Nevada | Reason ArchivesThe leading libertarian magazine and covering news, politics, culture, and more with reporting and analysis.(c) Reason
2024-03-19T00:38:10Z https://reason.com/feed/atom/WordPressLiz Wolfehttps://reason.com/people/liz-wolfe/liz.wolfe@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82644282024-02-07T15:49:26Z2024-02-07T14:30:29Z
Nikki Haley's shadowboxing: Last night, the results of Nevada's Republican presidential primary were tallied up. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who was running basically unopposed, received fewer votes than the option "none of these candidates." Yes, you read that right.
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) February 7, 2024
"The primary, which awards no delegates, had seemed like a foregone conclusion, as former President Donald J. Trump chose not to take part," reportsThe New York Times. "On Thursday, he will instead participate in party-run caucuses where all of the state's 26 delegates will be awarded, a choice by Nevada Republicans that complicated the process and rendered the primary basically irrelevant."
The dual-primary system in Nevada is confusing and frankly kind of stupid, so Haley's bad showing doesn't count for anything other than embarrassment, and the fact that so many people felt comfortable giving a protest vote doesn't count for much given the utter insignificance of the contest.
Nevada used to, in the past, hold caucuses, but did away with them circa 2021 in favor of a primary with both mail-in and in-person voting. This year, the Nevada Republican Party chose to host an in-person caucus, further adding to people's confusion and the extraordinary chaos that is this election season—one full of Trump skipping debates, Biden memory lapses, Gavin Newsom/Ron DeSantis debate-stage showdowns, oddly high Robert F. Kennedy Jr. polling (?), and "section guy" Vivek Ramaswamy constantly interrupting everyone else.
And it's only February. Someone could still die or go to prison!
Ronna McDaniel gets the boot: Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has told Donald Trump that she will resign following the South Carolina primary at the end of the month.
"Mr. Trump is then likely to promote the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, Michael Whatley, as her replacement, according to several people familiar with the discussions," reportsThe New York Times. "Under the arcana of the committee's rules, however, Mr. Trump cannot simply install someone. A new election must take place, and Mr. Whatley could face internal party dissent."
Though she was not technically fired, "McDaniel has faced months of pressure, a campaign from Trump-allied forces to unseat her and growing dissatisfaction and anxiety in the Trump camp about the strained finances of the R.N.C.," adds the Times. Whatley has consistently curried favor with Trump, endorsing his stolen-election theories.
Scenes from Tromsø: Hello, I am back and going rogue since I can't stand the busybody Europeans. No more SFNY this week, just pictures from my travels.
Several years ago, the Norwegian government forced tobacco manufacturers to comply with a new regulation that standardizes the look of all cigarette packs (as well as all loose and chewing tobacco). They also mandate that 30 percent of the front and 40 percent of the back of each pack must be covered with warning labels.
Of course, lots of countries do this. Plain packaging can be found in Australia, France, the U.K., Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Singapore, and Israel, to name just a few.
But can you imagine having to deal with the pain of living in Norway, land of conformity and high tax rates, while not being able to dull it via a pretty pack of American Spirits?
(For more on how Norway is a fake country populated entirely by gnomes and statists, check this out.)
QUICK HITS
A note of housekeeping: Some of you have complained that I use many paywalled links. I implore you to either be less cheap or to use special internet magicto get around them. (And stop complaining, I need frequent love and validation!)
Relevant/stupid:
Once again I find myself agreeing with Hamilton Nolan: The only way to save journalism, long term, is public funding. There's no secret as-yet-undiscovered business model that can get around that. https://t.co/v9MDYc5Ucq
Dartmouth will be the first Ivy League school to restore its standardized testing requirement. Now get ready for the rest of them to follow suit, and for you to be told five years from now that, actually, they never removed them, it was all a dream.
"When the leader of the training brought up hormone treatments, I shakily tapped the unmute button on Zoom and asked why 70 to 80 percent of female adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria have prior mental health diagnoses," writes gender clinic whistleblower Tamara Pietzke for The Free Press. "She flashed a look of disgust as she warned me against spreading 'misinformation on trans kids.' Soon the chat box started blowing up with comments directed at me. One colleague stated it was not 'appropriate to bring politics into this' and another wrote that I was 'demonstrating a hostility toward trans folks which is [a] direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath,' and recommended I 'seek additional support and information so as not to harm trans clients.'"
Chinese economy watch:
People in China are so mad at the CCP right now that they're going to random US Embassy posts to complain/ask the US for help.
This is a US Embassy post on Weibo about giraffe conservation efforts. The comments are all like "Help me, I've been unemployed for so long" pic.twitter.com/4MsbYELxEi
Yale Law's activist group, Students for Justice in Palestine, is claiming an Israel Defense Forces soldier's visit to campus "makes many of us—especially Palestinian Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students—feel physically and psychologically unsafe and unwelcome in our own school." More fromFree Beacon writer/Just Asking Questions guest Aaron Sibarium.
I went on Megyn Kelly's wonderful show (whilst terribly jet-lagged) along with Reason's Matt Welch to chat RFK Jr., Trump immunity, and Brooklyn mom mental derangement. Watch!
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82641152024-02-05T15:49:39Z2024-02-05T16:30:02Z
Super Bowl LVIII is fast approaching. For many Americans, that will mean gathering with friends to watch the game, enjoy some sort of dip-based snacks, and gripe about the halftime show. But for sex workers and those who would like to patronize them, it will mean a higher chance of getting nabbed by cops.
Under the guise of "stopping sex trafficking," authorities tend to ramp up prostitution stings around Super Bowl time. The ostensible motive behind this is that large sporting events like the Super Bowl draw an influx of traffickers and their victims to the locales hosting these events.
Yet no one has managed to marshal evidence of these hordes of traffickers allegedly descending on Super Bowl cities. The best authorities can do is sometimes point to a spike in Super Bowl weekend arrests of sex workers and their customers—a spike easily explained by the fact that cops are making a concerted effort to catch people offering to sell or pay for sex.
The Super Bowl sex trafficking myth is a sequel of sorts to an earlier idea—that domestic violence increased around the Super Bowl—for which there was also no evidence. Both myths have served a political agenda.
In this case, the myth gives law enforcement license to do more policing of sex workers and more surveillance generally; lends itself to splashy campaigns by nonprofits that use these theatrics to garner donations; and bolsters an idea (sex trafficking is everywhere!) used to push tough-on-sex-work policies.
Sex Workers Call To Stop the Stings
This year's Super Bowl takes place at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Today, Nevada sex workers and their allies will be gathering at the stadium to protest Super Bowl sex stings and the myths that encourage them.
"Every year, the Super Bowl is used as an excuse to violently arrest sex workers under the guise of anti-trafficking raids," notes a press release about the protest, which is being organized by the Las Vegas Red Umbrella Collective (LVRUC); the Sex Workers and Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project (ESPLERP); and the International Sex Worker Foundation for Art, Culture, and Education (ISWFACE). This "Stop the Raids" coalition also held two days of workshops and community-building activities for sex workers over the past weekend.
Police, media, and nonprofits "are all touting that false and misleading narrative that large sporting events cause forced labor in the sex trade and therefore warrants arresting us," says Maxine Doogan of ESPLERP. "It's clearly not good for us, or the sex trafficking victims or our clients to be burdened and punished with a prostitution arrests."
Their goal "is to call attention to the public and the press that we're not forced to work in the sex trade," says Doogan. "It's not OK to call us and our clients 'sex-trafficking victims and traffickers.' We're workers, and our clients are our clients."
Vegas Super Bowl Gives Juice to a Fading Myth
A decade ago, almost all reporting on "Super Bowl sex trafficking" seemed to be wholly credulous of law enforcement's narrative. From 2010 to 2016, 76 percent of U.S. print media stories on the subject "propagated the 'Super Bowl sex trafficking' narrative," according to a 2019 paper published in the Anti-Trafficking Review. Back in 2014—when Maggie McNeill challenged this narrative in Reason—questioning it was a pretty lonely perch.
Some groups pushing it tend to be less certain in their rhetoric than we've seen previously. But they still suggest that sex trafficking could increase around the Super Bowl. "It really comes down to basic numbers—where there are people the possibility of crime and trafficking increases," posted Agape International Missions (AIM) in January. "As the Super Bowl draws thousands of people to one location, this holds true."
The fact that this year's Super Bowl is happening in Vegas gives groups another angle for spreading discredited propaganda. Prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas, but many think it is, due to the city's reputation and the fact that some counties in Nevada do allow legal brothels.
"While the general link between human trafficking and Super Bowl host cities has become more speculative, Las Vegas may provide an exception to this conclusion," AIM suggested, adding that praying and giving to groups like AIM could help combat this.
This is how a lot of "anti-trafficking efforts" go: a mission to raise "awareness" about the issue that in turn encourages donations to the nonprofit "raising awareness." Which might all be well and good if these groups were making substantial strides toward helping people in abusive or exploitative situations. But often their "outreach" and "support" efforts amount to little more than additional "awareness" raising, and perhaps handing out bags of toiletries to people police pick up in prostitution stings.
Campaigns like the "It's a Penalty" initiative working to spread "awareness" about Super Bowl sex trafficking aren't running shelters for victims or helping them find jobs or providing them with legal aid. No, the folks behind these initiatives spend their time and resources doing things like passing out branded stickers and pens, making ads featuring professional athletes, and encouraging people to report their hunches to authorities.
Can You Spot a Sex Trafficker?
A Las Vegas nonprofit called Signs of HOPE "will be educating employees at Caesars Entertainment, MGM Resorts Wynn Resort properties" about how to spot sex traffickers, reports the Las Vegas Sun.
This is another anti-trafficking trope—that eagle-eyed hotel staff, airline employees, salon workers, etc., can spot the "signs" of sex trafficking if they're just "aware" enough. But the "signs" taught tend to be utter nonsense: a mix of sexist, racist, or classist stereotypes with things broad enough to apply to just about anyone.
For instance, Signs of HOPE chief Kimberly Small told the Sun that the potential signs of being a trafficking victim include lack of eye contact, excessive phone use, or being too quiet.
Signs of HOPE, It's a Penalty, and other groups urge people to report anything suspicious. It's an ethos likely to lead to the harassment of any women dressed provocatively or acting flirtatiously.
Hosting spot-a-trafficker trainings may net cash or good P.R. for the groups that run them and the corporations that make employees sit through them. But no one seems to be offering evidence that it is helping anyone catch traffickers or rescue their victims.
"Small added that people should even be aware of odd-looking situations, such as when a young child is being picked up by an older person, especially if the child seems unfamiliar with them," reported the Sun. This manages to mix two trafficking myths into one: the idea that there are large swaths of actual children in the U.S. being trafficked, and the idea that trafficking—of adults or minors—is generally done by strangers.
"The truth about trafficking, particularly in the context of minors, is that it is often not perpetrated by strangers but by those within their own circles—friends, acquaintances and, tragically, family members," writes ISWFACE's Victoria McMahan Parra in TheNevada Independent. "This pattern of exploitation, deeply rooted in a complex web of socioeconomic factors, reflects a systemic issue that goes beyond the simplistic narratives often peddled by sensationalist media and misinformed anti-trafficking campaigns."
Why the Myths Persist
Media in general, and especially local media, tends to be deferential to official narratives, especially when they're coming from cops. Their business also thrives on lurid stories and warnings of danger. So it's not surprising that apocryphal tales of Super Bowl sex-crime spikes keep resurfacing in the press.
More interesting is why police are framing these efforts as sex trafficking or human trafficking stings in the first place. If it's just an old-fashioned vice squad doing an old-fashioned prostitution sting, why all the fanfare about traffickers? Why not just tell the public they're out to catch consenting adults who mix money with their sex?
Reason's J.D. Tuccille explained this pretty concisely back in 2016:
Opponents of commercial sex find themselves on the wrong side of shifting public opinion, so they pull a little rhetorical sleight of hand….The implication of the "trafficking" terminology is that prostitutes are slaves—and they're being hustled off to a major sporting event near you.
Spending taxpayer money and police time to make sure people aren't privately trading sex for money (or vice versa) is the kind of thing many folks dislike. Stopping slavery sounds so much more noble—a cause that everyone can get behind.
It also lets the federal government get involved. Selling and paying for sex aren't federal crimes. But sex trafficking—defined under federal law as commercial sex involving minors, force, fraud, or coercion—is. That gives the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security a good impetus to intervene (and if the stings just happen to serve as a good cover for all sorts of surveillance, so be it).
Framing prostitution stings as anti-human-trafficking initiatives also lets local law enforcement access grant money the feds give out for stopping trafficking. These grants do not exist, theoretically, for simply stopping some guy from paying a consenting adult partner for sex.
Of course, all of this goes on without anyone having to actually prove that their work is helping victims of violence or abuse.
What results are "taxpayer-funded sting operations" against "men and women who are engaged in work our government has deemed unacceptable," writes Parra in her Nevada Independent piece. She notes that even when police stings do uncover people who could use assistance or protection, they're often treated as criminals because they fail to fit some perfect victim image. "These stings, rather than addressing the nuanced and pervasive nature of trafficking, only perpetuate a cycle of criminalization and marginalization of already vulnerable groups."
Today's protest in Vegas will be the third for Stop the Raids, which previously organized a protest in Phoenix around Super Bowl time last year and also a protest in Los Angeles last December.
The Los Angeles rally was held in protest of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto's policies "that criminalize and harass sex workers and their clients, all under the guise of rescuing sex trafficking victims," according to the group's website. "Feldstein-Soto has been weaponizing the archaic Red Light Abatement Act of 1913 to shut down motels where LA residents, particularly sex workers, had worked indoors safely."
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82388512023-06-17T12:46:14Z2023-06-16T15:45:34Z
As the Nevada Legislature was considering a bill earlier this week that would give the Oakland Athletics about $600 million in public money for a new stadium in Las Vegas, the team inadvertently made a pretty good argument for why it doesn't need the handout.
Here's what happened: On Tuesday, Athletics fans in Oakland staged a "reverse boycott" in an attempt to demonstrate that the team—which has for years lagged near the bottom of the MLB in terms of attendance—actually could put butts in the seats if the on-field product was any good. The Athletics have one of the worst records in the majors this year and have posted an average attendance of about 9,000 per game, but more than 27,000 people showed up for Tuesday's reverse boycott, The Mercury Newsreported. That's still only about three-quarters of the capacity of their current home, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
Perhaps not wanting to be seen as profiting from a protest staged against the team's owners, the Athletics announced that they would donate all ticket sale revenue from Tuesday's game to a local food bank. A noble gesture, sure, but a revealing one too. In a tweet, the team said ticket revenue from the game totaled $811,107.
That's over $800,000 in ticket revenue—a total that does not include sales of overpriced beers, $7.79 hot dogs, team merchandise, etc.—from a single not-sold-out game. Each team gets 81 home games in an MLB season. It's not hard to do the math.
There's nothing wrong with the Athletics potentially earning hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales every year, of course. Quite the opposite: It's a testament to America's prosperity that even a struggling professional baseball franchise is still, by any normal measure, a very lucrative business.
But it's more than a little awkward for the Athletics to broadcast that fact this week, after months of telling lawmakers in Nevada that the team—more specifically, team owner John Fisher—requires taxpayers to pick up a sizable portion of the tab for a new ballpark.
It didn't make much of a difference in the end. Nevada lawmakers approved the stadium bill this week, and Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, signed it. The bill provides $380 million in direct subsidies from the state to the team, but the actual tab for the public is $600 million once tax breaks and other financing are included. At his Field of Schemes blog, stadium subsidy critic Neil deMause estimates this to be the third-largest stadium subsidy ever awarded to an MLB franchise.
Even though it is common knowledge that the public never comes out ahead on stadium deals, the Athletics have hired consultants to promise that this time is different. It's true that there's no other city quite like Las Vegas—stadium backers say the 40 million annual tourists flowing through town make the math work in ways that it doesn't in other places.
Unfortunately for them, it's possible to check the math on those claims. Berry College economist E.F. Stephenson found that there is no statistically significant increase in hotel room occupancy rates when the Vegas Golden Knights, the city's NHL team, play home games. Maybe more visitors will flock to Las Vegas to see a bad baseball team play, but that seems unlikely. Instead, as is almost always the case, any economic activity directed toward the new ballpark will be shifted away from other entertainment options in the area.
"People will always say, 'Oh, but this one is different.' Every single stadium deal I've ever looked at the people who are supporting this say, 'This one will be different.' And when we look at it 15 to 20 years later, it's exactly the same as they always are," J.C. Bradbury, a sports economics professor at Kennesaw State University, toldThe Nevada Independent earlier this month. "There's always an excuse, and the reason is that there's a lot of money to be made by getting this stadium funded. And so the owner is going to benefit tremendously."
The Athletics don't need a handout. The public money being thrown at the stadium deal is a bad investment. All those facts are right out in the open, but lawmakers in Nevada didn't bother to notice.
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Peter Sudermanhttps://reason.com/people/peter-suderman/peter.suderman@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82265082023-04-17T13:29:36Z2023-04-18T11:00:25Z
Back in the pre-COVID days of 2019, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) proposed an annual "wealth tax" of 2 percent on assets for households worth more than $50 million, plus additional surtaxes on households worth $1 billion or more. There were several problems with the idea.
Such a tax would be incredibly difficult to administer, requiring tax authorities to regularly assess and value unusual assets like art collections. It might drive wealthy individuals and households to move their holdings to other countries with more favorable tax policies, as has happened in multiple countries. Most wealthy Western democracies that have experimented with wealth taxes eventually ended them.
Warren pitched her plan as a way to make the "tippy top 0.1% of U.S. households" pay "their fair share," providing revenue to "accelerate badly needed investments in the middle class." But a wealth tax was not a novel way to tax the rich; it was a dodgy policy that had been repeatedly tried and repeatedly failed.
Also, it is probably unconstitutional, since Article I of the Constitution prohibits any "capitation, or other direct, tax," except when taxes are extracted proportionally to the population of a state. It would at minimum invite lengthy court challenges.
Warren's wealth tax didn't make it out of the Democratic primary. President Joe Biden proposed a tax on households with high net worths as part of an early spending proposal, but his more modest plan also went nowhere, even though Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.
One might have expected that to be the end of the matter. But in politics, bad ideas never die. What does not fly in D.C. might still have a chance in the states.
As the third year of Biden's presidency began, a coalition of blue states began devising a wealth tax of their own. In January 2023, lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New York, Maryland, Illinois, and Washington cooked up a plan to impose a 1 percent tax on "extreme wealth"—a threshold set at $50 million per household—and a 1.5 percent tax on wealth in excess of $1 billion.
That idea, spearheaded by California Assembly Member Alex Lee (D–Palo Alto), faces a legal obstacle in his state, where a constitutional provision caps the tax rate on personal property at 0.4 percent. Lee's proposal pairs the California version with a constitutional amendment that would bypass the cap.
The fact that one of the bluest states in the nation would have to rewrite its constitution to impose the tax raises questions about its wisdom and political viability. Lee nevertheless sounded positively Warrenesque in a press release touting the plan's benefits. "With this modest tax on the ultra-wealthy who pay a lower effective tax rate than the bottom 99%," he said, "we would have sustained investments in our schools, tackle homelessness, maintain and expand needed services, and much more."
Lee assumes that high–net worth individuals would stay in California to pay the tax, which, in addition to the financial burden, would require them to file yearly reports on illiquid assets. Lee insisted that California need not worry about out-migration or capital flight. Between 2011 and 2020, he noted, California ranked "among the lowest of states in terms of residents with incomes above $200,000 leaving in an average year."
That ranking omits the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022, which were marked by migrations of highly paid remote workers from expensive locales to cheaper, lower-tax pastures like Florida and Texas. Furthermore, the upper-income salary earners captured by the numbers that Lee cited may not be representative of the billionaires and high-net-worth households that would be subject to the wealth tax. Marc Joffe, a state policy analyst at the Cato Institute, notes that billionaires often pay so much in taxes that even the loss of a few could depress state tax revenues.
The wealth tax has failed before. Progressive lawmakers will continue trying to make it happen—and likely keep failing.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82309992023-04-17T21:59:43Z2023-04-17T17:40:39Z
In November 2007, the original iPhone was barely four months old, Barack Obama was considered a long shot to win the Democratic nomination for president, and Steph Curry was a sophomore playing basketball for little-known Davidson College.
That same month, the TransWest Express Transmission Project filed its first request with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), seeking permission to build a 732-mile electric transmission line to connect a wind farm in southern Wyoming with a power grid serving the rapidly growing area around Las Vegas.
We've blown through 14 versions of iPhones, seen two terms of Obama's presidency (plus another term-and-a-half since he left office), and witnessed Curry score over 21,000 points and win four championships as a professional in the time that it took federal bureaucrats to review and approve an application for a transmission line carrying completely carbon-free, renewable energy across a mostly empty portion of the American West. That's a perfect illustration of the fact that the biggest obstacle to the government's renewable energy goals is often, in fact, the government itself.
Or governments, in this case. While the BLM took longer than anyone else to approve the project, the TransWest Express line suffered from "a 'spider web of jurisdiction' across multiple levels of government," according to Roxane Perruso, the company's COO. Perruso toldEnergyWire, a trade publication, that the project required approvals from state, local, and federal entities—and getting those permits required surveys of over 40,000 acres of land for environmental impacts and 60,000 acres of land for cultural impacts.
All that to get permission to build a power line, which is less invasive than other forms of infrastructure can be. In addition to the BLM and state governments of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, the project needed approval from the U.S. Forest Service, part of the federal Department of Agriculture, and the Western Area Power Administration, which is part of the federal Department of Energy. (In fairness, EnergyWire notes that the project also got snagged by disputes with some private property owners along the planned route.)
With all the permission slips finally locked down, construction on the line will begin later this year, and the 3,000-megawatt line could be operational by 2028, EnergyWire reports. By then, it'll be 23 years since the project was first proposed in 2005.
To put it simply: It should not take nearly a quarter century to build a supply line connecting renewable electric supply with an area where there is growing demand. But this is a recurring problem in America. A recent Princeton study found that 80 percent of the potential emissions reductions from green energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act would be lost without an expansion of transmission lines.
The time and expense of permitting have slowed or prevented some major renewable energy projects in recent years. "Windmills off Cape Cod, a geothermal facility in Nevada, and what could have been the largest solar farm in America have all been blocked by an endless series of environmental reviews and lawsuits," Alec Stapp, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, which advocates for policies that accelerate technological and industrial progress, wrote last year in The Atlantic. "U.S. climate spending could exceed more than half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade—but without permitting reform, those investments won't translate into much physical infrastructure."
Some of the most serious permitting obstacles are the environmental impact statements required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which take 4.5 years on average and run over 650 pages. Sure enough, the environmental impact statement associated with the TransWest Express Line took nearly six years—from January 2011 through December 2016—to be completed. In the statement issued this week by the BLM announcing its final approval of the project, the agency notes that the project will include "mitigation requirements" to offset disruptions "to lands with wilderness characteristics" and impacts to the habitat of the greater sage-grouse, a chicken-sized bird that nests on the ground in the western U.S.
