, those CBD-sauced burgers are technically a violation of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules that prohibit the mixing of cannabis-derived products like CBD oil with food or drink. But they are yet another sign that the CBD fad is overwhelming prohibitionist policies—at least in places where CBD is legal at the state level.

Unlike tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, CBD does not get you “high,” but it can anxiety. It’s legal in many states where marijuana remains illegal, can be readily purchased online or in retail stores (including some pharmacies), and has attracted the interest of pharmaceutical companies—although its usefulness as a treatment for just about everything remains subject to debate.

Legally, CBD remains in a bit of limbo, too. In last year’s Farm Bill, Congress legalized hemp and other cannabis-derived products, like CBD, that contain less than 0.3 percent THC by weight. But that hasn’t stopped state-level enforcement efforts, like the raid by state troopers in Ohio, who seized 55 gallons of CBD oil from a truck on Interstate 70 in February; or the local cops in a Dallas suburb who raided a tobacco shop in March and seized “hundreds of pounds of CBD oil in various forms.” Regulators in California and elsewhere have targeted bars serving CBD-infused cocktails.

Carl’s Jr. 4/20 burger deal is mostly an attempt to score free advertising—because how often is Reason going to write about a fast food chain otherwise?—rather than changing state and federal drug policy. But the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. The National Restaurant Association has named “CBD-infused foods” as the top food trend of 2019, and the ongoing mainstreaming of cannabis will make it more difficult for prohibitionists to rationalize such raids. It’s one thing for cops to claim that a small tobacco shop was selling a dangerous product, but much more difficult to make the case that a national fast-food chain is endangering the public in the same way.

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Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow recently that “national service will become one of the themes of [my] 2020 campaign.” As the MSNBC clip below makes clear, the defining element of the plan put forward by the Afghanistan War veteran and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is its vagueness. In fact, it’s not even clear if Buttigieg would make a year’s worth of service for high school grads mandatory or not. At one point he says he hopes to “make it, if not legally obligatory, then a social norm,” which can be read both as wanting to make it mandatory or simply a cultural expectation. There’s no mention of a national service plan in his book, Shortest Way Home, and there’s no mention of it on his campaign website either (in fact, I couldn’t find a list of any positions or policies on his website, suggesting that the Los Angeles Times‘ Doyle McManus is right when he claims that the candidate “has everything except positions on major issues“).

Buttigieg invoked the World War II service of John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush and his own military service as positive examples of privileged people mixing with people they otherwise would never get to know (he implies that JFK served with African Americans, but the military was segregated during World War II). That sort of service across class, geographical, and racial lines, he argues, is good for America, especially considering the “lack of social cohesion” he says characterizes not just Donald Trump’s presidency but our larger “era.” Rachel Maddow piped up that she has long “struggled with the civilian-military divide” and “the easy answer is there should be a draft,” even as she acknowledged that the Pentagon is firmly against conscription, believing it undermines morale and would pull in unqualified people.

The libertarian argument against military conscription was best summarized by Milton Friedman, who served on the federal commission that helped end the draft in the early 1970s. After listening to Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, inveigh against an all-volunteer army as mere “mercenaries,” Friedman replied, “General, would you rather command an army of slaves?” The same logic applies to mandatory non-military national service.

Buttigieg was emphatic that he’s not talking about forcing people to serve only in the military. Again, there were no details, but his national service plan would include having 18-year-old kids sign up for the armed forces or for a wide variety of other public-sector jobs. National service, he avers, is “one of those ideas that’s always popular but never urgent.” That’s true, regardless of political persuasion. Democrats such as former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley was also yammering on about it and the conservative Republican William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote a 1990 book, Gratitude, touting the idea.

Beyond being deeply illiberal, mandatory national service is profoundly at odds with the American experience. Unlike most European countries, for most of our history, we didn’t have conscription unless there was an active war. It’s true that during World War II, when essentially all aspects of the economy were put in service to the war effort, the draft took in a wide swath of men from all classes. But even then, well-connected folks got out of serving altogether or landed relatively safe military jobs (ask Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, whose desk-jockey assignments were seen as impediments to their post-war political careers).

More important, citing elements of the total mobilization of American society to fight World War II in order to sell peacetime policy proposals is a category error. Regardless of the lack of “social cohesion,” we should not be looking for guidance now to a period when food, gas, and more were rationed and the government effectively controlled the economy and virtually all aspects of life. During the Civil War, wealthy northern conscripts could buy their way out of serving and in smaller-scale call-ups (Korean, Vietnam, the Cold War years), connected people always found a way around serving. There’s every reason to believe the same sort of issues would plague any sort of national service plan.