But if reducing carbon emissions and developing green energy are going to be major national objectives, the sage-grouse might just have to get out of the way—or at least be less of a concern. Permitting reforms proposed last year by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) would have capped NEPA environmental reviews at no more than two years in length, but that proposal was decried by prominent progressives as a giveaway to money-grubbing capitalists who want to turn a profit by, well, building the very green energy infrastructure that progressives say America desperately needs.
In March, the Republican-led U.S. House passed a huge energy permitting reform bill that was declared "dead on arrival" by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), though some parts of the bill might be included in an upcoming congressional deal to lift the debt ceiling.
Until there are significant reforms, however, expect future projects like the TransWest Express line to take decades, if not longer. Building big infrastructure projects will never be as simple as turning on a light switch, but there's no reason for the government to force utility companies to operate at the speed of a first-generation iPhone in a 5G world.
If you could power large swaths of the United States with carbon-free energy but had to sacrifice one endangered species in exchange, would you do it?
That exact choice may be fantastical, but an episode playing out near Fallon, Nevada, provides a real-world example of thetradeoffs between environmental progress and environmental protections.
Last week, the largest geothermal company in the nationthreatened to sue the federal government over an endangered species decision that could derail its plans to supply Californians with emissions-free electricity. The company, Ormat, claims that the government hastily and erroneously listed the Dixie Valley toad as endangered last year. The decision halted construction of its12-megawatt Dixie Meadows geothermal plant. (To be clear, the company does not plan to exterminate the toad; it says it can build and operate the facility in a way that will not disturb a nearby area of hot springs and wetlands that sustains the species.)
The story reveals a conflict between several of the Biden administration's aims. Itwants the country to run entirely on clean energy by 2035, yet it also aims to increase protections for rare species, conserve vast landscapes, and champion Native American rights. Each aim may be noble on its own merits. But no one can have their cake thrice and eat it too.
After spending about 15 years exploring the project's feasibility, navigating the federal permitting process, and beginning construction, Ormat finally had the Dixie Meadows geothermal plant on pace to provide electricity by the end of 2022. In April of that year, however, the Biden administrationfiled an emergency endangered listing for the Dixie Valley toad. The animal exists nowhere else and had beenclassified as a distinct species five years earlier. In August, Ormat reached an agreement with an environmental litigator and a local tribe to pause construction while awaiting a final decision on the species. By December, instead of geothermal energy powering 12,000 Southern California homes, the feds had formally listed the toad as endangered, halting the plant indefinitely.
Dixie Valley is more than 100 miles east of Reno along a desert route so remote and unremarkable that it's been described as the "loneliest road in America." It remains revered by the Paiute and Shoshone people, who still hunt in the area and wade in what they consider to be sacred healing waters of its hot springs. "We don't have a church that's in a building, like a Catholic church or a Mormon church or a Presbyterian church," Leanna Hale, a resources director for the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe,toldThe Washington Post last year. "This is our church." The tribe has lobbied for 3 million acres in the region to be designated as a national monument.
The concern over the project at Dixie Meadows is that producing geothermal electricity there will upset a delicate landscape. Geothermal plants use wells to harness steam generated by the Earth's heat. They also use so-called injection wells to put water back into the system, which maintains pressure and ensures steam continues to be produced. Conventional geothermal facilities are viable where a lot of heat rises to the Earth's surface—Iceland, for instance, or the types of places that sometimes also support hot springs Native Americans cherish and rare toads dwell in. Disrupting the pressure, temperature, or other aspects of geothermal features could risk altering distinct habitat.
Concerns over the impacts of renewable-energy development are nothing new. In this case, the conflict is over a toad that scientists only recently determined was appreciably different from other western toads. Yet similar issues arise when constructing arrays of solar panels thatdisturb desert tortoises or farms of wind turbines thatkill protected eagles. And it's just as true ofmining the materials that it would take to manufacture equipment and infrastructure to generate and transmit clean electricity to the entire nation.
One project being stymied by environmental and tribal objections in what is reportedly one of the loneliest places in America should raise questions about where future energy projects might actually be allowed. At the very least, it does not bode well for visions of a carbon-free future any time soon. Environmentalists may trumpet the need for clean energy, but too many of them don't want it here, and they definitely don't want it there—and probably not there either, just to be safe.
In fact, concern over geothermal energy isn't even confined to one remote Nevada site. The Center for Biological Diversity, a high-profile environmental litigation group, brought the original lawsuit together with the Fallon tribe to block Ormat's Dixie Meadows project. Last year, it alsopetitioned the federal government to protect the bleached sandhill skipper butterfly. "The butterfly is restricted to a single alkali wetland in Humboldt County, Nevada," the group notes, and "could face extinction if the Baltazor Geothermal Development Project, proposed by developer Ormat, proceeds."
The Center filed266 lawsuits against the Trump administration, equal to about one legal challenge every five-and-a-half days. In the first three months of 2023, it has already sued the Biden administration28 times, or once every three days.
Maybe there will be other places in Nevada suitable for geothermal plants that do not attract legal challenges on endangered species grounds. Maybe other wind, solar, or—dare I say it—nuclear projects will ultimately prevail over environmental NIMBY opposition. But no one can escape the reality that any choice entails tradeoffs—and that will sometimes mean making hard choices between progress and preservation.
What if there was a way to power the country with clean energy without having to sacrifice rare wildlife habitats? Technological advances that have made geothermal energy popular with some environmentalists were, funnily enough,driven by the fracking boom. Those advances might eventually make hard choices easier by lowering the costs of progress. Part of geothermal's appeal is that, if the technology can be sufficiently developed, then it could hypothetically be deployedanywhere—even, say, beneath cities rather than on unique landscapes.
That potential will somewhat depend onfederal permitting and red tape not grinding progress to a halt, and environmentalists would be wise to support reforms that "let us build." Because even if one day geothermal plants can be sited anywhere, if we want to reap clean energy from them, then they will have to be sited somewhere.
Let's say you're interested in UFOs. It's a fun hobby, but you'd like to monetize your efforts. What do you do?
Historically, your avenues were limited. There was entertainment—science fiction movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or E.T. (1982), purportedly nonfiction books like Chariots of the Gods? (1968) or The Mothman Prophecies (1975). There was journalism, sometimes serious but mostly sensationalist. There were conferences and festivals where you could make money with attendance fees and UFO-themed merchandise.
The final and far less common route was to get someone, preferably someone with a lot of money, to pay you to study the subject.
In 1995 that someone was the Nevada businessman Robert Bigelow. He had already been funding various individual UFO researchers, but that year he decided to set up his own research organization, the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). He invited several luminaries of UFO research to participate, including Hal Puthoff, Jacques Vallée, and John Mack. Not simply a UFO organization, NIDS also probed the question of whether there is life after death. Its hotline (and later website) would take your reports of mysterious black flying triangles, but it also solicited reports of cattle mutilations and visits from "entities"—essentially ghosts.
In a rather odd government decision, the Federal Aviation Administration told pilots who wanted to report a UFO sighting that they should direct it to NIDS.
In 1996, NIDS started focusing on a place called Skinwalker Ranch. A nondescript cattle operation in northeastern Utah, the property was owned by the Sherman family, who for a year had been telling amazing tales of UFO sightings, cattle mutilations, and visits from mysterious entities. It was the trifecta, and so Bigelow bought the ranch and installed a full-time team of NIDS researchers.
For a year, they observed nothing. Accounts vary as to what transpired after that, but it apparently was enough to interest a U.S. senator.
Paranormal Pork
Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.), then in his second term, had been interested in UFOs for years when the Las Vegas journalist George Knapp told him about NIDS. Reid already knew Bigelow, having represented him as an attorney, and the two started communicating about Bigelow's project. By the end of the year, Reid had attended his first NIDS board meeting, which included a presentation by Vallée and discussions from other UFO researchers. Reid was hooked.
Reid's interest grew over the years, and he continued to attend UFO events, though his staff tried to steer him away from something they suspected the public would deem frivolous. Then, in 2007, Bigelow contacted the senator about James Lacatski, a Defense Intelligence Agency rocket scientist with an interest in UFOs. And so a new avenue for monetizing such an interest began to open: the spigot of government spending.
Lacatski had just read Hunt for the Skinwalker, a 2005 book about the phenomena allegedly transpiring on the ranch. He read about UFOs, dead cows, mysterious spirit-like orbs, strange health effects, and bizarre creatures emerging from portals. Fascinated, he gave the book to colleagues in the intelligence community. By his account, it was avidly read—especially in Baghdad's Green Zone, where there was a lot of downtime.
Lacatski started visiting Skinwalker Ranch. On one trip, he reported seeing a sort of technological apparition floating in midair in the ranch kitchen. It resembled, he said, the object on the cover of Mike Oldfield's album Tubular Bells.
After this otherworldly vision, Lacatski became convinced that there was a phenomenon worth investigating. He knew that his Pentagon bosses were unlikely to authorize such a thing. Nor could they publicly request funding to investigate a haunted ranch. So he and some allies invented a new program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP).
Bigelow—whose aerospace company also successfully launched two prototype inflatable space habitats during this period—connected Lacatski with Harry Reid. Reid looped in Sens. Ted Stevens (R–Alaska), who said he saw a UFO as a pilot in World War II, and Daniel Inouye (D–Hawaii). The three legislators lobbied the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee for funds, they got $22 million over five years, and a public solicitation was issued.
AAWSAP was to be a front. Nominally it was set up to study potential novel developments in aerospace weaponry. The public solicitation makes no mention of UFOs or ghosts. It simply discusses aerospace technology and lists a variety of fields that needed investigating, such as "propulsion," "lift," "power generation," and the only real oddity, the ambiguously phrased "human effects."
Just one proposal was received for the program concocted by Lacatski, Bigelow, and Reid. The proposal came from a new organization, BAASS—the Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. NIDS shut down, and BAASS took its place. BAASS's proposal made no bones about the fact that its researchers would be studying UFOs and that they'd do it both at BAASS headquarters in Las Vegas and at Skinwalker Ranch.
Part of the $22 million went via BAASS to the Mutual UFO Network, a volunteer-based UFO reporting organization, where it paid for updating the group's database and providing access to its investigations. BAASS eventually set up its own UFO database, carrying over work from NIDS. Its researchers did extensive investigations at Skinwalker Ranch, attempting to observe both supernatural activity and the UFOs they felt were related. They also investigated other UFO cases outside the ranch, such as the now-famous 2004 Nimitz "Tic Tac" incident, in which a Navy fighter jet recorded a mysterious aerial phenomenon off the California coast.
Their output was a mix of speculative scientific papers about warp drives and increasingly wild stories of flying orbs and poltergeist activity. This must have given pause to the higher-ups at the Defense Intelligence Agency: When the money ran out for AAWSAP, it was not renewed.
Disclosure
All this was unknown to the general public and probably to most of the Pentagon. Then, in 2017, The New York Times published a piece headlined "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money,'"telling some of the more mundane parts of the AAWSAP story. (The UFOs were included. The interdimensional portals weren't.) This article introduced the world to Luis Elizondo, who at one point had been head of AAWSAP.
Elizondo had just resigned from the Pentagon, citing his frustration at the slow pace of its UFO investigations. He had also hooked up with an unlikely ally: Tom DeLonge, formerly of the rock band Blink-182.
DeLonge had started To The Stars… Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA), an organization that seemed designed to cover as many paths to UFO monetization as it could. In DeLonge's ambitious plans, TTSA would have a science division, which would study UFOs and figure out how they work. It would have an aerospace division, which would take that science and use it to build warp-drive spaceships. And it would have an entertainment division, which would make films and TV shows about all this. The group's goals seemed ludicrously implausible, and the only real things they ended up generating were entertainment products, most notably a History Channel series on UFOs. The science never materialized, and TTSA now describes itself only as an entertainment company.
Along the way, the group pioneered a new way to make money from UFOs: The company's first conference was, among other things, a call for public investors. Many in the UFO community were excited by this new venture. TTSA is not publicly traded (it's a "public benefit corporation"), and the future of the investors' money is uncertain.
DeLonge's academy also dallied with getting funds from the government. It did not exactly manage to get money (as far as we know), but it did sign an agreement with the U.S. Army that allowed the group free use of Army labs to examine supposed pieces of crashed saucers in exchange for some vaguely defined technology sharing. Again, this all seems to have come to nothing. TTSA's most recent call for investors features DeLonge waxing lyrically about making a feature film based on a ghostly version of Bigfoot that peers into people's windows.
But something had been set in motion. That New York Times story gave journalists everywhere permission to write about UFOs, and TTSA's efforts gave other people ideas. Documentary filmmakers geared up to examine the subject. Edutainment companies started throwing ideas around. And more people started lobbying the government.
There's a concept in the UFO subculture called "disclosure." The idea here isn't simply a call for more government transparency; it's an assumption about what that transparency will reveal. There is so much evidence for extraterrestrial contact, the argument goes, that the government surely must know much more about it than it lets on.
The belief is predicated on two things. First there's the publicly available data and testimony regarding UFOs. This includes three U.S. Navy videos that were made public by Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. These videos were supposed to show amazing things, but—as is the case for many other videos promoted by UFO lobbyists—closer analysis suggests a variety of mundane explanations. For example, the "GoFast" video seemed to show something moving very fast, with no visible means of propulsion, but turned out to be moving quite slowly, and was probably a balloon. The "Gimbal" video, much vaunted for showing what looked like a rotating flying saucer, turned out to also resemble a camera artifact that rotated because of the gimbal mounted camera.
Secondly, there is privileged information. The U.S. military defaults to secrecy in a vast array of circumstances, but especially when it comes to battlefield technology, such as sensors. So UFO buffs often claim that significant evidence of advanced nonhuman technology exists, if only we could actually see it.
In 2020, Mellon convinced Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) to insert language into a bill establishing a UAP Task Force, triggering yet more media interest and more lobbying. ("UAP"—it stands for "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena"—has become the preferred term for UFO in official circles.) In June 2021, the task force produced a report. No alien technology was discussed, and the UFO reports were largely thought to have pretty mundane explanations. But people read between the lines and got very excited. So the cycle of nonrevelation, speculation, and legislation continued.
The UFO Gold Rush
When the government starts making appropriations and passing legislation, money descends. The "UAP startup" is now a thing. One such startup, UAPx, initially offered to test UAP detection equipment, then morphed into a kind of UAP tourism. The pandemic made that impractical, so it pivoted to shooting a docuseries with William Shatner.
More recently, Enigma Labs tossed its hat into the ring, aiming to set up a sophisticated database to track UFO sightings and then use A.I. to sort signal from noise. Possibly a preemptive move to establish a presence in the field before potentially lucrative government contracts are available, the group's source of funds is unclear. One rumor suggests that it's getting money from the controversial venture capitalist and political financier Peter Thiel, whose name has also been bandied about as a possible secret financier for UFO research at Stanford and Harvard universities. (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.)
Other companies seem to be betting UAPs are a route to future technologies the military will want. Quantum Generative Materials, whose CEO was a regular on UFO Twitter, hired a former fighter pilot who had briefed Congress on his UFO encounters. He is now the company's director of business development. The operation hopes its UFO studies will unlock new developments in quantum computers and artificial intelligence.
The UAP Task Force itself took a cycle through the revolving door. In 2022, government contractor Radiance Technologies hired both the task force's director, John F. Stratton Jr., and its informal chief scientist, Travis S. Taylor, presumably for something at least speculatively government- and UAP-related. Taylor is already very well known in the UFO entertainment industry, playing an excitable scientist on shows like Ancient Aliens and, of course, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.
Recent government action on UFOs seems mainly driven by three sets of incentives. First there are issues that virtually everyone recognizes as legitimate, such as new aerial technologies (especially drones) that could pose a national security threat when used by a (human) adversary. Another real issue arises when systems, equipment, or personnel fail to identify flying objects. These are genuine problems that need to be investigated and addressed.
The second set of concerns is more esoteric. Government contracts were given to investigate a supposedly supernatural ranch. Government scientists have investigated poltergeists. People who think "nonhuman intelligence" is playing games with us have been briefing politicians. These quirky pursuits are no longer limited to little pork programs like AAWSAP: A creeping weirdness is growing at the Pentagon. Those pushing in this direction may well believe in their mission, but surely we're better off when government action is based on real scientific evidence.
Then there's money. All this unsubstantiated strangeness is creating new financial opportunities in the military-UFO complex. And when financial opportunities appear, all sorts of characters will rush to both fill and expand them.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82110192022-11-12T14:03:24Z2022-11-12T01:43:50Z
While a national political audience, eyeing the razor-thin margin for partisan control of the United States Senate, eagerly awaits the nail-biting finish between incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto (D–Nev.) and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, people who actually live in Nevada have just made a more forthright decision about how their lives were governed during the height of COVID-19: They didn't like it.
Joe Lombardo, the Republican sheriff of Clark County, has been declared by both Decision Desk HQ and The Nevada Independent to be the winner of the state's gubernatorial race over Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak, after campaigning relentlessly against Sisolak's "draconian" pandemic shutdown of casinos and imposition of COVID-related mandates. Sisolak conceded Friday night. With 93 percent of ballots counted, Lombardo has 49.2 percent of the vote, Sisolak 47 percent; the margin of 21,216 votes dwarfs Laxalt's rapidly vanishing 798-vote lead over Cortez Masto with around 100,000left to count. It's the first time in 40 years a sitting governor has lost a general re-election in Nevada, and so far the only incumbent nationwide to get bounced.
"Sisolak's [Vegas Strip shutdown] may be the single biggest reason he's in serious danger of losing his job," Governing magazine foreshadowed in a piece Monday about Republican gubernatorial candidates using COVID policies to punch above their expected weight in the West. "His response to the pandemic and especially his decision to shutter businesses as the outbreak spread became one of the Republicans' main campaign attacks," reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal Tuesday.
If anti-lockdown policies led to easy reelection victories for Govs. Ron DeSantis (R–Fla.), Brian Kemp (R–Ga.), and Jared Polis (D–Colo.), Sisolak might be the cleanest case of a pro-lockdown incumbent getting scalped. Not only was Nevada's massive hospitality industry infuriated by watching tourists and conferences flock to open Florida, but the governor also had to contend with a messy pay-to-play scandal involving a well-connected but ineffectual COVID testing company.
"The emergence of the Northshore scandal probably cut him, perhaps enough to cost him the race even though he did his best to distance himself from it," the terrific Nevada political observer Jon Ralston wrote the Sunday before the election. "Sisolak has been relentless and ubiquitous. But it probably won't be enough because people are still mad about COVID restrictions and a governor is the most visible person for people to vent their spleens about all the ills of the world when a president is not on the ballot."
Nevada, like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, has featured some obvious ticket-splitting, with voters choosing Republicans for lieutenant governor (Stavros Anthony) and state controller (Andy Matthews), and Democrats for attorney general (Aaron Ford), treasurer (Zach Conine), and secretary of state (Francisco Aguilar). Generally speaking, the more wedded to 2020 election denialism the Republicans have been, the worse they have performed.
Lombardo survived a tough challenge in a jungle GOP primary against Reno attorney and MAGA enthusiast Joey Gilbert, whose commitment to the election-fraud bit was so total that he promptly sued Lombardo and several state officials for using an allegedly "illegal geometric formula" to tally up his double-digit loss. (Gilbert would eventually endorse Lombardo, as would Trump, even after Lombardo said in a general-election debate that Trump's 2020 allegations against Nevada vote counting "bothers me.")
Anti-lockdown gubernatorial campaigns by Republican challengers against Democratic incumbents proved less successful elsewhere. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one of the most notorious lockdowners in the country, not only sailed to an 11-point reelection victory against Tudor Dixon, but she also oversaw the biggest Democratic sweep in the Great Lakes State for decades. Dixon was also a comparative novice with extremely prohibitionist views on abortion who has said she believes Trump won Michigan in 2020, not Biden.
Across the border in Wisconsin, even as Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was fending off a Democratic challenger, incumbent Gov. Tony Evers also managed to narrowly hold onto office despite being heavily criticized both for pandemic policies and his stewardship during the deadly Kenosha riots in August 2020. His Republican opponent, Tim Michels, was also a Trump-endorsed questioner of the 2020 presidential election (open to potentially decertifying the Wisconsin results) and opposed abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother.
In New York, on the other hand, Rep. Lee Zeldin, who focused his campaign heavily on crime but also the economy and COVID policies, performed better than any Republican gubernatorial candidate in a generation, helping pull several contested House districts into the GOP camp. Zeldin still fell five percentage points short of unseating incumbent Kathy Hochul, likely harmed in this deep-blue state by having voted as a lame-duck congressman against certifying the results of the 2020 election.
Beware all commentators telling you what the deeply divided 2022 midterms were "about"; they were about many things, even in individual idiosyncratic races. But National Review's Michael Brendan Dougherty was on to something a week before the election when he observed:
We have just gone through a national political trauma and disruption to our way of life the likes of which we've never experienced before, and many never want to experience anything like it ever again. Voters currently cite the economy and inflation as their top issues, far outranking abortion and guns. Crime is often second or third in the priority list of voters, according to all pollsters. This is all downstream of Covid. We are still climbing out of our pandemic response, and our politics reflect that.
Maybe we underestimated voter distaste for stop-the-steal shenanigans. We probably failed to see what motivating role abortion politics would have. But in Nevada and a handful of other states, there were referendums available on pandemic policy, and with the exception of Michigan, restrictionists were lucky to hold onto power by their fingernails.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=82108652022-11-10T20:24:22Z2022-11-10T20:30:05Z
The Good: We have divided government. Since Democrats no longer control Congress, they can't bankrupt America quite so fast!
The Bad: Prediction markets, which I touted as the best guide to elections, didn't do so well. Yes, they correctly said Republicans would take the House, but they'd also predicted Republicans would take the Senate. Polls and statistical modelers like Nate Silver did a bit better this time. They also said Republicans would win both, but they gave them only a slight edge.
As I write this Wednesday morning, Republicans have (according to ElectionBettingOdds.com, the site Maxim Lott created that tracks election betting around the world) a 19 percent chance of winning the Senate.
Nineteen percent isn't zero; they could still win the Senate, but Republicans don't have the 60 to 70 percent chance that bettors gave them in recent weeks.
The Good: Bettors at least adjust their predictions quickly.
Tuesday night, while clods on CBS still said "Democrats and Republicans battle for control of the House," those of us who follow the betting already knew that Republicans would win the House.
Historically, bettors have a great track record. Across 730 candidate chances we've tracked, when something is expected to happen 70 percent of the time, it actually happens about 70 percent of the time.
That's because people with money on the line try harder than pundits to be right. They also adjust quickly when they see they've made a mistake.
At 8:23 p.m., with just 12 percent of the New Hampshire vote counted, bettors gave Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan more than a 90 percent chance of winning the Senate seat, up from 63 percent earlier in the day. You wouldn't have noticed that shift watching TV. The AP didn't call the race until 11:39 p.m.
Bettors also failed to predict President Donald Trump's win in 2016. But they at least gave him a 20 percent chance, much higher than most "expert" statistical modelers, like the Princeton Election Consortium, which gave him an absurd 0.01 percent chance.
Big picture: Betting odds remain the single best and fastest-updating predictor.
The Good: Tuesday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' odds of becoming the Republican presidential nominee jumped from 16 percent to 27 percent, while Donald Trump's odds fell to 18 percent. That's probably because of DeSantis' nearly 20-point blowout win in a swing state. I put this in the "good" category because, watching Trump on TV Tuesday night, I'm reminded that he's an ignorant bully who only cares about himself. His mere presence on the public stage hurts America by creating more division and hate. His election "denier" candidates like Doug Mastriano, Doug Bolduc, Tudor Dixon, and John Gibbs all lost.
Also, if DeSantis is nominated in 2024, bettors give him a 74 percent chance of winning, whereas they give Trump just a 47 percent chance.
The Good: If Vice President Kamala Harris is nominated, bettors give her just a 36 percent chance of becoming president.
The Ugly: Long-term incumbents won again: Sens. Patty Murray (D–Wash.), Mike Crapo (R–Idaho), and Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), who have spent 29 years in Congress; Sens. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) won, too (42 years).
The Good: Iowa passed an amendment protecting gun rights. Three states passed measures protecting reproductive freedom. Anti-abortion measures in two states lost. Maryland and Missouri legalized recreational weed.
The Bad: Recreational weed lost in Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Sports gambling lost in California. California also banned e-cigarettes, which will create a new criminal black market and kill more cigarette smokers.
The Ugly: Schumer will probably be Senate Majority Leader again.
The Ugly: The Wall Street Journalreports: "Europe Doubles Down on Big Government" with "politicians adding hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, guaranteeing business loans."
Won't voters ever ask government to LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE?
It's so sad. All around the world, we don't learn.
By the way, ElectionBettingOdds.com also tracks football odds. The Buffalo Bills, despite losing last Sunday, still lead the Super Bowl pack. The Eagles, Chiefs follow; 49ers, Ravens and Cowboys follow.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82106712022-11-09T20:27:39Z2022-11-09T20:30:05Z
Despite telling pollsters that rising prices are a top concern, voters in Tuesday's midterm election seem to have approved all three proposed minimum wage increases—policies that will likely force businesses in some places to raise prices.
The broadest minimum wage increase on the ballot was in Nebraska, where voters approved a hike from $9 per hour to $15 per hour. With all precincts reporting on Wednesday, the measure passed with more than 58 percent of the vote.
As a result, the minimum wage in the Cornhusker State will increase by $1.50 annually until it reaches $15 per hour in 2026. After that, the state's minimum wage will be tied to inflation and will continue to rise with the consumer price index.
Business groups like the Nebraska Grocery Industry Association have warned that the planned increase in minimum wages will require further price increases for goods and services. That's coming on the heels of decades-high inflation rates that have caused food prices to rise by more than 11 percent in the past year—something voters told exit pollsters on Tuesday was a top concern.
In Washington, D.C., an even more aggressive minimum wage increase was approved by more than 74 percent of voters—four years after D.C. City Council blocked a similar plan.
The so-called "tipped minimum wage" ballot question will increase hourly pay for waiters, bartenders, and other tipped workers from $5.35 per hour to $16.10 per hour by 2027. That means workers who earn tips will have to be paid the same amount as other employees who do not earn tips.
As Reason has previously reported, that's not as good of a deal for workers as it might sound. Tipped workers can earn far more than $16 per hour and D.C. law requires that employers make up the difference if workers fall short of the hourly minimum wage during their shifts. Eliminating the tipped minimum wage means customers will likely tip less, which means tipped workers might end up actually earning less despite the minimum wage increase.
In New York, a recent tipped minimum wage hike caused many bars and restaurants to cut hours and reduce staff, according to a survey from the New York City Hospitality Alliance. Workers who merely saw their hours cut might have been lucky. As Reason's Billy Binion reported in 2019, two researchers at Harvard Business School found that the average restaurant has an additional 14 percent chance of closing for every dollar added to the tipped minimum wage.
Unions and other left-leaning political groups have successfully pushed minimum wage hikes in states and localities in recent years, usually by ignoring the obvious trade-offs of these policies. In 2021, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that a national minimum wage of $15 per hour would cost 1.4 million jobs, even as the higher pay for those who remained employed would lift 0.9 million people out of poverty.
The final minimum wage question to appear on midterm election ballots was in Nevada, where voters were asked if they wanted to amend the state constitution to hike the minimum wage to $12 per hourbut also remove a previously approved measure tying future minimum wage hikes to inflation. It would also eliminate a provision of the state's minimum wage law allowing employers to pay $1 less per hour if they offer health insurance to their employees.
That's a complicated question—probably not well suited to a ballot initiative—but it appears to be headed for approval. With some precincts still unreported on Wednesday afternoon, 54 percent of voters have signaled their support.
As in D.C., where voters and the city council have been going back and forth over the tipped minimum wage increase for several years, Nevada's vote on Tuesday represents a quick reversal of a recent decision. In 2019, state lawmakers voted to tie the minimum wage to inflation. Now, that could be undone.
And with prices still rising at unacceptably high rates and driving wages higher everywhere, Tuesday's election is surely not the final word in the debate over how much workers should be paid per hour.
Maybe we should try letting employees and employers figure out the answer without getting state lawmakers and voters involved.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82102702022-11-08T16:27:58Z2022-11-08T16:35:59Z
Voters in Nevada on Tuesday will have an opportunity to radically overhaul how elections in the state work—and to guarantee more political competition in the future.
Voters everywhere else might want to take note.
A proposed constitutional amendment on the Nevada ballot would do away with party-specific primary elections and replace them with a top five primary system—in which all candidates compete in the same first-round contest, with the five top vote-getters advancing to the general election ballot. The same constitutional amendment, if approved, would institute ranked choice voting for the general election among the five candidates who advanced past the primary phase.
That's similar to the model recently adopted by Alaska—voters there approved a top four primary and ranked-choice general election in a 2020 ballot question—but including five candidates in the final round ensures even more robust political competition in the election that most voters pay attention to.
There are good arguments both in favor and against ranked-choice voting. Those who support it point out, correctly, that it more fairly and accurately captures the will of the voters than a simple first-past-the-post system where the candidate with the largest pile of first-place votes wins. Critics are right to point out that it can be confusing—a criticism that can't be merely dismissed as the result of voters being unfamiliar with how it works because a big part of the legitimacy of any election system is whether the participants see it as legitimate.
Those debates will continue, but the more important part of the proposed change in Nevada (like in Alaska) is the elimination of single-party primary elections. That's a much-needed change for both principled and practical reasons.
As a matter of principle, it makes little sense for state governments to pay for primary elections, which are nothing more than internal processes for parties to choose their nominees. Turning the primary election into what would more accurately be described as a first round of the general election—with all qualified candidates, regardless of party affiliation, competing in the same contest in front of all voters—eliminates that concern.
Practically, a top-five primary could also fix the outward drift of both major political parties, which are increasingly captured by their more extreme factions. Because candidates have to survive an internal primary in order to advance to the general election under the current model used in most states, candidates are pressured to appeal to the groups of voters who show up for the lower turnout primaries. The result is often that poor general election candidates—that is, candidates who do not represent the interests of the median voter in a state or district—win the major party primaries, forcing voters to choose between the lesser of two evils in the general election.
"The root cause of our political dysfunction is that November elections in this country are for the most part meaningless," Katherine Gehl, the businesswoman who led the effort to get Nevada's proposed election overhaul on the ballot, toldVox. "Most November voters are wasting their time, which is not only profoundly undemocratic and unrepresentative, it's the reason we can't solve our complex problems and make necessary trade-offs."
The greater level of political competition that a top five primary provides would potentially break that fever. A Trumpist Republican, an establishment Republican, a moderate Democrat, a progressive, and a libertarian might all find a place on the second-round general election ballot. Instead of choosing between the lesser of two evils, voters might get be able to vote for what they actually want. Wild.
It's unlikely that reforms like this will be pushed by the two major parties, which would like to keep as much control over the process as possible. In Nevada, for example, the proposed constitutional amendment was the result of a citizen-led initiative that required getting more than 140,000 signatures to get on the ballot.
Then, it had to survive a court challenge brought by Nevada Democrats who opposed the change. In June, the Nevada Supreme Court rejected that challenge and ordered the amendment be put before the voters. Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, the state's two Democratic senators, and Nevada's lone Republican congressman all oppose the ballot question, according to The Nevada Independent.
Nevertheless, polls suggest voters are open to the idea. But this is only the beginning of a long process. The same amendment must pass in two consecutive elections before it is adopted, so Nevadans will face the same choice in 2024.
We've heard a lot about how democracy is on the ballot this Election Day. In Nevada, that's literally true. And unlike a lot of other ideas floating around out there, this proposal is one that actually will give voters more of a say about who represents them in government.
Sex worker "Aella" has made hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly by "camming," showing her body to men online and talking intimately with them. Her customers are happy to pay for that.
This offends people.
It's "exploitation…under the banner of a career choice!" complains feminist Heather Brunskell-Evans.
Aella laughs at that, saying, "Where was she when I was working at a factory? Lots of people work terrible jobs. [But] a lot of sex workers make more money."
Aella left home to escape strict parents when she was 17. That's when she got that factory job.
Eventually, someone suggested she try camming, which Aella says turned out to be much better than factory work. "I could decide what kind of things I wanted to do, what my limits were."
Also, she made $200 an hour.
After camming, Aella tried "escort" work. That's really just another word for prostitution.
"I remember going into my first appointment feeling really nervous. Then it was actually a lovely experience….And I left with a bunch of money in my pocket. I was like, 'This was awesome.'"
To protect themselves, Aella and her friends have a screening process. When a new man calls, they demand references from previous escorts.
She doesn't understand why prostitution is illegal, why people like her need to be "protected" from prostitution. On Twitter, Aella labels herself "whorelord."
"When I was working at the factory, that was a thousand times worse," she says. "But nobody cared about that."
Prostitution is legal in parts of Nevada, in Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Netherlands, Hungary, Turkey, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand.
Legalizing sex work doesn't solve its problems, but it makes it safer and easier to regulate.
Of course, some women are forced into prostitution. Some are tricked into coming to America, where traffickers confiscate identity papers, withhold pay, and tell the woman they owe them for bringing them to the U.S.
That's obviously evil and should be prosecuted. But that would be easier to do if sex work were legal.
"It really would be a lot safer if it were decriminalized," says Aella. "I've been assaulted during sex work. It wasn't an option in my mind to go get the authorities' help."
Also, the vast majority of sex work is voluntary—a business transaction between consenting adults.
You might not realize that most is voluntary because police and media routinely call voluntary sex work slavery.
In 2019, New England Patriots owners Robert Kraft patronized a massage parlor that offered "happy endings." Police accused him as part of what they called a "sex trafficking" sting.*
"Ninety-nine percent of the headlines are not true," saysReason reporter Elizabeth Nolan Brown. "They say 'we rescued these women,' but by 'rescue,' they put them in jail and give them a criminal record. The victims are the sex workers themselves."
She uses her hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, Reddit, FetLife, and TikTok to run polls that ask provocative questions like, "Do women have systemic privilege due to their gender?"
"I'm really curious about the ways that our moral intuitions don't line up," Aella says. "I poke at things that make people feel confused about what they believe."
Sex work is one of those things.
Polls show a slight majority of Americans think sex work should be decriminalized. Support for legalization has been increasing.
"It should be legal," says Aella. "Discovering sex work was one of the best things that's happened to me. I have my own life. I make good money. I have a ton of spare time to do what I want. People are concerned about my 'exploitation'? That's wrong."
*CORRECTION: A previous version of this piece misstated the actions law enforcement took against Kraft in 2019.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82027142022-09-08T14:02:34Z2022-09-08T13:32:34Z
Reporter was "pursuing a potential follow-up story" after earlier negative reporting on the official. An elected official in Las Vegas has been arrested in conjunction with the murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German, who was stabbed to death outside of his Las Vegas home last weekend.
A longtime reporter for the Review-Journal, German had "made a career of breaking big stories about everything from organized crime and government malfeasance to political scandals," as the paper describes it.
One of the subjects of German's reporting was Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, who has now been arrested as a suspect in German's death.
The public administrator's office was "mired in turmoil and internal dissension," wrote German in May. "A half-dozen current and former employees interviewed by the Review-Journal are alleging the hostile work environment was fueled by the elected administrator of the office, Robert Telles, carrying on an 'inappropriate relationship' with a staffer that has harmed the office's ability to deal with the public in overseeing the estates of those who have died."
In a June letter posted to his campaign website, Telles "attacked the Review-Journal and its reporting and claimed the allegations against [him] were false," German reported at the time. The letter "also leveled what the employees allege was a threat to retaliate against them for stepping forward."
Telles lashed out at German on Twitter, too:
Does the @LVRJ know that @JGermanRJ may be doing double duty on their dime? Do they know he basically made a veiled threat to make me take down my site with the truth after I already lost the election? #LasVegaspic.twitter.com/9H2szMAGtV
Former Public Administrator John Cahill told German in June that Telles was "ethically challenged."
On Wednesday, the Review-Journal's executive editor, Glenn Cook, said the paper's staff were "relieved Robert Telles is in custody and outraged that a colleague appears to have been killed for reporting on an elected official."
German worked at the Review-Journal since 2010, coming there after two decades with the Las Vegas Sun.
At the time of his death, German "was pursuing a potential follow-up story about Telles in the weeks before he was killed," the Review-Journalreported today.
Telles' arrest came after police asked the public for help in identifying German's killer. "Police on Tuesday showed a brief video of a possible suspect walking on a sidewalk clad in bright orange 'construction attire' and distributed a photo of a distinctive red or maroon GMC Yukon Denali SUV with chrome handles, a sunroof and a luggage rack, saying it may have been linked to the case," notes the Associated Press. "Telles was seen in newspaper photos washing a similar vehicle parked in his driveway on Tuesday, and KTNV-TV reported the vehicle was towed away after police arrived on Wednesday."
FREE MINDS
The wage premium from having a college degree is falling:
The college wage premium has *falllen* over the last two years, as my new work with David Autor shows. Here is a sneak peek. Cc @jasonfurmanpic.twitter.com/PoHrYabzEI
A new paper looks at how access to guns helped decrease violence against black Americans in the Jim Crow south. The paper—to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Law and Economics—comes from Mike Makowsky and Patrick Warren, two associate professors of economics at Clemson University. "Greater access to firearms in the Black community reduced the rate of lynching in the Jim Crow South," Makowsky summed up the results on Twitter. "In a context where you are excluded from the institutions of governance and public safety, where terrorism against you is condoned, the tools of self-defense matter."
"The more subtle result, though, is this: public policy and law is about more than the words on paper. It's about the institutions and mechanisms of enforcement," Makowsky added. "Firearms restrictions, from the 19th and early 20th centuries, were designed for Black disarmament, but they weren't *written* for Black disarmament. They didn't have to be. They understood that the enforcement institutions would ensure the laws would work as intended."
"When advocating, designing, and voting for public policies, we would do well to consider the prospect [of] unintended [consequences] created by the *precise intentions* of those enforcing them," he concluded.
QUICK HITS
BREAKING: US District Judge Reed O'Connor in Texas rules that requiring employers to provide coverage for PrEP drugs (preventing the transmission of HIV) violates the religious rights of employers under federal law (RFRA). pic.twitter.com/d85C3izqSF
— Chris "Subscribe to Law Dork!" Geidner (@chrisgeidner) September 7, 2022
• More on the PrEP decision here, from Reason's Stephanie Slade.
• "A judge on Wednesday struck down Michigan's 1931 anti-abortion law, months after suspending it," reportsThe Washington Post. "The law, which was long dormant before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, violates the Michigan Constitution, said Judge Elizabeth Gleicher."
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82005602022-08-23T14:56:15Z2022-08-23T13:30:33Z
Homeless shelters destroyed "to ensure the safety and welfare" of homeless people. North Las Vegas authorities demolished a community of tiny homes that sheltered the homeless because the 50-square-foot structures didn't meet the minimum home size required by law or conform to other strict housing regulations. The situation showcases how government often thwarts private solutions to homelessness and poverty.
The tiny homes were built on private property owned by the nonprofit New Leaf Building Community. New Leaf's structures are small and basic, featuring four walls, one window, and a front door that locks. But despite their small size and lack of amenities, they could be life-changing for people previously living on the streets.
"Now I sleep on the damn sidewalk because of this!" a man who had been living in a New Leaf home told KTNV Las Vegas. A woman named Angela said her New Leaf home made her feel "like, yes, I can do this. I can stay clean and sober. I can create. Draw. I can become anything I want to be at that moment."
The New Leaf homes were built on private land by volunteers. The idea was to provide homeless people with "a place to call home," said New Leaf leader Joseph Lankowski. "They had a tiny home where they could lock the door, so then they could actually go out and get services without having to worry about getting your things stolen or anything like that."
Lankowski raised funds to buy the land after other options failed. In November 2020, the government destroyed 28 tiny homes New Leaf built on public land that had for years housed a homeless encampment. New Leaf then tried building tiny homes on trailers that could be parked in public parking spaces, but police started towing these. "And because their whole argument was property, you know, 'This is our property. It's not your property.' And we said, 'Okay. We'll buy our own property,'" he told KNTV.
The North Las Vegas land Lankowski built on is zoned for single-family homes, which must be a minimum size of 1,200 square feet. But because there was no existing zoning for this type of project, Lankowski decided to build first and deal with bureaucracy later.
"If code enforcement's whole premise is safety, what's safer?" he asked. "Being in a tiny home on private property or being out on the streets?"
A bill passed by Nevada in 2021—SB 150—says large cities and counties must legalize tiny home communities by creating new building and zoning rules that pertain to them. But these rules needn't be in place until 2024.
"Our homelessness crisis is urgent and can not wait for 'codes' to catch up," New Leaf posted on Instagram in July. The post said "the city of North Las Vegas did not give us due process before bulldozing. They are not playing by their own rules. This is private property. "
The city said New Leaf housing was in violation of Uniform Housing Code and Municipal Code regulations. "Since December 2021, the City has attempted to work with the property owner to correct violations on the property," it said in a statement to KTNV. "Rather than correct the violations, the property owner increased the pace of non-permitted construction and brought individuals to live on the property without access to fresh water, heating, cooling or adequate sewage disposal, all of which are required by SB150."
"On multiple occasions, the City served formal notices of violations and abatement on the property and issued civil and criminal citations to the property owner," the city added. "The owner never completed any appeals within the timeframes outlined in the various notices."
The Nevada Department of Transportation told KTNV:
"The decision to pursue this abatement was intended to ensure the safety and welfare of both the homeless and surrounding community due to significant biohazard concerns, including bodily waste, debris and intravenous drug paraphernalia accumulating inside drainage channels that feed into the Las Vegas Wash. Other concerns included potential pedestrian-vehicle hazards from crossing the interstate, walking alongside the shoulder and/or encamping within the Union Pacific Railroad corridor, as well as obstructed driver sightlines."
Lankowski said that New Leaf had been working to fix or appeal any violations.
"We had first aid kits. We had water. They were going to install showers," Angela, one of the residents, told KTNV.
The situation raises questions about the ethical housing of the homeless. Some—including the city of North Las Vegas, apparently—say it's wrong to build the homeless tiny shelters that don't contain things like indoor plumbing, heat, or air conditioning. But is some protection from the elements better than none at all? Doesn't having a dedicated place to sleep and store possessions matter, even if that's all it is?
The government seems to be making the perfect the enemy of the good here.
Alas, North Las Vegas isn't alone in seizing or destroying tiny homes built to house homeless people. City officials in Los Angeles and Denver have engaged in similar crackdowns.
For what it's worth, New Leaf seems to still be building. "We can't be stopped!" it posted to Instagram last week, in a call for volunteers to help build more tiny homes.
FOLLOWUP
Trump sues over seized documents. Former President Donald Trump is asking a judge to appoint a special master to review the documents the Justice Department seized from his Mar-a-Lago club. As part of the lawsuit, filed Monday, Trump "asked a judge to order investigators to immediately stop examining the items," reports the Wall Street Journal. "A special master is a third party, usually a retired judge, who reviews evidence to determine whether it is protected by attorney-client privilege, executive privilege, or similar legal doctrines."
"The government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office," notesThe New York Times. This includes more than 150 documents he returned to the National Archives in January and documents seized by the FBI in a recent raid.
FREE MINDS
The power of projection? People vote for democracy-destroying measures because they're afraid "their opponents will dismantle democracy first," according to new research. In the U.S., "partisans who most fear the other party's willingness to subvert democracy are also those most willing to support subverting democracy." In an experimental environment, the researchers performed interventions meant to reduce these fears; their findings suggest that with reduced fears of the other party, people "become more committed to upholding democratic norms" and "may also become more willing to vote against candidates of their own party who break these norms." You can find the full pre-print study ("The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding") here.
FREE MARKETS
Ireland gets a lesson in unintended consequences:
Ireland launched a campaign against greedy landlords with rent control, 52% tax, no deductions, no evictions.
They succeeded & landlords left the market in droves
Now there are 716 homes available to rent in the entire country and 150 queued for this one bed yesterday. #VanRepic.twitter.com/T8Np0hjthB
• Liz Truss—a limited government conservative who is friendly to free markets—looks poised to become Britain's next prime minister, writes Dan Hannan at the Washington Examiner.
Gov. Newsom vetoed our legislation to authorize SF, Oakland & LA to implement safe consumption sites.
The veto is tragic & a huge lost opportunity. These sites are proven to save lives & connect people to treatment. Sad day for CA's fight against overdose deaths.
• Americans increasingly see political polarization overtaking public education—and that's why we need school choice now, writesReason's J.D. Tucille.
• "Would you believe the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have something in common?" asksReason's Scott Shackford. "They both believe that the state should be able to force web companies to host content that these platforms disagree with or find morally objectionable in some fashion."
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James Wallnerhttps://reason.com/people/james-wallner/jwallner@rstreet.orghttps://reason.com/?p=81642992021-12-31T20:23:00Z2021-12-31T20:30:08Z
Former Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.) died on December 28 after recently being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was 82 years old. Reid was one of the most influential Democratic politicians of the last four decades before retiring in 2016. He spent most of that time in the Senate, first winning a seat there in 1986. Reid led Senate Democrats for 12 years (from 2005 to 2016). He served as the Senate's majority leader for eight years (from 2007 to 2014). Only two other senators have served longer in that role: Sen. Mike Mansfield (D–Mont.) and Sen. Robert Byrd (D–W.Va.). And like Mansfield and Byrd, Reid had an outsized impact on the Senate—and not for the better.
Reid earned a reputation among his opponents as a scrappy partisan street fighter who would do anything to win. He routinely infuriated Republicans with deft parliamentary maneuvering and unapologetic rhetoric. Reid often worked closely with his counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnell, (R–Ky.) to ensure that the Senate passed legislation that the two leaders, and a bipartisan mass of senators, supported over the objections of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Yet Reid's leadership prowess also helped create the dysfunction that grips the Senate today.
And therein lies Reid's lasting, and tragic, legacy. He skillfully wielded the majority leader's limited powers to make the Senate work while, at the same time, creating the impression that it was bitterly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Reid simultaneously downplayed Democrats' policy disagreements and highlighted their differences with Republicans. And he ensured some bills still passed by setting the Senate's agenda, overseeing important negotiations with Republicans, and then structuring subsequent floor debates to make it harder for any senator, liberal or conservative, to alter or defeat the products of those negotiations.