In talking with Maddow, Mayor Pete granted that any sort of program would also cost a lot of money, which, along with the sheer vagueness of his plan, works against its odds of becoming a reality. Yet this may be a bad idea whose time is coming, especially as Millennials such as Buttigieg ascend into positions of power.

The Green New Deal championed by fellow Millennial Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez includes a plan for the government to guarantee everyone a job, which is sort of the kissing cousin of national service and underscores younger Americans’ anxiety about finding employment. And a 2017 poll of 18-to-29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found 50 percent supporting voluntary national service (the good news: Just 7 percent support mandatory service).

Indeed, if politics teaches us anything, it’s that bad ideas become laws all the time.

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Kamala Harris, the California senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has offered a half-hearted apology for a hardline truancy policy she championed as a prosecutor.

Back when she was district attorney of San Francisco, Harris was a vocal supporter of prosecuting the parents of children who missed a lot of school. “I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime,” she said in 2010. “So I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.”

The vast majority of murder victims age 25 or younger dropped out of high school, Harris has said. Her solution: Stop them from dropping out. It was a “groundbreaking strategy,” she wrote in a 2009 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle. “To date, I have prosecuted 20 parents of young children for truancy. The penalty for truancy charged as a misdemeanor is a fine of up to $2,500 or up to a year of jail.”

As a candidate for California attorney general, a position she assumed in 2011, Harris supported the ultimately successful passage of a statewide truancy law, The Washington Post reported. The law “states that a student missing more than 30 minutes of instruction without an excuse three times during the school year must be classified as a truant,” according to the California Department of Education.

The parents of truant children were liable to be prosecuted, though as Vox noted, parents were normally only prosecuted if their kids missed more than a month. While no parents were jailed for truancy while Harris was DA of San Francisco, the state law she supported led to some California parents being put behind bars.

In an interview with Pod Save America host Jon Favreau that will air in full Wednesday night, Harris was asked if she would “support that kind of law, the California law, as president?”

“No,” she responded. But Harris didn’t appear ready to accept full responsibility for the parents who were sent to jail under the law she supported. “I had no control over that,” she said, even though she could have prevented it by opposing the law, which included penalties of up to a year in jail.

The fact that some parents were locked up was an “unintended consequence,” she added. “When I was DA, we never sent a parent to jail.”

After explaining her reasoning for supporting the local truancy policy as San Francisco D.A., Harris expressed regret that the state law led to jail time for some parents. “My regret is that, I have now heard stories where, in some jurisdictions, DAs have criminalized the parents,” Harris said. “And I regret that that has happened and the thought that anything I did could have led to that, because that was certainly not the intention,” she added, again emphasizing that jail time for parents “never was the intention.”

It’s worth noting, as the Post did last month, that when discussing her past support for anti-truancy policies, Harris focuses on her time as district attorney, not on what happened to parents while she was attorney general. This makes sense, as it’s much easier to defend a policy that didn’t result in parents going to jail.

Harris has used the “unintended consequence” defense to massage her record before. As Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella reported in February, Harris was asked about her previous support for a San Francisco policy to report undocumented juveniles who had been arrested to federal immigration officials. “That ended up being an unintended consequence of the policy and I did not support that consequence of that policy. And that policy I believe has since changed because it was not the intended purpose of that policy,” Harris said. In fact, this was the explicit policy of the city, and Harris opposed a push to change it.

Harris has tried to massage her record in other areas as well. In February, The Root asked Harris about her prior support for FOSTA, the disastrous anti-sex trafficking law that made it a federal crime to host web content that “facilitates prostitution.” Harris now says she’s not necessarily opposed to decriminalizing consensual sex work, but she still would not denounce FOSTA.

She also said she wants bad actors in sex work to be prosecuted. In theory, she’s right, but those bad actors often turn out to be clients who pay women for consensual sex. In the past, Harris has supported cracking down on these “johns.”

Or consider her position on drugs. Harris now supports legalizing marijuana for recreational use, but as a prosecutor, she opposed legalization for years. And while she’s fine with legalized weed, she wrote in her memoir The Truths We Hold that she still wants to give law enforcement money to “cut off the supply of fentanyl from China” and to “reinstate the DEA’s authority to go after the major pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors.” In short, she’s still a drug warrior.

In all of these areas—truancy, immigration, sex work, and drugs—Harris’ views appear to have evolved for the better. But that doesn’t mean she can or should avoid responsibility for the harm caused by policies she previously supported.

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