Reid's skill as a leader allowed him to essentially eliminate genuine deliberation on the Senate floor while ensuring that the Senate still legislated, a balancing act that his successors have struggled to perform.
Reid's tenure as majority leader set the standard for what senators expect of their leaders. That is, before Reid, senators understood the majority leader's primary responsibility to be facilitating the participation of interested senators in floor debates and keeping the legislative trains running on time. After Reid, senators understand the majority leader's primary responsibility to be protecting senators from taking votes they want to avoid, crafting legislative compromises, and structuring the legislative process to ensure that the Senate approves them.
Reid's dramatic transformation of the majority leader's responsibilities is especially striking because senators did not create the position officially until the 1920s. Before then, Senate leadership was provided by senators of extraordinary ability (e.g., Sens. John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster) or committee chairmen. And while the centralized role that today's Senate leaders play first emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, no majority leader before Reid was as intimately involved as he was in all aspects of the legislative process inside the Senate.
Reid's success in altering senators' expectations of the majority leader's responsibilities is even more striking because he led a Democratic Caucus that was beset with widening divisions over major issues like immigration, health care, and guns. As majority leader, Reid kept such party-fracturing issues from jeopardizing Democrats' ability to pass other bills by preventing senators from forcing floor votes on them. The result of Reid's efforts was to create the false impression that the Senate was bitterly divided between Democrats and Republicans when the reality was that there was considerable bipartisan agreement between senators on most issues.
Reid's leadership skill is evident in his creative use of the Senate's rules and practices to tightly control the floor and ensure that nothing happened there without his permission.
For example, Reid pioneered the now-ubiquitous tactic of filling the amendment tree and filing cloture on bills preemptively once the Senate began debating them. Filling the amendment tree blocks opponents of the bill from offering alternative proposals and protects its supporters from having to cast votes that could be used against them in their future efforts to win re-election. And filing cloture preemptively speeds Senate consideration of legislation and often confronts senators with a fait accompli, forcing them to choose between offering their amendments and passing the underlying bill.
Most controversially, Reid set the precedent for ignoring the Senate's rules when he could not use them to his advantage.
In 2013, Reid led his fellow Democrats to invoke the so-called nuclear option to effectively eliminate the filibuster for most presidential nominations. And McConnell and his fellow Republicans followed in Reid's footsteps by using the nuclear option to effectively eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations and to shorten the amount of time permitted under the rules after the Senate has invoked cloture on a nominee but before a final confirmation vote.
Reid's successors have struggled to imitate his example. They have successfully stifled deliberation on the Senate floor. But, unlike Reid, they have not figured out how to fashion bipartisan compromise on most controversial issues (e.g., not infrastructure). Consequently, today's Senate neither debates nor deliberates. We have Harry Reid to thank for that.
"I just want to tell you Officer Brown, you're taking money out of my kids' mouths," Stephen Lara said as Nevada Highway Patrol officers confiscated his life savings.
Police pulled over Lara near Reno on February 19. After he consented to a search, the officers discovered nearly $90,000 in bundled cash in Lara's backpack. Although Lara was not arrested or charged with a crime, the officers claimed the money was drug trafficking proceeds and seized through a practice known as civil asset forfeiture.
The government has since agreed to return Lara's money, and on Tuesday, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, released body camera footage of the February 19 traffic stop, calling it a "rare glimpse into an abuse of power that thousands of innocent Americans experience each year."
The Washington Post first reported in September on Lara's case after the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit on Lara's behalf against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), where his money had been sitting for more than six months since that traffic stop.
"I left there confused. I left there angry," Lara told the Post. "And I could not believe that I had just been literally robbed on the side of the road by people with badges and guns."
A Nevada Highway Patrol stopped Lara over near Reno for following too close to a semi-truck and traveling under the speed limit. Lara, a Marine combat veteran, was driving from Texas to California to visit his two daughters for the weekend, he said.
After asking Lara several questions about his background, the officer almost sheepishly explained that he was also doing drug interdiction work and asked Lara if he had any guns, drugs, or cash in his car.
Lara admitted he had cash. A lot of it.
"I don't trust banks, so I keep my own money," Lara responded when asked why. He then gave the officer permission to search his car.
On paper, Lara fit the profile of a trafficker. He was driving a rental car for a short-turnaround, long-distance trip with a huge amount of cash, $87,000 in fact. Civil asset forfeiture laws allow police to seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity without charging the owner with a crime. Law enforcement groups say civil forfeiture is vital for drug interdiction because it allows them to target traffickers' illicit proceeds.
But there's also nothing illegal about traveling domestically with large amounts of cash, a fact the officer acknowledges.
"So, as you know, right—I'm a vet, he's a vet, you're a vet—it's not illegal to carry currency or have currency," the officer says. "It does make us ask questions about why someone has $100,000. I can understand why someone doesn't trust banks in this day and age."
"I have nothing to hide from you," Lara responded. In fact, he had years of bank receipts documenting cash withdrawals.
With no probable cause to seize the cash, a Nevada Highway Patrol sergeant who arrived on the scene ordered a drug-sniffing dog to be brought in. The dog alerted on the cash, and the officers announced that they would be seizing it as probable drug proceeds.
Civil liberties organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Institute for Justice say that cases like Lara's show how police use civil forfeiture to seize property on flimsy suspicions. The owners, who are never charged with a crime, then bear the burden of going to court to prove their innocence, or rather the innocence of their property, to be precise.
"Carrying around cash is not a crime," Wesley Hottot, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, said in a press release. "Stephen did nothing wrong. He isn't charged with any crime and the government isn't even willing to defend this seizure in court. Innocent people shouldn't lose their property like this.
Around 35 states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform over the past decade based on these concerns. Four states—Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Maine—have abolished civil forfeiture entirely and now require a conviction before property can be forfeited.
The reason Lara sued the DEA is because of a wrinkle in forfeiture laws. The DEA works with state and local police on drug interdiction efforts, and federal law enforcement can "adopt" forfeiture cases from them, moving the cases to federal court. In return, the local police department gets a cut of the forfeiture proceeds, up to 80 percent.
While the Nevada Highway Patrol officers were debating what to do with Lara's cash, one of them was on the phone with a DEA agent.
Opponents of asset forfeiture say such adoptions are a loophole that allows state and local police to sidestep stricter state laws and requirements for civil forfeiture. The Institute for Justice estimates that the Nevada Highway Patrol stood to gain $70,000 from the federal forfeiture of Lara's cash.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder restricted when federal law enforcement could adopt local forfeiture cases in 2015, but in 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded those rules.
After about an hour and a half after Lara was first pulled over, the officers left him on the side of the road with a receipt of seizure and a number for a DEA agent.
"That money I have in my jacket is only a few dollars," Lara told them. "I have no money to pay for my kids' meals, my hotel, or even to get that car back to Texas."
The Institute for Justice says Lara had to get his brother to wire him money so he could continue his trip.
It was only after Lara sued the DEA for blowing its deadline to either give him his cash back or file a forfeiture case against it in federal court, and only after The Washington Post post reported on his case, that the government agreed to return his money. Lara is still pursuing lawsuits against the DEA and the Nevada Highway Patrol.
"I find it even more concerning that if this could happen to me, as a combat veteran who served overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, this could happen to anybody," Lara says in the Institute for Justice video.
The Nevada Highway Patrol did not immediately return a request for comment.
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Christian Britschgihttps://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/christian.britschgi@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81361672021-10-25T15:07:40Z2021-10-25T15:15:05Z
The political wrangling in Congress over Democrats' multitrillion-dollar domestic agenda and continual supply chain bottlenecks have buried what should otherwise be front-page, national news: Reno, Nevada's crackdown on whips.
Earlier this month, the Reno City Council passed an ordinance that prohibits people from using or possessing whips in the city's downtown without first obtaining a city permit. The policy is in response to an increasing number of 911 calls by people mistaking the periodic snaps and cracks of whips as gunshots.
Reno City Attorney Karl Hall said that the new restrictions were commonsense whip control, reports the Reno Gazette-Journal. He stressed that the ban only applies in several downtown neighborhoods and that the archaeologists' accessory isn't restricted in other areas of the city where it might prove useful.
A city staff report says whips have grown in popularity in recent years, with people using them "in fights, for intimidation, and to practice 'cracking' the whip."
Whip-related calls to police have increased 61 percent from 2019. Reno police say that the people using them "are amateurs when it comes to proper use, and it is evident they do not possess it for any intended proper use."
The new restrictions have proven controversial. Council Member Jenny Brekhus voted against the ordinance because it didn't apply citywide, thus leaving whips dangerously unregulated in most of Reno.
Meanwhile, a representative for the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union argued that banning the possession of whips without a permit, which is now a misdemeanor, only contributes to the criminalization of the homeless, reports CBS affiliate 8NewsNow. According to that representative, the city's homeless are known for using whips for self-defense.
Reno's new whip ban is certainly unusual, but it's not unique. Kaua'i County, Hawaii, passed a similar ban in 2018.
The Associated Press notes that the ban doesn't apply to private property, which makes it less offensive than it might otherwise be. But there's still plenty of reason to be worried about this expansion of state power.
There's a real possibility of increased police interactions with anyone thought to be possessing a now-prohibited whip.
That's particularly concerning given that most of the whips on Reno's streets are homemade from chains, leather straps, rope, and string, according to police. Is anyone possessing bundles of these materials going to be subject to snap law enforcement stops now? One could imagine local police harassing innocent citizens based on unfounded whip tips, or even conducting sting operations to corral violators.
There also isn't any grandfather clause in Reno's whip ban, meaning once-lawful whip-possessing citizens have now been made criminals.
It's understandable that Reno politicians and police would want to get a handle on excessive 911 calls. Whipping up a fake moral panic in order to do that is nevertheless a mistake.
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Charles Oliverhttps://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/https://reason.com/?p=81307372021-09-13T13:44:49Z2021-09-15T08:00:17Z
The Clark County, Nevada, school district, said it is aware of an "isolated incident" in which a substitute teacher taped a 9-year-old boy's mask to his face after he removed it. In a statement, the school district said that it is "dealing with the employee through the proper channels." The boy's mother, who wasn't identified by the media, said the boy got a drink of water and forgot to put his mask back on. "The teacher did not tell him to put it back on or send him to the office," she said. "She instead pulled him up in front of the classroom in front of all of the students and she then taped the mask across the top of his face."
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=81112152021-04-07T16:20:24Z2021-04-07T16:20:24Z
I was surprised to read [in the Los Angeles Times] that the Biden administration's "role model for America" is…California! He wants to "Make America California."
That's a terrible idea.
Californians now rush to move out of California.
Some hopeful folks still move there, but so many more leave that California now loses more than 10,000 citizens every month. In fact, the state will soon lose a congressional seat.
Why do Californians leave? "Exorbitant tax rates, high crime rates, the failing public school systems, the exorbitant cost of living," says reporter Kristen Tate in my new video.
So many Californians move away that there's now even a shortage of U-Hauls. Renting one to go from Los Angeles to Houston costs four times as much as it does to go from Houston to LA.
"People are just emptying out!" says Tate.
But this seems crazy. California has great weather and all kinds of natural advantages.
The state's politicians drive people away with bad policies.
Asked by Stossel TV whether it's a bad idea for President Joe Biden to "make the U.S. more like California," Governor Gavin Newsom's office replied with a statement saying, "Before the COVID pandemic, California saw job growth and record low unemployment."
Wow. Really?
Oh, it was a record for California. Before the pandemic, the state's unemployment was 12th worst in America. Now, it's 3rd worst.
The statement continues, "We remain the fifth largest economy in the world…home to 20 of Fortune's fastest growing companies."
But that only means California was hospitable to business years ago. Now Oracle, Tesla, and many other companies are moving operations to other states.
A big reason is California's onerous regulations. They make it hard to create anything new. It's also a reason housing costs so much.
California passed a law raising its minimum wage from $13 to $15 an hour. That's one reason many Californians can't find any legal work.
A good thing about America having 50 states is that when states fail, we can learn from their mistakes. People defeated by California's rules move to Nevada or Texas. But if the federal government adopts California's rules, where can we move?
The Congressional Budget Office says a national $15 minimum wage will help some people, but it will cost 1.4 million jobs.
Yet, Biden wants the higher minimum.
Biden's plan for America also includes a new version of Cash for Clunkers, the absurd program that once paid people to junk old cars. California has its own version, which the state claims helps reduce emissions.
"But most of the cars that were turned in were not even actively registered," says Tate. "It means they probably were just going to be scrapped anyway! These programs are failures…but they make environmentalists feel good."
Like California's "clean energy" rules. How long until all American motorists pay the $4 per gallon Californians pay? Or the $7 people pay in Norway and Denmark?
Biden also picked lots of Californians for his administration.
When Vice President Kamala Harris was San Francisco's district attorney, she oversaw 1,900 convictions for pot offenses. Yet, she's since joked about her own marijuana use. When the Biden administration fired staffers for using marijuana in the past, Harris was spared.
"Unfortunately, there's been a trend in the Biden administration of giving jobs to people who might check [race and gender] boxes," says Tate. "But they have horrendous track records."
Biden made Alejandro Mayorkas America's new secretary of Homeland Security even though he was cited by the inspector general for pressuring his staff to approve visas for politically powerful Democrats.
"In government, you always fail up," complains Tate.
The Los Angeles Times wrote that Biden wouldn't nominate California Labor Secretary Julie Su because "rampant levels of fraud scuttled [her] prospects." Biden then made her deputy secretary of labor.
"If we make America California," concludes Tate, "we are all going to be paying for it."
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81036472021-02-08T14:42:16Z2021-02-08T14:30:43Z
Nevada aims to bring innovative entrepreneurs to the state without forcing the public to foot the bill. An unusual proposal from Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak may help attract to his state some tech companies fleeing from Silicon Valley—while also making Nevada a positive model for experimental government.
Sisolak wants to allow "innovative technology" companies to run their own "alternative form of local government," operating schools and courts, imposing taxes, and doing other things expected of and allowed by municipal and county authorities.
Under Sisolak's draft plan, the Governor's Office of Economic Development will consider "Innovation Zone" proposals from tech companies that own at least 50,000 acres of undeveloped land in an area of the state that doesn't already belong to a city or town. If chosen, a company must invest at least $250 million into the area upfront plus another $1 billion over the next ten years.
The new tech-backed towns and cities would initially be governed by existing authorities in the county they're located in, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which first reported on the plan. But the goal is for the new innovation zones to be run by a three-member board of supervisors and other mechanisms of an independent local government.
"During his speech last month, Sisolak specifically named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a 'smart city' in the area east of Reno that would run entirely on blockchain technology, once the legislation passes," the Review-Journal reports.
Sisolak said his goal was to attract new and innovative tech businesses without the usual offering of all sorts of publicly-funded perks and special tax abatements.
The current model for local governance in Nevada is "inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and innovative industries," says Sisolak's draft proposal.
FREE MINDS
An open letter to Biden about Section 230. A January paper from First Amendment expert and Santa Clara University School of Law professor Eric Goldman, explains why President Joe Biden should "save, not revoke, Section 230."
Biden said during his campaign for president that he favors "repealing Section 230, the law that says websites aren't liable for third-party content," points out Goldman. But if Biden really wants to honor reality, rule of law, evidence-based policy-making and the First Amendment, he should leave Section 230 alone. And if he wants to "restore the U.S. as the world's free speech leader," he should leave Section 230 alone.
"It would be disingenuous for the United States to tout its global free speech leadership if we are simultaneously reducing Section 230's protections," writes Goldman.
The world is watching our moves on speech regulation, especially in light of how our moral leadership on the topic eroded in the Trump era. Our moves should promote free speech online, not seek to circumscribe it. Your presidency is a time to rebuild our country. It would be a tragic misstep if your presidency instead tore down one of Congress' most significant technology policy.
Replacing cops with health care professionals saves lives. "A program that replaces police officers with health care workers on mental health and substance abuse calls in Denver, Colorado, is showing signs of success, reports CBS News. "Despite responding to hundreds of calls, the workers made no arrests, the report said — and the city's police chief told CBS News on Friday that he believes the program 'saves lives.'" Read the city's six-month progress report on the program here.
QUICK HITS
Some businesses that advertised during Tom Brady's first Super Bowl:⁰⁰AOL Blockbuster⁰Radio Shack Circuit City CompUSA Sears HotJobs Yahoo VoiceStream Wireless Gateway Computers
• Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is suing a reporter to stop her from requesting records about a state official's discipline for sexual harassment.
• The mutant COVID-19 variant that's more highly transmissible (and has ravaged the United Kingdom) is now running rampant in the United States, according to a new study. The mutated strain—called B.1.1.7—was circulating in the U.S. "as early as late November 2020" and in "at least 30 states as of January 2021," write researchers. "Our study shows that the U.S. is on a similar trajectory as other countries where B.1.1.7 rapidly became the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant."
• Stealing Snapchat's shtick was no problem for Instagram. But beating TikTok at its game is proving to be much harder.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80958392020-12-09T14:35:56Z2020-12-09T14:33:49Z
In a unanimous vote, Nevada Supreme Court justices ruled against a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state's presidential election results. A federal district court in Nevada had ruled against the challenge—brought by Nevada Republican electors—last week. They appealed.
The Tuesday decision from the Nevada Supreme Court affirms the lower court's ruling, writing that the Republican challengers had not identified any flaws in that earlier decision.
"Despite our earlier order asking appellants to identify specific findings with which they take issue, appellants have not pointed to any unsupported factual findings, and we have identified none," write the justices.
The "Nevada lawsuit included baseless allegations that more than 61,000 people voted twice or from out of state," notes The Washington Post. "Although Trump campaign lawyer Jesse R. Binnall said last week a 'robust body of evidence' supported his claim that the state's six electoral votes were 'stolen' from the president, Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford (D) had challenged Trump's attorneys to present any evidence supporting the unfounded allegations."
Ford tweeted yesterday that he and members of his office had "met Pres. Trump & surrogates in court a lot. They never once presented sufficient evidence of widespread fraud. Yes, they spouted nonsense in the media. But they NEVER backed it up in court. That's why they always lost. And that's why they lost again tonight."
Ford thanked the lawyers on the case for "defending Nevada's elections from meritless claims of widespread fraud."
New information challenges the official narrative on how law enforcement caught the Golden State Killer. "Investigators and prosecutors said the investigation relied on genetic information people voluntarily made public, though with little reason to suspect it might incriminate members of their families in crimes," notes the Los Angeles Times. "The actual investigation was broader and more invasive, conducted without a warrant, and appeared to violate the privacy policy of at least one DNA company."
FREE MARKETS
Legislator proposes that New York City levy a tax on online shopping to pay for the city's public transportation system. Since the start of the pandemic, shopping online has become more of a necessity—and some officials apparently want to either discourage this safety measure or see that the government profits from it. A new bill proposed by Robert Carroll, a state legislator from Brooklyn, would add a $3 tax to purchases made online, exempting goods like food and medicine. "It's to nudge people to shop local and incentivize that," Carrol said in November. "It's also to say 'hey there's a cost to online delivery, there are multiple trucks, delivery trucks on my block every single day, there are tons of cardboard and plastic."
QUICK HITS
Good morning. Students at Howard University Law School spent the last 3 months observing the casual cruelty of local criminal court. During a pandemic. Still prosecutors ignored humanity. Still judges caged hundreds. They just released a report. Must read: https://t.co/zxvHo73Ndnhttps://t.co/sbzWjWbaAq
• California sheriffs are still rebelling against the state's latest pandemic restrictions.
• The problems with America's pandemic response go way beyond President Donald Trump, argues Matthew Yglesias.
• For once, a positive update on the prosecution of former Backpage executives:
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today issued an order in the case of journalists Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, ex-owners of Backpage, ordering the gvt to respond to a petition to remove Judge Susan Brnovich as trial judge. Plz see: https://t.co/CFmBM1duMM (Thread)
(More on the judge's potential conflict of interest here.)
• A Los Angeles judge panned the county's decision to ban outdoor dining, in a preliminary win for those challenging the order:
BREAKING: Judge James Chalfant issues tentative decision in the CRA/Mark Geragos' lawsuit vs L.A. County re: outdoor dining ban. Judge GRANTS a preliminary injunction, writing that the County "acted arbitrarily" and "failed to perform the required risk-benefit analysis." @FOXLApic.twitter.com/3W3sOZ8ey0
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Charles Oliverhttps://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/https://reason.com/?p=80781362020-08-03T14:28:38Z2020-08-04T08:00:06Z
Douglas County, Nevada, Public Library Director Amy Dodson insists that a proposed library diversity statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement was not an anti-police statement. "It simply was meant to state our inclusivity at the library, that we are open and welcoming to everyone and we treat everyone equally," she said. But that's not how Sheriff Daniel Coverley interpreted it. "Due to your support of Black Lives Matter and the obvious lack of support or trust with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, please do not feel the need to call 911 for help," Coverley wrote in a letter to the library. "I wish you good luck with disturbances and lewd behavior." A sheriff's spokesman later said that despite Coverley's letter the sheriff's office would continue to respond to 911 calls at the library. The library board later postponed a meeting to discuss the diversity statement, citing "community response."
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80776612020-07-30T18:49:06Z2020-07-30T18:50:27ZNew York Times SCOTUS reporter does not seem to understand the arguments she is criticizing.]]>
Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008, was "startled" by the sympathy that four justices recently expressed for a Nevada church's challenge to the state's 50-person cap on religious services. In an op-ed piece published today, Greenhouse argues that the justices' dissent from last Friday's decision against granting Calvary Chapel in Dayton an injunction pending appeal irrationally elevates religious concerns above public health. She says the dissenting justices—Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—"appear oblivious to the facts on the ground, particularly the well-documented role of religious services in spreading the virus."
To the contrary, it is Greenhouse who seems oblivious to the facts—in particular, Nevada's arbitrary distinction between houses of worship and businesses that pose similar or greater risks of COVID-19 transmission. Those favored businesses include bars, restaurants, gyms, arcades, bowling alleys, and, most conspicuously, casinos, where thousands of people from around the country have been gathering to try their luck since Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak allowed the gambling palaces to reopen on June 4. All of those businesses are permitted to operate at 50 percent of capacity, while churches, synagogues, and mosques may admit no more than 50 people at a time, regardless of their capacity. A church with seating for 500 people, for example, may not exceed one-tenth of its capacity.
That sort of discrimination is hard to reconcile with the standards that the Court has applied to laws that restrict religious activities. When those laws are neutral and generally applicable, the Court said in the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, they are consistent with the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom. But when those laws impose special burdens on religious organizations that do not apply to similarly situated secular organizations, the Court said three years later in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, they must satisfy strict scrutiny, meaning the government has to show the restrictions are narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest. That test is hard to pass, and the arguments mustered by Nevada in this case do not come close.
Calvary Chapel wanted to hold 45-minute services for up to 90 people, half of its capacity. Under its plan, congregants would follow designated one-way paths in and out of the church, observe physical distancing rules, sit in family groups spaced at least six feet apart, wear masks during services, and pass no items to each other. Sufficient time would be allowed to sanitize the church between services. These precautions, according to an infectious disease specialist consulted by the church, are "equal to or more extensive than those recommended by" the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Compare that prohibited plan with the situation in restaurants, where people frequently sit for longer than 45 minutes and do not wear masks while they are eating; in bowling alleys, where groups of up to 50 tournament spectators are allowed to sit together as long as they stay six feet away from other groups; or in casinos, where people drink and gamble in close proximity at blackjack and craps tables, often eschewing the masks that are notionally required. The state lets all those indoor businesses serve up to half as many customers as were allowed before the pandemic, which in casinos means thousands of patrons at any given time, gamblers who often will visit several casinos during their visits.
If there is a logical public health rationale for this distinction, Nevada was unable to locate it. Greenhouse cites "the well-documented role of religious services in spreading the virus," linking to a New York Times story that originally carried a headline claiming churches "Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases." But the information in the article, suggesting that "churches and religious events across the United States" account for something like 0.02 percent of COVID-19 infections, did not support that claim. Evidently that became apparent to the newspaper's editors, who revised the headline without explanation two days after the article appeared.
"The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion," Alito notes in his dissent from the decision to deny the injunction sought by Calvary Chapel, which was joined by Thomas and Kavanaugh. "It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine, or to engage in any other game of chance. But the Governor of Nevada apparently has different priorities. Claiming virtually unbounded power to restrict constitutional rights during the COVID–19 pandemic, he has issued a directive that severely limits attendance at religious services….That Nevada would discriminate in favor of the powerful gaming industry and its employees may not come as a surprise, but this Court's willingness to allow such discrimination is disappointing. We have a duty to defend the Constitution, and even a public health emergency does not absolve us of that responsibility."
Alito suggests that Sisolak's policy also runs afoul of the First Amendment by discriminating against speech based on viewpoint. "When large numbers of protesters [against police brutality] openly violated provisions of the Directive, such as the rule against groups of more than 50 people," he notes, "the Governor not only declined to enforce the directive but publicly supported and participated in a protest." Such discrimination also figured prominently in a federal judge's June 26 decision against New York's restrictions on religious services.
Greenhouse, who is currently the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale, does not simply disagree with Alito's argument. She does not seem to understand his point. "'Religion counts as a viewpoint,' he wrote, a sentence I found baffling," she says. "Isn't belief in public health a viewpoint?"
Greenhouse notes that Nevada's 50-person limit applies not only to churches but also to lecture spaces, museums, trade schools, and movie theaters (which are allowed to admit 50 customers per screen). But Kavanaugh, in a separate dissent, says Nevada is not off the hook simply because some venues have to comply with the same occupancy rule that applies to churches:
In these kinds of cases, the Court's religion precedents require a basic two-step inquiry. First, does the law create a favored or exempt class of organizations and, if so, do religious organizations fall outside of that class? That threshold question does not require judges to decide whether a church is more akin to a factory or more like a museum, for example. Rather, the only question at the start is whether a given law on its face favors certain organizations and, if so, whether religious organizations are part of that favored group. If the religious organizations are not, the second question is whether the government has provided a sufficient justification for the differential treatment and disfavoring of religion.
Gorsuch, in his own one-paragraph dissent, makes short work of Nevada's claim that the First Amendment allows it to disfavor houses of worship in this way:
This is a simple case. Under the Governor's edict, a 10-screen "multiplex" may host 500 moviegoers at any time. A casino, too, may cater to hundreds at once, with perhaps six people huddled at each craps table here and a similar number gathered around every roulette wheel there. Large numbers and close quarters are fine in such places. But churches, synagogues, and mosques are banned from admitting more than 50 worshippers—no matter how large the building, how distant the individuals, how many wear face masks, no matter the precautions at all. In Nevada, it seems, it is better to be in entertainment than religion. Maybe that is nothing new. But the First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion. The world we inhabit today, with a pandemic upon us, poses unusual challenges. But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.
Greenhouse still doesn't get it. "I've been fascinated that some liberal commentators found the dissenting opinions persuasive and the case a close one," she writes.
Greenhouse links to a Vox piece in which Ian Millhiser says Calvary Chapel "presented a much stronger legal argument" than South Bay United Pentecostal Church did in its challenge to California's restrictions on religious services last May. In that case, the Court likewise declined to issue an injunction pending appeal, and Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion emphasizing that states have broad discretion in dealing with communicable diseases. The same four justices dissented.
Millhiser, who was not impressed by the argument against California's rules, argues that churches in that state "were treated more favorably than similarly situated businesses, as they were allowed to reopen sooner than other places where groups of people gather in auditorium-like settings." By contrast, he says, "there's a plausible argument that Nevada does single out places of worship for inferior treatment that's not imposed on many comparable secular spaces."
Greenhouse won't even allow that much, and her reasoning is telling. "I understand the impulse not to appear unduly antagonistic toward religion," she says, "but I think that generosity toward the religious claim here loses sight of the broader context in which the dissenting justices were writing."
By that Greenhouse means "the persistence of the Supreme Court's conservative justices in seeking to elevate religious interests over those of secular society." As evidence of that persistence, Greenhouse cites recent decisions in which the Court upheld a religious exemption from Obamacare's contraceptive coverage mandate and ruled that the "ministerial exception" to employment discrimination claims extends to teachers hired by churches.
When you understand that Alito et al.'s receptiveness to Calvary Chapel's claims reflects a broader concern about religious freedom, Greenhouse seems to be saying, you should be wary about granting those claims any weight, no matter their legal merits. If she is trying "not to appear unduly antagonistic toward religion," she is not doing a very good job.
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Charles Oliverhttps://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/https://reason.com/?p=80414302020-01-13T15:47:28Z2020-01-17T09:00:15Z
The Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada received $737 million in loan guarantees from the federal government in 2011, and officials hailed it as the future of solar energy. But Bloomberg News reports the plant had already been rendered technologically obsolete by time it opened in 2015. It hasn't produced energy since April 2019 and lost its only customer late last year. But taxpayers remain on the hook for the loan guarantees.
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Brian Dohertyhttps://reason.com/people/brian-doherty/bdoherty@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80197022019-08-23T22:37:31Z2019-08-23T17:50:57Z
If you've been to Burning Man—the annual gathering dedicated to interactive art, intentional community, and wild revelry, whose gates open Sunday—you've noticed that the Black Rock playa on which you are camping is utterly dry and featureless, except for endless stretching miles of flaking cracked clay. It is devoid of any visible animal or plant life that didn't come in on a Burners' truck. You can do Burning Man for decades, as I have, and if you are lucky you might have one weird, miraculous sighting of a confused bird.
It's curious, then, how much attention the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) gives to birds in its latest Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on Burning Man. The BLM controls the federally owned land—a tiny portion of the vast Black Rock Desert playa, about 100 miles northeast of Reno—where 80,000 gather for the event.
In the public comment process between draft and final EIS, some commenters asked for some documented proof of bird impact, or even bird presence. The agency gave this dryly salty reply: "At the request of [Burning Man], biological resources surveys were not conducted as part of this EIS. This is typical of other proponents not wanting to bear the cost of wildlife surveys; therefore, the BLM assumes that wildlife are present." That's what you get for not wanting to pay for something a bureaucracy wants!
Having discussed the event with media and with many curious strangers in the 15 years since writing the book This Is Burning Man, the first detailed history of the event, I've often been asked why the federal government permits the event at all, given its reputation for unusually sexy and unusually druggy partying. The surface answer is: A legal process exists for seeking permits for gatherings on such federal lands, and the Burning Man Project (the nonprofit that now runs the event) goes through that tortuous process.
Dave Cooper—now an enthusiastic Burner, formerly the manager of the BLM's Black Rock National Conservation Area—says that despite the "pushback to Burning Man" that he frequently encountered when he was responsible for processing its permits, the event "always met the stipulations in their permit, and I saw no reason not to allow it to continue on the playa." Things have seemed a little different this year, with the BLM issuing the first full-on environmental report on the event since 2012. The nearly 1,000 pages that fill its twovolumes hint at many curious and colorful, and onerous and expensive, demands that the government might want to impose on the event.
When the draft version of the EIS came out in March, baffling and infuriating many in the Burning Man community, the agency received more than 2,000 public comments; contentious crowds showed up at a series of public meetings in Nevada, though only 5 percent of the event's attendees live in that state. Some of the more eyebrow-raising demands, such as a nine-mile concrete barrier around the event, were then walked back, or at least held in abeyance for some potential future year.
Despite an April Vanity Fair headline declaring "Burning Man Readies for War with the Federal Government," the event got its official permit in July without too much in the way of new bureaucracy that an attendee would notice—for now. The BLM is applying what it calls "adaptive management" to the event this year. That means it will be keeping an eye on nearly everything—while making Burning Man pay for the cost of its monitoring—and retaining the right to impose new restrictions moving forward.
What might have changed to create these public tensions isn't clear. Burning Man's organizers declined to speak for this story about their relationship with the BLM and what seemed like a contentious permit process, beyond public statements on their website.
However things roll at the event next week, the process shows that the BLM, on the surface dedicated to preserving and protecting public lands, can become niggling event managers when it sees the need—and can threaten attendees' Fourth Amendment rights in the process.
Bureau of Human Environment Management
The Black Rock playa was chosen for the event in the first place, back in 1990, because of its virtual imperviousness to harm (and, ironically, for its presumed isolation from the eyes of authority). But many of the BLM's concerns—drugs, weapons—seem to have nothing to do with preserving or managing the land per se, focusing instead on managing the event and its attendees. To those who object to that, the agency points out that the "human environment" and the safety and health of citizen-land users are also its legal concern.
When the EIS discusses the physical environment—air, soil, dust, light, birds, animals, plants, historic trails and artifacts—its comments seem both picayune and vague. The EIS isn't specific about what level of measured impact, if any, would reach some sort of threshold requiring specific action. As one commenter noted, "Without any objective description of what kind of impact is to be considered significant and how much impact is likely to occur, the imposition of mitigation measures would be both subjective and indefensible."
Yes, a part of the vast featureless playa that mostly has no artificial light now for a few weeks has artificial light; the BLM is thinking of requiring artists' worklights to be shielded so their beams don't go skyward. And yes, Burning Man is famously dusty. This is utterly unavoidable, given the nature of the playa: Human and vehicular movement disrupt the surface and loosen dust, which wind inevitably swirls into the air. The BLM notes that during the event, the quantity of a certain size of small particulate matter in the air is 10 times the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, and so it orders Burning Man to supply its workers and vendors with masks to help filter them. It's also requiring the organizers to keep monitoring the air.
The EIS does a lot of that—turning understood realities of the event into things allegedly requiring tabulation, monitoring, and management, without much explanation of what benefits are supposed to come from the action. It makes sure to note that it is not legally required to do a prudent cost-benefit analysis of its mitigation demands.
The EIS also worries over the dripping of oil and depositing of greywater and other non-native effluent on the playa, noting that in 2018 the BLM issued "74 warnings and 40 violation notices for fuel storage." More encouragingly, it notes that past oil-drip surveys of parked vehicles at Burning Man show a downward trend in the number of junkers dripping oil on the pristine playa, with 16 percent doing so in 2002 but only 4 percent in 2012.
While all attendees are instructed to not let any kind of wastewater, whether soapy or foody or uriney, hit the ground, the BLM is aware that with 80,000 people, this sometimes happens. But when you read the EIS fine print, you find that in the agency's own estimation the "playa has been classified as a 'discharging playa,' which means that through evaporation and capillary forces, groundwater is actively discharged into the atmosphere [and] hydrocarbons deposited on the playa would be subject to biological, physical, and chemical breakdown and dispersion, and would therefore likely be eliminated from the system over time….Therefore, groundwater quality is not anticipated to be greatly affected by the Event because groundwater is actively discharged to the atmosphere." In other words, none of the dripping of Burning Man attendees studied and investigated and cited and ticketed in such detail matter that much to the environment. But they do give an excuse for lots of monitoring and citations.
One of the more utterly head-shaking petty demands in this purported "leave no trace" environment is insisting Burning Man make and disseminate pamphlets with trail maps of historical trails in the larger region around the event.
Some of the BLM's event-managing proposals seem in direct conflict with its land-managing concerns. The most clearly absurd suggestion, which they retreated from between the draft version of the EIS in March and the final release in June, was that the entire 9-mile border of the encampment be surrounded by concrete Jersey barriers. (Some suspect this was a result of the Department of Homeland Security fantasizing about a scenario from a thriller novel regarding an attack on Burning Man, or worrying about potential repeats of a Vegas shooter scenario.) In the revised version, the Jersey barriers are no longer specifically demanded, but the possibility of an order "to implement physical perimeter barriers and controls" remains.
The concrete Jersey barrier solution would likely require more than a thousand big rig round trips and multiple thousand of crane operations to build that wall. That would damage both roads and playa far more than anything else happening at Burning Man, and it would create miles of dunes from piled particulates. (Talk about dust!) It could conceivably add $10 million to the cost of running the event, and in one commenter's words shows such a "lack of any reasonable consideration" that it alone "calls into question the integrity of the whole EIS document."
This absurd concrete wall around the city would also trap everyone inside with just one road out. That would be dangerous even in the unlikely "shooting driver running amok" fantasy that it was supposed to prevent, not to mention the far more likely trouble of rain making the playa difficult to drive on, or any other incident requiring a multi-path evacuation.
Burning Man already has a sophisticated radar and patrol system of its own—they hate gate crashers as much as the next ticketed event—and law enforcement officers on the premises are always patrolling the borders as well. The BLM can point to only one case of someone getting through it, and not for the purpose of criminal mayhem.
Cooper sees signs that "other people got their fingers in the process" this year outside the BLM, especially Homeland Security, who are the only reason he can think of for "extravagant recommendations for concrete barriers." He also sees the hands of law enforcement in the document's most controversial and rights-damaging proposal—one not instituted this year, though the BLM insists it likely will next year.
The BLM wants to institute what its representatives at public meetings now call a warrantless "screening" of every vehicle entering the event. It does not define what that would entail, but it would clearly be a further step beyond the lame, officious traffic pretexts for stops and searches that already hassle Burners on their way to the event. (Last year the vast majority of the drug arrests from such an operation didn't go to trial.)
Caveat Magister (that's his Burning Man name; he's also known as Benjamin Wachs) has a new book out called The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us About Building Better Communities. He says such searches would inject a "culture of suspicion; when everyone is worried about what could happen when they step out of line, people stop expressing themselves in ways they otherwise would. When you tell people they have no rights, it inevitably damages the culture, makes it angrier."
It would also be what should be seen as a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. But in practice, Fourth Amendment law has lots of balancing considerations of government goals, citizen burdens, and "reasonableness," despite the apparent clarity of the Constitution's language. The BLM blithely insists in the EIS that "the constitutionality of the proposed security screening is well supported in instances where the Department of the Interior contracts for or requires security at points of entry to large outdoor mass gatherings."
When asked to provide any case law litigating such issues, especially when "security" becomes arrests, the BLM had no further comment. It is true, as BLM spokesperson Ronald Evenson says, that the park service has done security screenings on people entering a concert venue on its land in Virginia for years with no known successful challenges. There are areas, like airports and some sports stadiums, where for security purposes such mass searches are practiced and have not been authoritatively declared unconstitutional.
But a 2008 article in the Suffolk University Law Review explains that, while the Supreme Court has taken no unequivocal position on the question, there are lower-court cases that support the notion that simply searching everyone entering a ticketed public event raises actionable Fourth Amendment concerns. Specifically, in the 2004 case of Bourgeois v. Peters, the 11th Circuit invalidated a city policy to force everyone going to a protest to submit to a metal detector search:
The Bourgeois decision cautioned that allowing mass suspicionless searches could lead to searches at a variety of large events, including sporting events, contrary to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of "searches based on evidence-rather then potentially effective, broad, prophylactic dragnets…." Under the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, the Bourgeois court analyzed the government's conditioning of access to a public event upon submission to a search, regardless of whether the individual relinquished a right or a privilege…
As a 2007 article in The International Sports Law Journal summed it up, "The general rule is that warrantless, suspicionless searches are unconstitutional unless they fit within certain recognized categories that are considered exceptions to this rule. There are three such categories: special needs beyond normal law enforcement (e.g., airport searches due to past hijackings); exigent circumstances (e.g., imminent destruction of evidence; danger to a police officer); and situations in which a diminished expectation of privacy exists (e.g., searches incident to arrest; searches of open fields or objects in plain view)." It is hard to see how searching people or vehicles going into Burning Man meet any of those criteria.
That said, nothing is completely predictable in Fourth Amendment litigation. But there's a good chance a judge would see the Burning Man case as distinct and even more troublesome than searching allegedly for dangerous weapons at protests or sports events. The EIS language explicitly mentions drugs, not restricting such searches to protection from violent mayhem. And it's one thing to ask people to withstand a simple patdown, and maybe a quick search of a purse or backpack, as they enter a concert, or protest, or sporting event. To have any hope of effectiveness, Burning Man searches would involve unpacking vehicles and trailers containing a week or more of one's possessions, food, tent, art, medicine, equipment—everything for a week in a harsh environment—that took hours to pack and would take hours to repack.
The burden of submitting to the search—or refusing and being denied entry to an event you likely spent anywhere from 5 to 15 hours driving to, plus around $500 for a ticket—ought to make any sane judge see a Burning Man search as qualitatively different from a concert or sports game. So should the possibility of extending what can already be hours-long lines to get into the event. As the EIS comments show, people are chomping at the bit to sue the BLM if it actually starts this warrantless, traffic-pretext-free mass "screening."
A more reasonable law enforcement demand, following a Salonarticle on problems in the treatment of sexual assaults during the event, is for Burning Man to contract for a new "sexual assault response team."
On the random bureaucracy front, BLM suggests it might in the future insist that any DIY living structure that a Burning Man camper builds that's over 10 feet tall would need to be inspected, possibly by a "Nevada-certified building inspector prior to occupancy." As commenters noted, that's crazy, given that such inspectors typically "inspect buildings to ascertain compliance with either the applicable building codes in the county, and/or the drawings as prepared and stamped by a licensed structural engineer." Without some state law regarding people's jerry-rigged lodging at Burning Man, "the inspectors are in a legal bind that is unfair to them personally and professionally."
Most building inspectors don't deal with the special requirements of short-term buildings and tent-like structures, and the number of potentially available Nevada-certified building inspectors of any sort in such a remote location—where a city's worth of such inspections would have to happen over a couple of days—is a completely unreasonable thing to consider, especially since BLM hasn't even demonstrated that there is a problem here that needs to be solved.
Where the EIS does bring up problems at Burning Man, they typically amount to single anecdotes. For example, it mentions the presence of one "individual inside the Event during build week with an assault rifle and approximately 40 grams of cocaine." (He harmed no one with the weapon.) And: "During the 2018 Event, a large moving truck traveling back from the playa overturned on a curve on SR 447 [which] resulted in multiple gallons of diesel leaking onto the highway." And then there's "an incident of a participant being gifted a substance that contained fentanyl."
One commenter summed up a range of Burner bemusement over the EIS: "It is, in fact, telling, that most of the ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT statement has absolutely nothing to do with the environment, impacts of the event upon it, nor facts—rather there are vague suggestions not based on well-sampled data and mostly non-environmental assessments."
Dumpster Striving
The Burning Man organizers, and large parts of their fanbase, are strenuously attached to not having dumpsters on site. The BLM thinks they might be a good idea. Letting people know they don't have to take their own waste away with them, as they now have to, will almost certainly make them generate more trash. And does the BLM really want to suddenly add the waste of a whole 80,000-population city to the local system, rather than the current decentralized system of having each individual vehicle take its trash to wherever the people in it are going? Imagine how much space the BLM approach would require—and how many 200-mile round trips to Reno-area landfills.
The BLM points out that poorly loaded trash on the back of trucks or trailers sometimes ends up on the side of the road back to Reno. Cooper agrees with Burning Man's counterargument, that when it comes to those regrettable unintended dumpings, "Burning Man is already required to pick it up, and they do it; not only that week's trash but trash that was left there all year." Cooper knows some attendees abuse private dumpsters at rest stops and in Gerlach or Reno, but he thinks the organizers do the best they can to educate their attendees about taking care of their own waste. Forcing the entire Burning Man trash stream into Reno-area landfills, robbing local tribes of their current business of charging people $5 a bag to take their trash, and destroying the delicate cultural balance that has Burners doing a better job of cleaning up after themselves than one would expect from partying Americans, seems an overkill response to a small existing problem.
The event undoubtedly has an unbalanced impact on some of the small communities that its 80,000 attendees wend through on their way to the playa, including Paiute tribal land and the towns of Nixon and Gerlach. Matthew Ebert, who used to manage a nearby ranch for Burning Man and rent trailers for playa events, is a former Gerlach resident who still owns a home there. He says that environmental complaints from locals often just reflect that they "find Burning Man to be an imposition on their regular lives," especially to the extent that passers-through are often a personality and social type that a desert hermit might find just plain annoying to deal with—especially if, as has sometimes happened, they left trash or even feces around town.
But the armies of invading art-techies have a brighter side. As the EIS states, the event's economic impact on Nevada alone is around $63 million a year. Total direct spending for the event and participants, minus labor expenses for the organizers, is "estimated at $132.6 million" annually. Burning Man is also required to help pay to maintain the last paved county road on the way to the playa, a rare though not unique case of a private entity forced to subsidize a public road because they cause it to be used a lot.
The average attendee spends around $666 in Nevada. The local BLM field office gets 3 percent of the event's gross revenue, as well as cost recovery for its expenses in managing the event. In 2017 that amounted to over $3.7 million paid from Burning Man to the BLM.
Localities in Nevada on the way to the event also collect lots of fuel and lodging taxes from the Burners. Nevada grocery stores, storage units, hotels, casinos, and airports all profit handily in sales. (The Reno airport says Burning Man "increases revenue at the airport between 11 and 15 million dollars.") The state of Nevada imposes a 9 percent tax on Burning Man ticket sales, which earned the state over $3.2 million in 2017.
So, beyond the simple civics textbook reasons why this weird counterculture event has had in the past a mostly complementary and congenial relationship with the government, there are millions of reasons to not scare Burning Man out of Nevada.
But could they ever leave? The EIS itself discusses a mutual effort on both sides to see if there was someplace better suited for the event, which came up zero. Burning Man has become a big landowner in the area, with the purchase, with the help of various wealthy techies in their orbit, of the nearby Fly Ranch, where the owners intend to experiment with more year-round versions of aspects of the Burning Man experience and ideology. The event has shown a demonstrated preference for the Black Rock playa, and organizers have every incentive to stick it out no matter how hard BLM leans on them. Surely the BLM knows this.
Still, as Caveat Magister says, "It's absurd to think that Burning Man hasn't spent all these years of negotiations wondering, do we have other options?"
Does Donald Trump Care What Happens at Burning Man?
Many in the Burner community see one big difference since the last environmental assessment was done by BLM for the event in 2012: Donald Trump is president. Neil Shister, a former Time correspondent and the author of the new book Radical Ritual: How Burning Man Changed the World, thinks the BLM's behavior is so rationally inexplicable that some sort of political "vindictiveness" seems at play, some "subtext" of "political revenge." But he grants that he knows no specifics. Many in the Burner community share those suspicions, though I have seen no hard evidence for them, and some familiar with the process insist D.C. has little concern for Burning Man permitting and lets localities have their head.
National politics do seem to be on the event organizers' minds more than before. Burning Man has hired a squad of lobbyists from Holland & Knight, including one former Trump staffer. (None of them responded to requests to talk about their work for the event.)
There's a certain sort of Republican orthodoxy for which the event has a natural attitudinal appeal. (GOP tax-cut king Grover Norquist, to give a prominent example, is a very public fan.) You could see how that could play out over, say, the dumpster fight. Burning Man's theory of radical self-reliance and its efforts to convince attendees to manage and haul out their own trash, with great though not perfect efficiency, may save Burning Man money; but it also teaches their audience to be responsible for themselves, to not coddle them in this harsh environment.
As the EIS notes, there's a sense in which this is bigger than either the organizers or the government. The agency could choose to not permit the event, or Burning Man could choose not to throw it, and many thousands of people would still show up at the Black Rock playa to gather, make art, and blow each others' minds. They'd just leave a way bigger mess without someone renting all the porta-johns. It's the kind of inevitability that even a federal bureaucracy might see fit to bow to rather than recklessly throw their weight around, especially with more than $3 million on the line.
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Charles Oliverhttps://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/https://reason.com/?p=80192792019-08-19T20:03:40Z2019-08-22T08:00:54Z
The owner of the Victoria Saloon in Sparks, Nevada, says the city is trying to force him to raise prices on drinks, undercutting his competitiveness with the nearby Nugget Casino Resort. Johnny Eastwick leases his patio from the city, and he says officials offered to renew his lease only if he agreed to match the Nugget's prices on drinks during special events, a requirement he says would force him to double and, in some cases, nearly triple his prices. City officials say the patio is in the public right of way, so Eastwick benefits from any special events hosted by the Nugget and should have to abide by its rules.
Insulting one's prizefighting opponent is a tradition that reaches back to boxer Jack Johnson, was perfected by Muhammad Ali, and is now an accepted form of mental warfare in boxing and MMA fights. When Lennox Lewis called fellow black British boxer Frank Bruno an "Uncle Tom," some invisible line of civility may have been crossed, but doing so never resulted in penalties for Lewis.
But an ugly brawl sparked by racial and religious insults after an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bout has Nevada regulators wondering if the time has finally come to put controls on pre-fight speech.
"I think it's gotten to the point with certain unarmed combatants to where it's become totally unacceptable," said Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) Executive Director Bob Bennett. "I definitely think, unequivocally, that's something we need to take a more active role in and hold fighters accountable for their language."
Bennett's comments came at a disciplinary hearing for the UFC's verbal warfare king, Conor McGregor, and his November 2018 opponent, Khabib Nurmagomedov. After defeating McGregor, Nurmagomedov jumped out of the cage and attacked members of McGregor's team. McGregor remained in the cage but gave and received punches.
Nurmagomedov later defended his actions saying, "He talked about my religion, he talked about my country, he talked about my father." Nurmagomedov is a Dagestani Avar––an ethnic group from southern Russia––and a Sunni Muslim.
In its role as the state regulatory body in Nevada for combat sports, including MMA and boxing, the NSAC issued large fines and suspensions to both fighters. (The $500,000 levied against Nurmagomedov for the attack on McGregor's team was the largest fine handed down since Mike Tyson was fined $3 million in 1997 for biting off part of Evander Holyfield's ear in the now-legendary "Bite Fight.")
Still, punishing only the fighters' actions left regulators wondering if they could punish their trash talking, too.
"None of these settlements take into account verbal statements made by parties to one another," said NSAC Chairman Anthony Marnell. So far, the NSAC has never punished a fighter for speech.
McGregor's other verbal blows include calling Nurmagomedov's manager Ali Abdelaziz: "a fucking snitch terrorist rat and that's it. I could go into heavy detail… and I will! He was pulled off of a flight going from Cairo, Egypt, to New York City on September 11, 2001. He was caught with fake passports in his possession. He turned informant and turned on the people that he was working with. He is a — I don't even know how that man is in this fucking country."
The commission members agreed to pursue rule changes to punish this type of fighter speech or what they called "inciting comments," but realized they weren't prepared to draft the actual regulations and placed the topic on a list of "items for future agendas." "[It] would break a lot of precedent and without notice that we're going to start fining and/or suspending for what you say vs. what you do," Marnell said.
The NSAC declined to comment for this story or clarify the status of any proposed regulation changes.
The UFC itself is much better positioned to regulate fighter speech (as the NFL and NBA do) owing to its existing fighter contracts, which stipulate adherence to the UFC Code of Conduct and which already include a prohibition on certain speech:
"Derogatory or offensive conduct, including without limitation insulting language, symbols, or actions about a person's ethnic background, heritage, color, race, national origin, age, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation."
The UFC's official reaction to NSAC's proposed regulation was not supportive. "I think it's crazy. I think it's insane. I think it's unconstitutional," said UFC President Dana White at a Jan. 31 press conference.
"First of all, I don't think you can legally do that. These guys get into a cage and they punch each other in the face. They can knock each other unconscious, they can choke each other, but they can't say mean things to each other? It's pretty ridiculous."
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Joe Setyonhttps://reason.com/people/joe-setyon/joe.setyon@reason.comhttp://reason.com/2018/11/07/ex-nevada-brothel-owner-dennis-hof-wins/2018-11-07T14:45:00Z2018-11-07T14:45:00Z
Voters in Nevada's Assembly District 36 must have really not liked the Democrat. That's one way to explain why Dennis Hof, a former brothel owner and reality TV star who died last month, still won in a landslide yesterday over Democrat Lesia Romanov.
Hof ran as a pro-Donald Trump Republican in a district that heavily supported the president in the 2016 election. The former brothel owner, who described himself as the "Trump of Pahrump" (a town in Nevada), was expected to win in the general election after upsetting incumbent Assemblyman James Oscarson. Then, hours after celebrating his 72nd birthday with a wide array of folks that included porn star Ron Jeremy and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Hof was found dead at his Nye County Love Ranch brothel on October 17.
By the time he died, it was too late to put another Republican on the general election ballot. As a result, Nevada Republicans encouraged people to vote for him anyway. And as tragic as his death was, Hof campaign manager Chuck Muth previously indicated his boss's passing might actually help his electoral chances.
"There are a lot of Republicans who were uncomfortable voting for Dennis because of the nature of his business and they now know that he is not the one who will be serving," Muth told Reuters last month. "They will feel much more comfortable casting the ballot for him knowing there will be another Republican to replace him."
So who will end up representing Nevada's Assembly District 36? Right now that's not exactly clear, though it will most likely be a Republican. The Los Angeles Timesreports that commissioners from the three counties included in the district will decide on a GOP replacement. Each commissioner will choose one candidate before meeting to decide on a final appointee. Nye County encompasses the largest swath of the district, so its commissioner will have the biggest say, according to theLas Vegas Review-Journal.
While this sort of scenario is exceedingly rare, it's actually not the first time a dead man has won an election. In 2014, The Washington Postcompiled a list of five people who were elected to Congress despite the fact that they were dead. In fact, there appear to be more examples of dead people winning elections than there are deceased folks losing elections where they were still on the ballot.
Who knows, maybe dying gives you an edge.
Bonus link: ReasonTV interviewed Hof back in 2014 on prostitution, libertarianism, and more. You can watch the exchange below:
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttp://reason.com/2018/10/17/nevada-brothel-owner-dennis-hof-dies/2018-10-17T21:55:00Z2018-10-17T21:55:00Z
"No cause of death has been determined, but no foul play is suspected," says Chuck Muth, Hof's campaign manager. "I'm told the Clark County coroner will conduct an autopsy."
For now, Hof's death has spurred a heady mix of reactions—befitting a man whose big heart and boorish behavior are both part of the lore.
To many who knew and worked with him, Hof was a priceless mentor, benefactor, and friend. As news of his death spread, so, too, did the online outpourings of gratitude and sadness from former and current workers at Hof's businesses (in addition to the Love Ranch outside Las Vegas, Hof owned six more legal brothels around Nevada, including The Moonlite BunnyRanch) and others who knew him.
"Your amazing achievements and the incredible opportunities you've provided for so many of us will never be forgotten," tweeted Bunny Ranch worker Ava Carter on Tuesday.
Penthouse journalist Mitchell Sunderland called Hof "the sweetest, least judgemental man in American life," and posted a personal story of how Hof had helped him at one of his darkest times. "America knew Dennis as the PT Barnum of Booty," added Sunderland, "but I saw him help numerous people, giving them advice, friendship, shelter, and, in some case's, money when nobody else would."
Many such individuals were sharing their stories on social media yesterday. "Those close to him knew the real Dennis—a kind & strong man who always made time for his friends," posted sociology researcher and sex worker Christina Parreira. "He was my rock, mentor, & friend, and I loved him immensely."
@DennisHof was my best friend. He truly saved my life. I love him so much. I still can't believe this. We had so many plans for the future. I love you Dennis pic.twitter.com/5xAM31XBaW
"You changed the sex work industry forever and your company changed my life," tweeted Ruby Rae, a graduate student and sex-worker rights activist who also works at the Bunny Ranch. "Through the opportunity of your employment I realized my own passions within this crazy world."
Within the larger sex worker community, however, Hof has been a controversial figure. Several dark allegations lie in Hof's history. Former employees and lovers accused him of sexual assault in 2005, 2009, and 2011. "My rapist is dead," former Love Ranch worker Jennifer O'Kane told the LasVegasReview–Journal on Monday.
And Hof's failure to fight for prostitution decriminalization or legalization writ large struck some as confirmation that his commitment to the wellbeing of sex workers started and ended with his own pocketbook.
"He could have tossed some money at different orgs trying to get sex work decrim," tweeted Amber Batts, an Alaska woman who spent several years in prison for allegedly "sex trafficking" willing adult women who worked for her escort service. Instead, Hof seemed "just fine staying in his neck of the woods" while sex workers elsewhere "are being jailed and getting killed out here."
But within his own brothels, Hof did help revolutionize working conditions for Nevada's legal prostitution industry. "When Hof bought he Bunny Ranch in the early 1990s, Nevada brothels would not let the women leave for days at a time," explains Allison Schrager at Quartz.
They had to do whatever the customer wanted, for the price the house set. Hof took his experience selling time-share property and employed a similar model to sex work. He had all the women work as independent contractors who set the terms of their own transactions, including the price, and then took 50%.
Schrager said she visited Hof's brothels three times while working on articles and enjoyed being in an environment "that felt so devoid of hypocrisy." This, she adds, "is how Hof lived his life."
"Dennis Hof was a visionary," tweeted Alice Little, a Bunny Ranch worker, blogger, and podcaster. "He has a dream- to give women an empowering environment to own their sexuality. He did that, and so much more. He was a mentor, role model, friend, and like a family member to so many of us."
Perhaps it's Hof's general politics—he's flitted back and forth between the Libertarian and Republican parties, coming down in recent years on the pro-Trump side of things—that put him at odds with his largely liberal peers in the adult entertainment and sex-work industries. But this conservatism also helped him out with local authorities in some of the Republican-heavy counties where brothels operate.
Hof was running for the Nevada senate as a Republican, and "though many prominent Nevada Republicans refused to endorse Hof, he was still expected to win the general election to represent the deep-red district," points out RollingStone. Now, come November, Hof's name will remain on the ballot but it will note that he is deceased. If Hof still wins, the seat gets filled by another Republican from the district, to be picked by commissioners from Nevada's Nye, Lincoln, and Clark counties.
Grover Norquist, who calls Hof "a friend and political ally," lamented that the man—"so full of energy and life" when Norquist saw him Monday—"could have made a big difference in the direction of Nevada towards limited government and lower taxes." Perhaps. But there's no doubt that he helped fight for and preserve Nevada's limited-government approach to sex work. Without Hof's personal and economic influence on local politics, Nevada's brothels face an uncertain future.
For now, Hof's "brothels will close because he was the sole licensee," reports the Review-Journal. But this "could be temporary as authorities and Hof's lawyers work to find a solution."
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Charles Oliverhttps://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/http://reason.com/2018/09/13/brickbat-sick/2018-09-13T08:00:00Z2018-09-13T08:00:00Z
When Kelly Coltrain was booked into the Mineral County, Nevada, jail for traffic tickets, she told staff she was on drugs and prone to seizures when she was in withdrawal. And when she became ill, she asked jailers to take her to the hospital. Instead, they gave her a mop and ordered her to clean up her vomit. Less, than an hour later, she died in her cell. Her family has sued the sheriff's office.
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Brian Dohertyhttps://reason.com/people/brian-doherty/bdoherty@reason.comhttp://reason.com/2018/08/27/burning-man-attorney-threatens-bureau-of/2018-08-27T19:20:00Z2018-08-27T19:20:00Z
In the week or so leading up the official beginning of the annual Burning Man festival, which is in full swing as of yesterday, agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) started a program of enhanced traffic law enforcement in the name of the U.S. Department of the Interior's opioid reduction task force. More specifically, they started vigorously stopping cars in Nixon, Nevada, a town that nearly all of Burning Man's attendees pass through on the 447. That state road is the only paved and drivable route from Reno to the Black Rock playa where the event is held.
The paper further reported that these efforts are aggravating the folks who run Burning Man, a fully permitted event that takes place on federal land:
The Burning Man organization has written a letter to top federal officials threatening a federal lawsuit in the wake of continuing traffic stops slowing vehicles headed to the 80,000-person event….The organization called for an immediate stop to the "improper and apparently unconstitutional behavior" and also demanded that all involved federal agencies preserve all records related to the traffic stops in a letter obtained by the Reno Gazette Journal.
"Many of the (traffic stop) tactics are attempts to intimidate and harass travelers who are doing nothing more than passing through the Reservation on a state-maintained highway. This is unacceptable and this behavior should not be tolerated by agency leaders nor the public," said Adam Belsky, special counsel to the Burning Man organization in the Wednesday letter.
The letter is addressed to Mr. Darryl LaCounte, acting director of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other top BIA officials in Washington, D.C….
"It appears that the BIA agents are unconstitutionally targeting attendees of the Burning Man event in violation of their First Amendment rights of free expression and of freedom to assemble," Belsky wrote.
So far, federal authorities will not comment on how many arrests have resulted from the stop, or what percentage of drug dog alerts led cops to contraband, or what percentage of that contraband consists of opioids. "The Pyramid Lake Police Department said that it will not release the records of how many citations, arrests and seizures the tribal and federal officers have made until 30 days after the operation concludes," the Gazette-Journal says.
The Pyramid Lake Tribal Council is cooperating with the BIA on the stops, stating they are in the service of helping "to carry out President Trump's directive to stop the opioid crisis."
In their official public statement on the law enforcement efforts—distinct from the threatening letter obtained by the Gazette-Journal—Burning Man organizers stress the damage that such pointless delays in movement could have on health and safety, on traffic congestion, on the economic benefit the event brings to the local tribes, and on safe operation of the event itself as vendors' and workers' arrivals are delayed.
They also list some of the reasons given to drivers for the stops: "driving over the posted speed limit, not stopping at the line at a stop sign, crossing the centerline or a tire touching the centerline, partially obscured license plates, not using turn signals, dim and non-functioning lights." Many of those stopped have insisted they were breaking no traffic laws. Burning Man is encouraging everyone stopped to fill out a report for them on their experiences.
Some personal stories and grousing about the traffic stops can be read here and here, although the idea that insanely vigorous enforcement of traffic laws turned into full-on roadblocks is exaggerated. The Gazette-Journal has also printed some personal tales of the stops.
Most of the reports I'm now seeing online indicate that the enhanced traffic stops are in abeyance now as the event is officially in motion. Nonetheless, everyone should of course obey all traffic laws and all other laws at all times always.
A few years back, as I reported, Bureau of Land Management forces were running drug dogs on mail sent to the event. Surprise, surprise: Their canine accusations of drug law violations were consistently wrong.
Burning Man has evolved over the years from near-anarchy to near–police state. I wrote the first narrative history of the event, This is Burning Man back in 2004, with a 10th anniversary edition available as an e-book with a new afterword.
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Leonard Robinsonhttps://reason.com/people/leonard-robinson/leonard.robinson@reason.comhttp://reason.com/2018/08/14/nevada-assembly-candidate-loses-brothel/2018-08-14T21:00:00Z2018-08-14T21:00:00Z
The Love Ranch, one of the seven legal brothels owned by Nevada Assembly candidate Dennis Hof, lost its brothel license last week.
According to the Nye County Licensing and Liquor Board, Hof failed to apply for renewal and pay fees on time. This is the first time in the board's 10-year history that a brothel license has been permanently revoked.
Hof has been running afoul of county rules a lot, authorities say. In February 2018, the Love Ranch's license was suspended after Hof failed to obtain permission before modifying several mobile homes on site. The brothel was eventually reopened in April.
Hof claimed back in February that this was political retribution for his challenging state Assemblyman James Oscarson in the Republican primary. "They're out of hand. It's the same stuff they're doing to Donald Trump," he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. They're using government power to put me out of business and discredit me."
In 2017, Hof had failed to pay county fees and complete necessary paperwork but was not penalized then.
This past April, citizens of Lyon and Nye counties, both of which contains brothels owned by Hof, drafted ballot referendums to ban brothels in their counties. Voters in Lyon County will see this on their ballots in November, while Nye county voters won't likely see a brothel vote on their ballots until 2020.
Hof argues that such measures won't eliminate prostitution, as crusaders claim, but simply lead to more dangerous working conditions for those involved. "The brothels are a bit like Walmart and church: Nobody forces you to go, but when you need something, you know where they're at," said Hof to the Las Vegas Review. "Live and let live. Don't try to impose your views on other people."
Regardless, Hof has said he plans to sell the brothels in both Lyon and Nye Counties so he can focus on his political aspirations without being trapped by a system that he believes is out to get him. In June, he beat three-time incumbent Oscarson in the GOP primary and will now face Democratic candidate Lesia Romanov in November.
But some women who work at the Love Ranch are optimistic that they will be back in business soon. "Dennis has told us to keep a good attitude," said Sonja Bandolik, an employee at Love Ranch. "He's got deep pockets. If it's humanly possible, he's going to make this happen."
Others have fled to northern Nevada to work at another brothel owned by Hof. And workers at other brothels Hof owns have been coming to his defense on social media.
Nye County commissioners have no issue with putting people out of work- absolutely disgusting. They should be ashamed, taking jobs away as part of a political agenda. Love Ranch closed for now. #sexworkhttps://t.co/fnrvSx6ckO
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Joe Setyonhttps://reason.com/people/joe-setyon/joe.setyon@reason.comhttp://reason.com/2018/08/09/death-row-inmate-to-state-just-kill-me-a/2018-08-09T17:00:00Z2018-08-09T17:00:00Z
A convicted murderer on death row in Nevada has one simple request: He wants the state to kill him.
By all accounts, 47-year-old Scott Dozier is a bad man. He already had one second-degree murder conviction under his belt when he was sentenced to death in 2007 for first-degree murder. In the latter case, the torso of Jeremiah Miller was eventually found crammed in a suitcase and dumped in the trash. The body was missing its head, arms, calves, and feet.
Dozier denies having committed both murders. But he says he's ready to die anyway, especially after his lethal injection was postponed for the second time last month. Nevada should "just get it done, just do it effectively and stop fighting about it," he tells the Associated Press.
Civil libertarians and classical liberals have long argued against capital punishment on the basis that the government shouldn't kill its own citizens. "The death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice," the ACLU argues. "Well-publicized problems with the death penalty process—wrongful convictions, arbitrary application, and high costs—have convinced many libertarians that capital punishment is just one more failed government program that should be scrapped," Ben Jones writes at Libertarianism.org.
But what about cases where the defendant wants to die? In this case, one might argue that the state wouldn't be murdering Dozier; it would simply be granting his last wish. Then again, while the state of Nevada wants to kill Dozier, it has no desire to let him go out on his own terms: he was put on suicide watch following the most recent postponement of his execution.
Dozier claims he's not suicidal. He doesn't even want to die that much; he just prefers death to prison. But his execution has turned into a complicated legal affair that sheds still more light on the messy business of capital punishment.
Hours before Dozier was set to be executed in July, Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez of Nevada's Eighth Judicial District Court said the state couldn't use a sedative called midazolam. That's because the drug's manufacturer, Alvogen, successfully argued that "serious harm" would be done to its business if the sedative was used in an execution.
Since then, the makers of the other two drugs that were set to be administered Dozier have also joined the fight. Neither Hikma Pharmaceuticals—which makes the opioid fentanyl—nor Sandoz Inc.—which manufactures the muscle relaxant cisatracurium—want the state to kill Dozier with their products.
Dozier, though, just wants it to all be over. "I want to be really clear about this. This is my wish," he tells the AP. "They should stop punishing me and my family for their inability to carry out the execution."
It's not like the state of Nevada disagrees. The attorney general's office says the drug companies are simply trying to improve their public image. "For Alvogen (and similarly situated drug manufacturers), this lawsuit has little downside. Whether it ultimately wins or loses, Alvogen scores points in the public relations arena just for bringing this lawsuit," lawyers for the AG's office wrote late last month in a petition to the Nevada Supreme Court. On Monday, 15 states filed an amici curiae with the Supreme Court expressing similar sentiments.
Dozier agrees with what those states are saying. "It just seems like they're a little late to the party on that whole theory," he told the Reno Gazette Journal earlier this week, referring to the drug companies. "I don't really think they care. I think they started caring when it started affecting them, bottom line."
As Reason has documented in the past, states often operate in the shadows when it comes to obtaining and administering death penalty drugs. In one instance, Texas even sought to procure banned drugs from a shady Indian company. There have also been questions regarding how humane death by lethal injection really is. Transparency is sorely needed, particularly in Dozier's case, where Alvogen has accused Nevada officials of illegally purchasing midazolam.
For now, Dozier has no choice but to keep waiting. The next court date for the case isn't until September 10, and prison officials want his execution to be rescheduled for November. "To be clear, this is actually a state of torture, without question," he told the Gazette Journal. "I mean at least now I know nothing's going to happen before September 10, so that's better."
And while he's no suicidal, the whole ordeal has made think about whether state-assisted suicide might be the way to go. "I've been thinking about writing them and telling them, 'You know what, would you let (the drugs) be used for state-assisted suicide, because I am in a terminal situation and I'm suffering?" he told the Gazette Journal.
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Zuri Davishttps://reason.com/people/zuri-davis/http://reason.com/2018/07/17/las-vegas-shooting-lawsuit-mgm-victims/2018-07-17T18:22:00Z2018-07-17T18:22:00Z
MGM Resorts International is filing a federal lawsuit against more than 1,000 victims of the October 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The company aims to exploit a legal loophole protecting companies that use "anti-terrorism" tools.
Last year, gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest country music festival just before killing himself. Nearly 60 died and more than 500 were taken to the hospital. Paddock's vantage point in his room at the Mandalay Bay hotel contributed to his ability to harm so many.
Hundreds of victims filed lawsuits against MGM Resorts, which owns both the Mandalay Bay and the Route 91 Harvest venue. The suits accused the company of not doing enough to prevent the deadly events. In one suit filed on behalf of 450 victims, the plaintiffs argue that MGM had a "duty of reasonable care" to monitor hotel guests.
Earlier this week, MGM Resorts filed its suit, hoping to absolve itself of liability. The lawsuit is not asking for money; it wants the court to consider the applicability of the 2002 SAFETY Act. As the Las Vegas Journal-Reviewexplains, the law
extends liability protection to any company that uses "anti-terrorism" technology or services that can "help prevent and respond to mass violence."
In this case, the company argues, the security vendor MGM hired for Route 91, Contemporary Services Corp., was protected from liability because its services had been certified by the Department of Homeland Security for "protecting against and responding to acts of mass injury and destruction.
The lawsuits argue that this protection also extends to MGM, since MGM hired the security company.
If the suit is won, it would render inviable any future civil suits against MGM over the massacre.
Attorney Robert Eglet, who is representing a number of the victims, calls the lawsuit "outrageous," telling the Journal-Review that MGM is engaged in a "blatant display of judge shopping."
MGM Resorts spokesperson Debra DeShong released a statement, as reported:
The Federal Court is an appropriate venue for these cases and provides those affected with the opportunity for a timely resolution. Years of drawn out litigation and hearings are not in the best interest of victims, the community and those still healing.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2018/05/02/crusaders-coming-for-legal-prostitution/2018-05-02T20:18:00Z2018-05-02T20:18:00Z
Throughout the United States there are only a handful of counties—all in Nevada—where prostitution is legal in licensed brothels. Now crusaders in two of these counties are trying to change this, with a campaign to put a brothel ban on the ballot this November.
There are currently around 22 active, legal brothels in Nevada, dispersed among seven counties. Anti-prostitution activists are targeting brothels in Lyon County—home to the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, The Love Ranch, the Sagebrush Ranch, and the Kit Kat Guest Ranch—and Nye County. Nye is headquarters to five legal brothels, including three owned by Dennis Hof, who is currently challenging state Assemblyman James Oscarson in the Republican primary.
"Prostitution is not going away, and you either put it in the hands of the professionals like liquor, marijuana and gaming, or you have it in the hands of the criminals," Hof tellsThe Nevada Independent, noting that his businesses are the largest single source of tax revenue for the county.
But in early April, four Lyon County residents filed a brothel-banning petition with local authorities. It needs 3,350 signatures by June 15th to move forward. If that happens, the Lyon County Commission will vote on the ban and, if it fails to pass the county commission, it will be posed to Lyon County voters at large on fall ballots.
The petition in Nye needs just 1,963 signatures to get on a November ballot initiative.
Both the Nye petitioners and those in Lyon County are working with lawyer Jason Guinasso and activist Kimberly Mull of the "No Little Girl" campaign, funded through something called the End Trafficking and Prostitution Political Action Committee. Guinasso, a resident of Reno, has been practicing law in Nevada since 2003 and made a failed bid for the state assembly in 2016. He has said that similar anti-brothel campaigns could be coming in Nevada's Lander and Storey counties.
No Little Girl asserts that all paid sex constitutes violence against women. The women working at Nevada's brothels tend to disagree.
On the No Little Girl website, "they grossly proclaim that 'no little girl grows up wanting to be a prostitute,'" Christina Parreira, a sex worker and Ph.D student, tells me in an email. "Of course the voices of actual sex workers are nowhere to be found."
Dear friends,
Sex work has always been controversial- even when it's legalized. Now this man would seek to take away my place of business.
If you support me- please, go leave a comment on his twitter stating why you support the Nevada brothels.
Since Lyon County officially legalized brothels four decades ago, it's "proven to be a time-tested and remarkably successful social experiment," writes Parreira on the Bunny Ranch blog. The groups cites studies of brothel ills that have been debunked or have "nothing to do with legal prostitution," she adds. And "the handful of individuals that submitted the petition represent faith-based organizations" who seem more interested in a pushing their specific sexual mores on others than in looking out for the safety of women who choose to work in Nevada brothels.
"As a licensed prostitute and PhD student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I can tell you that what I want is to continue to have the freedom to choose to work in a safe environment, where I can practice a trade that I love, lawfully and prosperously," continues Parreira. "Sex work is definitely not my last resort or my only option—it is my choice. I'd like to continue to have the opportunity to make that choice legally."
Nova Sky, who works at Lyon County's Kit Kat Ranch, tells KTVN.com that the anti-brothel group is "framing this as a question of the safety of women, but we're very safe."
"We don't have any of those fears that someone working on the streets would have," Amelia Heart, another Kit Kat Ranch worker, tells the TV station.
We couldn't agree more. That's why it's called trafficking, also known as slavery and coercion.
These things stand in stark contrast to the voluntary use of one's mental and physical labor in providing services for others, also known as "working" and "earning a living." https://t.co/illg09da7r
Ruby Rae started working in one of Hof's brothels seven years ago, when she was 20. "Since starting my career as a legal prostitute in Nevada, I can truthfully say it was one of the best decisions I have made," she writes in The Nevada Independent. Some clients have become "good friends," and Rae has been able to pay her way through college while also helping care for her grandfather with dementia. She is currently pursing a master's degree.
"When I heard about the petition that is being started by No Little Girl to put an end to the Lyon County brothels, I was angry, saddened and confused," writes Rae. "Not only is this group trying to take away my livelihood, success and freedom, but also they are trying to take that away from the hundreds of women I work with and the hundreds of staff that these four brothels employ."
Shutting down the brothels "would be a huge step back for me personally in terms of my career," Alice Little, who works at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, tells a local ABC affiliate. Sex workers, she says, "are going to fight tooth and nail" against this.
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Brian Dohertyhttps://reason.com/people/brian-doherty/bdoherty@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2018/01/08/charges-against-nevada-rancher-cliven-bu/2018-01-08T21:45:00Z2018-01-08T21:45:00Z
The federal government's long efforts to get Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and members of his family behind bars seems to have come to an end, as U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro today dismissed with prejudice all federal charges against Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and co-defendant Ryan Payne. (The "with prejudice" part means the government can't just try again on the same charges.)
Judge Navarro complained of "flagrant prosecutorial misconduct" in the case against the Bundys, including violating the Brady rule regarding withholding potentially exculpatory evidence from the Bundys legal team.
This decision comes after the same judge last month declared a mistrial in the case; the government was trying to get a new trial launched. As Fox News reported, "Navarro had suspended the trial earlier and warned of a mistrial when prosecutors released information after a discovery deadline. Overall, the government was late in handing over more than 3,300 pages of documents. Further, some defense requests for information that ultimately came to light had been ridiculed by prosecutors as 'fantastical' and a 'fishing expedition.'"
FBI logs about activity at the ranch in the days leading up to standoff;
Law-enforcement assessments dating to 2012 that found the Bundys posed no threat;
Internal affairs reports about misconduct by Bureau of Land Management agents.
"Failure to turn over such evidence violates due process," Navarro said last month. "A fair trial at this point is impossible."
Former Acting Nevada U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre, leading the prosecution, wrote all the above off as either inadvertent or insignificant error, not malfeasance, on the government's part.
The charges against the four men were all related to actions during the 2014 standoff on Bundy's Nevada ranch over his failure to pay fees to the Bureau of Land Management they insisted he owed.
The four men were specifically charged in 2016 with "one count of conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, one count of conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, four counts of using and carrying a firearm in relation to a crime of violence, two counts of assault on a federal officer, two counts of threatening a federal law enforcement officer, three counts of obstruction of the due administration of justice, two counts of interference with interstate commerce by extortion, and one count of interstate travel in aid of extortion. The indictment also alleges five counts of criminal forfeiture which upon conviction would require forfeiture of property derived from the proceeds of the crimes totaling at least $3 million, as well as the firearms and ammunition possessed and used on April 12, 2014."
The Arizona Republic goes on to note Navarro didn't even mention other disturbing accusations against the Bundy prosecution, including:
another document turned over to the defense in December…that raises more criticism of the BLM's conduct and use of force during the standoff.
A federal investigator alleged in a Nov. 27 memo to the assistant U.S. attorney general that prosecutors in the Bundy ranch standoff trial covered up misconduct by law-enforcement agents who engaged in "likely policy, ethical and legal violations."
In an 18-page memo, Special Agent Larry Wooten said he "routinely observed … a widespread pattern of bad judgment, lack of discipline, incredible bias, unprofessionalism and misconduct" among agents involved in the 2014 standoff.
He said his investigation indicated federal agents used excessive force and committed civil-rights and policy violations.
James Bovard, a lifelong chronicler of federal police power abuse, wrote in USA Today last week about many of the government's seemingly malicious missteps in the prosecution, including that:
The feds charged the Bundys with conspiracy in large part because the ranchers summoned militia to defend them after they claimed that FBI snipers had surrounded their ranch. Justice Department lawyers scoffed at this claim in prior trials involving the standoff but newly-released documents confirm that snipers were in place prior to the Bundy's call for help.
The feds also belatedly turned over multiple threat assessments which revealed that the Bundys were not violent or dangerous, including an FBI analysis that concluded that BLM was "trying to provoke a conflict" with the Bundys. As an analysis in the left-leaning Intercept observed, federal missteps in this case "fueled longstanding perceptions among the right-wing groups and militias that the federal government is an underhanded institution that will stop at nothing to crush the little guy and cover up its own misdeeds."
The Associated Press (via Chicago Tribune) noted the larger issues raised by the prosecution, and this dismissal:
Gregg Cawley, a University of Wyoming professor who writes about land protests in the West, said a collapse of the case would be seen by many as a victory for states' rights.
"But it would not actually be a clean victory," Cawley said. "Conspiracy is very hard to prove. The Bundys got acquitted in Oregon. But if charges in Nevada are dropped, there's no resolution to the question.
"It could be seen as criminals going free on a technicality, rather than an actual vindication."
But when the "technicalities" are related to the government's apparent willingness to violate principles of justice to get people who defy them, the message seems clear nonetheless.
The Oregonianhas a detailed account of the federal prosecutors' failed attempt to excuse their behavior, including many original documents.
The Intercept reported earlier in the year on the FBI's disturbing practice of pretending to be a documentary journalism team in order to gather info on the Bundys' supporters.
Among the miscarriage of justice against the Bundys and their allies was federal agents' murder (and lying about it) of LaVoy Finicum, one of the occupiers of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge on the part of Bundy supporters. The feds had already failed to get convictions against many others involved in that occupation.
Others still remain under prosecution related to the Bundy standoff. Ryan Bundy after today's dismissal called for their charges to be dropped as well, reported the Las Vegas Review Journal. "The government has acted wrongly from the get-go," Bundy said.
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2018/01/04/california-is-taxing-the-hell-out-of-pot/2018-01-04T14:15:00Z2018-01-04T14:15:00Z
Marijuana merchants in California, who began legally serving recreational customers on Monday, complain that they are overtaxed, and they have a point. Of the eight states that have legalized marijuana for nonmedical use, California has the second highest total taxes, beaten only by Washington, where legal recreational sales began in 2014. Alaska, where state-licensed pot shops first opened for business in 2016, has the lowest taxes (although not the lowest prices).
Here is a state-by-state breakdown of recreational marijuana taxes, from lowest to highest. To estimate the impact of taxes imposed at the wholesale level, I use a typical pretax retail price for an eighth of an ounce, as advertised by dispensaries in each state.
ALASKA
Recreational sales began: October 1, 2016
Relevant taxes:$50 per ounce on sales by growers, plus local sales taxes ranging from zero in Anchorage to 7.5 percent in Homer
Upshot: The wholesale tax adds $6.25 to the price of an eighth. Based on a pretax retail price of $60 (legal marijuana is expensive in Alaska), the 5 percent sales tax in Juneau would make the final price $63 and the total effective tax rate about 17 percent. In Anchorage, which has no sales tax, the rate would be 12 percent.
OREGON
Recreational sales began: October 1, 2015
Relevant taxes:17 percent state marijuana tax collected by retailers, plus local marijuana taxes (up to 3 percent); no general sales tax
Upshot: Marijuana taxes in cities such as Portland, Eugene, and Salem total 20 percent.
Upshot: Based on a wholesale marijuana price of $2,300 per pound of buds, the first tax adds $2.70 to the cost of an eighth. Assuming a pretax retail price of $60, the final price would be $70.95 in Las Vegas, where the local sales tax is 3.65 percent. The total effective tax rate would be 24 percent.
Upshot: Based on a wholesale marijuana price of $1,300 per pound, the excise tax adds $1.52 to the cost of an eighth. Assuming a pretax retail price of $30, the final price would be $36.65 in Denver, where the local marijuana tax is 3.5 percent and the local sales tax is 3.65 percent. The total effective tax rate would be 29 percent.
Upshot: The wholesale tax adds $1.16 to the cost of an eighth. Based on a pretax retail price of $50, the final price would be $67.10 in Oakland, where the local marijuana tax is 10 percent and the local sales tax is 3.25 percent. The total effective tax rate would be 37 percent.
Upshot: In Seattle, where the local sales tax is 3.6 percent, the total tax rate is 47.1 percent.
High marijuana taxes make it harder for state-licensed merchants to compete with black-market dealers, who also escape the regulatory burden imposed on legal businesses. In an interview with The New York Times last fall, Tawnie Logan, who chairs the board of the California Growers Association, estimated that an eighth goes for $20 on the black market in her state. At the Harborside dispensary in Oakland, by contrast, the price ranges from $40 to $55, and that's before the retail taxes, which together add 34.25 percent.
"I don't think that the current tax rate for cannabis in California is sustainable," Harborside CEO Steve DeAngelo told KPIX, the CBS station in San Francisco. "In our shop here, the tax rate has gone from 15 percent all the way up to almost 35 percent for adult consumers. That is a huge hit. And it's going to mean that a significant number of people, less affluent consumers, are going to turn to the lower prices of the underground market."
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/Naomi Brockwellhttps://reason.com/people/naomi-brockwell/http://reason.com/2017/11/14/stossel-who-owns-your-body/2017-11-14T17:00:00Z2017-11-14T17:00:00Z
Do you have the right to rent your body to someone else?
In most of America, you don't. But prostitution is legal in parts of Nevada.
Julie Bindel, author of the book The Pimping of Prostitution, wants that to change. She co-founded Justice for Women, a group that fights to end all prostitution. Bindel tells John Stossel, "I've interviewed a lot of sex buyers, and they talk about women like they're human toilets or spittoons for men's semen."
Does that mean it should be illegal?
No, says Christina Parreira, a PHD student at the University of Nevada who studies legal prostitution. She became a prostitute herself to gain access to the legal brothels and interview women there. She argues, "we don't need protection, we're consenting adult women. [Groups like Bindel's] say that it's oppression against women and we're being exploited. But I feel more exploited by these supposedly liberal women that are telling me that I'm being exploited."
John Stossel confronts Bindel, Parreira, and Dennis Hof, owner of seven legal brothels in Nevada.
Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.
Nevada's public defender system leaves lawyers underpaid and rural defendants underrepresented, according to a federal class-action lawsuit filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada.
In a lawsuit arguing Nevada has abandoned its Sixth Amendment duty to provide meaningful legal representation to poor defendants, the Nevada ACLU writes that the state's public defender system is "plagued with serious structural deficiencies that have created a patchwork approach to indigent representation and rendered access to justice a function of geography."
The suit is the ACLU's eighth ongoing legal challenge to what criminal justice advocates say is a national epidemic of underfunded and inadequate public defender systems. The ACLU has also filed Sixth Amendment lawsuits challenging public defender systems in California, Washington, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Louisiana, and Utah.
In Nevada, the ACLU says rural counties, which lack state-run public defender offices and instead rely on private contract attorneys, who are paid a flat fee. This flat-fee system, the suit argues, disincentivizes defense lawyers from doing more than the bare minimum of work. They're not reimbursed for travel and have to petition for extra funds to hire investigators or outside experts, which still may be denied.
The result, as detailed in several of the plaintiffs' cases, is that poor defendants lack adequate access to legal counsel at every stage of trial. They're stuck with high bails, leaving them in jail for months; they have little to no access to a lawyer before trial; and they're often urged to take plea deals by attorneys who may have barely skimmed their case, much less hired an investigator or tracked down witnesses.
"We have thousands of Nevadans who live in these rural counties and can't afford to hire an attorney if they're charged with a crime," says Amy Rose, the legal director of the Nevada ACLU. "At the end of the day they just don't have a fair chance of fighting the government's charges against them. This is a real issue that's been going on for a decade. The state is well aware of these problems, and they haven't taken any action to fix it."
The suit alleges that there are no standards or guidelines for contract attorneys in rural Nevada counties. They're appointed by a board of local officials, none of whom may be legal professionals. In Churchill County, Nevada, the only law practitioner on the board that appoints contracted public defenders is the district attorney, a system that essentially allows prosecutors to choose their opponent.
The lawsuit notes that in Churchill County, 364 indigent defense cases were assigned to one contract-appointed attorney during fiscal year 2016. Only four went to trial.
"The rarity of trials means that appointed attorneys cannot credibly threaten to hold the prosecution to its burden of proof," the suit says. "As a result, clients are pressured to accept pleas that do not reflect the merits of their cases."
One of the suit's plaintiffs, Nevada resident Jason Lee Enox, did not see his first contract attorney—hired by Churchill County—until a month after his arraignment on multiple charges of trafficking and drug possession. His attorney eventually withdrew from the case after being chastised in court by the judge for showing up unprepared.
According to the suit, Enox got a new flat-fee attorney, but he only met him a handful of times and the lawyer refused to return his calls or hire an investigator. With his trial looming, and facing a life sentence, Enox took what's known as an Alford plea this September—a type of guilty plea where the defendant maintains his innocence but admits that the evidence against him is likely too strong to overcome at trial.
In the meantime, Enox had been jail for more than a year. He lost his job, his house was demolished as a result of a property dispute he couldn't fight, and he was unable to attend his father's funeral.
Although the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to a lawyer in its landmark 1963 decision Gideon v. Wainwright, states have undercut the Gideon guarantee by chronically underfunding public defender services.
In Missouri, where the ACLU is also suing for Sixth Amendment violations, the state's 370 public defenders have a load of more than 80,000 cases a year. A 2014 study by the American Bar Association (ABA) found that in 97 percent of cases, Missouri public defenders failed to meet the ABA's recommended minimum hours to effectively represent their clients.
A similar class action lawsuit was filed in Louisiana this year, where public defender offices are so underfunded that, last year, 33 out of 42 of them started turning away cases or placing defendants on waiting lists. Their reasoning: What little legal assistance they could provide would be so ineffective as to violate defendants' constitutional rights anyway.
In addition to the end of flat-fee contracts, Rose says the Nevada ACLU would like to see uniform workload and training standards for public defenders. In 2007, a commision on indigent defense convened by the Nevada Supreme Court came to the same conclusion, but there's been no progress in the 10 years since.
"We've studied the problem enough," Rose says, "and we need to have some real action by the state to fix this issue."
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2017/09/14/nevadas-legislative-counsel-says-pot-fri/2017-09-14T16:30:00Z2017-09-14T16:30:00Z
The owner of Essence Cannabis Dispensary, a pot shop on the Las Vegas Strip, complains that there's "no other industry in the world" where "you can you buy a product and then not use it anywhere." A solution to that problem may be closer than commonly thought. According to a recent opinion from Nevada's Legislative Counsel Bureau (LCB), it is already legal for businesses to allow cannabis consumption, as long as they do not also sell it.
Question 2, the legalization initiative that Nevada voters approved last November, makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by a $600 fine, to consume marijuana in a store that sells it or in any "public place," defined as "an area to which the public is invited or in which the public is permitted regardless of age." According to the Las Vegas Police Department, that means "marijuana consumption is only allowed at private residences" and "can never be consumed inside a business." But the definition of "public place" is ambiguous and can be read to allow cannabis consumption in businesses that exclude people younger than 21, the state's minimum marijuana purchase and possession age.
That is how Nevada Legislative Counsel Brenda Erdoes interprets the law. "It is the opinion of this office that a business may establish and operate a lounge or other facility or special event at which patrons of the business are allowed to use marijuana," Erdoes says in a letter she sent state Sen. Tick Segerblom (D-Las Vegas) on Sunday. Her reasoning hinges on the definition of "public place":
This language would not prohibit the possession or use of marijuana at a place to which the public is not invited or permitted, including a person's home or a lounge or other facility with restricted access, such as a private lounge or other facility, which is closed to the public and only allows entry to persons who are 21 years of age or older, so long as the possession or consumption of marijuana at such a location is not exposed to public view. Similarly, possession or consumption of marijuana would not be prohibited at an event which imposes restrictions for entry on the basis of age so long as the possession or consumption of marijuana is not exposed to public view during the event. However, while a retail marijuana store would fall into this category of businesses which impose restrictions for entry on the basis of age, consumption of marijuana within a retail marijuana store is specifically prohibited.
Erdoes adds that pot-friendly businesses would be subject to local regulation. "This basically says local governments can license these businesses if they want to," Segerblom told the Las Vegas Sun.
Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, could exercise that option soon. The Clark County Commissioners plan to discuss the issue at a meeting next week. "I do feel it is very important for the people who are coming from out of town, the tourists, which are a big contributor to the industry's business, I'm told, to have a place where they can legally and safely consume the product," Steve Sisolak, who chairs the board of county commissioners, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Nevada dispensaries have been serving recreational consumers, many of them tourists, since the beginning of July.
Gov. Brian Sandoval, who warns that marijuana lounges could invite a federal crackdown, is not pleased. "I think it's way too early to be doing something like that," Sandoval told the Review-Journal. "I think it's important that we continue to see how the sale of recreational marijuana evolves." The governor thinks Erdoes is wrong about what current law allows. "I do not agree with the LCB opinion and believe that statutory authority is necessary to establish local marijuana smoking shops," he told the Sun. "I am concerned with these establishments popping up piecemeal throughout the state with differing rules and regulatory structure."
Sandoval noted that Segerblom introduced a bill that would have explicitly allowed local governments to license cannabis-friendly businesses and events. The bill passed the Senate but never got a floor vote in the Assembly, partly due to Sandoval's opposition. If Erdoes is right, Sandoval said, Segerblom's bill was superfluous.
Segerblom does not seem to have considered the possibility that age-restricted businesses fall outside Question 2's definition of a public place. When I raised that point with him in an email last month, he replied, "Good argument. Talk to police and local elected officials."
Meanwhile, the Marijuana Policy Project, which backed Question 2, says the initiative deliberately left the question of where cannabis could be consumed (aside from private residences) for state and local legislators to resolve. "It became clear early on that the initiative could not win if it included public consumption," MPP Communications Manager Morgan Fox told me last month, "and it was decided that the better course would be to try to improve the system after the initiative passed."
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2017/08/09/las-vegas-welcome-marijuana-buyers-but-n/2017-08-09T20:05:00Z2017-08-09T20:05:00Z
Since the beginning of 2014, when Colorado became the first state to let marijuana merchants serve recreational consumers, those customers have faced the challenge of finding a place where they can legally enjoy the cannabis products they can now legally buy. That problem is especially acute in Nevada, one of the four states where voters approved legalization last November and the first to see recreational sales, which started on July 1 as retailers who once catered exclusively to state-registered patients opened their doors to anyone 21 or older. Las Vegas now has about two dozen businesses selling recreational marijuana but not a single one—not a bar, not a restaurant, not a hotel, not a club—where you can use it.
That is a serious problem for a city that each year sees more than 40 million tourists, who account for most of the newly legal marijuana buyers. Armen Yemenidjian, who owns Essence Cannabis Dispensary, a pot shop on The Strip, told CBS News "70 to 80 percent" of his customers are tourists. Presumably the percentage is lower at stores further from the city's most popular attractions. But the Nevada marijuana market is expected to become one of the country's largest on the strength of its tourist business, and it is hard to believe there is no plan to accommodate all of those visiting cannabis consumers.
Question 2, Nevada's legalization initiative, makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by a $600 fine, to consume marijuana in a store that sells it or in any "public place," defined as "an area to which the public is invited or in which the public is permitted regardless of age." You might think (as I did) that the phrase "regardless of age" suggests marijuana consumption would be legal in a business that does not sell cannabis but excludes anyone younger than 21, the minimum age for legal purchase and possession. But according to Morgan Fox, communications manager at the Marijuana Policy Project, which backed Question 2, the language was intended to mean "regardless of age restrictions." In other words, "regardless of age" was supposed to modify "the public" rather than "invited" and "permitted," meaning that even a business that is open only to people 21 or older would qualify as a "public place."
That is certainly the way the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) reads the law. "Marijuana consumption is only allowed at private residences," says Jennifer Davies, an LVMPD public information officer. "It can never be consumed inside a business." Private clubs seem like a possible loophole, since they are not open to the general public. But as frustrated entrepreneurs in Denver have discovered, police tend to apply a strict definition of private clubs, the result of which is that any cannabis lounge accessible enough to attract tourists probably would not qualify.
One other possibility would be parked limousines or buses. Question 2 bans marijuana use "in a moving vehicle" but says nothing about stationary ones. The vehicle would have to be privately booked to avoid being deemed a public place, and even then police probably would take a dim view of it.
Question 2 does authorize the state legislature to "amend provisions of this act to provide for the conditions in which a locality may permit consumption of marijuana in a retail marijuana store." State Sen. Tick Segerblom (D-Las Vegas), a prominent Question 2 supporter, tried to do that last spring with S.B. 236, which would have allowed local governments to license businesses, including cannabis retailers, where marijuana could be legally consumed. The bill, which also would have allowed one-time licenses for special cannabis-friendly events, passed the Senate but never got a floor vote in the Assembly.
The resuit, as CBS News puts it, is that "the law here essentially says what tourists buy in Vegas, they can't use in Vegas." Nor can they legally take it home to consume there. As Yemenidjian, the marijuana merchant, observes, there's "no other industry in the world" where "you can you buy a product and then not use it anywhere."
Why did Question 2's backers decide to kick the can down the road on this issue? "It became clear early on that the initiative could not win if it included public consumption," MPP's Fox says, "and it was decided that the better course would be to try to improve the system after the initiative passed. Apparently it is a pretty common sticking point. None of the adult-use initiatives have included public consumption in any form, though they left the path open for this to change through regulation or legislation. It might be one of those things where even though it is the right way to go, the average voter just isn't there yet, possibly because there are very few examples in the U.S. to point to (and those exist in a gray area). When people see various forms of marijuana businesses in practice elsewhere and being regulated effectively, they become much more comfortable with them."
When Las Vegas police seized property through civil asset forfeiture laws last year, they were mostly likely to strike in poor and minority neighborhoods.
A report released last week by the Nevada Policy Research Institute (NPRI), a conservative think tank, found the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department raked in $1.9 million in asset forfeiture revenue in 2016. Two-thirds of those seizures occurred in zip codes with higher-than-average rates of poverty and large minority populations.
The 12 Las Vegas zip codes most targeted by asset forfeiture have an average poverty rate of 27 percent, compared to 12 percent in the remaining 36 zip codes. Clark County, Nevada, has an average poverty rate of 16 percent.
The 12 most targeted zip codes also have an average nonwhite population of 42 percent, compared to 36 percent in the other remaining zip codes.
Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police may seize property they suspect of being connected to criminal activity. The owner then bears the burden of challenging the seizure in court and disproving the government's claims. Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime by cutting off the flow of illicit proceeds.
But a bipartisan coalition of civil liberties groups and lawmakers have been calling for the laws to be reformed, saying asset forfeiture's perverse profit incentives and lack of safeguards leadspolice to shake down everyday citizens, who often lack the resources to fight the seizure of their property in court.
"The most troubling aspect of this practice is that the seizing law enforcement agency directly profits from the forfeitures," NPRI researcher Daniel Honchariw said in a statement. "And in the vast majority of cases the value of the property seized is less than the likely legal fees needed to contest the seizure, making the whole process nothing more than a form of legalized theft—with the government as the perpetrator."
The NPRI report found that more than half of all 2016 seizures were for amounts under $1,000, and 28 of those seizures were for $100 or less. The lowest amount seized was 74 cents.
The findings are similar to a Reasonanalysis of asset forfeiture data in Chicago earlier this year. That analysis of more than 23,000 property seizures over a five-year period found that seizures tended to focus on the South and West Side of Chicago, predominantly minority neighborhoods with high poverty rates. Likewise, the median value of a seizure was around $1,000, far from major cartel busts.
Illinois does not require an accompanying criminal conviction to begin a forfeiture action. Thanks to civil asset forfeiture reforms passed in 2015, Nevada in most cases does. But in the civil process, property owners must pay for their own lawyer if they choose to contest a seizure, and prosecutors enjoy a lower standard of evidence to win their case than in criminal court. Police can seize cash, cars, and even homes allegedly linked to illegal proceeds.
Of the 295 police seizures that occurred in Clark County that year, all but 16 were connected to alleged drug offenses.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
More than 20 states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform in recent years. New Mexico and Nebraska, for example, completely abolished civil asset forfeiture.
The NPRI report concludes that the evidence "supports the position that the practice of civil asset forfeiture should be abolished completely. A system of criminal forfeiture, reliant upon the same due-process protections afforded to criminal defendants, should instead become the norm."
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2017/07/17/nonmedical-marijuana-use-is-mainly-recre/2017-07-17T21:05:00Z2017-07-17T21:05:00Z
This month Nevada's medical marijuana dispensaries began serving all consumers 21 or older, not just patients with doctor's recommendations. The name for this new sort of cannabis commerce, according to Question 2, the 2016 ballot initiative that legalized it, is "retail marijuana," a term that fails to distinguish between medical use, which has been allowed in Nevada since 2001, and nonmedical use, which is newly legal. Question 2 also refers to "personal use," which likewise does not elucidate the change made by the initiative.
This fuzziness is no accident. So far eight states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) and the District of Columbia have approved general legalization of marijuana, all by ballot initiative. All of those measures avoid mentioning recreational use, preferring vague euphemisms such as retail, personal, and adult.
Reformers who eschew recreational have several concerns. Some worry that it sounds frivolous, while others say it is imprecise, since nonmedical use encompasses, say, spiritual or artistic purposes that may not fit comfortably in the category of recreation. But probably the most common objection is that recreational scares voters, as Dale Sky Jones, chancellor of Oaksterdam University, argued in a 2016 interview:
When they hear "recreational," they think about what their children are doing, because recreational is fun. It's Disney World, playtime, going to some park. That's recreation. Go ice skating. That's recreation. Why are we making this sound fun to children when the specific point here is to keep it away from children? We need to stop calling it "recreational cannabis." This is cannabis for adults. It's retail. It's commercial. It is not recreational….
Please stop calling it "recreational." Not only are you making it sound fun to the very group of people that we don't want consuming this for fun, but you're also scaring the soccer moms that are going out to vote.
Although I'm skeptical that most children or adolescents think "fun" when they hear the word recreational, Jones may be right that the adjective alienates soccer moms. Still, marijuana is fun (among other things), and recreational is the most apt way to capture that aspect of it. The word also encompasses the use of cannabis as a social lubricant and an aid to relaxation. Those three functions surely account for the vast majority of nonmedical use, making the term pretty precise as well as honest.
It cannot be said too often that there is nothing shameful or morally suspect about fun, although same varieties of it may not be appropriate for minors. Support for drug prohibition is based largely on the assumption that there is something wrong with chemically assisted pleasure, as reflected in recent comments by Scott Chipman, Southern California chairman for Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana. "'Recreational' is a bike ride, a swim, going to the beach," Chipman toldThe New York Times, sounding remarkably like Dale Skye Jones. "Using a drug to put your brain in an altered state is not recreation. That is self-destructive behavior and escapism."
I do not know whether Chipman thinks drinking is immoral or that alcohol should be banned for similar reasons. But even assuming he does, his line drawing seems arbitrary. Whether cannabis consumption (or drinking) is in fact self-destructive depends on the context in which it occurs. The fact that it can lead to injury does not distinguish it from riding a bike, swimming, or visiting the beach.
As for "escapism," Chipman's preferred forms of recreation surely can provide an escape from quotidian concerns, as can reading a book, watching a TV show or a movie, listening to music, playing poker or video games, hiking, skiing, riding roller-coasters, or any of the myriad other enjoyable activities in which people engage when they are not working. The fact that Chipman deems cannabis consumption especially objectionable may tell us something about his own tastes, there is no reason the rest of us should be morally or legally bound by them.
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Ronald Baileyhttps://reason.com/people/ronald-bailey/rbailey@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2017/07/17/open-the-yucca-mountain-nuclear-waste-re/2017-07-17T19:31:00Z2017-07-17T19:31:00ZWashington Post is right: "Put Yucca Mountain to work. The nation needs it."]]>
Hurray for the editorial board at the Washington Post! On Sunday, they published a op-ed forthrightly urging Congress and the Trump administration to move forward on opening the long-stalled Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada.
"It's past time the opposition was sidelined for good," the op-ed declares. "The nation's nuclear regulators have found that technical hurdles can be overcome; the biggest barriers to developing the site are political. Congress should re-fund Yucca Mountain and finally end this gratuitous fight."
More than 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel is being stored at nuclear power plants scattered across the countryside. It wasn't supposed to be that way. The plan was to send it all to the Yucca Mountain which was slated to open in 1998.
Since 1982, some $15 billion has been spent on preliminary study and work on the facility. Every environmental impact assessment has found that the repository would be safe for people and the environment. Opposed by environmental activists and the Nevada congressional delegation the facility was mothballed in 2010 by the Obama administration.
Now the Trump administration has asked congress to appropriate $120 million to restart the licensing process for the facility. In late June, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 49 to 4 on a bill that would move along the stalled Yucca Mountain approval process.
Are Nevada officials actually trying to preserve the state's marijuana black market?
In the first four days that Nevada residents could legally purchase marijuana for recreational uses, state retailers made $3 million in sales—and lined the state government's coffers to the tune of a cool $500,000 in tax revenues, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
Actually, that can't be right. Allowing for rounding, that only accounts for about 15 percent of sales—which is the state excise tax on the first wholesale sale. Nevada also imposes a 10 percent retail excise tax on recreational sales, and then adds in sales tax, which varies from just under 7 percent to over 8 percent according to where you are. Let's call the total tax take about 32 percent of legal recreational marijuana sales. That's a really high tax rate to impose on any industry—especially one that was thriving (albeit illegally) and entirely untaxed less than two weeks ago.
The confusion is understandable, given that Nevadans voted to legalize pot just last November and state officials dragged their feet on complying until the last minute. The market for marijuana is currently operating under emergency regulations issued July 6 after booze distributors went to court to protect a temporary, legally guaranteed monopoly on recreational marijuana sales guaranteed them by last year's ballot measure. In June they won an injunction prevent the state from authorizing competing licensees and the whole process threatened to founder.
"State officials are clearly rushing into this hoping no one will notice how sloppy implementation is actually going," Rafael Lemaitre, a former top staffer in the Obama administration's Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the Sun.
That the state might need to make room for more retailers to hang out their shingles is evident from reports of hours-long lines for people to make legal purchases.
Undoubtedly, many people were willing to endure long lines because of the novelty of legal marijuana sales and the festive nature—fireworks!—of the holiday weekend launch. But novelty wears off. You have to assume that Nevada pot connoisseurs might soon tire of long waits when they could certainly get quick delivery from whichever underground entrepreneurs had their business before July 1—especially when calling old dealers could also bypass that high tax.
Nevada isn't exactly inventing the wheel here, either. Other states have legalized marijuana in the past, and their experiences offer lessons to anybody willing to learn.
"Colorado and Washington both initially levied tax rates of over 30 percent and struggled to reduce the size of the black market," the Tax Foundation's Lindsey Lassiter and Matthew Stadnicki recently noted. "Nevada could face similar troubles stamping out the black market."
To keep people from reverting back to their reliable and responsive black market dealers, Lassiter and Stadnicki recommend that the state focus on a lower, relatively easily implemented retail sales taxes. Reduced burden and simplicity would encourage compliance. So, they say, would reducing the tax differential between the legal recreational market and the legal medical marijuana market, so that supply doesn't get diverted from the one to the other. If Nevada lawmakers don't make some changes, well…
Nine months after Colorado legalized recreational sales, PBS reported that black market marijuana remained far cheaper than the legal stuff, and stifling red tape made it difficult and expensive to open an aboveground business. Little has changed since then, except that the state has actually tightened regulations and recently hiked the marijuana sales tax by 50 percent.
"It seems kind of odd that at the same time they're trying to do something about the black and gray markets they're going to ratchet up the taxes and drive more people to the black and gray markets," former state Sen. Pat Steadman (D-Denver) commented earlier this year.
Washington state also tried its luck with sort-of legalization of marijuana that bound the market in restrictions and burdened it with high vice taxes (37 percent excise tax). Lawmakers and regulators channeled their inner commissars and tried to create a centrally planned market with caps on production and sales outlets. Lower prices and easier access—including home delivery—were two big competitive edges possessed by illegal dealers that led Seattle Weekly to conclude last September that "four years after legal weed, Seattle's black market still thrives."
State lawmakers recently voted down legalization of delivery services—a change that would have eliminated one major advantage possessed by underground vendors.
So…What's Nevada's excuse? Having seen states elsewhere enter into legalization of marijuana half-heartedly, and preserve a healthy black market as a result, it's impossible for lawmakers to claim they can't predict the outcome of their efforts to nominally legalize a product while retaining some of the worst aspects of prohibition via intrusive taxes and rules.
Then again, officials in Colorado and Washington have been living with the results of their bad choices, and seem unwilling to undo the damage. If you're incapable of learning from your own experiences, it's unlikely that you'll suddenly see lessons elsewhere.
Whatever the motivations of officials in Nevada and their counterparts in other states, you can anticipate that "legalizing" marijuana while burdening it with tight rules and high taxes will have legal dealers competing with underground vendors for a long time to come.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/2017/06/20/veto-wont-end-medicaid-for-all-efforts/2017-06-20T18:01:00Z2017-06-20T18:01:00Z
On Friday, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval vetoed a bill that would have made Nevada the first state in the nation to have a "Medicaid-for-all" health insurance option, striking the latest blow against Democrat-led efforts to expand government-run health care plans at the state level.
The bill in Nevada—semi-seriously referred to as "Sprinklecare" after chief sponsor, state Assemblyman Mike Sprinkle (D-Sparks)—would have allowed residents who were otherwise ineligible for Medicaid (the joint federal-state program is open only to low income residents and their dependents) to purchase "Medicaid-like" plans offered by the state. Even though the bill cleared both chambers of the Nevada legislation, there were many unanswered questions, including what those plans would have covered, how much they would have cost (a not insignificant question since Nevadans making more than the Medicaid threshold would have had to purchase those plans without the assistance of federal subsidies), and how many people would have taken advantage of the new system.
It was the lack of detail—the final bill was a mere four pages long, perhaps a record for brevity in health care policy—that Sandoval said forced him to veto it.
"Moving too soon, without factual foundation or adequate understanding of the possible consequences, could introduce more uncertainty to an already fragile healthcare market, and ultimately affect patient healthcare," Sandoval, a Republican, said in his veto message. Despite the vote, he praised the bill's supporters for their "creativity" and acknowledged that some of the ideas offered by Sprinkle "may play a critical role in future healthcare policy."
Sprinkle said in a statement that he will reintroduce the bill next year. There's good reason to believe that we might not have to wait that long to see another, similar propose pop-up somewhere else. "Now that Nevada put it on the national map as a policy idea, I'd expect to see other states experimenting with similar proposals over the next few years," writes Sarah Kliff, Vox.com's senior health care editor.
For supporters of government-run health care, Medicaid-for-all has several advantages over the types of single-payer systems that have been proposed in California and New York (and previously passed in Vermont). Unlike those plans, which would sweep aside all private insurance in favor of government-run insurance, Nevada's proposal would have offered the Nevada Care Plan alongside private offerings on the state's Obamacare exchange. The idea was to give an additional option to Nevadans who might earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but who otherwise might not be able to afford private insurance. With the Congressional Budget Office estimating that some 26 million Americans might lose their health insurance if the Republicans' healthcare bill becomes law, Sprinkle positioned his bill as a state-level alternative for those who could lose coverage, if and when Congress acts.
The lack of specificity in Sprinkle's bill meant there were widespread fears of unintended consequences. Health care providers worried about reimbursement rates—a longstanding fight between providers and Medicaid—and warned that Nevadans who already have private health insurance could jump to the new public option if it was more generous, the Los Angeles Times reported. In his veto message, Sandoval pointed out, correctly, that merely providing more coverage for people is not the same as giving them more health care. He also worried about disruptions to the state's current insurance market and the potential to drive doctors out of the state, again a consequence of Medicaid's lower than average reimbursement rate.
"The net result could mean greater wait times and less provider availability for all Nevadans, whether they are on Medicaid, Medicare or commercial insurance" Sandoval wrote.
The bill also lacked a clear analysis of how many people would sign up for the new state-run insurance option and how much the state would have to pay for offering it. Those projections can be wrong, but signing the bill without knowing those details would have been foolish.
Michael Schaus, communications director for the free market Nevada Policy Research Institute, said the veto is a welcome sign and called the Medicaid-for-all plan "an inferior government program" that wasn't a real solution for health care.
"Until the political discussion about healthcare goes beyond a promise to simply make someone else pay for everyone else's healthcare, real progress simply cannot be made," Schaus told Reason. "After all, the issue facing the the industry in Nevada—just as in the rest of the nation—isn't that government subsidizes too little or is too hands-off in its approach. It's actually quite the opposite."
Still, there is something worth noting about the effort. Republicans spent most of the past decade out of power in Washington, D.C., but with growing influence over state policy thanks to a tsunami of local and state level electoral victories. They used that influence to block some aspects of Obamacare from taking root—most notably the expansion of Medicaid—but generally failed to do much in the way of crafting their own health policy ideas. If the states are meant to be laboratories of democracy, then Republicans certainly missed a chance to experiment with what works and what does not, both in terms of policy and politics.
That may be one reason why the GOP, now that it's back in control of the federal government, is failing so spectacularly to create an Obamacare replacement. To be sure, there are dozens of other factors at play in the federal health care debate, but on a very basic level Republicans are struggling to find the overlap between what their voters want and what they are able to deliver. Those are questions that might be easier to answer with a few years' worth of trial and error in state capitols.
On the left, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is being quite clear about its plans to put health care near the forefront of its future campaign to retake the reins in Congress. What we are seeing now in places like California, Nevada, and New York is partially a response to Republican efforts at the federal level to roll back aspects of Obamacare, but it's also an attempt to work out some of the details in what that future national health care policy platform will look like.
I'm skeptical that the future of American healthcare is a foregone conclusion, mostly because I've yet to see evidence that a single-payer health care plan can work without massive tax increases that even ardent blue-staters would reject. Still, Nevada's Medicaid-for-all plan is best understood, for now, as another attempt to test the political fences and continue building a narrative around the progressive vision of healthcare policy. Those who believe in free market health care ideas need to pay attention.
This bill failed. Next time, somewhere else, with more answers, it might not.
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Ed Krayewskihttps://reason.com/people/ed-krayewski/ekrayewski@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2017/03/24/las-vegas-taxi-union-demands-state-crack/2017-03-24T21:15:00Z2017-03-24T21:15:00Z
A Las Vegas taxi union is asking the state to step in and squash competition from ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft and "illegal" drivers who were "taking food out of the mouths of" taxi drivers, as Theatla Jones, a representative of Local 4873 of the Industrial Technical Professional Employees Union, wrote in a letter to legislators obtained by The Nevada Independent.
"Working in the Las Vegas taxi industry was traditionally a solid job where a driver could support his family and enjoy benefits such as health insurance, dental/vision care, retirement benefits, vacation pay, and safety bonuses, but those days are gone unless we secure your help," Jones wrote to legislators. Taxi drivers "desperately need your help to survive due to unfair competition from and lack of regulation
Jones offered sixteen proposals and The Independent reports that one Democratic state senator says he's planning to introduce legislation Monday that incorporates some of them. Jones' proposals include "public safety" measures like FBI background checks, drug testing, and 24-7 commercial insurance, some of which most ridesharing services already do. "Taxi drivers have reported that they recognize [ride-share] drivers who have been terminated from taxi companies due to drug and or alcohol issues," Jones adds.
She claims that ride-share app drivers perform "cash runs" on the Vegas Strip and that taxi drivers said there was "a huge problem with vehicles that are not even 'real' Uber and Lyft" drivers. "All a driver needs," Jones continued, "is a small U or Lyft sticker in their window and they can start transporting passengers for cash." So-called "gypsy cabs" are not a new phenomenon and it's hard to imagine confusing a ride arranged on a smartphone app and one arranged on the street for cash.
Jones also wants rideshare drivers to be "trained to deal with 'Strip road conditions'" and to let the Taxi Authority enforce rules she claims the Nevada Transportation Authority doesn't have the resources to. She also offers proposals for taxes, including that the state demand state-issued decals with "full permitting and registration with tax authorities," enforcing fines for "off-APP trips," and forcing "Uber and Lyft to keep drivers off platform unless taxes paid."
Jones further offered proposals under the guise of "consumer/labor protection" to constrict the use of ridesharing apps, including that all trips be hailed "a minimum of 10 minutes in advance" and no surge pricing as well as "no excessively low or predatory pricing permitted from the" ride-sharing service.
Jones complains that ride-share drivers don't go to residential areas and "will often only come to your house if he/she can surge price you for several times the normal fare," a total misunderstanding of how surge pricing works. "The free market will not solve this problem," she says, of a problem of lack of access to taxis in residential urban areas that services like Uber have helped solve in recent years by connecting would-be drivers to underserved residents.
"You and the Democratic Party are in a position to help my members this session," Jones closed, "and I respectfully request your help to support my member's full time jobs." The Independent notes taxi companies gave 50 state legislators $476,200 in the 2016 election cycle. Jones is doing what cartels all over do, looking to government to maintain crumbling monopolies. Taxi drivers and companies would be better off competing for customers and drivers than looking toward more of the kind of needless and constricting regulations even the union admits the state doesn't have resources to effectively enforce.
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Charles Oliverhttps://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/https://reason.com/2017/02/08/brickbat-dog-gone-2/2017-02-08T09:00:00Z2017-02-08T09:00:00Z
The former head of the Boulder City, Nevada, animal shelter has been sentenced to 90 days in jail after pleading guilty to animal cruelty for needlessly euthanizing her own dog. An attorney for Mary Jo Frazier denied that she euthanized the dog to punish her ex-husband, who co-owned the dog with her, after their divorce. Frazier had been forced to retire from the shelter after an investigation indicated she had been needlessly euthanizing animals for years.